Buddhism is all about training the mind, and boot camp is an ideal training method for this generation's short attention span. The chapters in this small book can be read in any order, and are simple and easy to understand. Each story, inspirational quote, and teaching offers mindfulness-enhancing techniques that anyone can relate to. You don't need to be a Buddhist to find the Buddha's teachings motivational. As the Dalai Lama says, "Don't try to use what you learn (...) from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are." So whether it's Mother Teresa's acts of charity, Gandhi's perseverance, or your aunt Betty's calm demeanor, as long as you're motivated to be better today than you were yesterday, it doesn't matter who inspires you. Regardless of religion, geographical region, race, ethnicity, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, flexibility, or vulnerability, if you do good you feel good, and if you do bad you feel bad. Buddhism isn't just about meditating. It's about rolling up your sleeves to relieve some of the suffering in the world. If you are ready to be a soldier of peace in the army of love, welcome to Buddhist Boot Camp! (shrink)

It is commonly stated, by both whistleblower protection laws and political philosophers, that a breach of state secrecy by disclosing classified documents is justified if it serves the public interest. The problem with this defense of justified whistleblowing, however, is that the operative term – the public interest – is all too often left unclarified. This is problematic, because it leaves potential whistleblowers without sufficient certainty that their disclosures will be covered by the defense, leading many to err on the (...) side of caution and remain silent, depriving the public of much-needed information. Failing an agreed upon definition of the public interest or a process to determine it, judges’ applications of the public interest in whistleblowing cases have been criticized for demonstrating ‘judicial idiosyncrasy’. The present paper, therefore, sets out to provide some clarity concerning the concept of the public interest, and to ascertain the extent to which a public interest defense for whistleblowing is feasible and desirable. (shrink)

This highly original book sheds new light on aspects of incommensurability of values and its implications for ethics and justice. It provides original and innovative analysis of the characteristics of incommensurability in relation to values, and explores the implications of incommensurability for ethics, justice and public decision-making.

Amartya Sen argues that for the advancement of justice identification of ‘perfect’ justice is neither necessary nor sufficient. He replaces ‘perfect’ justice with comparative justice. Comparative justice limits itself to comparing social states with respect to degrees of justice. Sen’s central thesis is that identifying ‘perfect’ justice and comparing imperfect social states are ‘analytically disjoined’. This essay refutes Sen’s thesis by demonstrating that to be able to make adequate comparisons we need to identify and integrate criteria of comparison. This is (...) precisely the aim of a theory of justice (such as John Rawls’s theory): identifying, integrating and ordering relevant principles of justice. The same integrated criteria that determine ‘perfect’ justice are needed to be able to adequately compare imperfect social states. Sen’s alternative approach, which is based on social choice theory, is incapable of avoiding contrary, indeterminate or incoherent directives where plural principles of justice conflict. (shrink)

Video games are ideal platforms for the study of skill acquisition for a variety of reasons. However, our understanding of the development of skill and the cognitive representations that support skilled performance can be limited by a focus on game scores. We present an alternative approach to the study of skill acquisition in video games based on the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. Our investigation was motivated by a detailed analysis of the behaviors responsible for the superior performance of (...) one of the highest scoring players of the video game Space Fortress. This analysis revealed how certain behaviors contributed to his exceptional performance. In this study, we recruited a participant for a similar training regimen, but we collected concurrent and retrospective verbal protocol data throughout training. Protocol analysis revealed insights into strategies, errors, mental representations, and shifting game priorities. We argue that these insights into the developing representations that guided skilled performance could only easily have been derived from the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. We propose that the described approach could be applied to understand performance and skill acquisition in many different video games and help reveal mechanisms of transfer from gameplay to other measures of laboratory and real-world performance. (shrink)

Video games are ideal platforms for the study of skill acquisition for a variety of reasons. However, our understanding of the development of skill and the cognitive representations that support skilled performance can be limited by a focus on game scores. We present an alternative approach to the study of skill acquisition in video games based on the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. Our investigation was motivated by a detailed analysis of the behaviors responsible for the superior performance of (...) one of the highest scoring players of the video game Space Fortress. This analysis revealed how certain behaviors contributed to his exceptional performance. In this study, we recruited a participant for a similar training regimen, but we collected concurrent and retrospective verbal protocol data throughout training. Protocol analysis revealed insights into strategies, errors, mental representations, and shifting game priorities. We argue that these insights into the developing representations that guided skilled performance could only easily have been derived from the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. We propose that the described approach could be applied to understand performance and skill acquisition in many different video games and help reveal mechanisms of transfer from gameplay to other measures of laboratory and real-world performance. (shrink)

This paper reports a literature review on the topic of ethical issues in in-depth interviews. The review returned three types of article: general discussion, issues in particular studies, and studies of interview-based research ethics. Whilst many of the issues discussed in these articles are generic to research ethics, such as confidentiality, they often had particular manifestations in this type of research. For example, privacy was a significant problem as interviews sometimes probe unexpected areas. For similar reasons, it is difficult to (...) give full information of the nature of a particular interview at the outset, hence informed consent is problematic. Where a pair is interviewed (such as carer and cared-for) there are major difficulties in maintaining confidentiality and protecting privacy. The potential for interviews to harm participants emotionally is noted in some papers, although this is often set against potential therapeutic benefit. As well as these generic issues, there are some ethical issues fairly specific to in-depth interviews. The problem of dual role is noted in many papers. It can take many forms: an interviewer might be nurse and researcher, scientist and counsellor, or reporter and evangelist. There are other specific issues such as taking sides in an interview, and protecting vulnerable groups. Little specific study of the ethics of in-depth interviews has taken place. However, that which has shows some important findings. For example, one study shows participants are not averse to discussing painful issues provided they feel the study is worthwhile. Some papers make recommendations for researchers. One such is that they should consider using a model of continuous (or process) consent rather than viewing consent as occurring once, at signature, prior to the interview. However, there is a need for further study of this area, both philosophical and empirical. (shrink)

In this chapter I will concentrate on compromise in ethical conflict and disagreement. I will discuss compromises related to disagreement with respect to public decisions between options that represent conflicting incommensurable human values. The central question will be whether in those cases a principled compromise is possible. A ‘principled compromise’ can be defined as a rational way to achieve a trade-off or balance between conflicting values, for instance, by rational assignment of relative weights. I will argue that in some cases (...) incommensurability will prevent a principled compromise in the defined sense. I will show why phrases used by some philosophers, such as ‘making a rational trade-off’, ‘striking the right balance’, ‘finding the Aristotelian Mean’ or ‘splitting the difference’, are based on misunderstandings about the characteristics of incommensurable values that are usually at stake in the pursuit of a compromise. I will show that incommensurable values lack an equivalence relation and how this prevents a determinate trade-off or balance between them. This is especially important with respect to the pursuit of compromises in ethical conflicts, including conflicts of justice, where we need a rational and ethical justification for the final decision. I will argue that the model of deliberative democracy presents a promising procedure for making the final decision legitimate but that, in the relevant cases, it cannot avoid an ethical deficit. (shrink)

This highly original book sheds new light on aspects of incommensurability of values and its implications for ethics and justice. It provides original and innovative analysis of the characteristics of incommensurability in relation to values, and explores the implications of incommensurability for ethics, justice and public decision-making.

Given the crucial role unauthorized disclosures can play in uncovering grave government wrongdoing, it makes sense to search for a defense of justified cases of what I call “classified public whistleblowing.” The question that concerns me is what form such a defense should take. The main claim will be a negative one, namely, that a defense of whistleblowing cannot be based on individual rights, be they legal or moral, though this is indeed the most commonly proposed defense. In closing, I (...) will outline a more appealing alternative, namely, a justification defense. (shrink)

This article discusses the possibility of a rationally justified choice between two options neither of which is better than the other while they are not equally good either (‘3NT’). Joseph Raz regards such options as incomparable and argues that reason cannot guide the choice between them. Ruth Chang, by contrast, tries to show that many cases of putative incomparability are instead cases of parity—a fourth value relation of comparability, in addition to the three standard value relations ‘better than’, ‘worse than’ (...) and ‘equally good as’. It follows, she argues, that many choice situations in which rationally justified choice seems precluded are in fact situations within the reach of practical reason. This article has three aims: (1) it challenges Chang’s argument for the possibility of parity; (2) it demonstrates that, even if parity would exist, its problematic implications for practical reason would not differ from those of Raz’s incomparability; (3) it discusses the underlying cause of hard cases of comparison: the fact that none of the three standard value relations applies (‘3NT’). It will be shown that the problematic implications for the rational justification of the choice are due to 3NT itself, irrespective of whether 3NT is explained as incomparability or parity. (shrink)

This essay discusses implications of incommensurability of values for justified decision-making, ethics and justice. Under particular conditions incommensurability of values causes what might be called ‘incomplete comparability’ of options. Some leading theorists interpret this in terms of ‘imprecise equality’ and ‘imprecise comparability.’ This interpretation is mistaken and conceals the implications of incommensurability for practical and ethical reasoning. The aim of this essay is to show that, in many cases, incommensurability prevents the assignment of determinate weights to competing values. This may (...) have problematic consequences for a complete and impartial justification of decisions concerning conflicting values to the extent that they depend on the need of weighing them. (shrink)

Political philosophical work on whistleblowing has thus far neglected the role of journalists. A curious oversight, given that the whistleblower’s objective - informing the public about government wrongdoing - can typically not be realized without the media. The present article, therefore, aims to start remedying this neglect by exploring some of the most pressing questions. Accordingly, the paper will be structured as follows: Section 1 will explain why the authorities have treated whistleblowers far more harshly than the journalists who publish (...) their disclosures. Still, the freedom of expression of media workers is less extensive than that of ordinary individuals. Section 2 will explain why by arguing that the freedom of expression of the press, contrary to that of individuals, is not an unconditional good; instead, it is good merely instrumentally. Section 3 considers and refutes an argument for a more expansive press freedom based on the marketplace of ideas model and, in doing so, also discusses some important differences between the ethics of the traditional and the new online media. Often journalists, like whistleblowers, will justify their publications based on leaked classified documents by appealing to the public interest. Yet, this is problematic for two reasons: the public interest is never clarified; and this argument overlooks the fact that the public interest can also be a reason for not publishing about leaked classified documents, even if the leaks are verified. Accordingly, Section 5 sets out to clarify the public interest. Section 4 then discusses two case studies – one concerning unverified leaks, and one concerning verified leaks – in order to demonstrate how we might employ the concept of the public interest in order to determine the permissibility of publishing about leaked classified information in practice. (shrink)

Participants studied lists of nonwords that were orthographic-phonologically similar to a nonpresented critical lure, which was also a nonword . Experiment 1 showed a high level of false recognition for the critical lure. Experiment 2 showed that the false recognition effect was also present for forewarned participants who were informed about the nature of the false recognition effect and told to avoid making false recognition judgments. The present results show that false recognition effects can be obtained even when the critical (...) lure itself is not stored during study. This finding is problematic for accounts that attribute false memories to implicit associative responses or spreading activation but is easily explained by global familiarity models of recognition memory. (shrink)

Mobsters and others engaged in risky forms of social coordination and coercion often communicate by saying something that is overtly innocuous but transmits another message ‘off record’. In both ordinary conversation and political discourse, insinuation and other forms of indirection, like joking, offer significant protection from liability. However, they do not confer blanket immunity: speakers can be held to account for an ‘off record’ message, if the only reasonable interpreta- tions of their utterance involve a commitment to it. Legal liability (...) for speech in the service of criminal behavior displays a similar profile of significant protection from indirection along with potential liability for reasonable interpretations. Specifically, in both ordinary and legal contexts, liability depends on how a reasonable speaker would expect a reasonable hearer to interpret their utterance in the context of utter- ance, rather than on the actual speaker’s claimed communicative intentions. (shrink)

Metaphor is a pervasive and significant feature of language. We use metaphor to talk about the world in familiar and innovative ways, and in contexts ranging from everyday conversation to literature and scientific theorizing. However, metaphor poses serious challenges for standard philosophical theories of meaning, because it straddles so many important boundaries: between language and thought, between semantics and pragmatics, between rational communication and mere causal association. ;In this dissertation, I develop a pragmatic theory of metaphorical utterances which reconciles two (...) apparently incompatible intuitions. The first is that metaphors are vehicles for undertaking speech acts with a propositional content distinct from their conventional sentence meaning. The second is that metaphors are tools for inducing the essentially non-propositional effect of 'seeing things in a new light' or under a new aspect. These intuitions seem to be incompatible because it is assumed that only one can capture the essential function of metaphor. I propose instead that non-propositional 'seeing-as' or aspectual thought serves as the means by which speakers intend to accomplish their end of communicating content. This does not imply that speakers are not interested in and even committed to the effects of aspectual thought as well, only that it is not their sole, ultimate intention. ;In order to substantiate this proposal about how metaphor works, I develop an account of the psychological structures on which aspectual thought operates and the changes it engenders; I then show how the content of the speaker's intended speech act is determined by the aspect the sentence generates. By bringing propositional content and non-propositional aspectual thought together in this way, my account can treat the full range of metaphors, from 'ordinary' to 'poetic', within a unified theory. Armed with this account, we have the explanatory resources necessary to acknowledge both that ordinary conversational metaphors are efficient and sometimes essential vehicles for communicating determinate propositional contents, and also that rich, poetic metaphors are invitations to an open-ended contemplation of the subject under discussion. These apparently very different effects turn out to be manifestations of the same basic process of comprehension. (shrink)

The focus of this essay is on conflicts of values and rival options in public decision-making, ethics and justice that seem to require us to balance the values or options against each other. The aim is to investigate implications of the so-called fourth value relation between competing valuable options for the possibility to weigh and balance them. The fourth value relation applies to many alternatives that represent important but conflicting or incompletely compatible human values. In this essay I will try (...) to show that in those cases it is implausible that relative weights and right balances can be determined or that they exist at all. The fourth value relation has significant implications for the resolution of the relevant value conflicts because it renders the answer to the question ‘what’s the right thing to do?’ indeterminate as far as this answer depends on comparative weights of the alternatives. (shrink)

This book demonstrates the importance of a duty-based approach to morality. The dominance of what has been labeled “rights talk” leads to the neglect of duties without corresponding rights and stimulates the proliferation of questionable human rights. Therefore, this book argues for a duty-based perspective on morality in order to, first, salvage duties of virtue, and, second, counter the trend of rights-proliferation by providing some conceptual clarity concerning rights and duties that will enable us to differentiate between genuine and spurious (...) rights-claims. The argument for this duty-based perspective is made by examining two particularly contentious duties: duties to aid the global poor and civic duties. These two duties serve as case studies and are explored from the perspectives of political theory, jurisprudence and moral philosophy. The argument is made that both these duties can only be adequately defined and allocated if we adopt the perspective of duties, as the predominant perspective of rights either does not recognize them to be duties at all or else leaves their content and allocation indefinite. This renewed focus on duties does not wish to diminish the importance of rights. Rather, the duty-based perspective on morality will strengthen human rights discourse by distinguishing more strictly between genuine and inauthentic rights. Furthermore, a duty-based approach enriches our moral landscape by recognizing both duties of justice and duties of virtue. The latter duties are not less important or supererogatory, but function as indispensable complements to the duties prescribed by justice. In this perceptive and exceptionally lucid book, Eric Boot argues that a duty-focused approach to morality will remedy the shortcomings he finds in the standard accounts of human rights. The study tackles staple philosophical topics such as the contrasts between duties of virtue and duties of justice and imperfect and perfect obligations. But more importantly perhaps, it also confronts the practical question of what our human rights duties are and how we ought to act on them. Boot's book is a splendid example of how philosophy can engage and clarify real world problems. Kok-Chor Tan, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania A lively and enjoyable defence of the importance of our having duties to fellow human beings in severe poverty. At a time when global justice has never been more urgent, this new book sheds much needed light. Thom Brooks, Professor of Law and Government and Head of Durham Law School, Durham University. (shrink)

Fibril‐forming (fibrillar) collagens are extracellular matrix proteins conserved in all multicellular animals. Vertebrate members of the fibrillar collagen family are essential for the formation of bone and teeth, tissues that characterise vertebrates. The potential role played by fibrillar collagens in vertebrate evolution has not been considered previously largely because the family has been around since the sponge and it was unclear precisely how and when those particular members now found in vertebrates first arose. We present evidence that the classical vertebrate (...) fibrillar collagens share a single common ancestor that arose at the very dawn of the vertebrate world and prior to the associated genome duplication events. Furthermore, we present a model, ‘molecular incest’, that not only accounts for the characteristics of the modern day vertebrate fibrillar collagen family but demonstrates the specific effects genome or gene duplications may have on the evolution of multimeric proteins in general. BioEssays 25:142–151, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Since the mid-1990s most EU Member States have established a national forensic DNA database. These mass repositories of DNA profiles enable the police to identify DNA stains which are found at crime scenes and are invaluable in criminal investigation. Governments have always brushed aside privacy objections by stressing that the stored DNA profiles do not contain sensitive genetic information on the included individuals and that they reside under the statutory privacy protection regulations. However, it has been generally overlooked that the (...) police also store the DNA samples from which the DNA profiles are derived. Although these DNA samples are actually a potential source of genetic information, they have so far scarcely been the subject of discussion. In this article we will show that both European and national regulations offer inadequate protection to completely prevent function creep, that is, the use of these forensic DNA samples for purposes beyond those envisaged at the time of collection. (shrink)

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

We should not admit categorial restrictions on the significance of syntactically well formed strings. Syntactically well formed but semantically absurd strings, such as ‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ and ‘Caesar is a prime number’, can express thoughts; and competent thinkers both are able to grasp these and ought to be able to. Gareth Evans’ generality constraint, though Evans himself restricted it, should be viewed as a fully general constraint on concept possession and propositional thought. For (a) even well formed but (...) semantically cross-categorial strings often do possess substantive inferential roles; (b) hearers exploit these inferential roles in interpreting such strings metaphorically; (c) there is no good reason to deny truth-conditions to strings with inferential roles. (shrink)

Everyone has mistaken one thing for another, such as a stranger for an acquaintance. A person who has mistaken two things, Joseph Camp argues, even on a massive scale, is still capable of logical thought. In order to make that idea precise, one needs a logic of confused thought that is blind to the distinction between the objects that have been confused. Confused thought and language cannot be characterized as true or false even though reasoning conducted in such language (...) can be classified as valid or invalid. To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue at all, they take it for granted that confusion is a kind of ambiguity. Camp rejects this notion; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning. Camp proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science. (shrink)

Love for a country has come to be linked with two terms: patriotism and nationalism. The conceptual distinction between these two ideas has been a matter of controversy. In this chapter we propose that one way of thinking about and distinguishing between patriotism and nationalism is via the very concept of love. We make the claim that what distinguishes patriotism and nationalism is not the quality of love but the type of love invoked. We argue that love in patriotism is (...) similar to familial love whereas love in nationalism resembles intense passionate romantic love. We furthermore argue that love involved in our conception of patriotism can be harmless, while the kind of love associated with the relevant conception of nationalism can be dangerous and easily involves “bad faith,” a deceptive faith in the superior goodness of one’s country. To substantiate our claim, we draw from literature across different disciplines: philosophy, political psychology, and biology. (shrink)

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

Although DNA profiling has been an important forensic research technique since the late 1980s, for a long time, it had not captured much attention from either academics or the public so far.In recent years, this neglect seems to have ended. Not only has wide-spread media coverage of events such as 9/11 and the 2004 tsunami brought about widespread knowledge of the usefulness of forensic DNA identification, the development of large databases containing DNA profiles of both suspected and convicted criminals has (...) in the last few years also triggered a discussion on the intrusiveness of these measures into a number of civil rights.Indeed, although the increasing use of DNA based techniques in the criminal justice system promises to offer some great benefits for a society that is permeated with risk-aversion, at the same time it also gives rise to some worrying ethical and social consequences.In this article, we confine ourselves to an analysis of the practice of DNA sample retention by government agencies that use these samples to derive digital storable DNA profiles. While this practice seems unnecessary for the purpose of criminal investigation, it carries some severe risks for genetic privacy rights which have hardly been explored so far. (shrink)

We introduce an independence notion for choice functions, which we call ‘epistemic independence’ following the work by De Cooman et al. [17] for lower previsions, and study it in a multivariate setting. This work is a continuation of earlier work of one of the authors [29], and our results build on the characterization of choice functions in terms of sets of binary preferences recently established by De Bock and De Cooman [11]. We obtain the many-to-one independent natural extension in this (...) framework. Given the generality of choice functions, our expression for the independent natural extension is the most general one we are aware of, and we show how it implies the independent natural extension for sets of desirable gambles, and therefore also for less expressive imprecise-probabilistic models. Once this is in place, we compare this concept of epistemic independence to another independence concept for choice functions proposed by Seidenfeld [28], which De Bock and De Cooman [2] have called S-independence. We show that neither is more general than the other. (shrink)

On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor, speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean another. A variety of theorists have recently challenged this view; they offer criteria for distinguishing what is said from what is merely meant, and argue that these support classifying metaphor within 'what is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I conclude by sketching how we might extract a (...) workable notion of 'what is said' from ordinary intuitions about saying. (shrink)

In debates about the nature of scientific explanation, one theme repeatedly arises: that explanation is about providing understanding. However, the concept of understanding has only recently been explored in any depth, and this paper attempts to introduce a useful concept of understanding to that literature and explore it. Understanding is a higher level cognition, the recognition of connections between various pieces of knowledge. This conception can be brought to bear on the conceptual issues that have thus far been unclear in (...) the literature. Though this notion of understanding is broad, explaining various concepts of explanation, it is robust enough to underwrite an objective and useful notion of explanation. (shrink)

I argue that we can reconcile two seemingly incompatible traditions for thinking about concepts. On the one hand, many cognitive scientists assume that the systematic redeployment of representational abilities suffices for having concepts. On the other hand, a long philosophical tradition maintains that language is necessary for genuinely conceptual thought. I argue that on a theoretically useful and empirically plausible concept of 'concept', it is necessary and sufficient for conceptual thought that a thinker be able to entertain many of the (...) potential thoughts produced by recombining her representational abilities apart from a direct confrontation with the states of affairs being represented. Such representational abilities support a cognitive engagement with the world that is flexible, abstract, and active. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally inclined toward one of two opposite extremes when it comes to metaphor. On the one hand, partisans of metaphor have tended to believe that metaphors do something different in kind from literal utterances; it is a ‘heresy’, they think, either to deny that what metaphors do is genuinely cognitive, or to assume that it can be translated into literal terms. On the other hand, analytic philosophers have typically denied just this: they tend to assume that if metaphors (...) express any genuine content at all, then that content can in principle be paraphrased into literal terms. They often conclude on this basis that metaphor is theoretically dispensable, and so that it poses no special challenges and affords no distinctive insights for the philosophy of language and mind. (shrink)

/p. 14 The humanities, as defined by Congress, include the history, theory, and criticism of the arts. While the National Endowment for the Arts funds the creation, performance, and display of art, the National Endowment for the Humanities funds the theoretical dimensions that place the arts within a broader cultural context. Admittedly, the line is sometimes difficult to draw precisely, but generally, the humanities center on verbal analysis of the phenomenon of art, using the methodology and content of various humanities (...) disciplines, such as history and philosophy. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the implications of our engagement with fiction for our understanding of the mind and emotions: If I don’t believe that (...) Anna Karenina exists, can I really pity her, or hope or desire that she extricate herself from her tragic situation? And why is there no “morality fiction,” analogous to science fiction? I suspect that philosophers have been especially comfortable thinking about fiction because it seems, at least prima facie, to employ the imagination in a way that conforms to a standard model of the mind. Specifically, contemporary philosophers tend to think of imagination as a form of mental pretense. Mental pretense can take two main forms: a cognitive attitude of supposing a set of propositions to be true (make-believe) or else an experiential state of imaging a scenario as if it were before one (imaging). Much of our pretense intertwines the cognitive and experiential modalities, of course. But both share a crucial common feature: all of one’s imaginative effort is invested in pretending that certain contents obtain. In this sense, we can understand imagination as the “offline” simulation of actual beliefs and perceptions (and perhaps other attitudes as well), where we analyze these in the normal way, as states individuated by their attitude and representational content. While I share the burgeoning interest in fiction, I want to suggest that we also have a lot to learn from poetry, and in particular from poetic metaphor. I will argue.. (shrink)

This paper turns to Hannah Arendt’s brief, poignant remarks about the advent of a biotechnological revolution as a starting point for a renewed reflection on her concept of natality. By expanding on Arendt's significant, but often overlooked, reference to the work of the German anthropologist Arnold Gehlen, it will be argued that that natality is a concept that subverts any rigid opposition between zoe and bios, biological birth and politico-linguistic birth. Consequently, it will be shown that Jürgen Habermas and Michael (...) Sandel are mistaken to appeal to the concept of natality in their arguments against genetic enhancement. (shrink)

This volume collects articles of the late philosopher Tamara Horowitz. It includes four previously published and two unpublished articles. Though she had wide-ranging interests during her career, Horowitz was mostly concerned with what can be known as priori. She argued against too much confidence in philosophical intuition and argued for a more naturalist, scientific approach. Joseph Camp includes an editor's introduction to the collection of this important philosopher.

A venerable philosophical tradition claims that only language users possess concepts. But this makes conceptual thought out to be an implausibly rarified achievement. A more recent tradition, based in cognitive science, maintains that any creature who can systematically recombine its representational capacities thereby deploys concepts. But this makes conceptual thought implausibly widespread. I argue for a middle ground: it is sufficient for conceptual thought that one be able to entertain many of the thoughts produced by recombining one’s representational capacities, so (...) long as one can do this apart from a direct confrontation with the represented states of affairs. (shrink)

Abusive supervision has been shown to have significant negative consequences for employees’ well-being, attitudes, and behavior. However, despite the devastating impact, it might well be that employees do not always react negatively toward a leader’s abusive behavior. In the present study, we show that employees’ organizational identification and abusive supervision interact for employees’ perceived cohesion with their work group and their tendency to gossip about their leader. Employees confronted with a highly abusive supervisor had a stronger perceived cohesion and engaged (...) in less gossiping behavior when they identified more strongly with their organization. Our findings illustrate that organizational identification functions as a buffer for those confronted with an abusive supervisor. (shrink)

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)

Power and authority in terms of the Ten Commandments (TCs) are discussed. The paper reviews the TCs in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The treatment and basis for power and authority in each religion are clarified. Implications of power and authority using the perspective of the TCs are provided. The paper suggests that in today's business environment people tend to be selective in identifying only with certain elements of the TCs that fit their interest and that the TCs should be viewed (...) as general moral guidelines. (shrink)

An important milestone was crossed recently in the discipline of philosophy, but hardly anyone seems to have noticed. In 2004, for the first time since statistics have been gathered on such things, women earned more than 30 percent of the doctorates in philosophy in this country, 33.3 percent, up from 27.1 percent the year before. The highest percentage women had achieved previously in philosophy was 29.4 percent, in..

Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.

Although much has been written about the so-called political, ethical and religious turns in the thinking of Jacques Derrida, few have noticed that his late writings were marked by what we could tentatively call a “zoological turn.” This is surprising given that in The Animal That Therefore I Am Derrida clearly stated that the question as to what distinguishes the human from the animal has for him always been the most important question of philosophy. This essay will attempt to offer (...) a preliminary exploration of this still largely uncharted aspect of Derrida’s thought. Starting from a brief overview of Derrida’s most important writings on the question of the animal, it will be argued that his decision to write an entire book on this issue was largely motivated by his eagerness to settle a discussion with one of his pupils, the French theorist of technology Bernard Stiegler. (shrink)

This article critically surveys the current bioethical and politico-philosophical debate about the ethical permissibility of a so-called ‘liberal eugenics’ and argues that neither the liberal argument for nor the liberal argument against human genetic enhancement is internally consistent as, ultimately, each ends up violating the very liberal principles it nonetheless pretends to defend. In particular, it will be shown that while the argument against a new eugenics necessarily entails a preemptive dehumanization of any potential enhanced form of life, the argument (...) for it threatens to reduce any non-enhanced form of life to a “wrongful life” or a life not worth living. It will therefore be concluded that the specific stakes of this contentious issue cannot be grasped within a liberal conceptual framework. (shrink)

This is the journal of the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World, which is committed to the application of philosophy in the understanding and solution of contemporary ethical and conceptual problems. The journal provides a peer-reviewed venue for continuing dialogues in applied philosophy, philosophy and public policy, philosophy of the professions, race and gender studies, environmental philosophy, educational philosophy, and a range of multi-cultural issues. Philosophy in the Contemporary World invites original, creative, and unconventional thinking, welcomes both analytical and (...) continental approaches, and encourages submissions that cross disciplinary boundaries. An annual subscription to the journal includes membership in the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World. (shrink)

The U.S. Supreme Court recently held that a parody by the rap group 2 Live Crew of Ray Orbison's song "Oh, Pretty Woman" was "fair use" and thus did not infringe the copyright. Although the court insisted that it was not evaluating the quality of the parody, I argue that it does in fact make several aesthetic evaluations and sometimes even seems to praise the content of the parody. I first consider the stated reasons for the claimed refusal of the (...) court to evaluate aesthetic quality. Second, I examine the evaluations which the court in fact does make, at least some of which are clearly aesthetic evaluations. I then argue that aesthetic value judgments are both necessary and possible for determinations of "fair use" for such works as the "Pretty Woman" parody. (shrink)