This article explores the dynamic between Black youth and their teachers through an exploration of an approach to teaching and learning embedded in the complex cultural knowledge(s) of this population. It interrogates the concepts of ratchedemics and reality pedagogy as both philosophy and practice for moving past the framing of particular populations as dystopian and non-academic in the pursuit of the mirage of urban educational utopia.

Forming and sustaining healthy relationships of any kind requires empathy, thought, communication and effort, all of which are learned skills. Many of these skills can and should be learned in a variety of places, including and especially in schools. One of the most appropriate venues for teaching interpersonal relationship skills in school is through ‘sex ed’ classes. I argue that student-centred, anti-racist, culturally affirming and appropriate, inclusive, egalitarian and relationship-based learning environments are necessary for sex education that benefits all students. (...) The principles of hip-hop-based pedagogies, including Christopher Emdin's Reality Pedagogy, Bettina Love's Abolitionist Pedagogy and Rawls and Robinson's Youth Culture Pedagogy can serve as a useful theoretical framework around which to build sex education curriculum and policy. School-based sex education (SBSE) based on these principles may prove extremely beneficial not only to all students and their individual sense of identity and sexual autonomy but also to the general welfare of the public in the long run. (shrink)

Basing his view on the object relations theories of the "British School" of psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas examines the human subject's memories of its earliest experiences (during infancy and childhood) of the object, whether it be mother, father, or self. He explains in well-written and non-technical language how the object can affect the child, or "cast in shadow," without the child being able to process this relation through mental representations of language.

This paper has five theses, which are intended to address the claims in Jerry Fodor's paper. (1) The question arises of the relation between the philosophical theory of concepts and epistemology. Neither is explanatorily prior to the other. Rather, each relies implicitly on distinctions drawn from the other. To explain what makes something knowledge, we need distinctions drawn from the theory of concepts. To explain the attitudes mentioned in a theory of concepts, we need to use the notion of knowledge. (...) (2) Concepts can have a normative dimension without their nature being interpretation‐dependent, and without their nature being mind‐dependent. The normative dimension traces back instead to the role of truth as a constitutive aim of judgement. (3) Conceptual combination is to be explained at the level of reference and semantic value. When we respect this fact, there is no difficulty in explaining compositionality for epistemically‐constrained concepts. (4) Epistemically‐constrained theories of concepts are committed to the applicability of the notion of the a priori. They are not committed to the applicability of the notion of analyticity, where this is construed as truth purely in virtue of meaning or the identity of concepts. (5) Possession of a concept has causal‐explanatory powers, whether given by a possession condition in the form presented in A Study of Concepts, or by possession of an implicit conception. A possession‐condition theory of concepts need not be a form of dispositionalism. (shrink)

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing humanity and has become an area of growing focus in Business & Society. Looking back and reviewing climate change discussion within this journal highlights the importance of time and space in addressing the climate crisis. Looking forward, we extend existing research by theorizing and politicizing the co-implication of time and space through the concept of “space-time.” To illustrate this, we employ the logical structure of “the trace” to advance business and (...) society scholarship on climate change by shifting the focus to a place-bound emphasis on climate impacts and directing scholarship toward climate change’s temporal markers and material effects. By operationalizing “the trace,” we contribute to Business & Society debates in three ways: reimagining complex stakeholder relations, advancing a performative understanding of climate risk, and foregrounding planetary systems and the physical environment. (shrink)

Xenotransplant patient selection recommendations restrict clinical trial participation to seriously ill patients for whom alternative therapies are unavailable or who will likely die while waiting for an allotransplant. Despite a scholarly consensus that this is advisable, we propose to examine this restriction. We offer three lines of criticism: (1) The risk–benefit calculation may well be unfavorable for seriously ill patients and society; (2) the guidelines conflict with criteria for equitable patient selection; and (3) the selection of seriously ill patients may (...) compromise informed consent. We conclude by highlighting how the current guidance reveals a tension between the societal values of justice and beneficence. (shrink)

I will argue, pace a great many of my contemporaries, that there's something right about Boltzmann's attempt to ground the second law of thermodynamics in a suitably amended deterministic time-reversal invariant classical dynamics, and that in order to appreciate what's right about (what was at least at one time) Boltzmann's explanatory project, one has to fully apprehend the nature of microphysical causal structure, time-reversal invariance, and the relationship between Boltzmann entropy and the work of Rudolf Clausius.

Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management is a wide-ranging and expert analysis of the ethics of the intentional management of solar radiation. This book will be a useful tool for policy-makers, a provocation for ethicists, and an eye-opening analysis for both the scientist and the general reader with interest in climate change.

This essay critically assesses Anna Stilz's argument in Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration that legitimate states have a right to do wrong. I concede that individuals enjoy a claim against external interference when they commit suberogatory acts, but I deny that the right to do wrong extends to acts that would violate the rights of others. If this is correct, then one must do more than merely invoke an individual's right to do wrong if one hopes to vindicate a legitimate (...) state's right to commit injustices. Of course, there may be distinctive features of legitimate states that explain why they enjoy moral protections that individuals lack, but I argue that the value of collective self-determination is not up to this task. And even if these arguments fail, self-determination would at most explain why legitimate states enjoy a right to commit injustices against their own citizens; it would provide them no moral protection when they violate the rights of outsiders. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Karen Ng's Hegel's Concept of Life tackles one of the hardest problems – the placement and status of the category of life within treatises on epistemology and logic—within what are already two of the most difficult texts in the history of philosophy—Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. It does so with good attention to contemporary debates surrounding Hegel's logic and metaphysics, and manages to integrate concerns that have been more typically expressed in continental scholarship—such as the influence of (...) Schelling and Hölderlin—with concerns that have come out of the more recent analytic conversation – such as the status of universals and the attributability of inferentialism to Hegel's thought. Ng argues for a distinctive kind of post‐Kantian reading of Hegel, one which emphasizes Hegel's interests in Kant's thoughts about judgment and teleology in the third Critique rather than the categories and dialectic of the first Critique. In the first section, I want to trace a tension in Ng's thought between inflationary and deflationary understandings of ‘life’ and its associated terms. Here I will try to make out the relevant concept of life that makes the living object the promising form of a richer object of judgment for a self‐conscious subject. In the following section, I try to tease out the relation of life to two very closely related notions, namely the notion of an organism and the notion of a purpose. (shrink)

The first comprehensive collection of the work of Richard Rorty, The Rorty Reader brings together the influential American philosopher’s essential essays from over four decades of writings. Offers a comprehensive introduction to Richard Rorty's life and body of work Brings key essays published across many volumes and journals into one collection, including selections from his final volume of philosophical papers, Philosophy as Cultural Politics ) Contains the previously unpublished essay, “Redemption from Egotism” Includes in-depth interviews, and several revealing autobiographical pieces (...) Represents the fullest portrait available today on Rorty’s relationship with American pragmatism and the trajectory of his thought. (shrink)

The philosopher Kant is a key thinker in shaping our contemporary concept of morality, freedom, and happiness. This book argues that Kant believes in God, but that he is not a Christian, and that this opens up an important and neglected dimension of Western Philosophy.

David Carr's account of the nature of professional work is described and examined. It is argued that Carr's criteria for distinguishing between professional and non–professional work are not adequate. The criteria are as follows: the professions’ essential role in promoting human flourishing; their contestability; their direct concern for the well–being of clients; their provision of a high degree of autonomy for practitioners. They do not mark out a qualitative difference between professions and other occupations. Carr's notion of civic necessities applies (...) to what he describes as non–professional as well as to professional work. The role of commercial considerations in the usefulness of some kinds of work is considered and a distinction is made between technical and occupational virtues. Carr treats professional virtues as occupational virtues without appreciating that nearly all occupations have both occupational and technical virtues. A significant part of the wouthwhileness of work is bound up with practice of the relevant occupational virtues. (shrink)

For many philosophers of science, mathematics lies closer to logic than it does to the ordinary sciences like physics, biology and economics. While this view may account for the relative neglect of the philosophy of mathematics by philosophers of science, it ignores at least two pressing questions about mathematics that philosophers of science need to be able to answer. First, do the similarities between mathematics and science support the view that mathematics is, after all, another science? Second, does the central (...) role of mathematics in science shed any light on traditional philosophical debates about science like scientific realism, the nature of explanation or reduction? When faced with these kinds of questions many philosophers of science have little to say. Unfortunately, most philosophers of mathematics also fail to engage with questions about the relationship between mathematics and science and so a peculiar isolation has emerged between philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics. In this introductory survey I aim to equip the interested philosopher of science with a roadmap that can guide her through the often intimidating terrain of contemporary philosophy of mathematics. I hope that such a survey will make clear how fruitful a more sustained interaction between philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics could be. (shrink)

This book offers a broad-based critical survey of recent anti-realist arguments in the philosophy of science, cultural theory, hermeneutics, the sociology of knowledge and the interpretation of quantum-mechanics.

This chapter, which concentrates on the violent imaginaries that informed the reports and deeds of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, reviews the perseverance of pre-colonial notions of a sacred king whose “wild sovereignty” and inability to promote the flow of imaana earns him fateful sacrifice. The term imaana denotes a supreme being and, in a more generalized way, a “diffuse, fecundating fluid” of celestial origin whose activity upon livestock, land, and people brought fertility and abundance. As imaana's earthly representative, the king (...) channeled fertility to the rest of humanity. The chapter also discusses symbolism of the sovereign's body and its implicit link with the process of liquid flow. Habyarimana is an inadequate conduit of imaana and thus not a worthy king. He is the antithesis of Ruganzu Ndori. -/- . (shrink)

The first comparative study of Heidegger and Schelling, recognizing Schelling's place in post-Kantian GermanIdealism and his contribution to Heidegger's later thought.

We present a new modeling framework for recognition memory and repetition priming based on signal detection theory. We use this framework to specify and test the predictions of 4 models: (a) a single-system (SS) model, in which one continuous memory signal drives recognition and priming; (b) a multiple-systems-1 (MS1) model, in which completely independent memory signals (such as explicit and implicit memory) drive recognition and priming; (c) a multiple-systems-2 (MS2) model, in which there are also 2 memory signals, but some (...) degree of dependence is allowed between these 2 signals (and this model subsumes the SS and MS1 models as special cases); and (d) a dual-process signal detection (DPSD1) model, 1 possible extension of a dual-process theory of recognition (Yonelinas, 1994) to priming, in which a signal detection model is augmented by an independent recollection process. The predictions of the models are tested in a continuous-identification-with-recognition paradigm in both normal adults (Experiments 1–3) and amnesic individuals (using data from Conroy, Hopkins, & Squire,2005). The SS model predicted numerous results in advance. These were not predicted by the MS1 model, though could be accommodated by the more flexible MS2 model. Importantly, measures of overall model fit favored the SS model over the others. These results illustrate a new, formal approach to testing theories of explicit and implicit memory. (shrink)

Understanding statements containing the past tense involves tacit knowledge of the generalization of such principles as this: ‘Yesterday it rained’ is true if and only if yesterday had the same property as today is required to have for a present‐tense thought ‘It is now raining’ to be true when evaluated with respect to today. This is a variant of the truth‐value link. This tacit knowledge integrates with realism about the past because present‐tense statements are as categorical as their past‐tense counterparts (...) and cannot be reduced to counterfactuals without circularity. An externalist model of the perception of temporal properties and relations can be given, one involving a constitutive sensitivity to instances of those temporal properties and relations themselves. This can contribute to an explanation of how memory supplies knowledge of the past. (shrink)

Is flexibility or formality more useful for organizations that are pursuing improved performance? Organizational structure scholars offer opposing answers to this question, and empirical results have been mixed. Our study contributes to this research by describing a mediational model that links organizational flexibility to performance via opportunity exploitation. Specifically, we argue that flexible firms are able to exploit a greater number of opportunities, which, in turn, can improve performance. We also argue that the indirect effect of flexibility on performance via (...) opportunity exploitation is stronger when top executives display higher affective commitment for their firms, meaning that they have a positive emotional attachment to their firms. Top executives with higher affective commitment can mitigate the downsides experienced by the staff of flexible firms, such as uncertainty and negative affect, which improves the outcomes of flexibility. Drawing on a sample of 211 firms and their founders, we find support for our hypotheses. (shrink)

Middle age, for many, marks a key period for a radical reappraisal of one's life and way of living. The sense of time running out, both from the perspective that one's life has ground to a halt, and from the point of view of the greater closeness of death, and the sense of loneliness engendered by the compromised and wasteful nature of life, become ever clearer in mid-life, and can lead to a period of dramatic self doubt.In this book, the (...) philosopher Christopher Hamilton explores the moods, emotions and experiences of middle age in the contemporary world, seeking to describe and analyze that period of life philosophically. Hamilton draws on his own personal experiences of turning 40 as well as a wide range of sources - from the philosophical writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger to the literature of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conrad and the films of Woody Allen - to offer us a philosophy of middle age.Some of the many fascinating themes explored include the strong sense of nostalgia experienced in mid-life, of loss for one's youth, and of regret, the sense that life has become boring, the recognition that one can never fully escape feelings of guilt, and - central to the experience of middle age - the question of what is the point of going on at all. In the light of the 'melancholy wisdom' of mid-life Hamilton suggests that pleasure becomes much more important than at previous stages of life and he shows that the enjoyment of pleasure can be something noble.Insightful, entertaining, and thought-provoking, "Middle Age" is fascinating reading and for anyone heading for a 'mid-life crisis' it is much cheaper than buying a sports car. (shrink)

Liberation theology is widely referred to in discussions of politics and religion but not always adequately understood. The second edition of this Companion brings the story of the movement's continuing importance and impact up to date. Additional essays, which complement those in the original edition, expand upon the issues by dealing with gender and sexuality and the important matter of epistemology. In the light of a more conservative ethos in Roman Catholicism, and in theology generally, liberation theology is often said (...) to have been an intellectual movement tied to a particular period of ecumenical and political theology. These essays indicate its continuing importance in different contexts and enable readers to locate its distinctive intellectual ethos within the evolving contextual and cultural concerns of theology and religious studies. This book will be of interest to students of theology as well as to sociologists, political theorists and historians. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Integrated Life The Longer Life Peaks and Troughs Experience and Harm Which Deaths Are Worse?

Thanks to a helpful tetradic diagram found in the expanded fifth edition of John Deely’s Basics of Semiotics, in which the context and circumstances of a sign’s utterance (in addition to the sign-vehicle itself and the immediate object of the sign) is distinguished from all that is explicit in the sign itself apart from the context and circumstances of its utterance, it is possible to bring Deely’s insights to bear upon the semiotically suggestive work of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s implicitly semiotic (...) understanding of analogy is structurally present in his efforts to visually articulate the “laws of media” with his own “tetrad” diagrams. Deely’s discussion of the irreducible triadicity of signs therefore illuminates McLuhan’s attempt to understand how analogical thought actually works on the most fundamental structural level in the cognition of the semiotic animal. There is a unique cognitive syntax to analogy, which is operative in the animal that Deely has most appropriately identified as “the semiotic animal”. This article discusses McLuhan’s understanding of analogy in terms of its figure/ground structure, by using the example of the thermometer from Deely’s Basics of Semiotics. In relating this example to McLuhan’s tetrad, it is shown how McLuhan’s implicitly semiotic analysis can also increase our semiotic understanding of other technological tools, such as Skype videoconferencing. (shrink)