This paper contributes to biodiversity and species extinction literature by examining the relationship between corporate accountability in terms of species protection and factors affecting such accountability from forward-thinking companies. We use triangulation of theories, namely deep ecology, legitimacy, and we introduce a new perspective to the stakeholder theory that considers species as a ‘stakeholder’. Using Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood regression, we examine a sample of 200 Fortune Global companies over 3 years. Our results indicate significant positive relations between ecologically conscious companies (...) that are accountable for the protection of biodiversity and species extinction and external assurance, environmental performance, partnerships with socially responsible organizations and awards for sustainable activities. Our empirical results appear to be robust in controlling for possible endogeneities. Our findings contribute to the discussion on the concern of species loss and habitat destruction in the context of corporate accountability, especially in responding to the sixth mass extinction event and COVID-19 crisis. Our results can also guide the policymakers and stakeholders of the financial market in better decision making. (shrink)

Pervasive digitality reveals us as analogue creatures that are unprepared for a world and a logic generated increasingly through automation. Promulgated by capitalism, digitality has created a new form of alienation, one far more powerful and comprehensive than that envisaged by either Marx or Lukács in the analogue-industrial age. Digital alienation-through-automation is the central process in our digital post-modernity. The effects reach increasing registers and spheres of culture, economy and politics. This essay considers the effects within the production of knowledge (...) within higher education. Through a critique of Clayton Christensen’s concept of ‘disruptive technologies’, it develops the argument that knowledge produced in our higher institutions of learning suffer from two forms of ‘knowledge capture’. The first and most comprehensive is knowledge increasingly oriented toward instrumental outcomes, generated in vocationally oriented and market-pressured contexts, and produced by the general-sector institutions; second is knowledge, much of it profound and potentially world-changing—in economics and climate science in the cases discussed here. These are generated in both prestigious general-sector universities, and in the elite Ivy League and Russell Group universities but are unable to gain traction with an ascendant and alien post-Westphalian, post-modern and post-Enlightenment political context—created by a globalising digitality. I argue that unless we recognise our analogue essence, and that this has been alienated by digital automation, then the aporias of digitality, with knowledge production an important element, then our institution of higher learning will continue to produce much valuable knowledge that has diminishing practical (political) effect. (shrink)

Pervasive digitality reveals us as analogue creatures that are unprepared for a world and a logic generated increasingly through automation. Promulgated by capitalism, digitality has created a new form of alienation, one far more powerful and comprehensive than that envisaged by either Marx or Lukács in the analogue-industrial age. Digital alienation-through-automation is the central process in our digital post-modernity. The effects reach increasing registers and spheres of culture, economy and politics. This essay considers the effects within the production of knowledge (...) within higher education. Through a critique of Clayton Christensen’s concept of ‘disruptive technologies’, it develops the argument that knowledge produced in our higher institutions of learning suffer from two forms of ‘knowledge capture’. The first and most comprehensive is knowledge increasingly oriented toward instrumental outcomes, generated in vocationally oriented and market-pressured contexts, and produced by the general-sector institutions; second is knowledge, much of it profound and potentially world-changing—in economics and climate science in the cases discussed here. These are generated in both prestigious general-sector universities, and in the elite Ivy League and Russell Group universities but are unable to gain traction with an ascendant and alien post-Westphalian, post-modern and post-Enlightenment political context—created by a globalising digitality. I argue that unless we recognise our analogue essence, and that this has been alienated by digital automation, then the aporias of digitality, with knowledge production an important element, then our institution of higher learning will continue to produce much valuable knowledge that has diminishing practical (political) effect. (shrink)

Since the late-1980s the rise of the Internet and the emergence of the Networked Society have led to a rapid and profound transformation of everyday life. Underpinning this revolution is the computer – a media technology that is capable of not only transforming itself, but almost every other machine and media process that humans have used throughout history. In _Philosophy of Media_, Hassan and Sutherland explore the philosophical and technological trajectory of media from Classical Greece until today, casting a (...) new and revealing light upon the global media condition. Key topics include: the mediation of politics the question of objectivity automata and the metaphor of the machine analogue and digital technological determinism. Laid out in a clear and engaging format, _Philosophy of Media_ provides an accessible and comprehensive exploration of the origins of the network society. It is essential reading for students of philosophy, media theory, politics, history and communication studies. (shrink)

Through a systematic foregrounding of temporality as a framework of analysis, the dynamics of neo-liberal globalization and the revolution in ICTs constitute a new epistemological context. From this perspective the world as an economic, social, cultural, and political postmodernity becomes apparent. The article argues that liberal democracy was created and evolved in a specific context too. It was one formed through the interactions of Enlightenment thought and capitalist action - both of which were suffused by the temporality of the clock. (...) For nearly three-hundred years we have taken for granted its meter of the clock as the measure of temporal reality, and have similarly accepted that liberal democracy functions on the same temporal basis. This has blinded us to a "social acceleration" that has developed through the convergence of neo-liberal economics and ICTs to the point where liberal democracy and its clock time functioning simply cannot synchronize with the times of the network society. Classical liberal democracy has been rendered ineffectual as a means of democratic action, and neo-liberal globalization offers nothing to replace it. (shrink)

This essay argues that through a new and radical relationship with digital technologies that are oriented towards networking and automaticity, humans have become estranged from what philosopher Arnold Gehlen termed the ‘circle of action’ that expressed our ancient adaptation to tool use and constituted the basis for our capacity for reflective consciousness. The objectification of the material and analogue relationship that enabled humans to ‘act’ upon the world and to construct the basis for our collective endeavours, this paper shows, is (...) beginning to redirect the social orientation that tool use enabled, back to a form of individualism I term a ‘post-modern vanity’. Computer-driven automation on a networked and global scale is engendering a new illusion regarding our relationship with technology. Greek philosophy, later religion, and then the Enlightenment all saw our relation to technology as evidence of either our ‘specialness’ or our inherent ‘mastery over nature’. These perspectives resulted in our acquiring a ‘reasoned self-delusion’ wherein for the individual life had meaning and was ontologically tolerable—we thought ourselves to be of a realm beyond raw nature. Automation, however, to an unprecedented degree, objectifies and exteriorizes the processes of technology use, alienating the individual from the ‘circle of action’. This process is throwing us back to another form of what this essay terms a ‘reasoned self-delusion’ where we increasingly believe that we no longer need each other so much. The cult of computer efficiency and the virtual sphere of the network that it has spawned, I argue, is a largely barren sphere of radical individualism, a post-modern vanity, where we exist at a borderland closer to nature and to the animals than we have been for thousands of years. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Negative Capability Reclaimed: Literature and Philosophy Contra PoliticsIhab HassanI began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as the murderous.Seamus HeaneyTwo concerns cross in this essay: the first, explicit, regards the current condition of the academic humanities, their idioms and axioms, especially in America; the second, implicit, regards my own need to confront criticism, its abstractions that (...) now enable, now disable, the profession and even more the experience of literature. Such concerns must mix speculation and autobiography, mix the pride with the pathos of mind.But I should admit it from the start: my title cries paradox. Negative capability reclaimed? Can reclamation dwell in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as Keats thought, and can a critic aspire to the condition of a poet, in whom the “sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates consideration”? 1Mine, I repeat, is a hybrid critical discourse, touched by exasperation more than mystery. Yet negative capability can still serve us as emblem of certain qualities, attitudes, dispositions that we bring to literature, without turning that happy phrase into yet another slogan. Beyond the arrogance of transient ideologies, beyond the mawkishness of self-regard, negative capability may offer us a kind of patience, perhaps ascesis, the intellectual and, yes, spiritual equivalent of discipline in our moment. [End Page 305]IStated baldly, my proposition, which I will need continually to texture and qualify, is this: the prevalence of politics, the obsession with power, the unrelieved pressure of both in the university, skew our language, thought, values. Thus the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, between Homer and Plato, now cedes the field to a nastier agon between both and politics as GRIM (my acronym for the Great Rumbling Ideological Machine) grinds on. These are no abstractions; the clamorous evidence is all about, indicative even in its triviality, banality.Take a book blurb. Kathy Acker endorses a new, and quite intelligent work, entitled Male Matters, thus: “Calvin Thomas is able to hint at a way out of the prisonhouse of straight male identity.” Granted, this is but an ad in a university press catalogue. But what does the language reveal about the assumptions of academic discourse? “Prisonhouse,” really, for all unfortunate, straight males? Is a generalization of this kind permissible when blander generalizations about other groups raise such a hue and cry? Will straight African-American or Native American males feel “offended” by the statement? Or is it all a matter of restitution, categorical loyalty, political commitment? And when will that supreme fiction, the white, straight, bourgeois, rational male “subject” cease to prop up every ideological complaint?Thought blends into hype; words writhe; stereotypes become as transparent as the stereotypes they once repugned. But let us consider an example worthier of criticism. In his Inaugural Lecture as Robert Wallace Professor at the University of Melbourne, entitled “The Departure of English?” (the question mark risks disingenuousness), Professor Simon During inelegantly states: “The academic appropriation of the avant-garde transfiguration of values is happening as what I am calling the departure of English—in the relative decline of literary studies and cultural studies’ emergence.” 2 Professor During thus assumes, on behalf of cultural studies, the mantles of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Hugo Ball—where is Antonin Artaud?—and Walter Benjamin, though none really had a mantle to bequeath. For a moment, the mind reels: Nietzscheans and poètes maudits, Pataphysicians and Dadaists, as apostles of cultural studies, of political correctness, group think, and GRIM? Involuntarily, the lines of William Butler Yeats, in “The Scholars,” sing out: “Lord, what would they say / Did their Catullus walk that way?” [End Page 306]We are all free, of course, to reinvent our ancestors and to derive later authority from what an earlier generation derided—free, this side of ludicrousness. But Professor During’s argument, a sort of academic conceit, discourages mere ridicule; it has pedagogical consequences. Thus he continues: “I am certainly not claiming a causal relation between modernism circa 1900 and academic cultural studies today. Rather I want to argue that cultural studies... (shrink)

The Liber de compositione alchemiae or the The Book of the Composition of Alchemy is believed to have been the first book on alchemy that was translated from Arabic into Latin. The translator was the Englishman Robert of Chester who was one of the earliest translators to flock to Spain to learn Arabic and to translate some of the Arabic works. He completed his translation on 11 February, 1144.

If we are free to imagine what we choose, this is likely because our intentions determine what we are imagining. However, in a recent article, Munro and Strohminger (2021) argue that, in some cases of imagistic imagining, our intentions do not determine what we are imagining. They offer examples where, intuitively, a person intends to imagine one thing but, due to the causal source of the image used, imagine another. This paper acknowledges the challenge posed by these cases while arguing (...) on several grounds that, when present, intentions nevertheless always suffice to determine the object of one’s imaginings. I conclude by explaining how intentions could fix the objects of episodic rememberings in much the same way as they do for imaginings, thereby bolstering the case that remembering is a kind of imagining. (shrink)

​Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process—one with (...) its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states—judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach. (shrink)

A popular view has it that the mental representations underlying human pretense are not beliefs, but are “belief-like” in important ways. This view typically posits a distinctive cognitive attitude (a “DCA”) called “imagination” that is taken toward the propositions entertained during pretense, along with correspondingly distinct elements of cognitive architecture. This paper argues that the characteristics of pretense motivating such views of imagination can be explained without positing a DCA, or other cognitive architectural features beyond those regulating normal belief and (...) desire. On the present “Single Attitude” account of imagination, propositional imagining just is a form of believing. The Single Attitude account is also distinguished from “metarepresentational” accounts of pretense, which hold that both pretending and recognizing pretense in others require one to have concepts of mental states. It is argued, to the contrary, that pretending and recognizing pretense require neither a DCA nor possession of mental state concepts. (shrink)

The point of this paper is to reveal a dogma in the ordinary conception of sensory imagination, and to suggest another way forward. The dogma springs from two main sources: a too close comparison of mental imagery to perceptual experience, and a too strong division between mental imagery and the traditional propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire). The result is an unworkable conception of the correctness conditions of sensory imaginings—one lacking any link between the conditions under which an imagining (...) aids human action and inference and the conditions under which it is veridical. The proposed solution is, first, to posit a variety of imaginative attitudes—akin to the traditional propositional attitudes—which have different associated correctness (or satisfaction) conditions. The second part of the solution is to allow for imaginings with “hybrid” contents, in the sense that both mental images and representations with language-like constituent structure contribute to the content of imaginings. (shrink)

This essay unites current philosophical thinking on imagination with a burgeoning debate in the philosophy of memory over whether episodic remembering is simply a kind of imagining. So far, this debate has been hampered by a lack of clarity in the notion of imagining at issue. Several options are considered and constructive imagining is identified as the relevant kind. Next, a functionalist account of episodic remembering is defended as a means to establishing two key points: first, one need not defend (...) a factive view of remembering in order to hold that causal connections to past experiences are essential to how rememberings are typed; and, second, current theories that equate remembering with imagining are in fact consistent with a functionalist theory that includes causal connections in its account of what it is to remember. This suggests that remembering is not a kind of imagining and clarifies what it would take to establish the contrary. (shrink)

Currie’s (2010) argument that “i-desires” must be posited to explain our responses to fiction is critically discussed. It is argued that beliefs and desires featuring ‘in the fiction’ operators—and not sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires")—are the crucial states involved in generating fiction-directed affect. A defense of the “Operator Claim” is mounted, according to which ‘in the fiction’ operators would be also be required within fiction-directed sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" and "i-desires"), were there such. Once we appreciate that (...) even fiction-directed sui generis imaginings would need to incorporate ‘in the fiction’ operators, the main appeal of the idea that sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires") are at work in fiction-appreciation dissipates. [This is Chapter 10 of Explaining Imagination (OUP, 2020)]. (shrink)

Le mégaprojet de centrale au charbon Thar (Thar Coal Mega Power Project) est l’un des plus ambitieux du Pakistan. Il affectera directement les communautés du désert de Thar sur une superficie d’environ neuf mille kilomètres carrés. Plus de deux cent cinquante villages seront évacués pour assurer son succès économique. Le projet a d’ores et déjà provoqué des migrations, des spéculations sur le sol, l’usurpation de pâturages communs et le rejet des communautés. Les conflits dans la région revêtent deux faces. D’abord, (...) on constate des conflits entre les communautés autochtones, l’État et les fonctionnaires de la Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC). Ensuite, les problèmes intracommunautaires se sont transformés en conflits religieux entre musulmans et hindous, bien que les causes sous-jacentes soient environnementales. Cet article fournit une description critique des conflits, de l’usurpation de la terre, des processus de spéculation et d’accumulation dans la zone du projet. (shrink)

Many theorists claim that inner speech is importantly linked to human metacognition (thinking about one's own thinking). However, their proposals all rely upon unworkable conceptions of the content and structure of inner speech episodes. The core problem is that they require inner speech episodes to have both auditory-phonological contents and propositional/semantic content. Difficulties for the views emerge when we look closely at how such contents might be integrated into one or more states or processes. The result is that, if inner (...) speech is especially valuable to metacognition, we do not currently understand why it is. The article concludes with two positive proposals for understanding the content and structure of inner speech episodes, which should serve as constraints on future accounts of the metacognitive value of inner speech. (shrink)

Pretense is a topic of keen interest to philosophers and psychologists. But what is it, really, to pretend? What features qualify an act as pretense? Surprisingly little has been said on this foundational question. Here I defend an account of what it is to pretend, distinguishing pretense from a variety of related but distinct phenomena, such as (mere) copying and practicing. I show how we can distinguish pretense from sincerity by sole appeal to a person's beliefs, desires, and intentions – (...) and without circular recourse to an ‘intention to pretend’ or to a sui generis mental state of ‘imagining.’. (shrink)

Martin and Deutscher’s causal theory of remembering holds that a memory trace serves as a necessary causal link between any genuine episode of remembering and the event it enables one to recall. In recent years, the causal theory has come under fire from researchers across philosophy and cognitive science, who argue that results from the scientific study of memory are incompatible with the kinds of memory traces that Martin and Deutscher hold essential to remembering. Of special note, these critics observe, (...) is that a single memory trace can be shaped by multiple past experiences. This appears to prevent traces from underwriting Martin and Deutscher’s distinction between remembering an event and merely forming an accurate representation of it. This paper accepts such criticisms of the standard causal theory and, through considering the phenomenon forgetting through repetition, raises several others. A substantially revised causal theory is then developed, compatible with the thesis that individual memory traces are shaped by multiple past experiences. The key strategy is to conceive of episodic remembering not as the simple retrieval and projection of a static memory trace, but as a complex quasi-inferential process that makes use of multiple forms of information and cues—“prop-like” memory traces included—in generating the experience known as episodic remembering. When remembering is understood as a multi-componential process, there are a variety of ways in which a representation of the past may be appropriately causally dependent upon a prior experience of the event remembered. (shrink)

If imagination is subject to the will, in the sense that people choose the content of their own imaginings, how is it that one nevertheless can learn from what one imagines? This chapter argues for a way forward in addressing this perennial puzzle, both with respect to propositional imagination and sensory imagination. Making progress requires looking carefully at the interplay between one’s intentions and various kinds of constraints that may be operative in the generation of imaginings. Lessons are drawn from (...) the existing literature on propositional imagination and from the control theory literature concerning the prediction and comparison mechanisms (or “forward models”) involved in ordinary perception. A more general conclusion is reached that, once we have the tools to understand how some imaginings are both under willful control and helpfully guide action and inference, we will have what we need to understand the cognitive basis of imagination in general. (shrink)

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize With a new preface by the author In his most powerful and important book, renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton presents a brilliant analysis of the crucial role that German doctors played in the Nazi genocide. Now updated with a new preface, The Nazi Doctors remains the definitive work on the Nazi medical atrocities, a chilling exposé of the banality of evil at its epitome, and a sobering reminder of the darkest side (...) of human nature. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of inner speech in our mental lives, methods for objectively assessing inner speech capacities remain underdeveloped. The most common means of assessing inner speech is to present participants with tasks requiring them to silently judge whether two words rhyme. We developed a version of this task to assess the inner speech of a population of patients with aphasia and corresponding language production deficits. As expected, patients’ performance on the silent rhyming task was severely impaired relative to controls. (...) More surprisingly, however, patients’ performance on this task did not correlate with their performance on a variety of other standard tests of overt language abilities. In particular, patients who were generally unimpaired in their abilities to overtly name objects during confrontation naming tasks, and who could reliably judge when two words spoken to them rhymed, were still severely impaired (relative to controls) at completing the silent rhyme task. This seems to suggest that inner speech was more severely impaired in these patients than outer speech. However, these results should also cause us to critically reflect on the relation between inner speech and silent rhyme judgments more generally. (shrink)

It is often observed that images—including mental images—are in some sense representationally ambiguous. Some, including Jerry Fodor, have added that mental images only come to have determinate contents through the contribution of non-imagistic representations that accompany them. This paper agrees that a kind of ambiguity holds with respect to mental imagery, while arguing (pace Fodor) that this does not prevent imagery from having determinate contents in the absence of other, non-imagistic representations. Specifically, I argue that mental images can represent determinate (...) types of outlays of properties without help from any non-imagistic representations, yet can only become involved in the representation of particular objects through pairing with a non-imagistic representation of the right sort. These points are defended through reflection on the “Picture Principle,” the nature of depiction, and general principles for typing and individuating mental states. (shrink)

The (dis)continuism debate in the philosophy and cognitive science of memory concerns whether remembering is continuous with episodic future thought and episodic counterfactual thought in being a form of constructive imagining. I argue that settling that dispute will hinge on whether the memory traces (or “engrams”) that support remembering impose arational, perception-like constraints that are too strong for remembering to constitute a kind of constructive imagining. In exploring that question, I articulate two conceptions of memory traces—the replay theory and the (...) prop theory—that return conflicting answers to whether remembering is constructive imagining. The prop theory’s vision of traces is suggestive of continuism, while the replay theory’s is a natural fit for discontinuism. Which view of traces is in fact correct remains undetermined by current empirical work. Nevertheless, it may already be possible to reach a compromise in the (dis)continuism debate, through the development of a conciliatory continuist causal theory. This view—only outlined here—accepts the continuism-friendly prop theory of traces, while still requiring that genuine remembering fulfills an appropriate causation condition, as required by the kinds of causal theories of remembering typically favored by discontinuists. (shrink)

It is widely held that introspection-based self-ascriptions of mental states are immune to error through misidentification , relative to the first person pronoun. Many have taken such errors to be logically impossible, arguing that the immunity holds as an “absolute” necessity. Here I discuss an actual case of craniopagus twins—twins conjoined at the head and brain—as a means to arguing that such errors are logically possible and, for all we know, nomologically possible. An important feature of the example is that (...) it is one where a person may be said to be introspectively aware of a mental state that occurs outside of her own mind. Implications are discussed for views of the relation between introspection and mental state ownership, and between introspection and epistemic criteria for the “mark of the mental.”. (shrink)

Much of what we say is never said aloud. It occurs only silently, as inner speech. We chastise, congratulate, joke and cajole, all without making a sound. This distinctively human ability to create public language in the privacy of our own minds is no less remarkable for its familiarity. And yet, until recently, inner speech remained at the periphery of philosophical and psychological theorizing. This essay collection, from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, displays the rapidly growing (...) interest among researchers in the puzzles surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Questions explored include: the aids and obstacles inner speech presents to self-knowledge; the complex relation it bears to overt speech production and perception; the means by which inner speech can be identified and empirically assessed; its role in generating auditory verbal hallucinations; and its relationship to conceptual thought itself. (shrink)

Inner speech travels under many aliases: the inner voice, verbal thought, thinking in words, internal verbalization, “talking in your head,” the “little voice in the head,” and so on. It is both a familiar element of first-person experience and a psychological phenomenon whose complex cognitive components and distributed neural bases are increasingly well understood. There is evidence that inner speech plays a variety of cognitive roles, from enabling abstract thought, to supporting metacognition, memory, and executive function. One active area of (...) controversy concerns the relation of inner speech to auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia, with a common proposal being that sufferers of AVH misidentify their own inner speech as being generated by someone else. Recently, researchers have used artificial intelligence to translate the neural and neuromuscular signatures of inner speech into corresponding outer speech signals, laying the groundwork for a variety of new applications and interventions. (shrink)

This paper offers an overview of "the species problem", arguing for a view of species as homeostatic property cluster kinds, positioning the resulting form of realism about species as an alternative to the claim that species are individuals and pluralistic views of species. It draws on taxonomic practice in the neurosciences, especially of neural crest cells and retinal ganglion cells, to motivate both the rejection of the species-as-individuals thesis and species pluralism.

Drawing on a passage from Ramsey's Truth and Probability, we formulate a simple, plausible constraint on evaluating the accuracy of credences: the Calibration Test. We show that any additive, continuous accuracy measure that passes the Calibration Test will be strictly proper. Strictly proper accuracy measures are known to support the touchstone results of accuracy-first epistemology, for example vindications of probabilism and conditionalization. We show that our use of Calibration is an improvement on previous such appeals by showing how it answers (...) or sidesteps problems that have been raised for previous work in this area. (shrink)

It is often held that in imagining experiences we exploit a special imagistic way of representing mentality—one that enables us to think about mental states in terms of what it is like to have them. According to some, when this way of thinking about the mind is paired with more objective means, an explanatory gap between the phenomenal and physical features of mental states arises. This paper advances a view along those lines, but with a twist. What many take for (...) a special imagistic way of thinking about experiences is instead a special way of misconstruing them. It is this tendency to misrepresent experiences through the use of imagery that gives rise to the appearance of an explanatory gap. The pervasiveness and tenacity of this misrepresentational reflex can be traced to its roots in a particular heuristic for monitoring and remembering the mental states of others. The arguments together amount to a new path for defending the transparency of perceptual experience. (shrink)

In reply to Daniel Hutto’s “Getting Real About Pretense,“ I defend my theory of pretense against his claim that it is subject to counterexamples by clarifying wherein the value of the analysis lies. Then I argue that the central challenge still facing Hutto’s “primacy of practice” approach, as well as other 4E approaches to pretense, is to explain the link between pretense and deception.

Comparatively easy questions we might ask about creativity are distinguished from the hard question of explaining transformative creativity. Many have focused on the easy questions, offering no reason to think that the imagining relied upon in creative cognition cannot be reduced to more basic folk psychological states. The relevance of associative thought processes to songwriting is then explored as a means for understanding the nature of transformative creativity. Productive artificial neural networks—known as generative antagonistic networks (GANs)—are a recent example of (...) how a system’s ability to generate novel products can both be finely tuned by prior experience and grounded in strategies that cannot be articulated by the system itself. Further, the kinds of processes exploited by GANs need not be seen as incorporating something akin to sui generis imaginative states. The chapter concludes with reflection on the added relevance of personal character to explanations of creativity. [This is Chapter 12 of the book Explaining Imagination.]. (shrink)

The thirty chapters work through various fundamental metaphysical issues, sometimes focusing more on scholastic thought, sometimes on the seventeenth century.

Abstract: How it is that one's own thoughts can seem to be someone else's? After noting some common missteps of other approaches to this puzzle, I develop a novel cognitive solution, drawing on and critiquing theories that understand inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia as stemming from mismatches between predicted and actual sensory feedback. Considerable attention is paid to forging links between the first-person phenomenology of thought insertion and the posits (e.g. efference copy, corollary discharge) of current cognitive (...) theories. I show how deficits in the subconscious mechanisms regulating inner speech may lead to a 'fractured phenomenology' responsible for schizophrenic patients' reports of inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations. Supporting work on virtual environments is discussed, and lessons concerning the fixity of delusional belief are drawn. (shrink)

This chapter explores some of the major developments in the philosophical understanding of suicide in 19th Century Western thought. Two developments in particular are considered. The first is a widespread shift towards thinking about suicide in medical terms rather than moral terms. Deploying methods initiated by a number of French and German thinkers in the preceding century who worked at the then emerging interface between the social and biological sciences, a number of 19th century thinkers ejected what they took to (...) be old metaphysical superstitions about ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and replaced them with (allegedly) hard-nosed scientific diagnoses of ‘health’ and ‘sickness’. Dismissing traditional moral arguments against the permissibility of suicide, the phenomenon came to be viewed as a symptom of decline or degeneration. How variations of this view, in biological and social contexts, reorientated practical responses to suicide in terms of treatment rather than moral condemnation is explored. The second 19th century development in philosophical thought with respect to suicide the chapter considers concerns its place in one of the most significant controversies in Germany from 1860 to the turn of the century: the Pessimismusstreit or ‘pessimism dispute’. While philosophical pessimism might be thought to vindicate or even entail suicide, many of the most prominent pessimists—including Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann—denied that this was the case, and perhaps surprisingly took suicide to involve a special kind of moral and/or epistemic failing. The chapter aims to elucidate the different arguments which pessimists appealed to in order to ground this position. (shrink)

Are interpersonal comparisons of desire possible? Can we give an account of how facts about desires are grounded, that underpins such comparisons? This paper supposes the answer to the first question is yes, and provides an account of the nature of desire that explains how this is so. The account is a modification of the interpretationist metaphysics of representation that the author has recently been developing. The modification is to allow phenomenological affective valence into the “base facts” on which correct (...) interpretation is grounded. To use this extra resource within that theory to vindicate interpersonal comparisons, we will need to appeal rational connections between level of valence and level of desire, which this paper sets out and examines. (shrink)

Whether a person is pretending, or not, is a function of their beliefs and intentions. This poses a challenge to 4E accounts of pretense, which typically seek to exclude such cognitive states from their explanations of psychological phenomena. Resulting tensions are explored within three recent accounts of imagination and pretense offered by theorists working in the 4E tradition. A path forward is then charted, through considering ways in which explanations can invoke beliefs and intentions while remaining true to 4E precepts. (...) To make real progress in explaining pretense, 4E theorists will need to grow comfortable with the idea that two agents whose outward behaviors and environments are, in the short term, the same, may be guided by quite different beliefs and intentions, in virtue of which only one is pretending. In this way, the scientific project of explaining pretense remains inseparable from the more general project of determining which beliefs and intentions are appropriate to ascribe to which kinds of entities, given which kinds of behaviors. (shrink)

Few philosophers that have been studied as much as Ibn Sīnā have been as much misunderstood. His extraordinary ability to reflect upon and write in a variety of styles about seemingly every topic in every domain has steered his thought from philosophy and theology to mysticism and esoterism. Instead of helping us to learn and understand better Ibn Sīnā than he has previously been understood, the recent surge of Avicennan studies only adds more confusion to the already complex social context (...) which he was living in. (shrink)