Michael Abecassis 'Le Petit Theatre de Renoir: Martin O'Shaughnessy's _Jean Renoir_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 8, March 2004.

The discussion that follows establishes a three-way conversation between two films, Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps (Time Out [2001]) and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence [2008]) and one work of theory, Maurizio Lazzarato’s La Fabrique de l’homme endetté: essai sur la condition néo-libérale (The Making of Indebted Man: Essay on the Neoliberal Condition [2011]). The subject of the conversation will be neo-liberal governance and the role of debt within it. Part of Lazzarato’s argument regards the (...) central role debt has played since the start of the global financial crisis in 2008. But another part of his argument is that during the neo-liberal era, debt has been a, if not the .. (shrink)

_France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema_ Edited by Lucy Mazdon London: Wallflower Press, 2001 ISBN 1 903364-08-6 pbk 180 pp.

Maurizio Lazzarato is an Italian sociologist and philosopher who lives and works in France. He collaborated on collective works with important figures like Antonio Negri and Yann Moulier-Boutang in the 1990s and has been a frequent contributor to the journal Multitudes in which the same two intellectuals were also leading voices. During the same period, he was closely involved as a theorist and activist in the long and inventive struggle of the intermittents du spectacle, French cultural workers defending a social (...) security regime that took particular account of their unstable employment and the way in which their creativity overflowed their periods of paid activity. This involvement fed into a broader... (shrink)

I have no comment to make on the aesthetic merits of these verses. I have put them at the head of my discussion because they happen to introduce a cluster of concepts connected with forgiveness: pride, love, hate, God, friendship, goodwill, eternity, offence, condemnation, resentment, blame. We may think that some, but not all, of these have essential connections with the concept in which we are interested. And we may, of course, think that the list is incomplete. Other obvious candidates (...) spring to mind: pity, for example, repentance, compassion, punishment and pardoning. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy puts forward a bold and original theory of consciousness, one of the most fascinating but puzzling aspects of human existence. He analyses consciousness into purely psychological constituents, according pre-eminence to its epistemological power; the result is an integrated picture of the conscious mind in its natural physical setting. Consciousness and the World is a rich and exciting book, a major contribution to our understanding of the mind.

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness (...) in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

The French public has a distinct taste for realist representations of public crisis. Citing figures from the Centre National de la Cinématographie et de l’Image Animée (CNC), Sarah Cooper has shown that interest in documentary film is steadily on the rise in France (9), as attested to by the growing number of documentary festivals and documentary films recently released in theaters. Within this context, Martin O’Shaughnessy links the popularity of the social documentary genre to a series of political developments (...) in France, such as the 1995 protests against the infamous “Plan Juppé,” which aimed to slash public spending, and the French electorate’s spurning in 2005 of the Constitution proposed by the European .. (shrink)

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness (...) in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

The aim is to discover a principle governing the formation of the dream. Now dreaming has an analogy with consciousness in that it is a seeming-consciousness. Meanwhile consciousness exhibits a tripartite structure consisting of understanding oneself to be situated in a world endowed with given properties, the mental processes responsible for the state, and the concrete perceptual encounter of awareness with the world. The dream analogues of these three elements are investigated in the hope of discovering the source of the (...) kinship between dream and consciousness. The dream world proves to be a logically impossible world, limited by nothing more than sheer narratability. The internal world of the dreamer is notable for the limitlessness of the scope allotted to the imagination, together with the presence of two important phenomena encountered in waking consciousness: a measure of interiority, and the positing of a world. Finally, the dream further replicates consciousness in so far as we seem in dreaming concretely to experience our physical surrounds in the form of perceptual imagining. These properties play their part in enabling the dream to be a seeming-consciousness. At the same time they are such as to necessitate its not being consciousness. It is proposed that in the light of these properties, and those composing the state of consciousness, the dream simply is the imagining of consciousness. (shrink)

Additional arguments for sense‐data begin by defending the claim that perceptual sensations are psychological individuals, examples being phosphenes, after‐images, and the ‘ringings’ of ‘tinnitus’. Five arguments for sense‐data follow. First, that since corresponding to every veridical visual field is a possible non‐veridical visual field of sensations, the latter merely needs a different and regular outer cause to be deemed veridical. Second, since bodily sensation experience is extremely strong evidence for the existence of a matching sensation cause, the experience of ‘ringing’ (...) must be strong evidence that a ‘ringing’ sensation is its cause, and this holds in the veridical hearing of a ringing sound. Third, that it is inconceivable that one has a truly visual experience of a red visual field, and absolutely nothing red‐looking be there before one had noticed. Fourth, that the experience of sound might have had a different developmental history, in which first there was merely experience of auditory sensation, and then over millennia such experience gradually found itself caused by regular outer phenomena, thereby constituting the hearing of sound. And a fifth argument that resembles the first argument. (shrink)

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness (...) in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy; XII*—Processes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 215–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteli.

Brian O'Shaughnessy; XI*—Seeing the Light, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 85, Issue 1, 1 June 1985, Pages 193–218, https://doi.org/10.1093/aris.

Mental health, in one awake, guarantees that person knowledge of the central phenomenon-contents of his own mind, under an adequate classificatory heading. This is the primary thesis of the paper. That knowledge is not itself a phenomenon-content, and usually is achieved in no way. Rather, it stems from the natural accessibility of mental phenomenon-contents to wakeful consciousness. More precisely, when mental normality obtains, such knowledge necessarily obtains in wakeful consciousness. This thesis conjoins a version of Cartesianism with the concepts of (...) mental health and human nature. Demonstration of the thesis requires that we show that a particular human mental potential fails fully to be realized when such self-awareness is impaired. That potential is for consciousness of the world (w-Cs), wakefulness. W-Cs divides into consciousness of the outer world (ow-Cs), and consciousness of the inner world (iw-Cs), and we need to demonstrate an essential dependence of ow-Cs upon iw-Cs. Now w-Cs is the adoption of the correct occurrent epistemological posture to the world, and this involves free rational determination of occurrent cognitive attitudes via the internal systematized knowledge of the world, which requires adequate awareness of mental phenomenon-contents. Therefore ow-Cs needs iw-Cs. This is displayed in mental structural accounts of hypnotic, drunken, and psychotic disturbances of consciousness. (For we endorse a structural account of mental health.) We show how failures of self-consciousness entail disturbed modes of determination of cognitive attitudes by the knowledge-system, which is loss of contact with the personal yet true internal representation of the world, which is loss of contact with reality, which is a disturbance both of w-Cs and of consciousness itself. (shrink)

In this book Elizabeth Spillius and Edna O'Shaughnessy explore the development of the concept of projective identification, which had important antecedents in the work of Freud and others, but was given a specific name and definition by Melanie Klein. They describe Klein's published and unpublished views on the topic, and then consider the way the concept has been variously described, evolved, accepted, rejected and modified by analysts of different schools of thought and in various locations – Britain, Western Europe, North (...) America and Latin America. The authors believe that this unusually widespread interest in a particular concept and its varied ‘fate’ has occurred not only because of beliefs about its clinical usefulness in the psychoanalytic setting but also because projective identification is a universal aspect of human interaction and communication. _Projective Identification: The Fate of a Concept_ will appeal to any psychoanalyst or psychotherapist who uses the ideas of transference and counter-transference, as well as to academics wanting further insight into the evolution of this concept as it moves between different cultures and countries. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy; XII*—Processes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 215–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteli.

Martin O'Shaughnessy _Jean Renoir_ Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000 ISBN 0719050626 hb; 0719050634 pb 251 pp.

Brian O'Shaughnessy; XI*—Seeing the Light, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 85, Issue 1, 1 June 1985, Pages 193–218, https://doi.org/10.1093/aris.

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness (...) in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy; V—Material Objects and Perceptual Standpoint, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 77–98, https.

This volume provides the fundamentals needed to understand the various explanatory systems and methodologies used in the behavior sciences and to evaluate their findings, in particular the literature and findings on buyer behavior. In clear prose, the author discusses the key issues in modern philosophy, psychology, and sociology and their relevance for the student of marketing and buyer behavior. O'Shaughnessy exploits insights from many disciplines as to the many ways to derive understanding of behavioral phenomena, making it accessible not only (...) to academics and students of marketing, but to professionals as well. (shrink)

"Drawing on art, poetry, interviews, and book excerpts, Meditations on nature, meditations on silence explores the beauty and mystery of the natural world and ...

American naturalists all agree that traditional theism, with its belief in a supernatural personal god who is absolutely transcendent to nature, is inconsistent with the view that nature is all that there is. Yet despite the rejection of the traditional God of theism, some naturalists have found pantheism, with its belief in a divinity thoroughly immanent to nature, congenial. Nonetheless, no philosophically rigorous and systematic juxtaposition of the metaphysical and ethical commitments of pantheism with those of naturalism has been undertaken. (...) This essay seeks to fill that gap by investigating the viability of pantheism from the perspective of the ordinal naturalism of Justus Buchler. Several reasons can be .. (shrink)

In the brief autobiographical remarks found in the preface of Stuart Rosenbaum’s Pragmatism and the Reflective Life, we discover that Rosenbaum began his philosophical career in the tradition of analytic philosophy. It is precisely this background in the analytic tradition that gives weight to the powerful criticisms he levels against that tradition as he wends his way through his new-found love, American pragmatism. He informs us that American pragmatism has taught him to appreciate far more of human experience than is (...) tolerated in the analytic tradition and in Anglo-European philosophy in general. He believes that it is the American pragmatist tradition that has exhibited a holistic picture of human experience .. (shrink)