In March 2016, an interdisciplinary group met for two days and two evenings to explore the implications for policy making of second-order science. The event was sponsored by SITRA, the Finnish Parliament's Innovation Fund. Their interest arose from their concern that the well-established ways, including evidence-based approaches, of policy and decision making used in government were increasingly falling short of the complexity, uncertainty, and urgency of needed decision making. There was no assumption that second-order science or second-order cybernetics would reveal (...) any practical possibilities at this early stage of enquiry. On the other hand, some members of the group are practioners in both policy and in facilitating change in sectors of society. Thus, the intellectual concepts were strongly grounded in experience. This is an account of the deliberations of that group and some reflections on what came out of the various shared contributions and ensuing dialogues. The overall conclusion of the event is that there definitely are possibilities that are worthy of further research and exploration. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Max Bennett is a distinguished Australian neuroscientist, Peter Hacker an Oxford philosopher and leading authority on Wittgenstein. A book resulting from their collaboration, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, has received high praise. According to the Blackwell website, G.H. von Wright asserts that it 'will certainly, for a long time to come, be the most important contribution to the mind-body problem that there is'; and Sir Anthony Kenny says it 'shows that the claims made on behalf of cognitive science are ill-founded'. (...) M.R. Bennett & P.M.S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. (shrink)

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in this book, which focuses on how citizenship is addressed in the context of education or, more specifically, learning, which is understood as central to the government of individuals and societies in Europe. Educational research has provided numerous critical responses to the citizenship education introduced in the UK and elsewhere. Governance is a form of governing commensurate with the decentralisation associated with neoliberalism, but articulated in terms of transparency, accountability, and social (...) justice in accordance with Third Way thinking. The concern with voice, narrative, and accounting for oneself in the name of democracy and social justice has become central to the discourses and practices of citizenship in the learning society. The active way in which individuals are asked to relate to their European heritage is measured as a form of participation, and therefore contributes evidence of active citizenship. (shrink)

Bare plural generic sentences pervade ordinary talk. And yet it is extremely controversial what semantics to assign to such sentences. In this paper, I achieve two tasks. First, I develop a novel classification of the various standard uses to which bare plurals may be put. This “variety data” is important—it gives rise to much of the difficulty in systematically theorizing about bare plurals. Second, I develop a novel account of bare plurals, the radical account. On this account, all bare plurals (...) fail to express propositions. The content of a bare plural has to be pragmatically “completed” by a speaker in order for her to make an assertion. At least the content of a quantifier expression has to be supplied. But sometimes, the content of a sentential operator or modal verb is also supplied. The radical account straightforwardly explains the variety data: Speakers’ communicative intentions vary wildly across different contexts. (shrink)

This powerful critique of Marx's historical materialism - as a theory of power, as an account of history, and as a political theory -has been revised to take note of the profound intellectual and political changes that have occurred since the first edition was published. Reviews from the first edition 'Giddens draws upon a formidable knowledge of anthropology, archaeology, geography, and philosophy to demonstrate the limitations of Marxism and to formulate his own interpretation of the history of societies ... He (...) does a masterful job of setting his theory within a historical and critical framework of writings on Marx. His clarity of thought and his deft and often humorous handling of the unavoidable jargon of sociology and Marxist political theory makes this book a critical work of the highest quality.' Journal of International Law and Politics 'By contrast with many practictioners in the rather murky area of social theory, Giddens clearly seeks to make himself understood, and he has the useful quality of provoking one to argument. He has let light into some dark places.' The Times Higher Education Supplement 'Although Marx, Durkheim, and Weber continue to fill more index space than any other authors, Critique is Giddens's most explicit and committed statement of his own conceptualization of social theory ... It is his most original and therefore most vulnerable book, at once a cause for celebration and an invitation to critical reappraisal of the author's entire theoretical project.' Environment and Planning. (shrink)

First published in 1973, Sir Anthony Kenny’s classic introduction to Wittgenstein was widely praised for offering a lucid and historically informed account of the philosopher’s core concerns. Kenny's study is also remarkable for demonstrating the continuity between Wittgenstein’s early and late writings. Focusing on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind and language, Kenny closely examines the works of the middle years. He exposes apparent conflicts and then goes on to reconcile them, providing a persuasive argument for the unity of Wittgenstein’s thought. (...) This revised edition includes an extensive new introduction in which Kenny outlines developments in Wittgenstein scholarship since the book was first published and assesses Wittgenstein’s influence in the latter part of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates from inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the state are criticized here, because they typically assume relatively small numbers of agents and underplay the complexity and uncertainty in developed capitalist systems. In developed capitalist economies, law is sustained through interaction between private agents, courts (...) and the legislative apparatus. Law is also a key institution for overcoming contracting uncertainties. It is furthermore a part of the power structure of society, and a major means by which power is exercised. This argument is illustrated by considering institutions such as property and the firm. Complex systems of law have played a crucial role in capitalist development and are also vital for developing economies. (shrink)

I introduce a new version of Moral Error Theory, which I call Type-B Moral Error Theory. According to a Type-B theorist there are no facts of the kind required for there to be morality in stricto sensu, but there can be irreducible ‘normative’ properties which she deems, strictly speaking, to be morally irrelevant. She accepts that there are instrumental all things considered oughts, and categorical pro tanto oughts, but denies that there are categorical all things considered oughts on pain of (...) requiring ‘queer’ facts to obtain. I detail the most central motivation of this version of the theory against its more traditional rival, according to which there are no irreducible normative properties at all. The motivation is that it, unlike its rival, can successfully be defended against the notorious charge of self-defeat. (shrink)

Sir Anthony Kenny's engaging new multi-volume history of Western philosophy now advances into the modern era. The Rise of Modern Philosophy captures the fascinating story of the emergence, from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, of the great ideas and intellectual systems that shaped modern thought. Kenny introduces us to some of the world's most original and influential thinkers and helps us gain an understanding of their famous works. The great minds we meet include Rene Descartes, traditionally (...) seen as the founder of modern philosophy; the great British philosophers Hobbes, Locke, and Hume; continental thinkers such as Spinoza, Liebniz, and Hegel; and the towering figure of Immanuel Kant, who perhaps more than any other made philosophy what it is today. Kenny first tells the story of modern philosophy chronologically: his lively, accessible narrative brings the philosophers to life and fills in the historical and intellectual background to their work. It is ideal as the first thing to read for someone new to this wonderfully creative period. Kenny then backtracks to look closely at each of the main areas of philosophical exploration in this period: knowledge and understanding; the nature of the physical universe; metaphysics (the most fundamental questions there are about existence); mind and soul; the nature and content of morality; political philosophy; and God. The book also features many intriguing and beautiful illustrations which evoke the human and social side of philosophy. Anyone who is interested in the evolution of modern thought will find this a book a treasure. (shrink)

While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach, puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and (...) John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, "shored up" and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. "Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher," Chemero writes in his preface, adding, "I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything." With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought. (shrink)

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment it claims to reject? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Cascardi argues against the view that postmodern culture has rejected Enlightenment beliefs and explores instead the continuities contemporary theory shares with Kant's failed ambition to bring the project of Enlightenment to completion. He explores the link between aesthetics and politics in thinkers as diverse as (...) Habermas, Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Wittgenstein in order to reverse the tendency to see works of art simply in terms of the worldly practices among which they are situated. (shrink)

Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was published in 1711. It ranges widely over ethics, aesthetics, religion, the arts (painting, literature, architecture, gardening), and ancient and modern history, and aims at nothing less than a new ideal of the gentleman. Together with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Addison and Steele's Spectator, it is a text of fundamental importance for understanding the thought and culture of Enlightenment Europe. This volume presents a new edition of the text together with an (...) introduction, explanatory notes and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

Buying and selling are the most natural activities common to human beings. In a society where profit overrides personal dignity and human rights, many people see market as a virtue-free zone. They do not believe that one can buy and sell without dishonest gains. Consequently, they are ready to do anything in the name of business: manufacturing and selling fake and substandard goods and services for originals. Today, markets are flooded with fake medical drugs, fake foods, fake drinks/water, fake motor (...) parts and fake building materials. Thus market exhibits exploitative and negative impacts on customer satisfaction. Its impact on human life and property leads to increased deaths because of poisoning, building collapses and even increased road accidents. Such market transaction lacks mutual benefit which is its telos. This paper seeks to establish that market is not a virtue-free zone. It has moral standards of excellence internal to it. (shrink)

This concise, authoritative encyclopedia from one of the world's most renowned theologians explores all the major themes in the philosophy of religion.

This new edition keeps the same successful format, with each chapter providing a self-contained introduction to the topic it discusses, rewritten to include ...

Aquinas needs no introduction as one of the greatest minds of the middle ages. Highly influential on the development of Christian doctrine, his ideas are still of fundamental philosophical importance. This new critique of his natural law theory discusses the theory's background in Aristotle and advances new interpretations of contemporary legal issues which hark back to Aquinas.

I introduce a new version of Moral Error Theory, which I call Type-B Moral Error Theory. According to a Type-B theorist there are no facts of the kind required for there to be morality instricto sensu, but there can be irreducible ‘normative’ properties which she deems, strictly speaking, to be morally irrelevant. She accepts that there areinstrumentalall things considered oughts, andcategoricalpro tanto oughts (both of which she deems morally irrelevant), but denies that there arecategoricalall things considered oughts on pain of (...) requiring ‘queer’ facts to obtain. I detail the most central motivation of this version of the theory against its more traditional rival, according to which there are no irreducible normative properties at all. The motivation is that it, unlike its rival, can successfully be defended against the notorious charge of self-defeat. (shrink)

Taking a refreshingly hands-on approach to introductory ethics, A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox provides students with a set of tools to help them understand and make a constructive difference in real-life moral controversies. Thoroughly optimistic, it invites students to approach ethical issues with a reconstructive intent, making room for more and better options than the traditional "pro" and "con" positions that have grown up around tough problems like abortion and animal rights. Ideal for introductory and applied ethics courses, this unique (...) text does not treat ethics as a purely academic, historical, or theoretical subject, but as a wide-ranging and ongoing set of challenges that calls for multiple and interwoven kinds of intelligence. It covers the skills that are most vital to making real progress in ethics, including paying careful attention to the values at stake on all sides of an issue; looking for creative opportunities within difficult problems; critical-thinking skills such as defining key terms and making sure to judge similar cases alike; and learning how to engage in constructive dialogue. Instructors can readily use the experiential and applied activities inspired by this "toolbox" of practical skills to design an interactive and collaborative ethics course. Students can carry these essential skills directly from this book into such projects as campaigning for environmental awareness and staffing local homeless shelters. In addition to his own discussion, Weston includes gripping and provocative short selections from essayists, activists, and philosophers, and also cites his own students. Extensive "Exercises and Notes" sections end each chapter, and a detailed appendix offers instructors advice on how to use the Toolbox in the classroom. (shrink)

The guiding questions of this volume are: Can we have knowledge of the external world of things outside our minds?

This chapter addresses Immanuel Kant and the potential impasse of any philosophical account of religious experience. Various attempts within phenomenology are explored to broaden the notion of givenness and evidence beyond the parameters of object-givenness. Then, the chapter deals with a phenomenology of religious experience as an irreducible sphere of human experience, and its unique style of evidence and modalisations. For Kant, experience is limited to one mode of givenness in which objects of knowledge are actively constituted with the direct (...) implication that one cannot meaningfully speak of a religious experience. The recognition of the different quality of givenness in religious experience implicated the significant matter of religious evidence. (shrink)

Children are routinely treated paternalistically. There are good reasons for this. Children are quite vulnerable. They are ill-equipped to meet their most basic needs, due, in part, to deficiencies in practical and theoretical reasoning and in executing their wishes. Children’s motivations and perceptions are often not congruent with their best interests. Consequently, raising children involves facilitating their best interests synchronically and diachronically. In practice, this requires caregivers to (in some sense) manage a child’s daily life. If apposite, this management will (...) focus partly on a child’s well-being. To be ably executed, an account of children’s well-being will need to be articulated. This chapter focuses on the nature of children’s well-being. It has five sections. The first section clarifies the focus. The second section examines some hurdles to articulating a view of children’s well-being. The third section evaluates some accounts of children’s well-being. The fourth section addresses the view that children possess features essential to them that make their lives on balance prudentially bad for them. The fifth section sums things up. (shrink)

This book uncovers and examines the confusion in antiquity between Aristotle's hypothetical syllogistic and Stoic logic, and offers a fresh perspective on the ...

This paper introduces a conjecture that laws of nature may be of different kinds, in particular that there may, in addition to laws which constrain outcomes, be laws which empower systems to direct or select outcomes and laws which guide systems in such selections. The paper defends this conjecture by suggesting that it is not excluded by anything we know, is plausible, and is potentially of great explanatory power.

This chapter focuses on the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and their interpretation by Stanley Cavell. Cavell's philosophy has sought to reclaim the work of Emerson and Thoreau for and as philosophy, and particularly as American philosophy. In Cavell's Emersonian moral perfectionism, perfectionism is understood as ateleological, and not in terms of perfectibility. Cavell therefore seeks to distinguish this American expression of perfectionism from what he identifies as a dimension or tradition of the moral life that (...) spans the course of Western thought, found in teleological form in, for example, Plato and Aristotle. Emerson's essay expresses a disappointment in America's passive acceptance of its European inheritance and in the implications of this for citizenship and democracy. America, or American man, must undertake its own labour to produce its own knowledge of itself and the world. (shrink)

This chapter begins by providing some historical background to European integration. It draws attention to the way that history has been used to promote a European identity since the European Union and, with it, European citizenship were created in 1992. The framing of the relationship between globalisation and its socioeconomic challenges has made the need to attend to questions of citizenship, particularly through education, self‐evident. The shift in the mode of governance has not only entailed using education as a means (...) of educating citizens about Europe: in the current context, education, or specifically, learning, has become a central aspect of how citizenship is understood. Examples of recent educational and cultural policy highlight terms that are central to producing a particular mode of governance. These examples illustrate the practices of accountability that have emerged in recent years that require governments, institutions, organisations, and individuals to speak about themselves in particular ways. (shrink)

Educational research tends to conduct its analysis according to fixed identity categories and concepts, and in its concern for voice, empowerment, and inclusion, offers ways in which researchers can articulate an account of themselves and their practice. The researcher herself then can be seen as being constituted as a particular subject in the current context of the entrepreneurial lifelong learning citizen, whose virtues are evidenced through the continual accumulation of skills and competencies. The concern with social justice, representation, and ethics (...) found in methodological discussion effects a shoring up of identity and a process of risk management in the sense of a thorough audit of who the researcher is. Considerations of citizenship and of educational research then begin to become inseparable because the understanding of both citizenship and research is seen to entail a particular relationship to the self. (shrink)

This chapter provides examples of European and local programmes and policies deriving from the education and cultural policies, and focuses on the ecological subject. These examples further illustrate not only the way in which the citizen is addressed, but also the construction of citizenship in a particular relationship to space and time. To begin the analysis of space in the construction of European citizenship, the chapter focuses on Foucault's account of governmentality, which shows the historical shift in the object of (...) government from territory to population, and thus the emergence of liberalism. More recent accounts draw attention to the subsequent shift to environments. In light of the environmental self‐understanding of the active learning citizen, the chapter considers the relationship to history seen in the promotion of heritage in European cultural policy. This entails placing the citizen in a particular spatial and temporal relationship to Europe. (shrink)

In 1933, the year that Hitler took power in Germany, Martin Heidegger accepted the Rectorship of the University of Freiburg. Rectoral Address is selected for its pertinence to this period of European history, which remains so central to the understanding of what constitutes Europe's heritage. This chapter explores the relationship between the sociopolitical events that took place in Germany in 1933 and philosophical texts relating to them. It provides some contextualisation of the post‐war events that ensued from Heidegger's Address and (...) political decisions in terms of the re‐reading of his philosophy and the Heidegger affair. Karl Liowith's account gives a positive interpretation of Heidegger's work, in the sense of situating him within a lineage of European philosophers who responded to the decline of Europe, diagnosing and responding to its nihilism, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is followed by an introduction to Heidegger's Being and Time and subjectivity. (shrink)

Plato's texts have been subject to re‐reading in recent years, reflecting new ways in which philosophy has sought to understand the relationship between the author, the reader, and the text. This chapter begins by restating the allegory of the Stanley Cavell in The Republic, before turning to Cavell's reading of this in relation to the opening of the text. It further illustrates the idea of education as a finding of voice, which Cavell articulates through Emersonian moral perfectionism with reference to (...) his work on philosophy as autobiography. The educative relationship to the self and to the other, and the responsibility one takes for one's voice, is then illustrated further by way of Michel Foucault's account of Socratic parrhesia, a practice evident in The Republic and in other texts of Plato to which Foucault refers. Cavell ventures the term sublimation in relation to his questioning of the allegory of the Cave. (shrink)

This chapter illustrates how the language of research, citizenship, and education operates in two particular ways. First, by highlighting the way in which the discourses identified in policy and practice are taken up in educational research, and then by indicating how the particular mode of subjectivation detailed thus far is evident in certain forms of educational research. Both have implications for the critique educational research might provide. As a first example, the way in which educational research has responded to the (...) introduction of citizenship education in England is illustrated in the chapter by a review of research, policy, and practice covering the period 1995‐2005, commissioned by the British Educational Research Association. The review is taken to exemplify the field of education policy sociology. This is followed by discussion, in a second example, of what might be termed a genre of educational research concerned with voice and social justice. (shrink)

Can the Hippocratic and Judeo-Christian traditions be synthesized with contemporary thought about practical reason, virtue and community to provide real-life answers to the dilemmas of healthcare today? Bishop Anthony Fisher discusses conscience, relationships and law in relation to the modern-day controversies surrounding stem cell research, abortion, transplants, artificial feeding and euthanasia, using case studies to offer insight and illumination. What emerges is a reason-based bioethics for the twenty-first century; a bioethics that treats faith and reason with equal seriousness, that (...) shows the relevance of ancient wisdom to the complexities of modern healthcare scenarios and that offers new suggestions for social policy and regulation. Philosophical argument is complemented by Catholic theology and analysis of social and biomedical trends, to make this an auspicious example of a new generation of Catholic bioethical writing which has relevance for people of all faiths and none. (shrink)

Peter C. Hodgson engages the speculative reconstruction of Christian theology that is accomplished by Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and provides a close reading of the critical edition of the lectures. He analyses Hegel's concept of the object and purpose of the philosophy of religion, his critique of the theology of his time, his approach to Christianity within the framework of the concept of religion, his concept of God, his reconstruction of central Christian themes, and his placing (...) of Christianity among the religions of the world. Hodgson makes a case for the contemporary theological significance of Hegel by identifying currently contested sites of interpretation and their Hegelian resolution. (shrink)

Reid’s dilemma concludes that, whether the idea associated with a denied proposition is lively or faint, Hume is committed to saying that it is either believed or merely conceived. In neither case would there be denial. If so, then Hume cannot give an adequate account of denial. I consider and reject Powell’s suggestion that Hume could have advanced a “Content Contrary” account of denial that avoids Reid’s dilemma. However, not only would a Humean Content Contrary account be viciously circular, textual (...) evidence suggests that Hume did not hold such an account. I then argue that Govier’s distinction between force and vivacity cannot help Hume. Not only did Hume fail to recognize this distinction, we can advance a variant of Reid’s dilemma even if we distinguish force from vivacity. (shrink)

Preface to second edition -- The textures of society -- The contemporary relevance of the classics -- The frankfurt school -- Structuralism -- Post-structuralism -- Theories of structuration -- Contemporary critical theory -- Feminism and post-feminist theory -- Postmodernity -- Networks, risks, liquids -- Globalization -- Afterword.

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 27-29.