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In this study the author investigates his interpretive practice as a conductor, revealing how interpretive operations occur not as discrete and isolated activities, but rather an intertwined cyclic process. The study was based on an experiment of the author conducting five scores on two different occasions separated in time by between one day and several months. The study design included extensive content analysis of over 30 hours of video in which more than 12,000 codes were applied and collated. The study design also included traditional texted research, autoethnographic writing (a 25,000-word practice journal), semi-structured interviews, the use of Sonic Visualiser, and the documentation of a range of score study methods which the author describes as ‘listening in silence’. Although there are numerous studies that compare different performances of the same piece, and consider the extent to which differences are intentional and/or creative, none has been undertaken by a conductor in the role of artist-researcher. The study develops what the author calls the ‘ethos of multiple interpretability’, suggesting that a conductor can be ‘animated by’ the belief that there is no single correct way to perform a work specified by a score.

Funding: This research was generously supported by the European Research Council with grant ERC-2017-CoG 771074 for the project ‘The Social Epistemology of Argumentation’. In this paper, I highlight the significance of practices of refutation in philosophical inquiry, that is, practices of showing that a claim, person or theory is wrong. I present and contrast two prominent approaches to philosophical refutation: refutation in ancient Greek dialectic (elenchus), in its Socratic variant as described in Plato’s dialogues, and as described in Aristotle’s logical texts; and the practice of providing counterexamples to putative definitions familiar from twentieth century analytic philosophy, focusing on the so-called Gettier problem. Moreover, I discuss Lakatos’ method of proofs and refutations, as it offers insightful observations on the dynamics between arguments, refutations, and counterexamples. Overall, I argue that dialectic, in particular in its Socratic variant, is especially suitable for the philosophical purpose of questioning the obvious, as it invites reflection on one’s own doxastic commitments and on the tensions and inconsistencies within one’s set of beliefs. By contrast, the counterexample-based approach to philosophical refutation can give rise to philosophical theorizing that is overly focused on hairsplitting disputes, thus becoming alienated from the relevant human experiences. Insofar as philosophical inquiry treads the fine line between questioning the obvious while still seeking to say something significant about human experiences, perhaps a certain amount of what Lakatos describes as ‘monster-barring’—a rejection of overly fanciful, artificial putative counterexamples—has its place in philosophical argumentation. Publisher PDF

This research is generously supported by the European Research Council with grant ERC-2017-CoG 771074 for the project ‘The Social Epistemology of Argumentation’. Public engagement is one of the fundamental pillars of the European programme for research and innovation Horizon 2020. The programme encourages engagement that not only fosters science education and dissemination, but also promotes two-way dialogues between scientists and the public at various stages of research. Establishing such dialogues between different groups of societal actors is seen as crucial in order to attain epistemic as well as social desiderata at the intersection between science and society. However, whether these dialogues can actually help attaining these desiderata is far from obvious. This paper discusses some of the costs, risks, and benefits of dialogical public engagement practices, and proposes a strategy to analyse these argumentative practices based on a three-tiered model of epistemic exchange. As a case study, we discuss the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, arguably a result of suboptimal public engagement, and show how the proposed model can shed new light on the problem. Publisher PDF

In eighteenth-century Britain, there was more than one way of thinking about poverty. For some, poverty was an essentially moral problem. Another way of conceiving of poverty was in economic terms. In this article, however, I want to consider some eighteenth-century versions of the idea that poverty might be a political issue. What I have in mind is the idea that a society containing a large proportion of very poor people might be, just for that reason, an unstable and disordered society. I argue, first, that this idea is central to Smith's treatment of poverty in The Wealth of Nations. Then, after a brief account of how Paine and Godwin imagined the end of poverty, I describe the further development and refinement of Smithian lines of thought in Burke and Malthus. My conclusion is that Smith, Burke, and Malthus constitute evidence that present-day ideas of social justice derive more from the nineteenth century and subsequent developments in moral and political thought than from the early modern period. Publisher PDF

Funding: Economic and Social Research Council (Award number(s): [ES/V011383/1].). Drawing on both mathematical and anthropological understandings of fractality, this paper explores alternative perspectives of time as it relates to heroin addiction and poly-substance use in Scotland. The paper ethnographically illustrates temporalities which confound typical conceptualisations of linearity, and which can be better understood as fractal. Senses of linear time are disrupted for people who use heroin through intensive poly-substance use, an increasing trend in Scotland, as both time and memory become fragmented beyond coherence or re-assemblage. Distortedness and complexity being common descriptors applied to mathematical fractals, time shattered into uncountable and un-interpretable fragments similarly connotes fracture, dissonance and distortion. A meaningful engagement with fractal theory contains the potential to open up new vocabulary, imagery, and theoretical avenues with which to grasp complex and non-linear time experience. The aims of the paper are, therefore, twofold; to both provide a nuanced ethnographic exploration of substance use time, and to develop a reflexive analytical framework for temporal experience through fractals. Publisher PDF

Since at least the 1980s, the role of adversariality in argumentation has been extensively discussed within different domains. Prima facie, there seem to be two extreme positions on this issue: argumentation should (ideally at least) never be adversarial, as we should always aim for cooperative argumentative engagement; argumentation should be and in fact is always adversarial, given that adversariality (when suitably conceptualized) is an intrinsic property of argumentation. I here defend the view that specific instances of argumentation are (and should be) adversarial or cooperative to different degrees. What determines whether an argumentative situation should be primarily adversarial or primarily cooperative are contextual features and background conditions external to the argumentative situation itself, in particular the extent to which the parties involved have prior conflicting or else convergent interests. To further develop this claim, I consider three teloi that are frequently associated with argumentation: the epistemic telos, the consensus-building telos, and the conflict management telos. I start with a brief discussion of the concepts of adversariality, cooperation, and conflict in general. I then sketch the main lines of the debates in the recent literature on adversariality in argumentation. Next, I discuss the three teloi of argumentation listed above in turn, emphasizing the roles of adversariality and cooperation for each of them.

The present work was funded by Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant RPG-2016-333: Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth-Century Logic: Edition and Translation of Key Texts. This paper provides a philosophical analysis and a new edition of an anonymous Epitome (Compendium) of John Dumbleton’s solution to the semantic paradoxes (insolubilia). The first part of this paper briefly presents Dumbleton’s cassationist solution to the semantic paradoxes, which the English philosopher proposes in his Summa Logicae, written in the 1330s–40s. The second part investigates the solution to various types of insolubles proposed by the anonymous author of the Epitome. The third part provides a new critical edition of the Latin text – a first edition was edited by Bottin in 1978 – and an English translation. Publisher PDF

A distinction often drawn is one between conservative versus revisionary conceptions of philosophical analysis with respect to commonsensical beliefs and intuitions. This paper offers a comparative investigation of two revisionary methods: Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis as developed by S. Haslanger. It is argued that they have a number of common features, and in particular that they share a crucial political dimension: they both have the potential to serve as instrument for social reform. Indeed, they may produce improved versions of key concepts of everyday life, for example those pertaining to social categories such as gender and race (among others), which in turn may lead to social change. The systematic comparison of these two frameworks offered here, where similarities as well as differences are discussed, is likely to provide useful guidance to practitioners of both approaches, as it will highlight important aspects of each of them that tend to remain implicit and under-theorized in existing applications of these methodologies to specific questions. Publisher PDF

This paper argues for a version of sceptical invariantism about knowledge on which the acceptability of knowledge-attributing sentences varies with the context of assessment. Publisher PDF

This paper proves a precisification of Hume’s Law—the thesis that one cannot get an ought from an is—as an instance of a more general theorem which establishes several other philosophically interesting, though less controversial, barriers to logical consequence.

Funding: This collection has grown out of a series of activities in and around the DELTA Project at the University of Cologne, Germany, funded by the Ger- man Research Foundation’s (DFG) Emmy Noether Programme (project number 276392588). Proposing a series of innovative steps towards better understanding human lives at the interstices of water and land, this volume includes eight ethnographies from deltas around the world. The book presents ‘delta life’ with intimate descriptions of the predicaments, imaginations and activities of delta inhabitants. Conceptually, the collection develops ‘delta life’ as a metaphor for approaching continual and intersecting sociocultural, economic and material transformations more widely. The book revolves around questions of hydrosociality, volatility, rhythms and scale. It thereby yields insights into people’s lives that conventional, hydrological approaches to deltas cannot provide. Publisher PDF

In this thesis I focus on the cultural politics and film practices of Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray in the long 1960s, with the aim of recovering Indian political cinema as Third Cinema practice. I posit the contexts that motivated the radicalisation of their cinema in the 1970s, as an act of counter-Establishment political resistance itself. I use Third Cinema, as a practice and framework, to contextualise and understand Indian political cinema. The prevalence of an auteurist approach in scholarly work has overshadowed the political, intellectual, collective, and emancipatory aspects of these filmmakers’ practices, which my thesis foregrounds. The thesis further argues that Third Cinema is not just an aesthetic choice or film style, but also a praxis and critical framework driven by decolonisation, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. Based on this hypothesis, I argue that Third Cinema can potentially be practiced in any context across geopolitical boundaries, given its emancipatory nature focusing on decolonising culture. However, this connection has so far been critically disregarded both by scholars of Indian cinema and Third Cinema across the world. Most discussions of Third Cinema are restricted to Latin America with occasional reference to African and other ‘minor’ cinemas. The objective of my research is to extend both the canon and discourse of Third Cinema beyond Latin America to engage with contexts previously unnoticed. My thesis does this by situating Indian political cinema in the milieu of Transnational Third Cinema and by including critical writings and film manifestoes from India. Restoring Ghatak, Sen, and Ray’s filmmaking practices within Third Cinema discourse not just recovers them as Third Cinema practitioners but also strengthens Third Cinema as a rigorous critical framework. "My research was supported by Postgraduate Research Scholarship offered by the School of Philosophical, Anthropological, and Film Studies, University of St Andrews; St Leonard’s Scholarship; Scotland’s Saltire Scholarship. The field work was supported by the Travel Grant from the Russell Trust Postgraduate Scholarship 2016-17."-- Funding

My thesis identifies and establishes the Multiplex Film as a widespread paradigm in contemporary Indian Cinema, by critically examining its emergence from the post-millennium collapse of All-India and Alternative films, often referred to as Indian “art” and “commercial” films, previously well-established and seemingly distinct categories that have historically defined and characterised Indian cinema. I assert that reading pre-millennium Indian films by applying the Rasa analytical method, reveals multiple meeting points between All-India and Alternative Films, which have been obfuscated through a historic misconstruction and mislabelling of these film types; I contend that this interconnectedness expedites their convergence into the Multiplex Film. By tracing the contemporary phenomenon as a product of the Indian government’s economic liberalisation and globalisation policies, and the resultant corporatisation and transnationalism within the 21st century film industries in Mumbai and in other regional filmmaking centres, I present a way of studying Multiplex Films both as Indian Cinema as well as Transnational Cinema, while also contributing to the limited scholarship on the contemporary Indian film industries. My use of rasa in conjunction with generic dramatic principles detailed in the Natyasastra, an ancient Indian treatise on dramaturgy, offers a new Rasa framework that can be used to read any national cinema, as it functions independently of rasa as an aesthetic. Through a series of forty-five interviews across seven cities with personnel from the Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telegu, Marathi and Assamese film industries, including writers, directors, actors, producers, cinematographers, editors, sound designers, distributors, exhibitors, alongside spectator focus groups in metropolitan and smaller cities, in addition to close textual analysis of a range of Indian films, existing scholarship, official government and film industry reports, I re-examine assumptions about Indian film history and show how the earlier two film types are metamorphosed through contemporary socioeconomic, political and industrial shifts into the Multiplex Film. "This work was supported by the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies of the University of St Andrews (Postgraduate Research Scholarship) and the Russell Trust Postgraduate Award" -- Funding

The primary aim of this thesis is to formulate an intensional definition of aesthetic experience. Its secondary aims are (i) to show how this definition might be used for empirical research and (ii) to better understand other terms that are qualified by ‘aesthetic’ (chiefly, ‘aesthetic properties’ and ‘aesthetic value’). In chapter one, I will explain the nature of the problem we face and why it demands our attention. In chapters two and three, I will critically survey positions in the literature and argue that none adequately characterise aesthetic experience. In chapter four, I will motivate and defend an intensional definition of ‘aesthetic experience’ and an art-based account of ‘aesthetic properties’. The former states, put briefly, that aesthetic experiences are those which acquire a valence when the subject attends to the content of her experience for its own sake and discerns aesthetic properties. The latter states that ‘aesthetic properties’ are those which comprise the value artworks have as works of art. In chapter five, I will use this definition of aesthetic experience to formulate the hypothesis that mindfulness training can augment one’s propensity for having rewarding aesthetic experiences of nature and everyday life. I will then propose how this hypothesis could be empirically investigated. In chapter six, I conclude by examining what my analysis of ‘aesthetic experience’ and ‘aesthetic properties’ reveals about ‘aesthetic value’. I will then, finally, highlight topics requiring further research.

The thesis argues that the film songs in the 1950s, often termed the ‘golden era’ of films and film music, function as an integral narrative device of the cinema’s engagement with the national discourse and with socio-political issues. The songs do this by being a site of ambivalence and struggle rather than resolution. In this way, they engage with the ideological contradictions of the nationalist discourse and the newly-independent Indian nation-state. These are the contradictions of the transition towards modernity -- the tussle between tradition and modernization, Indian identity and westernization, home and the world – which were a part of the anti-colonial nationalist discourse, and continued to be pre-occupations for the policy makers of the newly independent nation-state. These contradictions have been written about in scholarship, both in Film Studies (Prasad 1998; Sarkar 2009; Majumdar 2009; Rajadhyaksha 2009; Vasudevan 2011) as well as from a Political Studies perspective (Chatterjee 1993; Parekh 1991; Kaviraj 2010). However, in the context of 1950s Bombay based Hindi cinema, the significant role of the song sequences in negotiating with these tensions has not been studied in detail; in fact the songs have not been recognised as playing a role in this equation, existing instead on the periphery of theoretical arguments on the film form. The original contribution of the thesis is to examine the significant role of the song in this equation. "This work was supported by the University of St Andrews (St Leonard’s College Scholarship), School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies and the Charles Wallace India Trust (Doctoral Grant towards completion of thesis)." -- Funding

The author is grateful to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for their financial support. Building on Neil Whitehead’s work in northern South America, this article considers the formations of two different deep-forest regional networks. Though these Amerindian spaces have origins in the precolonial past, this article analyses their shaping in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period when they were invaded by colonial agents. There were other regional systems along the course of the Amazon and its many tributaries that were a part of a similar historical process of refounding identities and claims on land and people involving challenges to leadership and political organization. Following Hal Langfur, we can term this general making of spaces a re-territorialization. Critical social relations include those between Amerindian ethnic entities and their leaders, soldiers, and missionaries. This article focuses on a key spatial relation between Amerindian settlements and the mission, or partially colonized village, which had an indirect or direct contact with each other. Postprint

The authors acknowledge funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy and the Sir Ernest Cassel Educational Trust Fund. The Amazon has been the object of numerous reflections upon the relationship between the natural environment and the categories of human society. This article analyses Brazilian writers who considered the relations between space and race over the course of the nineteenth century and early-twentieth century. It focuses on João Henrique de Mattos, José Veríssimo and Euclides da Cunha, placing them in relation to each other and within local, national and international discourses on race, nature and development. Its aim is to examine how a racialised geographical understanding of the Amazon changed over the course of the nineteenth century and was tied to Brazilian nation-building. Postprint

Generalizing on some arguments due to Arthur Prior and Dmitry Mirimanoff, we provide some further limitative results on what can be thought. Postprint

Groups are ubiquitous in our lives. But while some of them are highly structured and appear to support a shared intentionality and even a shared agency, others are much less cohesive and do not seem to demand much of their individual members. Queues, for example, seem to be, at a given time, nothing over and above some individuals as they exemplify a certain spatial arrangement. Indeed, the main aim of this paper is to develop the more general thought that at a given time, a group is nothing over and above some individual members as they exemplify a certain complex condition. The general conception of groups that emerges is able to accommodate a variety of constraints on a reasonable answer to the question of what are groups. Postprint

This monograph has been an appraisal of the anthropology of Britain as a project. In this final piece, the volume is reviewed and an argument is made along Kierkegaardian lines. Human life is an inward, personal adventure, of each in the face of the other: life is individual and possessed of infinite depth. Conducting social-scientific research (whether ‘anthropological’ or ‘sociological’) in a language – verbal, gestural and conventional – with which the researcher is ‘at home’ enables that individual and inward life, and its public and social dimensions, to be apprehended with a subtlety and sophistication far more difficult to acquire in ‘foreign’ settings. Anthropology ‘at home’ is ideally placed to differentiate between the cultural forms of life, the social structures of life, and how these are individually inhabited and personally experienced. To do justice to human life – descriptive, analytic – is to apprehend an immensity – a complexity and contrariety – beyond the delimitings of partial labels and categories, even beyond particular disciplines of study. Postprint

Atomism is the thesis that every object is composed of atoms. This principle is generally regimented by means of an atomicity axiom according to which every object has atomic parts. But there appears to be a sense that something is amiss with atomistic mereology. We look at three concerns, which, while importantly different, involve infinite descending chains of proper parts and have led some to question standard formalizations of atomism and composition in mereology. Postprint

Walking through the supermarket, I see the avocados. I know they are avocados. Similarly, if you see a pumpkin on my office desk, you can know it’s a pumpkin from its looks. The phenomenology in such cases is that of “just seeing” that such and such. This phenomenology might suggest that the knowledge gained is immediate. This paper argues, to the contrary, that in these target cases, the knowledge is mediate, depending as it does on one’s knowledge of what the relevant kind of thing looks like. To make the case requires examining the nature of knowing what Fs look like. Is such knowledge to be understood as knowledge of a fact, or rather as a kind of ability? From the conclusion that the knowledge in the target cases is not immediate, the paper concludes that perception does not afford us immediate knowledge concerning objects’ kinds. Postprint

According to a prominent line of interpretation, Kantians must sometimes choose between leaving individuals defenceless against evil or developing strategies to mitigate the stringency of duties in the face of others’ bad intentions. The thesis reacts to this setup, which unduly privileges Kant’s early critical moral theory at the expense of his mature system. In particular, it vindicates the relevance of Kant’s legal-political philosophy by discussing three cases where others’ noncompliance seems to ground exceptions to duties: political revolution, self-defence, and defensive lying. In addition to considering neglected yet significant passages from Kant, it makes the following main contributions. Chapter 1 analyses Kant’s state of nature as a systemic, inter-individual problem of noncompliance, suggesting that Kant’s political solution (exiting the state of nature) leads to a different version of the problem, involving citizens and sovereign. Turning to political revolution, Chapter 2 introduces an issue affecting both restricted and unrestricted interpretations of its prohibition: while, for Kant, supreme de facto power is at least a necessary condition for a state’s legitimacy, such supremacy is never conclusively established. The chapter also discusses the role of lex permissiva in state foundation, arguing against employing it to justify revolts by introducing a test for principles of non-contingent moral progress. Chapter 3 focuses on self-defence. After examining it in connection to the alleged right of necessity, it explores its juridical and ethical dimensions, with a particular focus on the issue of moderation. It makes room for a narrow state-enforced limitation on defence of individuals’ rights vis-à-vis one another, and, together with Chapter 1, advances a Kantian analysis of violence as unilateral exercise of force or immoderate self-defence. Chapter 4 discusses in detail Kant’s arguments against lying and his 1797 essay On an Alleged Right to Lie. Together with Chapter 3, it highlights Kant’s different attitudes toward the morality of defensive lying and force, putting his verdict on Inquiring Murderer in due philosophical perspective. Building on Chapter 2, it provides an account of how a lie wrongs “humanity as such”, vindicating Kant’s commitment to the idea that progress must happen in principle and on principle.

The development of a native clergy in the Andes has long been called for but only recently achieved. Drawing from archival and ethnographic data, this article sets out how intercultural prejudice and discrimination have served to prevent the ordination of native Andeans. In the early colonial period, doubts about the authenticity of Andean conversion to Catholicism were rooted in mainstream Spanish skepticism of and disdain for Andean culture, in the modern day, these same prejudices continue, meaning it is only within the last fifty years that a native clergy has developed in the southern Andes, in the Peruvian diocese of Abancay, as the result of the concerted efforts of its second bishop. Today, Abancay boasts its first generation of native clergy, made up entirely of men who were born and raised in the diocese in which they now serve, and which promises a new, more empathetic institutional relationship between what it has historically meant to be Andean and what it has meant to be Catholic.

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This research was supported by a Global Exploration Grant from the National Geographic Society (GEFNE120-14). New archival and ethnographic evidence reveals that Inka style khipus were used in the Andean community of Santiago de Anchucaya to record contributions to communal labour obligations until the 1940s. Archival testimony from the last khipu specialist in Anchucaya, supplemented by interviews with his grandson, provides the first known expert explanation for how goods, labour obligations, and social groups were indicated on Inka style Andean khipus. This evidence, combined with the analysis of Anchucaya khipus in the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología y Historia Peruana, furnishes a local model for the relationship between the two most frequent colour patterns (colour banding and seriation) that occur in khipus. In this model, colour banding is associated with individual data whilst seriation is associated with aggregated data. The archival and ethnographic evidence also explains how labour and goods were categorized in uniquely Andean ways as they were represented on khipus. Postprint

Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the looks view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks-related reasons. Postprint Non

I argue that what evidence an agent has does not supervene on how she currently is. Agents do not always have to infer what the past was like from how things currently seem; sometimes the facts about the past are retained pieces of evidence that can be the start of reasoning. The main argument is a variant on Frank Arntzenius’s Shangri La example, an example that is often used to motivate the thought that evidence does supervene on current features.

We are grateful to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2012-699 and SG132847 2014-2015) for funding. This special issue on Amerindian spaces is the result of a workshop held at the University of St. Andrews, UK, in June 2015. We asked participants to examine key concepts related to spatial history, such as borderlands, frontiers, and territories, by looking at them through alliances and rebellions involving Amerindians and the colonial and independent states in Latin America.1 Our aim was to gain a continental understanding of Indian political geography that went beyond European territorial divisions. This purpose continues into the present issue with its focus on the internal and international frontiers of Brazil and how they relate to spaces of indigenous collective action. The articles here reexamine areas that have been considered peripheral in Brazilian historiography, placing the emphasis on indigenous history and society. These spaces proved surprisingly impervious to the imposition of external authority, but each space has its own history that cannot be solely defined by the internal and external frontiers of Brazilian colonial and national expansion. Equally, these indigenous spaces influenced policy and practice, as governments sought to exert control over native labor and advance land settlement for colonists. Our choice for a spatial perspective forces an examination of a regionally connected system of social groups and the environments in which people lived, and which they sought to protect and defend. As a result, we go beyond place, territory, and frontier as concepts and use the term space to invoke a direct and holistic relationship with the larger spheres in which people move and act. Postprint

An account of the distinction between singular and general propositions should reflect the core ideas that have motivated the distinction. Those core ideas can be appreciated independently of many commitments regarding the metaphysics of propositions, but theorists with differing views on the latter have given quite different explanations of what it is for a proposition to be singular or general. Many of those explanations turn out not to reflect the core ideas adequately after all, either by misclassifying certain propositions or by failing to be sufficiently informative. A more satisfactory account can be formulated by more directly elaborating on the background ideas motivating the distinction. The resulting account not only does better than its competitors, but is compatible with various views on the metaphysics of propositions. Postprint

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In response to a critique of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and what it might offer ‘anthropology’, this article sets out to formulate a relation between the two that encompasses an ambitious programme of both knowledge and justice. A cosmopolitan anthropology would look beyond cultural difference to common civilisation, beyond local traditions to truth, and beyond conventions of personhood to a universal individuality. To know the human, to find ways justly to represent the human and to secure the human in moral social arrangements, is necessarily to come to terms with the individuality of life and identity. Publisher PDF

This article revisits four well-known accounts of the first European encounters with Amerindians in the Amazon. The sporadic character of these encounters make the impact on Amerindian societies irregular and uneven. My analysis is directed to the present condition as encountered, especially the variety of contacts. This approach obliges the text be treated as a whole, rather than being read selectively. Maintaining the integrity of the text allows us to see the different kinds of relations in their contexts. My intention is to use these reports to search for the bridges across cultural separations. Each drew the other towards them, in their own ways. These steps opened the way for the “refounding” of indigenous riverine societies in the seventeenth century. Resumo: Este artigo analisa quatro relatos bem conhecidos dos primeiros encontros europeus com ameríndios na Amazônia. O caráter irregular desses encontros torna o impacto nas sociedades ameríndias desigual. Minha análise é direcionada à condição presente, especialmente à variedade de contatos. Essa abordagem obriga o texto a ser tratado como um todo, em vez de ser lido de forma seletiva. Manter a integridade do texto nos permite ver os diferentes tipos de relações em seus contextos. Minha intenção é usar esses relatos para procurar as pontes entre as separações culturais. Cada um atraía o outro para eles, em seus próprios caminhos. Essas etapas abriram o caminho para a “refundação” das sociedades ribeirinhas indígenas no século XVII.

According to Schellenberg, our perceptual experiences have the epistemic force they do because they are exercises of certain sorts of capacity, namely capacities to discriminate particulars—objects, property-instances and events—in a sensory mode. She calls her account the ‘‘capacity view.’’ In this paper, I will raise three concerns about Schellenberg’s capacity view. The first is whether we might do better to leave capacities out of our epistemology and take content properties as the fundamental epistemically relevant features of experiences. I argue we would. The second is whether Schellenberg’s appeal to factive and phenomenal evidence accommodates the intuitive verdicts about the bad case that she claims it does. I argue it does not. The third is whether Schellenberg’s account of factive evidence is adequate to capture nuances concerning the justification for singular but non demonstrative perceptual beliefs, such as the belief that’s NN, where NN is a proper name. I argue it is not. If I am right, these points suggest a mental-state-first account of perceptual justification, rather than a capacity-first account, and one which treats the good and bad cases alike in respect of justification and complicates the relation between perceptual content and what one is justified in believing. Postprint

The Colonial Film Unit (CFU) (1939–1955) produced over 200 films, which were exhibited non-theatrically to African audiences through its fleet of mobile cinema vans. While the CFU closely monitored, and theorised on, its film texts, the particular ways in which these films were exhibited and received was afforded far less attention and remains critically overlooked by scholars. In this article, I examine the development of the mobile film show across a range of colonial territories. The London-based CFU sought to standardise film exhibition across the empire, imagining these film shows as political events, as a means of monitoring, addressing and homogenising disparate groups of colonial subjects. The regulation of film space can be understood within this context as part of the broader effort to regulate colonial space. Integral to this process was the local commentator, an often-overlooked figure within African cinema. The local commentator would organise the film show, provide additional talks, answer questions, counter unrest and recontextualise the films for local audiences, often without any direct European supervision. In examining government reports, personal interviews and, in particular, a series of audience surveys, the article repositions the commentator as a pivotal presence in the latter years of empire; a rising voice within African cultural and political life. Postprint

Bertrand Russell offered an influential paradox of propositions in Appendix B of The Principles of Mathematics, but there is little agreement as to what to conclude from it. We suggest that Russell’s paradox is best regarded as a limitative result on propositional granularity. Some propositions are, on pain of contradiction, unable to discriminate between classes with different members: whatever they predicate of one, they predicate of the other. When accepted, this remarkable fact should cast some doubt upon some of the uses to which modern descendants of Russell’s paradox of propositions have been put in recent literature.

In this paper, I examine a contextualist thesis that has been little discussed in comparison with contextualism about knowledge, namely contextualism about evidential support. This seems surprising since, prima facie, evidential support statements seem shifty in a way parallel to knowledge ascriptions. I examine but reject the suggestion that contrastivism about evidential support is motivated by arguments analogous to those used to motivate contrastivism about knowledge including sceptical closure arguments, the nature of inquiry, the existence of explicitly contrastive evidential support statements, and the intuitive shiftiness of some binary evidential support statements. I end by discussing the relations between contextualism about evidential support, evidence and knowledge. In particular, I argue that my discussion of contrastivism about evidential support undermines Neta's contextualist view about evidence, and his broader suggestion that the shiftiness of evidence statements explains the shiftiness of knowledge ascriptions. Postprint

Thomas Blackson argues that interest-relative epistemologies cannot explain the irrationality of certain choices when the agent has three possible options. I argue that his examples only refute a subclass of interest-relative theories. In particular, they are good objections to theories that say that what an agent knows depends on the stakes involved in the gambles that she faces. But they are not good objections to theories that say that what an agent knows depends on the odds involved in the gambles that she faces. Indeed, the latter class of theories does a better job than interest-invariant epistemologies of explaining the phenomena he describes. Postprint

Traditional monotheism has long faced logical puzzles (omniscience, omnipotence, and more). We argue that such puzzles rest on the assumed logical truth of the Law of Excluded Middle, which we suggest there is little theological reason to accept. By way of illustration we focus on God's alleged stone problem, and present a simple but plausible ‘gappy’ framework for addressing this puzzle. We assume familiarity with the proposed (subclassical) logic but an appendix is offered as a brief review. Postprint

Two newly discovered khipu (Andean twisted cord) epistles are presented as evidence that khipus could constitute an intelligible writing system, accessible to decipherment. Recent scholars have asserted that khipus were merely memory aides recording only numbers, despite Spanish witnesses who claimed that Inka era (1400 - 1532 CE) khipus encoded narratives and were sent as letters. In 2015, the author examined two khipus preserved by village authorities in Peru. Villagers state that these sacred khipus are narrative epistles about warfare. Analysis reveals that the khipus contain 95 different symbols, a quantity within the range of logosyllabic writing, and notably more symbols than in regional accounting khipus. A shared, mutually comprehensive communication system of such complexity presupposes a writing system, possibly logosyllabic. At the end of each khipu epistle, cord sequences of distinct colours, animal fibres and ply direction appear to represent lineage ("ayllu") names. Postprint Publisher PDF

1. To offer a new kind of reason for being unsatisfied with the simple Lockean reduction of belief to credence. 2. To defend the legitimacy of appealing to credences in a theory of belief. 3. To illustrate the importance of theoretical, as well as practical, interests in an interest-relative account of belief. 4. To have another try at extending my basic account of belief to cover propositions that are practically and theoretically irrelevant to the agent.

The two main theories of perceptual reasons in contemporary epistemology can be called Phenomenalism and Factualism. According to Phenomenalism, perceptual reasons are facts about experiences conceived of as phenomenal states, i.e., states individuated by phenomenal character, by what it’s like to be in them. According to Factualism, perceptual reasons are instead facts about the external objects perceived. The main problem with Factualism is that it struggles with bad cases: cases where perceived objects are not what they appear (illusions, broadly speaking) or where there is no perceived object at all (hallucinations). The main problem with Phenomenalism is that it struggles with good cases: cases where everything is perfectly normal and the external object is correctly perceived, so that one’s perceptual beliefs are knowledge. In this paper we show that there is a theory of perceptual reasons that avoids the problems for Factualism and Phenomenalism. We call this view Propositionalism. We use ‘proposition’ broadly to mean the entities that are contents of beliefs and other doxastic attitudes. The key to finding a middle ground between Phenomenalism and Factualism, we claim, is to allow our reasons to be false in bad cases. Despite being false, they are about the external world, not our phenomenal states. Postprint

Contemporary social-scientific research seeks to identify specific causal mechanisms for outcomes of theoretical interest. Experiments that randomize populations to treatment and control conditions are the “gold standard” for causal inference. We identify, describe, and analyze the problem posed by transformative treatments. Such treatments radically change treated individuals in a way that creates a mismatch in populations, but this mismatch is not empirically detectable at the level of counterfactual dependence. In such cases, the identification of causal pathways is underdetermined in a previously unrecognized way. Moreover, if the treatment is indeed transformative it breaks the inferential structure of the experimental design. Transformative treatments are not curiosities or “corner cases,” but are plausible mechanisms in a large class of events of theoretical interest, particularly ones where deliberate randomization is impractical and quasi-experimental designs are sought instead. They cast long-running debates about treatment and selection effects in a new light, and raise new methodological challenges. Postprint

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The title sequence of Chariots of Fire – filmed on the West Sands beach of St Andrews, Scotland – has become one of the most reworked and reinterpreted moments of British cinema, transposed across a variety of places, politics and times. In exploring these moves – from the period of its setting in 1924, through its production in 1980, and to its most recent reworkings in the London 2012 Olympics – the article examines the constantly evolving legacies of the sequence and the cultural capital which it has accrued via these various contexts. By considering the original production and its subsequent multiple receptions, the article positions the sequence at the vanguard of shifts in film production and cultural heritage. Viewed from the vantage point of the 2012 Olympics, the film provides an integral source of cultural capital not just for national but also for local and regional economies as they increasingly target new sources of revenue in a post-industrial age. Postprint

Philosophers often explain what could be the case in terms of what is, in fact, the case at one possible world or another. They may differ in what they take possible worlds to be or in their gloss of what is for something to be the case at a possible world. Still, they stand united by the threat of paradox. A family of paradoxes akin to the set-theoretic antinomies seem to allow one to derive a contradiction from apparently plausible principles. Some of them concern the interaction between propositions and worlds, and they appear to afford the means to map classes of propositions into propositions—or, likewise, classes of worlds into worlds—in a one-to-one fashion that leads to contradiction. Yet another family of paradoxes threaten the view that whatever could exist does, in fact, exist, which is in line with modal realism, for example. This article aims to survey and identify the source of each family of paradoxes as well as to outline some responses to them. Postprint

G Belot (2013) has recently developed a novel argument against Bayesianism. He shows that there is an interesting class of problems that, intuitively, no rational belief forming method is likely to get right. But a Bayesian agent’s credence, before the problem starts, that she will get the problem right has to be 1. This is an implausible kind of immodesty on the part of Bayesians.1 My aim is to show that while this is a good argument against traditional, precise Bayesians, the argument doesn’t neatly extend to imprecise Bayesians. As such, Belot’s argument is a reason to prefer imprecise Bayesianism to precise Bayesianism. For present purposes, the precise Bayesian agent has just two defining characteristics. First, their credences in all propositions are given by a particular countably additive probability function. Second, those credences are updated by conditionalisation as new information comes in. These commitments are quite strong in some respects. They say that there is a single probability function that supplies the agent’s credences no matter which question is being investigated, and no matter how little evidence the agent has before the investigation is started. The everyday statistician, even one who is sympathetic to Bayesian approaches, may feel no need to sign up for anything this strong. But many philosophers seem to be interested in varieties of Bayesianism that are just this strong. For instance, there has been extensive discussion in recent epistemology of whether various epistemological approaches, such as dogmatism, can be

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In recent work about know how, Rylean regress arguments have largely dropped out of focus. They play little role in the anti-intellectualist arguments of various kinds in the papers collected in Bengson and Moffett (2011). And they are used as something like target practice by intellectualists like Stanley (2011), who uses the first chapter of his book to dispose of them before getting onto the real business. The majority view seems to be that Ginet (1975) basically showed these arguments didn’t work, and it’s time to move onto other considerations for or against intellectualism. I think this isn’t right. In particular, I think Rylean regress arguments can show that some kinds of intellectualism are false, and others are undermined. In particular, I’ll argue that the Rylean regress arguments show that there is such a thing as intellectual skill, and this can’t be identified with propositional knowledge. The position I’m defending is a long way from the strongest kinds of Rylean position that Stanley spends most of his book arguing against. In particular, the view I’m defending is consistent with the following four theses.

This thesis is a study of the theories of pleasure as proposed in Plato’s Philebus, Aristotle’s EN VII.11-14 and EN X.1-5, with particular emphasis on the value of pleasure. Focusing on the Philebus in Chapters 1 and 2, I argue that the account of pleasure as restorative process of a harmonious state in the soul is in tension with Plato’s claim that some pleasures are good in their own right. I show that there are in fact two ways in which pleasure (and other processes of the soul) can have value in the Philebus. The tension in Plato’s position arises because he focuses exclusively on only one way in which pleasure can have value. Chapter 3 deals with Aristotle’s response to Plato in EN VII.11-14. According to the standard interpretation only complete activities (such as thinking and seeing) can be pleasures in their own right, but not incomplete activities (such as eating and drinking). Since this interpretation attributes to Aristotle both an implausible view and a bad response to Plato, I offer a novel interpretation of EN VII.12 according to which the central contrast is not between complete and incomplete activities, but between states and their use. This interpretation is more faithful to Aristotle’s text and gives him a better response to Plato. In Chapter 4 I turn to the central claim of EN X.4-5 that pleasure perfects an activity. I argue that we cannot understand how pleasure functions unless we take into account the state whose activation is perfected by pleasure. In particular, the agent’s disposition of being a lover of a certain activity (an attitude which belongs to the activated state) is crucial for explaining why the agent takes pleasure in it. The focus on the agent’s attitude highlights that the value of pleasure does not depend solely on the value of the activity (as many interpreters assume). I suggest instead that pleasure is valuable when and because it is an appropriate response to a given situation.