Anthony O'Hear

Minds and persons

1. Perceptual, reflective and affective consciousness as existence Ted Honderich 2. The domain of folk psychology Jose Luis Bermudez 3. Minds, persons and the unthinkable D. Z. Phillips 4. Moderately massive modularity Peter Carruthers 5. A theory of phenomenal concepts Michael Tye 6. Free will and the burden of proof William G. Lycan 7. Materialism and the first person Geoffrey Madell 8. Language, belief and human beings David Cockburn 9. Human minds David Papineau 10. Non-personal minds Stephen R. L. Clark 11. Personal agency E. J. Lowe 12. Mental substances Tim Crane 13. Mind and illusion Frank Jackson.

Logic, Thought and Language

1. What logic should we think with? R. M. Sainsbury 2. Mental representation and mental presentation Gregory McCulloch 3. Self-knowledge, normativity and construction Julia Tanney 4. The normativity of meaning Alan Millar 5. Two theories of names Gabriel M. A. Segal 6. Relativism and classical logic Crispin Wright 7. Principles for possibilia Christopher Peacocke 8. What are these familiar words doing here? A. W. Moore 9. Particular thoughts and singular thought M. G. F. Martin 10. Conditional belief and the Ramsey Test Scott Sturgeon 11. Necessary existents Timothy Williamson 12. Ambiguity and belief S. G. Williams 13. Basic logical knowledge Bob Hale 14. Freges target Charles Travis.

Philosophy and Educational Policy

There is a country where teachers have high status, and in which they have qualifications on a par with members of other respected profession. Parents and children have high aspirations and high expectations from education. Children are fully aware of the importance of hard and consistent work from each pupil. Schools open on 222 days in the year, and operate on the belief that all children can acquire the core elements of the core subjects. It is not expected that a class will have a tail. Those in danger of becoming part of an incipient tail have to make up work in their breaks or after school. If the worst comes to the worst poor pupils have to repeat a year, while those who are exceptionally able will move up a year. In the primary schools, children are kept as one large group whatever their individual ability. The teacher teaches the whole group, largely from a text book, though interspersing exposition with focused questioning and discussion, so as to ensure the matter in hand has been properly assimilated by all. Lessons last 40 minutes each, with frequent breaks for letting off steam, after which it is down to work again. Pupils are frequently tested and the school Principal makes a couple of unannounced checks on homework books each term. Secondary schools are selective (grammar, technical and secondary modern), allowing whole class teaching and whole class progression to predominate up to the end of schooling. The teacher indeed is in contact with the whole class for up to 80 per cent of the lesson time. While the school certainly does have non-academic aims, the focus is clearly on academic work. There is a conviction, shared by all involved, that the social and moral dimensions of the curriculum will tend to look after themselves and emerge as by-products of a properly conducted academic study.

Art and Technology: An Old Tension

This is not the first time the title ‘Art and Technology’ has been used, but to distinguish what I have to say from Walter Gropiuss Bauhaus exhibition of 1923, I am subtitling my paper ‘an old tension’, where the architect spoke of ‘a new unity’. In a way, Gropius has been proved right; the structures of the future avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy, the cathedrals of socialism, the corporate planning of comprehensive Utopian designs have all gone up and some come down. We have a mass media culture also largely made possible by technology. Corporatist architecture, whether statist ‘social housing’ or freemarket inspired, films, videos, modern recording and musical techniques are all due to technological advances made mostly this century. Only in a very puritanical sense could what has happened be thought of as inevitably bringing with it enslavement. All kinds of possibilities are now open to artists and architects, which would have been imaginable a few decades ago. No one is forced to use these possibilities in any specific way.

Philosophy – Wisdom or Technique?

Notice the key concepts: wonder, purification of emotion, piercing the blindness of activity, transcendent functions. There are echoes here of the Platonic doctrine of philosophy as the care of the soul, therapy, the turning of the soul from fantasy to reality. Education, says Plato (and not just philosophy), is the art of orientation, the shedding of the leaden weights which progressively weigh us down as we become more and more sunk in the material world and the world of desire, eating and similar pleasures and indulgences. All this is in the context of the Cave, and a form of vision which is to become able to bear ‘the sight of real being and reality at its most bright… which is a form of goodness’.

Prospects for beauty

Ruskin said ‘Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Nor one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.’

‘Two Cultures’ Revisited

Vanity of Science Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science. (Pascal, Pensees, No. 23)

The real or the Real? Chardin or Rothko?

I will begin by considering some themes from Prousts wonderful essay on Chardin, Chardin and Rembrandt (Proust, 1988). Proust speaks of the young man ‘of modest means and artistic taste’, his imagination filled with the splendour of museums, of cathedrals, of mountains, of the sea, sitting at table at the end of lunch, nauseated at the ‘traditional mundanity’ of the unaesthetic spectacle before him: the last knife left lying on the half turned-back table cloth, next to the remains of an underdone and tasteless cutlet. He cannot wait to get up and leave, and if he cannot take a train to Holland or Italy, he will at least go to the Louvre to have sight of the palaces of Veronese, the princes of van Dyck and the harbours of Claude. Doing this will, of course, make his return to his home and its familiar surroundings seem yet more drab and exasperating.