Perception and its objects

Early modern empiricists thought that the nature of perceptual experience is given by citing the object presented to the mind in that experience. Hallucination and illusion suggest that this requires untenable mind-dependent objects. Current orthodoxy replaces the appeal to direct objects with the claim that perceptual experience is characterized instead by its representational content. This paper argues that the move to content is problematic, and reclaims the early modern empiricist insight as perfectly consistent, even in cases of illusion, with the realist contention that these direct objects of perception are the persisting mind-independent physical objects we all know and love

Avoiding Contract Audit Citations by Improving Billing Submissions

In this session, INDOT auditors address common billing errors for different contract payment methodologies. Attendees responsible for preparing bills and submitting invoices will gain a better understanding of how contracts are designed and what is accepted for payment. Local agencies will understand how to review a consultant’s billing before making payment, thus avoiding citations. This presentation should be of particular interest to both engineering consulting firms and local agencies who do business with INDOT

A violent legacy: policing insurrection in South Africa from Sharpeville to Marikana

Fifty-two years separate the fatal shootings by police of 69 anti-apartheid protestors at Sharpeville on 21st March 1960 and of 34 striking miners at Marikana on 16th August 2012. The parallels between the two ‘massacres’ are easy to overstate; but both involved the use of lethal violence by the police against people taking part in insurrectionary action. Drawing on Marenin’s (1982) work on the relative autonomy of the police, this paper argues that events at Marikana have to be seen in the context of South Africa’s failure to tackle the structural violence of apartheid and the use of direct, personal violence by the police before and since the country became a constitutional democracy in 1994