Editors Rachel Brown and Deva Woodly bring together Mara Marin, Shatema Threadcraft, Christopher Paul Harris, Jasmine Syedullah, and Miriam Ticktin to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice that orients people to a new way of living, relating, and governing? The answer they propose is that a 21st-century approach to the politics of care must aim at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present. The politics of (...) care is an approach to political thought and action that moves beyond the liberal approach which situates care as a finite resource to be distributed among autonomous individuals, or as a necessarily feminine virtue. Instead, those elucidating the politics of care for the contemporary era draw on rich interdisciplinary traditions and social movements to theorize and practice care as an inherently interdependent survival strategy, a foundation for political organizing, and a prefigurative politics for building a world in which all people can live and thrive. (shrink)

What is the nature of children's trust in testimony? Is it based primarily on evidential correlations between statements and facts, as stated by Hume, or does it derive from an interest in the trustworthiness of particular speakers? In this essay, we explore these questions in an effort to understand the developmental course and cognitive bases of children's extensive reliance on testimony. Recent work shows that, from an early age, children monitor the reliability of particular informants, differentiate between those who make (...) true and false claims and keep that differential accuracy in mind when evaluating new information from these people. We argue that this selective trust is likely to involve the mentalistic appraisal of speakers rather than surface generalizations of their behavior. Finally, we review the significance of children's deference to adult authority on issues of naming and categorization. In addition to challenging a purely inductive account of trust, these and other findings reflect a potentially rich set of tools brought by children to the task of learning from people's testimony. (shrink)

Children aged 7 and 11 years were interviewed about death in the context of two different narratives. Each narrative described the death of a grandparent but one narrative provided a secular context whereas the other provided a religious context. Following each narrative, children were asked to judge whether various bodily and mental processes continue to function after death, and to justify their judgment. Children displayed two different conceptions of death. They often acknowledged that functioning ceases at death and offered appropriate (...) biological justifications for that judgment. However, they also claimed that functioning continues after death and offered appropriate religious justifications. The tendency to claim that functioning continues after death was more frequent among older children than younger children, more frequent in the context of the religious narrative as opposed to the secular narrative and more frequent with respect to mental processes than bodily processes. Particularly among older children, two distinct conceptions of death appear to co-exist: a biological conception in which death implies the cessation of living processes and a metaphysical conception in which death marks the beginning of the afterlife. (shrink)

Abstract: William James argued that we ordinarily think of the objects that we can observe—things that belong to 'the world of sense'—as having an unquestioned reality. However, young children also assert the existence of entities that they cannot ordinarily observe. For example, they assert the existence of germs and souls. The belief in the existence of such unobservable entities is likely to be based on children's broader trust in other people's testimony about objects and situations that they cannot directly observe (...) for themselves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing with Mountains1Paul A. Harris (bio)For Sydney Levy, who brought me on board.Geologic AspirationsStone breathes within nature's time cycle…. It begins before you and continues through you and goes on. Working with stone is not resisting time but touching it.—Isamu NoguchiUnder the suffocating circumstances of lockdown, COVID conditions inevitably wafted their way into the stoned thinking of Pierre Jardin.2 The pandemic atmosphere made air apparent, and breathing became personal, (...) political, and planetary. People sought perspective in sometimes surprising ways. While many turned to the Stoics, Jardin turned to stone. Suspending his disbelief in "The Hammock of Relaxation" (fig. 1), Jardin stretched his imagination, and set himself adrift in diffuse reveries of rocky respiration. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.The Hammock of Relaxation. Pebble on book cover.Photo by author.Jardin composes a life centered in absorbing stone(s), encompassing both a physical process of soaking in a substance slowly and psychological experience of becoming engrossed in it. He feels alive with stone and stone alive in him; literally and metaphorically, he has spent hours looking at stone, listening to stone, and touching/being touched by stone. But he had never seriously considered breathing stone. Immediately, a slew of questions arose: Do rocks breathe? Do mountains? Does the Earth? What would it mean to breathe with a stone, or with the planet? Jardin's pursuit of lithic and lithospheric respirations came to comprise his geologic aspirations, which are set out here. [End Page 261]Aerial ImaginationPierre Jardin's geologic aspirations took inspiration from Gaston Bachelard's aerial imagination, as described in Air and Dreams. Accepting Bachelard's invitation to "listen to nothing but our own breathing…, to become as aerial as our breath…" (Bachelard, Air 241), Jardin set about inventing a regimen of contemplative breathing exercises. To do so, he took up what Bachelard terms the "search for a thought hidden under expressive sedimen,ts, [in which] a geology of silence is developed" (Bachelard Air, 251). The question was, what "expressive sediments" should Jardin mine in this quixotic quest? What materials and mental modalities would precipitate a "geology of silence"?In order to meld minds with Bachelard, Jardin placed a pebble on Robert Lapoujade's pencil portrait that graces the book's cover (fig. 2). The results were alchemical: the cobble transmuted into a philosopher's stone, opening Bachelard's third eye; the rock launched a basalt on Jardin's senses that produced an "intoxication of aerial imagination raised to its cosmic role" (Bachelard, Air 241). A gesture as simple as placing a rock on a book crystallized new quartz-veins of thought. What follows are Jardin's experiments with a variety of "expressive sediments," a series of multi-scalar meditations and various instantiations of lithic respiration. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Aerial Basalt on the Senses. Pebble on book cover.Photo by author.Atmospheric CompositionsPierre Jardin's geologic aspirations began with a Composition of Place, a meditative technique deployed in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Loyola stipulates that "for contemplation or meditation about visible things… the 'composition' will consist in seeing through the gaze of the imagination the material place where the object I want to contemplate is situated" (Ganss 47). Taking "Breathing with Mountains" as the "object" of contemplation stretches Jardin's imagination to a geologic scale; its "material place" is the Earth's atmosphere, or more specifically, its lowest layer, the troposphere. [End Page 262]To facilitate his meditation, Jardin scales Earth down to a stunning serpentine stone, which he has mounted like a globe. Holding the stone and breathing slowly, Jardin can visualize the troposphere as the thinnest of films on the rock's surface. In his active imagination, the bumps, furrows, and ridges in the rough rock texture evoke the constant crumpling of the lithosphere caused by drifting and crashing tectonic plates.With the stone standing in for Earth, Jardin suddenly becomes a geologic giant representing Anthropocene humanity. As his exhalations cloud the stone, Jardin considers how Anthropogenic expirations are changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. An index of human impact is provided... (shrink)

Developmental psychologists have often portrayed young children as stubborn autodidacts who ignore the testimony of others. Yet the basic design of the human cognitive system indicates an early ability to co-ordinate information derived from first-hand observation with information derived from testimony. There is no obvious tendency to favour the former over the latter. Indeed, young children are relatively poor at monitoring whether they learned something from observation or from testimony. Moreover, the processes by which children and adults understand and remember (...) a sequence of events appear to be similar, whether they witness that sequence or are told about it. Children’s early receptivity to testimony raises the question of whether and how children discern what testimony is reliable. Arguably, before the emergence of reflective judgement, children are equipped with a tacit filtering device. To be understood, any new piece of testimony typically needs to be consistent with, and integrated into, what is already known about the topic in question. Children’s impoverished knowledge base will make that integrative process relatively slow. Thus, children’s early ignorance may often save them from misplaced credulity.Author Keywords: Trust; Testimony; Sources ; Cognitive development; Situation model. (shrink)

Children's utterances from late infancy to 3 years of age were examined to infer their conception of knowledge. In Study 1, the utterances of two English-speaking children were analysed and in Study 2, the utterances of a Mandarin-speaking child were analysed – in both studies, for their use of the verb know. Both studies confirmed that know and not know were used to affirm, query or deny knowledge, especially concerning an ongoing topic of conversation. References to a third party were (...) rare. By implication, 2-year-olds have a conception of knowledge that underpins their exchange of information in conversation. Implications for the child's developing theory of mind are discussed. (shrink)

This book demonstrates how children's imagination makes a continuing contribution to their cognitive and emotional development.

Children learn about the world from the testimony of other people, often coming to accept what they are told about a variety of unobservable and indeed counter-intuitive phenomena. However, research on children’s learning from testimony has paid limited attention to the foundations of that capacity. We ask whether those foundations can be observed in infancy. We review evidence from two areas of research: infants’ sensitivity to the emotional expressions of other people; and their capacity to understand the exchange of information (...) through non-verbal gestures and vocalization. We conclude that a grasp of the bi-directional exchange of information is present early in the second year. We discuss the implications for future research, especially across different cultural settings. (shrink)

Transactive memory theory describes the processes by which benefits for memory can occur when remembering is shared in dyads or groups. In contrast, cognitive psychology experiments demonstrate that social influences on memory disrupt and inhibit individual recall. However, most research in cognitive psychology has focused on groups of strangers recalling relatively meaningless stimuli. In the current study, we examined social influences on memory in groups with a shared history, who were recalling a range of stimuli, from word lists to personal, (...) shared memories. We focused in detail on the products and processes of remembering during in-depth interviews with 12 older married couples. These interviews consisted of three recall tasks: (1) word list recall; (2) personal list recall, where stimuli were relevant to the couples’ shared past; and (3) an open-ended autobiographical interview. We conducted these tasks individually and then collaboratively two weeks later. Across each of the tasks, although some couples demonstrated collaborative inhibition, others demonstrated collaborative facilitation. We identified a number of factors that predicted collaborative success, in particular, group-level strategy use. Our results show that collaboration may help or hinder memory, and certain interactions are more likely to produce collaborative benefits. (shrink)

Finds solutions to the world's greatest challenge climate change in global ethicsNew for this editionIncludes recent climate diplomacy and international agreementsPresents current data and information on climate scienceUpdated statistics; e.g. in chapters and sections that look at poverty and wealthExpanded learning guide for students and lecturersGlobal Ethics and Climate Change combines the science of climate change with ethical critique to expose its impact, the increasing intensity of dangerous trends particularly growing global affluence, material consumption and pollution and the intensifying moral (...) dimensions of changes to the environment. It shows you that global justice is vital to mitigating climate change. All of the author's royalties are being paid directly to the charity Oxfam. (shrink)

Writers on cognitive development differ on whether children are naturally inclined to maintain a veridical conception of the world or whether such an inclination emerges only gradually in the course of development. In either case, however, it is assumed that there is a consistent premium on veridicality. I argue against that assumption. Three different contexts are examined in which successful cognitive performance depends on temporarily setting aside what is known to be the case: counterfactual thinking, syllogistic reasoning and the comprehension (...) of connected discourse. (shrink)

PETRIVERSE. Noun.A world composed of rocks; e.g., a rock garden.Words composed of rocks; i.e., verse written in and/or about stone. [Latin petra, rock; Old English vers, from Latin versus a furrow]The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin is a xeriscape in the California Heights neighborhood of Long Beach, California, where many residents have taken advantage of a city program that subsidizes the conversion of grass lawns into drought-tolerant landscapes. The garden was conceived in 2009 when Pierre Jardin coined the neologism 'petriverse' to (...) denote both a world composed of rocks and words composed of rocks. The site has become known for two distinctive features: it presents constantly changing, eye-catching displays of... (shrink)

ASHÉ: Ritual Poetics in African Diasporic is a collection of interdisciplinary essays contributed by international scholars and practitioners. Having distinguished themselves across such disciplines as Anthropology, Art, Music, Literature, Dance, Philosophy, Religion, and Theology and conjoined to construct a defining approach to the study of Aesthetics throughout the African Diaspora with the Humanities at the core, this collection of essays will break new ground in the study of Black Aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to scholars, practitioners, and (...) students interested in tracing African heritage identities throughout the African Diaspora through close examination of a variety of discourses directly connected to expressive elements of cultural production and religious rituals. (shrink)

People live and age together in social groups. Across a range of outcomes, research has identified interdependence in the cognitive and health trajectories of ageing couples. Various types of memory decline with age and people report using a range of internal and external, social, and material strategies to compensate for these declines. While memory compensation strategies have been widely studied, research so far has focused only on single individuals. We examined interdependence in the memory compensation strategies reported by spouses within (...) 58 older couples. Couples completed the Memory Compensation Questionnaire, as well as an open-ended interview about their memory compensation practices. We found that internal, intra-individual memory compensation strategies were not associated within couples, but external, extra-individual strategies showed interdependence. Individuals’ scores on material/technological compensation strategies were positively correlated with their partners’. Reported reliance on a spouse was higher for men and increased with age. Our open-ended interviews yielded rich insights into the complex and diverse resources that couples use to support memory in day-to-day life. Particularly evident was the extent of interaction and coordination between social and material compensation, such that couples jointly used external compensation resources. Our results suggest that individuals’ reports of their compensation strategies do not tell the whole story. Rather, we propose that older couples show interdependence in their memory compensation strategies, and adopt complex systems of integrated material and social memory compensation in their day-to-day lives. (shrink)

Young children routinely display a naturalistic understanding of the world. When asked for explanations, they rarely invoke supernatural or religious explanations even when confronted by puzzling or unexpected phenomena. Nevertheless, depending on the surrounding culture, children are eventually prone to accept God as a creator, to believe in the power of prayer and to expect there to be an afterlife. A plausible interpretation of this dual stance is that children adopt two different cognitive routes to understanding: one grounded in empirical (...) observation and in trusted testimony about the observable world. Based on this route, children gradually build up a common-sense understanding of various natural domains, including the physical, the biological and the psychological. The second route is grounded in children’s early emerging ability to engage in shared pretense. As members of a religious community, children will routinely observe community members engage in activities, such as prayer, which cannot be readily understood in terms of their standard, common-sense framework. Nevertheless, children can charitably interpret prayer as special form of communication, directed at an imagined interlocutor. Cumulative exposure to such belief-based activities is likely to encourage children to transition from charitable interpreters of religious activities to participant believers. (shrink)

Pollution and overuse of resources in China have profound implications for the Chinese people and the world. Globalisation may be partly to blame for this situation, but it is hardly the only explanation. China has been overusing its resources for centuries. Traditional values appear to offer environmentally benign guidance for China's economic development, but they are largely impotent in the face of now-pervasive values manifested in Western-style consumption. Government policies go some way toward addressing this problem, but what may be (...) required is a new set of values that brings self-interest and environmental protection into common cause. (shrink)

Rock Records explores the intricate entanglements between Anthropos and Geos through a wide range of writings about stone, from media theory and ecophilosophy to the role of stones in art and the aesthetics of viewing stones. Authors engage the activity, vitality, and relationality of lithic matter and articulate multiple modalities of 'geo-affection,' as well as forms of geo-mythology, geo-sociality, and occult lithography. As the initial issue in a new digital/intermedial series of SubStance aimed at interweaving creative and critical work, Rock (...) Records also features digital versions of essays with photo-rich content, as well as a virtual exhibition of viewing stones and a series of speculative studies in... (shrink)

The Durban Platform for Enhanced Action calls for development of ‘a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties’ (emphasis added). By definition, parties to the climate convention are sovereign states. This reiteration of the role of states reveals an attachment to statist responses to climate change that has so far failed to reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Indeed, GHG pollution is increasing. The main reason for this increase is (...) growth in emissions from many developing countries, which collectively now produce over half of global emissions. Under current climate agreements, these countries are not obligated to limit these emissions. To require them to do so would arguably defy the principle of common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR) among states that forms the basis of the climate regime. (shrink)

PETRIVERSE. Noun.1) A world composed of rocks; e.g., a rock garden.2) Words composed of rocks; i.e., verse written in stone.The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin is a born-digital work of speculative theory that documents a decade of work on stone in a variety of media, from collecting cobble and composing displays in a contemplative rock garden, to conducting research, traveling, and photographing and writing about stones. This work has been undertaken as an apprenticeship to stone, in Deleuze's sense of apprenticeship of (...) a process in which "to learn is first of all to consider a substance…as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted. … One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood"... (shrink)

Most literature on the ethics of global warming focuses on the obligations of industrialized states to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases and to help poor countries do likewise. These books are no exception, arguing that the issue is a matter of international justice and equity.

This book contains the political writing of T. H. Green and selections from those of his ethical writings which bear on his political philosophy. Green's best known work, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, is included in full, as are the essay on freedom and the lecture 'Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract'. There are also extracts from Green's lectures on the English Revolution and from the Prolegomena to Ethics, and a number of previously unpublished essays and notes. All (...) the texts have been corrected against Green's manuscripts, held in Balliol College. The editors have provided a list of variants, full notes and an introductory essay on the importance of Green's form of revitalised liberalism. The volume will be a valuable sourcebook for students of Green's thought and the history of nineteenth-century liberalism. (shrink)

The world is in the early stages of what will be the greatest health crisis since the advent of modern medical technologies. Millions of people—particularly people in many of the world's poor countries—are infected with HIV. The vast majority of these people will go without modern medical intervention or substantial treatment, and will rapidly develop AIDS. The extent of this problem presents profound moral and ethical questions for the world's wealthy people and countries, for it is they who are most (...) able to assist the poor in managing and reversing this human tragedy. (shrink)

Bering's argument that human beings are endowed with a cognitive system dedicated to forming illusory representations of psychological immortality relies on the claim that children's beliefs in the afterlife are not the result of religious teaching. We suggest four reasons why this claim is unsatisfactory.

Climate change diplomacy is routinely characterized by preoccupation with narrow and short-term perceived national interests rather than the pressing need to mitigate global warming and respond agg...

Psychologists have emphasized children's acquisition of information through firsthand observation. However, many beliefs are acquired from others' testimony. In two experiments, most 4yearolds displayed sceptical trust in testimony. Having heard informants' accurate or inaccurate testimony, they anticipated that informants would continue to display such differential accuracy and they trusted the hitherto reliable informant. Yet they ignored the testimony of the reliable informant if it conflicted with what they themselves had seen. By contrast, threeyearolds were less selective in trusting a reliable (...) informant. Thus, young children check testimony against their own experience and increasingly recognise that some informants are more trustworthy than others. (shrink)