Sustainability science seeks to extend scientific investigation into domains characterized by a distinct problem-solving agenda, physical and social complexity, and complex moral and ethical landscapes. In this endeavor it arguably pushes scientific investigation beyond its usual comfort zones, raising fundamental issues about how best to structure such investigation. Philosophers of science have long scrutinized the structure of science and scientific practices, and the conditions under which they operate effectively. We propose a critical engagement between sustainability scientists and philosophers of science (...) with respect to how to engage in scientific activity in these complex domains. We identify specific issues philosophers of science raise concerning current sustainability science and the contributions philosophers can make to resolving them. In conclusion we reflect on the steps philosophers of science could take to advance sustainability science. (shrink)

Despite its use to exemplify how the world is “flat,” India is in many ways “spiky.” Hyderabad is a prosperous hub of information–communication technology while its impoverished agricultural hinterland is best known for dysfunctional agriculture and farmer suicide. Based on the belief that a lack of knowledge and skill lay at the root of agrarian distress, the “e-Sagu” project aimed to leverage the city’s scientific expertise and ICT capability to aid cotton farmers. The project fit with a national surge of (...) “last mile” projects bringing ICT to the village, but it was unique in using ICT to connect farmers directly with agricultural scientists acting as advisors. Such projects fit the interests of many actors, which has led to an unrealistic national enthusiasm about their impacts. This article uses the first five years of the project as a lens to view the cultural nature of both indigenous agricultural knowledge and “scientific” agricultural advising. Unlike lay publics whose uptake of science is better known, with farmers the invention and adoption of agro-scientific knowledge is deeply embedded in daily productive activities and sociocultural interactions. E-Sagu eventually had to abandon its construction of agricultural science as objective and acultural, resorting to rural methods of persuasion. It also found that it could only survive by joining forces with companies promoting commodification of agricultural inputs, which was a cause of the agrarian distress it sought to alleviate. (shrink)

The nuclear disaster that Japan suffered at Fukushima in the months following March 11, 2011 has been compared with other major nuclear disasters, especially, Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986). It is more like Chernobyl in severity, the only other 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale; more like Three Mile Island in long-term effects. Yet Fukushima is not just another nuclear disaster. In ways important to engineering ethics, it is much more like Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans than (...) like any nuclear disaster. It is (primarily) a consequence of a natural disaster, the enormous earthquake and tsunami that wrecked much of northeast Japan. One lesson of Fukushima, one shared with Katrina, concerns the different roles engineers have at different stages in an engineering project (planning, designing, management, and operations). In the planning stage, engineers seem to have relatively little power to affect certain early large-scale trade-offs between public safety and public welfare. Another lesson may be the importance of not leaving complex technical systems untended. The events that made the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl inevitable lasted only a few minutes or hours; the events that made the disasters in New Orleans and Fukushima inevitable were spread over several days. Fukushima avoided a more serious disaster because the plants were not abandoned in the way New Orleans was. A third lesson concerns our ideas of heroism, especially our sense that heroism is sometimes one’s duty. An engineer’s duty sometimes includes protecting others from harm even at the risk of the engineer’s life. (shrink)

O artigo procura considerar a fecundidade da ideia de arte e da própria criação artística no interior da prática filosófica de Marilena Chaui a partir de quatro pontos: i - a defesa de uma estética que não seja meramente pautada pelo julgamento de gosto e pela experiência do belo, mas por relações ativas entre arte, vida, crítica e engajamento social; ii - um parêntese de uma história pessoal que entrelaça política, ensino e literatura; iii - uma análise da escrita não (...) apenas filosófica, mas literária da autora, em uma comparação à própria escrita de Espinosa; iv - a importância da voz e da criação no ensino de filosofia de Chaui. (shrink)

In questo articolo prenderò spunto da due affermazioni attribuite a Miles Davis per discutere un aspetto importante di quello che l’improvvisazione ci insegna sulle pratiche umane: situazioni impreviste, magari indesiderate, possono risultare stimoli sorprendenti per l’esercizio della creatività, anziché restare elementi di disturbo o solamente semplici errori. Questo esercizio di creatività è il modo in cui costruiamo ordini normativi nelle nostre pratiche, artistiche e non.

Miles Davis, supremely cool behind his shades. Billie Holiday, eyes closed and head tilted back in full cry. John Coltrane, one hand behind his neck and a finger held pensively to his lips. These iconic images have captivated jazz fans nearly as much as the music has. Jazz photographs are visual landmarks in American history, acting as both a reflection and a vital part of African American culture in a time of immense upheaval, conflict, and celebration. Charting the (...) development of jazz photography from the swing era of the 1930s to the rise of black nationalism in the ’60s, Blue Notes in Black and White is the first of its kind: a fascinating account of the partnership between two of the twentieth century’s most innovative art forms. Benjamin Cawthra introduces us to the great jazz photographers—including Gjon Mili, William Gottlieb, Herman Leonard, Francis Wolff, Roy DeCarava, and William Claxton—and their struggles, hustles, styles, and creative visions. We also meet their legendary subjects, such as Duke Ellington, sweating through a late-night jam session for the troops during World War II, and Dizzy Gillespie, stylish in beret, glasses, and goatee. Cawthra shows us the connections between the photographers, art directors, editors, and record producers who crafted a look for jazz that would sell magazines and albums. And on the other side of the lens, he explores how the musicians shaped their public images to further their own financial and political goals. This mixture of art, commerce, and racial politics resulted in a rich visual legacy that is vividly on display in Blue Notes in Black and White. Beyond illuminating the aesthetic power of these images, Cawthra ultimately shows how jazz and its imagery served a crucial function in the struggle for civil rights, making African Americans proudly, powerfully visible. (shrink)

This year I made an album with Jay Auborn. One of the tracks features a piano, a violin, a bass synthesizer, some vocals and the sound of me hitting two sticks rhythmically on the side of the piano. It is based on a previous piece of music which I wrote with Andrew Prior called Birdsong and is called Songbird. How did this happen? It started with the playing of a piano riff, a piano riff that was being played because we (...) had just performed Birdsong at a performance in London with pianist, Dunstan Belcher. This piano riff was also being played because Jay had just been listening to Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and I overlaid some violin because I was thinking about Warren Ellis and Alice Coltrane and the Mixolydian mode and In a Silent Way by Miles Davis. But I was probably thinking about Miles Davis because Jay and I were just doing impressions to each other of Miles Davis, imagining we were him writing his autobiography.... Have you ever read his autobiography? Jesus. I played some bass because I had a conversation in the week previously about how I was frightened of bass. So bass was added. In a riff. A bit like Miles Davis, but I was thinking about ‘Atoms for Peace’ and not being scared of bass... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 157-172 [Access article in PDF] Symposium: On Ken Burns's "Jazz" Jazz: America's Classical Music? 1 Lee B. Brown I VIEWERS OF KEN BURNS'S third cultural epic "Jazz" probably fell into one of three categories. 2 Some found it gripping. Some found it grating. Some found it both at once.The series has unforgettable moments: spectacular jitterbug sequences; Jimmy Lunceford's horn men fanning their trumpet bells (...) with hat mutes in sync; the close-up of the whirring cross-hand drumming of Art Blakey; the bitter-sweet glance Billie Holiday and Lester Young exchange in their last filmed appearance together; the occasional marriage of visuals to music. One riveting three minutes comes when the talking heads tune out, a 78-rpm disk of Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" is set spinning, and the thrilling notes pour out on a carousel of visual imagery—finally freeze-framing on the face of the young genius himself.On the downside, the series is massively repetitious. As a result of Burns's decision to track two major figures—Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington—from cradle to grave, the same cuts of Armstrong appear again and again, no matter what the time frame. Some of the series' commentators are particularly annoying—the fiddler of Burns's Civil War series, Matt Glaser, for instance, with his fatuous theories [End Page 157] about Louis Armstrong and Albert Einstein. And the documentary's heavy load of social freight—by Wynton Marsalis, and his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch 3 —threatens to flatten the music.The series is designed as informative entertainment, not Jazz 101. But Burns pays a price here, as he did in his documentary about baseball, in which not even the basics of the game, let alone any of the subtleties, were explained. In "Jazz" we get no explanation of what Jelly Roll Morton did to transform ragtime into jazz. (The series could easily have pressed Morton himself into service. With no sacrifice of his considerable charm, Morton did explain it, beautifully, in his recorded Library of Congress interviews. 4) Although the swing era gets big billing, no attempt is made to explain how swing rhythm actually works, as contrasted with earlier practices. (I have watched swing drummer Panama Francis entertain a packed hall with a brief but riveting illustration of how it works.)As jazz history, the film also has problems. Some legendary figures are resurrected unconvincingly. When Marsalis tells us what the legendary trumpet player Buddy Bolden sounded like, the illustrative off-camera trumpet is Marsalis's, not Bolden's, who embedded not one note in a record groove. Further, we face the tiresomely obvious problem of omissions. We hear nothing of Albert Ayler, Keith Jarrett, Sun Ra, Mildred Bailey, Benny Carter, Lennie Tristano, Erroll Garner, Eric Dolphy, Art Pepper, or Woody Herman. All we learn about Bill Evans—whose influence on jazz piano was huge—is that Miles Davis hired him even though he was white. Omissions are inevitable, of course. But there is a muted pattern to the exclusions. It was impossible for the series to avoid Benny Goodman, given his central role in the swing era. But white figures are too often either ignored or treated as alienated outsiders. We hear New York Times columnist Margo Jefferson opine that Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death because he wasn't allowed to play with black musicians. In fact, many of the greatest players—white and black—never played with musicians of their own caliber.Most figures covered in the film are treated either with respect or with reverence. But things get nasty when matters turn to avant-gardists. Thus, Branford Marsalis—Wynton's talented brother—singles out the volcanic pianist Cecil Taylor for a particularly hostile attack. 5 Instead of explaining what Ornette Coleman meant by "free jazz," Albert Murray tells us that jazz is, by definition, free music—and by implication, that Coleman's concept must be fatuous. And Wynton has complained [End Page 158] elsewhere about a jazz avant-garde retreat into what he calls "a... (shrink)

In late 2014, the jazz combo Mostly Other People Do the Killing released Blue—an album that is a note-for-note remake of Miles Davis's 1959 landmark album Kind of Blue. This is a thought experiment made concrete, raising metaphysical puzzles familiar from discussion of indiscernible counterparts. It is an actual album, rather than merely a concept, and so poses the aesthetic puzzle of why one would ever actually listen to it.

This paper argues that cool is a virtue in a specific context: that of black Americans living under a specific modality of white supremacy. But cool is not merely a coping mechanism. A historical analysis of the term shows that cool is being unimpressed by, and calm in the face of, white supremacy. This is made manifest in a style, the “cool pose,” the sophistication of which is captured in the jazz of Lester Young and Miles Davis. Thus, (...) cool is both a virtue of character and a feature of black American aesthetics. But as a cultural phenomenon, it has been appropriated by white American culture. (shrink)

A fundamental cognitive function found across a wide range of species and necessary for survival is the ability to navigate complex environments. It has been suggested that mobility may play an important role in the development of spatial skills. Despite evolutionary arguments offering logical explanations for why sex/gender differences in spatial abilities and mobility might exist, thus far there has been limited sampling from nonindustrialized and subsistence-based societies. This lack of sampling diversity has left many unanswered questions regarding the effects (...) that environmental variation and cultural norms may have in shaping mobility patterns during childhood and the development of spatial competencies that may be associated with it. Here we examine variation in mobility, performance on large-scale spatial skills, and performance on small-scale spatial skills among Twa forager/pastoralist children whose daily lives have been dramatically altered since settlement and the introduction of government-funded boarding schools. Unlike in previous findings among Twa adults, boys and girls show similar patterns of travel on all measures of mobility. We also find no significant differences in spatial task performance by gender for large- or small-scale spatial skills. Further, children performed as well as adults did on mental rotation, and they outperformed adults on the water-level task. We discuss how children’s early learning environments may influence the development of both large- and small-scale spatial skills. (shrink)

Gangestad & Simpson's account of the role of good-gene sexual selection in conditional human mating strategies is reasonably convincing, but could be more so with a little more attention to (1), dropping unnecessary sub hypotheses and especially (2) the inclusion of alternative evolutionary explanations.

This illuminating collection of essays encompasses conceptions of responsibility around the globe, as discussed by leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, ...

Being open to persuasion can help show respect for an interlocutor. At the same time, open-mindedness about morally objectionable claims can carry moral as well as epistemic risks. Our aim in this paper is to specify when there might be duty to be open to persuasion. We distinguish two possible interpretations of openness. First, openness might refer to a kind of mental state, wherein one is willing to revise or abandon present beliefs. Second, it might refer to a deliberative practice, (...) according to which one is willing to engage with opposing reasons. We suggest these two interpretations are conceptually and empirically distinct. Once disambiguated, we suggest that different contexts may make different forms of openness appropriate as expressions of respect. (shrink)

In this special issue of Human Nature we explore the possible adaptive links between teaching and learning during childhood, and we aim to expand the dialogue on the ways in which the social sciences, and in particular current anthropological research, may better inform our shifting understanding of how these processes vary in different social and ecological environments. Despite the cross-disciplinary trend toward incorporating more behavioral and cognitive data outside of postindustrial state societies, much of the published cross-cultural data is presented (...) as stand-alone population-level studies, making it challenging to extrapolate trends or incorporate both ecological and developmental perspectives. Here, contributors explore how human life history, ecological experience, cumulative culture, and ethnolinguistics impact social learning and child development in foraging and transitioning societies around the world. Using historical ethnographic data and qualitative and quantitative data from studies with contemporary populations, authors interrogate the array of factors that likely interact with cognitive development and learning. They provide contributions that explore the unique environmental, social, and cultural conditions that characterize such populations, offering key insights into processes of social learning, adaptive learning responses, and culture change. This series of articles demonstrates that children are taught culturally and environmentally salient skills in myriad ways, ranging from institutionalized instruction to brief, nuanced, and indirect instruction. Our hope is that this collection stimulates more research on the evolutionary and developmental implications associated with teaching and learning among humans. (shrink)

We argued in earlier work that South Africa's democratic transition accomplished more than abolishing formal apartheid and replacing it with civil and political democracy. The transition also established a platform for “transformative constitutionalism,” an aspiration and generous constitutional framework for South Africa to embark on a postliberal path toward becoming an egalitarian social and economic democracy. Manifestly, the promised social and economic transformation remains largely unfulfilled. Many South Africans blame the constitutional settlement for this failure of delivery, seeing it as (...) a weak compromise with the old regime that restricts socio-economic transformation. We reject this view and assign blame for the failure of the transformative project squarely on the politics and policies of ANC governments in power over three decades. The transformative project was not blocked by the constitutional settlement; it was never attempted. The ANC brought mostly conventional, liberal democratic goals to the transition negotiations. It embraced neoliberalism before the 1996 Constitution was drafted, indeed before the 1994 elections brought the ANC to power. Ironically, during the Final Constitution drafting process (1994-1996), ANC negotiators moved left under the inspiration of and pressure from the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM). The 1996 text is transformative in aspiration and in its toolbox of innovative legal technologies, but the ANC never took it seriously as a guide to policy. If South African politics ever realigns, future activists will find in the 1996 text a storehouse of legal values and tools meant to nourish radical social and economic change. (shrink)

Epitome V (1621), and consisted of matching an element of area to an element of time, where each was mathematically determined. His treatment of the area depended solely on the geometry of Euclid's Elements, involving only straight-line and circle propositions – so we have to account for his deliberate avoidance of the sophisticated conic-geometry associated with Apollonius. We show also how his proof could have been made watertight according to modern standards, using methods that lay entirely within his power. The (...) greatest innovation, however, occurred in Kepler's fresh formulation of the measure of time. We trace this concept in relation to early astronomy and conclude that Kepler's treatment unexpectedly entailed the assumption that time varied nonuniformly; meanwhile, a geometrical measure provided the independent variable. Even more surprisingly, this approach turns out to be entirely sound when assessed in present-day terms. Kepler himself attributed the cause of the motion of a single planet around the Sun to a set of `physical' suppositions which represented his religious as well as his Copernican convictions; and we have pared to a minimum – down to four – the number he actually required to achieve this. In the Appendix we use modern mathematics to emphasize the simplicity, both geometrical and kinematical, that objectively characterizes the Sun-focused ellipse as an orbit. Meanwhile we highlight the subjective simplicity of Kepler's own techniques (most of them extremely traditional, some newly created). These two approaches complement each other to account for his success. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ethics and Research Topics What We Know Responses.

Contemporary feminist theory by and large agrees on criticizing the traditional, autonomous subject and instead maintains a relational, dependent self, but the vocabulary used to describe the latter remains contested. These contestations are seen in comparing the approach of some feminist legal theory, as demonstrated by Martha Fineman, to the approach of some feminist theory that draws on continental philosophy, as demonstrated by Judith Butler. Fineman's concept of vulnerability emphasizes the universality of vulnerability in the human condition, arguing that a (...) “responsive state” is most conducive to producing subjects who are “resilient” in the face of neoliberal pressures. We argue that vulnerability, as an existential as opposed to a political description, is a limited rubric under which to organize against neoliberal forces. Further, we contend that Fineman's rhetoric of resilience risks reiterating a neoliberal logic of individualized self-management. In response, we look to Butler's concept of precarity, which underscores particular social conditions, as opposed to universal ontological vulnerabilities, that debilitate certain subjects. At stake is how we respond to neoliberal forces today: a vocabulary of precarity poses a more effective challenge than one of vulnerability, for it opens onto not merely individual or institutional resilience but grounded, communal resistance. (shrink)

Generative AI has captured the public imagination as a tool that promises access to expertise beyond the technical jargon and expense that traditionally characterize such infospheres as those of medicine and law. Largely absent from the current literature, however, are interrogations of generative AI’s abilities to deal in culturally responsive communication, or the expertise interwoven with culturally aware, socially responsible, and personally sensitive communication best practices. To interrogate the possibilities of cultural responsiveness in generative AI, we examine the patterns of (...) response that characterize ChatGPT-3.5’s advice for coming out. Specifically, we submitted 100 prompts soliciting coming out advice to GPT-3.5, variegating each of those prompts slightly to account for intersectional identities. From the analysis, we find that, while the responses are largely in-line with best practices, there are also instances that might represent problematics concerning the interpellation of the user or the persons to whom one is coming out. (shrink)

The idea that english has more than one declarative "mood" has been dismissed as superstitious by empirically-minded grammarians of english for centuries--with such spectacular unsuccess, however, that the indicative/subjunctive dichotomy stands today as a cornerstone for philosophical and logical speculation about "conditionals." let me be next into the breach. i shall urge that there is no grammatical basis for any such distinction. and as for the particular adjudications of mood logicians and philosophers actually propose, there is neither rhyme nor reason (...) to them. my bent, then, is basically destructive. but i shall also be outlining a better taxonomy. (shrink)

This paper discusses the current fashion for brain-based learning, in which value-laden claims about learning are grounded in neurophysiology. It argues that brain science cannot have the ‘authority’ about learning that some seek to give it. It goes on to discuss whether the claim that brain science is relevant to learning involves a category mistake. The heart of the paper tries to show how the contribution of brain science to our grasp of the nature of learning is limited in principle. (...) Finally the paper explores the potential of brain science to illuminate specific learning disabilities. (shrink)

By a close examination of changes in analytical chemistry between the years 1920 and 1950, I document the case that natural science has undergone and continues to undergo a major revolution. The central feature of this transformation is the rise in importance of scientific instrumentation. Prior to 1920, analytical chemists determined the chemical constitution of some unknown by treating it with a series of known compounds and observing the kind of reactions it underwent. After 1950, analytical chemists determined the chemical (...) constitution of an unknown by using a variety of instruments which allow one to discriminate chemicals in terms of their physical properties. This transformation involved changes in the practice of analytical chemistry. It involved the development of a new family of scientific instrument-making companies, and a new level of capital expenditure necessary to do analytical chemistry. It involved the development of new means to disseminate information about scientific instruments. While I do not document the broader case, these changes have been widespread throughout the natural sciences. It is the rise in the importance of instrumentation which is the key conceptual change in what has been identified as the fourth big scientific revolution. (shrink)

Working in subsystems of second order arithmetic, we formulate several representations for hypergraphs. We then prove the equivalence of various vertex coloring theorems to \, \, and \.

Molly Farneth’s Hegel’s Social Ethics hearkens back to the tradition of Josiah Royce, which has continued in the work of Richard Bernstein and Jeffrey Stout. At the same time, it reflects the impact of three decades of interpretive work which has offered an alternative to the 19th and early 20th century reading of Hegel as a metaphysical systematizer. In this new reading he was from the beginning a social critic and political theorist who looked to lay the groundwork for post‐Enlightenment (...) vision of the social world as evolving toward one of social cooperation based on mutual recognition. Farneth has developed this reading of Hegel into one of powerful resources for democratic pluralism. (shrink)

Paul Davis explores the personal and cultural significances of translating as a distinctive mode of imaginative conduct for the five principal poet-translators of what was the golden age of the art in England: John Denham, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope.

In this paper, I provide a phenomenological account of aging and show how this account can address forms of age discrimination and injustice. Such an account is becoming increasingly critical as the welfare state attempts to adjust to the aging populations of the post-industrial countries. My primary focus is the relation between aging and time. Part 1 of this study describes how time consciousness is transformed by the experience of aging, demonstrating the unique and heterogeneous quality of one's life time. (...) Part 2 suggests how phenomenology can function as a type of critical gerontology in examining the management and production of discrimination in the time of aging. (shrink)