Reflective inquiry in nursing practice or 'revealing images'Nurses live and work in complex practice worlds; worlds of shrinking resources and expanding needs. Reflection through journaling offers unique opportunities to gain insight into practice. What might we learn from one's journal? A reflective journal can be a source of interplay between the self as written and the self as other. Likewise, the journal may act to situate ourselves in practice, while at the same time enabling us to illuminate how and in (...) what ways our understandings have become distorted. The extent to which one's journal is educative depends upon the manner in which one chooses to use it as a transformative tool, a tool that might well be described as a process of healing and enlightenment. In order to illustrate the reflexive nature of journaling, this paper is presented as a play reading, where a conversation about practice stories between the different aspects of the nurse's self is depicted. In adopting a play reading, an alternative pedagogical tool is used to illustrate different methodologies exemplifying the emergence of how and in what ways we develop and reconstruct our understanding in nursing. (shrink)

Mathematicians tend to think of themselves as scientists investigating the features of real mathematical things, and the wildly successful application of mathematics in the physical sciences reinforces this picture of mathematics as an objective study. For philosophers, however, this realism about mathematics raises serious questions: What are mathematical things? Where are they? How do we know about them? Offering a scrupulously fair treatment of both mathematical and philosophical concerns, Penelope Maddy here delineates and defends a novel version of mathematical (...) realism. She answers the traditional questions and poses a challenging new one, refocusing philosophical attention on the pressing foundational issues of contemporary mathematics. (shrink)

For Nietzsche, a phenomenon, a belief, a mode of knowledge, or of subjectivity, confronts us with the possibility of creating, rather than presupposing, the criteria for its evaluation. In his Untimely Meditations, he widened the parameters of criticizability in just this way, proposing that history might be evaluated from the criterion of whether it is good or bad for life. Nietzsche provokes us to ask what the right question is to bring to history. Stepping back to formulate a response might (...) allow us to appreciate the difference between interrogating the accuracy of historical accounts and assessing their effects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DisaffiliationsBeauvoir and Gorz on Masculinity as AgingPenelope DeutscherThe same drama of flesh and spirit, and of finitude and transcendence, plays itself out in both sexes; both are eaten away by time, stalked by death.The Second Sex, 763Simone de Beauvoir wrote her second large theoretical work in 1970, La Vieillesse (V), some nine years after André Gorz published a two-part article, “Le Vieillissement,” in Les Temps Modernes, in 1961 and (...) 1962. These were essays in which Gorz did not hesitate to refer to the “conflict between generations.” He found unremarkable the constant transitions involved in what he saw as a combat between younger and older age groups, unremarkable that the young would resent the domination of the aged and find themselves resented in turn. The aged would bear heavily on the young, but eventually find themselves demeaned if not subordinated by them.Since Gorz was one of the many references in La Vieillesse, Beauvoir was using resources that could have prompted her to think of youth and aging as a further domain of group-based conflict and hostility. Instead, she preferred a different language. Stories that might have seemed to be those of inter-generational conflict were present in her work—she mentions a story from the Brothers Grimm of three generations: son, father, and grandfather. The father treats the grandfather abusively until he learns that his son accordingly anticipates repeating the same treatment toward him. But Beauvoir does not narrate the story as one of conflict between groups who should be understood as “generations.”1 For Gorz, by contrast, such relations seem inevitable. He writes [End Page 88] of young men frustrated by their disenfranchisement by older men, who are in turn disenfranchised as young men eventually manage to usurp them.Just as the language of group-based conflict seems to Gorz obvious to describe such relations, so does the tacit (though not overtly noted) masculinity of their experience. But because he does not directly note that the conflict, on his own account, occurs between the younger and older generations of males, it is not clear how a vision of generational conflict might be inflected by a sense that such relations are also those of sexual difference. How might that affect relations between the sexes or relations among women of different ages?For her part, Beauvoir did refer to tensions between younger and older women, both in The Second Sex (SS) and Old Age(OA), but these were largely references to relations between mothers and daughters. They were familial stories. Certainly, they were refracted through structure and social context: It is the impoverished status and history of women that, in Beauvoir’s view, inhibits their lives to the point that mothers and daughters resent each other. But describing such tensions, Beauvoir does not present them as competition between groups. Her visions are those of individual experiences occurring in family contexts, not those of a generation of women of a particular age group, understanding each other as engaged in some kind of potentially conflictual group relations with a group of women understood as generationally younger or older. This is not to say that Beauvoir ought to have preferred the language of generational conflict in considering aging. But in understanding that she turned away, without saying so, from a model that might well have seemed most plausible, we can think further about the interpretation that did seem more plausible to her.How, then, do aging and sex interact for Beauvoir? Her presentation of aging in The Second Sex is characteristically ambivalent. She describes middle-aged women who have bet on the norms of femininity—“She has counted on her sexual attributes far more than man has” (SS, 620)—only to be confronted with the dilemmas of the transformation brought by time. Beauvoir takes this transformation to be largely negative—comprehended in terms of loss rather than possible gain. She describes the physical transformation of aging in terms of degeneration and the passing of youth, beauty, health, innovation, capacity. She also claims, albeit with an important exception, that it is experienced by the woman negatively, with accompanying effects of shock, discontinuity, crisis, anxious concern, denial... (shrink)

The mature Wittgenstein's groundbreaking analyses of sense and the logical must—and the powerful new method that made them possible—were the result of a multi‐year process of writing, re‐arranging, re‐writing and one large‐scale revision that eventually produced the Philosophical Investigations and RFM I. In contrast, his struggles during the same period with questions of arithmetic and higher mathematics remained largely in first‐draft form, and he drops the topic entirely after 1945. In this paper, I argue that Wittgenstein's new method can be (...) applied to the cases of arithmetic and set theory and that the result is innovative, recognizably Wittgensteinian, and independently appealing. I conclude by acknowledging the reasons Wittgenstein himself might have had to resist applying his own proven method to the case of mathematics—particularly to set theory—and by indicating why I think those reasons are ultimately unsound. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the feminist history of philosophy have viewed reason as associated with masculinity and subsequent debates have been framed by this assumption. Yet recent debates in deconstruction have shown that gender has never been a stable matter. In the history of philosophy 'female' and 'woman' are full of ambiguity. What does deconstruction have to offer feminist criticism of the history of philosophy? _Yielding Gender_ explores this question by examining three crucial areas; the issue of gender as 'troubled'; deconstruction; (...) and feminist criticism of the history of philosophy. The first part of the book discusses the work of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary French feminist philosophy including key figures such as Luce Irigiray. Particular attention is given to the possibilities offered by deconstruction for understanding the history of philosophy. The second part considers and then challenges feminist interpretations of some key figures in the history of philosophy. Penelope Deutscher sketches how Rousseau, St. Augustine and Simone de Beauvoir have described gender and argues that their readings of gender are in fact empowered by gender's own contradiction and instability rather than limited by it. (shrink)

This article argues that the act of conceptualizing a female divine, whether by so-called low-brow Goddess Spiritualists or high-brow French philosophers, rather than being a mere spiritual exercise, has enormous political significance for feminisms. In particular, I demonstrate that Irigaray's concept of the sensible transcendental, by refiguring a god which is both male and female, transcendent and immanent, theorizes a potential dissolution of the binary logic which forms the basis of western philosophy. The second half of the article looks at (...) the complex role of the angel in Irigaray's theory of the divine in order to demonstrate that, as a result of having misinterpreted the angel's position, critics have failed to recognize the significance and relevance of Irigaray's sensible transcendental for feminist politics. (shrink)

A novel treatment of an issue central to much current work in metaphysics: the distinction between the essential and accidental properties of individuals. Mackie challenges widely held views, and arrives at what she calls "minimalist essentialism," an unorthodox theory according to which ordinary individuals have relatively few interesting essential properties. Mackie's clear and accessible discussions of issues surrounding necessity and essentialism mean that the book will appeal as much to graduate students as it will to seasoned metaphysicians.

There’s a tendency to suppose that a naturalist is automatically, by virtue of her naturalism, committed to some particular view of logic. These days, for example, the classical Quinean picture is sometimes taken to be the naturalistic standard: logic lies at the center of the web of belief; remote from sense experience, but widely confirmed by its role in all our successful theorizing; a posteriori like the rest, but also the most resistant to change, given the principle of minimum mutilation; (...) and thus apparently, or even practically, a priori. 1 But others, at other times, have held that other views of logic followed directly from naturalism, say psychologism, or simple inductivism, or some form of linguistic conventionalism. The trouble is that ‘naturalism’ means something different in each case, or that it comes encumbered with various inessential add-ons (like holism). (shrink)

Our goal in this course is to investigate radical skepticism about the external world, primarily to compare and contrast various naturalist and therapeutic reactions to it. We’ll largely side-step attempts to refute the skeptic and focus instead on naturalistic and therapeutic ways of reacting without refuting (though the boundary between these isn’t always sharp). The hope is that this exercise will help differentiate various strains of naturalism and clarify their interrelations with a range of therapeutic approaches.

I argue that David Lewis’s attempt, in his ‘Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow’, to explain the fixity of the past in terms of counterfactual independence is unsuccessful. I point out that there is an ambiguity in the claim that the past is counterfactually independent of the present (or, more generally, that the earlier is counterfactually independent of the later), corresponding to two distinct theses about the relation between time and counterfactuals, both officially endorsed by Lewis. I argue that Lewis’s attempt (...) is flawed for a variety of reasons, including the fact that his own theory about the evaluation of counterfactuals requires too many exceptions to the general rule that the past is counterfactually independent of the present. At the end of the paper, I consider a variant of Lewis’s strategy that attempts to explain the fixity of the past in terms of causal, rather than counterfactual, independence. I conclude that, although this variant avoids some of the objections that afflict Lewis’s account, it nevertheless seems to be incapable of giving a satisfactory explanation of the notion of the fixity of the past. (shrink)

This talk surveys a range of positions on the fundamental metaphysical and epistemological questions about elementary logic, for example, as a starting point: what is the subject matter of logic—what makes its truths true? how do we come to know the truths of logic? A taxonomy is approached by beginning from well-known schools of thought in the philosophy of mathematics—Logicism, Intuitionism, Formalism, Realism—and sketching roughly corresponding views in the philosophy of logic. Kant, Mill, Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Ayer, Quine, and Putnam (...) are among the philosophers considered along the way. (shrink)

Pursues the theoretical level of the two‐tiered epistemology of set theoretic realism, the level at which more abstract axioms can be justified by their consequences at more intuitive levels. I outline the pre‐axiomatic development of set theory out of Cantor's researches, describe how axiomatization arose in the course of Zermelo's efforts to prove Cantor's Well‐ordering Theorem, and review the controversy over the Axiom of Choice. Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis and various questions of descriptive set theory were eventually shown to be independent (...) of the standard axioms, and new axiom candidates—Gödel's Axiom of Constructibility, on the one hand, determinacy and large cardinal axioms, on the other—offer dramatically different solutions. This situation presents a new epistemic challenge to the set theoretic realist: on what grounds can we adjudicate between new axiom candidates? (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to propose what seems to me a distinctive approach to set theoretic methodology. By ‘methodology’ I mean the study of the actual methods used by practitioners, the study of how these methods might be justified or reformed or extended. So, for example, when the intuitionist's philosophical analysis recommends a wholesale revision of the methods of proof used in classical mathematics, this is a piece of reformist methodology. In contrast with the intuitionist, I will focus (...) more narrowly on the methods of contemporary set theory, and, more importantly, I will certainly recommend no sweeping reforms. Rather, I begin from the assumption that the methodologist's job is to account for set theory as it is practiced, not as some philosophy would have it be. This credo lies at the very heart of the so-called ‘naturalism’ to be described here.A philosopher looking at set theoretic practice from the outside, so to speak, might notice any number of interesting methodological questions, beginning with the intuitionist's ‘why use classical logic?’, but this sort of question is not a live issue for most practicing set theorists. One central question on which the philosopher's and the practitioner's interests converge is this: what is the status of independent statements like the continuum hypothesis (CH)? A number of large questions arise in its wake: what criteria should guide the search for new axioms? For that matter, what reasons support our adoption of the old axioms? (shrink)

Naturalism in philosophy is sometimes thought to imply both scientific realism and a brand of mathematical realism that has methodological consequences for the practice of mathematics. I suggest that naturalism does not yield such a brand of mathematical realism, that naturalism views ontology as irrelevant to mathematical methodology, and that approaching methodological questions from this naturalistic perspective illuminates issues and considerations previously overshadowed by (irrelevant) ontological concerns.

The effort to fit simple logical truths–like `if it's either red or green and it's not red, then it must be green'–into Kant's account of knowledge turns up a position more subtle and intriguing than might be expected at first glance.

The human microbiome has become one of the dominant biomedical frameworks of the contemporary moment that may be understood to be post-Pasteurian. The recognitions the human microbiome opens up for thinking about the biological self and the individual have ontological and epistemological ramifications for considering what and who the human being is. As this article illustrates, the microbiopolitics of the human microbiome challenges the immunitarian Pasteurian model in which the organismic self shores itself up and defends itself against a microbial (...) non-self or other. Instead, this theory presents the human organism as comprised of multiple ecosystems and as a multitude, suggesting that the thanatopolitical attempts to wipe out microbial others (evident in the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, for example) are giving way to an affirmative microbiopolitics grounded in generative multispecies relationality. This article sets out to make the case for this affirmative microbiopolitics. (shrink)

What Do Philosophers Do? takes up the leading arguments for radical skepticism from an everyday point of view. A range of philosophical methods are examined and employed, for a revealing portrait of what philosophers do, and perhaps a quiet suggestion for what they should do, for what they do best.

I discuss a thesis that I call ‘The Appearance of Mind-Independence’, to the effect that, to the subject of an ordinary perceptual experience, it seems that the experience involves the awareness of a mind-independent world. Although this thesis appears to be very widely accepted, I argue that it is open to serious challenge. Whether such a challenge can be maintained is especially relevant to the assessment of any theory, such as Berkeley’s idealism, according to which the only objects of which (...) we are aware in perception are mind-dependent. But the issue is of significance for the philosophy of perception more generally. In the course of my sceptical discussion, I argue that recent work by Campbell and Cassam may be flawed by a failure to take sufficiently seriously the requirements for genuine mind-independence. (shrink)

Since the fourteenth century, Eastern Woodlands tribes have used delicate purple and white shells called “wampum” to form intricately woven belts. These wampum belts depict significant moments in the lives of the people who make up the tribes, portraying everything from weddings to treaties. Wampum belts can be used as a form of currency, but they are primarily used as a means to record significant oral narratives for future generations. In Reading the Wampum, Kelsey provides the first academic consideration of (...) the ways in which these sacred belts are reinterpreted into current Haudenosaunee tradition. While Kelsey explores the aesthetic appeal of the belts, she also provides insightful analysis of how readings of wampum belts can change our understanding of specific treaty rights and land exchanges. Kelsey shows how contemporary Iroquois intellectuals and artists adapt and reconsider these traditional belts in new and innovative ways. Reading the Wampum conveys the vitality and continuance of wampum traditions in Iroquois art, literature, and community, suggesting that wampum narratives pervade and reappear in new guises with each new generation. (shrink)

Begins with a presentation and elaboration of Benacerraf's epistemic challenge to realism: how can we gain knowledge of an acausal world of non‐spatio‐temporal abstracts? I then outline a theory of perception based in part on neurological theories of Hebb and developmental evidence from Piaget, and I argue in these terms that we can, in fact, perceive sets of medium‐sized physical objects. This account of perception is elaborated into an account of physical and mathematical intuition, faculties that produce various rudimentary beliefs (...) that underlie the simplest physical and set theoretic assumptions. I conclude by comparing and contrasting this epistemology with some controversial passages from Gödel's writings. (shrink)

The paper discusses sortal essentialism': the view that some sortal concepts represent essential properties of the things that fall under them. Although sortal essentialism is widely accepted, there is a dearth of theories purporting to explain why some sortals should have this characteristic. The paper examines two theories that do attempt this explanatory task, theories proposed by Baruch Brody and David Wiggins. It is argued that Brody's theory rests on an untenable principle about "de re" modality, while Wiggins' theory appeals (...) to a thesis about principles of individuation that is either unjustified, or vacuous and incapable of supporting sortal essentialism. (shrink)

Lack of supportive workplaces may be depriving babies and mothers of the health advantages of breastfeeding. This citizen science pilot project set out to engage women in photographing and sharing information on the available facilities for breastfeeding and expressing and storing breastmilk in Australian workplaces. While some useful insights were gained, the project failed in the sense that 234 people ‘liked’ the project Facebook page set up to recruit participants, but only nine photographs were submitted. The heaviest loss of participation (...) occurred after the ethics committee requirements were explained, in particular, the requirement for employer consent to take a photograph, or alternatively, for a participant to agree to bear the risk of taking a photo without permission. The ethics committee also made stipulations about the formality of language to be used. Thus, the project’s potential role as an enabler for health action was neutered. We argue that the ethics requirements worked contrary to our purpose and possibly acted to reinforce the powerlessness some women experience at work. (shrink)

I attempt to rebut Dean Zimmerman's novel argument (2010), which he presents in support of substance dualism, for the conclusion that, in spite of its popularity, the combination of property dualism with substance materialism represents a precarious position in the philosophy of mind. I take issue with Zimmerman's contention that the vagueness of ‘garden variety’ material objects such as brains or bodies makes them unsuitable candidates for the possession of phenomenal properties. I also argue that the ‘speculative materialism’ that is (...) available to a substance materialist property dualist who abandons the identification of persons with such garden variety objects is significantly more attractive than Zimmerman allows. Although I do not attempt to refute its substance dualist rival, I conclude that the combination of property dualism with substance materialism can withstand Zimmerman's objections. (shrink)

Mathematics depends on proofs, and proofs must begin somewhere, from some fundamental assumptions. For nearly a century, the axioms of set theory have played this role, so the question of how these axioms are properly judged takes on a central importance. Approaching the question from a broadly naturalistic or second-philosophical point of view, Defending the Axioms isolates the appropriate methods for such evaluations and investigates the ontological and epistemological backdrop that makes them appropriate. In the end, a new account of (...) the objectivity of mathematics emerges, one refreshingly free of metaphysical commitments. (shrink)

Despite some discomfort with this grandly philosophical topic, I do in fact hope to address a venerable pair of philosophical chestnuts: mathematical truth and existence. My plan is to set out three possible stands on these issues, for an exercise in compare and contrast.' A word of warning, though, to philosophical purists (and perhaps of comfort to more mathematical readers): I will explore these philosophical positions with an eye to their interconnections with some concrete issues of set theoretic method.

In several writings, John Martin Fischer has argued that those who deny a principle about abilities that he calls ‘the Fixity of the Past’ are committed to absurd conclusions concerning practical reasoning. I argue that Fischer’s ‘practical rationality’ argument does not succeed. First, Fischer’s argument may be vulnerable to the charge that it relies on an equivocation concerning the notion of an ‘accessible’ possible world. Secondly, even if Fischer’s argument can be absolved of that charge, I maintain that it can (...) be defeated by appeal to an independently plausible principle about practical reasoning that I call ‘the Knowledge Principle’. In addition, I point out that Fischer’s own presentation of his argument is flawed by the fact that the principle that he labels ‘the Fixity of the Past’ does not, in fact, succeed in representing the intuitive idea that it is intended to capture. Instead, the debate should be recast in terms of a different principle, which I call ‘the Principle of Past-Limited Abilities’. The principal contribution of my paper is thus twofold: to clarify the terms of the debate about the fixity of the past, and to undermine Fischer’s ‘practical rationality’ argument for the fixity of the past. (shrink)

My goal here is to explore the relationship between pure and applied mathematics and then, eventually, to draw a few morals for both. In particular, I hope to show that this relationship has not been static, that the historical rise of pure mathematics has coincided with a gradual shift in our understanding of how mathematics works in application to the world. In some circles today, it is held that historical developments of this sort simply represent changes in fashion, or in (...) social arrangements, governments, power structures, or some such thing, but I resist the full force of this way of thinking, clinging to the old school notion that we have gradually learned more about the world over time, that our opinions on these matters have improved, and that seeing how we reached the point we now occupy may help us avoid falling back into old philosophies that are now no longer viable. In that spirit, it seems to me that once we focus on the general question of how mathematics relates to science, one observation is immediate: the march of the centuries has produced an amusing reversal of philosophical fortunes. Let me begin there. In the beginning, that is, in Plato, mathematical knowledge was sharply distinguished from ordinary perceptual belief about the world. According to Plato’s metaphysics, mathematics is the study of eternal and unchanging abstract Forms,1 while science is uncertain and changeable opinion about the world of mere becoming. Indeed, in Plato’s lights, of the two, only mathematics deserves to be called ‘knowledge’ at all! Of course if sense perception cannot give us knowledge, if mathematics is not about perceivable things, then Plato owes us an account of how we ordinary humans achieve this wonderful insight into the properties of the abstract world of Forms. Plato’s answer is that we do not actually acquire mathematical knowledge at all; rather, we recollect it from a time before birth, when our souls, unencumbered by physical bodies, were free to commune with the Forms, and not just the mathematical ones, either – also Truth, Beauty, Justice, the Good, and so on.2 Whatever appeal this position may have held for the ancient Greeks, it will not begin to satisfy a contemporary, scientifically minded philosopher.. (shrink)

My topic here is metaphilosophy, the question of how philosophy is properly done. For some years now, I've been developing a particularly austere, roughly naturalistic approach to philosophical questions that I call 'second philosophy'. It has seemed to me that one effective way to convey the spirit of second philosophy is to compare and contrast it with other more familiar methods, like transcendental or therapeutic philosophy. Here I hope to pursue this sort of engagement with two other venerable schools of (...) thought: Hume's 'science of man' and Reid's 'philosophy of common sense'. Hume presents a fitting starting point for any discussion of naturalism -- even more so when Reid is on the agenda -- so my first pass at a portrait of the second philosopher traces her relations to the 'scientist of man'. Of course, Hume's cheerfully industrious inquirer eventually lands on the barren rock of skepticism, so we'll also take a second-philosophical look at the kinds of considerations that led poor Hume to his shipwreck. This sets the stage for Reid. (shrink)

The paper offers an explanation of the intuitive appeal of Saul Kripke's necessity of origin thesis, exhibiting it as the consequence of a temporally asymmetrical 'branching model' of possibilities which, in turn, rests on two plausible principles concerning possibility, time, and identity. Unlike some other accounts, my explanation dissociates the necessity of origin thesis from a commitment to individual essences or other sufficient conditions for identity across possible worlds. I conclude that although the branching model is not irresistible, its rejection (...) may necessitate the denial of a plausible principle that requires possibilities for actual individuals to be 'anchored' to their actual characteristics. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to sketch a distinctive version of naturalism in the philosophy of science, both by tracing historical antecedents and by addressing contemporary objections.

The enthusiastic reception for the first edition of this book has prompted us to produce a second. We were delighted by the interest from people thinking about and working in public services beyond health care, although the book had been unapologetically health focused. Eight years have passed, and although the issues we addressed are still very much with us, times have changed. 'Austerity' has bitten hard into the UK's public services, especially social care. Developments in policy, technology, organisation and practice (...) have affected health and social care, separately and together. Mindful of this, we have extended our reach to consider both sectors and, to an extent, the wider world of 'welfare'. Hence our new subtitle: 'rehabilitating the welfare state'. We have expanded our narratives, case studies and references accordingly, believing that the issues and perspectives in each field illustrate important points for all. (shrink)

This paper addresses the appropriation of theories of evolution by nineteenth-century feminists, focusing on the critical response to Darwin's The Descent of Man by Eliza Burt Gamble and Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's social evolutionism. For Gilman, evolutionism was a revolutionary resource for feminism, one of its greatest hopes. Gamble and Blackwell revisit Darwin's data with the aim of locating, amidst his ostensive conclusions to the contrary, his implicit "defense" of either the equality or the superiority of women. (...) This article identifies the reasons for, and limitations of, this enthusiasm. To some extent, the basis of this feminism is provided by its keen perception of disparities between what a text does, and what it says it is doing. But these feminists did not think through the implications for their own rhetoric about race hierarchy. Darwin's trope of the "savage" would return in the work of some of these feminists, occasionally displaced or rejected, but usually reiterated, and sometimes integral to the feminism in question. (shrink)

This paper discusses an asymmetry in the way that we think about causation. Put roughly, the asymmetry is this. We tend to regard hastening some event or result as a way of causing it, whereas we do not tend to regard delaying an event or result as a way of causing it. In the first two sections of this paper, I illustrate the asymmetry with some examples, characterize it more precisely, and explain why I think it is puzzling. In the (...) third section I discuss some responses to the puzzle that I take to be inadequate. In the following sections I present my own solution. I argue that the key to the asymmetry puzzle is a difference in the ways in which delaying and hastening are related to preventing. My explanation is compatible with the view that, in general, what delays an event or result is not among its causes. But it is also compatible with the view (to which I incline) that although delayers really are always causes of what they delay, there are pragmatic reasons why it is, in general, odd or unnatural so to describe them. (shrink)

My ultimate goal in this paper is to illuminate, from a naturalistic point of view, the significance of the application of mathematics in the natural sciences for the practice of contemporary set theory.

Though many working mathematicians embrace a rough and ready form of Platonism, that venerable position has suffered a checkered philosophical career. Indeed the three schools of thought with which most of us began our official philosophizing about mathematics—Intuitionism, Formalism, and Logicism—all stand in fundamental disagreement with Platonism. Nevertheless, various versions of Platonistic thinking survive in contemporary philosophical circles. The aim of this paper is to describe these views, and, as my title suggests, to trace their roots.I'll begin with some preliminary (...) remarks about the big three schools. This seems a reasonable approach to the issues both because most observers are familiar, at least in a general way, with the tenets of Intuitionism, Formalism, and Logicism, and because it is in reaction to these that contemporary Platonism has taken shape. (shrink)

The underrepresentation of females in mathematics-related fields may be explained by gender differences in mathematics self-concept (rather than ability) favoring males. Mathematics self-concept typically declines with student age, differs with student ethnicity, and is sensitive to teacher influence in early schooling. We investigated whether change in mathematics self-concept occurred within the context of a longitudinal intervention to raise and sustain teacher expectations of student achievement. This experimental study was conducted with a large sample of New Zealand primary school students and (...) their teachers. Data were analyzed using longitudinal multilevel modeling with mathematics self-concept as the dependent variable and time (which represents students’ increasing age each year), gender, and ethnicity entered as predictors and achievement in mathematics included as a control variable. Interaction terms were also explored to investigate changes over time for different groups. All students demonstrated a small increase in mathematics self-concept over the 3-year period of the current study but mathematics self-concept was consistently greater for boys than girls. Māori, Asian, and Other students’ initial mathematics self-concept was higher than that of New Zealand European and Pacific Islanders’ (after controlling for achievement differences). However, a statistically significant decline in mathematics self-concept occurred for Māori students alone by the end of the study. The expected age-related reduction over time in student mathematics self-concept appeared to be mitigated in association with the longitudinal study. Nevertheless, the demonstration of a comparatively lower mathematics self-concept remained for girls overall and declined for Māori. Our results reinforce implications for future research into mathematics self-concept as a possible determinant of female student career choices. (shrink)

This paper explores the question of what logic is not. It argues against the wide spread assumptions that logic is: a model of reason; a model of correct reason; the laws of thought, or indeed is related to reason at all such that the essential nature of the two are crucially or essentially co-illustrative. I note that due to such assumptions, our current understanding of the nature of logic itself is thoroughly entangled with the nature of reason. I show that (...) most arguments for the presence of any sort of essential re- lationship between logic and reason face intractable problems and demands, and fall well short of addressing them. These arguments include those for the notion that logic is normative for reason (or that logic and correct reason are in some way the same thing), that logic is some sort of description of correct reason and that logic is an abstracted or idealised version of correct reason. A strong version of logical realism is put forward as an alternative view, and is briefly explored. (shrink)

Mumford and Anjum (2014) present a new argument for the incompatibility of free will and causal determinism. Although their argument depends on the assumption that free will is, or is the exercise of, a causal power, it does not appeal to any special features of this power. Their new argument does, however, depend upon a general thesis of the incompatibility of causal powers with causal determinism. I argue that Mumford and Anjum have provided no justification for this general thesis. As (...) a consequence, their new argument for the incompatibility of free will and causal determinism is unsuccessful. (shrink)

In Of Grammatology, Derrida gave his attention to a number of philosophies of language for which writing is attributed the status of a supplemental form, with speech considered a more original form of language and the proper object of the linguist's science. A number of Derrida's remarks pointed out that the very defense of democracy, or human rights, even where they excluded children, women, workers, and colonized peoples, also provided the resources for subsequent claims by these groups for inclusion. Feminisms (...) bear witness to the historical auto‐immunity of the denial of women's rights. Historically, women's rights claims will also have their own auto‐immune logics, in their identifications with nationalist logics, in their alignment with an image of progress often disseminated at the expense of other cultures or classes, in an ethnocentrism or race blindness to which feminism has often been prone. (shrink)

Cet article s'attache à montrer le processus de création d'un espace public de proximité. À travers une expérience , nous présentons les grandes phases constitutives de ce processus. En effet, la création d'un espace public de proximité suppose une première phase de concertation à travers la mise en présence des différents acteurs et de différentes logiques d'action. Cet espace de concertation doit ensuite se transformer en un espace d'intermédiation. En passant d'un espace public de concertation à un espace public d'intermédiation, (...) on passerait d'une phase de confrontation d'idées à une phase d'articulation de ces idées. L'espace public de proximité correspondrait donc à cet espace d'intermédiation dont le fonctionnement serait basé sur les principes de démocratie et de participation.This article attempts to show the process of creation of a public sphere of proximity. Through an experiment , we present the main phases that made up this process. Indeed, the creation of a community-based development programme requires the first phase of dialogue between those involved concerning the possible spheres of action to be adopted. This dialogue phase must then be transformed into a programme of intermediation which implies moving from discussion of opposing ideas to the articulation of those ideas. The community-based development programme would thus correspond to this mediation process which would be based on the principles of democracy and participation. (shrink)

Beauvoir argued that both femininity and old age were “the other.” So did she understand their relationship to be analogical? This chapter answers in the negative. Understanding the relationship between femininity and aging in non‐analogical terms, Beauvoir also offers an alternative means of understanding their intersectionality. This variant can be found in the oscillating motion which emerges, according to Beauvoir's accounts, between the constitutions and the deconstitutions of femininity and aging.

How does the publication of Confessions of the Flesh impact feminist critique of Foucault's History of Sexuality project? The paper addresses this question in two ways: by asking how reflection on continuities and ruptures has, and can, be productive for feminist critique; and by revisiting the role of women in all four volumes. The terms of their inclusion have been considered an omission, particularly because the project omits same-sex eros between women. Where women appear, they are framed as spouses, or (...) as subordinated to some form of authority. And yet, insofar as the project contains more than one genealogical dimension, Foucault's “marriages” also belong to proximate plurigenealogies. In Confession's focus on the conditions for a juridical and divided self's subjectivation by will and desire, even the limited parameters within which women appear in the project incite the following question. What are the implications of Confessions of the Flesh's juridical self for genealogies of female subjectivation? (shrink)

The work of the distinguished philosopher Sarah Kofman has, since her tragic death in 1994, become a focus for many scholars interested in contemporary French philosophy. The first critical collection on her thought to appear in English, Enigmas evaluates Kofman's most important contributions to philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, feminism, and literary theory. These insightful essays range from analyses of Kofman's first book, L'Enfance de l'art, to her last, L'Imposture de la beauté. This unique volume represents the major themes in Kofman's scholarship: (...) literature and aesthetics; philosophy and metaphor; women, feminism, and psychoanalysis; and Jews and German nationalism. Selected essays explore and diagnose Kofman's personal struggles as they are reflected in her writing. (shrink)

How might we locate originality as emerging from within the “discrete” work of commentary? Because many women have engaged with philosophy informs that preclude their work from being seen as properly “original,” this question is a feminist issue. Via the work of selected contemporary French women philosophers, the author shows how commentary can reconfigure the philosophical tradition in innovative ways, as well as in ways that change what counts as philosophical innovation.

I argue that one in particular of CrispinWright’s attempts to capture our common or intuitive concepts of objectivity, warrant, and other associated notions, relies on an ambiguity between a given constructivist reading of the concepts and at least one other, arguablymore ‘ordinary’, version of the notions he tries to accommodate. I do this by focusing on one case in point, and concluding with a brief argument showing how this case generalises. I demonstrate why this ambiguity is unacceptable and also that (...) its resolution undermines the aim it serves: to account for and accommodate our ordinary conception of (at least) objectivity, warrant (or justication) and truth. (shrink)