A blue-ribbon panel convened by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) concluded in 2010 that teacher education in the United States must be “turned upside down,” with practical experience at its center and academic content woven around the practical. It might seem that the new clinical model based on medical education, which has been adopted by eight states, would be well-aligned with a Deweyan inquiry-based pedagogy. Dewey himself recognized a paradox, however: preparation for the combination of rigor (...) and flexibility needed for inquiry-based pedagogical skills absolutely requires immersion in clinical settings, even as immersion in the teaching environment that prevails in U.S. public schools systematically socializes new teachers to a very different set of skills than those needed for this model of effective pedagogy. Recent scholarship by Kuhnian scholars provides practical guidance for an alternative understanding of how changes in practice occur and may be transmitted to future generations. (shrink)

Jerome Popp's monograph is a part of the SUNY series in philosophy and biology, and accordingly is narrowly focused upon discussion of an evolutionary model of value theory. As Popp explains at the outset, Daniel Dennett—among others—has proposed that any naturalized moral theory must provide a naturalized account for its own existence. Popp's thesis for this work is that, in conjunction with his longoverlooked insight into the significance of Darwin's thought to the area of epistemology generally, Dewey solved this philosophic (...) problem long ago. This emphasis upon reconciling Dewey's work with Dennett's thought is reiterated in Popp's conclusion that "It is remarkable how Dewey's use of evolution in his arguments .. (shrink)

Our society’s preoccupation with making educational policy and practice “scientific” is attested to by the stated mission of the Institute of Education Sciences: “to provide rigorous evidence on which to ground education practice and policy.” Early in the twentieth century, John Dewey also advocated for a vision of education guided by science, and more recent scholarship has validated many of his ideas. However, as Deborah Seltzer‐Kelly argues in this essay, Dewey’s vision of a scientifically based system of education (...) was very different from that envisioned by the IES, and also very different from that implied by the progenitor of contemporary evolutionary thought, Donald Campbell. Seltzer‐Kelly proposes a Deweyan Darwinist model of educational method as a genuinely scientific alternative to the scientism that pervades current official efforts to imbue education with science. The implications of this model are profound, highlighting the difference between education as preparation for consent to authoritarian structures and education as preparation for genuinely democratic participation. (shrink)

Curiously, while the efficacy of the arts for the development of multicultural understandings has long been theorized, empirical studies of this effect have been lacking. This essay recounts our combined empirical and philosophical study of this issue. We explicate the philosophical considerations that shaped the development of the arts course we studied, which was grounded in rather traditional humanist educational thought, informed by Deweyan considerations for pedagogy and multiculturalism. We also provide an overview of the course and of the study (...) design: the ways in which the course worked to teach aesthetic theory through a combination of popular and canonical works, and the ways in which it sought to instill a sense of cross-cultural appreciation and solidarity among students through the inclusion of art from different cultures and generations. We then share our research findings and our return to the realm of philosophy to interpret them. Our postcolonial analysis incorporates emerging discussions of the arts as a tool for resistance and dialogue within the system of public education, and revisit and reconsider the very concept of education for pluralistic democracy. This approach problematizes traditional conceptions of pluralism, in which an attempt is made to dissolve difference in a common understanding, and instead advocates that works from among the contemporary popular arts and works drawn from the artistic “canon” alike must be considered and employed for their instrumental value to the educational process—especially for their ability to prompt an intersubjectivity that is accompanied by a heightened awareness of difference. (shrink)

In his landmark work, Democracy and Education, John Dewey (1916/1980) proposed that "democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience" (93). Given this, he argued, the role of the system of public education in a democracy must not only facilitate individual development, but do so in a way that simultaneously attends to the larger social good. Preparation for vocation was central to this effort, understood not as narrow technical (...) training, but rather as "such a direction of life activities as renders them perceptibly significant to a person, because of the consequences they accomplish, and also useful to his associates" (316). The threat .. (shrink)

I offer a very qualified argument to the effect that rights are grounded in a certain sort of prejudice that privileges individualistic and perhaps masculinist ways of thinking about moral life. I also propose that we look carefully at other conceptions of social ontology and moral life, including the much discussed care conception.

Regularities in event timing allow for the allocation of attention to critical time-points when an event is most likely to occur, leading to improved visual perception. Results from recent studies indicate that similar benefits may extend to memory for scenes and objects. Here, we investigated whether benefits of temporal regularity are evident when detailed, item-specific representations are necessary for successful recognition memory performance. In Experiments 1 and 2, pictures of objects were presented with either predictable or randomized event timing, in (...) separate encoding blocks. In the test phase, old and new objects were presented, intermixed with perceptually similar exemplars of encoded objects. In Experiment 3 we attempted to replicate previously reported memory enhancements for scenes. In contrast to predictions, temporal regularity did not affect response times or improve recognition memory accuracy in any of our experiments. These results suggest that any effects of temporal expectation on memory are subtle and may be sensitive to minor changes in task parameters. In sum, indirect upregulation of attention through imposed temporal structure may not be sufficient to have downstream effects on memory performance. (shrink)

In 2000, Business and Society Review published a Special Issue of the journal to explore scholars’ ideas about how the practice of corporate citizenship would evolve in the 21st century. Contributors to the volume predicted a change in business motives for engaging in social initiatives, suggesting that managers would begin to see corporate citizenship as a strategic necessity to preserve organizational legitimacy in the face of changing social values. This article uses data from a study of corporate citizenship practices in (...) over 500 Norwegian companies to explore the validity of the Special Issue predictions. We begin by reviewing the foundations of organizational legitimacy theory and examine recent research documenting the growing importance of corporate citizenship for assessments of business legitimacy. We describe our study methods, present our results, and discuss the implications of our findings in this context. (shrink)

In response to calls to expand the scope of research ethics to address justice in global health, recent scholarship has sought to clarify how external research actors from high-income countries might discharge their obligation to reduce health disparities between and within countries. An ethical framework—‘research for health justice’—was derived from a theory of justice (the health capability paradigm) and specifies how international clinical research might contribute to improved health and research capacity in host communities. This paper examines whether and how (...) external funders, sponsors, and researchers can fulfill their obligations under the framework. (shrink)

Cancer has long been a cultural touchstone: a metaphor of devastation and a spectre of social as well as bodily anomie and loss. Yet recent years have witnessed significant transformations in perceptions of cancer, particularly in perceptions of the cancer patient. This paper is concerned with the ‘struggles of subjectivity’ emergent in this transvalued cancer culture. Explored from the standpoint of the ‘bad patient’, and drawing on media and cultural methodologies, the paper will consider the convergence of medicine, morality and (...) popular iconography as they are embedded in the imageries, imaginaries and representational economies of the cancer culture industry. Of particular concern in this context are the (re)composures of the patient, as liminal figure, caught between clinical imperative and cultural fantasy. (shrink)

Since military planners must know the size and shape of the earth if they hope to track earth-orbiting satellites and to target missiles on distant lands, geodesy was an important concern of the two superpowers during the Cold War. The most important geodetic product in the United States was a series of increasingly powerful World Geodetic Systems, the first of which was published for the Department of Defense in 1960. Although WGS 60 was created because of intense international rivalries, it (...) reflected the intense rivalries between America's Army and its Air Force, and it introduced the notion of 'political geodesy'. My attention to American events does not indicate a lack of interest in the Soviet story; rather, I hope that historians with better language skills and better access to Soviet documents will examine geodetic research on the other side of the former Iron Curtain. (shrink)

Death narratives, nurturance, and transitive crossings within species and between species open pathways into entanglements of life of earth. This paper engages with time in both sequential and synchronous modes, investigating interfaces where time, species, and nourishment become densely knotted up in ethics of gift, motion, death, life, and desire. The further aim is to consider the dynamic ripples generated by anthropogenic mass death in multispecies knots of ethical time, and to gesture toward a practice of writing as witness.

This paper problematizes current thinking about education by arguing that the question of educational purpose is not simply a socio-political question concerned with what the ends should be and why, but can also be understood as a structural question, concerned with the way we understand education’s directional impetus. We suggest that it is possible to understand education as something other than a curricular instrument designed to facilitate a purpose external to itself. We challenge such an instrumental view by arguing that (...) education is an emergent phenomenon with its own unique aesthetic qualities (like art or music); a phenomenon, moreover, that does not simply serve a purpose, but generates the purpose it serves. In this paper we lay down the groundwork for such a non-instrumental understanding of education by combining the notion of emergence with ideas from Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Aristotle’s teleological notion of the ‘ideal’ as self-generated and the Greek notion of ‘paideia.’ This provides an opportunity to theorise education’s directional impetus as the ongoing and open-ended coordination of three realms of human life: the symbolic, the individual and the political. Given the acute political and social dilemmas that instrumental understandings of education bring forth in multicultural, and so called ‘democratic’ and ‘inclusive’ societies, we hope that by opening the possibility to theorise education as a non-instrumental phenomenon, it may become possible to have more fruitful discussion regarding education than endless political debate about what the curricular ends of education should be. (shrink)

An important theme to have emerged from the new experimentalist movement is that much of actual scientific practice deals not with appraising full-blown theories but with the manifold local tasks required to arrive at data, distinguish fact from artifact, and estimate backgrounds. Still, no program for working out a philosophy of experiment based on this recognition has been demarcated. I suggest why the new experimentalism has come up short, and propose a remedy appealing to the practice of standard error statistics. (...) I illustrate a portion of my proposal using Galison's experimental narrative on neutral currents. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of Margaret Cavendish's moral and political philosophy. In some respects Cavendish's theoury echoes Hobbes. However, although Cavendish agrees with Hobbes that morality is based on self-interest, she holds that morality derives from our natural desire for public recognition, not the desire for self-preservation. Via the desire for fame, self-love can motivate people to pursue virtue, which, for Cavendish, means establishing and maintaining a good government (in particular, absolute sovereignty). The paper explores how Cavendish thinks such (...) a government can be established and maintained. Cavendish's account of female virtue and its connection with honor and fame is also discussed. (shrink)

Background While community engagement is increasingly promoted in global health research to improve ethical research practice, it can sometimes coerce participation and thereby compromise ethical research. This paper seeks to discuss some of the ethical issues arising from community engagement in a low resource setting. Methods A qualitative study design focusing on the engagement activities of three biomedical research projects as ethnographic case studies was used to gain in-depth understanding of community engagement as experienced by multiple stakeholders in Malawi. Data (...) was collected through participant observation, 43 In-depth interviews and 17 focus group discussions with community leaders, research staff, community members and research participants. Thematic analysis was used to analyse and interpret the findings. Results The results showed that structural coercion arose due to an interplay of factors pertaining to social-economic context, study design and power relations among research stakeholders. The involvement of community leaders, government stakeholders, and power inequalities among research stakeholders affected some participants’ ability to make autonomous decisions about research participation. These results have been presented under the themes of perception of research as development, research participants’ motivation to access individual benefits, the power of vernacular translations to influence research participation, and coercive power of leaders. Conclusion The study identified ethical issues in community engagement practices pertaining to structural coercion. We conclude that community engagement alone did not address underlying structural inequalities to ensure adequate protection of communities. These results raise important questions on how to balance between engaging communities to improve research participation and ensure that informed consent is voluntarily given. (shrink)

The process of seeking the consent of a patient to a medical procedure is, arguably, one of the most important skills a doctor, or indeed any clinician, should learn. In fact, the very idea that doctors may institute diagnostic or treatment processes of any sort without a patient's consent is utterly counter-intuitive to the modern practice of medicine. It was not always thus, and even now it can be reliably assumed that consent is still not sought and gained appropriately in (...) every clinical encounter. To say that it should be sought and gained in this manner elevates the value of consent to a high level. It can be instructive to ask oneself why such a value might be held to be the case. The answer to this question lies in the philosophical underpinning of clinical consent, which sits within a notion of personal autonomy, and respect for autonomous decision making. (shrink)

The concept of innateness is central to Descartes's epistemology; the Meditations display a new, non-Aristotelian method of acquiring knowledge by attending properly to our innate ideas. Yet understanding Descartes's conception of innate ideas is not an easy task, and some commentators have concluded that Descartes held several distinct and unrelated conceptions of innateness. In Descartes on Innate Ideas, Deborah Boyle argues that Descartes's remarks on innate ideas in fact form a unified account. Addressing the further question of how Descartes (...) thinks innate ideas are known, the author shows that, for Descartes, thinkers have implicit knowledge of their innate ideas. Thus she shows that the actual perception of these innate ideas is, for Descartes, a matter of making them explicit, turning the intellect away from sense-perceptions and toward pure thought. The author also provides a new interpretation of the Cartesian "natural light," an important mental faculty in Descartes's epistemology. (shrink)

Abstract Inspired by Rawls?s admission that his twentieth?century contract theory builds in the parochial horizon of modern constitutional democracy, this essay critically examines two truisms about seventeenth?century contract theory. The first is the stock view that the English case is irrelevant to the logic of Leviathan and the Second Treatise. To the contrary, I argue that their political conclusions depend on introducing constitutional and legal ?facts?, in particular, facts about the constitution of the English monarchy. Second, I challenge the Whiggish (...) characterization of contract theory as an important step in the development of democratic sovereignty. I draw on Hume?s famous critique of the genre to make the case that seventeenth?century contract theory addressed a peculiarly ancien?regime issue ? namely, resistance to legitimate rulers. In both respects, Hobbes?s and Locke?s social contracts are properly regarded as ancien?regime theories of politics. They are, as Rawls would put it, ?political not metaphysical? theories. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the repeated rhetorical moves through which the third wave autobiographical subject seeks to be real and to speak as part of a collective voice from the next feminist generation. Given that postmodernist, postructuralist, and multiculturalist critiques have shaped the form and the content of third wave expressions of the personal, the study is ultimately concerned with the possibilities and limitations of such theoretical analysis for a third wave of feminist praxis.

There is a tension within Ockham's theory of mental language between its claim to being a semantics for conventional languages and its claim to being a model of concept acquisition and thought. In particular, the commitment to a redundancy-free mental language which serves to explain important semantic relations such as synonymy and ambiguity conflicts, _prima facie, with the possibility of opaque belief contexts. I argue that it is preferable to treat the theory of mental language as an idealized theory of (...) cognitive competence than to forfeit, as Jerry Fodor does, the commitment to conceptual parsimony. (shrink)

I discuss six problems with Warwick Fox’s “The Deep Ecology–Ecofeminism Debate and Its Parallels” and conclude that until Fox and some other deep ecologists take the time to study feminism and ecofeminist analyses, only disputes—not genuine debate—will occur between these two parties. An understanding of the six issues that I discuss is a precondition for such a debate.

The fan effect says that “activation” spreading from a concept is divided among the concepts it spreads to. Because this activation is not a physical entity, but an abstraction of unknown lower‐level processes, the spreading activation model has predictive but not explanatory power. We provide one explanation of the fan effect by showing that distributed neuronal memory networks (specifically, Hopfield networks) reproduce four qualitative aspects of the fan effect: faster recognition of sentences containing lower‐fan words, faster recognition of sentences when (...) more cues are provided, faster acceptance of studied sentences than rejection of probes, and faster recognition of sentences studied more frequently. These are all a natural result of the dynamics of distributed associative memory. (shrink)

s This article examines the iconic `Beggars' trilogy by feminist science fiction writer, Nancy Kress. These novels, produced in the early to mid-1990s, take as their `thought experiment' two points of rupture and contemporary cultural contestation: the advent of human genetic engineering and sleep, or, more specifically, the prospect of a sleepless society. I shall begin by situating my analysis of the Kress trilogy in this nexus of fields. I shall consider the interest of Kress's works for the sociology of (...) sleep as well as for a cultural analysis of science. In this context, and drawing in part on the work of Haran, I will suggest the particular value of science fiction as not only a site for, but also a source of, narrativized social theory. I shall introduce the notion of popular episteme as an analytic concept that aims to link the discursive to the social — that is, to theorize the relationship of textuality to materiality. In this context, I shall refer also to the psychoanalytic concept of `phantasy' as a point of convergence for both structures of feeling and structures of knowledge. I shall then introduce the Kress works, focusing particularly on the first novel Beggars in Spain, locating it in a period in which feminist science fiction saw a marked renaissance, and in which speculative theorizations of genetics formed a distinct subgenre. The analysis will then focus on three core themes emergent in the novels that, I shall argue, have profound contemporaneous resonance. These are the questions of: embodied capital; the political economy of what I will term fast time; and paranoia and the human condition. (shrink)

Unresolved questions surround Simonides fr. 531, which eulogizes the Greeks who fell at Thermopylae. To what genre do these lines belong, what were the original conditions of their performance, and does Diodorus Siculus, who preserves the fragment, transmit just an extract or the complete piece? Commentators even differ as to where Simonides’ lines began: for some the words τŵυ ༐υ Θερμοπλαιζ θαυóυτωυ form part of the original composition, for others they conclude Diodorus' prose introduction. In my reading of the fragment, (...) I aim to address some of these puzzles by focusing chiefly on issues that allow for greater certainty: the structure and sentiments of the lines, and the cohesion between the song's contents and the conventions found in near contemporary commemorations of men fallen in battle on their country or polis’ behalf. As the comparative material will suggest, Diodorus’ designation of the lines as an encomion, something ‘properly’ delivered in praise of living men, should perhaps not be dismissed out of hand. Simonides‘ words may have been embedded within a composition as much designed for the purpose of praising, exhorting and inspiring the living as for memorializing the dead. (shrink)

Existentialism is often seen and at times parodied as the philosophy of individuality, authenticity, despair, and defiance in a godless world. However, it cannot be understood without reference to religion, and in particular the monotheism of Christianity. Even the existentialist slogan, 'existence precedes essence', is formulated in relation to monotheism. This Element will show that monotheism and existentialism are intertwined: they react to each other, and share content and concerns. This Element will set out a genealogy of existentialist thought; explore (...) key atheistic and theistic existentialists; and argue that there are productive conversations to be had as regards key concepts such as freedom and authenticity, relationality, and ethics. (shrink)