Teachers in many countries complain that their pedagogic work is impeded by unreasonable bureaucratic demands by government agencies. This paper suggests that historical, institutional and cultural perspectives are needed to understand the processes at work. It draws on Weber’s classic study of bureaucracy, but also makes reference to claims that traditional bureaucracies have been modified in ways that ameliorate their authoritarian character. The central part of the paper examines the attempts of one country (Scotland) to address complaints about excessive bureaucracy: (...) it is argued that they show a limited understanding of the nature of institutional power. In the discussion that follows, a number of critical interpretations are considered: that bureaucracies are, by their very nature, anti-educational; that they undermine ethical consciousness and cause psychological damage; and that enhanced professionalism can serve as a counterweight to bureaucratic tendencies. The paper ends by suggesting that the powerful pragmatic argument that mass, state-run educational systems cannot function without complex administrative structures, should not be used to disguise the fact that they have unintended consequences, some of which tend to subvert their stated aims. (shrink)

Central aspects of Hume’s proposed “system of the sciences” as described in the Treatise are modeled on Newton’s Principia. But, as recent scholarship has suggested, Hume’s Treatise also bears a deeply subversive message with respect to Newtonian science. This chapter offers a revised overview of what Hume takes from Newton and what he rejects: The first part of the chapter argues that in the Treatise Hume adopts a version of Newton’s “analytic and synthetic method” for philosophy, (...) thereby placing a distinctively Newtonian form of explanatory reduction at the center of his own philosophical method. The second part of the chapter, on the other hand, shows that many of the most important aspects of Hume’s argument in Book 1 of the Treatise can be understood as critical of core conceptual and ontological commitments of Newton’s mechanics as developed in the Principia. (shrink)

9th and 10th Nov. 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizers: Takeshi Sato and Shunsuke Sugimoto.

Members of the Baha'i Faith have been subject to persecution in Iran since the mid‐nineteenth century. Our investigation considers how collective identity among a Pacific Northwest Community has been constructed through the contexts of continued persecution in Iran and the development of religious texts, which helped to define the religious community. The texts found within the Baha'i Faith utilize metaphors of the body to construct religious identity. Many anthropologists have theorized on the usefulness of the body as a unit of (...) study; in addition, recent attention by scholars has illustrated the intersection of the body and religion. A model is developed linking identity, consciousness, the body and experience that explains how collective identity is constructed. When considering the situation of the Baha'i community, this model has proven particularly useful in understanding how geographically disassociated people manage to construct social kinship within the context of religious persecution. In particular, American Baha'is describe the persecution of Baha'is in Iran as a collective experience, especially since the direct experience of persecution is far removed from their everyday living. Preliminary analysis of interviews with an American Baha'i, and an ex‐patriot Iranian Baha'i reveal differences in constructions of identity. (shrink)

The starting point for this paper is the ongoing debate about the relation between research and policy in education. Recent developments in England and Scotland are reviewed in the context of political and academic arguments about the nature and function of research activity. The defensiveness of the research community in the face of professional and political attacks is examined critically. A case study of the Higher Still programme is used to illustrate the complexity of the relationships between evidence, ideology, values (...) and professional practice. It is argued that the research community needs to become more politically sophisticated and to advance a clearer vision of its social function in advanced democratic societies if its potential contribution to educational development is to be realised. The dangers of a retreat to a narrow empirical role are highlighted. (shrink)

The Test of Basic Auditory Capabilities is a battery of auditory-discrimination tasks and speech-identification tasks that has been normed on several hundred young normal-hearing adults. Previous research with the TBAC suggested that cognitive function may impact the performance of older adults. Here, we examined differences in performance on several TBAC tasks between a group of 34 young adults with a mean age of 22.5 years and a group of 115 older adults with a mean age of 69.2 years recruited from (...) the local community. Performance of the young adults was consistent with prior norms for this age group. Not surprisingly, the two groups differed significantly in hearing loss and working memory with the older adults having more hearing loss and poorer working memory than the young adults. The two age groups also differed significantly in performance on six of the nine measures extracted from the TBAC with the older adults consistently performing worse than the young adults. However, when these age-group comparisons were repeated with working memory and hearing loss as covariates, the groups differed in performance on only one of the nine auditory measures from the TBAC. For eight of the nine TBAC measures, working memory was a significant covariate and hearing loss never emerged as a significant factor. Thus, the age-group deficits observed initially on the TBAC most often appeared to be mediated by age-related differences in working memory rather than deficits in auditory processing. The results of these analyses of age-group differences were supported further by linear-regression analyses with each of the 9 TBAC scores serving as the dependent measure and age, hearing loss, and working memory as the predictors. Regression analyses were conducted for the full set of 149 adults and for just the 115 older adults. Working memory again emerged as the predominant factor impacting TBAC performance. It is concluded that working memory should be considered when comparing the performance of young and older adults on auditory tasks, including the TBAC. (shrink)

Author note: Keith E. Yandell is Professor of Philosophy and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It is regrettably common for theorists to attempt to characterize the Humean dictum that one can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ just in broadly logical terms. We here address an important new class of such approaches which appeal to model-theoretic machinery. Our complaint about these recent attempts is that they interfere with substantive debates about the nature of the ethical. This problem, developed in detail for Daniel Singer’s and Gillian Russell and Greg Restall’s accounts of Hume’s dictum, is (...) of a general type arising for the use of model-theoretic structures in cashing out substantive philosophical claims: the question of whether an abstract model-theoretic structure successfully interprets something often involves taking a stand on non-trivial issues surrounding the thing. In the particular case of Hume’s dictum, given reasonable conceptual or metaphysical claims about the ethical, Singer’s and Russell and Restall’s accounts treat obviously ethical claims as descriptive and vice versa. Consequently, their model-theoretic characterizations of Hume’s dictum are not metaethically neutral. This encourages skepticism about whether model-theoretic machinery suffices to provide an illuminating distinction between the ethical and the descriptive. (shrink)

This article argues that Bentham’s metaphysics has until recently been unfairly belittled, and that it in fact built on and surpassed that of David Hume, of whom Bentham was both an attentive student and a fierce critic. Bentham’s logic is metaphysically based, multi-levelled, and comprehensive. First, taking Hume’s empiricism as a starting point, Bentham developed the additional mechanism of “reflection” to facilitate a utilitarian pragmatic resolution to Hume’s skepticism. Second, unlike Hume, Bentham aspired to encyclopedic knowledge, (...) especially of the human mind, which he believed allowed him to place his thought on a more solid and broader foundation. Third, whereas Hume focused on the passive understanding, Bentham captured the interaction between understanding and volition. Fourth, in relation to moral approbation, Hume adopted an approach which highlighted benevolence, whereas Bentham sought to reconcile self-preference with benevolence. Fifth, Hume’s common sense moral philosophy pushed him to associate justice with social convention, and helped to make him a conservative. Bentham developed the principle of utility to direct and push forward social reform for a better world. (shrink)

Este trabajo examina algunos ensayos políticos de David Hume para sostener que su estrategia escéptica de moderación de las facciones políticas no consiste solamente en el examen de los argumentos, de estas sino también en el despliegue de maniobras retóricas distintivamente escépticas. Con ellas, logra exponer los intereses reales que originan las posiciones partidistas y disolver las doctrinas mediante las cuales las facciones atraen a sus seguidores. La estrategia constituye una forma de acción política comprometida que se apoya en (...) su ciencia de la naturaleza humana. (shrink)

David Hume (1711-76) is one of the greatest figures in the history of British philosophy. Of all of Hume's writings, the philosophically most profound is undoubtedly his first, A Treatise on Human Nature. Hume on Morality introduces and assesses: Hume's life and the background of the Treatise ; the ideas and text in the Treatise ; and Hume's continuing importance to philosophy. James Baillie provides us with a map to Books 2 and 3 of the (...) Treatise, focusing on Hume's theory of the passions and morality. This book sets out its principal ideas and arguments of the Treatise in a clear and readable way and is ideal for anyone coming to Hume's work for the first time. (shrink)

Abstract:Hume described himself as an Academic skeptic and aligned himself with the skepticism of Socrates and Cicero. I argue, though, that Hume transformed the meaning of Academic skepticism by associating it with an experimental rather than dialectical method. In this essay, I distinguish between those aspects of Cicero’s Academic skepticism that Hume adopted and those he discarded in his presentation of mitigated skepticism in the first Enquiry. I then consider the implications of Hume’s transformation of Academic (...) skepticism for Hume’s polite eloquence in the Essays, particularly the essays on happiness, which are often described as possessing “Ciceronian” and “dialectical” elements. Hume’s transformation of Academic skepticism is essential to helping readers understand not only Hume’s alleged neo-Hellenism, but also the aims of his philosophical project. (shrink)

David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature presents the most important account of skepticism in the history of modern philosophy. In this lucid and thorough introduction to the work, John P. Wright examines the development of Hume's ideas in the Treatise, their relation to eighteenth-century theories of the imagination and passions, and the reception they received when Hume published the Treatise. He explains Hume's arguments concerning the inability of reason to establish the basic beliefs which underlie (...) science and morals, as well as his arguments showing why we are nevertheless psychologically compelled to accept such beliefs. The book will be a valuable guide for those seeking to understand the nature of modern skepticism and its connection with the founding of the human sciences during the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Hume’s discussion of space in the Treatise addresses two main topics: divisibility and vacuum. It is widely recognized that his discussion of divisibility contains an answer to Bayle, whose Dictionary article “Zeno of Elea” presents arguments about divisibility as support for fideism. It is not so widely recognized that, elsewhere in the same article, Bayle presents arguments about vacuum as further support for fideism. This paper aims to show that Hume’s discussion of vacuum contains an answer to these (...) vacuum-based fideistic arguments. Key to this answer is a distinction between two ways in which vacuum was conceived in the early modern period: i) as a genuine thing that has spatial properties, and yet is immobile, indivisible, and penetrable ; ii) as a mere absence of spatial things. This paper also aims to provide a novel defense of Hume against the long-standing objection that he is inconsistent in denying that we can conceive of a vacuum, while allowing that we can conceive of “invisible and intangible distance.” As I interpret him, Hume consistently denies that we can conceive of a positive vacuum, while allowing that we can conceive of two or more objects’ being arranged so as to have privative vacuum between them. (shrink)

Book Information Hume's Enlightenment Tract: The Unity and Purpose of 'An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'. By Stephen Buckle. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2001. Pp. xi + 351. Hardback, £40.

Hsueh M. Qu has recently argued that Hume’s famed ‘Separability Principle’ from the Treatise entangles him in a contradiction. Qu offers a modified principle as a solution but also argues that the mature Hume would not have needed to avail himself of it, given that Hume’s arguments in the first Enquiry do not depend on this principle in any form. To the contrary, I show that arguments in the first Enquiry depend on this principle, but I agree (...) with Qu that Qu’s solution to Hume’s quandary frees him of the contradiction. Next, I compare Qu’s solution to Hume’s original position. By analysing the divergent forms of 'Hume’s Dictum’ that follow from them, I show that Qu’s solution and Hume’s original position have significantly different consequences in a range of domains, including Hume’s modality. Generally, Qu’s solution fits better with Hume’s other commitments—even though Hume often fails to recognize it—thereby increasing its plausibility. (shrink)

Hume sought to analyse our propositionally-structured thought in terms of our ultimate awareness of nothing but objects, sensory impressions or their imagistic copies, The ideas of space and time are often regarded as exceptions to his Copy Theory of impressions and ideas. On grounds strictly internal to Humes account of the generality of thought. This ultimately reveals the limits of the Copy Theory and of Concept Empiricism. The key is to recognise how very capacious is our (Humean) imaginative capacity (...) to associate particular perceptions by various fine-grained determinable resemblances. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94. HUME'S EXPLANATION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF1 In The Natural History of Religion, David Hume offers a not unsophisticated account of the fact that persons hold religious beliefs. In so doing, he produces an explanatory system analogous to that which occurs concerning causal belief, belief in 'external objects', and belief in an enduring self in the Treatise ¦ The explanation of the occurrence of religious belief is more (...) detailed than the explanation provided in the other cases just mentioned. In the Natural History, Hume devotes a short volume to explaining religious belief, while in the Treatise the causal, external object, and enduring self beliefs merit 2 but long sections. More important, however, than length of treatment is the fact that the pattern of explanation is identical in each instance. The Natural History could be embedded without categorial clash into the Treatise, perhaps as Book Four with"fifteen sections, and each formerly separate volume would shed light on the program and tactics of the other. My interest here is in the epistemic features of the explanatory system Hume developed in the Natural History. Hume forthrightly proclaims that The Natural History Of Religion is in fact an attempt to explain the occurrence of religious belief. He writes: What those principles are, which give rise to the original belief, and what those accidents and causes are, which direct its operation, is the subject of our present enquiry.4 (NHR21) Original belief here does duty for "original religious belief", and as he takes religious belief to be nearly but not altogether universal in scope and astonishingly diverse in object, he supposes the principle, or cause, of such belief to be secondary in the sense that its operation is (so to say) defeasible and its product diversified. Hume's powerful critique of the argument from design in Sections II 95. through VIII of the Dialogues is not the only reason for doubting that his occasional kind remarks concerning it should be taken as indicating that he supposed it sound and valid. The very fact that Hume wrote a book intended to explain the occurrence of religious belief by identifying as its cause a built-in principle and its eliciting stimuli should give us pause about Hume's apparent acceptance of something like the argument from design. For while in the Natural History he says that: The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no ¦ rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion. (NHR21) He speaks, not of a conclusion having been proved true, but of a belief having been rendered unsuspendable. Further, neither we nor Hume will ordinarily offer a causal account of the fact that a person has a belief unless there is doubt that the person has sufficient reason for holding it. He does not, for example, offer any such explanation of our acceptance of sincere present-tense first person psychological reports, concerning the truth (indeed, the incorrigibility ) of which he in the Treatise confidently affirms : For since all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness, they must necessarily appear in every particular what they are, and be what they appear. Every thing that enters the mind, being in rea lity perception, 'tis impossible any thing should to feeling appear different. This were to suppose that even where we are most intimately conscious, we might be mistaken. (T190) Or, even more modestly, and without assuming a causal-account and a sufficient-reason-account of a belief to be competing (or even necessarily different) explanations, we may note that Hume proposes to explain the occurrence of religious belief by reference to principle and eliciting stimuli without making reference to reasons or arguments as items possessing epistemic function or 96. evidential force, but only as items capable of triggering a built-in response. That this is_ his tactic I have argued rather fully on another occasion; here I will focus only on the general pattern of Hume's explanation of religious belief. Hume endeavors to explain religious belief without supposing it (in any of its forms) to be true as well as without supposing it... (shrink)

Clearing algorithms are at the core of modern payment systems, facilitating the settling of multilateral credit messages with (near) minimum transfers of currency. Traditional clearing procedures use batch processing based on MILP - mixed-integer linear programming algorithms. The MILP approach demands intensive computational resources; moreover, it is also vulnerable to operational risks generated by possible defaults during the inter-batch period. This paper presents TORC3 - the Token-Ring Clearing Algorithm for Currency Circulation. In contrast to the MILP approach, TORC3 is a (...) real time heuristic procedure, demanding modest computational resources, and able to completely shield the clearing operation against the participating agents’ risk of default. (shrink)

The "impression of will" is intended to pick out the experience of willing an act. Hume discusses this impression in the Treatise primarily in terms of its psychological setting, describing it as "the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind".1 It is not obvious what Hume means in this and related passages. Scholars have offered a number of suggestions about (...) how the impression of will fits into Hume's overall moral psychology.2 But the specific issue I want to raise here concerns two substantive claims about the experience of willing an act that are attributed to Hume with some frequency. The first... (shrink)

The author argues that the core of Hume’s Academic skepticism lies in his commitment to an external world and objective causal powers that are cognitively opaque to human understanding. Three central topics of Hume’s theory of the understanding are discussed—the existence of absolute space, the existence of a world external to our senses, and the existence of objective causal powers. In each case, Hume draws a Pyrrhonian opposition between judgments based on his “Copy Principle” and the “fictions” (...) or “illusions” formed through association of ideas. While he suspends judgment concerning the existence of absolute space, he argues that the association-based beliefs in an external world and objective causal powers are necessary for human life and indispensible in science. In adopting such beliefs about external reality, while at the same time denying their intelligibility, Hume was following ancient Academic skepticism. (shrink)

Scott Yenor argues that David Hume's reputation as a skeptic is greatly exaggerated. In David Hume's Humanity, Yenor shows how Hume's skepticism is a moment leading Hume to defend a philosophy that is grounded in the inescapable assumptions of common life. Humane virtues reflect the proper reaction to the complex mixture of human faculties that define the human condition. These gentle virtues best find their home in the modern commercial republic, of which England is the leading (...) example. Hume's defense of both common life philosophy and humanity are, however, flawed by his secretly dogmatic assumptions about the nature of history and his Enlightened approach to religious teachings and psychology. This study makes the case for Hume's manner of grounding philosophy in common life is essential to any reinvigoration of the humanities. It ultimately holds that Hume's practice of that philosophy is seriously flawed, but that a more philosophic philosophy of common life is available. (shrink)

Hume takes his “naturalistic” study of human nature to show that certain general “principles of the imagination” can explain how human beings come to think, feel, believe, and act in all the ways they do independently of the truth or reasonableness of those responses. This appears to leave the reflective philosopher with no reason for assenting to what he has discovered he cannot help believing anyway. Relief from this unacceptably extreme skepticism is found in acknowledging and acquiescing in those (...) forces of “nature” that inevitably overcome the apparent dictates of “reason” and return the philosopher to the responses and beliefs of everyday life. Living in full recognition of these forces and limitations is what Hume means by the “mitigated scepticism” he accepts. (shrink)