1 Introducing Monsieur Foucault Stephen J. Ball Michel Foucault is an enigma, a massively influential intellectual who steadfastly refused to align himself ...

From the legendary inventor Daedalus to Goethe's tragic Faust, from the automata-making magicians of E.T.A Hoffmann to Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein – ...

Foucault, Power, and Education invites internationally renowned scholar Stephen J. Ball to reflect on the importance and influence of Foucault on his work in educational policy.

The Music Instinct Philip Ball provides the first comprehensive, accessible survey of what is known--and what is still unknown--about how music works its magic, and why, as much as eating and sleeping, it seems indispensable to humanity. --from publisher description.

The too-often unhappy 'marriage' of political theory and political science has long been a source of anguish for both partners. Should this troubled partnership be dissolved? Or might this marriage yet be saved? Ball answers the former question negatively and the latter affirmatively. Playing the part of therapist instead of theorist, he selectively recounts a number of episodes which estranged the partners and strained the marriage. And yet, he concludes that the conflicts were in hindsight more constructive than destructive, benefiting (...) both partners in heretofore unexpected ways and perhaps paving a path toward reconciliation and rapprochement. (shrink)

This book presents 12 original essays on historical and contemporary philosophical discussions of judgment. The central issues explored in this volume can be separated into two groups namely, those concerning the act and object of judgment. What kind of act is judgment? How is it related to a range of other mental acts, states, and dispositions? Where and how does assertive force enter in? Is there a distinct category of negative judgments, or are these simply judgments whose objects are negative? (...) Concerning the object of judgment: How many objects are there of a given judgment? One, as on the dual relation theory of Frege and Moore? Or many as in Russell's later multiple relation theory? If there is a single object, is it a proposition? And if so, is it a force-neutral, abstract entity that might equally figure as the object of a range of intentional attitudes? Or is it somehow constitutively tied to the act itself? These and related questions are approached from a variety of historical and contemporary perspectives. This book sheds new light on current controversies by drawing on the details of the distinct intellectual contexts in which previous philosophers' positions about the nature of judgment were formulated. In turn, new directions in present-day research promise to raise novel interpretive prospects and challenges in the history of philosophy. istorical and contemporary perspectives. This book sheds new light on current controversies by drawing on the details of the distinct intellectual contexts in which previous philosophers' positions about the nature of judgment were formulated. In turn, new directions in present-day research promise to raise novel interpretive prospects and challenges in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Although recent years have seen an increase in professional learning communities, use of video and lesson study groups, most teachers still work and learn in isolation. What they know is personal and remains private; little opportunity exists for most teachers to develop shared knowledge or language. The scale of the teaching force, and the rapid turnover of new teachers, makes this lack of shared knowledge an acute problem. This paper explores the potential of records of practice for developing collective professional (...) knowledge about teaching and learning. We define and illustrate what we mean by records of practice and elaborate the meaning of the term collective professional knowledge. Three concrete examples of records of practice, originating in different contexts and times, are presented and their special features are analyzed and discussed. The paper clarifies that records are not in themselves professional knowledge, but constitute a valuable and unique resource for the study of practice and the generation of knowledge originating in and useful for practice. To illustrate varied approaches for studying practice, possible uses of records of practice for the generation of collective professional knowledge are described and analyzed. The paper concludes with questions about records of practice and their uses. (shrink)

Meaning in philosophy, by K. Lehrer.--Meaning in linguistics, by A. Lehrer.--Theories of meaning, by W. Alston.--Of names, by J. S. Mill.--Of words, by J. Locke.--Of language, by G. Berkeley.--Signs and behavior situations, by C. Morris.--Meaning and verification, by M. Schlick.--Meaning and use, by R. Wells.--The meaning of a word, by J. Austin.--Meaning and speech acts, by J. R. Searle.--Meaning and linguistic analysis, by C. C. Fries.--The semantic compound of a linguistic description, by J. J. Katz.--Componential analysis and universal semantics, by (...) J. Lyons.--Bibliographical essay (p. 213-216). (shrink)

Kaplan (1989) famously claimed that monsters--operators that shift the context--do not exist in English and "could not be added to it". Several recent theorists have pointed out a range of data that seem to refute Kaplan's claim, but others (most explicitly Stalnaker 2014) have offered a principled argument that monsters are impossible. This paper interprets and resolves the dispute. Contra appearances, this is no dry, technical matter: it cuts to the heart of a deep disagreement about the fundamental structure of (...) a semantic theory. We argue that: (i) the interesting notion of a monster is not an operator that shifts some formal parameter, but rather an operator that shifts parameters that play a certain theoretical role; (ii) one cannot determine whether a given semantic theory allows monsters simply by looking at the formal semantics; (iii) theories which forbid shifting the formal "context" parameter are perfectly compatible with the existence of monsters (in the interesting sense). We explain and defend these claims by contrasting two kinds of semantic theory--Kaplan's (1989) and Lewis's (1980). (shrink)

here was a brief inaugural session of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness during the Psychonomic Society Conference in Los Angeles in November 1995, but the first full conference of the Association was held this June in the very pleasant surroundings of the Claremont Colleges. Being at this conference was very different from being at ‘Tucson II’ the previous year. This was a less ballyhooed, more intimate event, maybe less exciting, and less intellectually eclectic, but also perhaps more (...) conducive to serious scientific exchange. Certainly the roster of speakers was replete with luminaries of the consciousness studies movement, and highly respected names from psychology, neuroscience and philosophy: Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Ned Block, Philip Merikle, Daniel Schacter, Larry Jacoby, Walter Freeman, Valerie Hardcastle, both Churchlands, Melvyn Goodale, Owen Flanagan . . . to unfairly pick out just a few. (shrink)

This paper examines the study of computer based performance monitoring (CBPM) in the workplace as an issue dominated by questions of ethics. Its central contention paper is that any investigation of ethical monitoring practice is inadequate if it simply applies best practice guidelines to any one context to indicate, whether practice is, on balance, ‘ethical’ or not. The broader social dynamics of access to procedural and distributive justice examined through a fine grained approach to the study of workplace social relations, (...) and workplace identity construction, are also important here. This has three implications, which are examined in the paper, and are as follows: First, that it is vital for any empirical investigation of the ethics of CBPM practice to take into account not only its compliance with preexisting ‘best practice’ guidelines, but also the social relations which pervade the context of its application. Second, that this necessitates a particular epistemological treatment of CBPM as something whose effects are measurable and identifiable, as well as something which has a socially constructed meaning and is tropic in nature. Third, that existing debates against which this argument is set, which regard contrasting epistemologies and ontologies as incompatible, should be addressed, and an alternative introduced. Introducing situated knowledges (Haraway 1991) and material semiotic ontologies as such an alternative, the paper proceeds to analyse the ethics of a particular case of monitoring practice, Norco. Drawing on Marx (1998) the paper concludes that a fine grain analysis of the social is vital if we are to understand fully the ethics of monitoring in the workplace. (shrink)