A critique of Strawson's distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics.

During my (Hafiz) childhood in Bangladesh, I experienced the negative impact of the educational system. My experiences initiated a process of conscientization leading to values-driven activism through the establishment of Education for Development and Sustainability (EDS), a child-friendly community of practice, with Trine and Alamin. In encounters with Erling and Sigrid, we became aware that our activities were in accordance with action research based on cooperative inquiry (Heron & Reason, 2008). From that point of departure, we developed our own collaborative (...) living theory. In this paper, we explore the research question “How did we become action researchers and what is our driving force?” by using Stoller’s (1989) autobiographical narrative method to analyse selected, lived experiences. Sharing lived experiences and engaging in activism with each other and the EDS children became the base for our conscientization, radical empiricism and contemplating involvement in EDS. Value based activism can create empathic relations and emotions through shared engagement for social justice and the realization that we create a shared reality. Hence, conducting action research with children/youth is in our experience a key to sustainable development. However, to increase the transparency and validity of our research, we needed to explore how our experiences and actions have influenced our values, emotions and decisions to conduct research, our research topic and the research in itself. Therefore, we have engaged co-researchers and participants to critically question the research practice and made it open for discussion and comments in order to see alternative ways of interpreting situations and processes. (shrink)

The early modern period (roughly, 1600–1800 ce) in Europe brought tremendous changes in intellectual, political, and cultural life. It was a period in which philosophical debates were inevitably bound up with questions about the nature and sources of religious truth. A chronological examination of some of the period’s major thinkers highlights two issues that were central to the development of philosophy of religion in the period. The first concerns the relations between God, the soul, and the body; the other concerns (...) the relationship between human reason and divine revelation. (shrink)

This article addresses two interrelated questions: Why is it often difficult to create better environmental conditions in the world using traditional political processes and new technological fixes? May science and technology studies analyses of user strategies and micropolitics contribute to societies’ treatment of these difficulties? Focusing on the problems that the electric car has confronted in establishing itself as a viable alternative to the internal combustion car, the authors argue that its failure illustrates the poverty of organized politics, on one (...) hand, and the shortcomings of engineering design practices, on the other. The authors suggest that a thoroughgoing change in the automobility system will take place only if more attention is paid to the actual use of alternative vehicles. By driving differently and viewing automobility differently, electric vehicle owners develop “user scripts” that challenge established political and engineering scripts while contributing to what the authors call a “cultural politics of automobility.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of WritingJack KolbA Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing, by Paul H. Fry; 256 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, $45.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.And the worm turns. It might elicit dubious laughter from those Yale critics who taught Paul Fry, now William Lampson Professor at their institution, by his admission a Berkeley student in the 1960s (and (...) still, clearly, trying to come to terms with the absolutism of his era), to have him (a)rise to the occasion of verse. After all, the question he asks at the outset of his study—“how are we to account for all the poetry, not to mention fiction, not to mention all the criticism... that still gets written?”—seems anathema except to us academic conservatives, those who resent the encroachment of sterile philosophic approaches into literature. And irrelevant to those writers who don’t give a damn about academic criticism. Fry’s reality, and not just his literary reality, here confronts the weight of academia.What is most troublesome to me about this worthy book is the vast prolegomena that seems, alas, de rigueur these days, the critical dross that Fry must apparently spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to placate, dodge, and negotiate. If academic criticism must perform such elaborate obeisance to questionable philosophies of literature, then academic criticism is truly dead. No reason to grieve: it will be replaced by those who seek to understand and relish literature, still informed by the worthy questions of imitation and audience and authorial psychology, and even internal construction that have enticed readers for centuries.Fry is anything but a happy deconstructionist. One senses immediately that he is distinctly discontented with theoretical discourse, that what he really wants to discuss is poetry, and the poetic impulse. And when he does, he does it brilliantly. Indeed, it is only his argument that inhibits him. To oversimplify (an inevitable process in this book), Fry wants to rescue some poetry from the self-destructiveness, as he sees it, of sterile critical approaches—mostly from the neo-historicists, but also from all others who would deny the essential job of poetry to replicate reality. Both human and historical values have got in the way [End Page 522] of this “pure” conveyance. Somehow poetry (unique of the arts) can escape this:It is the function of indication, of saying that something just is (to which until now I have confined my notion of ostension), to estrange utterance from its historical situation by refusing to say that that something is predicated upon, determined by, something else, whether in narrative, description, or explanation....This is the moment, completing the structure of ostension, which reduces the estranged, necessarily “situated” utterance to sound and trace, and thus returns it to the unsignifying sphere of actuality, of things in themselves, from which history for its part is by nature forever estranged. Literature, then, is that mode of utterance which lays bare the irreducible distance between history and actuality from the parti pris of the latter. By suspending our purposeful engagement with the world, it reattaches itself to the world.(pp. 54–55)No single passage can do Fry justice, for his approach is accretive, and fearsomely intelligent (this is one of the few books of contemporary criticism I’ve read in which I felt that the awful vocabulary was merited). Yet, ultimately, Fry’s ontology sounds very much like old-fashioned mimesis; it is the universality of experience, he asserts, that escapes the historicist or the dogmatist or the deconstructionist. At some level poetry is what it is. In fact what Fry seemingly wants is in his terms an obliteration of the mediation of mimesis: his true poetry wants to be reality, or at least as close as we come to it in art.Of course the problem with this definition of poetry is that it is, despite Fry’s twistings and turnings, a definition of poetry. Poetry, as even Plato tells us, is an imitation. So how do we try to get closest to reality? With poetry, Fry suggests; poetry that acknowledges the universal reality... (shrink)

While various definitions of moral distress have been proposed, some agreement exists that it results from illegitimate constraints in clinical practice affecting healthcare professionals’ moral agency. If we are to reduce moral distress, instruments measuring it should provide relevant information about such illegitimate constraints. Unfortunately, existing instruments fail to do so. We discuss here several shortcomings of major instruments in use: their inability to determine whether reports of moral distress involve an accurate assessment of the requisite clinical and logistical facts (...) in play, whether the distress in question is aptly characterized as moral, and whether the moral distress reported is an appropriate target of elimination. Such failures seriously limit the ability of empirical work on moral distress to foster appropriate change. (shrink)

In 1993, after an optimistic beginning followed by a half-decadeof conflict, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project wasabandoned. In an era of `Big Science', a major scientificenterprise collapsed. Why? We employ the metaphor of the`frontier outpost' to analyse a critical moment in the history ofthis vastly expensive project, when the physicists who designedthe machine were forced to recognize that traditional post-warscientific values were no longer in harmony with governmentpriorities.

The workshop – presented by the director of a new center and the coordinator of an alliance intended to amplify and extend the influence of an established center – focused on the challenges involved in founding, growing, and sustaining centers for business ethics within university business schools. The discussion draws on experience at the Center for Business and Society, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado, and the Center for Business Ethics, Bentley College and Bentley’s Alliance for Ethics & Social (...) Responsibility. (shrink)

Introduction to a volume on Hegel, asking why his thought continues to be relevant today.

Coming from a Nordic environment, professionally working in teacher education, both authors engaged in developmental work and research in the Uluguru mountains in Tanzania. The research is carried out in a community-based organization for vulnerable youth, Mgeta Orphan Education Foundation, which builds on principles of action learning and action research. We have followed and participated in the development of the organization since 2010, and this article builds on data gathered in 2016-17. We will show and discuss some of the transformations (...) we have witnessed, mainly in the older members. The transformations seem to have an emergent character, and we examine further factors we have seen as crucial for transforming the lives of the young people in the orphan education project. Surprisingly, duty was a factor coming forth in the data. The youth perceived duty in a relational way, mainly caused by inner motivation nurtured by the example of their coordinator, Solomon, and by facing the continuous, emergent need for assistance in their local communities. Less surprisingly, belonging transpired as a fundamental factor. Previously, we have analyzed the transformational learning among the youngsters, and identified a set of transformational tools. Building on the transformational tools, we have derived a model for Relational Transformation. Transformative action research is the approach we follow, and one aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of the reciprocity of transformative processes in transformative research. (shrink)