The study of logic goes back more than two thousand years and in that time many symbols and diagrams have been devised. Around 300 BC Aristotle introduced letters as term-variables, a "new and epoch-making device in logical technique." (W. & M. Kneale The Development of Logic (1962, p. 61). The modern era of mathematical notation in logic began with George Boole (1815- 1864), although none of his notation survives. Set theory came into being in the late 19th and early 20th (...) centuries, largely a creation of Georg Cantor (1845-1918). See MacTutor's A history of set theory or, for more detail, Set theory from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (shrink)

Many defenders of sweat shop practices by major transnational corporations -- some of whom are Catholic -- claim that by refusing to buy such merchandise, we harm the poor. If we don't buy the merchandise, the corporations will close the factories because they will have no market for their goods and the poor will lose their jobs. "Any job is better than no job," they say.

Just north of the Arctic Circle sits Kotzebue, a town of the Inupiat people that has endured for over a century. In this compelling visual essay, Dennis Witmer captures scenes on its Front Street, the main thoroughfare whose buildings have evolved from the sod huts of Native cultures to permanent wood and concrete edifices. From front yards with parked snow machines to townspeople peacefully strolling down sidewalks, the striking black-and-white images in Front Street, Kotzebue offer a thought-provoking (...) view of life in the Arctic and people’s methods of coexisting with the brutality of nature. (shrink)

The intent of this research article is to argue with the line of reasoning of arguments from Paul Hager and other educational theorists against the front-end model of education. The model is rejected because it cannot be achieved in occupational preparation, and, moreover, those critics said that it is based on a wrong idea of conceptual interpretation of learning that makes it less conducive to lifelong learning in the long run. The framework which is rejected is a sharp distinction (...) of two concepts; process and product. The reason of rejection is that the sharp distinction does not exist. However, from the research, many analyses show that the front-end model is one of the most important aspects of employment and vocational education, which is the belief that actual practice at work will guarantee the skills of learners before they enter the actual operation. Based on a method of postmodern philosophical analysis, I found that the relationship between education and work is a highly complex relationship. The result of this complexity makes it impossible to have a perfect reason for Hager and his colleagues to reject the significance of the front-end model as concluded by their previous research. On the other hand, I argue that we would have more weight in reasoning if we are to point out that the new policy of lifelong learning still requires a new interpretation on integrity of front-end model of career preparation. This is because the more plausible definition of human being from Hannah Arendt is related to work and working. From what is conceptualized here as an argument of imperfect employability, I pointed out that the rejection of front-end model itself has an important base of conceptualization that does not match the definition of such conditions of being human. Therefore, the rejection of front-end model should be considered as an argument that does not yet have enough weight in reasoning. (shrink)

Editors' Introduction and List of Contributors.

Tough Fronts takes the difficult issues in urban education head on by putting street-savvy students at the forefront of the discussion on how to best make successful changes for inner city schools. Individual chapters discuss scholarly depictions of black America, the social complexity of the teacher-student relationship, individual success stories of 'at-risk' programs, popular images of urban students, and implications for education policy. With close attention to the voices of individual students, this engaging book gives vitality and legitimacy to arguments (...) for school changes that have been lacking in previous discussions. (shrink)

The task of this article is to clarify the appropriateness and adequacy of peace-making (confessional) rhetoric in the situation of the war of aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, in particular, the meaningful correspondence of the concept of «peace» in its application or reading by the bearers of different worldview paradigms. The «russkii mir» cannot be translated either as «Russian peace» or as «Russian world». This is because the scope and content of these concepts are different. Rus (Kyiv`s Rus) (...) — a thousand-year-old princely state with its center in Kyiv, where the ancestors of modern Ukrainians lived, baptized by Prince Volodymyr in 988. Rus is not Russia. But Muscovy adopted the name Russia to derive its historiography from Rus. «Russkii mir» actually refutes the axiological principles laid down by ancient Rus’s civilization (freedom, dignity, partnership, co-creation, mutual responsibility). «Russkii mir» destroys peace in global or any local images, trying to grab the territory it decided to own. «Russkii mir» encroaches on world domination and therefore tries to impose its rules of the game on the world, which would reshape the world structure according to the wishes of the Russian dictators. For this, «russkii mir» uses any means and institutions as a tool: the army, weapons of mass destruction, atrocities, terror, lies, propaganda, the church and peace-making rhetoric. The goal is not to restore peace, but to establish the world domination of the Russian Empire in any of its variants (Muscovy, Russian Empire, Soviet Union, Russian Federation or Orthodox Civilization). Russian Orthodox Church plays a leading role in this — it uses religious rhetoric to formu- late a worldview model of the «russkii mir», consolidates the Russian population for a war of aggression, and justifies the atrocities of the Russian military with the sacred mission of restoring the Holy Rus’. Russian Orthodox Church justifies the «civilizing mission» of the Russian troops, actually calls to protect «our Common Russian Fatherland» by killing Ukrainians on the territo- ry of Ukraine. False messianism, manichaeism, paternalism, hatred of the civilized world that lives by democratic standards and respects the dignity and freedom of the individual, Russian arrogance, conceit, supremacy and egomania — this is what Russian Orthodoxy promotes with its religious rhetoric. Therefore, if we hear calls for «peace» from the bearer of the «russkii mir»’s worldview, it actually means a demand to come to terms with all their whims, to give up one’s own identity, one’s own world, one’s own life, if they do not fit into the concept of «russkii mir». (shrink)

I. Confronted with the acuteness of the socio-economic problems the two major labour organizations have in 1976 strengthened their «Common Trade Unions' Front» in view of their negotiations with employers and with the government, to which the trade unions have submitted a common platform.The common front, that has its antecedents on the local, regional and professional level has never been and never will be of a permanent nature, some sort of organic unit. Each confederation maintains its own identity (...) and the front is meant to be re-animated according to the circumstances.II. From the employers' side representatives of employers' organizations have «as a personal point of view» and, no doubt, as a preliminary approach, launched the idea that a new and very comprehensive «social pact» should be negotiated. The socialist trade unions clearly tend to reject this idea, since it maywell lead to a further integration in the capitalist system, whereas the christiandemocratic union seems to be rather in favour of such a pact.In the present state of affairs the probability that it be realized is rather low indeed. (shrink)

In ten years the National Front's scores rose from less than 2 percent to more than 13 percent of the valid votes and the number of its electors from a hundred thousand to almost four millions. On the basis of two surveys conducted by CEVIPOF and OIP, this paper analyses the factors that account for this electoral rise. If the National Front vote is more frequent in urban areas, it is not so much because of objective factors than (...) because of subjective factors in relation with sociocultural and political specificities of the National Front's electorate. (shrink)

The presented article is an attempt to describe in a synthetic way an own vision of a German front-line soldier of the First World War. It also tries to show an image of some enemies – the French, the British and the Russians. The attempt was made on the basis of recollection material and literary forms created either during or soon after the war. The conclusion is unequivocal – the more contact the authors of the texts had with the (...) opponent, the more balanced image of the enemy they presented in their texts and the less were they prone to overestimate the German soldier. Yet the press material contained a lot of exaggeration. The authors created a haughty and sometimes even superhuman image of the German soldier. At the same time the image of the enemy was inhuman and deserving contempt. (shrink)

Work on farms and in restaurants is characterized by highly gendered and racialized divisions of labor, low wages, and persistent inequalities. Gender, race, and ethnicity often determine the spaces where people work in the food system. Although some research focuses on gendered divisions of labor in restaurants and on farms, few efforts look more broadly at intersectional inequalities in food work. Our study examines how inequality is perpetuated through restaurant and farm work in the United States and, specifically, how gender (...) and race/ethnicity influence where people work, their tasks and responsibilities, and their work experiences. In describing restaurant work, people in the restaurant industry typically refer to the front and back of the house to distinguish between different working spaces, jobs, and workers. We use this spatial metaphor of front and back of the house to analyze intersectional inequalities of food work in restaurants and on farms. The data derive from conversations with 63 restaurant and farm owners, managers, and workers in California and Pennsylvania. Our findings suggest that gendered and racialized bodies often define who works in the front and back of the “house,” and that owners and workers often naturalize gender and racial divisions of labor in food work. Despite these patterns, we found evidence of attempts to reduce these inequalities on farms and in restaurants. (shrink)

After the horrendous events of September 2001, photographer Peter Elliott loaded his cameras and some clothes into his car and began a cross-country journey, looking for the flag. He found it everywhere: painted on a retaining wall in Tacoma, flying over a trailer in Bozeman, carried billowing by a lone man walking a sandbar in Florida, made of plastic cups stuck in a fence in Mississippi, draped over a fake horse in Salinas, immaculately hanging from a Beverly Hills mansion's window. (...) Home Front is both a tribute to the profound emotions of the country and a testament to Elliott's eye. His genius in these eighty-seven arresting images is to wed these serendipitous meetings with the flag to a language of light and composition that draws as much from classic landscape photography as it does from urban visual idioms. Elliott manages to convey here America's stirring and complex national character, one in which those who have not benefited from the nation's prosperity nonetheless feel the same sense of pride as those who have. With its inspiring introduction by Julia Reed, Home Front is the record—both somber and joyous—of Elliott's encounters with spontaneous patriotism. (shrink)

The temporal‐focus hypothesis claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be independent from the space–time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the sagittal axis to find out the respective influences of language and culture on mental space–time mappings. An examination of Mandarin speakers' co‐speech gestures shows that some Chinese spontaneously perform past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back (...) (besides future‐in‐front/past‐at‐back) gestures, especially when gestures are accompanying past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back space–time metaphors (Exp. 1). Using a temporal performance task, the study confirms that Chinese can conceptualize the future as behind and the past as in front of them, and that such space–time mappings are affected by the different expressions of Mandarin space–time metaphors (Exp. 2). Additionally, a survey on cultural attitudes toward time shows that Chinese tend to focus slightly more on the future than on the past (Exp. 3). Within the Chinese sample, we did not find evidence for the effect of participants' cultural temporal attitudes on space–time mappings, but a cross‐cultural comparison of space–time mappings between Chinese, Moroccans, and Spaniards provides strong support for the temporal‐focus hypothesis. Furthermore, the results of Exp. 2 are replicated even after controlling for factors such as cultural temporal attitudes and age (Exp. 3), which implies that linguistic sagittal temporal metaphors can indeed influence Mandarin speakers' space–time mappings. The findings not only contribute to a better understanding of Chinese people's sagittal temporal orientation, but also have additional implications for theories on the mental space–time mappings and the relationship between language and thought. (shrink)

It is explained that, in the sense of the sociologist Erving Goffman, mathematics has a front and a back. Four pervasive myths about mathematics are stated. Acceptance of these myths is related to whether one is located in the front or the back.