In this article we assess the extant literature on women’s careers appearing in selected career, management and psychology journals from 1990 to the present to determine what is currently known about the state of women’s careers at the dawn of the 21st century. Based on this review, we identify four patterns that cumulatively contribute to the current state of the literature on women’s careers: women’s careers are embedded in women’s larger-life contexts, families and careers are central to women’s lives, women’s (...) career paths reflect a wide range and variety of patterns, and human and social capital are critical factors for women’s careers. We also identify paradoxes that highlight the disconnection between organizational practice and scholarly research associated with each of the identified patterns. Our overall conclusion is that male-defined constructions of work and career success continue to dominate organizational research and practice.We provide direction for a research agenda on women’s careers that addresses the development of integrative career theories relevant for women’s contemporary lives in hopes of providing fresh avenues for conceptualizing career success for women. Propositions are identified for more strongly connecting career scholarship to organizational practice in support of women’s continued career advancement. (shrink)

In this article we assess the extant literature on women’s careers appearing in selected career, management and psychology journals from 1990 to the present to determine what is currently known about the state of women’s careers at the dawn of the 21st century. Based on this review, we identify four patterns that cumulatively contribute to the current state of the literature on women’s careers: women’s careers are embedded in women’s larger-life contexts, families and careers are central to women’s lives, women’s (...) career paths reflect a wide range and variety of patterns, and human and social capital are critical factors for women’s careers. We also identify paradoxes that highlight the disconnection between organizational practice and scholarly research associated with each of the identified patterns. Our overall conclusion is that male-defined constructions of work and career success continue to dominate organizational research and practice. We provide direction for a research agenda on women’s careers that addresses the development of integrative career theories relevant for women’s contemporary lives in hopes of providing fresh avenues for conceptualizing career success for women. Propositions are identified for more strongly connecting career scholarship to organizational practice in support of women’s continued career advancement. (shrink)

BackgroundMoral distress (MD) is an emotional and psychological response to morally challenging dilemmas. Moral distress is experienced frequently by nurses in the intensive care unit (ICU) and can result in emotional anguish, work dissatisfaction, poor patient outcomes, and high levels of nurse turnover. Opportunities to discuss ethically challenging situations may lessen MD and its associated sequela.ObjectiveThe purpose of this project was to develop, implement, and evaluate the impact of nursing ethics huddles on participants’ MD, clinical ethics knowledge, work satisfaction, and (...) patient care among ICU nurses.Sample and SettingThe sample, 32 nurses from three ICU settings in an 800-bed tertiary academic medical center, participated in six nursing ethics huddles over a two-month period.MethodsAlvita K. Nathaniel’s Theory of Moral Reckoning guided development of the nursing ethics huddle process.1 The Moral Distress Thermometer was administered at three data points: baseline level of MD, and pre- and post-huddle to determine changes in the subjects’ level of MD.2 Focused content analysis was used to analyze qualitative responses from questionnaires about the subjects’ perception of the effect of the huddles on work satisfaction and patient care. Knowledge attainment was evaluated via open-ended short-answer questions.ResultsOverall, use of nurse-ethicist-led nursing ethics huddles was associated with improved quality of work life, patient care, and clinical ethics knowledge. The change in pre- and post-nursing ethics huddles MD scores was statistically significant (p < 0.0001). (shrink)

There was a deep continuity in Wollheim’s thought from his book on F. H. Bradley onward. His notion of the concept of art as deeply interiorized was inextricable from his sense of the psychological unity of the mind and the historical continuity of artistic tradition, seen on analogy with an inherited language. His study of pictorial representation pivoted on the innate psychological capacity of ‘seeing-in’, perceiving the represented subject in a surface from which it was seen as distinct but to (...) which it could be related. The expressiveness of depiction he explained through a psychoanalytic concept of projection in which we come to see a piece of the external world as corresponding to an inward state of mind. He reserved the use of the term ‘imagination’ for the artist’s elaboration of ‘seeing-in’. This he exemplified in accounts of painting by Manet, Friedrich, Titian, and Ingres among others. His critical stance has a close affinity with certain essays by Pater. (shrink)

In Eco’s work between around 1960 and 1992, “openness” in a modern literary text can mean (a) “permitting more than one interpretation,” and (b) “requiring a good deal of decoding work from the reader,” which is close to my own position. These two aspects of openness are demonstrated using Baudelaire’s Les Chats, in regard to which Eco denies that the text may be cristallin in Lévi-Strauss’s sense, while still requiring constructive effort from the reader. It is apparent that this term (...) is equivalent to Riffaterreʼs textual “monumentality.” Eco does not go into detail about the reader’s work in assembling the text’s global propositional structure. It is left to Riffaterre and myself to detail the various stages of this work, involving comparison of images in order to discover their common underlying generative proposition. In contrast to Riffaterre, I have long suggested that the modern poetic text is built on two such propositions. It is at the stage of relations between text and sociolect that Eco contributes much to modern poetics. Openness (b) seems to be a prerequisite for perceptual change in the reader, produced by contrast between textual structure and its sociolectic context. Riffaterre prefers to remain within the text/intertext/interpretant triad, preventing him from describing the text-sociolect relation, where the propositional innovation of the modernist text takes effect. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 185-200.

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

Husserl’s most systematic phenomenological work, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Ideas I) (Husserl, 2014), differentiates pure transcendental phenomenology, as an eidetic science, from the eidetic science of mathematics. In line with the tradition of transcendental philosophy arguably—ante rem—stretching back to Plato, Husserl contrasts transcendental phenomenology with mathematics and argues that its conceptuality cannot be appropriately articulated and conceived in analogy with mathematics. While both mathematics and transcendental phenomenology are eidetic sciences, (...) phenomenology “belongs to a basic class of eidetic sciences … [that is] totally different from that to which the mathematical sciences belong” (Husserl, 2014, 136). The key differential between these two sciences on Husserl’s view concerns the nature of the essences that are the subject matter of each discipline. Mathematics deals with exact essences, which he characterizes as ideas in the Kantian sense. Phenomenology deals with inexact essences, which Husserl characterizes as morphological. (shrink)

How do pictures represent? In this book Robert Hopkins casts new light on an ancient question by connecting it to issues in the philosophies of mind and perception. He starts by describing several striking features of picturing that demand explanation. These features strongly suggest that our experience of pictures is central to the way they represent, and Hopkins characterizes that experience as one of resemblance in a particular respect. He deals convincingly with the objections traditionally assumed to be (...) fatal to resemblance views, and shows how his own account is uniquely well placed to explain picturing's key features. His discussion engages in detail with issues concerning perception in general, including how to describe phenomena that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists, and the book concludes with an attempt to see what a proper understanding of picturing can tell us about that deeply mysterious phenomenon, the visual imagination. (shrink)

What philosophical issue or issues does Molyneux’s question raise? I concentrate on two. First, are there any properties represented in both touch and vision? Second, for any such common perceptible, is it represented in the same way in each, so that the two senses support a single concept of that property? I show that there is space for a second issue here, describe its precise relations to Molyneux’s question, and argue for its philosophical significance. I close by arguing that Gareth (...) Evans conflated the two issues, and thereby provide further grounds for distinguishing them. (shrink)

This essay assesses Quentin Meillassoux’s numerological approach to Mallarmé’s problematic but formally innovative poem “Un Coup de dés,” using a semiotic methodology to reveal the deficiencies of that approach from the viewpoint of literary theory. Section 1 describes my expanded version of Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of the structure of modern poetry. Poems are generated by two underlying propositions, each of which governs the structure of a set of symbolic images on the textual surface. These “matricial” propositions are linked by (...) a syntagmatic relation. The primary text functions as subject-sign of the Peircean semiotic triad; its object-sign is an intertextual model. The interpretant of these two textual signs is assembled by the reader and has a sociolectic counterpart – or context – which has similar lexical content but contrasting internal structure. This contrast may produce a change in the preconceptions of the reader. Section 2 examines Meillassoux’s approach to Mallarmé’s poem, which is preoccupied with a “number” supposedly encrypted in the text. This is not convincingly related to the propositional structure of the poem. In Section 3, the text is interpreted using a semiotics-based methodology. The poem is generated by two matrices: one concerning the “Master” versus the storm, and the second concerning the power of Chance. The relation linking the matrices is clarified. This analysis is compared with that of Meillassoux throughout. Section 4 resumes the differences between Meillassoux’s concentration on the “number” and the “siren,” and my analysis which centres on the relation between the Master (symbolising traditional poets and their preferred metre) and the Constellation (symbolising the wide range of new future poetic metres and formats). Meillassoux’s approach turns out to be unconvincing. (shrink)

What is special about photographs? Traditional photography is, I argue, a system that sustains factive pictorial experience. Photographs sustain pictorial experience: we see things in them. Further, that experience is factive: if suchandsuch is seen in a photograph, then suchandsuch obtained when the photo was taken. More precisely, photographs are designed to sustain factive pictorial experience, and that experience is what we have when, in the photographic system as a whole, everything works as it is supposed to. In this respect (...) photographs differ from handmade pictures, and from other information-preserving tools, such as the readings on a geiger counter. This distinctive feature can be used to explain what is epistemically special about photographs, and also to give an account of the distinctive phenomenology of looking at a photograph rather than a handmade picture. All this provides the background against which to assess claims that digital photography differs from traditional in certain key ways. (shrink)

Reid’s discussion of Molyneux’s question has been neglected. The Inquiry discusses the question twice, offering opposing answers. The first discussion treats the underlying issue as concerning common perceptibles of touch and vision, and in particular whether in vision we originally perceive depth. Although it is tempting to treat the second discussion as doing the same, this would render pointless various novel features Reid introduces in reformulating Molyneux’s question. Rather, the issue now is whether the blind can form a reasonable conception (...) of visual appearances, a conception that would allow them to perform Molyneux’s task. In explaining why Reid thought they can, I draw on his account of primary quality concepts as independent of sensation; of concept possession as ability, not acquaintance with sensation; and of visual appearance itself as in key part a matter of the perception of a primary quality, visible figure. Thus the issue does not concern cross-modality, what vision has in common with touch; but how even what is central in vision is amodal, able to be grasped independently of any sensory mode. Reid’s second Molyneux discussion thereby forms a focus for the Inquiry’s central claims, and the rejection of the Ideal Theory they entail. (shrink)

What kind of mental state is episodic memory? I defend the claim that it is, in key part, imagining the past, where the imagining in question is experiential imagining. To remember a past episode is to experientially imagine how things were, in a way controlled by one’s past experience of that episode. Call this the Inclusion View. I motive this view by appeal both to patterns of compatibilities and incompatibilities between various states, and to phenomenology. The bulk of the paper (...) defends the account against four objections. Imagining and remembering seem to differ in whether they are active or passive, in the forms of singular content they involve, in their relations to observation and in their relations to belief. I argue that these differences can be accommodated, and some even explained, once we flesh out what else is involved in episodic memory, in addition to imagining the past. (shrink)

Researchers from diverse disciplines, including organismal and cellular physiology, sports science, human nutrition, evolution and ecology, have sought to understand the causes and consequences of the surprising variation in metabolic rate found among and within individual animals of the same species. Research in this area has been hampered by differences in approach, terminology and methodology, and the context in which measurements are made. Recent advances provide important opportunities to identify and address the key questions in the field. By bringing together (...) researchers from different areas of biology and biomedicine, we describe and evaluate these developments and the insights they could yield, highlighting the need for more standardisation across disciplines. We conclude with a list of important questions that can now be addressed by developing a common conceptual and methodological toolkit for studies on metabolic variation in animals. (shrink)

Aesthetic judgements are autonomous, as many other judgements are not: for the latter, but not the former, it is sometimes justifiable to change one’s mind simply because several others share a different opinion. Why is this? One answer is that claims about beauty are not assertions at all, but expressions of aesthetic response. However, to cover more than just some of the explananda, this expressivism needs combining with some analogue of cognitive command, i.e. the idea that disagreements over beuaty can (...) occur, and when they do it is a priori that one side has infringed the norms governing aesthetic discourse. This combination can be achieved by reading Kant’s aesthetic theory in expressivist terms. The resulting view is a form of quasi‐realism about beauty. The position has its merits, but cannot ultimately explain the phenomena which motivate it. This conclusion generalises to quasi‐realism about other matters. (shrink)

The article explores the relationship between the philosopher and historian of mathematics Jacob Klein’s account of the transformation of the concept of number coincident with the invention of algebra and Husserl’s early investigations of the origin of the concept of number and his late account of the Galilean impulse to mathematize nature. Klein’s research is shown to present the historical context for Husserl’s twin failures in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, to provide a psychological foundation for the proper concept of number (...) and to show how this concept of number functions as the mathematical foundation of universal arithmetic. The argument is advanced that one significant result of bringing together Klein’s and Husserl’s thought on these issues is the need to fine-tune Husserl’s Crisis project of desedimenting the mathematization of nature. Specifically, Klein’s research shows that “a ‘sedimented’ understanding of numbers” “is superposed upon the first stratum of ‘sedimented’ geometrical ‘evidences’” uncovered by Husserl’s fragmentary analyses of geometry in the Crisis. In addition, then, to the task of “the intentional-historical reactivation of the origin of geometry” recognized by Husserl as intrinsic to the reactivation of the origin of mathematical physics, Klein discloses a second task, that of “the reactivation” of the “complicated network of sedimented significances” that “underlies the ‘arithmetical’ understanding of geometry.”. (shrink)

Is it legitimate to acquire one’s moral beliefs on the testimony of others? The pessimist about moral testimony says not. But what is the source of the difficulty? Here pessimists have a choice. On the Unavailability view, moral testimony never makes knowledge available to the recipient. On Unusability accounts, although moral testimony can make knowledge available, some further norm renders it illegitimate to make use of the knowledge thus offered. I suggest that Unusability accounts provide the strongest form of pessimist (...) view. I consider and reject five Unavailability accounts. I then argue that any such view will fail. But what is the norm rendering moral testimonial knowledge unusable? I suggest it lies in the requirement that we grasp for ourselves the moral reasons behind a moral view. This demand is one testimony cannot meet, and that claim holds whatever account we offer of the epistemology of testimony. However, while appeal to this requirement forms the most plausible pessimist view, it is another question whether pessimism is correct. (shrink)

Aesthetic judgements are autonomous, as many other judgements are not: for the latter, but not the former, it is sometimes justifiable to change one's mind simply because several others share a different opinion. Why is this? One answer is that claims about beauty are not assertions at all, but expressions of aesthetic response. However, to cover more than just some of the explananda, this expressivism needs combining with some analogue of cognitive command, i.e. the idea that disagreements over beuaty can (...) occur, and when they do it is a priori that one side has infringed the norms governing aesthetic discourse. This combination can be achieved by reading Kant’s aesthetic theory in expressivist terms. The resulting view is a form of quasi-realism about beauty. The position has its merits, but cannot ultimately explain the phenomena which motivate it. This conclusion generalises to quasi-realism about other matters. (shrink)

There is a common assumption about pictures, that seeing them produces in us something like the same effects as seeing the things they depict. This assumption lies behind much empirical research into vision, where experiments often expose subjects to pictures of things in order to investigate the processes involved in cognizing those things themselves. Can philosophy provide any justification for this assumption? I examine this issue in the context of Flint Schier's account of pictorial representation. Schier attempts to infer the (...) assumption from what he takes to be the fundamental facts about picturing. I argue that there is no plausible form of Schier's basic claims from which the assumption can be inferred. I then reject a second argument, that by appealing to the assumption Schier could explain why it is impossible to depict a particular without depicting it as having certain properties. I conclude that those sympathetic to the assumption need to articulate and defend some version of it suited to their needs. (shrink)

What is artistic style? In the literature one answer to this question has proved influential: the view that artistic style is the expression of personality. In what follows we elaborate upon and evaluatively compare the two most plausible versions of this view with a new proposal—that style is the expression of the artist’s ideals for her art. We proceed by comparing the views’ answers to certain questions we think a theory of individual artistic style should address: Are there limits on (...) what range of features can figure in a style? Can flaws be stylistic? Are there limits on the range of art forms across which a given style can be exhibited? To what extent is a style a kind of unity, and why? What makes style an artistic achievement? Why do we care about style? By considering the different views' answers to these questions we argue that our proposal is a workable theory of individual style and suggest that it fares better on the whole than both versions of the influential and widely accepted view. (shrink)

The impact of gender on assessments of leadership performance and leadership potential was examined through two clusters of leadership behaviors, one set related to traditional constructions of leadership labeled directing others and another associated with contemporary constructions of leadership labeled engaging others. Based on data collected from a sample of 91 senior leaders in one US financial services organization over a 3-year period prior to Covid-19, the results showed a negative relationship between directing others behaviors and leadership potential ratings for (...) females and a positive relationship between these variables for males. A negative relationship between engaging others behaviors and performance assessments was also found for females. This study highlights the continuing bias in leadership assessments of women and explores the contradictions between the perception and the reality of women's leadership. (shrink)

The target article by Corballis presents an interesting and novel theoretical perspective on the evolution of language, speech, and handedness. There are two specific aspects of the article that will be addressed in this commentary: (a) the link between Broca's area and gestural communication in chimpanzees, and (b) the issue of population-level handedness in great apes, notably chimpanzees.

The title of this present volume tends to be misleading. For it suggests that Nicholas’s didactic sermons are to be distinguished from his non-didactic ones—ones that are, say, more inspirational and less philosophical, or more devotional and less theological, or more situationally oriented and less Scripturally focused. Yet, in truth, all 293 of Nicholas’s sermons are highly didactic, highly pedagogical, highly exegetical.1 To be sure, there are inspirational and devotional elements; but they are subordinate to the primary purpose of teaching. (...) Likewise, only occasionally2 do the sermons show signs of addressing local circumstances that are idiosyncratic to the respective churches in Koblenz, Trier, Mainz, Augsburg, Frankfurt, Brixen, and Rome. Rather, their Scriptural focus more often than not yields up interpretations that are allegorical—or otherwise figurative—in a general way that allows Nicholas to draw inferences about the relationship between the intellect and the senses, about the unity of the virtues, the two natures in Christ, human freedom of will, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the inter-relationship of faith and reason, the triune nature of God, the role of conscience, the precepts of the natural law, time as the image of eternity, the four stages of a knowledge of God, Christ as Wisdom Incarnate, God as Beauty, the Holy Spirit as Love, … and so on. Each of the sermons contains more than one major theme, so that no sermon dwells at length upon a single topic so as to sound pedantic and inappropriately academic. On the contrary: in a limited measure Nicholas’s sermons tend to entice through their extensive display of original metaphor, of striking imagery, of fresh vocabulary, and of erudite knowledge of earlier writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Albertus Magnus, and Meister Eckhart. (shrink)

This article is a review of David Kolb's program of work on learning styles and experiential learning, which I find to be a problematic instance of psychologism. I argue that Kolb's approach ignores the process nature of experience and that attractive as it may be instrumentally, it ultimately breaks down under the weight of its structuralist reductions. Kolb attempts to account for experiential learning without a coherent theory of experience, such as might have been found in phenomenology, which he virtually (...) ignores. Thus, Kolb neglects the constitutive effects of the noetic-noemic corelationship and the intentional reality of the person. I contrast Kolb's formulations with John Dewey's much more resilient conception of "habit" and close with a critical analysis of various ways in which Kolb's learning-style instruments are used for aggressive intervention in people's lives. (shrink)

This essay addresses two central issues that continue to trouble interpretation of Zeno’s paradoxes: 1) their solution, and 2) their place in the history of philosophy. I offer an account of Zeno’s work as pointing to an inevitable paradox generated by our ways of thinking and speaking about things, especially about things as existing in the continua of space and time. In so doing, I connect Zeno’s arguments to Parmenides’ critique of “naming” in Fragment 8, an approach that I believe (...) adds considerably to our understanding of both Zeno’s puzzles and this enigmatic aspect of Parmenides’ thought. (shrink)

Cross-cultural scholarship in ritual studies on women's laments provides us with a fresh vantage point from which to consider the function of women and women's complaining voices in the epic poems of William Blake. In this essay, I interpret Thel, Oothoon, and Enitharmon as strong voices of experience that unleash some of Blake's most profound meditations on social, sexual, individual, and institutional forms of violence and injustice, offering what might aptly be called an ethics of witness. Tracing the performative function (...) of Enion, Jerusalem, Vala, and Erin in Blake's later epics, The Four Zoas and Jerusalem , I argue for the close connection between the female laments and the possibility of redemption, though in Blake such "redemption" comes at the cost of the very voices of witness themselves. (shrink)

What is sensory imagining and what role does it play in our lives? How does visualizing a castle, running through a tune in one's head, or imagining the taste of fish ice cream relate to perceiving such things, or to remembering them? What are the connections between imagining and agency, and how does it relate to emotion and other affect? The Profile of Imagining offers a theory that answers these and many other questions. It argues that sensory imagining involves the (...) redeployment of resources central to perception, though in a radically different context and to very different effect. The result is a view that explains central features of imagining's phenomenology and functional role, including its capacity to capture what it would be like to perceive its objects, while acknowledging the many and striking differences between imagining and sensing. Hopkins shows how the view can be extended to imagining in other forms, especially the imagining of affect; and uses it to argue for some surprising conclusions: that imagining something is not a way to engage with its aesthetic character; and that imagining provokes real feeling much less often than is usually assumed. -/- Table of contents: Introduction; Ch.1 Imagining and agency; Ch.2 To be given as a representation; Ch.3 Knowledge of sensory profiles; Ch.4 Profiles in imagination; Ch.5 Observation, overflow and attention; Ch.6 Episodic memory; Ch.7 Learning from imagining; Ch.8 Aesthetic engagement, imagining and the draw of the real; Ch.9 Reacting to imagining?; Conclusion. (shrink)

CONTENTS James G. Hart: Wisdom, Knowledge, and Reflective Joy: Aristotle and Husserl Wayne Martin: Judgment Stroke-Truth Predicate: Frege and the Phenomenology of Judgment David R. Cerbone: Distance and Proximity in Phenomenology: Husserl and Heidegger Ra·l GutiTrrez: "The Logic of Decadence": Deficient Forms of Government in the Republic Heribert Boeder: Derrida's Endgame Jacques Derrida: Phenomenology and the Closure of Metaphysics (1966) Hans Rainer Sepp: Jan Patocka and Cultural Difference Carl Friedrich Gethmann: Hermeneutic Phenomenology and Logical Intuitionism: On Oskar Becker's Mathematical Existence (...) Essays in Honor of Heribert Boeder by Dennis J. Schmidt, Claus-Artur Scheier, Klaus Erich Kaehler, Franco Volpi, Martfn Zubirfa, Burt Hopkins, and Marcus Brainard Edmund Husserl: The Idea of a Philosophical Culture (1923) Johannes Daubert: Notes from Husserl's Mathematical-Philosophical Exercises (1905), ed. and intro. Mark van Atten and Karl Schuhmann (German/English) Jacob Klein: On Aristotle Eugen Fink and Jan Patocka: On the Phenomenological Reduction. (shrink)

Freud's account of dreams has a cogent interpretive basis.

Can indistinguishable objects differ aesthetically? Manifestationism answers ‘no’ on the grounds that (i) aesthetically significant features of an object must show up in our experience of it; and (ii) a feature—aesthetic or not—figures in our experience only if we can discriminate its presence. Goodman’s response to Manifestationism has been much discussed, but little understood. I explain and reject it. I then explore an alternative. Doubles can differ aesthetically provided, first, it is possible to experience them differently; and, second, those experiences (...) reflect differences in the objects’ themselves. A range of objections to this position is considered, but all are found wanting. (shrink)

R. G. Collingwood thought that to express emotion is to come to understand it and that this is something art can enable us to do. The understanding in question is distinct from that offered by emotion concepts. I attempt to defend a broadly similar position by drawing, as Collingwood does, on a broader philosophy of mind. Emotions and other affective states have a profile analogous to the sensory profiles exhibited by the things we perceive. Grasping that one's feeling exhibits such (...) a profile is to understand it. That understanding differs from any involved in conceptualizing the affect in question. And, I argue, engagement with the expressive character of works of art is one way to gain it. (shrink)

Christopher Nolan’s Memento illustrates and explores two roles that memory plays in human life. The film’s protagonist, Leonard Shelby, cannot ‘make new memories’. He copes by using a ‘system’ of polaroids, tatoos, charts and notes that substitutes for memory in its first role, the retention of information. In particular, the system is supposed to help Leonard carry out his sole goal: to find and kill his wife’s murderer. In this it proves a disastrous failure. But are we so very much (...) better off? The film uses the failures of Leonard’s system to raise doubts about the effectiveness of our own psychological capacities for grasping the past. However, memory does more than allow us to retain information. As Richard Wollheim showed, it also enables the past to control our present, by perpetuating, while modifying, its affective hold over us. This is something wholly denied Leonard. By implicitly contrasting his position with ours in this respect, the film also explores this second role that memory plays in our lives. (shrink)

In this essay I will suggest that part of what makes the young Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson so remarkable is the fact that much of his work – in this age of “anything goes” post-postmodernism – is clearly modernist poetry, in both structure and effect. This structure will be that explained in my expanded version of Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of poetry, which deals with modernist work. I will suggest that one of the distinctive features of the latter is that (...) a modern poetic text is distinguished by two underlying “matricial” propositions, each of which generates a set of variant images having the same underlying semantic structure. This paradigmatic method of signifying is unique to poetry. Each matrix is reassembled by the reader from a comparison of the images of each set. The matrices are linked syntagmatically in a variety of relations such as negation or difference of scale. This bimatricial relation (subject-sign) has an intertextual counterpart (object-sign) of similar structure but different lexicon. The interpretant of these two complex signs has a sociolectic counterpart of similar lexicon but different structure. The semantic contrast thus established produces innovation, which is the other distinctive feature of modern poetry. It turns out that much of Hutchinson’s innovative work is structured in this way. (shrink)

The main concepts of the free energy (FE) neuroscience developed by Karl Friston and colleagues parallel those of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology. In Hobson et al. ( 2014 ) these include an innate virtual reality generator that produces the fictive prior beliefs that Freud described as the primary process. This enables Friston's account to encompass a unified treatment—a complexity theory—of the role of virtual reality in both dreaming and mental disorder. In both accounts the brain operates to minimize (...) FE aroused by sensory impingements—including interoceptive impingements that report compliance with biological imperatives—and constructs a representation/model of the causes of impingement that enables this minimization. In Friston's account (variational) FE equals complexity minus accuracy, and is minimized by increasing accuracy and decreasing complexity. Roughly the brain (or model) increases accuracy together with complexity in waking. This is mediated by consciousness-creating active inference—by which it explains sensory impingements in terms of perceptual experiences of their causes. In sleep it reduces complexity by processes that include both synaptic pruning and consciousness/virtual reality/dreaming in REM. The consciousness-creating active inference that effects complexity-reduction in REM dreaming must operate on FE-arousing data distinct from sensory impingement. The most relevant source is remembered arousals of emotion, both recent and remote, as processed in SWS and REM on “active systems” accounts of memory consolidation/reconsolidation. Freud describes these remembered arousals as condensed in the dreamwork for use in the conscious contents of dreams, and similar condensation can be seen in symptoms. Complexity partly reflects emotional conflict and trauma. This indicates that dreams and symptoms are both produced to reduce complexity in the form of potentially adverse (traumatic or conflicting) arousals of amygdala-related emotions. Mental disorder is thus caused by computational complexity together with mechanisms like synaptic pruning that have evolved for complexity-reduction; and important features of disorder can be understood in these terms. Details of the consilience among Freudian, systems consolidation, and complexity-reduction accounts appear clearly in the analysis of a single fragment of a dream, indicating also how complexity reduction proceeds by a process resembling Bayesian model selection. (shrink)

Hopkins begins his study with Plato's written and unwritten theories of eidê and Aristotle's criticism of both. He then traces Husserl's early investigations into the formation of mathematical and logical concepts, charting the critical necessity that leads from descriptive psychology to transcendentally pure phenomenology. An investigation of the movement of Husserl's phenomenology of transcendental consciousness to that of monadological intersubjectivity follows. Hopkins then presents the final stage of the development of Husserl's thought, which situates monadological intersubjectivity within the (...) context of the historical a priori constitutive of all meaning. An exposition of the unwarranted historical presuppositions that guide Heidegger's fundamental ontological and Derrida's deconstructive criticisms of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology concludes the book. By following Husserl's personal trajectory Hopkins is able to show the unity of Husserl's philosophical enterprise, challenging the prevailing view that Husserl's late turn to history is inconsistent with his earlier attempts to establish phenomenology as a pure science. Contents: Introduction Part I Descriptive Psychology 1. Investigation of the Origin of Number 2. Investigation of the Origin of Logical Signification Part II Cartesian Transcendental Phenomenology 3. Investigation of the Origin of Objective Transcendence 4. Investigation of the Origin of Subjective Transcendence Part III Historical Transcendental Phenomenology 5. The Crisis of Meaning in Contemporary European Science 6. Historical Investigation of the Phenomenological Origin Part IV Husserl and his Critics 7. Fundamental Critiques of Transcendental Phenomenology 8. A Husserlian Response to the Critics. (shrink)

This (1982) essay sets out the claim that psychoanalysis is a cogent extension of the intuitive common sense psychology by which we naturally understand human action. In this psychology explanation proceeds by relating actions to the logically and causally cohering desires and beliefs of agents. As Freud showed, this kind of explanation is systematically deepened and extended by the explanation of dreams, the symptoms of mental disorder, and other related phenomena via the Freudian concept of wish fulfilment, which was later (...) extended to the more inclusive post-Freudian concept of phantasy. In this extension everyday actions, such as Freud's writing up his patient Irma's case history on the day before his dream of Irma's injection, are seen to be rooted in the same unconscious motives as are represented as fulfilled in dreams and symptoms -- e.g., in this case, by unconscious stirrings of deep guilt on the topic of injection, of which Freud was unaware until he analysed the dream. As this illustrates, the understanding of wishfulfilments and other formations of phantasy enables us fill out our account of agents and their actions by adding a stock of previously unacknowledged desires and modes of expression of desire. These are seen to cohere with, and also to deepen, our previous understanding: after understanding Freud's dream, we also have a deeper and firmer (and so more cogent) understanding of his behaviour on the previous day. In this way Freud effected an extension of our everyday mode of understanding that was cogent, cumulative, and radical, as illustrated further by examination of Freud's case history of the patient described as the Rat Man. (shrink)

CONTENTS Rudolf Bernet: Husserl's Transcendental Idealism Revisited Ian Angus: In Praise of Fire: Responsibility, Manifestation, Polemos, Circumspection Dieter Lohmar: Husserl's Hesitant Revisionism in the Field of Logic Torsten Pietrek: A Reconstruction of Phenomenological Method for Metaethics Renaud Barabas: Sensing and Creating: Phenomenology and the Unity of Aesthetics Christian Lotz: Recollection, Mourning and the Absolute Past. Husserl, Freud and Derrida Karlheinz Ruhstorfer: Adieu: Derrida's God and the Beginning of Thinking Rosemary R. P. Lerner: Husserl vs. Neo-Kantianism Revisited: On Skepticism, Foundationalism, and (...) Intuition Sebastian Luft: A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Subjective and Objective Spirit: Husserl, Natorp and Cassirer Marcus Brainard: Husserl on Nature and Spirit Edmund Husserl: On Smoking (German/English) Johannes Daubert: Notes from Husserl's Mathematical-Philosophical Exercises (1905), ed. and intro. Mark van Atten and Karl Schuhmann (German/English) Dorion Cairns: On Eugen Fink's "The Problem of Husserl's Phenomenology". (shrink)