This lecture presents the text of the speech about William Shakespeare's involvement in the 1601 rebellion of the Earl of Essex delivered by the author at the 2008 Shakespeare Lecture held at the British Academy. It discusses the closure of performance theatre after the arrest of Essex, his steward Sir Gelly Meyrick, and several other men. The lecture also explains that the case of Meyrick is the first instance on record of a person being executed for commissioning the performance of (...) a Shakespeare play. (shrink)

If Shakespeare made the human, according to Harold Bloom, Jonathan Bate will explain what first made Shakespeare, the Classics. That a Classical education was decisive for a writer during the renai...

Jonathan Walkan challenges cognitive science's dominant model of mental representation and proposes a novel, well-devised alternative. The traditional view in the cognitive sciences uses a linguistic model of mental representation. That logic-based model of cognition informs and constrains both the classical tradition of artificial intelligence and modeling in the connectionist tradition. It falls short, however, when confronted by the frame problem---the lack of a principled way to determine which features of a representation must be updated when new information becomes (...) available. So far, proposed alternatives, including the imagistic model, have not resolved the problem. Waskan proposes the Intrinsic Cognitive Models hypothesis, according to which representational states can be concpetualized as the cognitive equivalent of scale models.Waskan argues further that the proposal that humans harbor and manipulate cognitive counterparts to scale models offers the only viable explanation for what most clearly differentiates humans from other creatures: the capacity to engage in truth-preserving manipulation of representations. The ICM hypothesis, he claims, can be distinguished from sentence-based accounts of truth preservation in a way that is fully compatible with what is known about the brain. (shrink)

This book explores the idea that much of our behaviour is controlled by automatic and intuitive mental processes, which shape and compete with our conscious thinking and decision making. Accessibly written, and assuming no prior knowledge of the field, the book will be fascinating reading for all those interested in human behaviour.

This book is devoted to articulating the connections between the nature and value of faith and humility. The goal is to understand these two virtues in a way that does not discriminate between religious and secular. Jon Kvanvig claims that each provides a necessary, compensating balance to the potential downside of the other.

How do our engagements with fictions and other products of the imagination compare to our experiences of the real world? Are the feelings we have about a novel's characters modelled on our thoughts about actual people? If it is wrong to feel pleasure over certain situations in real life, can it nonetheless be right to take pleasure in analogous scenarios represented in a fantasy or film? Should the desires we have for what goes on in a make-believe story cohere with (...) what we want to happen in the actual world? In Apt Imaginings, Jonathan Gilmore develops a new framework to pursue these questions, marshalling a wide range of research in aesthetics, the science of the emotions, moral philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and film and literary theory. Gilmore argues that, while there is a substantial empirical continuity in our feelings across art and life, the norms that govern the appropriateness of those responses across the divide are discontinuous. In this view, the evaluative criteria that determine the fit, correctness, or rationality of our emotions and desires for what is internal to a fiction can be contrary to those that govern our affective attitudes toward analogous things in the real world. In short, it can be right to embrace within a story what one would condemn in real life. The theory Gilmore defends in this volume helps to explain our complex and sometimes conflicted attitudes toward works of the imagination; challenges the popular view that fictions serve to refine our moral sensibilities; and exposes a kind of autonomy of the imagination that can render our responses to art immune to standard real-world epistemic, practical, and affective kinds of criticism. (shrink)

The last two decades have witnessed a crescendo of allegations that clinical translation is rife with waste and inefficiency. Patient advocates argue that excessively demanding regulations delay access to life‐saving drugs, research funders claim that too much basic science languishes in academic laboratories, journal editors allege that biased reporting squanders public investment in biomedical research, and drug companies (and their critics) argue that far too much is expended in pharmaceutical development.But how should stakeholders evaluate the efficiency of translation and proposed (...) reforms to drug development? Effective reforms require an accurate model of the systems they aspire to improve—their components, their proper functions, and their pathologies. However, there is currently no explicit and well‐developed model of translation for evaluating such criticisms.In what follows, we offer an explicit model of clinical translation. Many discussions of clinical translation and its pathologies presume that its main output is tangible: new drugs, vaccines, devices, and diagnostics. We disagree. We argue that the principal output of clinical translation is information—in particular, information about the coordinated set of materials, practices, and constraints needed to safely unlock the therapeutic or preventive activities of drugs, biologics, and diagnostics. To develop this information calls for a process far different from a simple linear progression of clinical trials; it requires exploratory sampling of many different elements in this set. Our model points to some limitations and liabilities of influential proposals for reforming research. It also reveals some underrecognized opportunities for improving the efficiency of clinical translation. (shrink)

Causal judgments are widely known to be sensitive to violations of both prescriptive norms (e.g., immoral events) and statistical norms (e.g., improbable events). There is ongoing discussion as to whether both effects are best explained in a unified way through changes in the relevance of counterfactual possibilities, or whether these two effects arise from unrelated cognitive mechanisms. Recent work has shown that moral norm violations affect causal judgments of agents, but not inanimate artifacts used by those agents. These results have (...) been interpreted as showing that prescriptive norm violations only affect causal reasoning about intentional agents, but not the use of inanimate artifacts, thereby providing evidence that the effect of prescriptive norm violations arises from mechanisms specific to reasoning about intentional agents, and thus casting doubt on a unified counterfactual analysis of causal reasoning. Four experiments explore this recent finding and provide clear support for a unified counterfactual analysis. Experiment 1 demonstrates that these newly observed patterns in causal judgments are closely mirrored by judgments of counterfactual relevance. Experiment 2 shows that the relationship between causal and counterfactual judgments is moderated by causal structure, as uniquely predicted by counterfactual accounts. Experiment 3 directly manipulates the relevance of counterfactual alternatives and finds that causal judgments of intentional agents and inanimate artifacts are similarly affected. Finally, Experiment 4 shows that prescriptive norm violations (in which artifacts malfunction) affect causal judgments of inanimate artifacts in much the same way that prescriptive norm violations (in which agents act immorally) affect causal judgments of intentional agents. (shrink)

Experimental manipulations are a key means to establish causal relationships in microbiology. However, challenges remain to establish the applicability of such experiments beyond the precise conditions in which they were conducted. Ecological information can help address these challenges by describing the extent to which an experimentally-determined mechanism can explain the natural phenomenon that it is purported to cause.

Econarratology is a project born of frustration and disconnect. As a graduate student, I struggled to pair the ecocritical theory that I was reading with the postcolonial texts that I was meant to be analyzing. I valued the work of scholars such as Jonathan Bate, Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Scott Slovic for its clear-eyed insistence that the environment matters and that literary critics, as astute analyzers of the way that culture can shape our world, are well placed (...) to study how representations of the physical world in literature can shape what Buell succinctly calls the environmental imagination. Yet, the primary texts that I was studying—narratives written by Caribbean and Black British writers—did... (shrink)

This paper discusses the notion of ecopoetics in relation to the work of Martin Heidegger and his concept of dwelling. Our aim, broadly stated, is to respond to the question: "What frame of mind could bring about sustainability - and how might we develop it?" In the first part of the paper, we comment on Jonathan Bate's notion of ecopoetics and his discussion of Heidegger. Crucial here is the question of whether we can ever approach Nature in an (...) non-ideological way or are all attempts to capture Nature, theoretically or poetically or narratively, nothing more than our own peculiar appropriation of it? Ecopoetics might be conceived as a response to this question, although we dispute Bate's view. In the second part of the paper, following Micheal Haar's perceptive reading, we elaborate the four senses that Heidegger gives to Nature, and in the third section, we make some concluding comments about the notion of sustainability that might be explicated in relation to Heidegger's four senses of Nature. (shrink)

There is evidence to suggest that some patients who undergo Deep Brain Stimulation can experience changes to dispositional, emotional and behavioural states that play a central role in conceptions of personality, identity, autonomy, authenticity, agency and/or self. For example, some patients undergoing DBS for Parkinson’s Disease have developed hypersexuality, and some have reported increased apathy. Moreover, experimental psychiatric applications of DBS may intentionally seek to elicit changes to the patient’s dispositional, emotional and behavioural states, in so far as dysfunctions in (...) these states may undergird the targeted disorder. Such changes following DBS have been of considerable interest to ethicists, but there is a considerable degree of conflict amongst different parties to this debate about whether DBS really does change PIAAAS, and whether this matters. This paper explores these conflicting views and suggests that we may be able to mediate this conflict by attending more closely to what parties to the debate mean when they invoke the concepts lumped together under the acronym PIAAAS. Drawing on empirical work on patient attitudes, this paper outlines how these different understandings of the concepts incorporated into PIAAAS have been understood in this debate, and how they may relate to other fundamental concepts in medical ethics such as well-being and autonomy. The paper clarifies some key areas of disagreement in this context, and develops proposals for how ethicists might fruitfully contribute to future empirical assessments of apparent changes to PIAAAS following DBS treatment. (shrink)

I start with a brief look at what the classic British intuitionists (Ewing, Broad, Ross) had to say about the relation between judgment and emotion. I then look at some more recent work in the intuitionist tradition and try to develop a conception of moral emotion as a form of practical seeming, suggesting that some moral intuitions are exactly that sort of emotion. My general theme is that the standard contrast between intuition and emotion is a mistake and that intuitionism (...) can happily accommodate the results of recent work in empirical moral psychology. (shrink)

abstract The most well‐known liberal‐egalitarian defence of cultural rights, provided by Will Kymlicka, presents culture as a primary good, and thus a resource that ought to be distributed according to some fair egalitarian criteria. Kymlicka relies on the intuition that inequalities between persons that are the result of brute luck rather than personal choice are unjust in making the case for various multicultural rights. This article makes two main claims. First, the standard luck egalitarian intuition on which Kymlicka's argument relies (...) cannot justify what he calls ‘polyethnic rights,’ in particular cultural and religious exemptions from generally applicable laws. Second, I argue that such exemptions are justifiable by appealing to the public value of fair equality of opportunity, properly construed. (shrink)

This article makes four claims. First, that the analytic/Continental split in political theory stems from an unarticulated disagreement about human nature, with analytics believing we have an innate set of mostly compatible moral and political inclinations, and Continentals seeing such things as alterable products of historical contingency. Second, that we would do better to talk of Continental-political-theory versus Rawlsian-political-philosophy, given that the former avoids arguments over principles, whilst the latter leaves genuine analytic philosophy behind. Third, that Continentals suffer from a (...) lack of such arguments, even by their own lights, whilst Rawlsians suffer from inconsistencies within the thought-patterns on which their principles depend. Fourth, that there is an alternative method – ‘normative behaviourism’ – that at least tries to move beyond the problems of both approaches, whilst sharing an idea of ‘praxis’ with the first, and an idea of deriving-principles-from-existing-judgements with the second. (shrink)

Many commentators have expressed concern that large investments in biomedical research over the past two decades have not been translated effectively into clinical applications. In its Critical Path Report, the Food and Drug Administration characterized the problem as a “technological disconnect between discovery and the product development process,” and documented that the number of investigational new drugs submitted to the agency had declined “significantly” since 2000. Along a similar vein, another study found that only five of 101 basic science studies (...) showing significant therapeutic promise were successfully translated into clinical applications.This perceived translational lag is stimulating a shift toward human testing of study interventions earlier in the drug development process. One indication of this trend is a recent guidance encouraging sponsors to pursue human “exploratory” studies before embarking on phase I trials. (shrink)

Jerry Gaus is the most important philosopher of public reason since John Rawls. His path-breaking work on this topic has deeply influenced a large group of moral and political philosophers, a group to which I happily belong. In this short paper I examine one feature of the account developed in his incredibly rich and illuminating book, The Order of Public Reason.Gaus (2011), cited hereafter as OPR. I argue Gaus’s theory struggles to resolve a crucial question: how can we be confident (...) that public reason will yield a set of moral rules whose content is minimally acceptable?Gaus’s viewGiven pervasive disagreement about morality, how can we engage in the practice of morality—making demands on others and frequently enforcing those demands with coercive threats—in a way that also manages to respect others as free and equal interpreters of morality? One solution, which Gaus associates with Kant and Rawls, is to bracket all those beliefs or commitments that divide us, and construct a set of mo. (shrink)

Jonathan Bennett's analysis of the second half of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant concerns himself with topics such as substance, the nature of the self, the cosmos, freedom and the existence of God, continues to be an engaging and accessible exploration of Kant's major work. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Karl Ameriks, illuminating its enduring importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this influential work has been revived (...) for a new generation of readers. (shrink)

In The Song of the Earth, Jonathan Bate promotes ‘ecopoesis’, contrasting it with ‘ecopolitical’ poetry (and by implication, other forms of writing and expression). Like others recently, including Simon James and Michael Bonnett, he appropriates the notion of ‘dwelling’ from Heidegger to add force to this distinction. Bate's argument is effectively that we have more chance of protecting the environment if we engage in ecopoetic activity, involving a sense of immediate response to nature, than if we do (...) not. This has obvious educational implications. If Bate, James and Bonnett are correct, then the educational pursuit of (eco)poetic sensibility will, of itself, contribute to education for a sustainable future by grounding human experience in nature; if their assertions are insupportable, and (eco)poetic sensibility does not afford privileged access to a state of nature, then the assumption cannot be made that the development of such sensibility will contribute to education for sustainability. I shall critique Bate's argument from a pragmatic perspective. (shrink)

Jonathan Dancy; I *—The Presidential Address: Why there is really No Such Thing as the Theory of Motivation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95.

The Food and Drug Administration and the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products recently issued documents encouraging sponsors to consider microdose testing before launching Phase I trials, and many commentators predict that such methodologies will be applied more routinely in drug development. However, exploratory testing has provoked several ethical criticisms. Skeptics question the value and validity of microdose trials, and whether they present a reasonable balance of risks and benefits for subjects. Another major criticism is that such studies (...) serve mainly commercial ends. The present article explores these and other ethical concerns for studies conducted in the oncology setting. It concludes that microdosing is not inconsistent with prevailing practices in Phase I research, and that in principle, such studies could strengthen the ethical basis for Phase I trials by providing them better evidentiary justification. (shrink)

This article examines the factors that influence the propensity of corporations to engage with NGOs. Drawing from resource dependency theory and related theories of social networks and the resource-based view of the firm, the authors develop a series of hypotheses that draw from this conceptual foundation to predict a range of factors that influence firms to collaborate with NGOs. These factors include the level of commitment of the firm to CSR, the strategic fit between the firm’s and the NGO’s resources, (...) the level of trust the firm has in NGOs, the frequency of contact with NGOs, prior level and perception of experience with NGOs, and the level of pressure exerted by NGOs. The authors report on results of a survey of the Top 500 firms in the Netherlands on their interactions with NGOs, finding general support for our hypotheses, and suggest that understanding the motives for firm–NGO interactions can teach us more about firms’ corporate social activities and the way such activities are shaped in the dynamic interplay between firms and their stakeholders. Our findings are relevant for future research on cross-sectoral interactions, for corporations considering future relationships with NGO cohorts, and for broader questions about the role of stakeholders and the role of business in society. (shrink)

This paper explores the practice of rewilding and its implications for environmental aesthetic values, qualities and experiences. First, we consider the temporal dimensions of rewilding in regard to the emergence of particular aesthetic qualities over time, and our aesthetic appreciation of these. Second, we discuss how rewilding potentially brings about difficult aesthetic experiences, such as the unscenic and the ugly. Finally, we make progress in critically understanding how rewilding may be understood as a distinctive form of ecological restoration, while resisting (...) the assimilation of rewilding into wilderness discourses. (shrink)

This book provides the first systematic, book-length defence of natural law ideas in ethics, politics and jurisprudence since John Finnis's influential Natural Law and Natural Rights. Incorporating insights from recent work in ethical, legal and social theory, it presents a robust and original account of the natural law tradition, challenging common perceptions of natural law as a set of timeless standards imposed on humans from above. Natural law, Jonathan Crowe argues, is objective and normative, but nonetheless historically extended, socially (...) embodied and dependent on contingent facts about human nature. It reflects the ongoing human quest to work out how best to live flourishing lives, given the natures we have and the social environments we inhabit. The nature and purpose of law can only be adequately understood within this wider context of value. Timely, wide-ranging and clearly written, this volume will appeal to those working in law, philosophy and religious studies. (shrink)

: "Therapeutic misconception" has been misconstrued, and some of the newer, mistaken interpretations are troublesome. They exaggerate the distinction between research and treatment, revealing problems in the foundations of research ethics and possibly weakening informed consent.

Devotion is the defining religious practice and central theological concept of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition, and this article is about the catalytic event that is said to instigate bhakti in the non-devoted. I examine how Jīva Gosvāmin and Viśvanātha Cakravartin, two important theologians in this tradition, argue that the cause of bhakti in the non-devoted is a meeting with a devotee. In this meeting, the non-devoted may develop conviction, which in turn gives him or her the motivation to continue along (...) the path of bhakti, the steps of which were charted in the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu of Rūpa Gosvāmin. Based on a few key passages from the Gauḍīya’s primary scriptural source, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Jīva and Viśvanātha argue that this conviction for bhakti is developed spontaneously. Since the spontaneous conviction to practice bhakti can only occur in sādhu-saṅga, or a meeting with a devotee, what causes that meeting? The devotee always acts freely and independently ; thus his or her motivation to meet and inspire conviction in the non-devoted is not reducible to a divine plan, divine grace, the piety of the receiver, special features of the receiver’s soul, high birth, or any other designation. Rather, the cause of sādhu-saṅga is the bhakti “living in the heart” of a devotee. This bhakti makes the devotee feel compassion toward the non-devoted, which leads him or her to provide sādhu-saṅga, which then creates conviction, which eventually leads to bhakti. (shrink)

In Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jonathan Marks offers an interpretation of the philosopher's thought and its place in the contemporary debate between liberals and communitarians. Against prevailing views, he argues that Rousseau's thought revolves around the natural perfection of a naturally disharmonious being. At the foundation of Rousseau's thought he finds a natural teleology that takes account of and seeks to harmonize conflicting ends. The Rousseau who emerges from this interpretation is a radical critic (...) of liberalism who is nonetheless more cautious about protecting individual freedom than his milder communitarian successors. Marks elaborates on the challenge that Rousseau poses to liberals and communitarians alike by setting up a dialogue between him and Charles Taylor, one of the most distinguished ethical and political theorists at work today. (shrink)