This paper addresses the question of how to educate toward democracy, which has as its defining trait the ability to self-correct. We draw on a study that investigated Deep Reflective Thinking (DRT) as a classroom method for cultivating collective doubt, which is essential for developing students’ capacity for self-correction in a community of inquiry.

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches (...) that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists. (shrink)

The inclusion of Elizabeth Shore in Thomas More’s History of King Richard III offers important insights into the decisions made by More in shaping his text. This article explores the evidence available to More as he wrote, emphasizing the near-complete absence of Shore from earlier narratives. Shore’s activity in the 1470s and 1480s is examined, along with evidence for her survival and that of her husband, Thomas Lynom, into the 1510s when More was writing. Lynom’s connections are considered, providing (...) an understanding of intersections of his activities with the environment in which More was shaping the History. As a central figure in the events of 1483 who survived into the 1520s, Shore was a prompt to the creation of More’s account—she was not simply a product of More’s literary and philosophical imagination, but part of his effort to respond to the immediate legacies of conflict in politics and society. (shrink)

Background: Clinical investigation is a growing field employing increasing numbers of nurses. This has created a new specialty practice defined by aspects unique to nursing in a clinical research context: the objectives (to implement research protocols and advance science), setting (research facilities), and nature of the nurse–participant relationship. The clinical research nurse role may give rise to feelings of ethical conflict between aspects of protocol implementation and the duty of patient advocacy, a primary nursing responsibility. Little is known about whether (...) research nurses experience unique ethical challenges distinct from those experienced by nurses in traditional patient-care settings. Research objectives: The purpose of the study was to describe the nature of ethical challenges experienced by clinical research nurses within the context of their practice. Research design: The study utilized a qualitative descriptive design with individual interviews. Participants and research context: Participating nurses (N = 12) self-identified as having experienced ethical challenges during screening. The majority were Caucasian (90%), female (83%), and worked in outpatient settings (67%). Approximately 50% had > 10 years of research experience. Ethical considerations: The human subjects review board approved the study. Written informed consent was obtained. Findings: Predominant themes were revealed: (1) the inability to provide a probable good, or/do no harm, and (2) dual obligations (identity as a nurse vs a research nurse). The following patterns and subthemes emerged: conflicted allegiances between protocol implementation, needs of the participant, desire to advance science, and tension between the nurse–patient therapeutic relationship versus the research relationship. Discussion: Participants described ethical challenges specific to the research role. The issues are central to the nurse–participant relationship, patient advocacy, the nurse’s role in implementing protocols, and/or advancing science. Conclusion: Ethical challenges related to the specialized role of clinical research nurses were identified. More research is warranted to fully understand their nature and frequency and to identify support systems for resolution. (shrink)

Special issue of the BERA Blog: 'Educators learning through communities of philosophical enquiry', edited by Joanna Haynes. In this blog post, we focus on the need for converting classrooms into place-responsive communities of inquiry that are essential to developing eco-citizen identities – identities that break with socially and environmentally harmful knowledge and habits.

Scholars working on recovering forgotten historical women philosophers have noted the importance of looking beyond traditional philosophical genres. This strategy is particularly important for finding Scottish women philosophers. By considering non-canonical genres, we can see the philosophical interest of the works of Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie (1762–1851), who presents an account of “sympathetic curiosity” as one of the basic principles of the human mind. Baillie's work is also interesting for being a rare case of a woman's philosophical (...) work that was discussed in print by another woman philosopher – in this case, by Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816), who argues for the importance of a feature of human nature that she calls the “selfish principle.” The article suggests that focusing on critical engagements between historical women philosophers can help integrate their texts into the history of philosophy without presenting them as “handmaidens” to male philosophers. (shrink)

Background: As a normative theory, care ethics has become widely theorized and accepted. However, there remains a lack of clarity in relation to its use in practice, and a care ethics framework for practice. Maternity care is fraught with ethical issues and care ethics may provide an avenue to enhance ethical sensitivity. Aim: The purpose of this scoping review is to determine how care ethics is used amongst health professions, and to collate the information in data charts to create a (...) care ethics framework and definition for midwifery practice. Method: The scoping review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) and Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) recommendations. The search was applied to the databases CINAHL, MEDLINE, PschInfo and Pubmed which were searched in September 2019 and again in July 2021. The inclusion criteria were guided by the mnemonic for search terms: Participants, Concept, and Context (PCC) and included variations of health care professionals, care ethics and utilization. The search was limited to qualitative studies published in English between 2010 and 2021. A data extraction tool was used to extract and synthesize data into categories. The articles were screened for eligibility by title, abstract and full text review, by two independent reviewers. Ethical Considerations: The scoping review was guided by ethical conduct respecting authorship and referencing sources. Results: Twelve of the initially identified 129 studies were included in the scoping review. Data synthesis yielded four categories of care ethics use by health professionals: relationship, context, attention to power and caring practices. In combination, the evidence forms a framework for care ethics use in midwifery practice. Conclusion: Care ethics use by health professionals enhances ethical sensitivity. A framework and definition for care ethics for midwifery practice is proposed. This review will be of interest to midwives and other health practitioners seeking to enhance ethical sensitivity. (shrink)

The question of whether AI systems such as robots can or should be afforded moral agency or patiency is not one amenable either to discovery or simple reasoning, because we as societies constantly reconstruct our artefacts, including our ethical systems. Consequently, the place of AI systems in society is a matter of normative, not descriptive ethics. Here I start from a functionalist assumption, that ethics is the set of behaviour that maintains a society. This assumption allows me to exploit the (...) theoretical biology of sociality and autonomy to explain our moral intuitions. From this grounding I extend to consider possible ethics for maintaining either human- or of artefact-centred societies. I conclude that while constructing AI systems as either moral agents or patients is possible, neither is desirable. In particular, I argue that we are unlikely to construct a coherent ethics in which it it is ethical to afford AI moral subjectivity. We are therefore obliged not to build AI we are obliged to. (shrink)

Conferring legal personhood on purely synthetic entities is a very real legal possibility, one under consideration presently by the European Union. We show here that such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome. While AI legal personhood may have some emotional or economic appeal, so do many superficially desirable hazards against which the law protects us. We review the utility and history of legal fictions of personhood, discussing salient precedents where such fictions resulted in abuse or incoherence. We (...) conclude that difficulties in holding “electronic persons” accountable when they violate the rights of others outweigh the highly precarious moral interests that AI legal personhood might protect. (shrink)

An utterer may convey a message to her intended audience by means of an explicit statement; or by a non‐conventionally mediated one‐off signal from which the audience is able to work out the intended message; or by conversational implicature. I investigate whether the last two are equivalent to explicit testifying, as communicative act and epistemic source. I find that there are important differences between explicit statement and insinuation; only with the first does the utterer assume full responsibility for the truth (...) of what she communicates to her audience. (shrink)

Here is a question as intriguing as it is brief: what are we? The animalist’s answer is equal in brevity: we are animals. This stark formulation of the animalist slogan distances it from nearby claims—that we are essentially animals, for example, or that we have purely biological criteria of identity over time. Is the animalist slogan—unburdened by modal or criterial commitments—still interesting, though? Or has it lost its bite? In this article we address such questions by presenting a positive case (...) for the importance of animalism and applying that case to recent critiques. (shrink)

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value.

Some regularities enjoy only an attenuated existence in a body of training data. These are regularities whose statistical visibility depends on some systematic recoding of the data. The space of possible recodings is, however, infinitely large – it is the space of applicable Turing machines. As a result, mappings that pivot on such attenuated regularities cannot, in general, be found by brute-force search. The class of problems that present such mappings we call the class of “type-2 problems.” Type-1 problems, by (...) contrast, present tractable problems of search insofar as the relevant regularities can be found by sampling the input data as originally coded. Type-2 problems, we suggest, present neither rare nor pathological cases. They are rife in biologically realistic settings and in domains ranging from simple animat behaviors to language acquisition. Not only are such problems rife – they are standardly solved! This presents a puzzle. How, given the statistical intractability of these type-2 cases, does nature turn the trick? One answer, which we do not pursue, is to suppose that evolution gifts us with exactly the right set of recoding biases so as to reduce specific type-2 problems to type-1 mappings. Such a heavy-duty nativism is no doubt sometimes plausible. But we believe there are other, more general mechanisms also at work. Such mechanisms provide general strategies for managing problems of type-2 complexity. Several such mechanisms are investigated. At the heart of each is a fundamental ploy – namely, the maximal exploitation of states of representation already achieved by prior, simpler learning so as to reduce the amount of subsequent computational search. Such exploitation both characterizes and helps make unitary sense of a diverse range of mechanisms. These include simple incremental learning, modular connectionism, and the developmental hypothesis of “representational redescription”. In addition, the most distinctive features of human cognition – language and culture – may themselves be viewed as adaptations enabling this representation/computation trade-off to be pursued on an even grander scale. (shrink)

Evidence from many different paradigms (e.g. change blindness, inattentional blindness, transsaccadic integration) indicate that observers are often very poor at reporting changes to their visual environment. Such evidence has been used to suggest that the spatio-temporal coherence needed to represent change can only occur in the presence of focused attention. In four experiments we use modified change blindness tasks to demonstrate (a) that sensitivity to change does occur in the absence of awareness, and (b) this sensitivity does not rely on (...) the redeploy- ment of attention. We discuss these results in relation to theories of scene percep- tion, and propose a reinterpretatio n of the role of attention in representing change. (shrink)

Some regularities enjoy only an attenuated existence in a body of training data. These are regularities whose statistical visibility depends on some systematic recoding of the data. The space of possible recodings is, however, infinitely large type-2 problems. they are standardly solved! This presents a puzzle. How, given the statistical intractability of these type-2 cases, does nature turn the trick? One answer, which we do not pursue, is to suppose that evolution gifts us with exactly the right set of recoding (...) biases so as to reduce specific type-2 problems to (tractable) type-1 mappings. Such a heavy-duty nativism is no doubt sometimes plausible. But we believe there are other, more general mechanisms also at work. Such mechanisms provide general (not task-specific) strategies for managing problems of type-2 complexity. Several such mechanisms are investigated. At the heart of each is a fundamental ploy representational redescription language and culture – may themselves be viewed as adaptations enabling this representation/computation trade-off to be pursued on an even grander scale. (shrink)

The paper reports results of the very first survey-based study on the prevalence, frequency and nature of ethical or other non-medical difficulties faced by Polish physicians in their everyday clinical practice. The study involved 521 physicians of various medical specialties, practicing mainly in inpatient healthcare. The study showed that the majority of Polish physicians encounter ethical and other non-medical difficulties in making clinical decisions. However, they confront such difficulties less frequently than their foreign peers. Moreover, Polish doctors indicate different circumstances (...) as a source of the experienced problems. The difficulties most often reported relate to (i) patients (or their proxies) requests for medically non-indicated interventions; (ii) problems with communication with patients (or their proxies) due to the patients’ negative attitude, unwillingness to cooperate, or aggression; and (iii) various difficulties with obtaining informed consent. Polish physicians report difficulties associated with disagreements among care givers or scarcity of resources less frequently than doctors from other countries. The study’s findings provide support for the thesis that a significant portion of Polish physicians still follow a traditional, paternalistic, and hierarchical model of healthcare practice. Instead of promoting patient’s empowerment, engagement, and rights, they often consider these ideas as a threat to physicians’ professional authority and autonomy. The study leads to the conclusion that due to insufficient training in medical ethics, communication skills, and medical law, many Polish physicians lack the knowledge and competence necessary to adequately respond to challenges posed by modern healthcare practice. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss Beauchamp and Childress’s treatment of the issue of moral status. In particular, we introduce the five different perspectives on moral status that Beauchamp and Childress consider in Principles of Biomedical Ethics and explain their alternative to those perspectives, raise some critical questions about their approach, and offer a different way to think about one of the five theories of moral status that is more in line with what we believe some of its leading advocates affirm.

The strength of democracy lies in its ability to self-correct, to solve problems and adapt to new challenges. However, increased volatility, resulting from multiple crises on multiple fronts – humanitarian, financial, and environmental – is testing this ability. By offering a new framework for democratic education, Teaching Democracy in an Age of Uncertainty begins a dialogue with education professionals towards the reconstruction of education and by extension our social, cultural and political institutions. -/- This book is the first monograph on (...) philosophy with children to focus on democratic education. The book examines the ways in which education can either perpetuate or disrupt harmful social and political practices and narratives at the classroom level. It is a rethinking of civics and citizenship education as place-responsive learning aimed at understanding and improving human-environment relations to not only face an uncertain world, but also to face the inevitable challenges of democratic disagreement beyond merely promoting pluralism, tolerance and agreement. -/- When viewed as a way of life democracy becomes both a goal and a teaching method for developing civic literacy to enable students to articulate and apprehend more than just the predominant political narrative, but to reshape it. This book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy, political science, education, democratic theory, civics and citizenship studies, and peace education research. (shrink)

For good or for ill, we have animal bodies. Through them, we move around, eat and drink, and do many other things besides. We owe much – perhaps our very lives – to these ever-present animals. But how exactly do we relate to our animals? Are we parts of them, or they of us? Do we and these living animals co-inhere or constitute or coincide? Or what? Animalism answers that we are identical to them. There are many objections to animalism, (...) and a dizzying array of rival views. In this article, we do not propose to evaluate those objections and rivals. We will instead present a new argument for that view. The argument begins with the fact that we have emotions. (shrink)

Psychiatry is unique in medicine in being on the border between science and the humanities. Science provides insight into the 'causes' of a problem, enabling us to formulate an 'explanation', while the humanities provide insight into its 'meanings' and helps with our 'understanding'. The new interdisciplinary field of 'philosophy of psychiatry' has developed to explore the range of issues relevant to this border country. The Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry is a unique textbook which provides a detailed introduction to (...) the field, a framework for study and skill development, and an overview of current research. It focuses on case studies in 5 key topic areas. Each case study is supported by selected readings from both philosophy and mental health, thinking skills exercises, self-test questions, key learning points and detailed guides to further reading. (shrink)

One challenge posed by climate change education is that, despite the scientific consensus on human induced climate change, the issue is controversial and politicised. A recent poll conducted in the USA revealed that 45% of respondents did not believe that human activity is a key cause of climate change, while 8.3% denied that climate change was occurring at all. The poll also found that those with conservative political beliefs were far more likely to deny anthropogenic climate change. The controversial nature (...) of climate change is a double-edged sword for educators—offering both benefits and risks. Controversial topics can be engaging for students, allowing them to critically examine competing perspectives, justify opinions and, thus, develop and practice critical thinking skills. On the other hand, they may provoke classroom conflict and expose teachers to backlash from students, parents, colleagues or even members of the public, including accusations of indoctrination. This risk has resulted in some teachers adopting problematic approaches to teaching about climate change, such as presenting students with an impartial account of ‘both sides’ of the debate. Some climate change sceptics groups have even developed their own curriculum materials and lobbied for their implementation in schools in order to provide students with a ‘balanced’ account of the issue. These problems, and suggestions for overcoming them, are explored by several papers in this special issue. (shrink)

In this paper, we will explore how Albert Camus has much to offer philosophers of education. Although a number of educationalists have attempted to explicate the educational implications of Camus’ literary works, these analyses have not attempted to extrapolate pedagogical guidelines towards developing an educational framework for children’s philosophical practice in the way Matthew Lipman did from John Dewey’s philosophy of education, which informed his philosophy for children curriculum and pedagogy. We focus on the phenomenology of inquiry; that is, inquiry (...) that begins with genuinely felt doubt, pointing to a problematic to which the inquirer seeks a solution or resolution. We argue that the central purpose of education is to develop lucid individuals. To this end, we concentrate on Dewey and the pragmatist tradition, starting from Peirce, leading to Lipman’s development of Dewey’s educational guidelines into classroom practice. We show where Camus and the pragmatists are congruent in their thinking, insofar as they can inform the educative process of the community of inquiry. What we conclude is that the role of the teacher is to develop lucid individuals facilitated in a classroom that is transformed into a community of inquiry embedded in contemporary historical moments. (shrink)

Within the community of inquiry literature, the absence of the notion of genuine doubt is notable in spite of its pragmatic roots in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, for whom the notion was pivotal. We argue for the need to correct this oversight due to the educational significance of genuine doubt—a theoretical and experiential understanding of which can offer insight into the interrelated concepts of wonder, fallibilism, inquiry and prejudice. In order to detail these connections, we reinvigorate the ideas (...) of Peirce by borrowing the language and concepts of Albert Camus, at the same time demonstrating their unlikely congruence. In particular, we argue for the necessity of genuine doubt along with the need for the presence of a diversity of prejudices as a starting point for genuine inquiry. (shrink)

Tacit knowledge is the form of implicit knowledge that we rely on for learning. It is invoked in a wide range of intellectual inquiries, from traditional academic subjects to more pragmatically orientated investigations into the nature and transmission of skills and expertise. Notwithstanding its apparent pervasiveness, the notion of tacit knowledge is a complex and puzzling one. What is its status as knowledge? What is its relation to explicit knowledge? What does it mean to say that knowledge is tacit? Can (...) it be measured? Recent years have seen a growing interest from philosophers in understanding the nature of tacit knowledge. Philosophers of science have discussed its role in scientific problem-solving; philosophers of language have been concerned with the speaker's relation to grammatical theories; and phenomenologists have attempted to describe the relation of explicit theoretical knowledge to a background understanding of matters that are taken for granted. This book seeks to bring a unity to these diverse philosophical discussions by clarifying their conceptual underpinnings. In addition the book advances a specific account of tacit knowledge that elucidates the importance of the concept for understanding the character of human cognition, and demonstrates the relevance of the recommended account to those concerned with the communication of expertise. The book will be of interest to philosophers of language, epistemologists, cognitive psychologists and students of theoretical linguistics. (shrink)

The article investigates the relations between Hausdorff and non-Hausdorff manifolds as objects of general relativity. We show that every non-Hausdorff manifold can be seen as a result of gluing together some Hausdorff manifolds. In the light of this result, we investigate a modal interpretation of a non-Hausdorff differential manifold, according to which it represents a bundle of alternative space-times, all of which are compatible with a given initial data set.

According to Val Plumwood (1995), liberal-democracy is an authoritarian political system that protects privilege but fails to protect nature. A major obstacle, she says, is radical inequality, which has become increasingly far-reaching under liberal-democracy; an indicator of ‘the capacity of its privileged groups to distribute social goods upwards and to create rigidities which hinder the democratic correctiveness of social institutions’ (p. 134). This cautionary tale has repercussions for education, especially civics and citizenship education. To address this, we explore the potential (...) of what Gerard Delanty calls ‘cultural citizenship’ as an alternative to the disciplinary citizenship that permeates Western liberal discourse. Cultural citizenship emphasises citizenship as communication and continual learning processes, rejecting the idea of citizenship as a fixed set of cultural ideals, norms or values defined and enforced by liberal society’s legal, political and cultural institutions, including education and ‘citizenship training’. However, we contend that a critical first step, essential to democratic correctiveness, is to clear away obstacles created by the privileging of a dominant epistemic position. We conclude that Plumwood’s philosophy alongside John Dewey’s work on democracy and education provide a theoretical framework for effective democratic inquiry aimed towards interconnective, deliberative practice and corrective methodology for epistemic accountability. (shrink)

This article argues that conscious attention exists not so much for selecting an immediate action as for using the current task to focus specialized learning for the action-selection mechanism and predictive models on tasks and environmental contingencies likely to affect the conscious agent. It is perfectly possible to build this sort of a system into machine intelligence, but it would not be strictly necessary unless the intelligence needs to learn and is resource-bounded with respect to the rate of learning versus (...) the rate of relevant environmental change. Support for this theory is drawn from scientific research and AI simulations. Consequences are discussed with respect to self-consciousness and ethical obligations to and for AI. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to highlight significant developments in the history of philosophy in schools in Australia. We commence by looking at the early years when Laurance Splitter visited the Institute for the Advancement for Philosophy for Children (IAPC). Then we offer an account of the events that led to the formation of what is now the Federation of Australasian Philosophy in Schools Associations (FAPSA), the development and production of a diverse range of curriculum and supporting materials for philosophy (...) in schools, the making of the Australasian journal, and more recent events. Our purpose is to create further interest in exploring this complex and rich history. This will achieve a better understanding of the possible future directions for classroom practice and research. (shrink)

We argue for peace education as a process of improving the quality of everyday relationships. This is vital, as children bring their habits formed largely by social and political institutions such as the family, religion, law, cultural mores, to the classroom (Splitter, 1993; Furlong & Morrison, 2000) and vice versa. It is inevitable that the classroom habitat, as a microcosm of the community in which it is situated, will perpetuate the epistemic practices and injustices of that community, manifested in attitudes, (...) beliefs, behaviours and actions that can limit the child’s ability to learn. The educational task then, is to create opportunities for children to problematize the very environment they inhabit. To this end, our concern is for peace education aimed at addressing epistemic violence; a form of harm brought about by a particular rationality of domination. -/- The classroom community of inquiry, initially developed by Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp as the methodology for the Philosophy for Children (P4C) approach to education (Lipman & Sharp, 1978; Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 1980), is often viewed as a solution to inequality in the classroom—an intellectually safe environment which allows students to explore, practice and internalize good reasoning through philosophy so that they can make school relevant to their lives. Traditionally, the teacher’s role is to take a ‘neutral stance’ in discussion during the conduct of a community of inquiry. However, we argue that it is misplaced to assume that the community of inquiry is a safe intellectual environment in which the teacher as co-inquirer also facilitates the discussion procedurally, letting the argument lead, which Lipman took as the guiding principle for his process of inquiry. For, as Paulo Freire (1987) put it: -/- ... the dominant ideology makes its presence in the classroom partly felt by trying to convince the teacher that he or she must be neutral in order to respect the student. This kind of neutrality is a false respect for students. On the contrary, the more I say nothing about agreeing or not agreeing out of respect for the others, the more I am leaving the dominant ideology in peace! (p. 174). -/- Teachers must be aware of the possibility of epistemic violence to be able to detect and disrupt it, in order to facilitate a peaceful inquiry. We do not consider peace in the negative, as the absence of conflict, but in the positive as the capacity to respond skilfully to conflict as a way of life. Therefore, we concentrate on peace education that prepares students to turn conflict into inquiry, rather than peace education as values education or character education that instils values of ‘fraternity and non-violence’ (Gregory, 2004, p. 277). The community of inquiry provides such a framework, however, we argue that it must be facilitated in a way that mitigates the effects of epistemic violence by creating an educational habitat in which multiple ways of knowing can flourish. (shrink)

This paper reports the findings from an interconnected set of experiments designed to assess children’s knowledge of the semantic interactions between negation and quantified NPs. Our main finding is that young children, unlike adults, systematically interpret these elements on the basis of their position in overt syntax. We argue that this observation can be derived from an interplay between fundamental properties of universal grammar and basic learning principles. We show that even when children’s semantic knowledge appears to differ from that (...) of adults, the observed differences.. (shrink)

In this paper non-Hausdorff manifolds as potential basic objects of General Relativity are investigated. One can distinguish four stages of identifying an appropriate mathematical structure to describe physical systems: kinematic, dynamical, physical reasonability, and empirical. The thesis of this paper is that in the context of General Relativity, non-Hausdorff manifolds pass the first two stages, as they enable one to define the basic notions of differential geometry needed to pose the problem of the evolution-distribution of matter and are not in (...) conflict with the Einstein equations. With regard to the third stage, various potential conflicts with physical reasonability conditions are considered with a tentative conclusion that non-Hausdorff manifolds are more likely to pass this stage than is typically assumed. When dealing with some of these problems, the modal interpretation of non-Hausdorff manifolds is invoked, according to which they represent bundles of alternative possible spacetimes rather than single spacetimes. (shrink)

There is an abundance of enthusiasm and optimism about how governments at all levels can make use of big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence. There is also growing concern about the risks that come with these new systems. This article makes the case for greater government transparency and accountability about uses of big data through a Government of Canada qualitative research case study. Adapting a method from critical cartographers, I employ counter-mapping to map government big data practices and internal discussions (...) of risk and challenge. I do so by drawing on interviews and freedom of information requests. The analysis reveals that there are more concerns and risks than often publicly discussed and that there are significant areas of silence that need greater attention. The article underlines the need for our democratic systems to respond to our new datafied contexts by ensuring that our institutions make changes to better protect citizen rights, uphold democratic principles and ensure means for citizen intervention. (shrink)

Recently, scholars have described the emotional consequences of transnational motherhood on families. Research, however, has neglected to address the lives of migrant fathers and how they compare to those of migrant mothers. This article fills the gap by analyzing the experiences of Mexican transnational mothers and fathers residing in New Jersey. Ethnographic data and interviews show that parents behave in similar ways when internationally separated from children. However, their migration patterns and emotional responses to separation differ. I show that these (...) differences are tied to Mexican gender ideology in which women’s maternal roles are sacralized, whereas fathers’ roles are tied to financial provision. Although the contemporary Mexican transnational family structure challenges gender norms, the analysis of how parents understand their family roles when separated from their children proves gender ideals to be highly durable in the transnational context. (shrink)

In the late 1960s Matthew Lipman and his colleagues at IAPC developed an educational philosophy he called Philosophy for Children. At the heart of Philosophy for Children is the community of Inquiry, with its emphasis on classroom dialogue, in the form of collaborative philosophical inquiry. In this paper we explore the development of educational practice that has grown out of Philosophy for Children in the context of Australia. -/- Australia adapted Lipman’s ideas on the educational value of practicing philosophy with (...) children in order to advance children’s social and intellectual capacities and dispositions. This has subsequently led to its development by both scholars and practitioners in directions that may or may not have been what Lipman had initially intended and to discussions on the nature and educational value of varied approaches that have been implemented in the classroom. To understand fully the effects of these changes requires an understanding of the towering influences that Peirce and especially Dewey were to Lipman. Whilst Lipman developed his own educational philosophy, he freely acknowledged that philosophy for children owes a debt to Peirce for the concept of the community of inquiry and to Dewey for his guidelines on education. -/- We will explore various ways in which the practice of philosophy for children has been implemented and analyse its expansion. This will achieve a better understanding of the possible future directions for classroom practice and research. (shrink)

Philosophy in schools in Australia dates back to the 1980s and is rooted in the Philosophy for Children curriculum and pedagogy. Seeing potential for educational change, Australian advocates were quick to develop new classroom resources and innovative programs that have proved influential in educational practice throughout Australia and internationally. Behind their contributions lie key philosophical and educational discussions and controversies which have shaped attempts to introduce philosophy in schools and embed it in state and national curricula. -/- Drawing together a (...) wide range of eminent scholars and practitioners in the field of educational philosophy, this anthology, the first of its kind, provides not only a historical narrative, but an opportunity to reflect on the insights and experiences of the authors that have made history. The collection is divided into three parts. The overarching theme of Part I is the early years of Philosophy for Children in Australia and how they informed the course that the ‘philosophy in schools movement’ would take. Part II focuses on the events and debates surrounding the development and production of new materials, including arguments for and against the suitability of the original Philosophy for Children curriculum. In Part III, key developments relating to teaching philosophy in schools are analysed. -/- This collection of diverse views, critical appraisals, and different perspectives of historical currents is intended to stimulate thought-provoking questions about theory and practice, and to increase general awareness both nationally and internationally of philosophy in schools in Australia. It is also intended to encourage readers to identify emerging ideas and develop strategies for implementation. (shrink)

We offer an overview of the development and production of the diverse range of Australian P4C literature since the introduction of philosophy in schools in the early 1980s. The events and debates surrounding this literature can be viewed as an historical narrative that highlights different philosophical, educational, and strategic positions on the role of curriculum material and resources in the philosophy classroom. We argue that if we place children’s literature and purpose-written materials in opposition to one another, we could be (...) missing valuable opportunities to develop further what might be considered a new genre in educational literature. (shrink)

This article explores the context for the accompanying suite of papers on creating and sustaining democratic spaces in education. Prompted by the centenary of Summerhill, the internationally famous democratic school founded in Suffolk, England, in 1921, by A.S. Neill, this collection of papers explores and broadens out the central questions at the heart of experiments in democratic education. We suggest that, at a time of distrust in and questioning of the central institutions of democratic government, and in the wake of (...) challenges to the mainstream system of state schooling, these questions are more relevant than ever. We argue that detailed attention to the everyday practice of creating democratic spaces in a variety of educational and social contexts can highlight the myriad ways in which educators, students, families and communities can keep democratic values and principles alive, thereby enriching our discussions about the meaning and value of democratic education. (shrink)

This volume will be an invaluable guide for student and professional researchers in visual perception, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 12-14, January/February 2022.

In this paper we will explore how Albert Camus has much to offer philosophers of education. Although a number of educationalists have attempted to explicate the educational implications of Camus’ literary works (Denton, 1964; Oliver, 1965; Götz, 1987; Curzon-Hobson, 2003; Marshall, 2007, 2008; Weddington, 2007; Roberts, 2008, 2013; Gibbons, 2013; Heraud, 2013; Roberts, Gibbons & Heraud, 2013) these analyses have not attempted to extrapolate pedagogical guidelines to develop an educational framework for children’s philosophical practice in the way Matthew Lipman did (...) from John Dewey’s philosophy of education, which informed his philosophy for children curriculum and pedagogy. To this end we offer comparisons and contrasts between Camus and the pragmatist educational discourse centred on communities of philosophical inquiry (or, more broadly, collaborative philosophical inquiry). In particular we focus on the phenomenology of inquiry, namely, that “inquiry must begin with a problem, question, or doubt and must aim at a solution or resolution, both of which are genuinely felt—something in which the inquirer actually has a stake” (Gregory & Granger, 2012: 13). We conclude that what Camus calls lucidity has implications for the notion of reconstruction, prominent in Dewey’s thoughts on education, and central to Lipman’s focus on philosophy functioning educationally. (shrink)

We provide a Camusian/Peircean notion of inquiry that emphasises an attitude of fallibilism and sustained epistemic dissonance as a conceptual framework for a theory of classroom practice founded on Deep Reflective Thinking (DTR), in which the cultivation of collective doubt, reflective evaluation and how these relate to the phenomenological aspects of inquiry are central to communities of inquiry. In a study by Fynes-Clinton, preliminary evidence demonstrates that if students engage in DRT, they more frequently experience cognitive dissonance and as a (...) result improve their ability to engage in further and more frequent DRT. Sustained intellectual progress occurs when the inquiry reaches a point whereby students can thoughtfully move between the position of disequilibrium (doubt) and equilibrium (belief) whilst understanding the impermanency of any fixed belief, which, in turn, enables reconstruction of thinking and appropriation of learning in the context of collaborative philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

FADYL JK and NICHOLLS DA. Nursing Inquiry 2013; 20: 23–29 Foucault, the subject and the research interview: a critique of methodsResearch interviews are a widely used method in qualitative health research and have been adapted to suit a range of methodologies. Just as it is valuable that new approaches are explored, it is also important to continue to examine their appropriate use. In this article, we question the suitability of research interviews for ‘history of the present’ studies informed by the (...) work of Michel Foucault – a form of qualitative research that is being increasingly employed in the analysis of healthcare systems and processes. We argue that several aspects of research interviewing produce philosophical and methodological complications that can interfere with achieving the aims of the analysis in this type of study. The article comprises an introduction to these tensions and examination of them in relation to key aspects of a Foucauldian philosophical position, and discussion of where this might position researchers when it comes to designing a study. (shrink)

This chapter gives an illustrated overview of recent philosophical work on the concept of delusion. Drawing on a number of case vignettes, examples are given of the wide range of theories that has been advanced to explain this most challenging of experiences. Some have agreed with the philosophical founder of modern descriptive psychopathology, Karl Jaspers, that delusions are “ununderstandable.” The large majority, though, has sought to understand delusion in terms of aberrations of one kind or another either of beliefs or (...) of the grounds or preconditions for beliefs. As a project in understanding, these theories offer helpful insights. A further group of theories focuses on the agential aspects of delusion as reflected, for example, in their role in the insanity defense. Agential theories converge with the person-centered approaches of contemporary empirical and clinical work on delusion. Such approaches bring an additional level of complexity in the form of delusions that are not pathological but adaptive in the life of the person concerned. As such they show the challenge of understanding delusion to be a project not just of understanding but of mutual understanding. (shrink)

The ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is typically associated with a punishing conception of responsibility rather than freedom. In this chapter, our aim is to explore Levinas’s often overlooked theory of freedom. Specifically, we compare Levinas’s account of freedom to the Kantian (and Fichtean) idea of freedom as autonomy and the Hegelian idea of freedom as relational. Based on these comparisons, we suggest that Levinas offers a distinctive conception of freedom—“finite freedom.” In contrast to Kantian autonomy, finite freedom constitutively involves (...) standing in certain social relations with others. And in contrast to Hegelian relational freedom, the social relations involved in finite freedom are not defined by mutual recognition, but by feelings of separation and even antagonism. Along the way, we promote a reading Levinas’s Totality and Infinity as a Hegel-style story of Bildung (development), and show how, on Levinas’s view, freedom can develop or mature in the life of the individual. (shrink)