Concerns around Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in higher education have so far largely centred on assessment integrity, resulting in fundamental questions about students’ broader engagement with these tools remaining underexplored. This paper reports on the findings of a survey that forms part of a wider study, comprising the first empirical investigation of GenAI use by university students as a method of engaging with their academic readings. Our survey of 101 students shows that over half of all students surveyed used GenAI (...) to some degree as a method of engaging with their unit readings. Our findings suggest that students turn to these tools in response to time constraints and conceptual difficulties, while maintaining complex attitudes toward their use: most welcome their availability, yet few report trusting or relying on GenAI-generated interpretations or summaries of texts. Importantly, our data reveals substantial demographic variations in usage patterns, with international students and those taking subjects as electives showing significantly higher rates of AI use to assist with reading. This suggests GenAI tools may be serving as important mediators for attempting to overcome epistemic barriers to learning, particularly for students who face additional linguistic or disciplinary challenges. (shrink)

There is a general tension between the individualised nature of current assessment practices in higher education and a collaborative approach to learning. This results in many dilemmas for educators as they try to balance academic integrity concerns and student preferences with social or collaborative assessment practices, including peer assessment, group assignments and direct assessment of teamwork or collaboration. This paper argues that focussing on singular assessment tasks or experiences tends to lead to marginal effects. Rather, we suggest that the collaborative (...) must be normalised within course structures: experiences of groupwork, peer learning and other forms of working with others should be commonplace and expected. We look to curricula to provide students with assessable tasks from many rich collaborative experiences, avoid issues of perceived and actual inequity and allow for risk and possible failure. We suggest that grading as presently enacted inhibits collaborative processes and that trust needs to be recognised as central and core to collaborative approaches. The challenges of assessing social and collaborative learning require holistic course wide attention that communicates to both students and colleagues that learning necessarily goes beyond the individual. (shrink)

Margaret Whitford's study provides the ideal introduction to Irigaray's thought, offering a sustained interpretation of her whole corpus, including previously untranslated French texts. Whitford suggests that Irigaray's work should be seen as "philosophy in the feminine," actively opposing the complicity of philosophy with other social practices which exclude or marginalize women.

ABSTRACTThe role of Concrete Utopias in the works of Roy Bhaskar are contrasted with the ‘Real Utopias’ of Erik Olin Wright. Critical Realism treats them as ‘possibilities’ that are real because re...

Along the way, she calls upon us to recognize the mysteries that lie at the heart of our lives and the metaphysical reality that gives meaning to life.The ...

Fifteen original essays open up a novel area of inquiry: the distinctively ethical dimensions of women's experiences of and in aging. Contributors distinguished in the fields of feminist ethics and the ethics of aging explore assumptions, experiences, practices, and public policies that affect women's well-being and dignity in later life. The book brings to the study of women's aging a reflective dimension missing from the empirical work that has predominated to date. Ethical studies of aging have so far failed to (...) emphasize gender. And feminist ethics has neglected older women, even when emphasizing other dimensions of 'difference.' Finally work on aging in all fields has focused on the elderly, while this volume sees aging as an extended process of negotiating personal and social change. (shrink)

This essay investigates a strand of left-republicanism that emerged in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The solidarists developed a distinctive theory of social property and a thorough critique of the liberal, republican, and socialist alternatives. Solidarism rests on the claim that the modern division of labor creates a social product that does not naturally belong to the individuals who control it as their private property; property, therefore, should be conceived as “common wealth,” divided into individual and (...) public shares. When the wealthy appropriate a disproportionate share, they have a quasi-contractual debt to society that they are obliged to repay. The concepts of social debt, common-wealth, reparations, and rent (“unearned increment”) played an important role in legitimizing egalitarian policies, but they have been largely forgotten today. This article resuscitates the theoretical arguments introduced by the solidarists and explains their relevance for contemporary debates about alternative economic arrangements. (shrink)

I briefly reprise a few themes of my book Moral Understandings in order to address some questions about responsibility and justification. I argue for a thoroughly situated and naturalized view of moral justification that warns us not to take moral universalism too easily at face value. I also argue for the significance of reports of experience, among other kinds of empirical evidence, in testing the habitability of moral forms of life.

The paper argues that the liberal approach to social rights is contradictory and provides an alternative account that draws on solidarism, a strand of nineteenth-century French Republican thought. Solidarism links together a normative theory of social obligation and a descriptive account of social value, debt and unearned increment. The theory of social property provides a distinctive foundation for social rights.

This article reviews the development of feminist studies during the latter quarter of the twentieth century, identifying initial themes in feminist theory and highlighting three major themes framing feminist scholarship today: the relationship between structure and agency; the intersection of race, class, and gender; and emerging studies of the political economy of sexuality. The article emphasizes the significance of understanding structured inequality, including new studies of sexuality and their relationship to race/class/gender stratification.

This chapter contains sections titled: Bioethics as “Dilemma‐motivated” The Expanding Universe of Bioethics Issues Institutional Settings of Bioethics Bioethics and Moral Reasoning Bioethics as Minimally Conventional Bioethics as Interdisciplinary The Core Theoretical Problems of Bioethics Attacks on Bioethics Can Bioethics Provide Answers? The Scope of Bioethics: From Western to Global The Future of Bioethics The Social Role of Bioethics “Uncontested Core” of Bioethics Acknowledgments.

George Berkeley's arguments have attracted a good deal of attention, but the account of abstraction has been often treated as if it were an entirely independent piece of writing. Berkeley links Locke's use of abstract general ideas to a belief in the possibility of an idea of existence abstracted from perception, that is, to the central issue of the Principles of Human Knowledge. The mistake Berkeley has been pointing to, the reliance on abstract general ideas, is a philosophical mistake, but (...) here it is clear Berkeley takes this mistake to have far‐reaching consequences, diverting the search for knowledge from what would be useful to know into trivial byways. Having identified the consequences of a mistaken belief in abstract ideas, Berkeley returns to his earlier claim, that it is language that leads us into this error. (shrink)

Inflammatory responses are essential for the clearance of pathogens and the repair of injured tissues; however, if these responses are not properly controlled chronic inflammation can occur. Chronic inflammation is now recognized as a contributing factor to many age‐associated diseases including metabolic disorders, arthritis, neurodegeneration, and cardiovascular disease. Due to the connection between chronic inflammation and these diseases, it is essential to understand underlying mechanisms behind this process. In this review, factors that contribute to chronic inflammation are discussed. Further, we (...) emphasize the emerging roles of microRNAs (miRNAs) and other noncoding RNAs (ncRNA) in regulating chronic inflammatory states, making them important future diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets. Copyright Line: © 2015 The Authors BioEssays Published by Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. (shrink)

Locke, in his discussion of essences, makes extensive use of a distinction he introduces between nominal and real essences. This distinction has always been found interesting and important, and in fact, R.I. Aaron said of it that ‘there is no more important distinction in the Essay.’ Nevertheless, to say there has not been general agreement about what Locke was getting at is putting it mildly. Interpretations of Locke's point in making such a distinction have varied widely, depending upon whether the (...) importance of the real or the nominal essence is stressed. Locke tells us we should distinguish the nominal essence, which is the abstract idea to which a general name is attached and for which it stands, from the real essence, which is the ‘real internal, but generally in Substances, unknown Constitution of Things, whereon their discoverable Qualities depend.’. (shrink)

In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act that ended the entitlement of poor families to government assistance. The debate leading up to that transformation in welfare policy occurred in the shadow of Speenhamland—an episode in English Poor Law history. This article revisits the Speenhamland episode to unravel its tangled history. Drawing on four decades of recent scholarship, the authors show that Speenhamland policies could not have had the consequences that have been attributed to (...) them. The article ends with an alternative narrative that seeks to explain how the Speenhamland story became so deeply entrenched. (shrink)

Volume 18, Issue 5, October 2019, Page 535-544.

This essay provides an interpretation of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī, a controversial figure in nineteenth-century Islamic political thought. One aspect of this controversy is the tension between "Refutation of the Materialists," Afghānī's well-known defense of religious orthodoxy, and a short newspaper article entitled "Reply to Renan" that dismisses prophetic religion as dogmatic and intellectually stifling. In this essay I argue that close attention to Afghānī's theory of civilization helps resolve this apparent contradiction. Afghānī's interest in Ibn Khaldūn and the French (...) historian Guizot is well known, but has not been fully explored in the literature. I suggest that understanding Guizot's distinctive approach to the concept of civilization illuminates Afghānī's writings on the political utility of religion. Afghānī was an ardent anti-imperialist and his goal was to encourage reform in Islamic countries while resisting Western hegemony. He concluded that the tension between prophetic religion and critical thought could help Islamic civilization to flourish. (shrink)

Berkeley published the New Theory in 1709, the Principles in 1710, and Three Dialogues in 1713. These three books, while differing from one another in form and in content, nevertheless display considerable overlap with one another, covering much the same ground. There is no reason to regard the use Berkeley makes of idealism and claims based on idealism to be significantly different in the New Theory from the other works, and the conclusions he draws there are similar to those of (...) the later works. The Principles certainly differs from the New Theory but is like Three Dialogues in explicitly endorsing an idealist ontology. Nevertheless, the Principles does differ from Three Dialogues in offering considerably less argumentation for this ontology. It can be surmised that Berkeley was acutely aware of the difficulties of convincing others of the truth of his theory, and was prepared to think and re‐think the best way of putting his arguments persuasively. (shrink)

This chapter includes Margaret Floy Washburn’s discussion of the basis of inferences about animal minds and her discussion of what it is like to be an amoeba.