Emancipatory practice development (ePD) is a practitioner‐led research methodology which enables workplace transformation. Underpinned by the critical paradigm, ePD works through facilitation and workplace learning, with people in their local context on practice issues that are significant to them. Its purpose is to embed safe, person‐centred learning cultures which transform individuals and workplaces. In this article, we critically reflect on a year‐long ePD study in an acute care hospital ward. We explore the challenges of practice change within systems, building collective (...) strength with frontline collaborations and leadership to sustain new learning cultures. Our work advances practice development dialogue through working closely with the underpinning theories. Our critique analyses how ePD can enact and sustain change within a complex system. We argue that ePD works to strengthen safety cultures by challenging antidemocratic practices through communicative action. By opening communicative spaces, ePD enables staff to collectively deliberate and reach consensus. Their raised awareness supports staff to resist ways of working which conspire against safe patient care. Sustainability of practice change is fostered by the co‐operative democracies created within the frontline team and meso level enablement. We conclude that the democratising potential of ePDt generates staff agency at the frontline. (shrink)

This anthology offers a comprehensive introduction to Pliny the Younger's Epistulae for intermediate and advanced Latin students, with the grammatical, lexical, and historical support to enable them to read quickly and fluidly. As the only selection of the letters with extensive commentary, it provides instructors with a unique and complete resource for students.ABOUT THE SERIESThe Oxford Greek and Latin College Commentaries is designed for students in intermediate or advanced Greek or Latin. Each volume includes a comprehensive introduction. The placement, on (...) the same page, of the ancient text, a running vocabulary, and succinct notes focusing on grammar, syntax, and distinctive features of style provides students with essential learning aids.Series Editors: Barbara Weiden Boyd, Bowdoin College, Stephen Esposito, Boston University, and Mary Lefkowitz, Wellesley CollegeAlso Available Ovid: Ars Amatoria, Book 3, Christopher M. Brunelle, St. Olaf CollegeForthcoming Latin VolumesSuetonius's Life of AugustusDarryl Phillips, Connecticut CollegeLucan's De Bello Civile, Book 5Jonathan Tracy, Massey University, New Zealand. (shrink)

Jacqueline Taylor presents an original reconstruction of Hume's social theory, which examines the passions and imagination in relation to institutions such as government and the economy. She goes on to examine Hume's system of ethics, and argues that the principle of humanity is the central concept of Hume's Enlightenment philosophy.

Against those who dismiss Kant's project in the "Religion" because it provides a Pelagian understanding of salvation, this paper offers an analysis of the deep structure of Kant's views on divine justice and grace showing them not to conflict with an authentically Christian understanding of these concepts. The first part of the paper argues that Kant's analysis of these concepts helps us to understand the necessary conditions of the Christian understanding of grace: unfolding them uncovers intrinsic relations holding between God's (...) justice and grace. Parts two and three provide an analysis of two concepts of grace used by Kant. Getting clear on their differences is the key to understanding why Kant's account is not Pelagian. (shrink)

Danièle-Djamila Minne-Amrane, née à Neuilly-sur-Seine le 13 août 1939, est décédée à Alger le 11 février dernier. Son père, Pierre Minne, professeur de philosophie, ancien résistant puis militant anticolonial au Sénégal, en est expulsé en 1947. Il s’installe alors en Algérie, dans la campagne de Tlemcen où sa femme, Jacqueline Netter, allait devenir institutrice. Après son divorce, cette dernière se remarie avec Abdelkader Guerroudj et tous deux militent au PCA (parti communiste algérien). Da...

A consideration of monotheism. The term ordinarily suggests belief in one God and derives from the Greek monos meaning “one” and theos meaning “god.” In the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the one god is regarded as supreme lord and creator of the universe, almighty, all-knowing, and all-good. Traditionally, Christianity has taught that God revealed himself to our first parents, Adam and Eve, as the one true God in Genesis. The Old Testament reveals a jealous God who forbids the (...) worship of strange and multifarious gods. God's chosen people, the Jews, are destined to prepare the way for the coming of the universal religion available not just to a privileged few. (shrink)

Despite its centrality in the philosophy of cognitive science, there has been little prior philosophical work engaging with the notion of representation in contemporary NLP practice. This paper attempts to fill that lacuna: drawing on ideas from cognitive science, I introduce a framework for evaluating the representational claims made about components of neural NLP models, proposing three criteria with which to evaluate whether a component of a model represents a property and operationalising these criteria using probing classifiers, a popular analysis (...) technique in NLP (and deep learning more broadly). The project of operationalising a philosophically-informed notion of representation should be of interest to both philosophers of science and NLP practitioners. It affords philosophers a novel testing-ground for claims about the nature of representation, and helps NLPers organise the large literature on probing experiments, suggesting novel avenues for empirical research. (shrink)

This article refutes Barth's criticisms of Schleiermacher's Christology/.

Philosophers in eighteenth-century Britain had a keen interest in human nature, and made great strides in developing more scientific conceptions of human nature by borrowing and adapting the methods from natural history and natural philosophy. Human nature was analyzed at the level of the individual: how to cultivate a moral sense, or a more refined taste with respect to beauty. Even more attention was paid to the members of a society, and to the stages of development, especially in relation to (...) laws, government, and other social institutions. Entering a new economic age of prosperity, British thinkers focused on social progress in manners and conversational skills, as well as in the arts and sciences. This chapter examines these developments and the work of some of the most important proponents of the science of human nature. It concludes with some reflection on the legacies of the eighteenth-century views in Britain, Europe, and America. (shrink)

In a recent letter, Dillion et. al (2023) make various suggestions regarding the idea of artificially intelligent systems, such as large language models, replacing human subjects in empirical moral psychology. We argue that human subjects are in various ways indispensable.

IntroductionResilience is a factor in how youth respond to adversity. The 88-item Adolescent Resilience Questionnaire is a comprehensive, multi-dimensional self-report measure of resilience developed with Australian youth.MethodsUsing a cross-sectional adolescent population, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to replicate the original factor structure. Over half of the adolescents were non-white and 9th graders with a mean age of 15.5.ResultsOur exploratory factor analysis shortened the measure for which we conducted the psychometric analyses. The original factor structure was not replicated. The exploratory factor (...) analysis provided a 49-item measure. Internal consistency reliability for all 12 factors ranged from acceptable. The revised factor total scores were highly and significantly correlated with item–total correlation coefficients.ConclusionThis revised shorter 49-item version of the Adolescent Resilience Questionnaire could be deployed and has acceptable psychometric properties. (shrink)

What can contemporary machine learning (ML) models do? Given the proliferation of ML models in society, answering this question matters to a variety of stakeholders, both public and private. The evaluation of models' capabilities is rapidly emerging as a key subfield of modern ML, buoyed by regulatory attention and government grants. Despite this, the notion of an ML model possessing a capability has not been interrogated: what are we saying when we say that a model is able to do something? (...) And what sorts of evidence bear upon this question? -/- In this paper, we aim to answer these questions, using the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) as a running example. Drawing on the large philosophical literature on abilities, we develop an account of ML models' capabilities which can be usefully applied to the nascent science of model evaluation. Our core proposal is a conditional analysis of model abilities (CAMA): crudely, a machine learning model has a capability to X just when it would reliably succeed at doing X if it 'tried'. The main contribution of the paper is making this proposal precise in the context of ML, resulting in an operationalisation of CAMA applicable to LLMs. We then put CAMA to work, showing that it can help make sense of various features of ML model evaluation practice, as well as suggest procedures for performing fair inter-model comparisons. (shrink)

Jacqueline Rose argues for an expansion of the new boundaries of `English', and for the importance of psychoanalysis to the understanding of our literary and historical lives.

Some scholars suggest that John Locke’s revisions to the chapter “Of Power” for the 1694 second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding may be indebted to the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth. Their claims rest on evidence that Locke may have had access to Cudworth’s unpublished manuscript treatises on free will. In this paper, I examine an alternative suggestion – the claim that Cudworth’s daughter, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and not Cudworth himself, may have exerted an influence on Locke’s revisions. I (...) discuss the plausibility of this claim in light of the relevant historical and textual evidence. (shrink)

Descriptive accounts of the nature of explanation in neuroscience and the global goals of such explanation have recently proliferated in the philosophy of neuroscience and with them new understandings of the experimental practices of neuroscientists have emerged. In this paper, I consider two models of such practices; one that takes them to be reductive; another that takes them to be integrative. I investigate those areas of the neuroscience of learning and memory from which the examples used to substantiate these models (...) are culled, and argue that the multiplicity of experimental protocols used in these research areas presents specific challenges for both models. In my view, these challenges have been overlooked largely because philosophers have hitherto failed to pay sufficient attention to fundamental features of experimental practice. I demonstrate that when we do pay attention to such features, evidence for reduction and integrative unity in neuroscience is simply not borne out. I end by suggesting some new directions for the philosophy of neuroscience that pertain to taking a closer look at the nature of neuroscientific experiments. (shrink)

First published in 1999, this book brings together the extensive modern evidence for innate imitation in babies. Modern research has shown imitation to be a natural mechanism of learning and communication which deserves to be at centre stage in developmental psychology. Yet the very possibility of imitation in newborn humans has had a controversial history. Defining imitation has proved to be far from straightforward and scientific evidence for its existence in neonates is only now becoming accepted, despite more than a (...) century of enquiry. In this book, some of the world's foremost researchers on imitation and intellectual development review evidence for imitation in newborn babies. They discuss the development of imitation in infancy, in both normal and atypical populations and in comparison with other primate species, stressing the fundamental importance of imitation in human development, as a foundation of communication and a precursor to symbolic processes. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Kant’s understanding of the universality of radical evil is best understood in the context of human sociality. Because we are inherently social beings, the nature of the human community we find ourselves in has a determinative influence on the sorts of persons we are, and the kinds of choices we can make. We always begin in evil. This does not vitiate responsibility, since through reflection we can become aware of our situation and envision ourselves (...) as members of a different community, one with different expectations, making genuine virtue possible. This understanding of radical evil helps to make sense of Kant’s high regard for the church in Religion. (shrink)

The field of AI safety seeks to prevent or reduce the harms caused by AI systems. A simple and appealing account of what is distinctive of AI safety as a field holds that this feature is constitutive: a research project falls within the purview of AI safety just in case it aims to prevent or reduce the harms caused by AI systems. Call this appealingly simple account The Safety Conception of AI safety. Despite its simplicity and appeal, we argue that (...) The Safety Conception is in tension with at least two trends in the ways AI safety researchers and organizations think and talk about AI safety: first, a tendency to characterize the goal of AI safety research in terms of catastrophic risks from future systems; second, the increasingly popular idea that AI safety can be thought of as a branch of safety engineering. Adopting the methodology of conceptual engineering, we argue that these trends are unfortunate: when we consider what concept of AI safety it would be best to have, there are compelling reasons to think that The Safety Conception is the answer. Descriptively, The Safety Conception allows us to see how work on topics that have historically been treated as central to the field of AI safety is continuous with work on topics that have historically been treated as more marginal, like bias, misinformation, and privacy. Normatively, taking The Safety Conception seriously means approaching all efforts to prevent or mitigate harms from AI systems based on their merits rather than drawing arbitrary distinctions between them. (shrink)

In this rich and detailed study of early modern women's thought, Jacqueline Broad explores the complexity of women's responses to Cartesian philosophy and its intellectual legacy in England and Europe. She examines the work of thinkers such as Mary Astell, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway and Damaris Masham, who were active participants in the intellectual life of their time and were also the respected colleagues of philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz and Locke. She also illuminates the continuities (...) between early modern women's thought and the anti-dualism of more recent feminist thinkers. The result is a more gender-balanced account of early modern thought than has hitherto been available. Broad's clear and accessible exploration of this still-unfamiliar area will have a strong appeal to both students and scholars in the history of philosophy, women's studies and the history of ideas. (shrink)

While accepting and welcoming our main thesis and project, Schäfer and Hühn’s Commentary on our paper focuses on two main criticisms, both of which seem to us mistaken. The first of these is that our paper falsely argues “that the existing definitions of leadership out there fall short in describing the role of ethics in leadership.” The second seems to be a belief that (i) we claim to be offering an entirely new definition of leadership and misrepresenting its nature because (...) (ii) in the view of Schäfer and Hühn this supposedly new definition “is essentially un-Aristotelian.”. (shrink)

Con el libro "Poiesis Educativa", la Fundacion Universitaria de Derecho, Administracion y Politica, S.C. Editorial, da comienzo a la coleccion FUNDAp - Educacion, cuyo proposito fundamental es acoger las creaciones de los estudiosos de la educacion desde sus diversos campos y ambitos de desenvolvimiento. Es un libro que desde el titulo nos propone, nos inquieta, nos reta. La autora expone en el su preocupacion por el hecho de que la conceptualizacion actual de la educacion reduce y socaba a esta, en (...) su empeno economicista y politicista de epistemologizar la educacion. (shrink)

In Part 3 of Projection and Realism, P. J. E. Kail offers an original and thought-provoking analysis of Hume's views on morality. Kail seeks to make sense of Hume's talk of projection and realism. Kail's stated aim is to help us understand Hume's own views, rather than some new Humean view. Part 3 is thus a contribution to the literature on Hume's meta-ethics. Kail's particular approach presents two challenges to the student of Hume's works. First, Kail gives us a set (...) of terms that are not Hume's; this includes a distinction between explanatory projection and feature projection; a distinction between two forms of realism, metaphysical hedonism and the identification of moral value with natural properties of. (shrink)

In this article, I explain why stabilizing constructs is important to the success of the Research Domain Criteria Project and identify one measure for facilitating such stability.

This paper explores Kant's concept of the highest good and the postulate of the existence of God arising from it. Kant has two concepts of the highest good standing in tension with one another, an immanent and a transcendent one. I provide a systematic exposition of the constituents of both variants and show how Kant’s arguments are prone to confusion through a conflation of both concepts. I argue that once these confusions are sorted out Kant’s claim regarding the need to (...) postulate God’s existence from a moral point of view makes much more sense. (shrink)

This article merges the intellectual concept of utopia and the material culture of the pie as a metaphor to explore the relative hegemony of Judeo-Christian utopian literature and criticism. Citing Lyman Tower Sargent's contributions to opening up scholarship on comparative utopias, the author underscores his influence on her own thinking and publications on the topic. The study traces parallels between intellectual and material cultures, especially in French, Japanese, and Indigenous Australian contexts. In conclusion, it suggests that contemporary transformations in writing (...) and reading utopias should encourage greater recognition of intercultural imaginaries of the ideal. (shrink)

Medical decision making on behalf of unrepresented patients is one of the most challenging ethical issues faced in clinical practice. The legal environment surrounding these patients is equally complex. This article describes the efforts of a small coalition of interested healthcare professionals to address the issue in Colorado. A brief history of the effort is presented, along with discussion of the legal, ethical, practical, and political dimensions that arose in Colorado’s effort to address decision making for unrepresented patients through an (...) extension of the existing Colorado Medical Treatment Decision Act (CRS 15-18). A discussion of lessons learned in the process is included. (shrink)

Data from experiments on Erica × darleyensis and from related observations (Viémont and Beaujard, 1983) are taken for a critical analysis of the proposed model of morphogenetic phenomena. The criteria for judging the coherence of the constructions proposed in plant morphology are based on mathematical constructions deduced from Petri nets, especially elementary nets.

The present work considers the communicative dimensions of intellectual practices in an effort to discern how these practices can take full account of their own placement within and accountability to the human communities and cultures they cultivate. The discussion is framed with a focus on intellectual communities who have struggled against the dominance of Euromodern epistemological orientations that have constructed their own cultures and intellectual practices as irrelevant or, at best inferior. This struggle is a decolonial praxis. The development of (...) communicology during the post-World War II period in the United States is taken up as an approach to theory construction that allows for the fullest possible examination of the very human condition in which thought and action emerge. Chicana and Latina phenomenology constitute a further development of this decolonial praxis consonant with the sensibilities of communicology. Chicana and Latina phenomenology is shown to advance our understanding of philosophy as an intellectual (i.e., communicative) practice that takes place in a world of other human beings to whom we are accountable. Theory construction as it relates to boundary conditions is taken as an important point that spans the all too common gap between the existential and the cultural and aids in constituting a theory construction project that is also a decolonial praxis. (shrink)

In this article, I analyse the discursive construction of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing as a development ‘problem’ in Plan’s ‘Because I’m a Girl’ campaign. I draw on existing scholarship that configures teenage pregnancy prevention campaigns in the ‘developed’ world as a site of biopolitics that seeks to maximise the well-being of the population by governing adolescent girls’ reproductive and sexual behaviours. Identifying Plan’s campaign as part of a larger turn towards adolescent girls in development discourse and policy, I also draw (...) on a growing body of scholarship that examines how campaigns targeting adolescent girls reinforce neo-liberal understandings of ‘development’ as achievable through the empowerment of individuals rather than through structural change. I argue that by discursively constructing adolescent pregnancy and parenthood as risky, Plan’s campaign reinforces reproductive norms of delayed reproduction and sexual debut, according to which adolescent girls in the ‘developing’ world are expected to comply. The campaign’s goal of ‘empowerment’ thus acts as a means of constructing adolescent girls as responsible reproductive decision makers who will break the ‘cycle of poverty’ by making rational reproductive and sexual choices. Thus, although Plan’s ‘Because I’m a Girl’ campaign addressed important issues, including adolescent girls’ right to reproductive autonomy, their focus on empowerment operates as a form of biopower that pursues the project of development through the regulation of girls’ reproduction and sexuality. (shrink)

The past decade has witnessed a growing awareness of conceptual and methodological hurdles within psychology and neuroscience that must be addressed for taxonomic and explanatory progress in understanding psychological functions to be possible. In this paper, I evaluate several recent knowledge-building initiatives aimed at overcoming these obstacles. I argue that while each initiative offers important insights about how to facilitate taxonomic and explanatory progress in psychology and neuroscience, only a “coordinated pluralism” that incorporates positive aspects of each initiative will have (...) the potential for success. (shrink)

As reproductive genetic technologies advance, families have more options to choose what sort of child they want to have. Using preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), for example, allows parents to evaluate several existing embryos before selecting which to implant via in vitro fertilization (IVF). One of the traits PGD can identify is genetic deafness, and hearing embryos are now preferentially selected around the globe using this method. Importantly, some Deaf families desire a deaf child, and PGD–IVF is also an option for (...) them. Selection for genetic deafness, however, encounters widespread disapproval in the hearing community, including mainstream philosophy and bioethics. In this paper I apply Elizabeth Barnes’ value-neutral model of disability as mere-difference to the case of selecting for deafness. I draw on evidence from Deaf Studies and Disability Studies to build an understanding of deafness, the Deaf community, and the circumstances relevant to reproductive choices that may obtain for some Deaf families. Selection for deafness, with deafness understood as mere-difference and valued for its cultural identity, need not necessitate impermissible moral harms. I thus advocate that it is sometimes morally permissible to select for deafness in one’s child. (shrink)

The Morris water maze has been put forward in the philosophy of neuroscience as an example of an experimental arrangement that may be used to delineate the cognitive faculty of spatial memory (e.g., Craver and Darden, Theory and method in the neurosciences, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2001; Craver, Explaining the brain: Mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). However, in the experimental and review literature on the water maze throughout the history of its use, (...) we encounter numerous responses to the question of “what” phenomenon it circumscribes ranging from cognitive functions (e.g., “spatial learning”, “spatial navigation”), to representational changes (e.g., “cognitive map formation”) to terms that appear to refer exclusively to observable changes in behavior (e.g., “water maze performance”). To date philosophical analyses of the water maze have not been directed at sorting out what phenomenon the device delineates nor the sources of the different answers to the question of what. I undertake both of these tasks in this paper. I begin with an analysis of Morris’s first published research study using the water maze and demonstrate that he emerged from it with an experimental learning paradigm that at best circumscribed a discrete set of observable changes in behavior. However, it delineated neither a discrete set of representational changes nor a discrete cognitive function. I cite this in combination with a reductionist-oriented research agenda in cellular and molecular neurobiology dating back to the 1980s as two sources of the lack of consistency across the history of the experimental and review literature as to what is under study in the water maze. (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of an account of explanatory integration that claims that explanations of cognitive capacities by functional analyses and mechanistic explanations can be seamlessly integrated. It is shown that achieving such explanatory integration requires that the terms designating cognitive capacities in the two forms of explanation are stable but that experimental practice in the mind-brain sciences currently is not directed at achieving such stability. A positive proposal for changing experimental practice so as to promote such stability is (...) put forward and its implications for explanatory integration are briefly considered. (shrink)

In this chapter I investigate the kinds of changes that psychiatric kinds undergo when they become explanatory targets of areas of sciences that are not “mature” and are in the early stages of discovering mechanisms. The two areas of science that are the targets of my analysis are cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology.

Many scholars point to the close association between early modern science and the rise of rational arguments in favour of the existence of witches. For some commentators, it is a poor reflection on science that its methods so easily lent themselves to the unjust persecution of innocent men and women. In this paper, I examine a debate about witches between a woman philosopher, Margaret Cavendish , and a fellow of the Royal Society, Joseph Glanvill . I argue that Cavendish is (...) the voice of reason in this exchange—not because she supports the modern-day view that witches do not exist, but because she shows that Glanvill’s arguments about witches betray his own scientific principles. Cavendish’s responses to Glanvill suggest that, when applied consistently, the principles of early modern science could in fact promote a healthy scepticism toward the existence of witches. (shrink)