John Dewey stated that ‘[h]owever far apart philosophy and educational theory may later have become, in their beginnings they were strictly identical.' Dewey's ‘progressivism' in Democracy and Education rests on this communion. A self-reflective philosophical education by the community, about the community, for the community, would create the conditions for the advance of social justice. But new progressive ideas championing redistributive justice might appear to be in worryingly short supply. That is one reason, among many, why Philip Kitcher’s The Main (...) Enterprise of the World is to be welcomed. His rethinking about education amounts to a radical re-education of our thinking about social justice, seeking redistribution of wealth, reduction of privilege, and a redefinition of what is valuable for people and planet in regard to production, distribution, and consumption. I will summarize his book and offer critical thoughts on it relating to three themes: the relation of his proposed Deweyan Society to some current and powerful criticisms of Western rationality; his proposals for classrooms; and the extent to which its own pragmatic philosophical justifications are open to deeper philosophical and educational significance. (shrink)

This book uses the philosophy of Wittgenstein as a perspective from which to challenge the idea of a critical social theory, represented pre-eminently by Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar.

Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth’s surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for political issue formation. The first section reviews the emergence – and eventual turn away from – concern (...) with ‘revolutions of the earth’ during the 18th- and 19th-century discovery of ‘geohistory’. The second section looks at the subterranean world both as an object of ‘downward’ looking territorial imperatives and as the ultimate power source of all socio-political life. The third section weighs up the prospects of ‘earth system governance’. The paper concludes with some general thoughts about the possibilities of ‘negotiating strata’ in more generative and judicious ways. (shrink)

The claim is frequently made that, as cities become loaded up with information and communications technology and a resultant profusion of data, so they are becoming sentient. But what might this mean? This paper offers some insights into this claim by, first of all, reworking the notion of the social as a spatial complex of ‘outstincts’. That makes it possible, secondly, to reconsider what a city which is aware of itself might look like, both by examining what kinds of technological (...) practices are becoming commonplace and by considering the particular case of spatial awareness. In turn, this leads to a third rumination on how cities might become aware as different kinds of sprite, channelling outstincts in spatially variable ways. Whatever the case, it is clear that new technical-artistic interventions are required if these sprites are not to become simply servants of the security–entertainment complex. Some of these interventions are examined in the fourth part of the paper. (shrink)

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein’s reflections bring into view the phenomenon of basic certainty. He explores this phenomenon mostly in relation to our certainty with regard to empirical states of affairs. Drawing on these seminal observations and reflections, I extend the inquiry into what I call “basic moral certainty”, arguing that the latter plays the same kind of foundational role in our moral practices and judgements as basic empirical certainty does in our epistemic practices and judgements. I illustrate the nature and (...) significance of basic moral certainty via critical examination of contemporary philosophical “explanations” of the wrongness of killing. These pseudo explanations, as I show them to be, will be seen to founder in a similar manner to Moore’s “Proof” of an external world, that is, in a manner that discloses the phenomenon of basic (moral) certainty. (shrink)

World Ethics: The New Agenda identifies different ways of thinking about ethics, and of thinking ethically about international and global relations. It also considers several theories of world ethics in the context of issues such as war and peace, world poverty, the environment and the United Nations. The discussion is grounded in an awareness of the post-9/11 world in which we live and offers a more detailed exploration of the idea of global citizenship and a global or cosmopolitan ethic.

This book argues that the institutions of law, and the structures of legal thought, are to be understood by reference to a moral ideal of freedom or independence from the power of others. The moral value and justificatory force of law are not contingent upon circumstance, but intrinsic to its character. Doctrinal legal arguments are shaped by rival conceptions of the conditions for realization of the idea of law. In making these claims, the author rejects the viewpoint of much contemporary (...) legal theory, and seeks to move jurisprudence closer to an older tradition of philosophical reflection upon law, exemplified by Hobbes and Kant. Modern analytical jurisprudence has tended to view these older philosophies as confused precisely in so far as they equate an understanding of law's nature with a revelation of its moral basis. According to most contemporary legal theorists, the understanding and analysis of existing institutions is quite distinct from any enterprise of moral reflection, but the relationship between ideals and practices is much more intimate than this approach would suggest. Some institutions can be properly understood only when they are viewed as imperfect attempts to realize moral or political ideals; and some ideals can be conceived only by reference to their expression in institutions. (shrink)

On this 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, what can we learn from Fanon’s turn to Marx over 60 years ago? This paper reviews Fanon’s active engagements with Marx throughout his work from Black Skin...

The so-called “problem” of structure and agency is clearly related to the philosophical problem of free will and determinism, yet the central philosophical issues are not well understood by theorists of structure and agency in the social sciences. In this article I draw a map of the available stances on the metaphysics of free will and determinism. With the aid of this map the problem of structure and agency will be seen to dissolve. The problem of structure and agency is (...) sustained by a failure to distinguish between metaphysical and empirical senses of the relation between social structure and individual agency. The ramifications of this distinction are illustrated via a case study of competing explanations of perpetrator behavior in Christopher Browning’s and Daniel Goldhagen’s studies of the German Order Police in the Holocaust. (shrink)

This essay argues that Antony and Cleopatra’s pitting of Egypt against Rome is a cipher of aesthetic resistance to modern rationality. The coordinates are Adornian. Antony’s and Cleopatra’s complex identities elude the disenchanting, nominalist machinery in which diffuse indeterminacy necessitates conceptual imposition. Here, the individuals are essentially dramatized: sensate, embodied selves composed and expressed in relations of passionate recognition. The lovers’ deaths, and especially Cleopatra’s self-conscious theatre, rewrite the ascetic, dominative, and pseudo-theatrical rationality of Octavian Rome. The protest, the passion (...) and singularity, lives mainly through its expressive emphases – such as hyperbole – and the re-functioning of the very dominative roles and norms being opposed. This reflects the restricted but critical – aesthetic – status of early modern drama, and specifies its opposition to the deepening attack on sensate knowing in its world. (shrink)

Stich & Ravenscroft (1994) have argued that (contrary to most people's initial assumptions) a simulation account of folk psychology may be consistent with eliminative materialism, but they fail to bring out the full complexity or the potential significance of the relationship. Contemporary eliminativism (particularly in the Churchland version) makes two major claims: the first is a rejection of the orthodox assumption that realistically construed propositional attitudes are fundamental to human cognition; the second is the suggestion that with the advancement of (...) scientific understanding of the mind it will be possible to entirely eliminate the mentalistic and intentional from our ontology, thus dissolving the mind-body problem. The first claim (which has been argued in detail) supplies the principal grounds for accepting the second, much more ambitious and significant, claim. Robert Gordon's (1995, 1996, 2000) radical simulation theory of "folk psychology", proposed initially (Gordon, 1986) as an alternative to "theory theory" accounts of self and interpersonal understanding, but subsequently developing into a quite general challenge to symbolic computational accounts of mind, is not merely consistent with, but actually provides considerable additional support for, the first eliminativist claim. However, although radical simulationism has no use for reified propositional attitudes, it relies on another family of mentalistic and intentional notions, including perspective taking, "seeing as", pretending, imagery, and, most centrally, imagination. It is thus inconsistent with eliminativist metaphysical ambitions. Nevertheless, from this perspective the mind-body problem is transformed. Its solution no longer depends on accounting directly for the intentionality of the attitudes, but rather on accounting for the intentionality of imagination. Although standard accounts of imagination derive its intentionality from that of the attitudes, the recently proposed "perceptual activity" theory of imagery and imagination (Thomas, 1999) can provide a direct account of the intentionality of imagination that is consistent with physicalism.. (shrink)

THE ARTICLE CONSIDERS HOW THE CONCEPTION OF PSYCHOSOMATIC DISORDER FITS INTO THE DUALISTIC AND MONISTIC VIEWS OF DOCTORS ON THE MIND-BODY RELATIONSHIP, AND POINTS OUT HOW THE DIFFICULTY OF FITTING IT INTO THE CURRENT KIND OF MONISM WOULD BE LESSENED IF PSYCHOSOMATIC DISORDERS WERE DEFINED AS SOMATIC SYMPTOMS WHICH CAN BE SUCCESSFULLY TREATED BY METHODS USED TO TREAT PSYCHIC SYMPTOMS.

The 2008 ‘credit crisis’ brought to attention that business and finance operate in open-complex systems. In contrast, the period leading up to the crisis was dominated by narrower thinking developed from the idea that business was about economics and that management concerned agency. This paper revisits ideas first developed in the late 1990s that arose from the observation that business was confronting interacting ‘systems.’ The main systems were around (sustainable) development, the internationalization of business and a set of social and (...) cultural concerns resulting from globalization.The paper anticipated the collapse of parts of the economic system as a result of hyper-competition. It points to the growing significance of ‘identity’ and its potential to create a ‘clash of values.’ It concludes by suggesting that as we enter this ‘systems age’ our models and assumptions around the boundaries of companies and the idea of companies and stakeholders would be severely challenged. (shrink)

In conversation, and in the company of a new generation of scholars working in the field, Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle re-explore the terrain and meaning of cosmopolitan studies now. This book offers a new survey and theorisation of cosmopolitan research, a burgeoning topic responding to increasingly complex patterns of human interaction in world society. It considers the question of cosmopolitan methodology: what are the methods needed for, or elicited by, studying cosmopolitan situations? and how are we to remain (...) faithful to the heteronomous human interiority and intentionality from which cosmopolitan moments are constructed? The volume focuses on the open-ended moment of ethnographic fieldwork that generates the concepts and methods needed to understand contemporary cosmopolitanization. The chapters cover a wide range of ethnographic situations and open up debate on what are the opportunities and responsibilities of a cosmopolitan anthropology in its exploration of human difference and commonality. (shrink)

I Am Dynamite ignites an alternative theory of the self and will, wrapped up in a combustible assault upon scholarly convention. Asking why the real effort of constructing and living within an identity is so often overlooked, it examines the subjective experience of existing in the world, with the power to define and transform oneself. Considering the trials and triumphs of five very different modern subjects--Primo Levi, Ben Glaser, Stanley Spencer, Rachel Silberstein and Friedrich Nietzsche--Nigel Rapport asks: can consciousness (...) of being a self in the world enable control over one's life within it? Calling for a renewed appreciation of the extraordinary within us all, this richly inventive work seeks to restore knowledge to its essential practical and moral aims--aiding and informing the lives we actually live. (shrink)

This article attempts to understand the reconstitution of the `present' in modern societies. I argue that this reconstitution is the result of work done on `bare life', which I associate with that little space of time between action and performance. The article goes on to consider the ways in which this reconstitution of the present is taking place, using examples from the economic sphere. Throughout the article, I argue that operations on bare life are not only instrumental but also open (...) up new spaces of biopolitical practice based on a greater recognition of the value of slowness in a world commonly figured as fast. (shrink)

Sinnott, Nigel Review of: Worst words, by Don Watson with Helen Smith Sydney: Vintage Books, 2015. 439 pp., pbk., ISBN 978 0 85798 344 2.

The concept of “tacit knowledge” as the means by which individuals interpret the “rules” of social interaction occupies a central role in all the major contemporary theories of action and social structure. The major reference point for social theorists is Wittgenstein's celebrated discussion of rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. Focusing on Giddens' incorporation of tacit knowledge and rules into his “theory of structuration”, I argue that Wittgenstein's later work is steadfastly set against the “latent cognitivism” inherent in the idea of (...) tacit knowledge and tacit rules. I also argue that the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules is either incoherent or explanatorily vacuous. (shrink)

Theories of superior collicular and hippocampal function have remarkable similarities. Both structures have been repeatedly implicated in spatial and attentional behaviour and in inhibitory control of locomotion. Moreover, they share certain electrophysiological properties in their single unit responses and in the synchronous appearance and disappearance of slow wave activity. Both are phylogenetically old and the colliculus projects strongly to brainstem nuclei instrumental in the generation of theta rhythm in the hippocampal EECOn the other hand, close inspection of behavioural and electrophysiological (...) data reveals disparities. In particular, hippocampal processing mainly concerns stimulus ambiguity, contextual significance, and spatial relations or other subtle, higher order characteristics. This requires the use of largely preprocessed sensory information and mediation of poststimulus investigation. Although collicular activity must also be integrated with that of “higher” centres, its primary role in attention is more “peripheral” and specific in controlling orienting/localisation via eye and body movements toward egocentrically labelled spatial positions. In addition, the colliculus may exert a nonspecific influence in alerting higher centres to the imminence of information potentially worthy of focal attention. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that collicular and hippocampal lesions produce deficits on similar tasks, although the type of deficit is usually different in each case. Functional overlap between hippocampus and colliculus is virtually certain vis-à-vis stimulus sampling, for example in the acquisition of information via vibrissal movements and visual scanning. In addition, insofar as stimulus significance is a factor in collicular orienting mechanisms, the hippocampus — cingulate – cortex — colliculus pathway may play a significant role, modulating collicular responsiveness and thus ensuring an attentional strategy appropriate to current requirements. A tentative “reciprocal loop” model is proposed which bridges physiological and behavioural levels of analysis and which would account for the observed degree and nature of functional overlap between the superior colliculus and hippocampus. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of new, published and revised essays, providing a distinctive, thoroughgoing, realist approach to contemporary psychological theories, concepts, methods, and applications. The essays also offer critical analyses of antirealist trends both in and outside of mainstream psychology.

1. The traditional position and the pressures for change. The Western legal tradition -- The Christian ethical hinterland -- The exceptional value of human life -- The justification of taking human life -- Suicide -- Christian ethics, assisted suicide, and voluntary euthanasia -- The cultural pressures for change -- 2. The value of human life -- 3. The morality of acts of killing -- 4. Slippery slopes.

Defining Imagery: Experience or Representation?
Historical Development of Ideas about Imagery
Subjective Individual Differences in Imagery Experience
Theories of Imagery, and their Implications for Consciousness
Picture theory
Description theory
Enactive theory.

Social robots have the potential to support autistic school children with their wellbeing. This research reveals how a co-design approach with autistic children and their teachers was undertaken. Focus groups with autistic children and teachers collaboratively identified user requirements for the social robot and robot behaviours within the school ecosystem in order to improve student wellbeing. The results reveal the importance of including autistic children in the co-design process to ensure their voices are heard and also that the role of (...) the robot is appropriate and targeted to the users’ needs and requirements. Autistic children and their teachers report multiple potential benefits for social robots supporting emotional wellbeing in the school. Autistic children were supportive of the introduction of a social robot in their school, mostly expressing positive attitudes towards the robot. The research is significant in revealing how a user-centred co-design approach involving autistic children and social robots may support emotional wellbeing. (shrink)

Nigel Blake; Intellectual Freedom and the Universities: a reply to Anthony O'Hear, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 25.

The author of In Defence of War responds to each commentator in turn, discussing the following issues, among others: the Christian specification of just war, its punitive form, the virtue of callousness, love for the enemy, the intention to kill, proportionality, empire, international law, human fatedness, and the First World War.

One of the most significant philosophical voices of the twentieth century - the philosopher of 'the Other' - Emmanuel Levinas' work offers a challenge to the discipline of anthropology that claims knowledge of the human. Levinasian philosophy considers subjectivity and identity as 'secret'. For him an attempt to document humanity should then be placed in an ethics of ignorance and 'not-knowing' so that 'otherness' can be inspired. Anthropology thus reaches the Levinasian challenge of defining itself as a humanistic science as (...) well as a humanistic documentation of social life. This book endeavours to take Levinasian and anthropological precepts equally seriously and offers tentative conclusions. (shrink)

As the 20th century began, few effective therapies existed. This soon changed with major therapeutic discoveries turning the century into what has been called the golden age of therapeutics.1 The emphasis of most of these developments was on medicines for common disorders as they presented the greatest need. However, it also allowed pharmaceutical manufacturers to produce blockbuster drugs that provided a large return on investment. Rare disorders were overlooked because most are genetic in origin and scientific knowledge was lacking, making (...) it difficult to find treatments. The first genetic disorder with a therapy was phenylketonuria. The biochemist who proposed the first successful treatment in the 1950s was actively discouraged as phenylketonuria was genetic and ‘incurable’.2 Another reason was an absence of incentives to invest in developing medicines for which the return was limited, given the small numbers of potential patients. This changed from 1983 as several countries began introducing orphan drug policies, with Canada being a notable exception. As the millennium changed, some drugs for rare disorders were available, but the sequencing of the human genome in the early 2000s provided scientific knowledge to develop many more. The new therapies are often costly because they require millions, even billions, of dollars and years to develop, test and satisfy regulatory standards. …. (shrink)

Heidegger’s disastrously whole-hearted commitment to Nazism was not a simple political mistake. We need to ask what in his childhood and early career underlay his powerful and persistent feeling of Blut und Boden, blood and soil, that led him to support volkisch (nationalist/racist) calls for a charismatic national leader.

The fundamental assumption of compensation for visual delays states that, since delays are dealt with, there must be compensatory mechanisms. These mechanisms are taken to be internal models. Alternatives for delay compensation exist, suggesting that this assumption may not be fundamental, and nor should the existence of internal models be assumed. Delays may even be employed in their own compensation.

It may not be too much to hope that, despite heavy reliance on the underdeveloped metaphor of "mastery", this excellent article portends the arrival of a new, more realistic paradigm for the science of perception. The attempt to explain qualitative consciousness may fail, however, unless we read the authors' position as being more metaphysically venturesome than it might superficially appear.