There has been little debate in political philosophy about whether the intentions of governments matter to the legitimacy of their policies. This paper fills this gap. First, I provide a rigorous statement of political anti-intentionalism, the view that intentions do not matter to political legitimacy. I do so by building on analogous debates in moral philosophy. Second, I sketch some strategies to defend political anti-intentionalism, which I argue are promising and available to a wide range of (...) theories of legitimacy. Third, I show that the distinction has implications for debates surrounding neutrality and political liberalism. (shrink)

Despite its internal divisions and the uncertainty surrounding many of its foundations, there is a growing consensus that the on‐going search for an alternative model of the mind finds a minimal theoretical identity in the pursuit of an anti‐Cartesian conception of mental phenomena. Nevertheless, this anti‐Cartesianism remains more or less explicitly committed to the neo‐Brentanian idea that intentionality is an essential feature of the mental—an idea that has prevailed since the advent of modern cognitive science in the 1950s. (...) An issue of compatibility is thereby raised, as neo‐Brentanism arguably sides with cognitive Cartesianism. The main goal of the paper is to put into full light one specific aspect of this largely unperceived problem of compatibility by arguing that the neo‐Brentanian property of intentionality is an essentially representational one that runs counter to the salient anti‐representationalism of anti‐Cartesianism. And, that this representational essence confronts the search for alternative models of the mind of an anti‐Cartesian kind with the following theoretical issue: To what extent is it possible to devise a non‐Brentanian property of intentionality, particularly one that is fully dissociated from the property of representation? This issue is shown to be much deeper and more difficult than it looks once the nature of representation is properly apprehended; it seems to be still waiting for an answer in the current search for an alternative model of the mind, if only because it has not yet be set in fully adequate terms. (shrink)

In the philosophical debate about literary interpretation, the actual intentionalist claims, and the anti-intentionalist denies, that an acceptable interpretation of fictional literature must be constrained by the author’s intentions. I argue that a close examination of the two most influential recent strands in this debate reveals a surprising convergence. Insofar as both sides (a) focus on literary works as they are, where work identity is determined in part by certain (successfully realized) categorial intentions concerning, e.g., title, genre, and large-scale (...) instances of allusion, allegory, and irony and (b) allow that works can acceptably be interpreted for unintended meanings—since an intentional act can, under a different description, exhibit unintended features—then they turn out to share the same interpretive policy concerning authorial intention. This suggests that philosophers should shift the interpretation debate away from issues of authorial intention and toward issues about the aims of interpretation. (shrink)

According to reductive intentionalism, the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is constituted by the experience's intentional (or representational) content. The goal of this article is to show that a phenomenon in visual perception called change blindness poses a problem for this doctrine. It is argued, in particular, that phenomenal character is not sensitive, as it should be if reductive intentionalism is correct, to fine-grained variations in content. The standard anti-intentionalist strategy is to adduce putative cases in (...) which phenomenal character varies despite sameness of content. This paper explores an alternative anti-intentionalist tack, arguing, by way of a specific example involving change blindness, that content can vary despite sameness of phenomenal character. (shrink)

Is self-deception something that just happens to us, or is it an intentional action of an agent? This paper discusses intentionalism, a theory claiming that self-deception is intentional behavior that aims to produce a belief that the agent does not share. The agent is motivated by his belief that p (e.g. he is bald) and his desire that not-p (e.g. not to be bald), and if self-deceiving is successful, the agent will end up believing not-p. Opponents of intentionalism (...) raise two different objections: it seems that self-deceiver should then simultaneously hold two incompatible beliefs (namely, that p and not-p), as well as simultaneously intend the deception and be unaware of it. This paper reviews possible answers to anti-intentionalist objections (temporal partitioning, psychological partitioning, and the attentional strategy account) and offers guidelines to strengthen intentionalist claims. (shrink)

Intentionalism in aesthetics is, quite generally, the thesis that the artist's or artists' intentions have a decisive role in the creation of a work of art, and that knowledge of such intentions is a necessary component of at least some adequate interpretive and evaluative claims. In this paper I develop and defend this thesis. I begin with a discussion of some anti-intentionalist arguments. Surveying a range of intentionalist responses to them, I briefly introduce and criticize a fictionalist version (...) of intentionalism before moving on to an approach I call moderate intentionalism. I consider a salient alternative known as hypothetical intentionalism and try to show why moderate intentionalism should be preferred to it. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers of history and interpretation theorists very often deny the thesis of intentional realism, because they reject intentionalism or the thesis that an agent's or author's intentions are relevant for the interpretive practice of the human sciences. I will defend intentional realism by showing why it is wrong to whole-heartedly reject intentionalism and by clarifying the logical relation between intentionalism and intentional realism. I will do so by discussing the two central arguments against intentionalism; the (...) argument from the perspective of narrative anti-realism and the epistemic argument focusing on the fact that an agent's or author's intentions are not epistemically accessible in a direct manner. In particular, I will show that the fact that historians write narratives does add a level of complexity as far as the giving of explanations of individual actions are concerned. Yet it does not follow that the explanatory power of a full fledged historical narrative can be understood as being completely independent of our folk psychological account of individual agency. Accordingly, we should also be prepared to accept a methodological distinction between the human and the natural sciences as long as the human sciences use the folk psychological framework for explanatory purposes, since it is only in the former that empathy plays an epistemically central role. I however do not claim that empathy is the only method of the human sciences nor do I claim that all interpretive disputes can be settled merely in light of our empathic capacities. (shrink)

In this critical review I explore the anti-intentionalist stance Adorno offers in his aesthetics, specifically focusing on his Notes to Literature, and the internal limits to this stance. Adorno rejects the primacy of authorial intentionalism: The presuppositions of its aesthetic methodology, he claims, place the individual in a position of epistemic priority, without exploring the social totalities which constitute the conditions of the presentation of aesthetic knowledge by any such individual. The role of the creator for Adorno is (...) inherently mediated within the context of such totalities. -/- This is not to wholly discount the role of creative intentions, however. Rather, Adorno frames the artist as a ‘bearer’ and a ‘representative of the total social subject’. In this context he allows for a qualified form of subjectivity, construed as a mode of creativity produced by a particular kind of “achieved self-awareness” or disposition of consciousness towards an “estrangement of meaning”. Indeed, the loss of the stronger presupposition that the subject acts as an authentic expository force can lead to a realization that objectivity by this means constitutes a “loss”, Adorno claims, which creates the possibility for pursuing a critical stance to facilitate the capacity for creating autonomous works of art. Creators of autonomous works acknowledge “the paradoxical relationship of the autonomous work to its commodity character” (‘Valery’s Deviations’), namely an awareness of their inherent reification. The self-alienating yet autonomous work is described by Adorno as possessing and demonstrating tacit yet genuine ‘wants’, but this is framed by the demands of the human condition to recognize how ill-fitting the forces of social production are upon and towards securing them. Aesthetic intentions and the subjects which channel them can be critically valuable if they allude to or exposit the contradictions between these demands and those forces. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXI, Number 1, April 1995, pp. 47-55 Hume as Dualist and Anti-Dualist PHILLIP D. CUMMINS Lome Falkenstein's recognition in "Hume and Reid on the Simplicity of the Soul" of the importance of the section of A Treatise of Human Nature entitled "Of the immateriality of the soul" is as praiseworthy as it is uncommon. His suggestion that Reid's intentionalist account of representation was motivated by (...) his desire to save the doctrine of the immaterial self from Hume's demolition of it in "Of the immateriality of the soul," though not proven, is highly provocative. Although I am going to offer a somewhat different reading of "Of the immateriality of the soul" and thereby imply that Falkenstein did not sufficiently appreciate Hume's version of mental-physical dualism, I regard his paper as both informative and insightful and consider my proposed corrections fully compatible with most, if not all, of his substantive claims. Let me begin by contrasting two questions relating to mental-physical dualism. One is whether mental states or properties are irreducibly different from physical states or properties. Materialists generally acknowledge that there is an apparent, putative, or presumed difference between them, only to argue one way or another that the only genuine properties are material ones. Defenders of what I shall call Minimal Mental/Physical Dualism insist that the distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of properties remains at even the deepest levels of metaphysical analysis. One version of the second question is: Are there any immaterial beings? This question really concerns individual subjects, the items to which states or properties are assigned; it asks: do any individual subjects have only mental properties? To answer "yes" is to Phillip D. Cummins is at the Department of Philosophy, 269 English Philosophy Building, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242-1408 USA. e-mail: [email protected] 48 Phillip D. Cummins hold what I shall call Strong Mental/Physical Dualism. Its opponents either answer "no" or take an agnostic stance. The two questions are not completely unrelated.1 As Descartes argued in the Sixth Meditation, an irreducible difference between mental and physical properties guarantees at least the metaphysical possibility of a disembodied mind.2 Despite this, an affirmative answer to the first question does not secure an affirmative answer to the second question. Minimal Mental/Physical Dualism does not entail Strong Mental/Physical Dualism. If it is possible for the same individual subject to have both mental and physical properties, it may be the case that whenever an individual subject has a mental property it also has a physical property.3 Consequently, an obvious strategy for establishing Strong Mental/ Physical Dualism is defending the impossibility of an individual subject's having both mental and physical properties, that is, arguing that the two kinds of properties are essentially incompatible with one another. Call this the Incompatible Properties Thesis. If it can be secured, to discover an individual with a mental property is virtually to discover an immaterial thing. Descartes utilized this strategy, also in the Sixth Meditation, where he wrote, The first observation I make at this point is that there is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible. For when I consider the mind, or myself in so far as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete. Although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, I recognize that if a foot or arm or any other part of the body is cut off, nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind. As for the faculties of willing, of understanding, of sensory perception and so on, these cannot be termed parts of the mind, since it is one and the same mind that wills, and understands and has sensory perceptions. By contrast, there is no corporeal or extended thing that I can think of which in my thought I cannot easily divide into parts; and this very fact makes me... (shrink)

Memphis Elvis is cool; Vegas Elvis is cheesy. How come? To call something cheesy is, ostensibly, to disparage it, and yet cheesy acts are some of the most popular in popular culture today. How is this possible? The concepts of cheese, cheesy, and cheesiness play an important and increasingly ubiquitous role in popular culture today. I offer an analysis of these concepts, distinguishing them from nearby concepts like kitchy and campy. Along the way I draw attention to the important roles (...) of cultural/historical context, background knowledge, and especially artist’s intentions as they are relevant to aesthetic assessments involving cheese and related concepts. I go on to contend that these concepts, properly understood, serve as helpful test cases concerning some important issues in contemporary aesthetics, such as the paradox of negative art and the contentious debate between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists. (shrink)

The rise and fall of the historian of British India -- A classical education -- History, philosophy, and history -- Induction and deduction -- Rational persuasion -- Good government.

Summary John Stuart Mill's classic tale of disillusionment from a ‘narrow creed’, an overt as much as a covert theme of his Autobiography (London, 1873), has for many years served as a guide to the search for the causes and sources of his ‘enlargement-of-the-utilitarian-creed’ project. As a result, in analyses of Mill's mature views, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—and friends—commonly take centre stage in terms of influence, whereas John's father—James Mill—is reduced either to a supernumerary or a villain in the last act (...) of John's intellectual development. However, students of Mill's works should not take at face value the story presented in Autobiography. Mill's own emphasis on the role of his ‘new influences’ has led scholars to disregard the role of his ‘old influences’ in his attempt to create a broader theory of living—one which takes into account both the intellectual and the emotional capacities of individuals. A close look at key aspects of John Stuart Mill's ‘enlargement project’ suggests that James Mill may have played a more positive role than is usually acknowledged. A way into the intellectual affinity of the two Mills is the person they both kept returning to for guidance and inspiration throughout their lives: Plato. (shrink)

Appeals to the actual author's intention in order to legitimate an interpretation of a work of literary narrative fiction have generally been considered extraneous in Anglo-American philosophy of literature since Wimsatt and Beardsley's well-known manifesto from the 1940s. For over sixty years now so-called anti-intentionalists have argued that the author's intentions – plans, aims, and purposes considering her work – are highly irrelevant to interpretation. In this paper, I shall argue that the relevance of the actual author's intentions varies (...) in different approaches to fiction, and suggest that fictions are legitimately interpreted intentionally as conversations in a certain kind of reading. My aim is to show that the so-called conversational approach is valid when emphasizing the cognitive content of a fiction and truths it seem to convey, for example, in a philosophical approach to fictions which contain philosophical purport using Sartre's fictional works as paradigmatic, and that anti-intentionalists' arguments against intentionalism do not threaten such an approach. (shrink)

The article views the development of the Tartu–Moscow semiotic school from the analysis of texts to the study of spatial entities (semiosphere being most well known of them). It comes to light that ‘culture’ and ‘space’ have been such notions in Tartu–Moscow School to which, for instance, the ‘semiosphere’ does not add much. There are studied possibilities to join Uexküll’s and Lotman’s basic concepts (as certain grounds of Estonian semiotics) with Tartu–Moscow School’s treatment of culture and space through the notion (...) of ‘semiotic subject’. Such an approach allows to see transdisciplinarity, which has come to issue only during the last decade, already in the first conceptions of Tartu–Moscow School where transdisciplinarity revealed itself in the symbiotic use of ‘culture’ and ‘space’. (shrink)

It seems that eudaimonistic reconstructions of John Stuart Mill's conception of happiness have fallen prey to what they thought Mill should have done with regard to the role of pleasure in his notion of happiness. Insisting that utility and eudaimonia make conflicting claims, something which mirrors Mill's ‘conflicting loyalties’, they downgrade pleasure to just one of the ingredients of happiness. However, a closer look at Mill's intellectual development suggests otherwise. By focusing on Mill's radical background, this paper argues that pleasure (...) retains a central role in his conception of happiness – even from a eudaimonistic point of view. (shrink)

This book explores various connections of John Stuart Mill's thought to ancient Greek philosophy primarily in relation to his conception of happiness. It argues that a better understanding of Mill's background in ancient Greek thought and his reading(s) of Plato's dialogues leads to innovative interpretations of his moral and political thought.

Contemporary sociosemiotics is a way to transcend borderlines between trends inside semiotics, and also other disciplines. Whereas semiotics has been considered as an interdisciplinary field of research par excellence, sociosemiotics can point directions at transdisciplinary research. The present article will try to conjoin the structural and the processual views on culture and society, binding them together with the notion of signification. The signification of space will illustrate the dynamic between both cultures and metacultures, and cultural mainstreams and subcultures. This paper (...) pays attention to the practice of sociocultural semiotisation of space and territorialisation by diverse examples and different sociocultural levels that imply semiotic cooperation between several members of groups that can be characterised as socii. We analyse territorialisation by graffiti, by furnishing spatial environment through artistic manners, by shaping the semiotic essence of cities through naming, renaming and translating street names, by pinning and structuring territories with monuments, by landmarking and mapping cultural space through individualisation of cities. We will see how principles of semiotisation of space are valid on different levels and how these principles form a transdisciplinary object of study as ‘semiotisation of space’, and how space can be regarded as a genuinely transdisciplinary research object. Individual, culture, and society are connected in such an object both as constituents and as a background of study. (shrink)

The article analyses the position of sociosemiotics in the paradigm of contemporary semiotics. Principles of studying sociocultural phenomena are discussed so as they have been set for analysing the inner mechanisms of sign systems in the semiology of F. de Saussure on the one hand, and for studying sign systems and semiotic units as related to referential reality in the semiotics of C. S. Peirce on the other hand. Three main issues are touched upon to define the scope of sociosemiotics: (...) the general methodology of sociosemiotics. its particular methods, and possible objects of analysis. The relevance of the features of objects in different humanitarian disciplines (cultural unit, historical fact, social fact, institutional fact, social process, etc.) is surveyed to define the object of study in sociosemiotics. Also, the article comments on the description of social organisations via cultural processes and on relations between an individual and society as controllable by social action models. (shrink)

Contemporary sociosemiotics is a way to transcend borderlines between trends inside semiotics, and also other disciplines. Whereas semiotics has been considered as an interdisciplinary field of research par excellence, sociosemiotics can point directions at transdisciplinary research. The present article will try toconjoin the structural and the processual views on culture and society, binding them together with the notion of signification. The signification of space willillustrate the dynamic between both cultures and metacultures, and cultural mainstreams and subcultures. This paper pays attention (...) to the practice of sociocultural semiotisation of space and territorialisation by diverse examples and different sociocultural levels that imply semiotic cooperation between several members of groups that can be characterised as socii. We analyse territorialisation by graffiti, by furnishing spatial environment through artistic manners, by shaping the semiotic essence of cities through naming, renaming and translating street names, by pinning and structuring territories with monuments, by landmarking and mapping cultural space through individualisation of cities. We will see how principles of semiotisation of space are valid on different levels (individual and social, formal and informal, democratic and hegemonic, cultural and subcultural) and how these principles form a transdisciplinary object of study as ‘semiotisation of space’, and how space can be regarded as a genuinely transdisciplinary research object. Individual, culture, and society are connected in such an object both as constituents and as a background of study. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill considered his A System of Logic , first published in 1843, the methodological foundation and intellectual groundwork of his later works in ethical, social, and political theory. Yet no book has attempted in the past to engage with the most important aspects of Mill's Logic . This volume brings together leading scholars to elucidate the key themes of this influential work, looking at such topics as his philosophy of language and mathematics, his view on logic, induction and (...) deduction, free will, argumentation, ethology and psychology, as well as his account of normativity, kinds of pleasure, philosophical and political method and the "Art of Life.". (shrink)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 20, Issue 1, Page 204-207, January 2012.

This chapter argues that two distinct, yet connected, contexts – Mill's “mental crisis” and his task as a “Logician” – led to the formation of two arguments on the value of art. On one hand, Mill argued that aesthetic cultivation was important as an end in itself. Excellence was to be pursued disinterestedly as part of a beautiful life. On the other, Mill argued aesthetic cultivation was important as a means to the utilitarian end – strengthening the social sympathies made (...) social happiness attainable. The first argument highlights what Mill thought was missing from the theory of his utilitarian predecessors, while the second brought Mill closer to this tradition, rather than moving him further away from it. (shrink)

James Mill'sHistory of British India(1817) made a rather strange claim: first-hand experience of India was not vital in writing a history – potentially, it led to false ideas about its subject-matter: eyewitnesses are susceptible to bias. The historian was thus to perform his task as a judge: sifting through various testimonies to obtain a ‘more perfect’ conception of the whole than those who witnessed its various parts. Although strange, Mill's claim does not bewilder his readers: after all, Mill was a (...) ‘militant’ exponent of theorizing utilitarianism. I argue that such a reading of Mill's method is injudiciously restrictive. Not only did Mill draw on well-known methodological concerns in contemporary historiographical practice, not necessarily linked with Jeremy Bentham or the Scottish theoretical historiography, but he also seemed to adopt the vocabulary of forensic rhetoric, making his claim that his was a ‘judging’ history more literal than it has been supposed. (shrink)

Interpretation in art refers to the attribution of meaning to a work. A point on which people often disagree is whether the artist’s or author’s intention is relevant to the interpretation of the work. In the Anglo-American analytic philosophy of art, views about interpretation branch into two major camps: intentionalism and anti-intentionalism, with an initial focus on one art, namely literature. -/- This article elaborates on variations on these theories of interpretation and considers their notable objections. The (...) debate about interpretation covers other art forms in addition to literature. The theories of interpretation are also extended across many of the arts. This broad outlook is assumed throughout the article, although nothing said is affected even if a narrow focus on literature is adopted. (shrink)

This edited book explores the relationship between political expertise, which is defined as scientific statesmanship or governance, and political leadership throughout the history of ideas. An outstanding group of experts study and analyze the ideas of significant philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, Burke, Comte, and Weber, among others. The contributors aim to interpret these thinkers' approaches to scientific statesmanship, deepening our understanding of the idea itself and decoding its theoretical complexities.