First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This theory of identity statements is extremely implausible. However, I hope to show that it is in fact Fred Kroon’s theory, and that he has some interesting arguments for it. On the other hand, I do not think the arguments succeed, and I think the theory really is as implausible as it sounds. In this paper I argue that Kroon is wrong about the evidence he claims supports his view, and that as an account of what is conveyed by speakers (...) who utter identity statements, it ought to be rejected. (shrink)

One way to solve the problem of negative existentials is to posit a realm of non–existent objects. Then the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’ could refer to a non–existent object, and a statement of (1).

Experimental radiobiology represented a long-standing priority for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, but organizational issues initially impeded the laboratory progress of this government-funded work: who would direct such interdisciplinary investigations and how? And should the AEC support basic research or only mission-oriented projects? Alexander Hollaender's vision for biology in the post-war world guided AEC initiatives at Oak Ridge, where he created and presided over the Division of Biology for nearly two decades. Hollaender's scheme, at once entrepreneurial and system-oriented, made good (...) use of the unique resources provided by the AEC and by Oak Ridge's national laboratory setting, while at the same time it restructured wartime research practices to better reflect biologists' own priorities. Because Hollaender offered many academic experimental biologists a way of envisioning military-related patronage as integral - rather than antithetical - to their professional identities, his work provides an important lens through which to examine the early post-war intellectual and institutional development of radiobiology. (shrink)

Controversies surrounding social media platforms have provided opportunities for institutional reflexivity amongst users and regulators on how to understand and govern platforms. Amidst contestation, platform companies have continued to enact projects that draw upon existing modes of privatized governance. We investigate how social media companies have attempted to achieve closure by continuing to set the terms around platform governance. We investigate two projects implemented by Facebook (Meta)—authenticity regulation and privacy controls—in response to the Russian Interference and Cambridge Analytica controversies surrounding (...) the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Drawing on Goffman’s metaphor of stage management, we analyze the techniques deployed by Facebook to reinforce a division between what is visible and invisible to the user experience. These platform governance projects propose to act upon _front-stage data relations:_ information that users can see from other users—whether that is content that users can see from “bad actors”, or information that other users can see about oneself. At the same time, these projects relegate _back-stage data relations_—information flows between users constituted by recommendation and targeted advertising systems—to invisibility and inaction. As such, Facebook renders the user experience actionable for governance, while foreclosing governance of back-stage data relations central to the economic value of the platform. As social media companies continue to perform platform governance projects following controversies, our paper invites reflection on the politics of these projects. By destabilizing the boundaries drawn by platform companies, we open space for continuous reflexivity on how platforms should be understood and governed. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

We present several new studies focusing on “salience effects”—the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge to someone when an unrealized possibility of error has been made salient in a given conversational context. These studies suggest a complicated picture of epistemic universalism: there may be structural universals, universal epistemic parameters that influence epistemic intuitions, but that these parameters vary in such a way that epistemic intuitions, in either their strength or propositional content, can display patterns of genuine cross-cultural diversity.

Summary The enthusiasm of Renaissance humanists for classical learning greatly influenced the development of botany in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Humanist scholars restored the treatises of Theophrastus, Pliny, Galen and Dioscorides on botany and materia medica to general circulation and argued for their use as textbooks in Renaissance universities. Renaissance botanists' respect for classical precepts and models of the proper methods for studying plants temporarily discouraged the use of naturalistic botanical illustration, but encouraged other techniques for collecting and (...) communicating new observations: herbaria, botanical gardens and field trips. (shrink)

This article begins with clarification of the notion of progress. The author believes that it is possible to consider progress objectively, if by progress we understand a positive change in the effectiveness of something. He mentions two types of progress: progress of improvement and progress of augmentation. He then distinguishes evaluative from reflective philosophy. Evaluative philosophy gives answers to the second and third of Kant's famous three questions; reflective philosophy answers the first, dealing with the limits of human knowledge. Progress (...) in evaluative philosophy takes the form of augmentation. But in reflective philosophy it could take the form of improvement. The author believes, however, that it is not an easy task to improve contemporary social philosophy. Three main obstacles are: the “anthropological turn” in philosophy, the challenge of postmodernism, and the turning of social philosophy into a kind of useful knowledge. (shrink)

This paper draws on research exploring how men narrate their long-term experiences of Weight Loss Surgery [WLS] and is specifically focused on findings relating to male embodiment. Whilst there is concern about increasing obesity and the possible role of bariatric [WLS] surgery in ameliorating this, there has been little research to date exploring men’s longer-term experiences of this. For the purposes of the present study, interviews were conducted with five men who had undergone bariatric surgery at least four years previously. (...) The transcribed interviews were subjected to narrative analysis with the additional incorporation of Watson’s “male body schema” into this process in order to facilitate focus on the embodied nature of the storied accounts obtained. The findings suggested two seemingly contrasting storylines: “ongoing struggles” and “success”. Struggles related mainly to control over eating habits and the visceral challenges of long-term side effects following surgery. Despite these struggles, the men ultimately presented an overriding storyline of embodied “success” in how the surgery had assisted them to live more normatively male lives. Importantly, narratives around struggles were presented as more private stories in contrast to the public emphasis on success. The silencing dynamic implicit in this suggests the likelihood that other men encountering similar experiences would be reticent to reveal their struggles, thereby perpetuating their suffering and leaving popular obesity and weight loss narratives unchallenged. (shrink)

Despite the growing literature on childhood obesity and lifestyle intervention programmes focusing on weight loss, few studies have examined young persons’ experiences of being identified as candidates for such programmes and of participating in them. This paper does so. Juxtaposing insights from phenomenology with an approach inspired by Foucault, the paper shows how teenage girls’ bodily self-perception and bodily self-awareness are shaped in intercorporeal assemblages comprising other people and specific features or elements of the lifestyle programme. Inspired by van Manen’s (...) hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, with its point of departure in lived experience, this paper draws on interviews with Norwegian teenage girls participating in the same lifestyle programme and identifies three core thematic aspects of the girls’ experiences: being identified as a candidate for a lifestyle programme and not wanting this; negotiating the lack of weight loss and the scales; and bodily situated agency – feeling good and being able. Permeating all three themes are two central, interrelated phenomena: agency and resistance. Furthermore, the paper shows how a combination of Foucauldian insights and a phenomenological understanding of intercorporeality can help to shed light on the power, affective, material and temporal dimensions of dys-appearance, as well as those of eu-appearance, and thus contribute to the understanding of the girls’ narrated lived experiences. On the basis of these findings, we argue that weight-related treatment goals are not necessarily compatible with the strengthening of adolescents’ body images and self-esteem. However, whilst being obliged to attend to their bodies while in the programme, the girls also encountered unexpected, positive bodily feelings and experiences. Such events, we suggest, offer a means of resisting the more troubling dys-appearing bodily situations our participants described so powerfully. (shrink)

This article is a commentary response to the study results outlined in “The State of Teacher Training in Philosophy.” In recognition of the study’s determination that 70 percent of the jobs new philosophers will apply for are non-tenure track, our graduate programs must provide training in teaching excellence and the fostering of student learning, or what I call pedagogical areté. I will argue that achieving this teaching excellence requires 1) Familiarity with cognitive neuroscience advancements on how people learn, 2) Knowledge (...) of today’s college students, and 3) Practiced methods for scaffolding and assessment of student learning. My claim is that pedagogic excellence is both a role-related moral obligation and a duty we owe to society—what Lee Shulman characterizes as the pedagogical imperative. This increased focus on pedagogical proficiency creates an opportunity for philosophy to establish and solidify its disciplinary value. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In the early 1970s, the idea of precaution—of heeding rather than ignoring scientific evidence of harm when there is uncertainty, and taking action that errs on the side of safety—was so appealing that the US Congress used it as the basis of the toxics provisions of the Clean Water Act of 1972, the federal Environmental Protection Agency based its proposals for implementing those provisions on it, and the courts frequently tended toward it when resolving conflicts over the implementation of pollution (...) control law. In other words, precaution was written into toxic water pollutant control law and was beginning to be written into policy and regulations. By 1976, the tables were completely turned. The EPA abandoned the safety-providing approach in the implementation of the law, even though the law required it, and adopted a risk-taking approach in the creation of standards for the vast majority of toxic water pollutants. The article examines how this change was brought about. It builds on recent work on undone science as an obstacle to regulation and contributes to the development of an account of the creation of the regulatory system, with both its achievements and its limitations. (shrink)

: In this essay, Houle focuses in on the ways in which a Foucauldian-framed account of violence, such as the one Gail Mason offers in Spectacles of Violence, rattles liberal (theoretical and 'common-sensical') understandings of culpability and lawfulness. Mason's analysis dares to suggest that violence is constitutive, not simply destructive of selves, of lives. Asking after the ways in which that constitution is asymmetrical in events of violence, Houle reintroduce some cautions and concerns about drawing from a poststructuralist perspective. This, (...) in turn, raises the question as to which ontology of the self such a rebalancing requires. The essays ends by making use of Mason's own distinction between our selves as 'who' and 'what,' to give a modified reading of the ways these aspects of selfhood are constituted or made possible in events of violence, which does not fall back upon the liberal conception of the self. (shrink)

This volume seeks to improve an understanding of and conversations about the nature, meaning and significance of higher education's public service within the scope of a democratic society. Contributors offer educators and students a praxis-oriented, hope-infused, contemplative approach to conceiving, developing and in some cases, returning to public service and public identity in the twenty-first century.

The preoccupation with "depth" and its relevance to cinema and media studies.

This essay reflects on the role academic journals like the JRE can play in facilitating and addressing tainted legacies. As an institution in religious ethics, the journal not only determines whose work is important, but it also replicates such judgments, passing certain sets of issues, concerns, and methods down from the past to the present, shaping future work. Journals highlight the systemic, structural elements of legacies that we often neglect in heated debate over how to respond to them. Consequently, they (...) illuminate the complexity of the problems tainted legacies present. I first discuss three ways a journal like the JRE facilitates the structural features of tainted legacies in religious ethics. I then suggest how the JRE might implement a position I call the “reformer” in response to such legacies. This position emphasizes practices of moral repair designed to challenge the systemic injustices that underlay tainted legacies. (shrink)