Abstract: This essay is about the relation between the expression and the arousal of emotion by music. I am assuming that music frequently expresses emotional qualities and qualities of human personality such as sadness, nobility, aggressiveness, tenderness, and serenity. I am also assuming that music frequently affects us emotionally: it evokes or arouses emotions in us. My question is whether there is any connection between these two facts, whether, in particular, music ever expresses emotion by virtue of arousing emotion. Of course, what it means to say that music expresses emotion is a contentious issue and I shall not be directly addressing it here, although what I say will have implications for any theory of musical expression. Nor will I be examining all the possible contexts in which music can be said to arouse emotion. My focus in this essay will be narrower. The question I shall try to answer is this: Are the grounds on which we attribute the expression of emotion to music ever to be identified with the arousal of that same emotion in listeners?

Abstract: We apply Carol Gilligan's distinction between a "male" mode of moral reasoning, focussed on justice, and a "female" mode, focussed on caring, to the reading of literature. Martha Nussbaum suggests that certain novels are works of moral philosophy. We argue that what Nussbaum sees as the special ethical contribution of such novels is in fact training in the stereotypically female mode of moral concern. We show this kind of training is appropriate to all readers of these novels, not just to women. Finally, we explore what else is involved in distinctively feminist readings of traditional novels

Publisher's Note: Jenefer Robinson takes the insights of modern scientific research on the emotions and uses them to illuminate questions about our emotional involvement with the arts. Laying out a theory of emotion supported by the best evidence from current empirical work, she examines some of the ways in which the emotions function in the arts. Written in a clear and engaging style, her book will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the emotions and how they work, as well as anyone engaged with the arts and aesthetics.

Abstract: In light of the enormous variety of poetic traditions we find around the world and across the ages, any attempt at finding a defining feature of poetry that would encompass all and only poems would seem to be in vain. What can Stabat Mater, Beat poetry, Shakespeare's sonnets, Goethe's Faust, and Japanese haiku possibly have in common? At-tempts to provide positive accounts, with necessary or sufficient reasons for what counts as a poem, often meet with the counterexamples that human creativity is wont to produce. Consider these excerpts from two twentieth-century poems. Are there any commonalities between the Georgian poet Galaktion Tabidze's 'Without Love' and the Mexican Octavio Paz's 'The Poet'? [transliterated:]usi Kvarulodmze ar sufevs ts-is kamaraze,sio ar dahqris, T-Ke ar krtebasasixarulod...El hombre es el alimento del hombre. El saber no es dis-tinto del so ?nar, el so ?nar del hacer. La poes ??a ha puestofuego a todos los poemas. Se acabaron las palabras, seacabaron las im ?agenes. Abolida la distancia entre el nom-bre y la cosa, nombrar es crear, e imaginar, hacer.1Aside from being literary texts, at first glance the similarities are hard to find. Even line breaks, a feature we typically associate with poetry, are ab-sent in Paz's prose poem. Neither is there a rhyme scheme in it as we find in the Georgian example(abca), which also combines the rhymes with specific line lengths. The passage from Paz's poem is filled with metaphors ('Man is the food of man,' 'to name is to create'), whereas Tabidze's has no metaphors (though there is imagery in it: 'the sun does not shine in the heavenly spheres'). In view of such dissimilarities, even those who are most familiar with the art form have shied away from drawing strict boundaries between poetry and other types of verbal art. Thus Robert Pinsky, a former laureate poet, says he 'will be content...to accept a social, cultural definition of poetry: poetry is what a bookstore puts in the section of that name.'2It barely needs remarking that such a definition is inappropriate on many levels; I will note only that it leads to a regress that, while not infinite, would likely land us back precisely at the doors of people like Pinsky himself, that is, poets, inasmuch as bookstores follow rather than create the categories under which they sort their books. In a recent article, Robert Pierce examined six contenders for a defining criterion of poetry: rhythm, imagery, beauty, unity, strangeness or playfulness, and ineffability of meaning.3None of these, he argues, does the job of separating poetry from other literary arts: there is no 'essential core of meaning' of the word 'poetry,' nor a 'clearly delimited entity that is poetry' according to Pierce.4While rhythm, imagery, and so forth may be typical features found in poems, none of them is necessary or sufficient for a text to count as one. Rather, he says: 'What the term 'poetry' refers to is a group of publicly visible things in the social world that we call 'poems.''5Hence all we can do is see what these things are and learn to use the term on the basis of how newly encountered texts resemble them. I will not review Pierce's arguments for a family-resemblance approach to poetry here. I agree with him that none of the features he considers passes muster as a characteristic all and only poems must have. Nevertheless, even if we fail to find a feature intrinsic to poems that will set them apart from other forms of literature, we may still be able to accomplish our definitional goal on the basis of a relational feature. I will rather argue for a historically-grounded poetic intention, one that I believe will provide us with the necessary and sufficient conditions for a satisfactory definition of poetry. If my definition is right, it will in addition provide a partial explanation for what is the ubiquitous characteristic of all poetries of the world - the use of repetition devices.

Abstract: In recent year a growing number of political philosophers have expressed worries about the nature of ideal theory and its dominance in the literature on social justice. Differently, in the post-Rawlsian literature on theories of justice, most of the work done by mainstream political theorists and philosophers is part of what is known as 'ideal theory'.

Abstract: Some claims about poems are uncontroversial: that a poem is composed in dactylic hexameter, as in Homer's epics, or in iambic pentameter, as in Shakespeare's sonnets, or in no particular traditional meter, as in most of e. e. cummings's work; that it rhymes following an abab pattern or that it does not; that it is very long, very short, or any length in between; that it employs sophisticated diction, archaic language, or common everyday words; that its similes and metaphors are novelor clich ?e. Such claims may easily be ascertained by those able to count syllables, those able to distinguish the stressed syllables from the unstressed dones, and those familiar with the varieties of poetic meter; by those able to tell whether two or more words sound alike; by those able to distinguish different text lengths; by those able to recognize when words are of the garden-variety kind. Except for familiarity with the kinds of poetic meter, 'those' are most of us. We may call these 'base,' 'lower level,' or 'structural' properties. At another level of description, poems may be tightly knit, unified, balanced, heavy and somber, light and jolly, and so on. The attributions in this case are still descriptive, but an evaluative judgment may be embedded in them, or it may be typically taken to be embedded, or intended to be embedded, in them. That is, a positive or negative valence may sometimes accompany the judgment that a poem is unified and balanced: one may find it good or bad in virtue of those characteristics (though one may also find it good or bad regardless of those characteristics). Further, justifications of why a poem is unified, balanced, and so on are made by reference to the qualities specified at the first level of description: it is unified because all the parts fit well together in some manner. We may call these 'aesthetic attributions'; as Jerrold Levinson puts it, here we have 'an overall impression afforded, an impression that cannot simply be identified with the structural properties that underpin it.' At a third level still, and in part in virtue of facts at the previous two levels, poems may be beautiful, terrific, or horrendously bad: here we have wholly evaluative attributions, or aesthetic judgments properly so-called. Note how there isan inverse proportion in informative value be-tween base properties and aesthetic judgments: base properties are informative about a work ('is in iambic pentameter') but not aesthetically evaluative and thus not aesthetically informative; aesthetic evaluations ('is beautiful') are aesthetically informative, but tell us nothing about the specific characteristics of a work. Aesthetic attributions fall in the middle also in that they may retain some of the informative value of either extreme: they may be somewhat structurally informative and some what aesthetically informative ('unified'). If it is true that these three levels are at once distinguishable and intrinsically related, some questions one may ask are: How are they related? How is our perception of a set of words arranged in a certain cadence and with breaks visually or aurally marked related to our perceiving in the mor attributing to them a certain set of aestheticqualities? How do we go from characteristics such as 'has lines of eighteen syllables, where a marked syllable is followed by two unmarked ones throughout' to 'is tightly knit' to 'is beautiful'? In other words, how do we move from purely descriptive attributes to aesthetic and evaluative ones? Anyone may count syllables, and most of us can more or less tell when a syllable is stressed relative to another that precedes or follows it. We may likewise be able to judge whether a metaphor is unusual or not simply by recalling whether we have heard anything like it in the past, or how unlike each other the terms of comparison are. That assessment may be accompanied by approval or disapproval; in itself it need not express either ('That's a novel metaphor: it is awful' is a perfectly sensible statement). Finally, when we move to 'beautiful' and 'moving,' we are making a judgment of taste: our approval is embedded in those terms. My concern in what follows is with the move from lower-level perceptual qualities to the attribution of aesthetic qualities. I am not concerned with how we go from there to an overall aesthetic evaluation. In my proposal, I question the much discussed wisdom handed down to us by Frank Sibley. I am referring to Sibley's famous claim, defended in 'Aesthetic Concepts' and related articles, that we are never, in any art form, warranted in making the (logical) jump from the description of non aesthetic properties to the ascription of aesthetic ones. In his words, Sibley claimed that 'there are no non aesthetic features which serve in any circumstances as logically sufficient conditions for applying aesthetic terms.' We cannot, for instance, go from 'employ[s] bright colors' to 'is lively and vigorous,' the way we can go from 'unmarried male' to 'bachelor' or from 'enclosed figure with four equal sides and four right angles' to 'square.' Surely we cannot, but why should anyone have thought otherwise? Aesthetic qualities are qualities, not concepts. As an attribute, 'graceful' more closely resembles 'hot' than it does 'square.' There is no reason to expect a one-to-one relationship between base properties and aesthetic attributions, but there is good reason to expect that a range of properties is clearly associated with a range of attributions, just as a range of temperatures is associated with feeling cold. Sibley also claimed that no particular base property or set thereof is necessary for any given aesthetic concept to apply. This is because things may have the same aesthetic quality for different reasons: 'one thing is graceful because of these features, another because of those, and so on almost endlessly.' I do not question whether Sibley's claims are defensible when it comes to vases, paintings, sculptures, or sonatas; indeed, his view is compelling as a general rule. However, it seems to me that some varieties of poetry provide, not an exception to Sibley's rule - I am not claiming logical entailments here, nor do I think any- one could - but evidence for what may be called a 'defeasible guarantee.' In at least some kinds of formal poetry, there is a sense in which a description in nonaesthetic terms sometimes ought to suffice, in virtue of what we may call 'psychoaesthetic' associations between the perception of formal features and felt aesthetic qualities, for the attribution of an aesthetic quality. Accordingly, my first goal in what follows is to show in what way I think it is sufficient and to provide some examples in support of that connection. I hope that from this it emerges that Sibley was wrong to hold that unless their relationship is a logicoconceptual one, no base properties ever suffice to warrant the ascription of an aesthetic quality.

Abstract: Representationalist solutions to the qualia problem are motivated by two fundamental ideas: first, that having an experience consists in tokening a mental representation; second, that all one is aware of in having an experience is the intentional content of that representation. In particular, one is not aware of any intrinsic features of the representational vehicle itself. For example, when you visually experience a red object, you are aware only of the redness of the object, not any redness or red quale of your experience. You are aware of outer red without being aware of inner red. According to the representationalist, the phenomenal character of your experience is just (an element of) the intentional content of your representation. In effect, inner red just is outer red. For her part, the defender of qualia, or anyway the defender of qualia who will figure in the present discussion, grants that experiencing a red object involves mentally representing it, and that when you have such an experience you are aware of its intentional content. But she denies that that intentional content exhausts your awareness. The defender of qualia (call her 'Quale') contends that your mental vehicle is itself mentally or phenomenally red, and that in addition to the outer redness of the object, you are aware of this inner redness, the intrinsic phenomenal character of your representational vehicle. Thus, contra the representationalist (call him 'Rep'), you are not aware of the content of your representation without being aware of its intrinsic features

Publisher's Note: The Blackwell Guide to Medical Ethics is a guide to the complex literature written on the increasingly dense topic of ethics in relation to the new technologies of medicine. Examines the key ethical issues and debates which have resulted from the rapid advances in biomedical technology Brings together the leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, medicine, theology and law, to discuss these issues Tackles such topics as ending life, patient choice, selling body parts, resourcing and confidentiality Organized with a coherent structure that differentiates between the decisions of individuals and those of social policy

Publisher’s Note:
Overview: Not focused on any one Upanishad in particular, it conveys the spirit in which the Upanishads were written and provides a short overview of their Metaphysics, Ethics and Epistemology.

Abstract: Is it morally permissible for me to have children? 1A decision to procreate is surely one of the most significant decisions a person can make. So it would seem that it ought not to be made without some moral soul-searching. There are many reasons why one might hesitate to bring children into this world if one is concerned about their welfare. Some are rather general, like the deteriorating environment or the prospect of poverty. Others have a narrower focus, like continuing civil war in Ireland, or the lack of essential social support for childrearing persons in the United States. Still others may be relevant only to individuals at risk of passing harmful diseases to their offspring. There are many causes of misery in this world, and most of them are unrelated to genetic disease. In the general scheme of things, human misery is most efficiently reduced by concentrating on noxious social and political arrangements. Nonetheless, we shouldn't ignore preventable harm just because it is confined to a relatively small corner of life. So the question arises: can it be wrong to have a child because of genetic risk factors?2Unsurprisingly, most of the debate about this issue has focused on prenatal screening and abortion: much useful information about a given fetus can be made available by recourse to prenatal testing. This fact has meant that moral questions about reproduction have become entwined with abortion politics, to the detriment of both. The abortion connection has made it especially difficult to think about whether it is wrong to Prevent a child from coming into being since doing so might involve what many people see as wrongful killing; yet there is no necessary link between the two. Clearly, the existence of genetically compromised children can be prevented not only by aborting already existing fetuses but also by preventing conception in the first place. Worse yet, many discussions simply assume a particular view of abortion, without any recognition of other possible positions and the difference they make in how people understand the issues. For example, those who object to aborting fetuses with genetic problems often argue that doing so would undermine our conviction that all humans are in some important senseequal.3 However, this position rests on the assumption that conception marks the point at which humans are endowed with a right to life. So aborting fetuses with genetic problems looks morally the same as killing "imperfect" people without their consent. This position raises two separate issues. One pertains to the legitimacy of different views on abortion. Despite the conviction of many abortion activists to the contrary, I believe that ethically respectable views can be found on different sides of the debate, including one that sees fetuses as developing humans without any serious moral claim on continued life. There is no space here to address the details, and doing so would be once again to fall into the trap of letting the abortion question swallow up all others. Fortunately, this issue need not be resolved here. However, opponents of abortion need to face the fact that many thoughtful individuals do not see fetuses as moral persons. It follows that their reasoning process and hence the implications of their decisions are radically different from those envisioned by opponents of prenatal screening and abortion. So where the latter see genetic abortion as murdering people who just don't mea-sure up, the former see it as a way to prevent the development of persons who are more likely to live miserable lives. This is consistent with a worldview that values persons equally and holds that each deserves high quality life. Some of those who object to genetic abortion appear to be oblivious to these psychological and logical facts. It follows that the nightmare scenarios they paint for us are beside the point: many people simply do not share the assumptions that make them plausible. How are these points relevant to my discussion? My primary concern here is to argue that conception can sometimes be morally wrong on grounds of genetic risk, although this judgment will not apply to those who accept the moral legitimacy of abortion and are willing to employ pre-natal screening and selective abortion. If my case is solid, then those who oppose abortion must be especially careful not to conceive in certain cases, as they are, of course, free to follow their conscrence about abortion. Those like myself who do not see abortion as murder have more ways to prevent birth.