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This book argues that what it is to be a picture does not fundamentally concern how such representations can be perceived, but how they relate to one another syntactically and semantically. This kind of approach, first championed by Nelson Goodman in his Languages of Art, has not found many supporters in part because of weaknesses with Goodman’s account. It is shown that a properly crafted structural account of pictures has many advantages over the perceptual accounts that dominate the literature on this topic. Part I (Chapters 1-5) presents the account and draws out some of its immediate consequences. In particular, it explains the close relationship between pictures, diagrams, graphs, and other kinds of non-linguistic representation. Also, it undermines the claim that pictures are essentially visual by showing how many kinds of non-visual representations, including audio recordings and tactile line drawings, are genuinely pictorial. Part II (Chapters 6-10) shows that the structural account of depiction can help to explain why pictures seem so perceptually special. Part III (Chapters 11-12) provides a new account of pictorial realism and shows how accounting for realism relates to an account of depiction in general.

Can we regard ourselves as free originators of some of our behavior? What is the place of values in a world of facts? What grounds the authority of moral imperatives, and why should we care about them? Unless satisfactory answers are provided for these questions, ethics has no credible status and is likely to be swallowed by psychology, history, or rational decision theory: an outcome quite common in recent (post-Hegelian) times as well as one to be strongly regretted. Immanuel Kant's philosophy is a sustained, bold, and successful effort aiming at offering us the answers we need, and this book is a clear and thorough account of this effort that builds on the author's previous interpretation of transcendental philosophy (as articulated in his Kant'sCopernican Revolution) and draws on the entire Kantian corpus. Free choice is rational choice, hence, it is also what reason would consider a good choice; evil behavior is not free — when we behave irrationally, we lose all control on our conduct and become obtuse wheels in the hands of irresistible nature. Which does not mean, however, that we should not take responsibility for our evil actions. On the contrary, that is exactly the right thing to do, despite the absurdity of the stance it involves. This very absurdity teaches us an important Kantian lesson on how to negotiate the bounds of sense: how there is not a single line demarcating sense from nonsense, but rather a variety of shades of (non)sense, experienced in the wake of an ideal of perfect meaningfulness but forever falling short of that ideal. In pursuing this troubling suggestion, the author brings additional light on Kant's understanding of the human form of life. Specifically, on its irremediably conflictual, undecidable character, and on the primacy unrealizable norms have in it.

John McDowell’s attempt to revive the doctrine of empiricism in a ‘minimal’ or ‘transcendental’ form is seriously undermined by inadequacies in the way he conceives what he styles the ‘order of justification’ connecting world, experience, and judgement. For example, his conception of the roles played by causation and nature in this order is threatened with vacuity. The requirements of self-consciousness and verbal articulacy which he places on subjects participating in the justificatory relation between experience and judgement are unwarranted, and have the implausible consequence that infants and non-human animals are excluded from the ‘order of justification’, and thus deprived of experience of the world. Above all, McDowell’s position is vitiated by a substantial error he commits in the philosophy of language: following ancient tradition rather than Frege’s radical departure from that tradition, he locates concepts at the level of sense rather than at the level of reference in the semantical hierarchy. This error generates an unwanted Kantian transcendental idealism which in effect delivers a reductio ad absurdum of McDowell’s metaphysical economy. To correct this mistake, Frege must first be followed in his location of concepts at the level of reference. Second, one must move beyond Frege to locate not only concepts but also propositions at that level. This, in turn, requires the serious consideration of an idea which McDowell mentions only to reject, that of objects as speaking to us ‘in the world’s own language’. Despite the correction recommended here, if empiricism is to have any chance of success, it must be still more minimal in its pretensions than McDowell allows. In particular, it must abandon the individualistic and intellectualistic construction which McDowell places on the ‘order of justification’.

George Berkeley notoriously claimed that his immaterialist metaphysics was not only consistent with common sense, but that it was also integral to its defense. This book argues that understanding the basic connection between Berkeley's philosophy and common sense requires a better understanding of the four principle components of Berkeley's positive metaphysics: the nature of being, the divine language thesis, the active/passive distinction, and the nature of spirits. This book begins by focusing on Berkeley's view of the nature of being. It elucidates Berkeley's view on Locke and the Cartesians, and examines Berkeley's views about related concepts such as unity and simplicity. From there, it moves on to Berkeley's philosophy of language, arguing that scrutiny of the famous Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge reveals that Berkeley identified the ideational theory of meaning and understanding as the root cause of some of the worst of humanity's intellectual errors, not abstract ideas. Abstract ideas are, rather, the most debilitating symptom of this underlying ailment. In place of the ideational theory, Berkeley defends a rudimentary use theory of meaning. This understanding of Berkeley's approach to semantics is then applied to the divine language thesis and is shown to have important consequences for Berkeley's pragmatic approach to the ontology of natural objects and for his approach to our knowledge of, and relation to, other minds, including God's. Turning next to Berkeley's much maligned account of spirits, the book defends the coherence of Berkeley's view of spirits by way of providing an interpretation of the active/passive distinction as marking a normative distinction and by focusing on the role that divine language plays in letting Berkeley identify the soul with the will. With these four principles of Berkeley's philosophy in hand, the book returns to the topic of common sense and offers a defense of Berkeley's philosophy as built upon, and expressive of, the deepest metaphysical commitments of mainstream Christianity.

Arguments that ordinary inanimate objects such as tables and chairs, sticks and stones, simply do not exist have become increasingly common. Some arguments for eliminativism are based on demands for parsimony or for a non-arbitrary answer to the special composition question; others arise from prohibitions against causal redundancy, ontological vagueness, or colocation; and others still come from worries that a common sense ontology would be a rival to a scientific one. This book makes the case that the mistakes behind all of these superficially diverse eliminativist arguments may be traced to a common source, and may be successfully resisted by adopting a small cluster of interrelated and independently plausible theses about reference, analyticity, and modality. By adopting these theses, we can make sense of our common sense world view without internal contradiction, violation of plausible metaphysical principles, or rivalry with a scientific ontology. In the end, however, the most important result of addressing these eliminativist arguments is not merely avoiding their conclusions. It also leads to important metaontological results, bringing into question widely held assumptions about which uses of metaphysical principles are appropriate, which metaphysical demands are answerable, and how we incur ontological commitments. As a result, the work of this book hopes to provide not only the route to a reflective understanding of our unreflective common sense world view, but also a better understanding of the proper methods and limits of metaphysics.

Standardized approaches for the measurement of primary production — the rate of energy storage in the organic matter of plants — are essential to facilitate scientific comparisons and syntheses as well as policy and management on global climate change and the carbon cycle. This book provides an overview of the principles that should underlie every program of measurement of primary production in the Earth's major biomes. Each of seven biome-based chapters provides an overview of essential features of primary production processes in the biome and detailed descriptions of the procedures used to quantify primary production in grasslands, shrublands, forests, peatlands and tundra, salt marshes, marine pelagic, and freshwater ecosystems. Recent advances in the measurement of belowground production in terrestrial biomes are described. The book also provides detailed guidelines for information management based upon current experiences of the US Long-Term Ecological Research network. Advanced techniques are described for scaling up empirical measurements of primary production using remotely-sensed information. Finally, the principles and practices for quantifying uncertainty in primary production measurements are explored using examples from various biomes.

This book is a primer on the political prophet and Christian social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), who is widely cited for his political realism in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s presidency. His works are on the favorite reading list of Barack Obama. In addition to mapping the “Niebuhr revival” on the political left and right, the book’s seven chapters acquaint readers with the central teachings and ways of thinking behind this fresh interest. The core of Niebuhr’s Christian realism and the role of irony in his thought are made accessible to non-specialists in ways that explain his appeal to secular as well as deeply religious minds. The book begins with an account of the fresh interest in the Protestant thinker and argues for Niebuhr’s sense of history as a prelude to explaining how his view of the human self as sinful and self-preoccupied (individually and in groups) relates to his passion for social justice. Three chapters then examine Niebuhr’s teaching as a preacher and writer with uncommon literary sensitivity, take up his classic 1952 title, The Irony of American History as an expression of his Christian realism, and probe the reasons for his mixed reception in contemporary Christian circles, both popular and academic. A final chapter examines the ways that Niebuhr’s legacy invites levels of self-reflection that judiciously illumine the personal, political, and religious challenges that we face in the contemporary world.

Is the point of belief and assertion invariably to think or say something true? Is the truth of a belief or assertion absolute, or is it only relative to human interests? Most philosophers think it incoherent to profess to believe something but not think it true, or to say that some of the things we believe are only relatively true. Common sense disagrees. It sees many opinions, such as those about matters of taste, as neither true nor false; it takes it as obvious that some of the truth is relative. This book argues that when it comes to truth, common sense is right, philosophical orthodoxy wrong. The first half of the book examines connections between the performative aspects of talk (what we do when we speak), our emotions and evaluations, and the conditions under which talk and thought qualifies as true or false. It argues that the performative and expressive sometimes trump the semantic, making truth and falsity the wrong dimension of evaluation for belief or assertion. Among the topics taken up are: racial slurs and other epithets; relations between logic and truth; the status of moral and ethical talk; vagueness, and the liar paradox. The book's second half defends the idea that much of everyday thought and talk is only relatively true or false. Truth is inevitably relative, given that we cannot work out in advance how our concepts will apply to the world. The book explains what it is for truth to be relative, rebuts standard objections to relativism, and argues that relativism is consistent with the idea that one view can be objectively better than another. The book concludes with an account of matters of taste and of how it is possible for divergent views of such matters to be equally valid, even if not true or false.

This book is a philosophical discussion of arithmetical knowledge. No extant account, it seems, is able to respect simultaneously these three strong pre-theoretic intuitions: (a) that arithmetic is an a priori discipline; (b) that arithmetical realism is correct, i.e.. that arithmetical claims are true independently of us; and (c) that empiricism is correct, i.e., that all knowledge of the independent world is obtained through the senses. This book investigates the possibility of a new kind of epistemology for arithmetic, one which will is specifically designed to respect all of (a)-(c). The book proposes that we could develop such an epistemology if we were prepared to accept three claims: (1) that arithmetical truths are known through an examination of our arithmetical concepts; (2) that (at least our basic) arithmetical concepts map the arithmetical structure of the independent world; and (3) that this mapping relationship obtains in virtue of the normal functioning of our sensory apparatus. Roughly speaking, the first of these claims protects a priorism, the second realism, and the third empiricism.

Toward a Generous Orthodoxy provides a refined exposition of Hans Frei's christologically motivated engagement with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clifford Geertz, Erich Auerbach, his use of ordinary language philosophy and nonfoundational philosophical insights, while illuminating and expanding his orientational indebtedness to Karl Barth's theology. By placing Frei's work into critical conversation with developments in pragmatist thought and cultural theory since his death, the rereading of Frei offered here aims to correct and resolve many of the complaints and misunderstandings that vex his theological legacy. The result is a clarification of the unity and coherence of Frei's work over the course of his career; a reframing of the complex relationship of his work to that of his Yale colleague George Lindbeck and successive "postliberal" theological trends; demonstration that Frei's uses of Barth, Wittgenstein, Auerbach, and Geertz do not relegate his theological approach to critical quietism, methodological separatism, epistemic fideism, or a so-called "theological ghetto"; explication and development of Frei's account of the "plain sense" of Scripture that evades charges of narrative foundationalism and essentialism on one hand and, on the other, avoids criticisms that any account so emphasizing culture, language, and practice will reduce scriptural meaning to the ways the text is used in Christian practice and community. What emerges from Toward a Generous Orthodoxy is a sharpened account of the christologically anchored, interdisciplinary, and conversational character of Frei's theology, which he came to describe as a "generous orthodoxy," modeling a way for academic theological voices to take seriously both their vocation to the Christian church and their roles as interlocutors in the academic discourse.

Molière wrote, directed, and starred in comedies for public and court audiences in 17th-century France. He is perennially successful, but perennially subject to critical controversy: do his plays aim to do more than make audiences laugh? This book focuses on a group of characters in the plays, the interpretation of whose role lies at the heart of any answer to this question. For over a century critics have called them raisonneurs. They are characters who engage with some of Molière's most foolish protagonists, but they have been variously interpreted as either exponents of wisdom or as bores who are subject to ridicule. This book argues that new light can be shed on the words and actions of these characters, and on the tenor of the plays as a whole by detailed contextual analysis of the structures of dramaturgy and comedy in which they are deployed. They emerge neither as the mouthpieces of common sense nor as pompous fools, but as thoughtful, witty, and resourceful friends of the foolish protagonists whom Molière himself played. The book takes into account what is known of the performance styles of Molière's troupe of actors as well as engaging closely with the text of the plays and the critical debate to date. Some of Molière's most teasingly problematic plays are held up to fresh scrutiny, including L'Ecole des femmes, Le Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, and Le Malade imaginaire.

Flavour is arguably the most fascinating aspect of eating and drinking. It utilises a complex variety of senses and processes, that incredibly work together to generate a unified, and hopefully pleasurable, experience. The processes involved are not just those involved in tasting at the time of eating, but also memory and learning processes — we obviously shun those foods of which we have a negative memory, and favour those we enjoy. Our understanding of the science of flavour has improved in recent years, benefiting psychology, cuisine, food science, oenology, and dietetics. This book describes what is known about the psychology and biology of flavour. The book is divided into two parts. The first explores what we know about the flavour system; including the role of learning and memory in flavour perception and hedonics; the way in which all the senses that contribute to flavour interact, and our ability to perceive flavour as a whole and as a series of parts. The later chapters examine a range of theoretical issues concerning the flavour system. This includes a look at multisensory processing, and the way in which the mind and brain bind information from discrete sensory systems. It also examines the broader implications of studying flavour for societal problems such as obesity.

This book, through close analysis of the scenes of reading in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, offers an invigorating new study of the novel and previously unacknowledged paths through it. After considering key childhood ‘Primal Scenes’ which mark the act of reading as revelatory and potentially traumatic, the book then examines the interwoven strands of the novel's narrative of reading: scenes where the narrator reads and where others provide ‘lessons in reading’ are shown to be intricately connected within the narrator's considerations of intelligence, sense experience, knowledge, and desire. These scenes offer us a phenomenology of reading, whose illuminations, wrong turns, and over-determinations often bewilder the narrator and lead us to interrogate our own understanding of the act we accomplish as we read A la recherche. This book emphasizes the complexities and contradictions with which reading is riven, and which connect it repeatedly to the experience of involuntary memory. Reading is shown to be frequently fraught with heady instability—‘délire’—of a highly revealing sort, from which narrator and readers alike have much to learn. The book's final chapter shows how the narrator's critical energies, turned contemplatively inwards in the Guermantes's library, are subsequently turned outwards for a final interpretive effort—the reading of his now aged acquaintances at the ‘Bal de têtes’—in a shift that provides the narrator not only the confidence to begin his work of art, through the translation of his impressions but also the humility to face, undeterred, the approach of death.