In her groundbreaking book, Epistemic Injustice, renowned moral philosopher and social epistemologist Miranda Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice to draw attention to the pervasive impact of epistemic oppression on marginalized social groups. Fricker’s account spurred a flurry of scholarship regarding the discriminatory impact of epistemic injustice and gave birth to a domain of philosophical inquiry that has extended far beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy. In this interview, Fricker responds to questions posed by A. C. Nikolaidis and Winston (...) C. Thompson that address the ways in which epistemic injustice intersects with education as a human endeavour and social institution. In doing so, Fricker reflects on her motivations in writing her book more than fifteen years ago and explicitly addresses some of the most significant contributions of the concept of epistemic injustice as a tool for analysing issues in education. She also offers insights on the purpose of education, outlines educational manifestations of epistemic injustice, and discusses the virtues that educators must exhibit and inculcate in their students in order for epistemic justice to obtain. (shrink)

The letter from Georges Florovsky to Davis McCaughey is a reflection after reading the Report The Era of Atomic Power: Report of a Commission (1946). Florovsky gives his own arguments against the development of research concerning nuclear weapons and their use. These include: treating an attempt at a technical transformation of the world as a human claim to put oneself in God’s place, i.e., to be a God-man. Another group of indictments against the use of the atomic bomb concerned ethical (...) issues and human responsibility for the war. Florovsky’s letter is his contribution to the discussion on the threat posed by the atomic bomb. (shrink)

Since the publication of Miranda Fricker’s seminal book Epistemic Injustice, philosophy of education scholarship has been mostly limited to analyses of culprit-based epistemic injustice in education. This has left structural manifestations relatively underexplored with great detriment to those who are most vulnerable to experience such injustice. This paper aims to address this oversight and open avenues for further research by exploring approaches to theorizing structural epistemic injustice in education and envisioning efficacious remedies. The author identifies three approaches: one that focusses (...) on educational institutions; one that focusses on institutional processes that impact educational outcomes; and one that focusses on epistemological processes that are internal to education. Whilst the approaches differ as to their explanatory power and ease of implementation, it is argued that all three demonstrate that epistemic injustice in education is often the result of structural factors which cannot be attributed to individual epistemic agents. The author concludes by suggesting that educational philosophers must examine each of these approaches in greater depth to make significant progress in disrupting the impact of epistemic injustice in education. (shrink)

Scholars of epistemology have identified two conceptions of epistemic injustice: discriminatory epistemic injustice and distributive epistemic injustice. The former refers to wrongs to one’s capacity as a knower that are the result of identity prejudice. The latter refers to violations of one’s right to know what one is entitled to know. This essay advances a third conception, formative epistemic injustice, which refers to wrongs to one’s capacity as a knower that are the result of or result in malformation—the undue restriction (...) of one’s formative capacities. The author argues that formative epistemic injustice is a distinctly educational wrong and that it brings to light important epistemic injustices that standard accounts of epistemic injustice either downplay or are unable to capture. This third conception of epistemic injustice is an important analytic tool for theorizing both epistemic injustice and educational justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Minerva Rava An Torva?Anastasios G. Nikolaidis1. Ovid Ars 2.659: Si paeta est, Veneri similis, si torva, Minervaetorva Merkel: flava R in marg. cum plerisque codd.: rava Heinsius: parva R cum aliquot dett.: fulva F.2. Priapea 36.4: Minerva torvo lumine est, Venus paetotorvo scripsi: flavo libri edd. vett.: flava et post hoc verbum commate interpunxit De Rooy (probant Vollmer, Clairmont, Parker): ravo Haupt: glauco Antonius.IMost codices for line 2.659 of (...) Ovid's Ars amatoria give flava in place of torva, but this reading does not suit the context (Ovid is suggesting ways of moderating the flaws of one's puella), which requires a word with a negative connotation.1 Among the proposed emendations, Heinsius' rava has been adopted by almost all editors of the Ars, but the elusive meaning of this adjective, in conjunction with its very limited use by the Latin poets and some other considerations that I explore below, allow us to look at this emendation afresh. In fact, apart from its appearance in the two lines under discussion, ravus seems to have been employed only on two other occasions, and only by Horace; and in one of them it is not the only codices reading (see note 11 below).2As a color term, ravus suggests a grey-yellowish or grey-bluish tinge, which corresponds to the implications of the Greek.3 The Greek word, however, was more extensively employed (see the respective [End Page 81] entries in LSJ and OLD) and more varied in meaning. With reference to eyes, for example, charopos appears to denote either the color of the iris (mostly in prose) or the flash, the glow of the gaze (nearly always in poetry; see note 5), which in turn may be due either to exuberant joy4 or-albeit not as frequently-to unrestrained fury.5 It appears, however, that in reference to human eyes charopos is a more or less complimentary term,6 whereas in reference to the eyes of animals, it carries rather negative overtones, whether it describes the color of the eyes or thegleam in them.7 We can thus account for the last explanation of charopos in Hesychius' Lexicon (). It seems that the connotation of the fierce glare, the awe-inspiring gaze, passed, at least to a small extent (see references in LSJ), from animals to humans, so that in a Lucian passage the goddess Athena is disparagingly depicted as charope (Dial. deor. 23.1: ).8 [End Page 82]It would follow, then, that rava, as applied to Minerva in the Ars amatoria passage, cannot refer to the color connotations of charopos (for these are positive)9 but only to the notion of a fierce glare, as is indeed appropriate to the warlike Athena.10 It may not be accidental, after all, that just before the first appearance of Athena in Homer (A 206), it is the glaring eyes of the goddess, not their color, that we encounter: (A 200; cf. Eustathius's commentary).11 On the other hand, one could argue that the eye color that the Greeks liked (charopon) was one that the Romans disliked (in which case rava would be appropriate), but the only evidence for this comes from the two passages we are discussing here.12 [End Page 83]In my view, the shortcoming in the puella that Ovid wants moderated is her grim, sullen countenance, her glaring look, not the color of her eyes. This is somewhat corroborated by the paeta of the first hemistich (again a kind of look, not color)13 and the comparison with Athena, who, as a war goddess, would have looked fierce. Yet, the adjective rava is not only used nowhere else by Ovid in any context;14 it is never attributed to Athena/Minerva/Pallas throughout Latin poetry.15 Even in Lucretius 4.1161, where the context is almost identical with that of Ars amatoria 2.659, Athena is only indirectly described as caesia (which translates see Aul. Gell. 2.26.19 and cf. André 1949, 178f.), a quality that is actually never attributed to Minerva by Latin poets (see Carter 1902, 113).16 By contrast, the adjective torvus... (shrink)

The objective structured clinical examination is a method for assessment clinical competencies and skills. However, there is a need to improve its design in psychology programs. The aim of this study was to analyze the effect of the different scenario's presentation order with different complexity/difficulty on the autonomic stress response of undergraduate students undergoing a Psychology OSCE. A total of 32 students of Psychology Bachelor's Degree were randomly selected and assigned to two OSCE scenarios of different complexity. While undergoing the (...) scenarios, participants heart rate variability was analyzed as an indicator of participant's stress autonomic response. Results indicate that the order of presentation of different complexity/difficulty scenarios affects the autonomic stress response of undergraduate Psychology students undergoing an OSCE. Students who underwent the high-complexity scenario first, reported significantly higher autonomic stress response than students who began the OSCE with the low-complexity scenario. Highly complex or difficult scenarios require good executive functions or cognitive control, very sensitive to autonomic stress responses. Therefore, OSCE design will benefit from placing easy scenarios first. (shrink)

The Rashomon effect – a phenomenon studied in the arts and social sciences – occurs when the same event is given contradictory interpretations by different individuals involved. The effect was named after Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, in which a murder is described in four contradictory ways by four witnesses. In the film, a samurai has been killed under mysterious circumstances. Four people give contradictory reports about the crime. In particular, the samurai's wife claims that she was sexually abused by (...) a bandit, fainted, and then awoke to find her husband dead; the bandit claims that he seduced the wife and challenged the samurai in a battle to victory or at least to an honorable death; the woodcutter (who may have been an onlooker) claims that he witnessed the rape and murder but was not involved; and the dead samurai's spirit claims that he committed suicide. The Rashomon effect is not only about constructing different versions of the world based on differences in perspective; it occurs when such differences appear together with the absence of evidence to assess any version of the truth, plus “the social pressure for closure on the question.” In this commentary, we describe the relevance of the Rashomon effect beyond the arts and social sciences, namely in the field of biology. We use examples from redox biology, which is full of contradictions, thus making it fertile ground on which to apply reasoning derived from the Rashomon effect. (shrink)

The 2007 publication of Miranda Fricker’s celebrated book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing gave way to a burgeoning area of study in philosophy of education. The book’s arguments create a context for expanding the scope of work on epistemic issues in education by moving beyond direct explorations of the distribution of epistemic goods and the role of power in curriculum development. Since that time, the rich scholarship on epistemic injustice in philosophy of education examines a variety of (...) topics, including the impact of epistemic injustice on the experiences of teachers and learners more broadly (focussing mostly on students who are marginalized along lines of race, gender, class, and ability, amongst others) and the implications of epistemic injustice for educational research, policy, and practice. This special issue extends this line of work by compiling a set of articles that address a broad range of topics, some of which are well established in the literature and some of which open new lines of inquiry in the field. In doing so, the issue aims to establish the intersection of epistemic injustice and education as a distinct area of study that holds great significance and potential. In this paper, A. C. Nikolaidis and Winston C. Thompson introduce the issue by discussing these contributions, explaining why education is central to the study of epistemic injustice (and vice versa), and exploring the complex nature of epistemic injustice and education as revealed in the articles that comprise this collection—namely, education’s simultaneous complicity as a perpetrator and promise as a disruptor of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Georges Sorel's Study on Vico is a revelatory document of the depths and stakes of French social thought at the end of the 19th century. What brought Sorel to the 18th century Neapolitan theorist of history? Acute awareness of the limitations of Marxist thought in his day, a profound concern with the material underpinnings of language, law, and culture, and the imperative to understand the possibilities of revolutionary change. We find here a different Sorel, one who speaks in surprising ways (...) to the 21st century. The translation is accompanied by an introduction and by a set of notes which situate the text both in Sorel's overall intellectual trajectory and in the fin de siècle debates from which it emerged. (shrink)

Despite the increase in ethics education offerings of the past few decades, universities struggle to foster desirable ethical dispositions among developing professionals. Part of the reason is that the values implicit in the enculturation of students in higher education cut against the aims of explicit ethics education. To accomplish desirable ethical dispositions among future professionals we ought to broaden our understanding of what the cultivation of ethical professionals entails from a narrow focus on ethics education to a broad focus on (...) ethics enculturation. This paper offers a framework for theorizing ethics enculturation, using examples from recent engineering ethics education literature to demonstrate how the framework captures elements about the development of ethical dispositions and decision-making skills that literature with a narrow focus on ethics education overlooks. (shrink)

"Historian Ramsay Cook called George Grant one of Canadas two most important political thinkers in the twentieth century.

Given Plutarch’s fragmentary piece on Aristophanes and Menander, a piece of Table Talk on almost the same topic and various attacks on comic poets scattered through the Lives, one might believe that Plutarch is a staid, conservative and humourless author. But several other instances in his writings reveal a playful, facetious, witty and humorous Plutarch. This paper will focus on the Quaestiones Convivales, which bear ample witness to this aspect of Plutarch’s personality and authorial technique. It will examine the ways (...) in which he introduces and describes the various interlocutors, discuss certain comments with which he tries to ridicule his philosophical opponents, notably the Stoics and the Epicureans, try to distinguish the various manifestations of Plutarch’s humour and finally suggest that Plutarch’s stance and attitude towards playfulness, comic situations and laughter may ultimately be affected, at least in part, by his allegiance to Plato. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 71, Issue 6, Page 787-807, December 2021.

Blame is an unpopular and neglected notion: it goes against the grain of a therapeutically-oriented culture and has been far less discussed by philosophers than such related notions as responsibility and punishment. This book seeks to show that neither the opposition nor the neglect is justified. The book's most important conclusion is that blame is inseperable from morality itself - that any considerations that justify us in accepting a set of moral principles must also call for the condemnation of those (...) who violate the principles. Properly understood, blame and morality must stand or fall together. (shrink)

Klara and the Sun, the latest novel by Nobel-prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, forces one to reckon with one's own anxieties about the future of emerging technologies and confront deep questions about the nature of dignity, existence, and humanity. The novel also provides one with complex characters and a speculative future through which to live new lives, experience novel worlds, and see through different eyes. At the same time, the novel’s world offers us an uncanny distance from our own, making us (...) prone to pass judgments on the characters’ moral faults that we later come to recognize are also our own. (shrink)

The fifth of eight books of the correspondence of George Santayana. During the period covered by this book, George Santayana had settled permanently in Rome. His best-selling novel, The Last Puritan, was published in London in 1935 and in the United States in 1936, where it was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. In 1936 Santayana became one of the few philosophers ever to appear on the front cover of Time magazine. His growing influence was evidenced further by (...) two other 1936 publications, Obiter Scripta: Lectures, Essays and Reviews and Philosophy of Santayana: Selections From the Works of George Santayana. Also during this year the first six volumes of the Triton Edition, a limited signed edition with significant new prefaces, was published by Scribner's. Santayana continued work on The Realm of Truth and The Realm of Spirit, as well as his autobiography, Persons and Places. (shrink)

While I deeply appreciate the painstaking and often generous remarks in R.N. Berki’s review of my book Hegel’s Retreat From Eleusis, [OWL, September 1978], I should like to correct two of his misapprehensions. First, the point is not that I try to “steer a middle course between ‘antiquaries’ who relegate Hegel to history books and ‘renovators’ who believe that Hegel is directly relevant,” but between the former and those who warp Hegel out of context in support of their preferred vision (...) of social and political action and/or explanation. Second, I do not conclude negatively about “the contemporary value of Hegel’s doctrine of the state;” If I had, the book would scarcely have been worth writing. It is simply that, in line with the first point, I counsel caution and salutary “archaeological” reflection. Current reality is messy: Hegel guides us and teaches us, but he furnishes no coup de foudre for solving our institutional problems. If this is irresolute, so be it. Does Mr. Berki propose bringing back monarchy, estates, and early 19th century municipal life? My own position is stated on pp. 109, 142–144, 183, 222–223. Although this may be, in Hayden White’s language, a Rankean trope, my option is surely not for “the historical dustbin.”. (shrink)

There is a well-worn image and phrase for libertarianism: "atomized individualism." This hobgoblin has spread so thoroughly that even some libertarians think their philosophy unreservedly supports private persons, whatever the situation, whatever their behavior. Smith's Self-Interest and Social Order in Classical Liberalism, corrects this misrepresentation with careful intellectual surveys of Hume, Smith, Hobbes, Butler, Mandeville, and Hutcheson and their respective contributions to political philosophy.

Collection of passages of George Santayana.

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is the superstar of Irish Philosophy. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700 and became a fellow in 1707. In 1724 he resigned his Fellowship to become Dean of Derry, and in 1734 he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He settled in Oxford in 1752 and died the following year. The work of George Berkeley is marked by its diversity and range. His writings take in such topics as mathematics, psychology, politics, health, economics, deism and (...) education, as well as that with which he is most associated - philosophy. Whatever topic he dealt with, his grasp of the subject matter was always impressive and his criticisms of his contemporaries often acute. Among the most noteable of the British Empiricists, he took his starting point from Locke's new 'way of ideas', but he rejected abstract ideas and the possibility of real existence outside perception. It is for this doctrine that he is most known - that there is no such thing as matter, and that things are collections of ideas which can exist only in our minds and only for so long as they are perceived. This philosophy, summed up in his phrase 'to be is to be perceived', he termed 'immaterialism'. A.C. Fraser's collection includes a series of what were previously unpublished notes by Berkeley on all the main topics of his philosophy. This, the 1901 edition, was the first complete edition of his works. (shrink)