Despite publishing nearly forty books between 1963 and 2003, Jeff Nuttall remains a minor figure in the history of the International Underground of the long 1960s. Drawing on his uncatalogued papers at the John Rylands Library, this article seeks to recoup Nuttall as one of the key architects of the International Underground. In so doing, my article argues that Nuttalls contributions to global counterculture challenge the critical consensus that British avant-garde writers were merely imitators of their US counterparts. By exploring (...) the impact of Nuttalls My Own Mag and Bomb Culture, it can be shown that Nuttall was a central catalyst of, and contributor to, the International Underground. As a poet, novelist and artist, Nuttalls multidisciplinary contributions to art were at the forefront of avant-garde practices that sought to challenge the perceived limitations of the novel as a social realist document and visual art as a medium confined to canvas. (shrink)

The exhibition Off Beat: Jeff Nuttall and the International Underground showcases the archive of Jeff Nuttall, a painter, poet, editor, actor and novelist. As the exhibition illustrates, Nuttall was a central figure in the International Underground during the 1960s through to the early 1970s. During this time he collaborated with a vast network of avant-garde writers from across the globe, as well as editing the influential publication My Own Mag between 1963 and 1967.

Second edition of the introductory guidebook to the basic principles of constructing sound arguments and criticising bad ones. Non-technical in approach, it is based on 186 examples, which Douglas Walton, a leading authority in the field of informal logic, discusses and evaluates in clear, illustrative detail. Walton explains how errors, fallacies, and other key failures of argument occur. He shows how correct uses of argument are based on sound strategies for reasoned persuasion and critical responses. This edition takes (...) into account many developments in the field of argumentation study that have occurred since 1989, many created by the author. Drawing on these developments, Walton includes and analyzes 36 new topical examples and also brings in work on argumentation schemes. Ideally suited for use in courses in informal logic and introduction to philosophy, this book will also be valuable to students of pragmatics, rhetoric, and speech communication. (shrink)

Argumentation, which can be abstractly defined as the interaction of different arguments for and against some conclusion, is an important skill to learn for everyday life, law, science, politics and business. The best way to learn it is to try it out on real instances of arguments found in everyday conversational exchanges and legal argumentation. The introductory chapter of this book gives a clear general idea of what the methods of argumentation are and how they work as tools that can (...) be used to analyze arguments. Each subsequent chapter then applies these methods to a leading problem of argumentation. Today the field of computing has embraced argumentation as a paradigm for research in artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Another purpose of this book is to present and refine tools and techniques from computing as components of the methods that can be handily used by scholars in other fields. (shrink)

This is an introductory guidebook to the basic principles of how to construct good arguments and how to criticeze bad ones. It is non-technical in its approach and is based on 150 key examples, each discussed and evaluated in clear, illustrative detail. Professor Walton, a leading authority in the field of informal logic, explains how errors, fallacies, and other key failures of argument occur. He shows how correct uses of argument are based on sound strategies for reasoned persuasion and (...) critical responses. Among the many subjects covered are: forms of valid argument, relevance, appeals to emotion, personal attack, uses and abuses of expert opinion, problems in deploying statistics, loading terms, equivocation, arguments from analogy, and techniques of posing, replying to, and criticizing questions. The book will be ideally suited to courses in informal logic and in the introduction to philosophy. It will also prove valuable to studetns of pragmatics, rhetoric, and speech communication. (shrink)

This book examines three areas in which abductive reasoning is especially important: medicine, science, and law. The reader is introduced to abduction and shown how it has evolved historically into the framework of conventional wisdom in logic. Discussions draw upon recent techniques used in artificial intelligence, particularly in the areas of multi-agent systems and plan recognition, to develop a dialogue model of explanation. Cases of causal explanations in law are analyzed using abductive reasoning, and all the components are finally brought (...) together to build a new account of abductive reasoning. By clarifying the notion of abduction as a common and significant type of reasoning in everyday argumentation, _Abductive Reasoning_ will be useful to scholars and students in many fields, including argumentation, computing and artificial intelligence, psychology and cognitive science, law, philosophy, linguistics, and speech communication and rhetoric. (shrink)

This book offers a new theory of begging the question as an informal fallacy, within a pragmatic framework of reasoned dialogue as a normative theory of critical argumentation. The fallacy of begging the question is analyzed as a systematic tactic to evade fulfillment of a legitimate burden of proof by the proponent of an argument. The technique uses a circular structure of argument to block the further progress of dialogue and, in particular, the capability of the respondent to ask legitimate (...) critical questions in reply to the argument. Walton analyzes the concept of burden of proof in argument, and provides chapters on the use of argument diagramming as a technique of argument reconstruction. This powerful method of argument analysis developed therein is then applied to more than 100 case studies of circular argumentation where the charge of begging the question is or has been thought to be an appropriate criticism. Throughout this work, Walton throws light on the relationship between the problem of circular reasoning and broader issues in the critical analysis of argumentation. Ground-breaking use is made of the pragmatic theory of argument as interactive dialogue. Rules for several kinds of dialogue framework provide standards of good reasoning to validate or to refute the criticism that a particular argument begs the question. This book is directed to students and professionals in the fields of speech communication, philosophy, linguistics, logic, dispute mediation, and education. (shrink)

Use of argumentation methods applied to legal reasoning is a relatively new field of study. The book provides a survey of the leading problems, and outlines how future research using argumentation-based methods show great promise of leading to useful solutions. The problems studied include not only these of argument evaluation and argument invention, but also analysis of specific kinds of evidence commonly used in law, like witness testimony, circumstantial evidence, forensic evidence and character evidence. New tools for analyzing these (...) kinds of evidence are introduced. (shrink)

A leading expert in informal logic, Douglas Walton turns his attention in this new book to how reasoning operates in trials and other legal contexts, with special emphasis on the law of evidence. The new model he develops, drawing on methods of argumentation theory that are gaining wide acceptance in computing fields like artificial intelligence, can be used to identify, analyze, and evaluate specific types of legal argument. In contrast with approaches that rely on deductive and inductive logic and (...) rule out many common types of argument as fallacious, Walton’s aim is to provide a more expansive view of what can be considered "reasonable" in legal argument when it is construed as a dynamic, rule-governed, and goal-directed conversation. This dialogical model gives new meaning to the key notions of relevance and probative weight, with the latter analyzed in terms of pragmatic criteria for what constitutes plausible evidence rather than truth. (shrink)

Ethical conduct is the hallmark of excellence in engineering and scientific research, design, and practice. While undergraduate and graduate programs in these areas routinely emphasize ethical conduct, few receive formal ethics training as part of their curricula. The first purpose of this research study was to assess the relative effectiveness of ethics education in enhancing individuals’ general knowledge of the responsible conduct of research practices and their level of moral reasoning. Secondly, we examined the effects of ethics education on the (...) positive psychological outcomes of perspective-taking, moral efficacy, moral courage, and moral meaningfulness. To examine our research hypotheses, we utilized a pretest–posttest quasi-experimental design consisting of three ethics education groups (control, embedded modules, and stand-alone courses). Findings revealed that both embedded and stand alone courses were effective in enhancing participants’ perspective-taking, moral efficacy, and moral courage. Moral meaningfulness was marginally enhanced for the embedded module condition. Moral judgment and knowledge of responsible conduct of research practices were not influenced by either ethics education condition. Contrary to expectations, stand alone courses were not superior to embedded modules in influencing the positive psychological outcomes investigated. Implications of these findings for future research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

There is considerable disagreement about the epistemic value of novel predictive success, i.e. when a scientist predicts an unexpected phenomenon, experiments are conducted, and the prediction proves to be accurate. We survey the field on this question, noting both fully articulated views such as weak and strong predictivism, and more nascent views, such as pluralist reasons for the instrumental value of prediction. By examining the various reasons offered for the value of prediction across a range of inferential contexts , (...) we can see that neither weak nor strong predictivism captures all of the reasons for valuing prediction available. A third path is presented, Pluralist Instrumental Predictivism; PIP for short. (shrink)

In response to the growing recognition of informal logic as a discipline in its own right, this collection of essays from leading contributors in the field provides the formative knowledge and historical context required to understand the development of a so far little studied subject area.

Even though tools for identifying and analyzing arguments are now in wide use in the field of argumentation studies, so far there is a paucity of resources for evaluating real arguments, aside from using deductive logic or Bayesian rules that apply to inductive arguments. In this paper it is shown that recent developments in artificial intelligence in the area of computational systems for modeling defeasible argumentation reveal a different approach that is currently making interesting progress. It is shown how (...) these systems provide the general outlines for a system of argument evaluation that can be applied to legal arguments as well as everyday conversational arguments to assist a user to evaluate an argument. (shrink)

I highlight a category of experiment-what I am calling 'demonstrations'-that differs in justificatory mode and argumentative role from the more familiar 'crucial tests'. 'Tests' are constructed such that alternative results are equally and symmetrically informative; they help discriminate between alternative solutions within a problem-field, where questions are shared. 'Demonstrations' are notably asymmetrical (for example, "failures" are often not telling), yet they are effective, if not "crucial," in interparadigm dispute, to legitimate questions themselves. The Ox-Phos Controversy in bioenergetics serves as (...) an integral case study. (shrink)

This book provides an argumentation model for means-end reasoning, a distinctive type of reasoning used for problem-solving gand decision-making. Means-end reasoning is modeled as goal-directed argumentation from an agent's goals and known circumstances, and from an action selected as a means, to a decision to carry out the action. Goal-based reasoning for argumentation provides an argumentation model for this kind of reasoning, showing how it is employed in settings of intelligent deliberation where agents try to collectively arrive at a conclusion (...) on what they should do to move forward in a set of circumstances. The book explains how this argumentation model can help build more realistic computational systems of deliberation and decision-making and shows how such systems can be applied to solve problems posed by goal-based reasoning in numerous fields, from social psychology and sociology, to law, political science, anthropology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, and robotics." -- Back cover. (shrink)

Kuhn's distinction of within- and between-paradigm thinking can be extended using his notion of a problem-field. Hull's notion of populational variation applies within paradigms; his type specimen approach allows one to analyze disagreement and identify the problem-field. Categories of questions or problem frames can also partition debate, establishing interparadigm variation. A case where multiple simultaneous paradigms compete highlights the role of empirical domains. The Ox-Phos Controversy in bioenergetics (1961-1977) serves as a case study. Conclusions are framed as strategies (...) for scientists. (shrink)

This investigation joins recent research on problems with ambiguity in two fields, argumentation and computing. In argumentation, there is a concern with fallacies arising from ambiguity, including equivocation and amphiboly. In computing, the development of agent communication languages is based on conversation policies that make it possible to have information exchanges on the internet, as well as other forms of dialogue like persuasion and negotiation, in which ambiguity is a problem. Because it is not possible to sharply differentiate between problems (...) arising from ambiguity and those arising from vagueness, obscurity and indeterminacy, some study of the latter is included. The semantic web is based on what are called ontologies, or systems of classification of concepts, shown to be useful tools for dealing with these problems. (shrink)

It is considered in some quarters that hypothesis‐driven methods are the only valuable, reliable or significant means of scientific advance. Data‐driven or ‘inductive’ advances in scientific knowledge are then seen as marginal, irrelevant, insecure or wrong‐headed, while the development of technology—which is not of itself ‘hypothesis‐led’ (beyond the recognition that such tools might be of value)—must be seen as equally irrelevant to the hypothetico‐deductive scientific agenda. We argue here that data‐ and technology‐driven programmes are not alternatives to hypothesis‐led studies in (...) scientific knowledge discovery but are complementary and iterative partners with them. Many fields are data‐rich but hypothesis‐poor. Here, computational methods of data analysis, which may be automated, provide the means of generating novel hypotheses, especially in the post‐genomic era. BioEssays 26:99–105, 2004. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Combining classical and contemporary readings with original essays, Pathways to Philosophy offers an imaginative introduction to the art of philosophical reflection and wonderment. The collection reflects the inherent multidisciplinary nature of the field - revealing and exploring the connections between philosophy, science, and literature. All material is carefully chosen, edited, and coordinated to ensure its accessibility to readers of all levels. The result is a presentation that is engaging, provocative, and fun. There are four main sections divided into twelve (...) chapters held together by a common thread: analysis and exploration of concepts and dimensions of the Self. The readings cover Eastern as well as Western traditions, and include selections by both women and men. In the process, it provides coverage of a number of topics which, though important, are often omitted from introductory texts. (shrink)

This volume, the fourth in the Edinburgh Leventis Studies series, comprises a selection of papers from the conference held in Edinburgh March 2005 in conjunction with Professor Terry Penner's tenure of the A. G. Leventis Visiting Research Chair in Greek. It brings together contributions from leading Plato scholars from Britain, Europe and North America on a closely defined topic central to Plato's thought and to Ancient Philosophy--Plato's Form of the Good. The importance of the collection lies in the combination and (...) presentation in one place of a range of different approaches to the good in Plato's Republic, and different solutions to the problems posed and proposed by these approaches. The two central issues, which form an underlying thread throughout the collection, are: first whether Plato's Republic is centred on what is good for individual humans, or on some quasi-moral good; and secondly, what the Form of the Good is. Pursuing the Good goes beyond recent studies in the field, and will appeal to classicists and philosophers alike. To the advanced student, it represents a wide-ranging introduction to central issues of Plato's philosophy; for the academic it will provide stimulus through antithetical and controversial solutions to questions old and new. (shrink)

The period from 1780 to 1850 witnessed an unprecedented explosion of philosophical creativity in the German territories. In the thinking of Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, and the Hegelian school, new theories of freedom and emancipation, new conceptions of culture, society, and politics, arose in rapid succession. The members of the Hegelian school, forming around Hegel in Berlin and most active in the 1830’s and 1840’s, are often depicted as mere epigones, whose writings are at best of historical interest. In _Politics, (...) Religion, and Art: Hegelian Debates, _Douglas Moggach moves the discussion past the Cold War–era dogmas that viewed the Hegelians as proto-Marxists and establishes their importance as innovators in the fields of theology, aesthetics, and ethics and as creative contributors to foundational debates about modernity, state, and society. (shrink)

This investigation joins recent research on problems with ambiguity in two fields, argumentation and computing. In argumentation, there is a concern with fallacies arising from ambiguity, including equivocation and amphiboly. In computing, the development of agent communication languages is based on conversation policies that make it possible to have information exchanges on the internet, as well as other forms of dialogue like persuasion and negotiation, in which ambiguity is a problem. Because it is not possible to sharply differentiate between problems (...) arising from ambiguity and those arising from vagueness, obscurity and indeterminacy, some study of the latter is included. The semantic web is based on what are called ontologies, or systems of classification of concepts, shown to be useful tools for dealing with these problems. (shrink)

For the first time Truth: A Contemporary Reader brings together essays that have shaped two aspects of a fundamental philosophical topic: the nature of truth and the value of truth. -/- Featuring 22 essays, this up-to-date reader includes seminal work by leading figures in contemporary analytic philosophy. It charts the development of the central 'grand proposals' about the nature of truth, and subsequently how their influence gradually diminished in face of new theories developed in the 20th and 21st-centuries. The reader (...) also demonstrates how truth is often taken to be valuable in various ways, in particular as the norm of correctness for belief and assertion, and the relationship between truth and other epistemic values. -/- With introductory overviews to each group of related papers complemented by guides to further reading, this reader introduces the central debates, familiarizes students with the most important work in the field and covers pivotal theories of truth including: -/- - correspondence theories - coherentism, pragmatism, verificationism - deflationary, primitivist, and pluralist theories -/- Moreover, by showing how thoughts about truth and value bear heavily on one another, Truth: A Contemporary Reader provides new opportunities for understanding and advancing the link between these central topics. This is an essential collection for anyone studying or working in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language today. (shrink)

Unhappily, most writers who seek to relieve the present "dreary" situation in aesthetics offer us either verbal pettifogging or nineteenth century "systems." We are, therefore, indebted to Harold Osborne for publishing a brave, bold, wise, and defective book in the field. Despite their defects, these essays clarify some important issues in important ways. They deserve the serious attention of everyone seriously interested in art.

John Hartley opens his short history of cultural studies by evoking a sense of the contested nature of the field in the contemporary moment and the intense debates about its objects, scope, methods, and goals: “Even within intellectual communities and academic institutions, there is little agreement about what counts as cultural studies, either as a critical practice or an institutional apparatus. On the contrary, the field is riven by fundamental disagreements about what cultural studies is for, in whose (...) interests it is done, what theories, methods and objects of study are proper to it, and where to set its limits” (1). (shrink)

This volume collects 17 of Douglas Husak's influential essays in criminal law theory. The essays span Husak's original and provocative contributions to the central topics in the field, including the grounds of criminal liability, relative culpability, the role of defences, and the justification of punishment. The volume includes an extended introduction by the author, drawing together the themes of his work, and exploring the goals of criminal theory.

The need for justice for individuals, groups, and society as a whole has perhaps never been more pressing. The presence or absence of social recognition plays a vital role in both social injustices and efforts to overcome and prevent them. Critical theory philosopher Axel Honneth’s influential accounts of recognition and struggles for recognition contain important insights about injustice and social justice movements. Unfortunately, some of Honneth’s concepts are narrow and need expansion for them to be useful in considering social injustices (...) and responses to those injustices. This is especially true if we are to understand and respond to current social justice issues such as Black Lives Matter and the climate crisis. -/- Douglas Giles presents an important corrective and addition to Axel Honneth’s view of recognition that gives the concepts of recognition, misrecognition, and struggles for recognition more explanatory power. He first critiques Honneth’s portrayal of misrecognition as being a simple lack of recognition and provides an alternative view of misrecognition as complex and multidimensional, helping us better understand the causes and effects of injustices. He then engages in a critical examination of Honneth’s account of struggles for recognition—the emancipation from injustice. The American civil rights movement and women’s suffrage movements are archetypal political struggles for recognition, but Honneth, like Charles Taylor and others, sees struggles for recognition only as political struggles, leaving out much of the story of struggles for recognition. In response, Giles presents a more robust picture of struggles for recognition that decentralizes struggles for recognition by including individual experience and agency. -/- This contribution to recognition studies expands the reality of recognition and misrecognition beyond theoretical concepts into the daily lives of individuals. Recognition is essential for affirming one’s identity and one’s place in community and society. Misrecognition is at the heart of many injustices from interpersonal relations to structural socioeconomic inequalities. Struggles for recognition are ubiquitous for everyone because people’s need for recognition extends far beyond political recognition. Giles crafts a view of recognition and misrecognition that identifies some important problems in critical theory’s approach to social justice and offers new conceptualizations to assist future research in various fields of critical social theories. (shrink)

This dissertation defends the truth-conditional theory of meaning and the inflationary theory of truth it requires by explaining how truth-conditions could play an explanatory role in the account of the proper use of a language while being nevertheless metaphysically "lightweight" properties of sentences instituted by the way these sentences are used by the speakers of a language. Following the common division of approaches to truth into deflationary and inflationary, the dissertation begins in Chapter One with a discussion of currently advocated (...) deflationary theories. A general characterization of deflationism is developed that focuses on the deflationist's explanation of why certain attributions of truth-condition to the sentences of a language are assertible. This basic, meaning-theoretic deflationary commitment is distinguished from the metaphysically deflationary idea that truth is somehow not "robust" in the way that traditional inflationary theories take it to be. Chapter Two then argues that meaning-theoretic deflationism is best characterized by a less-noticed commitment to the claim that it is sufficient for adequacy in a theory of truth that it imply the attributions of truth-conditions discussed in Chapter One. In Chapter Three the relation of these basic deflationary commitments to the also common deflationary claim that meanings attributed with locutions like the English "means that", meanings that, in Hartry Field's phrase, "encapsulate truth-conditions" is considered, and it is argued that this latter view is actually not compatible with deflationism. ;Chapter Four examines the most prominent sorts of inflationary theory and finds them wanting. Chapter Five then discusses in a general way how a better inflationary theory could be developed; the central ideas are that truth-conditions play an explanatory role in the account of certain embedded uses of sentences, and that truth-conditions should be understood as instituted for sentences by the way that speakers use them. In Chapter Six the relevant sort of use is explained. The result is a view that is meaning-theoretically inflationary, in that truth-conditions play an explanatory role in the account of meaning, but metaphysically deflationary. (shrink)

How do we characterize theoretical disagreement and how does this translate into strategies for practicing scientists? I integrate Kuhn’s (1962) notions of paradigms and problem-fields with Hull’s (1982,1988) concept of populational variation and Shapere’s (1974) characterization of domains in interpreting the Ox-Phos Controversy in bioenergetics (1961-1977). The analysis highlights the differences between intraparadigm disagreement (based on proposed solutions to shared problems) and interparadigm disagreement (based on the problems themselves and views of relevant domain).Kuhn (1959,1962) introduced the notion that a single, (...) uniform paradigm guides ‘normal science’. He further suggested that scientific communities undergo gestalt-like changes in research focus, implying that all disagreement is based on ‘incommensurable’ paradigms. Philosophers and historians of science concerned largely with how consensus is established (see Laudan 1984; Laudan and Laudan 1989) have found this problematic as a universal model (e.g., Lakatos and Musgrave 1970; Laudan 1977). (shrink)

Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that includes those who claim that an ideology or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily, that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected. Pragmatism originated in the United States during the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. Although it has significantly influenced non-philosophers—notably in the fields of law, education, politics, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism—this article deals with (...) it only as a movement within philosophy. (shrink)

This paper reports on the author’s experiences as manager of a capacity-building project in Latin America. The project aimed to strengthen planning, monitoring, and evaluation (PM&E) in agricultural research. Nine lessons are drawn: (1) Project design is much more than a technical process; it is essentially one of negotiation. (2) In capacity-building projects, design activities cannot end when implementation begins. (3) Capacity-building efforts should prepare managers to deal with complexity, uncertainty and change. (4) In capacity-building efforts, it is essential to (...) collaborate rather than patronize. (5) Organizational assessment is a complex social process, intertwined with organizational politics. (6) In designing capacity-building projects, it is essential to involve managers and staff members in assessing needs and opportunities. (7) Action-learning strategies offer great potential for capacity building. (8) In the context of strategic management and organizational learning, PM&E take on new meanings. (9) Training is most effective when it is designed to serve a purpose within an organizational change process. It is concluded that capacity building is more a process of social experimentation than of social engineering. Management systems cannot be imported, but need to be developed within organizations. Development agencies should play catalytic, facilitating roles, rather than take responsibility for organizational change. To support genuine capacity development, donors and funding agencies need to ensure that their planning and accountability procedures foster flexibility, innovation, and learning. (shrink)

Since its origins in North America in the 1960s, the field of program evaluation has grown considerably, and its concerns have broadened from accountability to program improvement, decision support, and institutional learning. Program evaluation is now commonly practiced in governmental organizations not only in North America but also in many countries of Western Europe and Oceania. Although program evaluation is a relatively new field with many controversies and lively debates, a unifying body of evaluation theory, methods, and standards (...) is gradually emerging. Evaluation has recently been described as a “transdiscipline,” as are statistics and measurement. This article is based largely on my personal experiences working in agricultural research organizations in developing regions. Here, a number of different types of evaluation are carried out, but program evaluation as defined by Patton (1997) and as practiced by social scientists to assess public programs is largely unknown. Distinct branches of agricultural research evaluation can be identified, with disciplinary roots in the natural sciences and in agricultural economics. The most rigorous agricultural research evaluations are economic studies. Systematic internal evaluation is notably lacking. Current pressures to improve performance, transparency, and accountability are creating demands for more systematic evaluation, and many program evaluation concepts and methods would seem to be of value in agricultural research organizations. However, in the current scenario of declining funding for agricultural research, managers are yet to be convinced to expand their evaluation activities and explore unfamiliar paradigms and methods. Moreover, they are not yet convinced that social-science-based program evaluation would produce useful results. Natural scientists and economists tend to view program evaluation as “soft-science” or no science at all. (shrink)

Mircea Eliade, often described by scholars and in the popular press as the world's most influential scholar of religion, symbolism, and myth, was trained as a philosopher, received his Ph.D. in philosophy, and taught in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest in the 1930s. Although he became a historian and phenomenologist of religion within the field of religious studies, his approach, methodology, and analysis are informed by philosophical assumptions and philosophical normative judgments. In several of his (...) writings, he goes far beyond the history and phenomenology of religion and presents a strong critique of contemporary Western philosophy as part of his larger critique of contemporary Western culture. He submits that contemporary philosophy,as a development of the Enlightenment, claims to be universal, but is in fact ethnocentric and provincial; claims to be innovative and creative, but is in fact increasingly trivial, insignificant, and uncreative. Eliade repeatedly charges that contemporary philosophy is bankrupt and desperately in need of renewal. I shall provide his philosophical critique of dominant Western philosophy, his analysis of self-other encounters, and his alternatives for philosophical renewal through the emerging confrontations, engagements, and creative dialogues between Asian, other non-Western, and Western philosophical perspectives. (shrink)

Dialogue theory, although it has ancient roots, was put forward in the 1970s in logic as astructure that can be useful for helping to evaluate argumentation and informal fallacies.Recently, however, it has been taken up as a broader subject of investigation in computerscience. This paper surveys both the historical and philosophical background of dialoguetheory and the latest research initiatives on dialogue theory in computer science. The main components of dialogue theory are briefly explained. Included is a classification of the main (...) types of dialogue that, it is argued, should provide the central focus for studying many important dialogue contexts in specific cases. Following these three surveys, a concluding prediction is made about the direction dialogue theory is likely to take in the next century, especially in relation to the growing field of communication studies. (shrink)

This volume shows how Gandhi's thought and action-oriented approach are significant, relevant, and urgently needed for addressing major contemporary problems and concerns, including issues of violence and nonviolence, war and peace, religious conflict and dialogue, terrorism, ethics, civil disobedience, injustice, modernism and postmodernism, oppression and exploitation, and environmental destruction. Appropriate for general readers and Gandhi specialists, this volume will be of interest for those in philosophy, religion, political science, history, cultural studies, peace studies, and many other fields.

Once deemed not respectable as a scientific domain, when behaviourist doctrine held sway, emotion is now an exploding subject of compelling attraction to a wide range of disciplines in psychology and neuroscience. Recent work suggests that the concept of 'affective regulation' has become a buzzword in these areas. Disciplines involved include not only affective neuroscience, but also cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, clinical psychiatric studies into syndromes of emotion dys-regulation , various psychotherapy approaches, and several others, e.g. the increasingly popular fields (...) of meditation and relaxation training. However, the overall conceptualization of emotion and its close ties to cognitive processes continues to befuddle many theorists and researchers, for various reasons. Mario Beauregard , Consciousness, Emotional Self-Regulation and the Brain. (shrink)

This volume is the result of a three-year collaboration (funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and the British Academy) between scholars of early China and of ancient/Hellenistic Greece to investigate the emergent discourses of emotions in philosophy, medicine, and literature from around the fifth century BCE to the second century CE. It brings together scholars working on the history and philosophy of emotions in the two ancient traditions, and with different areas of expertise, to investigate the emotions and (...) their conceptualization at a crucial period in the cultural and intellectual development of both cultures. The project was motivated by a desire to make an intervention in the existing scholarship on emotions in both fields, which stands to benefit from a greater methodological self-awareness about the category of emotions and the kinds of commitments it entails. The volume aims to explore how the tools of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary investigation might be deployed to advance our understanding of the emotions in the two ancient societies and to use that understanding as a contribution to current research on the emotions more generally. (shrink)

The field of public policy is dominated by the social sciences. Schools and departments of public policy and public administration are largely populated by economists, political scientists, and sociologists, and the vast majority of work in prestigious public policy journals employs empirical methods. This is unsurprising, in one respect, for collecting data, predicting and identifying the causal impacts of policies, and understanding political institutions and processes are massive, important tasks that require the tools of the social sciences. It is (...) surprising, in another respect however, since much policy scholarship and analysis aspires to offer recommendations to policymakers, and recommendations necessarily involve evaluative judgments, for example, that the status quo is deficient and that a certain course of action will make things better. To defend such judgments, policy scholars and analysts cannot appeal to the social sciences alone for these judgments concern the realm of values, not facts. Instead, careful ethical reflection and analysis is required. This need for ethical reflection in public policy is particularly evident in the practice of policy analysis, a principal analytic tool of the field. Policy analyses involve the identification of policy problems, the specification of criteria for evaluating possible solutions, and the recommendation that a policy option offers the best balance of trade offs. This identification of bads, the specification of goods policies should realize, and the weighing of these goods with the judgment that policymakers should or ought to pursue this course of action or that, are all deeply ethical activities. Ethical reflection and analysis is thus a constituent feature of policy analysis, and like the amassing of evidence and projection of outcomes, this reflection and analysis may be performed well or badly. The overall aim of this book is to provide students, scholars, and practitioners of public policy with guidance regarding the ethical dimensions of policy analysis. My aim in this chapter is to set the stage, providing an overview of these dimensions. After providing a brief overview of the practice of policy analysis, I identify the steps of an analysis where analysts must make ethical judgments in order to move forward, and fully articulate the ethical questions they must confront and take a position on. (shrink)

Thomas' remarks raise some interesting questions about the courage and cowardice of soldiers who happen to be fighting on the wrong side. These are interesting and complex questions of moral philosophy in their own right, and I did not feel that it was appropriate inCourageto dwell on them in too much detail. However, Thomas should have read more closely before declaring that “Walton does not even consider” cases of whether actions “on the part of the Axis soldiers would count as (...) courageous”. For there is a substantial discussion inCourageof the case of the actions of Field Marshal Erwin Rommell for which he was decorated in both World Wars. But Thomas is surely right that further discussion of other cases of this type will help to advance our understanding of problems in ethics of courage. (shrink)

Investigating the concepts and material realities of energy coursing through the arts: a foundational text. This book investigates energies—in the plural, the energies embedded and embodied in everything under the sun— as they are expressed in the arts. With contributions from scholars and critics from the visual arts, art history, anthropology, music, literature, and the history of science, it offers the first multidisciplinary investigation of the concepts and material realities of energy coursing through the arts. Just as Douglas Kahn's (...) earlier books helped introduce sound as a category for study in the arts, this new volume will be a foundational volume for future explorers in a largely uncharted domain. The modern concept of energy is only two hundred years old—an abstraction grounded in extraction—but this book takes a more expansive view. It opens with a clap: the sonic energies in a ceremony of the indigenous Goolarabooloo people of Australia. Other chapters explore the energies of photography; responses of artists in the early twentieth century—including Marcel Duchamp—to scientific discoveries in electricity and electromagnetism; the aestheticization of entropy in works by Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson; free-jazz musician Milford Graves's cross-cultural engagement with music, science, and spiritualism; energy field performance; and the self-generating energy of rumor and gossip as artwork. Contributors include such leading scholars as Linda Dalrymple Henderson, John Tresch, and Caroline A. Jones. Practicing artists and students of art history will find Energies in the Arts an essential work. Contributors Susan Ballard, Jennifer Biddle, Marcus Boon, Joan Brassil, Steven Connor, Milford Graves, Daniel Hackbarth, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Caroline A. Jones, Douglas Kahn, David Mather, Stephen Muecke, James Nisbet, Daniela Silvestrin, Michael Taussig, John Tresch, Melissa Warak. (shrink)

Clinical ethics training programs are responsible for preparing their trainees to be competent ethics consultants worthy of the trust of patients, families, surrogates, and healthcare professionals. While the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) offers a certification examination for healthcare ethics consultants, no tools exist for the formal evaluation of ethics trainees to assess their progress toward competency. Medical specialties accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) use milestones to report trainees’ progress along a continuum of (...) professional development as a means of “operationalizing and implementing” medical competencies. Utilizing the Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation and the ACGME and American Board of Pediatrics’ (ABP) Pediatric Milestones Project, we developed milestones for 17 subcompetencies in clinical ethics consultation and academic bioethics. As the field of clinical ethics becomes more standardized, such tools will be needed to promote the development of robust training programs and to certify that their graduates are competent practitioners. (shrink)

Anthropocentric and individualistic foundations result in forest management policy based on linear, single?dimensional, marginal analysis detrimental to the well?being of the forest ecosystem. Recent theories from the fields of ethics, economics, and policy analysis find that nonlinear, multidimensional analysis is possible, provided one can divorce oneself from anthropocentric and individualistic tendencies. Deep policy is introduced as a policy perspective that encourages questioning the fundamental values upon which policy decisions are made, just as deep ecology encourages a similar questioning of ecological (...) values. An experiment is proposed for forest management in the Pacific Northwest, in which a self?realizing Forest Board demonstrates punctuated equilibrium in forest management policy. (shrink)

As a means to challenge and diminish the hold of mainstream curriculum's claim of being a colorblind, politically neutral text, we will address two particular features that partially, though significantly, constitute the hidden curriculum in the United States—race and class—historically studied as separate social issues. Race and class have been embedded within the institutional curriculum from the beginning in the US; though rarely acknowledged as intertwined issues. We illustrate how the theoretical and interpretive structure of French philosopher and sociologist Pierre (...) Bourdieu can productively subsume the insights of critical race theory into its framework in a way that provides a more robust understanding of how race and class continue to be socially reproduced in schools. To perform this task we examine, through Bourdieu's constructs of habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence and misrecognition, the ways in which race, in general, and whiteness, specifically, influences pedagogical and curricular existence within the institutional superstructure of school. (shrink)

Questions about concepts bring into play all the cognitive science disciplines. For many centuries, concepts belonged to philosophy; but more recently, these original caretakers have shared responsibility for this domain with cognitive and developmental psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, anthropology, and neuroscience. Each of these fields has offered insights into these building blocks of thought, and each has contributed a unique perspective on fundamental questions about the nature of minds. However, the integrative approach of cognitive science holds the promise of providing (...) new vantage points from a range of disciplines on this core issue. (shrink)

One's contemporaneous conscious mental states seem bound in a single, unified experience. Dainton argues, against what he calls the S-Thesis, that we cannot explain such co-consciousness in terms of states' being located in a single phenomenal space, a functional space posited to explain our ability to locate ourselves relative to perceived stimuli. But Dainton's argument rests on a conflation of egocentric and allocentric self-localizing, and thus fails to undermine the S-Thesis. Nevertheless, experiments on visual neglect suggest one can have unconscious (...) mental states that are located in the same phenomenal field, so the S-Thesis fails after all. I examine a modified version of the S-Thesis according to which mental states are co-conscious when one is aware of them via a higher-order sensation that represents them as located in the same phenomenal field. But among other problems, this view fails to explain the co-consciousness of intentional states, which aren't located in phenomenal fields. Finally, I argue that a higher-order-thought model of consciousness best explains the apparent unity of experience in terms of one's tacit assumption that all the first-person thoughts in virtue of which one is conscious of one's mental states refer to the same individual. (shrink)

This work investigates the complexity of ethics as a field of inquiry and practice across a principal's career. Fully contextualized, and thus carrying the contradictions and requirements of any school, the issues realistically do not usually lead to a single, beat-all answer, as any solution will likely have positive and negative consequences. Drawn from the authors' experiences and studies of schools over decades, the central figure is a fictional principal of a magnet school, whose dilemmas reflect the questions educators (...) must be prepared for. Each decision takes into account the principal's and staff's identities and values because they are all human and their opinions influence the outcomes. The work injects analytic, virtue, feminist, care, deontological, and critical theory insights as Deweyan ethics provides a lens for examining dilemmas. This accessible work blends reflective theory, the ordinary worlds of schools, and engaging pedagogical practice to guide those planning to enter the education sector. (shrink)

John Dewey is a well-known proponent of certain aspects of progressive education, including the idea that students and teachers should be reflective co-inquirers, not just acquirers of information.1 Among his many other educational ideas are the continuing need to reconstruct school conditions and environments, pedagogical thinking and practice, curricular planning and development, and educational activities and outcomes.2 In the field of education, however, his ideas of ethical inquiry, thinking, and decision-making are not as widely known as his views of (...) teaching and learning. Moreover, some advocates and critics of his ideas often confuse or blur his ethical deliberations.3 Since we think his ethical... (shrink)

Nature sports include pursuits such as paragliding, white-water kayaking, free diving, mountaineering, and surfing. Participants in nature sports interact with geographical features (e.g. mountains, rivers, oceans, snow fields, ice sheets, caves, rock faces) as well as the dynamic forces that produce them (e.g. gravity, waves, thermal currents, flowing water, wind, rain, sun). In this article, I engage a representational approach to analyze how participants in nature sports interact with nature. Anthropocentric representations privilege participants’ interests, wants, desires, and ends; they typically (...) refer to claims of conquest/achievement in nature, or praise nature for its therapeutic qualities. In contradistinction, ecocentric representations recognize humankind as one entity in an interdependent world that comprises all living organisms and the geological processes and geomorphological features that sustain them. Ecocentric representations of nature sports highlight networks of participants and landforms that help preserve a balance between people and the environment. Yet, notwithstanding the allure of ecocentric representations, especially in the wake of evidence that human-induced greenhouse gases are predisposing environmental calamities, there is a substantial gap between the ontological concepts and categories of ecocentrism and lived sporting experiences and practices in nature. (shrink)

Students of the Hegelian school must acknowledge an abiding debt to Ernst Barnikol. Upon his death in 1968, he left uncompleted a voluminous manuscript on Bruno Bauer, representing over forty years of research. Of this manuscript, conserved at the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, only a fraction has been published, but even this fraction, in its almost six hundred pages, continues to set standards in the field for meticulous scholarship, rigorous analysis, and balanced criticism. Barnikol's interests were primarily (...) theological, though he recognised clearly that Bauer's religious critique was politically motivated. Barnikol also discovered, but did not publish, Bauer's 1829 Latin manuscript on Kant's aesthetics. This text, adjudicated by Hegel and awarded the Prussian royal prize in philosophy, had been deposited among Hegel's correspondence in the archives of the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. It was first published in 1996, in the original Latin, with German translation and commentary. In referring to his discovery, Barnikol made a substantive claim which must be disputed here, that Bauer's early text remained without influence on his subsequent work. Focusing on Bauer's depiction of art, and on the relation of art and religion as manifestations of spirit, we can trace lines of continuity and development in his thought, from his 1829 manuscript to his writings of 1841-42. The central idea of the early manuscript, a Hegelian conception of the unity of thought and being, is the key to deciphering the complex and elusive meaning of Bauer's critical theory in the Vormdrz. (shrink)

"This book analyses the contemporary global revival of Nondual âSaivism, a thousand-year-old medieval Hindu religious philosophy. Providing a historical overview of the seminal people and groups responsible for the revival, the book compares the tradition's medieval Indian origins to modern forms, which are situated within distinctively contemporary religious, economic, and technological contexts. The author bridges the current gap in the literature between "insider" and "outsider" perspectives by examining modern Nondual âSaivism from multiple standpoints as both a critical scholar of religion (...) and an empathetic participant-observer. The book explores modern Nondual âSaivism in relation to recent scholarly debates concerning the legitimacy of New Age consumptive spirituality, the global spiritual marketplace, and the contemporary culture of narcissism. It also analyses the dark side of the revived tradition, and investigates contemporary teachers accused of sexual abuse and illegal financial activities in relation to unique features of Nondual âSaivism's theosophy and modern scholarship on new religious movements and cults. This book shows that, although Kashmir âSaivism has been adopted by certain teachers and groups to market their own brand of "High Tantra," some contemporary practitioners have remained true to the system's fundamental tenets and teach authentic forms of Nondual âSaivism. This book will be of interest to academics in the fields of religion and Asian philosophies, especially South Asian, tantric, neo-tantric and yoga philosophies, alternative and New Age spiritualities, religion and consumerism, and new religious movements and cults"--. (shrink)