Past appraisal studies have shown that single appraisals are neither sufficient nor necessary for emotions but no study has examined the same issue with appraisal configurations (combinations of different single appraisals). Undergraduate participants repeatedly indicated their negative emotions (anger, sadness, fear, and guilt) and relevant appraisals as they occurred, or immediately after, in their everyday environments. The results not only replicated past findings on single appraisals but also suggested that appraisal configurations are neither sufficient nor necessary for these negative emotions.

In 1792 Dugald Stewart published Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. In its section on abstraction he declared himself to be a nominalist. Although a few scholars have made brief reference to this position, no sustained attention has been given to the central role that it played within Stewart’s early philosophy of mind. It is therefore the purpose of this essay to unpack Stewart’s nominalism and the intellectual context that fostered it. In the first three sections I aver (...) that his nominalism emanated from his belief that objects of the mind—qualities, ideas and words—were signs that bore no necessary relation to the external objects that they were meant to represent. More specifically, it was these signs that were arranged into systems of thought by the ‘operations of the mind’. The next three sections suggest that his treatment of words as signs most probably originated in his views on language and medicine and that his nominalistic philosophy of mind could also be extended to systems that sought to classify the natural world. I conclude by suggesting several avenues of enquiry that could be pursued by future scholars interested in excavating Stewart’s thought. (shrink)

Aesthetics has typically been regarded as an arena where claims about truth cannot be made as questions about art seem to involve more matters of taste than knowledge. In _Real Beauty_, however, Eddy Zemach maintains that beauty, ugliness, gracefulness, gaudiness, and similar aesthetic properties are real features of public things and argues that whether these features are present is a matter of fact that can be empirically investigated. By examining the opposing nonrealistic views of Subjectivism, Noncognitivism, and Relativism, Zemach (...) attempts to show how antirealistic interpretations of art generate absurd results and leave the realistic reading as the only cogent semantic interpretation of aesthetic statements. By discussing what inclines most people to hold nonrealistic views in aesthetics, such as the fluctuations of taste in fashion, Zemach argues that Realism can account for these fluctuations. He proposes that the aesthetic value of some things is due to their relations to other things and that relation may be temporal, resulting in the need for a temporal point for the correct temporal angle from which to view things. Zemach concludes that great art reveals significant truths about reality and that significantly true statements are aesthetically valuable, hence truth is an aesthetic merit. (shrink)

I defend a slightly modified version of geach's rule r, I.E., That although both a and b are g, It is possible for a to be the same f as b and a different h than b, Provided that the question whether a and b are the same g is undecidable. Answering those who object to relative identity I claim that they tacitly adhere to a false fregean view, I.E., That one cannot use a singular term to denote an entity (...) x if it is not true that for every y, X=y or not x=y. I show, However, That such terms are, And must be, Used by every empirically oriented language with finite or infinite predicative arsenal, And hence relative identity is more handy than absolute identity. Finally I give a version of leibniz's law for relative identity. (shrink)

This book introduces and explores a theory of global development ethics, revealing some of the challenges to projects of global development and including coverage of core topics such as immigration, technology, famine, race and capitalism. It is ideal for advanced-level courses in Global Ethics, Development Ethics and Applied Ethics.

The environment and sociopolitical contexts in which we dwell shape our approach to the world. Islands, following Pádraig Ó Tuama, trigger an openness to other persons and sites. They fuel the comity of their inhabitants, motivate their interconnection with others, and thus sharpen their sense of morality. The Caribbean islands, and the Americas writ large, are also sites of both genocide and of a novel way to embrace the world. The peoples of the Caribbean islands have used the predicaments of (...) isolation, displacement, and genocide to initiate a mode of living that is best articulated, in the contemporary period, through the concept of créolization. The authors considered in this essay have expanded our understanding of the créolization. They have made specific the experiential thread of resilience that undergirds the meaning of créolization. In Condé’s work, the resilience is highlighted through the individual writer’s creativity. Sealy, for her part, expands the meaning of créolization to model a prospective inclusionary polity in the form of a créolizing nation. As we know, nations are not isolated entities; they are part of a conglomeration with other nations. Getachew completes the study to show that the cosmopolitan world that we might aspire to reach can benefit from the post-World War II efforts of Caribbean and African postcolonial nations. In truth, we realize with these authors that a moral and equitable international environment has been the articulated goal of Caribbean peoples since arguably the sixteenth century. It is a goal consonant with all of the perennial humanist ideals of modernity. (shrink)

This book is based on two new nominalistic theses: first, that material things (houses, cats, people, symphonies, and also hair, milk, red, and love) are ...

While much has been written on the cultural and intellectual antecedents that gave rise to Carolus Linnaeus?s herbarium and his Systema Naturae, the tools that he used to transform his raw observations into nomenclatural terms and categories have been neglected. Focusing on the Philosophia Botanica, the popular classification handbook that he published in 1751, it can be shown that Linnaeus cleverly ordered and reordered the work by employing commonplacing techniques that had been part of print culture since the Renaissance. Indeed, (...) the functional adaptability of commonplace heads allowed him to split and combine the book?s chapters and tables and played a notable conceptual role in the way in which he spatialized words and, to a certain extent, specimens. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s first account of meaning was that sentences are pictures: the meaning of a sentence is a state of affairs it portrays. States of affairs are arrangements of some basic entities, the Objects. Sentences consist of names of Objects; an arrangement of such names, i.e., a sentence, shows how the named Objects are arranged. A sentence says that the state of affairs it thus pictures exists, hence it is true or false. That theory of meaning as picturing is based on (...) a primitive relation of naming, but what it is for an item to name another the Tractatus does not say. (shrink)

IT IS POSSIBLE to discern three main types of answers commonly given to the question about the nature of sensations. The first is the classical "private access" theory, according to which I can sense my own pain, while the pains of others can never be subject to direct inspection by me. The presence of overt pain behavior may inductively confirm the hypothesis that the body thus behaving is besouled [[sic]] and subject to a sensation of pain, but I can never (...) be sure that such pain really exists. I can feel only my own pain, and every pain I feel is necessarily my own. One token of this view is Cartesian dualism, but it is also adopted by most kinds of interactionism, epiphenomenalism, and their ilk. One of the notorious consequences of this theory is, that it makes the problem of Other Minds practically insoluble. Do the other humanoids have minds like my own, do they experience raw feelings similar to mine? The question remains logically unanswerable. The argument from analogy was often shown to be very tenuous, and one is therefore driven to accept the conclusion that sensation words must mean one thing in the context of egocentric sentences and quite another thing when the subject of the sentence is other than I. But if this is the case, mentalistic attributes proper are only I-ascriptive: that is, it would be a logical howler to apply them to anything other than myself; grammar thus forces me to adopt a position similar to that of the solipsist. (shrink)

Like frege, I claim that any singular term (a name, A definite description, Or an indexical) has a sense, And it refers to what satisfies that sense. Unlike frege, I say that this referent is the real world entity that satisfies the said sense in some belief world, Usually, The utterer's. Reference is a function from senses to transworld heirlines. Thus, My token of 'plato' may have a different sense than your token of 'plato', Yet both may refer to plato. (...) My token of 'the f' may have the same sense as your token of 'the f', Yet they may have different referents. My semantics constitutes, I believe, A new argument for the tenability of metaphysical realism. (shrink)

It has been persuasively argued that music refers. For example, a passage that resembles the demeanour of people under the sway of emotion E is seen as itself being E and, thus, as referring to E. Yet what is the purpose of such reference? Serious music, I say, works as a proof. A passage that refers to E is cast as a well-formed formula in a calculus. That formula is then creatively developed in accordance with the rules of that calculus (...) (e.g. harmony and counterpoint in classical music). As in scientific proofs, intermediary generated formulae need not have external meaning over and above the character they have due to their role in the formal sequence. Yet finally a formula is derived that does have external meaning; for example, it refers to emotion F. The composer has thus fictionally proved that E is equal to F, e.g. that hope is futile or that love conquers all. (shrink)

IntroductionEddy M. Zemach was born in Jerusalem in 1935. His mother, Helena, was a dentist as well as a poet, and his father, Shimon, was a dentist as well as a political figure. Eddy completed B.A. and M.A. degrees in both Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem. He studied for a doctoral degree in philosophy at Yale University. In 1965 he completed his dissertation on the boundaries of the aesthetic, supervised by Paul Weiss. Another of (...) his teachers at Yale was Wilfrid Sellars, who influenced his philosophical views on mind and language. Aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language formed the center of his philosophical interest, though this interest was extended to other philosophical areas, such as metaphysics and epistemology.Eddy published extensively in both philosophy and Hebrew literature, and also wrote many short stories . He wrote some two hundred papers, and twelve scholarly books .. (shrink)

According to the 'axiom of existence', Adopted in this article, Terms which do not denote existent entities do not denote at all. 'past entities', 'future entities', 'possible entities', 'fictional entities', Etc. Do not exist. The class of denoting terms has, Therefore, A changing membership. 'nixon' denotes now, But will fail to denote one hundred years from now. The same is true for terms indicating properties (e.G., '... Is a missile'). A theory of meaning and truth is developed on the basis (...) of this axiom. A denotationless term may still be meaningful. 'x' means, In english, 'the entity which ...' where the dots stand for a certain conjunction of open sentences known to speakers of english in various degrees, Found in reference books of authority, Etc. A statement can be true through either correspondence or analyticity. Thus 'nixon is the u.S. President' is (now) true in both ways. 'socrates was a philosopher', '2+2=4', And 'hamlet killed polonius' are only analytically true. 'polonius killed hamlet' is false. (shrink)

It would have been petty to chide Columbus for not finding a sea route to India; what he did find was so important that his failure to achieve his stated goal pales in comparison. Thomasson’s book, I think, is like that: I doubt that it achieves its goal, yet it opens up a whole range of subjects for further investigation. It is an inspiring, thought-provoking, innovative book.

Contemporary thinkers either hold that meanings cannot be mental states, or that they are patterns of brain functions. But patterns of social, or brain, interactions cannot be that which we understand. Wittgenstein had another answer (not the one attributed to him by writers who ignore his work in psychology): understanding, he said, is seeing an item as embodying a type Q, thus constraining what items will be seen as the same. Those who cannot see things under an aspect are meaning-blind.That (...) idea is expanded in this article. Its ontology consists of types only: entities that recur in space, time, and possible worlds. Types (Socrates, Man, Red, On, etc.) overlap; Socrates = Bald at some index and not in another. The logic used is thus that of contingent identity. Now some possible worlds are mentally represented; the entities that occur in them are meanings. But such entities may also recur in the real world. Thus the entities we experience, the phenomena, which serve as our meanings, may be identical in the real world with real things. A correspondence theory of truth is thus developed: a sentence is true iff its meaning constitutes, in a specified way, a real situation. (shrink)