Hamlyn's book is exactly what the subtitle says it is: a history of the philosophy of perception, where this is taken to be a part of what is now called the philosophy of mind, as distinguished from the theory of knowledge. He expounds and criticizes, clearly and carefully, the views of Western philosophers from the pre-Socratics to Ryle and Sartre, and in a final chapter of about ten pages he offers some conclusions of his own. He holds that "in the (...) primary sense, perception can signify any means whereby we come to recognize, identify or characterize something by means of the senses" ; that there is a conceptual connection between perception and sensation, in the sense that "an essential condition of our application of the concept of perception to a being of any kind is that such a being should have sense experiences or sensations" ; but that it is a mistake "to ask what experiences, processes or activities constitute perception... [although] this is just the question which has so often been asked in the history of philosophy and psychology". "An understanding of the concepts of sensation and perception comes... not by asking what experiences, processes or activities these terms stand for. It can come only as the result of an inquiry into the concepts which form the schemes to which these particular concepts belong". These schemes, Hamlyn says, center around the concept of knowledge, and include such concepts as those of identification, recognition, and awareness. (shrink)

The author criticises chapter 5 of r m hare's "the language of morals" in which hare tries to show why naturalism is "untenable." the author concludes that hare's analysis as well as the naturalists' "keep us from saying what we do say and want to say." (staff).

1. What is it according to Berkeley for bodies to exist in the mind? Maybe no simple or single answer to this question fits everything that he says about it in the Principles and Dialogues , but I think he gives or suggests an answer in Principles section 49 that he may have to give or be willing to accept across the board. The trouble is that this answer comes with a fairly high price.

1. ‘“But aren't you saying that all that happens is that he moans, and that there is nothing behind it?” I am saying that there is nothing behind the moaning ’ . This passage seems to me to epitomize a conception of the mind and its relation to the body found in the later work of Wittgenstein. It will be convenient to write as if this is his view of the mind. He suggests elsewhere that he is not advancing philosophical (...) theses in his later work; so maybe this view is not a philosophical thesis in some relevant sense; or maybe Wittgenstein is not wholly consistent; or maybe he puts it forward only dialectically, and in other philosophical contexts would have espoused other views of the mind as much as he espouses this one. In any case, what does this one amount to? ‘There is nothing behind the moaning.’ What does this mean? (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal Is Bringing Science and Spirit Together by Charles T. Tart. Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality by Logi Gunnarsson. Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena by Hereward Carrington. Can the Mind Survive beyond Death? In Pursuit of Scientific Evidence by Satwant K. Pasricha. Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation by Rupert Sheldrake. A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation by Rupert Sheldrake. “Why AI Is a Dangerous Dream,” (...) Opinion, Interview with Noel Sharkey by Nic Fleming. (shrink)

Metacognition is the capacity to evaluate the success of one's own cognitive processes in various domains; for example, memory and perception. It remains controversial whether metacognition relies on a domain-general resource that is applied to different tasks or if self-evaluative processes are domain specific. Here, we investigated this issue directly by examining the neural substrates engaged when metacognitive judgments were made by human participants of both sexes during perceptual and memory tasks matched for stimulus and performance characteristics. By comparing patterns (...) of fMRI activity while subjects evaluated their performance, we revealed both domain-specific and domain-general metacognitive representations. Multivoxel activity patterns in anterior prefrontal cortex predicted levels of confidence in a domain-specific fashion, whereas domain-general signals predicting confidence and accuracy were found in a widespread network in the frontal and posterior midline. The demonstration of domain-specific metacognitive representations suggests the presence of a content-rich mechanism available to introspection and cognitive control. (shrink)

“Forget Taste” rejects the classical notion of taste as a viable concept for the exercise of critical evaluation and proposes an alternative approach to critical evaluation based crucially on the idea of the constitutive purpose of the artwork. The goal of this paper is to advance an approach—which I call the purpose-driven approach—to the critical evaluation of artworks that develops from and refines the views of art evaluation presented in my previous work. This approach, in virtue of its focus on (...) the constitutive purposes of artworks, regards the artwork as typically singular. For that reason, it follows that this approach is pluralistic in contrast to the hedonic conception of the taste model popularized in the eighteenth century and which still recurs today, if sometimes only subconsciously, and that reduces critical evaluation to feelings of pleasure. I argue that the hedonic taste model, which is noncognitive and reductive, should be abandoned in favor of one that is cognitivist and pluralistic, namely, the purpose-driven approach. (shrink)

INTRODUCTIONFor the last two and a half decades – perhaps spurred onwards by R. W. Hepburn's seminal, wonderfully sensitive and astute essay “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty” – philosophical interest in the aesthetic appreciation of nature has been gaining momentum. One of the most coherent, powerfully argued, thorough, and philosophically compelling theories to emerge from this evolving arena of debate has been developed over a series of articles by Allen Carlson. The sophistication of Carlson's approach – especially (...) in terms of his careful style of argumentation – has raised the level of philosophical discussion concerning the aesthetic appreciation of nature immensely and it has taught us all what is at stake, logically and epistemologically, in advancing a theory of nature appreciation. Carlson has not only presented a bold theory of the aesthetic appreciation of nature; he has also refined a methodological framework and a set of constraints that every researcher in the field must address.Stated summarily, Carlson's view of the appreciation of nature is that it is a matter of scientific understanding; that is, the correct or appropriate form that the appreciation of nature – properly so called – should take is a species of natural history; appreciating nature is a matter of understanding nature under the suitable scientific categories. (shrink)

Regarded for decades as a fallacy, intentionalist interpretation is beginning to attract a following among philosophers of art. Intentionalism is the doctrine that the actual intentions of artists are relevant to the interpretation of the artworks they create – just as actual intentions are relevant to the interpretation of the everyday words and deeds of other people. Although there are several forms of actual intentionalism, I defend the form known as modest actual intentionalism, which holds that the correct interpretation of (...) an artwork is compatible with the author's actual intention, which itself must be supported by the artwork. Looking at literary works specifically, I consider criticisms of actual intentionalism – for example, the contention that such a stance substitutes paraphrase for a reading of the text. In particular, I argue against hypothetical intentionalism, which maintains that the correct interpretation of an artwork is constrained by the best hypotheses of the artist's intentions. As I show, the methodology of this position is in fact designed to track the author's actual intentions, and furthermore, hypothetical intentionalism does not accurately depict existing interpretive practices. (shrink)

Toward the end of his book Jokes, perhaps the best known philosophical treatment of the subject, Ted Cohen includes a notorious joke about a group of young Black men who are deterred from committing a gang rape by being thrown a basketball. This is a joke that perplexes Cohen and that he admits plays into stereotypes that presuppose the mindless obsession of Black youths with basketball as well as their unbridled sexuality. He agrees that the joke is morally bad and (...) that it would be a better world without it. But he denies that its evil compromises its alleged funniness. He writes: “Wish that there were no mean jokes. Try remaking the world so that such jokes will have no place, will not arise. But do not deny that they are funny. That denial is a pretense that will help nothing.” In this paper, I want to challenge the claim that the moral defectiveness of a joke, especially a racist joke, cannot ever compromise its capacity to be funny. (shrink)

James Shelley has raised the important question of whether it is possible to have aesthetic experiences of imperceptible artworks. This issue is important for determining whether or not the aesthetic theory of art can deal with certain cases of conceptual art. Shelley has argued that it is possible to have aesthetic experiences of imperceptibilia. And in this article, I concur with him, though for reasons different from his. Nevertheless, I go on to argue that this still fails to vindicate the (...) aesthetic theory of art. (shrink)

This chapter critically explores the notion of medium specificity both in its classical form, as represented by figures such as Rudolf Arnheim and André Bazin, and in its current revised versions as proposed by philosophers such as Berys Gaut, Dominic Lopes, and Ted Nannicelli. The thesis of this entry is that the idea of medium specificity is flawed in all of its variations.

In “Movies, Narrative and Emotion” there is an attempt to suggest the ways in which a certain form of narrative organization, to which we can call “erotetic narration,” This can be co-ordinated with the emotional address of the motion picture in terms of what can be called “criterial prefocusing.” On this view, the primary way in which the emotions are engaged is character-directed, the protagonist’s goals providing grounds which generate the narrative questions that the movie goes on to answer.

Disgust has been a perennial feature of art from medieval visions of hell to postmodern travesties. The purpose of this chapter is to chart various ways in which disgust functions in artworks both in terms of content and style, canvassing cases in which the content and/or style is literally disgusting in contrast to cases where the disgust serves to characterize the content, often for moral or political or broader cultural purposes.

In this essay, I am concerned with the representation of groups in popular culture. My interest has to do with the politics of representing people. The couplet beauty/nonbeauty (or, more specifically, beauty/ugliness) frequently figures importantly in the representation of groups, including most notably, for my purposes, ethnic and racial minorities. This couplet can be politically significant because beauty is often associated in our culture with moral goodness. . . . Thus, beauty and non beauty can serve as a basis for (...) political rhetoric. . . . If one concept of human beauty (which is connected to ideas of goodness) sees beauty as the instantiation or near approximation of the concept human being, then the related idea of human ugliness (which is connected with ideas of moral degradation) is rooted in problematic exemplifications of the concept of the human. These "problematic exemplifications" can take many forms. The two that will preoccupy me in this essay are the imperfect exemplifications of the human found in the popular genres of horror and humor. (shrink)

This remarkable collection contains Isaiah Berlin's appreciations of seventeen people of unusual distinction in the intellectual or political world, sometimes both.

Art, Emotion, and Ethics is a brilliant book with many important, useful, insightful, and even profound things to say about a range of topics including the relation of the imagination to art, understanding, and ethics, and the paradox of fiction, as well as sensitive and in-depth interpretations of masterpieces by the likes of Rembrandt and Nabokov. It is very convincing in its jousts with autonomists for people like me who favor the view that sometimes ethical blemishes are aesthetic blemishes and (...) sometimes ethical merits count as aesthetic merits. But that is because I am not an autonomist or even a moderate autonomist. (shrink)

Since 1996, with the premiere of his play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh has emerged as one of the most powerful young voices in the English-speaking theater world. The Pillowman is his most philosophical work. It is a meta-theatrical exercise that obliquely addresses the question of whether theater (and, by extension, literature) can be justified in anything that it says. Or, instead, are some things out of bounds, perhaps sometimes warranting regulation?

In this essay I trace the role of history in the philosophy of art from the early twentieth century to the present, beginning with the rejection of history by formalists like Clive Bell. I then attempt to show how the arguments of people like Morris Weitz and Arthur Danto led to a re-appreciation of history by philosophers of art such as Richard Wollheim, Jerrold Levinson, Robert Stecker and others.

This chapter contains sections titled: Essence and Expression: Danto's Philosophy of Art The End of Art: Danto's Philosophy of Art History A Critical Examination of Danto's Philosophy of Art Concluding Remarks.