In this article, we discuss the insights object-oriented ontology (OOO) offers in understanding the photographic process. Following Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena and Heidegger’sGeviert, Harman’s OOO focuses on the real versus sensory aspects of all objects of experience. In our analysis, we explore its implications for intentionality, signification and revelation in photography. OOO locates being within all objects and stands in opposition to the post-Cartesian correlationism influential in the continental tradition. In Heidegger’s terms, the still camera exhibits both presence (...) and readiness at hand. However, this readiness at hand is so ubiquitous that it is easy to overlook what makes it unique amongst the tools at our disposal. We argue that in the field of visual experience, the camera does what Kant believed impossible. It has the potential to reduce epistemic loss and transform the phenomenology of conscious experience into the noumenology of non-conscious awareness of the real object. (shrink)

Let’s make three assumptions. First, we shouldn’t support factory farms. Second, if animal-friendly agriculture lives up to its name—that is, if animals live good lives (largely free of pain, able to engage in species-specific behaviors, etc.) and are slaughtered in a way that minimizes suffering—then there is nothing intrinsically wrong with killing them for food. Third, animal-friendly agriculture does, in fact, live up to its name. Given these assumptions, it might seem difficult to criticize individuals who source their animal products (...) from “animal-friendly agricultural operations. However, I argue that they should drastically reduce their support for animal-friendly agriculture because it isn’t scalable—i.e., if we were to switch to that form of agriculture, most people would be priced out of its products. I say that it’s wrong to support a solution to a moral problem without sharing its costs. (shrink)

This is a lightly edited version of my comments on Lecture 4 of Bob Brandom’s Locke Lectures, as repeated in Prague in April 2007. Recordings of the Prague lectures, including commentaries and discussions, are available here. The slides that accompanied my talk are available there.

In Expressing Our Attitudes, Mark Schroeder speculates about the relation between expressivism and relativism. Noting that “John MacFarlane has wondered whether relativism is expressivism done right,” he suggests that this may get things back to front: “it is worth taking seriously the idea that expressivism is relativism done right”. In this piece, motivated both by Schroeder’s suggestion and by recent work from Lionel Shapiro, I compare and contrast my version of expressivism with MacFarlane’s version of relativism. I identify some significant (...) differences concerning the treatment of linguistic disagreement, but conclude that despite these differences, MacFarlane’s version of relativism counts as a version of expressivism in my sense, in most of the respects that matter. (shrink)

Is non-cognitivism compatible with minimalism about truth? A contemporary argument claims not, and therefore that moral realists, for example, should take heart from the popularity of semantic minimalism. The same is said to apply to cognitivism about other topics—conditionals, for example—for the argument depends only on the fact that ordinary usage applies the notions of truth and falsity to utterances of the kind in question. Given this much, minimalism about truth is said to leave no room for the view that (...) the utterances concerned are non-cognitive in nature. (shrink)

Many of the seemingly bland assertions and bald statements of the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume contain more than the mind immediately perceives. Author John Valdimir Price contends that an understanding of Hume's writings cannot be separated from an understanding of his life. By examining the works of Hume, Price shows the way in which an ironic way of seeing events and an ironic mode of expression permeated Hume's life and writings. Price examines Hume's irony as it is (...) exhibited in letters to his friends and in his writings concerned with morality, people, philosophy, politics, history, and above all religion. Hume's opinions on life in general are stated in works ranging from the Treatise of Human Nature and the Essays, Moral and Political, through the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and the Enquiry concerning Principles of Morals, to the Dialogue and Four Dissertations of his maturity. Price feels that Hume's recognition of the ironic in life came about from his perception of the disproportion between human hopes and human accomplishments. The rhetorical consequences of applying reason to a duality in human nature creates the ironic mode. Hume conceived man's opposing tendencies as his willingness to commit himself orally to a concept, a dogma, an idea, or an ideology, and his unwillingness to involve himself in the logical and rhetorical implications of articulating those principles. Hume's use of the ironic mode in his writings provides him with a means of challenging certain dogmatic assumptions common to thought, particularly to traditional religious thought; it acts as a mask for his sceptical intentions, and it is an implied criticism of many ideas. In his political writing, Hume frequently implied that the question under argument was almost too ridiculous to deserve serious treatment. This tactic was effectively employed in the Account of Stewart, in which Hume came to the defense of a friend. In his most profitable venture, the History of England, Hume not only used irony to advantage, but developed a new approach to the writing of history—the use of narrative. He presented history as a series of more or less connected events, not as a series of "right" or "wrong" attitudes. The author believes that Hume's initial religious scepticism, combined with the predominant satiric-ironic mode in the literature of his time, led him to seek irony as a method of self expression. This scepticism, which permeated all of Hume's attitudes toward life, reached its most complete expression in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, which accepted reason as its guide, but also accepted experience as its master. (shrink)

This is a case study investigating the growth of fair trade pioneer, Cafédirect. We explore the growth of the company and develop strategic insights on how Cafédirect has attained its prominent position in the UK mainstream coffee industry based on its ethical positioning. We explore the marketing, networks and communications channels of the brand which have led to rapid growth from niche player to a mainstream brand. However, the company is experiencing a slow down in its meteoric rise and we (...) question whether it is possible for the company to regain its former momentum with its current marketing strategy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:For Today, There Will Be a Speech (and a Song) TomorrowErik DoxtaderFor we see that things that are going to be take their start from deliberating and from acting, and equally that there is in general a possibility of being and not being in things that are not always actual. In them, both are open, both being and not being, and so also both becoming and not becoming. And (...) plenty of things are obviously like this.—Aristotle, De Interpretatione, IX*Wish again, four times again Four wishes deep into the well There's a price to pay for a wish to come true Trade a small piece of your life Roots in soil, uprooting the soil Mountain high, high mountain. The wish is only to speak a kind—Bob Mould, “Wishing Well”This is the time Because there is no time—Lou Reed, “There Is No Time” [End Page 311]The potential of rhetorical culture abides. In the subtle last lines of Norms of Rhetorical Culture, Tom Farrell imbued this potential with the aura of a (double) wish: when read with a forgiving spirit, the value of the “classical rhetorical tradition” appears in its capacity to “restore the power and resilience of the wish in the thought and expression of our civic life” (1993, 320). From within the history of our (not) being together, there are rhetorical goods to (be)come.Wishes must be made. Today, if it is not to betray the fact that a “rhetorical culture is something that must be cultivated,” our inheritance of rhetoric's potential is not a matter of fate. Far from given, although perhaps a gift that speaks volumes about our humanity, its appearance hinges on a choice to “uncover and engender new sources of creative reason” and to do so together, with an appreciation that this shared work is “unmistakably of ethical, aesthetic, and normative significance” (Farrell 1993, 11, 3). Confronted with such a task, as Farrell stressed again and again, “The question is how? How are we to find and develop the capacities that warrant and establish rhetorical study?” (1993, 65). And, from a theoretical and practical perspective, how can we struggle meaningfully with “our own nature as rhetorical creatures: an undiminished capacity to engage limitation through imagination, to find moral content in the experience of the other as audience, and wisdom through the collective production and enactment of logos ” (Farrell 1990, 83)? The rhetorical impulse coincides with the exigency of human experience that remains forgotten and yet unforgettable.1Knocking on modernity's door, Tom Farrell was deeply concerned with rhetoric's manifold potential. Over the course of a prolific career, he pursued the matter with passion, rigor, and integrity. He asked his colleagues, his students, and indeed his discipline to question conventional wisdom about the terms and power of rhetorical theory; interested in both everyday and extraordinary rhetorical practices, Farrell's criticism helped a field to see why its work counted as a vocation at the same time that he reached over the academy's walls in order to suggest that so-called mere rhetoric was quite a bit more complicated and much more important than perhaps some cared to admit. That his vision was compelling is evidenced not least by the numerous awards that he received for his work and the ways in which it continues to inform and shape critical thinking about the art of rhetoric.Just over two years after Tom's unfortunate and tremendously saddening death, this issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric pays tribute to his ground breaking work. Yet, as Farrell himself suspected, the risk that unbridled praise is the short road to bad infinity's silence brings the need for something more. Today, a consideration of his thought and writing demands a space [End Page 312] for critical reflection with practical significance, a forum—in Farrell's sense of the term—that affords an opportunity to ask both whether and how we might understand, extend, and indeed challenge Farrell's contention that rhetoric is the “collaborative manner of engaging others through discourse so that contingencies may be resolved, judgments rendered, action produced” (1990, 83). To these ends, this issue of the... (shrink)

In _A Theory of Regret_ Brian Price contends that regret is better understood as an important political emotion than as a form of weakness. Price shows how regret allows us to see that our convictions are more often the products of our perceptual habits than the authentic signs of moral courage that we more regularly take them to be. Regret teaches us to give up our expectations of what we think should or might occur in the future, and (...) also the idea that what we think we should do will always be the right thing to do. Understood instead as a mode of thoughtfulness, regret helps us to clarify our will in relation to the decisions we make within institutional forms of existence. Considering regret in relation to emancipatory theories of thinking, Price shows how the unconditionally transformative nature of this emotion helps us become more sensitive to contingency and allows us, in turn, to recognize the steps we can take toward changing the institutions that shape our lives. (shrink)

Understanding the nature of pain at least partly depends on recognizing its inherent first person epistemology and on using a first person experiential and third person experimental approach to study it. This approach may help to understand some of the neural mechanisms of pain and consciousness by integrating experiential–phenomenological methods with those of neuroscience. Examples that approximate this strategy include studies of second pain summation and its relationship to neural activities and brain imaging-psychophysical studies wherein sensory and affective qualities of (...) pain are correlated with cerebral cortical activity. The experiential paradigm of Price and Barrell offers the possibility of improved designs and methods for investigating neural mechanisms underlying pain and consciousness. (shrink)

John Searle and Susanna Siegel have argued that cases of aspect‐switching show that visual experience represents a richer range of properties than colours, shapes, positions and sizes. I respond that cases of aspect‐switching can be explained without holding that visual experience represents rich properties. I also argue that even if Searle and Siegel are right, and aspect‐switching does require visual experience to represent rich properties, there is reason to think those properties do not include natural‐kind properties, such as being a (...) tomato. (shrink)

What does it mean to say that an emotional response fits the situation? This question cannot be answered simply by specifying the core relational theme (loss or risk, say) associated with each emotion: we must also explain what constitutes an emotionally significant loss or risk. It is sometimes suggested that emotionally significant situations are those that bear on the subject’s interests or concerns. I accept that this claim is plausible for some emotional responses, and I propose a particular way of (...) interpreting it. I suggest that, for many emotions, emotional significance is determined by the subject’s likes and dislikes – that is, settled dispositions to find a certain situation pleasant or distressing. I contrast this account with other preference-based accounts and with an account that appeals to the subject’s interests. I argue that we should prefer the likes-based account to these rival views. (shrink)

Are inferences, theoretical and practical, subject to requirements of rationality? If so, are these of the form 'if … ought …' or 'ought … if …'? If the latter, how are we to understand the 'if'? It seems that, in all cases, we get unintuitive implications if 'ought' connotes having reason. It is difficult to formulate such requirements, and obscure what they explain. There might also be a requirement forbidding self-contradiction. It is a good question whether self-contradiction constitutes, or evidences, (...) irrationality; but talk of a rational requirement causes trouble. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 30-42 [Access article in PDF] How Can Music Seem to be Emotional? Kingsley Price Johns Hopkins University Preliminary Let me make some preliminary remarks about my question. First, the distinction employed in it, the distinction between seeming and reality, comes in two forms. The first is inclusive. A thing that really is so-and-so also seems to be so-and-so. The butler really (...) is guilty and seems guilty as well. The second is exclusive. A thing that is really not so-and-so seems to be so-and-so. The butler is really not guilty but seems to be guilty. The distinction that underlies my question is of the exclusive form.Second, the music I ask about is not music as read from scores on paper or held in memory. Nor is it music that contains linguistic elements-words or gestures as in song, opera, ballet, etc. Rather, it is purely instrumental music, and that as perceived or heard.Third, the emotions I refer to are not physiological conditions that may cause them, nor the behavior that may express them, but the conscious feelings we find in ourselves when we are undergoing emotion. [End Page 30] The Problem Persons (perhaps even the lower animals) can seem to be, without really being, emotional. They are pretending, or we perceive mistakenly. There is no difficulty, in principle, in explaining the situation. But there would be if they were sculptured persons only-that is, if they could not possibly be emotional. A sculpture cannot seem to be emotional by pretending it; nor can we perceive mistakenly that it is emotional when we know that it is a sculpture only.Much music is like sculpture. Not personal, we know that it cannot really be emotional. None-the-less, we hear the wedding march from Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream as joyful, the second movement of Chopin's Sonata in B-flat Minor as sorrowful, "The Great Fugue" as grimly resigned, the first movement of the first Razumowski as hopeful, etc. How can this be so? How can music seem to be emotional?I look for an answer to this question, first, within the perception, the hearing of music, and then, without it in its meaning. If seeming emotionality is found in either place, I shall have answered the question. And now, for the first place. The Perception In sense perception there are two major constituents.1 One is awareness; the other is the object of awareness. Awareness occurs in all the kinds of consciousness-in remembering, imagining, dreaming, and thinking, for example, as well as in sense perception. In this last, it is brought about by operation of the senses; while in the others, that operation plays no direct part. But although it differs in its cause, awareness in sense perception is precisely the same, considered in itself, as it is in all the other kinds of consciousness, considered in themselves.What is awareness? It cannot be explained, as many notions can, by eliciting its parts. To understand what squareness is, for example, we need only bring forward the parts that constitute it: four straight lines equal in length, four right angles, and closed plane figure. But awareness has no parts and cannot be explained in this way. To call attention to its simplicity and its identity in all kinds of consciousness, indeed, is all that can be done to explain it though we might add the simile that likens awareness to the light that brings things before our minds out of the dark that conceals them in its absence.Now, hearing is a kind of sense perception-the kind that occurs by virtue of operation of the auditory organs; and music heard is one of the objects of auditory awareness. Can we understand how this object can seem to be emotional by appeal to the awareness of it? If that awareness seemed to exist and did not really do so, the answer would be that we cannot since the awareness of it... (shrink)

Provocative and disconcerting, The False Past confronts what many generations hold near and dear about their memorials. What if everything we know about colonial history is wrong? What if history is driven by vanity and unexamined moral claims? What if fabrication and corruption are so integral to history that it must be written anew? These questions, posed by Nietzsche, are answered in this exciting new work. The False Past takes a disturbing escapade through Australia’s colonial past. Using a Nietzschean evaluation (...) of how the eternal recurrence of suffering worked in practice, it announces a fresh vision for frontier history. And in the finest Nietzschean tradition, Price reveals the uncaring absurdity and inconsistency of settlers in the pioneer past as their supreme failing because it produces contemporary trauma. The False Past evaluates claims to colonial nobility, too. Who were the souls aiming beyond humanity who rose up Down Under? Was its Übermensch a dark and moody genius with a taste for conquest, a supreme talent in pastoral profiteering, an Indigenous exemplar, or a cunning bushranger out on a mission? Awkward and confronting, bold and experimental, this book often says the unsayable. The False Past lays siege to nostalgia, piety, vanity and nihilism to explain how unfounded exceptionalism has come to rule our lives. A revisionist assault on settled history, The False Past promises to spark debate among readers for many years to come. (shrink)

Understanding the nature of pain depends, at least partly, on recognizing its subjectivity (thus, its first-person epistemology). This in turn requires using a first-person experiential method in addition to third-person experimental approaches to study it. This paper is an attempt to spell out what the former approach is and how it can be integrated with the latter. We start our discussion by examining some foundational issues raised by the use of introspection. We argue that such a first-person method in the (...) scientific study of pain (as in the study of any experience) is in fact indispensable by demonstrating that it has in fact been consistently used in conjunction with conventional third-person methodologies, and this for good reasons. We show that, contrary to what appears to be a widespread opinion, there is absolutely no reason to think that the use of such a first-person approach is scientifically and methodologically suspect. We distinguish between two uses of introspective methods in scientific experiments: one draws on the subjects’ introspective reports where any investigator has equal and objective access. The other is where the investigator becomes a subject of his own study and draws on the introspection of his own experiences. We give examples using and/or approximating both strategies that include studies of second pain summation and its relationship to neural activities, and brain imaging- psychophysical studies wherein sensory and affective qualities of pain are correlated with cerebral cortical activity. We explain what we call the experiential or phenomenological approach that has its origins in the work of Price and Barrell (1980). This approach capitalizes on the scientific prospects and benefits of using the introspection of the investigator. We distinguish between its vertical and horizontal applications. Finally, we conclude that integrating such an approach to standard third-person methodologies can only help us in having a fuller understanding of pain and of conscious experience in general. (shrink)

In ‘Naming and Necessity,’ Saul Kripke defends a number of essentialist claims. One of them is that having a certain origin is a necessary property of a material thing. Used in connection with a human being or, presumably, a living thing of another kind whose members sexually reproduce, ‘necessity of origin’ means that the organism must have been born of those individuals who are its parents, i.e., whose body tissues are sources of the sperm and egg from which it issued, (...) in the actual world. To say that the origin of an inanimate material thing is necessary is to say that having its origin in the hunk of matter from which it came is essential to it. (shrink)

One of the outstanding achievements of recent cosmology has been to offer some prospect of a unified explanation of temporal asymmetry. The explanation is in two main parts, and runs something like this. First, the various asymmetries we observe are all thermodynamic in origin – all products of the fact that we live in an epoch in which the universe is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Second, this thermodynamic disequilibrium is associated with the condition of the universe very soon after the (...) Big Bang – the essential point being that in the rapidly expanding universe of the time, gravity is able to create organisation much faster than other processes can destroy it. The stars, galaxies and other forms of organisation we find in the present universe are all products of this early period. Such concentrated energy sources themselves make possible the kinds of asymmetric phenomena with which we are most familiar, such as life itself. If this explanation proves to be right it will surely rank as one of the most impressive achievements in the whole of natural philosophy. Where else do we find this breathtaking scale, this extraordinary conjunction of fundamental physics, the first moments of Creation, the possibility of life and the basic character of human experience? And it is very much a contemporary achievement: even if its roots go back on one side to the investigation of time asymmetry in nineteenth century statistical mechanics, and on the other to Hubble's discovery in the 1920's of the expansion of the universe, the body of the picture has only begun to be filled in in the last twenty or thirty years. This fascinating story has recently been given some well-deserved publicity in Stephen Hawking's bestseller, A Brief History of Time – well-deserved, not least, because Hawking himself is responsible for a considerable part of the story as it presently stands. (shrink)

A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals.

Southern Africa, where most of these book chapters originate, has been identified as one of regions of the world most at risk of the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change. At the same time, it is still seeking ways to overcome the century long ravages of colonial and apartheid impositions of structural and epistemic violence. Research deliberations and applied research case studies in environmental education and activism from this region provide an emerging contextualized engagement that is related to a (...) wider internationally articulated quest to achieve social-ecological justice, resilience and sustainability through educational interventions. This book introduces a decade of mainly southern African critical realist environmental education research and thinking that asks the question: "How can we facilitate learning processes that will lead to the flourishing of the Earth’s people and ecosystems in more socially just ways?" The environmental education research topics represented in this book are wide-ranging. However, they all exhibit the common theme of social justice and wanting to create change towards a better future. All the authors have used critical realist or critical realist-influenced research methodologies. Offering contributions from a small but growing community of researchers working with critical realism in the global South, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners in the areas of environmental education, sustainability, development and the philosophy of critical realism in general. (shrink)