The same attitudes that allowed a significant increase in the anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations that are causing climate change are the same attitudes that are retarding an adequate ethical response to the impact that climate change is having on both human populations and the rest of the planet. The industrialized nations of the West paid little attention during the past three centuries to the impacts that their economies and cultures were having on the environment, both locally and globally. There (...) was an underlying belief that the planet could indefinitely absorb the wastes of manufacturing, and the natural resources that were fuelling industrialization were seemingly endless if not actually .. (shrink)

This article begins by unfolding Thomas Berry’s notion of Pax Gaia, using the concept as a key to unlock cogent aspects of his geobiological thought. Then, suggesting an addition to John Howard Yoder’s typologies, the authors argue that Berry’s vision of the peace of the Earth can be categorized as a “the pacifism of religious cosmology.” Berry’s cosmology of peace is then grounded with reference to concrete issues of ecojustice, with a particular focus on the interrelated concepts of “biocide” and (...) “geocide.” The article ends by highlighting the need for reinvention of the human, which emerges from the moral imperatives associated with the pacifism of religious cosmology. (shrink)

Hegel's Philosophy of History by Burleigh Taylor Wilkins Hegel on Reason and History. A Contemporary Interpretation by George Dennis O'Brien History and Theory.

Discussions of the theory and practice of systematics and evolutionary biology have heretofore revolved around the views of philosophers of science. I reexamine these issues from the different perspective of the philosophy of history. Just as philosophers of history distinguish between chronicle (non-interpretive or non-explanatory writing) and narrative history (interpretive or explanatory writing), I distinguish between evolutionary chronicle (cladograms, broadly construed) and narrative evolutionary history. Systematics is the discipline which estimates the evolutionary chronicle. ¶ Explanations of the events described in (...) the evolutionary chronicle are not of the covering-law type described by philosophers of science, but rather of the how-possibly, continuous series, and integrating types described by philosophers of history. Pre-evolutionary explanations of states (in contrast to chroniclar events) are still widespread in "evolutionary" biology, however, because evolutionary chronicles are in general poorly known. To the extent that chronicles are known, the narrative evolutionary histories based on them are structured like conventional historical narratives, in that they treat their central subjects as ontological individuals. This conventional treatment is incorrect. The central subjects of evolutionary narratives are clades, branched entities which have some of the properties of individuals and some of the properties of classes. Our unconscious treatment of the subjects of evolutionary narratives as individuals has been the cause of erroneous notions of progress in evolution, and of views that taxa "develop" ontogenetically in ways analogous to individual organisms. We must rewrite our narrative evolutionary histories so that they properly represent the branching nature of evolution, and we must reframe our evolutionary philosophies so that they properly reflect the historical nature of our subject. (shrink)

William Whewell (1794–1866), polymathic Victorian scientist, philosopher, historian, and educator, was one of the great neologists of the nineteenth century. Although Whewell's name is little remembered today except by professional historians and philosophers of science, researchers in many scientific fields work each day in a world that Whewell named. "Miocene" and "Pliocene," "uniformitarian" and "catastrophist," "anode" and "cathode," even the word "scientist" itself—all of these were Whewell coinages. Whewell is particularly important to students of the historical sciences for another word (...) he coined, one that was unfortunately not as successful as many of his others because it is difficult to pronounce. This word, "palaetiology," was the name Whewell gave to the class of sciences that are concerned with historical causation: the class we might today refer to as historical sciences. Although the disciplines Whewell included under the heading of palaetiology might seem to cut across conventional academic boundaries of his day and ours—his exemplary palaetiological sciences were geology and comparative philology—all these fields may be examined together, Whewell argued, because of their common interest in reconstructing the past. ¶ This paper is an essay in the palaetiological sciences, dedicated to Whewell on the bicentennial of his birth, an essay that examines some of the principles, maxims, and rules of procedure that these sciences have all in common. Its first purpose is to demonstrate the continuing validity of Whewell's classification of these sciences through a study of historical representation in three different palaetiological fields: systematics, historical linguistics, and textual transmission. Its second purpose is to continue the development of an extended analogy between historical representation and cartographic representation that I began in an earlier paper (O'Hara, 1993, Systematic Biology), an analogy that makes especially clear the common representational practices that are found throughout palaetiology. (shrink)

Two new modes of thinking have spread through systematics in the twentieth century. Both have deep historical roots, but they have been widely accepted only during this century. Population thinking overtook the field in the early part of the century, culminating in the full development of population systematics in the 1930s and 1940s, and the subsequent growth of the entire field of population biology. Population thinking rejects the idea that each species has a natural type (as the earlier essentialist view (...) had assumed), and instead sees every species as a varying population of interbreeding individuals. Tree thinking has spread through the field since the 1960s with the development of phylogenetic systematics. Tree thinking recognizes that species are not independent replicates within a class (as earlier group thinkers had tended to see them), but are instead interconnected parts of an evolutionary tree. It lays emphasis on the explanation of evolutionary events in the context of a tree, rather than on the states exhibited by collections of species, and it sees evolutionary history as a story of divergence rather than a story of development. Just as population thinking gave rise to the new field of population biology, so tree thinking is giving rise to the new field of phylogenetic biology. (shrink)

Accounts of the evolutionary past have as much in common with works of narrative history as they do with works of science. Awareness of the narrative character of evolutionary writing leads to the discovery of a host of fascinating and hitherto unrecognized problems in the representation of evolutionary history, problems associated with the writing of narrative. These problems include selective attention, narrative perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding, differential resolution, and the establishment of a canon of important events. The narrative aspects of (...) evolutionary writing, however, which promote linearity and cohesiveness in conventional stories, conflict with the underlying chronicle of evolution, which is not linear, but branched, and which does not cohere, but diverges. The impulse to narrate is so great, however, and is so strongly reinforced by traditional schemes of taxonomic attention, that natural historians have more often abandoned the diverging tree than they have abandoned the narrative mode of representation. If we are to understand the true nature of the evolutionary past then we must adopt tree thinking, and develop new and creative ways, both narrative and non-narrative, of telling the history of life. (shrink)

The species problem is one of the oldest controversies in natural history. Its persistence suggests that it is something more than a problem of fact or definition. Considerable light is shed on the species problem when it is viewed as a problem in the representation of the natural system (sensu Griffiths, 1974, Acta Biotheor. 23: 85–131; de Queiroz, 1998, Philos. Sci. 55: 238–259). Just as maps are representations of the earth, and are subject to what is called cartographic generalization, so (...) diagrams of the natural system (evolutionary trees) are representations of the evolutionary chronicle, and are subject to a temporal version of cartographic generalization which may be termed systematic generalization. Cartographic generalization is based on judgements of geographical importance, and systematic generalization is based on judgements of historical importance, judgements expressed in narrative sentences (sensu Danto, 1985, Narration and knowledge, Columbia Univ. Press, New York). At higher systematic levels these narrative sentences are conventional and retrospective, but near the "species" level they become prospective, that is, dependent upon expectations of the future. The truth of prospective narrative sentences is logically indeterminable in the present, and since all the common species concepts depend upon prospective narration, it is impossible for any of them to be applied with precision. (shrink)

"The Natural System" is the abstract notion of the order in living diversity. The richness and complexity of this notion is revealed by the diversity of representations of the Natural System drawn by ornithologists in the Nineteenth Century. These representations varied in overall form from stars, to circles, to maps, to evolutionary trees and cross-sections through trees. They differed in their depiction of affinity, analogy, continuity, directionality, symmetry, reticulation and branching, evolution, and morphological convergence and divergence. Some representations were two-dimensional, (...) and some were three-dimensional; n-dimensional representations were discussed but never illustrated. The study of diagrammatic representations of the Natural System is made difficult by the frequent failure of authors to discuss them in their texts, and by the consequent problem of distinguishing features which carried meaning from arbitrary features and printing conventions which did not. Many of the systematics controversies of the last thirty years have their roots in the conceptual problems which surrounded the Natural System in the late 1800s, problems which were left unresolved when interest in higher-level systematics declined at the turn of this century. (shrink)

Neither our evolutionary past, nor our pre-literate culture, has prepared humanity for the use of technology to provide records of the past, records which in many context become normative for memory. The demand that memory be true, rather than useful or pleasurable, has changed our social and psychological under-standing of ourselves and our fellows. The current vogue for lifelogging, and the rapid proliferation of digital memory-supporting technologies, may accelerate this change, and create dilemmas for policymakers, designers and social thinkers.

Classifications of animals and plants have long been represented by hierarchical lists of taxa, but occasional authors have drawn diagrammatic versions of their classifications in an attempt to better depict the "natural relationships" of their organisms. Ornithologists in 19th-century Britain produced and pioneered many types of classificatory diagrams, and these fall into three groups: (a) the quinarian systems of Vigors and Swainson (1820s and 1830s); (b) the "maps" of Strickland and Wallace (1840s and 1850s); and (c) the evolutionary diagrams of (...) the post-Darwin authors (1860 on). The quinarians distinguished between affinity and analogy and used both in their classifications, whereas Strickland rejected the quinarians' belief in numerical regularity and their use of analogy. Wallace's "maps" are easily given an evolutionary interpretation, and his approach was taken up and modified by later evolutionary anatomists. Sharpe returned to Strickland's methods and merely appended a superficial evolutionary interpretation. Contrary to common belief systematics has a rich conceptual history, and many of the conceptual developments in 19th-century systematics were made by ornithologists. (shrink)

"The Natural System" is the name given to the underlying arrangement present in the diversity of life. Unlike a classification, which is made up of classes and members, a system or arrangement is an integrated whole made up of connected parts. In the pre-evolutionary period a variety of forms were proposed for the Natural System, including maps, circles, stars, and abstract multidimensional objects. The trees sketched by Darwin in the 1830s should probably be considered the first genuine evolutionary diagrams of (...) the Natural System—the first genuine evolutionary trees. Darwin refined his image of the Natural System in the well-known evolutionary tree published in the Origin of Species, where he also carefully distinguished between arrangements and classifications. Following the publication of the Origin, there was a great burst of evolutionary tree building, but interest in trees declined substantially after 1900, only to be revived in recent years with the development of cladistic analysis. ¶ While evolutionary trees are modern diagrams of the Natural System, they are at the same time instances of another broad class of diagrams that may be called "trees of history": branching diagrams of genealogical descent and change. During the same years that Darwin was sketching his first evolutionary trees, the earliest examples of two other trees of history also appeared: the first trees of language evolution and of manuscript genealogy. Though these were apparently independent of evolutionary trees in their origin, the similarities among all these trees of history, and among the historical processes that underlie them, were soon recognized. Darwin compared biological evolution and language evolution several times in the Origin of Species, and both Ernst Haeckel and the linguist August Schleicher made similar comparisons. Both linguists and stemmaticists (students of manuscript descent) understood the principle of apomorphy—the principle that only shared innovations provide evidence of common ancestry—more clearly than did systematists, and if there had been more cross-fertilization among these fields the cladistic revolution in systematics might well have taken place in the nineteenth century. ¶ Although historical linguists and stemmaticists have in some respects had sounder theory than have systematists, at least until recently, they have also had the practical problem of very large amounts of data, a problem not often faced by systematists until the advent of molecular sequencing. The opportunity now exists for systematists to contribute to the theory and practice of linguistics and stemmatics, their sister disciplines in historical reconstruction, through application of our commonly used computer programs for tree estimation. Preliminary results from the application of numerical cladistic analysis to a large stemmatic data set have been very encouraging, and have already generated much discussion in the stemmatics community. (shrink)

The joy of intimacy--with yourself, with others, and with the whole universe. The long-awaited first book from a prominent modern American Zen teacher. For Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, intimacy is what Zen practice is all about: the realization of the essential lack of distinction between self and other that inevitably leads to wisdom and compassionate action. She approaches the practice of intimacy beginning at its most basic level--the intimacy with ourselves that is the essential first step. She then shows (...) how to bring intimacy into our relationships with others, starting with those dearest to us and moving on to those who don't seem dear at all. She then shows how to grow in intimacy so that we include everyone around us, all of society, the whole world and all the beings it contains. Each chapter is accompanied by practices she uses with her students at the Village Zendo for manifesting intimacy in our lives. (shrink)

138 titles across a wide range of scholarly publications illustrate the conceptual affinities that connect the palaetiological sciences of biological systematics, historical linguistics, and stemmatics. These three fields all have as their central objective the reconstruction of evolutionary "trees of history" that depict phylogenetic patterns of descent with modification among species, languages, and manuscripts. All three fields flourished in the nineteenth century, underwent parallel periods of quiescence in the early twentieth century, and in recent decades have seen widespread parallel revivals. (...) "Tree thinking" (O'Hara, 1988) is now standard within evolutionary biology, and the unity of what William Whewell called palaetiology is being once again appreciated by scholars and scientists in many fields. (shrink)

In the eighteenth century the category of the aesthetic sought to bridge the gap between the prevalent dualities of Cartesian thought: art and science, history and science, prejudice and truth. This special issue of _boundary 2_ addresses current debates about the status of art in the context of global modernity. The range of arguments represented here cover a broad historical scope—from Cartesianism to present-day global modernity—of cultural discourse on the aesthetic to bring a focus to contemporary discussions of the corollary (...) concepts of beauty, virtue, taste, and truth. These essays present a rich and provocative account of the place of the aesthetic in late-twentieth-century culture. Included in this volume are considerations of the relation between theories of art and the avant-garde; art’s relation to cognition; the aesthetic as history; the aesthetic as a unique access to modernity; and its impact on problems of identity formation, ideology, and resistances to the institutional powers inherent in dominant social formations. _Contributors. _Charles Altieri, Peter Burger, David Carroll, Anthony J. Cascardi, Howard Caygill, Allen Dunn, Eric Gans, Agnes Heller, Ronald A. T. Judy, Marie-Rose Logan, Daniel T. O’Hara, Donald E. Pease, Alan Singer. (shrink)

Are there basic religious certainties? That is, are there any beliefs which religious people legitimately hold without the need for rational justification? The question has been tackled, in different ways, by both Hinge Epistemologists and by Reformed Epistemologists. For the former, discussion has revolved around very general religious beliefs such as ‘God exists’ (e.g. Pritchard, 2000; Helm, 2001; Hoyt, 2007; Ariso, 2020). Reformed Epistemologists, like Alvin Plantinga, argue that Christian theism and particular Christian beliefs are ‘properly basic’ in that ‘I (...) don’t believe them on the basis of any other propositions’ (Plantinga, 1981, p. 42). In this paper I want to do two things. First, I give an account of what basic religious certainty is from a Wittgensteinian, Hinge Epistemology point of view. On this account I will argue that the clearest examples of basic religious certainties are found in local, historical and more narrow expressions of religious belief, as opposed to the very general acontextual religious beliefs usually discussed. Secondly, I challenge the Reformed Epistemological notion that Christian doctrine can be ‘properly basic’, mainly by showing that the New Testament writers did not treat very general religious beliefs, such as ‘God exists’ or God is good’, as properly basic in either the Hinge or Reformed Epistemological ways. I will conclude by drawing out some implications for contemporary Christian epistemology. (shrink)

This paper explores the concept of digital modernity, the extension of narratives of modernity with the special affordances of digital networked technology. Digital modernity produces a new narrative which can be taken in many ways: to be descriptive of reality; a teleological account of an inexorable process; or a normative account of an ideal sociotechnical state. However, it is understood that narratives of digital modernity help shape reality via commercial and political decision-makers, and examples are given from the politics and (...) society of the United Kingdom. The paper argues that digital modernity has two dimensions, of progression through time and progression through space, and these two dimensions can be in contradiction. Contradictions can also be found between ideas of digital modernity and modernity itself, and also between digital modernity and some of the basic pre-modern concepts that underlie the whole technology industry. Therefore, digital modernity may not be a sustainable goal for technology development. (shrink)

This book is an extended and provocative exercise in describing pragmatism’s past and in attempting to chart a course for its future. This description is not merely a history of philosophy or paean to American thought. It is rather a re-description that draws attention to a neglected and potentially fruitful theme in pragmatism, one that Koopman has termed “transitionalism” for its focus on historicity and temporality. One of the enduring features of pragmatism is its commitment to the revisability of truth (...) claims and even to revising its own methods and aims. If pragmatism encourages philosophers to revise old ways of thinking, then pragmatists are people who expect important ideas and institutions to develop .. (shrink)

This brief notice records anecdotes about Wittgenstein gathered from Br. Herbert Kaden OSB.

In this article, the rotational invariance of entangled quantum states is investigated as a possible cause of the Pauli exclusion principle. First, it is shown that a certain class of rotationally invariant states can only occur in pairs. This is referred to as the coupling principle. This in turn suggests a natural classification of quantum systems into those containing coupled states and those that do not. Surprisingly, it would seem that Fermi–Dirac statistics follows as a consequence of this coupling while (...) the Bose–Einstein follows by breaking it. In Sec. 5, the above approach is related to Pauli's original spin-statistics theorem and finally in the last two sections, a theoretical justification, based on Clebsch–Gordan coefficients and the experimental evidence respectively, is presented. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Commentary on Virgil, EcloguesJames J. O’HaraWendell Clausen. A Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. xxx + 328 pp. Paper, $27.95, Cloth, $60.00.This “first full-scale scholarly commentary on the complete book of poems known as the Eclogues to appear in English,” as the dust jacket proclaims, is a deeply learned, elegant, helpful, affectionate, humane and judicious guide to the language, style, text, plain meaning, and literary (...) antecedents of what are among the most elusive of ancient works. A sixteen-page introduction discusses “Pastoral Poetry,” “The Book of Eclogues” as a collection of carefully interrelated poems, and “The Composition of a Landscape” (mostly on trees and plants in Theocritus and Vergil). C. prints Mynors’ 1972 Oxford text, but at 3.102 argues for emending his certe neque amor causa est; vix ossibus haerent to hi certe (neque amor causa est), and would delete the refrain at 8.28a and 76. The volume is dedicated to Mynors; the Preface says that it was originally intended as a companion to his Georgics, published posthumously in 1990. C. offers a concise and original Introduction to each poem, focusing on major problems or features and presenting a modest bibliography, with more references to secondary works to come line by line, but the bibliography is highly selective. The commentary’s strengths lie in the discussion of textual problems and the interpretation of difficult Latin, in the remarks on style, diction, tone, rhetoric, and structure, and in the information on Vergil’s use of models, especially Hellenistic sources like Theocritus (extensive and helpful comments), Callimachus (C. naturally has more to say than earlier commentators), and Aratus, but also Roman sources like Lucretius or Plautus (more prominent here than in earlier commentaries, to good effect). Greek is translated in the notes; thus the commentary, like C.’s Virgil’s “Aeneid” and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1987), is at the same time both supremely learned, and accessible to highly literate non-specialists.Comments on specific poems:Eclogue 1: C. suggests that “the principal difficulty” here is that in alluding to Tityrus’ status Vergil has “deliberately confused” the private sense of libertas as freedom from slavery with its public or political sense as “the slogan of Octavian and his party.” The goal is to praise Octavian subtly and indirectly, and for more than just a personal favor, despite what the allegorical tradition has alleged. [End Page 332] On Tityrus’ planned offerings to the iuvenis in 42–43, C. champions Wissowa’s 1902 demonstration that Vergil alludes to once-monthly Hellenistic ruler cult, and points to honors decreed Octavian in 36 after the defeat of Sextus Pompey (but of course this depends on down-dating the collection; see below).Eclogues 3 and 7: The Introductions to the two amoebaean singing contests discuss the poetic problem of competitions in which neither singer may falter or fail, “for then the poem would be ruined.” C. argues that Vergil avoids this problem in 3 by having the contest end in a draw, and in 7 by having the poem describing the defeat of Thyrsis by Corydon be “dramatic—the imperfect recollection, that is, of a witness to an event and not, like the Third Eclogue, an omniscient poet’s description of it.” On 3.84 C. offers surprisingly little comment on the startling mention of Pollio; he is more helpful in the Introduction (xxi) but provides no cross-reference here; by contrast, on 9.35 he explains how “the pastoral illusion is momentarily shattered” by the mention of L. Varius Rufus.Eclogue 4: In an Introduction adapted from C.’s essay in J. L. Kugel, ed., Poetry and Prophecy (Ithaca 1990), C. focuses on a pre-collection version of the poem, which he suggests lacked the “brief pastoral apology” of 1–3 and “the emphatic—the rather too emphatic—reference to Pan and Arcadia near the end.” “To contemporary readers” of that poem, circulated during or soon after Pollio’s consulship, “the vexed question ‘Who is the boy?’ would not have occurred. They knew well enough who was meant: the expected son of Antony and Octavia and heir to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vergil's Aeneid and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary DiscourseJames J. O'HaraYasmin Syed. Vergil's Aeneid and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary Discourse. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005. x + 277 pp. Cloth, $65.This book, which "began as a PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley" (1997), tackles a timely, large, and difficult topic, possibly a topic too difficult to (...) be handled in a satisfactory way in a dissertation and first book. In sum, it makes a decent but flawed contribution on a topic that needs much more work, and in some ways, much more careful work.Two introductory chapters describe the importance of the Aeneid in imperial culture and the role of manipulation of the emotions in ancient theories of rhetoric. In a section called "The Reader's Subject Position," two chapters (both largely on Aeneas and Dido) treat "The Gaze" and "The Spectacle of Emotions." In the next section, on "Gender and Ethnicity," four chapters treat "Gendered Emotions" (before Allecto's visit, Amata is worried, but Turnus is calm; "frenzy, then, is female," 122), "Gendered Ethnicity" (Dido's characterization as Punic "is hard to detect because it is blended with her lover's persona," but it is still significant, 145), "Cleopatra and the Politics of Gendered Ethnicity" ("Augustan representations of Cleopatra form the birth of the Western discourse of orientalism," 177, somewhat overstated, but with interesting ideas about the connection between Cleopatra and Dido), and "Romanitas" (Greek stereotypes, and others, define Romans but are characterized by a "fundamental ambivalence," 203). A brief conclusion ends the book.The interesting argument that Syed makes in the first few chapters is "that the Aeneid used its visuality and its sublime style to appeal to the readers' emotions, and that it created a fictional space for an internal reader within the poem for [End Page 317] 316 whom the poem could articulate an identity by creating various fictional characters as figures of identification" (35). Both these and later chapters offer a mix of the new, the familiar, and, at times, the unconvincing. Two of the book's flaws are actually signaled in the surprising final paragraph, which declares that the book's "most glaring omission has been that of considering more Italian characters and generally of giving more attention to the second half of the poem" (227). Syed says that this "focus" on other aspects of the poem "has been a personal decision on my part," but it is hard to imagine thinking about "subject and nation" in the Aeneid without discussing the relationship between Rome and Italy both in the poem and in Vergil's world; see C. Ando, "Vergil's Italy: ethnography and politics in first-century Rome," pp. 123–42 in D. S. Levene and D. Nelis, eds., Clio and the Poets (Leiden, 2002), whose date is probably too close to Syed's publication date. Presumably there will be a full discussion of Rome and Italy in Alessandro Barchiesi's forthcoming The Geopoetics of Vergil's Aeneid.The lack of attention to Books 7–12 is also a problem, because often the arguments Syed makes about the parts of the Aeneid that she does treat are less convincing when we think about passages in the second half of the poem. The claims that Aeneas has a special ability "to control his emotional responses to the world" (70) and that "in contrast to Aeneas, whose emotions are carefully controlled, many characters in the poem give free rein to their emotions" (87), surely cry out for a consideration of Aeneas' rampage after the death of Pallas in Book 10 and the rage with which he kills Turnus in the poem's final lines. The discussion of Dido's wounds and of Lavinia's association, through allusive simile, with the wound of Menelaus (125–35) is fairly good. But Syed does not mention that Turnus at the start of Aeneid 12 is compared to a wounded deer, or that right before the Lavinia scene Vergil says Turnus "grows sicker with the attempt to heal" (aegrescitque medendo, 45). Lavinia is indeed associated with Menelaus by allusion, but Aeneas... (shrink)

This paper provides a queer critique of the European Court of Human Rights’ use of ‘European consensus’ as a method of interpretation in cases concerning sexuality rights. It argues that by routinely invoking the notion of ‘consensus’ in such cases, the Court (re)produces discourses and induces performances of sexuality and Europeanness that emphasise sameness and agreement, while simultaneously suppressing expressions of difference and dissent. As a result, this paper contends that the Court’s use of European consensus has ultimately functioned to (...) uphold and sustain the heteronormative order that underpins both the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and European society more generally. This is so, despite the role that European consensus has played in the Court’s recognition of ‘new’ rights for lesbian, gay and bisexual people under the ECHR. Drawing on insights from queer theory, as well as the work of Rancière and Foucault, this discussion is carried out through a close reading of Strasbourg cases relating to sexuality. (shrink)

The paper attempts to establish the importance of addressing what Chalmers calls the ‘easy problems’ of consciousness, at the expense of the ‘hard problem’. One pragmatic argument and two philosophical arguments are presented to defend this approach to consciousness, and three major theories of consciousness are criticized in this light. Finally, it is shown that concentration on the easy problems does not lead to eliminativism with respect to consciousness.

In recent work MacPherson argues that the standard method of modeling belief logically, as a necessity operator in a modal logic, is doomed to fail. The problem with normal modal logics as logics of belief is that they treat believers as "ideal" in unrealistic ways (i.e., as omnidoxastic); however, similar problems re-emerge for candidate non-normal logics. The authors argue that logics used to model belief in artificial intelligence (AI) are also flawed in this way. But for AI systems, omnidoxasticity is (...) impossible because of their finite nature, and this fact can be exploited to produce operational models of fallible belief. The relevance of this point to various philosophical views about belief is discussed. (shrink)

Institutions of higher education in the United States are remarkably diverse in their educational purposes, their organizational structure, and their architectural styles. But underlying all this diversity are two distinct historical models: the decentralized British "collegiate" model of university education, and the centralized Germanic university model. Early American higher education grew out of the British collegiate tradition and emphasized the comprehensive development of students' intellect and character, while the Germanic university tradition, introduced in the late 1800s, shifted the focus to (...) technical scholarship and research. The Germanic university model held sway for much of the twentieth century, but there is now a widespread renewal of interest in the older decentralized British collegiate model, and in universities across the United States and around the world, small "residential colleges" like those at Oxford and Cambridge are now being planned and built. These residential colleges or "houses" (as they are sometimes called) provide small, stable, faculty-led, home-like environments for a few hundred students each, and their social and architectural design seeks to counteract the impersonal bureaucratic experience that students often have in large Germanic-style universities. This revival of the collegiate model of university organization is one of the most important trends in the design of educational communities in the world today. (shrink)

The Pebble Limited Partnership proposes to create the Pebble Mine, one of the world’s largest open-pit mines, in the Bristol Bay watershed, home to Alaska’s largest sockeye salmon fishery. De...

In the last thirty years systematics has transformed itself from a discipline concerned with classification into a discipline concerned with reconstructing the evolutionary history of life. This transformation has been driven by cladistic analysis, a set of techniques for reconstructing evolutionary trees. Long interested in the large-scale structure of evolutionary history, cladistically oriented systematists have recently begun to apply "tree thinking" to problems near the species level. ¶ In any local ("non-dimensional") situation species are usually well-defined, but across space and (...) time the grouping of populations into species is often problematic. Three views of species are in common use today, the biological species concept, the evolutionary species concept, and the phylogenetic species concept. Each of these has strengths and weaknesses, but no matter which is applied, exact counts of the number of species in any extended area will always be ambiguous no matter how much factual information is available. This ambiguity arises because evolution is an historical process, and the grouping of organisms into species always depends to some extent upon expectations of the future behavior of those organisms and their descendants, expectations that cannot be evaluated in the present. The existence and special character of the species problem is itself one of the central pieces of evidence for evolution. (shrink)

Specialist Sport Programs are an underexamined activity that combines the best features of two different contexts for adolescent development: a sporting program and a secondary school. A mixed-methods study was conducted to determine the influence of participation in SSPs on the educational outcomes of lower secondary students in Western Australia. The results demonstrated a significant improvement in specialist students' mean grade for Mathematics over the course of a year, while their mean grade for all other subjects, and their level of (...) engagement with school, remained stable over the same period of time. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with key stakeholders. Overall, the participants felt that SSPs had a positive influence on students' engagement with school, and that this engagement had a positive impact on their academic achievement. Taken together, the results of this research suggest that there is a role for SSPs in promoting positive educational outcomes for lower secondary students attending public schools located in low SES areas. (shrink)