Virtuous Activity Is Sufficient for Happiness and Some Minimally Favorable Circumstances Are Necessary for Virtuous Activity
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Commentary on Englert Martha Nussbaum I Admire Englert's
Commentary on Englert Martha Nussbaum I admire Englert's paper. I find its major conclusions entirely convincing: (1) the analysis of the difference between Epicurean and Stoic attitudes to suicide; (2) the account of the original Stoic position; (3) the argument that Seneca is an orthodox Stoic about suicide; and (4) the very interesting claims about the role of dif- ferent sorts of freedom in Seneca's arguments. Although I am persuaded by his analysis, I am inclined to be somewhat more critical of the Stoic position than he seems inclined to be: for I think that in a crucial way it is internally incoherent. In what follows, therefore, I want to focus on a problem in the Stoic account itself, with respect to the ambivalence the suicide theory reveals toward the importance of externals. I shall do this by focusing on one line of argument leading to suicide, in Seneca's De Ira.l 1. The Stoics famously hold that only virtue is worth choosing for its own sake. And virtue all by itself suffices for a complete- ly fulfilled and fulfilling human life, that is, for eudaimonia. Virtue is something unaffected by external contingency—both, apparently, as to its acquisition and as to its maintenance once acquired? Items that are not fully under the control of the 1. My interpretation of this work is developed at greater length in Nussbaum 1994. My general account of Stoic virtue theory and its relationship to the call for the extirpation of passion is in chapter 10, my detailed analysis of the argu- ments about anger in the De Ira in chapter 11. -
Andy Clark, ‘Whatever Next?’
BBS Commentary on: Andy Clark, ‘Whatever Next?’ Word Counts Abstract: 61 Main text: 994 References: 69 Entire text: 1,180 Commentary Title Perception vs Action: The Computations May Be The Same But The Direction Of Fit Differs Author Information Nicholas Shea Faculty of Philosophy University of Oxford 10 Merton Street Oxford OX1 4JJ UK tel. 01865 286896 [email protected] www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/members/nicholas_shea Abstract Although predictive coding may offer a computational principle that unifies perception and action, states with different directions of fit are involved (with indicative and imperative contents, respectively). Predictive states are adjusted to fit the world in the course of perception, but in the case of action the corresponding states act as a fixed target towards which the agent adjusts the world. Main Text One of the central insights motivating Clark’s interest in the potential for predictive coding to provide a unifying computational principle is the fact that it can be the basis of effective algorithms in both the perceptual and motor domains (Eliasmith 2007, 380). That is surprising because perceptual inference in natural settings is based on a rich series of sensory inputs at all times, whereas a natural motor control task only specifies a final outcome. Many variations in the trajectory are irrelevant to achieving the final goal (Todorov and Jordan 2002), a redundancy that is absent from the perceptual inference problem. Despite this disanalogy, the two tasks are instances of the same general mathematical problem (Todorov 2006). Clark emphasises the “deep unity” between the two problems, which is justified but might serve to obscure an important difference. -
The Hymn of Cleanthes Greek Text Translated Into English
UC-NRLF 557 C29 ^ 033 TDt. 3 + 1921 3• MAIN ^ ft (9 -- " EXTS FOR STUDENTS, No. 26 THE YMN OF CLEANTHES GREEK TEXT TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH WITH BRIEF INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY E. H. BLAKENEY, M.A. ce 6d. net. HELPS FOR STUDENTS OF HISTORY. 1. EPISCOPAL REGISTERS OF ENGLAND AND WALES. By R. C. Fowler, B.A., F.S.A. 6d. net. 2. MUNICIPAL RECORDS. By F. J. C. Hearnsuaw, M.A. Gd. net. 3. MEDIEVAL RECKONINGS OF TIME. ' By Reginald L. Poole, LL.D., Litt.D. 6d. net. % 4. THE PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE. By Charles Johnson. 6d. net. 5. THE CARE OF DOCUMENTS. By Charles Johnson. 6d.net. 6. THE LOGIC OF HISTORY. By C. G. Cramp. 8d.net. 7. DOCUMENTS IN THE PUBUC RECORD OFFICE, DUBLIN. By B. H. Murray, Litt.D. 8d. net. 8. THE FRENCH WARS OF RELIGION. By Arthur A. TiUey» M.A. 6d. net. By Sir A. W. WARD, Litt.D., F.B.A. 9. THE PERIOD OF CONGRESSES, I. Introductory. 8d.net. 10. THE PERIOD OF CONGRESSES, II. Vienna and the Second Peace of Paris. Is. net. 11. THE PERIOD OF CONGRESSES, IH. Aix-la-ChapeUe to Verona. Is. net. (Nos. 9, 10, and 11 in one volume, cloth, 3s. Gd. net.) 12. SECURITIES OF PEACE. A Retrospect (1848-1914). Paper, 2s. ; cloth, 3s. net. 13. THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE. By Arthur A. TiUey, M.A* 8d. net. 14. HINTS ON THE STUDY OF ENGUSH ECONOMIC HISTORY. By W. Cunningham, D.D., F.B.A., F.S.A. 8d. net. 1 5. PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS. -
DAVID WILLIAMSON Is Australia's Best Known and Most Widely
DAVID WILLIAMSON is Australia’s best known and most widely performed playwright. His first full-length play The Coming of Stork was presented at La Mama Theatre in 1970 and was followed by The Removalists and Don’s Party in 1971. His prodigious output since then includes The Department, The Club, Travelling North, The Perfectionist, Sons of Cain, Emerald City, Top Silk, Money and Friends, Brilliant Lies, Sanctuary, Dead White Males, After the Ball, Corporate Vibes, Face to Face, The Great Man, Up For Grabs, A Conversation, Charitable Intent, Soulmates, Birthrights, Amigos, Flatfoot, Operator, Influence, Lotte’s Gift, Scarlet O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot, Let the Sunshine and Rhinestone Rex and Miss Monica, Nothing Personal and Don Parties On, a sequel to Don’s Party, When Dad Married Fury, At Any Cost?, co-written with Mohamed Khadra, Dream Home, Happiness, Cruise Control and Jack of Hearts. His plays have been translated into many languages and performed internationally, including major productions in London, Los Angeles, New York and Washington. Dead White Males completed a successful UK production in 1999. Up For Grabs went on to a West End production starring Madonna in the lead role. In 2008 Scarlet O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot premiered at the Melbourne Theatre Company starring Caroline O’Connor and directed by Simon Phillips. As a screenwriter, David has brought to the screen his own plays including The Removalists, Don’s Party, The Club, Travelling North and Emerald City along with his original screenplays for feature films including Libido, Petersen, Gallipoli, Phar Lap, The Year of Living Dangerously and Balibo. -
Bootstrap Hell: Perceptual Racial Biases in a Predictive Processing Framework
Bootstrap Hell: Perceptual Racial Biases in a Predictive Processing Framework Zachariah A. Neemeh ([email protected]) Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis Memphis, TN 38152 USA Abstract This enables us to extract patterns from ambiguous signals Predictive processing is transforming our understanding of the and establish hypotheses about how the world works. brain in the 21st century. Whereas in the 20th century we The training signals that we get from the world are, understood the brain as a passive organ taking in information however, biased in all the same unsightly ways that our from the world, today we are beginning to reconceptualize it societies are biased: by race, gender, socioeconomic status, as an organ that actively creates and tests hypotheses about its nationality, and sexual orientation. The problem is more world. The promised revolution of predictive processing than a mere sampling bias. Our societies are replete with extends beyond cognitive neuroscience, however, and is prejudice biases that shape the ways we think, act, and beginning to make waves in the philosophy of perception. Andy Clark has written that predictive processing creates a perceive. Indeed, a similar problem arises in machine “bootstrap heaven,” enabling the brain to develop complex learning applications when they are inadvertently trained on models of the world from limited data. I argue that the same socially biased data (Avery, 2019; N. T. Lee, 2018). The principles also create a “bootstrap hell,” wherein prejudice basic principle in operation here is “garbage in, garbage biases inherent in our inegalitarian societies result in out”: a predictive system that is trained on socially biased permanent perceptual modifications. -
After the Ball David Williamson
David Williamson’s first full-length play, The Coming of Stork, premiered at the La Mama Theatre, Carlton, in 1970 and later became the film Stork, directed by Tim Burstall. The Removalists and Don’s Party followed in 1971, then Jugglers Three (1972), What If You Died Tomorrow? (1973), The Department (1975), A Handful of Friends (1976), The Club (1977) and Travelling North (1979). In 1972 The Removalists won the Australian Writers’ Guild AWGIE Award for best stage play and the best script in any medium and the British production saw Williamson nominated most promising playwright by the London Evening Standard. The 1980s saw his success continue with Celluloid Heroes (1980), The Perfectionist (1982), Sons of Cain (1985), Emerald City (1987) and Top Silk (1989); whilst the 1990s produced Siren (1990), Money and Friends (1991), Brilliant Lies (1993), Sanctuary (1994), Dead White Males (1995), Heretic (1996), Third World Blues (an adaptation of Jugglers Three) and After the Ball (both in 1997), and Corporate Vibes and Face to Face (both in 1999). The Great Man (2000), Up for Grabs, A Conversation, Charitable Intent (all in 2001), Soulmates (2002), Birthrights (2003), Amigos, Flatfoot (both in 2004), Operator and Influence(both 2005) have since followed. Williamson is widely recognised as Australia’s most successful playwright and over the last thirty years his plays have been performed throughout Australia and produced in Britain, United States, Canada and many European countries. A number of his stage works have been adapted for the screen, including The Removalists, Don’s Party, The Club, Travelling North, Emerald City, Sanctuary and Brilliant Lies. -
The Extended Mind Andy Clark & David Chalmers1
The extended mind Andy Clark & David Chalmers1 1. Introduction Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the boundaries of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words ‘just ain’t in the head’, and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third posi- tion. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cogni- tive processes. 2. Extended cognition Consider three cases of human problem-solving: (1) A person sits in front of a computer screen which displays images of various two-dimensional geometric shapes and is asked to answer questions concerning the potential fit of such shapes into depicted ‘sockets’. To assess fit, the person must mentally rotate the shapes to align them with the sockets. (2) A person sits in front of a similar computer screen, but this time can choose either to physically rotate the image on the screen, by pressing a rotate button, or to mentally rotate the image as before. We can also suppose, not unrealistically, that some speed advantage accrues to the physical rotation operation. (3) Sometime in the cyberpunk future, a person sits in front of a similar computer screen. This agent, however, has the benefit of a neural implant which can perform the rotation operation as fast as the computer in the previous example. -
Philosophy of Happiness Regents Professor Julia Annas
Philosophy 220: Philosophy of Happiness Regents Professor Julia Annas. MWF 1 – 1.50 pm. Chavez 301. The course has a D2L website, where all the readings are to be found. My office is Social Science Building 123. Office hours TBA. The Philosophy Department office is Social Sciences Building 213. Why happiness? Happiness matters!. There are large numbers of self-help books telling us how to be happy. Some nations are planning to measure the happiness of their citizens to find out how it can be increased. There is a huge field of ‘happiness studies’, and focus on happiness in positive psychology as well as politics and law. Much of this is confusing, since it’s often not clear what the authors think happiness is. Is it feeling good? Is it having a positive attitude to the way you are now? Is it having a positive attitude to your life as a whole? Is it having a happy life? How can some people advise others on how to be happy? Philosophers have explored happiness, and our search for happiness, for two thousand years. They have asked what happiness is, and have developed different answers, including some now being rediscovered. In this course we will ask what happiness is, and look at major answers. We’ll look at rich philosophical traditions of thinking about happiness, and also at some recent work in the social sciences. We’ll examine the contributions being made to the ongoing search to find out what happiness is, and how we can live happy lives. Course Readings Course readings will be available on the D2L site. -
Cicero on Epicurean Friendship: a Reappraisal 109
Cicero on Epicurean Friendship: A Reappraisal 109 POLITEIA VOL. 1, No 2, SPRING 2019 APPENDIX CICERO ON EPICUREAN FRIENDSHIP: A REAPPRAISAL Phillip Mitsis New York University Given the occasion, I thought I might take the opportunity to revisit my first pub- lished paper on Epicureanism1 originally begun in a Lucretius seminar at Cornell in 1978 taught by Elizabeth Asmis. The paper's argument now seems to me in retrospect to exhibit a certain naive confidence in Cicero's reliability as a source, and though I still stand by some of its overall conclusions about Epicurean friendship, my views about the nature of the path that one needs to take to get to those conclusions has changed considerably.2 Readers will best judge whether a forty-year gap in looking at these arguments, apart from merely complicating matters, has led to any progress. At De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum 1.65-70, Cicero, through the character of Tor- quatus, offers our most detailed and seemingly systematic surviving account of Epi- curean views of friendship. Brad Inwood has forcefully reminded us, however, that this work has a particular focus and that its overall structure and arguments clearly reflect it.3 Cicero is examining what the fines (limits, ends, criteria, etc.) of goods and of evils are in various rival philosophical theories and in the first two books he sets himself the project of presenting and criticizing the Epicurean claim that pleasure serves as a final end or goal of our actions. One recurring problem in his account is that he glosses the notion of finis with terms having different valences and, thus, those wishing to extract from Cicero's discussion Epicurus' original view of friendship are faced with the problem that he often describes the relation of friendship to pleasure in terminology imprecise enough to encompass different theoretical outlooks. -
Language, Embodiment, and the Cognitive Niche
Opinion TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.10 No.8 Full text provided by www.sciencedirect.com Language, embodiment, and the cognitive niche Andy Clark School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, David Hume Tower, George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JX, UK Embodied agents use bodily actions and environmental in ways that (when successful) aid thinking and reasoning interventions to make the world a better place to think about some target domain or domains [11–13]. These in. Where does language fit into this emerging picture of physical structures combine with appropriate culturally the embodied, ecologically efficient agent? One useful transmitted practices to enhance problem-solving, and way to approach this question is to consider language (in the most dramatic cases) to make possible whole new itself as a cognition-enhancing animal-built structure. To forms of thought and reason. take this perspective is to view language as a kind of I present three ways in which to begin to flesh out this self-constructed cognitive niche: a persisting but never idea, and sketch a computational (connectionist and dyna- stationary material scaffolding whose crucial role in mical) framework in which to embed it. I end the argument promoting thought and reason remains surprisingly by suggesting an additional (non-essential but potentially poorly understood. It is the very materiality of this important) refinement: that linguistic activity might turn linguistic scaffolding, I suggest, that gives it some key out to be a mode of cognition-enhancing self-stimulation in benefits. By materializing thought in words, we create a system with no ‘Central Meaner’ orchestrating the whole structures that are themselves proper objects of percep- [14,15]. -
The Fragments of Zeno and Cleanthes, but Having an Important
,1(70 THE FRAGMENTS OF ZENO AND CLEANTHES. ftonton: C. J. CLAY AND SONS, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, AVE MARIA LANE. ambriDse: DEIGHTON, BELL, AND CO. ltip>ifl: F. A. BROCKHAUS. #tto Hork: MACMILLAX AND CO. THE FRAGMENTS OF ZENO AND CLEANTHES WITH INTRODUCTION AND EXPLANATORY NOTES. AX ESSAY WHICH OBTAINED THE HARE PRIZE IX THE YEAR 1889. BY A. C. PEARSON, M.A. LATE SCHOLAR OF CHRIST S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. LONDON: C. J. CLAY AND SONS, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE. 1891 [All Rights reserved.] Cambridge : PBIXTKIi BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS, AT THK UNIVERSITY PRKSS. PREFACE. S dissertation is published in accordance with thr conditions attached to the Hare Prize, and appears nearly in its original form. For many reasons, however, I should have desired to subject the work to a more under the searching revision than has been practicable circumstances. Indeed, error is especially difficult t<> avoid in dealing with a large body of scattered authorities, a the majority of which can only be consulted in public- library. to be for The obligations, which require acknowledged of Zeno and the present collection of the fragments former are Cleanthes, are both special and general. The Philo- soon disposed of. In the Neue Jahrbticher fur Wellmann an lofjie for 1878, p. 435 foil., published article on Zeno of Citium, which was the first serious of Zeno from that attempt to discriminate the teaching of Wellmann were of the Stoa in general. The omissions of the supplied and the first complete collection fragments of Cleanthes was made by Wachsmuth in two Gottingen I programs published in 187-i LS75 (Commentationes s et II de Zenone Citiensi et Cleaitt/ie Assio). -
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, IV - 1 | 2012, « Pragmatism and the Social Sciences: a Century of Influences and Interactions, Vol
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy IV - 1 | 2012 Pragmatism and the Social Sciences: A Century of Influences and Interactions, vol. 2 Roberto Frega and Filipe Careira Da Silva (dir.) Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/758 DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.758 ISSN: 2036-4091 Publisher Associazione Pragma Electronic reference Roberto Frega and Filipe Careira Da Silva (dir.), European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, IV - 1 | 2012, « Pragmatism and the Social Sciences: A Century of Influences and Interactions, vol. 2 » [Online], Online since 23 July 2012, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/758 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.758 This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020. Author retains copyright and grants the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Symposia. Pragmatism and the Social Sciences: A Century of Influences and Interactions, vol.2 Pragmatism and the Social Sciences A Century of Influences and Interactions, vol. 2 Roberto Frega and Filipe Carreira da Silva Section I. Classical Pragmatists and Contemporary Sociology Peirce and Iconology Habitus, Embodiment, and the Analogy between Philosophy and Architecture Tullio Viola Experiencing Practical Knowledge Emerging Convergences of Pragmatism and Sociological Practice Theory Tanja Bogusz The Social Scientist, the Public, and the Pragmatist Gaze Exploring the Critical Conditions of Sociological Inquiry Philippe Gonzalez and Laurence Kaufmann Section II. Law, Power, and the Prospects of a Pragmatist Social Theory Naturalistic Values and Progressive Politics A Missing Link Between Pragmatism and Social Theory Christoph Henning American Pragmatism and European Social Theory Holmes, Durkheim, Scheler, and the Sociology of Legal Knowledge Frederic R.