This paper examines the stage-level/individual-level hypothesis (Kratzer 1989; Diesing 1988) from the point of view of modern Scottish Gaelic. This language exhibits two syntactically distinct predicational structures, and in particular, two distinct subject positions distinguishable on the basis of word order. While the distinction between the two positions can be shown to support the stage/individual-level hypothesis in one sense, the picture is muddied by the fact that many habitual or ‘characteristic’ sentences seem to be formed according to the stage-level subject (...) construction type.The solution proposed relies on two novel elements. First, it distinguishes the classical Davisonian event variable from the Kratzerian one hypothesized to be the hallmark of the stage-level sentence type. And secondly, it makes a strict logical separation between two types of generics: generics proper, which involve quantifying over an individual variable; and habituals, which only involve quantification over an event variable. These are represented by two distinct logical types which may nevertheless give rise to similar truth conditions in context.I show that the analysis can be made to account for tense interpretation, the scope of genericity, and the facts of syntactic complementation in Scottish Gaelic. To the extent that the solution is successful, it is evidence for a quite direct mapping between syntactic and semantic representations and for the important intuitions behind the initial Kratzer/Diesing stage vs. individual-level hypothesis. (shrink)

This state-of-the-art guide to some of the most exciting work in current linguistics explores how the core components of the language faculty interact. It examines how these interactions are reflected in linguistic and cognitive theory, considers what they reveal about the operations of language within the mind, and looks at their reflections in expression and communication. Leading international scholars present cutting-edge accounts of developments in the interfaces between phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. They bring to bear a rich (...) variety of methods and theoretical perspectives, focus on a broad array of issues and problems, and illustrate their arguments from a wide range of the world's languages. After the editors' introduction to its structure, scope, and content, the book is divided into four parts. The first, Sound, is concerned with the interfaces between phonetics and phonology, phonology and morphology, and phonology and syntax. Part II, Structure, considers the interactions of syntax with morphology, semantics, and the lexicon, and explores the status of the word and its representional status in the mind. Part III, Meaning, revisits the syntax-semantics interface from the perspective of compositionality, and looks at issues concerned with intonation, discourse, and context. The authors in the final part of the book, General Architectural Concerns, examine work on Universal Grammar, the overall model of language, and linguistic and associated theories of language and cognition. All scholars and advanced students of language will value this book, whether they are in linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, artificial intelligence, computational science, or informatics. (shrink)

A critical survey of Quine's arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction.

In 'Meeting Needs', Braybrooke argues that a new and improved version of utilitarianism can be constructed around making a priority of satisfying needs. In this paper I concentrate on Braybrooke's suggestion about the method for determining needs, and more generally, the method of settling issues concerning matters of need. (This emphasis is chosen since these problems are most devastating to his project as currently formulated.) I argue that Braybrooke's method is seriously flawed. Braybrooke believes that the process for settling issues (...) concerning needs guarantees consensus and fairness. I refute this claim by showing that a number of assumptions crucial to Braybrooke's method are unwarranted. In addition, I show that these and other structural defects in the method are such that Braybrooke's account is guilty of paternalism and "fraud", despite his attempts to avoid these charges. I also indicate why similar methods are unlikely to meet with success. -/- . (shrink)

Gillian Rose was a philosopher, social theorist, memoirist, and Jewish convert to Christianity who died an untimely death in 1995. She offers a novel account of faith, which grows out of her Hegelian philosophical background inflected by her reading of Kierkegaard and her rediscovered Jewish heritage. For Rose, faith is a mode of social practice. Rose's conception of faith is here reconstructed by translating her obscure jurisprudential idiom into the language of social practices and norms. The conception of secular (...) faith developed by Rose is shown to have implications for contemporary discussions of ethics and politics. The contemporary relevance of Rose's work is made clear through comparison with recent work by Robert Brandom, Robert Adams, and Patrick Deneen. (shrink)

A review article of Gillian Brock's Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account. Reviewed by Dara Salam. Public Reason, Vol.3, No.1, June 2011, pp. 114-117.

Critical review of Gillian Russell's "Truth in Virtue of Meaning".

Three recent attempts to draw resources for theology from the work of philosopher and social theorist Gillian Rose are examined. Although her work has received little attention, it has been influential in the development of ‘Radical Orthodoxy’. Yet her dense style has led to many misunderstandings of her work. Each of the three attempts to draw theological resources from her work examined is problematic, either because it misrepresents Rose's work or because it reads Rose too narrowly. The outline of (...) a positive account of Rose's philosophy is developed through critical engagements with these three readers. I suggest that an alternative theological appropriation of Rose that focuses on her account of the theological virtues, particularly faith and love, might be possible. (shrink)

In Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account Gillian Brock emphasizes the compellingness of specific institutional and policy prescriptions, clarifies the relationship between cosmopolitanism and Rawlsian internationalism, and shifts the terrain on which arguments for global justice play out. In this, Brock makes her own view and the debates themselves more interesting and of interest to a broader audience. However she also brings to the fore a difficult question: What, exactly, do we add to our understanding when we think about the (...) actions we ought to take as duties of cosmopolitan justice as opposed to requirements of basic human decency? (shrink)

This is a review of Gillian Brock’s new book, Global justice: a cosmopolitan account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) which sets out the central theses of the book and then offers a critical appraisal of its central arguments. My specific concern is that Brock gives an insufficiently robust account of human rights with which to define the nature of global justice and thereby leaves cosmopolitanism too vulnerable to the normative pull of local and traditional moral conceptions that fall short (...) of the universalism that cosmopolitans should be able to embrace. Keywords: cosmopolitanism; human rights; global justice; Rawls; humanitarian intervention; global governance; liberal nationalism; democracy; equality; immigration (Published: 4 December 2009) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2009, pp. 369–382. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v2i4.2107. (shrink)

A review essay of Gillian Brock Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford University Press, 2009).

This article explores the implications of Gillian Rose's social and political theory of modernity. For Rose, modernity not only construes `the autonomous moral subject as free within the order of representations and unfree within its preconditions and outcomes' (1996: 57), it is also `the working out of that combination' (ibid.). The implications of this view are explored below, concentrating in particular on the way Rose tackled the aporias and contradictions of modern sociology and social theory. Its conclusion is twofold. (...) First, that Rose retrieves the absolute as fundamental to the meaning of social and political critique, and second that, in the face of demands for radical political action, not least in Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach, it is the religious dimension of our political experience that has been consistently overlooked. It is my argument that, in her concept of `the broken middle', Rose does not overcome the gap between theory and practice, but she does comprehend it as a way of life, one characterized by human struggling and failing. This way of life calls us to `mind the gap'. (shrink)

This article explores the conviction that the durability of communities is contingent, at least in part, on the conception of reason in play. It proposes that prospects for building and sustaining community areenhanced to the degree that rationalistic theories of rationality are rejected. The resulting equivocation in the processes of rule-making, moral thinking, analysis, and critique, while problematic, will bepreferable to the alternative and caricatured approaches premised on a strong division between reason and its so-called others. This desirable equivocation involves (...) an analysis of the role of trust in human relations and a revised conception of reason developed by philosopher and social critic Gillian Rose (1947–1995). Through an analysis of Rose’s commentary on the folk legend of Camelot and the phenomenology of friendship, this article tries to show how relations constrained by alterity can be transformed. (shrink)

This chapter examines the relationship between feminist theory and critical theory in Gillian Howie’s Between Feminism and Materialism, and the relation of both to philosophy. The chapter suggests that the relation between feminist theory and critical theory is a contradictory one in which the partners are at the same time close and yet estranged. It examines how Howie characterises this state of affairs and affirms her aim of 'putting Critical Theory to work for feminist theory’, explaining how her return (...) to a set of revivified Marxist categories does this. However, it also argues that Howie’s specific attempt to bring a certain aspect of critical theory to bear on the understanding of sex and gender is limited by its relation to feminist philosophy. But it ends by suggesting that the work undertaken in Between Feminism and Materialism can be extended in another direction to begin the project of a critical theory of sex and a critique of the gender industry. (shrink)

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?—Marilynne RobinsonMarilynne Robinson, Gilead (London: Virago Press, 2004), p. 280.Preamble: Going the Bloody Hard WayThe writings of Pamela Sue Anderson and Gillian Howie have been, and continue to be, important in helping to shape the development of my own philosophical vision. Yet my commitment to (a (...) fairly traditional) theism marks a point of departure between my work and theirs. Given their quite reasonable disinclination to persist with traditional theism, especially its concept of divine transcendence,Not only does an uncritical approach to the theistic conception of divine transcendence serve to sacralise hierarchical relationship between men and women, such that the latter is subordinate to the former, it also, as Anderson reminds us, sustains epistemic and practical norms that quietly yet pot. (shrink)

This article explores the conviction that the durability of communities is contingent, at least in part, on the conception of reason in play. It proposes that prospects for building and sustaining community areenhanced to the degree that rationalistic theories of rationality are rejected. The resulting equivocation in the processes of rule-making, moral thinking, analysis, and critique, while problematic, will bepreferable to the alternative and caricatured approaches premised on a strong division between reason and its so-called others. This desirable equivocation involves (...) an analysis of the role of trust in human relations and a revised conception of reason developed by philosopher and social critic Gillian Rose. Through an analysis of Rose’s commentary on the folk legend of Camelot and the phenomenology of friendship, this article tries to show how relations constrained by alterity can be transformed. (shrink)

The present special issue of Sophia on ‘feminist philosophy of religion’ is dedicated to Gillian O. Howie who died in 2013. This essay is a short obituary touching on Howie’s philosophical and personal legacy. The intention is to give a brief overview of Howie as a courageous woman with boundless intellectual curiosity and passionate commitments to feminist activities; these include writing and living her philosophical vision for creating a just society with collective political action. Howie inspired both women and (...) men in philosophy—especially, but not only, feminist philosophers of religion—with her work on the critical role of sexual difference in life today. (shrink)

Introduction -- Gillian Rose, philosopher of law -- On dualism -- On traditionalism -- On quietism -- Metaphysics of law -- Phenomenology of law -- After transcendence.

The interactions between literature and science and between literature and psychoanalysis have been among the most thriving areas for interdisciplinary study in recent years. Work in these 'open fields' has taught us to recognize the interdependence of different cultures of knowledge and experience, revealing the multiple ways in which science, literature, and psychoanalysis have been mutually enabling and defining, as well as corrective and contestatory of each other. Inspired by Gillian Beer's path-breaking work on literature and science, this volume (...) presents fourteen new essays by leading American and British writers. They focus on the evolutionary sciences in the nineteeth-century; the early years of psychoanalysis, from Freud to Ella Freeman Sharpe; and the modern development of the physical sciences. Drawing on recent debates within the history of science, psychoanalytic literary criticism, intellectual history, and gender studies, the volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of the formation of knowledge. Among its recurrent themes are: curiosity and epistemology; 'growth', 'maturity', and 'coming of age' as structuring metaphors ; taxonomy; sleep and dreaming and elusive knowledge; the physiology of truth; and the gender politics of scientific theory and practice. The essays also reflect Beer's extensive influence as a literary critic, with close readings of works by Charlotte Brontë, Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Edith Ayrton Zangwill, Charlotte Haldane, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Karin Boye. (shrink)

I was quite excited when I first read Restall and Russell’s (2010) paper. For two reasons. First, because the paper provides rigorous formulations and formal proofs of implication barrier the- ses, namely “theses [which] deny that one can derive sentences of one type from sentences of another”. Second (and primarily), because the paper proves a general theorem, the Barrier Con- struction Theorem, which unifies implication barrier theses concerning four topics: generality, necessity, time, and normativity. After thinking about the paper, I (...) am satisfied with its treatment of the first three topics, namely generality, necessity, and time. But I am not satisfied with its treatment of normativity, so my comments are exclusively on that topic. (shrink)

The contemporary American philosopher David Velleman recently noted, “Love is a moral emotion precisely in the sense that its spirit is closely akin to that of morality.”1 Although their kindred spirits are manifest, it is the tension between love and morality that at first glance is striking. Love seems to be supremely personal, unique to one individual and directed at another for highly contingent and possibly mysterious reasons. Even if Kantian or Utilitarian fantasies of objective morality are dismissed, the common (...) alternatives that put emphasis on community values or obligation to the Other are still distant from an affect directed…. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).