El artículo presenta el contexto epistemológico general de las observaciones y comentarios de Agustín sobre el aprendizaje del lenguaje ostensivo, especialmente, en algunos textos de las Confesiones.

Augustine was a convinced proponent of the multiplicity of meanings. He had both theoretical and theological reasons for affirming the phenomenon of polysemy. This article deduces seven themes from Augustine’s exegetical practice and from his discussions of the principles of his exegesis, and employs these as Augustine’s arguments for the multiplicity of meanings. Augustine acknowledges the legitimacy of the many senses of the Word of God. Because scripture is an ambiguous linguistic reality, it constitutes a system of signs and it (...) reuses earlier texts to convey new meanings. Augustine’s theological reasons for the multiplicity of meanings include the beliefs that human authorial intention is complemented by the primary divine intention, that scripture has to be interpreted Christologically, that scripture’s interpretations have to be spiritually useful, and that the texts of scripture are part of the new theological/literary context of the canon. (shrink)

Augustine in Context assesses the various contexts - historical, literary, cultural, spiritual - in which Augustine lived and worked. The essays, written by an international team of scholars especially for this volume, provide the background against which Augustine's treatises should be read and interpreted. They are organized according to a rationale which moves from an introduction to the person to the contexts of Augustine's works and ideas, starting from the intellectual setting and extending to the socio-political realm. Collectively the essays (...) highlight the embeddedness of Augustine in the world of late antiquity and the interdependence of his discourse with contemporary forms of social life. They shed new light on one of the most important figures of the western canon and facilitate a more enlightened reading of his writings. (shrink)

El artículo aborda la cuestión de la resurrección según la entiende Agustín, para quien ésta implica el 'totus homo', la resurrección del ser humano completo, cuerpo y alma. Muestra también que para Agustín la redención del 'totus homo' debe incluir las relaciones redimidas de las personas individuales con los otros seres vivos.

This Cambridge Companion serves as an authoritative guide to Augustine's Confessions - a literary classic and one of the most important theological/philosophical works of Late Antiquity. Bringing together new essays by leading scholars, the volume first examines the composition of the text, including its structure, genre, and intended audience. Subsequent essays explore a range of themes and concepts, such as God, creation, sin, grace, happiness, and interiority, among others. The final section of the Companion deals with its historical relevance. It (...) provides sample essays on the reception history of the Confessions. These essays demonstrate how each generation reads the Confessions in light of current questions and circumstances, and how the text continues to remain relevant and raise new questions. (shrink)

The article examines that for Augustine, resurrection means the resurrection of ‘totus homo’, the resurrection of the whole human being, body and soul. It also shows that for Augustine the redemption of ‘totus homo’ must comprise the redemption of the relationships of individual persons with other living beings.

Review of Tarmo Toom, The Cambridge Companion to Augustine’s Confessions, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 340 pp.

In this essay I ask if there are reasons that count in favor of having a desire in virtue of its attitudinal nature. I call those considerations desire's own reasons. I argue that desire's own reasons are considerations that explain why a desire meets its constitutive standard of correctness and that it meets this standard when its satisfaction would also be satisfactory to the subject who has it. Reasons that bear on subjective satisfaction are fit to regulate desires through experience (...) and imagination because desires are naturally sensitive to them. I also analyze the limits of application that such reasons have and how desire's own reasons relate to other kinds of reasons. (shrink)

One of the most exciting debates in philosophy of imagination in recent years has been over the epistemic use of imagination where imagination epistemically contributes to justifying beliefs and acquiring knowledge. This paper defends “generationism about imagination” according to which imagination is a generative source, rather than a preservative source, of justification. In other words, imagination generates new justification above and beyond prior justification provided by other sources. After clarifying the generation/preservation distinction (Section 2), we present an argument for generationism (...) about imagination, which can be divided into two parts; the philosophical part and the empirical part. In the philosophical part of our argument (Section 3), we claim that generationism about imagination follows from what we call “INACCESSIBILITY”. According to INACCESSIBILITY, imagination is properly constrained by the imaginative constrainers (i.e., the prior representations that constrain the development of a scenario in imagination) to which non-imaginative belief-forming processes do not have access. In the empirical part of our argument (Section 4), we claim that INACCESSIBILITY is plausible in light of relevant studies and theories in the empirical literature, especially the literature on mental simulation (Section 4.1), core cognition (Section 4.2), and intuitive physics (Section 4.3). (shrink)

Allan Cochrane, Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, x+178 pp., cloth, $114.27 paper, $36.25, ISBN: 978-0-631-21121-1 As cities grow and change, the problems related to urban areas have become a...

Using examples of the work of some of the world's great artists, the author supports his theories of how great masterpieces were created.

A large and growing body of literature has investigated the role of teachers’ agency in their career trajectories. However, far too little attention has been paid to English as a Foreign Language teachers’, especially female EFL teachers’, professional agency for their career development in the Chinese higher education setting. To address this gap, this study explores female EFL teachers’ professional agency from a self-discrepancy theory perspective, namely, how the participating teachers have perceived discrepancies in their professional development and how they (...) have enacted their professional agency to realize sustainable development. Based on a metaphor investigation of 167 teachers and interviews with nine of them, the current study found that there are certain discrepancies between female EFL teachers’ self-guides and actual selves concerning their professional identity construction; female EFL teachers’ professional agency is manifested in the continuum of iteration, practical evaluation, and projectivity processes, as well as in the entity of personal and environmental factors; and 3) female EFL teachers’ professional agency and gender identity are closely intertwined with each other. This study can offer implications for teacher agency research and female teachers’ sustainable development at large. (shrink)

Desire is commonly understood as a mental state in relation to which we are passive. Since it seems to arise in us spontaneously, without antecedent deliberation, it also seems to constitute a paradigmatic type of mental state which is not up to us. In this paper, I will contest this idea. I will defend a view according to which we can actively shape our desires by controlling the way in which we imagine their contents. This view is supported both by (...) behavioral and neural data which indicate that imagining can either strengthen or weaken our existing desires. Arguably, this influence is made possible by our capacity to imaginatively elaborate on the content of our desires. This gives a reason to think that what we desire is partially under our control. It is under our control only partially because we can influence our desires insofar as their content appears appealing to us in imagination. (shrink)

Imaginings are often characterized in terms of vividness. However, there is little agreement in the philosophical literature as to what it amounts to and how to even investigate it. In this paper, we propose a natural kind methodology to study vividness and suggest treating it as a homeostatic property cluster with an underlying nature that explains the correlation of properties in that cluster. This approach relies on the empirical research on the vividness of mental imagery and contrasts with those accounts (...) that treat vividness as an explanatory primitive and with those that attempt to provide a definition. We apply the natural kind methodology to make several substantive claims about the vividness of mental imagery. First, we will argue that it forms a homeostatic property cluster, in that it is reliably correlated with, but not defined by, some properties, such as the level of detail, clarity, perception-likeness and intensity. In arguing for this claim, we also show how the cluster can be modified in the light of empirical research by complementing it with a correlation between vividness and familiarity. Second, we will argue that these correlations can be explained by an underlying property at the architectural level; i.e., the availability of stored sensory information for the elaboration of a mental image. (shrink)

It is not uncommon to think that having a desire involves taking its object to be good in some sense. This idea has been developed in two directions: either toward a view that understands the positive evaluation in terms of a judgment or belief or a view according to which the relevant evaluation is perception-like. In this article, I defend a novel proposal that takes the positive evaluation of the object of desire to be a kind of imagining.

The capacity of contemporary forensic genetics has rendered “race” into an interesting tool to produce clues about the identity of an unknown suspect. Whereas the conventional use of DNA profiling was primarily aimed at the individual suspect, more recently a shift of interest in forensic genetics has taken place, in which the population and the family to whom an unknown suspect allegedly belongs, has moved center stage. Making inferences about the phenotype or the family relations of this unknown suspect produces (...) suspect populations and families. We discuss the criminal investigation following the Marianne Vaatstra murder case in the Netherlands and the use of forensic technologies therein. It is in many ways an interesting case, but in this paper, we focus on how race surfaced in science and society. We show that race materializes neither in the technologies used nor in the bodies at stake. Rather, race emerges through a material semiotic relation that surfaces in the translation that occurs as humans and things move across sites. We argue that race is enacted, firstly, in the context of legislation as biology reduced to bodily characteristics; secondly, in the forensic analyses as patterns of absent presence; and, thirdly, in society as a process of phenotypic othering. (shrink)

When we are invited to imagine an unacceptable moral proposition to be true in fiction, we feel resistance when we try to imagine it. Despite this, it is nonetheless possible to suppose that the proposition is true. In this paper, I argue that existing accounts of imaginative resistance are unable to explain why only attempts to imagine the truth of moral propositions cause resistance. My suggestion is that imagination, unlike supposition, involves mental imagery and imaginative resistance arises when imagery that (...) one has formed does not match unacceptable propositions. (shrink)

In 2005, seven European countries signed the so-called Prüm Treaty to increase transnational collaboration in combating international crime, terrorism and illegal immigration. Three years later, the Treaty was adopted into EU law. EU member countries were now obliged to have systems in place to allow authorities of other member states access to nationally held data on DNA, fingerprints, and vehicles by August 2011. In this paper, we discuss the conditions of possibility for the Prüm network to emerge, and argue that (...) rather than a linear ascent towards technological and political convergence and harmonisation, the story of Prüm is heterogeneous and halting. This is reflected also in the early stages of implementing the Prüm Decision which has proven to be more challenging than it was hoped by the drivers of the Prüm process. In this sense, the Prüm network sits uncomfortably with success stories of forensic science . Instead of telling a story of heroic science, the story of Prüm articulates the European dream: one in which goods, services, and people live and travel freely and securely. (shrink)

The ability to attribute beliefs and desires is taken by many to be an essential component of human social cognition, enabling us to predict, explain and shape behaviour and other mental states. In this paper, I argue that there are certain basic responses to attributed attitudes which have thus far been overlooked in the study of social cognition, although they underlie many of the moves we make in our social interactions. The claim is that belief and desire attributions allow for (...) the possibility to agree or disagree and to approve or disapprove, respectively. These evaluative responses may seem obvious but they are of considerable theoretical interest because they can’t be reduced to other roles of belief and desire attribution and are always an open possibility for attributers. What’s more, the responses of agreement/disagreement and approval/disapproval are indispensable for such attributions to be intelligible to us in the first place. (shrink)

According to the two-component view of sensory imagination, imaginative states combine qualitative and assigned content. Qualitative content is the imagistic component of the imaginative state and is provided by a quasi-perceptual image; assigned content has a language-like structure. Recently, such a two-component view has been criticized by Daniel Hutto and Nicholas Wiltsher, both of whom have argued that postulating two contents is unnecessary for explaining how imagination represents. In this paper, I will defend the two-component theory by arguing that it (...) has three explanatory advantages over its competitors. First, it makes explicit a widely acknowledged distinction between engaged imagination and mere supposition. Second, it explains how imagination is constrained by objects’ perceptual appearances. Third, it explains how imaginings can be exploratory. (shrink)

Self‐ascriptions of desire seem to differ in their epistemic security. There are easy cases in which a sincere self‐ascription immediately counts as knowledgeable, and there are hard cases in which it is an open question whether an agent actually knows that they have the desire that they take themselves to have. In this paper, I suggest an explanation according to which whether a self‐ascription of desire is easy or hard depends on whether one is familiar with the content of the (...) self‐ascribed desire. (shrink)

Artikkel uurib muutusi ja arenguid Jean-Paul Sartre’i subjektikäsituses, mis leidsid aset tema fenomenoloogilise ja eksistentsialistliku mõtlemise perioodidel, keskendudes valdavalt tema filosoofilistele töödele, rõhuasetusega subjekti üldist struktuuri puutuval problemaatikal. Suurimat tähelepanu pälvivad vabadusega seonduvad transformatsioonid, sest selles vallas on Sartre’i seisukohtade erinevused kõige märgatavamad ja ühtlasi kõige olulisemad, kuid jõudumööda pööratakse pilk ka nüansseeritumatele teisendustele. Artikkel tutvustab põgusalt nimetatud muutuste ja nende taga seisvate arengute sisu, püüab Sartre’i mõtlemise perioode klassifitseerida, loob võrdlusi varasemate ja hilisemate teoste vahel ning polemiseerib autoritega, kes (...) modifikatsioonide tähtsust kas alahindavad või sootuks tähelepanuta jätavad. Kokkuvõttes jõutakse tõdemuseni, et paljudel hilisema Sartre’i poolt kasutatavatel mõistetel on varasemaga võrreldes üsna teistsugune tähendus ning need tähendusnihked annavad tunnistust sellest, et Sartre’i subjekti-filosoofias leidsid aset mõned üsna kardinaalsed, eriti just vabadust ja subjekti läbipaistvust puudutavad pöörded. (shrink)

This chapter argues that our self-knowledge is often mediated by our affective self-knowledge. In other words, we often know about ourselves by knowing our own emotions. More precisely, what Cassam has called “substantial self-knowledge” (SSK), such as self-knowledge of one's character, one's values, or one's aptitudes, is mediated by affective forecasting, which is the process of predicting one's emotional responses to possible situations. For instance, a person comes to know that she is courageous by predicting her own emotional reactions to (...) possible risks and dangers. This hypothesis explains why attaining substantive self-knowledge tends to be difficult. Attaining substantive self-knowledge is difficult because, first, SSK is mediated by affective forecasting and, second, we tend to be wrong about predicting the intensity and duration of our own emotional reactions. As a result, we can identify what is common to central cases of SSK: such cases require knowledge about complex dispositions whose manifestations involve affective responses that one is not sufficiently familiar with. One thus needs to resort to the highly fallible method of affective forecasting. (shrink)

Enticing food photography which stimulates its viewers’ cravings, often given a dismissive label “food porn,” is one of the most popular contents in contemporary digital media. In this paper, I argue that the label disguises different ways in which a viewer can engage with it. In particular, food porn enables us to engage in cross-modal gustatory imaginings of a specific kind and an image’s capacity to afford such imaginings can contribute to its artistic merit.

Some philosophers and psychologists share an assumption that pleasure is by nature such that when an experience is pleasurable, an agent is motivated to continue having that experience. In this paper, I dispute this assumption. First, I point out how it does not make sense of the wanting-liking distinction in motivational neuroscience. Second, I present as a counterexample what I call’dynamic pleasure’ which does not motivate retaining one’s focus on the object of original experience but motivates an exploration of other (...) options instead. Third, as another counterexample, I bring out pleasures of relief which are bound to pass when one’s discomfort is removed and in which case it is reasonable to assume that there is no motivation to maintain them. Fourth, I appeal to phenomenology of pleasure and argue that many experiences have a temporal shape which is in conflict with the self-maintenance assumption. As an example, I use the pleasure in listening to a song. The conclusion of the paper is that we should reject the self-maintenance assumption and consider seriously pluralism about the motivational structure of pleasure. (shrink)

Can disagreement with my past self about aesthetic matters give a reason to reconsider my present aesthetic verdict and if it does, under what conditions? In other words, can such a disagreement be a sign of my failing in my present aesthetic judgement? In this paper, I argue that revising one’s judgement in response to disagreeing with one’s former self is appropriate but only when the former and the present self share the same aesthetic personality. The possibility of failure in (...) one’s aesthetic judgement is therefore bound up, among other things, with facts about one’s aesthetic identity over time. The resulting view has implications for our understanding of the scope of the autonomy in aesthetics and is consistent with empirical evidence regarding the way in which people evaluate aesthetic judgments. (shrink)

Interactionists about folk psychology argue that embodied interactions constitute the primary way we understand one another and thus oppose more standard accounts according to which the understanding is mostly achieved through belief and desire attributions. However, also interactionists need to explain why people sometimes still resort to attitude ascription. In this paper, it is argued that this explanatory demand presents a genuine challenge for interactionism and that a popular proposal which claims that belief and desire attributions are needed to make (...) sense of counternormative behavior is problematic. Instead, the most promising conception of belief and desire ascriptions is the communicative conception which locates them in the context of declarative and imperative communication, respectively. Such a communication can take both verbal and non-verbal form. (shrink)

This article empirically analyzes how victims’ remains were recovered, identified, repatriated, and retained after the World Trade Center terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It does so by asking the question whose body is it. This question brings to the fore issues related to personhood and ownership: how are anonymous and unrecognizable bodily remains given back an identity; and who has ownership of or custody over identified and unidentified human remains? It is in this respect that the article engages with (...) technoscientific and legal, or “technolegal,” trajectories of human remains in the wake of the WTC tragedy. By using the metaphor of “materialization,” it becomes possible to trace how remains are forensically identified and implicated in legal regimes. “Technolegal materialization” as a concept and methodological sensitivity contributes to the current “actor-network theory” -inspired legal scholarship, which tends to focus on legal practices in courtrooms but not those beyond them. In this article, 9/11 victims’ remains are followed from “Ground Zero” to the forensic laboratory and beyond and articulates five instances of technolegal materialization of bodily remains and their past and contemporary existences. (shrink)

What are the conditions under which an agent has an aesthetic reason to stop appreciating something? In this paper, I argue that such a reason is dependent not only on the aesthetic properties of the object of appreciation but also on the hedonic state of the agent. Virtuous aesthetic agents who are responsive to aesthetic reasons need to be sensitive to hedonic changes in relation to the object and to recognise when these changes make it appropriate to sever one’s appreciative (...) focus. The resulting view has implications for how to understand aesthetic fittingness, aesthetic obligation, and the difference between aesthetic and moral reasons. (shrink)

The paper uses insights from the so-called rape in disguise case study to describe forensic DNA practices in the Netherlands in late 1980s. It describes how "reliabilities" of forensic DNA practices were achieved. One such reliability - convincing evidence - proliferates body parts through time and space. Then, attention shifts to the individual who was suspected of having committed the rape. He was asked to deliver tissue for DNA typing, but refused to do so. Hence DNA typing could not be (...) used to connect the suspect to a cervical smear collected from the body of the victim. His refusal and the legal impossibility to use force to obtain his biological material led first to questions in the Dutch parliament and then to the Dutch forensic DNA law. Other legal measures enacted after this are also described. I argue that, by means of the various Dutch forensic DNA laws and new forensic genetic techniques, the application of forensic DNA practices have shifted from identification and evidence to a tool for criminal investigation and prevention of future crimes. In the final part of the paper, the right to inviolability of the body and its synonym bodily integrity are emphasised. I argue that despite the various forensic DNA laws, bodily integrity of obtained tissue for DNA typing is still at stake as the result of convincing evidence. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize Alvin Goldman's simulation theory of mindreading which involves the claim that the basic method of folk psychologically predicting behaviour is to form pretend beliefs and desires that reproduce the transitions between the mental states of others, in that way enabling to predict what the others are going to do. I argue that when it comes to simulating propositional attitudes it isn't clear whether pretend beliefs need to be invoked in order to explain relevant experimental results, (...) and whether pretend desires can be distinguished from 'real' ones as forming a separate kind of mental states. Since belief-desire model underlies the conception of pretend states in higher-level mindreading, dropping pretend attitudes from the picture isn't possible and, due to that, this model may be incoherent. Nevertheless, Goldman's theory could still survive because it includes an additional model of mindreading, but simulation is given much lesser role there. (shrink)