Uniqueness Thesis Research Articles

Justification and the Uniqueness Thesis Again

Justification and the Uniqueness Thesis Again

The Theatre of Caryl Churchill by R. Darren Gobert

Reviewed by: The Theatre of Caryl Churchill by R. Darren Gobert Benjamin Gillespie The Theatre of Caryl Churchill. By R. Darren Gobert. Critical Companions series. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014; pp. 328. It is no small task to condense the life’s work of one of Britain’s most celebrated and prolific living playwrights into a single volume. Caryl Churchill’s nearly six-decade-long career features some of the most formally innovative techniques in experimental drama produced since Beckett, and her explicitly feminist and socialist leanings have prompted numerous productions and much critical attention internationally. In line with the aims and scope of Bloomsbury’s Critical Companions series, R. Darren Gobert’s The Theatre of Caryl Churchill seamlessly interweaves text and performance analysis with extensive archival research, offering an exhaustive survey of Churchill’s oeuvre and refreshing critical perspectives that expand on her artistic legacy. As Gobert himself puts it, the book represents a comprehensive study of Churchill’s career that is “distinct in its form and enlivened by its archival discoveries” (xv). Accordingly, the book’s interlocking chapters are organized thematically rather than chronologically, cleverly reflecting the playwright’s radical tendency to jettison linear narrative in her plays. And while each chapter spotlights three plays that frame a unique thesis, no period of the playwright’s voluminous career is left unconsidered. Featured plays are considered alongside earlier and later pieces that enhance the author’s historical and theoretical findings. By the end of the epilogue, Gobert has impressively referenced more than fifty plays and literally hundreds of productions, all while drawing on extensive untapped archival sources that draw unique connections across Churchill’s prodigious career. The book is divided into six chapters: the first five by Gobert himself, while the final chapter comprises two critical essays from guest contributors Elaine Aston and Siân Adiseshiah. In “Churchill’s Landscapes” (chapter 1) Gobert focuses on Churchill’s uncanny ability to tailor form to thematic content, foregrounding the formal innovation of Top Girls, The Skriker, and Far Away. Next, “Derivatives; or Capitalism and the Theatre” explores Churchill’s critique of a market-driven economy in her plays Owners, Serious Money, and A Dream Play, simultaneously analyzing major productions and the financial transactions that facilitated their realization. Chapter 3 examines the exploration of “Identity and the Body” in Churchill’s work through extended analyses of Cloud Nine, Icecream (with or without Hot Fudge), and A Number, beautifully detailing the playwright’s longstanding preoccupation with the body and “how it reveals the cultural and [End Page 484] ideological histories written on it” (84). Chapter 4, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Collaboration,” documents rehearsal processes and production histories of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Fen, and Mad Forest and argues that Churchill suggests different models for social cooperation both onstage and off, especially in her collaborative work with Joint Stock. Gobert’s final chapter, “Performance and/as Theatre,” compellingly analyzes Traps, Blue Heart, and Love and Information to illustrate how Churchill’s work, especially her more recent plays, requires the liveness of theatrical performance to produce coherent meaning. Despite their unique foci, these chapters consistently overlap and fold back onto one another, richly developing arguments as earlier chapters are expanded on and enlivened by later ones. Each of Gobert’s five chapters benefit from being read together with the others, while the two guest essays stand apart from the previous five chapters and offer welcome contributions for reading Churchill’s plays through a distinctly British context. Throughout the book, Gobert offers useful, thick descriptions of the plays he discusses, in addition to maintaining an ongoing dialogue with a range of other scholars in the field. Peppered through these chapters are never-before-seen archival sources—including notes from rehearsal processes, script revisions, production histories, diary entries from frequent artistic collaborations (especially with British director Max Stafford-Clark, a frequent collaborator), as well as the divergent critical responses to these plays—all of which support Gobert’s diverse approaches to understanding the complexity of Churchill’s plays. Additionally, he includes many personal anecdotes taken from his own experience attending Churchill productions in London and New York over the years, which are enlightening and often amusing...

Assertion, uniqueness and epistemic hypocrisy

Engel (Grazer Philos Stud 77: 45–59, 2008) has insisted that a number of notable strategies for rejecting the knowledge norm of assertion are put forward on the basis of the wrong kinds of reasons. A central aim of this paper will be to establish the contrast point: I argue that one very familiar strategy for defending the knowledge norm of assertion—viz., that it is claimed to do better in various respects than its competitors (e.g. the justification and the truth norms)—relies on a presupposition that is shown to be ultimately under-motivated. That presupposition is the uniqueness thesis—that there is a unique epistemic rule for assertion, and that such a rule will govern assertions uniformly. In particular, the strategy I shall take here will be to challenge the sufficiency leg of the knowledge norm in a way that at the same time counts against Williamson’s (Knowledge and its limits, 2000) own rationale for the uniqueness thesis. However, rather than to challenge the sufficiency leg of the knowledge norm via the familiar style of ‘expert opinion’ and, more generally, ‘second-hand knowledge’ cases (e.g. Lackey in Learning from words: testimony as a source of knowledge, 2008), a strategy that has recently been called into question by Benton (Philos Phenomenol Res, 2014), I’ll instead advance a very different line of argument against the sufficiency thesis, one which turns on a phenomenon I call epistemic hypocrisy.

A Counterexample to the Uniqueness Thesis

In this essay, I present a straightforward counterexample to the Uniqueness Thesis, which holds, roughly speaking, that there is a unique rational response to any particular body of evidence.

PEOPLE WITH COMMON PRIORS CAN AGREE TO DISAGREE

AbstractRobert Aumann presents hisAgreement Theoremas thekey conditional: “if two people have the same priors and their posteriors for an eventAare common knowledge, then these posteriors are equal” (Aumann, 1976, p. 1236). This paper focuses on four assumptions which are used in Aumann’s proof but are not explicit in the key conditional: (1) that agents commonly know, of some priorμ, that it is the common prior; (2) that agents commonly know that each of them updates on the prior by conditionalization; (3) that agents commonly know that if an agent knows a proposition, she knows that she knows that proposition (the “KK” principle); (4) that agents commonly know that they each update only on true propositions. It is shown that natural weakenings of any one of these strong assumptions can lead to countermodels to Aumann’s key conditional. Examples are given in which agents who have a common prior and commonly know what probability they each assign to a proposition nevertheless assign that proposition unequal probabilities. To alter Aumann’s famous slogan: peoplecan“agree to disagree”, even if they share a common prior. The epistemological significance of these examples is presented in terms of their role in a defense of theUniqueness Thesis: If an agent whose total evidence isEis fully rational in taking doxastic attitudeDtoP, then necessarily, any subject with total evidenceEwho takes a different attitude toPis less than fully rational.

Defending the Uniqueness Thesis: A Reply to Luis Rosa

Defending the Uniqueness Thesis: A Reply to Luis Rosa

Why Responsible Belief Is Permissible Belief

It is widely thought that we are at least sometimes responsible for our doxastic attitudes. We can be praised, blamed, or neutrally appraised for our beliefs, disbeliefs, and withholdings. However, many epistemologists have also pointed out that, despite the fact that we are responsible both for certain actions and for certain beliefs, there are crucial differences between responsibility for beliefs and responsibility for actions. In this paper we discuss one such alleged difference, namely that whereas in many circumstances two or more different actions are equally permissible, our evidence is always such that there is a unique doxastic attitude that we are epistemically obliged to have given that evidence. We call this thesis the Uniqueness Thesis (UT) and its denial the Permissibility Thesis (PT). Like many authors writing on this topic, we will interpret the issue deontologically: for a belief to be obliged or permitted is for it to be responsible or blameless. Thus, we do not understand the issue merely evaluatively, but deontologically: the question is not whether doxastic attitudes are obliged or rather merely permitted if they are to be ideally rational or ideally reasonable. The central aim of this paper is to defend PT by rebutting certain arguments against PT and by providing some considerations that favour PT over UT. If we succeed, we have shown that there is good reason to think that responsible or blameless belief is permissible rather than obliged belief. Also, if we succeed, we have shown that the gap between the way we should normatively assess belief and action may not be as wide as has been thought. This paper is structured as follows. First, we distinguish between several varieties of UT and PT and select those that we deem relevant to our discussion (§ 2). Next, we discuss a couple of objections to PT and argue that they fail (§ 3). However, even if we are correct that they do not succeed, it does not follow that UT is false. Therefore, we also discuss two arguments for PT (§ 4) and provide two motivations for PT by showing that it is entailed by two views that are quite popular among theorists working on doxastic responsibility (§ 5). Even if our strategy does not establish or demonstrate the truth of PT, it will provide enough reasons to prefer PT over UT.

A Mathematical Model for Plato's Theory of Forms

Aims/ objectives: In this article we construct a mathematical/topological framework for comprehending fundamental concepts in Plato’s theory of Forms; specifically the dual processes of: 1. The participation/partaking-methexis of the many particulars predicated as F to the Formessence F , according to their degree of participation to it. 2. The presence-parousia of the Form-essence F to the particulars predicated as F , in analogy to their degree of participation to F as in 1. The theoretical foundation of our model is primarily based on a combination of both the Approximationist and Predicationalist approaches for Plato’s theory of Forms, taking into account the degree of participation of the particulars to the Form, that are predicated to. In constructing our model we assume that there exists exactly one Form corresponding to every predicate that has a Form (Plato’s ‘uniqueness thesis’), and to support our main theses we analyze textual evidence from various Platonic works. The mathematical model is founded on the dual notions of projective and inductive topologies, and their projective and inductive limits respectively.

La connaissance des objets de foi chez Henri de Gand, entre infusion, raisonnement et illumination

Henry of Ghent, one of the most important theologians of the late 13th century, is well-known for, among other things, defending the unique thesis that theologians can rely on a specific kind of divine illumination to secure their theological knowledge: the lumen medium. His theory of faith, however, which also relies on a kind of divine illumination, has hardly been examined until now. It is, however, most interesting: indeed, within a system that allows for a special kind of theological knowledge of the objects of faith, one is led to wonder what kind of relationship there can be between such a superior knowledge and obscure faith. Can an object of faith also be an object of proper theological knowledge? If it is the case, does theological knowledge build upon faith, as in traditional doctrines, or are they separate? And how can one know that they have been illuminated by God in such or such a way? In order to answer these questions, and others, we will first study the nature of faith and the corresponding divine light in Henry’s doctrine, especially from a psychological point of view; then we will analyze the way in which theological knowledge actually works; finally, we will examine the nature and the importance of divine illumination as regards the formation of theological knowledge; in conclusion, we will try and determine what precisely warrants our knowledge of the objects of faith.

Constitutional Rights and Democracy: A Reply to Professor Bellamy

In his rich and thoughtful paper, Richard Bellamy sketches a theory of individual rights that ascribes to them an inherently democratic character that “is best captured by a republican view of liberty as non-domination, rather than the standard liberal account of liberty as non-interference.” According to this view, “rights involve an implicit appeal to democratic forms of reasoning.” That is, the only justifiable “foundation of rights must be some form of ongoing democratic decision making that allows rights to be claimed under conditions of political equality.” Bellamy uses this particular model of rights to defend a somewhat unique thesis concerning the legitimacy of judicial review under a constitutional charter or bill of rights (henceforthconstitutional review). Many legal theorists question whether constitutional review can ever be rendered consistent with the theoretical and practical demands of democracy. According to these theorists, democracy embodies a form of self-rule whereby the members of a society establish and exercise legitimate authority over themselves. But self-rule seems seriously compromised once constitutional review enters the picture. Instead of having the people and their elected representatives setting the basic terms of social cooperation, we have instead a small group of elite, unelected, and unaccountable judges performing this vital task. Constitutional review empowers these individuals, in constitutional review cases, to substitute their own contestable views and preferences with respect to the basic terms of social cooperation for the duly considered views and preferences of the people and those whom they have duly elected to represent them. This is something one simply cannot tolerate in a democracy.

Justification and the Uniqueness Thesis

In this paper, I offer two counterexamples to the so-called 'Uniqueness Thesis.' As one of these examples rely on the thesis that it is possible for a justified belief to be based on an inconsistent body of evidence, I also offer reasons for this further thesis. On the assumption that doxastic justification entails propositional justification, the counterexamples seem to work. 1. The Uniqueness Thesis Do you think it is reasonable to claim that one can be rational in believing that p on the basis of certain evidence, while one could also be rational in believing that ~p on the basis of the same evidence? Or, maybe, that one can be rational in believing that p on the basis of certain evidence, while one could also suspend judgment about p on the basis of the same evidence? If you think of one of these as real possibilities, then your belief is inconsistent with the so-called 'Uniqueness Thesis':

False uniqueness: the self-perception of new entrants to higher education in the UK and its implications for access: a pilot study

A central tenet of contemporary education policy relates to the desire to extend Higher Education provision to less advantaged groups (widening participation). Our paper contends that a key behavioural obstacle to widening participation lies in the erroneous belief that persists among potential entrants from disadvantaged backgrounds as to their capabilities of succeeding within the HE environment a perception that serves to deflates application/recruitment rates from such groupings. We test this false uniqueness thesis using a sample of 127 new UK undergraduates, finding that students drawn from lower social class backgrounds consistently under-estimated their abilities vis-a-vis the overall cohort.

The Paradox of Evil in Tiantai Buddhist Philosophy

AbstractA unique thesis of Tiantai Buddhism is the claim that human nature contains evil and that even the Buddha cannot be completely rid of his evil nature. The thesis was most vigorously defended and developed by a Tiantai monk, Zhili (ad 960–1028). This thesis has attracted a lot of discussion among Tiantai scholars. Their debate focuses on whether this thesis is truly representative of the original doctrine of the Tiantai founder, Zhiyi (of the sixth century ad). In 2000, Brook Ziporyn published a book Evil and/or/as the Good, which offers Tiantai's evil‐nature thesis a novel explanation and justification. This book sparked a series of discussion on whether evil is not only necessary but also ‘valuable’. This present project gives an overview of these debates and provides a fresh insight on the topic.

Idol Food in Corinth: Jewish Background and Pauline Legacy

Idol Food in Corinth: Jewish Background and Pauline Legacy, by Alex T. Cheung. JSNTSup 176. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. Pp. 364. 55.00/$85.00. This substantial revision of Cheung's Westminster Theological Seminary dissertation is an important work that examines one of the longest sustained arguments on an ethical issue found in Scripture. The work is carefully argued and pays both thorough and fair attention to contemporary research on the passage. In addition, it gives exhaustive treatment to the issue of idol in early Christianity and argues a unique thesis that goes against the grain of almost all scholarly interpretation of this passage. Cheung's thesis is that in 1 Cor 8:1-11:1 Paul consistently and unequivocally opposes the eating of offered to idols. Paul gives two reasons for his prohibition: it is unloving (ch. 8) and it is idolatry (ch. 10). Paul's only caveat comes at the end of the argument, where he permits Christians to eat without constantly asking questions about the origin of food. But once Christians are aware that has been sacrificed to idols, they must not eat it. Cheung summarizes Paul's position as follows: To eat idol knowingly is to participate in idolatry; therefore, for the sake of the weak and for the sake of yourselves, avoid any if, and only if, you know that it is idol food (p. 162). After a brief introduction, ch. 1 addresses the social meaning of eating idol food. Following P. D. Gooch's work, particularly his archaeological findings, Cheung argues that all meals in temples in the first century would have involved idolatry and could not have been mere social occasions. Chapter 2 addresses the background of Paul's attitude toward idol in early Judaism. Cheung sees a strong, virtually universal abstinence from idol meat as a boundary marker for Jews, even those who seem quite open to accommodation with the surrounding Hellenistic culture. Chapter 3 presents the central argument through an exegetical investigation of 1 Cor 8:1-11:1. Cheung argues that the passage is a unity and condemns the eating of idol on two counts. First, it is unloving because it does damage to others. Second, it is idolatry because it is associated with demons. In ch. 4, Cheung surveys early Christian understanding of Paul's attitude and of the whole issue of eating offered to idols. He shows that 1 Corinthians was widely known and used in the early church, and that the early church universally opposed eating offered to idols. No one understood Paul's argument as condoning offered to idols. Cheung concludes that it is highly unlikely that what Paul taught on this important subject could have been forgotten or misunderstood by every early Christian author represented in our extant sources (p. 174). In ch. 5, Cheung offers a summary and concluding reflections. An appendix surveys the views of P. J. Tomson, Gooch, W. L. Willis, G. Theissen, M. M. Mitchell, and B. Witherington on various aspects of 1 Cor 8:1-11:1. Even if one were to grant Cheung his thesis, his argument contains a major flaw of omission. Cheung tries to show that Paul and all other authors in early Christianity are remarkably consistent (p. …

The self in transformation: Dialectical processes in long-term psychotherapy

A number of phases are notable during the process of integration of the self through psychotherapy. Each of these phases encompasses a particular ontology in relation to the dynamic self. The underlying process of change, moreover, may be conceived of as dialectical in nature with each phase having a unique thesis and antithesis. A clinical case is presented to illustrate these ideas for the therapist.

Aristotle's Philosophy of Action (review)

Book Reviews David Charles. Aristotle's Philosophy of Action. Ithaca: CorneU University Press, x984. Pp. xi + ~8~. $39.95. This is an ambitious book. To arrive at a comprehensive picture, Charles, drawing material primarily from the Physics, the De Motu Animalium, and the Ethics, explores the meaning of numerous passages and determines their implications for Aristotle's philosophy of action. Moreover, he frames the questions he directs at Aristotle's text to reflect current developments in the theory of action. The first chapter provides the ontological foundation for the analysis developed in subsequent chapters. Just as an ontology of events figures importantly in modern theories, an ontology of processes (kineseis)figures prominently in Charles' reading of Aristotle. Having defined the notion of process, Charles turns in the second chapter to the specification of necessary and sufficient conditions for Z's being a voluntary action and Z's being a basic act token. Then he takes up Aristotle's concept of desire and its role in deliberation. The third and fourth chapters discuss acras/a. On several recent accounts of practical reasoning, acras/a is problematic because the acratic act violates a principle of choice recognized by the theory, namely, the identity, the sufficiency or the uniqueness thesis. Charles' Aristotle does not endorse any of these principles. His notion of practical deliberation is such that a rational agent can conclude that x is best but intentionally do Y instead of X. Charles argues in the final chapter that Aristotle envisages several levels of explanation of human action (viz., a teleological, a rational, a psychophysical causal and a physical causal level). The different levels are consistent with each other but since the lower levels are only "non-causally sufficient" for the higher levels, the latter cannot be eliminated in favor of the former. At the level of physical explanation, Aristotle is a materialist; at the teleological level he is a non-reductionist. Charles is determined to map out Aristotle's views on a grid provided by contemporary philosophy of action, and therein lies the book's greatest strength. No other author has made a similar global effort to articulate and explicate Aristotle's analyses of processes, types of action, practical reasoning and acras/a in terms of modern theory. This approach often yields stimulating comparisons; it leads, for example, to the finding that Aristotelian process theory provides an appealing alternative to Davidson's analysis of events and to the rival account of Goldman. This programmatic approach, however, sometimes obscures the issues and produces troublesome interpretations. The obscurity is largely the result of Charles' [441] 442 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:3 JULY I987 style. He assumes familiarity with both the Aristotelian corpus and modern theory of action and thus he plunges into the discussion of technical questions without providing sufficient background for many readers. Equally troublesome is his expropriation of the diverse formulae employed by modern philosophers, which results in the use of a large number of quite different schemas to express Aristotle's thought. Furthermore , in order to find modern analogues, Charles ascribes certain positions to Aristode which are not likely to bear careful scrutiny. The attribution of equivalence class materialism to Aristotle falls in this category as does the separation of valuational from motivational factors in practical deliberation. At a later stage of the conversation, Charles tends to transform ideas introduced earlier and this too threatens the cogency of some of his conclusions. For instance, the difference between a basic and a non-basic action seems at first to follow from the identification of the former with a process and the latter with an activity, but this line of argument is jettisoned when certain processes are subsequently classified as nonbasic acts. Another case in point is the description of the practical syllogism in the second chapter and the explanation of acras/a in the third and fourth chapters. The initial account makes desire a mode of accepting the conclusion of a practical syllogism which issues in an action. However, in the case of acrasia, even though the acratic agent has drawn the conclusion that doing X is better than Y, she/he employs a second practical syllogism, concludes...

IMPLICATIONS OF “QUANTITATIVE REVOLUTION” IN GEOGRAPHY

Purpose of this article is to examine philosophical implication of the “qunatitative revolution”. The paper is divided into three sections. ; first, the philoso-methodological implications of “qunatitative revolution” are identified. ; second, the traditional dicho-tomism of nomothetic-idiographic approaches is rejected because of obsolescence of the uniqueness thesis ; third as a substitution of the dichotomy, the paired concepts, “universal, abstract individual, concrete”, which show the two different geographer's concerns are introduced, and the philosophical implications of “revolution” are examined in terms of each of those concerns. Main points of arguments addressed in the paper are as follows; 1) The so-called “qunatitative revolution” provided us various useful mathematical-quantitative techniques, it aimed, however, essentially to reformulate our discipline with introduction of the so-called scientific method. 2) So that, the “qunatitative revolution” should be considered not only from the techni-cal viewpoint, but also from the methodological one. 3) The attempt of reformulation started from Schaefer (1953) who criticized the Het-tner-Hartshorne type of idiographic approach and completed by Harvey (1969) via Bunge (1962). 4) The “classical” geographers considered as Wrigley (1965) pointed it out, that the ultimate goal of the discipline was to find a set of laws which governed geographical phe-nomena, and they had conviction that there was no difference methodologically between what would now be called the social and the physical sciences. Thus, the recent attempt by Schaefer, Punge and Harvey can be considered a revival of the “classical” paradigm of the discipline.5) The trend was often expressed as the change from the nomothetic to the idiographic approach, but the traditional dichotomy of “nomothetic idiographic” is not adequate for describing the present situation. Because those concepts are already obsolete by rejection of the so-called uniqueness thesis and are not suitable to express the alternative concerns of the present geographers. 6) Therefore, the paired concepts, “uiversal, abstract individual, concrete” would be suggested to adopt for describing the present geographer's concerns. 7) we should keep it in our mind that we can not make any reasonable statement on our experiences without generalization, and that we are always seeking some kind of the regularity in our experiences. In terms of generalization and seeking the regularity, there-fore, there is no difference between the universal, abstract and the individual, concrete approaches. 8) There is, however, a definite difference between the universal statement (it should be abstract) and the individual one (it should be concrete). The geographers who have interest in the former are necessarily oriented to build “theory” and those who are concer-ned with the latter become “facts” oriented. Orientations toward theory and facts, often sited as though, they are complimentary are essentially contradicted with each other as like as figure and background. 9) Harvey (1969) wrote that his book concerned with methodology rather than with philosophy, but in his arguments on the methodology of science, the author seems to impli-citly assume that geographers are solely concerning with the universal, abstract statements. But we can not neglect that good many geographers are actually concerning the individual and concrete cases at least under the present circumstance. In this sense, Harvey (1969) raised the important philosophical issues which involve the arguments on the purpose or aimes of the geography.

Walt Whitman's Intuition of Reality

Previous articleNext article No AccessWalt Whitman's Intuition of RealityMaximilian BeckMaximilian Beck Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 53, Number 1Oct., 1942 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/290317 Views: 3Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.