In this article we examine the specific contributions Native American thought can make to the ongoing search for a Western ecological consciousness. We begin with a review of the influence of Native American beliefs on the different branches of the modem environmental movement and some initial comparisons of Western and Native American ways of seeing. We then review Native American thought on the natural world, highlighting beliefs in the need for reciprocity and balance, the world as a living being, and (...) relationships with animals. We conclude that Native American ideas are important, can prove inspirational in the search for a modem environmental consciousness, and affirm the arguments of both deep ecologists and ecofeminists. (shrink)

Coexistence between livestock grazing and carnivores in rangelands is a major challenge in terms of sustainable agriculture, animal welfare, species conservation and ecosystem function. Many effective non-lethal tools exist to protect livestock from predation, yet their adoption remains limited. Using a social-ecological transformations framework, we present two qualitative models that depict transformative change in rangelands grazing. Developed through participatory processes with stakeholders from South Africa and the United States of America, the models articulate drivers of change and the essential pathways (...) to transition from routine lethal management of carnivores towards mutually beneficial coexistence. The pathways define broad actions that incorporate multiple values in grazing systems including changes to livestock management practices, financial support, industry capacity building, research, improved governance and marketing initiatives. A key finding is the new concept of ‘Predator Smart Farming’, a holistic and conscientious approach to agriculture, which increases the resilience of landscapes, animals and rural livelihoods. Implementation of these multiple pathways would lead to a future system that ensures thriving agricultural communities, secure livelihoods, reduced violence toward animals, and landscapes that are productive and support species conservation and coexistence. (shrink)

In _The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought,_ Chris L. Firestone, Nathan A. Jacobs, and thirteen other contributors examine the role of God in the thought of major European philosophers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The philosophers considered are, by and large, not orthodox theists; they are highly influential freethinkers, emancipated by an age no longer tethered to the authority of church and state. While acknowledging this fact, the contributors are united in arguing that this is (...) only one side of a complex story. To redress the imbalance of attention to secularism among crucial modern thinkers and to consolidate a more theologically informed view of modernity, they focus on the centrality of the sacred in the thought of these philosophers. The essays, each in its own way, argue that the major figures in modernity are theologically astute, bent not on removing God from philosophy but on putting faith and reason on a more sure footing in light of advancements in science and a perceived need to rethink the relationship between God and world. By highlighting and defending the theologically affirmative dimensions of thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, and others, the essayists present a forceful and timely correction of widely accepted interpretations of these philosophers. To ignore or downplay the theological dimensions of the philosophical works they address, they argue, distorts our understanding of modern thought. "Over the past twenty-five years there has been a gradual change in the study of modern philosophy toward recognizing the centrality of our relation to God in the work of most of the major modern thinkers of the period. _The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought_ is a timely and useful collection that has the potential to crystallize this important development in the study of modern philosophy." —_John E. Hare, Yale Divinity School_. (shrink)

God is a problematic idea in Kant's terms, but many scholars continue to be interested in Kantian theories of religion and the issues that they raise. In these new essays, scholars both within and outside Kant studies analyse Kant's writings and his claims about natural, philosophical, and revealed theology. Topics debated include arguments for the existence of God, natural theology, redemption, divine action, miracles, revelation, and life after death. The volume includes careful examination of key Kantian texts alongside discussion of (...) their themes from both constructive and analytic perspectives. These contributions broaden the scope of the scholarship on Kant, exploring the value of doing theology in consonance or conversation with Kant. It builds bridges across divides that often separate the analytic from the continental and the philosophical from the theological. The resulting volume clarifies the significance and relevance of Kant's theology for current debates about the philosophy of God and religion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Poetics of PerspectiveHarvey L. HixThe Poetics of Perspective, by James Elkins; xv & 324 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, $39.95.The Poetics of Perspective does not mention that Leonardo was born more than 100 years before Galileo and nearly 200 before Newton, but doing so would underscore its thesis. According to James Elkins, our anachronistic view of perspective, invented in the Enlightenment, systematically distorts our understanding of (...) Renaissance art. Instead of “tracing the outline” of the real nature of Renaissance art, our discussions (to borrow Wittgenstein’s metaphor) merely trace “the frame through which we look at it.” The actual Renaissance view, unlike the modern idée fixe, involved no concept of a unified pictorial space. In the absence of such a concept, “Renaissance authors and artists [End Page 368] thought there were many compatible perspectives, so that their writing and painting evince a ‘pluralist’ approach in strict contrast to the monolithic mathematical perspective we imagine today” (p. xi). The Poetics of Perspective attempts, in six substantial chapters and a brief envoi, to unearth this pluralistic Renaissance approach to perspective buried beneath modern preconceptions.Elkins identifies a number of differences between the Renaissance view of perspective and modern views. For instance, no longer is perspective “charged with the religious and social meanings it had for the early Renaissance” (p. 2). Why? “Renaissance artists and writers saw many techniques where we see a single discovery” (p. 8). Renaissance artists thought of perspective as a series of rules and techniques for constructing images; modern art historians, in contrast, think of perspective on analogy with tracing a scene on a pane of glass. In contrast to the “object oriented” Renaissance notion of perspective, the modern concept is “space oriented.” For the Renaissance, perspective was “a strategy for making pictures,” but for us it has become “a sign signifying a mental state, a culture, or an expressive language” (p. 17). Renaissance perspective originated as “a construction, an intellectual accomplishment rather than as a transcription of appearances” or a “revelation of optical reality” (pp. 136–38). To its contemporaries, Renaissance perspective suggested “the complicated, unfinished, and partial” rather than “the harmonious, balanced, and whole” (p. 170). We expect a uniform accuracy of perspective through an entire painting, but Renaissance practitioners were selective in their applications of perspective to passages of particular interest or significance. All these differences taken together, Elkins says, imply that our insistence on attributing to Renaissance paintings an isotropic application of perspective based on an ideal geometry is a mistake: “we are looking for something the Renaissance artists did not supply” (p. 226).Elkins’s excellent book is a corrective for the sort of thing Lillian Schwartz does in the April 1995 Scientific American. In the middle of a series of ill-substantiated conjectures, based on computer manipulations of images and ranging from the claim that Leonardo himself was a model for the Mona Lisa to the assertion that Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection of Christ, plastered over during the seventeenth century, must have been painted “in sunset colors,” she suggests that Leonardo intended The Last Supper to “appear as an extension of the refectory” in which it was painted. She explains the quirks of the painting’s perspective (“Leonardo placed Christ and the apostles up front, tilted the floor and table, designed side walls of uneven lengths and tapestries of different sizes and spacing”) by constructing a computer simulation to show that a person entering the room from what was then the main door “would perceive the supper as taking place in the refectory.” Schwartz’s conjecture may or may not be right, but comparison with her article reveals the major strengths of Elkins’s book. In contrast to Schwartz’s hasty manipulations, The Poetics of Perspective is encyclopedic; it takes scrupulous care to meet on their own ground the many [End Page 369] texts and paintings it examines, and it follows the Wittgensteinian imperative to stop thinking and look. Whatever the promise of the new technologies available to art historians, they can never replace the sort of patient attention Elkins lavishes on the works he studies.Harvey L. HixKansas City Art InstituteCopyright... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and BrechtHarvey L. HixCitation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht, by Claudette Sartiliot; xiii & 173 pp. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993, $15.95 paper.Claudette Sartiliot argues that “the traditional definition of citation” is “inadequate and outmoded” (p. 15). It no longer applies to modernist and postmodernist writers, for whom “quotation represents a definite break with the tradition as well as a means (...) of questioning the nature of the literary text” (p. 3). The traditional definition, derived from classical rhetoric, limits quotation to the purpose of illustration and ornament. In contrast, modernist and postmodernist citational practices, having abandoned the typographical separation of the quotation from the “main” text, question “the concept of text as an autonomous entity” and replace the idea of a book “by the more unbounded word discourse” (p. 20).To illustrate her point, Sartiliot appeals first to Derrida’s Glas, which “relies on citation to such an extent that it can serve as a paradigm for a theory of quotation” (p. 35). By juxtaposing two columns of text and by extensive quotation, Derrida (a) links quotation with violence and with sexual penetration, (b) stages “a game of appearance and disappearance” through which he evades the reader’s attempts to “pin him down” (p. 42), (c) reveals that words contain within themselves other words, (d) blurs boundaries between languages and disciplines, and (e) “demonstrates how meaning is generated through an aleatory scattering of semes” (p. 57).Sartiliot also attends to Joyce and Brecht, who achieve similar ends through their citational practices: “both have elevated ‘plagiarism’ to the level of originality” and both “have shown that writing is always and inevitably quoting” (p. 75). Because everything in Finnegans Wake is a quotation—even the characters—Joyce undercuts meaning: a text without boundaries cannot be ingested. Finnegans Wake is like quantum physics: “neither intimated that God was dead, but both confronted the world with a model of representation that intimated that ‘God played dice’” (p. 84).Brecht’s characters, like those of Finnegans Wake, are quotations rather than originals: “empty signifiers” whose very names are not their own, they challenge “the bourgeois myth of the identity and continuity of the subject” (p. 130). [End Page 367] As Copernicus removes humanity from the center of the universe and Marx removes humanity from the center of history, so Brecht removes humanity from the center of theatrical representation, revealing that “the subject as a fully present identity and entity” is delusory, and humanity is “a linguistic (and thus political) construct” (p. 124). In sum, by their citational practices Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht question “the notions of origin, closure, and authorship associated with the conception of the book” (p. 124).Citation and Modernity contains moments of insight. For instance, Sartiliot says of Finnegans Wake that “while Joyce was doing away with quotation marks in his own texts, he was forcing his critics to surround most of their critical terms with quotation marks, as a sore sign [sic] of their inability to find the right word to describe what he was doing” (p. 75). In other respects, however, her book is not satisfying. The most obvious problem is that her own citational practices contradict her thesis. After writers like Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht, she says, we can no longer return to traditional quotation based on classical rhetoric, yet her own quotation is strictly traditional: it illustrates and ornaments, and maintains a clear distinction between her own words and those belonging to someone else.There are other failures to live up to the book’s own standards. Sartiliot claims that the chief purpose of quotation is to attack the authority of the quoted father, to “subvert the notions of filiation and tradition” (p. 149) and “eclipse the precursor” (p. 8), yet her own book steadfastly upholds filiation and tradition. From the cover, which makes much of her having been a student of Derrida, to the pervasive jargon (totalization, hymen, logocentrism, dissemination, etc.), the book defers all too consistently to the authority of its father, and consequently fails to challenge its readers.Harvey L. HixKansas City Art InstituteCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Human clinical research has become a huge economic enterprise (Morin et al. 2002; Noah 2002). Because the human subject at the center can be so easily marginalized, many commentators recommend spec...

Agamben’s notion of the ‘paradigm’ has far-reaching implications for educational thinking, curriculum design and pedagogical conduct. In his approach, examples—or paradigms—deeply engage our powers of analogy, enabling us to discern previously unseen affinities among singular objects by stepping outside established systems of classification. In this way we come to envision novel groupings, new patterns of connection—that nonetheless do not simply reassemble those singular objects into yet another rigidly fixed set or class. Agamben sees this sort of ‘paradigmatic understanding’ as our (...) richest source of intelligibility. For Agamben the paradigm is ultimately about learning to see again, starting not with already perfectly known and categorized objects (or ideas), but rather with a fresh experience of one individual object and the analogical relations it may have to others, and to novel groupings that may arise. The paradigm is a method, a way in which educators might respond to a wide range of educational challenges. For a paradigmatic relation suspends while exposing, deactivates while revealing, complicates while clarifying. But articulating the enigmatic paradigmatic relation between example and class is far more than a method. It is epistemological (a way of knowing and conception of knowledge), ethical (a fostering of freedom from presupposed categories and reified principles) and ontological (a type of being that exposes the potential of knowing and communicating—their intelligibility and communicability). In these qualities, paradigms exhibit to educators a free, a new use of singularities. (shrink)

Differences in family factors in determining academic achievement were investigated by testing 432 parents in nine independent, coeducational Melbourne schools. Schools were ranked and categorized into three groups , based on student achievement scores in their final year of secondary school and school improvement indexes. Parents completed a questionnaire investigating their attitudes towards the school environment, their aspirations, expectations, encouragement and interest in their child’s education . They also responded to six open‐ended questions on their attitudes to achievement and to (...) their school. Multiple regression analyses revealed that parental expectations of their children’s educational level made the strongest unique prediction of high achievement followed by the length of time they had maintained their expectations. Limitations discussed include the disparity in meaning associated with the definition of school success and whether these results can be generalized to all students considering the biased sample. (shrink)

Two countable well orderings are weakly comparable if there is an order preserving injection of one into the other. We say the well orderings are strongly comparable if the injection is an isomorphism between one ordering and an initial segment of the other. In [5], Friedman announced that the statement “any two countable well orderings are strongly comparable” is equivalent to ATR 0 . Simpson provides a detailed proof of this result in Chapter 5 of [13]. More recently, Friedman has (...) proved that the statement “any two countable well orderings are weakly comparable” is equivalent to ATR 0 . The main goal of this paper is to give a detailed exposition of this result. (shrink)

Syntactic priming in language production is the increased likelihood of using a recently encountered syntactic structure. In this paper, we examine two theories of why speakers can be primed: error‐driven learning accounts (Bock, Dell, Chang, & Onishi, 2007; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006) and activation‐based accounts (Pickering & Branigan, 1999; Reitter, Keller, & Moore, 2011). Both theories predict that speakers should be primed by the syntactic choices of others, but only activation‐based accounts predict that speakers should be able to prime (...) themselves. Here we test whether speakers can be primed by their own productions in three behavioral experiments and find evidence of structural persistence following both comprehension and speakers’ own productions. We also find that comprehension‐based priming effects are larger for rarer syntactic structures than for more common ones, which is most consistent with error‐driven accounts. Because neither error‐driven accounts nor activation‐based accounts fully explain the data, we propose a hybrid model. (shrink)

'Leading economists presenting fundamentally important issues in economic theory' is the theme of the Nancy Schwartz lectures series held annually at the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management of Northwestern University. Reporting on lectures delivered in the years 1983 through 1997, this collection of essays discusses economic behavior at the individual and group level and the implications to the performance of economic systems. Using non-technical language, the speakers present theoretical, experimental, and empirical analysis of decision making under uncertainty and (...) under full and bounded rationality, the influence of economic incentives and habits, and the effects of learning and evolution on dynamic choice. Perfect competition, economic development, social insurance and social mobility, and negotiation and economic survival, are major economic subjects analyzed through our understanding of economic behavior. (shrink)

This edited volume demonstrates that a virtue-centered approach to the ethical life is a consistent feature of William James’s moral reasoning from the 1880s until his death. Yet, little else remains constant within his writings on these subjects, and this inconstancy furthers interest in his work over a century later.

In 1997 and 1998, the American secular philosopher Richard Rorty published a set of predictions about the twenty-first century ranging from the years 2014-95. He predicted, for instance, the election of a "strong man" in the 2016 presidential race and the proliferation of gun violence starting in 2014. He labels the years from 2014-44 the darkest years of American history, politics, and society. From 2045-95, Rorty thinks his own vision for "social hope" will be implemented within American society--a vision that (...) includes charity (in the Pauline sense), solidarity, and sympathy. Rorty considers himself a leftist, liberal, and a philosopher of hope. So why would a philosopher of hope predict such darkness and despair? In The Dark Years? Philosophy, Politics, and the Problem of Predictions philosopher and political theorist Jacob L. Goodson explains the fullness of Rorty's predictions, the problem of making predictions within the social sciences, and the reasons why even Rorty's vision for life after the "dark years" fails us on the standards of hope. Goodson argues that we ought to challenge the monopoly that American politics has as our object of hope. Goodson makes the case for a melancholic yet redemptive hope. -- back cover. (shrink)

This article advances, for the first time, a framework for situating public health law interventions as occurring in a predictable four-stage process. Whether the intervention is related to mandatory seat-belt laws, HIV prevention through needle-exchanges, or distracted-driving laws, these public health law interventions have generally been characterized by the following four stages. First, a series of publicized incidents, observances, or outcomes generate significant media attention, and are framed as public health harms. Then, a few select states evaluate such harms and (...) proactively seek testimony or evidence designed to support a law-based intervention. After this initial public engagement, states enact legal frameworks designed to minimize or reduce the harm, often in the absence of full information about the scope of harm or potential effectiveness of the intervention. In contrast, scholars have proposed that at these early stages, lawmaking should be evidence-based and “developed through a continuous process that uses the best available quantitative and qualitative evidence.”5 Our experience evaluating youth sports traumatic brain injury lawmaking suggests that, like other public health issues with sudden and intense media attention, an evidence-based approach was lacking during these early stages. (shrink)

Attentional control has grown in importance within theoretical and predictive models of psychopathology over past decades. The Attentional Style Questionnaire is a novel measure of internal a...

Technology, in order to be human, needs to be informed by a reflection on what it is to be a tool in ways appropriate to humans. This involves both an instrumental, appropriating aspect (‘I use this tool’) and a limiting, appropriated one (‘The tool uses me’).

Linkage of population-based administrative data is a valuable tool for combining detailed individual-level information from different sources for research. While not a substitute for classical studies based on primary data collection, analyses of linked administrative data can answer questions that require large sample sizes or detailed data on hard-to-reach populations, and generate evidence with a high level of external validity and applicability for policy making. There are unique challenges in the appropriate research use of linked administrative data, for example with (...) respect to bias from linkage errors where records cannot be linked or are linked together incorrectly. For confidentiality and other reasons, the separation of data linkage processes and analysis of linked data is generally regarded as best practice. However, the ‘black box’ of data linkage can make it difficult for researchers to judge the reliability of the resulting linked data for their required purposes. This article aims to provide an overview of challenges in linking administrative data for research. We aim to increase understanding of the implications of the data linkage environment and privacy preservation; the linkage process itself and linkage quality and potential bias in linked data. We draw on examples from a number of countries to illustrate a range of approaches for data linkage in different contexts. (shrink)

Gary S. Slater's C. S. Peirce & Nested Continua Model of Religious Interpretation comes to readers in the Oxford University Press series Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs. Before I say more about Slater's complex book, a story: Much philosophical scholarship on C. S. Peirce tends either to neglect the religious dimensions of his work or to secularize, demystify, and detheologize it. These secularized interpretations alienate those who read Peirce within the Christian and Jewish theological traditions and estrange the Transcendentalists within (...) American Philosophy who rely on religious language to talk and think about the natural world and personhood.There are significant divisions among Peirce scholars: the... (shrink)

Pragmatism is a philosophical school of thought emphasizing action, practices, and practical reasoning whereas prophecy is an ancient religious concept that requires belief in the reality of God. Although these two concepts seem to not be a natural fit with one another, the authors demonstrate why prophetic pragmatism is “pragmatism at its best.”.

This book brings Jewish moral reasoning into conversation with Richard Rorty's secular neo-pragmatist philosophy, which often comes across as anti-religious. The result is a type of hope for the future concerning the relationship between Judaism and secularism.

Hooglands commentaar op mijn ‘Pluralisme’ komt hierop neer dat levensbeschouwelijke neutraliteit niet mogelijk is, noch voor de overheid, noch voor de individuele burger. We kunnen geen radicale buitenstaanderspositie innemen tegenover de levensbeschouwing die we erop nahouden. Dat zou een vorm van hybris zijn. Wie niettemin levensbeschouwelijke neutraliteit bepleit en deze identificeert met tolerantie voor de levensbeschouwingen van anderen, pretendeert in feite dat het eigen tolerante standpunt moreel superieur is aan het standpunt van al diegenen die aan hun levensbeschouwing vastgeklonken zitten. (...) Dat is moreel verwerpelijk. (shrink)