In this article I attempt to redefine the role of a music teacher as being more than a director. To begin, I quote Michael Mark, who writes about how the legendary band director William Revelli was remembered in the small town of Hobart, Indiana, where he started the first band program in that town: [E]ach student was at least as motivated by a fear that the band might lose. The band had established a reputation—Hobart was expected to win, and winning (...) became a tradition which had to be upheld at each subsequent contest. . . . After 1930, any other rating would have been considered a failure—a personal failure for every band member, a failure to maintain the tradition of the Hobart band.1 Revelli .. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein gave priority to aesthetics over other disciplines due to its invaluable capacities for revealing certain aspects of the nature of human understanding and for guiding our actions toward an ethical life. Although Wittgenstein did not focus on these issues in a systematic way, these worries were present in his philosophy during his lifetime. That is why I use a very wide range of his writings, from the Tractatus to letters and diaries. Aesthetic inquiries can throw light upon the (...) existence of an intransitive understanding–that is, a kind of knowledge that cannot be expressed by language shared by all competent users of a language. I also discuss Wittgenstein’s conception of ethics in order to explain the close relationship that he proposed between ethics and aesthetics. I hope this will clarify why he believed there was so much to learn from paintings, films, music, poems, or novels. I compare works of art and religious belief and how the former can help us to guide our lives as the latter does. I do this while extending the scope and claiming the importance of aesthetic education, given that it can help us to deal with our nature and with our history. (shrink)

Although content related to parenting Autistic children is common in online media, little attention is paid to the experiences of Autistic parents. There is a growing trend of parents receiving autism diagnoses after their children are diagnosed, yet a basic Google search on “parents” and “autism” reveals myriad data on the experiences of parents of Autistic children and little on experiences of Autistic parents. A systematic online search, augmented with a “crowd-sourcing” request to online parent support groups, identified only 15 (...) articles and blogs that discuss Autistic parenting in advocacy, lifestyle, and parenting websites. This article explores the scope and content of Autistic parenting discourse in these online media to consider how the experiences of Autistic parents are conceptualized and situated within broader narratives of neurodiversity, autism and parenting. Media discourse focused on women who had received their autism diagnosis in adulthood, their experiences navigating their diagnoses, minimizing parenting challenges, and pushing back against autism stereotypes, with the majority of content intended for Allistic audiences. Recent increased recognition of autism in women has coincided with a new interest in Autistic parenthood, raising questions about gendered assumptions and disabled mothering. The media narrative includes “defying stereotypes” and “proving” autism is compatible with parenthood, echoing mainstream beliefs. Social justice issues reinscribed in the narrative illustrate how centring the voices of Autistic parents can reconceptualize public perception of autism and bridge the disconnect between parenting Autistic children, and Autistic parenting of children. (shrink)

This article attacks “open systems” arguments that because constant conjunctions are not generally observed in the real world of open systems we should be highly skeptical that universal laws exist. This work differs from other critiques of open system arguments against laws of nature by not focusing on laws themselves, but rather on the inference from open systems. We argue that open system arguments fail for two related reasons; 1) because they cannot account for the “systems” central to their argument (...) (nor the implied systems labeled “exogenous factors” in relation to the system of interest) and 2) they are nomocentric, fixated on laws while ignoring initial and antecedent conditions that are able to account for systems and exogenous factors within a fundamentalist framework. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel theory of artifact functions, drawing from persistence-based accounts of social functions, according to which the function of an artifact consists in those of its effects that contribute to the persistence of its kind. First, the paper argues that artifact functions have an underacknowledged “interventionist task”: functional ascriptions have implications for the ways that users have reason to use technologies, and how they have reason to intervene when technologies have undesired effects. Then, it argues that the (...) ways that users have reason to use technologies and intervene are informed by the present persistence conditions of artifact kinds. It is therefore useful to incorporate these persistence conditions into the artifacts’ functions. By focusing on the social and political embedding of artifacts, the theory also allows for fruitful connections between the theory of artifacts, the political philosophy of technology, and the literature on functions in the philosophy of social science. (shrink)

Although philosophers have long agreed that Anselm’s PROSLOGION contains what is often called the ontological argument (but not by Anselm himself), they do not agree about just what that argument is. In this paper, I do two things: (1) I set out a careful, precise statement of the argument in the PROSLOGION, taking due account of the historical, personal, philosophical, and theological contexts of Anselm’s thought. (2) Having disembarrassed the argument of some common misunderstandings and placed it in its proper (...) setting, I argue that it is more complicated and much stronger than all but a very few philosophers have realized. (shrink)

Side A. Hill, Clint. A conversation with a former Secret Service agent. Cousy, B. Athletics & the killer instinct, pt. 1.-Side B. Cousy, B. Athletics & the killer instinct, pt. 2. Copeland, A. Music in America.

What does it mean to bring Marxism and psychoanalysis together at this conjuncture? Such a project has been a throughline, arguably, for Fredric Jameson’s work for the past four decades. In this review-article, I read his chapter on Lacan and Hamlet for how it helps us to understand, not only how Jameson’s ruminations on desire and neurosis highlight the social tendencies in Lacanian theory (for example, the notion that desire is the desire of the other), but also how that relationship (...) throws new light on both the Marxist project and psychoanalysis proper. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to discuss how the possibility of understanding difference relates to political decision making. We will see , using Althusser, it is possible to establish and maintain difference without those differences becoming incommensurable; that it is possible to understand the differences of others. We‟ll then see that this ability is of little use when it comes time to act, for example, making a decision; that many differences are excluded from the process of decision making in (...) the public sphere. In Section II. this outcome is compared with the liberal democratic principle of toleration and found to be in conflict with it. However, we will then discover that although such decisions are „intolerant‟ and exclude, this does not seem to illigitimise, or make them intolerable, since the principle of tolerance is, as will be demonstrated, a vacuous principle. Following this, in Section III., we investigate how decisions could be legitimate and find it is merely "a moment of sheer power" and "willing" that legitimised them. We will compare this outcome with current traditional values, deciding we may still maintain them. In conclusion it is claimed that future democracies should be more pragmatic and deliberative. (shrink)

The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street offers a concise introduction to Jameson in jargon-free language and shows how his Marxist theories can be deployed to interpret Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed 2013 film (...) The Wolf of Wall Street. Beginning with a detailed account of Jameson's extensive writings on Marxist theory and how they have been deployed in the analysis of film writings, Clint Burnham then illustrates how Jameson's theory can help to make sense of The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that shows in all its glory the excesses, lunacies, and inner workings of 1990s finance capitalism. As Jameson has influentially argued, films like The Wolf of Wall Street are both complicit in and critical of their historical subject: Scorsese's film is not about the richest stockbrokers, but the Long Island penny traders who made it big. As a narrative of American success, it is also a film about failure. Clint Burnham's reading of Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street is a book about a contemporary film, and contemporary events, and contemporary theory. (shrink)

In my recent book on Fredric Jameson, I averred that while Jameson and Žižek seem to be ideologically aligned, a misperception suggested or affirmed by their frequent citation of each other’s work, these citations were, I argued, a screen that obfuscates more profound differences. But what are those differences? I propose here to lay some stress on what I take to be some important differences between those two projects, in terms of their attitudes towards the dialectic. Grounding that dialectic via (...) the vicissitudes of the Lacanian “non-relation,” I then turn to the question of historicism or historicity, articulated via contrasting readings of Jeff Wall’s 1994 photograph Untangling that allegorize via the pictorial not so much mark making but looking as labor – the labor of the clinic with or without the labor of the workshop. (shrink)

The Starz series Black Sails, while serving as a prequel to Treasure Island and thus providing intriguing backstories for such characters as James Flint, Billy Bones, and (of course) Long John Silver, portrays a realistic account of early eighteenth century pirate life in the Caribbean. In doing so, the show conveys intriguing insights into and applications of social contract theory reasoning, and both explicitly and implicitly asks questions about how those applications, especially as they pertain to the nature of government, (...) democracy, equality, tolerance, and justice, help us understand our own society more fully. (shrink)

To treat The Walking Dead as if it were only a zombie apocalypse story is to miss the deep and fundamental questions about society that the story raises. By looking past the immediacy of the zombie threat that drives the main narrative of the story – survival – it is possible to tease out important questions about community, social organization, leadership, utopian and dystopian world building, and, most importantly, morality. By focusing on the communities that come together in The Walking (...) Dead, this chapter examines how societal questions of utopian and dystopian world building frame important questions about how society functions, how it ought to function, and what it will take to get us beyond the problems plaguing contemporary society. (shrink)

Fresh translations of Meister Eckhart's sermons are made available in this volume: three for the first time in English and sixteen others for the first time since C. de B. Evans translated them in 1924 and 1931, long before the critical editions of the manuscripts were published in 2003. Other important sermons are included in the translations as well. They are meant to improve upon previous translations through sensitivity to Eckhart's metaphorical repertoire and his subtle word choice and phrasing. The (...) monograph portion of the volume describes Eckhart's metaphors and how they work together to form a cohesive whole. All of his homiletic choices are argued to be in service of the greater goal: catalyzing transformative change in his audience by insisting on his paradoxes and jarring people out of their customary way of relating to God and themselves. (shrink)

With attention to family relationships, A Genealogy of Social Violence sheds light on the processes by which the traditional nuclear family, through the mimetic behaviour of children, embeds violence into human desires and hence society as whole.Challenging the thought of Girard and of Rawls in order to offer a new understanding of justice, this book suggests that in order to achieve a more peaceful society, what is required is not the self-defeating narrative of equality, developed in order to manage the (...) violence engendered by our social institutions, but a reconceptualisation of the nuclear family structure.A striking critique of modern society, which draws on religion, mythology, literature, history, philosophy and political theory, A Genealogy of Social Violence will be of interest to social and political theorists, as well as philosophers working in the area of contemporary social and European thought. (shrink)

1. Marx's monstrous ecostential imagination -- 2. Stranger: consuming the nature of monstrosity -- 3. Creature: the nature of domination on the margins -- 4. Thing: hauntology as a study of inheritance -- 5. Other: disconnection and a critique of the natural self -- 6. Enchantment and the madness of science -- Final thoughts.

Diana Palardy's book is a remarkable work bringing contemporary Spanish interpretations of dystopia to a wider audience. Her work is incisive, thoughtful, and challenging in its analysis while remaining approachable. The text is broken into seven sections, each focusing on a particular narrative that provides a key element to Palardy's conclusion. Each section is delivered in manageable subsections that allow new readers to ease into the material while still providing for the rigor more familiar scholars will appreciate.The key themes of (...) the book are built around Palardy's position that an urban cultural studies approach is not only relevant but necessary, because "more dystopias take place in urban settings than... (shrink)

Interdisciplinary in scope and bringing together work from around the world, The Individual and Utopia enquires after the nature of the utopian as citizen, demonstrating the inherent value of making the individual central to utopian theorizing and highlighting the methodologies necessary for examining the utopian individual. The various approaches employed reveal what it is to be an individual yoked by the idea of citizenship and challenge the ways that we have traditionally been taught to think of the individual as citizen. (...) As such, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social theory, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, architecture and feminist thought, whose work intersects with political thought, utopian theorizing, or the study of humanity or human nature. (shrink)

This essay is an investigation of the relationship between homosexual interpretations of Jesus Christ and artistic explorations of the meaning of Christ to the LGBTQ community. I begin with an analysis of the public backlash to Enrique Chagoya’s 2010 lithograph The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals which features a depiction of Christ in a homoerotic situation. My analysis focuses both on Chagoya’s place in the historical canon of artists that create religious art that challenges heteronormative interpretations of Jesus and also (...) the resulting destruction of Chagoya’s work. My analysis examines the cultural importance of homosexual interpretations of Christ in the on-going debates about homosexuality as well as the biblical justifications for such interpretations. More, I argue that the public backlash to art that challenges traditionally held beliefs about Christ creates a cultural force for further marginalizing the LGBTQ community. I argue that traditional power structures, especially in contemporary America, rely upon the aesthetic marginalization of those individuals deemed to be engaged in subversive lifestyles in order to maintain their dominance in cultural discourse. Ironically, I argue, the attempts to subdue such artwork generates the necessary conditions for public discourse that will ultimately undermine the traditional cultural beliefs that undergird the protests against artists like Chagoya. (shrink)

A full separation theorem for the derivable rules of intuitionistic linear logic without bounds, 0 and exponentials is proved. Several structural consequences of this theorem for subreducts of (commutative) residuated lattices are obtained. The theorem is then extended to the logic LR+ and its proof is extended to obtain the finite embeddability property for the class of square increasing residuated lattices.

Description: Ancient Indian logic by itself is a very vast subject. The ancient Sanskrit term nyaya which was first used in a different or in a much more general sense, was later specifically applied to the Nyaya school. The physics and physiology and psychology of the Nyaya doctrine are not specifically its own, being from the first indistinguishable from those of its sister Sastra, the Vaisesika. What characterizes it specifically is the development of the nyaya or five-membered method of demonstration (...) and its insistence on the four sources of knowledge, corresponding to the first four members of its demonstrative formula, or 'Syllogism.' The importance of Nyaya is in its doctrine of the pramanas, or sources of proof, and in its formulation of the nyaya, or method of demonstration. Indian Logic in its Early Schools by H.N. Randle is an interpretation of Indian logical theory in its historical development based on the study of original texts wherever reference to Nyaya as a method of logic has been made, and thus, covers a very wide field of Indian philosophy. An indispensable work for students of Indian philosophy, it is especially important for those who are interested in Nyayadarsana in its relation to the early logic of other schools. (shrink)

Here we present what we believe is a novel account of what languages are, along with an axiomatically rich representation of languages and language-related data that is based on this account. We propose an account of languages as aggregates of dispositions distributed across aggregates of persons, and in doing so we address linguistic competences and the processes that realize them. This paves the way for representing additional types of language-related entities. Like demographic data of other sorts, data about languages may (...) be of use to researchers in a number of areas, including biomedical research. Data on the languages used in clinical encounters are typically included in medical records, and capture an important factor in patient-provider interactions. Like many types of patient and demographic data, data on a person’s preferred and primary languages are organized in different ways by different systems. This can be a barrier to data integration. We believe that a robust framework for representing language in general and preferred and primary language in particular – which has been lacking in ontologies thus far – can promote more successful integration of language-related data from disparate data sources. (shrink)

This paper proposes a reevaluation of assessment methods in philosophy higher education, advocating for a shift away from traditional written assessments towards oral evaluation. Drawing attention to the rising ethical concerns surrounding large language models (LLMs), we argue that a renewed focus on oral skills within philosophical pedagogy is both imperative and underexplored. This paper offers a case for redirecting attention to the neglected realm of oral evaluation, asserting that it holds significant promise for fostering students with some of our (...) traditional academic values that we want to maintain. We identify implications of this shift in emphasis which situates our discipline to contribute positively to solving some of the most pressing socio-political issues. Additionally, our proposal aims to demonstrate how philosophy can solidify its relevancy to the twenty-first century student and academy more broadly. (shrink)

The central claim of this paper is that American states’ use of so-called “triggering conditions” to regulate surrogate decision-making authority in end-of-life care leaves unresolved a number of important ethical and legal considerations regarding the scope of that authority. The paper frames the issue with a case set in a jurisdiction in which surrogate authority to withdraw life-sustaining treatment is triggered by two specific clinical conditions. The case presents a quandary insofar as the clinical facts do not satisfy the triggering (...) conditions, and yet both the appropriate surrogates and the care team agree that withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment is in the best interest of the patient. The paper surveys applicable law across the 50 states and weighs the arguments for and against the inclusion of such triggering conditions in relevant legal regimes. The paper concludes by assessing the various legal and policy options states have for regulating surrogate decision-making authority in light of the moral considerations, and notes the possibility for conflict within ethics teams arising from the potential tension between prudence, risk-aversion, and moral obligation. (shrink)

If we are physical things with parts, then accounts of what we are and accounts of when composition occurs have important implications for one another. Defenders of restricted composition tend to endorse a sparse ontology in taking an eliminativist stance toward composite objects that are not organisms, while claiming that we are organisms. However, these arguments do not entail that we are organisms, for they rely on the premise that we are organisms. Thus, sparsist reasoning need not be paired with (...) animalism, but could instead be paired with other accounts according to which we are composites. The embodied mind account—a version of the brain view—is one such account. Replacing the premise that we are organisms with the premise that we are embodied minds, in arguments that otherwise parallel those supporting animalist sparsism, yields an account according to which composite objects include thinkers, but perhaps nothing else. Since animalism has implausible implications about scenarios which are handled better by the embodied mind account, this approach is preferable to animalist sparsism. Furthermore, the role of mental features in sparsism makes embodied mind sparsism the more reasonable conclusion. Meanwhile, adopting sparsism allows the embodied mind account to dodge objections that may not be as easily avoided by it or other versions of the brain view if not paired with sparsism. These include objections about brains that are not persons, inorganic part replacement, and another form of part replacement that might seem to allow one to get a new brain. (shrink)

Transnational cooperation -- Principles of collective action and game theory -- Market failure and collective action -- Transnational public goods: taxonomy, institutions, and subsidiarity -- Sovereignty, leadership, and us hegemony -- Foreign aid and global health -- International trade -- Global finance -- Transnational crime: drugs and money laundering -- Political violence: civil wars and terrorism -- Rogue and failed states -- Environmental cooperation -- Conclusion.

We apply the theory of partial algebras, following the approach developed by Van Alten, to the study of the computational complexity of universal theories of monotonic and normal modal algebras. We show how the theory of partial algebras can be deployed to obtain co-NP and EXPTIME upper bounds for the universal theories of, respectively, monotonic and normal modal algebras. We also obtain the corresponding lower bounds, which means that the universal theory of monotonic modal algebras is co-NP-complete and the universal (...) theory of normal modal algebras is EXPTIME-complete. It also follows that the quasi-equational theory of monotonic modal algebras is co-NP-complete. While the EXPTIME upper bound for the universal theory of normal modal algebras can be obtained in a more straightforward way, as discussed in the paper, due to its close connection to the equational theory of normal modal algebras with the universal modality operator, the technique based on the theory of partial algebras is applicable to the study of universal theories of algebras corresponding to a wide range of logics with intensional operators, where no such connection is available. (shrink)

WINDSOR C, DOUGLAS C and HARVEY T. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 213–222 Nursing and competencies — a natural fit: the politics of skill/competency formation in nursingThe last two decades have seen a significant restructuring of work across Australia and other industrialised economies, a critical part of which has been the appearance of competency based education and assessment. The competency movement is about creating a more flexible and mobile labour force to increase productivity and it does so by redefining work as (...) a set of transferable or ‘soft’ generic skills that is transportable and is the possession of the individual. This article sought to develop an analysis of competency based clinical assessment of nursing students across a bachelor of nursing degree course. This involved an examination of a total of 406 clinical assessment tools that covered the years 1992–2009 and the three years of a bachelor degree. Data analysis generated three analytical findings: the existence of a hierarchy of competencies that prioritises soft skills over intellectual and technical skills; the appearance of skills as personal qualities or individual attributes; and the absence of context in assessment. The article argues that the convergence in nursing of soft skills and the professionalisation project reform has seen the former give legitimacy to the enduring invisibility and devaluation of nursing work. (shrink)

This article focuses on the #FeesMustFall movement and the question of a human rights culture. It provides evidence from the specific context of FMF at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, which exposes human rights abuses and violence to the dignity of protesting students. To advance a human rights culture within the higher education sector in the context of FMF, the article highlights the role of theology – ‘indecent theology’ – in revealing the problem and promise of higher education institutions in (...) the quest for a more liberating and responsible society. It is only through interrogating the narratives that sustain the current university structures – and continue to oppress the poor and the marginalised – that South Africa will be able to begin to construct a society that is respective of the rights of all. (shrink)