Tax compliance is an important issue for governments and the public alike. To meet public needs and fund public mandates, firms around the world are expected to comply with tax laws. Factors that are related to organizational (firm) tax compliance have not been sufficiently examined in the literature. Owing to the increasing global influence of transition economies, factors associated with firm tax compliance in transition economies are particularly of interest. Based on a sample of over 5,000 firms from 22 former (...) Soviet Bloc transition economies, we find that higher levels of corruption and higher levels of particularized trust (reliance on friends and family) are associated with lower levels of tax compliance. Interestingly, we also find that the negative relationship between corruption and tax compliance is weakened in situations of higher generalized trust (trust in strangers). Overall, our study’s results suggest that institutional factors play an important role and are related to firm tax compliance behavior in transition economies. (shrink)

Many political theorists today deny that citizenship can be defended on liberal grounds alone. Cosmopolitans claim that loyalty to a particular state is incompatible with universal liberal principles, which hold that we have equal duties of justice to persons everywhere, while nationalist theorists justify civic obligations only by reaching beyond liberal principles and invoking the importance of national culture. In Liberal Loyalty, Anna Stilz challenges both views by defending a distinctively liberal understanding of citizenship. Drawing on Kant, Rousseau, and (...) Habermas, Stilz argues that we owe civic obligations to the state if it is sufficiently just, and that constitutionally enshrined principles of justice in themselves--rather than territory, common language, or shared culture--are grounds for obedience to our particular state and for democratic solidarity with our fellow citizens. She demonstrates that specifying what freedom and equality mean among a particular people requires their democratic participation together as a group. Justice, therefore, depends on the authority of the democratic state because there is no way equal freedom can be defined or guaranteed without it. Yet, as Stilz shows, this does not mean that each of us should entertain some vague loyalty to democracy in general. Citizens are politically obligated to their own state and to each other, because within their particular democracy they define and ultimately guarantee their own civil rights. Liberal Loyalty is a persuasive defense of citizenship on purely liberal grounds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Graffiti and Colonial Unknowing:A Comment on Mishuana Goeman's "Caring for Landscapes of Justice in Perilous Settler Environments"Anna Cookin "caring for landscapes of justice in Perilous Settler Environments," Dr. Goeman shows how the NDN Collective's initiatives, Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero's Tongvaland project, and the works of Gabrieliño Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame "exemplify communities of care" that work toward "the unmapping of settler terrains" ("Caring for Landscapes" 51). Her address (...) highlights how these cartographic art productions are processes of (re)mapping that challenge colonial spatialities. Drawing on Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's poem "i am graffiti," Goeman frames these art works as Indigenous graffiti, insofar as they are everyday acts of resurgence1 that resist erasure and enact rematriation.My comments aim to articulate how Romero's and Dorame's works both reveal and disrupt a colonial unknowing by showing the cracks of settler colonial spatiality. I take Goeman's address to illustrate that the changing of minds and unsettling of settler identity will not occur through argumentation, facts, and figures alone, but rather through aesthetic and cartographic practices that "provide a way of seeing Indigenous futurities and relationalities" ("Caring for Landscapes" 52).Maps as Tools of Settler ColonialismIn order to highlight how these art practices enact a kind of (re)mapping that breaks through the veneer of colonial permanence, we first need to consider the way mapping transforms land into property in the service of Indigenous erasure and land dispossession. In her address, Goeman offers a short history of what is now called Los Angeles through the lens of dispossession that occurs through "international claiming of property and burgeoning US property law" ("Caring for Landscapes" 53). Tovaangar was divided into Spanish (and [End Page 64] then Mexican) land grants that, after 1846, were "registered under the US as property" (Goeman, "Caring for Landscapes" 53; emphasis added). The Land Act of 1851 "established the domestication of the California landscape under US governance" by legitimating existing Mexican land rights and mapping out territory yet "unclaimed" ("Caring for Landscapes" 54). The mapping of this so-called "unclaimed" territory propelled a violent erasure of California Indians by "establishing new and ongoing commerce centers" ("Caring for Landscapes" 53). Land was transferred into property—as a thing owned—without "the consent of those who … lived on the land since time immemorial, following the settler structure of passing land between Christian nations" ("Caring for Landscapes" 53). By showing how property rights legitimate conquest and violence, Goeman illustrates how mapping has been (and continues to be) an "essential settler-colonial tool to domesticate land in Southern California and propel development" ("Caring for Landscapes" 54). While she demonstrates how the mapping of Tovaangar using 493 hand-drawn Diseños maps served to sever Indigenous communities (and their relationships with land, such as the Gabrieliño Tongva with the San Gabriel Mountains), she emphasizes that this is an ongoing process that has not been left in a distant past. Newer maps that may seem more objective and scientific with "better models of scale or a more realist representation" remain, at their core, maps of dispossession ("Caring for Landscapes" 54).The very desire to objectively determine location by assigning latitude and longitude reveals a colonial spatiality, which "territorialize[s] the physical landscape by manufacturing categories and separating land from people" and conceives of space in terms of property logics (Goeman, "[Re]Mapping Indigenous Presence" 296). In addition to Indigenous land dispossession, this colonial spatiality rejects relationality by creating dualist boundaries between human and non-human, in which land is the raw material for human development and the creation of culture. Cherokee philosopher Brian Burkhart speaks of relationality in terms of locality, which he defines as "being-fromthe-land, knowing-from-the-land, and meaning-from-the-land" (Indigenizing Philosophy xvii). The severing of locality can be understood in terms of the transformation of land as relative to inert matter to be acted upon. Mapping serves as a tool of settler colonial erasure insofar as it delocalizes "land as the relational ground of kinship" into "land as a mere object that only has meaning or value in relation to people" ("Indigenizing Philosophy... (shrink)

The two most important and central concepts in ancient ethical theory are those of virtue and happiness. This is well-known by now, as is the way that many scholars and philosophers have in recent years investigated the structure of ancient ethical theories, at least partly in the hope that this would help us in our modern ethical thinking by introducing us to developed theories which escape the problems that have led to so much frustration with deontological and consequentialist approaches. And (...) there has indeed been considerable interest in developing modern forms of ethics which draw inspiration, to a greater or lesser extent, from the ancient theories. However, there is an asymmetry here. Modern theories which take their inspiration from Aristotle and other ancient theorists are standardly called virtue ethics, not happiness ethics. We have rediscovered the appeal of aretē, but eudaimonia is still, it appears, problematic for us. This has an important consequence for us, for in ancient theories virtue is not discussed in isolation; it is seen as part of a larger structure in which the overarching concept is happiness. If we focus on virtue alone and ignore its relation to happiness, we are missing a large part of the interest that study of the ancient theories can offer. (shrink)

Abstract:While self-determination is a cardinal principle of international law, its meaning is often obscure. Yet international law clearly recognizes decolonization as a central application of the principle. Most ordinary people also agree that the liberation of colonial peoples was a moral triumph. This essay examines three philosophical theories of self-determination’s value, and asks which one best captures the reasons why decolonization was morally required. The instrumentalist theory holds that decolonization was required because subject peoples were unjustly governed, the democratic view (...) holds that decolonization was required because subject peoples lacked democratic representation, and the associative view holds that decolonization was required because subject peoples were unable to affirm the political institutions their colonial rulers imposed on them. I argue that the associative view is superior to competing accounts, because it better reflects individuals’ “maker” interests in participating in shared political projects that they value. The essay further shows that if we accept the associative view, self-determination is not a sui generis value that applies to decolonization alone. Ultimately, our intuitions about decolonization can be justified only by invoking an interest on the part of persistently alienated groups in redrawing political boundaries. The same interest may justify self-determination in additional cases, such as autonomy for indigenous peoples, or greater independence for Scotland or Quebec. (shrink)

According to evidentialism, what is epistemically rational to believe is determined by evidence alone. So, assuming that prejudiced beliefs are irrational, evidentialism entails that they must not be properly based on the evidence. Recently, philosophers have been interested in cases of beliefs that seem to undermine evidentialism: these are beliefs that seem both prejudiced (and, thus, irrational) and properly based on the evidence (and, thus, rational). In these cases, a believer has strong statistical evidence that most members of a social (...) group have some property and then comes to believe that an individual member of that social group will likely have that property. For example, a server at a restaurant has statistical evidence that most Black diners tip less than average and then comes to believe that a particular Black diner will likely tip less than average. The goal of this paper is to defend evidentialism from the challenge posed to it by beliefs like the server’s by developing a plausible evidentialist account that explains away these conflicting intuitions. (shrink)

Background Few empirical studies have been found that explore ethical challenges among persons in high public positions that are responsible for elder care. The aim of this paper was to illuminate the meaning of being in ethically difficult situations related to elder care as experienced by high level decision-makers. Methods A phenomenological-hermeneutic method was used to analyse the eighteen interviews conducted with political and civil servant high level decision-makers at the municipality and county council level from two counties in Sweden. (...) The participants worked at a planning and control as well as executive level and had both budget and quality of elder care responsibilities. Results Both ethical dilemmas and the meaning of being in ethically difficult situations related to elder care were revealed. No differences were seen between the politicians and the civil servants. The ethical dilemmas mostly concerned dealings with extensive care needs and working with a limited budget. The dilemmas were associated with a lack of good care and a lack of agreement concerning care such as vulnerable patients in inappropriate care settings, weaknesses in medical support, dissimilar focuses between the caring systems, justness in the distribution of care and deficient information. Being in ethically difficult situations was challenging. Associated with them were experiences of being exposed, having to be strategic and living with feelings such as aloneness and loneliness, uncertainty, lack of confirmation, the risk of being threatened or becoming a scapegoat and difficult decision avoidance. Conclusion Our paper provides further insight into the ethical dilemmas and ethical challenges met by high level decision-makers', which is important since the overall responsibility for elder care that is also ethically defensible rests with them. They have power and their decisions affect many stakeholders in elder care. Our results can be used to stimulate discussions between high level decision-makers and health care professionals concerning ways of dealing with ethical issues and the necessity of structures that facilitate dealing with them. Even if the high level decision-makers have learned to live with the ethical challenges that confronted them, it was obvious that they were not free from feelings of uncertainty, frustration and loneliness. Vulnerability was revealed regarding themselves and others. Their feelings of failure indicated that they felt something was at stake for the older adults in elder care and for themselves as well, in that there was the risk that important needs would go unmet. (shrink)

This paper traces the intellectual trajectories of the first stand-alone theories of action, understood as both axiologically neutral and quasi-scientific from a methodological point of view. I argue that the rise of action theory of this kind corresponds to a particular moment of dissatisfaction within Western thought, and as such, it tells us far more about the history of philosophy than the subject itself. I conclude by explaining why subsequent failures to provide an acceptable theory of action are not accidental. (...) On the contrary, such failures owe themselves probably to the fact that formulating a theory of action is neither propitious nor useful. Thus, the most valuable lesson we can learn from philosophical desires for a theory of action is that we should take co-action as the starting point in our normative investigations, rather than positing action simpliciter as a problem to solve. That is, we should move away from propounding a theory of action, and instead focus on a paradigm shift, whereby we move away from a representational, towards a co-actional, model of action. (shrink)

It has long been accepted that participating in music, either as a performer, listener, and/or composer can contribute to human flourishing. This volume explores a fourth musical activity, the act of music scholarship, and reveals how engagement with the cultural, social, and political practices surrounding music contributes to human flourishing in a way that listening, performing, and even composing alone cannot. Music and Human Flourishing contains chapters by eleven prominent scholars representing the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. The (...) chapters are divided into three general categories—Contemplation, Critique, and Communication—and cover a broad range of topics and music traditions. In Part I, Contemplation, contributors explore a specific facet of music’s connection to human flourishing and contemplate new approaches for future action. Part II, Critique, contains chapters that challenge past assumptions of the various roles of music in society and highlight the effects that unconscious bias and stereotyping have had on music’s effectiveness to facilitate human flourishing. Part III interacts broadly with the concept of Communication and features chapters that explore how ethnicity, gender, religion, and technology influence one’s ability to connect with others through music. Collectively, the chapters demonstrate how the process of thinking and writing about music and human flourishing can lead to revelations about cultural identity, social rituals, political ideologies, and even spiritual transcendence. (shrink)

It has become commonplace within feminist theory to claim that women’s lives are constructed by multiple, intersecting systems of oppression. In this thesis, I challenge the consensus that oppression is aptly captured by the theoretical model of “intersectionality.” While intersectionality originates in Black feminist thought as a purposive intervention into US antidiscrimination law, it has been detached from that context and harnessed to different representational aims. For instance, it is often asserted that intersectionality enables a representational politics that overcomes legacies (...) of exclusion within hegemonic Anglo-American feminism. I argue that intersectionality reinscribes the political exclusion of racialized women as a feature of their embodied identities. That is, it locates the failure of political representation in the “complex” identities of “intersectional” subjects, who are constructed as unrepresentable in terms of “race” or “gender” alone. Further, I argue that intersectionality fails to supplant race- and class-privileged women as the normative subjects of feminist theory and politics. In Chapter One, I demonstrate that intersectionality illicitly imports unitary concepts of “race,” “gender,” and “class.” In Chapter Two, I argue that intersectionality lacks a theory of hierarchy: it is a “flat geography” which cannot capture vertical and horizontal lines of power. In Chapter Three, I explore the role of analogical reasoning in rendering racialized women invisible both as gendered and as racialized subjects in twentieth-century social movements. To concretize this argument, I turn to Simone de Beauvoir’s use of race-sex analogies to describe (white, bourgeois) “women’s” situation in The Second Sex. In Chapter Four, I advance a programmatic unified account of oppression. I suggest that the possibility of a unified theory (as opposed to an intersectional one) is intimated in the concrete articulation of race, class, and gender. My point of departure is a phenomenology of capitalism, which reveals that these are all fundamentally modes of exploitation and appropriation. In Chapter Five, I theorize how they are made visible (and invisible) on the body. I extend Frantz Fanon’s account of “epidermalization,” drawing upon the marxian concepts of “fetishism” and “mode of appearance” to elaborate four structures of gendered racialized perception: first, the “miscegenation taboo” structures perceptions of the “purity” of whiteness and the “polluting” effects of blackness. Whiteness, theorised as a “possessive investment” and as “property” is defined by the right to exclude. Second, the “episteme of tellable differences” produces the conviction that we can automatically “tell the difference” between a body placed in one “racial” or gender category, and another—while bodies that temporarily confound classification cause fear and consternation. Third, the “race/reproduction bind” names the axiomatic assumption that “race” is reproduced through (heterosexual) procreation and that “race” is, therefore, biologically inheritable. Finally, the “fear/criminalisation reflex” refers to the bidirectional equation of particular racialised-gendered bodies with crime, and of crime with those bodies; this a function of the discursive use of ‘crime’ as an alibi for “race’” the systemic racialisation of punitive carceral institutions, and the historical origins of “race” in transatlantic chattel slavery, which shaped perceptual-cognitive associations of freedom with whiteness and captivity with blackness. (shrink)

In his treatise "Elementa harmonica," Aristoxenus of Tarentum formulated a distinctive philosophical framework within the realm of sound exploration, deviating from the harmonics theory advanced by the Pythagoreans. A pivotal disparity lies in the methodological approach to research. Aristoxenus posited meticulous observation of acoustic phenomena as the foundational step in all inquiries, constituting a fundamental criterion for truth. He asserted that perception alone could authenticate the fidelity of the observed state of affairs. Aristoxenus vehemently opposed the Pythagorean disregard for auditory (...) testimony, deeming it a notable methodological lapse. According to him, the harmonikos must serve as a vigilant observer of acoustic phenomena, equipped with a discerning and cultivated musical ear. (shrink)

The recent phenomenon of land grabbing—that is, the large-scale acquisition of private land rights by foreign investors—is an effect of increasing global demand for farmland, resources, and development opportunities. In 2008–2010 alone, land grabs covered approximately 56 million hectares of land, dispossessing and displacing inhabitants. This article proposes a philosophical framework for evaluating land grabbing as a practice of territorial alienation, whereby the private purchase of land can, under certain conditions, lead to a de facto alienation of territorial sovereignty. If (...) land grabs alienate territorial sovereignty, it follows that inhabitants can claim a violation of the people’s right to “permanent sovereignty over natural resources.” However, because sovereignty is entangled in the historical and contemporary causes of land dispossession, I cast doubt on this strategy. Territorially sovereign regimes often undermine democratic land governance by obstructing participation in activities such as zoning, land use, property regulation, and environmental stewardship. These activities, which I theorize as practices of “world-building,” are key to democracy because they give occupants a say in the shape of their common home. The perplexities of sovereignty in matters of land governance suggest that establishing democratic participation in rule over land requires fracturing sovereignty. (shrink)

Ontological reism remains a defensible metaphysical position, and Kotarbiński’s unwillingness to propose a more robust defence of his views has some identifiable historical causes, i.e. his post-war engagement in practical philosophy (both praxeology and ethics), more relevant in the context of a war-ravaged country. There is however one more reason why it remains difficult to justify the ontological part of the doctrine. Kotarbiński assumes indeed that “the fundamental justification of concretism is both naively intuitive and ordinarily inductive” (Kotarbiński 1958, 402). (...) Does this mean that no decent philosophical discussion can be proposed in defence of intuitively grasped ideas? Certainly not, as, once again, is shown by the contemporary works on qualia. Ontological reism should be pursued as a negative theory though, not as a positive one. This question of the burden of the proof was raised by Kotarbiński in 1966, surprised by the fact that it is the reist, the one who rejects imaginary entities, who is supposed to bring new evidence in favour of his positions, whereas those who assume their existence do not feel compelled to go beyond intuitive claims. It cannot rely on analysis of language alone, but has to engage in the investigation of the world. This idea is coherent with the naturalistic tendencies of Kotarbiński’s approach, even if they did not yield any substantial results on their own. (shrink)

Log-linear analysis is a practical tool for examining relationships, successfully applied in many fields of science. This paper discusses the topic of estimation of the chance of getting pregnant in couples that underwent ART insemination. The authors focus on finding significant interactions between variables, on the basis of which statistical models are built. With the use of results of log-linear analysis, a model predicting the chances of achieving a clinical pregnancy that contained interactions was successfully built. Moreover, it was more (...) complete than the model obtained with the use of logistic regression alone. (shrink)

How should an agent revise her epistemic state in the light of doxastic disagreement? The problems associated with answering this question arise under the assumption that an agent’s epistemic state is best represented by her degree of belief function alone. We argue that for modeling cases of doxastic disagreement an agent’s epistemic state is best represented by her confirmation commitments and the evidence available to her. Finally, we argue that given this position it is possible to provide an adequate answer (...) to the question of how to rationally revise one’s epistemic state in the light of disagreement. (shrink)

We explored the frequency with which typical adults make Theory of Mind attributions, and under what circumstances these attributions occur. We used an experience sampling method to query 30 typical adults about their everyday thoughts. Participants carried a Personal Data Assistant that prompted them to categorize their thoughts as Action, Mental State, or Miscellaneous at approximately 30 pseudo-random times during a continuous 10-h period. Additionally, participants noted the direction of their thought and degree of socializing at the time of inquiry. (...) We were interested in the relative frequency of ToM and how prominent they were in immediate social exchanges. Analyses of multiple choice answers suggest that typical adults: spend more time thinking about actions than mental states and miscellaneous things, exhibit a higher degree of own- versus other-directed thought when alone, and make mental state attributions more frequently when not interacting than while interacting with others . A significant 3-way interaction between thought type, direction of thought, and socializing emerged because action but not mental state thoughts about others occurred more frequently when participants were interacting with people versus when alone; whereas there was an increase in the frequency of both action and mental state attributions about the self when participants were alone as opposed to socializing. A secondary analysis of coded free text responses supports findings 1–3. The results of this study help to create a more naturalistic picture of ToM use in everyday life and the method shows promise for future study of typical and atypical thought processes. (shrink)

In her Introduction, Tymieniecka states the core theme of the present book sharply: Is culture an excess of nature's prodigious expansiveness - an excess which might turn out to be dangerous for nature itself if it goes too far - or is culture a 'natural', congenial prolongation of nature-life? If the latter, then culture is assimilated into nature and thus would lose its claim to autonomy: its criteria would be superseded by those of nature alone. Of course, nature and culture (...) may both still be seen as being absorbed by the inner powers of specifically human inwardness, on which view, human being, caught in its own transcendence, becomes separated radically in kind from the rest of existence and may not touch even the shadow of reality except through its own prism. Excess, therefore, or prolongation? And on what terms? The relationship between culture and nature in its technical phase demands a new elucidation. Here this is pursued by excavating the root significance of the 'multiple rationalities' of life. In contrast to Husserl, who differentiated living types according to their degree of participation in the world, the phenomenology of life disentangles living types from within the ontopoietic web of life itself. The human creative act reveals itself as the Great Divide of the Logos of Life - a divide that does not separate but harmonizes, thus dispelling both naturalistic and spiritualistic reductionism. (shrink)

Vocabulary size has been suggested as a useful measure of “verbal abilities” that correlates with speech recognition scores. Knowing more words is linked to better speech recognition. How vocabulary knowledge translates to general speech recognition mechanisms, how these mechanisms relate to offline speech recognition scores, and how they may be modulated by acoustical distortion or age, is less clear. Age-related differences in linguistic measures may predict age-related differences in speech recognition in noise performance. We hypothesized that speech recognition performance can (...) be predicted by the efficiency of lexical access, which refers to the speed with which a given word can be searched and accessed relative to the size of the mental lexicon. We tested speech recognition in a clinical German sentence-in-noise test at two signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), in 22 younger (18–35 years) and 22 older (60–78 years) listeners with normal hearing. We also assessed receptive vocabulary, lexical access time, verbal working memory, and hearing thresholds as measures of individual differences. Age group, SNR level, vocabulary size, and lexical access time were significant predictors of individual speech recognition scores, but working memory and hearing threshold were not. Interestingly, longer accessing times were correlated with better speech recognition scores. Hierarchical regression models for each subset of age group and SNR showed very similar patterns: the combination of vocabulary size and lexical access time contributed most to speech recognition performance; only for the younger group at the better SNR (yielding about 85% correct speech recognition) did vocabulary size alone predict performance. Our data suggest that successful speech recognition in noise is mainly modulated by the efficiency of lexical access. This suggests that older adults’ poorer performance in the speech recognition task may have arisen from reduced efficiency in lexical access; with an average vocabulary size similar to that of younger adults, they were still slower in lexical access. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionLori A. Custodero and Anna NeumannIn this symposium, three scholars present the genesis, meaning, and artfulness of creative work and its realization as aesthetic experience within three educational fields. Lori A. Custodero, working out of music education, provides a perspective emanating from an aesthetic of childhood wonder and playfulness; David T. Hansen, writing out of philosophy of education, discusses how being fully present in the teaching moment leads (...) to meaningful experience; and Anna Neumann, who writes out of the field of higher education studies, represents scholars as engaged in intellectual pursuits, often framed aesthetically, and as struggling to hold on to precious time for creation. Aware of the inherent tensions in learning environments from child care centers to graduate schools, we address ways in which our research has revealed people's sustained pursuit of imagined possibilities, oftentimes amidst perceived impediments.Creative work involves imagining possibilities whereby individuals, alone and together, pose personally relevant questions and pursue fluent pathways of inquiry within the shared meanings of cultural context. At its finest, such work is artful, simultaneously responding to and emanating from immediate circumstance and past experience. It is malleable and vulnerable and compelling, fusing familiar images and surprising perceptions into new "equilibria... stable, even though moving" whereby "changes interlock and sustain one another."1 As scholars and teachers committed to learning, we strive to create and discern meaning between established understandings and emerging ideas and images. As we dance between reception and action, between insight and "onsight,"2 fully attentive to the perceived potentials in our work, we move toward synchrony, experiencing the aesthetic. The realizations that arise from experiences such as these — new or newly reconfigured words, sounds, images, movement, and ideas — express new balances of sense and feeling and, sometimes, beauty. Whether in the shared, artfully expressive vocalizations between the newborn infant and mother or in the scientist's finessing patience with elegant mathematical imagery, creative work invites a drawing together of what we know and what we struggle to know. Over time, the interplay of this work and its realization, [End Page 33] what Dewey refers to as "movement and culmination,"3 creates a momentum that serves to define lives as aesthetic.We have created this symposium as a space for considering the meanings of the aesthetic in lives — from its earliest instantiations in the experiences of infants and young children, to its developed expression in the professional (in this case, intellectual) efforts of adults pursuing scholarly careers, to its representation in teaching as intergenerational fusions of knowledge, learning, and lives. We see the aesthetic as both native and learned; as individually held and formed and felt, and as collectively created and voiced, the product of lives in intersection; as marking bounded moments in time (those instants of compelling "present-ness") and as spreading through years, well beyond bounded present-ness, perhaps as memory. Yet while striving to define the aesthetic in lives, we also strive to understand lives, individually and interactively, as lodgings for the aesthetic, as locations that give shape, form, and voice to beauty and insight, to creativity and learning. As we explore the lives in which the aesthetic finds its home, and within which it forms, we wonder about the extent to which the aesthetic may, in its turn, illuminate the strivings of those lives, including human desires to create, know, learn, understand, sense. We are then collectively concerned with the meanings of the aesthetic in lives and about the lives themselves as "moving spaces" within which the aesthetic can grow.We pursue this theme, centered on the power of the aesthetic to illuminate human lives, out of a realization that current understandings of what it means to be human — and especially what it means to learn and create — have been framed within the rubrics of the social sciences, certainly in productive ways. And yet we suggest that the artful, though powerful in its abilities to voice emotion and beauty, has not been employed as intensively as it might in efforts to understand what it means to create and learn as virtues of human existence, as perhaps the ultimate of human strivings. We hope that these symposium papers will help invigorate such... (shrink)

BackgroundFear of abandonment and aloneness play a key role in the clinical understanding interpersonal and attachment-specific problems in patients with borderline personality disorder and has been investigated in previous functional Magnet Resonance Imaging studies. The aim of the present study was to examine how different aspects of attachment representations are processed in BPD, by using for the first time an fMRI attachment paradigm including personalized core sentences from the participants’ own attachment stories. We hypothesized that BPD patients would show increased (...) functional involvement of limbic brain regions associated with fear and pain when presented personalized attachment relevant stimuli representing loneliness compared to healthy controls.MethodsWe examined the attachment classifications of 26 female BPD patients and 26 female HC using the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System. We used an fMRI-adapted attachment paradigm to investigate the neural correlates of attachment. All participants were presented three personalized sentences extracted from their AAP attachment narrative, combined with standardized AAP pictures representing being alone or in interactive attachment situations.ResultsAs expected, the classification of unresolved attachment was significantly greater in BPD compared to HC. BPD patients showed increased fMRI-activation in brain areas associated with fear, pain, and hyperarousal than HC when presented with personalized attachment-relevant alone stimuli. In particular, pictures with monadic attachment situations induced greater anterior medial cingulate cortex, anterior insula, amygdala, thalamus and superior temporal gyrus activation in the patient group.ConclusionThe results point to increased fMRI-activation in areas processing emotional distress and painful experiences in BPD patients. In particular, the emotional cascade reflecting attachment distress was evoked by combining monadic pictures, representing abandonment and aloneness, with the patients’ personalized narrative material. Our results confirmed and replicated previous results that illustrate once again the high relevance of aloneness and feelings of abandonment for BPD in the context of attachment trauma. Moreover, our results support the hypothesis of hypermentalization in response to attachment distress as a core feature of social-cognitive impairment in BPD associated with common treatment implications across different therapeutic orientations. (shrink)

I agreed to review this book based on the title alone (coupled with a cover picture of a adult pig and several piglets outdoors in the grass). My decision was justified, since it offers a coherent, detailed response to an important problem in animal ethics and animal welfare: the question of humane (or “animal friendly”) animal husbandry, especially in the meat industry, in which animals are raised with the end of being killed long before the end of their natural lifespan.Humane (...) animal husbandry is based on two distinct assumptions. The first is that animals’ welfare matters, so that they should have pleasant lives and avoid unnecessary suffering. The second is that killing animals for food is morally justified. This is commonly justified, in both popular and philosophical discourse, with the claim that “the animals are granted pleasant lives, usually in connection with the claim that they would not exist at all if it were not for the purpose of our consumption. By consuming and farmin. (shrink)

The author presents a new education project connected with Rawls’ model of a well-ordered society. The most important element of this project is moral education. Modern liberalism identifies moral education with civic education. The author finds this way of thinking about one’s participation in social and political life rather interesting and needed. However, what does the anthropological foundation of these concepts look like? The very idea of human being – as a rational individual alone – is assumed as the subject (...) of the process of education. The author tries to show that this idea is very close to the concept of human being one could call virtual. (shrink)

This paper presents scientists’ understanding of their roles in society and corresponding responsibilities. It discusses the researchers’ perspective against the background of the contemporary literature on scientific responsibility in the social sciences and philosophy and proposes a heuristic that improves the understanding of the complexity of scientific responsibility. The study is based on qualitative interviews with senior scientists. The presented results show what researchers themselves see as their responsibilities, how they assume them, and what challenges they perceive with respect to (...) their responsibilities. Regarding the latter, the interviewed researchers highlight those aspects of responsibility that go beyond the expertise of their professional role, and thus cannot be carried by scientists alone. For example, scientists alone cannot determine the general direction science takes, or the useful application of their research. The interviewed researchers describe those challenges as responsibilities that must be shared across different societal groups. In the theoretical literature, responsibility has been described as a relation between an actor (who), the action for which someone is responsible (what), and the normative framework against which someone is responsible (why). We will draw on this concept of “relational responsibility” to identify the various actors, normative frameworks, and actions relevant to scientific responsibility. This will serve as a heuristic tool to help identify the entanglement of responsibilities spread across several societal groups. (shrink)

Functional human brain mapping is commonly performed during invasive monitoring with intracranial electroencephalographic electrodes prior to resective surgery for drug­ resistant epilepsy. The current gold standard, electrocortical stimulation mapping, is time ­consuming, sometimes elicits pain, and often induces after discharges or seizures. Moreover, there is a risk of overestimating eloquent areas due to propagation of the effects of stimulation to a broader network of language cortex. Passive iEEG spatial-temporal functional mapping has recently emerged as a potential alternative to ESM. However, (...) investigators have observed less correspondence between STFM and ESM maps of language than between their maps of motor function. We hypothesized that incongruities between ESM and STFM of language function may arise due to propagation of the effects of ESM to cortical areas having strong effective connectivity with the site of stimulation. We evaluated five patients who underwent invasive monitoring for seizure localization, whose language areas were identified using ESM. All patients performed a battery of language tasks during passive iEEG recordings. To estimate the effective connectivity of stimulation sites with a broader network of task-activated cortical sites, we measured cortico-cortical evoked potentials elicited across all recording sites by single-pulse electrical stimulation at sites where ESM was performed at other times. With the combination of high gamma power as well as CCEPs results, we trained a logistic regression model to predict ESM results at individual electrode pairs. The average accuracy of the classifier using both STFM and CCEPs results combined was 87.7%, significantly higher than the one using STFM alone, indicating that the correspondence between STFM and ESM results is greater when effective connectivity between ESM stimulation sites and task-activated sites is taken into consideration. These findings, though based on a small number of subjects to date, provide preliminary support for the hypothesis that incongruities between ESM and STFM may arise in part from propagation of stimulation effects to a broader network of cortical language sites activated by language tasks, and suggest that more studies, with larger numbers of patients, are needed to understand the utility of both mapping techniques in clinical practice. (shrink)

Uterus transplantation is a relatively new intervention. A woman with absolute uterine factor infertility receives, by a surgical procedure, a transplanted uterus, most often by living donation. The uterus recipient may thus become pregnant and conceive her own child. As with any other medical treatment, UTx requires legitimation. The anticipated benefits must outweigh the risks of the medical intervention. The risks and benefits of UTx are by no means unequivocal and cannot be easily determined. The benefits depend on the final (...) evaluation of the suffering to be alleviated by the intervention. In the following, we will analyze the suffering addressed by UTx and discuss its normative value. First, we point out that (a) suffering is generally considered an important normative criterion in medicine as well as in the context of UTx; (b) we then describe the risks and anticipated benefits of UTx for the three persons directly concerned: the child, the donor, and the recipient; (c) we further analyze the suffering addressed by UTx. The intervention addresses a form of existential suffering. We discuss the common notion that existential suffering should be evaluated from the subjective perspective of the sufferer; (d) afterwards, we argue that in a social practice like medicine, a one‐sided evaluation stemming from the sufferer alone is not sufficient; and (e) finally, arguments from a societal perspective lead us to the conclusion that the existential suffering addressed by UTx does not possess a sufficiently strong normative value to legitimize a high‐risk, expensive procedure. (shrink)

With the advanced methods of analysing old biological material, it is pressing to discuss what should be allowed to be done with human remains, particularly for well documented historical individuals. We argue that Queen Christina of Sweden, who challenged the traditional gender roles, has an interest in maintaining her privacy when there are continued attempts to reveal her ‘true’ gender. In the long-running philosophical debate on posthumous wronging, the fundamental question is: Who is wronged? Our aim is to find this (...) ‘missing subject’ using narrative theory.Narrative identity emphasises the fact that no person is alone in knowing or telling their life story. People’s lives are entangled and parts of the life story of a deceased person can remain in the living realm. Since the narrative identity of a person does not necessarily end upon their death, and this narrative continues to relate directly to the person who once existed, it is the narrative subject that can continue to be posthumously wronged. Queen Christina can no longer maintain her own identity, but we maintain it by our research into her life. We propose three duties relevant for posthumous wronging: the duty of truthfulness, the duty of recognition and the duty to respect privacy. (shrink)

Studies in economic decision-making have demonstrated that individuals appreciate social values supporting equity and disapprove unfairness when distributing goods between two or more parties. However, this seems to critically depend on psychological mechanisms partly pertaining to the ingroup–outgroup distinction. Little is known as to what extent economic bargaining can be manipulated by means of psychological interventions such has hypnosis. Here we show that a hypnotic ingroup versus outgroup suggestion impacts the tolerance of unfairness in an Ultimatum Game. Specifically, the ingroup (...) suggestion was associated with significantly greater acceptance rates of unfair offers than the outgroup suggestion, whereas hypnosis alone exerted only small effects on unfairness tolerance. These findings indicate that psychological interventions such as hypnotic suggestion can contribute to ingroup favoritism and outgroup rejection. (shrink)

In the United States alone, the prevalence of AD is expected to more than double from six million people in 2019 to nearly 14 million people in 2050. Meanwhile, the track record for developing treatments for AD has been marked by decades of failure. But recent progress in genetics, neuroscience and gene editing suggest that effective treatments could be on the horizon. The arrival of such treatments would have profound implications for the way we diagnose, triage, study, and allocate resources (...) to Alzheimer’s patients. Because the disease is not rare and because it strikes late in life, the development of therapies that are expensive and efficacious but less than cures, will pose particular challenges to healthcare infrastructure. We have a window of time during which we can begin to anticipate just, equitable and salutary ways to accommodate a disease-modifying therapy Alzheimer’s disease. Here we consider the implications for caregivers, clinicians, researchers, and the US healthcare system of the availability of an expensive, presymptomatic treatment for a common late-onset neurodegenerative disease for which diagnosis can be difficult. (shrink)

Targeted killing has become a staple tactic in the “war in terror”. Since the beginning of the second Intifada, Israel is estimated to have killed over four hundred Palestinians in targeted strikes, while the US has killed over two thousand in Pakistan alone since 2004. These statistics include the deaths of innocent bystanders caught in the wrong place at the wrong time—“collateral damage”—as well as the deaths of the terrorists themselves. Be that as it may, the American and Israeli publics (...) have largely settled into an acceptance of the targeted killings carried out in their name.In Anna Goppel’s Killing Terrorists: A Moral and Legal Analysis, even the staunchest defender of targeted killing will find good reason to reconsider. The book does not bother developing an absolute, in-principle objection to targeted killing; it concedes to advocates of the practice that there are conceivable circumstances under which it might be justified. But these circumstances are shown to b .. (shrink)

In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing explains how bare land is formed. Capitalism produces ‘ruins’ by stripping living beings of the capacity to form their own ecological relations, a necessary condition for the reproduction of life. Contemporary capitalism alienates living beings from ecological relations, i.e. capitalism generates “the ability to stand alone, as if the entanglements of living did not matter. Through alienation, people and things (...) become mobile assets; they can be removed from their lifeworlds in distance-defying transport to be exchanged with other assets from other life worlds, elsewhere” (Tsing 2021, 5). Cutting the threads of the web of life through capitalist alienation, however, produces bare land as a side effect, infertile waste deprived of the means to reproduce itself without capitalist support. Alienation is the deracination of living beings from their lifeworld, transforming them into passive cogs for capitalist accumulation. However, Tsing upholds matsutake mushrooms, rare fungi popular among Japa- nese foodies, as exemplars of the resilience of ecological relations. Even amidst ruins, matsutakes successfully form beneficial relations with other living beings, like pine trees, other fungi and human beings. The insistent capacity to regenerate ecological relations is the ineluctable means of reproduction for the matsutake mushroom. Even at the end of the world, the matsutake persists by perpetually co-producing new lifeworlds for itself and fellow living beings (see also Haraway 2016). I claim that Tsing’s approach to capitalist alienation is descriptively convinc- ing but lacks the affective force for ecological class consciousness. Tsing surveys the web of life from the perspective of living beings quite distant from humankind, articulating a theoretical diagnosis rather than a political exhortation. On an affective level, it is challenging to generate ecological class consciousness among the (presumably) human readers of my chapter if they are presented with only the biographies of mushrooms growing far beyond my home. As Chantal Mouffe (2018, 72) argues, the construction of an emphatically political identity requires an appeal to the affects, like hope, indignation or compassion. Latour and Schultz also stress that ecological politics currently suffers from an affective misalignment, with people failing to identify with the fate of their increasingly inhospitable environments (2022, 47). Why would European humans care about these unknown fungi? The reproduction of our CO2-intensive livelihoods largely depends on the emission of bare land elsewhere, so in the short run, we stand to benefit more from putting our heads in the sand. I employ Chakrabarty’s (2021) suggestion of grounding post-humanist politics first in strategic anthropocentrism to subsequently push for a post-humanist expansion of our human understanding. One must first feel personally interpellated by the crisis of the global means of reproduction before one can grasp the need for an ecological class politics beyond human confines. I turn to John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath as a kindred spirit with more mobilising potential. Steinbeck tells the story of a family of impoverished farmers from Oklahoma, the Joads, travelling to California in pursuit of a better life, yet only encountering more poverty, exploitation and anti-immigrant racism. Steinbeck describes in detail the environmental and social devastation, but he focuses on the commodified labour power of migrant farmers rather than commodified mushrooms. Steinbeck’s main characters are also uprooted from their entangled histories in the land and community of rural Oklahoma, but they present a more familiar face of the ecological class deprived of the means of reproduction. Steinbeck’s outcry against alienation-as-deracination is clear, but the shift in perspective facilitates the empathetic outrage required for building ecological class consciousness. Steinbeck’s strategic anthropocentrism helps human readers understand why alienation-as-deracination is a concern. (shrink)

Anna Leuschner argues that there is problematic circularity in Helen Longino's approach that postulates the existence of some shared norms as a necessary precondition for well-functioning pluralistic communities. As an alternative, Leuschner proposes to approach the establishing of more pluralistic communities through political means on a case-by-case basis, taking relevant epistemic and political factors into account. In this paper, I argue that there is an alternative understanding of norms that avoids circularity. I do so by drawing on Isabelle Peschard's (...) discussion of shared practice. I go on to show that norms, so understood, are important in the cases where a political decision may not alone be sufficient for establishing a successful community. Specifically, I discuss pluralistic communities that include laypersons in possession of relevant expertise as an example. (shrink)

Quilty-Dunn et al.'s wide-ranging defense of the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH) argues that vision traffics in abstract, structured representational formats. We agree: Vision, like language, is compositional – just as words compose into phrases, many visual representations contain discrete constituents that combine in systematic ways. Here, we amass evidence extending this proposal, and explore its implications for how vision interfaces with the rest of the mind.

Why Law Matters argues that public institutions and legal procedures are valuable and matter as such, irrespective of their instrumental value. Examining the value of rights, public institutions, and constitutional review, the book criticises instrumentalist approaches in political theory, claiming they fail to account for their enduring appeal.

What is it for a picture to be more realistic, or more depictive, than another? Without committing to any thesis as to what depiction consists in, I show that degrees of depictiveness are grounded in a certain relation between two basic kinds of differences between pictures: configurational differences and content differences. A picture is thus more depictive just in case it is seen as having fewer nondepictive features, whereas a nondepictive feature is individuated through the susceptibility of the picture's configuration (...) to change without entailing any change in the picture's content. (shrink)

This paper discusses a counterexample to the thesis that visual experience is cognitively impenetrable. My central claim is that sometimes visual experience is influenced by the perceiver’s beliefs, rendering her experience’s representational content indeterminate. After discussing other examples of cognitive penetrability, I focus on a certain kind of visual experience— that is, an experience that occurs under radically nonstandard conditions—and show that it may have indeterminate content, particularly with respect to low-level properties such as colors and shapes. I then explain (...) how this indeterminacy depends on the perceiver’s beliefs or thoughts. Finally, I attempt to generalize the case and show how other sorts of visual experiences can also be penetrated by beliefs and, hence, be indeterminate. (shrink)

Julia Annas' book, Intelligent Virtue, provides the reader a novel account of the nature of virtue, practical reasoning, and flourishing. Throughout the book, Annas presents her account in a gradual manner with each chapter building on the next. Annas periodically presents and argues against potential objections to her view. Suitable for the interested undergraduate non-philosophy major, this book could also serve the curiosities of the most elite professors. While none of the chapters of the book stands well alone, the fluid (...) writing style and helpful examples make the 176-page work an easy read. At the end of each chapter, the reader finds herself happily continuing on to the next. (shrink)

When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. Independent representation of roles (e.g., containers vs. supporters) and “fillers” of those roles (e.g., bowls vs. cups, tables vs. chairs) is a core principle of language and higherlevel reasoning. But does such role-filler independence also arise in automatic visual processing? (...) Here, we show that it does, by exploring a surprising error that such independence can produce. In four experiments, participants saw a stream of images containing different objects arranged in forcedynamic relations — e.g., a phone contained in a basket, a marker resting on a garbage can, or a knife sitting in a cup. Participants had to respond to a single target image (e.g., a phone in a basket) within a stream of distractors presented under time constraints. Surprisingly, even though participants completed this task quickly and accurately, they false-alarmed more often to images matching the target’s relational category than to those that did not — even when those images involved completely different objects. In other words, participants searching for a phone in a basket were more likely to mistakenly respond to a knife in a cup than to a marker on a garbage can. Follow-up experiments ruled out strategic responses and also controlled for various confounding image features. We suggest that visual processing represents relations abstractly, in ways that separate roles from fillers. (shrink)

We give a complete characterization of the class of upward monotone generalized quantifiers Q1 and Q2 over countable domains that satisfy the scheme Q1 x Q2 y φ → Q2 y Q1 x φ. This generalizes the characterization of such quantifiers over finite domains, according to which the scheme holds iff Q1 is ∃ or Q2 is ∀ (excluding trivial cases). Our result shows that in infinite domains, there are more general types of quantifiers that support these entailments.

Anna J Dare,1 Anthony RJ Phillips,1–3 Michael Chu,1 Anthony JR Hickey,2 Adam SJR Bartlett1–31Department of Surgery, 2Maurice Wilkins Centre for Biodiscovery, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand; 3New Zealand Liver Transplant Unit, Auckland City Hospital, Auckland, New ZealandBackground: Hepatic steatosis is increasingly encountered among organ donors. Currently, there is no consensus guideline as to the type or degree of donor steatosis considered acceptable for liver transplantation, and little is known about local practices in this area. The aim of this (...) survey was to evaluate current clinical practices amongst liver transplant surgeons in Australia and New Zealand in the evaluation and use of steatotic donor livers in LT.Methods: An anonymous online twelve-question survey was emailed to all practicing LT surgeons in ANZ in January 2010.Results: The response rate was 83%. Estimated prevalence of steatosis in donor livers was between 40% and 60%. In determining suitability for LT, 90% of respondents reported rejecting organs with "severe" steatosis based on visual and palpation grounds alone. A total of 68% sought further histological assessment if the donor liver looked bad and there were risk factors for steatosis. The majority of respondents performed only one biopsy of the liver, using hematoxylin and eosin staining for fat assessment. There was wide variation in the upper limit of steatosis considered to be acceptable for LT. A total of 21% of respondents still considered microvesicular steatosis a risk factor for primary graft nonfunction.Conclusion: This survey highlights the significant variation in the appraisal and use of steatotic grafts by LT surgeons in ANZ. Accurate evaluation and judicious use of mild and moderately steatotic grafts is required if we are to utilize the available donor pool best.Keywords: liver transplantation, steatosis, fatty liver, organ donors. (shrink)

Judgments of visual resemblance (‘A looks like B’), unlike other judgments of resemblance, are often induced directly by visual experience. What is the nature of this experience? We argue that the visual experience that prompts a subject looking at A to judge that A looks like B is a visual experience of B. After elucidating this thesis, we defend it, using the ‘phenomenal contrast’ method. Comparing our account to competing accounts, we show that the phenomenal contrast between a visual experience (...) that induces the judgment that A looks like B, and a visual experience that does not induce this judgment, is best explained by the fact that the former visually represents B, whereas the latter does not. (shrink)

This paper explores the sense in which correctness applies to belief-like imaginings. It begins by establishing that when we imagine, we ‘direct’ our imaginings at a certain imaginary world, taking the propositions we imagine to be assessed for truth in that world. It then examines the relation between belief-like imagining and positing truths in an imaginary world. Rejecting the claim that correctness, in the literal sense, is applicable to imaginings, it shows that the imaginer takes on, vis-à-vis the imaginary world, (...) the first-person perspective of a believer. Imaginings, it concludes, ‘mimic’ beliefs with respect to the property of being correct or incorrect by virtue of having true or false content. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine Heidegger’s critique of Hegel and to determine whether it is justified. Heidegger claims that Hegel tries to reduce everything to a single absolute entity, to the absolute knowing subject. The result is the identification of being and nothing, as Hegel formulates it at the beginning of his Logic. Hegel identifies being with nothing because being has no references, no predicates, no properties. Heidegger agrees with Hegel that being and nothing are the same, (...) but in completely different respects. They are the same because only entity actually exists, i.e. as an existent being. But Being itself does not exist, and should be conceived in an utterly different way from entity. And since Being cannot “be” it is a non-entity and therefore nothing. (shrink)

The case of blurry vision has been cited by many as a counterexample to representationalism in the theory of perception. Specifically, it is claimed that the phenomenon of blurry vision is incompatible with the supervenience thesis which is at the root of representationalism. Michael Tye, a leading representationalist, has responded to such objections by giving an account of blurry vision in a way that, allegedly, renders it compatible with representationalism. In this paper I argue that Tye’s account of blurry vision, (...) though blocking one line of objection, cannot save representationalism. I then assimilate cases of blurry vision as well as similar cases to the more general category of indeterminate experiences. (shrink)

Works of fiction are alleged to differ from works of nonfiction in instructing their audience to imagine their content. Indeed, works of fiction have been defined in terms of this feature: they are works that mandate us to imagine their content. This paper examines this definition of works of fiction, focusing on the nature of the activity that ensues in response to reading or watching fiction. Investigating how imaginings function in other contexts, I show, first, that they presuppose a cognitive (...) infrastructure encompassing at least one additional kind of mental state, whose role is to determine, to some degree, truth in an imaginary world. I then discuss the implications for the definition of fiction, showing that the definition should be refined to accommodate the structure that imagining presupposes: a work counts as fiction just in case it mandates us, not only to imagine, but to engage in a more complex mental activity, an activity that in addition to imagining, involves positing a backdrop for our imaginings. (shrink)

A commonly-discussed feature of perceptual experience is that it has ‘assertoric’ or ‘phenomenal’ force. We will start by discussing various descriptions of the assertoricity of perceptual experience. We will then adopt a minimal characterization of assertoricity: a perceptual experience has assertoric force just in case it inclines the perceiver to believe its content. Adducing cases that show that visual experience is not always assertoric, we will argue that what renders these visual experiences non-assertoric is that they are penetrated by belief-like (...) imaginings. Lastly, we will explain why it is that when belief-like imaginings—as opposed to beliefs (and other cognitive states)—penetrate visual experience, they render visual experiences non-assertoric. (shrink)

This paper puts forward an account of imaginative immersion. Elaborating on Kendall Walton’s thesis that imagining aims at the fictional truth, it first argues that imaginings are inherently rule- or norm-governed: they are ‘regulated’ by that which is presented as fictionally true. It then shows that an imaginer can follow the rule or norm mandating her to imagine the propositions presented as fictional truths either by acquiring explicit beliefs about how the rule (norm) is to be followed, or directly, without (...) acquiring such beliefs. It proceeds to argue that to the extent that an imaginer follows this rule (norm) without holding such beliefs, she is more immersed in her imaginings. The general idea is that immersion in an activity is a matter of following rules or norms that apply to that activity without explicitly thinking about how to follow them, that is, without ‘doxastic mediation.’ Lastly, the paper shows that this thesis can explain various features associated with imaginative immersion, such as the sort of attentiveness it involves, the emotional response it generates, and its relation to spoilers. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman argued that the pictorial relation is reducible to reference. After explaining why previous attempts to refute this thesis of reduction have failed, I argue that in order to show that the thesis is indeed wrong we must find an aspect of pictures that is incompatible with it. I proceed to argue that there is indeed such an element to pictures. Ordinarily, a picture depicts its subject as having aesthetic properties. I show that the depiction of these properties requires (...) the picture’s engagement of our aesthetic judgement. Yet if according to the thesis of reduction a picture refers to these aesthetic properties, they must be inaccessible to aesthetic judgement, because reference is based on arbitrary correlation rules. Since pictures do engage our aesthetic judgement, we must conclude that the pictorial relation is irreducible to reference. (shrink)