While some of Paulo Freire's readers understand his pedagogy as a rejection of any and all directive teaching methods, there are many scholars who do recognise Freire's emphasis on teacher directiveness in its appropriate form. In light of this tension between directiveness and dialogue, it seems that students of Freire must inevitably come to a crossroads: is Freire's pedagogy directive or is it not? However, even this question does not get at the more critical dilemma: if Freire's pedagogy is directive, (...) is such directiveness incompatible with Freire's overwhelming emphasis on egalitarian dialogue? This paper establishes three readings of the issue of directiveness in Freire and ultimately provides an exegetical defence of what is termed the compatibilist reading—that directive teaching, properly construed, is compatible with dialogic teaching in Freirean pedagogy. The question this paper seeks to answer is how Freire can have it both ways. In sum, Freire undeniably supports teacher directiveness and philosophically justifies directiveness as compatible with problem-posing education through his concepts of virtue education, utopia and criticality. (shrink)

From the late eighteenth through the end of the nineteenth century, educational philosophers and practitioners debated the benefits and shortcomings of the use of emulation in schools. During this period, “emulation” referred to a pedagogy that leveraged comparisons between students as a tool to motivate them to higher achievement. Many educationists praised emulation as a necessary and effective motivator. Other educationists condemned it for its tendency to foster invidious competition between students and to devalue learning. Ultimately, by the late nineteenth (...) century emulation as a specific pedagogical practice had disappeared in American educational culture. In this article, Mark Jonas and Drew Chambers ask whether the disappearance of emulation is something to be celebrated or lamented. To answer this question they examine the historical concept of educational emulation and analyze the bases on which proponents and opponents argued. Parties on both sides of the debate framed their arguments in close relation to the way emulation was being used at that time, which prioritized actual competitions and prizes. In that context, the opponents made a better case, which presumably contributed to emulation's disappearance in schools afterwards. However, as earlier proponents of emulation argued, emulation need not be restricted to competitions and prizes. Instead, these proponents offered a philosophically and psychologically rich defense of emulation, but these were not carried through to an appropriate degree. The authors conclude that, construed appropriately, emulation not only had tremendous educational potential then, but still does today. With intentional effort on the part of teachers, emulation can greatly enrich students' lives and act as a powerful learning motivator. (shrink)

The extensive community use of complementary medicine can no longer be overlooked in the practice of hospital medicine. Protocols need to be developed and implemented so that health professionals can deal with the issues surrounding the use of CM. Policy development has generally focussed on the supply of CM in hospital but another approach, which is based on consideration of the ethical and legal context, is presented here. Such an approach demands clarification of institutional policy for individuals who are competent (...) and those who are incapable of self-administration or non-competent. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relationship between ethics and income among individuals of different religions in the HKSAR of China. The presence of both traditional Chinese religion and Christianity from the West makes our study particularly interesting. The content of ethical beliefs varies with religion and thus the effect of ethics on income may also vary across religion. Furthermore, a reverse causal relationship may run from income to ethics. Since culture and taste affect the consumption behavior of a person, depending on (...) the religion of the person, a person with a higher income may or may not like to ‘acquire’ more ethics. Our empirical results find that there is indeed a simultaneous relationship between income and being ethical so that a single equation estimation of income on ethics and vice versa generates biased estimates. Using a two-stage instrumental variable estimation, our study finds that being ethical contributes to higher income for Christians and the non-religious group, but lowers it for people of traditional Chinese religion. On the other hand, an increase in income increases the likelihood of a person’s being ethical for both Christians and the people of traditional Chinese religion, but reduces it for the non-religious group. (shrink)

In Two Minds is a practical casebook of problem solving in psychiatric ethics. Written in a lively and accessible style, it builds on a series of detailed case histories to illustrate the central place of ethical reasoning as a key competency for clinical work and research in psychiatry. Topics include risk, dangerousness and confidentiality; judgements of responsibility; involuntary treatment and mental health legislation; consent to genetic screening; dual role issues in child and adolescent psychiatry; needs assessment; cross-cultural and gender issues; (...) rational and irrational suicide; shared decision making in multi-agency teams, and the growing role of the user's voice in psychiatry. Key ethical concepts are carefully introduced and explained. The text is richly supported by detailed guides for further reading. There are separate chapters on teaching psychiatric ethics, including a sample seminar, and on writing a research ethics application. Each case history and discussion is followed by a critical commentary from a practitioner with relevant experience. Jim Birley adds a comparative international perspective on psychiatric ethics. Cartoons by Johnny Cowee provide punchy counterpoint! In Two Minds is the sister volume to the third edition of Sidney, Paul Chodoff and Steven Green's highly successful Psychiatric Ethics. In providing a bridge between theory and practice, it will be essential reading for everyone concerned with improving standards in mental health care. (shrink)

This volume explores how Catholicism began and continues to open its doors to the wider world and to other confessions in embracing ecumenism, thanks to the vision and legacy of the Second Vatican Council. It explores such themes as the twentieth century context preceding the council; parallels between Vatican II and previous councils; its distinctively pastoral character; the legacy of the council in relation to issues such as church-world dynamics, as well as to ethics, social justice, economic activity. Several chapters (...) discuss the role of women in the church before, during, and since the council. Others discern inculturation in relation to Vatican II. The book also contains a wide and original range of ecumenical considerations of the council, including by and in relation to Free Church, Reformed, Orthodox, and Anglican perspectives. Finally, it considers the Council’s ongoing promise and remaining challenges with regard to ecumenical issues, including a groundbreaking essay on the future of ecumenical dialogue by Cardinal Walter Kasper. (shrink)

Using the recommendations of the Commission on Freedom of the Press, we ask today's media consumers how they rate the performance of modern American journalism. We employ original survey data collected from journalism students at a major Midwest university, framing our findings in the context of the commission's 1947 recommendations. The result is presentation of contemporary opinions about the performance of American media in the context of journalism ideals articulated more than 60 years ago.

Michael A PetersBeijing Normal UniversityChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 and a ‘stable release’ on February 13, 2023. It belongs to OpenAI’s GPT-3 family (generativ...

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Three studies were conducted to explore the psychological determinants of COVID-deterrent behaviors. In Study 1, using data collected and analyzed both before and after the release of COVID-19 vaccines, mask-wearing, other preventative behaviors like social distancing, and vaccination intentions were positively related to assessments of the Coronavirus Behavioral Health Mindset ; belief in the credibility of science; progressive political orientation; less use of repressive and more use of sensitization coping; and the attribution of COVID-19 safety to effort rather than ability, (...) powerful forces, fate, or luck. In Study 2, favorable COVID-19 vaccination intentions were related to greater willingness to work, lower emotional distress, and greater customer experience mindset. Study 3 examined the personality and motives of individuals who volunteered to help deliver COVID-19 inoculations to the local community. The vaccine-giving volunteers, especially those with prosocial motives, had high CVBHM scores, belief in the credibility of science, low use of repressive coping, greater attribution of COVID-19 protection to effort, low likelihood of voting conservative, were older, and had more education than others. The majority of public health volunteers expressed prosocial motives to help people or join a cause, but many expressed the personal motives of getting the COVID-19 vaccination for themselves, conveying a public image of compassion, or structuring time. Based on the three research studies, a COVID-19 Mindset Hierarchy model is proposed to integrate the results. (shrink)

There is an apparent contradiction within Levinas’s work: on the one hand, Levinas upholds an account of existence that seemingly requires a creation narrative, while maintaining, on the other hand, that an account of the ethical import of that existence needs no recourse to the divine. This seeming contradiction results from a fundamental misunderstanding concerning Levinas’s account of creation and its logical consequences concerning the divine. This paper aims to clarify this misunderstanding by exploring the similarities between and influence of (...) F. W. J. Schelling’s work on Levinas’s thereby providing a more complete picture of both author’s respective accounts of genesis and the existence of God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Beautiful Soul:From Hegel to BeckettDrew Milne (bio)The "beautiful soul," lacking an actual existence, entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself and change itself into an actual existence, and dwelling in the immediacy of this firmly held antithesis—an immediacy which alone is the middle term reconciling the antithesis, which has been intensified to its pure abstraction, and is pure (...) being or empty nothingness—this "beautiful soul," then, being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is disordered to the point of madness, wastes itself in yearning and pines away in consumption.—G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of SpiritThe figure of the beautiful soul marks out a limit of representation. Its persistence is that of a literary fiction which cannot be actualized, but whose imaginative lure is no less powerful for being so resistant to embodiment. The beautiful soul emerges in a shift from philosophical reflections on moral beauty into the romantic novel, but for Robert E. Norton, the history of the beautiful soul is brought to a close by Hegel [139]. Nevertheless, the way this figure stands between philosophy and literature, and between moral agency and the literary imagination, casts shadows over contemporary thought. Unreconciled immediacy, disordered by consciousness of its contradiction and proximity to pure abstraction, becomes the sign of modern art, perhaps most explicitly in the writings of Samuel Beckett. In The Broken Middle, Gillian Rose projects the beautiful soul out of Hegel and Goethe into a speculative account of modern thought's ethical equivocations. For Allen Speight, Hegel's recourse to the awkward literary and novelistic status of the beautiful soul reveals how "inescapable questions discernible in the products of modern literary artists are ones that concern the account we give of our freedom as modern agents" [135]. This essay seeks to unravel some of the contemporary relevance of the beautiful soul, exploring the instability of this figure as a mediation between philosophy and literature, in particular as a tension in the interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.The difficulties posed by the beautiful soul for interpreting Hegel can be gleaned from Terry Pinkard's impressively lucid survey German Philosophy, 1760-1860. Pinkard notes how Hegel's discussion of the beautiful soul in the Phenomenology of Spirit "makes oblique reference to Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte, Fries, Novalis, perhaps Rousseau, and maybe even Hölderlin" [240n19] before ascribing centrality in Hegel's discussion to Jacobi's novel Waldemar. Oblique reference folds into a structure whose indeterminacy concerns both the freedom claimed by literary representations of the beautiful soul, and the inability of this freedom to amount to more than a confession of conceptual paralysis or impotence. The beautiful soul proves resistant to interpretation, a literary-philosophical compound that destabilizes conventions of referentiality. The beautiful soul threatens to dissolve philosophy from the perspective of an inward delicacy of moral feeling, claiming [End Page 63] [Begin Page 65] the authenticity of a subjectivity that will do no wrong and knows no other as an object on which to act. Philosophical interpretations are often too brusque with the reflexive irony through which the beautiful soul is represented, or insufficiently literal-minded to capture its content as form. In turn, the self-critical claims of literary representation often dissolve into an ironic indifference to determinate consequences.The beautiful soul, however, can hardly be said to have existed outside its representation in writing. It recurs in manifold guises more as an aspiration to be, or appear, morally sensitive but incapable of action. Donald Phillip Verene sketches its background in the Romantic movement but suggests that: "The beautiful soul is not difficult to understand, as Hegel sketches it in the several pages he devotes to it. We are familiar in ordinary experience with types of persons that approximate to the stance of the beautiful soul, that is, if we keep polite company and associate from time to time with delicate people" [100-01]. Anyone who has spent time with aesthetes or poets who claim a delicacy of moral insight without feeling the need of justification or labor to actualize their insights knows the ills this shape of... (shrink)

According to Quentin Meillassoux, one of the principal aims of speculative philosophy “must be the immanent inscription of values in being.” In this regard, the return to speculation in contemporary philosophy is in many ways a deeply ethical project. This “inscription of values” can only be successful, however, if it can somehow assert an absolute ethical value without, on the one hand, resorting to the kind of dogmatism laid to rest by the Kantian critique; or, on the other, by falling (...) into some form of ethical relativism incapable of grounding universal ethical judgments. Unfortunately, too many of these attempts have failed. The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, to explore the structure and failures of two such attempts through an analysis of the ethical projects of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, respectively; and then, secondly, to show how both of these thinkers, and the project of speculative ethics in general, could benefit by turning to the work of F.W.J. Schelling on the concept of good and evil as absolute ethical values. (shrink)

The U.S. civilian space program is focused on planning for a new round of human missions to the Moon and, later, perhaps, to Mars. These plans are intended to realize a “vision” for exploration articulated by President George W. Bush. It is important to examine this “vision” in the broader context of 21st-century space exploration, which is a truly global enterprise. Questions to be addressed include the following: How will extending human presence into the solar system affect society and culture (...) on Earth? What legal, ethical, and other value systems should govern human settlements and other activities in space? Do humans have rights to exploit extraterrestrial resources and alter extraterrestrial environments? Does space exploration need reinvention to meet social needs? This article describes the current environment for space policy making and a framework of space law, ethics, and culture within which these questions can be considered. (shrink)

The mental model theory predicts variations in the percentage of errors in meta-propositional reasoning tasks but does not specify the nature of these errors. In the present study, we drew predictions concerning the nature of errors in a meta-propositional reasoning task by importing and elaborating the distinction between implicit and explicit models previously applied by the mental model theory to the domain of propositional reasoning. An experiment was conducted in which participants were asked to solve problems concerning the truth (...) or falsity of propositional assertions. The task was to determine the truth-status of two persons making a propositional assertion about their own truth-status and/or the truth-status of the other person. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that people may reason in ways that differ in the extent to which initially implicit models are made explicit. As such, the results corroborate a basic principle of the mental model theory: the errors that reasoners make are consistent with at least one of the mental models they construct during the process of reasoning. (shrink)

In this study, W. J. Waluchow argues that debates between defenders and critics of constitutional bills of rights presuppose that constitutions are more or less rigid entities. Within such a conception, constitutions aspire to establish stable, fixed points of agreement and pre-commitment, which defenders consider to be possible and desirable, while critics deem impossible and undesirable. Drawing on reflections about the nature of law, constitutions, the common law, and what it is to be a democratic representative, Waluchow urges a different (...) theory of bills of rights that is flexible and adaptable. Adopting such a theory enables one not only to answer to critics' most serious challenges, but also to appreciate the role that a bill of rights, interpreted and enforced by unelected judges, can sensibly play in a constitutional democracy. (shrink)