Many attempts to define depiction appeal to viewers' perceptual responses. Such accounts are liable to give a central role in determining depictive content to picture features responsible for the response, design. A different project is to give a compositional semantics for depictive content. Such attempts identify syntax: picture features systematically responsible for the content of the whole. Design and syntax are competitors. But syntax requires system, in how picture features contribute to content, that design does not. By examining John Kulvicki's (...) semantics for basic depictive content, I argue that the relevant systematicity is absent from the pictorial realm. (shrink)

Aesthetic judgements are autonomous, as many other judgements are not: for the latter, but not the former, it is sometimes justifiable to change one’s mind simply because several others share a different opinion. Why is this? One answer is that claims about beauty are not assertions at all, but expressions of aesthetic response. However, to cover more than just some of the explananda, this expressivism needs combining with some analogue of cognitive command, i.e. the idea that disagreements over beuaty can (...) occur, and when they do it is a priori that one side has infringed the norms governing aesthetic discourse. This combination can be achieved by reading Kant’s aesthetic theory in expressivist terms. The resulting view is a form of quasi‐realism about beauty. The position has its merits, but cannot ultimately explain the phenomena which motivate it. This conclusion generalises to quasi‐realism about other matters. (shrink)

This (1982) essay sets out the claim that psychoanalysis is a cogent extension of the intuitive common sense psychology by which we naturally understand human action. In this psychology explanation proceeds by relating actions to the logically and causally cohering desires and beliefs of agents. As Freud showed, this kind of explanation is systematically deepened and extended by the explanation of dreams, the symptoms of mental disorder, and other related phenomena via the Freudian concept of wish fulfilment, which was later (...) extended to the more inclusive post-Freudian concept of phantasy. In this extension everyday actions, such as Freud's writing up his patient Irma's case history on the day before his dream of Irma's injection, are seen to be rooted in the same unconscious motives as are represented as fulfilled in dreams and symptoms -- e.g., in this case, by unconscious stirrings of deep guilt on the topic of injection, of which Freud was unaware until he analysed the dream. As this illustrates, the understanding of wishfulfilments and other formations of phantasy enables us fill out our account of agents and their actions by adding a stock of previously unacknowledged desires and modes of expression of desire. These are seen to cohere with, and also to deepen, our previous understanding: after understanding Freud's dream, we also have a deeper and firmer (and so more cogent) understanding of his behaviour on the previous day. In this way Freud effected an extension of our everyday mode of understanding that was cogent, cumulative, and radical, as illustrated further by examination of Freud's case history of the patient described as the Rat Man. (shrink)

By permission of The Gale Group, this article is reprinted (here on-line) from “Nicholas of Cusa,” pp. 122-125, Volume 9 of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, edited by Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987 ). The short bibliography at the end of the original article has been omitted; and the page numbers of the article are here changed.

This paper briefly addresses questions of confirmation and disconfirmation in psychoanalysis. It argues that psychoanalysis enjoys Bayesian support as an interpretive extension of commonsense psychology that provides the best explanation of a large range of empirical data. Suggestion provides no such explanation, and recent work in attachment, developmental psychology, and neuroscience accord with this view.

This paper considers clinical psychoanalysis together with developmental psychology (particularly attachment theory), evolution, and neuroscience in the context a Bayesian account of confirmation and disconfrimation. -/- In it I argue that these converging sources of support indicate that the combination of relatively low predictive power and broad explanatory scope that characterise the theories of both Freud and Darwin suggest that Freud's theory, like Darwin's, may strike deeply into natural phenomena. -/- The same argument, however, suggests that conclusive confirmation for Freudian (...) hypotheses, as in the case of Darwin's, will come from outside the original domain of explanation sketched out by Freud. As in Darwin's case conclusive confirmation came from understanding the physical mechanisms or reproduction, in Freud's case it will come from understanding the neural mechanisms that realise the phenomena described in psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Managers often encounter situations that require them to make decisions with ethical implications that affect the organization as well as the managers themselves. The issue we address in this study concerns whether the ethical consistency of managerial decisions is situation dependent. That is, are the decisions managers make ethically consistent when they are faced with different ethical situations? We hypothesize that managerial decisions will vary depending on the type of ethical situation they encounter. We also hypothesize that gender plays a (...) role in determining the ethical consistency of managerial decisions. Results of statistical analyses support our hypotheses. (shrink)

v. 1. Monologion. Proslogion. Debate with Gaunilo. Meditation on human redemption.

In this companion volume to Singing the Body of God, Steven P. Hopkins has translated into contemporary American English verse poems written by the South Indian Srivaisnava philosopher and saint-poet Venkatesa. These poems, in three different languages - Sanskrit, Tamil, and Maharastri Prakrit -- composed for one particular Hindu god, Vishnu Devanayaka, the "Lord of Gods" at Tiruvahindrapuram, form a microcosm of the saint-poet's work. They encompass major themes of Venkatesa's devotional poetics, from the play of divine absence and (...) presence in the world of religious emotions; the "telescoping" of time past and future in the eternal "present" of the poem; love, human vulnerability and the impassible perfected body of god; to the devotional experience of a "beauty that saves" and to what Hopkins terms the paradoxical coexistence of asymmetry and intimacy of lover and beloved at the heart of the divine-human encounter. Moreover, these poems form not only a thematic microcosm, but a linguistic one embracing all three of the poet's working languages. Like the remembered world of Proust's Combray in the taste of madeleine dipped in tea, or Blake's World in a Grain of Sand, we taste and see, in this one particular place, and in this one particular form of Vishnu, various protean forms and powers of the divine, and trace a veritable summa of theological, philosophical, and literary designs. Each translated poem forms a chapter in itself, has its own individual short Afterword, along with detailed linguistic and thematic notes and commentary. The volume concludes, for comparative reasons, with a translation of Tirumankaiyalvar's luminous cycle of verses for Devanayaka from the Periyatirumoli. As much an argument as an anthology, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian studies, comparative religion, and Indian literatures. (shrink)

Is it legitimate to acquire one’s moral beliefs on the testimony of others? The pessimist about moral testimony says not. But what is the source of the difficulty? Here pessimists have a choice. On the Unavailability view, moral testimony never makes knowledge available to the recipient. On Unusability accounts, although moral testimony can make knowledge available, some further norm renders it illegitimate to make use of the knowledge thus offered. I suggest that Unusability accounts provide the strongest form of pessimist (...) view. I consider and reject five Unavailability accounts. I then argue that any such view will fail. But what is the norm rendering moral testimonial knowledge unusable? I suggest it lies in the requirement that we grasp for ourselves the moral reasons behind a moral view. This demand is one testimony cannot meet, and that claim holds whatever account we offer of the epistemology of testimony. However, while appeal to this requirement forms the most plausible pessimist view, it is another question whether pessimism is correct. (shrink)

This is a critical notice of Colin McGinn's 'Mindsight'.

Understanding the notion of innerness that we ascribe to mental items is central to understanding the problem of consciousness, and we can do so in evolutionary and physical terms.

What is sensory imagining and what role does it play in our lives? How does visualizing a castle, running through a tune in one's head, or imagining the taste of fish ice cream relate to perceiving such things, or to remembering them? What are the connections between imagining and agency, and how does it relate to emotion and other affect? The Profile of Imagining offers a theory that answers these and many other questions. It argues that sensory imagining involves the (...) redeployment of resources central to perception, though in a radically different context and to very different effect. The result is a view that explains central features of imagining's phenomenology and functional role, including its capacity to capture what it would be like to perceive its objects, while acknowledging the many and striking differences between imagining and sensing. Hopkins shows how the view can be extended to imagining in other forms, especially the imagining of affect; and uses it to argue for some surprising conclusions: that imagining something is not a way to engage with its aesthetic character; and that imagining provokes real feeling much less often than is usually assumed. -/- Table of contents: Introduction; Ch.1 Imagining and agency; Ch.2 To be given as a representation; Ch.3 Knowledge of sensory profiles; Ch.4 Profiles in imagination; Ch.5 Observation, overflow and attention; Ch.6 Episodic memory; Ch.7 Learning from imagining; Ch.8 Aesthetic engagement, imagining and the draw of the real; Ch.9 Reacting to imagining?; Conclusion. (shrink)

Some philosophers take Perky's experiments to show that perceiving can be mistaken for visualizing and so that the two sometimes match in phenomenology. On Segal’s alternative interpretation Perky’s subjects did not consciously perceive the stimuli at all. I argue that even setting this alternative aside, Perky's results do not prove what the philosophers think. She showed her subjects, not the objects they were asked to visualise, but pictures of them. What they mistook for visualizing was not perceptual consciousness of stimuli, (...) but pictorial consciousness. Once clear about the nature of the latter, we can see that Perky's results reveal nothing very surprising. (shrink)

Hopkins begins his study with Plato's written and unwritten theories of eidê and Aristotle's criticism of both. He then traces Husserl's early investigations into the formation of mathematical and logical concepts, charting the critical necessity that leads from descriptive psychology to transcendentally pure phenomenology. An investigation of the movement of Husserl's phenomenology of transcendental consciousness to that of monadological intersubjectivity follows. Hopkins then presents the final stage of the development of Husserl's thought, which situates monadological intersubjectivity within the (...) context of the historical a priori constitutive of all meaning. An exposition of the unwarranted historical presuppositions that guide Heidegger's fundamental ontological and Derrida's deconstructive criticisms of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology concludes the book. By following Husserl's personal trajectory Hopkins is able to show the unity of Husserl's philosophical enterprise, challenging the prevailing view that Husserl's late turn to history is inconsistent with his earlier attempts to establish phenomenology as a pure science. Contents: Introduction Part I Descriptive Psychology 1. Investigation of the Origin of Number 2. Investigation of the Origin of Logical Signification Part II Cartesian Transcendental Phenomenology 3. Investigation of the Origin of Objective Transcendence 4. Investigation of the Origin of Subjective Transcendence Part III Historical Transcendental Phenomenology 5. The Crisis of Meaning in Contemporary European Science 6. Historical Investigation of the Phenomenological Origin Part IV Husserl and his Critics 7. Fundamental Critiques of Transcendental Phenomenology 8. A Husserlian Response to the Critics. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic theory can be regarded as a cogent extension of commonsense psychology by interpretive means internal to it.

The Vitruvian Man is a metaphor for the “ideal man” by feminist posthuman philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2013) as a proxy for eurocentric humanist ideals. The first half of this paper extends Braidotti's concept by thinking about the metaphor of the “ideal nurse” (Vitruvian nurse) and how this metaphor contributes to racism, oppression, and burnout in nursing and might restrict the professionalization of nursing. The Vitruvian nurse is an idealized and perfected form of a nurse with self‐sacrificial language (re)producing self‐sacrificing expectations. (...) The second half of this paper looks at how regulatory frameworks (using the example of UK's Nursing and Midwifery Council Code of Conduct) institutionalize the conditions of possibility through collective imaginations. The domineering expectations found within the Vitruvian nurse metaphor and further codified by regulatory frameworks give rise to boredom and burnout. The paper ends by suggesting possible ways to diffract regulatory frameworks to practice with affirmative ethics and reduce feelings of self‐sacrifice and exhaustion among nurses. (shrink)

How do pictures represent? In this book Robert Hopkins casts new light on an ancient question by connecting it to issues in the philosophies of mind and perception. He starts by describing several striking features of picturing that demand explanation. These features strongly suggest that our experience of pictures is central to the way they represent, and Hopkins characterizes that experience as one of resemblance in a particular respect. He deals convincingly with the objections traditionally assumed to be (...) fatal to resemblance views, and shows how his own account is uniquely well placed to explain picturing's key features. His discussion engages in detail with issues concerning perception in general, including how to describe phenomena that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists, and the book concludes with an attempt to see what a proper understanding of picturing can tell us about that deeply mysterious phenomenon, the visual imagination. (shrink)

We cannot imagine two straight lines intersecting at two points even though they may do so. In this case our abilities to imagine depend upon our abilities to visualise.

Many films are made by a two-tier process: the photographing of events which themselves represent the story the film tells. The latter representation is often illusionistic. I explore two consequences. The first concerns what we see in film. I argue that we sometimes see in such films, not events representing the story told, but simply the events composing that story. The way is thereby opened to a unified aesthetic of film, whether made the two-tier way or not. The second consequence (...) is that, since we see these films as photographic, we sometimes experience them as photographic recordings of the events, possibly fictional, that compose the story told. (shrink)

The problem of consciousness seems to arise from experience itself. As we shall consider in more detail below, we are strongly disposed to contrast conscious experience with the physical states or events by which we take it to be realized. This contrast gives rise to dualism and other problems of mind and body. In this chapter I argue that these problems can usefully be considered in the perspective of evolution.

Kant claims that the judgement of taste, the judgement that some particular is beautiful, exhibits two ‘peculiarities’. First: [t]he judgement of taste determines its object in respect of delight with a claim to the agreement of every one , just as if it were objective.

Between people who unabashedly support eating meat and those who adopt moral vegetarianism, lie a number of people who are uncomfortably carnivorous and vaguely wish they could be vegetarians. Opposing animal suffering in principle, they can ignore it in practice, relying on the visual disconnect between supermarket meat and slaughterhouse practices not to trigger their moral emotions. But what if we could have the best of both worlds in reality—eat meat and not harm animals? The nascent biotechnology of tissue culture, (...) originally researched for medical applications, holds out just such a promise. Meat could be grown in vitro without killing animals. In fact, this technology may not just be an intriguing option, but might be our moral obligation to develop. (shrink)

IN the fourth book of Stobaeus’ Anthologium, in a section entitled, ‘The Virtue of Having Children’, there is preserved a passage from the writings of the first-century Roman knight and Stoic, Musonius Rufus. This passage is headed: ‘Whether all children born should be raised’.

Is testimony a legitimate source of aesthetic belief? Can I, for instance, learn that a film is excellent on your say-so? Optimists say yes, pessimists no. But pessimism comes in two forms. One claims that testimony is not a legitimate source of aesthetic belief because it cannot yield aesthetic knowledge. The other accepts that testimony can be a source of aesthetic knowledge, yet insists that some further norm prohibits us from exploiting that resource. I argue that this second form of (...) pessimism has certain advantages over the first. I offer two candidates for the non-epistemic norm that, on this view, stands in the way of our taking aesthetic testimony. And I argue that this form of pessimism meets a challenge to pessimism in general – that of explaining why, if testimony cannot be a legitimate source of aesthetic belief, we can nonetheless rightly rely on the aesthetic recommendations of others. (shrink)

Burt C. Hopkins - Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Philosophy - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 271-273 Book Review Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Philosophy Steven Galt Crowell. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning:Paths Toward Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii + 323. Cloth, $79.95. Paper, $27.95. The "space of meaning" announced in the title of (...) the present collection of essays has both a historical and systematic referent. Historically, it refers to the fact that it is now "possible to recognize that what has distinguished philosophy in the twentieth century is not that it has concerned itself with language, but that, whether through the prism of language or not, it has concerned itself with meaning" . Systematically, it refers to the issues that emerge when the project of transcendental phenomenology is explored in a manner that.. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the process of entanglement at the 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference (IPNC) at University of California at Irvine held on August 18, 2022. Representing collective work from the US, Canada, UK and Germany, our panel entitled ‘What can critical posthuman philosophies do for nursing?’ examined critical posthumanism and its operations and potential in nursing. Critical posthumanism offers an antifascist, feminist, material, affective, and ecologically entangled approach to nursing and healthcare. Rather than focusing on (...) the arguments of each of the three distinct but interrelated panel presentation pieces, this paper instead focuses on process and performance (per/formance) and performativity as relational, connected and situated, with connections to nursing philosophy. Building upon critical feminist and new materialist philosophies, we describe intra‐activity and performativity as ways to dehierarchise knowledge making practices within traditional academic conference spaces. Creating critical cartographies of thinking and being are actions of possibility for building more just and equitable futures for nursing, nurses, and those they accompany—including all humans, nonhumans, and more than human matter. (shrink)

Can indistinguishable objects differ aesthetically? Manifestationism answers ‘no’ on the grounds that (i) aesthetically significant features of an object must show up in our experience of it; and (ii) a feature—aesthetic or not—figures in our experience only if we can discriminate its presence. Goodman’s response to Manifestationism has been much discussed, but little understood. I explain and reject it. I then explore an alternative. Doubles can differ aesthetically provided, first, it is possible to experience them differently; and, second, those experiences (...) reflect differences in the objects’ themselves. A range of objections to this position is considered, but all are found wanting. (shrink)

What kind of mental state is episodic memory? I defend the claim that it is, in key part, imagining the past, where the imagining in question is experiential imagining. To remember a past episode is to experientially imagine how things were, in a way controlled by one’s past experience of that episode. Call this the Inclusion View. I motive this view by appeal both to patterns of compatibilities and incompatibilities between various states, and to phenomenology. The bulk of the paper (...) defends the account against four objections. Imagining and remembering seem to differ in whether they are active or passive, in the forms of singular content they involve, in their relations to observation and in their relations to belief. I argue that these differences can be accommodated, and some even explained, once we flesh out what else is involved in episodic memory, in addition to imagining the past. (shrink)

I argue that authentic photography is not able to develop to the full as a communicative representational art. Photography is authentic when it is true to its self-image as the imprinting of images. For an image to be imprinted is for its content to be linked to the scene in which it originates by a chain of sufficient, mind-independent causes. Communicative representational art (in any medium: photography, painting, literature, music, etc.) is art that exploits the resources of representation to achieve (...) artistically interesting communication of thought. The central resources of representation are content, vehicle properties, and the interplay between these two. Whereas painting and other representational arts are able to exploit all three to communicate thought, authentic photography can exploit interplay only to a very limited degree. However, the exploitation of interplay is the culmination of communicative representational art: the natural endpoint in its development. (shrink)

The distinction between “passive” and “active” euthanasia, though problematic and highly criticized, retains a certain intuitive appeal. When a patient is allowed to die, nature appears simply to be taking its course. Yet when a patient is killed by, say, a lethal injection, humans appear to be causing his or her death. Guilt seems to follow naturally from the latter act while not from the former. Yet this view only holds up if age‐old and vague ideasabout “nature” and “artifice” go (...) unscrutinized. Once examined more closely the functional relevance of particular machines to particular bodies becomes evident. And the innocence and guilt less clear. (shrink)

Congenitally blind people can make and understand ‘tactile pictures’ – representations form of raised ridges on flat surfaces. If made visible, these representations can serve as pictures for the sighted. Does it follow that we should take at face value the idea that they are pictures made for touch? I explore this question, and the related issue of the aesthetics of ‘tactile pictures’ by considering the role in both depiction and pictorial aesthetics of experience, and by asking how far the (...) experience of those engaging with representations through touch can approximate to that of those engaging with them through sight. (shrink)