This commentary discusses critically the proposal of Foxall's intentional behaviorism that, when the use of intentional categories can be justifiably portrayed as heuristic overlay to theories incorporating radical behaviorist principles, intentionality may be part of behaviorist interpretations of behavior that occurs outside of the controlled conditions of the laboratory and practical behavioral interventions. I sketch an argument that typical uses of intentional categories for the explanation of human agency (e.g., its exercise in conducting scientific research) are not properly grasped as (...) being such heuristic overlay and so are not illuminated by behaviorist interpretations. (shrink)

Educational research suggests that the response biases of educators can negatively influence student performance and aptitude (Blanchett 2006; Bloom 2001; Darity et al. 2001; Gordon 2005; and Skiba et al. 2000). This article introduces ?good enough methods? for autoethnography as an alternative approach to this problem. Luttrell (2000, 13) conceptualizes ?good enough methods? researchers as those seeking to understand and appreciate difference and accept errors often made because of their blind spots and intense involvement. Evidence of this approach via (...) autoethnography is provided here from cases of graduate student-practitioners and their Intergroup/Intercultural Education professor. Moreover, the article highlights (a) a connection of autoethnography to research in Education, (b) five key decisions of a ?good enough methods? approach to autoethnography, and (c) how this approach can be applied to expose and address educator biases relating to ?the matrix? (Hill-Collins 1990) of race, class, and gender. (shrink)

After an introductory discussion primarily aimed to differentiate her approach to reading the Platonic dialogues from the so-called argument-focused approach, Gordon argues that Socratic dialectic—which she understands as “the question and answer depicted in the dialogues between Socrates and the interlocutors”—does not simply aim at uncovering inconsistencies in the interlocutors’ belief sets, but at urging through extra-logical means the interlocutors to live a particular—philosophical—kind of life. Next, she argues via a discussion of reader response theory for the parallelism between (...) Socrates’ relationship with his interlocutors and Plato’s relationship with his readers. Thus, Plato, like Socrates, should be seen as urging his readers through extra-logical means to live a particular life—‘to turn toward philosophy’. The remainder of the book consists of four chapters devoted to discussing the extra-logical means by which Plato accomplishes this urging—his use of dramatic effects, his use of character development, his use of irony, and his use of images. While I presume that Gordon would not object to my parenthetical inclusion of ‘logical’ in the description of her argument, it is clear that the focus of her attention in this book is the extra-logical means. (shrink)

To evaluate how study characteristics and methodological aspects compare based on presence or absence of industry funding, Hughes et al. conducted a systematic survey of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published in three major medical journals. The authors found industry-funded RCTs were more likely to be blinded, post results on a clinical trials registration database (ClinicalTrials.gov), and accrue high citation counts.1 Conversely, industry-funded trials had smaller sample sizes and more frequently used placebo as the comparator, used a surrogate as their primary (...) outcome, and had positive results. (shrink)

Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series—and the seminars on which they are based—brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This fourth volume in the series, _Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic_, focuses on questions revolving around the concepts of the aesthetic, the anti-aesthetic, and the political. (...) The book is about the fact that now, almost thirty years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or non-aesthetic art. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art. The central question of this book is whether artists and academicians are free of this choice in practice, in pedagogy, and in theory. The contributors are Stéphanie Benzaquen, J. M. Bern­stein, Karen Busk-Jepsen, Luis Camnitzer, Diarmuid Costello, Joana Cunha Leal, Angela Dimitrakaki, Alexander Dumbadze, T. Brandon Evans, Geng Youzhuang, Boris Groys, Beáta Hock, Gordon Hughes, Michael Kelly, Grant Kester, Meredith Kooi, Cary Levine, Sunil Manghani, William Mazzarella, Justin McKeown, Andrew McNamara, Eve Meltzer, Nadja Millner-Larsen, Maria Filomena Molder, Carrie Noland, Gary Peters, Aaron Richmond, Lauren Ross, Toni Ross, Eva Schürmann, Gregory Sholette, Noah Simblist, Jon Simons, Robert Storr, Martin Sundberg, Timotheus Vermeulen, and Rebecca Zorach. (shrink)

Intuitively, a classical field theory is background-in- dependent if the structure required to make sense of its equations is itself subject to dynamical evolution, rather than being imposed ab initio. The aim of this paper is to provide an explication of this intuitive notion. Background-independence is not a not formal property of theories: the question whether a theory is background-independent depends upon how the theory is interpreted. Under the approach proposed here, a theory is fully background-independent relative to an interpretation (...) if each physical possibility corresponds to a distinct spacetime geometry; and it falls short of full background-independence to the extent that this condition fails. (shrink)

Four years after the Panama Papers scandal, tax avoidance remains an urgent moral-political problem. Moving beyond both the academic and policy mainstream, I advocate the “democratization of tax enforcement,” by which I mean systematic efforts to make tax avoiders accountable to the judgment of ordinary citizens. Both individual oligarchs and multinational corporations have access to sophisticated tax avoidance strategies that impose significant fiscal costs on democracies and exacerbate preexisting distributive and political inequalities. Yet much contemporary tax sheltering occurs within the (...) letter of the law, rendering criminal sanctions ineffective. In response, I argue for the creation of Citizen Tax Juries, deliberative minipublics empowered to scrutinize tax avoiders, demand accountability, and facilitate concrete reforms. This proposal thus responds to the wider aspiration, within contemporary democratic theory, to secure more popular control over essential economic processes. (shrink)

Abstract:In contrast to “social contract” theories of the corporation, a moral justification of the corporation as actual, not hypothetical, agreement is presented. Central to the justification is the idea of personal projects, as developed by Loren Lomasky. The key idea is the role that corporations can play in the construction and advancement of personal, value-creating projects. The concept of the corporation as actual agreement, as a type of “right of association” theory, is defended against influential criticism of such theories by (...) Thomas Donaldson. (shrink)

Marquis’s account of the ethics of abortion is unsatisfactory but not as Christensen implies baseless. It requires to be amended rather than abandoned. It is true, as Marquis asserts that murder and abortion both might deprive people of something of value to them, in particular, the life of a sort that might have been to them worth living. However, it is mistaken to conclude, as Marquis does, that murder and abortion are thereby morally equivalent. Not all deprivation is wrongful. Not (...) all that is wrongful is wrongful because it deprives someone of something. Contrary to what Christensen asserts, and Marquis seems to accept, it is not solely those discernible people who currently exist who might be deprived by our current actions. It is not only towards and concerning such living discernible people that we can have moral duties. It is not only such living discernible people who can be the beneficiaries of our generosity. Hence, contraception and the emission of greenhouse gases are, like abortion, issues that raise significant moral questions; however, they might each be properly answered. Nonetheless, it does not follow that is morally equivalent to each other far less than they are all morally equivalent to murder. If and when they are morally wrong, they can be different wrongs. (shrink)

A thorough historical survey of philosophies of the arts.

The experience of fragility is part of the uncertainty surrounding the Covid epidemic. I see Depraz’s experience as involving two types of cognitive processes, one lighter than the other. The ….

Repression continues to be controversial. One insight crystallized by the commentaries is that there is a serious semantic problem, partly resulting from a long silence in psychology on repression. In this response, narrow views (e.g., that repression needs always be unconscious, must yield total amnesia) are challenged. Broader conceptions of repression, both biological and social, are considered, with a special stress on repression of meanings (denial). Several issues – generilizability, falsifiability, personality factors, the interaction of repression with cognitive channel (e.g., (...) recall vs. dreams), and false-memory as repression – are discussed. (shrink)

This article tackles the issue of offshore tax sheltering from the perspective of normative political realism. Tax sheltering is a pressing contemporary policy challenge, with hundreds of billions in private assets protected in offshore trusts and shell companies. Indeed, tax sheltering produces a variety of empirical dilemmas that render it a distinctive challenge for global governance. Therefore, it is crucial for normative political theorists to confront this problem. A realist approach offers three distinct advantages, elaborated in the three subsequent sections (...) of the article. First, it relaxes the theoretical burden by starting from the real practice of tax evasion rather than from an abstract theory of equality or justice. Second, this approach recognizes that sheltering is a political harm: a threat to the very maintenance of order, not just a problem of inequality or injustice. If politicians fail at such polity maintenance, realism's ethic of responsibility provides clear political reasons why they should be held accountable. Third, realism's focus on power and its acceptance of coercion open up new strategies for addressing the problem that would not be allowed by theories with a stronger emphasis on consensus. (shrink)

We present a high-level declarative programming language for representing argumentation schemes, where schemes represented in this language can be easily validated by domain experts, including developers of argumentation schemes in informal logic and philosophy, and serve as executable specifications for automatically constructing arguments, when applied to a set of assumptions. This new rule language for representing argumentation schemes is validated by using it to represent twenty representative argumentation schemes.

The challenge this book addresses is to demonstrate how, in teaching content knowledge, the development of intellectual and moral dispositions as virtues is not merely a good idea, or peripheral to that content, but deeply embedded in the logic of searching for knowledge and truth. It offers a powerful example of how philosophy of education can be brought to bear on real problems of educational research and practice – pointing the reader to re-envision what it means to educate children by (...) developing the person, instead of simply knowledge and skills. Connected intimately to the practice of teaching and teacher education, the book sets forth an alternative theory of education where the developing person is at the center of education set in a moral space and a political order. To this end, a framework of public and personal knowledge forms the content, to which personal dispositions are integral, not peripheral. The book’s pedagogy is invitational, welcoming its readers as companions in inquiry and thought about the moral aspects of what we teach as knowledge. (shrink)

According to one view of english nominals, imperfect nominals designate facts, and perfect nominals, events. it is argued here that this is mistaken. of imperfect nominals only "that"-clauses are fact designators; imperfect gerundive nominals are to be classed with perfect nominals as event designators. there are, however, two conceptions of events, arising from two different conceptions of time. the events designated by imperfect gerundives are to be conceived as spread out in time, divisible into parts, and such that the same (...) event may receive multiple descriptions. the events named by perfect nominals differ. they persist through time, rather than being extended in it, they do not divide into temporal parts, and obey strict conditions of identity. this position is argued for on the basis of linguistic evidence, as well as analysis of the conceptions of time involved. implications of the view for a number of philosophical problems are pointed out and briefly explored. (shrink)

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Leibniz vollbringt ein wichtiges philosophisches Manover, wenn er behauptet, daß Wunder, wenn sie auch nicht im Einklang mit den Naturgesetzen stehen, so doch im Einklang mit den allgemeineren metaphysischen Gesetzen, die Gott den Monaden in Form von Kraft eingeprägt hat. Leider hat er jedoch nie genug abgeklärt, auf welche Weise das Auftreten von Wundern mit seiner Physik der Kraft übereinstimmen kann. In verschiedenen Passagen scheint Leibniz sogar in einen Widerspruch verwickelt zu sein: wahrend er darauf besteht, daß Wunder über den (...) Naturgesetzen und der substaniellen Kraft stehen, erkennt er doch an, daß jede Substanz "n'agit que pour sa propre force et n'en reçoit jamais d'ailleurs" und daß alles, das je innerhalb einer Substanz geschehen wird, "est deja compris virtuellement dans sa nature ou notion". Wie kann ein Wunder – das per definitionem über der substantiellen Natur und Kraft steht – überhaupt vorkommen, wenn alles was mit einer Substanz geschieht, aus substantieller Natur oder Kraft folgen oder in ihr 'eingeprägt' sein muß? Um das Problem der Vereinbarkeit der Moglichkeit von Wundern und der Struktur des Leibnizschen metaphysischen Systems zu losen – und so ganz allgemein eine Annäherung zwischen Leibniz' theologischen Ansichten und seiner Metaphysik zu bewirken – rege ich an, daß wir Leibniz' Diskussion der derivativen Kraft bereichern und den Unterschied zwischen substanieller Essenz und Natur erhellen müssen. Erst wenn wir intermonadische von intramonadischer derivativer Kraft unterscheiden und substantielle Essenz mit primitiver Kraft verbinden und substantielle Natur mit intermonadischer derivativer Kraft, können wir sehen, wie Wunder über substantieller Kraft stehen können – nämlich insoweit sie über intermonadischer Kraft/substantieller Natur stehen, ohne gleichzeitig über primitiver Kraft/substantieller Essenz zu stehen. (shrink)

Of course, as scholars have long known, this example has serious limitations. For one thing, a substantial form, as the scholastics understood it, is much more dynamic than a mere shape. For example, the substantial form of an oak tree somehow explains how and why an oak tree can do everything that it does. So the substantial form of an oak tree could not be something as simple or crude as its shape. Nevertheless, the example of the bronze statue does (...) have the virtue of illustrating one of the chief advantages of hylomorphism as a philosophy of the human person. Although we can talk about the bronze and the shape of the statue, respectively, it still seems correct to say that the statue is exactly one thing, not two things. Likewise, although we can talk about the matter and the form of a human being, the hylomorphist insists that a human being is exactly one thing, not two things accidentally conjoined. (shrink)

Shortened version of Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science.

The central claim of this book is that, early and late, Wittgenstein modelled his approach to existential meaning on his account of linguistic meaning. A reading of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy sets up Bearn’s reading of the existential point of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Bearn argues that both books try to resolve our anxiety about the meaning of life by appeal to the deep, unutterable essence of the world. Bearn argues that as Wittgenstein’s and Nietzsche’s thought matured, they both separately came (...) to believe that the answer to our existential anxiety does not lie beneath the surfaces of our lives, but in our acceptance—Nietzsche’s “Yes”—of the groundless details of those surfaces themselves: the wonder of the ordinary. (shrink)

The most discussed and most significant issue on the religious scene today is whether it is possible, or even desirable, to believe in God. Mr. Kaufman's valuable study does not offer a doctrine of God, but instead explores why God is a problem for many moderns, the dimensions of that problem, and the inner logic of the notion of God as it has developed in Western culture. His object is to determine the function or significance of talk about God: how (...) the concept of God is generated in human experience; the special problems in turn generated by this concept (for example, the intelligibility of the idea of transcendence, the problem of theodicy) and how they are met; and under what circumstances the idea of God is credible or important or even indispensable. He does not try to prove God's existence or nonexistence, but elucidates what the concept of God means and the important human needs it fulfills. Four of the eleven essays have been previously published, at least in part; seven are completely new. (shrink)

In everyday English usage, the words ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ are normally taken to be opposite in meaning. It is an opposition with very ancient roots. One of its forbears was the medieval theory of Scriptural hermeneutics, which distinguished among the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic senses of Scripture. This itself had an ancestry in pre-Augustinian times: Augustine tells in his Confessions how he learned from Ambrose the trick of interpreting Scripture figuratively, thus eliminating the problems and contradictions created by a (...) literal reading. Earlier still, the distinction and the opposition were at least implicit in Poetics 21, where Aristotle differentiated between the standard or normal name for a thing, and various other types of name among which he listed metaphor. The antonymy of the literal and the figurative is therefore deeply embedded in our intellectual history, and it is perhaps for this reason that it has remained, to a large extent, unexamined and unquestioned. (shrink)

Libertarian treatments of free will face the objection that an uncaused human decision would lack full explanation, and hence violate the principle of sufficient reason. It is argued that this difficulty can be overcome if God, as creator, wills that I decide as I do, since my decision could then be explained in terms of his will, which must be for the best. It is further argued that this view does not make God the author of evil in any damaging (...) sense. Neither does it impugn my freedom. God’s creative activity does not put in place any secondary causes that determine my decision; and his will does not stand as an independent determining condition either, since it is fully expressed in my decision alone. (shrink)