Newly Published: Jeremy Bentham and Australia (Edited by Tim Causer, Margot Finn, and Philip Schofield, UCL Press), Free for Download @TimCauser @ElCatHome @UCLpress

 New Publication

Jeremy Bentham and Australia is a collection of scholarship inspired by Bentham’s writings on Australia. These writings are available for the first time in authoritative form in Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia, a volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham published by UCL Press.

 

In the present collection, a distinguished group of authors reflect on Bentham’s Australian writings, making original contributions to existing debates and setting agendas for future ones. In the first part of the collection, the works are placed in their historical contexts, while the second part provides a critical assessment of the historical accuracy and plausibility of Bentham’s arguments against transportation from the British Isles. In the third part, attention turns to Bentham’s claim that New South Wales had been illegally founded and to the imperial and colonial constitutional ramifications of that claim. Here, authors also discuss Bentham’s work of 1831 in which he supports the establishment of a free colony on the southern coast of Australia. In the final part, authors shed light on the history of Bentham’s panopticon penitentiary scheme, his views on the punishment and reform of criminals and what role, if any, religion had to play in that regard, and discuss apparently panopticon-inspired institutions built in the Australian colonies.

 

This collection will appeal to readers interested in Bentham’s life and thought, the history of transportation from the British Isles, and of British penal policy more generally, colonial and imperial history, Indigenous history, legal and constitutional history, and religious history.

The book is edited by Tim Causer, Margot Finn, and Philip Schofield.

Jeremy Bentham and Australia: Convicts, Utility, and Empire (UCL Press) is free for download at this link. 

 

Fischer and Fredericks on The Creeps as a Moral Emotion

Jeremy Fischer, Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Rachel Fredericks, Ball State University, have published The Creeps as a Moral Emotion in Ergo, at 191 (2020). Here is the abstract.

Creepiness and the emotion of the creeps have been overlooked in the moral philosophy and moral psychology literatures. We argue that the creeps is a morally significant emotion in its own right, and not simply a type of fear, disgust, or anger (though it shares features with those emotions). Reflecting on cases, we defend a novel account of the creeps as felt in response to creepy people. According to our moral insensitivity account, the creeps is fitting just when its object is agential activity that is insensitive to basic moral considerations. When, only when, and insofar as someone is disposed to such insensitivity, they are a creep. Such insensitivity, especially in extreme forms, raises doubts about creeps’ moral agency. We distinguish multiple types of insensitivity, respond to concerns that feeling the creeps is itself objectionable, and conclude with a discussion of epistemic issues relating to the creeps.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Papers: Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence @thePJCV

Call for Papers

Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence (PJCV)

Special Edition on Conflict and Violence in Plato’s Philosophy

Edited by Joan-Antoine Mallet (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)

We invite contributions dealing with all facets of conflict and violence in Plato’s philosophy. A variety of philosophical perspectives are welcome, including history of philosophy, continental tradition, phenomenology, analytical philosophy, non-Western philosophy, and theology. We are also interested in approaches from other fields in relation to Platonic philosophy as history, anthropology, archeology and philology. We are looking for global analyses of conflict and violence in Plato’s work and/or particular studies focused on one or a few dialogues. The selected articles will be published by Trivent Publishing in December 2020.

Possible general topics include, but are not restricted to, the following:

●    Sources and influences of Plato’s conception of conflict and violence (Homer, Hesiod, Presocratics …)
●    Socrates, crime, conflict and violence
●    Plato and the Sophists about crime and violence
●    Plato’s politics and ethics
●    Plato’s conception of war (polemos and stasis)
●    Plato’s critical approaches of political violence
●    Plato’s views about crime and retribution
●    Plato’s view about potential way of solving conflicts
●    Plato’s conception of sacrifice
●    Violence and myths in Plato’s work
●    Plato’s metaphysics and ontology
●    Plato’s epistemology
●    Plato’s aesthetics
●    Conflict and violence in Neoplatonism
●    Influence of Plato’s legacy on philosophical interpretations of conflict and violence

Deadlines

Those interested in contributing to this issue should submit an abstract of 100–250 words to Joan-Antoine Mallet at joan.mallet@trivent-publishing.eu and Andreas Wilmes at andreas.wilmes@trivent-publishing.eu no later than April 1, 2020. Authors will be informed of acceptance by no later than May 1, 2020. Full papers should be submitted by June 15, 2020, be written in the PJCV template available on trivent-publishing.eu/pjcv.html, and have a maximum of 20 pages.

"The Good Place"'s Good Profs--Philosophically Speaking @chronicle @CQuintanaDC @UCLA @ClemsonUniv

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, a discussion of the profs who help the TV series The Good Place find its philosophical footing. 

Olson on Reading, Consciousness, and Rationality: A New Book from Cambridge University Press

David R. Olson, University of Toronto, has published The Mind on Paper: Reading, Consciousness and Rationality (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Here is a description, from the publisher's website, of the book's contents.

Although the importance of literacy is widely acknowledged in society and remains at the top of the political agenda, writing has been slow to establish a place in the cognitive sciences. Olson argues that to understand the cognitive implications of literacy, it is necessary to see reading and writing as providing access to and consciousness of aspects of language, such as phonemes, words and sentences, that are implicit and unconscious in speech. Reading and writing create a system of metarepresentational concepts that bring those features of language into consciousness as a subject of discourse. This consciousness of language is essential not only to acquiring literacy but also to the formation of systematic thought and rationality. The Mind on Paper is a compelling exploration of what literacy does for our speech and hence for our thought, and will be of interest to readers in developmental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and education.

Presents a general theory of how reading and writing invite a new and distinctive consciousness of language

Finds a significant place for writing in the cognitive and educational sciences

Shows that the 'reading wars' can be resolved by a better understanding of the role of metarepresentational knowledge in reading and learning to read

 

Struck on Divination and Human Nature

New from Princeton University Press: Peter T. Struck, Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Divination and Human Nature casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination—the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. In this book, Peter Struck reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact—that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights—and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, Struck demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, Struck notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, Divination and Human Nature illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.

Peter T. Struck is Evan C. Thompson Term Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Via @curtisfrye.

Cross-posted to the Law and Magic Blog.

Poetics and Politics: A New Journal Devoted To Philosophy

A new journal, Poetics and Politics: A Journal for Humane Philosophy.

 In the current volume:


Articles by:

Paul M. Dowling, 'England's Re-formation in King Henry VIII' Full Article PDF

Patrick Martin, 'The Measure of Justice: Isabella’s Recusancy and Two Royal Couples' Full Article PDF |
Martin Thibodeau, 'Hegel on Intention, Action, and Tragedy' Full Article PDF |

Nikolas Prassas, 'Beauty and Theoria in Ruskin's Modern Painters' Full Article PDF |

Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode, 'The Possibility of Christian Tragedy' Full Article PDF |