Rationality contains a selection of the best contemporary writing on one of the central issues in the philosophy of social science. The contributors address themselves to questions which have increasingly become the subject of a many-sided debate between philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists: How are we to understand the beliefs and actions of other men in other cultures? Can we translate the meanings and the reason of one culture into the language of another. This volume is essential reading for courses on (...) the methodology and philosophy of social science and is so arranged that the student is introduced step by step to the cut and thrust of scholarly debate. (shrink)

This article proposes an approach to educational distribution that attempts to minimise enduring tensions among conflicting values. At the foundation of this approach is a threshold of educational adequacy based on what is needed for citizens to participate in a democratic society. This threshold is justified because it minimises conflict with parental rights and because it better manages ‘the bottomless pit’ problem of educational distribution. This threshold is then modified to stipulate that, after the threshold has been reached, public resources (...) should be distributed equally across students from all backgrounds. While this modification is essential to sending messages of equal citizenship, it also leaves a ‘moral residue’ because it allows wealthy parents to invest greater private resources in their children, thus preserving their children's competitive advantage. Minimising this harm requires policy mechanisms outside of schools that more aggressively break the link between educational outcomes, success in market competition, and social goods. Something ‘external’ to educational institutions is necessary, then, for the achievement of educational justice. (shrink)

■ ■ 1 the historical context I am not of their age or time and so have not personally heard their voices or seen their faces, but I know this by what is ...

Ashtekar has illustrated that two of the available roads to testing for time asymmetry can be generalized beyond the structure of quantum theory, to much more general formulations of mechanics. The purpose of this note is to show that a third road to T-violation, which I have called "Wigner's Principle," can be generalized in this way as well.

This article argues that the 2010 short film Pumzi is an exploration of post-crisis, ecological rehabilitation that asks for a rethinking of narratives modes for representing climate change. Employing seeds and sowing as ecological tropes, Pumzi explores how we create and carry narrative in relation to a rapidly changing earth. Both the multi-scalar geographical expanses as well as the deep geological timelines of Anthropocene discourse mean that placing the human in relation to its post-crisis environment requires more collective notions of (...) what narrative production and world building mean. This article argues that Pumzi cultivates a sympoietic—making together—mode of storytelling in an age of environmental crisis and planet-death as a well to both tell new stories and to think future worlds. In this way, Pumzi offers us a vision of an afrofuturist eco-ethics based in narrative practice. (shrink)

This book reconstructs, using the tools of propositional logic, thirty-six of the central arguments from Immanuel Kant's landmark work, the Critique of Pure Reason. Although there are many excellent companions to and commentaries on the Critique, none of these books straightforwardly reconstructs so many of Kant's arguments premise by premise, using the tools of propositional logic.

In this paper I argue that a phenomenological account of moral sense-bestowal can provide valuable insight into the possibility of moral dilemmas. I propose an account of moral sense-bestowal that is grounded in the phenomenology of expression that Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed throughout the course of his philosophical work, and most explicitly in the period immediately following the publication of Phenomenology of Perception. Based on this Merleau-Pontian account of moral sense-bestowal, I defend the view that there are genuine moral dilemmas, i.e., (...) that we can be faced with situations of conflicting oughts that we cannot resolve without moral remainder. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that Immanuel Kant's account of the moral wrongness of contempt in the Metaphysics of Morals provides important resources for our understanding of the nature of moral subjectivity. Although Kant typically emphasizes the subject's position as autonomous addressor of the moral law, his remarks on contempt bring into relief a dynamic relationship at the heart of practical subjectivity between the addressor and addressee positions. After tracing the development of reflection concerning the addressor and addressee positions in (...) early modern philosophy, beginning with Francisco Suarez and Samuel Pufendorf, I articulate and defend what I take to be a Kantian conception of the relation between those positions. More specifically, I argue that to be a moral subject at all is necessarily to position oneself as the addressor of the moral law, but that one must at the same time maintain oneself in the addressee position, resisting the full conversion to the addressor position that autonomy seems to demand. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that some of the most basic commitments of Kantian ethics can be understood as grounded in the dynamic of sense that Merleau-Ponty describes in his Phenomenology of Perception. Specifically, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s account supports the importance of universalizability as a test for the moral permissibility of particular acts as well as the idea that the binding character of the moral law is given as something like a fact of reason. But I also argue that (...) Merleau-Ponty’s account of reversibility suggests an important dimension of moral experience that is given in the experience of contact and that is underthematized in moral philosophies like Kant’s that emphasize the role of universalizability. Finally, I advance a positive account of moral experience that is centered on the idea of tact as ambiguous imperative. (shrink)

Contemporary academic interest in the human body is a response to fundamental changes in the relationship between body, economy, technology and society. Scientific advances, particularly new reproductive technologies and therapeutic cloning techniques, have given the human body a problematic status. Ageing, disease and death no longer appear to be immutable facts about the human condition. The emergence of the body as a topic of research in the humanities and social sciences is also a response to the women's and gay liberation (...) movements, and environmentalism, animal rights, anti-globalism, religious fundamentalism and conservative politics. Further, the human body is now central to economic growth in various biotechnology industries, in which disease itself has become a productive factor in the global economy and the body a code or system of information from which profits can be extracted through patents. In modern social theory, the body has been studied in the contexts of advertising and consumerism, in ethical debates about cloning, in research on HIV/AIDS, in postmodern reflections on cybernetics, cyberbodies and cyberpunk, and in the analysis of the global trade in human organs. The body is a central feature of contemporary politics, because its ambiguities, vulnerability and plasticity have been amplified by new genetic technologies. (shrink)

WILLIAM DAVIS HAS MAINTAINED THAT A SUPER PLEASURE HELMET COULD IN PRINCIPLE SATISFY ALL HUMAN NEEDS, BUT THAT SUCH A MACHINE IS PROBABLY A PRACTICAL IMPOSSIBILITY. I ARGUE THAT THE SUPER PLEASURE HELMET IS CONCEPTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE BY ARGUING THAT A PERSON'S NEEDS CANNOT BE SATISFIED JUST BY BRINGING ABOUT CERTAIN PSYCHOLOGICAL STATES IN THAT PERSON.

Especially since his “Reconceiving the University as an Institution and the Lecture as a Genre,” Alasdair MacIntyre has repeatedly returned to the subject of reconceiving university education, proposing a vision of what a university is and what a university education should be that differs widely from contemporary institutions and practices, and offering strong criticisms of the contemporary research university. He has argued provocatively that in its present form, the contemporary research university is not a university at all because it does (...) not carry out the purpose of a university. MacIntyre has also argued that philosophical practice always takes place within some tradition or other, and has identified as his own the broader Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition in which philosophy is to be understood as a craft. In this essay I examine and develop the relationship between MacIntyre’s critique of the contemporary research university, and his conception of philosophy as a craft practiced within a tradition. (shrink)

Hospitals are traditional sites, not only of care, but of knowledge production. The word ‘hospital’ is derived from ‘hospitality’, and is also associated with ‘spital’, ‘hotel’ and ‘hospice’. In medieval society, the hospice was a place of rest, security and entertainment. The Knights Hospitallers were an order of military monks that took its historical origin from a hospital founded in Jerusalem in 1048. Before the rise of the modern research hospital, these spitals had a more general function as charitable institutions (...) for the care and maintenance of the aged, infirm and impoverished. Hospitals were important in the historical emergence of the university, but with the dominance of bio-medical sciences medical faculties have become increasingly separated geographically and administratively from other faculties. Medical research is dominated by private corporations and increasingly medical knowledge exists outside the conventional procedures and norms of scientific research. (shrink)

The blind bandit -- Zuko alone -- The chase -- Bitter work -- The library.

The Professional Practice Program, also known as the co-operative education (co-op) program, at the University of Cincinnati (UC) is designed to provide eligible students with the most comprehensive and professional preparation available. Beginning with the Class of 2006, students in UC’s Centennial Co-op Class will be following a new co-op curriculum centered around a set of learning outcomes Regardless of their particular discipline, students will pursue common learning outcomes by participating in the Professional Practice Program, which will cover issues of (...) organizational culture, technology, professional ethics, and the integration of theory and practice. During their third co-op work term, students will complete a learning module on Professional Ethics. To complete the learning module students must familiarize themselves with the code of ethics for their profession, create a hypothetical scenario portraying an ethical dilemma that involves issues covered by the code, resolve the dilemma, and explain why their resolution is the best course of action based upon the code of ethics. A three-party assessment process including students, employers and faculty complete the module. (shrink)

The performance of population programmes suggests that even the more successful ones have acceptance rates that are only a fifth or so of what is needed to reduce population growth rates to the 1% a year that permits significant improvements in income per head. It is also clear that no programmes use bonuses at anything approaching the monetary values per recipient that are justifiable. There is no guarantee that such bonuses will produce the number of acceptors that are needed, but (...) it is fairly evident that without larger bonuses there will not be enough acceptors. (shrink)

In just thirteen brief, accessible chapters, this engaging little book takes "absolute beginners" from the most basic questions about the language (e.g., what does a classical Chinese character look like?) to reading and understanding selections from classical Chinese philosophical texts and Tang dynasty poetry._ " An outstanding introduction to reading classical Chinese_. Van Norden does a wonderful job of clearly explaining the basics of classical Chinese, and he carefully takes the reader through beautifully chosen examples from the textual tradition. An (...) invaluable work." —Michael Puett, Harvard University. (shrink)

Since 9/11, the possibilities for pluralism and tolerance have been severely tested by a discourse of terrorism and security. The development of an intelligent and cosmopolitan understanding between religious communities in Europe and America has been compromised by a range of legal and political responses to terrorism. While the debate about the berqa has clearly indicated the problems relating to Muslim cultural differences, we argue that legal pluralism and in particular the question of Shari’a tribunals may prove to be a (...) more decisive test of Western multiculturalism. This article examines the many criticisms raised against religious arbitration in domestic affairs and considers the presence of the Shari’a at various levels of society, claiming that the evolution of Sharia-mindedness is compatible both with a faith-based life and with liberal ideals. However, the problem with religious courts lies elsewhere, namely with the fragmentation of social life and the erosion of citizenship. The article concludes by examining the prospects and problems of Turkish entry into the European Union with special reference to the domestic policies of the Justice and Development Party. (shrink)

We show that subspaces of the space ${\mathbb{Q}}$ of rational numbers give rise to uncountably many d-logics over K4 without the finite model property.

The concept of a G‐quartet, a unique structural arrangement intrinsic to guanine‐rich DNA, was first introduced by Gellert and colleagues1 over 40 years ago. For decades, it has been uncertain whether the G‐quartet and the structure that it gives rise to, the G‐quadruplex, are purely in vitro phenomena. Nevertheless, the presence of signature G‐rich motifs in the eukaryotic genome, and the plethora of proteins that bind to, modify or resolve this nucleic acid structure in vitro have provided circumstantial evidence for (...) its physiological relevance. More recently, direct visualisation of G‐quadruplex DNA at native telomeres was achieved, bolstering the evidence for its existence in the cell. Furthermore, G‐quadruplex folded telomeric DNA has been found to perturb telomere function and to impede the action of telomerase, an enzyme overexpressed in >85% of human cancers, hence opening up a novel avenue for cancer therapy in the form of G‐quadruplex stabilising agents. BioEssays 29: 155–165, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

How secular is contemporary society? Are pockets of sectarianism embedded in societies of developed countries? This timely book examines the interweaving of politics and religion, and of tradition and innovation in a variety of cultural settings. Eminent scholars from four continents examine here current turmoil in religious beliefs, practices, and organization--not only in the Western world, but in South America, Africa, South Asia, New Zealand, and Japan. They scrutinize evidence of religious change, decline, and revival; investigate challenges posed by new (...) religious movements; and locate religious change and conflict in the context of broader shifts in consciousness and culture. Contributors include Richard Fenn, Phillip E. Hammond, David Martin, Philip Rieff, Roland Robertson, and Mark Schibley. With its focus on the interplay of secularization, rationalism, and sectarianism, this work offers a fitting tribute to Bryan Wilson, who has made so many contributions to the sociological understanding of these phenomena. (shrink)

On Blindness opens the eyes of the sighted to the world as experience by the blind, offering a unique opportunity to explore the challenges, frustrations, joys - and extraordinary insights - experienced in the everyday business of discovering the world without sight. What difference doessight or its absence make to our ideas about the world? What begins as a philosophical exchange between the noted philosopher and broadcaster Bryan Magee and the late Martin Milligan, activist and philosopher blind almost from (...) birth, develops into a personal and intense discussion of the implications of blindness. The debate is vigorous and oftenheated; sometimes contentious, it is always stimulating. In discussing the range of blind experience, from those born blind to those who became blind - including those who have to cope with the shock of gaining sight they had never before possessed - On Blindness argues strongly against the notionthat blindness is a simple experience. This extraordinary book casts new light on one of the most fundamental aspects of human experience. It will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in sight and blindness from a personal, practical or philosophical point of view. This dictionary is intended for anyone who enjoys food andwould like a handy, non-technical guide to the terms they encounter on food labels, in advertising or in the media. Its broad coverage of food and nutrition makes it invaluable for consumers, cooks, and a range of students and practitioners in the fields of catering, home economies, foodtechnology, and health care. (shrink)