Presenting a field-defining overview of one of the most appliable linguistic theories available today, this Handbook surveys the key issues in the study of systemic functional linguistics, covering an impressive range of theoretical perspectives. Written by some of the world's foremost SFL scholars, including M. A. K. Halliday, the founder of SFL theory, the handbook covers topics ranging from the theory behind the model, discourse analysis within SFL, applied SFL, to SFL in relation to other subfields of linguistics such as (...) intonation, typology, clinical linguistics and education. Chapters include discussion on the possible future directions in which research might be conducted and issues that can be further investigated and resolved. Readers will be inspired to pursue the challenges raised within the volume, both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

Recent magnetic resonance imaging and pathological studies have indicated that axonal loss is a major contributor to disease progression in multiple sclerosis. 1 H magnetic resonance spectroscopy, through measurement of N -acetyl aspartate, a neuronal marker, provides a unique tool to investigate this. Patients with primary progressive multiple sclerosis have few lesions on conventional MRI, suggesting that changes in normal appearing white matter, such as axonal loss, may be particularly relevant to disease progression in this group. To test this hypothesis (...) NAWM was studied with MRS, measuring the concentration of N -acetyl derived groups. Single-voxel MRS using a water-suppressed PRESS sequence was carried out in 24 patients with primary progressive multiple sclerosis and in 16 age-matched controls. Ratios of metabolite to creatine concentration were calculated in all subjects, and absolute concentrations were measured in 18 patients and all controls. NA/Cr was significantly lower in NAWM in patients than in controls, as was the absolute concentration of NA. There was no significant difference in the absolute concentration of creatine between the groups. This study supports the hypothesis that axonal loss occurs in NAWM in primary progressive multiple sclerosis and may well be a mechanism for disease progression in this group. (shrink)

We argue that the minimal biological requirements for consciousness include a living body, not just neuronal processes in the skull. Our argument proceeds by reconsidering the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Careful examination of this thought experiment indicates that the null hypothesis is that any adequately functional “vat” would be a surrogate body, that is, that the so-called vat would be no vat at all, but rather an embodied agent in the world. Thus, what the thought experiment actually shows is that the (...) brain and body are so deeply entangled, structurally and dynamically, that they are explanatorily inseparable. Such entanglement implies that we cannot understand consciousness by considering only the activity of neurons apart from the body, and hence we have good explanatory grounds for supposing that the minimal realizing system for consciousness includes the body and not just the brain. In this way, we put the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment to a new use, one that supports the “enactive” view that consciousness is a life-regulation process of the whole organism interacting with its environment. (shrink)

This article presents a critique of Philip Pettit’s concept of ‘freedom as non-domination’ and provides an alternative theory of both domination and republican political freedom. I argue that Pettit’s neo-republican concept of domination is insufficient to confront modern forms of domination and that this hampers his concept of republican freedom and its political relevance under the conditions of modernity. Whereas the neo-republican account of domination is defined by ‘arbitrary interference’, modern forms of domination, I argue, are characterized by routinization and (...) systemic forms of control and subordination. In the end, the neo-republican account of domination is more appropriate for 17th- and 18th-century social institutions rather than those that persist under modernity. In its place, I propose a more dynamic concept of domination and rework the concept of freedom in order to place the republican tradition within the context of modernity itself. I argue that the core insight of republicanism is its emphasis on the arrangement and reformation of social institutions to enhance social freedom. From this, I argue that republicanism can take its place as a more attractive alternative to liberal theory. (shrink)

Democracy is prone to what may be called presentism – a bias in the laws in favor of present over future generations. I identify the characteristics of democracies that lead to presentism, and examine the reasons that make it a serious problem. Then I consider why conventional theories are not adequate to deal with it, and develop a more satisfactory alternative approach, which I call democratic trusteeship. Present generations can represent future generations by acting as trustees of the democratic process. (...) The general principle is that present generations should act to protect the democratic process itself over time. They should try to make sure that future citizens continue to have competent control over their collective decision‐making. (shrink)

In the light of the modern idea of a sovereign and self-transparent subject, the paper evaluates the philosophical and ethical relevance of Bildung. As a first step, (the early) Nietzsche's and Adorno's criticism of Bildung is explicated, a criticism based upon the thinkers' critical stance towards the modern epistemological relation of subject and object. However, neither thinker abandons the concept of Bildung. The second part of the paper accordingly reconstructs Nietzsche's and Adorno's adherence to Bildung understood as a different relationship (...) of subject and object within Bildung. In the paper's concluding reflections there is an attempt to assess the systematic educational consequences, and to shed light on the ethical relevance, of a non-transparent subject of Bildung. (shrink)

Systems theory holds that emotional responses derive from the continuous, mutual interaction between multiple neurobiological and behavioral systems associated with emotion as they are contextually embedded. Developmental systems theory portrays these systems as becoming progressively integrated as they mature. From this perspective, regulatory processes are incorporated into emotion throughout the course of emotional development. This article examines the implications of developmental systems theory in understanding the association between emotion and emotion regulation, enlisting the functionalist orientation of contemporary emotions theory, a (...) broad portrayal of emotion regulatory influences, and attention to the role of context in the management of emotion. (shrink)

This is a study in the philosophy of social science. It takes the form of a comparative critique of three contemporary approaches: ordinary language philosophy, hermeneutics and critical theory, represented here respectively by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. Part I is devoted to an exposition of these authors' views and of the traditions to which they belong. Its unifying thread is their common concern with language, a concern which nonetheless reveals important differences of approach. For whereas ordinary language (...) philosophers tend to treat linguistic activity as the ultimate object of inquiry, both Ricoeur and Habermas regard it as a medium which betrays more fundamental dimensions of human experience and the social world. Part II complements the exposition with a critical analysis of its central themes: the conceptualisation of action, the methodology of interpretation, and the theory of reference and truth. The author defends many aspects of the work of Ricoeur and Habermas, such as the emphasis on power and ideology, the strategy of depth interpretation, and the link between consensus and truth; but he argues that there are serious deficiencies and obscurities in their work. He proposes solutions to these difficulties and concludes with a sketch of a critical and rationally justified theory for the interpretation of action - a critical hermeneutics. (shrink)

In this article, I defend Neo-Gricean accounts of language and communication from an objection about linguistic development. According to this objection, children are incapable of understanding the minds of others in the way that Neo-Gricean accounts require until long after they learn the meanings of words, are able to produce meaningful utterances, and understand the meaningful utterances of others. In answering this challenge, I outline exactly what sorts of psychological states are required by Neo-Gricean accounts and conclude that there is (...) sufficient evidence that these types of psychological states are present in and capable of being understood by the children in question. (shrink)

Constructing Marxist Ethics offers a series of compelling essays that reassess the role of ethics and moral values in Marxist theory and philosophy.

Rev. version of the author's Habilitationsschrift, Martin-Luther-Universitèat.

The role of private food standards in agriculture is increasingly raising questions of legitimacy, particularly in light of the impacts such standards may have on food producers. While much work has been carried out at a macro policy level for developing countries, there have been relatively few empirical case studies that focus on particular food supply chains, and even fewer studies still of the impact of private standards on developed countries such as Australia. This study seeks to address this imbalance, (...) with a particular focus on examining the impact of private standards on an Australian vegetable supply food system in North Tasmania as well as tracing the impact of perceived and actual power relations among actors. Applying a governance framework and adopting a Foucauldian position we show that private standards are a “technology of power” that have risen out of a crisis discourse in the mid-1990s about on-farm food safety. Private standards have the effect of using knowledge from particular actors to establish truths about good agricultural practice (GAP), however we show that Tasmanian vegetable growers are not docile bodies and are employing alternative knowledge and technologies of power to challenge how GAP is implemented on-farm. (shrink)

Global warming has aroused profound concerns about the future of humanity and the planet as a whole. Indeed, Bill McKibben has argued that anthropogenic climate change is tantamount to the very end of nature and articulates a sense of deep anxiety that many people share. I argue that this feeling of anxiety cannot be fully accounted for either by appeal to the consequences of global warming or the associated injustices. I locate its source with our recognition that human beings are (...) now responsible for some of the basic conditions supporting all life on Earth. I argue that if we are to assume such an awesome responsibility (and we must), it's good that we do so anxiously. While some have criticized the "I have a nightmare" global warming rhetoric of environmentalists, I identify a particular feature of our nightmare and claim that in it we can find a source for hope. (shrink)

Examining the role of dispositions (potentials and propensities) in both physics and psychology reveals that they are commonly derivative dispositions, so called because they derive from other dispositions. Furthermore, when they act, they produce further propensities. Together, therefore, they appear to form discrete degrees within a structure of multiple generative levels. It is then constructively hypothesized that minds and physical nature are themselves discrete degrees within some more universal structure. This gives rise to an effective dualism of mind and nature, (...) but one according to which they are still constantly related by causal connections. I suggest a few of the unified principles of operation of this more complicated but universal structure. (shrink)

In two experiments we tested the hypothesis that the mechanisms that produce belief bias generalise across reasoning tasks. In formal reasoning (i.e., syllogisms) judgements of validity are influenced by actual validity, believability of the conclusions, and an interaction between the two. Although apparently analogous effects of belief and argument strength have been observed in informal reasoning, the design of those studies does not permit an analysis of the interaction effect. In the present studies we redesigned two informal reasoning tasks: the (...) Argument Evaluation Task (AET) and a Law of Large Numbers (LLN) task in order to test the similarity of the phenomena concerned. Our findings provide little support for the idea that belief bias on formal and informal reasoning is a unitary phenomenon. First, there was no correlation across individuals in the extent of belief bias shown on the three tasks. Second, evidence for belief by strength interaction was observed only on AET and under conditions not required for the comparable finding on syllogistic reasoning. Finally, we found that while conclusion believability strongly influenced assessments of arguments strength, it had a relatively weak influence on the verbal justifications offered on the two informal reasoning tasks. (shrink)

This paper was written to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the University of Nottingham’s Easter School on “Issues in Agricultural Bioethics,” organized by Ben Mepham in 1993. At that time, agricultural ethics was being envisioned as an interdisciplinary sub-discipline comparable to that of medical ethics. Agricultural ethicists would co-operate with other agricultural faculty to produce careful articulation, analysis and critique of norms and values being implicitly assumed by agricultural researchers, practitioners and policy makers. Roughly two factors have conspired to substantially (...) limit the realization of that vision in the intervening 20 years. First, the institutional environment within agricultural universities was far less conducive to such an activity than medical schools. Second, while the rise of a food-oriented social movement might have provided new opportunities for food ethics, the social movement orientation has actually constrained the kind of philosophical work typically undertaken by bioethicists. The paper ends with a brief note calling for a renewal of the original vision. (shrink)

Carroll Izard’s theoretical and research contributions to the study of early socioemotional development are profiled. His studies of early emotional expression and the formulations of differential emotions theory have stimulated contemporary inquiry into the organization of early emotional life, the developmental processes by which distinct feelings and facial expressions become progressively concordant, and how the emotional expressions of others become imbued with emotion meaning. His work on emotion, attachment, and emotion–cognition relations has contributed to contemporary study of the emotional bases (...) of attachment organization and the development of the internal working models associated with attachment security. Because of Izard’s contributions, developmental emotions research is theoretically richer, and emotion has a more central place in our understanding of development and motivation. (shrink)

Book Information Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. By Martha C. Nussbaum. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge/New York. 2000. Pp. xxi + 312.

This paper is designed to respond to the conference theme of making business ethical specifically within a marketing context. Ethical marketing challenges marketers to move away from illusory and deceptive brand promises to make way for a form of marketing which serves the consumer with creative and truthful messages. The paper markets virtue to marketers whilst exploring existing marketing deontologies and the problem of the depersonalised relationship between marketer and consumer. ‘Marketing virtue’ is approached within an ontology that begins with (...) the marketer as a moral agent. Six virtues–based principles are proposed as a creative resource to improve the ethical performance of contemporary marketing. True prosperity for both marketer and consumer is seen within the Aristotelian concept of ευδαιμονια. (shrink)

As health care costs continue to escalate, cost control measures will likely become unavoidable and painful. One approach is to engage external forces to allocate resources - for example, through managed care or outright rationing. Another approach is to engage consumers to make their own allocation decisions, through "self-rationing," wherein they are given greater awareness, control, and hence responsibility for their health care spending. Steadily gaining popularity in this context is the concept of "consumer directed health care" (CDHC), which is (...) envisioned to both control cost and enhance choice, by combining financial incentives with information to help consumers make more informed health care decisions and to appreciate the economic trade-offs of those decisions. While CDHC is gaining attention in the popular press, business publications, and academic journals, it is not without controversy about its relative merits and demerits. CDHC raises questions regarding the ethical limits of consumer responsibility for their choices. While the emphasis on consumer choice implies that autonomy is the ruling ethical principle in CDHC, it must be tempered by justice and beneficence. Justice must temper autonomy to protect disadvantaged populations from further widening disparities in health care access and outcomes that could arise from health care reform efforts. Beneficence must temper autonomy to protect consumers from unintended consequences of uninformed decisions. Thoughtful paternalism suggests that CDHC plans offer choices that are comprehensible to lay consumers, limited in their range of options, and carefully structured with default rules that minimize potential error costs. (shrink)

I will argue that one class of issues in computer ethics oftenassociated with privacy and a putative right to privacy isbest-analyzed in terms that make no substantive reference toprivacy at all. These issues concern the way that networkedinformation technology creates new ways in which conventionalrights to personal security can be threatened. However onechooses to analyze rights, rights to secure person and propertywill be among the most basic, the least controversial, and themost universally recognized. A risk-based approach to theseissues provides a (...) clearer statement of what is ethicallyimportant, as well as what is ethically problematic. Once theissues of security have been articulated clearly, it becomespossible to make out genuine issues of privacy in contrast tothem. (shrink)

Mainstream environmental ethics grew out of an approach to value that was rooted in a particular conception of rationality and rational choice. As weaknesses in this approach have become more evident, environmental philosophers have experimented with both virtue ethics and with pragmatism as alternative starting points for developing a more truly ecological orientation to environmental philosophy. However, it is possible to see both virtue ethics and pragmatism as emerging from older philosophical traditions that are here characterized as “agrarian.” Agrarian philosophy (...) stresses the role of nature, soil and climate in the formation of moral character as well as social and political institutions. As such, reaching back to the agrarian tradition may provide a way to move forward with both virtue oriented themes as well as pragmatist themes in developing ecological ethics. (shrink)

The interstate highway system and environmental are seldom discussed conjointly in works on climate and sustainability programs. In this essay I employ a metaphor, likening the interstate system to environments, to illustrate a cognitive shortcoming, a failure of imagination, by the organisms found in both. I argue that several failures of the imagination combine to constitute a failure to be aware of the limitations of our situations and the parameters set by climatological considerations. However, by re-engaging with our environment through (...) the use of imaginative exercises, we can become aware of our surrounding in terms of both geographic and organismic limitations of our environment. Furthermore, to develop these sustainable policies, we can employ Kantian ethical deliberations that engage our sense of imagination to become ?situationally aware? of our place in the climates we inhabit and of others members of our environment. (shrink)

The problem with authenticity—the idea of being “true to one’s self”—is that its somewhat checkered reputation garners a complete range of favorable and unfavorable reactions. In educational settings, authenticity is lauded as one of the top two traits students desire in their teachers. Yet, authenticity is criticized for its tendency towards narcissism and self-entitlement. So, is authenticity a good or a bad thing? The purpose of this article is to develop an intimate understanding of authenticity by investigating its current interpretation (...) and criticisms, its struggle with narcissism and relation to freedom. Examining authenticity as multilayered self-exploration reveals a composite of understanding, care, and acceptance. While a side current of acceptable tension shifts our understanding of authenticity from the security of self-determination to the messy interplay involved in being “true to one’s self” and being “in-the-world”. (shrink)

I propose and outline an ethical theory of waste not as refuse or garbage, but rather as a property of activities and practices. On my account, waste results when resources are utilized in society in such a way that the maximum number of individuals within the community are unable to benefit from the collective resources and efforts of social activities. I point to three ethical “dimensions” of waste: socially unproductive activity, under-utilization of resources, and the mis-utilization or mis-direction of resources. (...) Each of these dimensions accounts for different kinds of practices and activities as well as institutional arrangements within any society. As I see it, waste emerges when those resources are employed and utilized in ways that do not maximize their potential benefits for what I term socially valid ends. In this sense, waste can be seen to adhere to practices, activities, and systems of production and consumption that do not benefit the largest possible share of the society. I end by considering the relevance of this ethical concept of waste for a broader theory of social justice. (shrink)

Tolstoy writes in a letter to his friend A. A. Fet that what he has written in War and Peace, “especially in the epilogue,” is also said by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation. Tolstoy adds, however, that Schopenhauer approaches “it from the other side.” Schopenhauer does indeed say much the same thing as Tolstoy says in his epilogue and elsewhere about history and the will. Each of these authors argues that history is not progressing and that it (...) is not governed by the actions of individual political or military leaders alone, but by the infinitely many actions of the multitude of people. What underlies this critique of history in each case is a quietist outlook on life, a perspective from which one must abandon the assertion of the will and accept life as it is given. Tolstoy's quietism, however, is a happy quietism; he wants his reader to joyfully embrace life for all that it has to offer. Schopenhauer's is an unhappy quietism; he wants his reader to accept life in the face of all that it is not. Thus, Tolstoy and Schopenhauer approach quietism, and consequently their critiques of history and the will, from different “sides.” These sides—to borrow Wittgenstein's way of speaking—are the sides of the happy and the unhappy. To approach quietism from one side rather than another is no small matter. In Tolstoy's case in particular, it made all the difference in the world. (shrink)

This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality to analyse the teacher’s face. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the teacher-face is a special type of face because it is an ’overcoded’ face produced in specific landscapes. This paper suggests four limit-faces for teacher faciality that actualise different mixes of signifiance and subjectification in a classroom in which individualisation and massifications are affected. Understanding these limit-faces suggests new ways to conceive the affects actualised in the classroom that are subjected to (...) increasing levels of surveillance from education policy makers. Through this ‘partial mapping’ new possibilities emerge to “escape the face”. (shrink)