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)

Purpose/methods: This study investigated the relationship between ethics education and training, and the use and usefulness of ethics resources, confidence in moral decisions, and moral action/activism through a survey of practicing nurses and social workers from four United States (US) census regions. Findings: The sample (n = 1215) was primarily Caucasian (83%), female (85%), well educated (57% with a master's degree). no ethics education at all was reported by 14% of study participants (8% of social workers had no ethics education, (...) versus 23% of nurses), and only 57% of participants had ethics education in their professional educational program. Those with both professional ethics education and in-service or continuing education were more confident in their moral judgments and more likely to use ethics resources and to take moral action. Social workers had more overall education, more ethics education, and higher confidence and moral action scores, and were more likely to use ethics resources than nurses. Conclusion: Ethics education has a significant positive influence on moral confidence, moral action, and use of ethics resources by nurses and social workers. (shrink)

Over the last decade, there has been a considerable expansion of mindfulness programmes into a number of different domains of contemporary life, such as corporations, schools, hospitals and even the military. Understanding the reasons for this phenomenon involves, I argue, reflecting upon the nature of contemporary capitalism and mapping the complexity of navigating new digital technologies that make multiple and accelerated solicitations upon attention and our affective lives. Whilst acknowledging the benefits of mindfulness practice, this article argues that it is (...) equally important to attend to the ethical framework that gives orientation to these practices and the outer conditions that shape lived daily experience, such as school or work environments. I suggest that the well-meaning efforts to secularise mindfulness, provide scientific evidence for its effectiveness, and introduce it to wider publics may have served to impoverish the rich contribution that practices of mindfulness, situated within a broader ethical framework, can make to human lives, and arguably contribute to the educational endeavour. For example, the emphasis on transforming inner conditions of students’ lives can lead to the neglect of outer conditions, such as structural inequality, or unhealthy and exploitative work practices. This can result in practices that privilege individual wellbeing over compassion and concern for the happiness of others, providing a buffer against loving attention to the world and others. Instead, I ask how mindfulness in educational settings could come to be viewed in a different light if we reflect upon the ways in which school environments and curricula can promote mindfulness, awareness, sensitive inquiry, and contemplative practices through the day, rather than offering it as a discrete intervention focused on the self and wellbeing. (shrink)

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

This paper advances a new paradigm in clinical ethics education that not only emphasizes development of individual cli but also focuses on the institutional context within which health care professionals work. This approach has been applied to the goal of improving the care provided to critically and terminally ill adults. The model has been adopted by about thirty hospitals and nursing homes; additional institutions will soon join the program, entitled Decisions Near the End of Life. Here, we describe the history (...) and rationale for this approach, its goals, pedagogical assumptions, and design. (shrink)

Hayek argued that the central question of economics is the coordination problem: How does the spontaneous interaction of many purposeful individuals, each having dispersed bits of subjective knowledge, generate an order in which the actors' subjective data are coordinated in a way that enables them to dovetail their plans and activities successfully? In attempting to solve this problem, Hayek outlined an approach to economic theorizing that takes seriously the limited, subjective nature of human knowledge. Despite purporting to have appropriated Hayek's (...) thought by acknowledging the information-transmitting role of prices, mainstream economists have missed Hayek's point. The predominant tool of formal economics—equilibrium analysis—begins by assuming the data held by actors to have been pre-reconciled, and so evades the problem to be solved. Even the more advanced tools for modeling knowledge in economic analysis, such as the economics of information, assume away either the subjectivism of knowledge and expectations (rendering the coordination of beliefs and plans a trivial matter) or the frictions and “imperfections” of reality (rendering the coordination problem indeterminate). (shrink)

In this article, Aislinn O'Donnell offers a set of reflections on the relation between therapy and education. In the first section, she examines criticisms of therapeutic education, mobilizing the example of prison education to highlight the difficulties that arise from imposing prescriptive modes of subjectification and socialization in pedagogy. In the second section, she addresses the relation between therapy and education by focusing on just one element of the experience of education: those moments at which a subject has the potential (...) of becoming significant in the life of a student. An important dimension of the educator's authority involves noticing such moments, fostering the conditions that make them more likely, and engaging in the creative process and practice of deciding how best pedagogically to respond to these moments. In the third section, O'Donnell develops this idea by detailing a philosophical approach and practice that understands “effectiveness” in education as bound to practice, creative responsiveness, and the judgment of the educator in concrete, singular pedagogical situations, rather than construed in terms of generic models of “best practice.”. (shrink)

This is a long critical discussion of Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism, focusing primarily on Wilderson's claim that Blackness is equivalent to Slaveness. The article draws out some strengths of the book, but argues that the book's central arguments often rest on shaky methodological, metaphysical, epistemic, and political grounds. Along the way, we consider some complications endemic to the project of evaluating a text so clearly geared towards Black audiences from the perspective of a non-Black reader.

In this essay, I examine the concept of thinking in Hannah Arendt's writings. Arendt's interest in the experience of thinking allowed her to develop a concept of thinking that is distinct from other forms of mental activity such as cognition and problem solving. For her, thinking is an unending, unpredictable and destructive activity without fixed outcomes. Her understanding of thinking is distinguished from other approaches to thinking that equate it with, for example, problem solving or knowledge. Examples of a ‘problem-solving’, (...) skills-based approach to thinking that place a premium on behavioural change are drawn from the context of the prison. I offer an alternative example of thinking with others from my philosophy classes in the prison. I draw upon Arendt's insights to develop a concept of ‘thinking-in-concert’. Whilst Arendt believes that thinking must be a solitary activity, I argue that the concept of ‘thinking-in-concert’ helps to capture experiences of thinking with others in a manner that is more hesitant and provisional than some descriptions of communities of enquiry or democratic education. The embodied presence of others matters when ‘thinking-in-concert’. I describe this approach as educational as well as conversational. This helps to communicate the way in which we turn towards others and may be pulled up short by them as we strive to think together or experience moments of conversion or insight whilst enjoying the ordinary activity of talking with others. This concept may help us to understand the difference between the experience of thinking, teaching and learning when we are physically present to one another and the experience of virtual learning or teaching. (shrink)

Zuidema et al. illustrate how empirical AGL studies can benefit from computational models and techniques. Computational models can help clarifying theories, and thus in delineating research questions, but also in facilitating experimental design, stimulus generation, and data analysis. The authors show, with a series of examples, how computational modeling can be integrated with empirical AGL approaches, and how model selection techniques can indicate the most likely model to explain experimental outcomes.

Popper's paradox of ideal evidence has long been viewed as a telling criticism of Keynes's logical theory of probability and its associated concept of the weight of argument. This paper shows that a simple addition to Keynes's definitions of irrelevance enables his theory to elude the paradox with ease. The modified definition draws on ideas already present in Keynes's Treatise on Probability (1973). As a consequence, relevant evidence and the weight of argument may increase, even when new evidence leaves the (...) probability unaltered. (shrink)

It is widely believed that philosophical pessimism is committed to fatalism about the sufferings that characterize the human condition, and that it encourages resignation and withdrawal from the political realm in response. This paper offers an explanation for and argument against this perception by distinguishing two functions that pessimism can serve. Pessimism’s skeptical mode suggests that fundamental cross-cultural constraints on the human condition bar us from the good life (however defined). These constraints are often represented as immune to political amelioration, (...) leading to the perception that pessimism is intrinsically fatalistic and resigned. Yet pessimism’s critical function emphasizes the political, economic, and cultural contingency of many sources of suffering and crisis while exhorting us to reject and reimagine the social forces that actively harm our capacity to flourish. It also offers an internal critique of skeptical pessimism’s tendency to naturalize and depoliticize the sources of our sufferings. These sometimes contradictory skeptical and critical tendencies should both be grouped under the pessimist banner, and we should see pessimism’s critical mode as especially valuable to political critique. -/- . (shrink)

According to the “standard framing” of racial appeals in political speech, politicians generally rely on coded language to communicate racial messages. Yet recent years have demonstrated that politicians often express quite explicit forms of racism in mainstream political discourse. The standard framing can explain neither why these appeals work politically nor how they work semantically. This paper moves beyond the standard framing, focusing on the politics and semantics of one type of explicit appeal, candid racial communication. The linguistic vehicles of (...) CRC are neither true code words, nor slurs, but a conventionally defined class of “racialized terms.”. (shrink)

This paper has two objectives, neither previously attempted in the published literature—first, to outline J. M. Keynes's theory of knowledge in some detail, and, secondly, to justify the contention that his epistemology is a variety of rationalism, and not, as many have asserted, a form of empiricism. Keynes's attitude to empirical data is also analysed as well as his views on prediction and theory choice. 1This paper is partly based on ideas initially advanced in O'Donnell [1982], a revised and expanded (...) version of which is to be published as O'Donnell [1989]. I should like to thank an anonymous referee for helpful comment, and King's College, Cambridge for permission to quote from the Keynes Papers. (shrink)

DIVUses a discussion of contemporary films and literary works to present an understanding of paranoia as a defining element in postmodern late-capitalist structure./div.

According to the “standard framing” of racial appeals in political speech, politicians generally rely on coded language to communicate racial messages. Yet recent years have demonstrated that politicians often express quite explicit forms of racism in mainstream political discourse. The standard framing can explain neither why these appeals work politically nor how they work semantically. This paper moves beyond the standard framing, focusing on the politics and semantics of one type of explicit appeal, candid racial communication. The linguistic vehicles of (...) CRC are neither true code words, nor slurs, but a conventionally defined class of “racialized terms.”. (shrink)

Although the E-Z Reader model accounts well for eye-tracking data, it will be judged by new predictions and consistency with evidence from brain imaging methodologies. The stage architecture proposed for lexical access seems somewhat arbitrary and calculated timings are conservatively slow. There are certain effects in the literature that seem incompatible with the model.

Evidence that an animal is capable of some degree of symbolic, human language processing supports the argument that the animal's consciousness is to some degree human-like. In this paper, we reinterpret the findings of Savage- Rumbaugh et al. using the twin tools of Deacon's referential hierarchy and Systemic Functional Linguistics, with a view to providing further corroborative evidence for a Bonobo ape's symbolic processing abilities, and as a result to open a window into the consciousness of at least one non-human (...) primate. (shrink)

We use formal semantic analysis based on new constructions to study abstract realizability, introduced by Läuchli in 1970, and expose its algebraic content. We claim realizability so conceived generates semantics-based intuitive confidence that the Heyting Calculus is an appropriate system of deduction for constructive reasoning.Well-known semantic formalisms have been defined by Kripke and Beth, but these have no formal concepts corresponding to constructions, and shed little intuitive light on the meanings of formulae. In particular, the completeness proofs for these semantics (...) do not generate confidence in the sufficiency of the Heyting Calculus, since we have no reason to believe that every intuitively constructive truth is valid in the formal semantics.Läuchli has proved completeness for a realizability semantics with formal concepts analogous to constructions. We argue in some detail that, in spite of a certain inherent inexactness of the analogy, every intuitively constructive truth is valid in Läuchli semantics, and therefore the Heyting Calculus is powerful enough to prove all constructive truths. Our argument is based on the postulate that a uniformly constructible object must be communicable in spite of imprecision in our language, and that the permutations in Läuchli's semantics represent conceivable imprecision in a language, while allowing a certain amount of freedom in choosing the particular structure of the language.We give a detailed generalization of Läuchli's proof of completeness for the propositional part of the Heyting Calculus, in order to make explicit constructive and algebraic content.In our treatment, we establish several new results about Läuchli models. We show how to extend the sconing and gluing constructions familiar from Kripke and Frame semantics and Topos theory, to Läuchli models, and use them to give an algebraic approach to countermodel construction. In particular, the Läuchli arguments are given without the restriction to the integers, Z, as a group of permutations, which makes much of the coding scheme used in Läuchli's original paper transparent.We also make use of a new propositions-as-types syntax for the Heyting calculus, with limited nondeterminism, in which validity of formulae can be decided without loop-detection. (shrink)

Clamp loaders are pentameric AAA+ assemblies that use ATP to open and close circular DNA sliding clamps around DNA. Clamp loaders show homology in all organisms, from bacteria to human. The eukaryotic PCNA clamp is loaded onto 3′ primed DNA by the replication factor C (RFC) hetero‐pentameric clamp loader. Eukaryotes also have three alternative RFC‐like clamp loaders (RLCs) in which the Rfc1 subunit is substituted by another protein. One of these is the yeast Rad24‐RFC (Rad17‐RFC in human) that loads a (...) 9‐1‐1 heterotrimer clamp onto a recessed 5′ end of DNA. Recent structural studies of Rad24‐RFC have discovered an unexpected 5′ DNA binding site on the outside of the clamp loader and reveal how a 5′ end can be utilized for loading the 9‐1‐1 clamp onto DNA. In light of these results, new studies reveal that RFC also contains a 5′ DNA binding site, which functions in gap repair. These studies also reveal many new features of clamp loaders. As reviewed herein, these recent studies together have transformed our view of the clamp loader mechanism. (shrink)

The authors interrogate genital examinations as events in which both client and practitioner are `produced' as relational subjects in quite specific ways. This article explores the way one female sex health worker talks about her work as a form of cultural exchange, noting what she requires of her clients and seeks to give of herself. Of particular importance is the way the practitioner produces the client as a social subject amenable to intimate examination, while resisting some traditional means for doing (...) so. The authors use a Foucauldian conceptual framework to signal their departure from feminist analyses which explain such practices in terms of a patriarchal medical system. (shrink)

As contribution to a recent debate (James, 1998; Murphy etal., 1997, 1998) the proportion of twins following ovulation induction (OI) or assisted conception (AC) in 1994 in Oxfordshire and West Berkshire was estimated, and by extrapolation the natural twinning rate in England and Wales was judged to have maintained a plateau phase since the 1970s. Similar figures for 1995 and 1996 from the same study, and hence a more stable local estimate, are now provided. The proportions, as before, were estimated (...) from women's responses to a questionnaire within a case[hyphen]control study, with ascertainment from general practitioners' records or hospital case[hyphen]notes for non[hyphen]responders or for those excluded from the study originally. In 1994, 1995 and 1996 the proportion of twins following OI/AC was overall 27% (24%, 30% and 27% respectively). Restriction to the 87% locally resident made no difference. The national crude twinning rate for those years was overall 13·3 per 1000 maternities (12·8, 13·6 and 13·4 respectively). (shrink)

DNA polymerases which duplicate cellular chromosomes are multiprotein complexes. The individual functions of the many proteins required to duplicate a chromosome are not fully understood. The multiprotein complex which duplicates the Escherichia coli chromosome, DNA polymerase III holoenzyme (holoenzyme), contains a DNA polymerase subunit and nine accessory proteins. This report summarizes our current understanding of the individual functions of the accessory proteins within the holoenzyme, lending insight into why a chromosomal replicase needs such a complex structure.

This chapter begins with conversations in a prison on Samuel Beckett and pedagogy, conversations that emerged from the authors classes in philosophy. There are two interwoven strands in the chapter. One questions the emphasis on competition and achievement in contemporary education and its implications for the author's relationship to failure. The second, strongly influenced by Beckett, explores ways of reimagining the relationship to failure in such a way that allows them to reflect on what matters in life. Rather than seeking (...) to eliminate failure, it is more interesting to think about how the concept of failure could be reimagined if, as Beckett suggests, failure is not accompanied by disappointment but became simply what we do, rather than being something we are. (shrink)