The 'postmodern condition,' in which instrumentalism finally usurps all other considerations, has produced a kind of intellectual paralysis in the world of education. The authors of this book show how such postmodernist thinkers as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard illuminate puzzling aspects of education, arguing that educational theory is currently at an impasse. They postulate that we need these new and disturbing ideas in order to "think again" fruitfully and creatively about education.

Hannaford shows that doing (reasoning and acting morally) and being (our "moral anatomy" or essential nature) do not exist in a vacuum but are rooted in community, in our relations with others. Moral reasoning, he argues, focuses on what we ought to do in a situation where we must consider the needs, desires, and expectations of others.

What is the nature of truth? Blake Hestir offers an investigation into Plato's developing metaphysical views, and examines Plato's conception of being, meaning, and truth in the Sophist, as well as passages from several other later dialogues including the Cratylus, Parmenides, and Theaetetus, where Plato begins to focus more directly on semantics rather than only on metaphysical and epistemological puzzles. Hestir's interpretation challenges both classical and contemporary interpretations of Plato's metaphysics and conception of truth, and highlights new parallels between (...) Plato and Aristotle, as well as clarifying issues surrounding Plato's approach to semantics and thought. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of ancient Greek philosophy, metaphysics, contemporary truth theory, linguistics, and philosophy of language. (shrink)

Helen Frowe (2014) depicts the following fictional case: Fran is being raped by Eric and can’t stop him with violent resistance. Nevertheless, she resists and breaks Eric’s wrist. The infliction of defensive harm on Eric is intuitively permissible, yet it runs counter to the dominant view that defensive harms must stand a reasonable chance of success. Call this the Success Condition (SC). To solve this problem, Daniel Statman (2008) contends that even if Victim’s defensive harms fail to prevent her rape, (...) they do prevent the destruction of another good, her honor, and thus SC is satisfied. Recently, Joseph Bowen (2016) has critiqued Statman’s proposal by showing that honor-based justifications for defensive harming are too permissive. In this paper, I contend that Statman’s proposal is too restrictive. First, I review Statman’s accounts of honor, dishonor, and non-honor. Second, I argue that Statman’s account requires Fran’s honor to be lost or damaged if she doesn’t resist—a highly offensive conclusion about rape victims. Third, I explain why the best alternative to this (i.e., allowing Fran’s honor to be maintained either way) satisfies SC but not the necessity condition. I conclude that we ought to reject Statman’s solution. (shrink)

Le propos est précédé par une illustration, la seule de l’ouvrage, extraite d’une Histoire de l’industrie du coton en Grande-Bretagne parue en 1835. Il s’agit de la reproduction d’un dessin représentant le processus d’impression de motifs sur du calicot. On y voit deux hommes travailler, de façon semble-t-il minutieuse, sur deux grandes machines installées dans un atelier spacieux. L’illustration est égayée par les motifs imprimés sur les pans de tissu, qui occupent une grande partie de l’esp..

Starting from an internalist, evidentialist, deontological conception of epistemic justification, this dissertation constitutes a defense of common sense epistemology. Common sense epistemology is a theory of ultimate evidence. At its center is a type of mental state called “seemings”—the kind we possess when something seems true or false. Common sense epistemology maintains, first, that all seemings are evidence for or against their content and, second, that all our ultimate evidence for or against a proposition consists in seemings. The first thesis (...) entails phenomenal conservatism—an increasingly prominent and controversial epistemic principle. Together these theses imply that what stances we’re intellectually permitted to take will ultimately come down to what seems to be the case. Following a short introduction, the groundwork for the project is laid in Chapter Two. Common sense epistemology is presented in detail and situated within a larger epistemic framework. Starting assumptions are made explicit and briefly defended. The significance of the project is highlighted, including for those who reject the starting assumptions. I then begin my defense. The defense of common sense epistemology offered herein is holistic in that I strengthen the metaphysical and historical foundations of the theory in addition to arguing straightforwardly for its truth. In Chapter Three I show how common sense epistemology is a contemporary outworking of epistemic insights contained in the work of Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid. In Chapter Four I give one of the most detailed accounts of seemings available and defend their existence. In Chapter Five I present my main argument for common sense epistemology. I begin with a Reidian argument for phenomenal conservatism. After concluding that all seemings are ultimate evidence, I consider what other kinds of mental states might serve in that role. All the likely alternatives are considered and rejected, leaving seemings as the lone candidate. In Chapter Six I respond to the problem of cognitive penetration—an influential objection that arises during my defense of phenomenal conservatism. Together these chapters compose one of the most thorough and sustained defenses of phenomenal conservatism and common sense epistemology in the literature. (shrink)

How should we understand the political morality of migration? Are travel bans, walls, or carrier sanctions ever morally permissible in a just society? This book offers a new approach to these and related questions. It identifies a particular vision of how we might apply the notion of justice to migration policy - and an argument in favor of expanding the ethical tools we use, to include not only justice but moral notions such as mercy.

Ethical Issues in Accounting offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction for students and teachers of business studies and accountancy as well as the practicing accountant. The book covers the ethical implications of several aspects of accounting: * ethics and taxation * creative accounting * ethics in accounting regulation * ethical dilemmas in the public sector * whistleblowing * various aspects of social accounting, including environmental accounting. The fitness of the accounting profession as guardians of accounting and auditing ethics is also (...) discussed in detail. (shrink)

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko is an art book tracing Ditko's life and career, his unparalleled stylistic innovations, his strict adherence to his own (and Randian) principles, with lush displays of obscure and popular art from the thousands of pages of comics he's drawn over the last 55 years.

The epistemic value of seemings is increasingly debated. Such debates are hindered, however, by a lack of consensus about the nature of seemings. There are four prominent conceptions in the literature, and the plausibility of principles such as phenomenal conservatism, which assign a prominent epistemic role to seemings, varies greatly from one conception to another. It is therefore crucial that we identify the correct conception of seemings. I argue that seemings are best understood as sui generis mental states with propositional (...) content and a distinct phenomenal character. Rival conceptions are shown to succumb to numerous difficulties. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga theorizes the existence of a sensus divinitatis – a special cognitive faulty or mechanism dedicated to the production and non-inferential justification of theistic belief. Following Chris Tucker, we offer an evidentialist-friendly model of the sensus divinitatis whereon it produces theistic seemings that non-inferentially justify theistic belief. We suggest that the sensus divinitatis produces these seemings by tacitly grasping support relations between the content of ordinary experiences (in conjunction with our background evidence) and propositions about God. Our model offers (...) advantages such as eliminating the need for a sui generis religious faculty, harmonizing the sensus divinitatis with prominent theories in the cognitive science of religion, and providing a superior account of natural revelation. (shrink)

Doxastic involuntarists have paid insufficient attention to two debates in contemporary epistemology: the permissivism debate and the debate over norms of assertion and belief. In combination, these debates highlight a conception of belief on which, if you find yourself in what I will call an ‘equipollent case’ with respect to some proposition p, there will be no reason why you can’t believe p at will. While doxastic involuntarism is virtually epistemological orthodoxy, nothing in the entire stock of objections to belief (...) at will blocks this route to doxastic voluntarism. Against the backdrop of the permissivism debate and the literature on norms of belief and assertion, doxastic involuntarism emerges as an article of faith, not the obvious truth it’s usually purported to be. (shrink)

Does knowledge depend in any interesting way on our practical interests? This is the central question in the pragmatic encroachment debate. Pragmatists defend the affirmative answer to this question while purists defend the negative answer. The literature contains two kinds of arguments for pragmatism: principle-based arguments and case-based arguments. Principle-based arguments derive pragmatism from principles that connect knowledge to practical interests. Case-based arguments rely on intuitions about cases that differ with respect to practical interests. I argue that there are insurmountable (...) problems for both kinds of arguments, and that it is therefore unclear what motivates pragmatism. (shrink)

Bilingual Discourse and Cross-Cultural Fertilisation: Sanskrit and Tamil in Medieval India. Edited by Whitney Cox and Vincenzo Vergiani with an introduction by Dominic Goodall. Collection Indologie, vol. 121. Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry / École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 2013. Pp. x + 466. Rs. 900, €38.

Most theists accept an anthropomorphic view of the divine: a God whose cognition and incarnate embodiment closely resembles human cognition and human embodiment. Most theists also accept an Anselmian view of God on which God has the maximal set of ontological (including moral) perfections. This chapter defends the view that Anselmianism entails that the anthropomorphic view of God is false and that some nonhuman animal is divine. Two arguments are given for this position, which we can call zootheism. The first (...) argument, the Power Argument, claims that because nonhuman animals have moral interests, maximal fairness entails a share in power over those interests. This, in turn, entails a direct share of power within the Godhead, which entails that some nonhuman animal is divine. The second argument, the Incarnation Argument, hues closely to Christian arguments for an incarnation: because God loves us, God will share in our suffering and will pursue non-privileged kinds of incarnate embodiments. This naturally motivates incarnating as a nonhuman animal, particularly given the historically privileged status of humans. Moreover, maximal fairness and maximal love entail that God also pre-existed as a nonhuman animal. Thus, God is, and always was, a nonhuman animal. (shrink)

In this paper I trace Ricoeur’s reflections on ideology and utopia from his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, first delivered in 1975, to his later writings on selfhood and the just from the 1990s. The thread that I follow begins from the closing lines of Ricoeur’s Lectures, wherein he suggests that “practical wisdom” (or phronesis) may provide an answer to the paradox of ideology. Taking this suggestion as my point of departure, I reread Ricoeur’s earlier solution to this problem back (...) from the vantage point of his later writings, where his conception of phronesis is further developed. Although these later writings are not immediately concerned with ideology, Ricoeur’s idea of “phronetic judgment” can still be understood within the earlier problematic. As I argue, Ricoeur’s concept of phronetic judgment helps to consolidate his earlier solution to the problem of ideology within his later, more systematic reflections on ethics, politics, and practical philosophy. Although Ricoeur’s reflections on ideology and utopia have been subject to considerable scrutiny, commentators typically discuss them within the context of his writings from the same period. The longer view that I adopt here therefore not only sheds light on questions of continuity in Ricoeur’s political thought, but may also stimulate further interest in his contribution to ideology critique and contemporary critical theory more broadly. (shrink)

Central to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s philosophical revival of rhetoric and dialectic is the importance given to the temporal character of argumentation. Unlike demonstration, situated within the “empty time” of a single instant, the authors of The New Rhetoric understand argumentation as an action that unfolds within the “full time” of meaningful human life. By taking a broader view of his work beyond The New Rhetoric, I first outline Perelman’s understanding of time and temporality and the challenge that it poses for (...) the study of argumentation. Next, I emphasize the distinction between argumentation’s internal and external temporal structures, and then show how Perelman problematizes a static view of a number of basic argumentative concepts by bringing out their essentially temporal character. Finally, in clarifying what is at stake in Perelman’s account, I conclude by drawing attention to a number of issues in contemporary argumentation studies that may benefit from a reconsideration of Perelman’s analysis of time. (shrink)

The epistemic value of seemings is increasingly debated. Such debates are hindered, however, by a lack of consensus about the nature of seemings. There are four prominent conceptions in the literature, and the plausibility of principles such as phenomenal conservatism, which assign a prominent epistemic role to seemings, varies greatly from one conception to another. It is therefore crucial that we identify the correct conception of seemings. I argue that seemings are best understood as sui generis mental states with propositional (...) content and a distinct phenomenal character. Rival conceptions are shown to succumb to numerous difficulties. (shrink)

BackgroundAdvances in healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) are occurring rapidly and there is a growing discussion about managing its development. Many AI technologies end up owned and controlled by private entities. The nature of the implementation of AI could mean such corporations, clinics and public bodies will have a greater than typical role in obtaining, utilizing and protecting patient health information. This raises privacy issues relating to implementation and data security. Main bodyThe first set of concerns includes access, use and control (...) of patient data in private hands. Some recent public–private partnerships for implementing AI have resulted in poor protection of privacy. As such, there have been calls for greater systemic oversight of big data health research. Appropriate safeguards must be in place to maintain privacy and patient agency. Private custodians of data can be impacted by competing goals and should be structurally encouraged to ensure data protection and to deter alternative use thereof. Another set of concerns relates to the external risk of privacy breaches through AI-driven methods. The ability to deidentify or anonymize patient health data may be compromised or even nullified in light of new algorithms that have successfully reidentified such data. This could increase the risk to patient data under private custodianship.ConclusionsWe are currently in a familiar situation in which regulation and oversight risk falling behind the technologies they govern. Regulation should emphasize patient agency and consent, and should encourage increasingly sophisticated methods of data anonymization and protection. (shrink)

Early moderns such as Locke and Descartes thought we could guarantee the justification of our beliefs, even in worlds most hostile to their truth, if only we form those beliefs with sufficient care. That is, they thought it possible for us to be impeccable with respect to justification. This principle has traditionally been used to argue for internalism. By placing all of the normatively relevant conditions in our minds, we ensure reflective access to what those norms require of us and (...) so sustain the possibility of impeccability (unlike externalism). However, recent challenges to transparency leave this reasoning vulnerable. In response, I show how impeccability can be sustained without requiring transparency. The account only works if we define internal states as those directly accessible to our rational belief forming systems. I argue that this sort of causal internalism, while somewhat revisionary, preserves traditional motivations for internalism while avoiding problems faced by other varieties. The result is a renewed argument for internalism that simultaneously moves us away from access internalism and towards a species of mentalism. (shrink)

A number of philosophers, going back at least to Kierkegaard, argue that to have faith in something is, in part, to have a passion for that thing—to possess a lasting, formative disposition to feel certain positive patterns of emotion towards the object of faith. I propose that (at least some of) the intellectual dimensions of faith can be modeled in much the same way. Having faith in a person involves taking a certain perspective towards the object of faith—in possessing a (...) lasting, formative disposition for things to seem as though the object of faith is worthy of one’s trust. After developing the view, I briefly discuss its epistemic implications. I suggest that, by systematically reorienting how one experiences the world, faith can actually change one’s total body of evidence (or perhaps even how one weighs that evidence), thereby altering what one is justified in believing about the object of faith. (shrink)

According to what I will call ‘the disanalogy thesis,’ beliefs differ from actions in at least the following important way: while cognitively healthy people often exhibit direct control over their actions, there is no possible scenario where a cognitively healthy person exhibits direct control over her beliefs. Recent arguments against the disanalogy thesis maintain that, if you find yourself in what I will call a ‘permissive situation’ with respect to p, then you can have direct control over whether you believe (...) p, and you can do so without manifesting any cognitive defect. These arguments focus primarily on the idea that we can have direct doxastic control in permissive situations, but they provide insufficient reason for thinking that permissive situations are actually possible, since they pay inadequate attention to the following worries: permissive situations seem inconsistent with the uniqueness thesis, permissive situations seem inconsistent with natural thoughts about epistemic akrasia, and vagueness threatens even if we push these worries aside. In this paper I argue that, on the understanding of permissive situations that is most useful for evaluating the disanalogy thesis, permissive situations clearly are possible. (shrink)

The cornerstone of contemporary nursing practice is the provision of individualised nursing care. Sustaining and nourishing the stream of research frameworks that inform individualised care are the findings from qualitative research. At the centre of much qualitative research practice, however, is an assumption that experiential understanding can be delivered through a thematisation of meaning which, it will be argued, can lead the researcher to make unsustainable assumptions about the relations of language and meaning‐making to experience. We will show that an (...) uncritical subscription to such assumptions can undermine the researcher's capacity to represent experience at the high level of abstraction consistent with experience itself and to thus inform genuinely individualised care. Instead, using qualia as a touchstone for the possibilities of understanding and representing experience, we trace the ‘designative’ and ‘expressive’ distinction to language in order to raise critical questions concerning both these assumptions and common practices within qualitative research. Following the ‘expressive’ account of language, we foreground in particular the hermeneutic work of Gadamer through which we explore the possibilities for a qualitative research approach that would better seek the mot juste of individual experience and illuminate qualia in order to better inform genuinely individualised care. (shrink)

Zizek insisted on the ‘temporal gap between the production of value and its actualization’ (Zizek, 2009b [2006], p. 52): ‘the temporality here is that of the futur antérieur: value “is” not immediately, it only “will have been,” it is retroactively actualized, performatively enacted’ (ibid.). His use of the word ‘gap’ calls to mind the psychoanalytic literature on which Zizek draws, which provides a way to understand the 2007 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and its aftermath. This paper presents three key ideas (...) about the GFC. First, the GFC was a traumatic encounter with lack, in which global capitalism confronted a gap at the centre of its chain of signifiers. Whether the financial system is seen as a series of promises or a system for allocating and hedging risk, a gap or lack remained at the origin of its chain of signifiers. Secondly, many explanations of the crisis focus on ‘getting back to fundamentals’, which can be read as an attempt to paper over the lack. Finally, in the panic to re-establish the master signifier, global finance tossed aside core justifications for capitalism, and it is not yet clear what the results will be: re-establishment of the old regime, a return to a Primal Father, or a turn to the analyst’s discourse. (shrink)

The Posterior Analytics has long been considered to raise and to go part of the way toward answering important philosophical questions concerning existence and essence. In the recent literature, however, scholars have been taking the view that the existence-essence distinction is not captured.

1. Among the most striking features of the political arrangements on this planet is its division into sovereign states.1 To be sure, in recent times, globalization has woven together the fates of communities and individuals in distant parts of the world in complex ways. It is partly for this reason that now hardly anyone champions a notion of sovereignty that would entirely discount a state’s liability the effects that its actions would have on foreign nationals. Still, state sovereignty persists as (...) a political fact. The number of states has increased enormously due to upheavals of the 20th century, and there is nothing in principle morally wrong with the existence of states - or so we will assume.2 What must be explored, then, are the limits of normatively plausible sovereignty. How bad does a government have to be for outsiders to be allowed to interfere? What responsibilities does a country incur because of its contribution to global warming? What obligations arise through trading? In this paper, we explore another pertinent question: to what extent is a country allowed to influence who lives on its territory by regulating immigration? The angle from which we approach this question continues to be neglected even now that questions of global justice are receiving much attention. Immigration amounts to a change in political relationships as immigrants alter their standing within one community and acquire a status elsewhere. Yet it also amounts to an alteration in physical relationship, since they acquire a relationship to a territory, making a life for themselves with the resources offered by a part of the earth.3 We base our exploration of.. (shrink)

In this important survey, an international group of leading philosophers chart the development of philosophy of education in the twentieth century and point to signficant questions for its future. Presents a definitive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of education. Contains 20 newly-commissioned articles, all of which are written by internationally distinguished scholars. Each chapter reviews a problem, examines the current state of the discipline with respect to the topic, and discusses possible futures of the field. Provides a solid (...) foundation for further study. (shrink)

I argue that some of the most prominent interpretations of Reid's response to skepticism marginalize a crucial aspect of his thought: namely, that our common sense beliefs meet whatever normative standards of rationality the skeptic might fairly demand of them. This should be seen as supplementary to reliabilist or proper functionalist interpretations of Reid, which often ignore this half of the story. I also show how Reid defends the rationality of believing first principles by appealing to their naturalness and irresistibility. (...) The resulting interpretation supplies Reid with a more satisfying and formidable response to the skeptic than interpretations currently offer. (shrink)

Purists think that changes in our practical interests can’t affect what we know unless those changes are truth-relevant with respect to the propositions in question. Impurists disagree. They think changes in our practical interests can affect what we know even if those changes aren’t truth-relevant with respect to the propositions in question. I argue that impurists are right, but for the wrong reasons, since they haven’t appreciated the best argument for their own view. Together with “Minimalism and the Limits of (...) Warranted Assertability Maneuvers,” “The Pragmatic Encroachment Debate,” and “Anti-Intellectualism” (below), this paper constitutes my attempt to refute the entire pragmatic encroachment debate. As I show in this paper, there is an argument for impurism sitting in plain sight that is considerably more plausible than any extant argument for pragmatism. (shrink)

Symmetric informationally complete quantum measurements, or SICs, are mathematically intriguing structures, which in practice have turned out to exhibit even more symmetry than their definition requires. Recently, Zhu classified all the SICs whose symmetry groups act doubly transitively. I show that lattices of integers in the complex numbers, the quaternions and the octonions yield the key parts of these symmetry groups.

Little work has been done to explore the moral foundations of the state’s right to territory.1 In modern times, the state has mostly been assumed to be a territorial unit, and no need was perceived to reflect on precisely what justifies its territorial jurisdiction. The state’s territoriality is related to another topic that has remained under-theorized: immigration. There is, moreover, an obvious relationship between these topics: the more powerful a state’s rights over its territory, the more powerful the right to (...) constrain access to that territory might become – or so, at any rate, we might suppose. Rights to territory and rights to immigration are usefully theorized together.2 Our starting point is a Lockean analysis of the moral foundations of territoriality offered by Simmons (2001). This is a natural starting point not only because Simmons is one of the very few contemporary writers who have taken up philosophical questions about territoriality in the first place, but also because Locke’s thought, as Simmons makes clear, actually allows for the development of a sophisticated account of territoriality. This makes Locke stand out simply because generally modern political.. (shrink)

This timely book addresses concerns about educational and moral standards in a world characterised by a growing nihilism.

ABSTRACT Katherine Dormandy argues that there is no partiality in virtuous faith. Partiality biases and leads to noetic entrenchment. In response, I contend there is an important sense in which virtuous faith is partial towards its object. Namely, it disposes one to perceive the object as more trustworthy and to rely on this partialist evidence in forming beliefs, even when the impartialist evidence points in the other direction. There are, after all, situations in which impartialist evidence is apt to mislead (...) or to fail to bring one to the truth. In such cases, faith attunes one to the subject’s true motivations and intentions. Here the partiality of faith constitutes a kind of social acuity or expertise, not a bias. Indeed, to lack faith in such situations—and to give impartialist evidence equal weight with the partial—might constitute a kind of bias against the subject, casting his or her actions in an overly negative light. (shrink)

Intellectualists disagree with anti-intellectualists about the relationship between knowledge and truth. According to intellectualists, this relationship is intimate. Knowledge entails true belief, and in fact everything required for knowledge is somehow relevant to the probability that the belief in question is true. According to anti-intellectualists, this relationship isn’t intimate. Or, at least, it’s not as intimate as intellectualists think. Factors that aren’t in any way relevant to the probability that a belief is true can make a difference to whether it (...) counts as knowledge. In this paper, I give a new argument for anti-intellectualism and draw out consequences of this argument for the pragmatic encroachment debate. The standard purist objection to pragmatism is that pragmatism entails anti-intellectualism. As I show, anti-intellectualism follows from premises that are plausible even if purism is true, so the standard purist objection to pragmatism fails. (shrink)