In Laboratory Epistemologies, Jenny Boulboullé examines the significance of hands-on experiences in contemporary life science laboratories. Addressing the relationship between contemplation and manipulation in epistemology, Boulboullé combines participant observations in molecular genetics labs and microbiological cleanrooms with a long durée study of the history and philosophy of science. She radically rereads Descartes' key epistemological text Meditations on First Philosophy, reframing the philosopher as a hands-on knowledge maker. With this reading, Boulboullé subverts the pervasive modern conception of the disembodied knower (...) and puts the hands-on experimenter at the heart of life sciences research. In so doing, she contributes a theoretical model to understanding how life processes on cellular and molecular levels is manually produced in today's techno-scientific spaces. By reassessing the Cartesian legacy and arguing that epistemology should be grounded in the standpoint of a hands-on practitioner, Boulboullé offers the philosophical and historical groundwork to understand and study contemporary life sciences research as multisensory embodied practices. (shrink)

Despite the welfare of the child being afforded special legal and moral importance, it appears that the law is currently not objective in its application to children. There is an undeniable link between healthy child development and education, with the latter greatly impacting on mental health and general well-being. Drawing on the example of the differential treatment of gifted children in an educational context, I argue that the legal framework with regard to learning disabilities and cognitive impairments operates contrary to (...) the proclaimed goal of protecting and promoting the welfare of the child. This, I argue, constitutes unjustified discrimination, especially since there is a case to be made that highly cognitively able children could be considered disabled under a social model of disability. Whilst the group of affected children is small at present, developments in cognitive enhancement technologies mean that many more children might in the future be affected. Since the law currently fails gifted children, it will by analogy also likely fail cognitively enhanced children. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Stuart, Jennie Review(s) of: Hands off not an option! The reminiscence museum mirror of a humanistic care philosophy, by Professor Dr Hans Marcel Becker assisted by Inez van den Dobbelsteen- Becker and Topsy Ros. Eburon Academic Publishers, Delft, 2011 272 pp.

The ever increasing ability of medical technology to reshape the human body in fundamental ways—from organ and tissue transplants to reconstructive surgery and prosthetics—is something now largely taken for granted. But for a philosopher, such interventions raise fundamental and fascinating questions about our sense of individual identity and its relationship to the physical body. Drawing on and engaging with philosophers from across the centuries, Jenny Slatman here develops a novel argument: that our own body always entails a strange dimension, (...) a strangeness that enables us to incorporate radical physical changes. (shrink)

The frequency and severity of natural disasters and extreme weather events are increasing, taking a dramatic economic and relational toll on the communities they strike. Given the critical role that entrepreneurship plays in a community’s viability, it is necessary to understand how small business owners respond to these events and move forward over time. This study explores the long-term dynamics and trajectory of individuals within the broader business community following a natural disaster, paying particular attention to the influence of social (...) identity. Results suggest that the community identity changes over the course of recovery and rebuilding, underscoring the need for a holistic approach so that intervening agencies can achieve the sustainable economic recovery desired. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractSocial learning and culture occur in a wide variety of animal species and across many different types of community structures. In article number 1900060, Jenny A. Allen present an overview of social learning in species across a spectrum of community structures, providing the necessary infrastructure to allow a comparison of studies that will help move the field of animal culture forward. Art designer: Emma Hilton.

James Frederick Ferrier James Frederick Ferrier was a mid-nineteenth-century Scottish metaphysician who developed the first post-Hegelian system of idealism in Britain. Unlike the British Idealists in the latter half of the nineteenth century, he was neither a Kantian nor a Hegelian. Instead, he largely develops his idealist metaphysics via his defense of Berkeley and … Continue reading Ferrier, James Frederick →.

Although the employment situation of disabled people has widely been identified as in need of improvement, progress in this area remains slow. While some progress has been made in including the physically or sensory disabled in the workplace, other types of disability have been largely neglected. This applies particularly to disabled workers in atypical employment, such as those whose workplace is the Digital Economy. In this article, we discuss the case of disabled app developers as a significant example of how (...) the current regulatory framework fails to be inclusive in its attempts to protect the rights of disabled Digital Economy workers. We identify two problems that are at the heart of this: first, a continuing failure to collect relevant and comprehensive data on disability, and second, a lack of accountability towards disabled workers in atypical employment. Consequently, we call for better data collection and argue for urgent policy changes to close the existing accountability gap. (shrink)

The article presents the concept of ASMR from a general and a linguistic perspective. The definition of the notion and a review on the state of research is followed by a classification of ASMR triggers based on the senses which constitute the source of experiencing the ASMR effect. The author argues that touch and smell be included in the classification of the triggers. The linguistic analysis focuses on the following issues: the phonetic properties of the voice triggers, onomastics – a (...) grammatical and conceptual study of the 17 classes of medionyms which were distinguished in the present research, and the ASMR discourse as the space where phatic and social functions are carried out on the part of ASMRtists as factors developing bonds within the ASMR community and where evaluative and persuasive functions are prominent in the comments of the recipients. (shrink)

Social Ethics is an animated introduction to moral philosophy and the key ethical issues of today, and will serve as the ideal text for undergraduate courses in applied, practical and social ethics.

Stuart, Jennie Review of: My year without meat, by Richard Cornish, Melbourne University Press 2016, 185 pp.

Stuart, Jennie Review of: Norman Haire and the study of sex, by Diana Wyndham, Sydney University Press, 2012,.

Stuart, Jennie This is not intended to be a discussion about humanist art, its place in the history of art or a detailed coverage of work which might be described as such. I am not qualified to do so. However, I believe, it is a field which could be explored further by Australian Humanists.

Contesting Conformity investigates the writings of Tocqueville, Mill, and Nietzsche in order to examine the relationship between non-conformity and modern democracy. Jennie Ikuta argues that non-conformity is an intractable issue for democracy while non-conformity is often important for cultivating a just polity, non-conformity can also undermine democracy. Democracy therefore needs non-conformity, but not in an unconditional way. This book examines this intractable relationship, and offers resources for navigating the relationship in contemporary democracies in ways that promote justice and freedom.

The core idea of social constructivism in mathematics is that mathematical entities are social constructs that exist in virtue of social practices, similar to more familiar social entities like institutions and money. Julian C. Cole has presented an institutional version of social constructivism about mathematics based on John Searle’s theory of the construction of the social reality. In this paper, I consider what merits social constructivism has and examine how well Cole’s institutional account meets the challenge of accounting for the (...) characteristic features of mathematics, especially objectivity and applicability. I propose that in general social constructivism shows promise as an ontology of mathematics, because the view can agree with mathematical practice and it offers a way of understanding how mathematical entities can be real without conflicting with a scientific picture of reality. However, I argue that Cole’s specific theory does not provide an adequate social constructivist account of mathematics. His institutional account fails to sufficiently explain the objectivity and applicability of mathematics, because the explanations are weakened and limited by the three-level theoretical model underlying Cole’s account of the construction of mathematical reality and by the use of the Searlean institutional framework. The shortcomings of Cole’s theory give reason to suspect that the Searlean framework is not an optimal way to defend the view that mathematical reality is socially constructed. (shrink)

It has become increasingly clear that social learning and culture occur much more broadly, and in a wider variety of animal communities, than initially believed. Recent research has expanded the list to include insects, fishes, elephants, and cetaceans. Such diversity allows scientists to expand the scope of potential research questions, which can help form a more complete understanding of animal culture than any single species can provide on its own. It is crucial to understand how culture and social learning present (...) in different communities, as well as what influences community structure and culture may have on one another, so that the results across these different studies may most effectively inform one another. This review presents an overview of social learning in species across a spectrum of community structures, providing the necessary infrastructure to allow a comparison of studies that will help move the field of animal culture forward. (shrink)

Does the real difference between non-consequentialist and consequentialist theories lie in their approach to value? Non-consequentialist theories are thought either to allow a different kind of value (namely, agent-relative value) or to advocate a different response to value ('honouring' rather than 'promoting'). One objection to this idea implies that all normative theories are describable as consequentialist. But then the distinction between honouring and promoting collapses into the distinction between relative and neutral value. A proper description of non-consequentialist theories can only (...) be achieved by including a distinction between temporal relativity and neutrality in addition to the distinction between agent-relativity and agent-neutrality. (shrink)

I develop a theory of counterfactuals about relative computability, i.e. counterfactuals such as 'If the validity problem were algorithmically decidable, then the halting problem would also be algorithmically decidable,' which is true, and 'If the validity problem were algorithmically decidable, then arithmetical truth would also be algorithmically decidable,' which is false. These counterfactuals are counterpossibles, i.e. they have metaphysically impossible antecedents. They thus pose a challenge to the orthodoxy about counterfactuals, which would treat them as uniformly true. What’s more, I (...) argue that these counterpossibles don’t just appear in the periphery of relative computability theory but instead they play an ineliminable role in the development of the theory. Finally, I present and discuss a model theory for these counterfactuals that is a straightforward extension of the familiar comparative similarity models. (shrink)

Infants have been described as 'statistical learners' capable of extracting structure (such as words) from patterned input (such as language). Here, we investigated whether prior knowledge influences how infants track transitional probabilities in word segmentation tasks. Are infants biased by prior experience when engaging in sequential statistical learning? In a laboratory simulation of learning across time, we exposed 9- and 10-month-old infants to a list of either disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words, followed by a pause-free speech stream composed of a (...) different set of disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words. Listening times revealed successful segmentation of words from fluent speech only when words were uniformly disyllabic or trisyllabic throughout both phases of the experiment. Hearing trisyllabic words during the pre-exposure phase derailed infants' abilities to segment speech into disyllabic words, and vice versa. We conclude that prior knowledge about word length equips infants with perceptual expectations that facilitate efficient processing of subsequent language input. (shrink)