Abstract Differing interpretations of the political thought of David Hume have tended to emphasize either conservative, gradualist elements similar to Burke or rationalist aspects similar to Hobbes. The concept of indirect utility as used by Hume reconciles these two approaches. Indirect utility is best illustrated by Hume's conception of justice, in contrast to his conception of benevolence, which yields direct benefits. This understanding of Hume's consequentialism also helps underscore certain egalitarian aspects of Hume's thought.

From the late eighteenth through the end of the nineteenth century, educational philosophers and practitioners debated the benefits and shortcomings of the use of emulation in schools. During this period, “emulation” referred to a pedagogy that leveraged comparisons between students as a tool to motivate them to higher achievement. Many educationists praised emulation as a necessary and effective motivator. Other educationists condemned it for its tendency to foster invidious competition between students and to devalue learning. Ultimately, by the late nineteenth (...) century emulation as a specific pedagogical practice had disappeared in American educational culture. In this article, Mark Jonas and Drew Chambers ask whether the disappearance of emulation is something to be celebrated or lamented. To answer this question they examine the historical concept of educational emulation and analyze the bases on which proponents and opponents argued. Parties on both sides of the debate framed their arguments in close relation to the way emulation was being used at that time, which prioritized actual competitions and prizes. In that context, the opponents made a better case, which presumably contributed to emulation's disappearance in schools afterwards. However, as earlier proponents of emulation argued, emulation need not be restricted to competitions and prizes. Instead, these proponents offered a philosophically and psychologically rich defense of emulation, but these were not carried through to an appropriate degree. The authors conclude that, construed appropriately, emulation not only had tremendous educational potential then, but still does today. With intentional effort on the part of teachers, emulation can greatly enrich students' lives and act as a powerful learning motivator. (shrink)

Patricia White (Stud Philos Educ 18:43–52, 1999) argues that the virtue gratitude is essential to a flourishing democracy because it helps foster universal and reciprocal amity between citizens. Citizens who participate in this reciprocal relationship ought to be encouraged to recognize that “much that people do does in fact help to make communal civic life less brutish, pleasanter and more flourishing.” This is the case even when the majority of citizens do not intentionally seek to make civic life better for (...) others. Were citizens to recognize the appropriateness of gratitude in these situations, the bonds of our democratic communities would be strengthened. In this paper, I examine White’s argument more carefully, arguing that it fails to address adequately the difficulties that arise when we attempt to encourage the virtue of gratitude in our students. To address these difficulties, I turn to an unlikely source for democratic inspiration: Friedrich Nietzsche. In spite of his well-known anti-democratic sentiments, Nietzsche offers democratic citizens insights into the social value of gratitude. I argue that Nietzsche’s ideas resolve the educational difficulties in White’s argument and viably establish gratitude as an important democratic virtue that ought to be cultivated. (shrink)

This commentary highlights methods for using scalp EEG to make inferences about contextual field interactions, which, in view of the target article, may be specially relevant to the study of schizophrenia. Although scalp EEG has limited spatial resolution, prior knowledge combined with experimental manipulations may be used to strengthen inferences about underlying brain processes. Both spatial and temporal context are discussed within the framework of nonlinear interactions. Finally, results from a visual contour integration EEG pilot study are summarized in view (...) of a hypothesis that relates receptive field and contextual field processing to evoked and induced activity, respectively. (shrink)

Scholars who consider the relationship between Marx’s and Hegel’s scientific method often make a critical mistake. In the exposition of the manner in which Marx had made use of Hegel’s logic, they fail to consider the relationship between form and content in the logical progression of categories. They fail to comprehend the circular nature of scientific method, with its attending concepts of “dialectic” and Aufhebung.

"Explores the concept of the social contract and how it shapes citizenship. Argues that the modern social contract is an account of the ethical and cultural conditions upon which modern citizenship depends"--Provided by publisher.

Many medical services lack robust evidence of effectiveness and may therefore be considered “unnecessary” care. Proactively withdrawing resources from, or de-funding, such services and redirecting the savings to services that have proven effectiveness would enhance overall health system performance. Despite this, governments have been reluctant to discontinue funding of services once funding is in place. The focus of this study is to understand how the framing of an issue or problem influences government decision-making related to de-funding of medical services. To (...) achieve this, a framework describing how problem frames, or explanatory naratives, influence government policy decisions was developed and applied to actual cases. The two cases selected were the Ontario government’s decisions to de-fund the drug Oxycontin and blood glucose test strips used by patients with diabetes. A qualitative content analysis of public discourse surrounding these two resource withdrawal examples was conducted and described using the framework. In the framework, government decision-making is a partial reflection of the visibility of the policy issue and complexity of the causal story told within a problem frame. By applying this framework and considering these two key characteristics of problem frames, we can better understand, and possibly predict, the shape and timing of government policy decisions to withdraw resources from medical services. (shrink)

Across Tibet during the 1940s, young Han Chinese weather observers became stranded at their weather stations, where they faced illness, poverty and isolation as they pleaded with their superiors for relief. Building on the premise that China exercised ‘imperial nationalism’ in Tibet, and in light of scholarship that emphasizes the desirous ‘gaze’ of imperial observers toward the frontier, this essay considers how the meteorological archive might disrupt our understanding of the relationship between observation and empire. Meteorology presented a new way (...) of viewing the landscape that deliberately disregarded the embodied experience of the observer in favour of instrument-mediated readings. The process produced a bifurcated archive, in which stations disseminated quantitative weather charts as a matter of public interest while privately recording the embodied and often miserable experiences of observational staff on the frontier. Unpublished letters between observers and supervisors offer a rare glimpse into the frontier as experienced by reluctant or unwilling agents of the state. (shrink)

A series of observations concerning the books of Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah raise questions about prophecy's very nature and pose the issues of definition and interpretation in a way that can help to address this problem for modern readers of biblical prophecy.

Managed care is evolving in ways that pose unique ethical challenges to those interested in the intersection of clinical and organizational ethics. For example, Disease Management is a form of managed care that has emerged in response to chronic illness. DM is a healthcare management tool that coordinates resources across an entire health care delivery system and throughout the life cycle of chronic disease. Health Maintenance Organizations have reduced some costs in the delivery of acute care, but real cost savings (...) will result only with greater efficiencies in the delivery of costly chronic care. DM is a systematic, population-based approach that identifies persons at risk of chronic ailment, intervenes with specific programs of care, measures clinical and other outcomes, and provides continuous quality improvement. Characterized as a movement to patient-driven services, DM involves a complex web of provider relations. (shrink)

The volume begins with what is in common to contemporary phenomenological historians and historiographers. That is the understandings that temporality is the core of human judgment conditioning in its forms how we consciously attend and judge phenomena. For every phenomenological historian or historiographer, all history is an event, a span of time. This time span is not external to the individual, rather forms the content and structure of every judgment of the person. It is the logic used by the individual (...) to structure the phenomenon attended. Rather than the phenomenon being seen as something solely external, it is understood by phenomenologists as also of our immediate awareness and thought. Thus, the phenomenological method discerns all judgment as based upon one’s span of attention of inner or outer phenomena.. There is an intentionality to attention. One intends one’s own foci. Attention is the temporal duration of that intending. The volume offers a text that enables contemporary historians, graduate students, and even undergraduates who are well taught, to understand both the history of phenomenology as a method of inquiry, and the contemporary practice of phenomenological historical and historiographical thought. (shrink)

For those who teach students in psychology, education, and the social sciences, the _Handbook of Demonstrations and Activities in the Teaching of Psychology, Second Edition_ provides practical applications and rich sources of ideas. Revised to include a wealth of new material, these invaluable reference books contain the collective experience of teachers who have successfully dealt with students' difficulty in mastering important concepts about human behavior. Each volume features a table that lists the articles and identifies the primary and secondary courses (...) in which readers can use each demonstration. Additionally, the subject index facilitates retrieval of articles according to topical headings, and the appendix notes the source as it originally appeared in _Teaching of Psychology_, the official journal of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, Division Two of the American Psychological Association. Volume I consists of 97 articles about strategies for teaching introductory psychology, statistics, research methods, and the history of psychology classes. Divided into four sections, the book suggests ways to stimulate interest, promote participation, grasp psychological terminology, and master necessary scientific skills. (shrink)

Otto Bauer has emerged once more in the thought of Western Marxists. The dominant theoretical voice of the Austrian Social Democrats in the late Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the First Austrian Republic, Bauer was re-examined in the 1970s and ’80s as ‘the third way’ was being explored in European politics by Eurocommunists. Bauer again is being discussed in the twenty-first century as not only a European ‘third way’, but as a model for nations across the globe. Bauer’s vision theoretically as well (...) as tactically between 1919 and 1934, when Austrian fascism ended the political efforts of Austrian Social Democracy, was of a pluralist parliamentary governance that sought through party coalitions and the influence of social experiment a developing societal praxis whose socialist principles would realise eventually Marx’s understanding of a classless society. A gradualism in long-range strategy and tactics would lead democratically to greater collective coexistence embracing differing cultures within and beyond separate nations. Reviewed here are five publications between 2005 and 2011 which are either thoughtfully supportive or critically dismissive of Bauer’s multi-cultural models for the socialist coexistence of communities and nations. Two conference collections and three books on Bauer’s thought and political life enable the contemporary mind to evaluate the seminal promise of Bauer’s Marxist understanding, where for him Marxism was a social-scientific instrument to guide societal development. (shrink)

Cognition and Temporality argues that both verbal grammar and figural grammar have their cognitive basis in twelve characteristic forms of judgment, distributed among individuals in human populations throughout history. These twelve logical forms are context-free and language-free foundations in our attentional awareness, and shape all verbal and figural statements. Moreover, these types of historical judgment are psychogenetic inheritances in a population, and each serves a distinct problem-solving function in the human species. Through analysis of verbal and figural statements, the author (...) contends, the researcher can find evidence of these forms of judgment, and in turn analyze how the event to which those statements attend is formally constructed by that judgment. This construction guides how the event is assessed, approached, and engaged in the process of problem-solving. Artists and aestheticians in the early twentieth century--including Wassily Kandinsky, Stephen C. Pepper, and Andrew Paul Ushenko--have all posited an inherited attentional perspective in individuals, manifested in the logical correspondence between their distinctive verbal and figural grammars. Cognition and Temporality elaborates these claims, arguing that while the styles of well-known artists and writers are conditioned by the public styles of a particular time period, variations in personal style manifest one's inherited form of judgment, and the characteristic grammars that express that form. Through rigorous visual and stylistic analysis, the author demonstrates the expression of these forms among notable writers and artists across history. The result is a wide-ranging and provocative contribution to phenomenology, aesthetic philosophy, and cultural history. (shrink)

This study examines how Germany and Austria each generated a normative narrative structure that became a template for the historians and others who formulated history within the two cultures. The author demonstrates these narrative structures and indicates both their strengths and weaknesses and ways to broaden their understandings.

Some adaptationist explanations are regarded as maximally solid and others fanciful just-so stories. Just-so stories are explanations based on very little evidence. Lack of evidence leads to circular-sounding reasoning: “this trait was shaped by selection in unseen ancestral populations and this selection must have occurred because the trait is present.” Well-supported adaptationist explanations include evidence that is not only abundant but selected from comparative, populational, and optimality perspectives, the three adaptationist subdisciplines. Each subdiscipline obtains its broad relevance in evolutionary biology (...) via assumptions that can only be tested with the methods of the other subdisciplines. However, even in the best-supported explanations, assumptions regarding variation, heritability, and fitness in unseen ancestral populations are always present. These assumptions are accepted given how well they would explain the data if they were true. This means that some degree of “circularity” is present in all evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary explanation corresponds not to a deductive structure, as biologists usually assert, but instead to ones such as abduction or induction. With these structures in mind, we show the way to a healthier view of “circularity” in evolutionary biology, and why integration across the comparative, populational, and optimality approaches is necessary. (shrink)

An interdisciplinary exploration of the forms, implications, and potentials of cinematic thinking.

Over the last decade, philosophers of education have begun taking a renewed interest in Rousseau’s educational thought. This is a welcome development as his ideas are rich with educational insights. His philosophy is not without its flaws, however. One significant flaw is his educational project for females, which is sexist in the highest degree. Rousseau argues that females should be taught to “please men…and make [men’s] lives agreeable and sweet.” The question becomes how could Rousseau make such strident claims, especially (...) in light of his far more insightful ideas concerning the education of males. This paper attempts to make sense of Rousseau’s ideas on the education of females. While I maintain that Rousseau’s project for Sophie ought to be rejected, I argue that we should try to understand how this otherwise insightful thinker could make such surprising claims. Is it a bizarre inconsistency in his philosophical reasoning or an expression of his unabashed misogyny, as so many have claimed? I argue that it is neither. Rather, it is a product of his conception of human happiness and his belief in the irreducible role human sexual relations has in achieving and prolonging that happiness. For Rousseau, sex, love and happiness are inextricably connected, and he believes that men and women will be happiest when they inhabit certain sex roles—not because sex roles are valuable in themselves, but because only through them can either men or women hope to be happy. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of self-overcoming has been largely misinterpreted in the philosophy of education journals. The misinterpretation partially stems from a misconstruction of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, and leads to a conception of self-overcoming that is inconsistent with Nietzsche’s educational ideals. To show this, I examine some of the prominent features of the so-called “debate” of the 1980s surrounding Nietzsche’s conception of self-overcoming. I then offer an alternative conception that is more consistent with Nietzsche’s thought, and (...) provides a more nuanced understanding of Nietzsche’s “anti-democratic” pedagogy. Ultimately, I argue that while Nietzsche’s educational philosophy is not egalitarian, it can be effectively utilized in “democratic” classrooms, assuming his concept of self-overcoming is properly construed. (shrink)

Critics of reliability theories of epistemic justificationoften claim that the `generality problem' is an insurmountabledifficulty for such theories. The generality problem is theproblem of specifying the level of generality at which abelief-forming process is to be described for the purposeof assessing its reliability. This problem is not asintractable as it seems. There are illuminating solutionsto analogous problems in the ethics literature. Reliabilistsought to attend to utilitarian approaches to choices betweeninfinite utility streams; they also ought to attend towelfarist approaches to social (...) choice situations that donot demand full aggregation of individual welfares.These analogies suggest that the traditional `single number'approach to reliability is misguided. I argue that a newapproach – the `vector reliability' approach – is preferable.Vector reliability theories associate target beliefs withreliability vectors – that is, structured collections ofreliability numbers – and construct criteria of epistemicjustification that appeal to these vectors. The bulk of thetheoretical labor involved in a reliability account of epistemicjustification is thus transferred from picking a uniquereliability number to constructing a plausible criterionof epistemic justification. (shrink)

‘‘Adaptive radiation’’ is an evocative metaphor for explosive evolutionary divergence, which for over 100 years has given a powerful heuristic to countless scientists working on all types of organisms at all phylogenetic levels. However, success has come at the price of making ‘‘adaptive radiation’’ so vague that it can no longer reflect the detailed results yielded by powerful new phylogeny-based techniques that quantify continuous adaptive radiation variables such as speciation rate, phylogenetic tree shape, and morphological diversity. Attempts to shoehorn the (...) results of these techniques into categorical ‘‘adaptive radiation: yes/no’’ schemes lead to reification, in which arbitrary quantitative thresholds are regarded as real. Our account of the life cycle of metaphors in science suggests that it is time to exchange the spent metaphor for new concepts that better represent the full range of diversity, disparity, and speciation rate across all of life. (shrink)

Is it possible to advance democracy by empowering ordinary citizens to make key decisions about the design of political institutions and policies? In 2004, the government of British Columbia embarked on a bold democratic experiment: it created an assembly of 160 near-randomly selected citizens to assess and redesign the province's electoral system. The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly represents the first time a citizen body has had the power to reform fundamental political institutions. It was an innovative gamble that has been (...) replicated elsewhere in Canada and in the Netherlands, and is gaining increasing attention in Europe as a democratic alternative for constitution-making and constitutional reform. In the USA, advocates view citizens' assemblies as a means for reforming referendum processes. This book investigates the citizens' assembly in British Columbia to test and refine key propositions of democratic theory and practice. (shrink)