Peter Milne

The visual arts operated as a touchstone for French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, influencing his thinking on everything from epistemology to politics. Building on the recent publication of a bilingual, six-volume edition of his writings on contemporary art and artists, this special issue of_ Cultural Politics_ provides a focus on Lyotard’s aesthetics. The issue includes a review of Lyotard’s writings on art, a discussion of his early figural aesthetics, and an essay on Lyotard’s little-known work, _Pacific Wall_, as well as two essays on Lyotard and music. Two previously untranslated works by Lyotard himself are also featured: the influential article “Argumentation and Presentation: The Crisis of Foundations” and the interview “What to Paint?,” given at the time of the publication of the book of the same name. Painter Leon Phillips, whose work embodies many of the attributes of painting that were most important to Lyotard, is the featured artist for the issue. Throughout, the contributors argue for the primary importance of aesthetics in understanding Lyotard’s thought. Peter W. Milne is Assistant Professor in the Department of Aesthetics at Seoul National University

According to the axiologist the value concepts are basic and the deontic concepts are derivative. This paper addresses two fundamental problems that arise for the axiologist. Firstly, what ought the axiologist o understand by the value of an act? Second, what are the prospects in principle for an axiological representation of moral theories. Can the deontic concepts of any coherent moral theory be represented by an agent-netural axiology: (1) whatever structure those concepts have and (2) whatever the causal structure of the world happens to be. We show that the answer is "almost always". The only substantive constraint is that autonomous moral agents cannot have the power to simultaneously block the options open to other autonomous moral agents. But this seems to be part and parcel of the notion of an autonomous moral agent.

This takes a little-known reading of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” by Lyotard as the starting point for an examination of the relation between body and law. Lyotard’s late notion of the intractable serves as a frame for this examination: explicitly claimed to be an absolute condition of morals, I argue it also has political implications, which are here drawn out through the link between the intractable and the body. In Lyotard’s later writings, the body is usually associated with an originary affectivity, which is sometimes equated with sexual difference but sometimes appears to come “before” and exceed this law of bodily differences. It is the latter case, I argue, that allows for a path to be opened beyond the bodily violence of the law to be found in Kafka, especially if this is framed in terms of a certain “politics of incommensurability.”

There are distinctive methodological and conceptual challenges in rare and severe event (RSE) forecast verification, that is, in the assessment of the quality of forecasts of rare but severe natural hazards such as avalanches, landslides or tornadoes. While some of these challenges have been discussed since the inception of the discipline in the 1880s, there is no consensus about how to assess RSE forecasts. This article offers a comprehensive and critical overview of the many different measures used to capture the quality of categorical, binary RSE forecasts – forecasts of occurrence and non-occurrence – and argues that of skill scores in the literature there is only one adequate for RSE forecasting. We do so by first focusing on the relationship between accuracy and skill and showing why skill is more important than accuracy in the case of RSE forecast verification. We then motivate three adequacy constraints for a measure of skill in RSE forecasting. We argue that of skill scores in the literature only the Peirce skill score meets all three constraints. We then outline how our theoretical investigation has important practical implications for avalanche forecasting, basing our discussion on a study in avalanche forecast verification using the nearest-neighbour method (Heierli et al., 2004). Lastly, we raise what we call the “scope challenge”; this affects all forms of RSE forecasting and highlights how and why working with the right measure of skill is important not only for local binary RSE forecasts but also for the assessment of different diagnostic tests widely used in avalanche risk management and related operations, including the design of methods to assess the quality of regional multi-categorical avalanche forecasts.

This paper responds to Rancière’s reading of Lyotard’s analysis of the sublime by attempting to articulate what Lyotard would call a “differend” between the two. Sketching out Rancière’s criticisms, I show that Lyotard’s analysis of the Kantian sublime is more defensible than Rancière claims. I then provide an alternative reading, one that frees Lyotard’s sublime from Rancière’s central accusation that it signals nothing more than the mind’s perpetual enslavement to the law of the Other. Reading the sublime through the figure of the “event,” I end by suggesting that it may even have certain affinities with what Rancière calls “politics.”

Taking as starting point two familiar interpretations of probability, we develop these in a perhaps unfamiliar way to arrive ultimately at an improbable claim concerning the proper axiomatization of probability theory: the domain of definition of a point-valued probability distribution is an orthomodular partially ordered set. Similar claims have been made in the light of quantum mechanics but here the motivation is intrinsically probabilistic. This being so the main task is to investigate what light, if any, this sheds on quantum mechanics. In particular it is important to know under what conditions these point-valued distributions can be thought of as derived from distribution-pairs of upper and lower probabilities on boolean algebras. Generalising known results this investigation unsurprisingly proves unrewarding. In the light of this failure the next topic investigated is how these generalized probability distributions are to be interpreted.

The validity of argument by disjunctive syllogism has been denied by proponents of relevant and paraconsistent logic. DS is stigmatised for its role in inferences — most notably C.I. Lewis's derivation of that fallacy of irrelevance ex falso quodlibet — that involve both it and other rules of inference governing disjunction, or, to speak more precisely, other rules of inference taken to apply to the very same disjunction that obeys DS. In avoiding these inferences the road less travelled is to deny the identity rather than to deny DS: what follows is, then, an exercise in disjoining disjunctions.

A conception of probability as an irreducible feature of the physical world is outlined. Propensity analyses of probability are examined and rejected as both formally and conceptually inadequate. It is argued that probability is a non-dispositional property of trial-types; probabilities are attributed to outcomes as event-types. Brier's Rule in an objectivist guise is used to forge a connection between physical and subjective probabilities. In the light of this connection there are grounds for supposing physical probability to obey some standard set of axioms. However, there is no a priori reason why this should be the case.

This article begins by exploring a lost topic in the philosophy of science:the properties of the relations evidence confirming h confirmsh'' and, more generally, evidence confirming each ofh1, h2, ..., hm confirms at least one of h1, h2,ldots;, hn''.The Bayesian understanding of confirmation as positive evidential relevanceis employed throughout. The resulting formal system is, to say the least, oddlybehaved. Some aspects of this odd behaviour the system has in common withsome of the non-classical logics developed in the twentieth century. Oneaspect – its ``parasitism'''' on classical logic – it does not, and it is this featurethat makes the system an interesting focus for discussion of questions in thephilosophy of logic. We gain some purchase on an answer to a recently prominentquestion, namely, what is a logical system? More exactly, we ask whether satisfaction of formal constraints is sufficient for a relation to be considered a (logical) consequence relation. The question whether confirmation transfer yields a logical system is answered in the negative, despite confirmation transfer having the standard properties of a consequence relation, on the grounds that validity of sequents in the system is not determined by the meanings of the connectives that occur in formulas. Developing the system in a different direction, we find it bears on the project of ``proof-theoretic semantics'''': conferring meaning on connectives by means of introduction (and possibly elimination) rules is not an autonomous activity, rather it presupposes a prior, non-formal,notion of consequence. Some historical ramifications are alsoaddressed briefly.