In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Teacher as Public ArtSheila Wright (bio)I entered the public art arena as an idealist optimist. Now, two decades later, I am a pragmatist realist. How did my dream of a populist marketplace turn into a nightmare?—Richard Posner, Artist vs. PublicLike Posner, many faculty members enter the academy as idealists, optimistic that their goals for and the promise of higher education will be fulfilled and their quest for knowledge (...) inspired, only to discover years later that they have become pragmatist realists.1 For many, change is necessary for survival, career success, and fulfilling dreams. At what point, however, might otherwise idealistic, visionary, and highly capable people become oppressed, disillusioned, and/or marginalized as professors? Under what conditions do professional dreams of transforming education and critical pedagogy become frustrated by rigid adherence to the status quo? How might initial aspirations of achieving a higher education become politicized and racialized as seemingly inescapable nightmares?For some faculty—particularly those of color and, especially, women working in historically white institutions—the assault on dreams occurs not only in nightmares during sleep but as monochrome, white-mares while awake.2 So, what does it mean just to be a professor in an environment where the simple quest to teach, conduct research, and serve can be frustrated by faulty, stereotypical, and often hostile assumptions, attitudes, and reactions to gender and skin? How might professors in these circumstances [End Page 83] respond to social constructions that manifest as body politics and racialized consciousness while simultaneously celebrating their identity, inner spirit, and cultural self—their ideals and visions? How do professors in these situations respond to institutional policies and practices and the social, cultural, and political nuances of place? Further, how can professors learn from their experiences and strive for meaningful transformation without the risk of being viewed as an "other," "unorthodox," an "activist," or worse?In this article "teacher as public art" is used as a metaphor to describe and explain the all-too-common perceptions and experiences of professors of color, especially women, within the academy. More specifically, this article reports findings from a qualitative study focused on what it means to be a woman of color in the academy. The findings presented are consistent with those encountered in a growing body of literature on the topic. Like other work in this area, an analysis of historical contexts can provide a critical link to understanding the cultural nuances framing the formation of professors' work identities. Triangulated data for this study included a visual art exhibition, personal reflections on the experiences of teaching in higher education, and formal research involving women faculty of color. Data were analyzed and interpreted based on literature defining the three worlds of professorship (scholarship, teaching, and service). The presentation of results and findings included here is intended to encourage further conversation regarding the retention, promotion, and tenure of faculty of color.Information and PerspectiveHighlighted throughout this discussion are (1) the relevance of locating self within the context of people and place; and (2) the importance of bringing meaning, authenticity, and credibility to teaching and research through continued reflection, self-assessment, and inquiry. The case presented is essentially a first attempt to accomplish these goals using self-study, personal experience, and public knowledge as an integrated vehicle for professional transformation. As both the researcher and a participant, the process required that I be simultaneously subjective and objective in order to examine the multiplicity of dialogues related to the professional self. In other words, the process required that I honor the voice of the person within—for example, artist, professor, woman, person of color—while, as a researcher, at the same time honoring the voices of those who participated in the study. As someone who came late to the academy (I was forty when I received my first tenure-track position), I drew for this study not only upon my prior experience and identity as a professor and educational researcher but also upon a myriad of pre-academy experiences and identities as, for example, an artist, art educator, administrator, and aspiring social reformer. The dynamic relationship [End Page 84] between those various identities facilitated and sustained a more cohesive... (shrink)

This book is a succinct introduction to the orienting of attention.

The book is a defence of scientific realism. Its primary aim is to argue that it is possible to establish scientific realism without Inference to the Best Explanation. The idea that plays the central role in the book is an "Eddington-inference". Arthur Eddington once considered a hypothetical ichthyologist who concluded from the fact that his net contained no fish smaller than the holes in his net that there were in the sea no fish smaller than the holes in his net. (...) Although Eddington himself defended the inference, the author of the present volume argues on probabilistic grounds that it is likely such an inference is flawed. He generalises the argument to develop a probabilistic justification for scientific realist claims about the existence of unobservable entities. (shrink)

Traditional inflationary approaches that specify the nature of truth are attractive in certain ways; yet, while many of these theories successfully explain why propositions in certain domains of discourse are true, they fail to adequately specify the nature of truth because they run up against counterexamples when attempting to generalize across all domains. One popular consequence is skepticism about the efficaciousness of inflationary approaches altogether. Yet, by recognizing that the failure to explain the truth of disparate propositions often stems from (...) inflationary approaches' allegiance to alethic monism, pluralist approaches are able to avoid this explanatory inadequacy and the resulting skepticism, though at the cost of inviting other conceptual difficulties. A novel approach, alethic functionalism, attempts to circumvent the problems faced by pluralist approaches while preserving their main insights. Unfortunately, it too generates additional problems---namely, with its suspect appropriation of the multiple realizability paradigm and its platitude-based strategy---that need to be dissolved before it can constitute an adequate inflationary approach to the nature of truth. (shrink)

What is truth? Philosophers are interested in a range of issues involving the concept of truth beginning with what sorts of things can be true. This is a collection of eighteen new and original research papers on truth and other alethic phenomena by twenty of the most promising young scholars working on truth today.

Compatibilist libertarianism claims that alternate possibilities for action at the agential level are consistent with determinism at the physical level. Unlike traditional compatibilism about alternate possibilities, involving conditional or dispositional accounts of the ability to act, compatibilist libertarianism offers us unqualified modalities at the agential level, consistent with physical determinism, a potentially big advance. However, I argue that the account runs up against two problems. Firstly, the way in which the agential modalities are generated talks past the worries of the (...) incompatibilist in the traditional free will problem. As such, it fails to dispel the worries that determinism generates for the incompatibilist. Secondly, in spite of the ingenious use of the supervenience thesis and multiple realizability, the position still allows us to generate the old worry that determinism at the physical level would mean no alternate possibilities at the level of agency. In particular, I develop a new example, the ‘atomic slit case’ that demonstrates how physical level information is salient to what is possible at the agential level, motivating incompatibilism. (shrink)

If you cannot lucidly doubt that you exist as a thinking thing, then nor can there be a lucid doubt about the reality of those psychological states and attributes whose possession is distinctive of thinkers, par excellence their being subject to the various kinds of doxastic and conative states involved in goal-directed thought. Thus, it seems a short step from the Cogito to at least a limited application of the categories of ordinary attitudinal psychology. Yet many leading modern philosophers—for instance, (...) Dennett, Stich, the Churchlands and, above all, Quine—have been united, notwithstanding other differences, in a tendency to skepticism about the reality of attitudinal states. (shrink)

'The most thorough and scrupulous of contemporary students of induction' (the execrable Quinton 1993, p. 172).

Although it’s sometimes thought that pluralism about truth is unstable—or, worse, just a non-starter—it’s surprisingly difficult to locate collapsing arguments that conclusively demonstrate either its instability or its inability to get started. This paper exemplifies the point by examining three recent arguments to that effect. However, it ends with a cautionary tale; for pluralism may not be any better off than other traditional theories that face various technical objections, and may be worse off in facing them all.

According to some theories of testimonial knowledge, testimony can allow you, as a knowing speaker, to transmit your knowledge to me. A question in the epistemology of testimony concerns whether or not the acquisition of testimonial knowledge depends on the speaker's testimony being sincere. In this paper, I outline two notions of sincerity and argue that, construed in a certain way, transmission theorists should endorse the claim that the acquisition of testimonial knowledge requires sincerity.

Perhaps the most intractable aspect of gender inequality concerns inequalities within the family around the domestic division of labor, especially over child care and other forms of caregiving. These enduring gender inequalities constitute a significant obstacle to achieving “strong gender egalitarianism”—a structure of social relations in which the division of labor around housework and caregiving within the family and occupational distributions within the public sphere are unaffected by gender. This article explores three kinds of publicly supported parental caregiving leaves that (...) bear on the potential for public policy to transform this private realm of inequality: equality-impeding policies, equality-enabling policies, and equality-promoting policies. The authors defend the third of these as necessary, given the importance of cultural constraints on the slow erosion of the gender division of labor over caregiving activities. (shrink)

Descartes made a sharp distinction between matter and mind. But he also thought that the two interact with one another. Is such interaction possible, however, without either a materialist reduction of mind to matter or an idealist (phenomenalist) reduction of matter to mind? These questions overshadow the Western tradition in metaphysics from the time of Descartes to present times. The book makes an effort to stay clear of reductivist views of the two Cartesian substances. It defends a dualistic psycho-physical parallel (...) theory which reconciles freedom of action with determinism in nature. Basic problems in perception theory are also discussed, with special emphasis on hearing and sound. Because of the intrinsic interest of the subject and the author's non-technical presentation of it, the book should appeal to all readers with a serious interest in philosophy and psychology. (shrink)

What is the best model of epistemic agency for virtue epistemology? Insofar as the intellectual and moral virtues are similar, it is desirable to develop models of agency that are similar across the two realms. Unlike Aristotle, the Stoics present a model of the virtues on which the moral and intellectual virtues are unified. The Stoics’ materialism and determinism also help to explain how we can be responsible for our beliefs even when we cannot believe otherwise. In this paper I (...) show how a neo-Stoic model of epistemic agency can address common objections to treating epistemic and moral agency similarly and allow a robust explanatory role for character in determining our actions and beliefs. The picture of epistemic responsibility that flows from this model also explains why we often deserve credit for our knowledge, while demonstrating that the truth of our beliefs is not something for which we are epistemically responsible. (shrink)

The Character Gap by Christian Miller is an excellent discussion of how the empirical research conducted on virtue bears upon the larger question of whether or not people are virtuous, especially when we consider the question through the lens of a philosophically rigorous account of virtue. His conclusion is that overall people are not virtuous—but then, neither are they vicious. In this commentary, I challenge the latter. I explore two alternative ways of conceiving of vice and utilize a range of (...) empirical findings—on topics ranging from bullying, to sexual assault, to factory farming—to argue that perhaps vice is much more prevalent than Miller believes, a worry that deserves our attention and concern. (shrink)

One problem that has formed the focus of much recent discussion on personal identity is the Fission Problem. The aim of this paper is to offer a novel solution to this problem.

"New wave" reductionism aims at advancing a kind of reduction that is stronger than unilateral dependency of the mental on the physical. It revolves around the idea that reduction between theoretical levels is a matter of degree, and can be laid out on a continuum between a "smooth" pole (theoretical identity) and a "bumpy" pole (extremely revisionary). It also entails that both higher and lower levels of the reductive relationship sustain some degree of explanatory autonomy. The new wave predicts that (...) reductions of folk psychology to neuroscience will be located in the middle of this continuum; as neuroscientific evidence about mental states checks in, theoretical folk psychology will therefore be moderately revised. However, the model has conceptual problems which preclude its success in reviving reductionism, and its commitment to a syntactic approach wrecks its attempt to rescue folk psychology. Moreover, the architecture of the continuum operates on a category mistake that sneaks in an eliminativist conclusion. I argue that new wave reductionism therefore tends to be eliminativism in disguise. (shrink)

Consider the much-discussed case of the distracted driver, who is alleged to successfully navigate his car for miles despite being completely oblivious to his visual states. Perhaps he is deeply engrossed in the music playing over the radio or in philosophical reflection, and as a result he goes about unaware of the scene unfolding before him on the road. That the distracted driver has visual experiences of which he is not aware is a possibility that first-order representationalists happily accept, but (...) higher-order representationalists steadfastly deny. HOR claims that perceptual states become conscious only as the object of higher-order states; perceptual states are not intrinsically conscious. According to HOR, since the driver is supposed to be completely distracted by other cognitive tasks, he cannot form higher-order representations of his visual states, with the result that those states are disqualified as experiences.1 HOR theories have come in two flavors, those that claim that the relevant higher-order representations are thought-like and those that that rely on an inner perception-like mechanism that is directed toward one. (shrink)

In this essay, I analyze pregnancy loss from a feminist phenomenological perspective. I draw upon relational accounts of personhood wherein a person's status and identity are formed through a lived history and the activity of “calling into personhood” a being a woman may seek to know (a child) or become (a mother—or parent or “Ren”). I draw upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who advances a feminist phenomenology that grounds the status and identity of women within embodied situations. Her (...) important work sheds light on the varied perceptions and processes that inform experiences of pregnancy and pregnancy loss. (shrink)

This article elaborates on a view of human subjectivity as open and intersubjectively constituted and discusses it as a presupposition for student's participation in educational situations. It questions the traditional persistent concept of subjectivity as inner and private, the homo clausus, which puts self realization before recognition of the other and individual cognition before mutual meaning. From the perspective of homo clausus participation is thus limited to mere situated activity. A concept of human subjectivity as open and plural, homines aperti, (...) makes it possible to conceptualize educational situations relationally and to take the in‐between as point of departure for understanding pedagogical relationships. Participation can then be understood in terms of involvement in meaning making, knowledge construction and mutual will formation. The relevance of analyzing discrepancies between concepts in educational theory is that they direct our interest and our attention differently. This is also how theoretical understandings work in the praxis of teaching; teachers’ actions are certainly not guided by their theories, but their conceptions about such basic issues as subjectivity and self make some actions and decisions seem more intelligible than others. (shrink)

Michael Ruse has offered an interesting and insightful analysis of function statements in biology. The analysis he gives of statements of the form ‘The function of x in z is to do y‘ is : z does y by using x.y is an adaptation.The first thing to notice about this formulation is the peculiarity of step. There are many cases in which we would naturally say that x was the adaptation, instead of y; or perhaps we might say that everything (...) asserted in step constituted the adaptation. For example, the function of the duck's webbed feet is to enable it to swim. But we would commonly and naturally say that the adaptation was the webbing, not the swimming. It seems to me that Ruse's insistence on the formulation in points to the major difficulty of his analysis : and understanding what drives him to this unnatural formulation suggests the way out of those difficulties. (shrink)

The central challenge of “machine ethics” is to build autonomous machine agents that act morally rightly. But how can we build autonomous machine agents that act morally rightly, given reasonable disputes over what is right and wrong in particular cases? In this chapter, I argue that Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy can provide an important part of the answer.