Provides an overview of the professional, legal and ethical issues teachers may encounter in the classroom and the school.

Geach's problem, the problem of accounting for the fact that judgements expressed using moral terms function logically like other judgements, stands in the way of most noncognitive analyses of moral judgements. The non-cognitivist must offer a plausible interpretation of such terms when they appear in conditionals that also explains their logical interaction with straightforward moral assertions. Blackburn and Gibbard have offered a series of accounts each of which interprets such conditionals as expressing higher order commitments. Each then invokes norms for (...) the coherent acceptance of attitudes to explain why we hold certain combinations inconsistent. Against these accounts the paper presses two related objections: (1) The norms needed to do the explanatory work cannot be strong enough to do that work without also ruling clearly consistent attitudes inconsistent. And (2), the norms of rational attitude acceptance do not neatly track the distinction between consistent and inconsistent attitudes. (shrink)

A Clearly argued and easy to read defense of Karl Popper's philosophy.

It has been argued in the conservation literature that giving conservation absolute priority over competing interests would best protect the environment. Attributing infinite value to the environment or claiming it is ‘priceless’ are two ways of ensuring this priority (e.g. Hargrove 1989; Bulte and van Kooten 2000; Ackerman and Heinzerling 2002; McCauley 2006; Halsing and Moore 2008). But such proposals would paralyse conservation efforts. We describe the serious problems with these proposals and what they mean for practical applications, and we (...) diagnose and resolve some conceptual confusions permeating the literature on this topic. (shrink)

For fifty years Hubert Dreyfus has done pioneering work which brings phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. This is a selection of his most influential essays, developing his critique of the representational model of the mind in analytical philosophy of mind and mainstream cognitive science.

Philosophers from Plato and Augustine to Heidegger, Nozick, and Baudrillard have warned us of the dangers of living on too heavy a diet of illusion and make-believe. But contemporary cultural life provides broader, more attractive opportunities to do so than have existed at any other point in history. The gentle forms of self-deceit that such experiences require of us, and that so many have regarded as ethically unwholesome or psychologically self-destructive, can in fact serve as vital means to political reconciliation, (...) cultural enrichment, and even (a kind of) utopia. -/- The first half of the book provides a highly schematic definition of simulated experience and compares it with some claims about the nature of simulation made by other philosophers about what it is for one thing to be a simulation of another. The author then provides a critical survey of the views of some major authors about the value of certain specific types of simulated experience, mainly in order to point out the many puzzling inconsistencies and ambiguities that their thoughts upon the topic often exhibit. In the second half of the book, the author defends an account of the positive social value of simulated experience and compares his own position to the ideas of a number of utopian political thinkers, as well as to Plato's famous doctrine of the "noble lie." He then makes some tentative practical suggestions about how a proper appreciation of the value of simulated experience might influence public policy decisions about such matters as the justification of taxation, paternalistic "choice management," and governmental transparency. (shrink)

This article argues that claims of divine kinship play a central role in the Bacchic gold tablets of the late classical period. While many scholars have interpreted these tablets in reference to the Orphic Zagreus myth, I contend that key details of their texts are better understood as assertions of a familial link with the gods that assured postmortem happiness. The tablets develop the Hesiodic idea of human-divine fellowship, expanding this theme to include claims of identity or kinship with the (...) gods through a variety of narrative strategies. This aspect of the tablets finds a parallel in Empedocles, who (under Orphic-Pythagorean influence) elaborates traditional human-divine fellowship into a claim that humans are exiled gods who can hope to rejoin divine society. Following this interpretive approach, I suggest that the puzzling expression “I/you fell into milk” in some tablets expresses a symbolic relation to the gods via divine breast milk. (shrink)

Many academics and world leaders have declared that there is a moral imperative to address climate change. But such claims often fall on deaf ears because the nature of the threat posed by global warming lacks many of the features of a paradigmatic moral transgression [Jamieson, Dale. 2007. The moral and political challenges of climate change. Working Paper, New York University, New York]. This paper explores these psychological obstacles to moral engagement about climate change. I argue that the temporal and (...) psychosocial distance of the threat of global warming undermines the kind of affective response that motivates moral concern. I conclude by suggesting that images focusing more on the personal and short-term consequences of global warming will generate stronger moral reactions. (shrink)

Function emerges in certain kinds of far-from-equilibrium systems. One important kind of function is that of interactive anticipation, an adaptedness to temporal complexity. Interactive anticipation is the locus of the emergence of normative representational content, and, thus, of representation in general: interactive anticipation is the naturalistic core of the evolution of cognition. Higher forms of such anticipation are involved in the subsequent macro-evolutionary sequence of learning, emotions, and reflexive consciousness.

Recently, several states in the US have made it more difficult to receive nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates in the hope of better orienting parents towards vaccination. However, little is known about how public-facing school staff implement and enforce mandate policies, including why or how often they steer parents towards nonmedical exemptions. This study focused on Michigan, which has recently added an additional burden for families seeking nonmedical exemptions. We used an anonymous online survey to assess Michigan public-school employees (...) (n = 157) about their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding Michigan's school enrollment vaccine mandate policy. Our main conclusions are that frontline school staff are generally knowledgeable about vaccines and immunization policy, but are at best ambivalent about their role in immunization governance, believing that other agents should be responsible for ensuring that children are vaccinated. Furthermore, some respondents indicated low vaccine confidence, which was associated with increased ambivalence about, or opposition to, their role in immunization governance. As more jurisdictions within and beyond the US consider introducing or tightening childhood vaccine mandates, it is increasingly important to understand how these policies can be improved by attending to the attitudes and roles of relevant frontline actors. (shrink)

If we want to be autonomous, what do we want? The author shows that contemporary value-neutral and metaphysically economical conceptions of autonomy, such as that of Harry Frankfurt, face a serious problem. Drawing on Plato, Augustine, and Kant, this book provides a sketch of how "ancient" and "modern" can be reconciled to solve it. But at what expense? It turns out that the dominant modern ideal of autonomy cannot do without a costly metaphysics if it is to be coherent.

This book is an introductory narrative of the foundational educational history and philosophy of the American system. The author presents the history of education as a part of the larger picture of the development of civilization. Therefore, the historic and philosophical antecedents of our current education system are explained.

Also included is a detailed reproduction of Bosse's rare landmark map of the river, first published in 1887-88."--BOOK JACKET.

Human life history incorporates childhood, a lengthy post-weaning period of dependency. This species-specific period provides an opportunity for extensive learning and for sophisticated cultural behaviors to develop, including crucial tool use skills. Although I agree that no individual cognitive trait singularly differentiates humans from other animals, I suggest here that without childhood, the traits that are key to human tool use would not emerge.

Guminski’s critical assessment of my version of the KCA (the “N-KCA”) is unfounded because he (1) fails to identify what is distinctive in the argument, (2) overlooks the importance of modality within KCA thought experiments, (3) does not recognize that the central arguments of the N-KCA are independent of specific mathematical accounts, and (4) overlooks key metaphysical distinctions, including that between infinite multitude and infinite magnitude. I also argue against Guminski’s “Alternative Version” of interpreting KCA thought experiments. Finally, I clarify (...) what is meant by “temporal marks” and offer some thoughts on future research directions for the KCA. (shrink)

Recently there has been a revival of philosophic interest in, and discussion of, ‘relativism’. Debates concerning relativism, however, tend to have an odd air of unreality. It is odd that while most everyone wants to refute relativism, just about no one wants to be identified as a relativist. There is even a tendency to use ‘relativist’ as an epithet of abuse. But, if relativism is universally acknowledged to be refuted, even self-refuting, then why is there so much discussion of it, (...) and why is there such a temptation to accuse opponents of this sin? The answer to this question which I wish to propose in this paper is that there are two sources for this situation. First, the fact that while no one sees themselves as relativists, many are seen as relativists suggests that there is a fair amount of current confusion in regard to what precisely ‘relativism’ is. Whenever there is a high degree of disagreement about the extension of a term, especially a term used to describe a philosophical position, it is reasonable to investigate whether there is some equivocation in the use of that term. Such an equivocation by itself, however, would not account for the present state of affairs. That ‘relativism’ is only applied to opponents suggests that there is some similarity between ‘relativist* positions, in at least some senses of that word, and some other positions that people are interested in defending. (shrink)

This is one of those cases to which Dr. 8 oodhouse's remark applies with all its force, that a method which leads to true results must have its logic — H.S Smith (" On Some of the Methods at Present in Use in Pure Geometry," p. 6) A goodly amount of modern metaphysics has concerned itself, in one form or another, with the question: what attitude should we take in regard to a language whose semantic underpinnings seem less than certain? (...) Since much of standard English is surely of this type, many philosophers have felt driven to extreme and unpalatable resolutions — wholesale rejection of attractive logical rules, radical "antirealism", "minimalism" about truth, and so forth, Scientists, however, have long dealt with analogous foundational insecurities and, under the duress of practicality, have framed a set of shifting attitudes towards language and reasoning that seem far more commonsensical than the extreme positions to which pure philosophy has often been led. Following this lead, this essay will recommend a more nuanced approach to linguistic insecurity that is neither naively optimistic nor mired in the gloomy sloughs of antirealism. (shrink)

The study of colour has become familiar territory in anthropology, linguistics, art history and archaeology. Classicists, however, have traditionally subordinated the study of colour to form. By drawing together evidence from contemporary philosophers, elegists, epic writers, historians and satirists, Mark Bradley reinstates colour as an essential informative unit for the classification and evaluation of the Roman world. He also demonstrates that the questions of what colour was and how it functioned - as well as how it could be misused (...) and misunderstood - were topics of intellectual debate in early imperial Rome. Suggesting strategies for interpreting Roman expressions of colour in Latin texts, Dr Bradley offers alternative approaches to understanding the relationship between perception and knowledge in Roman elite thought. In doing so, he highlights the fundamental role that colour performed in the realms of communication and information, and its intellectual contribution to contemporary discussions of society, politics and morality. (shrink)

The recent publication of a couple of guidebooks to some of the many crags around Armidale (in the New England area of northern New South Wales) has resulted in a bit of interest from outof-towners. (So far guides have been published on Dome Wall and Moonbi, arguably the best two crags in the district.) This article aims to give a bit of inside information on some of the climbs and, hopefully, entice some new blood (and splintered bone) to the area. (...) Fortunately, however, from your point of view as baggees and potential baggees, Armidale is a very good place to be— there are no scary routes and everything is fairly graded (particularly if you are in the back bar of the Wicklow Hotel). This, naturally enough, makes my job as bagger very difficult; however, I’ll do my best. (shrink)

The contemporary canon of what constitutes ancient political thought was fixed in the course of the nineteenth century by the then newly reigning discipline of the philosophy of history. It made little difference whether this discipline was positivistically or dialectically inclined. Whatever the methodological commitment there was general agreement that the sources of ancient wisdom on the nature and ends of social and political life were to be found in the political and ethical writings of Plato and Aristotle and, to (...) a lesser extent, Cicero. Here Cicero was read, in part, as a repository of a Stoic political wisdom that had not survived in the original texts. According to this tradition, genuine, if not final, political wisdom is to be found in the reflections of these ancient thinkers -- not a totally unexpected conclusion to come from philosophers. For these nineteenth-century practitioners of Geistesgeschichte the essence of ancient experience is distilled in its inner life, its art, literature, religion, and above all in its philosophical speculation, but not, for instance, in its political experience as recorded in its history. (shrink)

Comte’s ideas were spread in Britain through the medium of J S Mill’s System of Logic. Positivism in this version was much like the original in France: it was an historical theory about the classification of knowledge through three progressive stages. Progress referred to both scientific knowledge and civilisation. Comte’s system omitted the subject of psychology, but Mill’s followers, G H Lewes and Alexander Bain, remedied this by incorporating this discipline into the Comtean canon as an evolutionary doctrine.Comte had excluded (...) psychology from the ranks of the sciences because it lacked independence. That is, the mind’s ability to alter its environment by use of volition or will meant that it was not the sort of phenomenon that was analyzable using scientific method. Lewes, in countering this idea, based psychology in biology so as to emphasise those aspect of the discipline that were analogous to other sciences. Lewes saw the mind as the brain and regarded volition as very much like a reflex action or an instinct that might be beyond the mind’s control. Lewes also faulted Comte or classifying knowledge in an intellectual system that was not drawn from science. In place of Comte’s stages, Lewes substituted Herbert Spencer’s empirically-based notion of “ascending complexity”. This developmental thesis was not based upon natural selection, but upon the theory that both biological organism and the mind developed increased functionality as they evolved.Leslie Stephen’s positivism, unlike Lewes’, was not based upon data from neurophysiology. Instead it was a philosophical defence of a secular school of philosophy that began with Hume and Bentham and stretched forward to Lewes and Spencer. Rather perversely for a self-proclaimed member of a school that included Bentham, Stephen’s chief purpose was to attack utilitarianism, which he regarded as the opposition to evolutionary philosophy. Utilitarianism, Stephen argued, attributed too great a role to the intellect at the expense of the feelings. In his view, the latter were the important factors in decision-making and they were analogous to instincts and not subject to a utilitarian calculus. (shrink)

This article focuses on Hazlitt's treatment of Thomas Hobbes, who emerges as one of the most important figures in the lectures. Besides its importance to an understanding of Hazlitt's own thought -- which still awaits authoritative exposition -- Hazlitt's attitude sheds light on the reception of Hobbes in the early nineteenth century, and on the general intellectual climate of a period in which theorists were struggling to absorb the lessons of the Revolution.