We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory-affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to incendiary artworks that provoke mass boycotts, many of the images in our media culture strike as beyond the pale of consumption. Yet what does it mean to proclaim a media object "unwatchable": disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? Appealing to a broad academic and general readership, Unwatchable (...) offers multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images that circulate in our global visual culture, from cinema, television, and video games through museums and classrooms to laptops, smart phones, and social media platforms. This anthology assembles 60 original essays by scholars, theorists, critics, archivists, curators, artists, and filmmakers who offer their own responses to the broadly suggestive question: What do you find unwatchable? The diverse answers include iconoclastic artworks that have been hidden from view, dystopian images from the political sphere, horror movies, TV advertisements, classic films, and recent award-winners. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Dogmatic Slumber ofHume Scholarship Nicholas Capaldi State of the Art If one were to enumerate the issues that have received the most attention in Hume scholarship during the last half century, the list would undoubtedly feature the so-called principle ofinduction, causal necessity, the self, the relationship offact and value, scepticism, and the argument from design. If one were to ask what is the popular consensus on Hume's (...) position vis-à-vis these issues, the answer would be something Uke the following: Hume in his Treatise, first challenges his reader to produce a single simple idea that is not a copy of a corresponding impression. And he then abandons the inductive pattern of argumentation so as tobe free to use his inductively supported principle—the principle that every simple idea is a copy of a previous impression—as the foundation of his deductive arguments that we have no rational title to believe in the existence of causal connexions, objective moral values, continuing selves, or physical processes independent of our experience.1 Depending on how they are understood, each of these assertions about Hume could be either false or misleading. We note, for example, that Hume made complex ideas and not simple ideas the centre ofhis philosophy; thatcomplex ideas are not whollyreducible to simple ideas, and therefore not analysable without remainder into component impressions; that complex ideas were explicated by Hume in terms of the natural relations that spring from the mind's association of ideas (Hume claimed that "the principle of the association of ideas" was his major innovation in philosophy);2 that the associative activity of the mind is an instance, in Hume, ofthe self, notits denial; that the positive Humean conception ofthe selfis given in book 2 on the passions, which many never read; that Hume's entire Newtonian programme in the Treatise is based on the assumption that there are physical processes independent of human experience; that Hume did not deny causal connections, only the philosophical "necessity" that others ascribe to causal connections, and that he did so in the interest ofexplicating how Volume XVIII Number 2 117 NICHOLAS CAPALDI Newton's physicshadreplacedAristotelian physics; and, finally, Hume argued for the intersubjective validity ofconventional moral values on transcendental grounds. Few, ifany, ofthese positive points made here about Hume are new, mosthaving already appeared somewhere in the secondary literature. Yet these points have had little cumulative impact. The reason for this is that we are all always working under or against a pervasive misrepresentation of Hume. The thesis ofthis paper is that despite the best efforts ofa number of writers, starting all the way back with Kant and including John Davis, a canonic misreading of Hume continues to haunt textbooks, courses in the history of philosophy and philosophical education in general, journals, endless dreary dissertations, programme committees, and the minds of Hume scholars. We hope that by identifying and spelling out the programmatic nature of the canonic misreading, Hume scholarship will be awakened from its dogmatic slumber. What is the origin of the present canonic misreading of Hume?3 Some clue can be gained by noting the kind of unity the misreading quoted above imposes on Hume. The misreading derives all ofHume's positions in neat deductive order from Hume's supposed epistemology. Itmakesitappearasifeverypositionis the natural logical consequence of Hume's alleged empiricism. The recent origin of this canonic misreading ofHume is analytic philosophy. The Origin ofthe Canonic Misreading ofHume Analytic philosophy has been and remains the dominant school of philosophy in the twentieth century in the English language cultures where Hume is most hkely to be read. Analytic philosophy is itself a product of, and the twentieth century voice of, the Enlightenment Project.4 As an eighteenth century writer, Hume is not only associated with the Enlightenment Project but it is claimed by analytic philosophers that Hume is one of the progenitors of that project5 and therefore one of the progenitors of analytic philosophy itself. In short, the present canonic misreading of Hume originates in the analytic misappropriation of Hume to its own version of the Enlightenment Project. What is the Enlightenment Project? It is generally said that the Enlightenment replaced authority, faith, and tradition with reason... (shrink)

How can our human world – the world we experience and live in – exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That is Our Fundamental Problem. It encompasses all others of science, thought and life. It is the proper task of philosophy to try to improve our conjectures as to how aspects of Our Fundamental Problem are to be solved, and to encourage everyone to think, imaginatively and critically, now and again, about the problem. We (...) need to put the problem centre stage in our thinking, so that our best ideas about it interact fruitfully, in both directions, with our attempts to solve even more important more specialized and particular problems of thought and life. Philosophy pursued in such a fashion has fruitful implications for science, for scholarship, for education, for life, for the fate of the world. (shrink)

The Western world is in the habit of looking at the history of visual art ‘in closeup’ - single image by single image - and receiving its information about art history in that uniquely particulate form. But if instead we distance ourselves a little from the history of art, enough to see it ‘in long-shot’ as it were - i.e. as a more or less continuous, dense flow of images - patterns emerge in the flow which convey new information, (...) which can sometimes be in direct conflict with long-cherished traditional assumptions. If we use the 25,000 plus year of art history in this way as a ‘barium tracer meal’ for cultural evolution itself, it is unexpectedly revealed as punctuated rather than gradual, driven by alternating phases of open and closed growth in the human ecology, each with its own characteristic pressures of cultural selection. As a result human culture itself has two equally valid but opposite ‘fitness landscapes’: in the past 500 years the more successful strand in Western civilization has been the Type-A low-cohesion/ high-agility culture associated with a phase of open evolution involving our species relatively rapid transition from a manual to a machine ecology. The West’s traditional object-based imagery of painting and sculpture has its origins in that period of accelerating pre-industrial and industrial growth with its characteristic ‘economics of plenty’ epitomized by a triumphant capitalism. But the newly-emergent event-based imagery of installations and contextual art of the later twentieth and early twenty-first century is now indicating the gradual emergence (or more properly re-emergence) of the Type-B high-cohesion/lowagility pattern, previously associated with so-called ‘primitive’ cultures, and here with the global consolidation of our new machine ecology in a world increasingly dominated by the economics of scarcity. If that is so, it is probable that the syncretic form of meaning associated with the ‘sticky memes’ of art will increasingly come to challenge the present cultural dominance of analytic meaning, epitomized by the ‘smooth memes’ of science. The resolution of that conflict in evolutionary semantics may have a direct bearing on our species capacity to survive into the future. Whether it will be more decisively resolved within the Western or the Eastern group of civilizations seems at present a very open question. (shrink)

An inquiry into the current ways of knowing, their ramifications, and institutional and noninstitutional artistic practices that provide channels for education from below. Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses and Tools aims to both analyze and speculate about potentials of artistic ecologies, collective learning, and engaged pedagogies to engender new institutionalities. Going beyond tensions between individuals and institutions, Artistic Ecologies examines avenues for collective learning. If learning for life is emancipation—understood not just as a matter of power but of freedom—the essential question (...) that emerges is: What knowledge makes us free and how can institutions help produce it? In search of an answer, this publication’s textual and visual contributions explore sites and practices through which new institutionalities can emerge. Artistic Ecologies comprises essays analyzing current ways of knowing and their ramifications (Marina Garcés, Yayo Herrero and Pirate Care) and portraying alternative ways of forming knowledge through institutional and non-institutional artistic practices (DAAR—Decolonizing Architecture Art Research, Yael Davids, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, The Sensing Salon). Artistic contributions in various formats—poems, drawings, visual essays—by Luna Acosta, CAConrads, Eva Ďurovec, Teuta Gatolin, Margherita Isola, and Jammers illustrate heterodox channels for questioning the dominant forms of knowledge and educating from below. (shrink)

This volume has 41 chapters written to honor the 100th birthday of Mario Bunge. It celebrates the work of this influential Argentine/Canadian physicist and philosopher. Contributions show the value of Bunge’s science-informed philosophy and his systematic approach to philosophical problems. The chapters explore the exceptionally wide spectrum of Bunge’s contributions to: metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political (...) philosophy, medical philosophy, and education. The contributors include scholars from 16 countries. Bunge combines ontological realism with epistemological fallibilism. He believes that science provides the best and most warranted knowledge of the natural and social world, and that such knowledge is the only sound basis for moral decision making and social and political reform. Bunge argues for the unity of knowledge. In his eyes, science and philosophy constitute a fruitful and necessary partnership. Readers will discover the wisdom of this approach and will gain insight into the utility of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This anthology will appeal to researchers, students, and teachers in philosophy of science, social science, and liberal education programmes. 1. Introduction Section I. An Academic Vocation Section II. Philosophy Section III. Physics and Philosophy of Physics Section IV. Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind Section V. Sociology and Social Theory Section VI. Ethics and Political Philosophy Section VII. Biology and Philosophy of Biology Section VIII. Mathematics Section IX. Education Section X. Varia Section XI. Bibliography. (shrink)

Human beings engage works of the arts in many different ways: they sing songs while working, they kiss icons, they create and dedicate memorials. Yet almost all philosophers of art of the modern period have ignored this variety and focused entirely on just one mode of engagement, namely, disinterested attention. Nicholas Wolterstorff asks why this might be, and proposes that almost all philosophers have accepted the grand narrative concerning art in the modern world. It is generally agreed that (...) in the early modern period, members of the middle class in Western Europe increasingly engaged works of the arts as objects of disinterested attention. The grand narrative claims that this change represented the arts coming into their own, and that works of art, so engaged, are socially other and transcendent. Wolterstorff rejects this claim, and offers an alternative framework for thinking about the arts. Central to his alternative framework are the idea of the arts as social practices and the idea of works of the arts as having different meaning in different practices. (shrink)

Recently, I argued that human subjects in artificial wombs (AWs) “share the same moral status as newborns” and so, deserve the same treatment and protections as newborns. This thesis rests on two claims: (A) “Subjects of partial ectogenesis—those that develop in utero for at time before being transferred to AWs—are newborns,” and (B) “Subjects of complete ectogenesis—those who develop in AWs entirely—share the same moral status as newborns.” In response, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis argued that the subject in an AW is (...) “a unique human entity…rather than a fetus or a newborn.” She provides four lines of response to my essay. First, she argues that I have “misconstrued” what birth is. Once we correct that error, it becomes clear that subjects of partial ectogenesis have not been born. Second, she argues that my claims imply that non-implanted embryos (existing in vivo) “would also be ‘born.’” But that is absurd. Third, she claims I fail to “meaningfully respond” to distinctions she draws between subjects of ectogenesis and neonates. Finally, she criticizes my essay for focusing on subjects of AWs rather than focusing on pregnant persons (who should be at the “centre” of debates over AWs). I respond to each of these charges. In doing so, I reaffirm that (contra Romanis) some subjects of ectogenesis are newborns and all subjects of ectogenesis—even those that have not been born—share the same moral status as newborns. (shrink)

The question 'What is intelligence?' may seem simple to answer, but the study and measurement of human intelligence is one of the most controversial subjects in psychology. For much of its history, the focus has been on differences between people, on what it means for one person to be more intelligent than another, and how such differences might have arisen, obscuring efforts to understand the general nature of intelligence. These are obviously fundamental questions, still widely debated and misunderstood. New definitions (...) of intelligence and new factors affecting intelligence are frequently being described, while psychometric testing is applied in most large industries.IQ and Human Intelligence provides a clear, authoritative overview of the main issues surrounding this fascinating area, including the development of IQ tests, the heritability of intelligence, theories of intelligence, environmental effects on IQ, factor analysis, relationship of cognitive psychology to measuring IQ, and intelligence in the social context. The clear, accessible style and numerous explanatory boxes make this the ideal text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in psychology. Online Resource CentreThe Online Resource Centre to accompany IQ and Human Intelligence features the following resources:For registered adopters of the text:- Figures from the book, available to downloadFor students:- Hyperlinks to primary literature articles cited in the and 'Further Reading' sections of the book. (shrink)

BackgroundMulti-centre studies generally cost more than single-centre studies because of larger sample sizes and the need for multiple ethical approvals. Multi-centre studies include clinical trials, clinical quality registries, observational studies and implementation studies. We examined the costs of two large Australian multi-centre studies in obtaining ethical and site-specific approvals.MethodsWe collected data on staff time spent on approvals and expressed the overall cost as a percent of the total budget.ResultsThe total costs of gaining approval were 38 % (...) of the budget for a study of 50 centres (mean cost AUD $6960 per site) and 2 % for a study of 11 centres (mean cost AUD $2300 per site). Seventy-five and 90 % of time was spent on repeated tasks, respectively, and many time-consuming tasks, such as reformatting documents, did nothing to improve the study design or participant safety.ConclusionsImprovements have been made to the ethical approval application system, but more gains could be made without increasing risks of harm to research participants. We propose that ethical review bodies and individual sites publish statistics on how long they take to process approvals which could then be nationally benchmarked. (shrink)

A work of art is an intentional transformation of qi 氣 into a dynamic structure. The philosophy of qi is presented here as a means to develop the aesthetic theories of Richard Wollheim and Eliot Deutsch. Both Wollheim and Deutsch present their arguments, in part, as rejections of George Dickie’s “New Institutional Theory of Art.” I develop a robust qi aesthetic drawn from traditional sources and their contemporary commentaries as a way of joining the debate between Dickie and Wollheim/Deutsch, taking (...) the side of the latter, but attempting to provide a thicker vocabulary and a stronger rationale for challenging Dickie. (shrink)

The emergence of cave art in Europe about 30,000 years ago is widely believed to be evidence that by this time human beings had developed sophisticated capacities for symbolization and communication. However, comparison of the cave art with the drawings made by a young autistic girl, Nadia, reveals surprising similarities in content and style. Nadia, despite her graphic skills, was mentally defective and had virtually no language. I argue in the light of this comparison that the existence of the cave (...) art cannot be the proof which it is usually assumed to be that the humans of the Upper Palaeolithic had essentially ‘modern’ minds. The article includes peer commentary by Paul Bahn, Paul Bloom, Uta Frith, Ezra Zubrow, Steven Mithen, Ian Tattersall, Chris Knight, Chris McManus and Daniel Dennett , with response by Nicholas Humphrey. [Owing to the number of illustrations, the full text for this file is in excess of 1 Mb. .]. (shrink)

Adam Pautz (Pautz, Nanay (ed), Current Controversies in philosophy of perception, Routledge, New York and London, 2017, Pautz, Philosophical Issues 30:257–272, 2020 ) coined the phrase “the Laws of Appearance” for some underappreciated features of perceptual experience. Pautz suggests that the modal status of the Laws presents a puzzle: it is problematic to regard them as necessary, and also problematic to regard them as contingent. This paper presents possible counterexamples to the laws, suggesting that they are contingent as originally stated (...) (Sect. 1 ). But the laws are readily modified so as to express constitutive features of normal human visual experience, and thus understood they are metaphysically necessary (Sect. 2 ). Analogous pictorial laws govern representational painting, and these can be explained by appealing to the representational format of the medium (Sect. 3 ). This invites the question whether there might be format-based explanations of the Laws of Appearance. If so, can the contingency of the format facts be squared with the necessity of the Laws? The paper answers “Yes” to both questions (Sect. 4 ). (shrink)

In _Autonomy_ Nicholas Brown theorizes the historical and theoretical argument for art's autonomy from its acknowledged character as a commodity. Refusing the position that the distinction between art and the commodity has collapsed, Brown demonstrates how art can, in confronting its material determinations, suspend the logic of capital by demanding interpretive attention. He applies his readings of Marx, Hegel, Adorno, and Jameson to a range of literature, photography, music, television, and sculpture, from Cindy Sherman's photography and the novels of (...) Ben Lerner and Jennifer Egan to _The Wire_ and the music of the White Stripes. He demonstrates that through their attention and commitment to form, such artists turn aside the determination posed by the demand of the market, thereby defeating the foreclosure of meaning entailed in commodification. In so doing, he offers a new theory of art that prompts a rethinking of the relationship between art, critical theory, and capitalism. (shrink)

Comparing the ways in which the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio and the Australian cybernetic performance artist Stelarc criticize or defend technological cultural practices, this article argues that Virilio's ambiguous responses to avant-garde art highlight his key ideas far move clearly than his single-minded critique of 'termninal' mass-cultural practices - without any relationship to art - in Polar Inertia and Open Sky. Virlio's The Art of the Motor attacks the strategies of 20th-century technological avant- gardes for their apparent eugenicist and (...) fascist sympathies, but Virilios more recent interviews in Cyberrnonde and Voage d'hiver defend the ways in which the pre-technological avant-gardes resist the realist perspective of photography, and argue that the technological arts should offer similar resistance to the impact of cyberculture. Whereas Virilio concludes that such technological 'resistance' is probably impossible, Stelarc's recent research identifies exceptions to Virilio's rules. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Can Satan Cast Out Satan? Violence and the Birth of the Sacred in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight1Nicholas Bott (bio)Last Summer, Christopher Nolan’s final installment of the Batman trilogy hit theaters. The Dark Knight Rises promised to be the epic conclusion of a hero’s journey, a journey of a man’s transformation into a legend. Little was revealed in the official trailers, except that evil was rising in Gotham (...) City, and so too must The Batman. But in this essay I’d like to suggest that we didn’t need to view The Dark Knight Rises before seeing either evil, or Batman rise; by the end of the second film, evil and Batman have already risen—and together—in the sacred form of The Dark Knight.This essay first elucidates how Bruce Wayne’s strategy to inspire good among the citizens of Gotham, first articulated in Batman Begins, encompasses the hallmarks of Girard’s mimetic theory, including: mimesis, rivalry, scandal, and, finally, the outworking of the mimetic mechanism of the surrogate victim—the scapegoat. Next, this essay takes a closer look at the goodness, or lack thereof, of Batman’s climactic self-sacrifice with its attendant resolution. Finally, this essay demonstrates that interpretations [End Page 239] of Batman’s self-sacrifice in the movie have mirrored the disparate interpretations of Christ’s self-sacrifice, in relation to the climax and resolution of the Passion accounts.Mimetic Structure in Bruce Wayne’s StrategyBeginning With the EndThe final visual the audience is given in The Dark Knight is of Batman escaping on his Batpod. The screenplay’s description of this final scene reads: “The batpod streaks through Gotham’s underground streets, the Batman’s cape fluttering behind. A wraith...”; (TDK, 140).2 Commissioner Gordon’s voice is overheard saying, “... He’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector, a dark knight” (TDK, 140). Bruce Wayne has sacrificed himself for the sake of Gotham. But what kind of sacrifice has he made?3 In the words of Alfred, “The sacrifice he’s making [is]—to not be a hero. To be something more” (TDK, 73). And Batman has become something more. No longer a hero, the language Commissioner Gordon uses to describe Batman on behalf of Gotham is mythical and sacred. Girard understands this sacralization to be the completion of the surrogate victim mechanism, the satanic process whereby the sacrifice of an innocent scapegoat reconciles a community in the midst of crisis and violent upheaval.4 This sacred vision of Batman represents the final stage of the surrogate victim mechanism, providing evidence that the satanic has been at work. But if this is the case, something has gone terribly awry in Bruce Wayne’s strategy to inspire good. With this conclusion in mind, the flaws in Wayne’s strategy as it develops throughout Batman Begins and The Dark Knight become apparent, and correspond with each step in the mimetic process.Mimesis as PlotMimesis, or imitation, stands at the heart of The Dark Knight’s plot because it stands at the heart of Bruce Wayne’s strategy to inspire good. We encounter this strategy in Nolan’s first film, Batman Begins, as Wayne explains to Alfred his reasons for returning to Gotham City:Alfred:Are you coming back to Gotham for long, sir? [End Page 240]Bruce:As long as it takes. I want to show the people their city doesn’t belong to the criminals and the corrupt.Alfred:In the depression, your father nearly bankrupted Wayne Enterprises combating poverty. He believed his example could inspire the wealthy of Gotham to save their city.Bruce:Did it?Alfred:In a way. Their murder shocked the wealthy and the powerful into action.Bruce:People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy. I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man... I’m flesh and blood, I can be ignored, destroyed. But as a symbol... As a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.Alfred:What symbol?Bruce:Something elemental, something terrifying.(Batman Begins)5By invoking the symbolic, Bruce Wayne believes Batman will be... (shrink)

Gadamer's aesthetics demonstrates that the experience of art is grounded in the objectivities of language, history and tradition. By treating words and images as transmittable placeholders for meanings and concepts, hermeneutics gives a persuasive account of how artworks communicate. Davey demonstrates how hermeneutics transforms aesthetic reflection into a poignant attentive practice that is open to the unexpected. This new "poetics" is relevant not only to the understanding of art but also to showing, explaining and defending the cognitive content of the (...) humanities. Hermeneutic aesthetics provides a sound basis for re-thinking humanities disciplines as critical-creative practices able to re-envision the future. (shrink)

The identity of conscious states and brain states must remain a mystery until we find a way of characterising both sides of the equation in terms that have the same ‘dimensions’. In this paper I stress the need for ‘dual currency concepts’ that not only are but can be seen to be as appropriate for talking about, say, the experience of pain as for talking about the corresponding working of the brain. In the light of evolutionary theory I make a (...) radically new proposal for what the common dimension is, centred on the idea of ‘authorship’. (shrink)

A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, philosophers, and cognitive (...) scientists reflect upon the interdisciplinary reach of Chomsky's intellectual contributions. Balancing theoretical rigor with accessibility to the non-specialist, the Companion is organized into eight sections—including the historical development of Chomsky's theories and the current state of the art, comparison with rival usage-based approaches, and the relation of his generative approach to work on linguistic processing, acquisition, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. Later chapters address Chomsky's rationalist critique of behaviorism and related empiricist approaches to psychology, as well as his insistence upon a "Galilean" methodology in cognitive science. Following a brief discussion of the relation of his work in linguistics to his work on political issues, the book concludes with an essay written by Chomsky himself, reflecting on the history and character of his work in his own words. A significant contribution to the study of Chomsky's thought, A Companion to Chomsky is an indispensable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with interest in Noam Chomsky's intellectual legacy as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This essay considers the foundations of reasonable evaluation in the arts. These we argue concern the relations that constitute our experience of art, and the ontology of the art work itself. The being of the artwork, the experience and the interpretation of it all involve over-lapping modes of part–whole relations. The experience of meaningfulness is not an experience of a singular object or framework of meaning as closed and complete but an experience of relational meaning whereby exposure to one (...) set of meaningful relations transforms another in an on-going and open manner. This suggests that the experience of art itself provides the norms for reasonableness of evaluation. These norms are not rules in the sense of offering a method. They are characteristic of the features of an experience of meaningfulness itself. The essay suggests that the reasonableness of a response to a work can be considered in terms of its appropriacy relative to the context of its own horizon and the horizon surrounding the production of the work; its plausibility, that is, its internal coherence and consistency as a reading; whether the structure of the response is consistent with, supplements, or expands the intelligible content of the work; and whether it gives a sense of the latent possibilities still held within a work and intimates where the movement of a work’s subject-matter might. (shrink)

Abstract. A rhesus monkey, Helen, from whom the striate cortex was almost totally removed, was studied intensively over a period of 8 years. During this time she regained an effective, though limited, degree of visually guided behaviour. The evidence suggests that while Helen suffered a permanent loss of `focal vision she retained (initially unexpressed) the capacity for `ambient vision.

I have argued for a picture of decision theory centred on the principle of Rationally Negligible Probabilities. Isaacs argues against this picture on the grounds that it has an untenable implication. I first examine whether my view really has this implication; this involves a discussion of the legitimacy or otherwise of infinite decisions. I then examine whether the implication is really undesirable and conclude that it is not.

Advances in artificial intelligence have raised a basic question about human intelligence: Is human reasoning best emulated by applying task‐specific knowledge acquired from a wealth of prior experience, or is it based on the domain‐general manipulation and comparison of mental representations? We address this question for the case of visual analogical reasoning. Using realistic images of familiar three‐dimensional objects (cars and their parts), we systematically manipulated viewpoints, part relations, and entity properties in visual analogy problems. We compared human (...) performance to that of two recent deep learning models (Siamese Network and Relation Network) that were directly trained to solve these problems and to apply their task‐specific knowledge to analogical reasoning. We also developed a new model using part‐based comparison (PCM) by applying a domain‐general mapping procedure to learned representations of cars and their component parts. Across four‐term analogies (Experiment 1) and open‐ended analogies (Experiment 2), the domain‐general PCM model, but not the task‐specific deep learning models, generated performance similar in key aspects to that of human reasoners. These findings provide evidence that human‐like analogical reasoning is unlikely to be achieved by applying deep learning with big data to a specific type of analogy problem. Rather, humans do (and machines might) achieve analogical reasoning by learning representations that encode structural information useful for multiple tasks, coupled with efficient computation of relational similarity. (shrink)

Acoustical changes in the prosody of mothers’ speech to infants are distinct and near universal. However, less is known about the visible properties of mothers’ infant-directed (ID) speech, and their relation to speech acoustics. Mothers’ head movements were tracked as they interacted with their infants using ID speech, and compared to movements accompanying their adult-directed (AD) speech. Movement measures along three dimensions of head translation, and three axes of head rotation were calculated. Overall, more head movement was found for ID (...) than AD speech, suggesting that mothers exaggerate their visual prosody in a manner analogous to the acoustical exaggerations in their speech. Regression analyses examined the relation between changing head position and changing acoustical pitch ( F0 ) over time. Head movements and voice pitch were more strongly related in ID speech than in AD speech. When these relations were examined across time windows of different durations, stronger relations were observed for shorter time windows (< 5 sec). However, the particular form of these more local relations did not extend or generalize to longer time windows. This suggests that the multimodal correspondences in speech prosody are variable in form, and occur within limited time spans. (shrink)

Acoustical changes in the prosody of mothers’ speech to infants are distinct and near universal. However, less is known about the visible properties of mothers’ infant-directed speech, and their relation to speech acoustics. Mothers’ head movements were tracked as they interacted with their infants using ID speech, and compared to movements accompanying their adult-directed speech. Movement measures along three dimensions of head translation, and three axes of head rotation were calculated. Overall, more head movement was found for ID than AD (...) speech, suggesting that mothers exaggerate their visual prosody in a manner analogous to the acoustical exaggerations in their speech. Regression analyses examined the relation between changing head position and changing acoustical pitch over time. Head movements and voice pitch were more strongly related in ID speech than in AD speech. When these relations were examined across time windows of different durations, stronger relations were observed for shorter time windows. However, the particular form of these more local relations did not extend or generalize to longer time windows. This suggests that the multimodal correspondences in speech prosody are variable in form, and occur within limited time spans. (shrink)

Centring on human perception, attunement to others, and a transcendent conception of the good, Iris Murdoch's intervention in moral philosophy remains an insightful and evocative source for ethical theory. Discerning some pervasive dualisms that hamper its coherence and development, I suggest that her work finds a generative conversation partner in the contemporary metaphysician, William Desmond. Desmond's thought offers promising avenues to overcome these dualisms by repositioning the source and nature of value and by theorising an anti-reductive, relational ontology. Staging a (...) constructive encounter between these two thinkers that preserves Murdoch's distinct prioritisation of attention and individuality within a Desmond-inspired metaphysics, I present a synthetic ethical approach that promotes the ideal of attending to an other—in the givenness of its particularity, manifold surplus, and constitutive relationality—as good in itself. (shrink)

Somewhere in the depths of the Hegelian system there is an answer to any question you care to ask, even if you ask: what lies beyond the State? Because the State is for Hegel a `concrete whole', because it is the context in which all our moral and political self-understanding is grounded, the question of what lies beyond it might be thought particularly difficult for him to answer. Not a bit of it. Towards the end of the Philosophy of Right, (...) beyond the two sections on the State in its internal and external relations, lies the conclusion to the whole work. Beyond the spirits of individual peoples, given substance in their individual states, we find the World Spirit, and, for a philosopher who has been accused of worshipping the State, Hegel locates a great deal in the realm that transcends it, for to the realm of the universal or World Spirit belong art, religion, philosophy — and world history.For world history is about the passing away of states in the interests of a fuller conception of human totality — or freedom, as Hegel puts it — than they had succeeded in embodying, and though that fuller conception may then be successfully embodied in some other state, it is the lesson of world history that no state is immortal. Beyond the state, any state, lies a yet more concrete and yet more universal expression of the freedom of the spirit. Judged by that criterion, tried in the crucible of world-historical change, which usually means war, every state is eventually found wanting. (shrink)

How can the world we live in and see, touch, hear, and smell, the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning, and value - how can all of this exist and flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe, made up of nothing but physical entities such as electrons and quarks? How can anything be of value if everything in the universe is, ultimately, just physics? In Our Fundamental Problem Nicholas Maxwell argues that this problem of (...) reconciling the human and physical worlds needs to take centre stage in our thinking, so that our best ideas about it interact with our attempts to solve even more important specialized problems of thought and life. When we explore this fundamental problem, Maxwell argues, revolutionary answers emerge for a wide range of questions arising in philosophy, science, social inquiry, academic inquiry as a whole, and - most important of all - our capacity to solve the global problems that threaten our future: climate change, habitat destruction, extinction of species, inequality, war, pollution of earth, sea, and air. An unorthodox introduction to philosophy, Our Fundamental Problem brings philosophy down to earth and demonstrates its vital importance for science, scholarship, education, life, and the fate of the world. (shrink)

Adam Smith’s formal legacy to posterity consisted of meticulously revised editions of his two published works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations; long-standing plans for treatises on Jurisprudence, Rhetoric, and the Fine Arts were abandoned on the grounds that there was no time to complete them. This chapter discusses Smith oeuvre as component parts of an unrealized plan to develop a Science of Man on experimental principles. Smith’s introduction to this grand projet as a student (...) is explored and the influence of Hutcheson and Hume is emphasized as is the fact that Smith developed both the published and unpublished components of his Science of Man simultaneously. The question of the meaning Smith attached to ‘science’ is a continuing theme of the chapter. (shrink)

This is a response given at the book launch for Christopher Insole’s Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law, hosted jointly, in November 2020, by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, and the Australian Catholic University. The response considers the gap between the textual Kant, and the received Kant, and reflects on how theologians have been too quick either to condemn and dismiss Kant, or to rehabilitate Kant for theological projects, which Kant would have been (...) opposed to, given his deepest philosophical commitments. (shrink)

Intravenous drug abusers may incur bloodstream infections, in particular those involving the heart valves, that often require extended courses of antibiotics, commonly on the order of six weeks.Conventional wisdom has dictated that even when patients are sufficiently well to not need ongoing hospitalization, it is unsafe to complete their antibiotic course in any setting other than in a closely supervised facility, even if this is contrary to their wishes. The assumption has been that such patients would be at risk of (...) using their indwelling intravenous catheter for illicit purposes. Recent advances in the care of patients who suffer from addiction disorders suggest that when patients receive state-of-the-art addiction treatment, many may be able to continue their intravenous antibiotic course unsupervised, at home. This represents a departure from the parentalistic model of care of impaired patients who are prone to self-harm, moving towards a model that respects autonomy and trusts patients who are in recovery to continue their care in a manner that is self-beneficial. (shrink)

The most constructive response to the crisis in moral theory has been the revival of virtue ethics, which has the advantages of being personal, contextual, and, as will be argued, normative as well. It is also proposed that the best way to refound virtue ethics is to return to the Greek concept of technē tou biou, literally "craft of life." The ancients did not distinguish between craft and fine art, and the meaning of technē, even in its Latin form, ars, (...) still retains the meaning of skillful crafting and discipline. In Greco-Roman culture, techniques were very specific, covering dietetics, economics, and erotics. In ancient China, moral cultivation was intimately connected to the arts, from archery to poetry, music, and dance, such that virtually every activity would have both moral and aesthetic meaning. Using R. D. Collingwood's distinction between craft and fine art, it is proposed that the latter, particularly the performing arts of music and dance, can serve as a model for virtue ethics in our times. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new argument in favour of the claim that phenomenal consciousness overflows – that is, has a far higher capacity than – cognitive access. It shows that opponents of overflow implicate a necessary role for visual imagery in the change detection paradigm. However, empirical evidence suggests that there is no correlation between visual imagery abilities and performance in this paradigm. Since the use of imagery is not implicated in the performance strategy of subjects, we find (...) a new argument for consciousness without access. (shrink)

This article is about a relationship between the Socratic practice of philosophy and the aesthetic practice of watching and appreciating film. The conclusion that I defend is that certain narrative films, like the elenctic method in the hands of Socrates, are philosophical tools for examining our cognitive and emotional life and thus for gaining insight into aspects of our character. In the early sections of the article I construct an analogy between the practice of watching narrative film and the practice (...) of self-examination through dialogue and reflection. I argue that good aesthetic practice in film appreciation is analogous to good philosophical practice in the manner of Socrates, and I treat the elenchus as a method of self-examination rather than of conceptual analysis and Socrates himself as an examiner of people rather than of abstract concepts. In the later sections I discuss three films directed by Christopher Nolan—Memento, The Prestige, and Inception —as paradigm cases of Socratic film. I argue that these films show us something about ourselves by prompting extemporaneous emotional responses and cognitive judgments that we come, reflectively, to reject. (shrink)

Although Charles Peirce only rarely applied his semeiotic principles to art, his ideas are highly informative for contemplating the exchange of qualitative meaningin the iconic signs constitutive of art. Reflecting on Peirce’s theory of the icon, three hypo-iconic sub-types, the formative role of the sign-interpretant, and the metaphysical “qualisignificance” of a universe “perfused with signs”, I provide some theoretical notes toward sketching a semeiotic of art. Further illustrative of a Peircean semeiotic of art is the American painting of the Hudson (...) River School and the modern poetry of Wallace Stevens that progressively advance its insights in their own beautiful signs. These philosophers and artists have intellectual roots in Emerson’s transcendentalism with its Neoplatonic legacy, and together form a unique American strand of aesthetics. (shrink)

The most constructive response to the crisis in moral theory has been the revival of virtue ethics, which has the advantages of being personal, contextual, and, as will be argued, normative as well. It is also proposed that the best way to refound virtue ethics is to return to the Greek concept of technē tou biou, literally "craft of life." The ancients did not distinguish between craft and fine art, and the meaning of technē, even in its Latin form, ars, (...) still retains the meaning of skillful crafting and discipline. In Greco-Roman culture, techniques were very specific, covering dietetics, economics, and erotics. In ancient China, moral cultivation was intimately connected to the arts, from archery to poetry, music, and dance, such that virtually every activity would have both moral and aesthetic meaning. Using R. D. Collingwood's distinction between craft and fine art, it is proposed that the latter, particularly the performing arts of music and dance, can serve as a model for virtue ethics in our times. (shrink)

Acoustical changes in the prosody of mothers’ speech to infants are distinct and near universal. However, less is known about the visible properties of mothers’ infant-directed speech, and their relation to speech acoustics. Mothers’ head movements were tracked as they interacted with their infants using ID speech, and compared to movements accompanying their adult-directed speech. Movement measures along three dimensions of head translation, and three axes of head rotation were calculated. Overall, more head movement was found for ID than AD (...) speech, suggesting that mothers exaggerate their visual prosody in a manner analogous to the acoustical exaggerations in their speech. Regression analyses examined the relation between changing head position and changing acoustical pitch over time. Head movements and voice pitch were more strongly related in ID speech than in AD speech. When these relations were examined across time windows of different durations, stronger relations were observed for shorter time windows. However, the particular form of these more local relations did not extend or generalize to longer time windows. This suggests that the multimodal correspondences in speech prosody are variable in form, and occur within limited time spans. (shrink)

The termTabulae Iliacaeis conventionally applied to twenty low reliefs scattered through museums from Warsaw to New York. The common name conceals a bewildering artistic farrago: the earliestTabula, theTabula Iliaca Capitolina, is mid-Augustan, the latest late Antonine. Five of theTabulaebear the name Theodorus and I shall argue that he is the craftsman responsible for their execution. Where provenance is known, it is always Rome or the Roman Campagna. The materials of theTabulaevary widely: most, but not all, are of some sort of (...) marble, white, yellow, and Giallo Antico. Little can be said of their size, for not one survives complete. It would appear, however, that the largest rectangularTabula, the calcite 1 A, was originallyc.25 cm by 42 cm. Two, portraying the Shield of Achilles, were circular and 5O may have had a radius of 20 cm. The nameIliacaeis appropriate only in as much as eleven out of twentyTabulaeportray episodes from theIliad and six the Sack of Ilium; others, however, represent Alexander's victory at Arbela and the apotheosis of Hercules. What theTabulaedo display in common is a combination of low reliefs in miniature and inscriptions, often extensive and not always on the same topic as the reliefs. In ancient art, only the Megarian bowls stand comparison, and their ratio of text to illustration is substantially lower. (shrink)

What ought to be the aims of science? How can science best serve humanity? What would an ideal science be like, a science that is sensitively and humanely responsive to the needs, problems and aspirations of people? How ought the institutional enterprise of science to be related to the rest of society? What ought to be the relationship between science and art, thought and feeling, reason and desire, mind and heart? Should the social sciences model themselves on the natural sciences: (...) or ought they to take a different form if they are to serve the interests of humanity objectively, sensitively and rigorously? Might it be possible to get into human life, into art, education, politics, industry, international affairs, and other domains of human activity, the same kind of progressive success that is found so strikingly, on the intellectual level, within science? These are some of the questions tackled by What’s Wrong With Science? But the book is no abstruse treatise on the philosophy of science. Most of it takes the form of a passionate debate between a Scientist and a Philosopher, a debate that is by turns humorous, ironical, bitter, dramatically explosive. Even as the argument explores the relationship between thought and feeling, reason and desire, the two main protagonists find it necessary to examine their own feelings and motivations. (shrink)

Abstract:Philosophers and art critics have long argued that the language of color misses or even mars the ineffable sensation of color. But a literary perspective shows otherwise. Starting with examples of colors read but not seen, and then discussing how philosophers have addressed (and often muddled) the so-called problem of color, I propose thinking of color terms as techniques for stabilizing and directing color sensations. I then show how William H. Gass and Maggie Nelson develop a version of this idea (...) in their respective books about blue, which are really books about the relationship between writing and quality. (shrink)

This brief response to Will Davies clarifies and expands a number of the core arguments of the article ‘The Emergence of Neoliberalism: Thinking through and Beyond Michel Foucault’s Lectures on Biopolitics’ : 3–27). It is argued that it is a mistake to treat Foucault as a neoliberal because his lectures on biopolitics centred on the emergence of different trajectories of neoliberal reason. Instead, Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism can be read as a critical history, one that is partial and incomplete but (...) which nonetheless can be used as a starting point to think historically and critically about neoliberalism. It is suggested that a more nuanced history of neoliberalism, however, can be developed by paying closer attention to the complex relationship between neoliberal reason and the earlier liberal ideas of the 19th century – in particular those of John Stuart Mill. Finally, a claim is made for the value of historical analysis for understanding and responding to the challenges of the post-crisis present, to a situation in which neoliberal ideas appear to have a near-hegemonic grip over popular politics and discourse. (shrink)

Mankind as a species has little reason to boast about his sensory capacities. A dog's sense of smell, a bat's hearing, a hawk's visual acuity are all superior to our own. But in one respect we may justifiably be vain: our ability to see colours is a match for any other animal. In this respect we have in fact surprisingly few rivals. Among mammals only our nearest relatives, the monkeys and apes, share our ability – all others are nearly (...) or completely colour-blind. In the animal kingdom as a whole colour vision occurs only in some fishes, reptiles, insects and birds. (shrink)

I argue in favour of the central claim of virtue-ethical accounts of right action: that right action is virtuous action. First, I disambiguate this claim and argue for a specific interpretation of it. Second, I provide reasons to prefer target-centred over both agent-centred and motive-centred accounts of virtuous action. Third, I argue that an action is right if, only if, and because it is overall virtuous. Finally, I respond to important arguments to the contrary.

This volume explores some of the more important of Hans-Georg Gadamer's extensive writings on art and literature. The principal text included is 'The Relevance of the Beautiful', Gadamer's most sustained treatment of philosophical aesthetics. The eleven other essays focus particularly on the challenge issued by modern painting and literature to our customary ideas of art, and in turn revitalize our understanding of it. Gadamer demonstrates the continuing importance of such concepts as imitation, truth, symbol, and play for our appreciation of (...) contemporary art, and thereby establishes its continuity with the Western tradition. The essays here are not technical and are readily accessible to the beginning student and the general reader. The collection as a whole serves to illustrate the practice of hermeneutics and to introduce Gadamer's thought. Robert Bernasconi provides an introduction clarifying the central aims of the essays and their relations to Gadamer's major work, Truth and Method, and to the philosophy of art since Kant. A bibliography of Gadamer's writings available in English is also included. (shrink)

1. The Banner of Peace2. The Sacred Sign of Peace3. The Heart of Culture4. The Red Cross of Culture5. The Mission of Womanhood6. Glory to Women, Bearers of Culture7. Roots of Culture8. In spite of difficulties 9. Re-evaluation10. Defense of Values.

Production and comprehension have long been viewed as inseparable components of language. The study of vision, by contrast, has centered almost exclusively on comprehension. Here we investigate drawing—the most basic form of visual production. How do we convey concepts in visual form, and how does refining this skill, in turn, affect recognition? We developed an online platform for collecting large amounts of drawing and recognition data, and applied a deep convolutional neural network model of visual cortex trained (...) only on natural images to explore the hypothesis that drawing recruits the same abstract feature representations that support natural visual object recognition. Consistent with this hypothesis, higher layers of this model captured the abstract features of both drawings and natural images most important for recognition, and people learning to produce more recognizable drawings of objects exhibited enhanced recognition of those objects. These findings could explain why drawing is so effective for communicating visual concepts, they suggest novel approaches for evaluating and refining conceptual knowledge, and they highlight the potential of deep networks for understanding human learning. (shrink)

Artworks are seen here as presenting themselves as a means by which to navigate and plot the city for a writing interlocutor; The examples discussed reveat a plethora of emergent forms which are concentrated into three key modalities of urban arts practice in the twenty-first century walking play and cultural memory walking includes the talked walks of artist such as Richard Wentworth, the generative street incursions of Francis Alys, and the walking spectator at a site-based event, including works by (...) Gustv Metzger, Mark Wallinger and Pavel Althamer. Play embraces popular instances of mass public mobilisation in the form of flash mobs and mobile clubbing as well as ̀creative interventions such as free ranning, graffin writing and video sniffing, which reveal themselves to be engaged increasingly in a dialogue with the ̀high art' of artists like Antony Gomely, Mark Quinn and Carsten Holler. Cultural memory is considered via the burgeoning cases of holocaust installations, interrogating two of the best-known- and controversial-European urban sites from the point of view of the physical encounters that they implicity invite Peter Eisenman's memorial in Bertin and Rachel Whitereads' in Vienna. --Book Jacket. (shrink)

The theory presented here is a near neighbour of Humphrey's theory of sensations as actions. O'Regan & Noë have opened up remarkable new possibilities. But they have missed a trick by not making more of the distinction between sensation and perception; and some of their particular proposals for how we use our eyes to represent visual properties are not only implausible but would, if true, isolate vision from other sensory modalities and do little to explain the phenomenology of conscious (...) experience in general. (shrink)