When we climb in the high places of the earth, plodding slowly at mountaineer's pace with crampons on our boots, that we may keep foothold on the blue ice, we should stop from time to time and, steadying ourselves with our ice-axe for a moment, raise our downbent eyes, weary with guiding our steps between crevasses, to the great peaks we would conquer, and see, too, the foot hills we have left behind. Only by gazing thus can the Alpine climber (...) find values, and often he catches too, just then, a glimpse of beauty. So it is profitable to turn from our work in laboratories and among the sick, to survey the general state of our knowledge in larger sweep. We cannot hope to have added by our deliberations to-day anything of solving value in this ultimate problem. But we clarify to ourselves the state of our small knowledge and the extent of our nescience, and, though we may throw on these matters no more light than that which Milton tells us shines in Hell, “enough to make darkness visible,” yet it were well done. (shrink)

Reconstructive allografts using Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation are providing individuals living with upper limb loss and facial disfigurement with new opportunities for a sensate, esthetically acceptable, and functional alternative to current treatment strategies. Important research attention is being paid to how best to assess and screen candidates for VCA, measure optimal patient outcomes, and support patient adherence to lifelong behaviors and medical regimens. Far less attention, however, has been dedicated to the team science required for these complex VCA teams to form, (...) prepare, and provide the highest quality clinical and psychosocial care to those receiving VCA. VCA teams are unique in that they require specialized team members whose scope of practice may not otherwise overlap. The team also needs to constantly negotiate balancing patient safety with multiple risks throughout the transplant process. This study aimed to elucidate the team science needed for this highly innovative and complex area of medicine. Using in-depth qualitative interviews with 14 VCA team members and observations at team meetings, we found that careful consideration of team composition, team structure, and organizational commitment influences team performance and patient outcomes, but that to be efficient and truly effective, teams need to commit to developing processes that foster collaboration. These processes are action-oriented, strategic and interpersonal. Dedication and commitment to team science allows teams to manage conflict under stress and exercise ways to leverage strengths to provide optimal performance or patient psychosocial and clinical outcomes. This study can provide insight into quality improvement efforts for VCA teams and guidance for other transplant programs that wish to consider expansion into VCA. (shrink)

Developing students’ skills to pose and respond to questions and actively engage in inquiry behaviours enables students to problem solve and critically engage with learning and society. The aim of this study was to analyse the impact of providing teachers with an intervention in inquiry pedagogy alongside inquiry science curriculum in comparison to an intervention in non-inquiry pedagogy alongside inquiry science curriculum on student questioning and other inquiry behaviours. Teacher participants in the comparison condition received training in four inquiry-based science (...) units and in collaborative strategic reading. The experimental group, the community of inquiry (COI) condition, received training in facilitating a COI in addition to training in the same four inquiry-based science units. This study involved 227 students and 18 teachers in 9 primary schools across Brisbane, Australia. The teachers were randomly allocated by school to one of the two conditions. The study followed the students across years 6 and 7 and students’ discourse during small group activities was recorded, transcribed and coded for verbal inquiry behaviours. In the second year of the study, students in the COI condition demonstrated a significantly higher frequency of procedural and substantive higher-order thinking questions and other inquiry behaviours than those in the comparison condition. Implementing a COI within an inquiry science curriculum develops students’ questioning and science inquiry behaviours and allows teachers to foster inquiry skills predicated by the Australian Science Curriculum. Provision of inquiry science curriculum resources alone is not sufficient to promote the questioning and other verbal inquiry behaviours predicated by the Australian Science Curriculum. (shrink)

A revision of George Kennedy's translation of, introdution to, and commentary on Aristotle's On Rhetoric. His translation is most accurate, his general introduction is the most thorough and insightful, and his brief introductions to sections of the work, along with his explanatory footnotes, are the most useful available.

This book, first published in 1974, studies the similarities between Rousseau's thought and that of the Stoics, examining Rousseau's ideas on man, society, the state and government. It makes close reference to Rousseau's writings, and to the works of Seneca and other Stoics, presenting an opportunity to really come to grips with a complex and often contradictory mind.

In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor's method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor's argument. _Fate, Time, and Language_ presents Wallace's brilliant critique of Taylor's work. Written long before the publication of his fiction and essays, Wallace's (...) thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of certain paradigms of thought-the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever gimmickry of postmodernism-that abandoned "the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community." As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with his struggle to establish solid logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor's original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson's introduction connects Wallace's early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue. (shrink)

In this paper I trace the dialogical and narrative dimensions of the philosophical tradition and explore how they are reconfigured in the notion of community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), the mainstay of the collection of novels and discussion plans known as Philosophy for Children. After considering the ontology and epistemology of dialogue, I argue that narrative has replaced exposition in our understanding of philosophical discourse and that CPI represents a narrative context in which truth comes to represent the best story, (...) in a discursive location in which there are always multiple stories. Finally, I raise the issue of children's philosophical voice. Can children philosophize, and if they can, do they do so in a voice different from adults'? If so, what are the distinctive features of that voice? I assert that it is children's historical marginalization in the Western construction of rationality that now – as that rationality undergoes its crisis – makes of them, like women and other “natives,” privileged strangers to the tradition, who are, through CPI, enabled to enter it through dialogue and narrative. (shrink)

John Foster addresses the question: what is it to perceive a physical object? He rejects the view that we perceive such objects directly, and argues for a new version of the traditional empiricist account, which locates the immediate objects of perception in the mind. But this account seems to imply that we do not perceive physical objects at all. Foster offers a surprising solution, which involves embracing an idealist view of the physical world.

Romanis and Adkins explore the near-term prospect of artificial amnion and placenta technology (AAPT) which is being developed to supplement the gestational process following the premature ending of a pregnancy.1 While fetal-centric narratives prevail in discussions surrounding AAPT, the authors subvert this trend by centering the experience of pregnant persons with respect to pregnancy loss. The overarching aim of their paper is to move beyond a ‘philosophical understanding of pregnancy towards practical-orientated conclusions regarding the care pathways surrounding [AAPT]’ (Romanis and (...) Adkins,1 p1). This commentary will critically examine the viability of this aim. Romanis and Adkins use the term ‘pregnancy loss’ to refer to the phenomenon where individuals experience a complex set of emotions following the premature ending of pregnancy, despite the survival of the gestated entity. Following Golish and Powell, the authors note how parents may experience contradictory emotions, such as joy mixed with grief, as well as a range of negative feelings including shame, disappointment and a sense of failure.2 At present, this phenomenon has been recognised among parents, particularly the (formerly) pregnant person, in the context of neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) when the infant survives preterm delivery and …. (shrink)

This article draws attention to an understudied phenomenon, transnational political alliances (TPA), which occur when multinational corporations cooperate with local companies to influence public policies of the host government. The article first explores the economic and political sources of TPAs, their structures, and the obstacles to their formation. It then examines TPAs in the context of China, a critical case because of the hostile political environment that discourages TPAs. However, the surprisingly common occurrence of TPAs in China indicates the power (...) of economic incentives for political cooperation yet also suggests the need for further studies of TPAs in a wide variety of economic and political settings. (shrink)

While artificial womb technology is currently being studied for the purpose of improving neonatal care, I contend that this technology ought to be pursued as a means to address the unprecedented rate of unintended pregnancies. But ectogenesis, alongside other emerging reproductive technologies, is problematic insofar as it threatens to disrupt the natural link between procreation and parenthood that is normally thought to generate rights and responsibilities for biological parents. I argue that there remains only one potentially viable account of parenthood: (...) the voluntarist account, which construes parental rights as robust moral obligations that must be voluntarily undertaken. The problem is that this account mistakenly presumes a patriarchal divide between procreation and parenthood. I propose a reframing of procreation and parenthood from a feminist perspective that recognises gestational motherhood as involving robust moral obligations that ought to be voluntarily undertaken. If this were the case, all gestational mothers would be, by definition, willing mothers. To make this happen I argue that ectogenesis technology must be a widely available reproductive option. (shrink)

In the end, even the creative achievements of Shakespeare and Bach must be eradicated by death and nothingness, when the earth is burnt up in the sun. But the temporality of human existence and meaning does not invalidate the quest for meaning-for even that future universe, as dead as it must be will have some meaning, in that it contains the artifacts, even in ashes, of the sometime existence of human life and consciousness. We HAVE BEEN. It was towards this (...) vision that Mahler strove. (shrink)

This book urges educational institutions to contemplate the harm they have caused to individual and society by their tragic suppression of the energy essential to the flowering of the mind's full potential. No more strident and uncompromising a voice is to be found on this topic than Whitehead's, in _The Aims of Education and Other Essays_. Walker's interpretation of these essays is set in a story of the lives of several teachers, education students, parents, and a professor. Whitehead's presence is (...) conjured among them as an uncomfortable and challenging gadfly. The philosophic depth is made widely accessible through the conversational language of imaginary journals and dialogues. This strategy also enables Walker to demonstrate the neglected power of dialogic pedagogy, and to suggest its centrality in the realization of Whiteheadian aims. The dialogues show a group of people curiously energized by an inquiry in which their stereotypical foundations are crumbling under the combined impact of focused dialogue and the brilliance of Whitehead's counterpoint. Their creative vitality of mind is shaken out of the narcosis of ingrained routines and secondhand ideas, and they discover the forgotten power of revitalizing outlook and action with an individual discernment of meaning, importance, and truth. They have immediately experienced the very quality of mind and its manner of cultivation Whitehead insists upon. This is intelligence enriching life with its full and interweaving spectrum of intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual sensitivities. (shrink)

This book presents a straightforward account of disease, the problems of practice, and the moral, legal and financial questions in the field.

John Foster presents a penetrating investigation into the question: what is it to perceive a physical object? Is perceptual contact with a physical object, he asks, something fundamental, or does it break down into further factors? If the latter, what are these factors, and how do they combine to secure the contact? For most of the book, Foster addressed these questions in the framework of a realist view of the physical world. But the arguments which thereby unfold - (...) arguments which undermine direct realism and establish a version of the sense-datum theory - lead to the conclusion that we do no perceive physical objects at all. The only way to avoid this conclusion is by abandoning physical realism for a form of idealism, and this is the option which Foster finally embraces. The Nature of Perception makes an important contrbution to the ongoing debate: it sheds fresh light on the traditional issues, and breathes new life into positions which most current philosophers assumeto be dead. (shrink)

Originally published in 1975. The main concern of this book is the nature of the gap between the theoretical issues, raised at an abstract level by social scientists, and their facts, the material organized in an empirical analysis. The author draws on material from several disciplines to explore the contributions of social science theory to historical insight.

Originally published in 1975. The main concern of this book is the nature of the gap between the theoretical issues, raised at an abstract level by social scientists, and their facts, the material organized in an empirical analysis. The author draws on material from several disciplines to explore the contributions of social science theory to historical insight.

The cognitive theory of perception, of which David Armstrong is the originator and most illustrious advocate, claims that sense perception consists in the acquisition of propositional information about the environment. In my book The Nature of Perception, I argue that the theory is vulnerable to two main objections.

Edible insects are a potentially less burdensome source of proteins on the environment than livestock for a majority of rural consumers. Hence, edible insects are a timely idea to address the challenges of the supply side to sustainably meet an increasing demand for food. The objective of this paper is twofold. The first is to identify and compare rural-households’ intentions to consume insect-based foods among households drawn from two regions in Kenya—one where consumption of insects is common and the other (...) where the practice is uncommon. The second is to explore consumers’ trust in sources of information regarding quality and appropriateness of food items. The study employed an extended theory of planned behaviour and involved 432 participants. Results indicate that rural households have positive intentions to consume insect-based foods and those intentions are higher for individuals who are more familiar with the practice. Results also show that information sources from industry are more trusted than those from the media. Further, the study revealed that control variables such as perceived availability of insect-based foods and their level of fit with the culinary practices have a higher influence on consumption intentions than general attitudes. In addition, age of the respondent, gender, household size and level of formal education, significantly influence the consumption intentions. The study discusses the implications of these findings in the development of sustainable agri-food systems. (shrink)

In all the arts a war is being waged between modernists and postmodernists. Radicals have tended to side with the modernists against the forces of conservatism. Postmodern Culture is a break with this tendency. Its contributors propose a postmodernism of resistance - an aesthetic that rejects hierarchy and celebrates diversity. Ranging from architecture, sculpture and painting to music, photography and film, this collection is now recognised as a seminal text on the postmodernism debate.The essays are by Hal Foster, Jürgen (...) Habermas, Kenneth Frampton, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Gregory L. Ulmer, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Edward W. Said. (shrink)

Community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) is a way of practicing philosophy in a group that is characterized by conversation; that creates its discussion agenda from questions posed by the conversants as a response to some stimulus (whether text or some other media); and that includes discussion of specific philosophers or philosophical traditions, if at all, only in order to develop its own ideas about the concepts under discussion. The epistemological conviction of community of philosophical inquiry is that communal dialogue, facilitated (...) by a philosophically educated person, recapitulates and reconstructs the major elements—and even the positions or claims—of the tradition, in one form or another, through the distributed thinking characteristic of dialogical discourse. The pedagogical locus of control of CPI is the group as a whole, which is understood as potentially self‐regulating through a process of ongoing dialectical transformation. The role of the facilitator is to act, among other things, from the Socratic “position of ignorance” as a bridge between concepts and arguments and as a trigger for conceptual system transformation. (shrink)

Ectogenesis technology would make it possible to support the complete gestational development of a human being outside the female body. Proponents argue that this technology offers a welcome opportunity to expand reproductive options for those unable or unwilling to gestate. However, by completely bypassing pregnancy, the use of ectogenesis prevents the formation of gestational family ties. Consequently, it has faced criticism for perpetuating a patriarchal view of the family that undermines the moral significance of gestation. The concern is that the (...) introduction of this technology might result in the loss of reproductive autonomy for those who desire to experience pregnancy, as they face pressures to opt for ectogenesis instead. Existing accounts of family values define parents' rights to rear a child, but they fail to establish a right to gestate that can protect an individual's interest in bearing a child. To provide a more comprehensive account of family values, I argue that pregnancy involves a unique quality of intimacy and can make distinct contributions to one's flourishing. Based on this premise, I defend a fundamental moral right to gestate that can help safeguard the option of pregnancy for those who desire it. In conclusion, I consider how a prospective gestator need not provide optimal conditions for fetal development in the way that ectogenesis promises in order for their choice of pregnancy to be justified. (shrink)