8 How ‘Romantic’ is the Pavilion? At first glance the Pavilion's exoticism might seem to have a good deal to do with contemporary Romantic writers’ fascination with the Oriental and exotic. A widespread public interest in these modes put Byron's ‘Oriental tales’ and Thomas Moore's romance Lalla Rookh at the top of the bestseller lists. Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’, after all, is often regarded as the paradigmatic Romantic short poem. So, flouting the conventions of historians of architecture, who designate this p
7 Experiencing the exotic So far we have looked in some detail at the interiors of Nash's Pavilion, with the important exception of the Banqueting Room (decorated by Robert Jones) and the Music Room (decorated by Frederick Crace). Both were designed as coups de theatre and it is this aspect of these rooms that I'd like you to focus upon now. 6 The Pavilion and the picturesque Nash's evocation of the picturesque as an aesthetic to describe the projected exterior for the Pavilion is striking. If neoclassical Palladian houses had stood four-square in the landscape, rising up out of extensive lawns and commanding an elaborately naturalistic landscape of grazing sheep and cattle to the horizon diversified by an ornamental lake, the picturesque house was instead enfolded within and extended by its garden. Repton and Nash, in partnership from 1796 to 1802, were two 4 ‘Chinese’ on the inside Our evidence for the evolution of the Pavilion's interiors is largely derived from Augustus Pugin's watercolours of the building's interiors and exteriors, executed for a picture-book commissioned around 1820 by the house-proud prince from his architect John Nash, entitled Views of the Royal Pavilion, completed in 1826. On the whole, the Pavilion today has been restored to congruence with the Views, to appear as it did in 1823 when the building was finished. Let's now look at th 2 A prince at the seaside In this section we will take a closer look at the life of George IV and what brought him to Brighton. The Prince of Wales (see Figure 2), known familiarly to his friends as ‘Prinny’, was born in 1762 and destined to become Prince Regent in 1811 following the onset of the madness of his father, George III. He finally became George 6 Further reading For a more advanced introduction to the topic of consciousness, which includes an historical survey of philosophical and psychological work on the topic and a survey of recent debates, see: Güzeldere, G. (1997) ‘The many faces of consciousness: a field guide’, in N. Block, O. Flanagan and G. Güzeldere (eds), The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, pp. 1–67. (The collection in which this essay appears is a useful one, which reprints 4.5 The function of consciousness There is another problem I want to mention briefly. What is the function of consciousness? What difference does it make to have phenomenally conscious experiences? This may seem an odd question. Surely, the answer is obvious: the function of consciousness is to provide us with information about our environment – about colours, shapes, sounds and so on. But this is too swift. We do not need to have conscious experiences in order to acquire perceptual information about our enviro 4.3 The easy problems and the hard problem What implications do naturalism and strong naturalism have for the study of the mind? There are two. First, naturalists will deny the existence of souls, spirits and other psychic phenomena and maintain that the mind is part of the natural world, subject to natural laws. This view is shared by most modern philosophers of mind. Secondly, strong naturalists will hold that mental phenomena can be reductively explained in terms of processes in the brain, which can themselves be explained i 2.10 Section summary After setting aside ‘natural’ meaning as largely irrelevant to language (section 2.3), Grice attempts to define the (non-natural) meaning of utterances in terms of the content of the speakers’ psychological states, and in particular in terms of their intentions in performing those utterances. He reaches a final definition, which we called Grice 3, after two false starts (section 2.6). The meaning of expressions, or of sentences at least, is derivative, defined by him in terms of the mea 2.7 Expression meaning as defined by Grice Recall Step Two in the Gricean agenda: to define the meaning of expressions in terms of the meaning of individual utterances. Carrying out this strategy successfully would lend strong support to the thought that it is the mental states of speakers, rather than the meaning of expressions, that are the ultimate source of utterances’ meaning. 2.6 Which intentions? Grice makes three attempts to answer this last question. The second builds on the first; the third, which he proposes to adopt, builds on the second. In the next three activities, you will be asked to extract these attempts in turn, and appreciate the alleged shortcomings of the first two. 2.3 Grice on natural and non-natural meaning Ironically, the word ‘meaning’ has many different meanings. There are four occurrences of ‘mean’ (or ‘meaning’ or ‘meant’, etc.), italicised, in the following paragraph: Roberto's instructor had been mean to put it so bluntly, but she was probably correct that his short legs meant he would never be a great dancer. He turned into the narrow alleyway, meaning to take a shortcut ho 1.5 Some useful terminology and a convention It will be useful to end this section by establishing a simple convention and introducing some terminology. The convention has already been at work in this chapter, but has yet to be made explicit. It is a convention for marking the difference between using a word and mentioning it. Italy has a capital city, and the English language contains a word for that city, but the word and the city are distinct entities. When we are talking about the word rather than what the word i 1.1 Introduction One of the most impressive but puzzling capacities we have is the ability to represent the world around us, both in talking about it among ourselves and in thinking about it as individuals. When someone utters the sentence, ‘The German economy is bouncing back’, for example, they are able to convey to their audience something about the German economy. Their utterance may be correct or it may be incorrect, but either way it is making a claim about how things are, and in this loose but intu Introduction This unit introduces key questions about language and thought, such as how can language, which is public and accessible, be used to convey thoughts, which seem hidden from view. This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course Thought and experience: themes in the philosophy of mind (AA308). Acknowledgements This unit was written by Dr Sean Crawford
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reprodu References 7 Summary We have been primarily concerned to explore in a preliminary fashion the domain of the mental. We have looked briefly at various different kinds of actual and possible minds – normal and abnormal human minds, animal minds, angelic minds, and so on – and at the variety of mental phenomena – thought, perception, sensation, emotion, etc. Describing what a mind might be like is partly a matter of describing the kinds of mental phenomena that the mind in question exhibits. Conceiving of what 5 Dispositions versus occurrences Another important distinction to keep in mind is that between what philosophers call dispositions and what they call occurrences. A disposition is a tendency or propensity to manifest or exhibit something in certain circumstances. A wine glass, for example, has the dispositional property of brittleness: it will shatter into pieces when struck with enough force. But it need not ever actually shatter for it to possess the disposition of brittleness (it may be melted down into some 4 The attitudinal and the experiential Are there any mental phenomena that do not involve having an experience? Though the term ‘experience’ covers a lot of the ment
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