To address the underrepresentation of women in philosophy effectively, we must understand the causes of the early loss of women. In this paper we challenge one of the few explanations that has focused on why women might leave philosophy at early stages. Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich offer some evidence that women have different intuitions than men about philosophical thought experiments. We present some concerns about their evidence and we discuss our own study, in which we attempted to replicate their (...) results for 23 different responses to 14 scenarios . We also conducted a literature search to see if other philosophers or psychologists have tested for gender differences in philosophical intuitions. Based on our findings, we argue that that it is unlikely that gender differences in intuitions play a significant role in driving women from philosophy. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview Priscilla Alderson discusses how she came to research parental and childhood consent and became a sociologist and how, late in her career, she became convenor of the critical realism group started by Roy Bhaskar at the Institute for Education in London. She discusses aspects of her seminal research over the years on multiple subjects, such as the rights of children, and reflects on what critical realism has added to her social research.

It is widely held in contemporary philosophy of mind that states with underived representational content are ipso facto psychological states. This view—the Content View—underlies a number of interesting philosophical projects, such as the attempt to pick out a psychological level of explanation, to demarcate genuinely psychological from non-psychological states, and to limn the class of states with phenomenal character. The most detailed and influential theories of underived representation in philosophy are the tracking theories developed by Fodor, Dretske, Millikan and others. (...) Tracking theorists initially hoped to ‘naturalize’ underived representation by showing that although it is distinctively psychological it is not irreducibly so, yet they ended up developing theories of representation that by their own lights don’t pick out a distinctively psychological phenomenon at all. Burge sets out to develop a theory of underived representation that does pick out a distinctively psychological phenomenon. His theory promises to vindicate the Content View and the various philosophical projects that depend on it. In this paper I argue that Burge’s theory dementalizes representation for the same reason tracking theories do: These theories hold that representations are states with underived accuracy conditions, yet such states are found in all sorts of mindless systems, like plants. (shrink)

People's time is a limited resource and, in economic evaluations that adopt a societal perspective, it is important that it is valued and accounted for. Yet, in economic evaluations of interventions for children and young people (CYP), attempts to take into account the opportunity cost of their time are rare. To understand why this is the case, we need to first understand what views health economists hold in relation to CYP time, and what challenges they face in incorporating this in (...) their evaluations. We planned and carried out an international survey of health economists. We used a combination of approaches to identify potential survey respondents (the survey's sampling frame), we developed a questionnaire that sought to capture respondents' views and practice through close- and open-ended questions, we piloted the questionnaire through a series of cognitive interviews, and we e-mailed unique links to the final version of the questionnaire to 1956 individuals in the sampling frame. We analysed data using quantitative (descriptive and inferential statistics) and qualitative (thematic analysis) methods. We received 274 complete responses. Most respondents (87%) believe CYP time should be considered for inclusion in economic evaluations conducted from a societal perspective. However, they identify a number of obstacles to doing so, most prominently uncertainties around appropriate practice (e.g., when CYP's time should or should not be included in calculations), methodological gaps (e.g., what value to attach to CYP's time), and practical difficulties in measuring displaced time in CYP. Reporting on their own practice, most respondents found it challenging to consider CYP time in their studies, and stressed the need for clear guidance on when, and further research on how, to appropriately account for CYP's time in economic evaluations. We offer our views on how to move the topic forwards and make suggestions further research. (shrink)

Cesario argues that experimental studies of bias tell us little about why group disparities exist. We argue that Cesario's alternative approach implicitly frames understanding of group disparities as a false binary between “bias” and “group differences.” This, we suggest, will contribute little to our understanding of the complex dynamics that produce group disparities, and risks inappropriately rationalizing them.

This article argues that a sustained, consistent, and ambitious argument underlies Annette Michelson’s writings on art and film across the 1970s and 1980s. Working in relation to modernist discourses of the 1960s, Michelson links an account of time and temporal organization in cinema to a developmental model of film spectatorship. Read in this way, Michelson’s writing represents an alternate and overlooked strand of film theory and criticism, one that provides a new account of cinematic avant-gardes—and an alternative to what I (...) call the infantile tendencies of film theory that is grounded in the terms of cognitive maturity. (shrink)

What we regard as real are the objects of the phenomenal world which we perceive. We regard those that we see objectively, as in the third person perspective, as real. What then is the mind that pe...

Simply put, charter schools have not lived up to their advocates’ promise of equity. Using examples of tangible civil rights gains of the twentieth century and extending feminist theories of invisible labor to include the labor of democracy, the authors argue that the charter movement renders invisible the labor that secured civil protections for historically marginalized groups. The charter movement hangs a quality public education—previously recognized as a universal guarantee—on the education consumer’s ability to navigate a marketplace. The authors conclude (...) that the neoliberal agenda of positioning choice as the best mechanism for securing an education rolls back the rights that were already secured through the labor of democracy. (shrink)

THAT DESCARTES WAS INTERESTED from the very start of his philosophic career in developing a method for problem-solving that could be applied generally to the solution of "unknowns" is well known. Also well known is the further development of the method by the introduction of the technique of hyperbolic doubt in his mature, metaphysical works, especially in the Meditations. Perhaps less widely appreciated is the important role that accounts of systems of signs played in the development of his early accounts (...) of a method; it is crucial to the method that the elements of problems be identified and signified by simple and convenient signs that can then be arranged to display the relations among the known elements and the unknown solution. Commentators such as Michel Foucault have brought this interest in signification to our attention and shown the widespread importance of such projects in the seventeenth century. Few, however, have examined the relation between the early projects of signification and the later, metaphysical works. I suggest that one way to understand Descartes' metaphysical turn in his mature work is as an attempt to ground the accounts he has offered of signification in something further: representation, particularly mental representation. From the start, Descartes explains signification by reference to mental representation: a word, figure, or symbol signifies its objects by prompting the mind to think of those objects. Although Descartes offers detailed and comprehensive accounts in works such as the Rules for the Direction of the Mind of what constitutes effective and convenient systems of signification by way of the relations between signifying element, system, and the objects signified thereby, the mental operations that allow signification to operate, especially that of the "intuition of simple natures," is never fully explained. It remains to the mature phase of Descartes' career to crack open the basic operations of our thought by developing the full-fledged doctrine of ideas--a doctrine that makes explicit how an object is represented to a subject. (shrink)

I here present a feminine voice version of the moral case against abortion and draw from it some conclusions for public policy. My motto is solidarity with the last and least. The unborn individual is “one of us”—to be welcomed, not dismissed as a burden on society. Abortion, I argue, is bad for women, bad for children, and bad for the rest of us. Public policy should reflect these conclusions.

ABSTRACT Between 1796 and 1814, two of late Enlightenment Germany's most prominent historians offered striking revisions to earlier accounts of European history. The renowned journalist, historian, and Slavicist August Ludwig Schlözer published a critical edition and translation of the Old Slavonic Primary Chronicle alongside a detailed historical commentary. This commentary presented Russia as an important protagonist in Europe's emergence from barbarism to Enlightened modernity. By contrast, his colleague Johann Gottfried Eichhorn published several historical works arguing that France had failed to (...) cultivate a mature bourgeoisie and, consequently, had not become a fully modern polity. Building on the work of J. G. A. Pocock and Michael Printy, this article examines the thought of Eichhorn and Schlözer as political responses to the crises of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. It thereby offers both a fresh assessment of the work of two major Enlightenment intellectuals and an analysis of how notions of European modernity were reconfigured in a period of profound political turmoil. (shrink)

It will surprise no readers that Germans fiercely debated the notion of revelation from 1750 to 1850. Nevertheless, few would deny the difficulties inherent to studying the topic, with its bewilder...

After yeast cells commit to the cell cycle in a process called START, genes required for DNA synthesis are expressed in late G1. Periodicity is mediated by a hexameric sequence, known as a MCB element, present in all DNA synthesis gene promoters. A complex that specifically binds MCBs has been identified. One polypeptide in the MCB complex is Swi6, a transcription factor that together with Swi4 also binds G1 cyclin promoters and participates in a positive feedback loop at START. The (...) finding that Swi6 is directly involved in both START and DNA synthesis gene control suggest a model in which Swi6, activated through its participation in START, serves as the central transcription factor in coordinating late G1 gene expression. The mechanism may be conserved in all eukaryotic cells. (shrink)