This dual methods study explored one social studies teacher education program as it attempted to incorporate a cycle of practice-based teacher education into a methods course for the purpose of democratizing the teacher education experience. In addition to detailing the pedagogical decisions of the course instructor, researchers followed two social studies teacher candidates into their student teaching experience. Findings suggested that promoting social studies practice through a pedagogy of enactment is not enough. Rather, mentor teachers, course instructors, and teacher candidates (...) need to be aligned pedagogically as to the purposes and practices of social studies education. (shrink)

The rise of networked social movements contesting neo-liberal globalization and protesting the summits of global finance and governance organizations has posed an analytical challenge to social movement theorists and called into question the applicability to this global milieu of the familiar concepts and heuristics utilized in social movement studies. In this article, we argue that the self-defining alter-globalization movement(s) might instead be engaged with as an expression and effect of global complexity, and we draw upon a ‘minor’ literature in social (...) movement studies that includes Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze and Alberto Melucci to illustrate our claims. This article uses a Deleuzian reading of complexity to describe the phase space of the ‘movement of movements’, and its perturbation of global civil society through the iteration of sense-making processes (reflexive framing) and the exploration of singularities inhering in social movement ‘plateaux’. Those transnational gatherings, protests and social forums facilitated by computer-mediated communications and the advent of unprecedented mobility which constitute a ‘shadow realm’ that remains largely invisible to political exchange theories operating within the conceptual confines of the nation-state. (shrink)

During the three centuries from 800 to 500 B.C., the Greek world evolved from a primitive society- -both culturally and economically- -to one whose artistic products dominated all Mediterranean markets, supported by a wide overseas trade. In the following two centuries came the literary, philosophical, and artistic masterpieces of the classic area. Vital to this advance was the development of the polis, a collective institution in which citizens had rights as well as duties under the rule of law, a system (...) hitherto unknown in human history. In this study, the first systematic exploration of the forces that created the political framework of Greek civilization, Chester Starr shows how the Greeks emerged form a Homeric world of individuals to the polis of 500 B.C. The age-old conflict between the self-serving demands of human beings and the less vocally-expressed needs of the community serves as the backbone of Starr's interdisciplinary analysis of the rise of the polis. (shrink)

There has been much discussion of whether there could be objects A and B that are “individuatively vague” in the following way: object A and object B neither determinately stand in the relation of identity to one another, nor do they determinately fail to stand in this relation. If there are objects of this type, then we would have a genuine case of metaphysical vagueness, or “vagueness-in-the-world.” The possibility of vague objects in this sense strikes many as incoherent. The possibility’s (...) very description not only seems to talk of two objects but, much worse, it seems to point to a feature that distinguishes them: unlike object A, object B is not determinately identical to object A. This suspicion of incoherence is voiced in the famous arguments given against the possibility by Gareth Evans and Nathan Salmon. But the status of those arguments and others is uncertain. Here I present a new argument against vague objects — or more precisely, against the possibility of individuatively vague objects that satisfy an important and common additional condition that I will call “Democracy.” Since my argument turns on a connection between what is indeterminate and what is possible, I call it “the modal argument.”. (shrink)

G.E. Moore, more than either Bertrand Russell or Ludwig Wittgenstein, was chiefly responsible for the rise of the analytic method in twentieth-century philosophy. This selection of his writings shows Moore at his very best. The classic essays are crucial to major philosophical debates that still resonate today. Amongst those included are: * A Defense of Common Sense * Certainty * Sense-Data * External and Internal Relations * Hume's Theory Explained * Is Existence a Predicate? * Proof of an (...) External World In addition, this collection also contains the key early papers in which Moore signals his break with idealism, and three important previously unpublished papers from his later work which illustrate his relationship with Wittgenstein. (shrink)

G.E. Moore, more than either Bertrand Russell or Ludwig Wittgenstein, was chiefly responsible for the rise of the analytic method in twentieth-century philosophy. This selection of his writings shows Moore at his very best. The classic essays are crucial to major philosophical debates that still resonate today. Amongst those included are: * A Defense of Common Sense * Certainty * Sense-Data * External and Internal Relations * Hume's Theory Explained * Is Existence a Predicate? * Proof of an (...) External World In addition, this collection also contains the key early papers in which Moore signals his break with idealism, and three important previously unpublished papers from his later work which illustrate his relationship with Wittgenstein. (shrink)

In April 1939, G. E. Moore read a paper to the Cambridge University Moral Science Club entitled ‘Certainty’. In it, amongst other things, Moore made the claims that: the phrase ‘it is certain’ could be used with sense-experience-statements, such as ‘I have a pain’, to make statements such as ‘It is certain that I have a pain’; and that sense-experience-statements can be said to be certain in the same sense as some material-thing-statements can be — namely in the (...) sense that they can be safely counted on. When Moore later read his paper to Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein took violent exception to it, and the two entered into a heated exchange. The only known notes of this exchange are a previously unpublished verbatim record of part of it, taken by Norman Malcolm. This paper is an edition of Malcolm’s notes. These notes are valuable for both philosophical and scholarly reasons. They give us a glimpse of a sustained exchange between Wittgenstein and a real-life interlocutor; they contain a defence by Wittgenstein of the idea that a word’s use can illuminate its meaning; and they provide evidence of Wittgenstein’s philosophical engagement with the topic of certainty, and with Moore’s thought on it, long before he began to write the notes which make up On Certainty, in 1949. (shrink)

G. E. Moore was a central figure in twentieth-century philosophy. Along with Russell and Wittgenstein, he pioneered analytic philosophy, and his Principia Ethica shaped the contours of twentieth-century ethics. Indeed, until the publication of Rawls's A Theory of Justice, no single book in moral philosophy was to equal Principia's influence. Unfortunately, however, Principia Ethica has so dominated critical discussions of Moore's work that even experts on his moral philosophy have tended to ignore his Ethics, which he published eight (...) years later. But Ethics is Moore's only other book on moral philosophy, and one of only a handful of post-Principia publications dealing with ethics. Its detailed discussions of utilitarianism, free will, and the objectivity of moral judgements find no real counterpart in Principia while its account of right and wrong and of the nature of intrinsic value deepen our understanding of his moral philosophy. The republication of Ethics thus rounds out our understanding of Moore's ethical thought. But the book's value goes beyond its historical or scholarly interest. A short but philosophically rich text, Ethics stands independent of Principia and repays careful study in its own right. By raising a number of fundamental questions in ethics, questions that remain live today, by proffering clear, credible, and often innovative answers to them, and by doing so with a philosophical skill that is still impressive, Moore's short book is a minor classic. Almost a century after its original publication, it still amply rewards those who read it.This new edition of Moore's Ethics includes his essay 'The Nature of Moral Philosophy' as well as editorial notes, an introduction, and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

It has been demonstrated that death certificates do not accurately record the actual cause of death in up to one-fourth of cases, as determined from subsequent autopsy findings. The purpose of this study was to explore the use of natural language autopsy data bases as an automated quality assurance mechanism. We translated the account of the major process leading to death, or the primary diagnosis, from all 45,564 narrative autopsy reports obtained at The Johns Hopkins Hospital between May 28, 1889, (...) and June 30, 1987, into the hierarchical system of Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) titles. We obtained a total of 125,772 MeSH title translations, 1,563 of them distinct (average 2.8 per case), ranging in frequency from 6,029 occurrences of LUNG to 1 occurrence apiece of 357 MeSH titles. The natural-language-to-MeSH translations showed expected trends over the past century: fewer infectious diseases; more cardiovascular and neoplastic disease among adults; and more respiratory diseases and congenital malformations in the pediatric age group. The greater availability of autopsy documents in electronic form should increase the value of this resource for quality assurance. (shrink)

Legal positivism maintains a distinction between law as it is and law as it ought to be. In other words, for positivists, a law can be legally valid even if it is immoral. H. L. A. Hart hoped to defend legal positivism against natural law. This paper analyses Hart’s criticism of Gustav Radbruch, a natural lawyer, before suggesting that Hart’s account of legal positivism gives rise to a logical problem. It is concluded that this problem leaves logical space for a (...) theory of natural law based on moral authority rather than legal validity. (shrink)