Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

Grodzinsky examines Broca's aphasia in terms of some specific grammatical deficits. However, his grammatical models offer no way to characterize the distinctions he observes. Rather than grammatical deficits, his patients seem to have intact grammars but defective modules of parsing and production.

Catharine MacKinnon's investigation of the role of sexuality in the subordination of women is a logical culmination of radical feminist thought. If this is correct, the position of her work relative to radical feminism is analogous to the place Parmenides's work occupied in ancient Greek philosophy. Critics of MacKinnon's work have missed their target completely and must engage her work in a different way if feminist theory is to progress past its current stalemated malaise.

We need to find a middle way between the exaggerated deference towards science characteristic of scientism, and the exaggerated suspicion characteristic of anti-scientific attitudes — to acknowledge that science is neither sacred nor a confidence trick. The Critical Commonsensist account of scientific evidence and scientific method offered here corrects the narrowly logical approach of the Old Deferentialists without succumbing to the New Cynics' sociologism or their factitious despair of the epistemic credentials of science.

“The most likely use for Haack’s volume will be in introductory pragmatism courses and it is eminently appropriate for this task. However, others who would wish to speak out about pragmatism authoritatively would do well to go through the book from cover to cover. Outside of philosophy, the volume provides an introduction to a vital aspect of what philosophy has to offer to other disciplines, psychology among them....it is hard to think what could have been done to improve upon the (...) collection.”. (shrink)

Human beings are strange animals. Although evolutionary theory has brilliantly accounted for the features we share with other creatures—from the genetic code that directs the construction of our bodies to the details of how our muscles and neurons work—we still stand out in countless ways. Our brains are exceptionally large, we alone have truly grammatical language, and we alone compose symphonies, drive cars, eat spaghetti with a fork and wonder about the origins of the universe.

Why has humankind developed so differently from other animals? How and why did language, culture, religion, and the arts come into being? In this wide-ranging and ambitious essay, Christoph Türcke offers a new answer to these timeworn questions by scrutinizing the phenomenon of the dream, using it as a psychic fossil connecting us with our Stone Age ancestors. Provocatively, he argues that both civilization and mental processes are the results of a compulsion to repeat early traumas, one to which hallucination, (...) imagination, mind, spirit, and God all developed in response. Until the beginning of the modern era, repetition was synonymous with de-escalation and calming down. Then, automatic machinery gave rise to a new type of repetition, whose effects are permanent alarm and distraction. The new global forces of distraction, Türcke argues, are producing a specific kind of stress that breaks down the barriers between dreams and waking consciousness. Türcke’s essay ends with a sobering indictment of this psychic deregulation and the social and economic deregulations that have accompanied it. (shrink)

This book examines how the early Christian elite articulated and cultivated the affective dimensions of compassion in a Roman world that promoted emotional tranquillity as the path to human flourishing. Drawing upon a wide range of early Christians from both east and west, Wessel situates each author in the broader cultural and intellectual context. The reader is introduced to the diverse conditions in which Christians felt and were urged to feel compassion in exemplary ways, and in which warnings were sounded (...) against the possibilities for distortion and exploitation. Wessel argues that the early Christians developed literary methods and rhetorical techniques to bring about appropriate emotional responses to human suffering. Their success in this regard marks the beginning of affective compassion as a Christian virtue. Comparison with early modern and contemporary philosophers and ethicists further demonstrates the intrinsic worth of the early Christian understanding of compassion. (shrink)

Spontaneous play, important for forming the basis of friendships and peer relations, is a complex activity involving the management and production of talk-in-interaction. This article focuses on the intricacies of social interaction, emphasizing the link between alignment and affiliation, and the range and importance of verbal and nonverbal interactive devices available to children. Analysis of the way in which two girls, one of whom has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, engage in spontaneous activities demonstrates the potential for interactional difficulty due (...) to the unscripted nature of the interaction. The article argues for further research into how improvised, unscripted interactions are initiated within moment-by-moment talk, how they unfold, and how they are brought to a close in everyday contexts in order to understand how children create their social worlds. (shrink)

At the turn of the 21st century, Susan Leigh Anderson and Michael Anderson conceived and introduced the Machine Ethics research program, that aimed to highlight the requirements under which autonomous artificial intelligence systems could demonstrate ethical behavior guided by moral values, and at the same time to show that these values, as well as ethics in general, can be representable and computable. Today, the interaction between humans and AI entities is already part of our everyday lives; in the near (...) future it is expected to play a key role in scientific research, medical practice, public administration, education and other fields of civic life. In view of this, the debate over the ethical behavior of machines is more crucial than ever and the search for answers, directions and regulations is imperative at an academic, institutional as well as at a technical level. Our discussion with the two inspirers and originators of Machine Ethics highlights the epistemological, metaphysical and ethical questions arising by this project, as well as the realistic and pragmatic demands that dominate artificial intelligence and robotics research programs. Most of all, however, it sheds light upon the contribution of Susan and Michael Anderson regarding the introduction and undertaking of a main objective related to the creation of ethical autonomous agents, that will not be based on the “imperfect” patterns of human behavior, or on preloaded hierarchical laws and human-centric values. (shrink)

Much of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein can be brought to bear directly on the theoretical and critical determinations made by literature scholars. Like a language game which consists of a structural center in its essential grammar or rules and a temporal and contingent diversity in its actual uses or playing moves, Wittgensteinian philosophy as adapted herein for literary criticism points us toward a strategy of descriptive investigations whose coherence and usefulness is demonstrated in its circumstantial adaptability and responsiveness to (...) diverse texts . A reliance on Wittgensteinian philosophy adds to our work a means of discriminating among divergent critical perspectives insofar as certain perspectives will be more or less appropriate or useful in opening up different texts. For Wittgenstein, every path to a text may be different, but that does not make all equally useful or efficacious in every case. ;Chapter One discusses Wittgenstein's heuristic of the language game, his rejection of theory, and his methodology of descriptive investigations as they might be applied to literary criticism. The second chapter investigates the similarities and differences between Wittgensteinian philosophy and the deconstructive project. In the third chapter, a Wittgensteinian literary methodology is applied to the poetry of several women poets as the poems' language games and their "resemblances" are discussed. The fourth and concluding chapter points the way for future uses of Wittgenstein for literary criticism and theory: specifically regarding axiological determinations of literary and critical texts, deliberations of canonicity, and the parallels with and divergences from the poststructural critical approach of the New Historicism. The crucial point of the dissertation is that of fit: which critical methods prove most useful towards opening up which texts? Close investigations into the parameters of the language games of texts, critics, and methods will enable us to determine which paths to take towards more complete descriptive analyses and critiques. Wittgenstein's philosophical approach provides us with a strong means of developing such a method for literary criticism. (shrink)

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I examine Frege’s explanation of how Hilbert ought to have presented his proofs of the independence of the axioms of geometry: in terms of mappings between (what we would call) fully interpreted statements. This helps make sense of Frege’s objections to the notion of different interpretations, which many have found puzzling. (The paper is the text of a talk presented in October 1994.).

Book synopsis: Since its publication in 1677, Spinoza’s Ethics has fascinated philosophers, novelists, and scientists alike. It is undoubtedly one of the most exciting and contested works of Western philosophy. Written in an austere, geometrical fashion, the work teaches us how we should live, ending with an ethics in which the only thing good in itself is understanding. Spinoza argues that only that which hinders us from understanding is bad and shows that those endowed with a human mind should devote (...) themselves, as much as they can, to a contemplative life. This Companion volume provides a detailed, accessible exposition of the Ethics. Written by an internationally known team of scholars, it is the first anthology to treat the whole of the Ethics and is written in an accessible style. (shrink)

La traduction apparaît comme un domaine majeur de recherche dans les sciences humaines et sociales depuis deux ou trois décennies, suscitant une abondante production scientifique. A la fois technique linguistique et outil potentiellement puissant de médiation culturelle, elle constitue le type de transfert culturel par excellence, et à ce titre a attiré l’attention des chercheurs en études culturelles. Cet article passe en revue quelques-uns des travaux-clés dans ce domaine, leurs apports, et la manière dont ils ont sorti les études traductologiques (...) de leur tour d’ivoire linguistique et philologique pour en faire un objet d’étude pleinement en prise avec des questions sociétales plus larges de production et de circulation non seulement de textes mais d’idées, de discours et de modèles, dans lesquelles le traducteur est invité dorénavant à assumer sa responsabilité de « passeur » pas forcément neutre. Cette nouvelle interdisciplinarité a incontestablement apporté un dynamisme et des perspectives nouvelles à la traductologie (et vice-versa) ; cependant, elle soulève la question des compétences requises pour aborder ces thématiques, et celle des limites disciplinaires. Si l’ouverture de la traduction en tant qu’objet d’étude apparaît comme un enrichissement, l’apport de la notion de traduction comme méthode et comme modèle d’échanges culturels doit encore faire ses preuves, malgré l’existence de plusieurs tentatives stimulantes allant dans ce sens. (shrink)

Summary Scholars who study Roman prodigies and expiations have mostly ignored Cassius Dio’s imperial prodigy lists. This paper argues that these lists should be considered valid. If we accept them, we have a wealth of evidence for the continuation of prodigy reports and expiations in the early Roman Empire.

Race and Pedagogy identifies persistent, institutional racism as the cause of the lower rates of high school graduation among African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans in the United States. Adams and Buffington-Adams provide a retrospective look at their own and other teachers’ efforts to acknowledge the limitations of their own cultural lenses in order to identify, examine, and fix the failings of the current educational system.

American government and industry are encouraging educators to adopt the computer as a primary educational medium. However, efforts to use educational software have been disappointing and computer literacy has not been widely adopted as a basic literacy skill. This article will explore the advantages and disadvantages of integrating computers into education and describe their cultural implications for educational policy.