Satire is often the best way of revealing the truth (recall Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal"). Sokal's spoof exposed the hypocrisy practiced by these so-called cultural revolutionaries. They claim to be democratizing thought, but they purposely write in tongues for an initiated elite. They claim that their work is transformative and subversive, but they focus obsessively on the linguistic and social construction of human consciousness, not on the hard reality of people's lives. Their claim to originality is particularly offensive to (...) historians who have always known that social structure and cultural meaning change over time. With few exceptions, their pretensions obscure their nakedness. (shrink)

Charles Taylor is one of the most influential and prolific philosophers in the English-speaking world today. The breadth of his writings is unique, ranging from reflections on artificial intelligence to analyses of contemporary multicultural societies. This thought-provoking introduction to Taylor's work outlines his ideas in a coherent and accessible way without reducing their richness and depth. His contribution to many of the enduring debates within Western philosophy is examined and the arguments of his critics assessed. Taylor's reflections on the topics (...) of moral theory, selfhood, political theory and epistemology form the core chapters within the book. Ruth Abbey engages with the secondary literature on Taylor's work and suggests that some criticisms by contemporaries have been based on misinterpretations and suggests ways in which a better understanding of Taylor's work leads to different criticisms of it. The book serves as an ideal companion to Taylor's ideas for students of philosophy and political theory, and will be welcomed by the non-specialist looking for an authoritative guide to Taylor's large and challenging body of work. (shrink)

It is widely known that dreams can be strongly affected by traumatic events, but there may be other ways in which dreams relate to trauma. In this paper, we argue that different types of dreams could both contribute to trauma and alleviate it according to the prediction errors that occur either in dreams or in response to them after waking. A prediction error occurs when an experience contradicts one’s expectation and it is often accompanied by surprise. Prediction errors are involved (...) in memory updating processes that can be long-lasting. Not only nightmares but also unpleasant, and surprisingly, even neutral and pleasant dreams have the potential to contribute to trauma, affecting our waking lives in a similar way to waking traumatic experiences. We postulate that certain dreams can also be beneficial for trauma alleviation. Further, clinical evidence suggests that working with prediction errors that occurred in dreams and during our response to dreams after waking can assist in alleviating the negative effects of trauma. (shrink)

Government encouragement of free markets is a highly effective means of fostering pharmaceutical innovation; the NIH, by including “free-market provisions” in its licensing agreements that discourage anti-competitive and research-impeding behavior, can do a great deal to support this goal even without legislative overhaul.

In two curiously neglected papers, David Lewis claims to reduce to absurdity the supposition (commonly labeled DAB) that (some) desires are belief-like. My aim in this paper is to explain the significance of this claim and rebut the proof.

There is an urgent need to understand how private and public organisations can play a role in promoting human values such as fairness, dignity, respect and care. Globalisation, technological advance and climate change are changing work, organisations and systems in ways which foster inequality, alienation and collective risk. Against this backdrop, organisations are being urged to make their contribution to the common good, take account of the interests of multiple stakeholders, and respond ethically as well as efficiently to complex challenges (...) which transcend traditional organisational and state boundaries. Ethics, Meaningfulness, and Mutuality poses critical questions related to organisational design by challenging limits to current thinking, such as the neglect by political philosophers of markets, firms and stakeholders, or by organisational theorists of business ethics. In so doing, the book advances our understanding of the theory and practice of ethical organising. Specifically, meaningfulness and mutuality will be used to yield values and principles for a philosophy of ethical organising which includes an account of human values in morally desirable collective action, and examines the relationship of collective action to the contested concept of shared value creation. Within a philosophy of ethical organising, mutuality permits an examination of the unavoidable relational nature of collective action, whereas meaningfulness addresses fundamental human concerns for significance and leading a life we have reason to value. By addressing our status as relational beings with human needs for meaning, a philosophy of ethical organising brings critical thinking to the creation of morally informed organisational practices which are not only instrumentally beneficial for addressing wicked problems, but are normatively desirable for human flourishing. (shrink)

While reviewing relevant recent research, it becomes apparent that cognitive approaches have been rejected and excluded from Critical Discourse Analysis by many scholars out of often unjustified reasons. This article argues, in contrast, that studies in CDA would gain significantly through integrating insights from socio-cognitive theories into their framework. Examples from my own research into the comprehension and comprehensibility of news broadcasts, Internet discussion boards as well as into discourse and discrimination illustrate this position. However, I also argue that there (...) are salient limits to cognitive theories which have to be taken into account, specifically when proposing social change via rational/cognitive insights. Examples from recent political debates on immigration and from the election campaign in the US in 2004 serve to emphasize these arguments. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Taylor's criticism of contemporary moral philosophy and the role which this plays in his wider account of the development of Western moral consciousness, an account which I compare with Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the ModernAge. While I endorse Taylor's rejection of ?naturalism?, I deny that this entails the rejection of non?realism and I maintain that, indeed, the non?realist conception of a social foundation for morality represents the most cogent response to the contemporary dilemmas Taylor (...) identifies. (shrink)

The four essays in this volume examine the most central issues that face liberal democratic regimes. They tackle the protection of individual liberty, the basic principles of ethics, the benefits and the costs of representative institutions, and the central importance of gender equality in society.

This paper brings to light the significance of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking for contemporary physics. The point of departure is his 1956–57 Collège de France lectures on Nature, coupled with his reflections on the crisis in modern physics appearing in THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE. Developments in theoretical physics after his death are then explored and a deepening of the crisis is disclosed. The upshot is that physics’ intractable problems of uncertainty and subject-object interaction can only be addressed by shifting its philosophical (...) base from objectivism to phenomenology, as Merleau-Ponty suggested. Merleau-Ponty’s allusion to “topological space” in THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE provides a clue for bridging the gap between “hard science” and “soft philosophy.” This lead is pursued in the present paper by employing the paradoxical topology of the Klein bottle. The hope is that, by “softening” physics and “hardening” phenomenology, the “two cultures” (cf. C. P. Snow) can be wed and a new kind of science be born. (shrink)

This book investigates what actually happens when Pierre Bayle writes about the past and challenges the still prevalent view that he is dispassionate in the way he treats the subjects of the more than two thousand articles in his biographical Dictionnaire historique et critique. It opens with two case studies of the way he uses the sources available to him, which reveal a committed writer at work. Subsequent chapters explore the theory that shapes his erudition; the method that he devised (...) to discern falsehood from truth; his critical approach to Scripture; his conceptual reconstruction of the past. Bayle emerges from this as a writer whose interest in the past is more than antiquarian. The ideal of impartiality, which he drew from Renaissance conceptions of history, is not neutral but always situated. For all their apparent objectivity, the articles in the Dictionnaire are actually shaped by the debates, conflicts, and politics of Bayle's own time and place. In 1989, when this book was first published, its intertextual and contextualised reading of Bayle was innovative. Although many similar studies followed, this book led the way by developing an approach that allows us to gain access to the deeper strata of Bayle's thought. (shrink)

Five fundamental manifestations of symmetry in physics—reproducibility as symmetry, predictability as symmetry, symmetry of evolution of isolated physical systems, symmetry of states of physical systems, and gauge symmetry—are investigated for their essential meaning and physical significance. The approach is conceptual, to the complete exclusion of mathematical formalism.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

It seems to be important to recollect that if there were no names in the history of philosophy except those belonging to the creators of new systems, this would mean the extermination of culture, and thereby the death of philosophy itself. The very word "culture" and the inherent meaning in philosophy presuppose a continuity. For this reason they evoke disciples, imitators and followers who weave a living and indestructible chain. In other words, a tradition is sown, the fruits of which (...) are perpetually gathered in values, reassuring man of the ultimate and eternal harmony of all being, reaffirming the truth that nothing finally that is contingent or fleeting, nothing that is exclusively material or functional within life can sustain life, and reestablishing that only from that which lies beyond the phenomena can mankind gain access to all the abundance of spiritual resources indispensable for dealing with life. And it is tradition that constitutes an everlasting re-dedication to the life and the immortality of the spirit. Such re-dedication is Mumford's fruitful contribution to the philosophy of history and of ideas. He keeps the concept alive. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the distinction between classical liberalism and libertarianism and in particular with the claim of the latter to offer a theory of the good society which is independent of, and different from, that offered by classical liberalism. My argument is naturalistic in the following sense. A good society is one which delivers whatever is good for people, so that a theory of the good society (to ~ a theory of the good society) must say something about (...) what people are like and what is good for them. That is to say, it must be capable of making such judgments coherently and on its own terms. I shall argue that libertarianism is incapable of making such judgments because it rests on a Hobbesian radical individualism in which, by analogy with classical physics, people exist only as particulars, as individuals. If there are no general classes we cannot say what people have in common; if we cannot say what they have in common, the only "general" good is the negative liberty which enables them to pursue their own goals in their own way. Radical individualism leads by the shortest of routes to moral subjectivism. Thus libertarianism derives such plausibility as it has by drawing illicitly on aspects of classical liberalism which do not depend on radical individualism. In doing so it undermines not only its claim to be a distinct theory with its own foundations, but most of its own claims about what is good for people. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the idea of digital technologies as truth‐bearers in health care and argue that devices like SenseCam, which facilitate reflection and memory recall, have a potentially vital role in healthcare situations when questions of veracity are at stake (e.g., when best interest decisions are being made). We discuss the role of digital technologies as truth‐bearers in the context of nursing people with dementia, as this is one area of health care in which the topic of truth‐telling (...) has been hotly debated. People with dementia have been excluded from research studies and decisions that affect their lives because they are not regarded as truth‐bearers—that is, as being capable of giving truthful accounts of their experiences. Also, considerable research has focused on the ethics of lying to and deceiving people with dementia. Given their increasing prominence in healthcare settings, there has been surprisingly little discussion of what role digital technologies might play in relation to these questions of truth and deception. Drawing on theories from science and technology studies (STS), we explore their possible future role in some of the truth‐making processes of health care. In particular, we discuss the potential value of constraints on use of SenseCam to support the accounts of people with dementia as part of their care. (shrink)

The violation of parity in weak interactions demonstrated in 1956 was an event that shook the foundations of physics. Since that time, the status of physical symmetry has been very much in doubt. The problem is presently addressed by first examining the essential relation between symmetry and asymmetry. Then, through the medium of qualitative mathematics, an attempt is made to show how these opposites may be fused in a topological structure expressing a new principle, that of "synsymmetry".

I start by considering Mark Steiner’s startling claim that Hume takes geometry to be synthetic a priori, which engenders the Kantian challenge to explain how such knowledge is possible. I argue, in response, that Steiner misinterprets the (deceptive) relevant passage from Hume, and that Hume, as the received view has it, takes geometry to be analytic, although in a more expansive sense of the word than the modern one. I then note a new challenge geometry engenders for Hume. Unlike Euclidean (...) space, Humean space is finitely divisible, for which several Euclidean axioms and theorems do not hold. I argue, in response, that (crucially for his scientific project) Hume can account for our belief in the truth of Euclidean geometry on the basis of non-Euclidean ideas, although (innocuously for him) not all should be true. I conclude by arguing, on a less optimistic note, that Hume cannot point to a geometry that is true of our (discrete) ideas. (shrink)

Psychology departments often require undergraduates to participate in faculty and graduate research as part of their course or face a penalty. Involuntary participant pools in which students are compulsorily enrolled are objectively coercive. Students have less autonomy than other research participants because they face a costly alternative task or the penalties that accompany failure to meet a course requirement if they choose not to participate. By contrast, other research participants are free to refuse consent without cost or penalty. Some researchers (...) claim that the educational value of participation justifies the requirement. They treat coercion as a cost that can be outweighed by the benefits to students. This paper argues that such an approach is flawed because coercion is not like other costs and that educational value is inherently low relative to personal study or classroom time. The unethical nature of involuntary participation is best demonstrated with an opportunity cost analysis. This shows that students are forced to sacrifice higher value alternatives that they have paid to do and undertake a lower value activity that principally benefits others. Faculty have a conflict of interest as they are the beneficiaries of student coercion in their role as researchers and responsible for student achievement in their role as teachers. Voluntary participant pools can resolve this conflict but at the cost of reducing the supply of participants. A change in departmental research conduct is required to restore the autonomy of students who are competent adults and not legitimate subjects of paternalism when it comes to research participation. (shrink)

In the section of the Treatise titled “Of the immateriality of the soul”, Hume adduces an argument to show that nothing can be “locally conjoined” with all of a person’s perceptions. The argument is seldom discussed, and deserves attention, mainly because it can be transformed into an argument against the very existence of a soul. In this paper, I present and closely examine both arguments, Hume’s argument and the one against the existence of the soul. Both, I conclude, are fallacious.

Leslie’s doomsday argument purports to show that the likelihood of the human race perishing soon is greater than we think. The probability we attach to it, based on our estimate of the chance of various calamities which might bring extinction about (a nuclear holocaust, an ecological disaster, etc.), should be adjusted as follows. If the human race were to survive for a long time, we, livingnow, would be atypical. So our living now increases the probability that the human race will (...) end shortly. In this paper, I criticize some attempts to rebut the argument, and present my own. To facilitate the analysis, I consider a structurally similar problem, the “ShootingRoom.”. (shrink)

Learning Beyond the Objective in Primary Education explores an existential perspective for pedagogy in response to the current technocratic paradigm of education prevalent in many countries worldwide. This new perspective is termed 'Bildung's repetition.' The book seeks to encourage policy makers and educational practitioners to consider the impact of education on children, over and above the meeting of set targets and objectives.

The Gibbs' Paradox is commonly explained by invoking some type of "principle of indistinguishability," which asserts that the interchange of identical particles is not a real physical event, i.e., is operationally meaningless. However, if this principle is to provide a satisfactory resolution of the Paradox, it must be operationally possible to determine whether, in fact, two given systems are identical or not. That is, the assertion that the Gibbs' Paradox is resolvable by an indistinguishability principle actually is an assertion that (...) we can in principle possess a complete set of effective procedures for determining the identity or non-identity of arbitrary physical systems. We show that, in rather general situations, an assertion of this type is not well founded. It is further pointed out that a failure to recognize an incomplete set of "sameness criteria" can lead to serious blunders in physics and in biology. (shrink)

A portrait of the development of the author's philosophy includes philosophical discussions with intellectuals such as Paul Tillich, Erich Fromm, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt.

I have attempted to present a meta-theory for ethical theories which naturally fits in with a general pragmatic philosophical orientation. There are standard problems for such philosophical views to which I have tried to offer solutions. In addition to the meta-theory one would like to see an actual ethical theory which would exemplify that meta-theory, but that is a topic more appropriate for another time.