This volume presents ten new essays on the nature of perceptual imagination and perceptual memory, framed by an introductory overview of these topics. How do perceptual imagination and memory resemble and differ from each other and from other kinds of sensory experience? And what role does each play in perception and in the acquisition of knowledge? These are the two central questions that the contributors seek to address.

Ethical perspectives on regional, rural, and remote healthcare often, understandably and importantly, focus on inequities in access to services. In this commentary, we take the opportunity to examine the implications of normalizing metrocentric views, values, knowledge, and orientations, evidenced by the recent (2022) New South Wales inquiry into health outcomes and access to hospital and health services in regional, rural and remote New South Wales, for contemporary rural governance and justice debates. To do this, we draw on the feminist inspired (...) approach to rural health ethics involving analysis of power relationships developed by Simpson and McDonald and related ideas from critical health sociology. In presenting this analysis, we extend contemporary thought about spatial health inequities and structural violence. (shrink)

La réflexion sur la guerre de Montesquieu est amorcée dans l’ouvrage qu’il consacre à l’histoire de Rome : les Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence. C’est pour le baron de la Brède un moyen de prendre position contre les arguments machiavélistes qui soutiennent les entreprises de conquêtes de son époque. Il s’agit alors de retracer la généalogie de cette prise de position depuis les thèses de Machiavel, dont Montesquieu hérite, jusqu’aux usages politiques qu’il (...) dénonce. (shrink)

The lives of children who live at the intersectional nexus between childhood autism and race may be considered as “shadow stories” that have remained silenced in autism literature. We explored the experiences of racialized parents who provide care to autistic children. We drew on a theoretical framework known as DisCrit and decolonizing arts-based methodologies. Racialized parents of autistic children demonstrated resistance along various themes, including fighting the system, protecting my child, and creating cultural communities. We join black girlhood studies, critical (...) race theory, and disabled children’s childhood studies by continuing the journey of decentering Whiteness in childhood disability research. We demonstrate how disabled racialized communities engage in activism and social justice while forming powerful counter-discourses. (shrink)

There existed a tradition of mimetic experimentation in the late nineteenth century, whereby morphologists sought to scale down sublime natural phenomena to tabletop devices in the laboratory. Experimenters constructed analogs of the aurora, attempting to replicate the colors and forms of the phenomenon with discharge tube experiments and electrical displays, which became popular spectacles at London’s public galleries. This paper analyses a closely allied but different kind of imitation. Between 1872 and 1884, Professor Karl Selim Lemström (1838–1904) attempted to reproduce (...) the aurora borealis in all of its complexity atop four mountains in northern Finland. Crucially, his “artificial aurora” was to materialize at the same scale as the original phenomenon and in its natural habitat in the polar atmosphere. With his experiment Lemström hoped to uncover the workings of the aurora and the electrical currents that he believed were always present within the atmosphere; his epistemological framework was one of learning by making. This paper sheds light on the broader problem of what it meant to authentically replicate a phenomenon that remained largely enigmatic, and, most importantly, how this replication could be verified. This prompts a discussion as to whether model experiments needed only to appear visually similar to the objects they purported to imitate, were required to preserve their form, or needed to be materially identical in order to the original to be identified as legitimate “reproductions” in the late nineteenth century. (shrink)

Fiona Woollard presents an original defence of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, according to which doing harm seems much harder to justify than merely allowing harm. She argues that the Doctrine is best understood as a principle that protects us from harmful imposition, and offers a moderate account of our obligations to offer aid to others.

This powerfully iconoclastic book reconsiders the influential nativist position toward the mind. Nativists assert that some concepts, beliefs, or capacities are innate or inborn: "native" to the mind rather than acquired. Fiona Cowie argues that this view is mistaken, demonstrating that nativism is an unstable amalgam of two quite different--and probably inconsistent--theses about the mind. Unlike empiricists, who postulate domain-neutral learning strategies, nativists insist that some learning tasks require special kinds of skills, and that these skills are hard-wired into (...) our brains at birth. This "faculties hypothesis" finds its modern expression in the views of Noam Chomsky. Cowie, marshaling recent empirical evidence from developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, computer science, and linguistics, provides a crisp and timely critique of Chomsky's nativism and defends in its place a moderately nativist approach to language acquisition. Also in contrast to empiricists, who view the mind as simply another natural phenomenon susceptible of scientific explanation, nativists suspect that the mental is inelectably mysterious. Cowie addresses this second strand in nativist thought, taking on the view articulated by Jerry Fodor and other nativists that learning, particularly concept acquisition, is a fundamentally inexplicable process. Cowie challenges this explanatory pessimism, and argues convincingly that concept acquisition is psychologically explicable. What's Within? is a clear and provocative achievement in the study of the human mind. (shrink)

Liberalism assumes a number of political values that are central to its popular appeal. Historically, fraternity was an additional value that called on citizens to consider themselves part of a civic community. While contemporary liberalism has placed significant emphasis on the values that promote individualism – liberty and equality – it has rarely referred to fraternity as a value. Yet, a robust version of fraternity is either existent or possible in at least one liberal’s, Kant’s, version of liberalism. Drawing upon (...) Kant’s notions of unity and friendship in his moral and religious writings to show how Kant conceived of fraternity in its private sense, I offer textual evidence of these concepts spilling over into Kant’s theory of right. In so doing, I reconstruct a version of Kantian fraternity that is consistent with Kant’s broader theory of right in an effort to give fraternity a greater role in classical liberalism. (shrink)

In this paper the author presents two different modes of relationship between phenomenological psychopathology and philosophy. The dominant mode conforms to the medical-psychiatric discourse which takes pathological time experiences as negative deviations from the ‘normal’ and ‘adequate’ equivalent. In this mode phenomenological description of ‘disturbed’ time experiences requires philosophy to provide an insight into the ‘essence’ of time and an essentially adequate experience of time. Only such a philosophical insight can deliver a valid reference point for investigating what is really (...) missing in pathological time experiences. This philosophical reference point can either consist in a metaphysical-normative concept of time and time experiences, or in a transcendental concept of how normal and abnormal time experiences are constituted in the inner consciousness of time. There is another mode of relationship which conforms to Freud’s discovery that pathological symptoms are not just negative alterations of the ‘normal’ but hide an own ‘meaning’. The author makes the case for the use of philosophy to unveil the specific kind of meaning in pathological experiences of time. She refers to existential philosophy in this respect, and in particular to its concept of Angst as a fundamental philosophical experience. This allows for a hermeneutic approach to ‘disturbed’ time experiences. What looks from a pure psychiatric perspective to be a mere ‘disorder’ of the ‘normal’, becomes understandable as a specific form of ‘suffering from one’s own temporality’. She argues that people with disturbed time experiences are especially sensitive to anxiety-laden experiences of what it means to be temporal, whilst ‘normal’ people can screen them out in favor of a ‘mentally undisturbed’ everyday life. (shrink)

I defend a form of naturalism which has much in common with Iris Murdoch's ‘true naturalism’, but I argue that it can accommodate God. I consider what it could mean for naturalism to be theistic in this sense, and respond to the charge that it leaves no room for the transcendent.

Which objects and properties are represented in perceptual experience, and how are we able to determine this? The papers in this collection address these questions together with other fundamental questions about the nature of perceptual content. The book draws together papers by leading international philosophers of mind, including Alex Byrne (MIT), Alva Noë (University of California, Berkeley), Tim Bayne (St Catherine’s College, Oxford), Michael Tye (University of Texas, Austin), Richard Price (All Souls College, Oxford) and Susanna Siegel (Harvard University) Essays (...) address the central questions surrounding the content of perceptual experience Investigates how are we able to determine the admissible contents of experience Published in association with the journal Philosophical Quarterly . (shrink)

Scientific and philosophical perspectives on hallucination: essays that draw on empirical evidence from psychology, neuroscience, and cutting-edge philosophical theory.

It is tempting to think that zebras, goats, lions, and similar animals matter morally, but not in quite the same way people do. This might lead us to adopt a hybrid view of animal ethics such as ‘Utilitarianism for Animals; Deontology for People’. One of the core commitments of deontology is the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA): the view that doing harm is harder to justify than allowing harm. I explore how this core tenant of deontology applies to non-person, (...) non-human animals and whether hybrid views of animal ethics can accept it. In doing so, I aim to do three things. First, to show that my defence of the DDA can solve a problem surrounding our duties to wild animals, while making only minimal claims about animal moral status. Second, to offer an argument that for many non-person, non-human animals, we should recognise deontological constraints on their treatment, but also see those constraints as importantly different from the constraints against doing harm to persons. Third, to get clearer on how we should understand Utilitarianism for Animals and Nozickian hybrid approaches to animal ethics. (shrink)

My starting point in this paper is that expansive naturalism is a defensible position. I spell out what this position involves, and grant with Iris Murdoch that we should take seriously the idea that the world in which we are immersed has an irreducibly spiritual dimension. I consider what it could mean to think of spiritual reality in supernaturalist terms, agree with the naturalist that dualistic supernaturalism is to be rejected, and ask whether one can legitimately reject this model as (...) both a naturalist and a theist. (shrink)

Although the focus of "Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights" is practical, Gould does not shy away from hard theoretical questions, such as the relentless debate over cultural relativism, and the relationship between terrorism and democracy.

Can the phenomenal character of perceptual experience be altered by the states of one's cognitive system, for example, one's thoughts or beliefs? If one thinks that this can happen then one thinks that there can be cognitive penetration of perceptual experience; otherwise, one thinks that perceptual experience is cognitively impenetrable. I claim that there is one alleged case of cognitive penetration that cannot be explained away by the standard strategies one can typically use to explain away alleged cases. The case (...) is one in which it seems subjects' beliefs about the typical colour of objects affects their colour experience. I propose a two-step mechanism of indirect cognitive penetration that explains how cognitive penetration may occur. I show that there is independent evidence that each step in this process can occur. I suspect that people who are opposed to the idea that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable will be less opposed to the idea when they come to consider this indirect mechanism and that those who are generally sympathetic to the idea of cognitive penetrability will welcome the elucidation of this plausible mechanism. (shrink)

This book challenges readers to rethink rural health ethics. Traditional approaches to health ethics are often urban-centric, making implicit assumptions about how values and norms apply in health care practice, and as such may fail to take into account the complexity, depth, richness, and diversity of the rural context. There are ethically relevant differences between rural health practice and rural health services delivery and urban practice and delivery that go beyond the stereotypes associated with rural life and rural health services. (...) This book examines key values in the rural context that have not been fully explored or taken into account when we examine health ethics issues, including the values of community and place, and a need to “revalue” relationships. It also advocates for a greater attention to meso and macro level analysis in rural health ethics as being critical to ethical analysis of rural health care. This book is essential reading for those involved in health ethics, rural health policy and governance, and for rural health providers. (shrink)

Badiou has said that his entire philosophical project stems from the need to “update” the traditional philosophical categories of Truth, Being, the Infinite and the Universal in the wake of the 19th Century German mathematician Georg Cantor’s explication of transfinite set theory. In his essay, “What is Love?”, he provides an account of one of the ways in which a post-Cantorian reconfiguration of the ontological status of the category of Woman might operate. This is given in the form of a (...) postscript subtitled “The Feminine Position and Humanity” wherein he gives Lacan’s conception of supplementary feminine jouissance “an extra turn of the screw”. This essay draws on Badiou’s reconfiguration of the philosophical category of Woman to examine the implications of another postscript, that which abruptly concludes the 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee. It reads Coetzee’s invention of the “Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos” with recourse to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and on through the ontological reconfiguration of the philosophical category of Woman demonstrated by Badiou. It argues that Coetzee assembles, through the intervention of the postscript, a situation that “makes it possible to argue”, along with Badiou, that, for the woman position, love knots together the four types of truths – Politics, Art, Science, and Love (2008, 196). (shrink)

I defend the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing: the claim that doing harm is harder to justify than merely allowing harm. A thing does not genuinely belong to a person unless he has special authority over it. The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing protects us against harmful imposition – against the actions or needs of another intruding on what is ours. This protection is necessary for something to genuinely belong to a person. The opponent of the Doctrine must claim that (...) nothing genuinely belongs to a person, even his own body. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that God has been put to rest. Naturalism is the default position, and the naturalist can explain what needs to be explained without recourse to God. This book agrees that we should be naturalists, but it rejects the more prevalent scientific naturalism in favour of an 'expansive' naturalism inspired by David Wiggins and John McDowell. Fiona Ellis draws on a wide range of thinkers from theology and philosophy, and spans the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy. (...) She tackles various philosophical problems including the limits of nature and the status of value; some theological problems surrounding the natural/ supernatural relation, the Incarnation, and the concept of myth; and offers a model to comprehend the relation between philosophy and theology. (shrink)

Our pollution of the environment seems set to lead to widespread problems in the future, including disease, scarcity of resources, and bloody conflicts. It is natural to think that we are required to stop polluting because polluting harms the future individuals who will be faced with these problems. This natural thought faces Derek Parfit’s famous Non-Identity Problem ( 1984 , pp. 361–364). The people who live on the polluted earth would not have existed if we had not polluted. Our polluting (...) behaviour does not make these individuals worse off. It may therefore seem that we do not harm them by polluting. Parfit argues that we should replace person-affecting principles with an impersonal principle of beneficence, Principle Q ( 1984 , p. 360.). I argue that Principle Q cannot give an adequate account of our duties to refrain from polluting. I consider attempts to solve the Non-Identity Problem by denying that to harm someone an agent must make them worse off. I argue that such responses provide a partial solution to the Non-Identity Problem. They do show that we harm future individuals in a morally relevant sense by polluting. Nonetheless, this is only a partial solution. The Non-Identity Problem still suggests that our harm-based reasons not to pollute are less strong than we intuitively believe. Thus on its own an appeal to the claim that we harm future individuals is not able to give a fully satisfactory account of why we are required not to pollute. (shrink)

This article investigates the contribution made by indigenous employees to the work of the Hong Kong Observatory from its inception and into the early twentieth century. As has so often been the case in Western histories of science, the significance of indigenous workers and of women in the Hong Kong Observatory has been obscured by the stories of the government officials and observatory director(s). Yet without the employees, the service could not have functioned or grown. While the glimpses of their (...) work and lives are fleeting, often only revealed in minor archival references, this article seeks to interrogate these sources to make these workers’ lives visible and to offer an examination of everyday working relationships at this place and point in time. It focuses on three areas. First, an exploration of who these workers were, and the role they played at the observatory. Second, an investigation of their contribution to the nascent science of meteorology. Third, an examination of available evidence – levels of high staff turnover, complaints, instances of foot dragging, or working to rule, as well as the tenacity to continue for years under difficult working conditions – to demonstrate the ability of workers to reject or to negotiate with colonial/patriarchal authority. In profiling their stories, this article will add to the literature examining the lives of scientific workers and their contributions to science, the everyday cultural and social contexts of colonial meteorology, and the role of ordinary men and women in producing meteorological knowledge at this time. (shrink)

L.A. Paul argues that interesting issues for rational choice theory are raised by epistemically transformative experiences: experiences which provide access to knowledge that could not be known without the experience. Consideration of the epistemic effects of pregnancy has important implications for our understanding of epistemically transformative experiences and for debate about the ethics of abortion and applied ethics more generally. Pregnancy is epistemically transformative both in Paul’s narrow sense and in a wider sense: those who have not been pregnant face (...) significant barriers to acquiring the knowledge made accessible through pregnancy. This knowledge is crucial for engaging with the ethics of abortion. The epistemically transformativeWIDE nature of pregnancy may require us to use new methods to try to partially grasp what pregnancy is like such as for example, significant engagement with narrative literature. Because pregnancy is also epistemically transformative in a narrow sense, we need to work out how to engage in ethical reasoning when relevant knowledge is not fully accessible to all. This argument has implications beyond the debate about abortion. Philosophers in many areas of applied ethics will need to work out how to respond appropriately to epistemically transformative experiences. (shrink)

Introduction -- The ethics of care and global politics -- Rethinking human security -- 'Women's work' : the global care and sex economies -- Humanitarian intervention and global security governance -- Peacebuilding and paternalism : reading care through postcolonialism -- Health and human security : gender, care and HIV/AIDS -- Gender, care, and the ethics of environmental security -- Conclusion. Security through care.

It is widely held that in Plato's Sophist, Forms rest or change or both. The received opinion is, however, false—or so I will argue. There is no direct support for it in the text and several passages tell against it. I will further argue that, contrary to the view of some scholars, Plato did not in this dialogue advocate a kind of change recognizable as 'Cambridge change', as applicable to his Forms. The reason that Forms neither change nor rest is (...) that they are purely intelligible entities, not susceptible to changing or being at rest. Since Plato continues in the Sophist to treat Forms as causes, it follows that Forms are changeless causes. I ask what conception of cause might allow for this view, and reject the suggestion that Plato was some kind of proto-dispositionalist about causation. Instead I suggest that he understood causation to incorporate a notion of structuring, such that Forms can be seen to structure their participants and so cause them to possess the attributes they possess. (shrink)

The senses, or sensory modalities, constitute the different ways we have of perceiving the world, such as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. But how many senses are there? How many could there be? What makes the senses different? What interaction takes place between the senses? This book is a guide to thinking about these questions. Together with an extensive introduction to the topic, the book contains the key classic papers on this subject together with nine newly commissioned essays.One reason (...) that these questions are important is that we are receiving a huge influx of new information from the sciences that challenges some traditional philosophical views about the senses. This information needs to be incorporated into our view of the senses and perception. Can we do this whilst retaining our pre-existing concepts of the senses and of perception or do we need to revise our concepts? If they need to be revised, then in what way should that be done? Research in diverse areas, such as the nature of human perception, varieties of non-human animal perception, the interaction between different sensory modalities, perceptual disorders, and possible treatments for them, calls into question the platitude that there are five senses, as well as the pre-supposition that we know what we are counting when we count them as five.This book will serve as an inspiring introduction to the topic and as a basis from which further new research will grow. (shrink)

If beliefs and desires affect perception—at least in certain specified ways—then cognitive penetration occurs. Whether it occurs is a matter of controversy. Recently, some proponents of the predictive coding account of perception have claimed that the account entails that cognitive penetrations occurs. I argue that the relationship between the predictive coding account and cognitive penetration is dependent on both the specific form of the predictive coding account and the specific form of cognitive penetration. In so doing, I spell out different (...) forms of each and the relationship that holds between them. Thus, mere acceptance of the predictive coding approach to perception does not determine whether one should think that cognitive penetration exists. Moreover, given that there are such different conceptions of both predictive coding and cognitive penetration, researchers should cease talking of either without making clear which form they refer to, if they aspire to make true generalisations. (shrink)

Abstract I argue for a new interpretation of the argument for the non-identity of Being and Difference at Sophist 255c-e, which turns on a distinction between modes of being a property. Though indebted to Frede (1967), the distinction differs from his in an important respect: What distinguishes the modes is not the subject's relation to itself or to something numerically distinct, but whether it constitutes or conforms to the specification of some property. Thus my view, but not his, allows self-participation (...) for Forms. Against Frede and the more traditional interpretation, I maintain that the distinction is not introduced by way of the pros alla / kath' hauta distinction, or by way of uses or senses of the verb `to be', but is established prior to the argument and is deployed in its frame. Moreover, since I read the argument's scope as restricted to properties in what I shall call the attribute mode, my interpretation can explain, as its rivals cannot, why the criterion of difference at 255d6-7 does not apply to the Form, Difference, itself. (shrink)