Within the current global political context in Western democracies, one might argue that engaging in public discourse about matters of shared concern is not an inviting opportunity for citizens. Generally speaking, participation in public discourse is not something we seek out unless, perhaps, from behind the privacy of our electronic devices. What this might indicate, following an Arendtian insight, is that we currently have no sense of a shared world together. In other words, we have become alienated from that which (...) binds us together: a common world. The primacy of a horiztonal, political relation wherein we speak to one another and not at or against each other is in urgent need of articulation and, for this, we... (shrink)

This book puts forward a radical, unorthodox thesis with respect to the Anthropocene, the philosophy of Deleuze/Guattari and education. This book analyses the Anthropocene for its unconscious drives and develops a parallel mode of education and social change.

Insight and strategy 2 Abstract In multiple-cue learning (also known as probabilistic category learning) people acquire information about cue-outcome relations and combine these into predictions or judgments. Previous studies claim that people can achieve high levels of performance without explicit knowledge of the task structure or insight into their own judgment policies. It has also been argued that people use a variety of suboptimal strategies to solve such tasks. In three experiments we re-examined these conclusions by introducing novel measures of (...) task knowledge and self-insight, and using ‘rolling regression’ methods to analyze individual learning. Participants successfully learned a four-cue probabilistic environment and showed accurate knowledge of both the task structure and their own judgment processes. Learning analyses suggested that the apparent use of suboptimal strategies emerges from the incremental tracking of statistical contingencies in the environment. (shrink)

The typical kind of color realism is reductive: the color properties are identified with properties specified in other terms (as ways of altering light, for instance). If no reductive analysis is available — if the colors are primitive sui generis properties — this is often taken to be a convincing argument for eliminativism. That is, realist primitivism is usually thought to be untenable. The realist preference for reductive theories of color over the last few decades is particularly striking in light (...) of the generally anti-reductionist mood of recent philosophy of mind. The parallels between the mind—body problem and the case of color are substantial enough that the difference in trajectory is surprising. While dualism and non-reductive physicalism are staples, realist primitivism is by and large a recent addition to the color literature. And it remains a minority position, although one that is perhaps gaining support. In this paper, we investigate whether it should be accepted, and conclude it should not be. (shrink)

Written by some of the world's leading academics and professionals in the field, this collection of essays brings together two complementary views on child development - the role of society and the role of cognitive growth.

The role of power and its relation to values has become a topic of growing interest in business ethics as well as in the literature of management and the sociology of organizations. Though there is more interest in the role and potential for abuse of power in corporations, the concept of power drawn from classical political theory and initial behavioral studies of power in organizations is inadequate for understanding the place, complexity and ethics of power in the corporation. Analyses of (...) power drawn from recent political theory can provide a more fine-grained and illuminating understanding of power than has been available from classical political theory and social science literature. I distinguish three approaches: the behavioral model commonly employed, the ideological model which comes out of the political theory of certain neo-Marxists, and what I call the disciplinary model drawn form Michel Foucault's analysis of modern forms of power. I suggest areas of working life and ethical issues about the relation between power and values that can be illuminated by these alternate analyses. (shrink)

In their recent paper ‘Why lockdown of the elderly is not ageist and why levelling down equality is wrong’ Savulescu and Cameron attempt to argue the case for subjecting the ‘elderly’ to limits not imposed on other generations. We argue that selective lockdown of the elderly is unnecessary and cruel, as well as discriminatory, and that this group may suffer more than others in similar circumstances. Further, it constitutes an unjustifiable deprivation of liberty.

This chapter contains sections titled: Overview Epistemology and Explanation Subject and Object; Dasein and World Dasein, Reality, and Explanatory Priority Truth and Being True.

It is human nature to wonder how things might have turned out differently--either for the better or for the worse. For the past two decades psychologists have been intrigued by this phenomenon, which they call counterfactual thinking. Specifically, researchers have sought to answer the "big" questions: Why do people have such a strong propensity to generate counterfactuals, and what functions does counterfactual thinking serve? What are the determinants of counterfactual thinking, and what are its adaptive and psychological consequences? This important (...) work brings together a collection of thought-provoking papers by social and cognitive psychologists who have made important theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of this topic. The essays in this volume contain novel theoretical insights, and, in many cases descriptions of previously unpublished empirical studies. The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking provides an excellent overview of this fascinating topic for researchers, as well as advanced undergraduates and graduates in psychology--particularly those with an interest in social cognition, social judgment, decision judgment, decision making, thinking and reasoning. (shrink)

This philosophy of education paper describes a schizophrenic situation. A new airport is being planned in the locale of a university which is a Centre of Excellence of Education for Sustainable Development, and the university is a major partner. The airport involves an investment in jobs, resources, and will encourage further economic development. The planners have named the inter-connected developments around the airport as the ‘Aerotropolis’, including new university facilities. One could argue that the airport is a classic example of (...) the ‘Capitalocene’, where capital rushes into a new project, and environmental costs are ignored. This paper will execute a schizoanalytic critique of the process, from the perspective of a university education researcher caught up in the rushing flows of capital. Schizoanalysis has been chosen as the educational methodology to analyse this situation, because the researcher is part of what is happening, and is turned inside out by the designation in their region of the new airport. This paper is positioned in education between capital and the environment – it will describe from an insider’s perspective what it is like to be possessed, evacuated, sold out, and exploited by capital. (shrink)

Over the past decade or so, several commentators have called for mission-driven research programs on solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation management (SRM) or climate engineering. Building on the largely epistemic reasons offered by earlier commentators, this paper argues that a well-designed mission-driven research program that aims to evaluate solar geoengineering could promote justice and legitimacy, among other valuable ends. Specifically, an international, mission-driven research program that aims to produce knowledge to enable well-informed decision-making about solar geoengineering could (1) (...) provide a more effective way to identify and answer the questions that policymakers would need to answer; and (2) provide a venue for more efficient, effective, just, and legitimate governance of solar geoengineering research; while (3) reducing the tendency for solar geoengineering research to exacerbate international domination. Thus, despite some risks and limitations, a well-designed mission-driven research program offers one way to improve the governance of solar geoengineering research relative to the ‘investigator-driven’ status quo. (shrink)

a good summation of all the works of foucault and habermas, but not useful to cite.

In this paper, we examine the logics of essence and accident and attempt to ascertain the extent to which those logics are genuinely formalizing the concepts in which we are interested. We suggest that they are not completely successful as they stand. We diagnose some of the problems and make a suggestion for improvement. We also discuss some issues concerning definability in the formal language.

Interpretations of Heidegger's Being and Time have tended to founder on the question of whether he is in the end a realist or an idealist, in part because of Heidegger's own rather enigmatic remarks on the subject. Many have thus depicted him as being in some way ambivalent, and so as holding on to an unstable combination of the two opposing positions. Recently, William Blattner has explained the apparent ambivalence by appealing to Kant's transcendental/empirical distinction. Although an ingenious reading of (...) Being and Time, there are a number of difficulties involved in cashing out its central claims. I argue that it fails, moreover, to capture Heidegger's avowed animus toward both realism and idealism. After criticizing Blattner's reading, I recount several features of Heidegger's ?existential analytic? of Dasein in Division I of Being and Time and connect them with his (slightly later) notion of world?entry. This latter notion provides a way of explaining how Heidegger retains a realistic conception of natural entities, while offering an overall view that cannot be identified with either realism or idealism. (shrink)

Bermúdez's case for rational framing effects, while original, is unconvincing and gives only parenthetical treatment to the problematic assumptions of extensional and semantic equivalence of alternative frames in framing experiments. If the assumptions are false, which they sometimes are, no valid inferences about “framing effects” follow and, then, neither do inferences about human rationality. This commentary recaps the central problem.

This paper proposes a new organizational metaphor, the ‘Biophilic Organization’, which aims to counter the bio-cultural disconnection of many organizations despite their espoused commitment to sustainability. This conceptual research draws on multiple disciplines such as evolutionary psychology and architecture to not only develop a diverse bio-cultural connection but to show how this connection tackles sustainability, in a holistic and systemic sense. Moreover, the paper takes an integrative view of sustainability, which effectively means that it embraces the different emergent tensions. Three (...) specific tensions are explored: efficiency versus resilience, organizational versus personal agendas and isomorphism versus institutional change. In order to illustrate how the Biophilic Organization could potentially provide a synthesis strategy for such tensions, healthcare examples are drawn from the emerging fields of Biophilic Design in Singapore and Generative Design in the U.S.A. Finally, an example is provided which highlights how a Taoist cultural context has impacted on a business leader in China, to illustrative the significance of a transcendent belief system to such a bio-cultural narrative. (shrink)

An authoritative and accessible book by a qualified scientist, showing incredible proof of the mind-body connection. There is no longer any doubt that the way we think affects our bodies: countless scientific studies have shown this to be true. For former pharmaceutical scientist Dr David Hamilton, the testing of new drugs highlighted how profoundly the mind and body are connected. Time and time again, the control group of patients in drug trials improved at similar rates to those who actually (...) received the medicines. Astounded, Dr Hamilton decided to change the direction of his work to explore the relationship between the mind and the body. This bestselling acclaimed book was first published 10 years ago. In it, Dr Hamilton explores the effect of visualization, belief and positive thinking on the body, and shows how using our imagination and mental processes can stimulate our own defences and healing systems to combat disease, pain and illness. In this new edition, Dr Hamilton has added four new chapters to discuss the latest cutting-edge information and extraordinary new techniques. These include using imagery to stimulate the immune system - a method that can benefit cancer patients undergoing conventional treatment - effectively using the mind to speed up rehabilitation from stroke, and powerful visualization strategies to help facilitate recovery from injury and illness. (shrink)

In the late preschool years children acquire a "theory of mind", the ability to ascribe intentional states, including beliefs, desires and intentions, to themselves and others. In this paper I trace how children's ability to ascribe intentions is derived from parental attempts to hold them responsible for their talk and action, that is, the attempt to have their behavior meet a normative standard or rule. Self-control is children's developing ability to take on or accept responsibility, that is, the ability to (...) ascribe intentions to themselves. This is achieved, I argue, when they possess the ability to hold an utterance or rule in mind in the form of a quoted expression, and second, when they grasp the causal relation between the rule and their action. The account of how children learn to ascribe intention to themselves and others will then be used to explore the larger question of the relations amongst language, intentional states and the ascription and avowal of those states. (shrink)

The global pandemic has pushed many of us to online streaming services. A particular genre in these services is the ‘end of the world’ science fiction film, in and through which the speculated results of processes such as climate change are depicted. CGI technology is frequently deployed to create images of the end of the world, which is a backdrop to the narrative of, ‘saving ourselves amidst the ruins’. This philosophy of education essay will critically examine ten films in order (...) to:Explain how ‘the end of the world’ images connected to processes such as climate change, obscures and displaces attention from the real, scientifically proven processes that are not so entertaining, but are still deadly. The images are created by capital and its machines for audience attention and have little to do with real social change. Science sits in an ambiguous position in this paper in that the real processes of climate change proven by science may be funded by capitalist mechanisms that can also be their cause.Introduce a reformulated notion of ecosophy from the work of Félix Guattari, Murray Bookchin, Arne Næss and Andre Gorz. This essay will suggest that ecosophy has the potential to teach the underlying split between depictions of the end of the world through the capitalist machine and the real social change necessary under climate change. Ecosophy is in the context of this essay a specific conceptual construction designed for teaching about climate change through cinema. (shrink)

Understanding, as Descartes, Locke and Kant all insisted, is the primary 'faculty' of the mind; yet our modern sciences have been slow to advance a clear and testable account of what it means to understand, of children's acquisition of this concept and, in particular, how children come to ascribe understanding to themselves and others. By drawing together developmental and philosophical theories, this book provides a systematic account of children's concept of understanding and places understanding at the heart of children's 'theory (...) of mind'. Children's subjective awareness of their own minds, of what they think, depends on learning a language for ascribing mental states to themselves and others. This book will appeal to researchers in developmental psychology, cognitive science, education and philosophy who are interested in the cognitive and emotional development of children and in the more basic question of what it means to have a mind. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that early performance of amnesic individuals in a probabilistic category learning task is relatively unimpaired. When combined with impaired declarative knowledge, this is taken as evidence for the existence of separate implicit and explicit memory systems. The present study contains a more fine-grained analysis of learning than earlier studies. Using a dynamic lens model approach with plausible learning models, we found that the learning process is indeed indistinguishable between an amnesic and control group. However, in contrast to (...) earlier findings, we found that explicit knowledge of the task structure is also good in both the amnesic and the control group. This is inconsistent with a crucial prediction from the multiple-systems account. The results can be explained from a single system account and previously found differences in later categorization performance can be accounted for by a difference in learning rate. (shrink)

Multiple cue probability learning studies have typically focused on stationary environments. We present three experiments investigating learning in changing environments. A fine-grained analysis of the learning dynamics shows that participants were responsive to both abrupt and gradual changes in cue-outcome relations. We found no evidence that participants adapted to these types of change in qualitatively different ways. Also, in contrast to earlier claims that these tasks are learned implicitly, participants showed good insight into what they learned. By fitting formal learning (...) models, we investigated whether participants learned global functional relationships or made localized predictions from similar experienced exemplars. Both a local (the Associative Learning Model) and a global learning model (the novel Bayesian Linear Filter) fitted the data of the first two experiments. However, the results of Experiment 3, which was specifically designed to discriminate between local and global learning models, provided more support for global learning models. Finally, we present a novel model to account for the cue competition effects found in previous research and displayed by some of our participants. (shrink)

In Being and Time, Heidegger explicitly defers any consideration of ourselves (Dasein) as embodied. I try to account for Heidegger's reluctance to talk about 'the body' in connection with his explication of Dasein, by arguing that doing so would be at odds with the kind of investigation his 'phenomenology of everydayness' is meant to be. That Heidegger omits discussion of the body in Being and Time might lead one to think of the human body in terms of the other categories (...) Heidegger deploys: readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand (Being and Time) and biological organisms (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics). I argue that any such identification ought to be resisted, as these categories serve only to deprive our bodies of their specifically human dimension. Indeed, by surveying the failure of these categories as proper to the human body, we gain further insight into Heidegger's initial deferral: only given the existential analytic can one begin to offer a proper account of ourselves in bodily terms. (shrink)

Many commentators fear that climate engineering research might lead policy-makers to reduce mitigation efforts. Most of the literature on this so-called ‘moral hazard’ problem focuses on the prediction that climate engineering research would reduce mitigation efforts. This paper focuses on a related ethical question: Why would it be a bad thing if climate engineering research obstructed mitigation? If climate engineering promises to be effective enough, it might justify some reduction in mitigation. Climate policy portfolios involving sufficiently large or poorly planned (...) reductions in mitigation, however, could lead to an outcome that would be worse than the portfolio that would be chosen in the absence of further climate engineering research. This paper applies three ethical perspectives to describe the kinds of portfolios that would be worse than that ‘baseline portfolio’. The literature on climate engineering identifies various mechanisms that might cause policy-makers to choose these inferior portfolios, but it is difficult to know in advance whether the existence of these mechanisms means that climate engineering research really would lead to a worse outcome. In the light of that uncertainty, a precautionary approach suggests that researchers should take measures to reduce the risk of mitigation obstruction. Several such measures are suggested. (shrink)

Advocates of ordinary aesthetics argue that aesthetic experiences found in everyday life can have an impact on our ethical being. This raises the question of how, specifically, action arises from aesthetic experience. Although this matter affects both Aesthetics and Ethics, the current literature provides few details on potential mechanisms. Using neurophysiological evidence, this article proposes specific action profiles and associated mechanisms for aesthetic experiences. To achieve this, it is argued that aesthetic experience originates within the mind and that ordinary aesthetic (...) experiences are logically permissible. Subsequently, a proposed landscape of aesthetic experience is derived. Mechanisms for pathways from experience to action are provided for each category of aesthetic experience. In sum, this provides a tangible bridge between Aesthetics and Ethics, enabling a better understanding of how one’s ethical being is influenced by certain experiences. (shrink)

In his final collection of philosophical papers, Richard Rorty continued his attack on the traditional conception of philosophy by arguing that many of our debates should be thought of as matters of cultural politics rather than about ontology or truth. Consistent with that view, Rorty had argued that we come to see debates about human rights not as an attempt to ground rights in human nature but rather as attempts to expand our moral imagination. I extend this claim to an (...) account of human rights as political rather than metaphysical, an account that treats human rights as a political innovation to be justified in terms of the work of human rights. (shrink)

The first clear and faithful guide to the timeless, practical teachings of the Stoic philosopher Seneca. Stoicism, the most influential philosophy of the Roman Empire, offers refreshingly modern ways to strengthen our inner character in the face of an unpredictable world. Widely recognized as the most talented and humane writer of the Stoic tradition, Seneca teaches us to live with freedom and purpose. His most enduring work, over a hundred "Letters from a Stoic" written to a close friend, explains how (...) to handle adversity; overcome grief, anxiety, and anger; transform setbacks into opportunities for growth; and recognize the true nature of friendship. In Breakfast with Seneca, philosopher David Fideler mines Seneca's classic works in a series of focused chapters, clearly explaining Seneca's ideas without oversimplifying them. Best enjoyed as a daily ritual, like an energizing cup of coffee, Seneca's wisdom provides us with a steady stream of time-tested advice about the human condition-which, as it turns out, hasn't changed much over the past two thousand years. (shrink)

A small proportion of clinical strains of Candida albicans undergo white–opaque switching. Until recently it was not clear why, since most strains carry the genes differentially expressed in the unique opaque phase. The answer to this enigma lies in the mating process. The majority of C. albicans strains are heterozygous for the mating type locus MTL (a/α) and cannot undergo white–opaque switching. However, when these cells undergo homozygosis at the mating type locus (i.e., become a/a or α/α), they can switch, (...) and they must switch in order to mate. Even though the newly identified stages of mating mimic those of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the process differs in its dependency on switching, and the effects switching has on gene regulation. This unique feature of C. albicans mating appears to be intimately intertwined with its pathogenesis. The unique, newly discovered dependencies of switching on homozygosis at the MTL locus and of mating on switching are, therefore, reviewed within the context of pathogenesis. BioEssays 26:10–20, 2004. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

These days it seems like everyone knows that we should do something about climate change, but there also seems to be a lot of inertia to take action. Until relatively recently, a common view was that governments would provide the solutions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report “SR15”, released in 2018, established that individuals should also contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet the mitigation requirements to limit warming to 1.5 C. Publicly, there are (...) plenty of good intentions from both individuals and governments, but there’s not a lot of action on either side. So, what’s going on? (shrink)