There are many ways in which a musical performance can be “bad,” but here the focus is on two: those performances that make you laugh, and those that make you angry. These forms of musical badness, however, are not primarily compositional deficits, but either (a) that the performer simply cannot competently deliver the music to their audience, inducing laughter, or (b) that the performer exhibits some form of disrespect, provoking anger. Such laughter or anger stems from failure of the expected (...) relationship between a performer and their audience, that is, a social failure. After surveying a range of musical faults, the article examines the causes of laughter in general and in relation to some of examples of risible “bad” music. Similarly, the causes of social and moral anger in general are examined, and several cases of anger-inducing musical performances are presented. The article concludes with a consideration of the broader implications of these responses to “bad” music for theories of emotional expression in music, the relationship between aesthetic and moral judgments, and the centrality of musical performances as opposed to works in discussions of musical expression and value. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 (2002) 545-546 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late 17th Century Scotland Michael Hunter, editor. The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late 17th Century Scotland. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2001. Pp. vii + 247. Cloth, $90.00. This is a superb collection of original materials (including a range of private correspondence, (...) scribal works, and printed texts) related to the "strange reports" of incidence of "second sight" in Scotland from the 1680s to the 1700s. The material includes literary exchanges between powerful figures in the Anglo-Scottish intellectual community like Robert Boyle, John Aubrey, Robert Kirk, John Frazer, and Samuel Pepys. All of these texts are edited with immaculate care and informative annotation. The lengthy introduction provides both intellectual context and a detailed bibliographical account. Collectively the texts reproduced here provide a comprehensive resource for the examination of attitudes to magic and the supernatural in the late seventeenth century. From these texts one can reconstruct the battle between "orthodox" Anglican defenders of a "spirit world" and the sceptical assault on its authenticity. This was a war of ideas with the victors hoping to fix the meaning and nature of second sight as either supportive or corrosive of the established ecclesiastical institutions. Was this phenomena an established "matter of fact" which proved the routines of nature and also the paranormal intervention of God? Or was it, as some sceptics argued, evidence of priestly fraud and manipulation? The debates over the meaning and significance of these transgressions of the ordinary course of nature vacillated between treating them as acts of God or the Devil, as manifest frauds or ignorant misunderstandings. As Michael Hunter argues in his introduction, men like Boyle focussed upon the issue of second sight because it was a less exotic and less controversial phenomenon than the more culturally unstable manifestations of witchcraft. Fundamental to the orthodox cultural project was the creation of an empirically robust form of knowledge that combined folklore, antiquarian erudition, and biblical exegesis to establish the reality and boundaries of the natural and the divine.Although Hunter establishes the "origins" of the interest as an intellectual spin off from Boyle's project for the "Protestantisation" of the Highlands, the core text reproduced here is Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth. Kirk, educated in Edinburgh and St. Andrews, was minister of Aberfoyle and worked with Boyle on his Gaelic Bible after 1684. This scriptural labor brought him to London in the late 1680s and into an elite Anglican circle that included Edward Stillingfleet. The text edited here is based on the earliest surviving manuscript of the early 1690s which was compiled from earlier notes. It is clear that the work was circulated in the period only in scribal form: a partial version was first printed in 1815 and a complete text in 1964. As Hunter establishes by examining Kirk's overlooked student notebooks from the 1660s and 1670s, it is possible to reconstruct the eclectic intellectual culture that formed the background to the work—here Aristotelian texts mingled with more modern authors like Campanella and Descartes. These notebooks not only record Kirk's pastoral concerns and the spiritual health of his flock, they also register a range of more exotic interests in folkish charms and the various operations and manifestations of the "invisible powers." The discovery of a "kingdom of fairies," which was apparently comprehensible to certain individuals with second sight, was ideal material upon which Kirk was able to synchronize the findings of Holy Scripture and modern natural philosophy.As Hunter's elegant and effective introduction outlines, men like Kirk, Frazer, and later Martin Martin, deliberately mimicking the epistemological strategies of the London-based Royal Society, aimed to display matters of fact as a dispassionate means of responding to the cultural assault of the sceptical wits who dismissed stories of the "lychnobious" world as [End Page 545] idle fantasy or deliberate fraud. Although this work was learned, serious, and erudite, and in the... (shrink)

The phenotypic variation found in domesticated plants and animals is striking, so much so that Darwin used it to illustrate the power of selection to effect change. Recent developments in genomics technologies are leading to dramatic progress in elucidating the genetic changes that occur during domestication. The Genetics Society Autumn Meeting on the genetics of domestication took place in November 2004 at the Royal Society in London, and was organised by Helen Sang (Roslin Institute, UK) and Jonathan Jones (John (...) Innes Centre, UK). The meeting brought together many of the leading researchers on livestock and crop domestication and provided a timely and exciting account of recent progress in the field. BioEssays 27:574–576, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

"Born in London in 1806, son of James Mill , philosopher, economist and senior official in the East India Company. Mill gave a vivid and moving account of his life, and especially of his extraordinary education, in the..

           “I’ve written a story!†My eighty year old father’s rich, booming voice fired up the phone line, briefly burning through the fuzzy enunciation that stemmed from a minor stroke of three years back. It hadn’t been the stroke but rather his growing blindness that had slowed his production. Through dictation he’d still kept up his short monthly magazine column (in one of the last and most gravely scatological of these (...) he’d inadvertently shamed my Enlightenment scholarship by writing “I thought everyone knew that Frederick the Great and Voltaire corresponded about their bowel movementsâ€). He sounded happier and more alive than I’d heard him in years, though the sketch he’d written, from a cat’s viewpoint, is spectrally peopled under aliases by his Shakespearian actor parents, and a spunky Lesbian witch who lightheartedly inducts my mother into her coven through ritualized sexual intercourse, which scandalizes my grandmother and titillates my father, who confesses along the way to alcoholism, habitual premature ejaculation, voyeurism, and unassuageable jealousy of his illustrious father, whose death in 1949 aroused only “a cold pride†(unlike the wrench I know he felt when his wife and his mother died in the late 1960s). The sketch resolves with his dead father’s body intoning Hamlet’s lines about what a piece of work is man, ending with “A paragon of animals,†which the feline observer coolly concludes must surely refer to cats.            That phone call was my last conversation with my father. A month before he had, quixotically, married a woman he’d known for two decades, on his part decidedly nonexclusively, a few days after she got a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer. Now, in deference to her fear of flying, they took off on a tiring train and car trip from San Francisco to a convention in London, Ontario, where my exhausted father began his slide into incontinence, depression, and dementia.. (shrink)

Review of Marco Brusotti & Herman Siemens (eds.), Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy, Volume I: Nietzsche, Kant, and the Problem of Metaphysics. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. xix + 298 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4742-7477-7. Hardcover, $114.00 (volume); $256.00 (collection).

Feminist theories are concerned to analyse how women can transform society so that they are no longer subordinated, by understanding how patriarchal relations control and constrict them. (Abbott and Wallace, 1997: 284) Feminisms start from the position that women are oppressed within a society, which is patriarchal and socially constructed within knowledge which is malestream. This traditionally defines men such that they are rendered subordinate, within a social world constructed by men. Feminisms are engaged with making transparent patriarchal constructs, and (...) illuminating the ‘spaces’ within which women-realities can become more visible. This paper presents research undertaken by two key services working with male sex workers in central London. The insights gained from this research are discussed, as they allow comparison between the traditionally subordinate position of women and the contextual experiences of the ‘hidden’ population of male sex industry workers. It demonstrates, that like women, for male sex workers, hegenomic and heterosexist constructs ensure that they also occupy a subordinated position within society. (shrink)

What influences people’s appreciation of works of art? In this paper, we provide a new cognitive approach to this big question, and the first empirical results in support of it. As a work of art typically does not activate intuitive cognition for functional artefacts, it is represented as an instance of non-verbal symbolic communication. By application of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory of communication, we hypothesize that understanding the artist’s intention plays a crucial role in intuitive art appreciation judgements. About (...) 60 works of fine art, representing a wide range of periods, genres and styles, were selected in the permanent exhibitions at Tate Britain in London, and rated by more than 500 visitors for goodness and understanding of the artist’s intention. Results suggest that works of art whose artist’s intention is easy to understand tend to be preferred over those with more obscure intentions, even when controlling for familiarity effects. (shrink)

“In the beginning there was hunger.” This opening quote from Levinas sets the stage for Pelluchon’s ethico-political project that revamps classical phenomenology’s intentionality of the ego by focusing on the sensing and enjoyment of the “gourmet cogito” who “lives from” and finds nourishment in a world that cannot be reduced to a noeme. She critiques Heidegger’s existential analytic and focuses on an ontology where our love of life precedes our being-towards-death, before boldly mapping out a new social pact, founded on (...) the structures of existence that her phenomenology of nourishment reveals. (shrink)

Since the time of Hippocrates, madness has typically been viewed through the lens of disease, dysfunction, and defect. In 'Madness', philosopher of science Justin Garson presents a radically different paradigm for conceiving of madness and the forms that it takes. In this paradigm, which he calls madness-as-strategy, madness is neither a disease nor a defect, but a designed feature, like the heart or lungs.

Using the latest cognitive and psychological scientific data and theory, this book answers the question "why would anyone believe in God?".

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Philosophy is a collection of essays on important texts and figures in the history of Chinese thought. The essays cover both well-known texts such as the Analects and the Zhuangzi as well as many of the lesser-known thinkers in the classical and post-classical Chinese tradition. Most of the chapters focus on thinkers or texts in one of three important historical movements: Classical ("pre-Qin") Chinese philosophy, Chinese Buddhism, and the Confucian response to Buddhism ("neo-Confucianism" broadly construed).

This paper argues for contrastivism about the deontic modals, 'ought', 'must', and 'may'. A simple contrastivist semantics that predicts the desired entailment relations among these modals is offered.

This is a short overview of the biological functions debate in philosophy. While it was fairly comprehensive when it was written, my short book ​A Critical Overview of Biological Functions has largely supplanted it as a definitive and up-to-date overview of the debate, both because the book takes into account new developments since then, and because the length of the book allowed me to go into substantially more detail about existing views.

The downsides of monogamy are felt by most people engaged in long-term relationships, including restrictions on self-discovery, limits on friendship, sexual boredom, and a circumscribed understanding of intimacy. Yet, a "happily ever after" monogamy is assumed to be the ideal form of romantic love in many modern societies: a relationship that is morally ideal and will bring the most happiness to its two partners. -/- In Why It’s OK to Not Be Monogamous, Justin L. Clardy deeply questions these assumptions. (...) He rejects the claim that non-monogamy among honest, informed and consenting adults is morally impermissible. He shows instead how polyamorous relationships can actually be exemplars of moral virtue. The book discusses how social and political forces sustain and reward monogamous relationships. The book defines non-monogamy as a privative concept; a negation of monogamy. Looking at its prevalence in the United States, the book explains how common criticisms of non-monogamy come up short. Clardy argues, as some researchers have recently shown―monogamy relies on continually demonizing non-monogamy to sustain its moral status. Finally, the book concludes with a focus on equality, asking what justice for polyamorous individuals might look like. (shrink)

Most a posteriori arguments against the existence of God take the following form: (1) If God exists, the world would not be like this (where 'this' picks out some feature of the world like the existence of evil, etc.) (2) But the world is like this . (3) Therefore, God does not exist. Skeptical theists are theists who are skeptical of our ability to make judgments of the sort expressed by premise (1). According to skeptical theism, if there were a (...) God, it is likely that he would have reasons for acting that are beyond our ken, and thus we are not justified in making all-things-considered judgments about what the world would be like if there were a God. In particular, the fact that we don't see a good reason for X does not justify the conclusion that there is no good reason for X. 1 Thus, skeptical theism purports to undercut most a posteriori arguments against the existence of God. What follows is an account of the nature of skeptical theism, an application of skeptical theism to both the argument from evil and the argument from divine hiddenness, and a review of the cases for and against skeptical theism. (shrink)

Because anticipated and retrospective regret play important roles in practical deliberation and motivation, better understanding them can illuminate the contours of human agency. However, the possibility of self-ignorance and the fact that we change over time can make regret—especially anticipatory regret—not only a poor predictor of where the agent will be in the future but also an unreliable indicator of where the agent stands. Granting these, this paper examines the way in which prospective and, particularly, retrospective regret can nevertheless yield (...) important insight into the sorts of creatures we are, both generally and individually. The experience of retrospective regret can show a person she values something in a way she did not know or that she is (or was) a different person than she had thought, insights which can factor into forward-looking, or prospective, deliberation. Such instances of revelatory regret reveal something to the agent about herself as agent. I examine two cases of agential self-ignorance. In the first, the experience of regret reveals what the agent values, not only to others but even to the agent himself. In the second, the agent anticipates experiencing regret for an action but does not experience the regret, suggesting that the agent did not value the rejected alternative in the way she thought. Anticipatory regret is forward-looking and can play an important role in practical deliberation. But insofar as anticipatory regret flows from one’s imperfect judgment and prospection about oneself, retrospective regret can be an important corrective in helping the agent understand her own standpoint. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on attributions of phenomenal consciousness, leaving to the side interesting questions about how people attribute other types of consciousness. While researchers are not in perfect agreement about how the concept of phenomenal consciousness should be understood, the standard line is that a creature is phenomenally conscious just in case it has phenomenally conscious mental states, and that a mental state is phenomenally conscious just in case it has phenomenal qualities. The chapter explores whether lay people employ the (...) concept of phenomenal consciousness. It begins by looking at the evidence for an affirmative answer to this question, focusing on Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz's article, Intuitions About Consciousness: Experimental Studies. The chapter explains the evidence for a negative answer to the target question, focusing on Justin Sytsma and Edouard machery's article, Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience. (shrink)

A crucial tenet of virtue-based or expertise-based theorizing about politics is that there are ways to identify and select morally and epistemically excellent people to hold office. This paper considers historical challenges to this task that come from within Greek and Confucian thought and political practice. Because of how difficult it is to assess character in ordinary settings, we argue that it is even more difficult to design institutions that select for virtue at the much wider political scale. Specifically, we (...) argue that the vast majority of proposals that purport to select for virtue are either (a) unlikely to be effective, (b) not implementable at the scale of most current nations, or (c) have already been incorporated into most democratic states. Thus defenders of meritocratic institutions should take more seriously the practical barriers that will almost certainly arise when trying to implement these proposals at scale. Historical proponents of meritocratic values were well aware of concerns about the feasibility of their political ideals, and we should be too. (shrink)

Contrastivism about ‘ought’ holds that ‘ought’ claims are relativized, at least implicitly, to sets of mutually exclusive but not necessarily jointly exhaustive alternatives. This kind of theory can solve puzzles that face other linguistic theories of ‘ought’, via the rejection or severe restriction of principles that let us make inferences between ‘ought’ claims. By rejecting or restricting these principles, however, the contrastivist takes on a burden of recapturing acceptable inferences that these principles let us make. This paper investigates the extent (...) to which a contrastivist can do this. (shrink)

Contemporary metaphysics is dominated by the view that every object belongs to a kind permanently in the sense that it cannot cease to belong to that kind without thereby ceasing to exist. For example, some philosophers think that a person is destroyed if they cease to be a person, a statue is destroyed if it ceases to be a statue, and so on. I believe that this standard view is false. Being a person, or a statue, or etc., is like (...) being a child: just as I did not cease to exist when I ceased to be a child, so people and statues need not cease to exist when they cease to be people and statues. Borrowing a term from Daniel Korman (who uses it in a similar but perhaps not identical way), I call this view phasalism because it entails that the kind-properties which ordinary objects instantiate are phase sortal properties, i.e., kind-properties that an object can instantiate for a temporary phase of its career. This dissertation is a partial defense of phasalism. I develop a phasalist metaphysics in detail, highlighting its virtues and rebutting objections along the way. After some stage-setting (Chapter 1), I defend a phasalist criterion of identity over time for ordinary objects (Chapter 2), as well as a phasalist account of the role that sortal properties play in the identity over time of ordinary objects (Chapter 3). Then I defend a phasalist-friendly approach to the identity over time of lumps, hunks, pieces, etc. of matter (Chapter 4). The material in these chapters amounts to a phasalist solution to certain material coincidence puzzles, such as the puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay. I go on to show that familiar puzzles about undetached parts (Chapter 5) and fission (Chapter 6) can be solved within the confines of my phasalist metaphysics as well. (shrink)

Beliefs have genealogies. Can tracing a belief’s genealogy illuminate the epistemic quality of the belief? This paper sets out a general epistemology of genealogies. As it turns out, genealogies for beliefs come in two sorts: those that trace a belief to some mental event that doubles as evidence for the belief and those that do not. The former have the potential to undercut the belief, rebut the belief, or—importantly—both. The latter have the potential to reinforce the belief or rebut the (...) belief but—importantly—not undercut it. The ultimate conclusion is that there is a role for genealogies in the epistemic appraisal of our beliefs, but this role will be circumscribed by the availability of clear and compelling genealogies. (shrink)

Scholars have suggested that leaders’ ethical failures at the beginning of the twenty-first century have raised awareness about the importance of ethical leadership (EL). Yet, there has been no systematic effort to evaluate whether this awareness indeed led to changes in EL or how followers react to this leadership style over time. To address this gap, we examine the evolution in EL means, variability, and its associations with follower outcomes between 2004 and 2019. Our cross-temporal meta-analysis included 359 independent samples (...) from 314 studies published between 2005 and 2020 and focused on followers’ ratings of their leaders using the Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS; Brown et al., in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117–134, 2005). Using cubic spline meta-regressions, our results indicated no global changes in EL mean levels and variability across the 15-year period. Nevertheless, country-level comparisons revealed different EL-trends in China (i.e. decrease) versus the United States (i.e. stable), and further moderation analyses highlighted the role of cultural value dimensions and national corruption rates. Finally, we also found that the relationship between EL and desirable follower outcomes (e.g. organizational citizenship behavior) became gradually stronger over time on a global level. These results provide a solid empirical basis to evaluate cross-temporal trends in EL and its (changing) impact on follower outcomes across the globe. (shrink)

In "Saving One Another: Philodemus and Paul on Moral Formation in Community" Justin Reid Allison compares how the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus and the Christian apostle Paul envisioned the members of their communities helping one another to grow into moral maturity. Allison establishes that Philodemus and Paul are more similar than previously noticed in their conception and practice of moral formation in community, and that these similarities offer a critical opportunity to consider important differences between the two as well. By (...) deepening the comparison to include differences alongside similarities, and to include theological and socio-economic facets of communal moral formation, Allison shows that Philodemus and Paul uniquely shed fresh light on one another's texts when understood in comparative perspective. (shrink)