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There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix. The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relation between creativity and the (...) perception and passage of time, and reviews the creativity and improvisational quality of anthropological scholarship itself. Individual essays examine how the concept of creativity has changed in the history of modern social theory, and question its applicability as a term of cross-cultural analysis. The contributors highlight the collaborative and political dimensions of creativity and thus challenge the idea that creativity arises only from individual talent and expression. (shrink)

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If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

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Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate,Elizabeth Grosz argues that art-especially architecture, music, and painting-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention and aesthetic. By regarding our most cultured human accomplishments as (...) the result of the excessive, nonfunctional forces of sexual attraction and seduction, Grosz encourages us to see art as a kind of bodily enhancement or mode of sensation enabling living bodies to experience and transform the universe. Art can be understood as a way for bodies to augment themselves and their capacity for perception and affection-a way to grow and evolve through sensation. Through this framework, which knits together the theories of Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jakob von Uexküll, we are able to grasp art's deep animal lineage. Grosz argues that art is not tied to the predictable and known but to new futures not contained in the present. Its animal affiliations ensure that art is intensely political and charged with the creation of new worlds and new forms of living. According to Grosz, art is the way in which life experiments with materiality, or nature, in order to bring about change. (shrink)

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Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

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This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2014, given byElizabeth Anderson, an American philosopher.

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The non-identity problem concerns actions that affect who exists in the future. If such an action is performed, certain people will exist in the future who would not otherwise have existed: they are not identical to any of the people who would have existed if the action had not been performed. Some of these actions seem to be wrong, and they seem to be wrong in virtue of harming the very future individuals whose existence is dependent on their having been (...) performed. The problem arises when it is argued that the actions do not harm these people—because the actions do not make them worse off than they would otherwise be.1 Consider: Radioactive Waste Policy: We are trying to decide whether to adopt a permissive radioactive waste policy. This policy would be less inconvenient to us than our existing practices. If we enact the newly-proposed policy, then we will cause there to be radioactive pollution that will cause illness and suffering. However, the policy will have such significant effects on public policy and industry functioning, that different people will exist in the future depending on whether we enact the policy. Two things should be emphasized. First, the illness and suffering caused will be very serious: deformed babies, children with burns from acid rain, and adults dying young from cancer. Second, the policy will affect who will exist in the future because our present practices invade people’s everyday lives, for example by affecting recycling practices in the home; these practices will change if the policy is adopted. Furthermore, whether we adopt the policy will determine which plants are built where, what jobs are available, and what trucks are on the road. These effects will create small differences in everyone’s lives which ultimately affect who meets whom and who conceives with whom, or at least when people conceive. This affects who exists in the future. (shrink)

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When trust is broken, how should we determine who is at fault? Previous discus- sions of broken trust typically attribute the fault to trusters who place trust foolishly or trustees who act in an untrustworthy manner. These discussions take for granted the ability of the truster and trustee to communicate and understand the boundaries of what is being entrusted, that is, the domain of trust. However, the boundaries of entrusted domains are not always clear to either party which can result (...) in broken trust despite the best efforts of both truster and trustee. In this paper, I argue that deter- mining who to blame when trust is broken is a messy affair in which disagreements over fault regularly arise. I introduce three features of trust domains that take center stage in negotiations regarding who is at fault when trust is broken: scope, rigidity and ordering. (shrink)

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Contemporary literature criticises a necessary link between empathy and actions that demonstrate genuine moral worth. If there is such a necessary link, many argue, it must come in the developmental stages of our moral capacities, rather than being found in the mental states that make up our motivating reasons. This paper goes against that trend, arguing that critics have not considered how wide-ranging the mental states are that make up a person’s reasons. In particular, it argues that empathy can play (...) a role in moral motivation when it is to some extent unconscious or it occurs far prior to the moral action itself. (shrink)

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This class-tested text provides a comprehensive overview of the classical and current theories of moral development and applications of these theories in various counseling and educational settings.

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Under some circumstances, individuals are willing to engage in unethical behaviors that benefit another entity. In this research we advance the unethical pro-organizational behavior construct by showing that individuals also have the potential to behave unethically to benefit their supervisors. Previous research has not examined if employees engage in unethical acts to benefit an entity that is separate from oneself and if they will conduct these acts to benefit a supervisor. Our research helps to address these gaps. We also demonstrate (...) that unethical behavior to benefit a supervisor, what we term unethical pro-supervisor behavior, is more likely to occur if individuals are more (versus less) identified with their organization or supervisor. That is, feeling a sense of oneness with one’s organization or supervisor can result in employees engaging in unethical behavior to help their supervisor. Further, this positive relationship is weakened if the employee possesses higher levels of moral identity. We test our hypotheses with a two-part laboratory study, a field study, and a time-lagged field study. Theoretical and practical implications of this work are discussed. (shrink)

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Essays at the intersection of philosophy and architecture explore how we understand and inhabit space. To be outside allows one a fresh perspective on the inside. In these essays, philosopherElizabeth Grosz explores the ways in which two disciplines that are fundamentally outside each another—architecture and philosophy—can meet in a third space to interact free of their internal constraints. "Outside" also refers to those whose voices are not usually heard in architectural discourse but who inhabit its space—the destitute, the (...) homeless, the sick, and the dying, as well as women and minorities. Grosz asks how we can understand space differently in order to structure and inhabit our living arrangements accordingly. Two themes run throughout the book: temporal flow and sexual specificity. Grosz argues that time, change, and emergence, traditionally viewed as outside the concerns of space, must become more integral to the processes of design and construction. She also argues against architecture's historical indifference to sexual specificity, asking what the existence of (at least) two sexes has to do with how we understand and experience space. Drawing on the work of such philosophers as Henri Bergson, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan, Grosz raises abstract but nonformalistic questions about space, inhabitation, and building. All of the essays propose philosophical experiments to render space and building more mobile and dynamic. (shrink)

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Communication, when defined as an act intended to affect the psychological state of another individual, demands the use of inference. Either the signaler, the recipient, or both must make leaps of understanding which surpass the semantic information available and draw from pragmatic clues to fully imbue and interpret meaning. While research into human communication and the evolution of language has long been comfortable with mentalistic interpretations of communicative exchanges, including rich attributions of mental state, research into animal communication has balked (...) at theoretical models which describe mentalized cognitive mechanisms. We submit a new theoretical perspective on animal communication: the model of inferential communication. For use when existing proximate models of animal communication are not sufficient to fully explain the complex, flexible, and intentional communication documented in certain species, specifically non-human primates, we present our model as a bridge between shallower, less cognitive descriptions of communicative behavior and the perhaps otherwise inaccessible mentalistic interpretations of communication found in theoretical considerations of human language. Inferential communication is a framework that builds on existing evidence of referentiality, intentionality, and social inference in primates. It allows that they might be capable of applying social inferences to a communicative setting, which could explain some of the cognitive processes that enable the complexity and flexibility of primate communication systems. While historical models of animal communication focus on the means-ends process of behavior and apparent cognitive outcomes, inferential communication invites consideration of the mentalistic processes that must underlie those outcomes. We propose a mentalized approach to questions, investigations, and interpretations of non-human primate communication. We include an overview of both ultimate and proximate models of animal communication, which contextualize the role and utility of our inferential communication model, and provide a detailed breakdown of the possible levels of cognitive complexity which could be investigated using this framework. Finally, we present some possible applications of inferential communication in the field of non-human primate communication and highlight the role it could play in advancing progress toward an increasingly precise understanding of the cognitive capabilities of our closest living relatives. (shrink)

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Many people face a problem about potentiality: their moral beliefs appear to dictate inconsistent views about the significance of the potentiality to become a healthy adult. Briefly, the problem arises as follows. Consider the following two claims. First, both human babies and cats have moral status, but harms to babies matter more, morally, than similar harms to cats. Second, early human embryos lack moral status. It appears that the first claim can only be true if human babies have more moral (...) status than cats. Among the properties that determine moral status, human babies have no properties other than their potentiality that could explain their having more moral status than cats. So human babies’ potentiality to become adult persons must explain their having more moral status than cats. But then potentiality must raise moral status generally. So early human embryos must have some moral status. It appears that the view that must underlie the first claim implies that the second claim is false. (shrink)

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The concept of vulnerability is widely used in bioethics, particularly in research ethics and public health ethics. The traditional approach construes vulnerability as inherent in individuals or the groups to which they belong and views vulnerability as requiring special protections. Florencia Luna and other bioethicists continue to challenge traditional ways of conceptualizing and applying the term. Luna began proposing a layered approach to this concept and recently extended this proposal to offer two new concepts to analyze the concept of vulnerability, (...) namely understanding external conditions that trigger vulnerability and layers of vulnerability with cascading effects. Luna's conception of vulnerability is useful, which we demonstrate by applying her layered view and the new analyses in multiple contexts. We begin by outlining Luna's view and we use vignettes from healthcare involving transgender patients, the care of patients in psychiatric contexts, and research involving prisoners to illustrate how each part of Luna's concept elucidates important moral issues. (shrink)

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When Cool finally realized that false memories had been planted, she sued the psychiatrist for malpractice. In March 1997, after five weeks of trial, her case was settled out of court for $2.4 million. Nadean Cool is not the only patient to develop false memories as a result of questionable therapy. In Missouri in 1992 a church counselor helped Beth Rutherford to remember during therapy that her father, a clergyman, had regularly raped her between the ages of seven and 14 (...) and that her mother sometimes helped him by holding her down. Under her therapist's guidance, Rutherford developed memories of her father twice impregnating her and forcing her to abort the fetus herself with a coat hanger.The father had to resign from his post as a clergyman when the allegations were made public. Later medical examination of the daughter revealed, however, that she was still a virgin at age 22 and had never been pregnant. The daughter sued the therapist and received a $1-million settlement in 1996. (shrink)

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The concept of preference dominates economic theory today. It performs a triple duty for economists, grounding their theories of individual behavior, welfare, and rationality. Microeconomic theory assumes that individuals act so as to maximize their utility – that is, to maximize the degree to which their preferences are satisfied. Welfare economics defines individual welfare in terms of preference satisfaction or utility, and social welfare as a function of individual preferences. Finally, economists assume that the rational act is the act that (...) maximally satisfies an individual's preferences. The habit of framing problems in terms of the concept of preference is now so entrenched that economists rarely entertain alternatives. (shrink)

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This book expands the landscape of research in mathematics education by analyzing how the body influences mathematical thinking.

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Seven studies explored the empirical basis for claims that infants represent cardinal values of small sets of objects. Many studies investigating numerical ability did not properly control for continuous stimulus properties such as surface area, volume, contour length, or dimensions that correlate with these properties. Experiment 1 extended the standard habituation/dishabituation paradigm to a 1 vs 2 comparison with three-dimensional objects and confirmed that when number and total front surface area are confounded, infants discriminate the arrays. Experiment 2 revealed that (...) infants dishabituated to a change in front surface area but not to a change in number when the two variables were pitted against each other. Experiments 3 through 5 revealed no sensitivity to number when front surface area was controlled, and Experiments 6 and 7 extended this pattern of findings to the Wynn (1992) transformation task. Infants’ lack of a response to number, combined with their demonstrated sensitivity to one or more dimensions of continuous extent, supports the hypothesis that the representations subserving object-based attention, rather than those subserving enumeration, underlie performance in the above tasks. (shrink)

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This paper argues that an agent’s moral obligations are necessarily connected to her desires. In doing so I will demonstrate that such a view is less revisionary—and more in line with our common-sense views on morality—than philosophers have previously taken it to be. You can hold a desire-based view of moral normativity, I argue, without being (e.g.) a moral relativist or error theorist about morality. I’ll make this argument by showing how two important features of an objective morality are compatible (...) with such a desire-based account: 1) morality’s authoritative nature, 2) our ability to condemn immoral agents. (shrink)

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Background: Caregivers and administrators in long-term facilities have fragile moral work in caring for residents with dementia. Residents are susceptible to barriers and vulnerabilities associated with the most intimate aspects of their lives, including how they express themselves sexually. The conditions for sexual agency are directly affected by caregivers’ perceptions and attitudes, as well as facility policies. Objective: This article aims to clarify how to approach capacity determinations as it relates to sexual activity, propose how to theorize about patient autonomy (...) in this context, and suggest some considerations for finding an ethically responsible and practically feasible way to respect the sexual rights of this population. Research Design: The focus is on residents with early to moderate dementia in states of daily dependency on professional caregivers. The article critically examines existing empirical research on sexuality among persons with dementia, caregivers’ attitudes, and institutional roadblocks to enabling residents’ sexuality. A relational lens and insights from disability studies are used in the philosophical analysis. Participants and Research Context: No research participants were part of this analysis. Ethical Considerations: This article offers a conceptual analysis and normative framework only. Findings: The analysis highlights the delicate balance that capacity assessments for sexual activity have to strike; while caregivers should protect those who cannot give adequate consent, the denial of sexuality among residents can cause deep, long-ranging harms. Sexual agency features into an ongoing sense of self for many individuals with dementia, and the imposition of inappropriate standards and expectations for sexual autonomy can lead to unwarranted obstacles to sexual activity. Discussion: Recommendations include developing clear and inclusive institutional policies and practices of care, providing education for caregivers on how to discuss and document residents’ sexual preferences over time, and taking advantage of ethics consultation services. Conclusion: This analysis establishes the need for more research and discussion on this sensitive topic. Future research should investigate the specific responsibilities of caregivers in furthering the sexual interests of residents, how exactly to modify existing capacity instruments, and how best to support historically marginalized patients in their sexual identities. (shrink)

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Interest in political theology has surged in recent years, and this accessible volume provides a focused overview of the field. Many are asking serious questions about religious faith in secular societies, the origin and function of democratic polities, worldwide economic challenges, the shift of Christianity's center of gravity to the global south, and anxieties related to bold and even violent assertions of theologically determined political ideas. In fourteen original essays, authors examine Christian political theology in order to clarify the contemporary (...) discourse and some of its most important themes and issues. These include up-to-date, critical engagements with historical figures like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant; discussions of how the Bible functions theopolitically; and introductions to key movements such as liberation theology, Catholic social teaching, and radical orthodoxy. An invaluable resource for students and scholars in theology, the Companion will also be beneficial to those in history, philosophy, and politics. (shrink)

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This book offers new essays exploring concepts and applications of nonideal theory in bioethics. Nonideal theory refers to an analytic approach to moral and political philosophy (especially in relation to justice), according to which we should not assume that there will be perfect compliance with principles, that there will be favorable circumstances for just institutions and right action, or that reasoners are capable of being impartial. Nonideal theory takes the world as it actually is, in all of its imperfections. Bioethicists (...) have called for greater attention to how nonideal theory can serve as a guide in the messy realities they face daily. Although many bioethicists implicitly assume nonideal theory in their work, there is the need for more explicit engagement with this theoretical outlook. A nonideal approach to bioethics would start by examining the sociopolitical realities of healthcare and the embeddedness of moral actors in those realities. How are bioethicists to navigate systemic injustices when completing research, giving guidance for patient care, and contributing to medical and public health policies? When there are no good options and when moral agents are enmeshed in their sociopolitical viewpoints, how should moral theorizing proceed? What do bioethical issues and principles look like from the perspective of historically marginalized persons? These are just a few of the questions that motivate nonideal theory within bioethics. This book begins in Part I with an overview of the foundational tenets of nonideal theory, what nonideal theory can offer bioethics, and why it may be preferable to ideal theory in addressing moral dilemmas in the clinic and beyond. In Part II, authors discuss applications of nonideal theory in many areas of bioethics, including reflections on environmental harms, racism and minority health, healthcare injustices during incarceration and detention, and other vulnerabilities experienced by patients from clinical and public health perspectives. The chapters within each section demonstrate the breadth in scope that nonideal theory encompasses, bringing together diverse theorists and approaches into one collection. (shrink)

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Morality, according to some theories, demands a lot of us. One way to defend such demanding moral theories is through an appeal to the division of normativity; on this picture, morality is only one of the normative domains that guides us, so it should be expected that we often fail to follow that guidance. This paper defends the division of normativity as a response to demandingness objections against an alternative: moral rationalism. It does this by addressing and refuting three arguments: (...) the argument from blameworthiness, the argument from agency, and the argument from authority. In turn, I show that none of these arguments work as responses to the division of normativity – if normativity generally is divided, so too must be blameworthiness, agency, and authority. (shrink)

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John Dewey (1859-1952) lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, a period of extraordinary social, economic, demographic, political and technological change. During his lifetime the United States changed from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from a regional to a world power. It emancipated its slaves, but subjected them to white supremacy. It absorbed millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, but faced wrenching conflicts between capital and labor as they were (...) integrated into the urban industrial economy. It granted women the vote, but resisted their full integration into educational and economic institutions. As the face-to-face communal life of small villages and towns waned, it confronted the need to create new forms of community life capable of sustaining democracy on urban and national scales. Dewey believed that neither traditional moral norms nor traditional philosophical ethics were up to the task of coping with the problems raised by these dramatic transformations. Traditional morality was adapted to conditions that no longer existed. Hidebound and unreflective, it was incapable of changing so as to effectively address the problems raised by new circumstances. Traditional philosophical ethics sought to discover and justify fixed moral goals and principles by dogmatic methods. Its preoccupation with reducing the diverse sources of moral insight to a single fixed principle subordinated practical service to ordinary people to the futile search for certainty, stability, and simplicity. In practice, both traditional morality and philosophical ethics served the interests of elites at the expense of most people. To address the problems raised by social change, moral practice needed to be thoroughly reconstructed, so that it contained within itself the disposition to respond intelligently to new circumstances. Dewey saw his reconstruction of philosophical ethics as a means to effect this practical reconstruction. (shrink)

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The vivid, dramatic images of distant stars and galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope have come to define how we visualize the cosmos. In their immediacy and vibrancy, photographs from the Hubble show what future generations of space travelers might see should they venture beyond our solar system. But their brilliant hues and precise details are not simply products of the telescope's unprecedented orbital location and technologically advanced optical system. Rather, they result from a series of deliberate decisions made (...) by the astronomers who convert raw data from the Hubble into spectacular pictures by assigning colors, adjusting contrast, and actively composing the images, balancing the desire for an aesthetically pleasing representation with the need for a scientifically valid one. In Picturing the Cosmos,Elizabeth A. Kessler examines the Hubble's deep space images, highlighting the remarkable resemblance they bear to nineteenth-century paintings and photographs of the American West and their invocation of the visual language of the sublime. Drawing on art history and the history of science, as well as interviews with astronomers who work on the Hubble Heritage Project, Kessler traces the ways that the sublime, with its inherent tension between reason and imagination, not only forms the appearance of the images, but also operates on other levels. The sublime informs the dual expression—numeric and pictorial—of digital data and underpins the relevance of the frontier for a new era of exploration performed by our instruments rather than our bodies. Through their engagement with the sublime the Hubble images are a complex act of translation that encourages an experience of the universe as simultaneously beyond humanity's grasp and within the reach of our knowledge. Strikingly illustrated with full-color images, this book reveals the scientific, aesthetic, and cultural significance of the Hubble pictures, offering a nuanced understanding of how they shape our ideas—and dreams—about the cosmos and our places within it. (shrink)

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This volume aims to question, challenge, supplement, and revise current understandings of the relationship between aesthetic and political operations. The authors transcend disciplinary boundaries and nurture a wide-ranging sensibility about art and sovereignty, two highly complex and interwoven dimensions of human experience that have rarely been explored by scholars in one conceptual space. Several chapters consider the intertwining of modern philosophical currents and modernist artistic forms, in particular those revealing formal abstraction, stylistic experimentation, self-conscious expression, and resistance to traditional definitions (...) of "Art." Other chapters deal with currents that emerged as facets of art became increasingly commercialized, merging with industrial design and popular entertainment industries. Some contributors address Post-Modernist art and theory, highlighting power relations and providing sceptical, critical commentary on repercussions of colonialism and notions of universal truths rooted in Western ideals. By interfering with established dichotomies and unsettling stable debates related to art and sovereignty, all contributors frame new perspectives on the co-constitution of artworks and practices of sovereignty. (shrink)

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Conferralism is the view that social properties are neither intrinsic to the things that have them nor possessed simply by virtue of their causal or spatiotemporal relations to other things, but are somehow bestowed (intentionally or not, explicitly or not) upon them by persons who have both the capacity and the standing to bestow them. We argue that conferralism faces a dilemma: either it is viciously circular, or it is limited in scope in a way that undercuts its motivation.

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This paper examines the idea that straight talk can actually pose certain dangers for democracy by asking two interrelated questions. First, does our belief in the importance of sincerity necessarily improve political deliberation? Second, does our belief cause us to under-appreciate other important communicative resources? We will see that much hinges on our answers to these questions because they deal directly with whose voices are to be considered legitimate and authoritative in our public sphere. This paper begins from a deliberative (...) democratic standpoint: democracy is a logocentric enterprise—that is, language is at the center of democratic political projects. So it is critical that we pay attention to how we evaluate political words. Otherwise, not only can we not really understand what is going on in the public sphere, but we are also more likely to make poor judgments about what sort of speech and speakers make our democracy more robust. -/- To explore these questions, this paper examines the discourse ethics that underwrite much of deliberative democratic theory (section I). It then goes on to discuss some of the dangers that the particular ethic of sincerity poses for democratic communication. The paper argues that the emphasis on sincerity: -/- 1) too easily collapses the relation between claims to truthfulness and truth claims and contributes to an undemocratic epistemology; 2) oversimplifies human psychology, ignoring the possibility of multiple and complexly related intentions; 3) denigrates “rhetorical” forms of speech; and 4) privileges a seemingly non-rhetorical mode of communication: hyper-sincerity. (shrink)

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This Husserlian transcendental-phenomenological investigation of interkinaesthetic affectivity first clarifies the sense of affectivity that is at stake here, then shows how Husserl’s distinctive approach to kinaesthetic experience provides evidential access to the interkinaesthetic field. After describing several structures of interkinaesthetic-affective experience, I indicate how a Husserlian critique of the presupposition that we are “psychophysical” entities might suggest a more inclusive approach to a biosocial plenum that includes all metabolic life.

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This article has two main aims. First, it will defend an ‘attitudinal’ account of pleasure, that is, an account of what it is that makes an experience pleasurable for a subject that explains it in terms of a certain kind ofde redesire that the subject has towards that experience. Second, in doing so, the article aims to further our understanding of unconscious desires, and of what the subjects of such desires can be. The article begins by introducing two existing accounts (...) of what makes an experience pleasurable. It then offers a diagnosis of a recent objection to attitudinal accounts from Bramble and existing responses from attitudinal theorists, arguing that the two positions are currently at a stalemate. After this, I argue for the possible existence of unknowable and unconsciousde redesires, and show how such desires provide the best defence of such ‘attitudinal’ accounts. (shrink)

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Research on human infants, adult nonhuman primates, and children and adults in diverse cultures provides converging evidence for four systems at the foundations of human knowledge. These systems are domain specific and serve to represent both entities in the perceptible world (inanimate manipulable objects and animate agents) and entities that are more abstract (numbers and geometrical forms). Human cognition may be based, as well, on a fifth system for representing social partners and for categorizing the social world into groups. Research (...) on infants and children may contribute both to understanding of these systems and to attempts to overcome misconceptions that they may foster. (shrink)

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The speech-to-song illusion ( Deutsch et al., 2011 ) tracks the perceptual transformation from speech to song across repetitions of a brief spoken utterance. Because it involves no change in the stimulus itself, but a dramatic change in its perceived affiliation to speech or to music, it presents a unique opportunity to comparatively investigate the processing of language and music. In this study, native English-speaking participants were presented with brief spoken utterances that were subsequently repeated ten times. The utterances were (...) drawn either from languages that are relatively difficult for a native English speaker to pronounce, or languages that are relatively easy for a native English speaker to pronounce. Moreover, the repetition could occur at regular or irregular temporal intervals. Participants rated the utterances before and after the repetitions on a 5-point Likert-like scale ranging from “sounds exactly like speech” to “sounds exactly like singing.” The difference in ratings before and after was taken as a measure of the strength of the speech-to-song illusion in each case. The speech-to-song illusion occurred regardless of whether the repetitions were spaced at regular temporal intervals or not; however, it occurred more readily if the utterance was spoken in a language difficult for a native English speaker to pronounce. Speech circuitry seemed more liable to capture native and easy-to-pronounce languages, and more reluctant to relinquish them to perceived song across repetitions. (shrink)

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Concerns about children's ability to fully comprehend and evaluate advertising messages has stimulated substantial research and heated debate among scholars, business leaders, consumer advocates, and public policy makers for more than three decades. During that time, some very fundamental questions about the fairness of marketing to children have been raised, yet many remain unresolved today. With the emergence of increasingly sophisticated advertising media, promotional offers and creative appeals in recent years, new issues have also developed. This paper provides a basis (...) for further examination of some the key questions in this area, and suggests how children's advertising research can be employed to illuminate them. (shrink)

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For much of his career, British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott was identified with Margaret Thatcher’s conservative policies. He has been called by some a guru to the Tories, while others have considered him one of the last proponents of British Idealism. Best known for such books as _Experience and Its Modes_ and _Rationalism in Politics_, Oakeshott has been the subject of numerous studies, but always with an emphasis on his political thought.Elizabeth Campbell Corey now makes the case that (...) Oakeshott’s moral and political philosophies are more informed by religious and aesthetic considerations than has previously been supposed. Hers is the first book-length study of this premise, arguing that Oakeshott’s views on aesthetics, religion, and morality are intimately linked in a creative moral personality that underlies his political theorizing. Corey focuses on a wealth of early material from Oakeshott’s career that has only recently been published, as well as his acclaimed “Tower of Babel” essays, to show that these works illuminate his thinking in ways that could not have been realized prior to their publication. She places Oakeshott squarely in the Augustinian tradition, citing his 1929 essay “Religion and the World,” and then identifies his departure from it. She explores Oakeshott’s recurring theme of “living one’s life in the present”; examines his explicit discussions of religion, aesthetics, and morality; and then considers his political thought in light of this moral vision. She finally compares his idea of Rationalism to Eric Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism and considers both thinkers’ treatment of Hobbes to delineate their philosophical differences. Through this insightful analysis, Corey shows Oakeshott to be not merely a political philosopher but a thinker with humanistic interests—one who throughout his life was deeply interested in the question of what it means to be human and was moved by art, poetry, and religion while recognizing the necessary evil of political arrangements in order for those activities to flourish. Her work is a major step in a reevaluation of Oakeshott, showing that his conservatism has been greatly misunderstood and that he is more properly regarded as a philosopher whose vision of the human condition, while oftentimes detached and skeptical, is also romantic and inspired. (shrink)

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This paper defends a desire-based understanding of pleasurable and unpleasant experiences. More specifically, the thesis is that what makes an experience pleasant/unpleasant is the subject having a certain kind of desire about that experience. I begin by introducing the ‘Desire Account’ in more detail, and then go on to explain and refute a prominent set of contemporary counter-examples, based on subjects who might have ‘Reflective Blindness’, looking particularly at the example of subjects with depression. I aim to make the Desire (...) Account more persuasive, but also to clear up more widespread misunderstandings about depression in metaethics. For example, mistakes that are made by conflating two of depression’s most prominent symptoms: depressed mood and anhedonia. (shrink)

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This collection of original essays brings a dramatically different perspective to bear on the contemporary "crisis of journalism." Rather than seeing technological and economic change as the primary causes of current anxieties, The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered draws attention to the role played by the cultural commitments of journalism itself. Linking these professional ethics to the democratic aspirations of the broader societies in which journalists ply their craft, it examines how the new technologies are being shaped to sustain value commitments (...) rather than undermining them. Recent technological change and the economic upheaval it has produced are coded by social meanings. It is this cultural framework that actually transforms these "objective" changes into a crisis. The book argues that cultural codes not only trigger sharp anxiety about technological and economic changes, but provide pathways to control them, so that the democratic practices of independent journalism can be sustained in new forms. (shrink)

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