Controversies in science are an essential feature of scientific practice: defined here as current problems that are unresolved because there are no accepted procedures by which they can be resolved or there are differing assumptions that affect the interpretation of evidence. Although there has been much attention in science education literature addressing socio-scientific and historical controversies in science, less has been paid to the teaching of contemporary scientific controversies. Using semi-structured qualitative interviews with 18 teachers at different career stages in (...) England, we investigated teachers’ social representations of scientific controversies using the discourse of the collective subject. We found a lack of controversy in teachers’ responses. Whilst scientific controversies were seen as an essential feature of how science works, they were not viewed as essential in science education and were represented as a distraction and dealt with informally, outside the planned curriculum and in response to students’ questions. Subject knowledge was considered a barrier. We argue that teaching about carefully selected scientific controversies has the potential to contribute to teachers’ and students’ understandings of science and the nature of science. There are perceived to be few opportunities for teachers to exercise this in the English context. We suggest how the collective subject discourses might be used to open up a discussion about teaching controversies in professional learning situations. Materials to stimulate discussion of scientific controversies could be useful in future curriculum development in science, but these would need to address the barriers of subject knowledge, access to literature and conflict with assessment-related priorities and a perceived need to advocate for trust in science. (shrink)

This is an interview with Professor Lynda Birke, one of the key figures of feminist science studies. She is a pioneer of feminist biology and of materialist feminist thought, as well as of the new and emerging field of hum-animal studies. This interview was conducted over email in two time periods, in the spring of 2008 and 2010. The format allowed for comments on previous writings and an engagement in an open-ended dialogue. Professor Birke talks about her key arguments (...) and outlooks on a changing field of research. The work of this English biologist is typical of a long and continuous feminist engagement with biology and ontological matters that reaches well beyond the more recently articulated ‘material turn’ of feminist theory. It touches upon feminist issues beyond the usual comfort zones of gender constructionism and human-centred research. Perhaps less recognized than for instance the names of Donna Haraway or Karen Barad, Lynda Birke’s oeuvre is part of the same long-standing and twofold critique from feminist scholars qua trained natural scientists. On the one hand, theirs is a powerful critique of biological determinism; on the other, an acutely observed contemporary critique of how merely cultural or socially reductionist approaches to the effervescently lively and biological might leave the corporeal, environmental or non-human animal critically undertheorized within feminist scholarship. In highlighting the work and arguments of Lynda Birke, it is hoped here to provide an accessible introduction to the critical questions and challenges that circumvent contemporary discussions within feminist technoscience as theory and political practice. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to clarify an aspect of Descartes’s conception of mind that seriously impacts on the standard objections against Cartesian dualism. By a close reading of Descartes’s writings on imagination, I argue that the capacity to imagine does not inhere as a mode in the mind itself, but only in the embodied mind, that is, a mind that is not united to the body does not possess the faculty to imagine. As a mode considered as a (...) general property, and not as an instance of it, belongs to the essence of the substance, and as imagination (like sensation) arises from the mind-body union, then the problem arises of knowing to what extent a Cartesian embodied mind is separable from the body. (shrink)

Birke, a feminist biologist who has written extensively on the connections between feminism and science, seeks to bridge the gap between feminist cultural analysis and science by looking "inside" the body, using ideas in anatomy and physiology to develop the feminist view that the biological body is socially and culturally constructed. She rejects the assumption that the body's functioning is fixed and unchanging, claiming that biological science offers more than just a deterministic narrative of how nature works. Annotation copyrighted by (...) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Francis Dunlop; Public Criteria and Private Experience: a reply to P. McKenzie, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 137–1.

Francis Dunlop; The Abolition of Morality?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 33, Issue 3, 16 December 2002, Pages 473–484, https://doi.org/10.1111/146.

There exists a significant disparity within society between individuals in terms of intelligence. While intelligence varies naturally throughout society, the extent to which this impacts on the life opportunities it affords to each individual is greatly undervalued. Intelligence appears to have a prominent effect over a broad range of social and economic life outcomes. Many key determinants of well-being correlate highly with the results of IQ tests, and other measures of intelligence, and an IQ of 75 is generally accepted as (...) the most important threshold in modern life. The ability to enhance our cognitive capacities offers an exciting opportunity to correct disabling natural variation and inequality in intelligence. Pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers, such as modafinil and methylphenidate, have been shown to have the capacity to enhance cognition in normal, healthy individuals. Perhaps of most relevance is the presence of an ‘inverted U effect’ for most pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers, whereby the degree of enhancement increases as intelligence levels deviate further below the mean. Although enhancement, including cognitive enhancement, has been much debated recently, we argue that there are egalitarian reasons to enhance individuals with low but normal intelligence. Under egalitarianism, cognitive enhancement has the potential to reduce opportunity inequality and contribute to relative income and welfare equality in the lower, normal intelligence subgroup. Cognitive enhancement use is justifiable under prioritarianism through various means of distribution; selective access to the lower, normal intelligence subgroup, universal access, or paradoxically through access primarily to the average and above average intelligence subgroups. Similarly, an aggregate increase in social well-being is achieved through similar means of distribution under utilitarianism. In addition, the use of cognitive enhancement within the lower, normal intelligence subgroup negates, or at the very least minimises, several common objections to cognitive enhancement. Subsequently, this paper demonstrates that there is a compelling case for cognitive enhancement use in individuals with lower, normal intelligence. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall suggest that, what Descartes supported in his letter to More of August 1649, when he claimed that God’s essence might be present everywhere, was not that God can’t exist without being extended, i.e. being omnipresent, but that God has necessarily the disposition to be extended. If my interpretation is correct, then the claim that God’s essence is omnipresent is consistent with the thesis that God is omnipresent ratione potentiæ.

SummaryThis article examines the role played by conceptions of friendship in the francophone Catholic world during the early-to-mid twentieth century, focusing particularly on the review La Relève, a significant French Canadian publication of the 1930s and 1940s. For many francophone Catholic intellectuals during this period, friendship signalled a shared commitment to common religious, social and political goals. These notions of community and friendship were especially central to Catholic thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, who participated in the personalist (...) movement, an influential current of philosophy in mid-twentieth-century France. While the young writers at La Relève were initially a small and cliquish group of old schoolmates, their growing interest in personalism led them to conceive of their group in more inclusive and communitarian terms. Their personal ties to Maritain also allowed them to cultivate links with a broader, international network of francophone Catholic authors. These relationships would come to fruition during the Second World War, when the Relève group would act as publishers for many European anti-fascist intellectuals living in North American exile. The example of La Relève thus allows us to see how friendship served as both an idealised form of social relationship and a means for building up a larger community of like-minded Catholic intellectuals and social activists. (shrink)

Full Disclosure: This is the fourth start of an invited editorial. Rapidly changing conditions and circumstances have made its topic, authoritarianism and the presence of strongman presidents, even...

Utilizing the writings of Pierre Bourdieu and Sheldon Wolin,this paper introduces a special issue on ``Educational Rights andEntitlements.'' Its purpose is to characterize and critique `the box ofliberalism' that both advances and constrains what is conceived andenacted in education. Following it are a set of significantcontributions from the sixth biennial conference of the InternationalNetwork of Philosophers of Education, August 1998, Ankara.

This essay addresses the troubling and uncanny figure of Mother in feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, literary criticism, and real life. Readings of feminist literary criticism and the films Alien and Aliens explore the liminality of Mother and the consequences for feminist thought and practice of the persistent narrative modes (the sentimental and the gothic) locatable in all of these discourses on/of Motherhood.

This paper explores how horses are represented in the discourses of "natural horsemanship" , an approach to training and handling horses that advocates see as better than traditional methods. In speaking about their horses, NH enthusiasts move between two registers: On one hand, they use a quasi-scientific narrative, relying on terms and ideas drawn from ethology, to explain the instinctive behavior of horses. Within this mode of narrative, the horse is "other" and must be understood through the human learning to (...) communicate and through appropriate training. On the other hand, NH enthusiasts—like many horse owners—seek to emphasize partnership. In this type of discourse, people portray their horses as almost human. The tensions between these two ways of talking about horses reflect contradictory ideas about control versus freedom in relating to horses, especially as related to emotions expressed by caregivers about their relationships with horses. (shrink)

The book then addresses the human/animal opposition implicit in much feminist theorizing, arguing that the opposition helps to maintain the essentialism that feminists have so often criticized. The final chapter brings us back from ideas of what 'the animal' is, to ask how these questions might relate to environmental politics, including ecofeminism and animal rights.

Kant’s Mathematical World (KMW) is a strikingly original, richly detailed account of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics as a reckoning with the long-held understa.

This article explores relationships of youth power in a set of threads leading to the potential of today’s youth activism to combat the climate crisis. Following an introduction featuring Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, the threads are these: First from an American context is history of youth development, with one emphasis on the construction of adolescence. Second is learning experience about the US environment with its own national ‘exceptionalist’ history. Third is the role of inspiring youth movements, from history and contemporary times. (...) Fourth is a turn to climate activism by youth as central to democracy. One general thematic about youth power across the article is that it oftentimes takes on a mythical character. (shrink)

This study develops and tests an empirical model of consumer punishing behaviours in third-party ethically questionable situations. The model examines the impact of perceived injustice, consumer-company identification, identification with the victim, and consumer involvement on punishing behaviours. A number of ‘real-life’ ethical scenarios are employed to generate over 1000 data responses from a self-administered questionnaire. The positive influence of perceived injustice on punishing behaviours is the most supported hypothesis of the study. The relation between consumer-company identification and punishment is in (...) part mediated through perceived injustice and also depended upon the employed scenario, with both negative and positive relations identified. An important positive relationship between identification with the victim and punishment behaviour was identified. No significant support exists for the influence of consumer involvement in the issue on punishing behaviours. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the historical and cultural genealogy of the presumed separation between ethics and economic theory, taking publicly supported care for children of working mothers (or parents) as a case that illuminates problems for thinking about gender justice that arise because of these disciplinary boundaries and the particular concept of “the human individual” that is implicit in them. Care for children of working mothers is an issue that has been important in the West since the inception of “second wave” (...) feminism. However, I argue that the global expectation that women are responsible for care of small children, coupled with the reality that small children really must have caregivers, makes this issue pertinent to women everywhere, and it has lately been recognized as an issue for development and global justice. Predominant political philosophies and neoclassical economics have a common philosophical root in abstract individualist method. I argue that this has made possible a claim of intellectual respectability for neo-liberal politics that resists feminist and postcolonial critique, even though these critiques show its inability to deal with matters, such as the need for child care, that have moral issues inextricably involved in them. The economy of rationalindividual self-interest has so far only generated child care with a very large component of exploitation of caregivers. (shrink)

The philosopher Enrique Dussel offers a critical analysis of European construction of indigenous peoples which he calls "transmodern." His theory is especially relevant to feminist and other concerns about the potential disabling effects of postmodern approaches for political action and the development of theory. Dussel divides modernity into two concurrent paradigms. Reflection on them suggests that modernism and postmodernism should not be too strongly distinguished. In conclusion, his approach is compared with that of Mohanty.

Prelude : scientists as prophets and the rhetoric of prophecy -- The Delphic oracle and ancient prophetic ethos -- The natural magician and the prophet : Francis Bacon's ethical alchemy -- Confirming signs : the prophetic ethos of the early Royal Society -- Interlude : competing ethical models and a catch-22 -- J. Robert Oppenheimer : cultic prophet -- Rachel Carson, kairotic prophet -- Media, metaphor, and the "oracles of science" -- Climate change and the technologies of prophecy -- Postlude (...) : problems and solutions. (shrink)

This article discusses the theoretical and practical experiment of creating, promoting and co-teaching a medical humanities course: Medicine, War and the Arts at a School of Medicine in the United States from the viewpoint of the students who took the class. Specifically, it analyses how three themes emerged in students’ responses to the oral, literary and visual stories of war and trauma in the course and how they revealed the subjective and ambivalent nature of all medical encounters with patients. The (...) conclusion is that actively encouraging students to view the role of the physician through the lens of historical and contemporary trauma enables them to contemplate the difficult question, “Who’s Your Enemy?” when caring for the sick and themselves. (shrink)

The work and ideas of Rudolf Laban, dancer, choreographer and seminal theoretician of movement and dance, have had a profound impact across a range of disciplines. This book explores this impact.