This book studies education and curriculum from the perspective of the teacher’s stance in the classroom. Writing through the lenses offered by autobiography, a lifetime in the classroom serving as teacher, and drawing heavily on Jewish and secular scholarly texts, Block offers a vision of education that serves as an alternative to the increasingly instrumentalist, managerial, standards-driven impersonal nature of contemporary schools. He advocates not for a pedagogy of ethics, but for the original ethical stance every teacher already assumes by (...) entering into the classroom. It is from this stance in ethics, he argues, that all pedagogy derives. (shrink)

This new work from Alan Block explores the contemporary discourses of education, scholarship and learning. Pedagogy, Religion and Practice offers a strong argument for the centrality of ethics in curriculum, scholarship and the classroom, and presents a powerful argument against the present emphasis on standards and quantitative accountability.

The role of Broca's area is currently unclear even with regard to language. Suggestions that this area was enlarged on the left in certain of our hominid ancestors are unconvincing. Broca's area may have nothing to do with a lateralized gestural or vocal system Handedness may have evolved more than four million years ago.

The trajectory taken by Advaita Vedānta as a subject of academic discourse over the greater part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first has provided students of Indian philosophy with valuable insight into not only the range of issues with which Advaita is concerned but also the intellectual presuppositions, commitments, and agendas of both Advaitic scholars and apologists.1 The resulting variety of interpretations affords continuing opportunities to reflect on the ways in which academic research into Advaita Vedānta has served (...) to elucidate, and in some cases reconstitute, the object of its study. In what follows, I will be concerned with the extent to which such reflection bears on the role of .. (shrink)

One of the issues which arises in connection with the study of mysticism concerns the status of a so-called 'pure consciousness' experience, i.e., a state of consciousness devoid of conceptual or empirical content and often alleged to be characterized by the realization of the mystic's identity with ultimate reality. Proponents of what I shall call the unanimity thesis typically assert that the state of pure consciousness is the common core of all mysticism; variations in accounts of mystical experience result from (...) post-experiential interpretations of this universal state of consciousness which are derived from the conceptual framework of a given mystic's religious tradition. In contrast to the perennialist position are the 'contextualists,' who claim that mystical experience is essentially shaped and constructed by the beliefs and expectations brought to the experience, with the consequence that not only is the very possibility of a state of pure consciousness undermined, but that there are as many varieties of mystical experience as there are traditions which allow for such experiences. ;The present inquiry is concerned with an examination of the state of pure consciousness as mystical experience, and with the often-made distinction between monistic and theistic experience. In this connection, I draw on the Advaita Vedanta philosophy of the eighth century Indian thinker Samkara. I argue that the Vedantic framework provides a justification for claims concerning non-dual, pure consciousness as the ontological ground of reality and as realizable in mystical experience, and sheds light on the monistic/theistic distinction in a way which partially reconciles the perennialist and contextualist positions. ;Despite this partial reconciliation, however, in the final analysis I will suggest that the distinction between monistic and theistic experience is perhaps best understood not in light of a distinction between mystical states of consciousness , but rather in terms of how a mystic approaches the reality he or she believes to be the ultimate source of meaning and value. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

Current fears of a “reproducibility crisis” have led researchers, sources of scientific funding, and the public to question both the efficacy and trustworthiness of science. Suggested policy changes have been focused on statistical problems, such as p-hacking, and issues of experimental design and execution. However, “reproducibility” is a broad concept that includes a number of issues. Furthermore, reproducibility failures occur even in fields such as mathematics or computer science that do not have statistical problems or issues with experimental design. Most (...) importantly, these proposed policy changes ignore a core feature of the process of scientific inquiry that occurs after reproducibility failures: the integration of conflicting observations and ideas into a coherent theory. (shrink)

Our best scientific theories explain a wide range of empirical phenomena, make accurate predictions, and are widely believed. Since many of these theories make ample use of mathematics, it is natural to see them as confirming its truth. Perhaps the use of mathematics in science even gives us reason to believe in the existence of abstract mathematical objects such as numbers and sets. These issues lie at the heart of the Indispensability Argument, to which this Element is devoted. The Element's (...) first half traces the evolution of the Indispensability Argument from its origins in Quine and Putnam's works, taking in naturalism, confirmational holism, Field's program, and the use of idealisations in science along the way. Its second half examines the explanatory version of the Indispensability Argument, and focuses on several more recent versions of easy-road and hard-road fictionalism respectively. (shrink)

Attempts to formalize the diagnostic process are by no means a recent undertaking; what is new is the availability of an engine to process these formalizations. The digital computer has therefore been increasingly turned to in the expectation of developing systems which will assist or replace the physician in diagnosis. Such efforts involve a number of assumptions regarding the nature of the diagnostic process: e.g. where it begins, and where it ends. ‘Diagnosis’ appears to include a number of quite different (...) cognitive processes, some of which seem more subject to formalization than others. Underlying the difficulties inherent in these efforts at formalization, is the hierarchical structure of medical knowledge including that of diseases. (By ‘hierarchical structure’, I mean no more than that our descriptions of clinical objects necessarily refer to different levels of organization; atomic, molecular, cellular, physiological system, entire patient.) Since diagnosis is in part a form of classification, measures of similarity between the clinical findings of a particular patient and a potential disease, are needed. This is complicated by the fact that some diseases are described using the vocabularies of physics and chemistry, others with the vocabulary of psychology, and most, with terms taken from a number of different hierarchical levels. The differences between the descriptions made using these vocabularies will be seen to exert systematic (if not uniform) influences upon the diagnostic process. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This is a “bottom-up” paper in the sense that it draws lessons in defining disciplinary categories under study from a series of empirical studies of interdisciplinarity. In particular, we are in the process of studying the interchange of research-based knowledge between Cognitive Science and Educational Research. This has posed a set of design decisions that we believe warrant consideration as others study cross-disciplinary research processes.

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societal-level analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self-transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective (...) autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s α statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and within-society agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research. (shrink)

A mathematical model based upon catastrophe theory is derived to describe the kinematics of the wing beat in Dipteran flight. The parameters of the model correspond to anatomical and physiological characteristics of the insect.

The contemporary operating environment for deployed United States military operations largely focuses on deployments to predominantly Islamic countries. The differences in cultural values between d...

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

The concept of evolvability—the capacity of a population to produce and maintain evolutionarily relevant variation—has become increasingly prominent in evolutionary biology. Paleontology has a long history of investigating questions of evolvability, but paleontological thinking has tended to neglect recent discussions, because many tools used in the current evolvability literature are challenging to apply to the fossil record. The fundamental difficulty is how to disentangle whether the causes of evolutionary patterns arise from variational properties of traits or lineages rather than being (...) due to selection and ecological success. Despite these obstacles, the fossil record offers unique and growing sources of data that capture evolutionary patterns of sustained duration and significance otherwise inaccessible to evolutionary biologists. Additionally, there exist a variety of strategic possibilities for combining prominent neontological approaches to evolvability with those from paleontology. We illustrate three of these possibilities with quantitative genetics, evolutionary developmental biology, and phylogenetic models of macroevolution. In conclusion, we provide a methodological schema that focuses on the conceptualization, measurement, and testing of hypotheses to motivate and provide guidance for future empirical and theoretical studies of evolvability in the fossil record. (shrink)

First published in 1975, this is a book of general intellectual interest about the role of the university in contemporary society and that of university teachers in relation to their subjects, their students, and their wider political commitments. Alan Montefiore offers preliminary analyses of the family of concepts most often invoked in discussions of these problems, taking the central dispute to be between those who hold a 'liberal' view of the university and those who regard this notion as illusory, (...) dishonest or undesirable. Six academics, representing, discuss issues of substantive conflict in light of Montefiore's initial distinctions. The volume is of particular interest to students of political and social philosophy, and political and educational theory. It is also intended for a wider readership among those who care about the political status of the universities and recognize the importance and difficulty of the problems involved in this. (shrink)

This article arises indirectly out of the development of a particular approach, called ATT-Meta, to the understanding of some types of metaphorical utterance. However, the specifics of the approach are not the focus of the present article, which concentrates on some general issues that have informed, or arisen from, the development of the approach. The article connects those issues to the questions of metaphorical meaning and truth. -/- A large part of the exploration of metaphor in fields such as Cognitive (...) Linguistics and natural language Pragmatics takes metaphor to rest on complex mappings between a target subject matter and a source subject matter (see, e.g., Lakoff 1993, 2008). This is one main way in which some aspects of the source, generally including some structural aspects, can have parallels in the target. It is typical for much, and perhaps the whole, of the meaning of a metaphorical expression to be explained by means of these parallels. We will talk about “parallelism” rather than “isomorphism,” or even “analogy,” because “isomorphism” implies a strict one-to-one correspondence between items in the source scenario and items in the target scenario, and analogy theorists often hold that analogy rests on isomorphism. We wish not to prejudge the question of whether looser, messier forms of parallelism are sometimes needed. Also, we will talk about parallels rather than mappings, because our discussion will embrace the question of parallelism that may be discernible, albeit implicitly, in accounts of metaphor that are not presented as being based on mappings. Three main cases of such accounts are Relevance Theory (RT: e.g., Sperber & Wilson 2008, Wilson & Carston 2006), the categorization-based or "class-inclusion“ approach (Glucksberg 2008), and Ritchie’s (2006) CLST account (Context-Limited Simulation Theory). -/- One main issue we will address is that of substantial non-parallelism that can exist between source and target subject-matters in metaphor: more precisely, the issue that there may be source aspects that are exploited by the utterance and have a deep effect on metaphorical interpretation but that do not themselves have a natural parallel in the target subject-matter (although we will point out that artificial parallels can generally be created). This is part of a broader point that the content of metaphorical discourse should often be seen as being derived in a rather holistic way from several metaphorical bits of the discourse, which conspire to describe some source-domain scenario, rather than being derived by putting together metaphorical meanings of each metaphorical bit (even if each bit could in principle be assigned its own separate metaphorical meaning). As a result, we suggest that it is misguided to think of the propositions making up the content (or, if you like, "meaning“) about the target scenario that is being described is a matter of metaphorical meaning of specific grammatical units such as sentences, clauses or other constituents that a traditional semantic theory would assign propositional meaning to. Rather, grammatical units (that are to be taken metaphorically) have meanings in source-domain terms; content in target-domain terms is derived from the source-domain scenario depicted by those units and fleshed out through inference; and the target-domain content is only (in general) fuzzily relatable to particular grammatical units. This view is on a spectrum at whose extreme point we could place Davidson’s (1984) view that metaphors only have literal (i.e., source-domain) meanings, with other effects on the understander not being a matter of propositional content. However, on our view it is proper to take metaphorical discourse as having non-literal meaning, couched as a collection of propositions, among other things possibly; it is just that the propositions are not to be thought of (in general) as meaning of specific sentences, clauses or other grammatical units rather than of a possibly only fuzzily delineated piece of discourse. -/- A second main concern of the article is the question of how much, and what types of, inference are involved in the derivation of metaphorical meaning. While our own ATT-Meta approach accords with, amongst other accounts, Relevance Theory (RT) as to the centrality of inference in metaphor interpretation, we disagree with RT on its claim that metaphor interpretation is a matter of (a relatively high degree of) concept "broadening“ and (often) "narrowing“. We argue that almost all inference can in fact be theoretically re-described as concept broadening and/or narrowing, and what is left over should be included in the metaphor interpretation process anyway. Thus, the RT claim about broadening and narrowing really just says that inference, of unrestricted type, is involved in metaphor understanding, in accord with what ATT-Meta claims. (shrink)