Israel Scheffler is the pre-eminent philosopher of education in the English-speaking world today. This volume collects seventeen original, invited papers on Scheffler's philosophy of education by scholars from around the world. The papers address the wide range of topics that Scheffler's work in philosophy of education has addressed, including the aims of education, cognition and emotion, teaching, the language of education, science education, moral education, religious education, and human potential. Each paper is followed by a response from Scheffler himself. (...) The collection is essential reading for anyone concerned with contemporary scholarship in philosophy of education, or with the place of this singularly important author in it. (shrink)

In an exploratory context, a qualitative approach was used to document perceptions of psychiatric advance directives among legal professionals and mental health professionals in Ontario and Quebec. A Web survey was administered and a qualitative analysis approach was used to explore attitudes towards PADs. It was found that legal and mental health professionals hold dif erent values related to clinical, ethical and legal issues, which may be related to their professional training. Among the advantages associated with PADs include their ability (...) to document a mentally ill individual’s clear wishes, respect autonomous choices and foster collaborative treatment. Reported disadvantages of PADs include the possibility of new circumstances arising, mentally ill individuals may not comprehend completing a PAD, and whether a mentally ill individual should be permitted to refuse treatment on ethical grounds. (shrink)

In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the complete demolition of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophes, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. The Radical Enlightenment played a part in this revolutionary process, which effectively overthrew all justification for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, and slavery. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions of (...) the eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have received limited scholarly attention. The greatest obstacle to the movement finding its proper place in modern historical writing is its international scope: the Racial Enlightenment was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time. In this wide-ranging volume, Jonathan Israel offers a novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents. Particular emphasis is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism. (shrink)

First published in 1963, this title considers the philosophical problems encountered when attempting to provide a clear and general explanation of scientific principles, and the basic confrontation between such principles and experience. Beginning with a detailed introduction that considers various approaches to the philosophy and theory of science, Israel Scheffler then divides his study into three key sections – Explanation, Significance and Confirmation – that explore how these complex issues involved have been dealt with in contemporary research. This title, (...) by one of America’s leading philosophers, will provide a valuable analysis of the theory and problems surrounding the Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

Reasoning about causation in fact is an essential element of attributing legal responsibility. Therefore, the automation of the attribution of legal responsibility requires a modelling effort aimed at the following: a thorough understanding of the relation between the legal concepts of responsibility and of causation in fact; a thorough understanding of the relation between causation in fact and the common sense concept of causation; and, finally, the specification of an ontology of the concepts that are minimally required for (automatic) common (...) sense reasoning about causation. This article offers a worked-out example of the indicated analysis. Such example consists of: a definition of the legal concept of responsibility (in terms of liability and accountability); a definition of the legal concept of causation in fact (in terms of the initiation of physical processes by an agent and of the provision of reasons and/or opportunities to other agents); CausatiOnt, an AI-like ontology of the common sense (causal) concepts that are minimally needed for reasoning about the legal concept of causation in fact (in particular, the concepts of category, dimension, object, agent, process, event and act). (shrink)

In the 1920s, London was a city on the cusp of change. Just as dance halls and jazz-age decadence displaced wartime austerity, a new generation of artists and designers sought to enliven the city's architecture, erecting dazzling buildings in the emerging art deco style. In contrast with the aging Victorian structures that dotted the city, these bright and colorful buildings--from the Hoover factory to the Ideal House by Raymond Hood, who later designed New York's Rockefeller Center--communicated the city's aspirations as (...) a thriving, modern metropolis. In the decades since, London's art deco buildings have lost none of their appeal. Millions of visitors gaze up at the headquarters of the Daily Telegraph and the nearby Daily Express, take in the elegance of Eltham Palace, or sip a martini at the Savoy. The city's most popular art deco attraction, however, is the London Underground, which boasts a series of art deco and modernist stations, designed throughout the 1920s and '30s by noted architect Charles Holden. In Modernism London Style, architectural historian Christoph Rauhut, with the help of three hundred photographs by Niels Lehmann, captures the architectural art deco heritage of London in a thrilling photographic tour. A portrait of the city during the interwar years, it chronicles the creativity of the artists and designers of the period--and the currents in the city's culture that helped shape their work. Insightful essays and an introduction by architecture scholar Adam Caruso shed light on some of the key features that characterize art deco, from floral and animal motifs to Egyptian themes. For readers planning a trip to London and hoping to place these striking buildings, the book also includes a detailed register and maps. (shrink)

This volume presents, for the first time, an assemblage of contributions on the philosophical dimensions of the impersonal, the multiplicity of its linguistic, social, scientific, religious and artistic perspectives, as well as initial approaches to its unified definition. Linguistic and logical impersonality The “It" in K. Kraus “Impersonality” in the subject and in events The impersonal ontology of H. Rombach Levinas on the “Il y a” Organisation in non-egological consciousness The witness of consciousness in the Vedānta traditions Anonymous self-consciousness G. (...) Deleuzes figures of the impersonal The impersonal in G. Agamben's Philosophy Formal and collective thought in Spinoza Cusanus and the person as stake in the game of life Impersonal subjectivity and the comedy of solipsism Dimensions of the impersonal in T. Nagel, E. Husserl and H. Plessner On the figure of the impersonal in the Anthropocene Language and mask in F. Nietzsche Theodoros Terzopoulos on impersonality and theatre With contributions by Michael Astroh, Eric Ebner, Eric Eggert, Rolf Elberfeld, Katrin Felgenhauer, Ralf Gisinger, Annika Hand, Stefan Lang, Robert Lehmann, Enrico Müller, Daniel Neumann, Frank Raddatz, Christian Rößner, Thomas Schmaus, Fabian Strobel and Theodoros Terzopoulos. (shrink)

For better and worse, our world has been transformed by Big Data. To understand digital traces generated by individuals, we need to design multidisciplinary approaches that combine social and data science. Data and social scientists face the challenge of effectively building upon each other’s approaches to overcome the limitations inherent in each side. Here, we offer a “data science perspective” on the challenges that arise when working to establish this interdisciplinary environment. We discuss how we perceive the differences and commonalities (...) of the questions we ask to understand digital behaviors, and how our methods may complement each other. Finally, we describe what a path toward common ground between these fields looks like when viewed from data science. (shrink)

Socrates: A Life Worth Living traces the life and ideas of one of Western Civilization's founding philosophers, whose influence is still felt more than two thousand years later. Socrates is famous for how he died, executed by the Athenian government for corrupting the youth of Athens, but his most important contribution was to challenge the people around him to test their ideas and beliefs in conversation with each other, in the belief that in this way we could become a society (...) that knows the difference between truth and falsehood, and find what makes a life worthwhile. He did not claim to have definitive answers, but he knew that knowledge was the key to finding them, and he invited everyone he met to join him in his quest. (shrink)

By a free logic is generally meant a variant of classical first-order logic in which constant terms may, under interpretation, fail to refer to individuals in the domain D over which the bound variables range, either because they do not refer at all or because they refer to individuals outside D. If D is identified with what is assumed by the given interpretation to exist, in accord with Quine’s dictum that “to be is to be the value of a [bound] (...) variable,” then a free variation on classical semantics does not require that all constant terms refer to existents, and in this sense such terms lack existential import. (shrink)

1. t. Plethysmographische untersuchungen. 1899.--2. t. Die physischen äquivalente der bewusstseinserscheinungen. 1901.--Atlas. 1899.--3. t. Elemente der psychodynamik. Text. 1905.

Der Beitrag stellt die These auf, dass der Einfluss digitaler Bilder auf visuelle Kultur nur verstanden werden kann, wenn die spezifische Materialität dieser Artefakte bedacht wird. Anhand einer Analyse des berühmten Utah teapot werden fünf materiale Schichten unterschieden, darunter Herstellung, Codierung, forensische und epistemische Materialität, sowie der Begriff der Trans-Materialität. Jede Schicht wird in Beziehung zu theoretischen Konzepten von Materialität in Medienwissenschaften, Kunstgeschichte, Computerwissenschaft und Anthropologie diskutiert. This article argues that the impact of digital images on visual culture can only (...) be understood if the specific materiality of these artefacts is taken into account. An analysis of the famous distinguishes five material layers, including making, coding, forensic and epistemic materiality, as well as the notion of trans-materiality. Each layer is developed in relation to theoretical concepts of materiality in media studies, art history, computer science, and anthropology. (shrink)