Power is everywhere. But what is it and how does it infuse personal and institutional relationships in higher education? Power, Knowledge and the Academy: The Institutional is Political takes a close-up and critical look at both the elusive and blatant workings and consequences of power in a range of everyday sites in universities. Chapters focus on specific locations in which power shapes personal and institutional knowledge including student-supervisor relationships, research teams, networking, the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK, and literature (...) reviews. (shrink)

An explicit linking of the minutiae of everyday parenting practices and the good of society as a whole has been a feature of government policy. The state has taken responsibility for instilling the right parenting skills to deal with what is said to be the societal fall-out of contemporary and family change. ?Knowledge? about parenting is seen as a resource that parents must access in order to fulfil their moral duty as good parents. In this policy portrait, caring for children (...) is posed as a classless and gender-neutral activity. A key theme of this article is that parents from different social class groups are positioned and understand themselves in quite distinct ways in relation to parenting skills advice and expert intervention into their family and home lives. We take a ?relational? perspective to show how mothers and fathers from different social class groups see themselves, and are located by policy and practice, as clients or consumers, and as commonplace or pioneers, in relation to parenting support for themselves and the education system for their children. We identify the lived gendered and classed disparities of power, and associated moral worth, attached to particular parenting practices. (shrink)

Go to John Cantwell’s response to the original paper from here › Go to Grazia Ietto-Gillies’ original paper from here ›.

Two of the most important political movements of the late twentieth century are those of environmentalism and feminism. In this book, Val Plumwood argues that feminist theory has an important opportunity to make a major contribution to the debates in political ecology and environmental philosophy. _Feminism and the Mastery of Nature_ explains the relation between ecofeminism, or ecological feminism, and other feminist theories including radical green theories such as deep ecology. Val Plumwood provides a philosophically informed account of the relation (...) of women and nature, and shows how relating male domination to the domination of nature is important and yet remains a dilemma for women. (shrink)

The author explores the idea that no behavior, even that of criminals, has any ultimate intentional basis, and that all decisions and beliefs occur by accident only.

The Twentieth Century has seen a dramatic rise in the use of probability and statistics in almost all fields of research. This has stimulated many new philosophical ideas on probability. _Philosophical Theories of Probability_ is the first book to present a clear, comprehensive and systematic account of these various theories and to explain how they relate to one another. Gillies also offers a distinctive version of the propensity theory of probability, and the intersubjective interpretation, which develops the subjective theory.

This paper suggests a new principle for confirmation theory which is called the principle of explanatory surplus. This principle is shown to be non-Bayesian in character, and to lead to a treatment of simplicity in science. Two cases of the principle of explanatory surplus are considered. The first (number of parameters) is illustrated by curve-fitting examples, while the second (number of theoretical assumptions) is illustrated by the examples of Newton's Laws and Adler's Theory of the Inferiority Complex.

Women, Humanity and Nature Val Plum wood There is now a growing awareness that the Western philosophical tradition which has identified, on the one hand, maleness with the sphere of rationality, and on the other hand, femaleness with the sphere...

Yule, Val A series of before-and-after pictures shows the cost to a city that is bombed. A recent example is the UNESCO-listed sites in the Syrian city of Aleppo - one example is given above. After bombing these sites were all rubble.

Rationalism is the key to the connected oppressions of women and nature in the West. Deep ecology has failed to provide an adequate historical perspective or an adequate challenge to human/nature dualism. A relational account of self enables us to reject an instrumental view of nature and develop an alternative based on respect without denying that nature is distinct from the self. This shift of focus links feminist, environmentalist, and certain forms of socialist critiques. The critique of anthropocentrism is not (...) sacrificed, as deep ecologists argue, but enriched. (shrink)

This paper begins by developing a causal theory of mechanisms in medicine, and illustrates the theory with the example of the mechanism of the disease anthrax as elucidated by Koch. The causal approach to mechanisms is then compared to the Machamer, Darden, Craver approach. At first sight the two approaches appear to be very different, but it is argued that the divergence is less than it initially seems. There are some differences, however, and it is argued that, where these differences (...) occur, the causal approach to mechanisms is superior. (shrink)

Ideal for undergraduate students in philosophy and science studies, Philosophy of Technology offers an engaging and comprehensive overview of a subject vital to our time. An up-to-date, accessible overview of the philosophy of technology, defining technology and its characteristics. Explores the issues that arise as technology becomes an integral part of our society. In addition to traditional topics in science and technology studies, the volume offers discussion of technocracy, the romantic rebellion against technology. Complements The Philosophy of Technology : The (...) Technological Condition: An Anthology, edited by Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek. (shrink)

In this much-needed account of what has gone wrong in our thinking about the environment, Val Plumwood digs at the roots of environmental degradation. She argues that we need to see nature as an end itself, rather than an instrument to get what we want. Using a range of examples, Plumwood presents a radically new picture of how our culture must change to accommodate nature.

Laws, codes, and rules are essential for any community, public or private, to operate in an orderly and productive fashion. Without laws and codes, anarchy and chaos abound and the purpose and role of the organization is lost. However, danger is significant, and damage serious and far-reaching when individuals or organizations become so focused on rules, laws, and specifications that basic principles are ignored. This paper discusses the purpose of laws, rules, and codes, to help understand basic principles. With such (...) an understanding an increase in the level of ethical and moral behavior can be obtained without imposing detailed rules. (shrink)

The paper briefly summarises the historical evolution of transnational corporations and their activities. It then introduces the major theories developed to explain the TNC. There is an attempt to place the theories historically, within the context of the socio-economic … More ›.

Archaeological discoveries, unless of unusual beauty, are generally of less inherent interest than the conclusions to which they point. Not that they are merely evidence in the court-room sense of the word; they certainly spur the imagination, and provide tangible links with those vast, unknown areas of human knowledge which scholarship seeks to restore to us. The public interest in recovered documents of the past, however, seems mainly in the discovery of the objects themselves rather than in the interpretation of (...) those objects. It is as if proving there was a past at a given date is of more interest than the life which made up that past.It is evident, for example, that public interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls is fading, now that publication of some of the new texts contained in them allows a preliminary assessment of their significance. Contact with the minds of men who composed them seems to be of lesser moment to many than the physical existence of manuscripts written and made use of two thousand years ago. (shrink)

This book traces the development of Dialectical Logic within the history of modern western philosophy, culminating in Marx s materialist dialectics. It brings out the essential contours of Logic through a detailed exposition of the ontological and epistem.

Imre Lakatos gained fame in the English-speaking world as a follower and critic of philosopher of science Karl Popper. However, Lakatos’ background involved other philosophical and scientific sources from his native Hungary. Lakatos surreptitiously used Hegelian Marxism in his works on philosophy of science and mathematics, disguising it with the rhetoric of the Popper school. He also less surreptitiously incorporated, particularly in his treatment of mathematics, work of the strong tradition of heuristics in twentieth century Hungary. Both his Marxism and (...) his emphasis on heuristics contained a view of science and mathematics that contrasted with the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy of science. Both involved a dynamic view of science, whether historical or psychological, and an emphasis on practice as opposed to static, formal representations of scientific theories. (shrink)

In this posthumously published paper Val Plumwood reflects on two personal encounters with death, being seized as prey by a crocodile and burying her son in a country cemetery with a flourishing botanic community. She challenges the exceptionalism which sets the human self apart from nature and which is reflected in the choice between two conceptions of death, one of continuity in the realm of spirit, the other a reductive materialist conception in which death marks the end of the story (...) of the self. Both perspectives structure out the basis of animal existence – that we are all food, and through death nourish others. She commends an animistic materialist approach, where life is seen as in circulation and where mortuary practices might affirm death as an opportunity of life for others in the ecological community. (shrink)