2,172,549 research outputs found

    Poets in dialogue, dialogues in poets

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    Is there something noticeably peculiar about dialogues with poets when transformed into writing, be it in electronic or printed form? The pauses and hesitations, the thrust and parry, the slurrings and overlappings of ordinary speech by and large disappear. In their place is an artifice, a deliberate creation of a script, with questions and responses clearly marked for our attention. Might we be approaching a tidied duologue which, some might also cynically remark, largely reproduces a dual monologue? Moreover, when poets are in dialogue, with whom or what does the poet converse

    Attempting to create scientific and objective tests to measure national wellbeing may be less effective than just asking people how happy they feel

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    Since David Cameron announced his intention to measure the country’s happiness in 2010 there has been a flurry of debate about whether happiness is something that can or should be measured. Robert Battison examines the Office of National Statistics’ latest exercise in finding objective measurements for happiness, and suggests that simply asking people whether they are happy or not might be the most accurate measurement aroun

    How To Form Aesthetic Belief: Interpreting The Acquaintance Principle

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    What are the legitimate sources of aesthetic belief? Which methods for forming aesthetic belief are acceptable? Although the question is rarely framed explicitly, it is a familiar idea that there is something distinctive about aesthetic matters in this respect. Crudely, the thought is that the legitimate routes to belief are rather more limited in the aesthetic case than elsewhere. If so, this might tell us something about the sorts of facts that aesthetic beliefs describe, about the nature of our aesthetic judgements, or about the responses that ground them. Getting the epistemology right here may help with the metaphysics, the semantics or the philosophical psychology. Investigating the legitimate sources of aesthetic belief may thus teach us something important about the aesthetic realm

    Occupy Wall Street: From Representation to Post-Representation

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    Trying to assess something as recent and dynamic as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) presents problems for political analysts. There is always a danger that by the time one has written in judgement the event-movement will have morphed into something quite different. For this reason alone we need to be careful about offering too definitive a judgment on what it represents, about what we think is new in the phenomenon as well as what we think presents linkages to the past. On the one hand, OWS is still in the process of becoming-something . On the other hand, though, we can see the outline of more or less familiar characteristics that might help orientate us towards something that is being greeted as a new departure

    Acts and their objects

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    I shall begin with the assumption that there are, among our mental acts. some which stand in direct contact with ohjects in the material world. The aim of this paper will he to clarify and to draw out certain implications of this somewhat trivial assumption, and ultimately to say something about the ontological structure of those of our acts which effect the function of bringing us into contact with material acts which serve. as we might say, as the most external points of consciousness which touch the objects consciousness is trying to grasp. Amongst material objects I shall include not only material things such as tables

    Public Opinion and the Dynamics of Reform

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    Why do economic reforms that are proceeding successfully often run aground? A number of observers have expressed surprise that public opinion regarding the continuation of a reform process often runs directly counter to the performance of the reform itself. This is especially surprising if one thinks of voters as forward-looking. If anything, a reform that is proceeding successfully might be expected to see burgeoning political support, as voters learn something about the underlying reform, or about the incumbent government's ability to implement it smoothly. In this paper we show that there might arise circumstances where the initial success of reform might result in it running into a political impasse. We suggest that the key might lie in the effect that the reform process has on the balance of political power. In particular, if initially successful reforms change the balance of political power in such a way as to make future redistribution less likely, then public opinion may turn against reform. Thus, in some sense, an initially successful reform may well end up sowing the seeds of its own destruction.political economy, economic reform, public opinion, redistribution, compensation

    Quine: Underdetermination and naturalistic metaphysics

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    Quine’s naturalism has no room for a point of view outside science from which one might criticize science, or a transcendental point of view from which one could ask questions about the adequacy of science with respect to reality (‘as it is in itself’). Adrian Moore sniffs out some genuine tensions in this, arguing in effect that Quine is forced by his own views to admit those sorts of questions as legitimate. I venture that Quine, even if he would grant that the posing of such questions is an inevitable feature of reason in some sense, would take such curiosity to be strictly speaking a mistake, something like that of thinking there must be a single truth-predicate for all levels of Tarski’s hierarchy

    The Art of Compassion: Educating Nurses for the World (Chapter in Awaken the Stars: Reflections on What We Really Teach)

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    Excerpt: A unique and perhaps subtle difference exists between educating the best nurses in the world and educating the best nurses for the world. There is a distinction between the two that is at the heart of what makes caring for someone in their time of need an incredible vocation. Think upon a time when you experienced the knowledge, skills, and care of a nurse! think each of us can identify or recall nurses who were proficient and effective coordinators of care. They were nurses who were professionals in the world, protecting and promoting health and safety for ind ividuals, families, and populations. You might also have vivid recollections of unforgettable, highly venerated nurses who were someth ing more for you; their presence seemed to make all the difference. There was something about them that activated the transition from good to great. That something, I believe, was compassion made alive by the nurse\u27s ability to engage in meaningful and transformative human connections. In nursing, compassion involves seeing the patients as more than the sum of their diagnosis, vita l signs, and laboratory results. A nurse who personifies compassion has cultivated a deep-rooted concern for the total well-being of others while also striving to alleviate their suffering

    Why I have no hands

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    [FIRST PARAGRAPH] Consider the following argument for the claim that there are no hands--or feet or ears or any other arbitrary parts of human beings. Premise One: I am the only rational, conscious being--for short, the only person-- now sitting in this chair. Trust me: my chair isn't big enough for two. You may doubt that every rational, conscious being is a person; perhaps there are beings that mistakenly believe themselves to be people. If so, read ‘rational, conscious being’ or the like for 'person'. Premise Two: Anything that would be rational and conscious in one environment could not fail to be rational or conscious in another environment without differing internally in some way. Nothing can fail to be rational or conscious merely by having the wrong relational properties. All philosophers of mind except perhaps dualists and eliminative materialists make this assumption. The content of someone's intentional states might be sensitive to her surroundings: on Twin Earth there may be someone whose mind is just like yours except that your thoughts about water correspond in him or her to thoughts about something else, if the colourless, potable liquid called 'water' on Twin Earth is not H2O but a substance with a different chemical composition. But unless mental features are not caused by physical ones, that being could hardly fail to be rational or conscious at all, if you are rational and conscious. Premise Three: If there is such a thing as my hand, there is also such a thing as my "hand-complement": an object made up or composed of just those parts of me that don't share a part with my hand. [1] If my hand exists, then "the rest of me but for my hand" exists as well. (I assume that I am a material object, and that my hand, if it existed, would be a part of me.) 2 This is just to say that there is nothing ontologically special about hands: saying that there are hands but no hand-complements would be as arbitrary as saying that there are hands but no feet. Any reasonable ontology of material objects that gives us hands gives us hand-complements as well. This might sound less than obvious because 'hand' is a familiar, compact word of ordinary English, while 'handcomplement' is philosophical jargon. But that is an accidental feature of our language, and presumably reflects our interest in hands and our lack of interest in hand-complements. There is no reason to suppose that it has any ontological significance. Consider that 'cheir' in ancient Greek and 'manus' in Latin, the words that dictionaries translate as 'hand', actually meant something that included eight or ten inches of forearm. Strictly speaking, the ancient Greeks and Romans had no word for what we call hands. But that does not imply that they disagreed with us about what material objects there are

    My Sight\u27s Shadow

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    The story in the photographs I am showing is not about a person, but about the span of experience and emotion presented through time. I am looking into things that stand alone, and things that stand together — the idea of sharing space and experience with something or someone or being by yourself. One thing that draws me to photography as a medium is the way that photographs are able to tell a story or explain something without words. Photographs offer a unique perspective which, by their nature, alters reality. There is always some amount of truth that lies in an image, but it varies. It is a compelling aspect of a story -- a fantasy or a point of view, that interjects itself into the empty spaces between photographs on a wall. There are ways in which I might take a photograph in order to make that moment seem like something that it’s not. This statement is a combination of these ideas
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