This article argues that the figure of the dog functions in Horace’s Epodes as a cipher for trauma. My title takes its inspiration from Freud’s “talking cure,” but my contention is that Horace accomplishes an inversion of this psychoanalytic method in his Epodes. I argue that Horace’s rehabilitation of Archilochean iambus in the image of attack animals in Epode 6 at this particular pass in Roman history involves a rehabilitation of the iambic dog and a refocusing of the rabid rage—punning (...) on the semantic link between rabies (anger) and rabies (disease)—that characterized not only the Triumviral period, but also the biography of Archilochus. (shrink)

In this text, the authors confront the many issues which can confuse, frighten or ensnare young people as they struggle to make their own decisions in a world where the hard edges of moral choice have become increasingly blurred. Issues such as drug abuse and abortion are explored in their secular context, while also being placed under the microscope of both Biblical and church teaching. The positions of the Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, Prebyterian and Methodist churches are examined through (...) their own statements and publications. (shrink)

Kant’s notion of autonomy is not only a central concept in pure moral philosophy; it is also a key organizing concept in applied moral philosophy. Across the whole spectrum of human endeavors, there are helping relationships wherein some helpers (e.g., doctors, teachers, social workers, advisors, managers, or organizers) try to help their counterparts (e.g., patients, students, clients, workers, and so forth) to help themselves. But there is a fundamental “helping self-help conundrum” in the very idea of helpers giving external assistance (...) to others to become more autonomous, i.e., to become independent of external assistance. This conundrum makes genuine autonomy-enhancing help very subtle, difficult, and scarce. There is, however, a golden thread in applied moral philosophy running from Socrates, Stoics, and Augustine down to modern philosophers such as John Dewey, Leonard Nelson, David Hawkins, and Gilbert Ryle. This tradition appreciates the limitations highlighted by the fundamental conundrum and which argues that genuine help must be indirect to create the preconditions and catalyze the processes of the others taking an active and constructive role in helping themselves. The analysis also highlights the “yin and yang” of unhelpful help as social engineering (yang) and “rapacious benevolence” (yin). Iven Illich in particular developed a general critique of the “helping profession,” with their professional cartels always finding more “needs” and “disabilities” that need to attended to, that thereby generate more learned disabilities and disabling help. (shrink)

Desire is commonly spoken of as a state in which the desired object seems good, which apparently ascribes an evaluative element to desire. I offer a new defence of this old idea. As traditionally conceived, this view faces serious objections related to its way of characterizing desire's evaluative content. I develop an alternative conception of evaluative mental content which is plausible in its own right, allows the evaluative desire theorist to avoid the standard objections, and sheds interesting new light on (...) the idea of evaluative experience. (shrink)

Theories of well-being are typically divided into subjective and objective. Subjective theories are those which make facts about a person’s welfare depend on facts about her actual or hypothetical mental states. I am interested in what motivates this approach to the theory of welfare. The contemporary view is that subjectivism is devoted to honoring the evaluative perspective of the individual, but this is both a misleading account of the motivations behind subjectivism, and a vision that dooms subjective theories to failure. (...) I suggest that we need to revisit and reinstate certain features of traditional hedonism, in particular the idea that felt experience plays a role that no theory of welfare can afford to ignore. I then offer a sketch of a theory that is subjective in my preferred sense and avoids the worst sins of hedonism as well as the problems generated by the contemporary constraints of subjective theorists. (shrink)

Desire satisfaction theorists and attitudinal-happiness theorists of well-being are committed to correcting the psychological attitudes upon which their theories are built. However, it is not often recognized that some of the attitudes in need of correction are evaluative attitudes. Moreover, it is hard to know how to correct for poor evaluative attitudes in ways that respect the traditional commitment to the authority of the individual subject's evaluative perspective. L. W. Sumner has proposed an autonomy-as-authenticity requirement to perform this task, but (...) this article argues that it cannot do the job. Sumner's proposal focuses on the social origins of our values and overlooks the deep psychological roots of other evaluative attitudes that are just as problematic for welfare. If subjective theories of welfare are to be at all plausible they may need to abandon or modify their traditional commitment to the authority of the individual subject. (shrink)

This is a collection of seventeen essays on learning, teaching, and the philosophy of education. A sequel to Hawkins's 'The Informed Vision' (1947), this new volume covers a wide range of topics, from generating the most basic student interest in the subject matter at hand to the specific challenges of teaching science and mathematics. In the title essay, Hawkins addresses widespread concerns over low literacy rates and the poor state of our educational system, questioning our limited understanding of (...) literacy as the ability to manipulate the printed word. Another essay explicates methods of inducing children toward certain types of learning, and then letting their spontaneous, natural urges toward self-education take over. In his concluding essay on human equality, Hawkins argues -- contrary to recent works such as Richard J Herrnstein and Charles Murray's 'The Bell Curve' -- that it is the relative poverty or wealth of our intellectual nurturing with respect to the cultural mainstream that accounts for differences in educational performance, no congenital inequalities. Moreover, he seeks to address exactly what sort of equivalence or equality -- preferably one that does not erase individual and cultural differences-we can and ought unqualifiedly to approve of and so seek to realise. Whatever the topic, Hawkins's essays draw upon a lifetime of teaching experience, illuminating the multiplicity of methods that should be used to educate our children. (shrink)

Philosophers concerned with what would be good for a person sometimes consider a person’s past desires. Indeed, some theorists have argued by appeal to past desires that it is in the best interests of certain dementia patients to die. I reject this conclusion. I consider three different ways one might appeal to a person’s past desires in arguing for conclusions about the good of such patients, finding flaws with each. Of the views I reject, the most interesting one is the (...) view that prudential value is, at least partly, concerned with the shape of a life as a whole. (shrink)

There is a strong appetite in ‘the wild’ (i.e., beyond the academy) for public philosophy. There are myriad forums available, from magazines and online publications to podcasts and YouTube videos, for those who wish to engage in philosophy in a non-academic context. For academic philosophers, this has raised methodological and metaphilosophical questions like: ‘what is the best way to engage in public philosophy?’ and ‘what are our aims when we engage in public philosophy?’ But what do ‘the public’ want? If (...) public philosophy is philosophy written for a public audience, what is it, exactly, that it can or might do for them? Several answers have been proposed by philosophers, but less attention has been paid to how the public themselves might answer that question. The aim of this essay is to try and put together at least the beginning of an answer. In June 2022 we put out a survey in the hope of eliciting views from ‘the public’ on issues relating to the nature and aims of both philosophy (more generally) and public philosophy. In doing so, our aim was to take a ‘democratic’ approach to answering the question: What is public philosophy? (shrink)

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of knowledge—analytic and intuitive, explicit and tacit. Analytic knowledge is arrived at by logical deductive thinking, and is a sequential thought process in which each step can be explained and defended. Intuitive knowledge, in contrast, is frequently alogical or nonrational, and often involves nonconscious mental processes. Though intuitive ways of knowing are essential to both scientific research and scientific medicine, the culture of medicine celebrates only the analytic, evidentiary kind of knowledge, while eschewing intuition (...) as being “nonscientific.” The popularity and prevalence of what is known as evidence-based medicine reflects this bias in favor of the analytic and the explicit. Though the evidence-based approach has contributed greatly to standardizing medical care, favoring treatments for which there is evidence of effectiveness, it has limitations. An overreliance on evidence-based medicine is problematic, because this approach leaves out important factors in the actual practice of clinical medicine such as diagnosis, nonverbal cures provided by patients, and the way the doctor–patient relationship bears on patient management and compliance, and because it is not appropriate for dealing with medical conditions that do not lend themselves to study by controlled clinical trials. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial CultureSpencer Hawkins (bio)Mufti, Aamir. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton UP, NJ: Princeton, 2007. xv + 325 pp.Mufti’s comparison of the Jewish question and the Indian Partition invites readers to join building projects that delineate and then endanger minorities within nations. Literature about minorities speaks a language (...) deliberately distant from the national one. Minority status has little to do with population numbers for Aamir Mufti; instead it signifies [End Page 61] tential victimization through disproportional rights, since “minority is always potentially exile” (Mufti 13). This definition of minority suits his two examples—Jews in Germany and Muslims in India—since in the twentieth century both fledgling nations adopted forms of nationalism that regarded the lives of these minorities as contaminants to the purity of the emergent national body. The prologue catalogues the brutality in India that prompted Mufti to write this book. Among the horrors listed were the destruction of Babri Mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 and the videotaped gang rapes of Muslim women that became a widespread form of entertainment in India. While Mufti reads violence toward minorities as correlative with the rise of nationstates, he considers similarities and differences between nation building in the West and in the subcontinent. In both cases, the new establishment of political equality for citizens came along with the desire to pare down the number of officially recognized citizens. Muslim and Jewish minorities migrated to “minority” nations in the collapsing British Empire, in present-day Pakistan and Israel, respectively, during the respective formations of India and Germany. By founding nations on formerly British-occupied territory, minorities potentially would enjoy the role of nationalist majorities. This solution strikes Mufti as spreading the nationalist contagion onto the minority.The whole book lets literature mark broad cultural attitudes and phenomena. The first chapter observes incipient Jewish nationalism in a work by a British author, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, who spent time in Germany and grew fascinated with the Jewish question while abroad. Her Britishness reinforces a pattern in Mufti’s schema: British powers facilitate the rise of nationalism among minorities in India and in Germany. Daniel Deronda comes at the tail end of a long discourse on Jews’ relation to Europe. The first of Mufti’s cases within canonical literature is the hope for tolerance and a dialogue of cultures, which G. E. Lessing allegorizes through a drama about Saladin, the Muslim sultan of Egypt and Syria, who learns to trust the eponymous Jewish merchant in Nathan the Wise. “Muslim” stands in for “Christian” since Nathan’s alienation is allegorical for the alienation of Jews in Lutheran Germany. Heinrich Heine weighs in on the advantages to assimilation in this period with his fragmentary novel The Rabbi from Bacherach, where religiously raised Jewish children feel comforted when they hear the Tale of the Nibelungen from Father Rhein, the personification of a river that figures generally for German national myth and, in Heine’s story, as a possible source of comfort for partially assimilated minorities. If we read literature as a barometer of cultural pressures, then the appeal of assimilation for European Jews declines in the late colonial nineteenth century when George Eliot inscribed religion into the “secular” discourse of national citizenship.Since the Israeli state is outside of the range of his argument, we leave the Jewish Question with George Eliot’s philo-Semitism in Daniel Deronda, where the only hope for European Jews is to become a nation and to occupy the Palestinian territory. Mufti compares the concerns of early Zionism and Pakistani nationalism side by side in chapter 2. Pakistani issues dominate chapters 3 to 5. In chapter 2, he launches the comparison with the parallel between Hebrew’s development as a national language to identify [End Page 62] Jews secularly and culturally, not just religiously, and Urdu’s transition from a vernacular language to a national language with the secular goal of creating a Pakistani culture freed from Hindi’s erstwhile predominance. When he depicts language choice as mimetic of specific cultural trends, Mufti indicates the shape of... (shrink)

Discrete choice experiments—selecting the best and/or worst from a set of options—are increasingly used to provide more efficient and valid measurement of attitudes or preferences than conventional methods such as Likert scales. Discrete choice data have traditionally been analyzed with random utility models that have good measurement properties but provide limited insight into cognitive processes. We extend a well-established cognitive model, which has successfully explained both choices and response times for simple decision tasks, to complex, multi-attribute discrete choice data. The (...) fits, and parameters, of the extended model for two sets of choice data (involving patient preferences for dermatology appointments, and consumer attitudes toward mobile phones) agree with those of standard choice models. The extended model also accounts for choice and response time data in a perceptual judgment task designed in a manner analogous to best–worst discrete choice experiments. We conclude that several research fields might benefit from discrete choice experiments, and that the particular accumulator-based models of decision making used in response time research can also provide process-level instantiations for random utility models. (shrink)

There is an enduring and widespread perception amongst policy makers and practitioners that certain groups of children, in particular those who find learning difficult, have a detrimental effect on the achievement of other children. Challenging this basic assumption, this award-winning book argues that high levels of inclusion can be entirely compatible with high levels of achievement and that combining the two is not only possible but essential if all children are to have the opportunity to participate fully in education. This (...) fully revised second edition is packed with vivid case studies that explore the benefits and tensions for children and schools, and sets out to answer the following questions: What is the nature of the relationship between the inclusion of some children and the achievement of all? Are there strategies which can raise the achievement of all children, whilst safeguarding the inclusion of others who are more vulnerable? What changes can a school make to ensure high levels of inclusion as well as high levels of achievement for all its children? Achievement and Inclusion in Schools offers a fully up-to-date analysis of current issues in light of recent changes to education policy in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It provides practical guidance for practitioners and policy-makers, and will be of interest to anyone passionate about inclusive education. (shrink)

This article is a contribution to our understanding of how Archilochean poetics may be situated in the longer poetic tradition. In examining two fragments that have received little attention, I hope to illustrate how Archilochus’ poetry both engaged with its predecessors and was in turn engaged by its successors. Fragment 222W employs a theme that was perhaps already conventional for Hesiod, in which the incompatibility of the sexes is implicated in the cycle of seasons, an idea that also seems relevant (...) to Archilochus’ quarrel with the daughters of Lycambes. Light is shed on 39W by comparing it to later words for skinning that serve as metaphors for cheating someone, the best known example of which is found in Catullus. In the first fragment the text can be elucidated by a look to Archilochus’ forerunners, and in the second by looking to his heirs. (shrink)

PREFACE. THE Author of this very practical treatise on Scotch Loch - Fishing desires clearly that it may be of use to all who had it. He does not pretend to have written anything new, but to have attempted to put what he has to say in as readable a form as possible. Everything in the way of the history and habits of fish has been studiously avoided, and technicalities have been used as sparingly as possible. The writing of this (...) book has afforded him pleasure in his leisure moments, and that pleasure would be much increased if he knew that the perusal of it would create any bond of sympathy between himself and the angling community in general. This section is interleaved with blank shects for the readers notes. The Author need hardly say that any suggestions addressed to the case of the publishers, will meet with consideration in a future edition. We do not pretend to write or enlarge upon a new subject. Much has been said and written-and well said and written too on the art of fishing but loch-fishing has been rather looked upon as a second-rate performance, and to dispel this idea is one of the objects for which this present treatise has been written. Far be it from us to say anything against fishing, lawfully practised in any form but many pent up in our large towns will bear us out when me say that, on the whole, a days loch-fishing is the most convenient. One great matter is, that the loch-fisher is depend- ent on nothing but enough wind to curl the water, -and on a large loch it is very seldom that a dead calm prevails all day, -and can make his arrangements for a day, weeks beforehand whereas the stream- fisher is dependent for a good take on the state of the water and however pleasant and easy it may be for one living near the banks of a good trout stream or river, it is quite another matter to arrange for a days river-fishing, if one is looking forward to a holiday at a date some weeks ahead. Providence may favour the expectant angler with a good day, and the water in order but experience has taught most of us that the good days are in the minority, and that, as is the case with our rapid running streams, -such as many of our northern streams are, -the water is either too large or too small, unless, as previously remarked, you live near at hand, and can catch it at its best. A common belief in regard to loch-fishing is, that the tyro and the experienced angler have nearly the same chance in fishing, -the one from the stern and the other from the bow of the same boat. Of all the absurd beliefs as to loch-fishing, this is one of the most absurd. Try it. Give the tyro either end of the boat he likes give him a cast of ally flies he may fancy, or even a cast similar to those which a crack may be using and if he catches one for every three the other has, he may consider himself very lucky. Of course there are lochs where the fish are not abundant, and a beginner may come across as many as an older fisher but we speak of lochs where there are fish to be caught, and where each has a fair chance. Again, it is said that the boatman has as much to do with catching trout in a loch as the angler. Well, we dont deny that. In an untried loch it is necessary to have the guidance of a good boatman but the same argument holds good as to stream-fishing... (shrink)

Analysis of Mao's writings on education from 1917 as a student in Hunan to 1973 as the first Chinese leader to greet an American president.

Discretion is a pervasive phenomenon in legal systems. It is of concern to lawyers because it can be a force for justice or injustice: at once a means of advancing the broad purposes of law and of subventing them. For social scientists the discretion exercised by legal actors is an important form of decision-making behaviour, in which legal rules are merely one force in a field of pressures and constraints that push towards certain courses of action or inaction. This book (...) presents a variety of analyses of legal discretion by lawyers and social scientists, who have made discretion and its uses a central part of their scholarly concerns. (shrink)

This book traces the translation history of German philosophy, with long and well-justified layovers in Paris, proposing an innovative translation strategy toward addressing the long-standing difficulties in its translation. The volume discusses the context around why German philosophy, whose profundity is often understood to lie in German's iconic polysemous vocabulary, has been so difficult to translate. To best grapple with its complexity, Hawkins outlines a strategy of "differential translation," which involves translating conceptually dense German terms with multiple different terms (...) in the target text, rather than the conventional standard of selecting one term and using it consistently. The book explores how this strategy, which runs counter to the expectation of readers and translators, has played out in debates across both the French-language and English-language translation landscapes, with well-known translators such as Adam Phillips and Joan Stambaugh boldly in favor and others such as Jean Laplanche polemically against it. The book encourages researchers and translators to continue to question norms in translation practice and write translations that do justice to the multifarious meanings in Germanic vocabulary. This book will be of interest to researchers interested in the German language, translation studies, philosophy, and intellectual history. (shrink)

Drama Trauma is a difficult book to review because it both does and does not hang together as one sustained linear argument. Made up of pieces originally written for another book-length project and of more recent critical readings of cultural performance, the book moves from a lengthy section on Shakespeare to much briefer sections on contemporary drama, performance art and installation pieces. And since there's no conclusion, it's not always clear how the sections interact with one another; how they hang (...) together, so to speak. But the sections themselves make for a provocative read; and, if one accepts the book as a loosely organized attempt to 'reflect the non-linear incursions of theory and political performance that have altered our understanding of dramatic 'genre' over more than the past decade' (21), Drama Trauma marks an important contribution to the fields of drama scholarship, performance studies, cultural studies and media studies. (shrink)

For decisions between many alternatives, the benchmark result is Hick's Law: that response time increases log-linearly with the number of choice alternatives. Even when Hick's Law is observed for response times, divergent results have been observed for error rates—sometimes error rates increase with the number of choice alternatives, and sometimes they are constant. We provide evidence from two experiments that error rates are mostly independent of the number of choice alternatives, unless context effects induce participants to trade speed for accuracy (...) across conditions. Error rate data have previously been used to discriminate between competing theoretical accounts of Hick's Law, and our results question the validity of those conclusions. We show that a previously dismissed optimal observer model might provide a parsimonious account of both response time and error rate data. The model suggests that people approximate Bayesian inference in multi-alternative choice, except for some perceptual limitations. (shrink)

Deliberative democrats have argued that democracy requires citizens to seek consensus, using a familiar style of principle-based moral argument. However, critics like Iris Young object that deliberative democracy’s favoured model of reasoning is inadequate for resolving deep value conflicts. She and others have suggested that the aim of improving understanding across political differences could be achieved if our conception of legitimate democratic discourse were broadened to include a significant role for narrative. The question is whether such a revision would amount (...) to abandoning the deliberative democratic goal of seeking reasonable resolutions of value conflict. This thesis argues that a narrative approach to deliberative democracy can realize its commitment to reasoned justification, while preserving the significance of differing perspectives and promoting mutual understanding. The narrative-contextualist approach is developed and illustrated with reference to public debate over issues such as cultural accommodation and historical justice. (shrink)

This paper queries why we are more reluctant to perform stem cell research on human than on nonhuman embryos, given their remarkable similarities together with the former's greater promise for addressing human illnesses. I begin by examining two leading arguments for prohibiting stem cell research on human embryos. The first type of argument suggests that we should not interfere with the potential for human life. This argument, advanced in different ways by both utilitarians and religious believers, inadequately grapples with the (...) moral complexities raised by current technologies, such as IVF and cloning. Moreover, it fails to address the significant adverse effects of human overpopulation to both human and nonhuman well-being. The second line of argument addressed here suggests that we are morally prohibited from "playing God." This argument overlooks the various ways in which we do—indeed, we must—make life and death decisions. Further, the argument rests on an undefended assumption that we are only prohibited from making such decisions with regard to human life, while remaining free to make such decisions with regard to animals without apparent moral qualms. On the contrary, I argue that, from a fully ethical Darwinian standpoint, we must treat both human and nonhuman life with respect. Far from requiring us to abstain from difficult moral decision making, an attitude of respect toward all life requires human willingness to take responsibility for making difficult—indeed, sometimes excruciating—moral decisions. (shrink)

The dominant approach to assessing decision-making capacity in medicine focuses on determining the extent to which individuals possess certain core cognitive abilities. Critics have argued that this model delivers the wrong verdict in certain cases where patient values that are the product of mental disorder or disordered affective states undermine decision-making without undermining cognition. I argue for a re-conceptualization of what it is to possess the capacity to make medical treatment decisions. It is, I argue, the ability to track one’s (...) own personal interests at least as well as most people can. Using this idea, I demonstrate that it is possible to craft a solution for the problem cases—one that neither alters existing criteria in dangerous ways (e.g. does not open the door to various kinds of abuse) nor violates the spirit of widely accepted ethical constraints on decision-making assessment. (shrink)

This paper investigates the logistics of crafting and accounting for animal realities on television. Using the case of The Making of David Attenborough’s Conquest of the Skies, a behind-the-scenes documentary about how the Sky TV series David Attenborough’s Conquest of the Skies was created, it explores how the material reality of animals becomes a televisual reality. In seeking to challenge the lingering concern within many media studies critiques of wildlife TV about the constructed and manipulated nature of televisual animals, we (...) propose an approach focused on how realities are provoked. This approach draws on recent debates within STS and screen theory about the contingent elements and accountability relations that become practically operative in making something real. Equally significant is the animal performer. How do the animals, often domesticated, that are used in television to simulate wildness or scientific facts participate in and resist the television apparatus? And how do these animal performances shape distinct animal–human relations and contact zones? (shrink)

The theory of nonnegative matrices is an example of a theory motivated in its origins and development by purely mathematical concerns that later proved to have a remarkably broad spectrum of applications to such diverse fields as probability theory, numerical analysis, economics, dynamical programming, and demography. At the heart of the theory is what is usually known as the Perron–Frobenius Theorem. It was inspired by a theorem of Oskar Perron on positive matrices, usually called Perron’s Theorem. This paper is primarily (...) concerned with the origins of Perron’s Theorem in his masterful work on ordinary and generalized continued fractions (1907) and its role in inspiring the remarkable work of Frobenius on nonnegative matrices (1912) that produced, inter alia, the Perron–Frobenius Theorem. The paper is not at all intended exclusively for readers with expertise in the theory of nonnegative matrices. Anyone with a basic grounding in linear algebra should be able to read this article and come away with a good understanding of the Perron–Frobenius Theorem as well as its historical origins. The final section of the paper considers the first major application of the Perron–Frobenius Theorem, namely, to the theory of Markov chains. When he introduced the eponymous chains in 1908, Markov adumbrated several key notions and results of the Perron–Frobenius theory albeit within the much simpler context of stochastic matrices; but it was by means of Frobenius’ 1912 paper that the linear algebraic foundations of Markov’s theory for nonpositive stochastic matrices were first established by R. Von Mises and V.I. Romanovsky. (shrink)