Six African countries participated in an intercontinental professional development workshop developed by the science and math staff at the University of Iowa and supported by the Africa-America Institute. The 11-day workshop was designed to produce changes in goal setting, assessment practices, instruction, and curriculum structures for high school teachers. The article provides a detailed description of the workshop and discusses evidence of workshop successes. Preworkshop and postworkshop vision statements and curriculum units were used to track the progression of five Kenyan (...) educators as they moved toward constructivist-based practices. Teachers enhanced their views of science and math learning outcomes and learning environment as the workshop progressed. Specifically, teachers moved from emphasizing better grades and exam scores to greater student use of science and math skills. They also shifted from a heavily teacher-centered classroom view to a more student-centered classroom view. (shrink)

Utilitarianism, the great reforming philosophy of the nineteenth century, has today acquired the reputation for being a crassly calculating, impersonal philosophy unfit to serve as a guide to moral conduct. Yet what may disqualify utilitarianism as a personal philosophy makes it an eminently suitable guide for public officials in the pursuit of their professional responsibilities. Robert E. Goodin, a philosopher with many books on political theory, public policy and applied ethics to his credit, defends utilitarianism against its critics and (...) shows how it can be applied most effectively over a wide range of public policies. In discussions of such issues as paternalism, social welfare policy, international ethics, nuclear armaments, and international responses to the environment crisis, he demonstrates what a flexible tool his brand of utilitarianism can be in confronting the dilemmas of public policy in the real world. (shrink)

Revisioning macro-democratic processes in light of the processes and promise of micro-deliberation, Innovating Democracy provides an integrated perspective on democratic theory and practice after the deliberative turn.

If all reasonable people of goodwill and patience will eventually reachconsensus, then anyone who fails to join inthat consensus as being unreasonable or lackingin good will or patience. The ``nice''''(consensual) and ``nasty'''' (intolerant) faces ofcommunitarianism are thus joined. This articleattempts to deny communitarians that excuse forintolerance by undermining Keith Lehrer''s proofof the inevitability of rational consensusamong all patient people of good will.

This is the second of two chapters on preference democracy. It points out that theories of liberal democracy necessarily require systematic responsiveness to popular wishes, in ways that make them fundamentally ‘preference‐respecting’, but that there are many different kinds of preferences and correspondingly many different ways of respecting them. Different models of democracy are better at providing certain sorts of respect for certain sorts of preferences than others, and which model of democracy liberal democrats want to adopt therefore depends on (...) which sorts of preferences they want to accord which sort of respect. The central claim of this chapter is that the author's preferred model of ‘democratic deliberation within’ is preference‐respecting in the right way, and that it therefore deserves a key role in any larger system of democratic accountability. The different sections of the chapter are: Respecting Preferences, Not Just Recording Them; Permissible Paternalism; Assessing Alternative Models of Preference‐Respecting Democracy; The Virtues of Sporadic Assessments: Preference‐Respecting Arguments for Indirect Democracy; and Combining ‘Democratic Deliberation Within’ and Trustee‐style Representative Democracy. (shrink)

An interesting fact about customary international law is that the only way you can propose an amendment to it is by breaking it. How can that be differentiated from plain law-breaking? What moral standards might apply to that sort of international conduct? I propose we use ones analogous to the ordinary standards for distinguishing civil disobedients from ordinary law-breakers: would-be law-makers, like civil disobedients, must break the law openly; they must accept the legal consequences of doing so; and they must (...) be prepared to have the same rules applied to them as everyone else. (shrink)

The idea to produce the current volume was conceived by Jiirgen Mittelstrass and Robert E. Butts in 1978. Idealist philosophers are wrong about one thing: the temporal gap separating idea and reality can be very long indeed - even ten or so years! Problems of timing were joined by personal problems and by the pressure of other professional commitments. Fortunately, James Brown agreed to cooperate in the editing of the volume; the infusion of his usual energy, good judgement and (...) good-natured promptness saved the volume and made its produc tion possible. Despite the delays, the messages of the papers included in the book have not gone stale. An extremely worthwhile exercise in international philosophical cooperation has come to fruition; the German constructivist philosophical position is here represented in papers in English that will make its contemporary importance available to a larger audience. The editors owe thanks to many persons. All involved in the project owe much to the interest and support of Nicholas Rescher, a friend of the undertaking from the time of its inception. My review of the translations was helped immensely by Andrea Purvis' careful copy editing of the typescript. Most of all, however, we owe gratitude and admiration for the tireless efforts on behalf of this enterprise to Jiirgen Mittelstrass. (shrink)

Many large corporations now have written codes of ethics to guide the business/marketing activities of employees. The purpose of this study was to determine the frequency and types of topics which are covered in the ethics policy statements of large U.S. corporations. The results indicated that the topics covered most often (respectively) were: misuse of funds/improper accounting, conflicts of interest, political contributions, and confidential information. It is concluded that in addition to written ethics policy statements, top management should communicate ethical (...) values and demonstrate by example. (shrink)

Complaints are common about the arbitrary and conservative bias of special-majority rules. Such complaints, however, apply to asymmetrical versions of those rules alone. Symmetrical special-majority rules remedy that defect, albeit at the cost of often rendering no determinate verdict. Here what is formally at stake, both procedurally and epistemically, is explored in the choice between those two forms of special-majority rule and simple-majority rule; and practical ways are suggested of resolving matters left open by symmetrical special-majority rules – such as (...) ‘judicial extrapolation’ or ‘subsidiarity’ in a federal system. (shrink)

Robert Schofield explores the rational elements of British experimental natural philosophy in the 18th century by tracing the influence of two opposing concepts of the nature of matter and its action—mechanism and materialism. Both concepts rested on the Newtonian interpretation of their proponents, although each developed more or less independently. By integrating the developments in all the areas of experimental natural philosophy, describing their connections and the influences of Continental science, natural theology, and to a lesser degree social and (...) institutional changes, the author demonstrates that mechanistic concepts dominated interpretations from about 1687 to 1740, when they were replaced by materialistic concepts. A revival of the mechanistic approach early in the next century made England a fertile field for ideas on the dynamic interaction of forces. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Making sense of the world around us is a process involving both semiotic and material mediation—the use of signs and sign systems and various kinds of tools. As we use them, we experience them subjectively as extensions of our bodily selves and objectively as instruments for accessing the world with which we interact. Emphasizing this bipolar nature of language and technics, understood as intertwined "forms of sense," Robert Innis studies the multiple ways in which they are rooted in and (...) transform human perceptual structures in both their individual and social dimensions. The book foregrounds and is organized around the notion of "semiotic embodiment." Language and technics are viewed as "probes" upon which we rely, in which we are embodied, and that themselves embody and structure our primary modes of encountering the world. While making an important substantive contribution to present debates about the "biasing" of perception by language and technics, Innis also seeks to provide a methodological model of how complementary analytical resources from American pragmatist and various European traditions can be deployed fruitfully in the pursuit of new insights into the phenomenon of meaning-making. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Validity of Anselm's Ontological Argument The Truth of the Anselmian Premises On Whether Anselm's Ontological Argument Begs the Question On Parodies The Validity of the Ontological Argument of Descartes and Leibniz On the Truth of the Descartes–Leibniz Premises Critiques of the Descartes–Leibniz Ontological Argument Ontological Arguments of the Twentieth Century Gödel's Ontological Argument On Whether Gödel's Argument is Sound The Modal Perfection Argument The Temporal‐Contingency Argument Conclusion References Appendix 1. Logic Matters Appendix 2. Formal (...) Proofs of Some Modal Arguments. (shrink)

Introduction -- Modes of settling: settling down, settling in, settling up, settling for, settling one's affairs, settling on -- The value of settling: settling as an aid to planning and agency, settling, commitment, trust, and confidence, settling the social fabric -- What settling is not: settling is not just compromising, settling is not just conservatism, settling is not just resignation -- Settling in aid of striving: settling in order to strive, what strivings require settling, and why, when to switch between (...) one and the other, and why -- Conclusions. (shrink)

Professor Marcucci's book on Whewell [6] is a comprehensive expository treatment of Whewell's philosophy of science. The work contains chapters on Whewell's theory of ideas, the fundamental principles of his philosophy of science, his views on mathematics and mechanics, and on his philosophy of induction and philosophy of discovery. In addition there is a chapter on the English reception of Whewell's thought. Professor Marcucci's notes are rich, both in references to Whewell's many critics and to nearly all of the extant (...) literature on Whewell. Indeed, no full study of Whewell has as yet appeared that makes better or more extensive use of all the relevant literature on Whewell. (shrink)

_An accessible discussion of the thought of key figures of the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy._.

abstract Even if a state would have been perfectly within its rights not to provide for people's welfare at all, it might still be wrong for it to exercise that discretion conditional upon something that claimants do (like ‘look for work’). What might make some conditions morally permissible and others impermissible? One answer is in terms of the consonance of the condition with the purposes of the policy. If a policy is supposed to be for one purpose — or, morally, (...) if it can be justified only by reference to one purpose — then that policy must not impose conditions that are appropriate only to some other purpose. It is an improper exercise of power for public officials to tack wholly inappropriate conditions onto programmes justified on some other grounds altogether. Tacking labour‐market conditions onto policies that are ostensibly designed to promote people's welfare can be a case in point. (shrink)

Informal justice often is castigated as rough justice, procedurally unauthorized and substantively unrationalized and prone to error. Yet those same features are present, to some extent, in formal justice as well: they do not form the basis for any sharp categorical contrast between formal and informal justice. Furthermore, some roughness in justice may be no bad thing. Certain of those elements of roughness in formal justice are inextricably bound up with other features of formal justice that are rightly deemed morally (...) important. And rough informal justice can sometimes be used to change formal justice in more just directions. (shrink)

A thorough account of Langer's philosophical career.

ABSTRACT In this article I examine whether and how America can be understood as an assemblage of placeways encompassing very different forms of temperament, patterns of action and feeling, and systems of viewing the world. I argue that the contemporary American landscape can no longer be seen as a composition of well-defined individual spaces but, rather, as zones of influence that are labile, with no sharp edges, subject to symbolic contestation and a wide range of expectations with material and symbolic (...) consequences. These zones and places are matrices of energies, locating different forms of experience in people and giving rise to different existential preferences. Of particular importance are the contrasts between proximity and distance and between the space of nature and urban space as well as the development of a new sense of time as social organizing principle. It is proposed that we see America as a meshwork of intersecting lifelines rather than an assemblage of external accretions. (shrink)

If voters accord evidentiary value to one another's reports, revising their own views in the light of them as Bayesian rationality requires, then even relatively small electoral majorities ought to prove rationally compelling and opposition ought rationally to vanish. For democratic theory, that is a jarring result. While there are no resources for avoiding that result within the Bayesian model itself, there are various aspects of the political process lying outside that model which do serve to underwrite the rationality of (...) persistent opposition to majority opinion. Key Words: Bayesian rationality • consensus • political opposition. (shrink)