A combination of social forces has thrown marriage into question in westernised societies at the end of the millennium. This uncertainty creates space for new ways of thinking about marriage. In this context, we examine the idea of marriage as friendship. We trace its genealogy in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor and then subject it to critical scrutiny using some of Michel de Montaigne’s ideas. We ask how applicable the ideal of higher friendship is (...) to marriage and what might be gained and lost by a synthesis of marriage and friendship. Grounding the discussion in historical sources is valuable because the topic is so little explored in the contemporary philosophical literature. This approach also allows any enduring value in these historical texts to be elicited. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that a new conception of history was developed in the early nineteenth century: the past came to be seen in a new light, as did the way of studying the past. This article discusses the nature of this collective revision, focusing on one of its first and most important manifestations: Ranke's 1824 Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker. It argues that, in Ranke's case, the driving force of the revision was religious, and that, subsequently, an understanding (...) of the nature of Ranke's religious attitude is vital to any interpretation of his historical revision. Being aesthetic-experiential rather than conceptual or "positive," this religious element is reflected throughout Ranke's enterprise, in source criticism and in historical representation no less than in the conception of cause and effect in the historical process. These three levels or aspects of the historical enterprise correspond to the experience of the past, and are connected by the essence of the experience: visual perception. The highly individual character of the enterprise, its foundation in sentiments and experiences of little persuasive force that only with difficulty can be brought into language at all, explains the paradoxical nature of the Rankean heritage. On the one hand, Ranke had a great and lasting impact; on the other hand, his approach was never re-utilized as a whole, only in its constituent parts—which, when not in the relationship Ranke had envisioned, took on a new and different character. This also suggests the difference between Ranke's revision and a new paradigm: whereas the latter is an exemplary solution providing binding regulations, the former is unrepeatable. (shrink)

Readers should be glad that most of the seven essays in this volume have been published and not limited to the smaller audience of philosophers who heard them as papers at the joint meetings of the American Philosophical Association and the Society for the Study of the History of Philosophy in December 1982. The topic of the Society’s meetings was “The Philosophical Significance of The Principles of Psychology” by William James, both, I take it, for his own philosophy and that (...) of others. However, it seems confusing to have made these papers, when published, “address the question of the fundamental nature of the thought contained in” the Principles, as editor DeArmey writes in his Preface, and also to have collected them under the ambiguous title of the book. It is recommended by this reviewer that the readers should welcome and judge these essays as addressing their original topic and audience. (shrink)

A person making normative judgments can do so from the perspective of a Judge or a Coach. If you're a Judge, you seek to assign responsibility. If you're a Coach, you seek to improve an agent's performance. While there is a place for being sometimes a Judge and sometimes a Coach, no one should always be a Judge. It is a small and mean person who only wags a finger and never lends a hand. The same is true for a (...) normative discipline like epistemology. A good coach gives useful advice. Advice is useful when it suggests that you modify something you can directly control. And because we are typically unable to directly control our beliefs, a good epistemological coach will have no use for a theory that tells us what an epistemologically good belief is, such as a theory of knowledge or justification. But we are capable of changing many of the ways we reason about the world. Otherwise, what's an education good for? And so a good epistemological coach needs a theory of what makes reasoning epistemically good. What sort of theory of good reasoning would a good epistemological coach employ in order to provide useful guidance for real people? We argue for a middle path between a pure reliablist theory of good reasoning and a pure pragmatic theory of good reasoning. The best theory for an epistemological coach, the theory that will yield the most effective advice, is a mongrel theory that identifies good reasoning with reasoning that achieves an adroit combination of reliabilist accuracy and pragmatic efficiency. (shrink)

(2002). Philosophy of Science 72 (January), 198-208.

There is now a considerable literature on Michel Foucault but this is the first monograph which explicitly addresses his influence and impact upon education. Personal autonomy has been seen as a major aim, if not the aim of liberal education. But if Foucault is correct that personal autonomy and the notion of the autonomous person are myths, then the pursuit of such an aim by educationalists is misguided. The author develops this critique of personal autonomy and liberal education from the (...) writings of Foucault, and also considers Foucault's own educational practices. The author, James Marshall, who lives in New Zealand, has already written several articles for academic journals on Foucault. (shrink)

Significance testing is the primary method for establishing causal relationships in psychology. Meehl [1978, 1990a, 1990b] and Faust [1984] argue that significance tests and their interpretation are subject to actuarial and psychological biases, making continued adherence to these practices irrational, and even partially responsible for the slow progress of the ‘soft’ areas of psychology. I contend that familiar standards of testing and literature review, along with recently developed meta-analytic techniques, are able to correct the proposed actuarial and psychological biases. In (...) particular, psychologists embrace a principle of robustness which states that real psychological effects are (1) reproducible by similar methods, (2) detectable by diverse means, and (3) able to survive theoretical integration. By contrast, spurious significant findings perish under the strain of persistent tests of their robustness. The resulting vindication of significance testing confers on the world a role in determining the rationality of a method, and also affords us an explanation for the fast progress of ‘hard’ areas of psychology. *I would like to thank Dick Boyd and Phil Gasper for helpful comments on the ideas presented here. (shrink)

J D Marshall; The Concept of Teaching, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 9, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 105–118, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.19.