Schools have always been under presure to change or reform. Recent public criticism of schools provoked an attempt to address weaknesses in American education. Goals 2000 is a legislative effort that would reform schools using national goals for education. Selected goals are highlighted and The Language of Education provides a structure to develop understanding of the goals. We conted that Scheffler's method for examining the discussion on education and policies developed from it is valid in the contemporary context. The analysis (...) possible using The Language of Education would bring a missing sense of order to educational policy development and possibly give voice to those often disenfranchised by the process. (shrink)

The primary resource for quantum computation is Hilbert-space dimension. Whereas Hilbert space itself is an abstract construction, the number of dimensions available to a system is a physical quantity that requires physical resources. Avoiding a demand for an exponential amount of these resources places a fundamental constraint on the systems that are suitable for scalable quantum computation. To be scalable, the effective number of degrees of freedom in the computer must grow nearly linearly with the number of qubits in an (...) equivalent qubit-based quantum computer. (shrink)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s book Never Let Me Go is a thoughtful and provocative exploration of what it means to be human. Drawing on insights from the hermeneutic-phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, I argue that the movement of Ishiguro’s story can be understood in terms of actualising the human potential for autonomous action. Liberal theories take autonomy to be concerned with analytically and ethically isolatable social units directing their lives in accordance with self-interested preferences, arrived at by means of rational calculation. However, I (...) argue that such theories are simplistic abstractions from our human-life world, distorting the fundamental embodied, embedded, and relational nature of autonomy. When we attend closely to our concrete, lived existence we see instead that autonomy is about responding appropriately to others with whom we share a world. As we follow the path of Ishiguro’s central character Kathy H., we are shown how an awareness and acceptance of our existential finitude as precarious and fallible creatures is necessary for guiding such appropriate interactions. As Kathy grows and is affirmed into her life-world, which grounds and supports her Being, she moves from heteronomy to autonomy; from being moved by external laws to embodying those laws, thereby becoming autonomous. This is exemplified by her appropriation of the carer role, through which she responds in a fitting way to those with whom she shares her world, bearing the weight of and dwelling responsibly within our human condition. (shrink)

It is true that Hegelian historicism has indeed led to a dominant ethos of moral relativism bound up with the belief that individual self-actualization is the highest value, thus creating a society that is, in the phrase of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. “after God.” Nevertheless, this egocentric and nihilistic relativism exists alongside a robust and militant moral totalitarianism enforced by the modern clerisy of the media, multi-national corporations, and government bureaucrats, that is, a “managerial elite.” This article argues that the (...) transcendental idealism of Kant and the subsequent historicization of Kant’s dialectic by Hegel has served to reconceptualize the older, Baconian view of science, creating the idea that scientific progress is moving toward the goal of a future perfection of absolute rational unity. The a priori rational structure of reality that makes science possible is not a Platonic Ideal, but something that unfolds within history. This is what allowed Marx to conceive of dialectical materialism as a science, and this is what allows the managerial elite of the present to claim a scientific and objective basis for their programs while at the same time using the tools of historical and cultural criticism to relativize and historicize the claims of all competing moral and social “constructs.”. (shrink)

A recent proposal by Dr. W. H. McCrae, cosmologist and mathematician, to the effect that decisions between such cosmogonies as those of Hoyle and of Gamow are experimentally impossible by virtue of a general cosmological indeterminacy principle, is here examined and elaborated upon. Some comments on the "antinomies" in Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" are made in reference to this principle as well as to the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle. If McCrae's principle is accepted, we will have moved a long way (...) toward Kant's conclusion that a logically consistent understanding of an underlying "ultimate reality" is outside the confines of science--whatever one may think of Kant's own line of reasoning. (shrink)

Clark Carlton brings a much-needed theological sensitivity to the issues surrounding current debates about homosexuality and the ethics of sexual reorientation therapy. Yet, Carlton’s portrayal seems to mischaracterize and unnecessarily dismiss reorientation therapy on etiological and other theoretical grounds. It is suggested that for most therapists engaged in sexual reorientation therapy the role of developmental factors in homosexual attraction is neither overstated nor minimized.

The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve presents a road map for an evolutionary psychology of the twenty-first century. It brings together theory from biology and cognitive science to show how the brain can be composed of specialized adaptations, and yet also an organ of plasticity. Although mental adaptations have typically been seen as monolithic, hard-wired components frozen in the evolutionary past, The Shape of Thought presents a new view of mental adaptations as diverse and variable, with distinct functions (...) and evolutionary histories that shape how they develop, what information they use, and what they do with that information. The book describes how advances in evolutionary developmental biology can be applied to the brain by focusing on the design of the developmental systems that build it. Crucially, developmental systems can be plastic, designed by the process of natural selection to build adaptive phenotypes using the rich information available in our social and physical environments. This approach bridges the long-standing divide between "nativist" approaches to development, based on innateness, and "empiricist" approaches, based on learning. It shows how a view of humans as a flexible, culturally-dependent species is compatible with a complexly specialized brain, and how the nature of our flexibility can be better understood by confronting the evolved design of the organ on which that flexibility depends. (shrink)

A promise to do some action seems to create a binding obligation to do that action. And yet, paradoxically, an obligation seems not to be a fact that we can create or bring into existence; we can create an obligation only by creating or bringing into existence something else. The only way to avoid the paradox is to show that the act of promising creates something other than an obligation, which nonetheless binds us to perform the action in question. After (...) considering and rejecting various options such as the promisee's expectation and the promisor's resolve, Prichard locates the bindingness of a promise in a prior general promise, which allows the noises we make when promising to generate an obligation to perform the promised action. (shrink)

The paper proposes to integrate literary studies in consciousness research to develop a strong ethical and existential dimension in the field. More specifically, it considers the value of fictional narrative for developing concepts of selfhood and personal identity that cohere with the reductionist explanations of human consciousness and self in modern empirical consciousness research. My central claim is that looking to the literary representations of human consciousness and existence that reject or are free from conventional essentialist ideas of self, agency, (...) and anthropocentrism can help 'normalize' the reductionist scientific descriptions of humans and reduce their psychologically and socio-culturally disruptive impact. The paper uses Virginia Woolf's The Waves as an example, showing how the novel's non-anthropocentric and non-essentialist conceptions of self and consciousness overlap with materialist theories in neuroscience and -philosophy but present these in a distinctive narrative framework and poetic terms that bring out the inherent emancipatory potential of the materialist explanation of human existence and offer the reader the possibility of relating to these experientially and emotionally. (shrink)

Dion is a human person, Lefty is his left foot, and Theon is Lefty-Complement, a proper part of Dion. Lefty is annihilated and Dion survives left-footless. After Lefty’s annihilation Theon, if he survives, occupies the same region as Dion. I suggest that this scenario be understood as a fusion case in which Dion and Theon, initially overlapping but distinct, are identical after Lefty’s annihilation and propose an account of proper names that allows us to say that Dion and Theon have (...) ‘become identical’ without commitment to occasional identity or other controversial metaphysical doctrines. The proposed solution employs the semantics developed by Wolfgang Schwarz to address the ‘paradox of occasional identity’, posed by puzzle cases of fission, to deal with the problem of Dion and Theon, a body-minus puzzle. (shrink)

I bogen "Den store humor" undersøger Harald Høffding humoren som livsanskuelse. "Den store humor" er ifølge Høffding en etisk livsholdning, som et menneske kan leve sit liv efter. Inspireret af filosoffen Søren Kierkegaards stadieteori karakteriserer Harald Høffding humoren som et etisk standpunkt, der nægter at anerkende den kristnes tragiske syn på livet. I stedet formår humoristen, at balancere livets lyse og skyggefulde sider. Humoristen lever sit liv med åbne øjne og har derfor blik for såvel verdens komik som tragik. Harald (...) Høffding (1843-1931) var teolog og filosof og virkede gennem 30 år som professor ved Københavns Universitet. I løbet af sin karriere opnåede han en central position i det danske videns- og kulturliv og nød stor anerkendelse både i og udenfor Danmark. Høffding var yderst virksom hele sit liv, og tankegodset i hans bøger er stadig relevant i dag. Udover værkerne om etik, filosofihistorie og psykologi kendes han for monografier om Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Jacques Rousseau og Baruch Spinoza. (shrink)

Engelhardt invites readers to understand what it means to live in a world after God, where questions of sin and virtue have been replaced with life-and-death-style choices. After God provides a dark prophetic vision. But there is still hope. As Engelhardt argues, In this culture, children now grow up apart from and defended against a recognition of the God Who lives. They are nurtured in a social fabric that is structured so as to avoid a recognition of, much less an (...) encounter with, God. Nevertheless... a traditional Christianity has endured, even though its morality and bioethics have become ever more strongly counter-cultural. The source of this traditional Christian otherness over against the surrounding post-theistic culture lies in the origins of Christianity itself, in the Christianity of the Apostles and the Fathers, namely, in Orthodox Christianity. Against the tenor of the times, disregarding the animus to set traditional Christianity aside, and despite heretics prominent within its fold, Orthodox Christianity remains a light in a world after God. --! From back cover. (shrink)

al-majmūʻah 1. Kayfa naʻmal lil-Islām -- Muqawwimāt shakhṣīyat al-Muslim -- al-Tawāzun wa-al-iʻtidāl fī ḥayāt al-Muslim.

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Classical treatise on the fundamentals of Nyaya philosophy with commentaries; critical edition.

Guidelines for a model bride in Islam based on Islamic teachings; includes stories of six exemplary Muslim wives during Prophet Muhammad's time.