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7Wittgenstein, Human Beings and ConversationAnthem Studies in Wittgenstein. 2021.The papers in this volume can be roughly divided between?the philosophy of mind? and?the philosophy of language?. They are, however, united by the idea that this standard philosophical classification stands in the way of clear thinking about many of the core issues. With this, they are united by the idea that the notion of a human being must be central to any philosophical discussion of issues in this area, and by an insistence on an inescapably ethical dimension of any adequate discussion of th…Read more
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4Chapter 1. Rush Rhees: The reality of discourseIn John T. Edelman (ed.), Sense and reality: essays out of Swansea, Ontos Verlag. pp. 1-22. 2009.
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10Fatalism: thoughts about tomorrow's sea battlePhilosophy 94 (2): 295-312. 2019.The hold of the fatalistic reasoning that Aristotle criticizes is dependent, first, on the idea, articulated by Frege, that the real candidates for truth and falsity are something other than particular contingent happenings such as affirmations or thinkings, and, second, on the idea that the demand for speculative reflection overrides any demand for practical deliberation. Standard challenges to the reasoning embody the same presuppositions and so simply perpetuate the core confusions. They do s…Read more
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48Deirdre’s Smile: Names, Faces, and ‘the Simple Actuality’ of AnotherSophia 60 (1): 209-223. 2019.The paper explores what it could mean to speak of love as involving a delight in ‘the simple actuality’ of another, or, as Buber does, of the ‘touchable’ human being as ‘unique and devoid of qualities’. Developing strands in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of perception, it is argued that the relation between recognising this as a particular individual and recognising particular qualities in her may be close to the reverse of what might be supposed: a recognition of this distinctive smile being depend…Read more
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31Tense and emotionIn Robin Le Poidevin (ed.), Questions of time and tense, Oxford University Press. pp. 77--91. 1998.
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O'HEAR, ANTHONY The Elements of Fire: Science, Art and the Human World (review)Philosophy 64 (n/a): 272. 1989.
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13The Element of Fire: Science, Art and the Human World By Anthony O'Hear London: Routledge, 1988, 178 pp., £19.95 (review)Philosophy 64 (248): 272-. 1989.
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24In the Beginning Was the DeedPhilosophical Investigations 36 (4): 303-319. 2013.Winch's readings of Wittgenstein and Weil call for a significant rethinking of the relation between “metaphysics” and “ethics.” But there are confusions, perhaps to be found in all three of these writers, that we may slip into here. These are linked with the tendency to see idealist tendencies in Wittgenstein, and with his remark that giving grounds comes to an end, not in a kind of seeing on our part, but in our acting. The sense that we think we see in this suggestion is dependent on a distort…Read more
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11Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Religion, Individuality and Philosophical MethodPhilosophical Books 31 (2): 82-83. 1990.
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9An introduction to the philosophy of mindPalgrave. 2001.This book differs from others by rejecting the dualist approach associated in particular with Descartes. It also casts serious doubt on the forms of materialism that now dominate English language philosophy. Drawing in particular on the work of Wittgenstein, a central place is given to the importance of the notion of a human being in our thought about ourselves and others.
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18Human Relationships By Paul Gilbert Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991, 164 pp., £35.00, £10.95 paper (review)Philosophy 67 (260): 262-. 1992.
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67Human beings and giant squids (on ascribing human sensations and emotions to non-human creatures)Philosophy 69 (268): 135-50. 1994.A television nature programme a year or two ago contained a striking sequence in which a giant squid was under threat from some other creature . The squid responded in a way which struck me immediately and powerfully as one of fear. Part of what was striking in this sequence was the way in which it was possible to see in the behaviour of a creature physically so very different from human beings an emotion which was so unambiguously and specifically one of fear
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Emotion, expression and conversationIn Ylva Gustafsson, Camilla Kronqvist & Michael McEachrane (eds.), Emotions and understanding: Wittgensteinian perspectives, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 126. 2009.
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80The Evidence for ReincarnationReligious Studies 27 (2). 1991.There are significant numbers of well-documented cases of the following general kind. At the age of 3 or 4 a child starts to make claims about his past which clearly do not correspond to anything that has happened in his present life. He claims to remember living in a certain place, doing certain things, being with certain people, and so on. It is then found that these memory claims fit the life of a person who died shortly before the child was born. The accuracy of the memory claims is striking…Read more
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39Other human beingsSt. Martin's Press. 1990.The author argues that a view of what a person is cannot be separated from our view of how another person is to be treated. What is needed is an acknowledgement of the tangible, persisting human being--a being with a distinctive bodily form and having its own distinctive kind of value--as a fundamental feature of our thought.
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135Language, belief and human beingsIn Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 141-157. 2001.We may think of the core of Cartesian dualism as being the thesis that each of us is essentially a non-material mind or soul: ‘non-material’ in the sense that it has no weight, cannot be seen or touched, and could in principle continue to exist independently of the existence of any material thing. That idea was, of course, of enormous importance to Descartes himself, and we may feel that having rejected it, as most philosophers now have, we have rejected what is of greatest philosophical signifi…Read more