Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
I Claim (i + claim)
Selected AbstractsIs the Partial Identity Account of Property Resemblance Logically Incoherent?DIALECTICA, Issue 4 2007Winner of the 2006 dialectica essay prize According to the partial identity account of resemblance, exact resemblance is complete identity and inexact resemblance is partial identity. In this paper, I examine Arda Denkel's (1998) argument that this account of resemblance is logically incoherent as it results in a vicious regress. I claim that although Denkel's argument does not succeed, a modified version of it leads to the conclusion that the partial identity account is plausible only if the constituents of every determinate property are ultimately quantitative in nature. [source] The Argument from the finer-grained content of colour experiences A redefinition of its role within the debate between McDowell and non-conceptual theoristsDIALECTICA, Issue 1 2003Annalisa COLIVA In this paper I address the question of whether the fact that our colour experiences have a finer-grained content than our ordinary colour concepts allow us to represent should be taken as a threat to theories of the conceptual content of experience. In particular, I consider and criticise McDowell's response to that argument and propose a possible development of it. As a consequence, I claim that the role of the argument from the finer-grained content of experience has to be redefined. In particular, I acknowledge that this problem is helpful in order to bring to the fore the issue of the proper characterisation of the constraints upon the possession conditions of perceptual demonstrative concepts. Yet, I contend that, in light of the foregoing discussion, it is neutral with respect to the dispute between conceptual and non-conceptual theorists. For that dispute hinges on whether it is possible to have experiences with a certain content independently of having the concepts, which are needed for its canonical specification and not on whether those experiences are conceptualisable in all their finesse of grain. [source] Precise entities but irredeemably vague concepts?DIALECTICA, Issue 3 2002Enrique Romerales Various arguments have recently been put forward to support the existence of vague or fuzzy objects. Nevertheless, the only possibly compelling argument would support, not the existence of vague objects, but indeterminately existing objects. I argue for the non-existence of any vague entities,either particulars or properties - in the mind-independent world. Even so, many philosophers have claimed that to reduce vagueness to semantics is of no avail, since linguistic vagueness betrays semantic incoherence and this is no less a problem than is ontological incoherence. After spelling out why there are fewer essentially vague concepts than usually thought. I claim that only the linguistic competence of the whole speaking community for each word can draw the sharp boundaries for its concept, even if these are unknowable in practice and still leave a precise range of indetermination. This could explain both the existence of boundaries and our non-removable ignorance of them, fulfilling the intuitions of the epistemic theory of vagueness with the supervaluationist's indeterminacy. [source] Modern Classics: Reflections on Rammstein in the German Class,DIE UNTERRICHTSPRAXIS/TEACHING GERMAN, Issue 1 2008Martina Lüke The decreasing interest in the study of foreign languages forces us to reconsider and re-evaluate new teaching methods and approaches. Nevertheless, the use of music, in particular modern or pop music, for interdisciplinary studies and students' language skills appears to be still neglected. I claim that the lyrics and music of the popular group Rammstein deal with classical German literature and music and therefore should be added to the curriculum. Based on personal teaching experiences while teaching German for a couple of years at both high-school and university level I will provide insight into some aspects dealing with Rammstein in the classroom. [source] Epitomising the Modern Spanish Nation through Popular Music: Coplas from La Caramba to Concha Piquer, 1750,1990GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2007Mercedes Carbayo Abengózar Music is an important language of the emotions and can often arouse strong passions in its performance and representation, both from the individual's perspective of personal identity and for the individual's sense of identity and of belonging to a given community. Likewise, music can serve to whip up and reinforce nationalism and national chauvinism against the ,other' as well as serving as a badge of identity. In this article I explore a musical form, a song that has been defined as ,Spanish' and as the ,national' song: la copla. Copla is rooted in the past and first appeared as both a poetic and a theatrical form, but always accompanied by music. It was, however, during the eighteenth century, when nationalism made its appearance as a ,concern' in the Spanish political-cultural arena, when coplas would be used as a mark of Spanish identity. Copla is a women's song. Although it has been interpreted by men, some of them internationally renowned like Miguel de Molina, the most famous performers have been and still are women. That is why perhaps a recurrent theme of coplas is unrequited love, whereby love and passion play an important role, either with regard to the individual or the community from which the individual hails. But there are also other themes such as the longing stimulated by alien rule, which is reflected by cultural opposition and resistance to discourses of power, not only in terms of open opposition, but in a more subtle form of resistance, particularly in gender terms. I claim that it is precisely this resistance to fixed discourses of gender that have made coplas excellent negotiators with the different musical, social and political contexts and in this way have made them an icon of the invented tradition that is fundamental in the creation of a nation. [source] Expressing the Not-Said: Art and Design and the Formation of Sexual IdentitiesINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ART & DESIGN EDUCATION, Issue 1 2005Nicholas Addison Central to this paper is an analysis of the work produced by a year 10 student in response to the ,Expressive Study' of the art and design GCSE (AQA 2001). I begin by examining expressivism within art education and turn to the student's work partly to understand whether the semi-confessional mode she chose to deploy is encouraged within this tradition. The tenets of expressivism presuppose the possibility that through the practice of art young people might develop the expressive means to give ,voice' to their feelings and come to some understanding of self. I therefore look at the way she took ownership of the ,expressive' imperative of the title by choosing to explore her emerging lesbian identity and its position within the normative, binary discourses on sex and sexual identity that predominate in secondary schools. Within schooling there is an absence of formal discussion around sex, sexual identity and sexuality other than in the context of health and moral education and, to some extent, English. This is surprising given the emphasis on self-exploration that an art and design expressive study would seem to invite. In order to consider the student's actions as a situated practice I examine the social and cultural contexts in which she was studying. With reference to visual semiotics and the theoretical work of Judith Butler, I interpret the way she uses visual resources not only to represent her emerging sexual identity but to counter dominant discourses around homosexuality in schools. I claim that through her art practice she enacts the ,name of the law' to refute the binary oppositions that underpin sex education in schools. This act questions the assumptions about the purpose of expressive activities in art education with its psychologically inflected rhetoric of growth and selfhood and offers a mode of expressive practice that is more socially engaged and communicative. [source] A great leap towards liberalism?INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 2 2000The Hungarian welfare state The article analyses the changing role of the Hungarian state by examining the principles and boundaries of government commitment in income maintenance. I test the hypothesis that the welfare regime is liberal and is becoming increasingly more so. The empirical analysis addresses three major issues: the reliance on universal schemes in family support, the nature of poor relief assistance, and the institutional structure of the pension system. I find that these different programs do not add up to constitute any specific type of welfare regime. Rather, the emerging, and still transitory welfare system appears ,,faceless''. I claim that a static welfare typology cannot be applied to the Hungarian welfare system and therefore reject the liberal hypothesis. [source] Evaluating Migrant Integration: Political Attitudes Across Generations in Europe,INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW, Issue 1 2010Rahsaan Maxwell This article engages debates about migrant integration by analyzing political trust and satisfaction in 24 European countries. The evidence suggests that first-generation migrants have the most positive attitudes, while native-origin and second-generation migrant-origin individuals have similar political trust and satisfaction scores. To explain these outcomes, I focus on the importance of subjective integration factors related to the stages of migration. I claim that first-generation migrants, who have gone through the disruptive process of changing countries, will have lower expectations and be more likely to have positive evaluations of the host society. In comparison, native-origin and second-generation migrant-origin individuals have been raised in the same society and are likely to share perspectives toward that society's political institutions. [source] The Linguistic Territoriality Principle , A CritiqueJOURNAL OF APPLIED PHILOSOPHY, Issue 2 2008HELDER DE SCHUTTER abstract In this essay, I develop a critique of the linguistic territoriality principle, which states that, for reasons related to the value of language identity, language groups should be territorially accommodated. While I acknowledge the desirability of implementing a linguistic territoriality principle in some specific cases, I claim that this principle is in general inappropriate for the ,post-Westphalian' linguistic world in which we live. I identify, analyze and reject two distinct justifications for the linguistic territoriality principle: the Linguistic Context justification and the Language Survival justification. Finally, I argue for different means of giving political recognition to the fact that most people value their language as an importance source of identity. This alternative theory sets out to officially recognize multiple languages in a given territory. [source] The Great Divide Revisited: Ottoman and Habsburg Legacies on TransitionKYKLOS INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, Issue 4 2007Valentina Dimitrova-Grajzl SUMMARY The former socialist countries of South East and Central Europe exhibit great variation in institutional quality. Unlike the sparse existing literature, I claim that the variation can be explained by the legacies of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. I identify historical legacies of the Empires, which have affected the current institutional quality of the successor states. I show empirically that the Empires' legacies are key determinants of institutional quality, and that the Habsburg successors have institutions that are more efficient in a market economy than the Ottoman successors. In contrast, I find an insignificant effect of socialism on institutional quality. [source] THE PARADOX OF INQUIRY IN AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONSMETAPHILOSOPHY, Issue 1 2008SCOTT MACDONALD Abstract: The Confessions recounts Augustine's successful search for God. But Augustine worries that one cannot search for God if one does not already know God. That version of the paradox of inquiry dominates and structures Confessions 1,10. I draw connections between the dramatic opening lines of book 1 and the climactic discussion in book 10.26,38 and argue that the latter discussion contains Augustine's resolution of the paradox of inquiry as it applies to the special case of searching for God. I claim that he develops a model, relying on the universal human experience of joy and truth, that identifies a starting point that (1) is common to all human beings, (2) is sufficient for guiding a successful search for God, and (3) avoids commitment to recollection of experiences prior to birth. The model is crucial to Augustine's rejection of traditional Platonist views about recollection. [source] What's Wrong With Infinite Regresses?METAPHILOSOPHY, Issue 5 2001Daniel Nolan It is almost universally believed that some infinite regresses are vicious, and also almost universally believed that some are benign. In this paper I argue that regresses can be vicious for several different sorts of reasons. Furthermore, I claim that some intuitively vicious regresses do not suffer from any of the particular aetiologies that guarantee viciousness to regresses, but are nevertheless so on the basis of considerations of parsimony. The difference between some apparently benign and some apparently vicious regresses, then, turns out to be a matter of a more general assessment of costs and benefits, making viciousness of regresses in some cases less of a local matter than is usually thought. [source] THE NATURE OF TESTIMONYPACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2006JENNIFER LACKEY I then offer a diagnosis of the widespread disagreement regarding this topic; specifically, I argue that our concept of testimony has two different aspects to it. Inadequate views of testimony, I claim, result either from collapsing these two aspects into a single account or from a failure to recognize one of them. Finally, I develop an alternative view of testimony that captures both aspects of the nature of testimony and thereby provides the basis for an illuminating theory of testimony's epistemological significance. [source] ACADEMIC ARGUMENTS FOR THE INDISCERNIBILITY THESISPACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2005CASEY PERIN I claim that these arguments, unlike modern sceptical arguments, are supposed to establish mere counterfactual rather than epistemic possibilities. They purport to show that for any true perceptual impression j, there are a number of alternative causal histories j might have had which would not have resulted in any change in the way in which j represents its object. [source] Descartes's Theory of DistinctionPHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH, Issue 1 2002PAUL HOFFMAN In the first part of this paper I explore the relations among distinctness, separability, number, and non-identity. I argue that Descartes believes plurality in things themselves arises from distinction, so that things distinct in any of the three ways are not identical. The only exception concerns universals which, considered in things themselves, are identical to particulars. I also argue that to be distinct is to be separable. Things distinct by reason are separable only in thought by means of ideas not clear and distinct. In the second part I argue that the notion of separability in Descartes's account of real distinction between mind and body is subject to five different interpretations. I claim that the heart of Cartesian dualism concerns the separability of the attributes thought and extension. It does not require that mind and body are separable in the sense that each can exist without the other existing. [source] Effective Opportunity and Democratic DeliberationPOLITICS, Issue 2 2007Michael Allen This article develops a conception of effective opportunities of minority speakers that is tied to the possibilities of conceptual innovation in informally inclusive democratic deliberation. My argument proceeds through a critical engagement with Brian Barry and Bikhu Parekh on what it means to have an equal opportunity in a multicultural society. I claim that the exchange between Barry and Parekh reaches a conceptual deadlock over the possibility of producing a substantive revision in the concept of equality. I break this conceptual deadlock, however, by appeal to the potential of diverse speakers in informal deliberation to reinvent the meanings of their basic political terms of co-operation. [source] THE GAP IS SEMANTIC, NOT EPISTEMOLOGICALRATIO, Issue 2 2007Giuseppina D'Oro This paper explores an alternative to the metaphysical challenge to physicalism posed by Jackson and Kripke and to the epistemological one exemplified by the positions of Nagel, Levine and McGinn. On this alternative the mind-body gap is neither ontological nor epistemological, but semantic. I claim that it is because the gap is semantic that the mind-body problem is a quintessentially philosophical problem that is not likely to wither away as our natural scientific knowledge advances.1 [source] SEMANTIC EXTERNALISM AND A PRIORI SELF-KNOWLEDGERATIO, Issue 2 2006Jussi Haukioja The argument known as the ,McKinsey Recipe' tries to establish the incompatibility of semantic externalism (about natural kind concepts in particular) and a priori self-knowledge about thoughts and concepts by deriving from the conjunction of these theses an absurd conclusion, such as that we could know a priori that water exists. One reply to this argument is to distinguish two different readings of ,natural kind concept': (i) a concept which in fact denotes a natural kind, and (ii) a concept which aims to denote a natural kind. Paul Boghossian has argued, using a Dry Earth scenario, that this response fails, claiming that the externalist cannot make sense of a concept aiming, but failing, to denote a natural kind. In this paper I argue that Boghossian's argument is flawed. Borrowing machinery from two-dimensional semantics, using the notion of ,considering a possible world as actual', I claim that we can give a determinate answer to Boghossian's question: which concept would ,water' express on Dry Earth?1 [source] Radical quotation and real repetitionRATIO, Issue 2 2004David Roden In this essay I argue for a constructivist account of the entities composing the object languages of Davidsonian truth theories and a quotational account of the reference from metalinguistic expressions to interpreted utterances. I claim that ,radical quotation' requires an ontology of repeatable events with strong similarities to Derrida's account of iterable events. In part one I summarise Davidson's account of interpretation and Olav Gjelsivk's arguments to the effect that the syntactic individuation of linguistic objects is only workable if interpreters make richer assumptions about semantic properties than Davidson can tolerate. In part two I show that the objectivist account of syntactic objects which Gjelsivk's arguments presuppose is incompatible with one corollary of Davidsonian semantic indeterminacy: namely, the relativity of language to interpretative scheme. In place of this an account of radical interpretation is presented in which a quotational theory of metalinguistic reference furnishes the requisite relativity. In part three I argue that this account requires that particular utterance events must be repeatable to be radically quotable and give reasons why particularity and repeatability are not incompatible. [source] Moral Incapacity and Huckleberry FinnRATIO, Issue 1 2001Craig Taylor Bernard Williams distinguishes moral incapacities , incapacities that are themselves an expression of the moral life , from mere psychological ones in terms of deliberation. Against Williams I claim there are examples of such moral incapacity where no possible deliberation is involved , that an agent's incapacity may be a primitive feature or fact about their life. However Michael Clark argues that my claim here leaves the distinction between moral and psychological incapacity unexplained, and that an adequate understanding of the kind of examples I suggest must involve at least some implicit reference to deliberation. In this paper I attempt to meet Clark's objection and further clarify my account of primitive moral incapacities by considering an example from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. What this example shows, I argue, is how our characterization of an agent's response as a moral incapacity turns not on the idea of deliberation but on the way certain primitive incapacities for action are connected to a larger pattern of response in an agent's life, a pattern of response that itself helps to constitute our conception of that agent's character and the moral life more generally. [source] ENHANCING EVOLUTION AND ENHANCING EVOLUTIONBIOETHICS, Issue 8 2010IAIN BRASSINGTON ABSTRACT It has been claimed in several places that the new genetic technologies allow humanity to achieve in a generation or two what might take natural selection hundreds of millennia in respect of the elimination of certain diseases and an increase in traits such as intelligence. More radically, it has been suggested that those same technologies could be used to instil characteristics that we might reasonably expect never to appear due to natural selection alone. John Harris, a proponent of this genomic optimism, claims in his book Enhancing Evolution that we not only have it in our power to enhance evolution, but that we also have a duty to do so. In this paper, I claim that Harris' hand is strong but that he overplays it nevertheless. He is correct to dismiss the arguments of the anti-enhancement lobby and correct to say that enhancement is permissible; but ,good' is different from ,permissible' and his argument for the goodness of enhancement is less convincing. Moreover, he is simply wrong to claim that it generates a duty to enhance. [source] | |||||||||||||