What 4′33″ Is

What is John Cage's 4′33″? This paper disambiguates this question into three sub-questions concerning, respectively, the work's ontological nature, the art form to which it belongs, and the genre it is in. We shall see that the work's performances consist of silence (rather than containing environmental sounds), that it is a work of performance art (rather than music), and that it belongs to the genre of conceptual art. Seeing the work in these ways helps us to understand it better, and promises to assuage somewhat the puzzlement and irritation of those who are at first resistant to its charms.     

大音希声与《4′33″》哲理内涵的异同

大音希声,是中国古代文艺理论中的一种美学观念,为老子所提出,语出<道德经>:大方无隅,大器晚成.大音希声,大象无形.又说:听之不闻名日希.老子认为最美的音乐是自然无声之乐,而非人为的部分之美,这与他的道可道,非常道;名可名,非常名的见解以及他的无为自化的思想是完全一致的.<4′3″>是20世纪美国先锋派音乐中心人物约翰·凯奇的一部重要作品,颇符合大音希声的境界.大音希声与<4′33″>似乎是有着一种相同的艺术美学构思,但从哲理内涵的角度仔细分析,我们就会发现,他们存在着本质上的不同.     

Is schizotypy taxonic? Response to

Beauchaine, Lenzenweger, and Waller (2008) criticize our taxometric study of schizotypy (Rawlings, Williams, Haslam, & Claridge, in press) on a variety of methodological and philosophical grounds. We argue that their critique selectively applies more stringent standards to our work than to studies supporting their view that schizotypy is taxonic (i.e., categorical). Many of their criticisms apply at least equally to existing studies that offer support for a schizotypy taxon, and these studies are vulnerable to biases favouring taxonic conclusions that were controlled for in our study. Contrary to their criticisms, we did not claim to have disconfirmed previous taxonic findings about schizotypy, and our findings positively support dimensional models of schizotypy rather than merely being null results. Similarly, our findings are not artefacts of the sampling or measurement decisions that they question. Even well-replicated taxometric findings are not immune to empirical challenge, and evaluation of such challenges must be even-handed.     

What Makes an Intuition a Compatibilist Intuition? A Response to Sripada

So-called “manipulation arguments” have played a significant role in recent debates between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Incompatibilists take such arguments to show that agents who lack ultimate control over their characters or actions are not free. Most compatibilists agree that manipulated agents are not free but think this is because certain of the agent’s psychological capacities have been compromised. Chandra Sekhar Sripada has conducted an interesting study in which he applies an array of statistical tools to subjects’ intuitive responses to a manipulation case, and he insists that the results of his study provide compelling evidence that people favor compatibilist views of freedom. I argue that because the case that forms the centerpiece of his study is relevantly different from the sort of cases incompatibilists have developed and because he fails to build deterministic conditions into this case, Sripada’s data cannot help settle the disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists.     

Response to A Different Vantage Point Commentary: Psychotherapeutic Genetic Counseling,Is it?

Whether genetic counseling is a form of psychotherapy is open for debate. Early practicioners in genetic counseling described it as such, and this claim has been replicated in recent publications. This commentary is a rebuttal to the claim that genetic counseling is distinct from psychotherapty. We argue that it is a a form of psychoterapy that aims to help clients manage a health threat that affects their psychological wellbeing, paralleling the goals of psychotherapy.     

What Influences Audience Response to Figure Painting?

The Psychological Record - According to Mechner (2017), the aesthetic response is characterized by a “surprise-tinged” emotion that has no immediate function and tends to be...     

Which God? What Power? A Response to Andrew H. Gleeson

Andrew H. Gleeson has written an essay commenting on an exchange between Dewi Z. Phillips and me, arguing that I was mistaken to dismiss Phillips’ criticism of the standard definition of omnipotence as unsuccessful. Furthermore, he charges Swinburne, me, and analytic theists in general, with an excessive anthropomorphism that obliterates the distinction between Creator and creature. In response, I contend that all of Gleeson’s criticisms are unsound.     

Arrested Histories: A Response to Françoise Davoine

This commentary examines the psychoanalytic drama narrated by Françoise Davoine in terms of the dream at its crossroads: a site within the analysis (and its dramatic narrative) in which the dead and the living change places and the untold stories of the patient's and analyst's mothers begin to emerge. Davoine's narrative recounts the emergence of a language in which the hidden stories become entangled with each other as well as the breakdown of signification in which an uninscribed history appears on the scene. Ultimately the analysis turns around an arrest of signification, a form of madness that reveals the violent history at the heart of the exchanges enacted in the analytic encounter. This is also the point, I suggest, at which the possibility of a new relation to history and a new form of address open up.     

Infinitism Redux? A Response to Klein

Foundationalist, Coherentist. Skeptic etc., have all been united in one respect—all accept epistemic justification cannot result from an unending, and non-repeating. chain of reasons. Peter Klein has recently challenged this minimal consensus with a defense of what he calls "Intinitism"—the position that justification can result from such a regress. Klein provides surprisingly convincing responses to most of the common objections to Infinitism, but I will argue that he fails to address a venerable metaphysical concern about a certain type of regress. My conclusion will be that until Klein answers these metaphysical worries he will not have restored Infinitism as a viable option in epistemology.