bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Twenty-First-Century Fiction
Authors: Schoene Berthold
Published: June 2018

This chapter looks at how the contemporary British and Irish novel is becoming part of a new globalized world literature, which imagines the world as it manifests itself both within (‘glocally’) and outside nationalist demarcations. At its weakest, often against its own best intentions, this new cosmopolitan writing cannot but simply reinscribe the old imperial power relations. Or, it provides an essential component of the West’s ideological superstructure for globalization’s neoliberal business of rampant upward wealth accumulation. At its best, however, this newly emergent genre promotes a cosmopolitan ethics of justice, resistance. It also promotes dissent while working hard to expose and deconstruct the extant hegemonies and engaging in a radical imaginative recasting of global relations.
The Future of the Novel
Authors: Boxall Peter , Cheyette Bryan
Published: June 2018

This chapter addresses the future of the novel. It also reflects on the possibility and nature of historical change. The push and pull between the novel as an expressive symptom of an ailing culture, and the novel as the engine for the production of new cultural possibilities, runs through the long history of novelists’ reflections on the future of the novel. From our perspective in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the perception of a watershed triggered by 1973, and a new understanding of the relationship between style, fiction, and knowledge, seems remarkably prescient. Moreover, the new generation of novelists that have emerged since the turn of the century have collectively registered the re-emergence of a kind of historical vitality in the culture.
Extended Circularity: A New Puzzle for Extended Cognition
Authors: Carter J. Adam , Kallestrup Jesper
Published: June 2018

Mainstream epistemology has typically presumed a traditional picture of the metaphysics of mind, whereby cognitive processes (e.g., memory storage and retrieval) play out within the bounds of skull and skin. Contemporary thinking in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science decreasingly favors this simple “intracranial” picture. Likewise, proponents of active externalist approaches to the mind—e.g., the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC)—have largely proceeded without asking what epistemological ramifications should arise once cognition is understood as criss-crossing between brain and world. This chapter aims to motivate a puzzle that arises once these thought strands are juxtaposed, and highlights a condition of epistemological adequacy that should be accepted by proponents of extended cognition. Once this condition is motivated, the chapter demonstrates how attempts to satisfy it apparently inevitably devolve into a novel epistemic circularity. Eventually, proponents of extended cognition have a novel epistemological puzzle on their hands.
Extended Epistemology
Authors: Pritchard Duncan
Published: June 2018

What does it take to convert the deliverances of an extended cognitive process into knowledge (i.e., extended knowledge)? This question is explored in the context of anti-luck virtue epistemology. It is argued that what is key to extended cognitive processes is how they are cognitively integrated within the cognitive character of the agent. In this context, anti-luck virtue epistemology is shown to be comfortably able to accommodate cases of extended knowledge; it is also explained that such a theory of knowledge can allow for a relatively broad range of instances of extended knowledge, including cases that do not essentially involve the manifestation of intellectual virtue, and cases that involve positive epistemic dependence. Finally, it is argued that while the threshold for extended knowledge may be relatively low, this should not preclude generally preferring an extended knowledge that involves an epistemic standing that extends far above that threshold.
Knowledge, Credit, and the Extended Mind, or what Calvisius Sabinus got Right
Authors: Wheeler Michael
Published: June 2018

According to one prominent view in contemporary epistemology, the correct application of one’s cognitive abilities in believing truly is necessary and sufficient for a kind of credit that is, in turn, necessary for knowledge. Epistemologists who hold this view typically take the cognitive abilities concerned to be based in states and processes that are spatially located inside the head of the knowing subject. Enter the hypothesis of extended cognition (henceforth ExC). According to ExC, the physical machinery of mind sometimes extends beyond the skull and skin. The present chapter will explore what happens when the credit condition on knowledge is brought into contact with ExC. Via discussions of (a) empirical psychological work on the adaptive character of technologically augmented memory and (b) thought experiments from the extended cognition and extended knowledge literatures, conclusions will be drawn for our understanding of ‘knowledge in the wild’.
Reflective Knowledge
Authors: Mi Chienkuo , Ryan Shane
Published: June 2018

In this paper, we defend the claim that reflective knowledge is necessary for extended knowledge. We begin by examining a recent account of extended knowledge provided by Palermos and Pritchard (2013). We note a weakness with that account and a challenge facing theorists of extended knowledge. The challenge that we identify is to articulate the extended cognition condition necessary for extended knowledge in such a way as to avoid counterexample from the revamped Careless Math Student and Truetemp cases. We consider but reject Pritchard’s (2012b) epistemological disjunctivism as providing a model for doing so. Instead, we set out an account of reflection informed by Confucianism and dual-process theory. We make the case that reflective knowledge offers a way of overcoming the challenge identified. We show why such knowledge is necessary for extended knowledge, while building on Sosa’s (2012) account of meta-competence.
Extended Knowledge, the Recognition Heuristic, and Epistemic Injustice
Authors: Alfano Mark , Skorburg Joshua August
Published: June 2018

This chapter argues that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. It explains the recognition heuristic as studied by Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to the cognitive agent. Having connected the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, it argues that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of scaffolded cognition. It considers the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding before using Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, emphasizing the Darfur Inference. Finally, it uses data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. It ends with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better.
Introduction
Authors: Reutlinger Alexander , Saatsi Juha
Published: June 2018

What is a scientific explanation? This has been a central question in philosophy of science at least since Hempel and Oppenheim’s pivotal attempt at an answer in 1948 (also known as the covering-law model of explanation; Hempel 1965: chapter 10). It is no surprise that this question has retained its place at the heart of contemporary philosophy of science, given that it is one of the sciences’ key aims to provide ...
Extending the Counterfactual Theory of Explanation
Authors: Reutlinger Alexander
Published: June 2018

In the recent debate on explanation philosophers tend to agree that the natural and social sciences do not only provide causal but also non-causal explanations. It is a challenging aspect of this agreement that currently dominant causal accounts of explanation fail to cover non-causal types of explanation. So, how shall we react to this challenge? The goal of this chapter is to articulate and to extend the counterfactual theory of explanation (CTE). The CTE is a monist account of explanation. Monism is the view that there is one single philosophical account capturing both causal and non-causal explanations. According to the CTE, both causal and non-causal explanations are explanatory by virtue of revealing counterfactual dependencies between the explanandum and the explanans.
Searching for Non-Causal Explanations in a Sea of Causes
Authors: Bokulich Alisa
Published: June 2018

In the spirit of explanatory pluralism, this chapter argues that causal and non-causal explanations of a phenomenon are compatible, each being useful for bringing out different sorts of insights. First the chapter reviews the author’s model-based account of scientific explanation, which can accommodate causal and non-causal explanations alike. Then it distills from the literature an important core conception of non-causal explanation. This non-causal form of model-based explanation is illustrated using the example of how Earth scientists in a subfield known as aeolian geomorphology are explaining the formation of regularly-spaced sand ripples. The chapter concludes that even when it comes to everyday “medium-sized dry goods” such as sand ripples, where there is a complete causal story to be told, one can find examples of non-causal scientific explanations.
Good Questions
Authors: Carballo Alejandro Pérez
Published: June 2018

Pérez Carballo adopts an epistemic utility theory picture of epistemic norms where epistemic utility functions measure the value of degrees of belief, and rationality consists in maximizing expected epistemic utility. Within this framework he seeks to show that we can make sense of the intuitive idea that some true beliefs—say true beliefs about botany—are more valuable than other true beliefs—say true beliefs about the precise number of plants in North Dakota. To do so, however, Pérez Carballo argues that we must think of the value of epistemic states as consisting in more than simply accuracy. This sheds light on which questions it is most epistemically valuable to pursue.
Can All-Accuracy Accounts Justify Evidential Norms?
Authors: Meacham Christopher J. G.
Published: June 2018

Meacham takes aim at the epistemic utility theory picture of epistemic norms where epistemic utility functions measure the value of degrees of belief and where the norms encode ways of adopting non-dominated degrees of belief. He focuses on a particularly popular subclass of such views where epistemic utility is determined solely by the accuracy of degrees of belief. Meacham argues that these types of epistemic utility arguments for norms are (i) not compatible with each other (so not all can be correct), (ii) do not solely rely on accuracy considerations, and (iii) are not able to capture intuitive norms about how we ought to respond to evidence.
Making Things Right
Authors: Pettigrew Richard
Published: June 2018

Pettigrew focuses on trade-off objections to epistemic consequentialism. Such objections are similar to familiar objections from ethics where an intuitively wrong action (e.g., killing a healthy patient) leads to a net gain in value (e.g., saving five other patients). The objection to the epistemic consequentialist concerns cases where adopting an intuitively wrong belief leads to a net gain in epistemic value. Pettigrew defends the epistemic consequentialist against such objections by accepting that the unintuitive verdicts of consequentialism are unintuitive, but offering an error theory for why these intuitions do not show the view to be false.
Accuracy, Ratification, and the Scope of Epistemic Consequentialism
Authors: Joyce James M.
Published: June 2018

Joyce focuses on trade-off objections to epistemic consequentialism. Such objections are similar to familiar objections from ethics where an intuitively wrong action (e.g., killing a healthy patient) leads to a net gain in value (e.g., saving five other patients). The objection to the epistemic consequentialist concerns cases where adopting an intuitively wrong belief leads to a net gain in epistemic value. Joyce defends the epistemic consequentialist against such objections by denying that his version of epistemic utility theory is properly thought of as a species of epistemic consequentialism, and given this, does not condone the problematic trade-offs. His argument turns on distinguishing between treating degrees of belief as final ends and treating them as a basis for estimation.
Epistemic Consequentialism and Epistemic Enkrasia
Authors: Askell Amanda
Published: June 2018

Askell investigates what the epistemic consequentialist will say about epistemic enkrasia principles, principles that instruct one not to adopt a belief state that one takes to be irrational. She argues that a certain epistemic enkrasia principle for degrees of belief can be shown to maximize expected accuracy, and thus that a certain kind of epistemic consequentialist is committed to such a principle. But this is bad news for such an epistemic consequentialist, according to Askell, because epistemic enkrasia principles are problematic.
Epistemic Free Riding
Authors: Dunn Jeffrey
Published: June 2018

Free riding occurs in the practical domain when some action is rational for each group member to perform but such that when everyone performs that action, it is worse overall for everyone. Dunn argues that some surprising empirical evidence about group problem-solving reveals that groups will often face cases where it is epistemically best for each individual to believe one thing, even though this is ultimately epistemically worse for the group that each member believes in this way. Dunn’s work is thus an extension of work on the division of cognitive labor and ways that group inquiry might differ from individual inquiry.
Rich Perceptual Content and Aesthetic Properties
Authors: Stokes Dustin
Published: June 2018

Both common sense and dominant traditions in art criticism and philosophical aesthetics maintain that aesthetic features or properties are perceived. However, there are many reasons to be sceptical of this. This chapter defends the thesis—that aesthetic properties are sometimes represented in perceptual experience—against one of those sceptical opponents who maintains that perception represents only low-level properties, and since all theorists agree that aesthetic properties are not low-level properties, perception does not represent aesthetic properties. This chapter offers a novel argument—the argument from seeing-as—against that sceptic which moves from consideration of ambiguous figures to consideration of visual art, concluding that aesthetic properties are sometimes perceived and delivers a general lesson for philosophy of perception. Contrary to extant theories of rich perceptual content, aesthetic properties are better candidates for high-level perceptual contents than standardly theorized rich contents like natural kinds.
Can We Visually Experience Aesthetic Properties?
Authors: Logue Heather
Published: June 2018

This chapter explores the claim that we can visually experience aesthetic properties (such as gracefulness or gaudiness). First, it considers epistemological and phenomenological arguments in favour of the more general claim that we can visually experience so-called ‘high-level’ properties (which include aesthetic properties), and an argument against this claim based on classification of illusions. After arguing that none of these arguments are compelling, the chapter considers two arguments in favour of the claim that we can visually experience at least some aesthetic properties that have certain distinctive features (‘observationality’, and a ‘superficial’ metaphysical structure). It is argued that these arguments aren't compelling either, and the chapter concludes by suggesting that there may be no fact of the matter as to whether we can visually experience aesthetic properties.
Evaluative Perception as Response-Dependent Representation
Authors: Noordhof Paul
Published: June 2018

One dimension of the controversy over whether evaluative properties are presented in perceptual content has general roots in the debate over whether perceptual content, in general, is rich or austere. This chapter argues that we need to recognize a level of rich non-sensory perceptual content, drawing on experiences of chicken sexing and speech perception, to capture what our experience is like and our epistemic entitlements. In both cases (and many others), we are not conscious of the precise perceptual cues that are the basis for discriminations and, thus, the characterization of the phenomenal content of such experiences must go beyond sensory properties. Nevertheless, this point is arguably insufficient to establish the perception of evaluative properties. Their representation requires the subject to respond in certain ways. The chapter discusses how this should go for the case of pain and then, in outline, for moral properties.
Doubts about Moral Perception
Authors: Väyrynen Pekka
Published: June 2018

This chapter defends doubts about the existence of genuine moral perception, understood as the claim that at least some moral properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. The doubts are local: even if perceptual experiences generally can be cognitively penetrable and rich, standard examples of moral perception are better explained as habitual implicit inferences or transitions in thought. The chapter sketches a model on which the relevant transitions in thought can be psychologically immediate depending on how readily and reliably non-evaluative perceptual inputs, jointly with the subject’s background moral beliefs, training, and habituation, trigger the kinds of phenomenological responses that moral agents are disposed to have when they represent things as being morally a certain way. It is then argued that this rival account of moral experience explains at least as much as the moral perception hypothesis but is simpler and (at least by one relevant measure) more unified.
Perception of Absence as Value-Driven Perception
Authors: Farennikova Anya
Published: June 2018

Experiences of absence are often laden with values and expectations. For example, one might notice that a job candidate is not wearing a tie, or see the absence of a wedding band on a person's ring finger. These experiences embody cultural knowledge and expectations, and therefore seem like good candidates for being a form of evaluative perception. This chapter argues that experiences of absence are evaluative apart from the social or cultural values they take on. They are evaluative in their core, solely by virtue of being experiences of absence. The chapter begins by explaining why certain experiences of absence should be treated as a case of genuine perception. It then clarifies the role of the evaluative states in experiences of absence. The chapter concludes by arguing that experiences of absence constitute a new form of evaluative perception, and presents the subjective–objective dichotomy in a new light.
Moral Perception and Its Rivals
Authors: McGrath Sarah
Published: June 2018

Proponents of moral perception hold that some of our moral knowledge is perceptual knowledge. Discussions of whether moral perception is possible often seem to assume that there is some attractive alternative account of how we arrive at moral knowledge in those cases that are regarded as among the best candidates for cases of full-fledged moral perception. This chapter challenges that assumption by critically examining some alternative accounts of how we arrive at knowledge in the relevant class of cases, arguing that the more closely one examines these alternative accounts, the more implausible they seem as accounts of how we actually manage to arrive at moral knowledge. A modest version of moral perception is sketched, one that does not suffer from any similarly implausible commitments. There are some concluding reflections on why it matters whether some of our moral knowledge is perceptual.
Epistemic Sentimentalism and Epistemic Reason-Responsiveness
Authors: Cowan Robert
Published: June 2018

Epistemic Sentimentalism is the view that emotional experiences such as fear and guilt are a source of immediate justification for evaluative beliefs. For example, guilt can sometimes immediately justify a subject’s belief that they have done something wrong. This chapter focuses on a family of objections to Epistemic Sentimentalism that all take as a premise the claim that emotions possess a normative property that is apparently antithetical to it: epistemic reason-responsiveness, i.e., emotions have evidential bases and justifications can be demanded of them. This chapter responds to these objections whilst granting that emotions are reason-responsive. This is not only dialectically significant vis-à-vis the prospects for Epistemic Sentimentalism, but also supports a broader claim about the compatibility of a mental item’s being reason-responsive and its being a generative source of epistemic justification.
The Primacy of the Passions
Authors: Lenman James
Published: June 2018

Value is not perceived as the empirical world is but is constituted by the order and structure reflection and deliberation impose upon desires—the passions in our souls—that furnish the basic currency of evaluative and normative thought. Perception, like our other cognitive resources, is nonetheless shaped and informed by our passions as they in turn shape and inform it. Evaluative reason and justification is driven by our passions and ultimately grounded in them. While locally we generally desire things because they are valuable, globally, in the last analysis, they are valuable because we (at our best) desire them. Here the role of desire is grounding and global but it is still not Archimedean: it is not a matter of raw, brute desire but of evaluation informed by all the substantive ideals from which the whole complex web of our evaluative and normative thought itself is woven.
The modern context of palliative care
Authors: Payne Sheila , Morris Sara
Published: June 2018

Evidence suggests that in the past support services for patients and family carers of terminally ill people have often been unavailable or inadequate in addressing their needs. This chapter will briefly summarize the context of hospice and palliative care services. The chapter argues that definitions of palliative care are culturally and temporally dependent, exemplified by the changing terminology used in the United Kingdom. One of the challenges facing service deliverers is the necessity to work collaboratively across health and social care services, and statutory and voluntary sector organizational boundaries. The funding and organizational positioning of hospice and palliative care services are often contingent upon health care systems and resources. All roles require careful recruitment, dedicated training, and consistent support to provide effective contributions from volunteers. The chapter ends by providing a short description of three studies investigating the role of volunteers undertaken in the United Kingdom.
Volunteering and the challenges of change
Authors: Hartley Nigel
Published: June 2018

Hospice leaders in the UK seem to fear that volunteers will respond disruptively to change. This chapter poses a number of questions around the challenges of change in volunteer development in hospices It considers how to introduce to facilitate new and necessary models of recruitment, training and education programmes arguing that renegotiating terms and conditions with hospice volunteers while rearticulating expectations is crucial if hospices are to continue to be relevant in a new world of health and social care. We regularly hear about the key role volunteers have brought to the success of the modern hospice movement and of the importance Cicely Saunders attached to involving volunteers even before the first patients were admitted to St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham in 1967.
Relevance Theory and the Effect of Literature on Beliefs
Authors: Kenny Neil
Published: June 2018

To what extent does literature affect our beliefs about the real world? Relevance theory offers new ways of exploring that old question. That is partly because relevance theory embraces the whole communications circuit: it tracks the communication of meaning from author via text to reader, rather than focusing on just one of those phases. It can also describe how unintended meaning can be inferred by readers. The question of the effect of literature upon beliefs is explored through one case study (Adventures of Tom Sawyer) and through various notions drawn from relevance theory: cognitive environments; contextual assumptions; implicatures; internal and external relevance; epistemic vigilance. It is argued that the evanescence or durability of any effects that literature may have upon readers’ beliefs can be investigated by combining those relevance-theoretic notions with ones drawn from certain other cognitive or literary-critical approaches: immersion; kinesis; perceptual simulation; tagging.
On the Borders of the Ostensive
Authors: Sellevold Kirsti
Published: June 2018

This chapter studies uses of blushing as emotional expression both independently and in combination with the scalar expression almost in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Introducing the notion of ‘emotional vigilance’, it argues that uses of involuntary emotional expression play an essential role in the communicative effect of the novel and are enacted at both the ostensive and the non-ostensive level, through authorial agency and character behaviour respectively. The scalar expression almost pinpoints how the almost-but-not-quite-fulfilled love story between the two main characters is articulated, and arguably made to happen, by such expressions. Together, they create a rich web of implicatures and implications, the space in which the suspense of the novel and its tragic outcome are played out. The chapter thus explores the borders of the ostensive; that is to say, of the conditions within which relevance itself operates.
‘Invisible Guests’
Authors: Williams Wes
Published: June 2018

Poetry has long been concerned with truth grasped as a form of communicable proof. But poets know about failed communication, too: when Virgil’s Aeneas tries, three times, to embrace the shade of his dead father, he moves to a distinctive ternary rhythm; one that is repeated throughout human history. This chapter, centred on a close reading of ‘Album, V’, part of Seamus Heaney’s final collection, Human Chain, discusses the experiments in inference which poetry enacts as a sustained, reflexive inquiry into the conditions and limits of communicability. Exploring both intertextual relations between ancient and modern poets and the contextual implications of shared sights, sounds, memories, gestures, and words, Heaney’s work moves between languages, genres, and generations. In so doing, it exemplifies the enduring salience and force of what Sperber and Wilson term ‘poetic effects’: generating common knowledge, they prove to be links in the chain of human, embodied cognition.
‘Look Again’, ‘Listen, Listen’, ‘Keep Looking’
Authors: Banks Kathryn
Published: June 2018

This chapter offers a way of understanding the effects of poetic images (metaphorical or literal). It employs and extends the notion of ‘emergent properties’, as well as relevance theory’s account of how communicative acts can ‘show’ as much as they mean. The images examined are from poems by Mary Oliver (‘Wings’, ‘Wild Geese’, and ‘Mindful’). The chapter suggests that such poetry is particularly in need of a new theoretical approach capable of engaging with its focus on embodied experience and ‘merging’ with nature. It shows how ‘emergent properties’—for example, a complex sense of what continuity with nature might feel like—can result from engaging in a range of imaginary sensorimotor experiences. The final section of the chapter turns to an abstract painting by Natalia Wróbel which dialogues with Oliver’s poetry, and fleshes out the relevance theory account of communicative showing to articulate differences between artistic genres and media.
Towards a Passing Theory of Literary Understanding
Authors: Cave Terence
Published: June 2018

Relevance theory offers a model of communication where utterances are constantly updated by the speaker, inviting the listener to engage in a corresponding activity of inferential adjustment. In the case of literature, the potential time-scale of this activity is expanded, whether by the length of the text, the passage of historical time, or the demands of close reading. How then do incremental effects operate within the virtual time of literary utterance? How does one effect become a platform or trigger for others? This chapter touches on issues such as the situated logic of collocation and the ‘echoic’ as a way of approaching literary allusiveness, and brings together the micro-analysis of a line of poetry with a broader-scope reflection on the principles that operate over extended fictions. Adapting to literary understanding Davidson’s notion of a ‘passing theory’, it tracks the time-bound, ephemeral passage of verbal events through the reader’s cognitive focus.
Aesthetics on the Edge
Authors: Lopes Dominic McIver
Published: June 2018

Recent years have seen an explosion of research on the biological, neural, and psychological foundations of artistic and aesthetic phenomena, which had previously been the province of the social sciences and the humanities. Meanwhile, it is a boom time for meta-philosophy, many new methods have been adopted in aesthetics, and philosophers are tackling the relationship between empirical and theoretical approaches to aesthetics. These eleven essays propose a methodology especially suited to aesthetics, where problems in philosophy are addressed principally by examining how aesthetic phenomena are understood in the human sciences. Since the human sciences include much of the humanities as well as the social, behavioural, and brain sciences, the methodology promises to integrate arts research across the academy. The volume opens with four essays outlining the methodology and its potential. Subsequent essays put the methodology to work, shedding light on the perceptual and social-pragmatic capacities that are implicated in responding to works of art, especially images, but also music, literature, and conceptual art.
Introduction
Authors: Lopes Dominic McIver
Published: June 2018

Practised as a second-order discipline, aesthetics constructs theories of artistic and aesthetic phenomena as those phenomena are understood in the humanities and social and behavioural sciences. Parts II and III of this book illustrate how to do aesthetics as a second-order discipline, focusing first on the psychology of images and then on their socially embedded functions. Part I considers some of the advantages of second-order aesthetics. It protects against the parochialism that can result from a reliance on intuitions in philosophy. Second-order aesthetics also promises to bring together and integrate disparate lines of inquiry across disciplines, bridging the recent explosion of new research in the aesthetic sciences with scholarship in the humanities.
Aesthetic Theory and Aesthetic Science
Authors: Lopes Dominic McIver
Published: June 2018

There is currently a great deal of fundamental disagreement in research into aesthetic response. The remedy is ideally integration, wherein researchers in the different aesthetic sciences and humanistic studies converge on a common conception of what they are trying to explain, even if they continue to disagree about how to explain it. If it is to be successful, this convergence will require that researchers in both the scientific and humanistic disciplines be sensitive to the limitations that are inherent in each of these two different approaches. On the one hand, we should not expect a conception of aesthetic response that is productive for research across disciplines to be given a precise a priori definition. On the other hand, aesthetic science must acknowledge that aesthetic response is embedded in critical practice, about which the humanities have a lot to say.
Making Histories in Normandy, 1066–1204
Authors: Cleaver Laura
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines manuscripts containing texts about the past produced in Normandy between 1066 and 1204. A remarkable number of these manuscripts can be linked to the authors of the texts contained within. However, the manuscripts also demonstrate the importance of collaboration between patrons, authors, scribes, and artists for the production of a history book. Moreover, some volumes indicate the importance of choices made by those copying existing works, and provide evidence for the reception and status of works over time. The surviving manuscripts vary significantly in their size and decoration, demonstrating different levels of investment by individuals or communities, and hinting at a range of potential audiences, from those at the royal court, to a monastic community, or other historians.
Text and Image
Authors: Cleaver Laura
Published: June 2018

This chapter explores combinations of text and imagery in histories produced in England between 1066 and 1272. It focuses on case studies of the Worcester chronicle, and the works of Henry of Huntingdon, Gerald of Wales, Ralph Diceto, and Matthew Paris. Through an examination of page design and the content and location of imagery, it argues that decoration could be used to attract and engage readers, and to add nuance to text. Imagery was used to draw attention to elements of the narrative, prompt a reader to connect chronologically distant events, and impose interpretative frameworks onto the past. This chapter argues that the imagery in many of these histories was intended to help a reader connect the past and present, but that this, together with the complexity of such page designs, often led to images being omitted when text was subsequently copied.
Introduction
Authors: Diamond James A.
Published: June 2018

The Introduction provides an outline and summary of the separate chapters in the book and the overarching goals of the book. The first is to shatter the stereotype of Judaism as a religion of law absent of any theology. The second is to actually forge a Jewish philosophical theological discourse that spans a continuum of Jewish texts, thinkers, and exegetes from the Bible, to the classical rabbis, to the medieval commentators (parshanim), to Hasidism, to modern secular philosophy. All the issues in the book are explored from a decidedly Jewish stance, both existentially and intellectually. That entails both bringing God into the quest and reading my own particular religious tradition’s foundational scriptures as they examine life from their various perspectives. There is a particular subplot that courses its way through all the chapters. It is the promotion of freedom—in both acts and thought—encouraged by the Jewish God.
Biblical Knowing Toward Death
Authors: Diamond James A.
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines the meaning of death for Jewish philosophical theology. How is the biblical view of life, ethics, law, and the pursuit of knowledge informed by the prospect of death or impending death? The Hebrew Bible is bracketed by the question of death, from the death at history’s inception that Adam and all subsequent human beings anticipate, to Moses’ unique death that awaits no other human at the Torah’s conclusion. Close readings of these narratives yield the notion that death allows for the potential of the absolutely supreme act of dying for others that informs all other acts of self-sacrifice. All the biblical cases focusing on a yearning for death or suicide, relating to Moses, Saul, Elijah, Jonah, Samson, and Job, involve this notion of a death on behalf of others.
Angelic Encounters as Metaphysics
Authors: Diamond James A.
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines angels’ role as dynamic actors within the drama of the narratives in which they appear. Cognitions that signal an encounter with an angel or a kind of human apparition are instructive for biblical metaphysics. They offer an awareness of some objective metaphysical reality as it exists independently of the human embodied psyche, allowing for momentary escapes from cognitive reference points that are skewed by personal predicament, character, and biases. Close readings of biblical narratives such as Jacob’s wrestling with an angel in Genesis 32, Hagar’s angelic revelation in the desert in Genesis 16, and Gideon’s encounter with an angel before going to battle in Judges 6, show the angel as the vehicle of distilling divine knowledge for earthly consumption.
God as Liberator and the Slave
Authors: Diamond James A.
Published: June 2018

This chapter offers a new approach to the moral quandary of the biblical sanctioning of slavery. The chapter argues that the Bible shapes its ideal view of slavery, not simply as deleterious to the human moral condition but as metaphysically injurious as well. It first conducts a methodical narrative analysis of the term ‘eved, the Hebrew word for slave. It then proceeds to examine the Bible’s strict regulation of slavery which is calibrated to rule it out of existence altogether. Rabbinic law advanced biblical law in further humane directions, limiting the harshness of slavery, culminating in a medieval formulation by Maimonides which presents a model of Jewish philosophical theology through a sophisticated weave of biblical texts, philosophy, theology, and law.
A God That Ceased to Become, a Nation That May Have Ceased to Exist
Authors: Diamond James A.
Published: June 2018

This chapter responds to the Holocaust, the greatest challenge to any contemporary Jewish philosophical theology. Any Jewish theology that continues to insist on theodicy in the shadow of such an exhaustive obliteration of humanity and the divine Presence, or of any traces of godliness in the world, remains incomplete or worse an utter failure. The two most profound thinkers confronting the challenge are Kalonymous Kalman Shapira (1889–1943), the Piaseczner Rebbe, and Emil Fackenheim, the philosopher most known for his view of the Holocaust as a rupture in civilization and thought. The former, whose collection of sermons were delivered and transcribed in the Warsaw Ghetto, buried, and retrieved after the war, is placed in dialogue with the latter.
Postscript
Authors: Diamond James A.
Published: June 2018

The conclusion of this book cursorily looks beyond it by reconvening the encounter between the protagonists of the preceding chapter. It would be blasphemous to consider the establishment of the State of Israel as somehow compensation, or in vulgar terms, a consolation prize for the devastation of the Shoah. However, it would also leave a gaping lacuna for any current Jewish philosophical theology not to at least attempt to theologically engage this radical historical transformation of Jewish existence. This postscript probes the question of how does Israel, a guarantor of Jewish physical survival, shape our future relationship with the Divine, while at the same time remaining cognizant of the brute historical fact of the Shoah that ruptured the continuum of Jewish philosophical theology and threatened its very viability?
Open-Mindedness
Authors: Fantl Jeremy
Published: June 2018

This chapter argues for a “Platonic” conception of open-mindedness. Open-mindedness is not simply a matter of being willing to change your mind in response to a counterargument. You have to be willing to change your mind conditional on spending significant time with the argument, finding each step compelling, and being unable to expose a flaw. If you are willing to do this, then you may be open-minded toward the argument provided you also don’t violate various procedural norms and aren’t disposed to allow various affective factors to influence your beliefs (for example, you aren’t willfully ignorant). On this conception, we can explain how it is possible to hold an outright or “full” belief even while being open-minded toward arguments against that belief.
The Epistemic Efficacy of Amateurism
Authors: Fantl Jeremy
Published: June 2018

This chapter discusses when knowledge can survive exposure to counterarguments, even if you find each step compelling and can’t expose a flaw. One consequence of Bayesian epistemology is that knowledge can survive if you lack the expertise to reliably evaluate the counterargument. Knowers can retain knowledge in the face of an apparently flawless counterargument as long as the counterargument is too sophisticated for them, and as long as their knowledge has a basis with which they have sufficient facility (this is one of the lessons of the literature on higher-order evidence). This is one reason why it is so important, in academic writing, to emphasize the case for the opposition. If you train your reader adequately, and they still find the steps in your argument compelling and are unable to locate a flaw, then it becomes harder for them to closed-mindedly dismiss your argument while retaining knowledge that you’re wrong.
On Inviting Problematic Speakers to Campus
Authors: Fantl Jeremy
Published: June 2018

This chapter argues that it is often impermissible to invite problematic speakers to campus. Opponents of campus speech codes often argue that it is important to invite problematic speakers in order to teach students resilience. On the contrary, I argue, if you know that their past or future behavior is both wrong and reflects accurately on their current attitudes or dispositions, it is impermissible to invite them. To do so can require you to stand in solidarity with the problematic speaker and thereby stand against—to betray—those who have been or will be victimized by their speech or behavior. Inviting a speaker to campus comes with obligations to the speaker—obligations of politeness and respect. Because it is impermissible to satisfy those obligations to certain kinds of problematic speakers, it is impermissible to invite them in the first place.
Introduction
Authors: Renker Elizabeth
Published: June 2018

The terms “poetry” and “realism” have a complex and mostly oppositional relationship in American literary histories of the postbellum period. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated. Poetry is thus almost entirely absent from scholarship on American literary realism except as the emblem of realism’s opposite: a desiccated genteel “twilight of the poets.” The typical tale held that, while poetry sputtered into decline, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain towered over literary culture as “major realists,” with 1885 standing as the ...
After Wings
Authors: Renker Elizabeth
Published: June 2018

This chapter focuses on selected poems that Sarah Piatt published between 1866 and the mid-seventies. This period was simultaneous to the evolving debates about reality categories traced in Chapter 2 but prior to the oft-construed advent or high point of realism in the eighties and nineties. Even at this relatively early stage of her career, Piatt articulated a consistent realist counterpoetics that challenged the conventions of romantic idealism from the inside—that is, from within the culture in which she was simultaneously pursuing her career. These poems reproduce conventions of genteel poetry in complex forms of reiteration that function as replication or indictment. This poetic practice is also one of the keys to Piatt’s realism.
Non‐Cognitive Accounts
Authors: Kvanvig Jonathan L.
Published: June 2018

If we are unsatisfied with cognitive accounts of faith worth having, as argued in the last chapter, we will want to see what the options are for a non‐cognitive account of the matter. To that end, we can begin with an account of the contours of the logical space of non‐cognitivism that are relevant here. Specific non‐cognitive accounts are differentiated froma more generic, functional and non‐cognitive account, arguing for the superiority of the latter.
Faith, Humility, and Virtues in Isolation
Authors: Kvanvig Jonathan L.
Published: June 2018

Faith worth having is a virtue, a character trait under the guidance of the executive function of the will that contributes to a good life. This executive function balances the role of each of the virtues to contribute to such a life, and there are generalities regarding different virtues that this holistic process encodes. Some pairs of virtues are complementary, protecting their holders from the excesses of each. Here it is argued that faith and humility are such balancing characteristics.
Expressions of Humility and Epistemological Psychology
Authors: Kvanvig Jonathan L.
Published: June 2018

Intellectual humility can be merely implicit, but can also be articulated. One context in which it is expressed gives rise to the preface paradox. The danger of this paradox is that it constitutes a threat to any account that places high value on intellectual humility. The present chapter aims to deflect this concern, showing how expressions of humility and fallibility are appropriate and generate no paradoxical consequences.
The Technical View
Authors: Figdor Carrie
Published: June 2018

Chapter 7 completes the discussion of alternatives to Literalism. It presents the view that the terms are used literally in the unexpected domains, but with distinct reference. The view has two main variants. The Technical-Behaviorist variant holds that they refer to patterns of behavior in the new domains. Dennett’s Intentional Stance is pressed into service as a familiar way to articulate this variant. The Exsanguinated Property variant holds that they refer to quasi-cognitive properties of some sort. Homuncular functionalism is a familiar way of articulating this variant. It argues that both variants fail to justify the distinction in reference that they propose between uses for humans and for nonhumans. It summarizes the benefits of Literalism and its strength relative to the three alternative views discussed in Chapters 5–7.
The Unity Puzzle
Authors: Schechter Elizabeth
Published: June 2018

This chapter introduces the major philosophical debate about the split-brain phenomenon. Split-brain surgery severs the major white matter fiber tract connecting the two cerebral hemispheres. A number of individuals who underwent this surgery later agreed to act as participants in experiments designed to reveal its psychobehavioral consequences. The basic finding is that, after they are surgically divided in this way, the two hemispheres cannot interact in all the ways they once could: indeed, split-brain subjects sometimes give the impression of having two minds and spheres of consciousness, one associated with each hemisphere. A split-brain subject nonetheless seems to be one of us, at the end of the day. The aim of the book is to reconcile these apparently opposing intuitions by explaining how a split-brain person could have multiple minds.
Subjects of Experience and Subjective Perspectives
Authors: Schechter Elizabeth
Published: June 2018

This chapter offers a preliminary defense of the claim that the two hemispheres of a split-brain subject are associated with distinct subjects of experience. The empirical basis of this 2-subjects claim is that, while both hemispheres are the source or site of elements of experience, these elements are unified only within each hemisphere system, and not across them. In other words, consciousness is unified intrahemispherically, but disunified interhemispherically. A split-brain subject thus has two subjective perspectives, one associated with the right hemisphere and one with the left. Our first-personal way of understanding what it is to be an experiencing subject, however, makes it impossible for a single subject of experience to have multiple subjective perspectives in just the same way that another subject of experience has one. It seems to follow that the two hemispheres of a split-brain subject are associated with distinct subjects of experience, each standing in just the relation to its one perspective that I do to mine.