Imaginative Resistance and Modal Knowledge

Readers of fictions sometimes resist taking certain kinds of claims to be true according to those fictions, even when they appear explicitly or follow from applying ordinary principles of interpretation. This "imaginative resistance" is often taken to be significant for a range of philosophical projects outside aesthetics, including giving us evidence about what is possible and what is impossible, as well as the limits of conceivability, or readers' normative commitments. I will argue that this phenomenon cannot do the theoretical work that has been asked of it. Resistance to taking things to be fictional is often best explained by unfamiliarity with kinds of fictions than any representational, normative, or cognitive limits. With training and experience, any understandable proposition can be made fictional and be taken to be fictional by readers. This requires a new understanding both of imaginative resistance, and what it might be able to tell us about topics like conceivability or the bounds of possibility

Some remarks about Descartes' rule of signs

What can we deduce about the roots of a real polynomial in one variable by simply considering the signs of its coefficients? On one hand, we give a complete answer concerning the positive roots, by proposing a statement of Descartes' rule of signs which strengthens the available ones while remaining as elementary and concise as the original. On the other hand, we provide new kinds of restrictions on the combined numbers of positive and negative roots.Comment: 10 page

On Conceiving the Inconsistent

This work has been developed within the 2013–15 ahrc project The Metaphysical Basis of Logic: The Law of Non-Contradiction as Basic Knowledge (grant ref. ah/k001698/1). A version of the paper was presented in September 2013 at the Modal Metaphysics Workshop in Bratislava. I am grateful to the audiences there and at the Aristotelian Society meeting for many helpful comments and remarks.Peer reviewedPostprin

Boston University Baroque Orchestra, December 4, 2008

This is the concert program of the Boston University Baroque Orchestra performance on Thursday, December 4, 2008 at 8:00 p.m., at Room 102, 855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were Concerto for two violas and strings by Georg Philipp Telemann, Suite for strings by Henry Purcell, Concerto grosso in F. op. 6, no. 9 by George Frideric Handel, and Motet, Lange mala, umbrae, terrores, RV 629 by Antonio Vivaldi. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund