Research In Mathematics Education In Australasia 2016–2019 (sometimes shortened to RiMEA 2016–2019) is a timely and important edited collection where contributors provide critical reviews on mathem...

Practical reasoning as an important form of argumentation in politics has received limited research attention in critical discourse studies despite the proposal of an analytical model. Focusing on argument development surrounding events related to the extradition bill crisis of Hong Kong, this paper analyzes 48 editorials published in the South China Morning Post during the crisis period adopting Fairclough’s model. A number of recurrent themes have been identified in the corpus in association with the four argument components within the model (...) – Claims, Goals, Values and Circumstances – which may increase understanding of the social contexts of the extradition bill crisis. It is further argued that, although Fairclough’s model may not capture the arguments in individual editorials comprehensively, the model can be usefully applied to analyze a collection of interrelated editorials to reveal more insights about an ongoing political crisis. (shrink)

The Parmenidean Ascent is a full-throated and wide-ranging defense of an extreme form of monism or the denial of all distinctions, a form of monism rarely seen since the time of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides. At once historically sensitive and deeply engaged with trends in recent and contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of action, epistemology, and philosophy of language, The Parmenidean Ascent aims, on rationalist grounds and in a skeptical spirit, to challenge the content of-and to overturn the methods of much of (...) contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This paper defends an interpretation of Descartes according to which he sees us as having normative (and not merely psychological) certainty of all clear and distinct ideas during the period in which they are apprehended clearly and distinctly. However, on this view, a retrospective doubt about clear and distinct ideas is possible. This interpretation allows Descartes to avoid the Cartesian Circle in an effective way and also shows that Descartes is surprisingly, in some respects, an epistemological externalist. The paper goes (...) on to defend this interpretation against some powerful philosophical objections by Margaret Wilson and others by showing how Descartes' doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths can be brought in to support his epistemology. This doctrine and other analogous positions in Descartes can also reveal that Descartes, again surprisingly, takes important steps toward doing epistemology without direct appeal to God and God's veracity. (shrink)

Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886-1967) was not only an eminent Islamologist, he was also a man with solid roots in his own time. He taught in Naples and Rome, then for the ten years 1939-1948 at the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the few university teachers who, when the oath of loyalty to the Italian fascist regime was introduced in October 1931, opted not to accept that act of submission. His memoirs, Fantasmi ritrovati, were published in 1966; (...) the book, now out of print, conjures up a tableau vivant of half a century of intellectual encounters in Italy and Europe between the wars. Among the portraits he paints there is the astounding story of those crucial days in June 1924 when the fascist government became a full-blown regime. This article presents extended extracts from that story. (shrink)

This paper critically examines a prominent and perennial strategy—found in thinkers as diverse as Kant and Shamik Dasgupta—of simultaneously embracing the Principle of Sufficient Reason and also limiting it so as to avoid certain apparently negative consequences of an unrestricted PSR. I will argue that this strategy of taming the PSR faces significant challenges and may even be incoherent. And for my purposes, I will enlist a generally derided argument by Leibniz for the PSR which will help us to see (...) the connections between the PSR and a radical form of monism. (shrink)

What enables individuals to act together? Recent discoveries suggest that a variety of mechanisms are involved. But something fundamental is yet to be investigated. In joint action, agents represent a collective goal, or so it is often assumed. But how, if at all, are collective goals represented in joint action and how do such representations impact performance? To investigate this question we adapted a bimanual paradigm, the circle-line drawing paradigm, to contrast two agents acting in parallel with two agents performing (...) a joint action. Participants were required to draw lines or circles while observing circles or lines being drawn. The findings indicate that interpersonal motor coupling may occur in joint but not parallel action. This suggests that participants in joint actions can represent collective goals motorically. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice has undergone a steady growth in the medical ethics literature throughout the last decade as many ethicists have found it to be a powerful tool for describing and assessing morally problematic situations in healthcare. However, surprisingly scarce attention has been devoted to how epistemic injustice relates to physicians’ professional duties on a conceptual level. I argue that epistemic injustice, specifically testimonial, collides with physicians’ duty of nonmaleficence and should thus be actively fought against in healthcare encounters on the (...) ground of professional conduct. I do so by fleshing out how Fricker’s conception of testimonial injustice conflicts with the duty of nonmaleficence as defined in Beauchamp and Childress on theoretical grounds. From there, I argue that testimonial injustice produces two distinct types of harm, epistemic and non-epistemic. Epistemic harms are harms inflicted by the physician to the patient qua knower, whereas non-epistemic harms are inflicted to the patient qua patient. This latter case holds serious clinical implications and represent a failure of the process of due care on the part of the physician. I illustrate this through examples taken from the literature on fibromyalgia syndrome and show how testimonial injustice causes wrongful harm to patients, making it maleficent practice. Finally, I conclude on why nonmaleficence as a principle will not be normatively enough to fully address the problem of epistemic injustice in healthcare but nevertheless may serve as a good starting point in attempting to do so. (shrink)

This paper analyzes and evaluates Spinoza way of carrying out his naturalistic program in psychology. I begin by examining Spinoza’s general metaphysical doctrine according to which each thing strives to preserve itself. While this doctrine cannot be true in its unqualified form, it does receive some support from Spinoza’s views on the nature of complex individuals. I then explore the problematic way in which Spinoza applies the doctrine of self -preservation to human psychology. The paper goes on the investigate the (...) naturalistic character of Spinoza’s views on such topics as irrational action, prudence, altruism, mental causation and the nature and classification of affects. (shrink)

An ardent treatise for the Dignity of Man, which elevates Humanism to a truly Christian level, making this writing as pertinent today as it was in the Fifteenth Century.

To początkowy fragment mowy O godności człowieka Pico della Mirandoli." Wstępem poprzedział Danilo Facca, przełożyli Zbigniew Nerczuk i Mikołaj Olszewski. -/- This is an excerpt from the Polish translation of Pico della Mirandola's De dignitate hominis. The preface to the translation by Danilo Facca. Translation by Zbigniew Nerczuk and Mikołaj Olszewski.

Spinoza's response to a certain radical form of scepticism has deep and surprising roots in his rationalist metaphysics. I argue that Spinoza's commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason leads to his naturalistic rejection of certain sharp, inexplicable bifurcations in reality such as the bifurcations that a Cartesian system posits between mind and body and between will and intellect. I show how Spinoza identies and rejects a similar bifurcation between the representational character of ideas or mental states and the epistemic (...) status of these ideas, a bifurcation to which Spinoza sees the radical sceptic committed. Spinoza's rejection of this bifurcation helps to explain some of his most cryptic statements concerning scepticism and also reveals a promising and highly metaphysical strategy for understanding and responding to scepticism. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 42-44.

In their address of structural racism in healthcare, Sabatello and colleagues provide both a remarkable review of the empirical literature regarding the disproportionate impacts of the COVID...

In a now classic paper, Karen Carr argues that Kierkegaard is a religious “anti-rationalist”: He holds that reason and religious truth exist in necessary tension with one another. Carr maintains that this antagonism is not a matter of the logical incoherence of Christianity, but rather the fact that genuine submission to Christ precludes approaching him through demonstration. In this essay, we argue that while Kierkegaard is in fact an anti-rationalist, the literature has failed to appreciate the full strength of his (...) position. It is not just that reason and obedience are in tension; rather, Kierkegaard holds the stronger view that reason is actively offended by Christianity’s primary claims. Not only is reason incapable of generating any positive evidence for the truth of Christianity, more radically, it provides evidence against it. In order to make this case, we offer a close reading of Practice in Christianity, developing a typology of Kierkegaard’s account of Christ’s “offense.” Finally, having motivated Kierkegaard’s strong anti-rationalism, we consider why, on his account, anyone would want to be a Christian. (shrink)

While the normative debate on European integration has addressed the importance of the construction of truly democratic institutions as well as the establishment of social rights at EU level, the role of progressive social movements has not been much debated. Building upon theorization and research in social movement studies, I argue that progressive social movements are indeed already contributing to the construction of European public spheres. Not one liberal (or bourgeois), public sphere but the proliferation of subaltern counterpublics could allow (...) for the participation of the excluded, giving them the possibility to make their political voice heard. Through different paths of Europeanization (in particular, domestication, externalization and transnationalization), progressive social movements have played an important role in the creation of a critical public sphere as, by contesting European institutions, they have contributed to make them (more) accountable, but have also developed collective identities at EU level and, with them, European public spheres. A main challenge is now to connect an emancipatory critical public to public institutions. (shrink)

This paper offers a defense of a much-maligned Leibnizian argument for the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the principle according to which whatever is has a sufficient reason or explanation. While Leibniz’s argument is widely thought to rely on a question-begging premise, the paper offers a wholly original and non-question-begging defense of that premise, a defense that Leibniz did not anticipate. The paper does not present this defense of Leibniz's argument as an interpretation of Leibniz; rather, the paper—more modestly in one (...) way, less modestly in another—simply claims that this argument succeeds. (shrink)

Spinoza ' s understanding and understanding Spinoza -- Spinoza ' s understanding -- Understanding Spinoza -- The metaphysics of substance -- Descartes and substance -- Spinoza contra Descartes on substance -- Modes -- Necessitarianism -- The purpose of it all -- The human mind -- Parallelism and representation -- Essence and representation -- Parallelism and mind - body identity -- The idea of the human body -- The pancreas problem, the pan problem, and panpsychism -- Nothing but representation -- Representation, (...) will, and belief -- Skepticism -- Psychology : striving and self - preservation -- Conatus -- Desire, joy, and sadness -- Love, hate, and all that -- The ethics of the ethics -- The good notion of the good -- The right notion of the right -- Knowledge and morality -- Freedom and morality -- Helping others -- Lies and degrees of freedom -- The state, religion, and scripture -- Rights and power -- Religion and the state -- Scripture -- Prophecy and the truth of the Bible -- From PSR to eternity -- The aftermath of Spinoza -- Leibniz -- Bayle and Hume -- The pantheism controversy -- Hegel -- Nietzsche -- Prospects of spinozistic rationalism. (shrink)

This is a translation of three works by Mirandola: "On the Dignity of Man," a document of early Renaissance humanism; "One Being and the One," a treatise on the relationship between unity and being; and "Heptaplus," an interpretation of the first verses of "Genesis.".

I argue that the key motivation for the essentialist is that modal intuitions, such as "Humphrey might have won", are not to be explicated in terms of persons in other possible situations who are similar to the actual Humphrey. However, because of a need to preserve the necessity of identity, the essentialist must claim that certain other intuitions (such as "Hesperus might not have been Phosphorus") have to be understood in terms of similarity (as in Kripke) or have to be (...) rejected (as in Yablo). This move leads to ineliminable doubts about the essentialist's rejection of similarity, and so it leads to an undermining of the motivation for essentialism itself. (shrink)

Memory and forgetting are inextricably intertwined. In order to understand how memory works we need to understand how and why we forget. The topic of forgetting is therefore hugely important, despite the fact that it has often been neglected in comparison with other features of memory. This volume addresses various aspects of forgetting, drawing from several disciplines, including experimental and cognitive psychology, cognitive and clinical neuropsychology, behavioural neuroscience, neuroimaging, clinical neurology, and computational modeling. The first chapters of the book discuss (...) the history of forgetting, its theories and accounts, the difference between short-term and long-term forgetting as well as the relevance of forgetting within each of the numerous components of memory taxonomy. The central part summarizes and discusses what we have learned about forgetting from animal work, from computational modeling, and from neuroimaging. Further chapters discuss pathological forgetting in patients with amnesia and epilepsy, as well as psychogenic forgetting. The book concludes by focusing on the difference between forgetting of autobiographical memories versus collective memory forgetting. This book is the first to address the issue of forgetting from an interdisciplinary point of view, but with a particular emphasis on psychology. The book is scientific and yet accessible in tone, and as such is suitable for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychology and related subjects, such as science and neuroscience. (shrink)

Humans are by nature social beings tuned to communicate and interact from the very beginning of their lives. The sense of touch represents the most direct and intimate channel of communication and a powerful means of connection between the self and the others. In our digital age, the development and diffusion of internet-based technologies and virtual environments offer new opportunities of communication overcoming physical distance. It however, happens that social interactions are often mediated, and the tactile aspects of communication are (...) overlooked, thus diminishing the feeling of social presence, which may contribute to an increased sense of social disconnection and loneliness. The current manuscript aims to review the extant literature about the socio-affective dimension of touch and current advancements in interactive virtual environments in order to provide a new perspective on multisensory virtual communication. Specifically, we suggest that interpersonal affective touch might critically impact virtual social exchanges, promoting a sense of co-presence and social connection between individuals, possibly overcoming feelings of sensory loneliness. This topic of investigation will be of crucial relevance from a theoretical perspective aiming to understand how we integrate multisensory signals in processing and making sense of interpersonal exchanges, this is important in both typical and atypical populations. Moreover, it will pave the way to promising applications by exploring the possibility to use technical innovations to communicate more interactively in the case of people who suffer from social isolation and disconnection from others. (shrink)

By invoking surprising rationalist considerations that Bernard Williams does not anticipate, this paper defends Williams’s claim that that moral criticism on the basis of purported external reasons amounts to ‘bluff’. After strengthening this rejection of external reasons by drawing parallels to compelling rationalist arguments in other domains, the paper mounts a similarly rationalist critique of internal reasons invoked by Kantian moral philosophers. The paper closes with an apocalyptic line of thought that develops the preceding rationalist arguments into a challenge to (...) the notion of acting for reasons in general. (shrink)