Addresses recent perspectives central to the interpretation and criticism of Dewey’s philosophy.

It is hard to get very far in discussing aesthetic or religious subjects without invoking some version of the thought that ordinary consciousness is but the tip.

Dewey's "Art as Experience" defends the view that art and life are a y. But his version of this view exhibits an ambiguity, arising from his ency to move back and forth in the text between two usages of "art". These usages allow for two different interpretations of the theme of the unity and life: an "aesthetic" interpretation emphasizing the uniqueness of the arts as instrumentally valuable sources of aesthetic and ummatoryexperience, and an "aestheticist" interpretation emphasizing the ence of such (...) experience not only in the fine arts but throughout the trum of intelligent practice. Are these interpretations necessarily in ion, or can we read them as part of a single consistent argument about the re of art in Dewey's text? I arguethat we can, but to do so we need to dialectically, and with a glance toward a figure whose influence on Dewey nderappreciated in the recent literature: Hegel. (shrink)

Danto was not a fan of Dewey, the pragmatist who dominated Columbia's philosophy department for much of the twentieth century. A broad context for what might at first seem their total clash of philosophical temperaments is Danto's embrace of analytic philosophy in a period when classical pragmatism was evolving into the neopragmatism of Richard Rorty. A more specific context is Danto's preference for Cartesian‐inflected forms of atomistic explanation and representationalism, in contrast to Dewey's anti‐dualist and anti‐representationalist holism. In addition, Dewey's (...) vision of art as embodied in human experiences across the modern institutional spectrum contrasts starkly with Danto's more “compartmental” account of the Artworld. Yet despite these differences, both philosophers were also (in Dewey's case since the turn of the twentieth century, in Danto's case in late career) deeply, if differently, indebted to Hegel, who provided a fertile framework for understanding how human beings can at one and the same time be social, self‐interpreting spiritual beings and also natural beings. This fact provides a basis for thinking that while Danto never renounced his lifelong aversion to pragmatism, a subtler strand of Dewey's pervasive influence is present in his later writings. (shrink)

Writers in pragmatist aesthetics tend, as naturalists, to avoid the originally Kantian-Idealist term “autonomy” when discussing art and aesthetic experience. Even so, a more general autonomy concept, emphasizing that art and the aesthetic comprise a normatively special aspect of experience, is already implicit in much of the pragmatist aesthetics literature, including in John Dewey’s seminal Art as Experience. As the cultural disciplines move beyond earlier modernist- and postmodernist-era debates about art’s total autonomy from or total “heteronomous” absorption within the processes (...) of life, I argue that a more naturalistically down-to-earth version of the above general autonomy idea remains indispensable in a century of social, environmental, and existential crises whose solutions demand creative agency of a kind that artistically charged experiences can inspire. Drawing upon key pragmatist themes, I further develop the general autonomy idea by arguing that aesthetic experiences within and without the fine arts are horizontally transcendent; that art and the aesthetic answer a persistent human need for experiences that are intrinsically rewarding while also serving the instrumental function of being redemptive; that to this end, our global culture needs collectively accessible autonomous spaces within language and experience that can help people explore and interrogate the meanings of what we individually and collectively do; and that the value of our theoretical beliefs about the arts lies not in their power to represent a world supposedly independent of human thought and action but in what they lead us to do in the world. In conclusion, I illustrate this pragmatic interpretation of the general autonomy idea with a reading of Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory. (shrink)

This is a historical account of Niebuhr's and Dewey's relationship which spans the thirties, forties, and early fifties, when Dewey was philosophy professor emeritus at Columbia and Niebuhr was professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary. The author advances two claims of interest to the general philosophical reader: first, that the two thinkers' ethical and political visions were much closer in substance and method than either they or their followers tended to acknowledge; and second, that Niebuhr was in his (...) practice, if not in his self-understanding, a kind of theological pragmatist. (shrink)

There is a long history of the science of intelligent machines and its potential to provide scientific insights have been debated since the dawn of AI. In particular, there is renewed interest in the role of AI in research and research policy as an enabler of new methods, processes, management and evaluation which is still relatively under-explored. This empirical paper explores interviews with leading scholars on the potential impact of AI on research practice and culture through deductive, thematic analysis to (...) show the issues affecting academics and universities today. Our interviewees identify positive and negative consequences for research and researchers with respect to _collective_ and _individual use_. AI is perceived as helpful with respect to information gathering and other narrow tasks, and in support of impact and interdisciplinarity. However, using AI as a way of ‘speeding up—to keep up’ with bureaucratic and metricised processes, may proliferate negative aspects of academic culture in that the expansion of AI in research should assist and not replace human creativity. Research into the future role of AI in the research process needs to go further to address these challenges, and ask fundamental questions about how AI might assist in providing new tools able to question the values and principles driving institutions and research processes. We argue that to do this an explicit movement of meta-research on the role of AI in research should consider the effects for research and researcher creativity. Anticipatory approaches and engagement of diverse and critical voices at policy level and across disciplines should also be considered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Epistemology and Environmental Philosophy:The Epistemic Significance of PlaceChristopher J. Preston (bio)IntroductionEnvironmental philosophy began its life as a series of investigations into the question of whether an ethic of the environment was necessary and possible. A good deal of interesting ink was spilled in this quest. But over time a vigorous community of inquirers has created a territory much more broad. Questions of politics and metaphysics, meta-ethics and aesthetics are (...) now staples of the discipline. The philosophies of science and technology, of biology and ecology, each now contain questions that belong to environmental philosophy. Continental thought in general and phenomenology in particular have both come to include major thinkers happy to call themselves environmental philosophers.Despite the significant current breadth of the field, there still remain a few philosophers that dismiss environmental philosophy. They do this because they think that the real business of philosophy resides far away from environmental concerns in Platonic and Cartesian questions about [End Page 1] knowledge, truth, and mind. This collection is an attempt to draw the attention of those few remaining skeptics by bringing the concerns of environmental philosophers into direct contact with epistemology and its cognates. Each of the following articles addresses relationships between knowledge, truth, and mind and the physical environments from which those central features of human life emerge. The physical environments that are the concerns of these authors include the flesh and blood physiologies, the rock and earth geographies, and the life and death ecologies out of which all knowledge claims ultimately emerge. These authors endeavor to contextualize epistemology relative to the material environments from which it issues. This task of environmentally contextualizing the life of the mind is one I have termed elsewhere the grounding of knowledge (Preston 2003).The articles that follow draw together threads that the careful observer might have already noticed in several areas of philosophy. This observer might have seen feminist epistemologists grounding knowledge not only in social contexts that include gender, race, and class, but also in physical contexts that include bodies and geographies (Haraway 1988, Harding 1998). She might have noticed laboratory theorists grounding scientific theories among the physical realities of the lab (Latour and Woolgar 1979, Knorr-Cetina 1992). She might also have read the work of philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists exploring how the mind seems often to rely upon embodied experience in external environments in the work it does (Johnson 1987, Clark 1997). She might have been captured by the texts of phenomenologists reporting how people perceive and experience from enfleshed and embedded locations (Casey 1993, Abram 1996). She would also, no doubt, be familiar with environmental philosophers admiring how Native American epistemologies take geography seriously, a process Sioux Indian Vine Deloria has called "thinking from a spatial point of view" (Deloria 1994). She might even have had her attention drawn to an area of perceptual studies known as ecological psychology promoting the radical idea that inner processes of perception are in fact more fruitfully studied by focusing on outer considerations such as animacy and environmental structure (Gibson 1979, Reed 1996). These quite radical departures from the traditional picture together suggest that what was previously thought to be located exclusively in the deep recesses of the human mind is in reality intricately woven into a number of external and environmental factors. [End Page 2] Environments can no longer be looked at as just incidentally relevant to epistemology. They are not just the scenes in which the making of a knowledge claim happens to take place. Physical environments can be in subtle but important ways partly constitutive of those claims.The grounding of knowledge that this collection proposes holds forth a number of promises. It promises, for example, to make epistemology more earth-bound and attentive to the ecologies in which it takes place. It promises to illuminate how the human mind and its activities do not so much distance us from the rest of nonhuman nature as demonstrate our connection with it through its very workings. Grounding knowledge also suggests a corrective to the disembodied epistemologies of Platonists and their heirs while simultaneously supplying another way for environmental philosophy to broaden its scope beyond ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Epistemology and Environmental Philosophy:The Epistemic Significance of PlaceChristopher J. Preston (bio)IntroductionEnvironmental philosophy began its life as a series of investigations into the question of whether an ethic of the environment was necessary and possible. A good deal of interesting ink was spilled in this quest. But over time a vigorous community of inquirers has created a territory much more broad. Questions of politics and metaphysics, meta-ethics and aesthetics are (...) now staples of the discipline. The philosophies of science and technology, of biology and ecology, each now contain questions that belong to environmental philosophy. Continental thought in general and phenomenology in particular have both come to include major thinkers happy to call themselves environmental philosophers.Despite the significant current breadth of the field, there still remain a few philosophers that dismiss environmental philosophy. They do this because they think that the real business of philosophy resides far away from environmental concerns in Platonic and Cartesian questions about [End Page 1] knowledge, truth, and mind. This collection is an attempt to draw the attention of those few remaining skeptics by bringing the concerns of environmental philosophers into direct contact with epistemology and its cognates. Each of the following articles addresses relationships between knowledge, truth, and mind and the physical environments from which those central features of human life emerge. The physical environments that are the concerns of these authors include the flesh and blood physiologies, the rock and earth geographies, and the life and death ecologies out of which all knowledge claims ultimately emerge. These authors endeavor to contextualize epistemology relative to the material environments from which it issues. This task of environmentally contextualizing the life of the mind is one I have termed elsewhere the grounding of knowledge (Preston 2003).The articles that follow draw together threads that the careful observer might have already noticed in several areas of philosophy. This observer might have seen feminist epistemologists grounding knowledge not only in social contexts that include gender, race, and class, but also in physical contexts that include bodies and geographies (Haraway 1988, Harding 1998). She might have noticed laboratory theorists grounding scientific theories among the physical realities of the lab (Latour and Woolgar 1979, Knorr-Cetina 1992). She might also have read the work of philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists exploring how the mind seems often to rely upon embodied experience in external environments in the work it does (Johnson 1987, Clark 1997). She might have been captured by the texts of phenomenologists reporting how people perceive and experience from enfleshed and embedded locations (Casey 1993, Abram 1996). She would also, no doubt, be familiar with environmental philosophers admiring how Native American epistemologies take geography seriously, a process Sioux Indian Vine Deloria has called "thinking from a spatial point of view" (Deloria 1994). She might even have had her attention drawn to an area of perceptual studies known as ecological psychology promoting the radical idea that inner processes of perception are in fact more fruitfully studied by focusing on outer considerations such as animacy and environmental structure (Gibson 1979, Reed 1996). These quite radical departures from the traditional picture together suggest that what was previously thought to be located exclusively in the deep recesses of the human mind is in reality intricately woven into a number of external and environmental factors. [End Page 2] Environments can no longer be looked at as just incidentally relevant to epistemology. They are not just the scenes in which the making of a knowledge claim happens to take place. Physical environments can be in subtle but important ways partly constitutive of those claims.The grounding of knowledge that this collection proposes holds forth a number of promises. It promises, for example, to make epistemology more earth-bound and attentive to the ecologies in which it takes place. It promises to illuminate how the human mind and its activities do not so much distance us from the rest of nonhuman nature as demonstrate our connection with it through its very workings. Grounding knowledge also suggests a corrective to the disembodied epistemologies of Platonists and their heirs while simultaneously supplying another way for environmental philosophy to broaden its scope beyond ethics... (shrink)

BackgroundDealing with end of life is challenging for patients and health professionals alike. The situation becomes even more challenging when a patient requests a legally permitted medical service that a health professional is unable to provide due to a conflict of conscience. Such a scenario arises when Victorian health professionals, with a conscientious objection (CO) to voluntary assisted dying (VAD), are presented with patients who request VAD or merely ask about VAD. The Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (Vic) recognizes the (...) inherent conflict of conscience that may arise for some health professionals when asked to provide VAD and responds by affording broad protection to conscientious objectors who wish to refuse to take part in the VAD process.MethodsSeventeen semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with Victorian health professionals with a self-identified CO to VAD in the lead-up to the implementation of VAD in Victoria. Interviews explored how participants anticipated they would manage their CO in practice. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed thematically.ResultsOur results reveal that the way in which health professionals claimed they would approach CO conversations is variable and was dependant on the strength of their opposition to VAD. We categorized conscientious objectors according to their approach as either dissuasive non-referrers, passive non-referrers, facilitators or negotiators. Our study also explores the perceived difficulties of exercising one’s CO as identified by our participants.ConclusionThe broad protection offered by the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (Vic) encourages a range of behaviors from conscientious objectors, due to the minimal obligations imposed. In order to assist conscientious objectors, more policy, institutional guidance, and education needs to be available to conscientious objectors explicitly addressing how to effectively manage one’s CO. Such guidance is imperative to ensuring that their moral integrity is preserved and that they are exercising their CO appropriately. (shrink)

Free will is often said—by compatibilists and incompatibilists alike—to be a power (or complex of powers) of agents. This paper offers proposals for, and examines the prospects of, a powers-conception of free will that takes the powers in question to be causal dispositions. A difficulty for such an account stems from the idea that when one exercises free will, it is up to oneself whether one wills to do this or that. The paper also briefly considers whether a powers-conception that (...) invokes powers of a different kind, such as agent-causal or noncausal powers, might fare better with respect to this problem. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers beginning with their “Splitting a difference of opinion: The shift to negotiation” Jan Albert van Laar and Erik Krabbe claim that it is sometimes reasonable to shift from a critical discussion to a negotiation in order to settle a difference of opinion. They argue that their proposal avoids the fallacies of bargaining and middle ground. Against this permissive policy for shifting to negotiation, we argue that the motivating reasons for such shifts typically fail, and (...) that the permissive policy avoids neither fallacy while structurally incentivizing two types of strategic maneuvering that constitute rational and argumentative hazards: argumentative overcharge and abandonment of discussion. (shrink)

Uncertainty is recognized as a key issue in water resources research, amongst other sciences. Discussions of uncertainty typically focus on tools and techniques applied within an analysis, e.g. uncertainty quantification and model validation. But uncertainty is also addressed outside the analysis, in writing scientific publications. The language that authors use conveys their perspective of the role of uncertainty when interpreting a claim —what we call here “framing” the uncertainty. This article promotes awareness of uncertainty framing in four ways. 1) It (...) proposes a typology of eighteen uncertainty frames, addressing five questions about uncertainty. 2) It describes the context in which uncertainty framing occurs. This is an interdisciplinary topic, involving philosophy of science, science studies, linguistics, rhetoric, and argumentation. 3) We analyze the use of uncertainty frames in a sample of 177 abstracts from the Water Resources Research journal in 2015. This helped develop and tentatively verify the typology, and provides a snapshot of current practice. 4) Provocative recommendations promote adjustments for a more influential, dynamic science. Current practice in uncertainty framing might be described as carefully-considered incremental science. In addition to uncertainty quantification and degree of belief (present in ~5% of abstracts), uncertainty is addressed by a combination of limiting scope, deferring to further work (~25%) and indicating evidence is sufficient (~40%) – or uncertainty is completely ignored (~8%). There is a need for public debate within our discipline to decide in what context different uncertainty frames are appropriate. Uncertainty framing cannot remain a hidden practice evaluated only by lone reviewers. (shrink)

Sign language phonological parameters are somewhat analogous to phonemes in spoken language. Unlike phonemes, however, there is little linguistic literature arguing that these parameters interact at the sublexical level. This situation raises the question of whether such interaction in spoken language phonology is an artifact of the modality or whether sign language phonology has not been approached in a way that allows one to recognize sublexical parameter interaction. We present three studies in favor of the latter alternative: a shape‐drawing study (...) with deaf signers from six countries, an online dictionary study of American Sign Language, and a study of selected lexical items across 34 sign languages. These studies show that, once iconicity is considered, handshape and movement parameters interact at the sublexical level. Thus, consideration of iconicity makes transparent similarities in grammar across both modalities, allowing us to maintain certain key findings of phonological theory as evidence of cognitive architecture. (shrink)

The Catholic Church proscribes methods of birth control other than sexual abstinence. Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recognizes abstinence as an acceptable method of birth control in research studies, some pharmaceutical companies mandate the use of artificial contraceptive techniques to avoid pregnancy as a condition for participation in their studies. These requirements are unacceptable at Catholic health care institutions, leading to conflicts among institutional review boards, clinical investigators, and sponsors. Subjects may feel coerced by such mandates to (...) adopt contraceptive techniques inconsistent with their personal situation and beliefs; women committed to celibacy or who engage exclusively in non-heterosexual activities are negatively impacted. We propose principles to insure informed consent to safeguard the rights of research subjects at Catholic institutions while mitigating this ethical conflict. At the same time, our proposal respects the interests of pharmaceutical research agencies and Catholic moral precepts, and fully abides by regulatory guidance. (shrink)

Yet such a contrast fails to provide an adequate account of the full scope of either philosophy or psychoanalysis. On the one hand, philosophical inquiry is not wholly pre-empted by the question of reality; it may also extend into the realm of phantasy, as can be seen in Plato's effort to determine the epistemological value of eikasia or in Husserl's consideration of Phantasie as a basis of insight into essences. On the other hand, psychoanalysts are as concerned about reality as (...) they are about phantasy. Indeed, one of the key phrases of psychoanalytic therapy is "adaptation to reality." The reason for this concern with reality is clear: if phantasies are modifications or distortions of the real, it is imperative to discern what the character of reality is, especially since it is held out as the standard of a sound state of mental health. (shrink)

Stories are an important indicator of our vision of the future. In the case of artificial intelligence (AI), dominant stories are polarized between notions of threat and myopic solutionism. The central storytellers—big tech, popular media, and authors of science fiction—represent particular demographics and motivations. Many stories, and storytellers, are missing. This paper details the accounts of missing AI narratives by leading scholars from a range of disciplines interested in AI Futures. Participants focused on the gaps between dominant narratives and the (...) untold stories of the capabilities, issues, and everyday realities of the technology. One participant proposed a “story crisis” in which these narratives compete to shape the public discourse on AI. Our findings indicate that dominant narratives distract and mislead public understandings and conceptions of AI. This suggests a need to pay closer attention to missing AI narratives. It is not simply about telling new stories, it is about listening to existing stories and asking what is wanted from AI. We call for realistic, nuanced, and inclusive stories, working with and for diverse voices, which consider (1) story-teller; (2) genre, and (3) communicative purpose. Such stories can then inspire the next generation of thinkers, technologists, and storytellers. (shrink)

Encounters with Alphonso Lingis is the first extensive study of this American philosopher who is gaining an international reputation to augment his national one. The distinguished contributors to this volume address most of the central themes found in Lingis's writings—including singularity and otherness, death and eroticism, emotions and rationality, embodiment and the face, excess and the sacred. The book closes with a new essay by Lingis himself.

Sometimes, it is difficult to know what someone means. Sometimes, it merely appears to be difficult. Consider this masterpiece of philosophical hermeneutics from a P. G. Wodehouse short story: “Jeeves,” I said. “A rummy communication has arrived. From Mr. Glossop.” “Indeed, sir?” “I will read it to you. Handed in at Upper Bleaching. Message runs as follows: ‘When you come tomorrow, bring my football boots. Also, if humanly possible, Irish water-spaniel. Urgent. Regards. Tuppy.’.

Women’s lives have been affected exponentially by the COVID_19 pandemic. In this paper, we explore some of the ways in which women’s everyday experiences of paid and unpaid labour have exacerbated...