Why should we deliberate? I discuss a Kantian response to this query and argue that we cannot as rational beings avoid deliberation in principle; and that we have good reasons to consider the value and strength of Kant's philosophical investigations concerning fundamental moral issues and their relevance for the question of why we ought to deliberate. I also argue that deliberation is a wide duty. This means that it has to be set as an end, that it is meritorious, and (...) that we cannot specify exactly what acts can be identified with it or are required for its realization. I begin by discussing why we cannot avoid deliberation in principle, that deliberation is a wide duty and why we ought to set it as an end. In the second part I argue how deliberation can be acknowledged in cosmopolitan education, and how we can inquire into the quality of communication in terms of deliberation in such an education or elsewhere. (shrink)

What ought to count as an explanation? Such normative questions—what “ought to be” the case?—typically mark the domain that those with a type of philosophical aspiration call their own. Debates in the philosophy of history have for too long been marred by bad advice from just such aspirants. The recurrent suggestion has been that historians have a particular need for a theory of explanation since they seem to have none of their own. But neither the study of the natural sciences (...) nor the study of narrative compels or even makes plausible the view that it will be possible to adduce the norms of explanation, either in history or elsewhere, in advance of identifying theories that explain. I readily concede to Stueber, Carr, and FORLAND the use of a certain vocabulary when speaking of others. But it is one thing to point to a pervasive habit of explaining behavior in certain terms. It is quite another to document that these explanations have any value as explanations.What apart from habit or philosophical dogma establishes any of their proposals as explanatory? Explanation by invoking the myth of the shared should be replaced by explanations that have empirical content. (shrink)

Kalle Pihlainen’s book reworks seven essays published over the last dozen years. Pihlainen’s Preface and Hayden White’s Foreword articulate a cri de cœur. Both fear that something important has been missed. White’s Foreword somewhat cryptically characterizes Pihlainen’s book as “metacritical,” and locates Pihlainen in the role of being a “serious reader” for the community of theorists of history. What does it mean to be a “serious” reader? White never says. But following White’s hint, Pihlainen can be read as updating Marx’s (...) conception of the task of unmasking sources of alienation by focusing on the reasons for the estrangement of histories from a wider audience. For him, “the core case is that the ‘historical’ nature of history itself needs to be acknowledged”. It remains unacknowledged so long as the source of meaning in history continues to be displaced. For even those who emphasize narrative form tend to talk as if meanings were imposed by some factor other than human intervention, as if form magically imbues content with significance. But this is one more symptom, if such is needed, of collective bad faith, a denial that only people make meaning. By taking disembodied literary forms as repositories of significance, responsibility for meaning is once again deflected or deferred. In this key regard, Pihlainen’s claim to place “decided emphasis on its [historical theory’s] ethical-political momentum” signals that the issues he intends to foreground are not epistemological or discursive. Pihlainen rightly suspects that all the talk of “narrativism” and “discourse” serves only to evade confronting the truly difficult moral and political challenges that writing represents. His various chapters identify these evasions and the challenges that remain. (shrink)

One important thesis Ásta defends in Categories We Live By is that social properties and categories are somehow dependent on our thoughts, attitudes, or practices—that they are inventions of the mind, projected onto the world. Another important aspect of her view is that the social properties are related to certain base properties; an individual is placed in a category when the relevant base properties are thought to hold of them. I see the relationship between the social and the base as (...) connected to the problem of explaining how the social properties are sufficiently stable so as to be taken seriously, both in theoretical endeavors as well as in practical matters of how we relate to each other. In this light, I identify stability constraints for an adequate account of social categories. I argue that certain distinctive aspects of Ásta's conferralist view of social categories, such as the radical contextualism in her account of gender, undermine the stability of categories and are at odds with taking social categories seriously. I end with the suggestion that a distinctive “sheltered” form of normativity might help us do justice to Ásta's insights while avoiding some of the destabilizing elements of conferralism. (shrink)

A central challenge for research on how we should prepare students to manage crossing boundaries between different knowledge settings in life long learning processes is to identify those forms of knowledge that are particularly relevant here. In this paper, we develop by philosophical means the concept of a dialectical system as a general framework to describe the de-velopment of knowledge networks that mark the starting point for learning processes, and we use semiotics to discuss the epistemological thesis that any cognitive (...) access to our world of objects is mediated by signs and diagrammatic reasoning and abduction as those forms of practical knowledge that are crucial for the development of knowledge networks. The rich-ness of this theoretical approach becomes evident by applying it to an example of learning in a biological research context. At the same time, we take a new look at the role of mathematical knowledge in this process. (shrink)

Stakeholder scholars have long explored how stakeholder relationships differ from economic transactions. We contribute to this ongoing inquiry by developing a conceptual framework of relationality in stakeholder theory that encompasses a stakeholder-theoretic extension of Williamson's contracting schema and a new typology of stakeholder relationships. Premised on understanding relationality as the need for informal human relationships beyond formal governance, our framework locates the key difference between transaction cost economics and stakeholder theory in their treatment of informal relationships. While transaction cost economics (...) perceives informal relationships to be shaped by formal governance structures and enforced by contractual safeguards, stakeholder theory is open to the possibility that some informal relationships between stakeholders may be genuinely moral and thus irreducible to formal governance and contractual safeguards. These stakeholder relationships may lead to unique economic effects described by instrumental stakeholder theory. The difference that we identified between the two literatures shows how stakeholder theory's embrace of relationality surpasses that of transaction cost economics. (shrink)

What are the prospects for a cognitive science of meaning? As stated, we think this question is ill posed, for it invites the conflation of several importantly different semantic concepts. In this paper, we want to distinguish the sort of meaning that is an explanandum for cognitive science—something we are going to call meaning—from the sort of meaning that is an explanans in cognitive science—something we are not going to call meaning at all, but rather content. What we are going (...) to call meaning is paradigmatically a property of linguistic expressions or acts: what one’s utterance or sentence means, and what one means by it. What we are going to call content is a property of, among other things, mental representations and indicator signals. We will argue that it is a mistake to identify meaning with content, and that, once this is appreciated, some serious problems emerge for grounding meaning in the sorts of content that cognitive science is likely to provide. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce a novel difficulty for teleosemantics, viz., its inability to account for what we call unexploited content—content a representation has, but which the system that harbors it is currently unable to exploit. In section two, we give a characterization of teleosemantics. Since our critique does not depend on any special details that distinguish the variations in the literature, the characterization is broad, brief and abstract. In section three, we explain what we mean by unexploited content, and (...) argue that any theory of content adequate to ground representationalist theories in cognitive science must allow for it.1 In section four, we show that teleosemantic theories of the sort we identify in section two cannot accommodate unexploited content, and are therefore unacceptable if intended as attempts to ground representationalist cognitive science. Finally, in section five, we speculate that the existence and importance of unexploited content has likely been obscured by a failure to distinguish representation from indication, and by a tendency to think of representation as reference. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism by Harold D. RothDerek Asaba Chi (bio)The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism. By Harold D. Roth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021. Series: SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Pp. xiii+ 522. Hardcover ＄ 77.37, isbn 978-1-4384-8271-2. The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism (hereafter Contemplative Foundations) is a compilation of articles and book chapters selected from Harold (...) class='Hi'>Roth's almost 27 years of scholarly publications on the origins and early history of the classical Daoist tradition. The essays that constitute this collection seek to counter certain myths about Early China Studies and Daoist Studies that have previously prevented the field from identifying, in a historically plausible, contemplatively grounded, and textually justified fashion, some of the basic contours of classical Daoism. Roth begins by discussing prior studies of the early history of Daoism. In his view, these studies were hampered in their understanding of the contemplative foundations of Daoism by limits derived from a set of unreflective assumptions that restrict human cognitive possibilities to merely those that were deemed possible by European cultures. Some of the most deleterious of these assumptions were: "all human beings have a genetic predisposition to a belief in gods or other supernatural beings; veridical human cognition is restricted to either reason or emotion—categories established by the European Enlightenment" (p. 2). Roth argues that these products of unreflective Eurocentrism have largely contributed to a failure to recognize that early Daoist thinkers could possibly have derived their ideas about human psychology, human nature, and the nature of the cosmos through anything other than abstract rational thought or emotional responses (pp. 3-5). These unreflective thoughts have contributed to constructing the idea that contemplative experiences can never be epistemologically valid, and that, because of this non-veridicality, attempts to ascertain the contemplative foundations of classical Daoism are either unnecessary or deluded. The author also discusses the distinctive philosophical origins of classical Daoism. The first myth about the origins of classical Daoism revolves around beliefs that the Daoist tradition began with Lao Dan 老聃 in the sixth century BCE and his outstanding work the Daodejing 道德經. Further, Lao Dan founded a Daoist "school" that included Zhuang Zhou 莊周, the sole author of the Zhuangzi [End Page 1] 莊子, and other eponymous works created by later disciples such as Liezi 列子 and Wenzi 文子. Together they created and transmitted a Daoist school that developed a lofty mystical philosophy which accepted death as a natural transformation and maintained a cosmology of the Way Dao 道 and its Inner Power or Potency De 德. However, this tradition of "philosophical Daoism" or "Lao-Zhuang" 老 莊 became singularly corrupted through its contact with superstitious beliefs in longevity, immortality, and polytheistic deities to form the organized Daoist religion that emerged in the second century CE and that persists until today (p. 3). Roth argues that the contemplative foundations of classical Daoism are grounded in a distinctive form of practice that the author defines as "inner cultivation," neiye 內業, or "inward training" (p. 6). Roth provides a list of works that present surviving evidence for these practices. These include: the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, as well as other classical texts of mixed traditions, including the Lüshi Chunqiu 呂士春秋 and the Huainanzi 淮 南子. Contemplative Foundations is divided into two parts which present a more or less holistic view of the contemplative foundation of classical Daoism. Part I is dedicated to the careful textual analysis of the major surviving sources of classical Daoism to derive evidence for both its contemplative foundations and its historical and social context. First, the author examines the theories of the physiological basis of psychology and self-cultivation as discussed in three texts from the Guanzi 管子 and in the Huainanzi. Despite its apparent absence in the early Daoist tradition, the physiological basis of human psychology plays a major role in the theory and practice of neidan 內丹, or "physiological alchemy," which emerged somewhat later, when Daoism became institutionalized (p. 23). Roth tries to link the psychological experience to physiological conditions that make possible a whole range of neidan practices that seem to have preceded Daoist religion but became fully developed therein. Roth moves on to debunk the traditional... (shrink)

The ability to integrate information from diverse texts and to detect logical implications of the integrated information is fundamental to the understanding process. This paper shows that identifying and configuring relevant facts in order to support hypothesized inferences is extremely difficult unless the facts have been committed to memory. Simply reading relevant texts for familiarization and then referring to them as needed provides an inadequate basis for deductive logic. Further, apprehension of the logical configuration of fads underlying a particular inference (...) can be an essentially automatic process for the reasoner who has structured the facts appropriately in memory. A model of search and memory mechanisms is proposed. It accounts for accuracy and reaction time data, as well as individual differences in inference evaluation. The implications of the superiority of memorization over familiarization‐plus‐referencing as a basis for learning and reasoning are discussed. (shrink)

Do we need principles of the unification of our agency, our mode of acting? Immanuel Kant and Christine Korsgaard argue that the reflective structure of our mind forces us to have some conception of ourselves, others and the world—including our agency—and that it is through will and reason, and in particular principles of our agency, that we take upon ourselves to unify and test the way(s) in which we make our lives consistent. I argue that the principles suggested—the hypothetical imperative (...) and the categorical imperative—function to unify our understanding of ourselves and others as agents as efficacious and autonomous and that the extent to which those concerned render themselves efficacious and autonomous in cosmopolitan education or elsewhere is due to the extent to which they act in accordance with and are motivated by the suggested principles and in particular the categorical one. I first discuss how the principles function to unify our agency and how the categorical imperative functions as a test of maxims for our actions, how the will is the source of our morality, and how we are forced to have practical identities. I end with some remarks on what it means to acknowledge the mentioned principles in cosmopolitan education. (shrink)

Submission of study protocols to research ethics committees constitutes one of the earliest stages at which planned trials are documented in detail. Previous studies have investigated the amendments requested from researchers by RECs, but the type of issues raised during REC review have not been compared by sponsor type. The objective of this study was to identify recurring shortcomings in protocols of drug trials based on REC comments and to assess whether these were more common among industry-sponsored or non-industry trials.

In this paper I take up (what I call) the pregnancy loss objection to defenses of abortion that deny fetal moral status. Though versions of this objection have been put forth by others—particularly Lindsey Porter’s in a 2015 paper—I argue that the existing versions of the objection are unsuccessful in various ways: failing to explain the ground of moral considerability that would apply to embryos/fetuses in very early pregnancy, lack of clarity about what it means to take grief after miscarriage (...) seriously, and implausible implications regarding pre-embryo and infertility cases. I go on to offer a more plausible version of the objection, which I apply only to mid-pregnancy and fetuses, by drawing on personal narratives of later pregnancy loss and abortion and emphasizing practices that indicate the relevant kind of mourning. I then take up the question of how experience of the sort I have in mind can function as evidence, by situating my version of the objection in a pragmatist ethical view. Finally I consider and respond to some worries about the very idea of taking experience of pregnancy loss to be evidence regarding fetal moral status. (shrink)

It is definitely a welcome contribution to Nietzsche scholarship that a volume on Beyond Good and Evil has been published in the German series Klassiker Auslegen, established by Ottfried Höffe. The series aims at providing cooperative commentaries by leading scholars in the field on the most important works in the history of philosophy. As with the other “classics” that have been covered, the order of contributions follows the order of the original publication; in the case of Beyond Good and Evil, (...) there is one contribution for each of the nine chapters, plus one contribution each analyzing the “preface” and “aftersong” and a general introduction by the editor. All the contributions aim at... (shrink)

The problem to which the present paper is addressed is one aspect of that of the relationship between Religion and Morality. That God is good is a proposition which presents itself to many with axiomatic force, and by its help the path is traced which leads directly either from Religion to Morality or from Morality to Religion. Yet the reflective mind may well ask: By what evidence, or in what way, do we know that God is good? If the proposition (...) rests on evidence in the ordinary sense, what is it and wherein lies its convincing character? Or if it rests, as is often asserted, on another sort of knowledge altogether, what is this non-experiential cognition and what are its guarantees? Or again, we may ask whether the proposition is analytic, i.e. (shrink)

Claims of progress in our ethical or moral beliefs and practices—as well as claims to ethical or moral regression—are commonplace in American social and political conversation. Often, such commentary involves a lamenting of the decline of “traditional” values in contemporary society or alternatively a rejoicing in the ways that we appear to have overcome prior prejudicial values. In this dissertation, I am concerned with the notions of progress and improvement that underlie such commonsense judgments. At a minimum, ethical progress requires (...) the idea that some values or practices are better than others and hence that replacing some beliefs or practices with others can be a genuine improvement. Taking inspiration from the ethical works of John Dewey, I sketch an account of evaluative progress that conceives of this sort of improvement in ethical beliefs or practices in terms of problem-resolving. On my view, resolving a problem involves both offering an adequate conception of the problem and finding a problem-solution which lives up to the world and to the values we reflectively endorse. On my account, resolving problems is not simply a matter of finding the best means to a fixed end; rather, I conceive of problem-resolving as a dynamic process in which ends themselves are typically in flux. The sort of “dynamic deliberation” I have in mind, then, goes beyond mere instrumental reasoning, by not only allowing us to recognize conflicts between ends or means to ends, but in also providing a way to rationally revise or reject ends. Finally, in order for this sort of problem-resolving to make good on the idea of genuine improvement or progress, the process of solving problems must involve some sense of objectivity. I offer a procedural account of objectivity that emphasizes the role of the world in constraining our inquiry, involves a naturalization of ethical epistemology, and allows for objective inquiry to be undertaken by an individual or a community. (shrink)

Sometimes individuals act together, and sometimes each acts on his or her own. It's a distinction that often matters to us. Undertaking a difficult task collectively can be comforting, even if only for the solidarity it may engender. Or, to take a very different case, the realization (or delusion) that the many bits of rudeness one has been suffering of late are part of a concerted effort can be of significance in identifying what one is up against: the accumulation of (...) grievances (no doubt well catalogued) is seen, not as an unfortunate coincidence of affronts stemming from various quarters, but as itself a product of a unified exercise of agency. A paranoid conspiracy theorist is not usually to be taken seriously. But he does get right that it certainly would be awful, for example, if everyone were out to get him and were working together to do so. After all, the stability and impact of agency that's shared can be expected to be more serious than the effects of a mere collection of individual acts.[1.. (shrink)

Human beings as imperfect rational beings face continuous challenges, one of them has to do with the lack of recognizing and respecting our inner dignity in present times. In this collective paper, we address the overall theme—Philosophy of Education in a New Key from various perspectives related to dignity. We address in particular some of the constraints and possibilities with regard to this issue in various settings such as education and society at large. Klas Roth discusses, for example, that (...) it is not uncommon that the value of human beings has to do with their price in, inter alia, their social, cultural, political and economic settings throughout the world. He argues that such a focus does not necessarily draw attention to the inner dignity of human beings, but that human beings ought to do so in education and society at large. Lia Mollvik discusses views of inner and outer dignity, and argues that there needs to be a balance in between them, and that the balance ought to be acknowledged in education. Rama Alshoufani discusses the classification of human beings in terms of various diagnoses related to the asserted dysfunction of the brain, and she argues that such classification does paradoxically not necessarily respect people with such diagnoses as ends in themselves. On the contrary, she argues that their inner dignity is not respected, but that it should be. Other such failures are due to the lack of inner dignity when it comes to Children’s rights as discussed by Rebecca Adami, and to the lack of recognition of human beings’ vulnerability as discussed by Katy Dineen. Fariba Majlesi criticizes a too strong emphasis on substantive notions of humanist education, which seem to hinder new ways of thinking; she argues that it is necessary to acknowledge the latter in and through education in order to preserve the dignity of human beings. Dignity, it is argued throughout the paper, has an inner moral worth, and is beyond price. (shrink)

Today all, religious life exists under die threat of destruction., and the human spirit is in peril. A defense of the divine traditions in every land is needed. The ten essays contained in this book, written by an international group of distinguished scholars, explore the thesis that the defense of God depends on what men and women say and do, an awesome responsibility. The idea of a defense of God is complicated., for God is not readily defended in a world (...) that contains radical evil, the force that lays waste the human spirit and mocks the sacred. God, moreover, says little in his own defense. The authors of these essays express a wide variety of ways that God should-and should not-be ôdefended, ö as well as pose the central question of how God might be understood. They concur that both religion and the defense of God are vital concerns. New considerations about the nature of God and about how God relates to evil emerge. This collection of essays succeeds in contributing to the defense of God, because in discussing different and often conflicting views of God significant religious insights are to be found. (shrink)

This collection of essays, originally published in 1970 by Random House, gathers together some of the best initial responses to the problems raised by Edmund Gettier's celebrated critique of the traditional analysis of knowledge. Designed for upper-level courses and seminars in undergraduate philosophy programs and is intended as an introduction to epistemology from the analytic point of view.

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a reconfiguration of the possibility‐space of positions regarding the metaphysics and epistemology associated with historical knowledge. A tradition within analytic philosophy from Danto to Dummett attempts to answer questions about the reality of the past on the basis of two shared assumptions. The first takes individual statements as the relevant unit of semantic and philosophical analysis. The second presumes that variants of realism and antirealism about the past exhaust the metaphysical options . This essay argues that both (...) of these assumptions should be rejected. It develops as an alternative an irrealist account of history, a view based in part on work by Leon Goldstein and Ian Hacking. On an irrealist view, historical claims ought to be treated as subject to the same conditions and caveats that apply to any theory of empirical or scientific knowledge. Irrealism argues for pasts as made and not found. The argument emphasizes the priority of classification over perception in the order of understanding and so verification. Because nothing a priori anchors practices of classification, no sense can be attached to claims that some single structure must or does determine what events take place in human history. Irrealism denies to realism the very intelligibility of any imagined view from nowhere, that is, a determinately configured past subsisting sub specie aeternitatis. A plurality of pasts exists because constituting a past always depends to some degree on socially mediated negotiations of a fit between descriptions and experience. (shrink)

This work represents an attempt of the author to make up his own mind as to what peirce and james meant as well as to develop his own theories on some of the main issues which they raise. pragmatism is considered primarily as a theory of knowledge which interprets it in terms of verification by experience. the ethical and religious applications of pragmatism do not receive very much attention. (bp, edited).

As a Popperian, Ian C. Jarvie takes falsifiability to be a defining characteristic of rationality. This suggests that any disagreement about the truth or falsity of a particular belief that can be settled by further evidence should be rationally resolvable, at least in the following sense. Niceties about probabilities aside, one should be able to specify under what conditions, that is, given what evidence, one would surrender that belief. Put another way, if a belief will not be given up no (...) matter what evidence one might ever confront, then this establishes that belief as mere dogma. (shrink)

"John Locke is considered as one of the most important philosophers of the modern era. The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were both highly influenced by Locke's philosophical ideas. Commonly known as the 'Father of Liberalism' Locke heavily influences contemporary libertarianism, with its emphasis on small government, the requirement of actual consent to that government, and a natural executive right to establish one's own sovereignty and enforce one'' own rights. The Lockean Mind provides a comprehensive survey of (...) his work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Comprising almost sixty chapters by a superb team of international contributors, the volume is divided into twelve parts covering the full range of Locke's thought: Historical Background, Locke's Interlocutors, Locke's Epistemology, Locke's Philosophy of Mind, Locke on Philosophy of Language and Logic, Locke's Metaphysics, Locke's Natural Philosophy, Locke's Moral Philosophy, Locke on Education, Locke's Political Philosophy, Locke's Social Philosophy, Locke on Religion. This collection is essential reading for students and researchers working in political philosophy, philosophy of mind, libertarianism, British Empiricism, epistemology and political theory, as well as for those in related Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines with an interest in John Locke"--. (shrink)

The very idea of narrative explanation invites two objections: a methodological objection, stating that narrative structure is too far from the form of a scientific explanation to count as an explanation, and a metaphysical objection, stating that narrative structure situates historical practice too close to the writing of fiction. Both of these objections, however, are illfounded. The methodological objection and the dispute regarding the status of historical explanation can be disposed of by revealing their motivating presupposition: the plausibility of an (...) exclusivist explication of explanation which appeals either to the unity-of-method thesis or some implicit notion of analytic equivalence, both problematic philosophical doctrines. The metaphysical objection fails with the rejection of the idea, in Mink's phrase, of an "untold story." The argument against history as an "untold story" develops from Danto's image of an Ideal Chronicler recording ideal events. A consequence of rejecting this view is that it no longer makes sense to speak of historical narratives as true or false. However, this failure engenders no special problem for assessing the objectivity or explanatory utility of narratives qua explanations. (shrink)

What is it for a duty or obligation to be directed? Thinking about paradigmatic cases such as the obligations generated by promises will take us only so far in answering this question. This paper starts by surveying several approaches for understanding directed duties, as well as the challenges they face. It turns out that shared agency features something similar to the directedness of duties. This suggests an account of directedness in terms of shared agency – specifically, in terms of the (...) so-called practical intimacy that holds between individuals when they act together. The final section addresses a challenge to the shared agency approach posed by legal wronging in tort law. (shrink)

This book develops a philosophical structure for historical explanation that resolves disputes about the scientific status of history that have persisted since the nineteenth century. It does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative and by making their logic explicit. The books formulates a unique positive account of the logic of narrative explanations. This logic reveals how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. The book also develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology (...) of history--that is, it argues that there exists no one fixed past but many pasts. It includes a novel reading of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, displaying how Kuhn offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. The book situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework. Naturalism regards all canons of rational inquiry as evolving and contingent. The book also argues for the general philosophical significance of historical explanation. The first four chapters defuse methodological and the metaphysical objections to narrative explanations. The final three chapters explore how narrative explanations relate to other sciences. It will be of interest to researchers in historiography, theory of history, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The theory of knowledge objectification, initially presented and developed by Luis Radford, has gained some traction in the field of mathematics education. As with any developing theory, its presentation contains statements that may contradict its stated intents; and these problems are exacerbated in its uptake into the work of other scholars. The purpose of this study is to articulate a Spinozist-Marxian approach, in which the objectification exists not in things—semiotic means that mediate interactions—but as real relation between people. As a (...) consequence, the concept of mediation is unnecessary and can be abandoned. A concrete classroom example from Radford’s own studies is used to exemplify and develop pertinent issues. In particular, the societal nature of the ideal—a synecdoche of relations between objects that reflect relations between people—should be added and the notion of mediation no longer is required. (shrink)

Kant begins his Lectures on Pedagogy by stating, “[t]he human being is the only creature that must be educated” (Kant, 2007, 9:441), and he argues that it is through education that we can transform our initial “animal nature into human nature” (ibid. 2007, 9:441). Kant understands education as involving an ordered process of care, discipline, instruction and formation through enculturating, civilizing and moralizing (Formosa 2011). Further, Kant envisages that we should pursue as a species the “moral perfection” that is the (...) “final destiny of the human race” through education (Collins, 1997, 27:470; see Dean, 2014). However, to engage in this pursuit Kant believes that, through education and social change, we have to regulate our “animal nature” and counter the moral corruption of our species, which he calls the “radical innate evil in human nature (not any the less brought upon us by ourselves)” (Kant, 1998, 6:32). If humanity is to pursue its final destiny of moral perfection, then education will need to respond responsibly to the propensity to evil that is deeply rooted in us as finite and imperfect rational beings living in imperfect and at times even in morally corrupted social conditions. This paper outlines some of the relevant issues. (shrink)

Davidson held that the explanation of action in terms of reasons was a form of causal explanation. He challenged anti-causalists to identify a non-causal relation underlying reasons---explanation which could distinguish between merely having a reason and that reason being the one for which one acts. George Wilson attempts to meet Davidson’s challenge, but the relation he identifies can serve only in explanations of general facts, whereas reasons explanation is often of particular acts. This suggests that the relation underlying reasons explanation (...) is not only causal, but singular as well. A further proposal, extracted from Fred Dretske’s views, characterizes this singular causal relation in terms of non-mental triggers. But this suggestion underestimates the explanatory role of the environment at the time of action, and shares with Wilson’s proposal the inability to account for the rationalization of particular acts. A situational environmentalist conception of reasons explanation, however, does not face these difficulties. (shrink)

Revolutionizing received opinion of Taoism's origins in light of historic new discoveries, Harold D. Roth has uncovered China's oldest mystical text--the original expression of Taoist philosophy--and presents it here with a complete translation and commentary. Over the past twenty-five years, documents recovered from the tombs of China's ancient elite have sparked a revolution in scholarship about early Chinese thought, in particular the origins of Taoist philosophy and religion. In _Original Tao,_ Harold D. Roth exhumes the seminal text of (...) Taoism--_Inward Training (Nei-yeh)_--not from a tomb but from the pages of the _Kuan Tzu,_ a voluminous text on politics and economics in which this mystical tract had been "buried" for centuries. _Inward Training_ is composed of short poetic verses devoted to the practice of breath meditation, and to the insights about the nature of human beings and the form of the cosmos derived from this practice. In its poetic form and tone, the work closely resembles the _Tao-te Ching_; moreover, it clearly evokes Taoism's affinities to other mystical traditions, notably aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. Roth argues that _Inward Training_ is the foundational text of early Taoism and traces the book to the mid-fourth century B.C. (the late Warring States period in China). These verses contain the oldest surviving expressions of a method for mystical "inner cultivation," which Roth identifies as the basis for all early Taoist texts, including the _Chuang Tzu_ and the world-renowned _Tao-te Ching._ With these historic discoveries, he reveals the possibility of a much deeper continuity between early "philosophical" Taoism and the later Taoist religion than scholars had previously suspected. _Original Tao_ contains an elegant and luminous complete translation of the original text. Roth's comprehensive analysis explains what _Inward Training_ meant to the people who wrote it, how this work came to be "entombed" within the _Kuan Tzu,_ and why the text was largely overlooked after the early Han period. (shrink)

A suggestion famously made by Peter Winch and carried through to present discussions holds that what constitutes the social as a kind consists of something shared – rules or practices commonly learned, internalized, or otherwise acquired by all members belonging to a society. This essays argues against the explanatory efficacy of appeals to this shared something as constitutive of a social kind by examining a violation of social norms or rules, viz., mistakes. I argue that an asymmetric relation exists between (...) the notion of mistakes and that of the social. In particular, mistakes do not presuppose a concept of the social, but the concept of the social requires prior specification of a category of mistakes. But no such prior specification proves possible. The very notion of a mistake is so inchoate that it makes it impossible to provide the kind of regimentation required for a rule-governed domain. Thus, there may be recognized mistakes even in the absence of a unified system or common knowledge of norms.Later writers attempt to avoid Winch's over-strong assumption that something shared and internal constitutes the social but cannot. Extending recent work by Stephen Turner, I argue that ``the social'' is not a domain that is susceptible to lawlike treatment, but rather a heterogeneous, motley collection. For absent the assumption of a shared something, no social object exists to be explained. So, I conclude, we have at present no clear way of marking out the social as a coherent or unified domain of inquiry. (shrink)

Science literacy is frequently touted as a key to good citizenship. Based on a two-year ethnographic study examining science in the community, the authors suggest that when considering the contribution of scientific activity to the greater good, science must be seen as forming a unique hybrid practice, mixed in with other mediating practices, which together constitute “scientifically literate, good citizenship.” This case study, an analysis of an open house event organized by a grassroots environmentalist group, presents some examples of activities (...) that embed science in “good citizenship.” Through a series of vignettes, the authors focus on four central aspects: the activists' use of landscape and spatial arrangements, the importance of multiple representations of the same entity, the relational aspect of knowing and becoming part of a community, and the insertion of scientific into moral discourse, resulting in what they call a “stewardship triad.”. (shrink)

Auschwitz is still the greatest challenge for philosophy and reason, rather than representing their end, as Lyotard most prominently seems to imply. The article shows how the evolution of the question of dialectics from Hegel to postmodernism must be thought in relation to Auschwitz. The critics of reason and Hegel such as Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault are highlighting the break between reason and unspeakable suffering, for which Auschwitz is the most prominent symbol, but reintroduce ‘behind’ the scene much more speculative (...) concepts than Hegel himself (Plasma by Lyotard, khora by Derrida and power as an absolute by Foucault). Adorno for his part thought that only a negative dialectics could address the problem adequately but transferred the unity of opposites just in the realm of utopia. But there is no negative (Adorno) or positive dialectics, only dialectics which mediates and posit the positive and the negative on a higher level. (shrink)

The intentions of others often enter into your practical reasoning, even when you’re acting on your own. Given all the agents around you, you’ll come to grief if what they’re up to is never a consideration in what you decide to do and how you do it. There are occasions, however, when the intentions of another figure in your practical reasoning in a particularly intimate and decisive fashion. I will speak of there being on such occasions a practical intersubjectivity of (...) intentions holding between you and the other individual. I will try to identify this practical intersubjectivity, and to take some preliminary steps toward giving a philosophical account of it. Occasions of practical intersubjectivity are usually those where individuals share agency, or do things jointly, such as when they walk together, kiss, or paint a house together. I will not assume that all instances of practical intersubjectivity are instances of shared agency. But the converse is true: any instance of shared agency involves a practical intersubjectivity holding between the participants. An account of shared agency is inadequate if it fails to handle practical intersubjectivity. The paper is structured as follows. In section 1, I present an example to illustrate this idea of practical intersubjectivity, at least as it appears in the context of shared agency. Practical intersubjectivity is a normative phenomenon, and it is on this basis that in section 2 I distinguish it from the mere coordination of intentions some have recognized as essential for shared activity. The task of section 3 is to show how practical intersubjectivity cannot be adequately described in terms of ordinary intentions familiar from the study of individual agency. Such approaches fail to handle the rational dynamics of intention revision when practical.. (shrink)

Shadow pictures radically changed the modern understanding of pictorial concepts. Tim Otto Roth’s broadly based cultural history traces the consequences of this revolution of methods of vision and image production in the sciences and the arts. By means of abundant image and text sources he develops a picture theory based on physics and projective geometry. This definitive book comprising 500 pages provides a generally understandable and vivid insight in the history of shadowgraphs from the 19th century until the present (...) age. A crucial role play scientific processes as the X-ray technique, but also the artistic examination of space and body. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anonymous Versus Open Donation and Queerness as Political:Comments on Groll's Conceiving PeopleAmanda Roth (bio)1. IntroductionIn this commentary on Daniel Groll's 2021 book Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation, I examine a number of the book's major themes, especially around the idea that donor-conceived children have a significant interest in genetic knowledge and therefore, donor-conceiving parents are morally required to use an open (...) donor.1 I point to some concerns about Groll's case for this view and, in doing so, highlight the way in which taking up an LGBTQ+ perspective complicates and undermines the case against anonymous donation. The major theme of my comments is that the open versus anonymous decision is not merely an ethical decision, but a political one.My comments are organized around a few of the book's major themes, so I'll begin with laying out the most relevant themes in some detail. I then take up four points to consider in more depth. In so doing, I'll be drawing on my own scholarly perspective on issues of nontraditional reproduction, which is informed by my own social positionality in relation to family matters; this means that I (not so subtly) bring a queer perspective to the discussion of Groll's book. The through-line of my comments is this: While I agree with and appreciate much of Groll's approach, I want to stress the sense in which gamete donation is not just an ethical issue, but a political one, given its implication in bionormativity (and heteronormativity). I wonder if a deeper acknowledgment of the political nature of the issues might lead to moral conclusions that are different from those that Groll comes to, even assuming similar ethical values as starting points.2. Groll's major claims(1) Claim 1: Disclosure to donor-conceived offspring—in the usual case at least—is morally required given the intimacy argument: [End Page 166]The intimacy argument suggests that keeping "the secret" about donor conception involves intentional deception and undermines the proper intimacy of parent-child relationships (Groll 2021, 36–49).(2) Claim 2: Anonymous donor conception is (generally) morally impermissible because of the significant interest view.Donor-conceiving parents can reasonably foresee that their children will likely develop a significant interest in genetic knowledge. Significant interests "matte[r] quite a lot to the person who has [them]," "tak[e] up a space … in a person's mental economy" and/or "pla[y] a structuring role in a person's life and self-conception" (Groll 2021, 62–3). But not all donor-conceived people take such an interest in genetic information, and this information is not necessary for identity construction or psychological wellbeing (Groll 2021, 58, 61).2 Rather, multiple routes to self-identity exist, the genetic route being one among the options. Moreover, one needn't experience any loss in not taking this route; however, for those who take it up, genetic knowledge is objectively valuable and nonfungible (Groll 2021, 81–9). This is because genetic knowledge is uniquely relevant to the identity-related question "Who am I?" (Groll 2021, 112–3).3Groll argues that donor-conceiving parents should assume that their child will form such an interest because this is empirically a "good bet." Further, significant interests—at least when they are worthwhile (that is, not trivial and not morally objectionable)—are connected to one's wellbeing by the wellbeing principle: In satisfying a non-instrumental significant worthwhile interest, one's life goes better (Groll 2021, 62). It follows, then, that parents ought to choose open donors since (to simplify) parents are obligated to promote their children's wellbeing (ibid).4Counter to what one might expect, Groll does not take his ethical case against anonymous donor conception to justify prohibition of the practice. This is because wronging children in this way is within the realm of (unethical) choices we allow parents to make without societal interference.5 Moreover, to aim regulation at anonymous donor conception could reinforce bionormativity and target already marginalized families for special negative attention (Groll 2021, chapter 8).(3) "Claim" 3: Groll's own personal... (shrink)

The role of gestures in communication is still debated: Some claim that gestures are merely ancillary forms of expressions, whereas others suggest a central role of gestures in the development of language. In this article, I provide data in support of the overarching hypothesis that gestures have a transitional function between ergotic/epistemic movements of hands and symbolic expressions. The context for the study of these transitions is constituted by school science laboratory activities conducted by students who are also asked to (...) describe and explain while still within proximity of the materials of their investigations. It is hypothesized that communication is distributed across the context (verbal, gestural, material) and shifts increasingly into a verbal modality as students become familiar with the phenomena they are to learn about. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that initial temporal delays between gestures and the corresponding words decrease and finally disappear so that gestural and verbal modalities coincide. It is suggested that engaging in communication in the presence of material has an important cognitive function in that it affords a distribution of cognition across different modalities until individuals have developed the competence to express themselves effectively in the verbal modality. (shrink)

This paper considers two ways functions figure into scientific explanations: (i) via laws?events are causally explained by subsuming those events under functional laws; and (ii) via designs?capacities are explained by specifying the functional design of a system. We argue that a proper understanding of how functions figure into design explanations of capacities makes it clear why such functions are ill-suited to figure into functional-cum-causal law explanations of events, as those explanations are typically understood. We further argue that a proper understanding (...) of how functions enter into design explanations of capacities enables us to show why two prominent objections to functionalism in the philosophy mind?the argument from metaphysically necessary effects (Bennett, 2007; Rupert, 2006) and causal exclusion (Kim, 1993, 1998; Malcolm, 1968)?are misguided when interpreted as posing a threat to functional explanation in science across the board. If those arguments pose a threat at all, they pose it to instances of (i); however, a great number of the functional explanations we find in psychology?and the sciences generally?are instances of (ii). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Gilgamesh among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic by Theodore ZiolkowskiJohannes HauboldTheodore Ziolkowski. Gilgamesh among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011. xvi + 226 pp. 3 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $35.This book surveys modern receptions of the Gilgamesh Epic from the earliest lectures and publications of George Smith to recent reworkings of the epic in Western literature and art. The argument (...) is divided into five chapters. After an introduction which outlines the contents of the poem and tells the story of its rediscovery, chapter 1, “The Initial Reception (1884–1935),” takes us from Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton’s Ishtar and Izdubar of 1884 via the “Babel and Bible” controversy of the early twentieth century to the predominantly German reception prior to World War II. Several major figures make an appearance here, including Freud, Jung, Rilke, Hesse, Mann, Döblin, Canetti, and Pannwitz. Chapter 2, “Representative Beginnings (1941–1958),” takes up the thread of German engagement with the towering achievements of Hermann Kasack’s Die Stadt hinter dem Strom (61–64) and, especially, Hans Henny Jahnn’s Fluß ohne Ufer (67–74), an enigmatic re-imagining of the Gilgamesh story on a scale that deserves a monograph study of its own. Elsewhere, the reception of Gilgamesh continues with “four poets in English” (Lucas and Bridson in Britain; Olson and Corso in the United States; 48–59) and with the first musical settings, among them Martinů’s oratorio The Epic of Gilgamesh (75–77). Chapter 3, “The Popularization of Gilgamesh (1959–1978),” surveys new translations into the major European languages (79–80), and with them a range of popular responses. Ziolkowski notes a surge in adaptations for children, as well as other initiatives aimed at a wider public (81–82). It is against this background, he argues, that we need to see more ambitious experiments in musical and literary reception, including Per Nørgård’s opera Gilgamesh (105–7); Louis Zukofsky’s “canto 23” (which forms part of his larger poetic cycle entitled “A,” 85–88); Stanisław Lem’s review of an imaginary Gilgamesh adaptation in his A Perfect Vacuum (Doskonała Próżnia, 97–99); and the “fictional exuberances” of John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, and Rhoda Lerman’s Call Me Ishtar (99–105). Ziolkowski also draws attention to what he argues was the first overtly gay reworking of Gilgamesh, in Guido Bachmann’s novel of the same name (91–94). Chapter 4, “The Contemporization of Gilgamesh (1979–1999),” continues the theme of popularization in a political key: Ziolkowski takes us on a whistle-stop tour of late twentieth-century preoccupations, from successive crises in the Near East (109) to post-colonialism (109–10); the spread of psychoanalysis, both in a Freudian and a Jungian key (112–19); deconstruction (118–19); the rise of ecologism [End Page 669] (110, 123–35); and minority politics in the USA (135–38). Chapter 5, “Gilgamesh in the Twenty-First Century (2000–2009),” sets out to show that “Gilgamesh, who was born and flourished in the mid-third millennium b.c.e., is alive and well” (154). Ziolkowski identifies “a new focus” (167) on cultural and religious conflict in the wake of Samuel Huntington and the events of 9/11, although it must be said that the responses of Schrott and Begrich (171–78) do not fit this framework particularly well, and in practice much of the chapter seems designed to tie up loose ends. The book is equipped with a timeline of works discussed (199–205), end notes (207–20), and an index (221–26), but no bibliography.In lucid and unpretentious prose, Ziolkowski sets out what he sees as the most significant “Western” responses to the epic of Gilgamesh. He leaves the Near and Far East to “appropriately qualified scholars” (x): one hopes that others will take up the invitation, and that they will make connections with the materials explored in this book. Ziolkowski also passes over Latin America and the Caribbean—perhaps he felt there was nothing to say (for a possible starting point, see C... (shrink)

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. ---Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 84, as quoted by Frederick Crews, The Critics Bear it Away, pp. 143--144..

This article discusses symmetry as an analytical tool for sociological analysis. Symmetry is presented as a property of social formations and a way to generate information about them through their mutual comparisons. The concept thus displaces the old dichotomy between individual and society. The latter forces to think in terms of wholes and parts, unduly limiting the possibilities at hand by keeping individuals as prisoners of societies, as it were. Symmetry opens the door for more alternatives by making room for (...) more social formations at the same time. To develop this concept, the article turns to both Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and Harrison White’s network theory which are presented as enacting an “order from noise” approach (as opposed to an “order from order” approach). The article then reconstructs a whole spectrum going from social formations at a high level of symmetry to social formations at a low level of symmetry. At the first end, we have social formations like groups that define the identities of persons (or even define persons as identities). At the other end, we have entire functional sectors (like politics, science, law, economy, etc.) whose chief characteristic is to be asymmetric to each other (so that doing politics, for instance, is unlike doing science and vice-versa). (shrink)

Scholars explore from many fresh angles the interweavings of two of the richest strands of human culture-music and esotericism-with examples from the medieval period to the modern age. Music and esotericism are two responses to the intuition that the world holds hidden order, beauty, and power. Those who compose, perform, and listen to music have often noted that music can be a bridge between sensory and transcendent realms. Such renowned writers as Boethius expanded the definition of music to encompass not (...) only sounded music but also the harmonic fabric of human and cosmic life. Those who engage in pursuits called "esoteric," from ancient astrology, magic, and alchemy to recent and more novel forms of spirituality, have also remarked on the relevance of music to their quests. Esotericists have composed music in order to convey esoteric meaning, performed music to create esoteric influences, and listened to music to raise their esoteric awareness. The academic study of esotericism is a young field, and few researchers have probed the rich interface between the musical and esoteric domains. In Explorations in Music and Esotericism, scholars from numerous fields introduce the history of esotericism and current debates about its definition and extent. The book's sixteen chapters present rich instances of connections between music and esotericism, organized with reference to four aspects of esotericism: as a form of thought; as the keeping and revealing of secrets; as an identity; and as a signifier. Edited by Marjorie Roth and Leonard George. Contributors: Elizabeth Abbate, Malachai Komanoff Bandy, Adam Bregman, Charles E. Brewer, Benjamin Dobbs, Anna Gawboy, Pasquale Giaquinto, Adam Knight Gilbert, Joscelyn Godwin, Virginia Christy Lamothe, Andrew Owen, Christopher Scheer, Codee Ann Spinner, Woodrow Steinken, and Daphne Tan. (shrink)

In this article, we draw on established views of CSR dysfunctionalities to show how and why CSR is regularly observed to be both shaped by and supportive of capitalism. We proceed to show that these dysfunctionalities are maintained by both the pro- and anticapitalist approaches to CSR, both of which imply an ill-defined separation of the economy and society as well an overly strong problem or solution focus on political and economic issues. Finally, we present a post-capitalist approach to CSR (...) that overcomes (1) the ill-defined separation of the economy and society, (2) the capitalist bias towards economic rationalities, and (3) the overidentification of society with its political system; this approach thus helps to manage the abovementioned CSR dysfunctionalities. (shrink)

For almost half a century, the person most responsible for fomenting brouhahas regarding degrees of plasticity in the writing of histories has been Hayden White. Yet, despite the voluminous responses provoked by White’s work, almost no effort has been made to treat White’s writings in a systematic yet sympathetic way as a philosophy of history. Herman Paul’s book begins to remedy that lack and does so in a carefully considered and extremely scholarly fashion. In his relatively brief six chapters (plus (...) an introduction), Paul packs a wealth of information. He convincingly demonstrates that a guiding theme of White’s work from earliest times has been that historians have no choice but to impose a structure on historical data and thus bear responsibility for structures so imposed. As such, a key philosophical question concerns on what bases White contends that a freedom of choice exists regarding forms given to recorded histories. This essay focuses on how Paul argues for a unified vision that answers this question, as well as how he offers an original and comprehensive conception of White’s writings. (shrink)

In The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes a "history of the present" by showing the connections between the archaeology of knowledge and criticism. In the first, he is fundamentally concerned with the changes in human perception evident at the end of the eighteenth century and the relation of these changes to the fundamental structures of experience. Underlying the history of medicine is the moral and political attempt to link the development of (...) science with the development of bourgeois freedom. In The Order of Things, he cites archaeology as a method of uncovering the fundamental paradigms of cultures and their systems of thought. Finally, in Discipline and Punish, he considers discourse a domain of power relations and thus establishes a link between knowledge and power. A "history of the present" is a self-conscious field of power relations and political struggle. (shrink)

The current paper addresses two methodological problems pertinent to the analysis of observer studies in nonverbal rapport and beyond. These problems concern: the production of standardized stimulus materials that allow for unbiased observer ratings and the objective measurement of nonverbal behaviors to identify the dyadic patterns underlying the observer impressions. We suggest motion capture and character animation as possible solutions to these problems and exemplarily apply the novel methodology to the study of gender and cultural differences in nonverbal rapport. We (...) compared a Western, individualistic culture with an egalitarian gender-role conception and a collectivistic culture with a more traditional gender role conceptions. Motion capture data were collected for five male and five female dyadic interactions in each culture. Character animations based on the motion capture data served as stimuli in the observation study. Female and male observers from both cultures rated the perceived rapport continuously while watching the 1 min sequences and guessed gender and cultural background of the dyads after each clip. Results show that masking of gender and culture in the stimuli was successful, as hit rates for both aspects remained at chance level. Further the results revealed high levels of agreement in the rapport ratings across gender and culture, pointing to universal judgment policies. A 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 ANOVA for gender and culture of stimuli and observers showed that female dyads were rated significantly higher on rapport across the board and that the contrast between female and male dyads was more pronounced in the Arab sample as compared to the German sample. nonverbal parameters extracted from the motion capture protocols were submitted to a series of algorithms to identify dyadic activity levels and coordination patterns relevant to the perception of rapport. The results are critically discussed with regard to the role of nonverbal coordination as a constituent of rapport. (shrink)

“Democratization” has recently become a popular trope in Western public discourses on medicine, where it refers to patient participation in the gathering and distribution of health-related data using various digital technologies, in order to improve healthcare technically and socially. We critically analyze the usage of the term from the perspective of the “politics of buzzwords.” Our claim is that the phrase works primarily to publicly justify the dramatic increase in the application of information and data technologies in healthcare and therefore (...) fosters the corresponding industry. As a buzzword, “democratizing healthcare” is characterized by vagueness, which is why it receives meaning only through a word collective—a group of words that provide it with a context and are often used together with it. We examine key terms associated with “democratization” in the healthcare discourse—participation, empowerment, and personalized medicine—and show that the buzzword receives rhetorical power through the ambiguous reference to these concepts. As a consequence, the idea of “democracy” becomes diluted into meaning merely “access to,” and “healthcare” is reduced to the notion of a preventive, nonacute, monitored form of medical care. (shrink)