In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:131. THE HUME LITERATURE FOR 1978 The Hume Literature from 1925 to 1976 has been thoroughly covered in my book Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship : A Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 1978; J¿ 5.50), which also lists the main earlier writings on Hume. Publications of the year 1977 were listed in Hume Studies last November. What follows here will bring the record up to the end of 1978. (...) Readers are invited to inform me of any omissions, and to send me offprints of their own articles. The intention is to maintain a complete bibliographical record of critical work on Hume, by the regular publication in Hume Studies of an annual bibliography covering the previous year, with addenda consisting of items omitted through ignorance in previous years. References to recently-appearing reviews (of books from earlier lists) are given at the end. The following abbreviations of journal titles are used here: APQAmerican Philosophical Quarterly JHIJournal of the History of Ideas JHPJournal of the History of Philosophy JPJournal of Philosophy PASProceedings of the Aristotelian Society PBPhilosophical Books PQPhilosophical Quarterly PRPhilosophical Review RIPRevue Internationale de Philosophie RMReview of Metaphysics TLSTimes Literary Supplement Other abbreviations should be obvious enough, and mainly follow the British Standard (no. 4148). ANSCOMBE, G. E. M. 'Rules, Rights, and Promises', Midwest Studies in Phil. 3, 318-23. ARMSTRONG, D. M. Universals and Scientific Realism, vol. 2: A Theory of Universals, 85-90. Cambridge. ATTFIELD, R. God and the Secular, esp. chs. 5-6. Cardiff. 132. BAIER, A. 'Hume's Analysis of Pride', JP 75, 27-40. (on Davidson 1976) BALDI, M. 'Le edizioni italiane dei Saggi economici di David Hume', Riv. crit. Stor. FiI. 33, 275-96. BARNOUW, D. 'Skepticism as a Literary Mode - Hume, David and Musil, Robert', Mod. Lang. Notes 93, 852-70. BASU, D. K. 'Who is the Real Hume in the Dialogues?', Indian Phil. Q. 6, 21-8. BEAUCHAMP. see ROBINSON. BECK, L. W. Essays on Kant and Hume. New Haven & London, (includes reprints of his 1967a and b, and 1974, and the first Eng. tr. of his 1969; also a new paper,? Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant', on pp. Ill ff) BLACKMAN, L. L. 'The Logical Impossibility of Miracles in Hume', Int. J. Phil. Relig. 9, 179-87. BOSS, G. "1I Promise": Les fonctions du langage chez Hume et Austin', Revue Théol. et Phil. 110, 29-48. BRACKEN, H. M. 'Bayle, Berkeley, and Hume', EighteenthCentury Studies 11, 227-45. BROWNSEY, P. F. 'Hume and the Social Contract', PQ 28, 132-48. BURKE, J. J. 'Hume's History of England: Waking the English from a Dogmatic Slumber', Studies in 18th-century Culture 7, 235-50. CAPALDI, N. 'Hume as Social Scientist', RM 32, 99-123. CARNIE, R. H. 'The Hume-Hailes Relationship', Forum for Mod. Lang. Studies 14, 289-303. CARTWRIGHT, N. 'Comments on Wesley Salmon's "Science and Religion..."', Phil. Studies 33, 177-83. COHEN, Benjamin. 'Contrariety and Causality in Hume', Hume Studies 4, 29-39. CONNIFF, J. 'Hume on Political Parties: The Case for Hume as a Whig', Eighteenth-Century Studies 12, 150-73. CUMMINS, R. 'The Missing Shade of Blue', PR 87, 548-65. DOUBLE, R. 'Hume's Empirical Argument for Empiricism', Sth J. Phil. 16, 329-38. 133. ERDE, E. L. 'Founding Morality: "Hume v. Plato" or "Hume & Plato"?', S. -west. J. Phil. 9, 19-25. FARR, J. 'Hume, Hermeneutics, and History: A "Sympathetic" Account', Hist. & Theory 17, 285-310. FLEW, A. 'Inconsistency within a Reconciling Project', Hume Studies 4, 1-6. GASKIN, J. C. A. Hume's Philosophy of Religion, (xi, 188 pp.* London. [Times Higher Ed. Suppl. 21 July (1978), 17; TLS 28 July (1978), 863; RB 20 (1979), 68-71] GINSBERG, R. 'Hume and the Social Contract', EighteenthCentury Life 4, 91-4. GUPTA, G. 'Another Look at the Buddha-Hume "Connection"', Indian Phil. Q. 5, 371-86. GUPTA, R. 'Certain Aspects of the Causal Theories of the Buddhist, Hume and Mill', Indian Phil. Q. 5, 319-35. HAAKONSSEN, K. 'Hume's Obligations', Hume Studies 4, 7-17. HACKING, I. 'Hume's Species of Probability', Phil. Studies 33, 21-37. HALL, R. Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship: A bibliographical guide. (x, 150 pp.) Edinburgh. [British Book News... (shrink)

The rapid generation of new shapes observed in the living world is the result of genetic variation, especially in “morphological” developmental genes. Many of these genes contain coding tandem repeats. Fondon and Garner have shown that expansions and contractions of these repeats are associated with the great diversity of morphologies observed in the domestic dog, Canis familiaris.1 In particular, they found that the repeat variations in two genes were significantly associated with changes in limb and skull morphology. These results open (...) the possibility that such a mechanism contributes to the diversity of life. BioEssays 27:581–587, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Acknowledgments THROUGHOUT this book I cite the many people who have provided information on individual programs and activities. ...

From the Supreme Court to the bedroom, privacy is an intensely contested interest in our everyday lives and privacy law. Some people appeal to privacy to protect such critical areas as abortion, sexuality, and personal information. Yet, privacy skeptics argue that there is no such thing as a right to privacy. I argue that we cannot abandon the concept of privacy. If we wish to avoid extending this elusive concept to cover too much of our lives or shrinking it to (...) cover too little, we must come to understand it. After exploring the privacy arguments of philosophers and constitutional and tort privacy law, I argue for a new definition of privacy and an explanation of its value that clarifies and resolves many of our conflicts. Privacy is critical because it allows us to protect a realm in which we can have intimate relations with others. (shrink)

This book is a tribute to Kevin Kelly, who has been one of the most influential British theologians for a number of decades. On its own merits, however, it is groundbreaking collection of essays on key themes, issues and concepts in contemporary moral theology and Christian ethics. The focus is on perspectives to inform moral debate and discernment in the future. The main themes covered are shown in the list of contents below. Several of the of the contributors are from (...) the United States, three others live and work in Continental Europe and the rest are from various parts of the British Isles. Many of the authors are among the best known in their fields on both sides of the Atlantic. (shrink)

Wider diversity in board member characteristics has been advocated as a means of improving organizational performance by providing boards with new insights and perspectives. With data from 240 YMCA organizations, a board diversity index was constructed and compared to multiple measures of board member diversity. Results revealed higher levels of social performance and fundraising results when board members had greater occupational diversity. Gender diversity compared favorably to the organization's level of social performance but a negative association surfaced for level of (...) funds raised. The diversity in board member age groupings was linked to higher levels of donations. (shrink)

Social media platforms have been vested with hope for their potential to enable ‘ordinary citizens’ to make their judgments public and contribute to pluralized discussions about organizations and their perceived legitimacy :60–97, 2018). This raises questions about how ordinary citizens make judgements and voice them in online spaces. This paper addresses these questions by examining how Western citizens ascribe responsibility and action in relation to corporate misconduct. Empirically, it focuses on modern slavery and analyses online debates in Denmark on child (...) slavery in the cocoa industry. Conceptually, it introduces the notion of cosmopolitanism as a general disposition of care and responsibility towards distant others, conceived as a prerequisite for the critical evaluation of corporate responsibility in the Global South. The analysis of online debates shows that citizens debate child slavery in terms of individual consumer responsibility rather than corporate responsibility. Corporations are not considered potential agents of change. As a consequence, online citizen debates did not reflect a legitimacy crisis for the cocoa industry, as debates over responsibility were overwhelmingly concerned with the agency of the Western individual, the individual agency of the speakers themselves. Participants in debates understood their agency strictly as consumer agency. (shrink)

This experiment uses quantitative and qualitative measures to address the effect of two syllabus statements on academic misconduct: one based on prohibitions and one on academic integrity. Students expressed favorable attitudes toward the statements, showed an increase in guilt compared to a control group, but showed no decrease in intentions to cheat. Including only a standard academic misconduct statement in one's syllabus is not sufficient to alter behavior, which should be acknowledged by faculty.

Non-epistemic values pervade climate modelling, as is now well documented and widely discussed in the philosophy of climate science. Recently, Parker and Winsberg have drawn attention to what can be termed “epistemic inequality”: this is the risk that climate models might more accurately represent the future climates of the geographical regions prioritised by the values of the modellers. In this paper, we promote value management as a way of overcoming epistemic inequality. We argue that value management can be seriously considered (...) as soon as the value-free ideal and inductive risk arguments commonly used to frame the discussions of value influence in climate science are replaced by alternative social accounts of objectivity. We consider objectivity in Longino's sense as well as strong objectivity in Harding's sense to be relevant options here, because they offer concrete proposals that can guide scientific practice in evaluating and designing so-called multi-model ensembles and, in fine, improve their capacity to quantify and express uncertainty in climate projections. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a partial analysis of the role of values in qualitative data collection in social research. The partial analysis shows that nonepistemic values have both required and permissible roles to play during this phase of research. By appeal to the analysis, I reject the ideal of value-free science as applied to qualitative data collection, and I demonstrate why two alternative ideals should likewise be dismissed as standards for values in qualitative data collection. Also, I briefly discuss (...) the extent to which the partial analysis carries over to quantitative data collection in social research. (shrink)

The assessments issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) aim to provide policy-makers with an objective source of information about the various causes of climate change, the projected consequences for the environment and human affairs, and the options for adaptation and mitigation. But what, in this context, is meant by ‘objective’? In practice, in an effort to address internal and external criticisms, the IPCC has regularly revised its methodological procedures; some of these procedures seem to meet the requirements (...) of objectivity, at least as understood in a specific sense, but the relationship between objectivity and value-neutrality requires further investigation. The aim of this paper is to offer an appropriate philosophical account of objectivity, reconcilable with the fact that the IPCC is not value-free. I argue that Sandra Harding’s notion of strong objectivity is particularly well suited to this goal, and I examine the extent to which the current IPCC procedures match her account. (shrink)

Universities around the world are undergoing a marketisation process in order to respond to consumer-oriented demands. Despite priority shifts, universities have remained traditionally hierarchical and elitist. Moreover, a new and growing generation of academic researchers has found it increasingly difficult to integrate in academia. Systems and patterns of behaviour breeding cultural narcissism, intended as a value and cultural system characterised by an investment in false self-projections backed by Machiavellian attainment, exist and appear to thrive in academic institutions. This organizational adaptation (...) for survival is now embedded in higher education and interlinked with mobbing, workplace bullying and academic misconduct. The problematics we are witnessing today in many academic settings (high rates of mental health issues, widespread research misconduct scandals and loss of credibility of academic research) are a by-product of an organizational narcissistic culture. Amidst economic shifts, it might seem reasonable to adopt measures aimed at increasing assets, invest in highly entrepreneurial academics who attract financial resources to universities and use any means to salvage the reputations of educational institutions. Yet these strategies might be promoting and perpetuating value systems that are undermining academic integrity, and therefore contributing to the scientific credibility crisis and failure of these institutions. (shrink)

Qualitative researchers sometimes talk about objectivity in relation to qualitative data sets. In this paper, I defend a reconstructed notion of objective qualitative data sets that may serve as a useful and reachable guiding ideal in qualitative data generation. In the first part of the paper, I develop the ideal. According to it, a qualitative data set is objective to the extent that it, in conjunction with true assumptions, possesses a combination of good-making features in virtue of which the data (...) set is suited to serve as evidence base for a satisfying answer to the research question under study. In the second part of the paper, I examine and reject two possible lines of objection to this ideal: One is that it picks out the wrong good-making features. The other is that the very focus on good-making features is misguided: the objectivity of a qualitative data set should instead be seen as a matter of how it was generated or evaluated. (shrink)

ABSTRACTObjective: This study was designed to improve our understanding of prospective memory changes in ageing, and to identify the cognitive correlates of PM decline, using a virtual environment, to provide a more realistic assessment than traditional laboratory tasks.Design: Thirty-five young and 29 older individuals exposed to a virtual town were asked to recall three event-based intentions with a strong link between prospective and retrospective components, three event-based intentions with a weak link, and three time-based intentions. They also underwent retrospective episodic (...) memory, executive functions, binding in working memory, processing speed, and time estimation assessments.Results: Older individuals recalled fewer intentions than young adults. While age-related PM decline affected the recall of both prospective and retrospective components, the recall of the latter seemed more challenging for older individuals when the link was weak. This PM decline was linked to an age-related decline... (shrink)

In most discussions of moral responsibility, an agent’s moral responsibility for harming or failing to aid is equated with the agent’s being blameworthy for having done wrong. In this paper, I will argue that one can be morally responsible for one’s action even if the action was not wrong, not blameworthy, and not the result of blameworthy deliberation or bad motivation. This makes a difference to how we should relate to each other and ourselves in the aftermath. Some people have (...) blown off their responsibility when they shouldn't have, and others have held themselves responsible – or second and third parties have held them responsible – as if they were wrongdoers and blameworthy when neither is the case. (shrink)

In attempting to provide protection to individuals and communities, childhood immunization has benefits that far outweigh disease risks. However, some parents decide not to immunize their children with some or all vaccines for reasons including lack of trust in governments, health professionals, and vaccine manufacturers. This article employs a theoretical analysis of trust and distrust to explore how twenty-seven parents with a history of vaccine rejection in two Australian cities view the expert systems central to vaccination policy and practice. Our (...) data show how perceptions of the profit motive generate distrust in the expert systems pertaining to vaccination. Our participants perceived that pharmaceutical companies had a pernicious influence over the systems driving vaccination: research, health professionals, and government. Accordingly, they saw vaccine recommendations in conflict with the interests of their child and “the system” underscored by malign intent, even if individual representatives of this system were not equally tainted. This perspective was common to parents who declined all vaccines and those who accepted some. We regard the differences between these parents—and indeed the differences between vaccine decliners and those whose Western medical epistemology informs reflexive trust—as arising from the internalization of countering views, which facilitates nuance. (shrink)

For disciplines depending upon precise definitions and distinctions, students’ notes provide an avenue for student engagement with skill and content. Activities enliven the classroom, and those discussed here can also help students develop and exercise critical thinking skills through note-taking. Lecturing and experiential learning happen hand-in-hand when the instructor uses teaching about notes and note-taking as a method for critical engagement with class content. In this paper, I integrate research on the cognitive function of student note-taking with research on student (...) engagement—particularly, motivating student learning, engaging students with texts, lecture, or discussion, and promoting metacognition about learning practices—by arguing that the instructor who teaches and emphasizes student note-taking elevates note-taking to a method of student engagement and daily critical thinking practice; I discuss particular methods for supporting teaching note-taking, methods that promote active learning, student engagement, and student understanding (and could be utilized in a variety of classes). (shrink)

Case Study research is characterized by the employment of multiple data gathering methods. In this paper, I examine the concurrent use of participant observation and qualitative interviews. The question I examine is: what is the rationale behind their combination in case study research? In the literature on case study research, the two most common reasons for using multiple methods appeal to comprehensiveness and convergent confirmation respectively. I argue that there is a third significant, yet overlooked, way to motivate the joint (...) use of participant observation and qualitative interviews: the methods may generate complementary evidence and this puts the researcher in a better position to confirm that her data manifest central epistemic values and so are suitable as basis for providing an adequate answer to her research question. I refer to this as the rationale of blended epistemic value validation. (shrink)

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, reminders of death are particularly salient. Although much terror management theory research demonstrates that people engage in defensive tactics to manage mortality awareness, other work shows that existential concerns can motivate growth-oriented actions to improve health. The present study explored the associative link between coronavirus anxieties, fear of death, and participants' well-being. Results, using structural equation modeling, found that increased mortality concerns stemming from COVID-19 were associated with heightened benefit finding from the pandemic. Increased benefit (...) finding, in turn, was related to higher life satisfaction, meaning in life, self-esteem, resilience, and vitality while also correlating negatively with depression and stress scores. There was no evidence for reverse mediation in that fear of mortality did not predict well-being through coronavirus worries. Overall, although many persons have experienced mental health concerns as a function of the COVID-19 pandemic, our findings demonstrate positive benefits that paradoxically follow in terms of an increased appreciation of life, improved relationships, and better health. (shrink)

JohnLocke’s 1700–1702 correspondencewith Dutch Arminian Philippus van Limborch has been taken by commentators as the motivation for modifications to the fifth edition of “Of Power,” the chapter in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that treats freedom. In this paper, I offer the first systematic and chronological study of their correspondence. I argue that the heart of their disagreement is over how they define “freedom of indifference.” Once the importance of the disagreement over indifference is established, it is clear that when (...) Locke altered parts of “Of Power” as a reaction to Limborch’s questioning, he did so in the interest of further clarifying and solidifying his view, not changing it. Seeing how they disagree over indifference also allows us to see the correspondence as showcasing the conflict between intellectualism, the view that cognitive states determine the will, and voluntarism, the view that the will alone determines action. (shrink)

In this article, the authors operationalize the intersection of gender and race in survey research. Using quantitative data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, they investigate how gender/racial stereotypes about African Americans affect Whites’ attitudes about two types of affirmative action programs: job training and education and hiring and promotion. The authors find that gender/racial prejudice towards Black women and Black men influences Whites’ opposition to affirmative action at different levels than negative attitudes towards Blacks as a group. Prejudice (...) toward Black women has a larger effect on Whites’ policy preferences than does prejudice toward Black men or Blacks in general. In future research, survey methodologists should develop better intersectional measures to further document these gender/racial attitudes. (shrink)

Sensitivity to the extra-linguistic context, as exhibited by indexical and demonstrative expressions, and sensitivity to the linguistic context, as exhibited by, for example, anaphoric uses of third person pronouns, are regularly regarded as different and independent phenomena. The data on indexicals, demonstratives, and third person pronouns, however, call for a more unified notion of context and of context sensitivity. This paper aims to develop such a unified picture by generalizing the notion of anaphora to encompass extra-linguistic context dependency and generalizing (...) the notion of a structured discourse context so that contexts contain antecedents for expressions that refer to entities in the extra-linguistic context. (shrink)

Canadian children’s literature rarely depicts characters labelled with intellectual disabilities, yet when it does it often remains mired in stereotypes that recycle prevalent myths and misconceptions. Even as more recent literature attempts to push back against such stereotypes, it nevertheless predominantly remains caught in these dangerous representational repertoires. This article offers a brief history of Canadian literary depictions of intellectual disability and a critique of the Canadian publishing spheres. Through a critical analysis of Lorna Schultz Nicholson’s book Fragile Bones, we (...) discuss the limits of representation of intellectual disability in children’s fiction. We also offer a critique of the ableist publishing climate in Canada and suggest that structural barriers prevent disabled writers from entering the literary marketplace on an equal playing field. These barriers to publishing lead to the vast underrepresentation of disabled authors and the misrepresentation of disability in general and intellectual disability in particular in Canadian children’s literature. (shrink)

We expand on the article “Ethical Challenges Arising in the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Overview from the Association of Bioethics Program Directors (ABPD) Task Force” to consider the ways in which rural...

Jusqu’à une date récente, la voiture reposait sur des principes bien établis de mécanique et de thermodynamique, elle doit maintenant intégrer les technologies numériques. Tiraillé entre l’appel du progrès et les peurs qui y sont associées, le législateur a un rôle clé à jouer dans les nombreux domaines qui seront touchés par la montée en puissance de l’intelligence artificielle. Sous le chapitre des véhicules autonomes tout particulièrement, accepter de confier sa sécurité à une intelligence artificielle est un pas essentiel, mais (...) délicat, dans le processus du développement. C’est pourquoi on peut se demander si le principe de précaution pourrait protéger efficacement contre les appréhensions légitimes liées à ces innovations. (shrink)

In the UK, higher education and health care providers share responsibility for educating the workforce. The challenges facing health practice also face health education and as educators we are implicated, by the way we design curricula and through students’ experiences and their stories.

Axel Honneth distinguishes between recognitive practices according to the social domain in which they occur and this allows him to theorise the relationship between power and recognition. 'Love-based recognition', which suggests the centrality of recognition to the relationships that nurture us in the first instance, is located in the family. Honneth argues that relationships encompassed by this category are pre-political, thereby repeating the distinction between the public and the private common to much political theory. This article explores the structure of (...) this delineation in his thinking. I argue that Honneth's analysis marginalises feminist concerns with how power functions through recognition in the private sphere. Honneth also robs himself of a rejoinder to recognition sceptics, who suggest that the desire for recognition is a condition of subordination. The article argues for an alternative approach to the analysis of 'love' within recognitive theory. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. (shrink)

The rediscovery of Aristotle’s works on syllogisms in the Latin world, especially the Sophistici Elenchi and then the Prior Analytics, gave rise to sophisticated views on the nature of syllogistic form and syllogistic matter in the thirteenth century. It led to debates on the ontology of the syllogism as studied in the Prior Analytics, i.e. the syllogism made of letters and the four logical constants a/e/i/o, with deep consequences on the definition of logic as a universal method for all sciences (...) and as a science itself. (shrink)

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a rise in the number of deaths of undocumented Mexican migrants crossing the U.S./Mexican border. Who is responsible for these deaths? This article examines the culpability of (1) migrants, (2) humanitarian volunteers, (3) the Mexican government, (4) the U.S. government, and (5) U.S. businesses. A significant portion of the blame is assigned to U.S. free trade policies and U.S. businesses employing undocumented immigrants.

Since the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, classrooms in the U.S. have experienced a steady decline in the amount of time teachers spend on social studies, with the elementary grades suffering the highest level of decline. There is currently a need to understand how teachers perceive the problem of insufficient social studies instruction time and gain their perceptions of curriculum integration as a solution. The purpose of the qualitative case study was to explore how 14 (...) elementary social studies teachers in Grades 3 to 5 integrate social studies throughout the curriculum. In addition, another aim was to evaluate the outcomes of employing an integrated social studies curriculum on teaching civic competence to students. This qualitative case study included interviews and focus group discussions; data were then analyzed using a thematic analysis. It was discovered that teachers believed that by increasing instructional time for social studies, students’ understanding of the subject and its concepts should also increase; however, the key disadvantage was the need to have adequate time and planning to integrate the subject. The interviewed teachers shared that the best method of integration is by incorporating social studies concepts in classroom projects and activities. From the results, it is then recommended for the integrated curriculum theory to be strongly considered by the key educational decisions makers in the country. The results can help the schools determine how to best increase social studies instructional time, improve quality of social studies education, and the positive effects of instilling civic competence among their students. (shrink)

There is general agreement among ecofeminists regarding the desirability of a variety of expressions of ecofeminism, but this pluralism is under threat with the emergence of an approach that emphasizes the primacy of a philosophical ecofeminism which claims the authority to prescribe what ecofeminism should be. The recent anthology Ecological Feminism is symptomatic of this trend, with contributors who affirm the philosophical significance of ecological feminism by privileging philosophers’ voices over those of other ecofeminists, rather than by engaging in critical (...) dialogue with, and exploring connections between, different ecofeminist discourses. This colonizing strategy actively excludes many women’s voices from the creation of an environmental ethic, including those of activist, spiritual, and “Third World” ecofeminists, but fails to offer any adequate philosophical grounds for doing so. (shrink)

In his paper ‘Gesture Projection and Cosuppositions,’ Philippe Schlenker argues that co-verbal gestures convey not at-issue content by default and in particular, that they trigger conditional presuppositions. In this commentary, I take issue with both of these claims. Conditional presuppositions do not supply a systematic means for capturing the semantic contribution of a co-verbal gesture. Some gestures appear to contribute content inside of a negation when their associated speech content is likewise embedded; in other cases, co-verbal gestures arguably contribute unconditional (...) content to the global level. When this happens, we can infer what might look like a conditional presupposition, but this inference follows naturally from general principles already at work in purely verbal discourse and does not justify the claim that gesture content is contributed to a conditional presupposition. Problems exposed in the discussion of conditional presuppositions show that we are not yet in a position to make a general claim about the at-issue status of co-verbal gestures. (shrink)

_In _Challenging the One Best System_, a team of leading education scholars offers a rich comparative analysis of the set of urban education governance reforms collectively known as the “portfolio management model.”_ They investigate the degree to which this model—a system of schools operating under different types of governance and with different degrees of autonomy—challenges the standard structure of district governance famously characterized by David Tyack as “the one best system.” The authors examine the design and enactment of the portfolio (...) management model in three major cities: New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Denver. They identify the five interlocking mechanisms at the core of the model—planning and oversight, choice, autonomy, human capital, and school supports—and show how these are implemented differently in each city. Using rich qualitative data from extensive interviews, the authors trace the internal tensions and tradeoffs that characterize these systems and highlight the influence of historical and contextual factors as well. Most importantly, they question whether the portfolio management model represents a fundamental restructuring of education governance or more incremental change, and whether it points in the direction of meaningful improvement in school practices. Drawing on a rigorous, multimethod study, _Challenging the One Best System_ represents a significant contribution to our understanding of system-level change in education. (shrink)

Although I am not supposed to have a favorite patient, she is one. Arissa is a three‐year‐old girl. Her parents, natives of Comoros, had illegally immigrated to the French department of Mayotte. When I first began treating her, I saw her as a time bomb. But we built a relationship, and when she deteriorated on my watch, I wanted to say, “Fight to the end!—she is my favorite patient!” But I thought that I did not have the necessary distance to (...) answer the question. (shrink)

An important milestone was crossed recently in the discipline of philosophy, but hardly anyone seems to have noticed. In 2004, for the first time since statistics have been gathered on such things, women earned more than 30 percent of the doctorates in philosophy in this country, 33.3 percent, up from 27.1 percent the year before. The highest percentage women had achieved previously in philosophy was 29.4 percent, in..