Through a close reading of Plutarch’s Against Colotes 3-9, the paper reconstructs and interprets the original Epicurean criticism against Democritean epistemology and ontology, and in particular against Democritus’ theory of sensible qualities, and Plutarch’s twofold criticism of Epicurean epistemology, on similar grounds, and of the questionable exegetical and argumentative manoeuvres used by the Epicurean Colotes. In the process of interpreting Plutarch’s text, the paper reflects on the nature, motivation and plausibility of Plutarch’s own exegetical and argumentative strategies. Finally, the paper (...) suggests that a careful reading of Against Colotes will help us to put into focus the important question of whether, independently of their apparently opposite claims about the “reality” of secondary qualities, Democritus and Epicurus shared either a form of radical relativism or a form of commonsense “intersubjectivism” in their evaluations of ascriptions of such qualities to macroscopic objects. (shrink)

In this chapter my aim is to suggest that an engagement with visuality is worthwhile, may be even necessary, for qualitative methods in geography. In doing this I want to push the case for these methods when despite sometimes warm words there are relatively few examples of their use. Indeed if one were to look at the methods in qualitative textbooks in geography, then the overwhelming dominance is of linguistic sources – be they written and/or spoken. I will focus upon (...) methods connected to the production of what we might call visual ethnographies. In doing this I want to highlight not a set of techniques, as though they were some items on an a la carte menu, but also paradoxes in the ways visual material is treated in geographical work. That is I want to highlight an ambivalence around visuality and its treatment in geography, and point to some theoretical critiques and slippages. I shall throughout this chapter be trying to position the visual as being used for more than just creating ‘data’ to be brought into accounts. Rather I am trying to suggest it may figure more prominently in finalised versions and as outputs. In this I must confess my complicity as a long time cheerleader for visual research and new forms of visuality without really developing those forms. I shall effectively focus upon photographic and video work. This is not to deny the good work done in terms of other visual methods – such as respondent drawings and maps. Partly my aim is to focus on visual media at a time when they are proliferating in society, and thus may form either a topic for study and a means for studies. It is also a time when visual ways of knowing have come under intense and refined critique within the discipline. My starting point is a sense that ‘visual methods’ may almost have been killed off before they were born in qualitative geography by powerful arguments about the problematic elements of visual knowledge – and in geography especially. A variety of visual methods, and especially the long reliance on modes of observational practice in landscape work and visual tropes for truth and knowledge across the discipline, have been criticised for assumptions of detachment and objectivity of knower leading to objectification of the known. Recently the issue of representational knowledge has been challenged tout court – and the visual seems perhaps inescapably bound to the representational. It has become common to hear the refrain that geography is a ‘visual discipline’ – and that this in some sense is a problem or limitation. But often ‘those asserting the occularcentrism of geography, do so only as a prelude to other sensory articulations of knowledge’ to produce what might be claimed as a more rounded version of the discipline. Just as classical anthropology positioned textual approaches against embodied experience, so in geography the visual is said to have been opposed to the embodied. Vision is positioned as the problem both in how geographers know and a powerful locus of practice within the discipline. There is much to gain from taking this line of argument seriously and I will work with and through some of these problematics below. And yet, as I browse through geographical journals, I am not exactly overwhelmed by the deployment of visual media. My contention is that we have allowed one sense of visuality, with a troubling past, to rather dominate our critical understanding of what visual methods might comprise or what they might do. This chapter will begin with a review of some of the classic heritages of visual knowledge in geography, and their politics and legacies. It will develop an account of some of the deployments of visual methods, and different modes of visuality therein. The chapter will examine visual ethnographies that seek to offer an engaged, participatory form of seeing and set it against a more ironic and perhaps even alienated, critical forms of seeing. It will conclude by trying to refigure how we think of seeing as representing rather than a medium of connecting and making present. It will thus ask about the how we might show what is not seen, when it cannot be pictured and how we might think about vision not as the antithesis of touch but through a haptic register. (shrink)

This short article explores the expanding and contested terrain of social work ethics, considering the form and content of future areas for development. It charts the broadening of the field beyond a focus on professional codes of ethics, principle-based theories, difficult cases and decision-making models towards more embedded and situated approaches to ethics in professional life. The potential for further empirical research into ethical issues in social work, including how practitioners conceptualize and handle ethical difficulties, is noted, alongside the scope (...) for focused studies and monographs drawing on moral, political and religious philosophy to examine particular theoretical approaches or to develop new ways of approaching ethics in social work, drawing on its radical, critical and transformatory traditions. (shrink)

The following text is taken from the publisher's website: "Romanticism is, and always has been, one of the most hotly contested terms in literary and cultural history. Many of the writers now described as Romantic refused to be defined by the word: 'it would be such bad taste', said Byron in 1820. Lovejoy spoke of a plurality of ‘romanticisms’, born of distinct thought complexes, whilst René Wellek argued that literatures labelled Romantic indicated common conceptions. Comparably, in the post-World War II (...) period, political commentators have seen Romanticism as either profoundly radical or deeply reactionary. This significant collection gathers key critical discussions that explore the complex and many-sided nature of the 'Romantic'. A new introduction by the editors, a full index and chronological table of contents guide the reader through the wealth of material dedicated to a term that is both extremely unstable and remarkably persistent.". (shrink)

The present volume, number VI in the series «Groningen Studies in Cultural Change», offers a selection of papers presented at the International Conference 'Knowledge and Learning' held in Groningen in November 2001. It is the second of three volumes. The first, entitled «Learned Antiquity: Scholarship and Society in the Near East, the Greco-Roman World, and the Early Medieval West» has been edited by Alasdair A. MacDonald, Michael W. Twomey and Gerrit J. Reinink. The third one bears the title «Scholarly Environments: (...) Centres of Learning and Institutional Contexts 1600-1960» and will be edited by Alasdair A. MacDonald and Arend H. Huussen. The present volume, «Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages», contains new studies on a wide range of matters pertaining to scholarship from the early Middle Ages throught to the Renaissance and beyond. The disciplines discussed include: literature, philosophy, cultural history, and education. (shrink)

Research methods are "technique for... gathering data" and are generally dichotomised into being either quantitative or qualitative. It has been argued that methodology has been gendered, with quantitative methods traditionally being associated with words such as positivism, scientific, objectivity, statistics and masculinity. In contrast, qualitative methods have generally been associated with interpretivism, non-scientific, subjectivity and femininity. These associations have led some feminist researchers to criticise or even reject the quantitative approach, arguing that it is in direct conflict with the aims (...) of feminist research. It has been argued that qualitative methods are more appropriate for feminist research by allowing subjective knowledge, and a more equal relationship between the researcher and the researched. This paper considers the quantitative/qualitative divide and the epistemological reasoning behind the debate before investigating two research methods, the statistical survey and the semi-structured interview, in respect of their use to feminist researchers. It concludes by arguing that different feminist issues need different research methods, and that as long as they are applied from a feminist perspective there is no need for the dichotomous "us against them", "quantitative against qualitative" debates. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relationship between historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, and indeed scientists themselves. I argue that they co-habit a shared intellectual territory ; and they should be able to do so peacefully, and with mutual respect, even if they disagree radically about how to describe the methods and results of science. I then go on to explore some of the challenges to mutually respectful cohabitation between history, philosophy and sociology of science. I conclude by identifying (...) a familiar kind of project in the philosophy of science which seeks to explore the worldview of a particular scientific discipline, and argue that it too has a right to explore the shared territory even though some historians and sociologists may find it methodologically suspect. (shrink)

Normativity in Ecclesiology has tended to be based on a particular understanding of theology as blueprint. In the Ecclesiology and Ethnography Conversation there has been some dispute around how theological normativity should operate. This paper argues that theological knowledge arises from an ecclesial context of ‘abiding.’ This abiding is pneumatological in nature ‘like the wind’ and as such it is perilous. This point is argued with resort to a critical realist epistemology.

In research textbooks, and much of the research practice, they describe, qualitative processes and interpretivist epistemologies tend to dominate visual methodology. This article challenges the assumptions behind this dominance. Using exemplification from three existing visual data sets produced through one large education research project, this article considers the affordances and constraints of the research process focusing particularly on analysis. It examines how and when the visual can be incorporated, gives some critical reflections on the role and use of visual methods (...) to fulfil different research intents, and, in particular, considers combining large, open-ended data sets with acceptable and rigorous analysis techniques. We then explore arguments about the nature of visual data, what is considered epistemologically appropriate and the decision-making which accompanies any appraisal of process in education research. The intention is to challenge ourselves, and fellow visual methods researchers, to develop a more complete understanding of the theory and practice of visual research. (shrink)

Highlighting literature and philosophy's potential impact on economics, health care, bioethics, public policy and theology, this book analyses the heuristic value of fiction. It alerts us to how we risk succumbing to the deceptions of fiction in our everyday lives, because fictional representations constantly feign to be of the real and claim a reality of their own. Philosophy and literature disclose how the substantive sphere of social, economic and medical practice is sometimes driven and shaped by the affect-ridden and subjective. (...) Analysing a wide range of literature-from Augustine, Shakespeare, Spinoza and Deleuze to Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Philip Roth, W. G. Sebald and Jonathan Littell-Michael Mack rethinks ethical attitudes towards the long or eternal life. In so doing he shows how philosophy and literature turn representation against itself to expose the hollowness of theologically grand concepts that govern our secular approach towards ethics, economics and medicine. Philosophy and literature help us resist our current infatuation with numbers and the numerical and contribute towards a future politics that is at once singular and diverse. (shrink)

Global justice as a field must confront a central problem: how global is global justice? A defining feature about the burgeoning literature in global justice is its operation within a bounded, philosophical tradition. Global justice research is too often a product of one tradition in self-isolation from others that nonetheless claims to speak for what is best for all. This criticism applies to various philosophical traditions whether so-called “analytic,” “Continental” or others. The problem is that each tradition too often works (...) independently from others to construct new ideas about the promotion of global justice: these ideas are designed by some for application to all. “Global” justice may have an international reach, but it too often lacks a more global character. The development of a more global approach to global justice raises several vexing questions. What does it mean to have a “global” approach to global justice? How “global” should any such approach be? And how can a coherent and compelling model for it be constructed? This chapter develops a new approach for a more distinctly global view of global justice: the idea of global philosophy. Most approaches to global justice are developed within bounded philosophical traditions. One problem is that each offers contributions to global justice that is constricted by the narrow bounds of their particular tradition. The issue is not only that global justice may be overly culturally-specific, but rather that bounded traditions close off important resources for addressing philosophical problems that can be accessed through closer engagement with other philosophical traditions. A global philosophy is then a more “unbound philosophy” better suited for a globalized world. Our world is ever-changing with ideas and people travelling as never before. It is time for philosophy to catch up with these developments and this chapter will explain why and how. (shrink)

Like proper names, demonstratives, and definite descriptions, pronouns have referential uses. These can be 'essentially indexical' in the sense that they cannot be replaced by non-pronominal forms of reference. Here we show that the grammar of pronouns in such occurrences is systematically different from that of other referential expressions, in a way that illuminates the differences in reference in question. We specifically illustrate, in the domain of Romance clitics and pronouns, a hierarchy of referentiality, as related to the topology of (...) the grammatical phase. Our explanation is based on extending the 'Topological Mapping Hypotheses' of Longobardi and Sheehan & Hinzen. The extended topology covers the full range of interpretations, from purely predicative to quantificational, to referential and deictic. Along this scale, grammatical complexity increases, and none of these forms of reference is lexical. This provides evidence for the foundational conclusion that the source of essential indexicality is grammatical rather than lexical, semantic or pragmatic. (shrink)

The evolving genre of arts-based research constitutes a range of arts-derived tools used by qualitative researchers at different phases of the research process, which may encompass data collection, analysis, and dissemination. Its primary purpose is to provide an audience with evocative access to multiple meanings, interpretations, and voices associated with lived diversity and complexity. Arts-based research is thus a genre that strives for new ways of seeing, knowing, and feeling. In reflecting temporally on the evocative power of arts-based research, the (...) notion of vintage wine in new bottles is evoked to recover, situate, and critically reflect on the extraordinary interdisciplinary arts-based autobiographic work of Charlotte Salomon. Salomon, who died in Auschwitz in 1943, produced before her execution a remarkable and outstanding single body of work consisting of a series of over 769 gouache paintings titled, “Life? or Theater? A Play with Music”. The work integrates image, text and music, as she confronts the viewer with a visual narrative of her short life, speaking evocatively through time on multiple levels to a wide public audience. The aim of this paper is to herald and sociologically reflect on this work and its methodological and epistemological significance as a profound and early piece of arts-based research. (shrink)