Mannison's Impossible Dream

1976 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-542
Author(s):  
Peter Preuss

Alastair Hannay wrote that there is a campaign against the mental image and a look at the philosophical literature on that topic bears him out. But there is also a campaign against dreams. Given the first campaign this is not surprising. What is surprising is that they are separate campaigns. Intuitively mental images and dreams seem to be as alike as kittens and cats, the one being merely the developed form of the other, made possible by the fading of consciousness of the real world. One would think that an attack on the one is also an attack on the other, at least in the sense that an analysis of the one will, with modest modifications, also be an analysis of the other.But this seems not to be so. To say that a man who pictured his nursery was not a spectator of a resemblance of his nursery, but rather resembled a. spectator of his nursery, may have some initial plausibility because some people behave in curious ways at such times. But to say this of a person who dreamt of his nursery is simply nonsense.

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Glaz

Grounded in a rich philosophical and semiotic tradition, the most influential models of the linguistic sign have been Saussure’s intimate connection between the signifier and the signi-fied and Ogden and Richards’ semiotic triangle. Within the triangle, claim the cognitive lin-guists Radden and Kövecses, the sign functions in a metonymic fashion. The triangular semi-otic model is expanded here to a trapezium and calibrated with, on the one hand, Peirce’s conception of virtuality, and on the other hand, with some of the tenets of Langacker’s Cogni-tive Grammar. In conclusion, the question “How does the linguistic sign mean?” is answered thus: it means by virtue of the linguistic form activating (virtually) the entire trapezium-like configuration of forms, concepts, experienced projections, and relationships between all of the above. Activation of the real world remains dubious or indirect. The process is both meto-nymic and virtual, in the sense specified.


2004 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reva Brown ◽  
Sean McCartney

All too often discussion of Capability proceeds as if it is clear what ‘Capability’ is: and that all that is required is the ascertaining of means for developing it. This paper seeks to explore the meanings of Capability. It provides two broad meanings, and discusses the paradoxes inherent in the application of these to the real world of management and business. On the one hand, Capability is defined as Potential, what the individual could achieve. Potential is an endowment, which is realised by the acquisition of skills and knowledge, i.e. the acquisition of Content. On the other hand, Capability is defined as Content: what the individual can (or has learned to) do. This Content has been acquired by, or input into, the individual, who then has the Potential to develop further. So there are different routes to Capability, depending on the definition of Capability one chooses. All of this impinges on the development of Capability. This leads us on to a consideration of whether the ‘Development of Capability’ is a meaningful concept.


1976 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rondo Cameron

C P. Kindleberger once described economic history as “great fun” but not very useful for understanding what happens in the real world. W. N. Parker, on the other hand, doesn't regard it as at all amusing, but terribly important. Within that range, surely, each of us can locate his own ratio of practicality to enjoyment inherent in the pursuit of economic history. I myself was drawn to the study of economic history, even before I was aware of its existence—in fact, it was my youthful intention to invent the discipline—by two distinct motives. On the one hand, I wanted to enter (or create) a profession in which the work itself would yield intellectual pleasure. At the same time, having just lived through the longest depression in modern times and the most destructive war in history, I wanted to do something that would be useful to society. History, I knew, was interesting. Economics, I assumed, was important. I therefore resolved to give up the study of engineering, which had occupied me briefly before the war, and to create the new discipline of economic history. I was mildly surprised to discover upon enrolling in the Yale Studies for Returning Servicemen that the discipline did, indeed, already exist, and was, furthermore, ably represented at Yale by none other than Harold F. Williamson.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Rongkun Zhang

Conventional accounts of Zhuangzi’s concept of fate are limited to only a certain aspect of it. At the same time, they seem to be mutually contradictory. This essay investigates this concept afresh based on textual analysis and elucidates Zhuangzi’s real concerns about fate. This analysis reveals that Zhuangzi laid stress on the virtue demonstrated in confronting the unavoidable. More specifically, the important meaning of fate encompasses, on the one hand, a whole acceptance of the facts facing us by forgetting oneself, and on the other hand, responding positively to the facts by following the “Heavenly Way” until a spontaneous state is reached. We shall see as well how Zhuangzi’s views on the relation between Heaven and the Human, and on certain moral values, help to validate his theory on fate. Thus, through exploring his underlying thoughts and showing how their various aspects are logically connected, we shall show that Zhuangzi’s concept of fate is imbued with a humanistic spirit in the face of affairs in the real world.


2015 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 49-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kwiryna Handke

Semantic field of violet colors in the works of Stefan ŻeromskiThe analyzed vocabulary material originates from the works of Stefan Żeromski. The violet field comprises therein the colors named: violet, of the violet, lilac – which are used in different grammatical forms of type and numbers. There are no derivative forms of adverbs and verbs and there is no the lila lexeme.The author considers the vocabulary of this thematic field in its textual usages and context functions – as the result of Żeromski’s message – in order to show, on the one hand, how the writer looks at the real world and, on the other hand, the writer’s creations of the presented world.On the basis of the fragment of expanded colors appearing in Żeromski’s works, the author examines the degree of the writer’s artistic sensitivity and his creative opportunities in the use of colors – of the chosen field of colors. The author also examines relations between linguistic and physical indicators of colors, which were fixed in a given national language (including, inter alia, prototypes of colors), and simultaneously were reflected in the collection of texts of this writer.The above composes the background of Żeromski’s masterly abilities in the paintbrush creation of pictures with the help of linguistic and stylistic means.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Jonathan Gilmore

This chapter identifies a general dilemma in descriptive and explanatory claims about the arts. On the one side is the pull of continuity, in which responses to the contents of fictions and other imagined creations are said to be modeled (morally, affectively, epistemically) on responses to ordinary real-world states of affairs. On the other is the pull of discontinuity, in which such engagements are posed as offering potentially sui generis sorts of experiences that resist assimilation or reduction to those encountered in the everyday. This chapter identifies the place of the book’s discontinuity thesis within that general tension, and discusses the thesis’s main rivals: (1) those who argue that our affective states are not the same kind across encounters with fictions and the real world; and (2) those who argue for continuity or invariance of affective states across those contexts.


Author(s):  
Peters Anne

This chapter discusses fragmentation and constitutionalization—which are understood to be two trends in the evolution of international law. ‘Fragmentation’ has a negative connotation, and is used as a pejorative term (rather than diversity, specialization, or pluralism). ‘Constitutionalization’, in contrast, feeds on the positive ring of the concept of constitution. Both constitutionalization and fragmentation are terms that describe not only legal processes in the real world of law but are also labels for the accompanying discourses (mostly among academics, less so among judges, and even less so among political law-making actors). The putative trends so far do not have a clearly definable end-result, such as a completely fragmented international legal order on the one hand, or a world constitution on the other.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-100

There is an ambiguity in Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imaginary (1940). On the one hand, Sartre describes mental images as impoverished in contrast to the fullness and depth of the world of perception. On the other hand, Sartre identifies the imagination with human freedom, and in this sense the imaginary can be seen as an enrichment of the real. This paper explores this ambiguity and its import for understanding both racist and antiracist ways of relating to others. Part One explores Sartre’s argument for the “essential poverty” of the image through examples of racist images. Part Two discusses the enriching power of the imaginary for cultivating more just social and political arrangements in the context of racial oppression. Part Three argues that bad faith can take the form either of fleeing from reality into the impoverished world of the imaginary, or of failing to see the imaginary possibilities implicitly enriching the real.


2018 ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. E. Mamonov

Our analysis documents that the existence of hidden “holes” in the capital of not yet failed banks - while creating intertemporal pressure on the actual level of capital - leads to changing of maturity of loans supplied rather than to contracting of their volume. Long-term loans decrease, whereas short-term loans rise - and, what is most remarkably, by approximately the same amounts. Standardly, the higher the maturity of loans the higher the credit risk and, thus, the more loan loss reserves (LLP) banks are forced to create, increasing the pressure on capital. Banks that already hide “holes” in the capital, but have not yet faced with license withdrawal, must possess strong incentives to shorten the maturity of supplied loans. On the one hand, it raises the turnovers of LLP and facilitates the flexibility of capital management; on the other hand, it allows increasing the speed of shifting of attracted deposits to loans to related parties in domestic or foreign jurisdictions. This enlarges the potential size of ex post revealed “hole” in the capital and, therefore, allows us to assume that not every loan might be viewed as a good for the economy: excessive short-term and insufficient long-term loans can produce the source for future losses.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-47
Author(s):  
Julia Langkau

AbstractThis paper argues that we should distinguish two different kinds of imaginative vividness: vividness of mental images and vividness of imaginative experiences. Philosophy has focussed on mental images, but distinguishing more complex vivid imaginative experiences from vivid mental images can help us understand our intuitions concerning the notion as well as the explanatory power of vividness. In particular, it can help us understand the epistemic role imagination can play on the one hand and our emotional engagement with literary fiction on the other hand.


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