Partial Evidence: An enquiry concerning a possible affinity between literary moral cognitivism and moral pluralism

This paper begins by affirming the view that if there is a debate to be had over whether literature can convey moral knowledge, then efforts by proponents to substantiate this claim will already be necessarily conditioned by an understanding of what morality consists in, independently of literature. This observation brings to light a certain danger for the debate, namely that if participants fail to explicitly specify the ethical theory that they rely on, then the debate can seem nebulous. This raises a new question: is there an account of morality, independent of literature, which is most conducive to literary moral cognitivism, that is, which optimises literary moral cognitivism's chances of succeeding philosophically? This paper both formulates and investigates this hypothesis with reference to moral pluralism, the view that there is an irreducible plurality of foundational moral principles. It concludes that such an affinity exists, but with an important caveat: the affinity is stronger at the level of moral suggestion than the level of moral justification. This has implications for the strength of the version of literary moral cognitivism that it is ultimately plausible to endorse from a moral pluralist point of view

Keats, Truth, and Empathy

At one level, Keats’s sonnet entitled On Peace (1814) is full of philosophical certainties. The speaker believes, for example, that a nation’s people have a right to live in freedom under the rule of law, and that the rule of law should be applicable to everybody. Political and philosophical commitments of this kind do not seem to be called into question in this poem, or made the subject of an enquiry. On the contrary, it is as though we are confronted with somebody who, in certain central thematic respects at least, appears to know his own mind

Jean Starobinski and the critical gaze

This paper explores Jean Starobinski's often tacit conception of the implied author, with a view to clarifying his intellectual legacy for literary criticism. It argues that it is plausible to trace a certain strand in the intellectual genealogy of Starobinski's literary theory from the descriptive psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey to twentieth-century psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Accordingly, the question "Who is Jean Starobinski?" is formulated in a sense which seeks to move beyond the bare facticity of biographical detail, a sense that can be expected to differentiate between scholarly and purely journalistic enquiry to ask: who, exactly, is the Jean Starobinski that we encounter in his major works - works like "The Living Eye" and "Transparency and Obstruction"? It is from this vantage point that the discussion proceeds to clarify Starobinski's ambivalent relations to both Rousseau and Freud, and thereby to illuminate some of the tensions and nuances inherent in his notion of the implied author

Combining knowledge mapping and videoconferencing for open sensemaking communities

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has been growing rapidly, opening up new opportunities for widening participation (Willinsky, 2006). OpenLearn is an OER pilot project developed by the UK Open University (OU) [http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn], and launched in October 2006, supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. OpenLearn has published 3371 hours in the LearningSPace and 5194 in the LabSpace of OERs designed specifically for distance learning (the OU’s core business), and covers a range of subjects from arts and history to science and nature. There are more than 300 units at all study levels from access to higher education, graduation and postgraduation. Our current work is to investigate how these tools can be used to foster open sensemaking communities (Buckingham Shum, 2005) around the OERs, that is, the interpretative work that must take place around any resource for learning to take place. How can we support this critical activity in an OER context when learners must find and engage with peers themselves, if they do not wish to study alone? This paper introduces the e-learning environment that has been developed after the first year of OpenLearn, focusing on the uses made of two sensemaking support tools, Compendium for knowledge mapping, and FlashMeeting for videoconferencing

Images of otherness : on the problem of empathy and its relevance to literary moral cognitivism

If the possible ends of art criticism are taken to include not only the provision of a detailed evaluation of the artwork, but, cognately, an elaboration upon how one has been, or believes oneself to have been, changed by a particular artistic encounter, then the very praxis of art criticism stands to benefit from a theoretical elucidation of the possible nature of the subjective transformations that may flow from the critical appreciation of art. We are entitled to enquire, in particular, into the conditions under which, and indeed the extent to which, such putative change at the personal level can be explicated in moral epistemological terms. It is pertinent in this context also to investigate the phenomenal character of the experiences that have been operative and their essential structures; to enquire, in short, into the phenomenology of the transformative artistic encounter. In this thesis, the bearing, in particular, of intersubjectivity upon the content and modalities of disclosure in a literary context will be investigated. It will be shown how an understanding of the relevance of intersubjectivity to the phenomenology of literary experience can inform an assessment of the claims of literary aesthetic moral cognitivism. Yet the intention to clarify the connection between literary experience and intersubjectivity also requires reflection upon what it is in the first place to encounter someone else, and to apperceive a foreign subjectivity and its motivations. For this reason, the contributions of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein to the investigation of the phenomenology of empathy will be discussed and evaluated. This discussion will in turn be shown to be of assistance in clarifying the role of the imagination in the apperception and comprehension of another person’s mental life. The thought of Jean Starobinski will prove to elucidate the question of why the insights of the phenomenological tradition are highly pertinent to the investigation of literary experience, and to the development, in particular, of a conception of an imagined ‘Other’ who is (in a sense that will be clarified) embedded within the literary text, a person, that is, to whom one might coherently refer as the “implied author”. For reasons which will emerge in the course of this study, it will be argued that authentic empathy, in its fulfilling explication (in the Steinian sense), is given to the empathising consciousness in the manner of a semblance, and, consonantly, that the phenomenological structure of authentic empathy is characterised in its mature phases by an homological relation to pictureconsciousness. The epistemological significance of literature’s capacities for moral suggestion will be explicated principally in terms of the unfolding of values within the human personality, and in terms of the disclosure of the phenomenal character and structures of virtuous experience. It will be explained why the structure of empathy has implications for the aesthetic value of literature. The question of the relation between aesthetic and ethical value will be clarified. In this context, it will be argued on phenomenological grounds that the appresentation of moral virtue in an implied author could contribute to the aesthetic value of a literary work, although it will also be shown that implied authorial moral virtue could conflict irremediably with other qualities like moral doubt and uncertainty, which may themselves be important sources of aesthetic value. For this reason, the thesis will conclude by challenging the ethicist view that an aesthetically relevant ethical flaw in a literary work must count as an aesthetic flaw

Fostering Open Sensemaking Communities by Combining Knowledge Maps and Videoconferencing

In this paper, our aim is to investigate the role of Compendium maps for both learners and educators to share and debate interpretations in FlashMeetingTM (FM) videoconferences in the context of OpenLearn, an online environment for open learning. This work is based on a qualitative study of knowledge maps and web videoconferencing interactions, and quantitative data presented in diagnostic reports about both tools. Our theoretical approach is based on the sensemaking concept and an existing framework for three learning scenarios. Our findings describe four applications of knowledge maps in videoconferencing: (i) Mind Maps for a FM virtual lecture (transmission scenario); (ii) Learning Path Map which integrates a FM conference (studio scenario); (iii) Concept Maps during a peer-to-peer event (negotiation scenario) and (iv) Web Maps for a FM replay (assessment scenario)

07171 Abstracts Collection -- Visual Computing -- Convergence of Computer Graphics and Computer Vision

From 22.04. to 27.04.2007, the Dagstuhl Seminar 07171 ``Visual Computing - Convergence of Computer Graphics and Computer Vision\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Edith Stein and the Problem of Empathy: Locating Ascription and a Structural Relation to Picture Consciousness

The domain of phenomenological investigation delineated by the Husserlian term authentic empathy presents us with an immediate tension. On the one hand, authentic empathy is supposed to grant the subject access (in some sense that remains to be fully specified) to the Other’s experience. On the other hand, foundational phenomenological considerations pertaining to the apprehension of a foreign subjectivity determine that it is precisely a disjunction in subjective processes that is constitutive of the Other being other. In my approach to this problem, I seek, within the context of a reading of Edith Stein’s work 'On the Problem of Empathy', to clarify the place of ascription in authentic empathy, and to render more explicit a certain notion of “contiguity” that I take to be informing Stein’s understanding of the co-givenness of the Other’s mental life. I go on to argue that a resolution to the problem of empathy lies in the idea that the respective lived experiences of self and Other are, as a matter of descriptive fact, phenomenally connected by a relation of resemblance, and that, consonantly, the essential structure of authentic empathy is characterised in its mature phases by an homological relation to picture consciousness

Chaotic behaviors of a digital filter with two’s complement arithmetic and arbitrary initial conditions and order

This letter shows some counter-intuitive simulation results that the symbolic sequences and the state variables of a digital filter with two’s complement arithmetic and arbitrary initial conditions and order will be eventually zero when all the filter parameters are even numbers, no matter the system matrix of the filter is stable or not

The trial of learning objects: exploring the design and delivery of VTE courses with learning objects

This paper describes a project undertaken in the Australian vocational training and education (VTE) sector that sought to investigate success factors associated with the design and delivery of courses using learning objects (LOs). The project explored the strategies used by three teachers as they used digital repositories to discover learning objects, and then applied the objects through a content management system to create online courses. The paper reports the factors that were found to influence the online learning settings that resulted and teachers\u27 perceptions of LOs as building blocks for online courses