This article looks at Bernard Williams’s relevance to particular debates in constitutional theory about the legitimacy of two competing models of institutional design: political constitutionalism which endorses giving the final say on the meaning of constitutional rights to legislatures; and legal constitutionalism which endorses giving the final say on the meaning of rights to courts. Recent defences of political constitutionalism have made claims about the realism of their accounts when compared with legal constitutionalism and have co-opted Bernard Williams’s realism to (...) support their case. This article examines these claims, concluding that these accounts of political constitutionalism rely on a distinctly non-Williamsian form of political moralism in that they assume a legitimacy for political constitutionalism which is prior to politics and political disagreement. It offers an alternative defence of political constitutionalism, a partial defence, which, it argues, is closer to the realism of Bernard Williams than these accounts. (shrink)

It is often said nowadays that to understand pleasure we must understand it as affording us a reason for or an explanation of action. It is only from the standpoint of the agent that we can avoid being misled. Both Professor Nowell-Smith and Mr. Manser have argued along these lines; and Dr. Kenny has written that “pleasure is always a reason for action” and has elucidated what he means by a footnote: “I do not mean that a thing’s being pleasant (...) is always a sufficient reason for doing it; there may be strong reasons for abstaining. I mean merely that it is always silly to ask a man why he wants pleasure.” When I first saw this point made, I had the perhaps not uncommon philosophical experience of immediately finding it both lucid and convincing, but then, afterwards gradually becoming less and less clear about the source of my conviction. The reasons for my obfuscation are as follows. In one crucial sense anything can afford an agent with a reason for action. It depends upon what the agent wants and upon the projects in which he is engaged. Moreover, without having any strong reasons for abstaining from what will give me pleasure, I may not be at all moved by the prospect of pleasure. As I write this paper I can list a dozen activities or experiences which would afford me pleasure. I have no strong reason for abstaining; I do not particularly enjoy writing papers; I am not writing with a great sense of urgency; I have the time and the money to indulge myself. Yet I do not rush to open a Guinness or Mr. Alfred Grossman’s new novel. So that far from it being silly to ask me why I do not apparently want pleasure at the moment, it is a question that I find forced upon me. But if this question makes sense, there is at least a problem as to why “it is always silly to ask a man if he wants pleasure.” For one might expect the two questions to stand or fall together. This is the problem to which I address myself in this paper. But in order to do so I must first take up certain points from recent discussions which are in danger of preventing a solution. (shrink)

President Trump verbally attacked human rights in his campaign rhetoric in 2016, leading many to believe that he would undermine the role of human rights in US foreign policy as President. I examine whether or not President Trump’s anti-human rights rhetoric manifested in US foreign policy by analyzing potential changes in how human rights were considered in foreign aid allocations under the Trump Administration. While President Trump had a number of executive tools at his disposal to exert control over foreign (...) aid allocation, he would still have had to overcome considerable bureaucratic and legislative inertia in order to implement his anti-human rights agenda in US foreign aid. I demonstrate that he was unsuccessful in overcoming this inertia, at least in the first 2 years of his Administration (the years for which data is currently available). If anything, human rights received more consideration under President Trump than under President Obama. (shrink)

This paper briefly examines the concept of the ancient mode of production as expressed in Karl Marx’s Formations. It looks at how twentieth-century Marxist historiography picks up this concept in its characterisation of the Greco-Roman city-state. It explores the feasibility of the use of the concept in relation to the advancement of knowledge of the city-state, especially through the development of archaeology. It examines how social classes are structured and relations of exploitation are presented. And it analyses the need for (...) politics in the organisation of this socio-economic form in terms of how it is joined up with the social relations of production. (shrink)

A presence for decades in individuals’ everyday life practices and identity formation, the Walt Disney Company has more recently also become an influential element within the "big" curriculum of public and private spaces outside of yet in proximity to formal educational institutions. _Disney, Culture, and Curriculum_ explores the myriad ways that Disney’s curricula and pedagogies manifest in public consciousness, cultural discourses, and the education system. Examining Disney’s historical development and contemporary manifestations, this book critiques and deconstructs its products and perspectives (...) while providing insight into Disney’s operations within popular culture and everyday life in the United States and beyond. The contributors engage with Disney’s curricula and pedagogies in a variety of ways, through critical analysis of Disney films, theme parks, and planned communities, how Disney has been taught and resisted both in and beyond schools, ways in which fans and consumers develop and negotiate their identities with their engagement with Disney, and how race, class, gender, sexuality, and consumerism are constructed through Disney content. Incisive, comprehensive, and highly interdisciplinary, _Disney, Culture, and Curriculum_ extends the discussion of popular culture as curriculum and pedagogy into new avenues by focusing on the affective and ontological aspects of identity development as well as the commodification of social and cultural identities, experiences, and subjectivities. (shrink)

(2010). Shaping Youth Discourse About Technology: Technological Colonization, Manifest Destiny, and the Frontier Myth in Facebook's Public Pedagogy. Educational Studies: Vol. 46, Youth, New Media, and Education, pp. 503-523.

In this collection of essays, Camillo “Mac” Bica, Ph.D., a former Marine Corps Officer, Vietnam Veteran, and philosopher, provides a cogent analysis of why a veteran may not want to be thanked for his “service” in war. Mac’s experiential and theoretical perspective is both gut wrenching and concise. “The Philosopher speaks from the mind,” Mac writes, “the warrior from where it hurts.” With simplicity, poignancy, and power, this book, together with future installments of the War Legacy Series, works to dispel (...) the mythology of nobility and heroism by providing a window into the reality of war and its devastating effects upon all who experience its horrors. (shrink)

A vibrant portrait of four college friends-Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley-who formed a new philosophical tradition while Oxford's men were away at war.

When Sartre arrives late to meet Pierre at a local establishment, he discovers not merely that Pierre is absent, but Pierre’s absence, where this depends, or so Sartre notoriously supposes, on a frustrated expectation that Pierre would be seen at that place. Many philosophers have railed against this view, taking it to entail a treatment of the ontology of absence that Richard Gale describes as ‘attitudinal’ – one whereby absences are thought to ontologically depend on psychological attitudes. In this paper, (...) I aim to make Sartre’s intuition respectable. What Sartre perceives is an absential location, only the boundaries of which are circumscribed by what Sartre is doing at that place: meeting Pierre. I explain how this Sartrean view, though not specifically attributable to Sartre, nonetheless honours some of the phenomenological data described, if a little opaquely, in Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

I present a novel anti-sceptical BIV argument by focusing on conditions on the production and use of the locative preposition ‘in’. I distinguish two uses of ‘in’—material and descriptive phenomenological—and I explain in what respect movement is central to the concept that our use of ‘in’ expresses. I go on to argue that a functionalist semantics of the intelligible use of ‘in’ demands a materialist philosophy of action in the spirit of G.E.M. Anscombe, but also why the structure of space (...) is not irrelevant either; appeal to the structure of space unsettles the causal-empirical assumptions that ground the picture of subjectivity and agency that the biv narrative assumes. Finally, I explain why a functionalist semantics demands a Naïve Realist metaphysics of perception, consistent with some of Putnam’s last writings on philosophy of perception. (shrink)

I offer a reading of Murdoch's conception of concrete universality as it appears in 'The Idea of Perfection', the first essay in the Sovereignty of Good. I show that it has British Idealist overtones that are inflected by Wittgenstein, a thought I try to illuminate by drawing an analogy with Wittgenstein's discussion of the metre stick in Paris in Philosophical Investigations §50. In the last part of the paper, I appeal to the work of Murdoch's erstwhile tutor Donald MacKinnon to (...) respond to an objection to my strategy, which I draw from Murdoch's later work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. (shrink)

I ask whether figure-ground structure can be realized in touch, and, if so, how. Drawing on the taxonomy of touch sketched in Katz's 1925 The World of Touch, I argue that the form of touch that is relevant to such consideration is a species of immersed touch. I consider whether we can feel the space we are immersed in and, more specifically, the empty space against which the surfaces of objects, as I shall urge, “stand out.” Harnessing M. G. F. (...) Martin's account of bodily awareness and touch, I defend a positive thesis, pace Graham Nerlich on whose The Shape of Space I otherwise rely, both to defend the supposition that empty space can in principle be felt and to argue that touching empty space is not a mere species of absence perception. Along the way, I defuse a causal worry that might be thought to arise in the case of touching empty space. (shrink)

1. Barry and Cullity (2022b) argue that when morally assessing a person’s climate actions,1 we should ask how these actions affect other people’s prospects.2 For the present purposes, we can unders...

This paper expands on the notion of "moral conversion" (advanced by Bernard Lonergan but underdeveloped in his work) by developing a typology that uses two "cross-hatching" criteria. First, it distinguishes between moral conversions that have to do with a person's relation to moral obligation, good and evil, and between moral conversions that have to do with how a person regards the question of happiness and the meaning of life. Secondly, it distinguishes between conversions regarding the _content_ (what is good/evil or (...) the meaning of life?), regarding _attitude_ (becoming committed to doing good or to the meaning-seeking process), and regarding _coherence_ (conforming one's actual life to what is understood to be right/wrong or meaning-giving). Combining both criteria leaves us with six types of moral conversion. Each type is then illustrated and supported with concrete real-life narratives. I conclude with an attempt at a definition of moral conversion that includes all types. The article is a summary of Chapter 5 of my dissertation (2008) "Narratives of Hope: A Philosophical Study of Moral Conversion.". (shrink)

This new Reader brings together classic pieces of gender theory, as well as examples of the sophistication of contemporary gender theory and research methodologies in the field of education. Leading international gender researchers address current debates about gender, power, identity and culture and concerns about boys’ and girls’ schooling, gender achievement patterns, the boys’ education debate, and gender relationships in the curriculum, the classroom and youth cultures. The Reader is divided into six sections which reflect contemporary concerns about Gender and (...) Education: Gender and Educational Theory Difference and Power Identity Work Knowledge and Pedagogy Reflexivity and Risk Gender and Citizenship. A specially written Introduction from the editors, both experts in feminist and masculinity research, provides a much-needed context to the current educational climate. Undergraduates, postgraduates and academics interested in education, gender studies and women’s studies will find this a stimulating and important resource. The analysis of the gender dimensions of the curriculum, teaching and alternative pedagogies also provide important insights for practitioners wishing to promote gender equality. (shrink)

Despite some recognition that Aboriginal women who have experienced breast cancer may have unique health needs, little research has documented the experiences of Aboriginal women from their perspective. Our main objective was to explore and to begin to make visible Aboriginal women's experiences with breast cancer using the qualitative research technique, photovoice. The research was based in Saskatchewan, Canada and participants were Aboriginal women who had completed breast cancer treatment. Although Aboriginal women cannot be viewed as a homogeneous group, participants (...) indicated two areas of priority for health‐care: (i) Aboriginal identity and traditional beliefs, although expressed in diverse ways, are an important dimension of breast cancer experiences and have relevance for health‐care; and (ii) there is a need for multidimensional support which addresses larger issues of racism, power and socioeconomic inequality. We draw upon a critical and feminist conception of visuality to interrogate and disrupt the dominant visual terrain (both real and metaphorical) where Aboriginal women are either invisible or visible in disempowering ways. Aboriginal women who have experienced breast cancer must be made visible within health‐care in a way that recognizes their experiences situated within the structural context of marginalization through colonial oppression. (shrink)

Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2020, Page 101-113.

In this study we present a self-organizing connectionist model of early lexical development. We call this model DevLex-II, based on the earlier DevLex model. DevLex-II can simulate a variety of empirical patterns in children's acquisition of words. These include a clear vocabulary spurt, effects of word frequency and length on age of acquisition, and individual differences as a function of phonological short-term memory and associative capacity. Further results from lesioned models indicate developmental plasticity in the network's recovery from damage, in (...) a non-monotonic fashion. We attribute the network's abilities in accounting for lexical development to interactive dynamics in the learning process. In particular, variations displayed by the model in the rate and size of early vocabulary development are modulated by (a) input characteristics, such as word frequency and word length, (b) consolidation of lexical-semantic representation, meaning-form association, and phonological short-term memory, and (c) delayed processes due to interactions among timing, severity, and recoverability of lesion. Together, DevLex and DevLex-II provide an accurate computational account of early lexical development. (shrink)

In what sense does empty space feature in visual experience? In the first part of this essay I sketch a view advanced by Soteriou and Richardson on which one's visual awareness of empty space is explained by appeal to ‘structural’ features of the phenomenology of visual experience, in particular the phenomenology of experiencing one's visual field as bounded. I suggest that although this ‘structuralist’ view is silent on whether empty space has a phenomenal appearance, the very appeal to structural features (...) seems a natural foil to some such thought. In the second part, I outline a view on which it can be granted that empty space does, after all, have a phenomenal appearance and, so, is not best cast as a species of absence perception as the structuralist avows, at least on a certain construal of ‘absence perception’. After O'Shaughnessy , I contend that although some privations have a phenomenal appearance, ‘absence perception’ should single out the putative perception of phenomena that lack phenomenal reality. I finally consider how the descriptive phenomenology that the structuralist points to, and which I urge should be embraced, can nonetheless be reconciled with the view I spell out. (shrink)

O'Brien & Opie's connectionist interpretation of and depends heavily on the notions of and that underlie the classic account. When the assumptions, shared by both accounts, are removed, the connectionist versus classic contrast appears to be between behavioral and linguistic accounts.

Byrne & Russon's account of program imitation in primates involves propositional attitudes (expectations and goals), which limits its falsifiability. Yet their account of priming shows exactly how imitation without attitudes would look. The challenge is to upgrade the notion of priming to give an account of low-level program imitation without invoking propositional attitudes.

Secondly, there is the approach of Augustine. Augustine focusses his original attention on the fact of understanding of immaterial substances, and thus can be said to begin his investigation of the soul with a conception of the soul as a substance separate in itself, apprehending universals in an immediate and direct act. Augustine, and the philosophers in this tradition, face the reverse of Aristotle's problem, for they must try to account for the fact of sensation with which he began, and (...) they must explain why the soul troubles to animate the body at all, why it operates at all through the medium of the body. (shrink)

Re-encountering certain kinds of artworks in the present (re-listening to music, re- reading novels) can often occasion a kind of recollection akin to episodic recollection, but which may be better cast as ‘phasic’, at least insofar as one can be said to remember ‘what it was like’ to be oneself at some earlier stage or phase in one’s personal history. The kinds of works that prompt such recollection, I call ‘still lives’ - they are limited wholes whose formal properties are (...) stable over time. In the first part of the paper, I spell out a way of making sense of the peculiar power that certain artworks have to occasion such recollection – it is, as I explain, a power or ductus that derives from the form of the artwork, though possession of such a power is not limited to art. I then detail three dimensions along which episodic recollection and phasic recollection as occasioned by re-encountering ‘still lives’ differ: metaphysical, phenomenological, and descriptive. In the second half, I explore a challenge for my account of phasic recollection, which in turn helps make more vivid my proposal as well as the spectral analogy at the heart of it: Just as one can see regions behind one by looking in the direction of a mirror located in the same space in which one is, sometimes by re-encountering certain kinds of artworks now, past intervals or phases ‘behind one’ can be ‘made present’ in a way that the paper aims to make plain. I also explain to what extent phasic recollection might be understood as a form of mental time travel, and what the attendant phenomenology of ‘transportation’ involves. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot all studied at Oxford University during the Second World War. One of their wartime tutors was Donald MacKinnon. This paper gives a broad overview of MacKinnon's philosophical outlook as it was developing at this time. Four talks from between 1938 and 1941—‘And the Son of Man That Thou Visiteth Him’ (1938), ‘What Is a Metaphysical Statement?’ (1940), ‘The Function of Philosophy in Education’ (1941) and ‘Revelation and Social Justice’ (1941)—give a foretaste (...) of the conception of moral philosophy that he later articulated in A Study of Ethical Theory (1957). We identify aspects of his philosophical outlook and unusual treatment of method that likely shaped his teaching. We trace his influence in the work of Midgley, Murdoch and Foot, all of whom studied with him from Trinity Term 1940 until their finals in 1942. In the case of Anscombe, though she was briefly his student—he taught her Plato—she and MacKinnon moved in shared intellectual circles, and there is reason to think that some of the forces that shaped MacKinnon's outlook also shaped hers. The sketch we offer is incomplete—in particular, we are not able to do justice to MacKinnon's explicitly theological writings—but we hope to achieve three things. First, to go some way towards indicating the importance of the teacher MacKinnon to understanding the work of his better-known pupils. Second, to introduce a philosopher for whom the teaching of philosophy, practical ethics and metaphysical theory were deeply entwined. Third, to reflect on the relationship between, on the one hand, a conception of the practice and significance of metaphysics and, on the other, a view on the role and nature of philosophical teaching and learning. (shrink)

For the past two decades, agricultural workers in regions of Central America have reported an epidemic of chronic kidney disease of undetermined etiology (CKDu) that is not associated with established risk factors of chronic kidney disease. Several hypotheses have emerged, but the etiology of CKDu remains elusive and controversial. The aim of this literature review was to describe the potential risk factors of CKDu in Mesoamerica and implications for the U.S. agricultural worker population. PubMed and CINAHL databases were searched for (...) articles published between 2000 and 2018 that examined CKDu in Mesoamerica; 29 original studies were included in this review. CKDu is a multifactorial disease that is often asymptomatic with hallmark characteristics of elevated serum creatinine and blood urea nitrogen (BUN), low glomerular filtration rate, electrolyte abnormalities, and non-nephrotic proteinuria. Reducing the global prevalence of CKDu will require more robust studies on causal mechanisms and on interventions that can reduce morbidity and mortality in vulnerable populations. (shrink)

We are once again back to the faculty of arts and to Siger of Brabant, and we are concerned to set forth his attitude toward the problem of the soul in Aristotle, not paraphrasing it, as was done earlier, but giving it in terms of the analytical discussion of the preceding two sections. A vitally important point must be made at the outset: Siger is not consciously attempting to accommodate Aristotle to the Faith. He is interested only in reconstructing the (...) Stagirite's own argument in a systematic and coherent manner, regardless of whether the conclusions come into conflict with Christian doctrine or not. Admittedly, he recognizes that these conclusions are sometimes at variance with Christian teachings, and he makes no attempt to blink these variations, but there is not in Siger any of the Thomist conviction that reason, properly exercised, cannot do otherwise than confirm the truths of faith. No--Siger reluctantly finds that properly employed reasoning can sometimes produce conclusions in conflict with truths of faith. His analysis of the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul, as presented in his De anima intellectiva, leads him to conclude that the rigorous application of systematic reasoning to the given premisses could have led to no other answers than the ones that Aristotle seems to reach. Bonaventure, faced with this dilemma, assumed that Aristotle's reasoning was proper and therefore concluded that his premisses must have been wrong; Aquinas agrees with Siger that the premisses were correct and therefore decides that the reasoning was faulty or perhaps merely inadequate, since the conclusions reached fail to confirm the truths of the Christian Revelation. Siger, however, finds both the premisses and the reasoning proper, and thus he is ultimately forced to the device of calling the resulting conclusions only "philosophical" and saying that they are always replaceable by the apodeictic certainties of the Faith. The recent research on Siger--Gilson, Van Steenberghen, and Nardi--has recognized that he was by no means insincere, or deliberately controverting the Faith; these commentators well understand that he is trying carefully and dispassionately to set forth the Aristotelian argument in all its consistency. When the conclusions reached appear to be contrary to Christian doctrine, he can do no more than say, as he does. (shrink)

The situation after the 13th century, however, badly needs to be clarified by additional detailed research. Bruno Nardi and Anneliese Maier have exhibited a nice understanding of the extraordinary complexities surrounding the question of what "Averroism" might be during this later period, but they stand nearly alone in this knowledge; even Gilson is content to dismiss, with a few strokes of the pen, the entire "Averroist" tradition as authority-bound, sterile, and doomed to early extinction through sheer stagnation. But the very (...) history of philosophy attests to the vitality of the tradition, whatever it may consist of, or at least to the vitality of the designation, for Cremonini in the 17th century was still preferring the commentaries of Averroes to all others, and late in the 16th century Marcantonio Zimara was commonly known as an "Averroist"--to name but two obvious cases. From before the time of Siger of Brabant through to the 17th century Averroes was read as the Commentator on Aristotle, and every generation throughout this period reveals its quota of philosophers who are, or who could easily be, dubbed "Averroists." It is here being asked: what do all these thinkers share, if anything? A common attitude toward the nature of the intellective soul? A common sympathy toward Averroes' Neo-Platonic rendering of Aristotle? A common blind reproduction of the Commentator's interpretation of the Stagirite? An unwarranted trust in the capacities of unaided reason, as manifested in a constant opposition of the conclusions of natural reason to the doctrines of the Christian Revelation? A common tendency in the direction of doubt, insincerity, heresy, and even atheism? It is here suggested that, far from taking "Averroism" as an obsolescent and disappearing species of subversive thinkers, it would be more enlightening to consider the tradition as symptomatic of the essential inability of Christian thinkers to assimilate Greek philosophy without modifications which would profoundly alter the fundamental character of that philosophy. Or, to phrase it somewhat differently, throughout the mediaeval period, when the domain of natural reason was being radically separated from the domain of faith, the rigorous rendering of Aristotle that Averroes presented maintained a steady appeal, which waned only when new translations from the Greek pointed up the Neo-Platonic predispositions of the Commentator, and revealed that the original spirit of the Stagirite was rather different than the flavor that Averroes introduces to the texts. (shrink)

Anscombe’s published writings, lectures and notes on sensation point toward a sophisticated critique of sense-data, representationalist and direct realist theories of perception (in both their historical and contemporary forms), and a novel analysis of the concept of sensation. Her philosophy of perception begins with the traditional question, ‘What are the objects of sensation?’, but the response is a grammatical rather than ontological enquiry. What, she asks, are the characteristics of the grammatical object of sensation verbs? Anscombe’s answer is: sensation verbs (...) take ‘intentional objects’, where an ‘intentional object’ is a description which has the characteristics of the concept of intention—characteristics elucidated in great detail in her Intention. This simple manoeuvre allows Anscombe to reject two opposing positions in the philosophy of perception - that the objects of sensation are sense-data and that the objects of sensation are tables and chairs (etc). Both views, she argues, fail to recognise the grammatical fact that the verbs of sensation take intentional objects. This chapter outlines the case for a grammatical methodology in philosophy of perception, by framing an analysis of the ways in which the sense-data and direct-realist theories of perception arise out of the theoretical demands that are generated when the grammar of the concept of sensation is left unexplored. Along the way, it will be shown that Anscombe’s philosophy of perception should not be read as fore-running contemporary representationalism, and that reading it as such in fact runs counter not only to the letter but the spirit of Ancombe’s proposal. (shrink)

I draw on Carl Stumpf’s essay “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie”, and his precocious On the Psychological Origin of the Idea of Space, to set out a charge he raises against Kant’s fo...

ABSTRACT I draw on Carl Stumpf’s essay “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie” (1891), and his precocious On the Psychological Origin of the Idea of Space (1873), to set out a charge he raises against Kant’s form/matter distinction. The charge rests, I propose, on the supposition that colourless extension, or empty space, cannot be seen. I consider an objection that Stumpf raises against Kant’s notorious ‘subtraction’ argument. Kant supposes that we can ‘take away’ from the representation of a body all that the understanding (...) thinks in relation to it and extension would yet remain (Remainder), separate from all sensation (Separateness). Stumpf denies both claims but I suggest he needn’t. I outline a way of defending Remainder without Separateness, extrapolating from some neglected descriptive phenomenology in Husserl’s 1907 “Thing and Space” lectures: we see empty regions insofar as we see things through them. Finally, by appeal to so-called ‘structural’ features of visual experience, I detail a distinctive approach to making the subtraction argument intelligible. (shrink)

In his reference letter for Murdoch’s 1947 fellowship application at Newnham College, Cambridge, her erstwhile Oxford undergraduate tutor, Donald MacKinnon, remarks that Murdoch is ‘on the threshold of creative work of a high order’. This chapter outlines the nature of that ‘creative work’ and its early development. We show how Murdoch’s close study of the Christian existentialist philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel (1883–1973) came to inflect both her early critique of Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism and her first attempts to show (...) the limits of logical positivism. We explain how once at Cambridge, Murdoch’s exposure to Wittgenstein’s method, through her philosophical friendship with Elizabeth Anscombe, gave her the conceptual means to recast those aspects of Marcel’s thought (as well as those of Martin Buber) that she believed were important but, as she wrote in her application, ‘vague’. We show, finally, how both strands of Murdoch’s thinking are later brought into synchrony in the much-discussed example of M&D. This, in turn, allows us to isolate Murdoch’s understanding of the individual’s relation to their own ‘ghostly past’ and to reveal the importance of Murdoch’s early encounters with Anscombe and Marcel. (shrink)

In this study we present a self‐organizing connectionist model of early lexical development. We call this model DevLex‐II, based on the earlier DevLex model. DevLex‐II can simulate a variety of empirical patterns in children's acquisition of words. These include a clear vocabulary spurt, effects of word frequency and length on age of acquisition, and individual differences as a function of phonological short‐term memory and associative capacity. Further results from lesioned models indicate developmental plasticity in the network's recovery from damage, in (...) a non‐monotonic fashion. We attribute the network's abilities in accounting for lexical development to interactive dynamics in the learning process. In particular, variations displayed by the model in the rate and size of early vocabulary development are modulated by (a) input characteristics, such as word frequency and word length, (b) consolidation of lexical‐semantic representation, meaning‐form association, and phonological short‐term memory, and (c) delayed processes due to interactions among timing, severity, and recoverability of lesion. Together, DevLex and DevLex‐II provide an accurate computational account of early lexical development. (shrink)

I consider the first part of Marty’s Raum und Zeit, which treats of both the nature of space and spatial perception. I begin by sketching two charges that Marty raises against Kantian and Brentanian conceptions of space (and spatial perception) respectively, before detailing what I take to be a characteristically Martyan picture of space perception, though set against the backdrop of contemporary philosophy of perception. Marty has it that spatial relations are non-real but existent, causally inert relations that are grounded (...) in space, which is itself non-real but existent. Objects do not inhere in space in the way properties inhere in substances. Rather, there is a ‘non-real’ relation of ‘fulfillment’ (Erfüllung) that holds between objects and places in space, which itself subsists. I consider whether any contemporary philosophy of perception is equipped to make sense of Martyan space perception and I suggest that the most promising conception is Naïve Realism. I then outline a difficulty for this theoretical translation. Naïve Realism is a direct theory of perception whereby S is said to perceive O just in case S stands in a psychological relation of acquaintance with O, where this relation is both non-representational and explanatorily primitive. For Marty however, all relations are non-real and, insofar as they are grounded, are neither fundamental, nor brute or primitive in an explanatory sense. I close by detailing what I thereby take a distinctively Martyan form of Naïve Realism to involve. The central theoretical tenet that phenomenal character is fundamentally constituted by worldly objects is preserved; but the manifestly relational structure of the acquaintance relation, construed in particular as a relation of awareness, is treated as derivative. I make headway in spelling out the latter claim by bringing Marty into fleeting conversation with another Thomist - G.E.M. Anscombe. (shrink)

This paper involves constructive exegesis. I consider the contrast between morality and art as sketched in Philippa Foot's 1972 paper of the same name, ‘Morality and Art’. I then consider how her views might have shifted against the background of the conceptual landscape afforded by Natural Goodness, though the topic of the relation of art and morality is not explicitly explored in that work. The method is to set out some textual fragments from Natural Goodness that can be arranged for (...) a tentative Footian ‘aesthetics’. I bring them into conversation with some ideas from Iris Murdoch to elucidate what I think the import may be, for Foot, of depicting human form. (shrink)

In this book, Earl Mac Cormac presents an original and unified cognitive theory of metaphor using philosophical arguments which draw upon evidence from psychological experiments and theories. He notes that implications of this theory for meaning and truth with specific attention to metaphor as a speech act, the iconic meaning of metaphor, and the development of a four-valued system of truth. Numerous examples of metaphor from poetry and science are presented and analyzed to support Mac Cormac's theory. A Cognitive Theory (...) of Metaphortakes up three levels of explanation—metaphor as expressed in surface language, the semantics of metaphor, and metaphor as a cogitive process—and unifies these by interpreting metaphor as an evolutionary knowledge process in which metaphors mediate between minds and culture. Mac Cormac considers, and rejects, the radical theory that all use of language is metaphorical; however, this argument also recognizes that the theoryof metaphor may itself be metaphorical. The book first considers the computational metaphor often adopted by cognitive psychology as an example of metaphor requiring analysis. In contrast to three well-known philosophical theories of metaphor—the tension theory, the controversion theory, and the grammatical deviance theory—it develops a semantical anomaly theory of metaphor based on a quasi-mathematical hierarchy of words. In developing the theory, Mac Cormac makes much-needed connections between theories of metaphor and more orthodox analytic philosophy of meaning, including discussions of speech acts and the logic of fuzzy sets. This semantical theory of explanation is then shown to be compatible with contemporary psychological theories of memory. (shrink)