The authors in this edited volume reflect on their experiences with culturally relevant pedagogy-as students, as teachers, as researchers-and how these experiences were often at odds with their backgrounds and/or expectations.

While several tests and strategies are recommended for colorectal cancer (CRC) screening, studies suggest that primary care providers often recommend colonoscopy without providing information about its risks or alternatives. These observations raise concerns about the quality of informed consent for screening colonoscopy.

This paper develops a novel problem for representationalism (also known as "intentionalism"), a popular contemporary account of perception. We argue that representationalism is incompatible with supervaluationism, the leading contemporary account of vagueness. The problem generalizes to naive realism and related views, which are also incompatible with supervaluationism.

This volume contains essays on an array of topics originally presented orally by a master teacher and scholar. With characteristic rhetorical elegance, Msgr. Synan, late professor at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto, delivered these papers in a variety of settings on issues relating to his specialty of mediaeval Christian philosophy and to his interest in Jewish-Christian dialogue, on the theology of sanctity and of death, and on morally significant historical events. Medieval figures represented here include Aquinas, Augustine, Abelard, and Godfrey (...) of St. Victor; some topics treated are war and peace, philosophical innovations, ecclesiology, evil, goliardic verse, law and abortion, Church councils and Jews in the Middle Ages, and convictions uniting Jews and Christians. This book also contains representative sermons–including a Month’s Mind for Etienne Gilson, an introduction detailing Synan’s background and professional contributions, an updated bibliography of his published works, and an extensive index. Especially appealing to those who knew Synan are three posthumous tributes and thirteen photographs from throughout his life. The selections in this volume are scholarly but non-technical, intended for anyone moved to seek elucidation of the topics discussed. (shrink)

Disability is primarily a social phenomenon -- a way of being a minority, a way of facing social oppression, but not a way of being inherently or intrinsically worse off. This is how disability is understood in the Disability Rights and Disability Pride movements; but there is a massive disconnect with the way disability is typically viewed within analytic philosophy. The idea that disability is not inherently bad or sub-optimal is one that many philosophers treat with open skepticism, and sometimes (...) even with scorn. The goal of this book is to articulate and defend a version of the view of disability that is common in the Disability Rights movement. To be physically disabled is not to have a defective body, but simply to have a minority body. (shrink)

Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that art-especially architecture, music, and painting-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention and aesthetic. By regarding our most cultured human accomplishments as (...) the result of the excessive, nonfunctional forces of sexual attraction and seduction, Grosz encourages us to see art as a kind of bodily enhancement or mode of sensation enabling living bodies to experience and transform the universe. Art can be understood as a way for bodies to augment themselves and their capacity for perception and affection-a way to grow and evolve through sensation. Through this framework, which knits together the theories of Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jakob von Uexküll, we are able to grasp art's deep animal lineage. Grosz argues that art is not tied to the predictable and known but to new futures not contained in the present. Its animal affiliations ensure that art is intensely political and charged with the creation of new worlds and new forms of living. According to Grosz, art is the way in which life experiments with materiality, or nature, in order to bring about change. (shrink)

Clinical musings on the nature of reality and "known experience." Therapists must rely on their clients' reporting of experience in order to assess, treat, and offer help. Yet we all experience the world through various filters of one sort or another, and our experiences are transformed through several nonconscious processes before reaching our conscious awareness. Science, philosophy, and wisdom traditions share the belief that our awareness is very restricted. How, then, can anyone accurately report their experience, let alone get help (...) with it? Neuropsychologist Aldrich Chan examines how our experience of reality is assembled and shaped by biological, psychological, sociocultural, and existential processes. Each chapter explores processes within these domains that may act as "veils." Topics in the book include: the default mode network, cognitive distortions, decision-making heuristics, the interconnected mind, memory, and cultural concepts of distress. By understanding the ways in which reality can be distorted, clinicians can more effectively help their clients reach their personal psychotherapeutic goals. (shrink)

This article introduces a process-oriented approach for improving present moment conceptualization in psychotherapy that is in alignment with neuroscience: the Temporospatial movements of mind model. We elaborate on seven temporal movements that describe the moment-to-moment morphogenesis of emotional feelings and thoughts from inception to maturity. Temporal refers to the passage of time through which feelings and thoughts develop, and electromagnetic activity, that among other responsibilities, bind information across time. Spatial dynamics extend from an undifferentiated to three dimensional experiences of emotional (...) and cognitive processes. Neurophysiologically, spatial refers to structures within the brain and their varying interactions with one another. This article culminates in the development of an atheoretical temporospatial grid that may help clinicians conceptualize where patients are in their cognitive and emotional development to further guide technique. (shrink)

This dissertation explores several illuminating points of intersection between the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of vagueness. Among other things, I argue: (i) that it is entirely unhelpful to theorize about perception or consciousness using Nagelian "what it's like" talk; (ii) that a popular recent account of perceptual phenomenology (representationalism) conflicts with our best theory of vagueness (supervaluationism); (iii) that there are no vague properties, for Evans-esque reasons; (iv) that it is impossible to insert "determinacy" operators into representationalism in (...) a truth-preserving manner; and (v) that strong versions of dualism are unable to accommodate the possibility of borderline consciousness. (shrink)

Social constructionism is often considered a form of anti-realism. But in contemporary feminist philosophy, an increasing number of philosophers defend views that are well-described as both realist and social constructionist. In this paper, I use the work of Sally Haslanger as an example of realist social constructionism. I argue: that Haslanger is best interpreted as defending metaphysical realism about social structures; that this type of metaphysical realism about the social world presents challenges to some popular ways of understanding metaphysical realism.

Much of the literature on the relationship between belief and credence has focused on the reduction question: that is, whether either belief or credence reduces to the other. This debate, while important, only scratches the surface of the belief-credence connection. Even on the anti-reductive dualist view, belief and credence could still be very tightly connected. Here, I explore questions about the belief-credence connection that go beyond reduction. This paper is dedicated to what I call the independence question: just how independent (...) are belief and credence? I look at this question from two angles: a descriptive one (as a psychological matter, how much can belief and credence come apart?) and a normative one (for a rational person, how closely connected are belief and credence?) Ultimately, I suggest that the two attitudes are more independent than one might think. (shrink)

If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

Women as commercial baby factories, nature as an economic resource, life as one big shopping mall: This is what we get when we use the market as a common ...

Many evidentialists are impermissivists. But there’s no in-principle reason for this. In this paper, I examine and motivate permissivist evidentialism. Not only are permissivism and evidentialism compatible but there are unique benefits that arise for this combination of views. In particular, permissivist evidentialism respects the importance of evidence while capturing its limitations and provides a plausible and attractive explanation of the relationship between the epistemic and non-epistemic. Permissivist evidentialism is thus an attractive option in logical space that hasn’t received enough (...) attention. (shrink)

In this project I am concerned with the extent to which conceptual engineering happens in domains outside of philosophy, and if so, what that might look like. Specifically, I’ll argue that...

This new and important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. In the last few decades there has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based on (...) data taken out of context. This book is the first detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy. (shrink)

We already have a distinction between the intension and extension of terms. This is not simply the distinction that is operative in philosophy of mind, body, and action. There, the concern is with things, and with a physicalistic or a mentalistic account of them. The physicalist says he supports an ‘extensional’ analysis of things, the mentalist an ‘intensional’. So, the physicalist says that, in the end, only ‘the extensional language of physical science’ will do in ontology. But, associating this physical-mental (...) dichotomy with the intension-extension distinction as applied to terms is misleading. The ontological issue is obscured by the association. An ontologist wants, like Spinoza or Berkeley, to know whetherthingsare extended or not, and in what respects. This question makes central the concept of space, or more generally of ‘field’, ‘domain’. Unfortunately, the same word ‘extension’ is used also for the spread or location of athingin space. To dissociate the extension of a term, a logical notion, from the ontological notion of the spatial status of a thing, I introduce the new word ‘extention’. This coinage correlates, not with the ‘intension’ of terms—the logical correlate of ‘extension’—but with ‘intention’, a word that fortunately already has common currency, and reeks with connotations that have logical ties with ‘consciousness’. So, from here on, we have two dichotomies: intension-extension applying to terms, and intention-extention applying to things. Since terms are things, both sorts of considerations are relevant to them, the logical one and the ontological. Only the latter applies to, say, stones or persons, since these are not linguistic terms. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology has often been understood as the study of feminine "ways of knowing." But feminist epistemology is better understood as the branch of naturalized, social epistemology that studies the various influences of norms and conceptions of gender and gendered interests and experiences on the production of knowledge. This understanding avoids dubious claims about feminine cognitive differences and enables feminist research in various disciplines to pose deep internal critiques of mainstream research.

In a recent paper, Barry Loewer attempts to defend Humeanism about laws of nature from a charge that Humean laws are not adequately explanatory. Central to his defense is a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations: even if Humeans cannot offer further metaphysical explanations of particular features of their “mosaic,” that does not preclude them from offering scientific explanations of these features. According to Marc Lange, however, Loewer’s distinction is of no avail. Defending a transitivity principle linking scientific explanantia to (...) their metaphysical grounds, Lange argues that a charge of explanatory inadequacy resurfaces once this intuitive principle is in place. This paper surveys, on behalf of the Humean, three strategies for responding to Lange’s criticism. The ready availability of these strategies suggests that Lange’s argument may not bolster anti-Humean convictions, since the argument rests on premises that those not antecedently sharing these convictions may well reject. The three strategies also correspond to three interesting ways of thinking about relations of grounding linking Humean laws and their instances, all of which are consistent with theses of Humean supervenience, and some of which have been heretofore overlooked. (shrink)

Darwin himself suggested the idea of generalizing the core Darwinian principles to cover the evolution of social entities. Also in the nineteenth century, influential social scientists proposed their extension to political society and economic institutions. Nevertheless, misunderstanding and misrepresentation have hindered the realization of the powerful potential in this longstanding idea. Some critics confuse generalization with analogy. Others mistakenly presume that generalizing Darwinism necessarily involves biological reductionism. This essay outlines the types of phenomena to which a generalized Darwinism applies, and (...) upholds that there is no reason to exclude social or economic entities. (shrink)

This article defends as correct and as faithful to Aquinas’s thought the tenets of “descriptivism” (sometimes called “naturalism”) in the context of criticisms that Patrick Lee has made in “Is Thomas’s Natural Law Theory Naturalist?” (American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71:4 [1997]: 567–87). “Revisiting Aquinas” argues that evaluative utterances are descriptive; so even if human goods were immediately known by practical reason (a position nonetheless rejected), their understanding would be a descriptive one, which moral objectivity requires. The arising of the prescriptivity (...) of precepts in relation to practical reason is then treated. The descriptivism articulated in this paper supports Lee’s emphasis on the primacy of love and choice; it further stresses that submission to an understood order of objective goods is essential to willing well. (shrink)

Kripke's own view of the 'inner life' as comprised of '"qualia"' that have no 'natural "external" manifestation' leads him into misinterpreting wittgenstein's denials on this count. so kripke gives wittgenstein's account a paradoxical and sceptical cast which misrepresents it, making it look as if it called for a sceptical solution and a 'warranted assertibility' theory of truth. but wittgenstein was making sport of the 'inner-outer' (subjective-objective) distinction with the rapier of his suggestion that psychological talk is not regulated by the (...) logic of object-designation-and-property talk. a conventional reading can mistake this as a "simple" denial of logic wholesale that jettisons rules, meanings, and their ilk. (shrink)

Investigo la relación filosófica entre Avenarius y Husserl en los años del curso Problemas fundamentales de la fenomenología en relación especial con el concepto natural de mundo. Primero, expongo brevemente los temas fenomenológicos fundamentales: el concepto natural de mundo, la reducción fenomenológica y la unidad del yo. En segundo lugar, sintetizo las ideas básicas de la obra Der menschliche Weltbegriff de Avenarius. En tercer lugar, discuto la coincidencia entre Avenarius y Husserl, poniendo énfasis en la reducción primordial, y planteo las (...) críticas de Husserl a Avenarius, destacando la postura unívoca de Avenarius en contraste con la postura fenomenológica de Husserl. I study the philosophical relationship between Avenarius and Husserl during the years where the later held the lectures The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, taking especially into account the natural concept of the world. First, I expound briefly the basic phenomenological topics of the lectures: the natural concept of the world, the phenomenological reduction and the ego's unity. Second, I tackle the basic ideas of Avenarius' Der menschliche Weltbegriff . Third, I discuss the coincidence between Avenarius and Husserl, paying special attention to the primordial reduction, and also the objections that Husserl made to Avenarius, making a contrast between Avenarius' univocal approach to being and Husserl's phenomenological account. (shrink)

Credences are similar to levels of confidence, represented as a value on the [0,1] interval. This chapter sheds light on questions about credence, including its relationship to full belief, with an eye toward the empirical relevance of credence. First, I’ll provide a brief epistemological history of credence and lay out some of the main theories of the nature of credence. Then, I’ll provide an overview of the main views on how credences relate to full beliefs. Finally, I’ll turn to the (...) empirical, and suggest some ways that cognitive science does and could answer questions about credence, such as what credences one has, how credences relate to beliefs, and the extent to which we can control our credences. (shrink)

There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix. The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relation between creativity and the (...) perception and passage of time, and reviews the creativity and improvisational quality of anthropological scholarship itself. Individual essays examine how the concept of creativity has changed in the history of modern social theory, and question its applicability as a term of cross-cultural analysis. The contributors highlight the collaborative and political dimensions of creativity and thus challenge the idea that creativity arises only from individual talent and expression. (shrink)

Philosophical theories of gender are typically understood as theories of what it is to be a woman, a man, a nonbinary person, and so on. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. There’s good reason to suppose that our best philosophical theory of gender might not directly match up to or give the extensions of ordinary gender categories like ‘woman’.

More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, butThe Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward (...) racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings--in economics, sociology, and psychology--with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy. -/- Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action. -/- Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 447-464 [Access article in PDF] Virtue, Reason, and Cultural Exchange: Leibniz's Praise of Chinese Morality Franklin Perkins I should regard myself very proud, very pleased and highly rewarded to be able to render Your Majesty any service in a work so worthy and pleasing to God; for I am not one of those impassioned patriots of one country alone, but (...) I work for the well-being of the whole of mankind, for I consider heaven as my country and cultivated men as my compatriots. —Leibniz (to Peter the Great), 1716 1 Diversity and Harmony Leibniz worked tirelessly to promote tolerance, peace, and the exchange of ideas, perhaps most in his attempts to bridge religious factions in Europe, but also in his receptiveness to the past and his attitude toward other cultures. This accommodation of differences is rooted in the belief that the most perfect possible world maximizes both diversity and harmony. In a time of rapid globalization, as the imperative to maximize diversity and harmony grows, I believe it is worthwhile to turn our attention to Leibniz's philosophy, particularly as it is expressed in his writings on China. The ground of Leibniz's openness toward other cultures is different from the ground to which we are accustomed. Multiculturalism is usually grounded in skepticism. We should accept and tolerate others because we can never be certain that our own beliefs are correct. The ground of Leibniz's tolerance leads in the opposite direction—we should [End Page 447] accept others not because no one knows the truth but because everyone knows something of the truth. 2The well-known metaphor of monads as perspectives on a city illustrates this approach. Leibniz writes, "Indeed, all individual substances are differentexpressions of the same universe and different expressions of the same universal cause, namely God. But the expressions vary in perfection, just as different representations or drawings of the same town from different points of view do." 3 The metaphor of different monads as different perspectives on a town captures what is needed for cultural exchange. What each of us "sees" is not wrong but partial or perspectival. Because our view is limited, we must learn from others whose views have different limitations, and we must be careful not to force our perspective on others. At the same time, each perspective is grounded in truth, which is what Leibniz intends when he says that each monad expresses the same universe. That is said to express a thing in which there are relations [habitudines] which correspond to the relations of the thing expressed. But there are various kinds of expression.... What is common to all these expressions is that we can pass from a consideration of the relations in the expression to a knowledge of the corresponding properties of the thing expressed. Hence, it is clearly not necessary for that which expresses to be similar to the thing expressed, if only a certain analogy is maintained between the relations. 4Leibniz gives many examples. An idea expresses its object. The perception of a monad expresses the universe, and the understanding of a mind expresses the understanding of God. Every effect expresses its cause. The senses and secondary qualities express their objects, as well as the body and its organs. Definitions express the essence of what they define. Paintings express the cities they represent. What do such dissimilar relationships have in common? The two things need not be similar but their conditions must be analogous. In the New Essays Leibniz writes that the resemblance is a relation of order, as an ellipse resembles the circle whose projection it is, "there is a certain precise and natural relationship between what is projected and the projection which is [End Page 448] made from it, with each point on the one corresponding through a certain relation with a point on the other." 5 In the Theodicy Leibniz says that the representation has a natural relationship to what is represented. If this representation is imperfect, then it... (shrink)

This book is composed of research presented at the fourth international Queering Paradigms Conference (QP4), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It intends to contribute to building a queer postcolonial critique of the current politics of queer activism and of queer knowledge production and circulation.

Metaphysical orthodoxy maintains that the relation of ontological dependence is irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive. The goal of this paper is to challenge that orthodoxy by arguing that ontological dependence should be understood as non- symmetric, rather than asymmetric. If we give up the asymmetry of dependence, interesting things follow for what we can say about metaphysical explanation— particularly for the prospects of explanatory holism.