Showing papers in "Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement in 2014"
TL;DR: The authors argue that metrical and parallelistic verse texts are processed line-by-line in working memory and that treatment of the line as a whole unit is necessary for the processing of the regular patterned forms which hold of the verse.
Abstract: Verse, defined as a spoken or written text divided into lines, is often assigned high cultural value. This paper argues that metrical and parallelistic verse texts are processed line-‐by-‐line in working memory. Treatment of the line as a whole unit is necessary for the processing of the regular patterned forms which hold of the verse. In turn, these regular patterned forms make the processing of the text easer and produce other effects which have been experimentally shown to produce interconnected low-‐level aesthetic effects of pleasure, familiarity and truth. This may in part explain why verse is often given a higher cultural value than prose, and hence why verse is found throughout the spoken and written literatures of the world.
15 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the present state of Islamic philosophy in its main home, namely, Iran, is assessed and the role played by other Muslim scholars such as theologians, mystics and jurists in shaping Islamic philosophy.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to critically assess the present state of Islamic philosophy in its main home, namely, Iran. However, since such a study requires some knowledge of the past developments of philosophical thought among Muslims, the paper briefly, though critically, deals with the emergence and subsequent phases of change in the views of Muslim philosophers from ninth century onward. In this historical survey I also touch upon the role played by other Muslim scholars such as theologians, mystics and jurists, in shaping Islamic philosophy. The last section of the paper, deals, not in great details, with one or two possible scenarios for the future of Islamic philosophy.
9 citations
TL;DR: We praise and admire creative people in virtually every domain from the worlds of art, fashion and design to the fields of engineering and scientific endeavour as mentioned in this paper. But we also sometimes blame, condemn or withhold praise from those who fail creatively; hence we might say that someone's work or ideas tend to be rather derivative and uninspired.
Abstract: We praise and admire creative people in virtually every domain from the worlds of art, fashion and design to the fields of engineering and scientific endeavour. Picasso was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Einstein was a creative scientist and Jonathan Ive is admired the world over as a great designer. We also sometimes blame, condemn or withhold praise from those who fail creatively; hence we might say that someone's work or ideas tend to be rather derivative and uninspired. Institutions and governmental advisory bodies sometimes aspire, claim or exhort us to enable individual creativity, whether this is held to be good for the individual as such or in virtue of promoting wider socio-economic goods. It is at least a common thought that people are more self-fulfilled if they are creative and society more generally is held to be all the better for enabling individual creativity.
8 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Nishida Kitarō and Ueda Shizuteru discuss the nature of dialogue from the perspective of two key members of the Kyoto School, namely its founder and its current central figure.
Abstract: As we attempt to engender a dialogue between different philosophical traditions, one of the first – if not indeed the first – of the topics which need to be addressed is that of the very nature of dialogue. In other words, we need to engage in a dialogue about dialogue. Toward that end, this essay attempts to rethink the nature of dialogue from the perspective of two key members of the Kyoto School, namely its founder, Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), and its current central figure, Ueda Shizuteru (b. 1926). The Kyoto School is the most prominent group of modern Japanese philosophers, whose thought emerges from the encounter between Western and Eastern traditions. This essay seeks to elucidate and further unfold the implications of rethinking of the nature of dialogue from the perspective of Nishida's and Ueda's primarily Zen Buddhist reception of and response to Western philosophy.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that most people are not as good a driver, teacher, romantic partner or romantic partner as they take themselves to be and, as if that wasn't bad enough, they are also considerably less popular than they have hitherto believed.
Abstract: You're not as clever as you think you are. Nor for that matter are you as good a driver, teacher or romantic partner as you take yourself to be and, as if that wasn't bad enough, you are also considerably less popular than you have hitherto believed. Finally – and crucially for the argument of this paper – I contend that your abilities as an aesthetic judge are considerably less impressive than you take them to be. To avoid descending into name calling it's worth pointing out that such claims apply to the vast majority of people – myself, somewhat paradoxically, included.
6 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore Daoism's relevance to environmental philosophy and to the aspiration of people to live in a manner convergent with nature, arguing that the Daoist proposal is one of living more "spontaneously" than people generally do in the modern, technological world, and of allowing other beings to do so as well.
Abstract: This paper sympathetically explores Daoism's relevance to environmental philosophy and to the aspiration of people to live in a manner convergent with nature. After discussing the Daoist understanding of nature and the dao (Way), the focus turns to the implications of these notions for our relationship to nature. The popular idea that Daoism encourages a return to a ‘primitive’ way of life is rejected. Instead, it is shown that the Daoist proposal is one of living more ‘spontaneously’ than people generally do in the modern, technological world, and of allowing other beings to do so as well. These themes are clarified in a final section, inspired by some Daoist remarks, devoted to the relationship of human beings with animals.
6 citations
TL;DR: For instance, the authors reviewed some recent work in developmental psychology that has the potential to inform philosophical research on a variety of topics, not necessarily because of what children think, but because learning what children's aesthetic intuitions are and how they develop can help us to better understand why adults have the intuitions that they do.
Abstract: Over the last ten years or so, many cognitive scientists have begun to work on topics traditionally associated with philosophical aesthetics, such as issues about the objectivity of aesthetic judgments and the nature of aesthetic experience. An increasingly interdisciplinary turn within philosophy has started to take advantage of these connections, to the benefit of all. But one area that has been somewhat overlooked in this new dialogue is developmental psychology, which treats questions about whether and to what extent children's intuitions about various aspects of aesthetic experience match those of adults, as well as the origins and developmental trajectories of these intuitions. The current paper reviews some recent work in developmental psychology that has the potential to inform philosophical research on a variety of topics – not necessarily because of this work tells us directly about what children think, but because learning what children's aesthetic intuitions are and how they develop can help us to better understand why adults have the intuitions that they do.
5 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that creativity is a kind of virtue and argued that it is a virtue in philosophical ethics, epistemology, and increasingly aesthetics, so an account of creativity as a virtue can draw on well established theories.
Abstract: The thought that creativity is a kind of virtue is an attractive one. Virtues are valuable traits that are praised and admired, and creativity is a widely celebrated trait in our society. In philosophical ethics, epistemology, and increasingly aesthetics, virtue-theoretical approaches are influential, so an account of creativity as a virtue can draw on well-established theories. Several philosophers, including Linda Zagzebski, Christine Swanton and Matthew Kieran, have argued for the claim that creativity is a virtue, locating this claim within a broader picture of intellectual, ethical and aesthetic virtues respectively. Moreover, a prominent research programme in psychology, led by Teresa Amabile, holds that people have an intrinsic motivation when they are creative, and this seems seamlessly to fit with the view that creativity is a virtue, for it is often held that a requirement for a trait to be a virtue is that the virtuous agent acts from an intrinsic motivation.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a detailed account of particular lines of argument is provided, with the aim of suggesting that so-called "Buddhist idealism" unfolded as a tradition not just for Buddhists, but within Indian philosophy more generally.
Abstract: In accord with the theme of the present volume on ‘Philosophical Traditions’, it is not so much the aim of this essay to provide a detailed account of particular lines of argument, as it is to suggest something of the manner in which so-called 'Buddhist idealism' unfolded as a tradition not just for Buddhists, but within Indian philosophy more generally. Seen from this perspective, Buddhist idealism remained a current within Indian philosophy long after the demise of Buddhism in India, in about the twelfth century, and endured in some respects at least until the Mughal age, when the last thinker to be examined here, the Jain teacher Yaśovijaya, was active.
4 citations
TL;DR: There is no such thing as analytic philosophy, conceived as a special discipline with its own distinctive subject matter or peculiar method as mentioned in this paper. But there is an analytic task for philosophy that distinguishes it from other reflective pursuits, a global or synoptic commission: to establish whether the final outputs of other disciplines and common sense can be fused into a single periscopic vision of the Universe.
Abstract: There is no such thing as ‘analytic philosophy’, conceived as a special discipline with its own distinctive subject matter or peculiar method. But there is an analytic task for philosophy that distinguishes it from other reflective pursuits, a global or synoptic commission: to establish whether the final outputs of other disciplines and common sense can be fused into a single periscopic vision of the Universe. And there is the hard-won insight that thought and language aren't transparent but stand in need of analysis – a recent variation upon the abiding philosophical theme that we need to get behind appearances to tell the ultimate truth about reality – an insight that threatens to be lost once philosophers appeal to intuitions.
4 citations
TL;DR: The phenomenon-and-explanation model as mentioned in this paper is a theory-construction approach that aims to explain aesthetic phenomena that arise from our interactions with narratives and artworks.
Abstract: In recent years, aesthetics – like many other philosophical areas – has gradually replaced conceptual analysis projects with theory construction projects. For example, in a presidential speech of the American Society for Aesthetics, Kendall Walton advocates for the theory-construction methodology, which does not primarily aim to capture the meaning of aesthetic terms in ordinary English. Instead of trying to define what beauty or art is, philosophers have shifted their focus to explaining aesthetic phenomena that arise from our interactions with narratives and artworks. We are experiencing a shift from what Jonathan Weinberg and Aaron Meskin call the ‘traditional paradox-and-analysis model’ to a new paradigm, the ‘phenomenon-and-explanation model’. The methodology of the new paradigm explicitly takes its cue from the sciences: look for observable data, propose theories that aim to explain the data, adjudicate competing theories, and repeat.
TL;DR: Hutcheson's Inquiry into the Original of Our Idea of Beauty and Virtue as discussed by the authors was the first sustained and significant work in philosophical aesthetics as we now know it, and it inaugurated a series of philosophical writings on taste and beauty that continued for almost a century.
Abstract: It is well known that we owe the term ‘aesthetics’ in its philosophical sense to the 18th century German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten. The eighteenth century's interest in aesthetics, however, pre-dated the invention of the term. In 1725, Francis Hutcheson published an Inquiry into the Original of Our Idea of Beauty and Virtue. This may be said to be the first sustained and significant work in philosophical aesthetics as we now know it. Hutcheson's volume preceded Baumgarten's by 10 years, and within Scotland it inaugurated a series of philosophical writings on taste and beauty that continued for almost a century. Contributors included major philosophical figures like David Hume, Thomas Reid and Adam Smith, as well as influential figures less well known today such as Alexander Gerard, George Turnbull and Lord Kames.
TL;DR: For example, Parfit as mentioned in this paper points out that in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, philosophy was typically thought of as bearing on how to live, and the implications for how to living were naturally flowing naturally from metaphysical theories.
Abstract: Philosophy, in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, and in various other cultures too, was typically thought of as, among other things, bearing on how to live. Questions of how to live may now be considered by some as merely one optional specialism among others, but Derek Parfit for one, we shall see, rightly treats implications for how to live as flowing naturally from metaphysical theories. In the hope of showing something about the ancient Graeco-Roman tradition as a whole, I shall speak of things that I and others have said before,1 but I will highlight certain aspects of how the various groups or individuals related their philosophy to their lives. I shall start with the ancient Stoics as providing a clear case, then move on more briefly to their rivals, the Epicureans, and finally, more briefly again, to consider their predecessors and successors in other ancient schools and periods. This will not be a survey of the main central doctrines, although that is also something useful to attempt. But it will involve a selection of important ideas to illustrate their application to how to live.
TL;DR: Nietzsche as mentioned in this paper explores the main figurations of Epicurus we find in his middle period and concludes by taking a critical look at his later and more ambivalent reception of the Epicurus.
Abstract: This essay looks at Nietzsche in relation to the Epicurean tradition. It focuses on his middle period writings of 1878–82 – texts such as Human, all too Human, Dawn, and The Gay Science – and seeks to show that an ethos of Epicurean enlightenment pervades these texts, with Epicurus celebrated for his teaching of modest pleasures and cultivation of philosophical serenity. For Nietzsche, Epicurus is one of the greatest human beings to have ever graced the earth and the inventor of ‘heroic-idyllic philosophizing’. At the same time, Nietzsche claims to understand Epicurus differently to everybody else. The essay explores the main figurations of Epicurus we find in his middle period and concludes by taking a critical look at his later and more ambivalent reception of Epicurus.
TL;DR: Eisenstadt et al. as discussed by the authors argued that modernity is a polycentric notion, and pointed out that there are many philosophical modernities in non-western philosophical contexts, such as India.
Abstract: The much-welcomed recent acknowledgement that there is a plurality of philosophical traditions has an important consequence: that we must acknowledge too that there are many philosophical modernities. Modernity, I will claim, is a polycentric notion, and I will substantiate my claim by examining in some detail one particular non-western philosophical modernity, a remarkable period in 16 to 17 century India where a diversity of philosophical projects fully deserve the label ‘modern’. It used to be a commonplace in studies ofmodernity, and remains one still in philosophical historiography, that modernity is something that happened first, and uniquely, in Europe; and attempts were made to convert the supposition into a tautology through defnitions of modernity that exclude nonEuropean periodizations and geographies (for example, in terms of capitalist modes of production, the emergence of nation states and nationalist collective identities, the industrial revolution, secularization, and so on). NonEuropean philosophies are traditional, and only European philosophy is modern. Progress of sorts occurred with the acknowledgement of the existence of alternative regional modernities, but the acknowledgement was tied to a centre/periphery model and to an associated ideology of European diffusionism. Eisenstadt, for instance, is willing to acknowledge ‘multiple modernities’, but only insofar as these new modernities imitate and copy a first modernity centred in Europe. Post-colonial writers such as R. Radhakrishnan have 1 The following quotation is representative: ‘Historically, modernization is the process of change towards those types of social, economic and political systems that have developed in Western Europe and North America from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth’ (Eisenstadt ‘Multiple Modernities’: 1). For similarly Eurocentric definitions of modernity, see also Giddens The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); Hall and Gieben Formations of Modernity (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1992), 1–16 2 Eisenstadlt, Shmuel N. (2000) ‘Multiple modernities’, Daedalus 129(1): 1–29 75 doi:10.1017/S1358246114000071 ©The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2014 Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 74 2014 struggled with what they term ‘the curse of derivativeness’, and have sought to find in the interplay between colonised and coloniser, between tradition and modernity, a more dialectical pattern of engagement. What I will argue for in this essay is a more radical rejection of the commonplace picture. I will claim that we should think instead of modernity as a happening potentially indigenous to any culture, irrespective of period or place, that like the famous Indian banyan tree it is ‘polycentric’, here borrowing Susan Friedman’s very useful term. ‘The new geography of modernism’, Friedman says, ‘needs to locate many centres of modernity across the globe, to focus on the cultural traffic linking them, and to interpret the circuits of reciprocal influence and transformation that take place within highly unequal state relations’; it involves a recognition that these modernities are different, not derivative. There is just one way to substantiate such a claim, and that is through the detailed, painstaking, excavation of modernities that have been lost or lost sight of, and I will spend the remainder of this talk doing precisely that, unearthing an incipient early modernity in pre-colonial Indian philosophical theory. The arrival ofmodernity at a certain point in the history of philosophy seemingly admits of two non-compossible explanations. One model presents modernity as involving a thorough rejection of the ancient – its texts, its thinkers, its methods – as starting afresh and from the beginning. This was how the two figures who are emblematic of the ‘new philosophy’ in Europe, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Rene Descartes (1596–1650), chose to present themselves. 3 Radhakrishnan, R. (2002) ‘Derivative discourses and the problem of signification’, The European Legacy 7(6): 783–95 4 Freidman, Susan (2006) ‘Periodizing modernism: postcolonial modernities and the space/time borders of modernist studies’, Modernism/ Modernity 13(3): 429 5 Bacon: ‘There was but one course left, therefore,—to try the whole thing anew upon a better plan, and to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations.’ (Instauratio magma, Preface; 1857–74, vol. 4: 8 in The Works of Francis Bacon, J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath (eds)(London: Longmans)). Descartes: ‘As soon as I was old enough to emerge from the control of my teachers, I entirely abandoned the study of letters... For it seemed to me that much more truth could be found in the reasonings which a man makes concerning matters that concern him than in those which some scholar makes in his study.’ (Discourse, AT vi. 9; 1984: 115, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham (ed.)(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)). ‘The following
TL;DR: The authors provided an overview of the rise of Japanese philosophy during the period of rapid modernization in Japan after the Meiji Restoration, and examined the controversy surrounding Japanese philosophy towards the end of the Pacific War (1945), and its renewal in the contemporary context.
Abstract: The paper provides an overview of the rise of Japanese philosophy during the period of rapid modernization in Japan after the Meiji Restoration (beginning in the 1860s). It also examines the controversy surrounding Japanese philosophy towards the end of the Pacific War (1945), and its renewal in the contemporary context. The post-Meiji thinkers engaged themselves with the questions of universality and particularity; the former represented science, medicine, technology, and philosophy (understood as ‘Western modernity’) and the latter, the Japanese – ‘non-Western’ – tradition. Within the context, the question arose whether or not Japan, the only non-Western nation to succeed in modernization at the time, could also offer a philosophy that was universal in scope? Could Japanese philosophy offer an alternative form of modernity to the global domination of Western modernity? In this historical context, the philosophies of Kitaro Nishida and Tetsuro Watsuji, two of the tradition's most prominent thinkers, are introduced. Nishida is considered the ‘father of modern Japanese philosophy’ and his followers came to be known as the ‘Kyoto School’. The essay ends with a brief reflection on the influence of philosophy on culture, focusing on the aftermath of the tsunami catastrophe in 2011.
TL;DR: The authors looked at the different understandings each author offers of intersubjectivity and authentic self-hood and questions the extent to which for each author God plays a role in interpersonal relationships.
Abstract: Abstract Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas are three of the most prominent Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. This paper looks at the different understandings each author offers of intersubjectivity and authentic self-hood and questions the extent to which for each author God plays a role in interpersonal relationships.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make an attempt to gain some understanding of the background to this long-standing (and still to some diminishing extent persistent) mutual incomprehension from the standpoint of one who came to philosophy as a PPE student in the Oxford of the late 1940s.
Abstract: There is – of course – no one such thing as the continental tradition in philosophy, but rather a whole discordant family of notably distinct traditions. They are, nevertheless, broadly recognisable to each other. For much of the last century, however, most of those engaged in or with philosophy in continental Europe, on the one hand, and in the English-speaking world, on the other hand, had surprisingly little knowledge of, interest in or even respect for what was going on in the other. Happily, the situation today is vastly improved on each side of the philosophical channel. What follows is an attempt to gain some understanding of the background to this long-standing (and still to some diminishing extent persistent) mutual incomprehension from the standpoint of one who came to philosophy as a PPE student in the Oxford of the late 1940s.
TL;DR: Schoenberg's notion of Klangfarbenmelodie, or sound colour melody, was introduced in the final section of his Harmonielehre (1911) as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: A few years ago I gave a paper on the aesthetics of ‘noise,’ that is, on the ways in which non-musical sounds can be given aesthetic shape and structure, and thereby form the basis of significant aesthetic experience Along the way I made reference to Arnold Schoenberg's musical theory, in particular his notion of Klangfarbenmelodie, literally ‘sound colour melody,’ or musical form based on timbre or tonal colour rather than on melody, harmony or rhythm Schoenberg articulated his ideas about Klangfarbenmelodie in the final section of his Harmonielehre (1911) ‘Pitch is nothing else but tone colour measured in one direction,’ wrote Schoenberg ‘Now, if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colours that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call ‘melodies’…then it must also be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colours of the other dimension, out of that which we simply call “tone colour”’ In other words, traditional melodies work by abstracting and structuring the dominant pitch characterizing a musical sound, while ‘sound colour melodies’ work, Schoenberg argues, by structuring the combined set of pitches contained in a given musical sound (the overtones as well as the dominant pitch) Schoenberg is emphatic that, although a neglected and underdeveloped possibility within Western classical music, ‘sound colour melody’ is a perfectly legitimate and viable form of musical expression; indeed for Schoenberg it is a musical form with enormous potential
TL;DR: In this paper, the meaning of the term "communalism" when it is used to express a defining characteristic of Africa's cultures is discussed, as well as the reactions on the part of African philosophers and scholars to the movement that has come to be known in Western academia and culture as "feminism".
Abstract: African philosophy today is a complicated and dynamic discipline. This presentation will concentrate on two topics that are currently of special interest. One concerns the meaning of the term ‘communalism’ when it is used to express a defining characteristic of Africa's cultures. The other concerns the reactions on the part of African philosophers and scholars to the movement that has come to be known in Western academia and culture as ‘feminism’.
TL;DR: A primary dimension of our engagement with fictional works of art, paradigmatically literary, dramatic, and cinematic narratives, is figuring out what is true in such representations, what the facts are in the fictional world.
Abstract: A primary dimension of our engagement with fictional works of art – paradigmatically literary, dramatic, and cinematic narratives – is figuring out what is true in such representations, what the facts are in the fictional world. These facts (or states of affairs) include not only those that ground any genuine understanding of a story – say, that it was his own father whom Oedipus killed – but also those that may be missed in even a largely competent reading, say, that Emma Bovary's desires and dissatisfactions are fed by reading romance novels.
TL;DR: The authors make a sharp distinction between the philosophical and the psychological approaches to aesthetics; and the revolution brought about by cognitive science has led many to believe that the philosophy of art no longer controls a sovereign territory of its own.
Abstract: It has always been controversial to make a sharp distinction between the philosophical and the psychological approaches to aesthetics; and the revolution brought about by cognitive science has led many to believe that the philosophy of art no longer controls a sovereign territory of its own. To take one case in point: recent aesthetics has addressed the problem of fiction, asking how it is that real emotions can be felt towards merely imagined events. Several philosophers have tried to solve this problem by leaning on observations in psychology – Jenefer Robinson, for example, exploring the domain of pre-conscious and non-rational responses, and Greg Currie, invoking simulation theory from the realm of cognitive science. I am not yet persuaded that either has succeeded in solving the philosophical question: but the fact that such sophisticated and well-informed philosophers should begin from studies in empirical psychology says much about how the subject of aesthetics has changed since the early days of linguistic analysis.