It is increasingly common for philosophers to rely on the notion of an idealised listener when explaining how the semantic values of context-sensitive expressions are determined. Some have identified the semantic values of such expressions, as used on particular occasions, with whatever an appropriately idealised listener would take them to be. Others have argued that, for something to count as the semantic value, an appropriately idealised listener should be able to recover it. Our aim here is to explore the range (...) of ways that such idealisation might be worked out, and then to argue that none of these results in a very plausible theory. We conclude by reflecting on what this negative result reveals about the nature of meaning and responsibility. (shrink)

The article attempts to clarify the appeal to the Benedictine ideal that Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) makes in The Aims of Education and Other Essays as a way to renew the life of the spirit in education. In particular, the essay will consider St. Benedict's three central themes of Whitehead's philosophy: freedom and discipline, the teacher as artist and the art of life, and universities as workshops or homes of creative energy. The aim is to bring about a harmony of (...) thought and action, the mind to the feelings of the heart, to subordinate scientific or critical pedagogy to aesthetic‐spiritual instruction. This deserves our attention because today's educational theories and practices emphasize the technical, the critical, and the social sides to the neglect of the aesthetic‐spiritual side. On both its practical and theoretical side, the educational theory of Whitehead falls within the Benedictine tradition of ora (meditative reading) and labora (work). (shrink)

This essay builds on various critiques of the relationship between the voice and autonomous individual subjectivity, briefly tracking the specific history through which the voice transformed into an ideal object representing the liberal subject of post-Enlightenment thought. This paper asks: what are we to make of those enfleshed voices that do not conform to the ideal voice of the self-possessed liberal subject? What are we to make of those voices that refuse the imperative of improvement that underpins social and economic (...) contractualism? How might we attend to the sonicity of those voices that refuse to individuate, possess, and accumulate? And what fugitive modes of speech might be transmitted by such un-formed and un-organized voices? Against the idealized voice of liberalism, and the gendered and racialized exclusions that this voice implies, I propose a mode of fugitive listening that allows us to open our ears to the noisy voices and modes of speech that sound outside the locus of politics proper. Indebted to the Black radical tradition, fugitive listening attends to sonic practices that refuse the given grounds of representation. I argue that fugitive listening is a practice that can be situated in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call ‘the undercommons’. The essay concludes by turning to gossip, figuring this noisy modality of speech as central to undercommon spaces shaped by Black performance. (shrink)

The problem with idealization is not just that, when idealizing, scientists ask us to suppose false things. Many people do that. No, the puzzling thing about idealizers—unlike astrologers, spodomancers, and homeopaths—is that it is worth listening to them. Supposing that populations of rabbits are in- finite is useful for a variety of ecological explanations. Yet we are not up to our necks in rabbits; the puzzle is why it should be useful to suppose that we are.

Classroom discussion practices that can lead to reasoned participation by all students are presented and described by the authors. Their research emphasizes the careful orchestration of talk and tasks in academic learning. Parallels are drawn to the philosophical work on deliberative discourse and the fundamental goal of equipping all students to participate in academically productive talk. These practices, termed Accountable TalkSM, emphasize the forms and norms of discourse that support and promote equity and access to rigorous academic learning. They have (...) been shown to result in academic achievement for diverse populations of students. The authors outline Accountable Talk as encompassing three broad dimensions: one, accountability to the learning community, in which participants listen to and build their contributions in response to those of others; two, accountability to accepted standards of reasoning, talk that emphasizes logical connections and the drawing of reasonable conclusions; and, three, accountability to knowledge, talk that is based explicitly on facts, written texts, or other public information. With more than fifteen years research into Accountable Talk applications across a wide range of classrooms and grade levels, the authors detail the challenges and limitations of contexts in which discourse norms are not shared by all members of the classroom community. (shrink)

In light of recent studies in the phenomenology of music, the essay engages anew in the classical phenomenological controversy over the ideal status of musical works. I argue that musical works are bound idealities. I maintain that the listener’s capacity to apperceive physical sounds as musical melodies, which can be repeatedly and intersubjectively experienced, accounts for the ideality of musical works. Conceived of as bound idealities, musical works 1) are bound to the acts that sustain them; 2) do not have (...) retroactive validity; 3) are inseparable from their reproductions; 4) are modified by the performances. I conclude with some reflections on the importance of bound idealities for the phenomenologically-oriented philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics that reinforce settler-colonialism, yet settler communities, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of identity and history. This article, provoked by Māori protocols of encounter, explores the necessity of developing a sense of collective identity as precursor to meeting in settler-Indigenous politics. It argues that the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a social group—apparent in paradigmatic approaches to engaging social difference in settler communities—is at the heart of the particularity (...) of settler group identity and also stands at the heart of countless failures to meet in settler-Indigenous politics. This essay thus seeks to mark the particular ground of this unmarkedness of settler identity in Western philosophies that set being unmarked as both ontology and ideal; the dominance of settler communities in places of settlement; and the willful forgetting of the colonial histories brought about by such dominance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 7-19 [Access article in PDF] Evaluating a Performance - Ideal vs. Great Performance Gilead Bar-Elli Two Notions of Performance Music, as everybody knows, is a performing art. Not only are musical works performed, but they are also designed, by their very nature, to be performed. The notion of a performance of a musical composition is therefore part and parcel of our conception (...) of music. And yet the relationships between a composition and its performances give rise to many difficult problems, some of which will be touched on later. For the present I want to stress two more specific issues in which the significance of the notion of performance for music lies. The first is that a musical composition is constituted by concepts and properties intrinsically connected to performance. In fact, I believe that the very meaning of these concepts and properties is rooted in the ways they are manifested in performance. Hence, even if a certain composition has never and will never be performed, it is still constituted by concepts and properties whose meaning lies in the ways they should be manifested in performance.The second point is that since music is in fact a performing art, since weperform music, and listen to various performances of the same compositions, and conceive of them and evaluate them as music, notions of performance are an integral part of the conceptual repertoire in which we conceive of music. Hence questions pertaining to the nature of performance, and to the relationship between a composition and its performances are inescapable in any philosophical investigation of music. And around these general questions a host of others suggest themselves: What makes a particular performance (even if faulty) a performance of a particular work? Can there be different equally good performances of the same work? In what terms should performances be evaluated (and graded) and how? Can a composition be individuated apart from its performances and how?On many of these problems and the issues surrounding them, a distinction between two conceptions of performance seems helpful, and sometimes [End Page 7] necessary. On the one hand we may conceive of a performance as a musical entity in itself, independently of the composition whose performance it in fact is. A performance thus conceived can be aesthetically evaluated "on its own" so to speak, or in and of itself, with no regard to our having an independent access to the composition whose performance it is. Sometimes, to push it to an extreme, we may not even know that it is a performance of a particular composition, and may not care if it is. Let us call this the"autonomousconception of a performance."On the other hand we often think of a performance as being essentially a performance of a particular composition, and we thus conceive of it and evaluate it. Here knowing which composition the performance is a performance of is essential. It is arguable that on this conception we must also have (in principle at least) an independent access to the composition, by being able to read its score, for example.1 Being a performance of a particular composition is, on this view, part of the very nature and identity of the performance. There can yet be various different performances of the same composition, and they may be compared and evaluated as such. In light of this essential relationship between the performance and "its" composition (the work whose performance it is) let us call this the "intentionalisticconception of a performance."There is a great difference between these two conceptions, and they imply important differences for the nature of music and of musical composition. I am not committing myself here to any particular view of the ontic nature of a composition — whether it is a class of performances, or a kind (in Nicholas Wolterstorff's sense) or a design (in Roger Scruton's).2 I shall exemplify the pertinence of the above distinction for one case. Many people think that music resides only in performances (some would add, actual and possible... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 7-19 [Access article in PDF] Evaluating a Performance - Ideal vs. Great Performance Gilead Bar-Elli Two Notions of Performance Music, as everybody knows, is a performing art. Not only are musical works performed, but they are also designed, by their very nature, to be performed. The notion of a performance of a musical composition is therefore part and parcel of our conception (...) of music. And yet the relationships between a composition and its performances give rise to many difficult problems, some of which will be touched on later. For the present I want to stress two more specific issues in which the significance of the notion of performance for music lies. The first is that a musical composition is constituted by concepts and properties intrinsically connected to performance. In fact, I believe that the very meaning of these concepts and properties is rooted in the ways they are manifested in performance. Hence, even if a certain composition has never and will never be performed, it is still constituted by concepts and properties whose meaning lies in the ways they should be manifested in performance.The second point is that since music is in fact a performing art, since weperform music, and listen to various performances of the same compositions, and conceive of them and evaluate them as music, notions of performance are an integral part of the conceptual repertoire in which we conceive of music. Hence questions pertaining to the nature of performance, and to the relationship between a composition and its performances are inescapable in any philosophical investigation of music. And around these general questions a host of others suggest themselves: What makes a particular performance (even if faulty) a performance of a particular work? Can there be different equally good performances of the same work? In what terms should performances be evaluated (and graded) and how? Can a composition be individuated apart from its performances and how?On many of these problems and the issues surrounding them, a distinction between two conceptions of performance seems helpful, and sometimes [End Page 7] necessary. On the one hand we may conceive of a performance as a musical entity in itself, independently of the composition whose performance it in fact is. A performance thus conceived can be aesthetically evaluated "on its own" so to speak, or in and of itself, with no regard to our having an independent access to the composition whose performance it is. Sometimes, to push it to an extreme, we may not even know that it is a performance of a particular composition, and may not care if it is. Let us call this the"autonomousconception of a performance."On the other hand we often think of a performance as being essentially a performance of a particular composition, and we thus conceive of it and evaluate it. Here knowing which composition the performance is a performance of is essential. It is arguable that on this conception we must also have (in principle at least) an independent access to the composition, by being able to read its score, for example.1 Being a performance of a particular composition is, on this view, part of the very nature and identity of the performance. There can yet be various different performances of the same composition, and they may be compared and evaluated as such. In light of this essential relationship between the performance and "its" composition (the work whose performance it is) let us call this the "intentionalisticconception of a performance."There is a great difference between these two conceptions, and they imply important differences for the nature of music and of musical composition. I am not committing myself here to any particular view of the ontic nature of a composition — whether it is a class of performances, or a kind (in Nicholas Wolterstorff's sense) or a design (in Roger Scruton's).2 I shall exemplify the pertinence of the above distinction for one case. Many people think that music resides only in performances (some would add, actual and possible... (shrink)

Insightful ideals on the subtle and dynamic relation between the person and the environment have been expressed by Vygotsky, Lewin, Bronfenbrenner and Stern. Carefully following their intricate dialogue reveals that their ideas are mutually enriching. The present essay aims to revitalize this intricate dialogue, and to show how it converges to supply rich meaning to the concept of personal space-time totality. With a view to an empirical study of the personal space-time totality, a four-phase inquiry is proposed, which is essentially (...) a refined co-construction between the subject and the researcher. It is suggested that such a co-construction can be meaningfully integrated into research areas such as autobiographical and narrative studies, commonsense psychology, and optimal human development. (shrink)

The so-called New Music in Europe after the Second World War was based on the idea of progress, similar to technological progress and related to it, and aimed at a complete rationalization of composing. The ideal of music as autopoiesis, which appeared in the 1950s, became inherent to this development. It supposed a kind of communication on music as a reified object, which opposed music making and listening as communication between partners. Separated from the life-world and conceived as a self-referential (...) system, New Music should represent not only the logical achievement of the historical development of European music, but also the superiority of Western musical thought in the more developed countries over the music cultures of the world. Therefore, the integral serialism, which should rule the musical composition, became a form of symbolic power within the musical field, in correspondence with similar forms of domination within the economic, political and technological fields. However, some European composers rejected this trend and tried to find an alternative to aestheticism by means of political engagement. For instance, the Italian composer Luigi Nono explores the dialectic between subject and object, technological development and critique of technology, avant-garde and critique of progress, globalization and anti-imperialistic resistance. In his strategy, in which Gramsci's and Walter Benjamin's thought played an important role, aesthetics became inseparable from politics. His search for identity as a composer transforms the tragedy of listening into an allegory of human condition. (shrink)

The question that should be posed at this time is the following: Does every artist have an audience? It is not so long since the era of totalitarian regimes, when many composers had almost no access or nearly no access to an audience. But ideally, every composition should have a chance to be presented to a wider public. At that moment, the composition is entirely dependent on its interpretation, which determines to what extent the audience will accept the unknown work. (...) The task of the interpreter is to lead the listener through an unknown musical landscape and convince her of the absolute necessity of the existence of this landscape. This occurs, however, only in the concert performance, and demands from the interpreter an extremely high degree of preparation, and from the listener the requisite measure of tolerance and openness. The interpreter’s encounter with a work in the framework of a concert performance leads to an even deeper understanding of the composition. The performer does not need verbal comments in order to perceive and react to the audience’s response. Thus, the artist becomes acquainted with the work from a completely different perspective—that of the audience. Through the repeated interaction between interpreter and audience, the work comes alive and becomes part of the stage and the musical experience. (shrink)

This dissertation sets out to answer the question ''What fixes the semantic values of context-sensitive referential terms—like names, demonstratives, and pronouns—in context?'' I argue that it is the speaker's intentions that play this role, as constrained by the conventions governing the use of particular sorts of referential terms. These conventions serve to filter the speaker's intentions for just those which meet these constraints on use, leaving only these filtered-for intentions as semantically relevant. By considering a wide range of cases, including (...) many involving confused and deceptive speakers, I argue that this 'constraint theory' provides a better account of linguistic reference than does any extant alternative, whether intentionalist or non-intentionalist. Along the way, I argue that semantics cannot depend on the reactions of idealized listeners, that speaker meaning is far less clear, and helpful, a notion than it is standardly taken to be, and that speakers needn't aim to be cooperative in order to fix the meaning of their terms in context. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that public discourse as we know it is less than ideal from an epistemological point of view. In this paper, we develop an underappreciated aspect of the trouble with public discourse: what we call the Listening Problem. The listening problem is the problem that public discourse has in giving appropriate uptake and reception to ideas and concepts from oppressed groups. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser, we develop an institutional response to the (...) listening problem: the establishment of what we call Receptive Publics, discursive spaces designed to improve listening skills and to give space for counterhegemonic ideas. (shrink)

This essay presents the normative foundation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s constructivist theory of justice in three steps. First, I show that for Du Bois the public sphere in Anglo-European modern states consists of a dialectical interplay between reasonable persons and illiberal rogues. Second, under these nonideal circumstances, the ideal of autonomy grounds reasonable persons’ deliberative openness, an attitude of public moral regard for others which is necessary for constructing the terms of political rule. Though deliberative openness is the essential vehicle (...) of construction, reasonable persons only have a pragmatic political obligation to forge ties of deliberative reciprocity with likeminded persons whom they trust will listen and not harm them. Finally, I present Du Bois’s defense of black suffragists’ support of the 19th Amendment to illustrate pragmatic political obligation in action. I sketch successful democratic engagement that reconstitutes a nonideal public sphere. (shrink)

"The overall aim of this book is to understand the character of moral progress, so that making moral progress may become more systematic and secure, less chancy and less bloody. Drawing on three historical examples - the abolition of chattel slavery, the expansion of opportunities for women, and the increasing acceptance of same-sex love - it asks how those changes were brought about, and seeks a methodology for streamlining the kinds of developments that occurred. Moral progress is conceived as pragmatic (...) progress, progress from rather than progress to, achieved by overcoming the problems and limits of the current situation. Two kinds of problems are distinguished: problems of exclusion, found when the complaints of some people are ignored; and problems of false consciousness, present when the oppressed adopt judgments from the ambient society and do not protest their condition. The proposed methodology advocates procedures for listening to voiced complaints and for systematically reviewing the way in which particular self-conceptions, ideals and identities are taken to be appropriate for various groups of people. Through outlining a picture of moral practice, at both the individual and the societal levels, the book seeks to orient moral philosophy away from metaethical questions of realism and towards moral methodology"--. (shrink)

Democracy used to be seen as a relatively mechanical matter of merely adding up everyone's votes in free and fair elections. That mechanistic model has many virtues, among them allowing democracy to 'track the truth', where purely factual issues are all that is at stake. Political disputes invariably mix facts with values, however, and then it is essential to listen to what people are saying rather than merely note how they are voting. The great challenge is how to implement that (...) deliberative ideal among millions of people at once. In this strikingly original book, Goodin offers a solution: 'democratic deliberation within'. Building on models of ordinary conversational dynamics, he suggests that people simply imagine themselves in the position of various other people they have heard or read about and ask, 'What would they say about this proposal?' Informing the democratic imaginary then becomes the key to making deliberations more reflective - more empathetic, more considered, more expansive across time and distance. (shrink)

Background The ideal basis of age estimation is considered to be a combination of clinical, skeletal and dental examinations. It is not easy to determine how forensic physicians take account of evidence-based data obtained from medical journals in their medical decision-making. The question of what is an ethically acceptable probability that adolescents are incorrectly considered to be over 18 has not been answered. Methods In a retrospective study over 1 year (2007), 498 files (for 141 female subjects and 357 male (...) subjects) regarding age assessment requested by the public prosecutor's office for purposes of criminal or asylum proceedings were reviewed. Chronological age was estimated from a combination of physical examination, radiographic examination of the left hand and determination of dental status. Results Estimates of chronological age in 498 subjects claiming to be 9–14 years old were incompatible with the alleged age in 356 (71%) when made by the forensic physician but in only 17 (3%) when based on data from published studies on age estimation in adolescents. Conclusions The present study suggests that in most cases the forensic physician ignores the adolescent's word. Medical mission and ethics imply a need to listen to the claims of persons in custody, whatever the risk of false claims. This situation should prompt forensic physicians to keep up with published data on estimating the age of adolescents. (shrink)

Though much of what we learn about the world comes from trusting testimony, the status of aesthetic testimony – testimony about aesthetic value – is equivocal. We do listen to art critics but our trust in them is typically only provisional, until we are in a position to make up our own mind. I argue that provisional trust (but not full trust) in testimony typically allows us to develop and use aesthetic understanding (understanding why a work of art is valuable, (...) or similar); and aesthetic understanding is an essential component of aesthetic virtue. Aesthetic virtue is the orientation of a whole person towards aesthetic value and aesthetic reasons, through action, non‐cognitive and cognitive attitudes. The ideal (aesthetically virtuous) way to make aesthetic judgements is through your own aesthetic understanding. (shrink)

If, as many suppose, pornography changes people, a question arises as to how.1 One answer to this question offers a grand and noble vision. Inspired by the idea that pornography is speech, and inspired by a certain liberal ideal about the point of speech in political life, some theorists say that pornography contributes to that liberal ideal: pornography, even at its most violent and misogynistic, and even at its most harmful, is political speech that aims to express certain views about (...) the good life, 2aims to persuade its consumers of a certain political point of view—and to some extent succeeds in persuading them. Ronald Dworkin suggests that the pornographer contributes to the ‘moral environment, by expressing his political or social convictions or tastes or prejudices informally’, that pornography ‘seeks to deliver’ a ‘message’ , that it reflects the ‘opinion’ that ‘women are submissive, or enjoy being dominated, or should be treated as if they did’, that it is comparable to speech ‘advocating that women occupy inferior roles’.3 Pornography on this view is political speech that aims to persuade its listeners of the truth of certain ideas about women, and of course ‘the government must leave to the people the evaluation of ideas’.4 Another answer offers a vision that is not grand and noble, but thoroughly reductive. Pornography is not politically persuasive speech, but speech that works by a process of psychological conditioning. This view seems common enough in the social science literature. Consider, for example, this description of an early experiment, from a time that pre-dates contemporary political debate. (shrink)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's spiritual masterpiece, The Divine Milieu, in a newly-revised translation by Siôn Cowell, is addressed to those who have lost faith in conventional religion but who still have a sense of the divine at the heart of the cosmos. "The heavens declare the glory of God," sings the Psalmist. Teilhard would agree. "We are surrounded," he says, "by a certain sort of pessimist who tells us continually that our world is foundering in atheism. But should we not (...) say rather that what it is suffering from is unsatisfied theism?" He sees a universe in movement where progress is the spiritualisation of matter and its opposite is the materialisation of spirit. Teilhard opts for progress. The Divine Milieu is both the divine centre and the divine circle, the divine heart and the divine sphere. The Divine Milieu is an essay on the notion of grace. It is written for those who listen primarily to the voices of the Earth: its purpose is to provide a link to traditional Christianity (as expressed in Baptism, Cross and Eucharist) in order to demonstrate that the fears prevalent in contemporary world society as it abuses its very foundation - Mother Earth - may be better understood by the Gospel path. Teilhard's primary purpose is to show a way forward which he sees as the "Christian religious ideal". (shrink)

Lecturing is the only educational form inherited from the universities of the middle ages that is still in use today. However, it seems that lecturing is under threat, as recent calls to do away with lecturing in favour of more dynamic settings, such as the flipped classroom or pre-recorded talks, have found many adherents. In line with the post-critical approach of this book, this chapter argues that there is something in the university lecture that needs to be affirmed: at its (...) best, the university lecture functions as a technique for thinking together or for making collective thinking happen in a lecture hall. The lecture offers the set-up, both technological and architectural, to forge a common experience that binds together the listeners and the speakers; that experience can be characterised as visualising ideas or seeing things as if they had taken on a ‘bodily form’. By looking at several examples of lecturing moments experienced by Gadamer as a student and later recounted in his autobiography, we can better understand the paradigmatic experience that characterises the lecture – as an ideal to be sought, even if, perhaps, not always actualised in everyday lectures. (shrink)

Theravada Buddhist sermons in palm-leaf manuscript collections in South and Southeast Asia are frequently bilingual, including portions in the classical language of Pali and a local vernacular, such as Burmese, Sinhala, or Thai. These bilingual sermons prove to be ideal subjects for exploring how Buddhist scriptures function as kinetic, interactive processes of performance and reception. This paper draws on three examples of Pali-Khmer sermons composed in Cambodia between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The three bilingual texts or “bitexts” analyzed in (...) this article each follow a different format: rearranged phrasal gloss, selective sentence gloss, and vernacular expansion. These formats draw on the pan-Theravada technology of the bitext to create a dynamic oscillation between Pali and Khmer passages, amplifying patterns established by differential practices of listening and recitation. The key medium in this process is language, which serves as a fluid intermediary that makes the relational activity of scripture possible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Invitation to Play:A Response to Patrick Schmidt's "What We Hear is Meaning Too:Deconstruction, Dialogue, and Music"Patrice Madura Ward-SteinmanThe aims of dialogue-as-deconstruction, as described by Patrick Schmidt, are concepts I have pondered as a result of a five-week sabbatical visit to Melbourne, Australia. My research focus there was improvisation, and early in my visit I attended two concerts at the premier jazz club, Bennett's Lane. There I heard twelve (...) improvisers in a variety of ensembles, all in celebration of the seventieth birthday of their mentor, Tony Gould, who also performed. Gould is cited by John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell as an "outstanding player who has never ceased to develop as an improviser" and who "as a pianist, records prolifically across a wide musical spectrum."1While the music was jazz, it was freer and fresher than usual. There was striking interaction among the musicians, including facial expressions that reflected genuine ecstasy, and body movement that was naturally "in sync" with the music. I began to ask many questions, including: Is Australia's jazz different from that [End Page 82] in the U.S.? Is Tony Gould's influence as a teacher the reason for the difference? What accounts for the sensation of "freshness" in this music? And why is this musical experience so gripping, both aurally and visually? Serendipitously, I discovered answers through the opportunity to respond to Schmidt's aims of dialogue-of-deconstruction. I shall illustrate how those aims, namely decentralized power and conflict, multiplicity and meaning, and mis-listening may be met in the improvising music ensemble.Decentralized Power and ConflictThe lifeblood of "free jazz" and "free improvisation" ensembles is de-centralized musical interaction, which may be considered a metaphor for dialogue-as-deconstruction. Case in point: the Tony Gould Quartet was an improvising unit with each musician contributing to the musical whole. The air was electric with each musician poised in both the anticipation of what the other might play and in the moment of creation.A recent trend in studies of organizational behavior is on "self-directed" or "self-managed" groups, as identified by Keith R. Sawyer.2 David Borgo3 explains that the characteristics of these "self-organizing systems" or "SOSs" are threefold: they operate without centralized control, they "exhibit both complex and adaptive dynamics," and they are comprised of autonomous individuals who demonstrate a high degree of connectivity. Both authors assert that an ideal SOS is the free improvising ensemble, where musical ideas are allowed to emerge and adapt, and even musical "mistakes" may be manipulated into the context, thus creating new directions in dialogue.However, SOSs have some inherent problems. For example, they are "slow to emerge.... The more complex they are, the longer it may take them to warm up: hierarchical layers have to settle down... and individual(s) have to acquaint themselves with one another."4 Borgo explained that even advanced improvisers often need to pursue a musical idea for a long while for it to achieve coherence. Philip Alperson adds: "As the number of designing intelligences increases, the greater is the difficulty in coordinating all the parts; the twin dangers of cacophony and opacity lurk around the corner."5It seems that "interactional synchrony"6 can develop among musicians who have "good chemistry" after a warm-up period, but those with conflicting personalities, aesthetic dispositions, or musical styles may have a more difficult time of it. When members of the Tony Gould Quartet were asked how they are able to achieve musical unity, they explained that they have played together for many years, they "hang out and drink together" when not on the bandstand, and they trust each other. Even when one of the members feels "out of sorts," their improvisations are respected as authentic expressions. Others' differences are honored, [End Page 83] rather than felt in opposition to one's self.7 Ingrid Monson8 quotes several musicians who use the metaphor of marriage to describe the musical relationship during a peak performance; on the other hand, jealousy, competition, and even hostility on the bandstand are not uncommon and can destroy an ensemble. So, it appears... (shrink)

ABSTRACTDemocracies, Dewey and others have argued, are ideally spaces of reasons – they allow for an exchange of reasons both practical and epistemic by those willing to engage in that discourse. That requires that citizens have convictions they believe in, but it also requires that they be willing to listen to each other. This paper examines how a particular psychological attitude, “epistemic arrogance,” can undermine the achievement of these goals. The paper presents an analysis of this attitude and then examines (...) four arguments for how its adoption – especially by the powerful – undermines the ideal of democracy as a space of reasons. (shrink)

How human musical experience emerges from the audition of organized tones is a riddle of long standing. In _The Musical Representation_, Charles Nussbaum offers a philosophical naturalist's solution. Nussbaum founds his naturalistic theory of musical representation on the collusion between the physics of sound and the organization of the human mind-brain. He argues that important varieties of experience afforded by Western tonal art music since 1650 arise through the feeling of tone, the sense of movement in musical space, cognition, emotional (...) arousal, and the engagement, by way of specific emotional responses, of deeply rooted human ideals. Construing the art music of the modern West as representational, as a symbolic system that carries extramusical content, Nussbaum attempts to make normative principles of musical representation explicit and bring them into reflective equilibrium with the intuitions of competent listeners. The human mind-brain, writes Nussbaum, is a living record of its evolutionary history; relatively recent cognitive acquisitions derive from older representational functions of which we are hardly aware. Consideration of musical art can help bring to light the more ancient cognitive functions that underlie modern human cognition. (shrink)

Independent on Sunday October 2nd One of the country's lead­ing philosophical counsellers, and chairman of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP), Tim LeBon, said it typically took around six 50 ­minute sessions for a client to move from confusion to resolution. Mr LeBon, who has 'published a book on the subject, Wise Therapy, said philoso­phy was perfectly suited to this type of therapy, dealing as it does with timeless human issues such as love, purpose, happiness and emo­tional challenges. `Wise (...) Therapy, is part of a series aimed at promoting an integrative attitude as its ethos. Among all the many perspectives of psychotherapists and counselors, philosophy needs to take its place and needs to find its voice. Tim LeBon has provided an effective means by which counselors can bring philosophy into their work with clients' - APPA journal `Tim Le Bon's Wise Therapy is a comprehensible and well argued book dealing with the practical therapeutic applications of philosophical research that may well be of interest to philosophers but -- as the author himself intends -- will be of most obvious benefit to therapists and counselors, both by informing their dialogue with clients in new ways and by helping them become more informed about ways to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising within the context of their own work' - Metapsychology `A fascinating workshop for therapists and clients, backed up a thorough degree if philosophical acuity' - Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis `I strongly recommend the book for philosophers as well as practitioners, teachers, students and supervisors in counselling and psychotherapy' - Self and Society `Provides some additional and valuable arrows for the therapist's quiver' - Irvin Yalom, author of Love's Executioner `Like Aristotle, Tim LeBon examines what is said and extracts what is best from it…. There are many fascinating exercises designed to bring out and enlighten the client's values, conception of the good life, well-being, happiness, pleasure, and the proper place of reason in life…. Wise Therapy is well written and engaging. The case histories are illuminating examples of therapeutic techniques at work, the thought experiments are well designed, and the philosophical position adapted from the internal debates of the philosophers is level headed…. I recommend it highly to philosophers with an interest in counselling, and psychological counsellors with an interest in philosophy' - Jeff Mason, The Philosophers' Magazine `Tim LeBon has… authored a text which should become a staple on the philosophical counsellor's bookshelf…. Wise Therapy is a concise, well-written book…. His ability to relate philosophical concepts to counselling concerns is admirable and attests to the skill and knowledge he possesses as a working counsellor. But, by far the most important part of Tim LeBon's book to PC is the last chapter, "The Counsellor's Philosophical Toolbox"' - Craig Munns in The Examined Life ` Tim LeBon has done a good job of offering practical approaches to some of the most important and vexing issues that arise in counselling…. Tim LeBon's book contains helpful suggestions, practical information, and useful examples, and would make a good addition to the library of any counsellors willing to allow philosophy to turn mere client sessions into wise therapy' - Peter Raabe, Practical Philosophy Wise Therapy is an original and practical guide to how philosophy can benefit counselling and psychotherapy. Tim LeBon argues that therapy, informed by philosophy, can help clients make better decision and achieve emotional wisdom. He uses philosophical approaches to explore issues of right and wrong, the emotions and reasons, well-being and the meaning of life, and develops a 'counsellor's toolbox' of techniques that can help practitioners apply the wisdom of philosophy to good therapeutic practice. For counsellors who may find philosophical approaches to therapy useful, this work addresses key philosophical topics - the emotions, free will, the meaning of life and ethics. It is jargon-free where possible and assumes no previous philosophical training. From The Independent, 16th November 2004 Plato is my agony aunt It was the end of a love affair that broke her heart. Could the wisdom of the great philosophers show her how to be happy again? Claire Smith tries a novel form of therapy "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates said. Nor is the life you're left with after your boyfriend has left you for another woman - at least, that's how it felt in October last year when mine broke rank and went off with an art student from Cleveland, Ohio. We were over there for the opening of his new art exhibition. He'd flown over four days before me and had met her at a party. Supposedly, they "connected". The five months that followed were a roller-coaster of confusion, vitriol and despair. I knew there'd been problems in our relationship. We saw the world very differently; he delighted in the charm of the ordinary, I wanted maximum divinity. He walked; I galloped. He drank tea; I loathed the stuff. But, along the banks of the Thames, we'd made a promise to always stick together. Our love was something unique: "transcendental", I called it. And besides, we recycled. Surely a commitment to save the world would save our relationship? Alas, no. So there I was, a woman scorned. Hell truly hath no greater fury. And what made it worse was that I still believed in our transcendental love. If I wanted to change the way I was feeling, I needed to alter the way I was thinking. But how? A few bottles of wine and a sharp blow to the head might have done the trick. Fortunately, there's an older, more trusted way of turning your head on its head that counsellors are starting to use: philosophy. The idea of employing Plato as an agony aunt was begun in 1981 by the German philosopher Gerd Achenbach. Although philosophy spends a lot of its time asking real-life questions that affect real-life people - What is happiness? And is it always wrong to lie? - most of the debate goes on in ivory towers. What Achenbach and subsequent philosophers including Tim LeBon, the chairman of the UK's Society for Philosophy in Practice, wanted to do was "give practical application" to this gigantic library of great thoughts. So how does it work? Like most types of therapy, you sign up for a set of sessions. "Two would give you a new perspective on one issue; six would help you to make a major life-decision, like a career change; with 12 you can start to rethink your entire life philosophy," explains LeBon. Each session lasts 50 minutes and costs £50 - and, no, you don't have to have any previous knowledge of philosophy. "If you think of Friends, it would suit Ross and Chandler more than Joey," LeBon says. "It's for anyone who wants to make their emotions more intelligent. Or for those who have tried other kinds of therapy, and want something more cerebral." The first session begins with the patient venting off about whatever's troubling them. The rant over, the counsellor then picks out some key concepts that are crucial to the problem - in the case of heartbreak, it is love and happiness that come hurtling to the fore - and then gets the patient to define what they mean. So, what is love? What is happiness? To kick-start the patient's thinking, LeBon describes what a great philosopher had to say about it. In my case, he tells me what Plato wrote about love in his Symposium: that to stop man fighting the gods, Zeus decided to cut each human in two, so they would lose their strength. "This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other," Plato said. "Each of us is a 'matching half' of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him." This method of probing what we might think are "obvious" ideas, such as love and happiness, was devised by Socrates in the squares of Athens. "The only I thing I know is that I know nothing at all," he boasted. What Socrates showed was that although many of the thinkers of his time thought they knew what justice, happiness and goodness meant, their understanding was tied in to their personal agenda and world view, and, what's more, when pushed, their ideas often contradicted themselves. A bit like me on love. Whereas part of my understanding of love was something that gave life meaning, made it worth living and bound us together, I also believed that true love was "transcendental": that it was out of this world, and it didn't matter if the two people who loved each other couldn't get along in the day-to-day. Love was bigger than the mundane. But when it came to the next stage of the therapy, critical thinking - "to check out whether your assumptions stand up to examination" - I walked head first into a contradiction. If I think love's purpose is to make life worth living, but then say it's irrelevant to daily life, surely my two ideas of love are not compatible? As the cogs in my brain start to creak into motion, I feel myself taking a step back from my predicament: thinking about how I've been thinking. This idea I had of transcendental love might have started off as a romantic dream. But when the relationship stopped working, and I found myself feeling trapped and frustrated, I used it to justify the mechanics of a relationship that just didn't work in the daily grind. I used it to lie to myself. In the final stage, LeBon gets me to start thinking about how to go forward. "You can't change what has happened," he says. "You can't change that he's left you, or how you behaved in the relationship. So, as the Stoics did, let's work on controlling the controllables: the things that you can change." To work out what can be changed, he gets me to try out a thought experiment, a method often used in philosophy to imagine other worlds where people can have different codes of behaviour. Thought experiments shatter your preconceived ideas of how the world should be and let your imagination run wild to how the world could be. "I find Viktor Frankl very useful here, the Austrian psychiatrist and concentration-camp survivor who actually believed that everything in life happens for a purpose," LeBon says. "Suppose this break-up did happen for a reason that will work to your benefit," he suggests. "What might that be? The answer might be that you can now focus on something important that was denied in the relationship. Or - the Hollywood version - so you'll meet someone who is really right for you." Temporarily freed of any sense of responsibility for the relationship that was, and its sorry demise, the list came fast. I could now travel more; he didn't like me travelling on my own, but too often he didn't want to go anywhere, preferring to stay in his studio and make art. I'd love to meet someone with a similar sense of adventure to mine. For the first time in two years, I was being honest with myself about what I really wanted - listening to those voices that we all have inside our heads, and too often try to muzzle. So did philosophy save me? Well, I'm now dating a travel writer I have to run to keep up with. I still haven't got over the fact that my replacement came from Cleveland, Ohio. But I guess I never will. Tim LeBon can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] A FEW WORDS FROM THE WISE Compiled by Ed Caesar · "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet" - Plato · "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness" - Friedrich Nietzsche · "That man shall live as his own master and in happiness who can say each day 'I have lived'" - Horace · "The good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy" - Aristotle · "There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than friendship" - Thomas Aquinas · "Whatever you do... love those who love you" - Voltaire · "Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination" - Immanuel Kant · "Happiness is a state of which you are unconscious. The moment you are aware that you are happy, you cease to be happy" - Jiddu Krishnamurti · "Love is an ideal thing. Marriage is a real thing" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I shrink, therefore I am Therapy has many answers, but some questions require the help of a philosopher, says Clint Witchalls Sunday November 21, 2004 The Observer Danny had worked in the City of London for 10 years. As a research analyst, stockbroker and fund manager, he'd made a lot of valuable contacts, earnt a lot of cash, and learnt some important business skills. However, as he approached his mid-thirties, he no longer felt good about himself or what he did for a living, and he found his colleagues cold and unfriendly. A chronic illness made him realise his mortality, and he began to reassess his priorities. Danny had been struggling with his career conundrum for nearly five years when he met David Arnaud, a philosophical counsellor. After a few soul-searching sessions, Danny arrived at a decision. Today, he teaches economics to sixth-formers, and he loves it. 'It's a much better lifestyle,' he says. Many people are turning to philosophical counsellors to get answers to questions such as: 'How do I make sense of myself?' 'What is important to me?' 'Where am I going?' These are perhaps not the sort of questions that require psychiatric intervention, but Arnaud, who recently completed the first empirical study of philosophical counselling in the UK, has found that within just five sessions the majority of clients, with important decisions to make, tend to move from a state of concern and confusion to a resolution. Modern philosophical counselling can be traced back to 1981, when the philosopher Gerd Achenbach opened the first practice near Cologne. Achenbach referred to the new discipline as 'therapy for the sane.' Today, there are hundreds of philosophical counsellors around the world, with the movement particularly strong in the US, Britain and the Netherlands. 'The dilemmas people face aren't always primarily psychological,' says Alex Howard, a philosophical counsellor from Newcastle. 'If people face problems that are social or economic, it doesn't make sense to define their problems in purely psychological terms.' Tim LeBon, a founder member of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP) and author of Wise Therapy, adds: 'We are faced with far more life choices than our grandparents, yet have far fewer resources to deal with them. Our grandparents may have gone to a priest or to other family members for advice; most people don't trust these solutions any more and so want to make their own well-informed, well thought-out choices. Philosophical counselling can help these people - people in mid-life crises who are wondering how to make the most of the rest of their life. People who want to take stock of their values.' Where stressed executives might once have been prescribed a course of tranquillisers or antidepressants, they can now get a dose of Bertrand Russell instead: 'Success is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.' While some philosophical counsellors do recommend books for their clients to read, most sessions are about helping the client identify faulty thoughts. For example, a briefing in Aristotelian logic might show a client why their beliefs are erroneous. The person might infer that they're a screw-up because they've screwed up. The counsellor could point out that they're making an error called 'fallacy of composition' - that is, what's true of the part isn't necessarily true of the whole. In philosophical counselling, problems aren't pathologised as they are by the psychiatric profession, and the dialogue between client and counsellor is more like a meeting of equals, compared to many therapies where the client is treated like a patient and seen as someone who is, in some way, inadequate. 'Anybody can benefit from philosophical counselling,' says Howard. 'But it does require someone who is willing to take stock.' Lou Marinoff, author of international bestseller Plato Not Prozac! has done much to promote philosophical counselling. 'Some people who have stabilised their neurochemistry and validated their emotions now wish to examine or re-examine the criteria of their beliefs, the principles of their conduct, or the meaning of their lives,' he says. 'With whom shall they do this? Psychologists and psychiatrists can shed light on such issues - as can rabbis, priests, imams and gurus. Philosophers are now rejoining the ranks of helpers.' LeBon believes certain therapies (such as cognitive behavioural therapy) don't go far enough in helping their clients. 'For instance, if you are anxious about your relationship, a cognitive therapist would try to dispute your catastrophising and jump to conclusions to make you feel less anxious,' says LeBon. 'A philosophical counsellor would do this, but would also look for existential meaning in your anxiety - perhaps you really don't want to be in the relationship and that is what your anxiety is telling you.' LeBon also gives short shrift to psychoanalysts. 'There's very little evidence for the Freudian unconscious, and it's time to move on to more intellectually satisfying and helpful therapies,' he says. However, Alain de Botton, the man who popularised philosophy as self-help, isn't ready to bury psychologists and their ilk just yet. 'The truth is that psychoanalysis grew out of philosophy - it's not some completely new idea, and in fact, done properly, psychoanalysis is philosophical anyway. It may even be dangerous to the mental health of some people to suggest a philosopher rather than a properly trained analyst. The knowledge of analysts when it comes to many emotional problems is now much greater than that of most philosophers.' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004. (shrink)

Background Metaphors are central to the human understanding of complex issues; through the immediate associations they evoke and frame problems and suggest solutions. Our suggestion of Music in the Park as a metaphor for health systems reform brings to the forefront the environmentally diverse but bounded spaces of health services that offer a variety of attractors within their confines, while pushing into the background organizational and economic concerns.Reflections Parks, like health services, are embedded in their local landscape, serving their communities, (...) but most importantly parks are public spaces, publically funded, ideally offering universal access and equity and to be shared by all who want to go there.Music, like health, is tangible, technical and scientific, yet ultimately experiential and based on meaning. While it encompasses a wide range of styles and approaches, music making requires as its most important skill active listening which brings with it to be ‘in the moment’, to take personal risks and to draw energy and inspiration from the participants. Hence ‘audiences’ are equally active participants because music only has meaning if it internally resonates with the listener and only can exist in what is a co-constructed experience.Conclusions Music in the Park is a metaphor for primary health care systems based on shared values of experts and unique local communities. Health professionals are players in this arena, who develop and practise the full range of their skills in response to individual and community needs and preferences. Their leadership works through inspiration and empowerment, making patients ‘co-producers’ of their own health and ‘co-shapers’ of their health services. (shrink)

For my invited contribution to this special issue of Religions on “Feminisms and the Study of ‘Religions,’” I focus on philosophy of religion and contestations over its relevance to the academic field of Religious Studies. I amplify some feminist philosophers’ voices—especially Pamela Sue Anderson—in corroboration with recent calls from Religious Studies scholars to diversify philosophy of religions in the direction of locating it properly within the current state of Religious Studies. I want to do this by thinking through two proposals (...) in productive tension: first, any philosophy of religions worthy of the name is intrinsically feminist; second, any philosophy of religions worthy of the name is intrinsically traditional. I want to use the productive tension between these two to illuminate ways calls for broadening the field can be enhanced when such calls are seen as both feminist and traditional. I proceed as follows. First, I note three instances of explicitly feminist work in philosophy of religions that do not suffer from the same narrowness as so-called “traditional” philosophy of religion. Religious Studies critics of philosophy of religion overstate the case in claiming feminist philosophy of religion is too narrow. Second, I develop a useful distinction between the concepts of “tradition” and “institution” to locate forces of oppression more precisely in dynamics of institutionalization so that we might rehabilitate tradition as a resource for combating institutionalized oppressiveness. I do this in response to the hegemony of current philosophers of religion who claim to speak about “the traditional god.” And third, I briefly coordinate four topics in religions from diverse feminist perspectives to help refine paths of inquiry for future philosophy of religions that is both feminist and traditional. My hope is that these clarify a philosophy of religions renewed through feminisms—moving from fringe to normative topics in institutionalized philosophy of religion, maintaining focus on actually existing human beings rather than hypothetically existing transcendent entities. I turn our attention to technical issues surrounding the status of mae chis, Buddhist laity who seek monastic recognition in Theravada. I turn our attention to struggles over fitting criteria for leadership between Mary Magdalene and Peter in early Christian contexts. I have us listen to Muslim women who seek to speak for themselves, many of whom describe Muhammad as a feminist. I have us listen to Anderson’s criticism of arguments about the (non)existence of a god and her promotion of human yearning as guided by regulative ideals as a pointed challenge to institutionalized philosophy of religion. In all these ways and more, feminist challenges to institutionalized philosophy of religion further contribute to diversifying field. (shrink)

Despite the lack of invariance problem (the many‐to‐many mapping between acoustics and percepts), human listeners experience phonetic constancy and typically perceive what a speaker intends. Most models of human speech recognition (HSR) have side‐stepped this problem, working with abstract, idealized inputs and deferring the challenge of working with real speech. In contrast, carefully engineered deep learning networks allow robust, real‐world automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the complexities of deep learning architectures and training regimens make it difficult to use (...) them to provide direct insights into mechanisms that may support HSR. In this brief article, we report preliminary results from a two‐layer network that borrows one element from ASR, long short‐term memory nodes, which provide dynamic memory for a range of temporal spans. This allows the model to learn to map real speech from multiple talkers to semantic targets with high accuracy, with human‐like timecourse of lexical access and phonological competition. Internal representations emerge that resemble phonetically organized responses in human superior temporal gyrus, suggesting that the model develops a distributed phonological code despite no explicit training on phonetic or phonemic targets. The ability to work with real speech is a major advance for cognitive models of HSR. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

The history of note?taking has only begun to be written. On the one hand, the basic functions of selecting, summarizing, storing and sorting information garnered from reading, listening, observing and thinking can be identified in most literate contexts in some form or other. On the other hand, Renaissance humanists emphasized with unprecedented success the virtues of stockpiling notes on large scales and for the long term, thanks to the availability of paper and a new abundance of books, but also to (...) their ability to transmit their own keen motivation to avoid any future loss of learning. We continue to share many early modern ideals for insuring the collection and retrievability of information and have built on early modern practices that facilitate the accumulation and the organization of information, including collaborative work and the use of rearrangeable slips. (shrink)

Stephen John has recently suggested that the ethics of communication yields important insights as to how values should be incorporated into science. In particular, he examines cases of “wishful speaking” in which a scientific actor endorses unreliable conclusions in order to obtain the consequences of the listener treating the results as credible. He concludes that what is wrong in these cases is that the speaker surreptitiously relies on values not accepted by the hearer, violating what he terms “the value-apt ideal”. (...) I expand on this view by integrating into it Miranda Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice. I find testimonial injustice can arise in a manner unanticipated by Fricker, specifically that a credibility excess given to a speaker typically reduces the ability of others in the epistemic community to transmit knowledge, a phenomenon I term “collateral epistemic injustice”. I argue that this possibility entails that receivers have an ethical obligation to assign credibility judiciously. A further consequence of this view is that the value-apt ideal is insufficient. Because audience members have an obligation to assign credibility judiciously, a speaker cannot merely rely on shared values, they must also be open about the extent to which their conclusions depend on those values. Thus, both wishful speaking and obscuring the value-dependent nature of a conclusion makes one an unreliable source of information. Accordingly, other community members have an ethical obligation to ignore a speaker that frequently engages in either. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Modern Socratic Dialogue and Resilient Democracy: Creating the Clearing for an American Bildung1Laura J. Mueller (bio)Michael Hogue’s American Immanence draws from some of the fundamental features of American philosophy: philosophy is not alienated from life, but rather, part and parcel of the structure of our experiences, a way of living. His notion of “resilient democracy” is particularly representative of this tradition of thought. Resilient democracy is, first of all, (...) an ethos, grounded in “the collective experience of uncertainty and animated by the living desire to bring about a more beautiful world.”2 This ethos is an associational, relational one, and it is democratic because, for Hogue, it must be “empathetic, emancipatory, and equitable,” assuming that each member of the association can be enriched by other members” (AI, 172–73). Vital to this democratic ethos is its anti-foundational politics; we start not with an immutable reality, but rather with the vulnerable reality of our actual, political, experiences (AI, 176). We start with where we are, not where some abstract ideal demands we should be. Democracy, for Hogue, is not just a certain political ideal for which to aim, but rather a way of being, a way of life. Dewey writes:A democracy is more than an associated form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.... These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond... They secure a liberation of his powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.3Throughout this paper, I use “democracy” in this sense; as a way of life, as a relational ethos, not as any particular political system. [End Page 40]As a way of life, democracy is both the process—the struggle—and that which we aim for. This feature of democracy is similar to the structure of Bildung, in which self-cultivation is both the process and the product.4 For example, for Wilhelm von Humboldt, an individual is in “continuing activity,” whose powers are never stagnant; humankind is always progressing, an infinite object.5 This is an end-in-view, not a fixed end.6 Humboldt “did not formulate a catalogue which prescribed what a person should know, what a person should read, what a person should have heard, what a person should have concerned himself with, so that one can say: this person has Bildung.”7 For Humboldt, Bildung is “the development of the capacities of the individual into a harmonious whole.”8 This paper, in part, looks at Hogue’s resilient democracy as a cultivation of both the individual and the group, as Bildung of both self and culture. In particular, the individual and culture that are being cultivated are relational, grounded in an emancipatory, equitable, and empathetic ethos, with a democratic way of life.Similar to the traditional Bildungstradition, education plays a vital role in this kind of democratic cultivation. If our end-in-view is a democratic society, then the method to reach that end must also be democratically ordered. Myles [End Page 41] Horton put it best: “When you believe in a democratic society, you provide a setting for education that is democratic.”9Modern Socratic Dialogue (MSD) is a particular method of philosophical dialogue that engages in and cultivates the ethos of resilient democracy. It cultivates empathy (in listening), pluralism (difference is accommodated and incorporated) and equity (insofar as no special knowledge is required), and anti-foundationalism (participants approach the conversation with epistemic humility, not trying to grasp a Truth as the ground of knowledge, but rather work together to form a common truth that comes out of their situatedness). These are all traits of Hogue’s resilient democracy, and all traits of an American Bildung, our self-correcting vulnerability, a way of being that replaces an unattainable ideal without sacrificing amelioration.Much like the tradition it addresses, this paper is layered; it is polyphonically pluralistic in method and structure. The many voices of this paper are first stratified and folded in... (shrink)

As a defender of the fundamental importance of Mendel’s experiments for understanding heredity, the English biologist William Bateson did much to publicize the usefulness of Mendelian science for practical breeders. In the course of his campaigning, he not only secured a reputation among breeders as a scientific expert worth listening to but articulated a vision of the ideal relations between pure and applied science in the modern state. Yet historical writing about Bateson has tended to underplay these utilitarian elements of (...) his program, to the extent of portraying him, notably in still-influential work from the 1960s and 1970s, as a type specimen of the scientist who could not care less about application. This paper offers a corrective view of Bateson himself—including the first detailed account of his role as an expert witness in a courtroom dispute over the identity of a commercial pea variety—and an inquiry into the historiographic fate of his efforts in support of Mendelism’s productivity. For all that a Marxian perspective classically brings applied science to the fore, in Bateson’s case, and for a range of reasons, it did the opposite during the Cold War. (shrink)

Difficulties understanding speech form one of the most prevalent complaints among older adults. Successful speech perception depends on top-down linguistic and cognitive processes that interact with the bottom-up sensory processing of the incoming acoustic information. The relative roles of these processes in age-related difficulties in speech perception, especially when listening conditions are not ideal, are still unclear. In the current study, we asked whether older adults with a larger working memory capacity process speech more efficiently than peers with lower capacity (...) when speech is presented in noise, with another task performed in tandem. Using the Eye-tracking of Word Identification in Noise Under Memory Increased Load an adapted version of the “visual world” paradigm, 36 older listeners were asked to follow spoken instructions presented in background noise, while retaining digits for later recall under low or high memory load. In critical trials, instructions directed listeners’ gaze to pictures of objects whose names shared onset or offset sounds with the name of a competitor that was displayed on the screen at the same time. We compared listeners with different memory capacities on the time course for spoken word recognition under the two memory loads by testing eye-fixations on a named object, relative to fixations on an object whose name shared phonology with the named object. Results indicated two trends. For older adults with lower working memory capacity, increased memory load did not affect online speech processing, however, it impaired offline word recognition accuracy. The reverse pattern was observed for older adults with higher working memory capacity: increased task difficulty significantly decreases online speech processing efficiency but had no effect on offline word recognition accuracy. Results suggest that in older adults, adaptation to adverse listening conditions is at least partially supported by cognitive reserve. Therefore, additional cognitive capacity may lead to greater resilience of older listeners to adverse listening conditions. The differential effects documented by eye movements and accuracy highlight the importance of using both online and offline measures of speech processing to explore age-related changes in speech perception. (shrink)

Corcoran, John. 2005. Meanings of word: type-occurrence-token. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 11(2005) 117. -/- Once we are aware of the various senses of ‘word’, we realize that self-referential statements use ambiguous sentences. If a statement is made using the sentence ‘this is a pronoun’, is the speaker referring to an interpreted string, a string-type, a string-occurrence, a string-token, or what? The listeners can wonder “this what?”. -/- John Corcoran, Meanings of word: type-occurrence-token Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4150 (...) E-mail: [email protected] The four-letter written-English expression ‘word’, which plays important roles in applications and expositions of logic and philosophy of logic, is ambiguous (multisense, or polysemic) in that it has multiple normal meanings (senses, or definitions). Several of its meanings are vague (imprecise, or indefinite) in that they admit of borderline (marginal, or fringe) cases. This paper juxtaposes, distinguishes, and analyses several senses of ‘word’ focusing on a constellation of senses analogous to constellations of senses of other expression words such as ‘expression’, ‘symbol’, ‘character’, ‘letter’, ‘term’, ‘phrase’, ‘formula’, ‘sentence’, ‘derivation’, ‘paragraph’, and ‘discourse’. Consider, e.g., the word ‘letter’. In one sense there are exactly twenty-six letters (letter-types or ideal letters) in the English alphabet and there are exactly four letters in the word ‘letter’. In another sense, there are exactly six letters (letter-repetitions or letter-occurrences) in the word-type ‘letter’. In yet another sense, every new inscription (act of writing or printing) of ‘letter’ brings into existence six new letters (letter-tokens or ink-letters) and one new word that had not previously existed. The number of letter-occurrences (occurrences of a letter-type) in a given word-type is the same as the number of letter-tokens (tokens of a letter-type) in a single token of the given word. Many logicians fail to distinguish “token” from “occurrence” and a few actually confuse the two concepts. Epistemological and ontological problems concerning word-types, word-occurrences, and word-tokens are described in philosophically neutral terms. This paper presents a theoretical framework of concepts and principles concerning logicography, including use of English in logic. The framework is applied to analytical exposition and critical evaluation of classic passages in the works of philosophers and logicians including Boole, Peirce, Frege, Russell, Tarski, Church and Quine. This paper is intended as a philosophical sequel to Corcoran et al. “String Theory”, Journal of Symbolic Logic 39(1974) 625-637. https://www.academia.edu/s/cdfa6c854e?source=link -/- . (shrink)

In a phenomenology of acting, Phillip Zarrilliconsiders acting as a 'question' to be explored in the studio, and then reflected upon. This book is a vital response to Jerzy Grotowski's essential question: "How does the actor 'touch that which is untouchable?'" Phenomenology invites us to listen to "the things themselves", to be attentive to how we sensorially, kinaesthetically, and affectively engage with acting as a phenomenon and process. Using detailed first-person accounts of acting across a variety of dramaturgies and performances (...) from Beckett to newly co-created performances to realism, it provides an account of how we 'do' or practice phenomenology when training, performing, directing, or teaching. Zarrilli brings a wealth of international and intercultural experience as a director, performer, and teacher to this major new contribution both to the practices of acting, and how we can reflect in depth on those practices. An advanced study for actors, directors, and teachers of acting thatis ideal for both the training/rehearsal studio and research, a phenomenology of acting is an exciting move forward in the philosophical understanding of acting as an embodied practice. n reflect in depth on those practices. An advanced study for actors, directors, and teachers of acting thatis ideal for both the training/rehearsal studio and research, a phenomenology of acting is an exciting move forward in the philosophical understanding of acting as an embodied practice. (shrink)

In two posthumously published essays, ‘History of Astronomy’ and ‘Of the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called The Imitative Arts’, Adam Smith suggests provocatively that philosophy is an ‘art of imagination’ and that we take the same ‘very high intellectual pleasure’ in appreciating systematic scientific theories and in listening to musical ‘systems’, i.e., complex works of non-programmatic instrumental music. In this paper, I reconstruct the view of imagination, as the cognitive faculty primarily responsible for perception (...) and appreciation of such ‘systems’, that undergirds these claims, and argue that it is to be understood as aiming at ideal ends – in the first instance, at beauty or an order among variety (systematicity). Smith thus offers a distinctive view of aesthetic imagination, as neither freely playing nor imitative (two common views of imagination both in his time and ours) but rather as aiming at, and progressively realizing non-rational norms of order (again, at least in the first instance, an ideal of beauty). (shrink)

I do not by any means with to take on the philosophy or aesthetics of music as a whole. In his review of Edward Lippman’s Humanistic Philosophy of Music, Monroe Beardsley lists six areas in which an ideal philosophy of music ought to provide guidance: an ontology of music, an answer to the question What is a musical work of art? a taxonomy of music, a categorical scheme for the basic and universal aspects of music; a hermeneutics or semiotics of (...) music, an answer to the question What, if anything, can music refer to? an epistemology of music; a theory of music criticism, an answer to the question What makes one musical work better than another? the foundations of a social philosophy of music.4 My subject here is the third item. I want most particularly to separate it from the fifth item, for to arrive at an interpretation of a particular piece is not to arrive at an evaluation of it. I shall also try, particularly in my discussion of Nelson Goodman’s seminal Languages of Art, to avoid the first item.5 And I shall try throughout to avoid embroilment in the question of how the aesthetic experience can be separated from the nonaesthetic.My subject is in fact only a part of the third item above, namely, current theories of musical expression. “Expression” is not equivalent to “meaning”; I understand and shall use the word “expression” to indicate a kind of meaning that entails some kind of reference outside the internal syntax of the artwork itself. As Goodman remarks, “rather obviously, to express is to refer in some way to what is expressed.”6 How this reference is made by the artwork is interaction with the listener, and what sort of purpose it serves—these concerns will be the focus of this essay. To choose this focus is not to deny something of which I have no doubt, both from Peter Faltin’s careful arguments and from my own experience: there is a kind of musical meaning that is purely syntactic, that operates without reference outside the internal operations or procedures of musical systems themselves.7 But through this may be ontologically the most fundamental kind of musical meaning, it is not the only kind. To listen for this alone is not the only way to approach music. Indeed, I should guess it is not the most fundamental way for many listeners. 4. I paraphrase and abbreviate from Monroe C. Beardsley, review of A Humanistic Philosophy of Music by Edward A. Lippman, Musical Quarterly 66 : 305.5. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols ; all further references to this work, abbreviated LA, will be included in the text.6. Goodman, “Reply to Beardsley,” Erkenntnis 12, pt. 1 : 171; and see Edward T. Cone: “Expressive values in any art … cannot arise from analytical values alone. How could they? Unless one wishes to explain what it could possibly mean for a work of art to ‘express itself,’ then one must agree that expression, by its very definition, implies a relationship between the work of art and something else; while analytical values are derivable purely from internal structure” . Anthony Newcomb, professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Madrigal at Ferrara. He is currently at work on a book on musica ficta, Understood Accidentals in Renaissance Vocal Polyphony, 1450-1600, and a study of the relationship between structure and expression in nineteenth-century music. (shrink)