In this paper, I support a hybrid form of expressivism called constructive ecumenical expressivism (CEE) which I have previously used (to attempt) to resolve the gamer’s dilemma. (Young, 2016. Resolving the gamer’s dilemma. London: Palgrave Macmillan.) In support of CEE, I argue that the various other attempts at either resolving, dissolving or resisting the dilemma are consistent with CEE’s moral framework. That is, with its way of explaining what a claim to morality is, with how moral norms are established, (...) with the role intuition is able to play in establishing these norms, and therefore with how the gamer’s dilemma can be resolved. I also demonstrate, more broadly, how CEE advocates robust relativism as a means of justifying the constructed moral norm’s normative credentials, and therefore how one society’s norm can be judged morally superior to another’s. (shrink)

The problems and the keys to their solutions -- Ontology of artworks -- Copyright and its limits -- Token appropriation -- Pattern appropriation -- Appropriation of artistic elements.

The pregnant subject has a unique experience of her body. The dichotomy between self and other, self and world, breaks down. She can experience a positive narcissism and sense of process. Some conceptualizations and practices of contemporary medicine, however, can alienate the pregnant subject from this bodily experience. Keywords: Embodiment, Split Subjectivity CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

In this paper I defend the traditional anti-intellectualist claim that a form of knowing how to Φ (e.g., knowing how to play the guitar) exists that entails the ability to Φ (play the guitar), and that this knowledge cannot be reduced to propositions (such as ‘S knows a way _w_ to Φ’, where _w_ is a means of Φing). I also argue that S can know how to Φ in the absence of the ability to Φ, and for this knowledge (...) to be likewise irreducible to propositions. This is made possible when one distinguishes between type and token actions. Moreover, I contend that type and token actions, and one’s ability to engage in them, are differentiated at the level of motor representations. Motor representations provide an alternate means of grading knowledge how to that presented by Carlotta Pavese, insofar as this form of gradable knowledge is likewise irreducible to propositions. (shrink)

In this beautifully written account, Julian Young provides the most comprehensive biography available today of the life and philosophy of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Young deals with the many puzzles created by the conjunction of Nietzsche's personal history and his work: why the son of a Lutheran pastor developed into the self-styled 'Antichrist'; why this archetypical Prussian came to loath Bismarck's Prussia; and why this enemy of feminism preferred the company of feminist women. Setting Nietzsche's thought (...) in the context of his times - the rise of Prussian militarism, anti-Semitism, Darwinian science, the 'Youth' and emancipationist movements, as well as the 'death of God' - Young emphasises the decisive influence of Plato and of Richard Wagner on Nietzsche's attempted reform of Western culture. (shrink)

For centuries philosophers have wrestled with the dichotomy between individual freedom on the one hand and collective solidarity on the other. Yet today there is a growing realization that this template is fundamentally flawed. In this book, Mark Young embraces and advocates a more holistic concept of freedom; one which is not merely defined negatively but which positively provides the preconditions for individuals to actively exercise their autonomy and to flourish as human beings in the process. Young posits (...) the idea of 'freedom in community' and traces its origin back to Aristotle. Taking as his premise that humans are deeply social beings who live their lives intricately interwoven with each other, he examines what type of political community is relevant for us in this post-Classical, post-Enlightenment and, indeed, post-Existential world. Identifying the failure of traditional 'statist' models of politics, Young instead argues for a civil society: a globally interlinked and free set of liberal communities as the best context for nourishing human flourishing. In this way we can achieve a proper setting for Eudaimonia in a modern sense. (shrink)

Now, for the first time, a philosopher undertakes a systematic investigation of the moral and aesthetic issues to which cultural appropriation gives rise. Cultural appropriation is a pervasive feature of the contemporary world Young offers the first systematic philosophical investigation of the moral and aesthetic issues to which cultural appropriation gives rise Tackles head on the thorny issues arising from the clash and integration of cultures and their artifacts Questions considered include: “Can cultural appropriation result in the production of (...) aesthetically successful works of art?” and “Is cultural appropriation in the arts morally objectionable?” Part of the highly regarded New Directions in Aesthetics series. (shrink)

In Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), an apparent tension arises between his pursuit of a self-proclaimed “new theory of everything,” or general ontology, and his assertion that any ontology must be able to account for distinctions among various regions of being. This paper delves into this tension between universality and specificity, particularly concerning the question of animal ontology, and examines the potential for constructing an object-oriented animal ontology. By juxtaposing Harman’s perspectives with those of Matthew Calarco and other scholars, I (...) aim to demonstrate the feasibility of developing an animal ontology using the framework of OOO. (shrink)

What is the meaning of life? In today's secular, post-religious scientific world, this question has become a serious preoccupation. But it also has a long history: many major philosophers have thought deeply about it, as Julian Young so vividly illustrates in this thought-provoking second edition of _The Death of God and the Meaning of Life_. Three new chapters explore Søren Kierkegaard’s attempts to preserve a Christian answer to the question of the meaning of life, Karl Marx's attempt to translate (...) this answer into naturalistic and atheistic terms, and Sigmund Freud’s deep pessimism about the possibility of any version of such an answer. Part 1 presents an historical overview of philosophers from Plato to Marx who have believed in a meaning of life, either in some supposed ‘other’ world or in the future of this world. Part 2 assesses what happened when the traditional structures that give life meaning began to erode. With nothing to take their place, these structures gave way to the threat of nihilism, to the appearance that life is meaningless. Young looks at the responses to this threat in chapters on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Foucault and Derrida. Fully revised and updated throughout, this highly engaging exploration of fundamental issues will captivate anyone who’s ever asked themselves where life’s meaning really lies. It also makes a perfect historical introduction to philosophy, particularly to the continental tradition. (shrink)

An application of Young's Habermasian critical theory of education to classroom communication problems of teachers in schools, with a special focus on the question/answer cycle and its educational role. The book uses classroom transcripts extensively in the analysis.

Crick and Koch’s 1990 “neurobiological theory of consciousness” sparked the race for the physical correlates of subjective experience. 30 years later, cognitive sciences trend toward consideration of the brain’s electromagnetic field as the primary seat of consciousness, the “to be” of the individual. Recent advancements in laboratory tools have preceded an influx of studies reporting a synchronization between the neuronally generated EM fields of interacting individuals. An embodied and enactive neuroscientific approach has gained traction in the wake of these findings (...) wherein consciousness and cognition are theorized to be regulated and distributed beyond the individual. We approach this frontier to extend the implications of person-to-person synchrony to propose a process of combination whereby coupled individual agents merge into a hierarchical cognitive system to which they are subsidiary. Such is to say, the complex mammalian consciousness humans possess may not be the tip of the iceberg, but another step in a succeeding staircase. To this end, the axioms and conjectures of General Resonance Theory are utilized to describe this phenomenon of interpersonal resonant combination. Our proposal describes a coupled system of spatially distributed EM fields that are synchronized through recurrent, entraining behavioral interactions. The system, having achieved sufficient synchronization, enjoys an optimization of information flow that alters the conscious states of its merging agents and enhances group performance capabilities. In the race for the neurobiological correlates of subjective experience, we attempt the first steps in the journey toward defining the physical basis of “group consciousness.” The establishment of a concrete account of the combination of consciousness at a scale superseding individual human consciousness remains speculation, but our suggested approach provides a framework for empirical testing of these possibilities. (shrink)

In this concise book based on his Arne Ryde Lectures in 2002, Young suggests a conceptual framework for studying strategic learning and highlights theoretical developments in the area. He discusses the interactive learning problem; reinforcement and regret; equilibrium; conditional no-regret learning; prediction, postdiction, and calibration; fictitious play and its variants; Bayesian learning; and hypothesis testing. Young's framework emphasizes the amount of information required to implement different types of learning rules, criteria for evaluating their performance, and alternative notions of (...) equilibrium to which they converge. He also stresses the limits of what can be achieved: for a given type of game and a given amount of information, there may exist no learning procedure that satisfies certain reasonable criteria of performance and convergence. In short, Young has provided a valuable primer that delineates what we know, what we would like to know, and the limits of what we can know, when we try to learn about a system that is composed of other learners. (shrink)

That the Arctic is undergoing transformative changes driven in large part by external forces is no longer news. The high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, which are not themselves significant sources of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) or short-lived climate pollutants (such as black carbon soot), are experiencing effects attributable to climate change that are equal to or greater than those occurring in any of the planet's other large regions. Prominent among these effects are rising surface temperatures, a deepening (...) of the active layer of the permafrost, the collapse of sea ice, increases in the intensity of coastal storm surges made possible by the retreat of sea ice, the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and the acidification of marine systems. The deposition of black carbon in the high north alone—almost 60 percent of which is thought to originate in Europe—appears to account for half or more of the increase in temperature occurring in the Arctic. Positive feedback processes, such as lowered albedo (that is, the capacity of Earth's surface to reflect incoming solar radiation back into space) following the melting of ice at sea and snow on land, have the effect of magnifying the impact of these external forces. Nowhere is the challenge of adapting to the impacts of climate change more urgent than in Arctic coastal communities confronted with the need to relocate to avoid physical destruction. And nowhere are the threats to individual species (for example, the polar bear) and whole ecosystems more severe than they are in the Arctic, where biophysical changes are outstripping the capacity of plants and animals to adapt to altered conditions. (shrink)

Social change to undermine injustice usually should be pursued through democratic processes. A suitably defined model of deliberative democracy articulates how democracy can produce just policies. As usually understood, however, the model of deliberative democracy focuses too much on argument, privileges unity, assumes face‐to‐face discussion, and assumes a norm of order.

Theories of deliberative democracy presume too narrow an understanding of political communication. Several forms of communication additional to argument are important for political debate, especially between members of more dominant and more marginalized groups. Greeting, rhetoric, and narrative each have important functions for public acknowledgement of interlocutors and communication when premises are not shared.

What can we learn about the nature of technology by studying practices of maintenance and repair? This volume addresses this question by bringing together scholarship from philosophers of technology working at the forefront of this emerging and exciting topic. -/- The chapters in this volume explore how attending to maintenance and repair can challenge and complement existing ways of thinking about technology focused on use and design and introduce new philosophical perspectives on the relationship between technology, time and human practice. (...) They examine the significance of maintenance and repair practices at different scales in relation to a diverse range of philosophical traditions and a wide variety of technologies, from urban infrastructure such as bridges and buildings to data technologies such as servers and software systems. Together, the contributions highlight common themes in the philosophical study of maintenance, including the role of skill, the significance of social values and the potential of these practices to transform the technologies to which they are applied. By reflecting on the different ways in which we keep technologies going, from the devices we use in our homes to the large technical systems which surround us, this volume reveals the philosophical significance of practices of maintenance, not only as a source of new insights but also as a resource for enriching our understanding of a variety of existing topics in philosophy. -/- Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of technology, philosophy of engineering and science & technology studies. (shrink)

Residential racial and class segregation produce or exacerbate distributive injustice and political exclusion. Integration as the dispersal of a concentrated minority among the majority, however, often has its own harmful consequences. An alternative ideal of differentiated solidarity combines positive affinity grouping with non‐discrimination and regional government that encourages attention to shared problems and inequality.

The scope of issues of justice extends globally on many issues. Governance of global society therefore needs transformed institutions. A vision of global democracy assumes a relational model of self‐determination as non‐domination in the context of inclusive and stronger global institutions.

Stephen Stich has criticized the possibility of providing a legitimate set of norms for reasoning, since such norms are justified via reference to pretheoretical intuitions. I argue that through a process of perspicuously mapping the belief sphere one can generate a list of intellectual virtues that instrumentally lead to true beliefs. Hence, one does not have to rely on intuitions since the norms of reason are derived from factual claims about the intellectually virtuous agent.

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

This is a clear and lucid account of Nietzsche's philosophy of art, combining exegesis, interpretation and criticism in a judicious balance. Julian Young argues that Nietzsche's thought about art can only be understood in the context of his wider philosophy. In particular, he discusses the dramatic changes in Nietzschean aesthetics against the background of the celebrated themes of the death of God, eternal recurrence, and the idea of the Übermensch. Young then divides Nietzsche's career and his philosophy of (...) art into four distinct phases, but suggests that these phases describe a circle. An attempt at world-affirmation is made in the central phases, but Nietzsche is predominantly influenced at the beginning and end of his career by a Schopenhauerian pessimism. At the beginning and end art is important because it 'redeems' us from life. (shrink)

Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the greatest writers and German philosophers of the nineteenth century. His work influenced figures as diverse as Wagner, Freud and Nietzsche. Best known as a pessimist, he was one of the few philosophers read and admired by Wittgenstein. In this comprehensive introduction, Julian Young covers all the main aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Beginning with an overview of Schopenhauer's life and work, he introduces the central aspects of his metaphysics fundamental to understanding his work as (...) a whole: his philosophical idealism and debt to the philosophy of Kant; his attempt to answer the question of what the world is; his account of science; and in particular his idea that 'will' is the essence of all things. Julian Young then introduces and assesses Schopenhauer's aesthetics, which occupy a central place in his philosophy. He carefully examines Schopenhauer's theories of the sublime, artistic genius and music, before assessing his ethics of compassion, his arguments for pessimism and his account of 'salvation'. In the final chapter, he considers Schopenhauer's legacy and his influence on the thought of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, making this an ideal starting point for those coming to Schopenhauer for the first time. (shrink)

In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche observes that Greek tragedy gathered people together as a community in the sight of their gods, and argues that modernity can be rescued from 'nihilism' only through the revival of such a festival. This is commonly thought to be a view which did not survive the termination of Nietzsche's early Wagnerianism, but Julian Young argues, on the basis of an examination of all of Nietzsche's published works, that his religious communitarianism (...) in fact persists through all his writings. What follows, it is argued, is that the mature Nietzsche is neither an 'atheist', an 'individualist', nor an 'immoralist': he is a German philosopher belonging to a German tradition of conservative communitarianism - though to claim him as a proto-Nazi is radically mistaken. This important reassessment will be of interest to all Nietzsche scholars and to a wide range of readers in German philosophy. (shrink)

ArgumentNeuroscience research has created multiple versions of the human brain. The “social brain” is one version and it is the subject of this paper. Most image-based research in the field of social neuroscience is task-driven: the brain is asked to respond to a cognitive (perceptual) stimulus. The tasks are derived from theories, operational models, and back-stories now circulating in social neuroscience. The social brain comes with a distinctive back-story, an evolutionary history organized around three, interconnected themes: mind-reading, empathy, and the (...) emergence of self-consciousness. This paper focuses on how empathy has been incorporated into the social brain and redefined via parallel research streams, employing a shared, imaging technology. The concluding section describes how these developments can be understood as signaling the emergence of a new version of human nature and the unconscious. My argument is not that empathy in the social brain is a myth, but rather that it is served by a myth consonant with the canons of science. (shrink)

Although it is not yet officially recognized as a clinical entity which is diagnosable, Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) has been included in section III for further study in the DSM-5 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA, 2013). This is important because there is increasing evidence that people of all ages, in particular teens and young adults, are facing very real and sometimes very severe consequences in daily life resulting from an addictive use of online games. This article summarizes general (...) aspects of IGD including diagnostic criteria and arguments for the classification as an addictive disorder including evidence from neurobiological studies. Based on previous theoretical considerations and empirical findings, this paper examines the use of one recently proposed model, the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model, for inspiring future research and for developing new treatment protocols for IGD. The I-PACE model is a theoretical framework that explains symptoms of Internet addiction by looking at interactions between predisposing factors, moderators, and mediators in combination with reduced executive functioning and diminished decision making. Finally, the paper discusses how current treatment protocols focusing on Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Internet addiction (CBT-IA) fit with the processes hypothesized in the I-PACE model. (shrink)

A bewildering array of accounts of the ontology of musical works is available. Philosophers have held that works of music are sets of performances, abstract, eternal sound-event types, initiated types, compositional action types, compositional action tokens, ideas in a composer’s mind and continuants that perdure. This paper maintains that questions in the ontology of music are, in Rudolf Carnap’s sense of the term, pseudo-problems. That is, there is no alethic basis for choosing between rival musical ontologies. While we have no (...) alethic basis for choosing any ontology of music, pragmatic reasons can be given for favoring certain ontologies of musical works over others. (shrink)

Although the language-related fiber pathways in the human brain, such as the superior longitudinal fasciculus and arcuate fasciculus, are already well-known, understanding more sophisticated cortical regions connected by the fiber tracts is essential to scrutinize the structural connectivity of language circuits. With the regions of interest that were selected based on the Brainnetome atlas, the fiber orientation distribution estimation method for tractography was used to produce further elaborate connectivity information. The results indicated that both fiber bundles had two distinct connections (...) with the prefrontal cortex. The SLF-II and dorsal AF are mainly connected to the rostrodorsal part of the inferior parietal cortex and lateral part of the fusiform gyrus with the inferior frontal junction, respectively. In contrast, the SLF-III and ventral AF were primarily linked to the anterior part of the supramarginal gyrus and superior part of the temporal cortex with the inferior frontal cortex, including the Broca's area. Moreover, the IFJ in the PFC, which has rarely been emphasized as a language-related subregion, also had the strongest connectivity with the previously known language-related subregions among the PFC; consequently, we proposed that these specific regions are interconnected via the SLF and AF within the PFC, IPC, and temporal cortex as language-related circuitry. (shrink)

This book discusses the structure of Yijing in relation to ideas developed in the West and presents the Jeongyeok to overcome any hierarchical system implied by the Yijing. Both the Yijing and the Jeongyeok are also examined as textual sources for kindling a discussion about divine impersonality and personality for the meeting of East and West.

This article serves as a brief constellation of thought working towards a ruderal futurism. Proposed as an alternative of the granary logic of state and capital, the ruderal is positioned as a force functioning in the aftermath of – and in opposition to – the composite human/state/cereal-turned-capitalist ordering of nature. The role of agriculture and cereal crop production in early states as well as its exalted status within modern nation state and attendant culture is examined as a departure point for (...) experimental approaches to their negation. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive, accessible survey of Western philosophy of music from Pythagoras to the present. Its narrative traces themes and schools through history, in a sequence of five chapters that survey the ancient, medieval, early modern, modern and contemporary periods. Its wide-ranging coverage includes medieval Islamic thinkers, Continental and analytic thinkers, and neglected female thinkers such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). All aspects of the philosophy of music are discussed, including music and the cosmos, music's value, music's relation (...) to the other arts, the problem of opera, the origins of musical genius, music's emotional impact, the moral effects of music, the ontology of musical works, and the relevance of music's historical context. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars in philosophy and musicology, and all who are interested in the ways in which philosophers throughout history have thought about music. (shrink)

Abraham Singer defends the Market Failures Approach to business ethics from the objection that the MFA cannot account for the moral value of disruptive innovation. Singer argues that critics who attack the MFA on these grounds face a dilemma: either accept the MFA, along with its general prohibition on disruptive innovation, or reject the very idea that business and market competition should be understood as rule-governed activities at all. This commentary argues that the dilemma Singer poses to MFA critics is (...) a false one. (shrink)

This paper argues that the propositions “S knowing how to Φ entails that S has the ability to Φ” and “S knowing how to Φ does not entail the ability to Φ” can both be true and non-contradictory when true, so long as one distinguishes between Φ as an action-type and Φ as an action-token. In order to defend this claim, recent work by Young, Levy, and Gaultier is discussed with a view to integrating into a coherent and novel (...) position certain commonalities within their respective views. As a consequence of this integration, a revised version of Young’s type-token action clause is suggested that provides comprehensive support for the assertion that knowing how to Φ both does and does not necessitate the ability to Φ, depending on whether one is talking about action types or action tokens. (shrink)