The pandemic has been the most vivid agent of change that many of us have known. But it has not changed everything: plenty of the institutions, norms, and practices that sustain racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy have either weathered the storm of the crisis or been nourished by its effects. And yet enough has changed for us to see that the pandemic has profoundly recontextualised those structures and systems of violence, bringing us into a fresh negotiation with, for example, (...) the question of how we discuss and imagine freedom. Responding in part to this unexpected provocation, activist-scholars Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson forged a collaboration from the lockdown of 2020, corresponding by letter to create their forthcoming book, Rehearsals for Living, due to be published by Haymarket Books (US) and Knopf (Canada) in 2022. In this interview, we asked them to explain the epistolary form of the book and expand on the concept of “rehearsal”, before inviting them to reflect on a series of issues that animate our current crises: the politics of recognition; the notion of apocalypse; ways to disrupt linear temporalities; practises of reciprocity against proprietary logics; the gendered violence of state apparatuses; and worldbuilding as a method of resistance. In their expansive answers, Robyn and Leanne draw on their experiences as organisers and educators, commenting on anticolonial struggles, the Movement for Black Lives, and the rise of abolition discourse. Stressing the need to build a multiplicity of shared homespaces in the face of racial/colonial capitalism and organized abandonment, they challenge us to rethink the predicaments and possibilities of the present, enabling us to imagine futures liberated of extractivist, carceral governance – “planting more liberatory futures in the present”, as Robyn puts it. The task of sowing those seeds is a collective praxis of rewriting the narratives that constitute us, refusing to hear that nothing can change and insisting that everything must. (shrink)

A slew of recent political theorists—many taking their cue from the political writings of Bernard Williams—have recently contended that political normativity is its own kind of normativity, distinct from moral normativity. In this article, we first attempt to clarify what this claim amounts to and then reconstruct and interrogate five major arguments for it. We contend that all these arguments are unconvincing and fail to establish a sense in which political normativity is genuinely separate from morality.

The use of informational terms is widespread in molecular and developmental biology. The usage dates back to Weismann. In both protein synthesis and in later development, genes are symbols, in that there is no necessary connection between their form (sequence) and their effects. The sequence of a gene has been determined, by past natural selection, because of the effects it produces. In biology, the use of informational terms implies intentionality, in that both the form of the signal, and the response (...) to it, have evolved by selection. Where an engineer sees design, a biologist sees natural selection. (shrink)

This 1982 book is an account of an alternative way of thinking about evolution and the theory of games.

Hegel's "highway of despair," introduced in his _Phenomenology of Spirit_, represents the tortured path traveled by "natural consciousness" on its way to freedom. Despair, the passionate residue of Hegelian critique, also indicates fugitive opportunities for freedom and preserves the principle of hope against all hope. Analyzing the works of an eclectic cast of thinkers, Robyn Marasco considers the dynamism of despair as a critical passion, reckoning with the forms of historical life forged along Hegel's highway. _The Highway of Despair_ (...) follows Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, and Frantz Fanon as they each read, resist, and reconfigure a strand of thought in Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit_. Confronting the twentieth-century collapse of a certain revolutionary dialectic, these thinkers struggle to revalue critical philosophy and recast Left Hegelianism within the contexts of genocidal racism, world war, and colonial domination. Each thinker also re-centers the role of passion in critique. Arguing against more recent trends in critical theory that promise an escape from despair, Marasco shows how passion frustrates the resolutions of reason and faith. Embracing the extremism of what Marx, in the spirit of Hegel, called the "ruthless critique of everything existing," she affirms the contemporary purchase of radical critical theory, resulting in a passionate approach to political thought. (shrink)

Concentrating on problems that commonly perplex general readers and beginning students, John Maynard Smith discusses fundamental issues in biology, with emphasis on evolution, development, and cognition. He provides a nontechnical account of molecular genetics, which is the foundation of modern biology, and explores such issues as heredity, animal behavior, the definition and origin of life, the brain and how we know things, artificial and natural intelligence, and genetics. The book is unique in presenting modern ideas in terms that can (...) be understood without an in-depth knowledge of biology. (shrink)

This paper makes the case for a revision of contemporary forms of political realism in political theory. I argue that contemporary realists have gone awry in increasingly centring their approach around a metaethical claim: that political theory should be rooted in a political form of normativity that is distinct from moral normativity. Several critics of realism have argued that this claim is unconvincing. But I suggest that it is also a counterintuitive starting point for realism, and one unnecessary to avoid (...) the ‘applied morality’ approach to political theory that realists oppose. Instead, realism should be methodologically orientated around what I term ‘empirically constitutive political realities’ - enduring features of real political contexts that are systematically consequential in their normative implications. Realists can persuasively argue that such empirically constitutive political realities must be attended to in political theory-building, and not merely treated as a context in which independently formulated moral theories are simply applied. This framing of realism accords real politics a genuinely foundational theoretical role, but without requiring any contentious metaethical stance about a non-moral political normativity. I explain some methodological implications that follow for realism – in particular the need to prioritise empirically grounded theorisation of real political contexts over abstract and rather essentialist claims about ‘the political’. I also argue that such a framing of realism helps engender a more accurate, less divisive, and more pluralist conception of methodological debates within political theory. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Marion is one of the leading Catholic thinkers of our time: a formidable authority on Descartes and a major scholar in the philosophy of religion. This book presents a concise, accessible, and engaging introduction to the theology of Jean-Luc Marion. Described as one of the leading thinkers of his generation, Marion's take on the postmodern is richly enhanced by his expertise in patristic and mystical theology, phenomenology, and modern philosophy. In this first introduction to Marion's thought, Robyn Horner (...) provides the essential background to Marion's work, as well as analysing the most significant themes for contemporary theology. This book serves as an ideal starting point for students of theology and philosophy, as well as for those seeking to further their knowledge of cutting-edge thinking in contemporary theology. (shrink)

Anthropocentrism is "the belief that there is a clear and morally relevant dividing line between humankind and the rest of nature, that humankind is the only principal source of value or meaning in the world" p. 51.

First ever philosophy treatise on photography, analytic in approach but sensitive to photo-history, not confined to aesthetics or art (illus.), Walker Evans photo on cover. Papercover printing, Dec. 2000.

After reviewing factors implicated in the generation of delusional beliefs, we conclude that whilst a perceptual aberration coupled with a particular type of attri‐butional bias may be necessary to explain the specific thematic content of a bizarre delusion, neither of these factors, whether in isolation or in combination, is sufficient to explain the presence of delusional beliefs. In contrast to bias models (theories which explain delusion formation in terms of extremes of normal reasoning biases), we advocate a deficit model of (...) delusion formation–that is, delusions arise when the normal cognitive system which people use to generate, evaluate, and then adopt beliefs is damaged. Mere bias we think inadequate to explain bizarre delusions which defy commonsense and persist despite overwhelming rational counter‐argument. In particular, we propose that two deficits must be present in the normal cognitive system to explain bizarre delusions: (1) there must be some damage to sensory and/or attentional‐orient‐ing mechanisms which causes an aberrant perception–this explains the bizarre content of the causal hypothesis generated to explain what is happening; and (2) there must also be a failure of normal belief evaluation–this explains why a hypothesis, implausible in the light of general commonsense, is adopted as belief. This latter deficit occurs, we suggest, when an individual is incapable of suspending the natural favoured status of direct first‐person evidence in order to critically evaluate hypotheses, given equal pri‐ority whether based on direct or indirect sources of information. In contrast, delusions with ‘ordinary’ content may arise when a single deficit of normal belief evaluation occurs in the context of an extreme (but normal) attentional bias, thus causing failure to critically evaluate hypotheses based on misperceptions and misintrepretations of ambiguous (but ordinary) first‐person experience. (shrink)

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on semantics are explored and found wanting: Kent Bach’s view that there is a narrow semantic notion of context which is responsible for providing semantic values for a (...) small number of indexicals, and Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s view that semantics includes the provision of values for all indexicals, even though these depend on the speaker’s communicative intentions. Finally, some implications are considered for the favoured semantics/pragmatics distinction of the fact that there are linguistic elements which do not contribute to truth-conditional content but rather provide guidance on pragmatic inference. (shrink)

The idea is that, in a wide range of contexts, utterances of the sentences in (a) in each case will communicate the assumption in (b) in each case (or something closely akin to it, there being a certain amount of contextually governed variation in the speaker's propositional attitude and so the scope of the negation). These scalar inferences are taken to be one kind of (generalized) conversational implicature. As is the case with pragmatic inference quite generally, these inferences are defeasible (...) (cancellable), which distinguishes them from entailments, and they are nondetachable, which distinguishes them from conventional implicatures. The core idea is that the choice of a weaker element from a scale of elements ordered in terms of semantic strength (that is, numbers of entailments) tends to implicate that, as far as the speaker knows, none of the stronger elements in the scale holds in this instance. The pattern is quite clear in (1) and (2), where the weak/strong alternatives are some/all and five/six respectively. In the case of (3), the stronger expression must be intelligent and good-hearted which entails intelligent; what Y's utterance implicates is that Mary does not have the two properties: intelligence and good-heartedness, so that, given the proposition expressed (Mary is intelligent) it follows, deductively, that she is not good-hearted, in Y's opinion. The example in (4) involves a scale inversion due to the negation, so that the weak/strong alternatives are not necessarily/not possibly; the negation which the scalar inference generates creates a double negation, which is eliminated giving possibly. (shrink)

Belief and credal commitment sometimes seem to make less and less sense in the West. A kind of 'cultural amnesia' has taken hold, where formal religious adherence begins to seem almost unthinkable. This is especially so for the idea of divine revelation. Robyn Horner argues this means we need to re-evaluate how theology proceeds, focusing not so much on beliefs but on experience. Exploring ways in which the experiential might open human beings up to divine possibility, the author turns (...) to phenomenology because it seeks to examine unrestrictedly what is given through involved encounter. Bringing phenomenology and poststructuralism together, Horner develops the idea of revelation as an 'event' wherein God interrupts and exceeds human experience, affecting and transforming it. This striking concept, named but largely unexplored by theology, articulates a notion of supernatural revelation which now starts to appear both coherent and plausible. (shrink)

Within relevance theory the two local pragmatic processes of enrichment and loosening of linguistically encoded conceptual material have been given quite distinct treatments. Enrichments of various sorts, including those which involve a logical strengthening of a lexical concept, contribute to the proposition expressed by the utterance, hence to its truth-conditions. Loosenings, including metaphorical uses, do not enter into the proposition expressed by the utterance or affect its truth-conditions; they stand in a relation of 'interpretive resemblance' with the linguistically encoded concept (...) used to represent them. This asymmetric treatment is questioned here, arguments are given for an account which reflects the complementarity of these processes and several alternative symmetrical treatments are explored. (shrink)

Within the philosophy of language, pragmatics has tended to be seen as an adjunct to, and a means of solving problems in, semantics. A cognitive-scientific conception of pragmatics as a mental processing system responsible for interpreting ostensive communicative stimuli (specifically, verbal utterances) has effected a transformation in the pragmatic issues pursued and the kinds of explanation offered. Taking this latter perspective, I compare two distinct proposals on the kinds of processes, and the architecture of the system(s), responsible for the recovery (...) of speaker meaning (both explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning). (shrink)

A standard view of the semantics of natural language sentences or utterances is that a sentence has a particular logical structure and is assigned truth-conditional content on the basis of that structure. Such a semantics is assumed to be able to capture the logical properties of sentences, including necessary truth, contradiction and valid inference; our knowledge of these properties is taken to be part of our semantic competence as native speakers of the language. The following examples pose a problem for (...) this view of semantics. (shrink)

What I hope to achieve in this paper is some rather deeper understanding of the semantic and pragmatic properties of utterances which are said to involve the phenomenon of metalinguistic negation[FN1]. According to Laurence Horn, who has been primarily responsible for drawing our attention to it, this is a special non-truthfunctional use of the negation operator, which can be glossed as 'I object to U' where U is a linguistic utterance. This is to be distinguished from descriptive truthfunctional negation which (...) operates over a proposition. (shrink)

Going beyond the hype of recent fMRI "findings," this interdisciplinary collection examines such questions as: Do women and men have significantly different brains? Do women empathize, while men systematize? Is there a "feminine" ethics? What does brain research on intersex conditions tell us about sex and gender?

It is widely accepted that there is a distinction to be made between the explicit content and the implicit import of an utterance. There is much less agreement about the precise nature of this distinction, how it is to be drawn, and whether any such two-way distinction can do justice to the levels and kinds of meaning involved in utterance interpretation. Grice’s distinction between what is said by an utterance and what is implicated is probably the best known instantiation of (...) the explicit/implicit distinction. His distinction, along with many of its post-Gricean heirs, is closely entwined with another distinction: that between semantics and pragmatics. Indeed, on some construals they are seen as essentially one and the same; “what is said” is equated with the truthconditional content of the utterance which in turn is equated with (context-relative) sentence meaning, leaving implicatures (conventional and conversational) as the sole domain of pragmatics. (shrink)

The work reported in this paper investigated the putative functional dependence of pragmatic language skills on general mind‐reading capacity by testing theory‐of‐mind abilities and understanding of non‐literal speech in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls. Patients showed difficulties with inferring mental states on a false‐belief picture‐sequencing task and with understanding metaphors and irony on a story‐comprehension task. These difficulties were independent of low verbal IQ and a more generalised problem inhibiting prepotent information. Understanding of metaphors and understanding of irony (...) made significant and independent contributions to discriminating patients from controls, suggesting that metaphor and irony make distinct pragmatic demands. (shrink)

First and still only philosophy treatise on drawing, explaining the bases of meaning in all kinds of drawings, including technical and informational, design, child, and art drawings--depictive and nondepictive, East and West--engaging cognitive and developmental psychology, philosophy, art history and criticism. Ca 290 double-columned pp., 92 illus. Reviews include: Philosophy--David Hills, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 235-237. Aesthetics--Michael Podro, British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 3 (July 2008): 346-347. Art history--Svetlana Alpers, Phi Bet Kappa (...) Society Key Reporter (Summer 2006): 14 http://www.pbk.org/documents/tkrpdf/TKRSummer2006.pdf. General--Amy Ione, Leonardo On-line Reviews: http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/jan2007/draw_ione.html . (shrink)

This paper has aimed to remedy a neglect of multi-party disputes by addressing how those involved in a two-party argument may collaborate with others who are co-present. Collaboration is a complex phenomenon. In the first place, we have seen that disputes, although initially produced by two parties, do not consist simply of two sides. Rather, given one party's displayed position, stance, or claim, another party can produce opposition by simply aligning against that position or by aligning with a counterposition. This (...) means that parties can dispute a particular position for different reasons and by different means. It is therefore possible for several parties to serially oppose another's claim without achieving collaboration. A second complexity, then, is just that collaboration is a negotiated phenomenon. For example, while it is possible for an outside party to produce an uninvited alignment display that is sympathetic to an already-stated position in a two-party dispute, the party whose position it supports can agree or disagree with that display. Thus, outsiders' uninvited alignment displays that occur subsequent to those of the insiders or principals in a two-party dispute must be considered as collaboration offers, which can be accepted or rejected. But that is not the end of it, for an outside party can offer alignments that now align with a principal party's position and then, addressing a different aspect of the principal's talk, align against it. Finally, in addition to being offered, collaboration can also be solicited. A principal in a two-party dispute solicits collaboration by inviting an outsider to display an alignment favorable to inviter's own position or to participate in a joint activity that supports that stance. Such solicits can be accepted, rejected, or, again, handled in such a way as to exhibit neutrality. Argumentative collaboration, in short, is a specific, momentary, and delicate state of affairs that is also an organized, technical achievement.The fact that the subjects for this study were children has become submerged in the formal analysis of alignment structures and collaboration. Thus, following this research, two directions can be pursued. One would be to ask how children's arguments differ from those occurring among adults. A reasoned answer would be that matters of substance or content may distinguish disputes among youthful persons from those occurring among older ones, while the forms of disputing remain relatively invariant (Maynard, 1985a, 1985b). In other words, by studying multi-party disputes among first-grade children, we learn about the structure of collaboration as a generic phenomenon among at least practitioners of standard English no matter what their age. This claim can be sustained in part because the analysis presented here depends upon deriving a priori conventional relations between utterances, rather than statistical relations between variables (Coulter, 1983). We have not examined exogenous influences — which would include the age characteristics of participants — on disputes, but rather the endogenously-produced structure of argumentative discourse. Still, the claim that patterns of collaboration are generic to children and adults can be examined with further research on multi-party disputes among different age groups.Another, more radical, research orientation, would be to consider, in any social arena where the members are identified as children, how it is that such a ‘membership category’ (Sacks, 1972) is relevant. If that query is made, then research on ‘children's arguments’ would involve investigating formal practices for exhibiting the accountable category ‘children’ as much as it would mean describing the ways that disputing is done. Those who have studied children's arguments, in Pollner's (1979) terms, have treated ‘children’ as a social fact, a ‘thing,’ rather than as a socially organized meaning, or ‘ing.’To attend to the -ing of things involves a radical modification of the attitude of daily life, for it requires attending to the processes of constitution in lieu of the product thus constituted (Pollner, 1979: 253, fn. 11).In short, we have treated arguments as the important event without also seeing how it is that the category ‘children’ is constituted as a recognizable feature of and within the research setting. (shrink)

Inevitably, much of this reply will concern points on which I disagree with one or other of the commentators. I should start, therefore, by saying that I am delighted to find that their thinking is in many ways similar to my own, and that a serious attempt is under way to clarify the concept of information in biology.

Gavagai! or the Future History of the Animal Language Controversy. By DAVID PREMACK.

Feminist scholars have shown that research on sex/gender differences in the brain is often used to support gender stereotypes. Scientists use a variety of methodological and interpretive strategies to make their results consistent with these stereotypes. In this paper, I analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research that examines differences between women and men in brain activity associated with emotion and show that these researchers go to great lengths to make their results consistent with the view that women are more (...) emotional than men. (shrink)

A cognitive pragmatic approach is taken to some long-standing problem cases of negation, the so-called presupposition denial cases. It is argued that a full account of the processes and levels of representation involved in their interpretation typically requires the sequential pragmatic derivation of two different propositions expressed. The first is one in which the presupposition is preserved and, following the rejection of this, the second involves the echoic (metalinguistic) use of material falling in the scope of the negation. The semantic (...) base for these processes is the standard anti-presuppositionalist wide-scope negation. A different view, developed by Burton-Roberts (1989a, 1989b), takes presupposition to be a semantic relation encoded in natural language and so argues for a negation operator that does not cancel presuppositions. This view is shown to be flawed, in that it makes the false prediction that presupposition denial cases are semantic contradictions and it is based on too narrow a view of the role of pragmatic inferencing. (shrink)

Two important methodological debates in political theory concern (i) the place of historical research and interpretation in normative inquiry; and (ii) the importance of comparing different cultural traditions of political thought. The first question animates a long-standing controversy over the relative importance of ‘history of political thought’ versus ‘philosophy’ in political theory, while the second has been central to the recent growth of ‘comparative political theory’. Despite both debates being concerned, in fundamental ways, with history and comparison, they have remained (...) surprisingly disconnected from broader debates in the humanities and social sciences about the use of comparative history and, in particular, of the prominent methodological approach in political science known as ‘comparative historical analysis’. This may reflect the fact that the debates over history of political thought and comparative political theory have fundamentally revolved around thought—history as the history of thought and comparison as the comparison of thought—whereas comparative historical analysis is more centrally focused on the study of political behaviour. In this paper I suggest that this neglect of comparative historical analysis in political theory represents a missed opportunity. Like other forms of social scientific inquiry, comparative historical analysis can yield important empirical knowledge for political theorists. But I wish to more ambitiously suggest that comparative historical analysis can also be adapted for conducting normative political theory itself. I summarise the key features of comparative historical analysis for political theorists, and explain how its use of historical cases can supplement both the use of imaginary thought experiments and the study of contemporary politics. I then delineate three specific ways in which comparative historical analysis might be used to support normative inquiry: deductive testing, inductive construction, and casuistic elaboration. All three, I argue, can help meet recent calls to bring the study of real political behaviour more centrally into political theory research. (shrink)

Neuroscience research examining sex/gender differences aims to explain behavioral differences between men and women in terms of differences in their brains. Historically, this research has used ad hoc methods and has been conducted explicitly in order to show that prevailing gender roles were dictated by biology. I examine contemporary fMRI research on sex/gender differences in emotion processing and argue that it, too, both uses problematic methods and, in doing so, reinforces gender stereotypes.

Horner, Robyn; Tucker, Steven Theology is a required study for persons seeking accreditation to teach Religious Education in Catholic schools in Victoria. In this context it is distinguished from Religious Education, not only in the senses that to undertake Theology is neither to undertake Religious Education nor to study the aims and processes of Religious Education, but also in the sense that Religious Education studies are mandated alongside the study of Theology for those seeking accreditation, and further, in the (...) sense that the provision of Theology in a Catholic university is subject to distinct ecclesial oversight. (shrink)