This contribution compares entries on Friedrich Froebel and the kindergarten in German and United States’ histories of education from 1857 to 1933. In the American histories, Froebel appears as the great “hero” of education of the 19th century, whereas in the German histories, Pestalozzi is the “hero.” This difference in the perspectives goes back to fundamental differences in the political culture and political traditions of the two countries, which differed greatly as to the shaping of the public and private spheres. (...) Consequently, there were also different views on public education. In the immigration society of the United States, it was important to integrate children with various language and cultural backgrounds. As families could not do this alone, public kindergartens were needed. In Germany, in contrast, Froebel’s idea of the kindergarten was seen as an attack on family ties, and Pestalozzi was highly esteemed, because he made home education central. The American interest in “making citizens” produced Froebel as the hero; the German interest in leaving the education of young children to mothers and in the family lauded Pestalozzi. This case study of the reception of Froebel in Germany and the United States illustrates the high context-dependence of the construction of educational “heroes.”. (shrink)

This article is a case study of a woman-owned and-operated sexual products business, conceived in the midst of a fragmenting women's movement in 1977. The article tracks the evolution of pro-sex feminist ideology within this business during the past 22 years. Whereas most feminist organizations research focuses on nonprofit organizations and their relationship to the state, this study focuses on a political organization that depends on profits for survival. The voices in this study reveal the complexities of running an “alternative” (...) business during the 1980s and 1990s and of balancing political ideals with profit needs. Ironically, as Toy Box and its consumer base grow, more and more men and women are exposed to pro-sex feminism and buying into its philosophy. This contradiction is fundamental to the story of Toy Box's history and evolution. (shrink)

Authored by an interdisciplinary team of experts, including historians, classicists, philosophers and theologians, this original collection of essays offers the first authoritative analysis of the multifaceted reception of Greek ethics in late antiquity and Byzantium, opening up a hitherto under-explored topic in the history of Greek philosophy. The essays discuss the sophisticated ways in which moral themes and controversies from antiquity were reinvigorated and transformed by later authors to align with their philosophical and religious outlook in each period. Topics examined (...) range from ethics and politics in Neoplatonism and ethos in the context of rhetorical theory and performance to textual exegesis on Aristotelian ethics. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy, classics, patristic theology, and those working on the history of education and the development of Greek ethics. (shrink)

The Description Logic Handbook covers all aspects of the research in the field of knowledge representation. Written by some of the most prominent researchers in the field, and covering the basic technical material and implementational aspects, it is both a unique reference and a self-study guide.

Basically, the connection of two many-sorted theories is obtained by taking their disjoint union, and then connecting the two parts through connection functions that must behave like homomorphisms on the shared signature. We determine conditions under which decidability of the validity of universal formulae in the component theories transfers to their connection. In addition, we consider variants of the basic connection scheme. Our results can be seen as a generalization of the so-called E-connection approach for combining modal logics to an (...) algebraic setting. (shrink)

Feature logics are the logical basis for so-called unification grammars studied in computational linguistics. We investigate the expressivity of feature terms with negation and the functional uncertainty construct needed for the description of long-distance dependencies and obtain the following results: satisfiability of feature terms is undecidable, sort equations can be internalized, consistency of sort equations is decidable if there is at least one atom, and consistency of sort equations is undecidable if there is no atom.

Unification was originally introduced in automated deduction and term rewriting, but has recently also found applications in other fields. In this article, we give a survey of the results on unification obtained in two closely related, yet different, application areas of unification: description logics and modal logics.

The first introductory textbook on description logics, relevant to computer science, knowledge representation and the semantic web.

This book defends an original and pluralist theory of when and why discrimination wrongs people, in particular, through unfair subordination, through the violation of their right to a particular deliberative freedom, or through the denial to them of access to a basic good.

Description logics are a family of knowledge representation formalisms that are descended from semantic networks and frames via the system Kl-one. During the last decade, it has been shown that the important reasoning problems (like subsumption and satisfiability) in a great variety of description logics can be decided using tableau-like algorithms. This is not very surprising since description logics have turned out to be closely related to propositional modal logics and logics of programs (such as propositional dynamic logic), for which (...) tableau procedures have been quite successful.Nevertheless, due to different underlying institutions and applications, most description logics differ significantly from run-of-the-mill modal and program logics. Consequently, the research on tableau algorithms in description logics led to new techniques and results, which are, however, also of interest for modal logicians. In this article, we will focus on three features that play an important rôle in description logics (number restrictions, terminological axioms, and role constructors), and show how they can be taken into account by tableau algorithms. (shrink)

Aristotle's account of female nature has received mostly negative treatment, emphasising what he says females cannot do. Building on recent research, this book comprehensively revises such readings, setting out the complex and positive role played by the female in Aristotle's thought with a particular focus on the longest surviving treatise on reproduction in the ancient corpus, the Generation of Animals. It provides new interpretations of the nature of Aristotle's sexism, his theory of male and female interaction in generation, and his (...) account of inherited features. It also discusses a range of more general issues which can and should be re-examined in light of Aristotle's account of female animals: his methodology, hylomorphism, teleology and psychology. Aristotle on Female Animals will be valuable to all those interested in Aristotle's philosophy and the history of gender. (shrink)

For the past 40 years, the 14-day rule has governed and, by defining a clear boundary, enabled embryo research and the clinical benefits derived from this. It has been both a piece of legislation and a rule of good practice globally. However, methods now allow embryos to be cultured for more than 14 days, something difficult to imagine when the rule was established, and knowledge gained in the intervening years provides robust scientific rationale for why it is now essential to (...) conduct research on later stage human embryos. In this paper, I argue that the current limit for embryo research in vitro should be extended to 28 days to permit research that will illuminate our beginnings as well as provide new therapeutic possibilities to reduce miscarriage and developmental abnormalities. It will also permit validation of potentially useful alternatives. Through consideration of current ethical arguments, I also conclude that there are no coherent or persuasive reasons to deny researchers, and through them humanity, the knowledge and the innovation that this will generate. (shrink)

We agree with Svirsky, Howard, and Berman that the US Food and Drug Administration plays various roles, only one of which is the technical review and evaluation of product safety and e...

Very often, when a belief or a method of reasoning strikes us as morally wrong, it also seems to wrong someone in particular. For instance, if an acquaintance j.

I argue that T.M. Scanlon's contractualist account of morality has difficulty accommodating our intuitions about the moral relevance of the number of people affected by an action. I first consider the "Complaint Model" of reasonable rejection, which restricts the grounds for an individual's rejection of a principle to its effects upon herself. I argue that it can accommodate our intuitions about numbers only if we assume that, whenever we do not know who will be affected, each individual may appeal only (...) to the _expected effects on her. This assumption, I suggest, leads to counterintuitive results in cases where, although we do not know who will be affected, we do know that _someone will be. I then consider two proposals to supplement the complaint model with a direct appeal to aggregation. I argue that both are open to serious objections. (shrink)

I argue that there is an important analogy between sex selection and selective abortion of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome. There are surprising parallels between the social construction of Down syndrome as a disability and the deeply entrenched institutionalization of sexual difference in many societies. Prevailing concepts of gender and mental retardation exert a powerful influence in constructing the sexual identities and life plans of people with Down syndrome, and also affect their families' lives.1.

The combination of Fuzzy Logics and Description Logics has been investigated for at least two decades because such fuzzy DLs can be used to formalize imprecise concepts. In particular, tableau algorithms for crisp Description Logics have been extended to reason also with their fuzzy counterparts. It has turned out, however, that in the presence of general concept inclusion axioms this extension is less straightforward than thought. In fact, a number of tableau algorithms claimed to deal correctly with fuzzy DLs with (...) GCIs have recently been shown to be incorrect. In this paper, we concentrate on fuzzy \, the fuzzy extension of the well-known DL \. We present a terminating, sound, and complete tableau algorithm for fuzzy \ with arbitrary continuous t-norms. Unfortunately, in the presence of GCIs, this algorithm does not yield a decision procedure for consistency of fuzzy \ ontologies since it uses as a sub-procedure a solvability test for a finitely represented, but possibly infinite, system of inequations over the real interval [0,1], which are built using the t-norm. In general, it is not clear whether this solvability problem is decidable for such infinite systems of inequations. This may depend on the specific t-norm used. In fact, we also show in this paper that consistency of fuzzy \ ontologies with GCIs is undecidable for the product t-norm. This implies, of course, that for the infinite systems of inequations produced by the tableau algorithm for fuzzy \ with product t-norm, solvability is in general undecidable. We also give a brief overview of recently obtained decidability results for fuzzy \ w.r.t. other t-norms. (shrink)

Efforts to include women in the canon have long been beset by reactionary gatekeeping, typified by the charge “That's not philosophy.” That charge doesn't apply to early and mid‐analytic female philosophers—Welby, Ladd‐Franklin, Bryant, Jones, de Laguna, Stebbing, Ambrose, MacDonald—with job titles like lecturer in logic and professor of philosophy and publications in Mind, the Journal of Philosophy, and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. It's hopeless to dismiss their work as “not philosophy.” But comparable reactionary gatekeeping affects them, this paper argues, (...) typified by the labels “bad philosophy” and “derivative philosophy.” Virtue and vice epistemology help explain why these women have been neglected and why their own approaches are epistemically virtuous. Their contemporaries and historians are deficient in scholarly virtues in labelling these women's work “bad” or derived from male mentors with no or specious justification. Their disparaged qualities—intellectual humility, modesty, critical self‐reflection, disclosing biases—are often epistemic virtues. (shrink)

: I argue that there is an important analogy between sex selection and selective abortion of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome. There are surprising parallels between the social construction of Down syndrome as a disability and the deeply entrenched institutionalization of sexual difference in many societies. Prevailing concepts of gender and mental retardation exert a powerful influence in constructing the sexual identities and life plans of people with Down syndrome, and also affect their families' lives.

Unification in description logics has been proposed as a novel inference service that can, for example, be used to detect redundancies in ontologies. The inexpressive description logic EL is of particular interest in this context since, on the one hand, several large biomedical ontologies are defined using EL. On the other hand, unification in EL has been shown to be NP-complete and, thus, of considerably lower complexity than unification in other description logics of similarly restricted expressive power. However, EL allows (...) the use of the top concept, which represents the whole interpretation domain, whereas the large medical ontology SNOMED CT makes no use of this feature. Surprisingly, removing the top concept from EL makes the unification problem considerably harder. More precisely, we will show that unification in EL without the top concept is PSPACE-complete. In addition to the decision problem, we also consider the problem of actually computing EL−⊤-unifiers. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Fermenta cognitionis, Heft 1." verfügbar.

Par leurs contributions à ce livre, vingt-trois chercheur.e.s rendent hommage à leur collègue qui souvent fut aussi leur professeure, l’historienne juive Paula Hyman. Comme le rappelle Richard I. Cohen dans son avant-propos, P. Hyman fut une historienne des Juifs de France et les publications qu’elle a consacrées à la vie des Juifs dans la France contemporaine ont constitué un apport considérable à ce champ de recherches. Toutefois le volume dont il est ici question célèbre P. Hyman pour ses...

ABSTRACT Alice Ambrose is best known as Wittgenstein’s student during the 1930s. Her association with probably the most famous philosopher of the twentieth century contributes to her obscurity. Ambrose is referred to in historiography of this period as ‘follower’ or ‘disciple’ but never considered in her own right as a philosopher. The neglect of her place in the history of philosophy needs to be resisted. This paper explores some of Ambrose’s most interesting ideas from the early 1950s, when she developed (...) and expanded some of Wittgenstein’s inchoate suggestions and contributed to on-going debates about how to do philosophy and the role of language in the discipline. By combining an analysis of the 1950 paper “The Problem of Linguistic Inadequacy” and the 1952 paper “Linguistic Approaches to Philosophical Problems”, it will be seen that Ambrose rejects the idea that ordinary language can be improved and begins to develop the view that philosophical language adapts to usage. Thus, Ambrose does not blindly follow Wittgenstein but breaks with his idea that there is something inherently wrong with the way philosophers communicate. The paper also seeks to show how marginalized philosophers become obscured in the history of the subject through the example of Ambrose. (shrink)

With its pessimistic vision and bleak message of world-denial, it has often been difficult to know how to engage with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Schopenhauer's arguments have seemed flawed and his doctrines marred by inconsistencies; his very pessimism almost too flamboyant to be believable. Yet a way of redrawing this engagement stands open, Sophia Vasalou argues, if we attend more closely to the visionary power of Schopenhauer's work. The aim of this book is to place the aesthetic character of Schopenhauer's standpoint (...) at the heart of the way we read his philosophy and the way we answer the question: why read Schopenhauer - and how? Approaching his philosophy as an enactment of the sublime with a longer history in the ancient philosophical tradition, Vasalou provides a fresh way of assessing Schopenhauer's relevance in critical terms. This book will be valuable for students and scholars with an interest in post-Kantian philosophy and ancient ethics. (shrink)

I propose that meat replacement is to meat, as drag is to gender. Meat replacement has the potential to shake concepts of meat, like drag does for gender. Meat replacements not only mimic meat but disclose how meat itself is performed in carnivorous culture -and show that it may be performed otherwise. My approach is inspired by the show RuPaul’s Drag Race. The argument builds on an imitation of Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, performed by replacing ‘drag/ gender/ sex/ (...) heterosexism’ terms and relations in Butler’s text with ‘meat replacement/ meat/ species/ carnism’ ones. (shrink)

I propose that the intensification of meat production ironically makes meat concepts available to be populated by plants. I argue that what I call “technologies of effacement” facilitate the intensification of animal farming and slaughter by blocking face-to-face encounters between animals and people (Levinas 1969; Efstathiou 2018, 2019). My previous ethnographic work on animal research identifies technologies of effacement as including (a) architectures and the built environment, (b) entry and exit rules, (c) special garments, (d) naming and labeling procedures, and (...) (e) protocols for handling animals (Efstathiou 2018, 2019). Building on ethnographic research by Dawn Coppin (2003) and Nöellie Vialles (1994), in the United States and France respectively, I propose that (a) Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) buildings, gestation, and farrowing crates; (b) rules for entering and exiting the slaughterhouse; (c) white slaughterhouse garments; (d) unique identification systems; and (e) “trapping” animals before stunning can all operate as technologies of effacement. Though developed to serve other manifest aims, like hygiene, expediency, or safety, these technologies operate to sustain routine, inviting one to look at animals as tokens of a known type while blocking encounters between humans and animals (and also among animals) as radically different, morally significant Others (Efstathiou 2018, 2019). (shrink)

In a broad survey of negative and hostile attitudes toward canines in pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, the author posits that warm ties between humans and canines have been seen as a threat to the authority of the clergy and indeed, of God. Exploring ancient myth, Biblical and Rabbinical literature, and early and medieval Christianity and Islam, she explores images and prohibitions concerning dogs in the texts of institutionalized, monotheistic religions, and offers possible explanations for these attitudes, including concern (...) over disease. (shrink)

This book makes the case for Marsilio Ficino, a Renaissance philosopher and priest, as a canonical thinker, and provides an introduction for a broad audience. Sophia Howlett examines him as part of the milieu of Renaissance Florence, part of a history of Platonic philosophy, and as a key figure in the ongoing crisis between classical revivalism and Christian belief. The author discusses Ficino's vision of a Platonic Christian universe with multiple worlds inhabited by angels, daemons and pagan gods, as (...) well as our own distinctive role within that universe - climbing the heights to talk with angels yet constantly confused by the evidence of our own senses. Ficino as the "new Socrates" suggests to us that by changing ourselves, we can change our world. (shrink)

This Element provides an account of Aristotle on women which combines what is found in his scientific biology with his practical philosophy. Scholars have often debated how these two fields are related. The current study shows that according to Aristotelian biology, women are set up for intelligence and tend to be milder-tempered than men. Thus, women are not curtailed either intellectually or morally by their biology. The biological basis for the rule of men over women is women's lack of spiritedness. (...) Aristotle's Politics must be read with its audience in mind; there is a need to convince men of the importance of avoiding insurrection both in the city and the household. While their spiritedness gives men the upper hand, they are encouraged to listen to the views of free women in order to achieve the best life for all. (shrink)

Attending to the rich entanglements of scientific and critical theory, contributors to this issue scrutinize phenomena in nature to explore new territory in feminist science studies. With a special focus on relating theory to method, these scholars generate new feminist approaches to scientific practice. Contributors probe this relationship by way of topics from poetics of human-jellyfish interactions to a feminist reconsideration of a well-known thought experiment in thermodynamics. Two contributors analyze plant-insect encounter research to spin their own symbiotically inflected account (...) of “affective ecologies.” Technologies of human memory storage and retrieval lead one writer to interrogate how our understandings of memory and amnesia are currently under revision. Another contributor tracks the lively evolutionary and morphological theories that textile artisans manifest in material models of sea creatures. What emerges from these diverse essays is an approach to critical thinking that inhabits, elaborates, and feeds upon scientific theory, holding feminist theory accountable to science and vice versa. _Sophia Roosth_ is Assistant Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. _Astrid Schrader_ is Visiting Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Sarah Lawrence College. _Contributors_: Karen Barad, Lina Dib, Eva Hayward, Carla Hustak, Vicki Kirby, Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth, Astrid Schrader. (shrink)

Our main research question is how pliable Norwegian meat consumption practices are. However it is not any type of elasticity we are interested in. We are specifically interested in the scope for what we dub the “4Rs” of responsible meat consumption within existing food systems: 1. Reducing the amount of animal-based proteins used 2. Replacing animal-based protein with plant-based, or insect-based alternatives 3. Refining processes of utilization of animal-based protein to minimize emissions, loss and waste 4. Recognising animal-based protein as (...) precious –i.e. recognising the people and the animals involved in meat production. -/- These four principles are derived by analogy to ethical principles guiding the use of animals in research, the so-called “3Rs”, namely: the imperatives to reduce the number of animals needed to make a scientific inference, to replace animal experiments with other types of research, and where not possible to replace ‘more’ with ‘less’ sentient creatures, and to refine the experimental setup so it minimises the discomfort and/or distress inflicted upon the animals (Russell and Burch, 1959). There are no such principles guiding the use of animals in farming, given the farming industry intrinsically relies on increasing its resources, of which animals are one. The current profile of climate change however opens up a way to re-appreciate meat –indeed what we articulate as the fourth principle of recognizing the preciousness of meat, above, given planetary boundaries. We proceed to reflect on how these 4Rs can be modulated, from a cultural-social perspective, that is, we look at cultural factors that could stretch current food practices along the 4R aspects. (shrink)

In this paper, my aim is to offer some comments on the study of Mu‘tazilite kalām, framed around the study of a particular episode in the Mu‘tazilite dispute about man – a question with a deceptively Aristotelian cadence that is not too difficult to dispel. Within this episode, my focus is on one of the major arguments used by the late Baṣrans to hold up their side of the dispute, and on the relationship between the mental and the physical which (...) emerges from it. The most interesting – and most surprising – aspect of this relationship is that the mental and the physical do not seem to be treated as distinct terms, thus creating the space for questions about how the two relate. The first person perspective seems to be identified with the physical body. My interest then is in the response of the reader to this surprising presentation – or rather, in a certain kind of reader response, and thus a certain kind of interpretive mode, whose value and viability it is part of my aim to help clarify. (shrink)

_Synthesizes the most important recent work on wonder and brings a number of disciplines into conversation. _.