Before COVID-19, dementia singing groups and choirs flourished, providing activity, cognitive stimulation, and social support for thousands of people with dementia in the UK. Interactive music provides one of the most effective psychosocial interventions for people with dementia; it can allay agitation and promote wellbeing. Since COVID-19 has halted the delivery of in-person musical activities, it is important for the welfare of people with dementia and their carers to investigate what alternatives to live music making exist, how these alternatives are (...) delivered and how their accessibility can be expanded. This community case study examines recent practice in online music-making in response to COVID-19 restrictions for people with dementia and their supporters, focusing on a UK context. It documents current opportunities for digital music making, and assesses the barriers and facilitators to their delivery and accessibility. Online searches of video streaming sites and social media documented what music activities were available. Expert practitioners and providers collaborated on this study and supplied input about the sessions they had been delivering, the technological challenges and solutions they had found, and the responses of the participants. Recommendations for best practice were developed and refined in consultation with these collaborators. Over 50 examples of online music activities were identified. In addition to the challenges of digital inclusion and accessibility for some older people, delivering live music online has unique challenges due to audio latency and sound quality. It is necessary to adapt the session to the technology's limitations rather than expect to overcome these challenges. The recommendations highlight the importance of accessibility, digital safety and wellbeing of participants. They also suggest ways to optimize the quality of their musical experience. The pandemic has prompted innovative approaches to deliver activities and interventions in a digital format, and people with dementia and their carers have adapted rapidly. While online music is meeting a clear current need for social connection and cognitive stimulation, it also offers some advantages which remain relevant after COVID-19 restrictions are relaxed. The recommendations of this study are intended to be useful to musicians, dementia care practitioners, and researchers during the pandemic and beyond. (shrink)

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)

Must a society aim indefinitely for continued economic growth? Proponents of economic growth advance three central challenges to the idea that a society, having attained high levels of income and wealth, may justly cease to pursue further economic growth: if environmentally sustainable and the gains fairly distributed, first, continued economic growth could make everyone within a society and globally, and especially the worst off, progressively better off; second, the pursuit of economic growth spurs ongoing innovation, which enhances people’s opportunities and (...) protects a society against future risks; and third, continued economic growth fosters attitudes of openness, tolerance, and generosity, which are essential to the functioning of a liberal democratic society. This article grants these challenges’ normative foundations, to show that, even if one accepts their underlying premises as requirements of justice, a society may still justly cease to aim for economic growth, so long as it continues to aim for and realize gains on other dimensions. I argue that, while continued economic growth might instrumentally serve valuable ends, it is not necessary for their realization, as a society can achieve these ends through other means. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

This article discusses a Leverhulme residency undertaken by the author Julie Brixey-Williams in 2003–4 at the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland. Notions of medical visibility were explored through practice-led investigations under the umbrella title, Traces of the Invisible, that concentrated on making concrete, visible responses to the hidden or intangible elements of the anesthetist’s working life in areas such as sleep, breath, pain and genetic markers. Rosebud is a unique nine-foot concertina bookwork created after reading the (...) entire story of The Sleeping Beauty into an anesthetic machine. This essay expands upon the concepts and material responses that led to the making of the book with particular reference to how the book’s structure forms a relationship to language and the body-as-site, whilst operating as a sculptural object that raises the visibility of the anesthetic profession. Fairy tales and their telling, including stories of enchanted sleep, transformational qualities, magical languages and shaman healers, will be examined alongside. (shrink)

The question of capacity building in education has predominantly been approached with regard to the methods and methodologies of educational research. Far less attention has been given to capacity building in relation to theory. In many ways the latter is as pressing an issue as the former, given that good research depends on a combination of high quality techniques and high quality theorising. The ability to capitalise on capacity building in relation to methods and methodologies may therefore well be restricted (...) by a lack of attention to theory. In this paper we make a case for capacity building with regard to theory, explore the different roles of theory in educational research, and provide an outline of an agenda for capacity building with regard to theory. (shrink)

The problem of theorizing privacy moves on two levels, the first consisting of an inadequate conceptual vocabulary and the second consisting of an inadequate institutional grammar. Privacy rights are supposed to protect individual subjects, and so conventional ways of understanding privacy are subject-centered, but subject-centered approaches to theorizing privacy also wrestle with deeply embedded contradictions. And privacy’s most enduring institutional failure modes flow from its insistence on placing the individual and individualized control at the center. Strategies for rescuing privacy from (...) irrelevance involve inverting both established ways of talking about privacy rights and established conventions for designing institutions to protect them. In terms of theory, turning privacy inside out entails focusing on the conditions that are needed to produce sufficiently private and privacy-valuing subjects. Institutionally, turning privacy inside out entails focusing on the design, production, and operational practices most likely to instantiate and preserve those conditions. (shrink)

This paper develops the argument that the acquisition of responsible organizations can be a source of competitive advantage for acquiring firms. We arguethat corporate responsibility identity is a tacit and strategic resource because it is valuable, rare, non-imitable and non-substitutable. We postulate that organizational identity is a useful framework to better understand corporate responsibility identity. Finally, we argue that to capitalize on the acquisition of responsible organizations, acquiring firms must engage in critical self-reflexivity and be willing to modify their organizational (...) identity. (shrink)

2017 substantive revision of the original 2008 "Continental Rationalism" entry (and 2012 revision) that introduces women and non-European authors and new historiographical considerations.

This paper is the second of two in a series. In our first paper, we presented a social justice framework emerging from an extensive literature review and incorporating core social determinants specific to mental health in the age of COVID-19 and illustrated specific social determinants impacting mental health (SDIMH) of our resettled Bhutanese refugee population during the pandemic. This second paper details specific barriers to the SDIMH detrimental to the basic human rights and social justice of this population during this (...) pandemic. The SDIMH, as described, further informs the need for social justice measures and cultural humility in mental healthcare, public health, law, and community engagement. This work concludes with a proposed call to action toward mental health improvement and fair treatment for refugee populations in three core areas: communication and education, social stigma and discrimination, and accessibility and availability of resources. (shrink)

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)

Some interesting exceptions notwithstanding, the traditional logic of economic efficiency has long favored hierarchical forms of organization and disfavored democracy in business. What does the balance of arguments look like, however, when values besides efficient revenue production are brought into the picture? The question is not hypothetical: In recent years, an ever increasing number of corporations have developed and adopted socially responsible behaviors, thereby hybridizing aspects of corporate businesses and social organizations. We argue that the joint pursuit of financial and (...) social objectives warrants significant rethinking of organizational democracy’s merits compared both to hierarchy and to non-democratic alternatives to hierarchy. In making this argument, we draw on an extensive literature review to document the relative lack of substantive discussion of organizational democracy since 1960. And we draw lessons from political theory, suggesting that the success of political democracy in integrating diverse values offers some grounds for asserting parallel virtues in the business case. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind and language who advance causal theories face a sort of conjunction problem. When we say that the thing had in mind or the thing referred to is a matter of what causally impacted the thinker or speaker, we must somehow narrow down the long conjunction of items in a causal chain, all of which contributed to the having in mind, but only one of which becomes the object of thought or the linguistic referent. Here, I sketch a (...) notion of cognitive focus intended to do this narrowing. The notion borrows three key aspects from visual focus and some technological aides—causation, amplification, and suppression. I suggest a broader application of this framework to address the conjunction problem not only in ordinary contexts of perceptual focus but also in evidence cases involving non-perceptual cognitive focus. I further suggest cognitive focus is helpful in distinguishing referential vs. attributive thought. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to determine how Locke understands suspension and the role it plays in his view of human liberty. To this end I, 1) discuss the deficiencies of the first edition version of ‘Of Power’ and why Locke needed to include the ability to suspend in the second edition, then 2) analyze Locke’s definitions of the power to suspend with a focus on his use of the terms ‘source’, ‘hinge’, and ‘inlet’ to describe the power. I (...) determine from these descriptions that the ability to suspend is a passive power and is a necessary condition for the rational deliberation that Locke takes to be necessary for acting as a free agent. In 3) I connect Locke’s view of the power to suspend to his discussion in the sections that precede ‘Of Power.’ I argue that the kind of judgment that Locke endorses in his discussion of the Molyneux problem is also at work in acts of suspension. In 4) I apply my interpretation to Locke’s description of the connection between the power to suspend and liberty. In 5) I conclude with a discussion of a passage from the fifth edition of the Essay. Locke adds this passage to address worries raised by Limborch over the course of their correspondence. According to Chappell, it lends evidence to the view that Locke takes suspensions to be caused by undetermined volitions. (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)

Convergence of model projections is often considered by climate scientists to be an important objective in so far as it may indicate the robustness of the models’ core hypotheses. Consequently, the range of climate projections from a multi-model ensemble, called “model spread”, is often expected to reduce as climate research moves forward. However, the successive Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicate no reduction in model spread, whereas it is indisputable that climate science has made improvements in (...) its modelling. In this paper, after providing a detailed explanation of the situation, we describe an epistemological setting in which a steady model spread is not doomed to be seen as negative, and is indeed compatible with a desirable evolution of climate models taken individually. We further argue that, from the perspective of collective progress, as far as the improvement of the products of a multi-model ensemble is concerned, reduction of model spread is of lower priority than model independence. (shrink)

Un grand nombre de revues se sont créées pour résister à la colonisation et accompagner les luttes pour l’indépendance. Une installation, présentée notamment au Centre Pompidou (mai-juin 2021), permet de prendre connaissance de ce patrimoine exceptionnel et de réfléchir au rôle des revues dans l’histoire. Deux ouvrages parus aux Nouvelles Éditions Place/INHA en 2021, une base de données de 1000 revues accessible sur sismo.inha.fr, accompagne également ce projet.

Qu'entendre par modernité? Résulte-t-elle d'une transposition des schèmes théologiques et des dispositifs théologico-politiques propres au christianisme médiéval, ou bien s'est-elle affirmée contre son propre passé théologique, en rupture avec les formes héritées du passé? Et comment situer, dans ce processus, les philosophies de Hobbes et de Spinoza, comprises tantôt comme héritières des théologies de la toute-puissance divine, de l'augustinisme ou de la Réforme, tantôt comme inaugurant le.

In proposition 7 of the second part of the Ethics, Spinoza famously contends that the “order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas.” On this basis, Spinoza argues in the scholium that thought and extension are different ways of conceiving one and the same substance: “the thinking substance and the extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, now under that”. Less famously, in the same scholium, (...) Spinoza insists that the relation of thought and extension is not the only issue at stake. He notes that “certain Hebrews” saw, “as if through a cloud,” the unity of God and the world in knowing: “they maintained that God, God’s intellect, and the things understood by him are one and the same.” The cloud is the idea of divine transcendence. Commenting on this passage, Aviezer Ravitzky has observed that Spinoza’s mention of these “certain Hebrews” should inform us about “an inherent problem, about dynamite concealed in the teachings of the Jewish Aristotelians such as Maimonides.” If, as Aristotle argues in the De Anima and Metaphysics, the knower and the known are one in knowing, then the distinction between God and the objects of God’s knowing is undermined. Noetic union is ontological union, for the intellect is its ideas. Thus Aristotelian noesis undermines divine transcendence. E2p7 and its scholium, then, presage the most famous—or infamous—expression of the Ethics, Deus sive Natura. Maimonides qualifies his Aristotelianism with an hierarchical emanationist cosmology, thereby avoiding the implications of noetic union by differentiating between the creator and the creatures and between the agent intellect, the lowest of the celestial spheres and source of the human acquired intellect, and the divine intellect. Gersonides, the fourteenth century giant of the medieval Jewish tradition and its most consistent Aristotelian, endorses the Aristotelian formula, arguing consistently that the intelligible is an intellect and offering a meticulous explanation of “why it is said of non-material things that the intellect, the thinker, and the intelligible are all one.” In this article, I argue that Gersonides’ own highly Averroian position is evoked in E2p7s and that Spinoza extends and radicalizes the Gersonidean inheritance. Beginning from E2p7 and its scholium, I explore the implications of noetic union for the relationship of God and the world and that between thought and extension. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, an entity has moral status if and only if it or its interest matters morally for its own sake. Some philosophers, who think of moral status in terms of duties and rights owed to an entity, allow that moral status can come in degrees, with only some beings having status of the highest degree – that is, full moral status (FMS). We critically review the competing accounts of what qualifies one for FMS. Some accounts demand cognitive sophistication, which (...) excludes many children, while others are inclusive of children but fail by (a) putting children morally on a par with most animals (experiencing subject of a life), (b) invoking criteria of dubious moral relevance (potentiality, membership in a biological species), or (c) not securing impartial moral status (special relationships). We end with our own account, which attempts to rectify such problems, addressing specifically the moral status of children. (shrink)

Foetal images have been central to the medicalized abortion debate since the 1960s. Feminists have extensively analysed such pictures, arguing that the pregnant body is separated from the foetus and erased from view, and that the rights of women and foetuses are set in opposition. In this article I introduce the latest image in this debate, the 3D sonogram, which is widely reported as new evidence for a reduction in the gestational time limit. Through close analysis of two examples, I (...) argue that the rhetorical use of these images can be characterized by a conflation of knowing with seeing. With the new clarity of sonograms to the untrained eye, image producers are legitimated by a discourse of public information and concerned citizens are called upon to exercise their rights to see/know. For feminist theory, this implies the need for continued analysis of the epistemology of foetal images and renewed focus on the subject position of the viewer. (shrink)

The Quietist affair at the end of the seventeenth century has much to teach us about theories of the will in the period. Although Bossuet and Fénelon are the names most famously associated with the debate over the Quietist conception of pure love, Malebranche and his erstwhile disciple Lamy were the ones who debated the deep philosophical issues involved. This paper sets the historical context of the debate, discusses the positions as well as the arguments for and against them, and (...) opens up investigation of important material that is all but ignored in the English literature and only incompletely addressed in the French. (shrink)

The Ethics of Joy offers reconstructive argument, careful engagement with select literature, and a big-picture presentation of Spinoza’s view of the well-lived human life. Not “convinced that Kantians in ethics are Kantians because of an argument that Kant or Korsgaard makes,” Andrew Youpa urges us to consider Spinoza’s view as “an alternative way of thinking about our lives—an alternative that is illuminating and insightful”. Since “the presentation of an illuminating alternative is arguably the best a philosopher can do”, this is (...) no small task. Youpa argues that Spinozan virtue—human excellence—is defined by our power to care for ourselves and others, not by our accountability. On his reading, power, and... (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga, in some essays recently published and presented, defends the rationality of a belief in the existence of God on the grounds that it is foundationally justified. Though this belief does not appear to be justified were we to adopt what Plantinga calls classical foundationalism, there are other, less restrictive versions of foundationalism. Plantinga urges that we recognize that a belief in the existence of God can be warranted within one of these frameworks.

_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)

This article develops the concept of proximity as socio-spatial distance by looking at the temporally and spatially condensed events of contemporary art exhibition openings. The article begins by examining some developments in proximity research, the limitations of theorizing the importance of proximity as mere physical nearness, arguing that potentiality renders proximity meaningful. After introducing the art event, we offer a three-pronged approach to proximity by showing the imperatives for being-there, the conditional indeterminacy of potentiality and the politics of proximity. In (...) contrast to much recent research, it is argued that the significance of events is not reducible to evaluated outcomes. Two ethnographic vignettes show the imperatives, indeterminacies and politics in action. We conclude by showing how this conceptualization of proximity has analytic purchase beyond the empirical realm of contemporary art. (shrink)

Whereas experiments and computer simulations seem very different at first view because the former, but not the latter, involve interactions with material properties, we argue that this difference is not so important with respect to validation, as far as epistemologyEpistemology is concerned. Major differences remain nevertheless from the methodological point of view. We present and defend this distinction between epistemology and methodology. We illustrate this distinction and related claims by comparing how experiments and simulations are validated in evolutionary studies, a (...) domain in which both experiments in the lab and computer simulations are relatively new but mutually reinforcing. (shrink)

Abstract An important strand of theories of practice stress that individuals' practical knowledge, i.e., their ability to act in appropriate and/or effective ways, is mainly tacit. This means that the social scientist cannot find out about this knowledge by simply asking the individuals she studies to articulate how it is appropriate and/or effective to act in various circumstances. In this paper, I pursue the proposal that the method of participant observation may be used to find out about individuals' practical knowledge. (...) Surprisingly, the literature does not contain any systematic and comprehensive discussion of this suggestion. I distinguish and exemplify four types of observation that are indicative of individuals' practical knowledge. The observations may serve as a basis for the social scientist's formulations of this knowledge. Further, I point to two main ways in which things may go wrong when the social scientist uses participant observation to find out about individuals' practical knowledge. I argue that the social scientist can make reasonably sure to avoid these two potential difficulties. Accordingly, I conclude that these difficulties do not undermine the effectiveness of the method. In this sense, social scientists are right to use the method of participant observation to find out about individuals' practical knowledge. (shrink)

Historically the terms “final,” “unconditional,” and “intrinsic” have played a foundational role in ethical theory. I argue that final/instrumental distinction is best understood in terms of the for-sake-of relation and involves a tri-part division of goods. I show that this first way of categorizing goods is more closely aligned with a second way of categorizing goods in terms of intrinsic/extrinsic goods than has thus far been acknowledged. Lastly, I distinguish yet a third way of categorizing goods: unconditional/conditional goods. While the (...) final/instrumental and intrinsic/extrinsic distinctions have received the lion’s share of philosophical attention, the unconditional/conditional distinction is no less important. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on moral personhood understood in terms of the notion of moral status. An entity is said to have moral status only if it or its interest matters morally for its own sake. Nonutilitarians tend to think of moral status in terms of entitlements and protections that can conflict with, and sometimes override, doing what would maximize the good and minimize the bad. If moral status comes in degrees, and if there is a status of the highest degree (...) (i.e., full moral status), then moral persons are those with full moral status. After giving a more precise account of it, we assess different views of what it takes to qualify for full moral status (some of which appeal to metaphysical notions of person). We also briefly discuss how metaphysical notions of personhood are put to moral use in utilitarian moral theorizing that eschews the notion of moral personhood. (shrink)

IntroductionMilitary personnel and Veterans are at increased risk of mental and physical health conditions, which can impact their families. Spouses often perform a vital role in caring for service members and Veterans facing illness or injury, which can lead to caregiver burden. In turn, this may contribute to relationship issues. Research suggests that ensuring that spouses are well supported can alleviate some of these negative effects. The current study examined whether social support received by spouses of newly released Veterans buffers (...) the impact of Veterans’ health on caregiver burden, subsequently impacting spouses’ relationship satisfaction.MethodsData were collected as part of the Canadian Armed Forces Transition and Well-being Survey. The sample included N = 595 spouses of Regular Force Veterans who released in 2016 with at least 2 years of service. We examined Veterans’ mental and physical health and spouses’ caregiver burden, social support, and relationship satisfaction. A moderated mediation model was tested using structural equation modeling.ResultsThere was a significant indirect association between Veterans’ health and spouses’ relationship satisfaction through caregiver burden. Furthermore, social support moderated the association, as evidenced by a weaker association between Veterans’ health and caregiver burden at low levels of social support compared to high levels.ImplicationsFindings suggest additional efforts should be made to ensure sufficient support is provided to spouses, especially when they are caring for a service member or Veteran facing illness or injury, to strengthen their families’ well-being. (shrink)

This article explores the consequences of failure to communicate early, as recommended in risk communication scholarship, during the first stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia and the United Kingdom. We begin by observing that the principles of risk communication are regarded as basic best practices rather than as moral rules. We argue firstly, that they nonetheless encapsulate value commitments, and secondly, that these values should more explicitly underpin communication practices in a pandemic. Our focus is to explore the values (...) associated with the principle of communicating early and often and how use of this principle can signal respect for people’s self-determination whilst also conveying other values relevant to the circumstances. We suggest that doing this requires communication that explicitly acknowledges and addresses with empathy those who will be most directly impacted by any disease-control measures. We suggest further that communication in a pandemic should be more explicit about how values are expressed in response strategies and that doing so may improve the appraisal of new information as it becomes available. (shrink)

Aberrations and variations within kinds of creatures required explanation to Western medievals, who took the Genesis creation narratives together with Aristotelian species to imply that change was limited to within species; consequently, species were presumed static. Medieval philosophers often explained variation—including “new” kinds like mules—as due to problems in procreation/gestation (following Aristotle) or by sin. I argue that Aquinas's explanation of variation in women, people with disabilities, and mules suggests that Aquinas cannot be taken to entirely reject the possibility of (...) new kinds, and parallels in his explanation of the existence of women and the possible existence of new kinds provides warrant for a re‐evaluation of his understanding of the notion of the natures or essences shared by kinds. Sin—individual or original—is an inadequate explanation for variation, and the argumentative parallels between Aquinas's treatment of women and mules challenge presumptions about what medievals mean by “static kinds” at all, revealing space for evolutionary thought. (shrink)

This commentary places Jussim in dialogue with sociological perspectives on social reality and the political-academic nature of scientific paradigms. Specifically, we highlight how institutions, observers, and what is being observed intersect, and discuss the implications of this intersection on measurement within the social world. We then identify similarities between Jussim's specific narrative regarding social perception research, with noted patterns of scientific change.