Papers by Charles Nussbaum
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 15, 2020
<p>The chapter moves through a brief history of ontology and trends in contemporary analyti... more <p>The chapter moves through a brief history of ontology and trends in contemporary analytic ontology before investigating common positions in musical ontology such as Platonism (Kivy, Dodd), compliance theory (Goodman, Elgin), continuant theory (Rohrbaugh, Magnus), and performance theory (Davies, Currie). After evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each of these, it argues for a version of continuant theory as an account of musical ontology that makes sense of musical practices and intuitions while honouring naturalistic philosophical commitments. Moreover, I suggest that the inherently "shaky" nature of undecidable claims within ontology (musical or otherwise) means that ontological approaches should not take fact-stating as their sole objective. Rather, ontological statements may function both descriptively and prescriptively: as such, ontology possesses a key regulative purpose within our theoretical discourse.</p>
Dialogue, 1999
RésuméDans son ouvrage de 1995, Naturalizing the Mind, Dretske propose une analyse de l&amp;a... more RésuméDans son ouvrage de 1995, Naturalizing the Mind, Dretske propose une analyse de l&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;introspection qui s&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;appuie sur la notion de perception déplacée. Tout comme Dretske perçoit qu&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;il pèse 170 livres (c&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;est la perception déplacée) en percevant la lecture indiquée sur sa balance, il perçoit qu&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;il se représente un objet bleu (perception déplacée) en percevant cet objet bleu. Dans les deux cas, le sujet percevant procède à partir d&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;un «fait intermédiare» à l&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;inférence d&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;un «fait cible» déplacé. Le présent article dévoile une confusion au sujet des faits intermédiaires dans l&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;approche de Dretske, explore certaines des conséquences de cette confusion, et suggère une manière d&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;y remédier.
Having discussed issues of methodology in Chapter 1 and introduced the requisite philosophy of la... more Having discussed issues of methodology in Chapter 1 and introduced the requisite philosophy of language in Chapter 2, we are now ready to pursue the central arguments of the book, the arguments to the conclusions that (1) the Reformation in its Puritan form was, in Weber’s language, an “adequate cause” of the emergence of pornographic narrative fiction as a distinct genre in the modern West and (2) that this genre constitutes a self-deceptive vehicle for sexual or blood-lustful arousal. (Here we shall confine ourselves to sexual pornography. The phenomenon of violent pornography will be addressed in Chapter 4.) An adequate cause according to Weber, it is essential to recall, is a causal condition that is neither necessary nor sufficient, but raises the probability of some event’s occurrence. We begin in Section 3.2 by considering the uneasy relationship between pornographic literature and Anglo-American law. Section 3.3 takes up Erich Auerbach’s influential idea of Stiltrennung, or “separation of styles,” in the literature of the West and its relations to Christianity, Protestant Christianity, the modern novel, and pornographic writing. Section 3.4 explicitly ties the concerns of the present chapter to the issues of conversational implicature and perceptive equilibrium broached in Chapter 2 by introducing the important notion of imaginative resistance. Section 3.5 uses results gleaned in these discussions to frame John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure as the first genuinely pornographic Western literary work. Section 3.6 considers the relationship between pornography and prostitution, and Section 3.7 summarizes the chapter and poses a question concerning pornography as cultural construction or psychological universal, a question taken up in detail in the following and final chapter.
Metaphilosophy, Apr 1, 2003
Much of Western speculative metaphysics has subscribed to what has been called ''explanatory rati... more Much of Western speculative metaphysics has subscribed to what has been called ''explanatory rationalism,'' which holds that there is a reason for everything that is and for the way everything is. Theodicies, or metaphysical attempts to solve the problem of evil, have relied on a special application of this principle of explanatory rationalism, namely, the principle of plenitude, which holds that the evil in the world is a necessary ingredient in the world's overall perfection or degree of reality. This essay argues that the principle of plenitude is aesthetically motivated, and that only in art and perhaps in revealed religion can the demands of explanatory rationalism be satisfied.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 26, 2013
Philosophy and Literature, Apr 1, 2022
The term "tragedy" is widely misused in common parlance to designate any disastrous occurrence of... more The term "tragedy" is widely misused in common parlance to designate any disastrous occurrence of great magnitude. If this practice is to be resisted and reformed, an alternative account of real-life tragedy must be sustained. I attempt to offer one that is grounded in the connections between agency and luck. More specifically, I argue that in a universe lacking any supernatural power of fate, real-life tragedy occurs when the exercise of agency results, through a confluence of constitutive and circumstantial bad luck, in the suffering and the destruction of the agent.
Philosophical Psychology, Jun 1, 2001
While purely causal theories of reference have provided a plausible account of the meanings of na... more While purely causal theories of reference have provided a plausible account of the meanings of names and natural kind terms, they cannot handle vacuous theoretical terms. The causal homeostasis theory can but incurs other difficulties. Theories of reference that are intensional and not ...
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2015
Process studies, Apr 1, 1986
Northwestern University Press eBooks, Aug 4, 2018
Modern Philology, Aug 1, 2006
... Public concerné de Deeper than reason emotion and its role in literature... : Scholars and st... more ... Public concerné de Deeper than reason emotion and its role in literature... : Scholars and students of philosophy, particularly in aesthetics and philosophy of mind, those working in literary, music, and art theory. © 2000-2011. ...
Pornographic narrative fiction is literature, if not literature in the honorific sense. A speech-... more Pornographic narrative fiction is literature, if not literature in the honorific sense. A speech-act approach to pornographic literature, therefore, will be a special application of a speech-act approach to literature. Speech-act theory, part of pragmatics, or the theory of language use, is the study that concerns itself not with what is said by a speaker, but with what is done by a speaker in saying (illocutions) or by saying (perlocutions). In this chapter, I argue that pornographic fiction exploits the pragmatics of fictional discourse, specifically its convention of expressing implicatures by flouting conversational maxims or rules. I shall explicate the expression of implicature by flouting, an idea first developed by H. Paul Grice, presently. Although a number of writers, including Searle (1979), Wolterstorff (1980), Sperber and Wilson (1986), and, perhaps most systematically, Currie (1990), have adopted a speech-act approach to literary discourse, to my knowledge, only one writer, Mary Louise Pratt, has made a sustained attempt to apply the Gricean notion of flouting as an indicator of implicature to an analysis of literary discourse in her unfortunately seldom-cited 1 Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977).
The MIT Press eBooks, 2007
Oxford University Press eBooks, Sep 5, 2013
Southwest Philosophy Review, 1993
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Papers by Charles Nussbaum