Background This pilot study evaluated the speaking book ‘What it means to be part of a clinical trial’. The book aims at empowering populations with information on their rights and responsibilities when enrolled in clinical research. Wide publication of the book—at significant cost—is anticipated. It is important that the book is evaluated within the communities for whom it is intended, and the necessary changes (if any) are made, before translation and large-scale publication takes place. Objective The objective of the study (...) was to measure the efficacy and ease of use of the book. Methods Participants were recruited from a catering company. Participants were questioned on their knowledge of clinical trials and were then given the book. Instructions for use of the book were given to one group (‘experimental’ group). The other group (‘control’ group) was not given any instructions. A week later, the investigators returned, repeated the knowledge questions and asked ‘ease of use’ questions. Results A two-way repeated measure of covariants showed a statistically significant positive increase in knowledge of clinical trials among the intervention group (p=0.02). Results for the control group displayed trends that were not statistically significant. Percentage analysis of ‘ease of use’ questions proved that the book is easy to use, although some changes would be beneficial. Conclusion This study revealed that the speaking book is easy to use. It significantly increased knowledge of clinical trials among the study sample if instructions on use of the book were provided. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the role of contract as a governance mechanism in contemporary economic and social relations, exploring this theme in the context of recent writing on contract and contracting within law and other disciplines. The trends towards both outsourcing by private firms and privatization of public services have increased the importance of contract as an instrument of market and quasi-market exchange. Such organizational developments have been accompanied by institutional changes in the way in which business relationships are regulated (...) through legal and extralegal norms and other constraints in the contractual environment. Contract is also being deployed increasingly as an instrument of regulation of social relations between the state and citizens in the fields of welfare, education and criminal justice. Following Macneil, the paper develops a methodology for assessing the quality of different types of relationship—between buyers and sellers, purchasers and providers, providers and consumers, regulators and regulatees, government and governed, and state agencies and citizens—according to the relationality of «contract» norms. Drawing on theories of responsive regulation, the paper explores the institutional and organizational conditions of responsive contractual governance in selected areas of market, quasi-market, and social relations. The underlying argument is that the core values of democracy, participation, and citizenship have a central part to play in the determination of responsive regulatory policy. We should aim to increase the level of public participation in decisions concerning organizational and institutional frameworks, so that citizen and consumer interests may adequately be represented in the determination of optimal forms of governance. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary collection of essays highlights the relevance of Buddhist doctrine and practice to issues of globalization. From philosophical, religious, historical, and political perspectives, the authors show that Buddhism—arguably the world’s first transnational religion—is a rich resource for navigating todays interconnected world.

When searching for concepts in memory—as in the verbal fluency task of naming all the animals one can think of—people appear to explore internal mental representations in much the same way that animals forage in physical space: searching locally within patches of information before transitioning globally between patches. However, the definition of the patches being searched in mental space is not well specified. Do we search by activating explicit predefined categories and recall items from within that category, or do we (...) activate and recall a connected sequence of individual items without using categorical information, with each item recalled leading to the retrieval of an associated item in a stream, or both? Using semantic representations in a search of associative memory framework and data from the animal fluency task, we tested competing hypotheses based on associative and categorical search models. Associative, but not categorical, patch transitions took longer to make than position-matched productions, suggesting that categorical transitions were not true transitions. There was also clear evidence of associative search even within categorical patch boundaries. Furthermore, most individuals' behavior was best explained by an associative search model without the addition of categorical information. Thus, our results support a search process that does not use categorical information, but for which patch boundaries shift with each recall and local search is well described by a random walk in semantic space, with switches to new regions of the semantic space when the current region is depleted. (shrink)

My conversion into a knower has been a long and winding road. From childhood reverie to the years of formal schooling, education has never ceased to lure me into its magical power. How do we really get to know/see/learn whatever happens on our educational journey? In this paper, I will re‐trace my quest for knowledge that reaches beyond the boundaries of traditional epistemology. My wonderings will take me to explore, via Jung, the possibilities of imaginative education through Gnosis and Sophia. (...) The paper intends to weave together several Jungian discourses with their versions by other thinkers who have contributed to the fields of depth psychology, esotericism, and educational philosophy. (shrink)

I reply to each of the contributions in this issue. I agree with much that Hillel Steiner argues, especially his insistence that the associated ideas of impartiality and discontinuity are crucial to dealing satisfactorily with a diversity of competing claims. I am, however, less willing to conceive provision for that diversity as the role, rather than a role, that we should ascribe to rights. I question the success of David Miller’s endeavour to provide a unified justification of human rights grounded (...) in the concept of need. It is the notion of a minimally decent human life, rather than need itself, that does most of the justificatory work in Miller’s argument and, arguably, that notion does not deliver a genuinely unitary account of human rights. I concede the case for state funding of opera and the arts more generally to John Horton’s argument, but defend neutralism, and its associated distinction between the right and the good, as a strategy for dealing with diversity, including cultural diversity. I resist Richard Bellamy’s attempt to ground all basic rights in democracy and suggest that his argument relies upon idealized assumptions about the functioning of democracy. I share much of his objection to substituting judicial for political decision-making but argue that a strong moral commitment to rights need not imply a shift in power from democratic processes to courts. I endorse Albert Weale’s argument for favouring a beneficial design approach over a rights approach to healthcare and to many other social goods. Rights should not monopolize our moral and political thinking. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

This volume explores the use of higher-order logics in metaphysics. Seventeen original essays trace the development of higher-order metaphysics, discuss different ways in which higher-order languages and logics may be used, and consider their application to various central topics of metaphysics.

This is a straightforward, elementary textbook for beginning students of philosophy. The general aim is to provide a clear introduction to the main issues arising in the philosophy of mind. Part I discusses the Cartesian dualist view which many find initially appealing, and contains a careful examination of arguments for and against. Part II introduces the broadly functionalist type of physicalism which has Aristotelian roots. This approach is developed to yield accounts of perception, action, belief and desire, and the emerging (...) theory of the mind is compared at each stage with rival historical and contemporary views. In Part III the functionalist approach is further explored in giving analyses of sensation, thought and freedom of will. The discussions throughout are exceptionally clear, and the writing uncomplicated, to make available to the students a wealth of detailed argument in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The essays in Religious Upbringing and the Costs of Freedom are the personal stories of philosophers who were brought up religiously and have broken free, in one way or another, from restraint and oppression. As trained philosophers, they are well equipped to reflect on and analyze their experiences. In this book, they offer not only stories of stress and liberation but ruminations on the moral issues that arise when parents and other caregivers, in seeking to do good by their children, (...) sometimes end up doing real harm to their personal development and sense of autonomy as individuals. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Raymond D. Bradley, Damien Alexander DuPont, Diane Enns, Paul H. Hirst, Amalia Jiva, Irfan Khawaja, Christine Overall, Tasia R. Persson, and Glen Pettigrove. (shrink)

This is a straightforward, elementary textbook for beginning students of philosophy. The general aim is to provide a clear introduction to the main issues arising in the philosophy of mind. Part I discusses the Cartesian dualist view which many find initially appealing, and contains a careful examination of arguments for and against. Part II introduces the broadly functionalist type of physicalism which has Aristotelian roots. This approach is developed to yield accounts of perception, action, belief and desire, and the emerging (...) theory of the mind is compared at each stage with rival historical and contemporary views. In Part III the functionalist approach is further explored in giving analyses of sensation, thought and freedom of will. The discussions throughout are exceptionally clear, and the writing uncomplicated, to make available to the students a wealth of detailed argument in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In recent years there has been much debate over whether recognition has displaced, or should displace, redistribution as the pre‐eminent concern of contemporary politics. That debate is not about whether we should continue to pursue an egalitarian ideal, since equality is as much a goal for the politics of recognition as it is for the politics of redistribution. In this essay, I address only issues of recognition and ask what kind of equal recognition we can reasonably demand or pursue. I (...) argue that we can expect to secure equal recognition of difference or particularity only if that recognition is mediated by more general forms of recognition. Certainly that approach is implied if we hold that difference should be recognised because that difference matters to the recognised rather than to the recogniser. Thus, I challenge the prevailing view that the politics of difference should replace the politics of universalism; rather, the politics of difference presupposes a form of universalism. I also use a distinction between status and merit recognition to indicate the difficulties that confront the goal of equal recognition if we insist that particularity or difference should be the object of unmediated recognition. I use cultural and religious identities as the main foci for my argument, but I also consider how far that argument translates to issues of sexuality and gender. (shrink)

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that (...) ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience. (shrink)

The paper examines important discrepancies between major figures influencing the intellectual development of biosemiotics. It takes its perspective from the work of Gregory Bateson. Unlike C. S. Peirce and J. von Uexküll, Bateson begins with a strong notion of interaction. His early writings were about reciprocity and social exchange, a common topic among anthropologists of the time, but Bateson’s approach was unique. He developed the notion of meta-patterns of exchange, and of the “abduction” of these metapatterns to a variety of (...) other phenomena, in both biology and in game theory. Later, Bateson’s concept of ecology of mind, the product of interactive phenomena, was modified by a non-purposive cybernetics. Biosemiotics has yet to adopt Bateson’s interactive stance, which is absent from Peirce’s approach to communication, of Uexküll’s functional cycles, and of Hoffmeyer’s discussion of the relation between culture and environment. Rather than pursuing notions of appropriate “subjectivity” through changed ethical response to ecological conditions (Hoffmeyer’s discussion of empathy), the paper discusses the advantages of an approach that continues to focus on conditions of paradox and pathology. Specifically, Bateson’s resolution of the relation between culture and environment arises from situations of blocked communication where ecological bonds become binds. (shrink)

The paper examines the sudden disappearance in the United States of millions of honeybees in managed bee colonies. The major research undertaken in the U.S. concentrates on finding the pathogens responsible. This paper suggests an alternative avenue of research a) that as a result of global warming there is a disjunction between bees pollinating cycles and the life cycle of plants b) that understanding changes in “timing cycles” as a result of global warming is the key to understanding the disappearance (...) of the bees. It notes that Gregory Bateson argued that any condition of ecosystem collapse would be characterized first by a collapse in its communicative order rather, than from changed physical states. The collapse of bee colonies and demise of other pollinators is a seeming confirmation of Gregory Bateson argument. Honeybees are ‘go betweens’ in ecosystemic order. It also argues that an appropriate topology of timing cycles and their recursions would enable better visual comprehension of the heterarchical ‘pattern which connects’, in Bateson’s phrase, and prompt awareness of possible catastrophe in human food supplies. (shrink)

The initiators of information theory had deliberately tried to expunge ‘meaning’ from aspects of their theory. Bateson’s ecology of mind was consistent with physical definitions of information as feedback and constraint yet tied these cybernetic mechanisms into context of messages, meta-messages, and their meaning. Thus Bateson’s cybernetic epistemology was of a most unusual type: a theory of informational constraint with no located mind, a theory of agency in which conscious purpose was no longer the guiding executor of mental activity. At (...) the same time Bateson rejected many premises of phenomenology: self-hood or body-hood could not be arbitrarily cut off from the reflexive and recursive system of communication in which human beings were always involved. Embodiment, the interactions that evoke the ‘fabric’ (Merleau-Ponty) of life, involve communicative interactions both as persons within a system of social relations and also as living organisms within a system of ecological relations. (shrink)

(2006). Toleration, Value‐pluralism, and the Fact of Pluralism. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 9, The Political Theory of John Gray, pp. 189-210.

Sir David Ross introduced and discussed his notion of prima facie duties in chapter 2 of The Right and the Good , and it is to this chapter that I shall devote most attention. I wish to show that the distinction between prima facie and “actual” duties, as expounded by Ross, entails that there are no “actual” duties; and I wish to show that this unfortunate consequence of the distinction arises from Ross's explicit epist-emological views. Writers such as Ewing, Baier (...) and Frankena, who have quoted Ross's distinction with some degree of approval, force one to ask how, precisely, they interpreted it. In the first part of this paper I set out Ross's exposition in detail, since failure to do this has blinded adherents to its difficulties; in the second part I summarise my findings and indicate the problems Ross rightly poses for us; in the third part I suggest possible sources for Ross's views. Two points should be noted at the outset. Firstly, the distinction applies to acts, not actions; “act” refers to “the thing done, the initiation of change, and ‘action’ the doing of it, the initiating of change, from a certain motive” . Secondly, the term “right” is used throughout as synonymous with “what is my duty”. (shrink)

I shall show that there are two concepts of God in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , both of which conform to the main epistemo-logical tenets in his earlier writings. Firstly, Hume considers the notion of God as an explanatory cause, and rejects it; secondly, he considers the notion of God as the name of a private sentiment, and whilst not rejecting the notion, emphasises that it has no explanatory power.

During the last decade, children have shown an increasing need for mental wellbeing interventions due to their anxiety and depression issues, which the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated. Socially Assistive Robotics have been shown to have a great potential to support children with mental wellbeing-related issues. However, understanding how robots can be used to aid the measurement of these issues is still an open challenge. This paper presents a narrative review of child-robot interaction (cHRI) papers (IEEE ROMAN proceedings from 2016–2021 and (...) keyword-based article search using Google Scholar) to investigate the open challenges and potential knowledge gaps in the evaluation of mental wellbeing or the assessment of factors affecting mental wellbeing in children. We exploited the SPIDER framework to search for the key elements for the inclusion of relevant studies. Findings from this work (10 screened papers in total) investigate the challenges in cHRI studies about mental wellbeing by categorising the current research in terms of robot-related factors (robot autonomy and type of robot), protocol-related factors (experiment purpose, tasks, participants and user sensing) and data related factors (analysis and findings). The main contribution of this work is to highlight the potential opportunities for cHRI researchers to carry out measurements concerning children’s mental wellbeing. (shrink)