Gabriel Herkenhoff Coelho Moura

After nearly being killed off by CDs in the 1980s and 1990s, and despite the rise of streaming services like Spotify, vinyl records have had a major resurgence this century. Although nearly half of all records are purchased from online retailers and big-box stores, roughly half are bought at independent record shops, even though they are typically more expensive there. We believe one major reason for this is that record shops offer us aesthetic rewards that online retailers and megastores do not. In this paper, we will examine the aesthetic value of record shops. Skeptics may think that their value owes largely to the music they sell, the nostalgia they can induce, or the social status they can confer. While we agree that these values play some role in explaining contemporary interest in record shops, we argue that they are valuable for a number of other distinctively aesthetic reasons. First, record shops function as aesthetic institutions that are objects of appreciation in their own right. Second, record shops afford worthwhile participatory experiences of an aesthetic nature. Finally, the experiences that one has at record shops may ultimately enhance one’s appreciation of the music one listens to at home.

Patrick Hassan's book traces Nietzsche's engagement with pessimism from its onset prior to the writing of BT, through the change of HH, and into his later works. The book's governing aims are to clarify what the term "pessimism" applied to in German intellectual life of the 1860s to 1880s and to establish that Nietzsche's understanding of and reaction to pessimism is not all about Schopenhauer. As the progenitor of philosophical pessimism, Schopenhauer naturally figures prominently in the book, but Hassan urges us throughout to remember that Nietzsche was living in the world of Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Bahnsen, Olga Plümacher, Agnes Taubert, Phillip Mainländer, and Eugen Dühring, that he read all these sources... Read More.

This book presents a detailed, up-to-date, and historically informed survey and critical explication of the deflationary approach to the topic of truth. It is divided into three parts. Part 1 explains what deflationism about truth involves and develops a useful framework that clarifies how this approach differs from the traditional, "inflationary" approach. The framework illuminates certain general deflationary themes in terms of what we call broad four-dimensional deflationism, which comprises four different dimensions that any deflationary account must satisfy. We first examine the degree to which each of these dimensions is displayed in early, "proto-deflationary" accounts. We then, while explaining the details and historical development of the different contemporary species of deflationism, assess the degree to which each version of them adheres to the deflationary dimensions, in addition to clarifying how each species differs from inflationism and how they all differ from one another. Part 2 of the book examines challenges to deflationism, systematizing them by considering the deflationary dimension that each targets and grouping the challenges in terms of them. For each challenge, this part explains its historical development and investigates the extent to which the most prominent contemporary deflationary accounts answer, or fail to answer, it. Part 3 of the book is an appendix that presents new directions for deflationism by developing a version of the approach that answers the challenges examined in Part 2. The three parts of the book together provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the challenges to and merits of the deflationary approach to truth.

Some kinds are both socially constructed and perceptible, such as gender and race. However, this gives rise to a puzzle that has been largely neglected in social constructionist accounts: how does culture shape and bias what we perceive? I argue that perceptual learning is the best explanation of our ability to perceive social kinds, in comparison to accounts that require a person acquire beliefs, theories, or concepts of the kind. I show how relatively simple causal factors known to influence perceptual learning in the laboratory can be extended to understand how culture shapes and biases perception. This account makes clear that the process of perceptual enculturation begins at a very early age, and does not in most cases require background beliefs on the part of the learner: the causal pathways by which perceptual learning occur suffice. It has significance for our understanding of how socially constructed kinds are culturally transmitted, as well as for how such kinds might be altered through interventions.

This volume explores the roles and uses of abstraction in scientific and artistic practice. Conceived as an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts across histories and philosophies of art and science, this collection of essays draws on the shared premise that abstraction is a rich and generative process, not reducible to the mere omission of details in a representation. When scientists attempt to make sense of complex natural phenomena, they often produce highly abstract models of them. In the history and philosophy of art, there is a long tradition of debate on the function of abstraction, and - more recently - its relation with theories of depiction. Adopting a process-oriented perspective, the chapters in this volume explore the epistemic potential of a diversity of practices of abstracting. The systematic analysis of a wide range of historical cases, from early twentieth-century abstractionist painting to contemporary abstract photography, and from nineteenth-century physics to recent research in biology and neurosciences, invites the reader to reflect on the material lives of abstraction through concrete artefacts, experimental practices and theoretical and aesthetic achievements. Abstraction in Science and Art: Philosophical Perspectives will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of science, and epistemology, as well as to historians of science and art, and to practicing artists and scientists interested in exploring foundational questions at the heart of the creative practice of abstracting.

Aesthetic preferences and practices vary widely between individuals and between cultures. How should aesthetics proceed if we take this fact of aesthetic diversity, rather than the presumption of aesthetic universality, as our starting point? How should we theorize the cultural origins and cultural basis of aesthetic diversity? How should we think about the value and normativity of aesthetic diversity? In an effort to model what the turn toward diversity might look like in aesthetic inquiry, each author defends a different account of aesthetic diversity, and they engage in a collective dialogue about these issues.

In this paper, I highlight the philosophical differences between Camus’s and Sartre’s notions of the absurd. “The absurd” is a technical term for both philosophers, and they mean different things by it. The Camusian absurd is a mismatch between theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning. The Sartrean absurd, in contrast, is our theoretical inability to explain contingency or existence. For Sartre, there is only relative, local absurdity; for Camus, the absurd is universal and absolute. I show how their different understandings of the absurd led to Sartre’s misreading of The Stranger; he misses its main mechanism for generating the feeling of the absurd because he reads the novel through his own conception. In order to draw out their philosophical differences, I will provide a reading of the novel that contrasts with Sartre’s.

From ancient conceptions of becoming a philosopher to modern discussions of psychedelic drugs, the concept of transformation plays a fascinating part in the history of philosophy. However, until now there has been no sustained exploration of the full extent of its role. Transformation and the History of Philosophy is an outstanding survey of the history, nature, and development of the idea of transformation, from the ancient period to the twentieth century. Comprising twenty-two specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into four clear parts: - Philosophy as Transformative: Ancient China, Greece, India, and Rome - Transformation Between the Human and the Divine: Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy - Transformation After the Copernican Revolution: Post-Kantian Philosophy - Treatises, Pregnancies, Psychedelics, and Epiphanies: Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Each of these sections begins with an introduction by the editors. Transformation and the History of Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in the history of western and non-western philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics. It will also be extremely useful for those in related disciplines such as religion, sociology, and the history of ideas.

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system.