This edited volume presents a post-humanist reflection on education, mapping the complex transdisciplinary pedagogy and theoretical research while also addressing questions related to marginalised voices, colonial discourses, and the relationship between theory and practice. Exhibiting a re-imagination of education through themed relationalities that can transverse education, this cutting-edge book highlights the importance of matter in educational environments, enriching pedagogies, teacher-student relationships and curricular innovation. Chapters present contributions that explore education through various international contexts and educational sectors, unravelling educational implications with (...) reference to the climate change crisis, migrant children in education, post-pandemic education, feminist activisism and other emergent issues. The book examines the ongoing iterations of the entanglement of colonization, modernity, and humanity with education to propose a possibility of education capable of upholding heterogeneous worlds. Curated with a global perspective on transversal relationalities and offering a unique outlook on posthuman thoughts and actions related to education, this book will be an important reading for students, researchers and academics in the fields of philosophy of education, sociology of education, post humanism and new materialism, curriculum studies, and educational research. (shrink)

We commonly evaluate search engines and the results they return, but what grounds those evaluations? One straightforward way of evaluating search engines appeals to their ability to satisfy the goals of the user. Are there, in addition, user-independent norms, that allow us to evaluate search engines in ways that may come apart from their ability to satisfy the individuals who use them? One way of grounding such norms appeals to moral or political considerations. I argue that in addition to those (...) norms, there are also distinct user-independent epistemic norms that apply to search engines. Evaluating search engines relative to them, however, requires us to appreciate the impact search engines have on our practices and norms of inquiry more broadly: by systematically altering the accessibility of information, search engines don’t just give us information but shape our collective imagination, and the categories it operates over. (shrink)

Scholars who have attempted to explain Iris Murdoch’s moral realism have done so in widely divergent ways, some characterizing her as a classical moral realist, others as a pragmatic moral realist, and still others as a “reflexive realist.”See, e.g., respectively, Fergus Kerr, “Back to Plato with Iris Murdoch,” in Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1997), 68–88; Sami Pihlstrom, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defence (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005); and Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The (...) Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For the purpose of this article, I follow Maria Antonaccio’s characterization of these realisms. See pages 3–4. None of these attempts, however, capture adequately Murdoch’s distinctive position. In an effort to improve upon these accounts, this article argues that a proper characterization of Murdoch’s view must regard her as developing a version of m. (shrink)

The first of the following two narratives is a personal reflection by the instructor of “Narrative Approaches to Bioethics,” an elective in the PhD program at the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University. The author argues that perhaps the primary goal of medical ethics education should be to show how to construct plausible and defensible interpretations of human experience and sensibly resolve the problems that these happenings occasion. To that end, the author engaged the sympathetic (...) reading capacities of his students by “thwarting” their expectations for medicalized case studies to “dissect” and instead chose works that invited careful readings of morally-complex literary works. One such reading was Huckleberry Finn, which the class read on the book’s 100th anniversary. Huckleberry Finn chronicles Huck’s search for truth, goodness and justice on the Mississippi River–a location the class explored on a field trip. The second narrative is the personal reflection of one of the students in this class and attests to the moral pedagogical power of Huck Finn. He relates the insights gleaned from a particular passage where Huck confronts moralistic dogmas. (shrink)

Proponents of natural normativity maintain that the moral evaluation of human beings shares a certain common conceptual pattern with the evaluation of other living things. The adequacy of this analogy has been challenged, with opponents arguing that because humans are rational, there is a gap between what is natural and what is normative for humans. Rational creatures, the argument goes, are importantly different from non-rational living things in that reason includes the ability to step back from what is natural and (...) ask whether it is good that our nature is constituted as it is. Micah Lott has attempted a response to this challenge. After evaluating his proposal, I offer a reply that attempts to resolve an important dilemma, namely, that the naturalist either lacks a satisfying response to the authority-of-nature challenge or is forced to abandon naturalism. (shrink)

Nos proponemos en nuestro trabajo resaltar los rasgos esenciales de la Filosofía, la función de la misma, el papel del filósofo como indagador del cosmos y de la sociedad, y en este contexto preguntamos y trato de responder cual es su relación con la política y el deber ser de la democracia. El filósofo es el pensador que estudia la naturaleza, la vida, el hombre y la sociedad, trascendiendo en su investigación lo que se presenta como materialidad fenoménica al simple (...) sentido común. Diferente al hombre común, al creyente o al dogmático, el filósofo explica los diferentes problemas del mundo a partir de �una toma de conciencia�: toma de conciencia de sí mismo, sobre el universo, sobre la sociedad y todas las cosas que lo rodean. La toma de conciencia es producto del principio que define y alumbra la conciencia del hombre: el Lógos. La Razón es el principio natural, político, moral y jurídico que rige la totalidad del universo. El Lógos es la fuente iluminadora que alumbra mi interioridad y lo que me hace conocer las leyes naturales, jurídicas, políticas y morales. Es por ello que estas leyes y estas normas pueden ser explicadas por la razón humana, puesto que el logos anida en la conciencia de los hombres. (shrink)

Philippa Foot’s attempt in Natural Goodness to defend the claim that moral goodness is a form of species-specific natural goodness and that immorality is a natural defect has elicited a number of challenges. For instance, Scott Woodcock presents the following dilemma: Foot’s account of natural normativity either yields morally objectionable results, or there exists an appeal to a normative standard not grounded in natural norms. I contend that the Footian Neo-Aristotelian approach possesses the resources necessary for an adequate answer to (...) this dilemma. I argue that Foot’s naturalism does wind up with a normative standard not grounded in empirically typical natural norms but that it is no Achilles’ heel. To support this thesis, I contend that such a standard appears inappropriate only if one assumes Foot is endeavoring to justify or establish a substantive conception of human goodness and defect, something she is not attempting. (shrink)

Although thick ethical concepts have been neglected in Murdochian scholarship, this article argues that they were central to the thought of Iris Murdoch. In the first section, the article provides a sustained account of thick ethical concepts in Murdoch's philosophy, demonstrating how these concepts align with and illuminate familiar aspects of her philosophical essays. The first section also explores the ways in which Murdoch's alternative account of moral concepts was at the heart of her overall attack on the noncognitivism of (...) her day. In the second section, the article provides a reading of The Black Prince and considers the ways that thick ethical concepts offer new insight into Murdoch's literary activity. It concludes by suggesting that studying Murdoch's philosophy and literature in light of thick ethical concepts reveals a deep unity between her two intellectual projects. (shrink)

Recent defenders of Philippa Foot, such as Michael Thompson and John Hacker-Wright, have argued that it is a mistake to think that Ft aims to justify a substantive conception of human soundness and defect. instead, she relies on the acceptance of certain groundless moral norms to underwrite her views about what is characteristically human. I maintain that this is a weakness and that the Footian-style proponent of natural normativity needs to provide a story about how we might achieve justified self-confidence (...) regarding moral norms. In this paper, I offer a coherentist model for doing so, thereby addressing the justification gap. (shrink)

In this dissertation I argue that Murdoch’s philosophical-ethical project is best understood as an anti-Enlightenment genealogical narrative. I maintain that her work consistently displays four fundamental features that typify genealogical accounts: 1) liberation from a dominant philosophical picture; 2) restoration of a previous philosophical picture wrongly dismissed; 3) restoration of practices no longer intelligible on the dominant view; and 4) recovery of an alternative grammar at odds with the dominant philosophical discourse. The dominant philosophical picture Murdoch subverts is the eclipse (...) of consciousness wrought by both the Anglo-analytic and Continental-existentialist traditions. Whether effaced by totalizing linguistic structures or identified with an empty choosing will, Murdoch argues that the forces present within her philosophical context are fundamentally hostile to an adequate conception of consciousness. Her genealogical project attempts to reassert the primacy of consciousness within this antagonistic climate by restoring a Platonic, erotic conception of consciousness. Additionally, Murdoch insists that consciousness is the fundamental form of moral being and that moral transformation, including the practices for that transformation, cannot be understood without a thick conception of consciousness. Murdoch’s account, therefore, refocuses our attention on important practices or techniques of moral purification rendered unintelligible on the dominant view. Finally, Murdoch recovers the Platonic metaphor of the Good, including the conceptual array in which the Good receives its meaning, in an attempt to develop an alternative grammar fit for the task of picturing the complexities and nuances of our ethical situation. I conclude by commenting on both the promising and problematic aspects of Murdoch’s legacy. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that narratives concerning Periclean Athens have mistakenly imposed modern conceptions of enlightenment onto the Greek world,and have therefore been blinded to crucial aspects of Socrates’s practice of moral reason giving. In contrast to the Kantian conception of enlightenment, which puts forth an image of the ideally enlightened person as an autonomous reasoner, one who refuses to be guided by another and who has the courage to throw off the chains of tradition and “think for oneself,” (...) I argue that Socrates provides us with a much different picture of the enlightened individual. Socrates’s practice of moral reasoning does not take the form of autonomous rationality that is antithetical to tradition, but rather his practice recognizes the rightful authority of tradition and custom in moral reason giving. Thus, rather than characterizing Socrates through a Kantian enlightenment reading, this paper argues that we should study Socrates through the lens of the sensus communis, a humanist concept articulated well by Giambattista Vico and Hans Georg-Gadamer. (shrink)

Recent cases have found factual disclosure requirements to be constitutional when imposed on abortion providers but unconstitutional when imposed on crisis pregnancy centers. This paper argues that the outcomes in both kinds of cases can be explained by courts' perception of abortion as an ideological, political, or moral act rather than as health care.

Available in English for the first time, this much-anticipated translation of Enrique Dussel's _Ethics of Liberation_ marks a milestone in ethical discourse. Dussel is one of the world's foremost philosophers. This treatise, originally published in 1998, is his masterwork and a cornerstone of the philosophy of liberation, which he helped to found and develop. Throughout his career, Dussel has sought to open a space for articulating new possibilities for humanity out of, and in light of, the suffering, dignity, and creative (...) drive of those who have been excluded from Western Modernity and neoliberal rationalism. Grounded in engagement with the oppressed, his thinking has figured prominently in philosophy, political theory, and liberation movements around the world. In _Ethics of Liberation_, Dussel provides a comprehensive world history of ethics, demonstrating that our most fundamental moral and ethical traditions did not emerge in ancient Greece and develop through modern European and North American thought. The obscured and ignored origins of Modernity lie outside the Western tradition. _Ethics of Liberation_ is a monumental rethinking of the history, origins, and aims of ethics. It is a critical reorientation of ethical theory. (shrink)

What, if anything, is epistemically wrong with beliefs involving accurate statistical generalizations about demographic groups? This paper argues that there is a perfectly general, underappreciated epistemic flaw which affects both ethically charged and uncharged statistical generalizations. Though common to both, this flaw can also explain why demographic statistical generalizations give rise to the concerns they do. To identify this flaw, we need to distinguish between the accuracy and the projectability of statistical beliefs. Statistical beliefs are accompanied by an implicit representation (...) of the statistic's modal profile. Their modal profile determines the circumstances in which they can legitimately be projected to unobserved instances. Errors in that implicit content can be compatible with the accuracy of the “bare” statistic, whilst systematically leading to downstream errors in reasoning, in a manner which reveals an epistemic flaw with an important aspect of the belief state itself. (shrink)

Visual perception relies on stored information and environmental associations to arrive at a determinate representation of the world. This opens up the disturbing possibility that our visual experiences could themselves be subject to a kind of racial bias, simply in virtue of accurately encoding previously encountered environmental regularities. This possibility raises the following question: what, if anything, is wrong with beliefs grounded upon these prejudicial experiences? They are consistent with a range of epistemic norms, including evidentialist and reliabilist standards for (...) justification. I argue that we will struggle to locate a flaw with these sorts of perceptual beliefs so long as we focus our analysis at the level of the individual and her response to information. We should instead broaden our analysis to include the social structure within which the individual is located. Doing so lets us identify a problem with the way in which unjust social structures in particular “gerrymander” the regularities an individual is exposed to, and by extension the priors their visual system draws on. I argue that in this way, social structures can cap perceptual skill. (shrink)

Engaging feminist and queer of color theory as well as work emerging from social movements, this piece critically examines narratives of impasse between Black Studies and Native Studies in the US, particularly assertions of incommensurability between the goals of Black freedom and Native sovereignty. The article outlines some of the theoretical debates between Black and Indigenous Studies that have calcified into impasses, focusing particularly on Afropessimist and Settler Colonial Studies’ framings of either slavery/anti-Blackness or settler colonialism as the foundational violence (...) around which a racist/settler modernity is structured. This article argues that approaches that emphasize relationality and the co-determination of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism can help us to think beyond a Black/Native impasse and towards a mutual futurity for both Black and Indigenous people in living in the place we currently call the United States. (shrink)

What does it take to be prejudiced against a particular group? And is prejudice always epistemically problematic, or are there epistemically innocent forms of prejudice? In this paper, I argue that certain important forms of prejudice can be wholly constituted by the differential accessibility of certain pieces of information. These accessibility relations constitute a salience structure. A subject is prejudiced against a particular group when their salience structure is unduly organised around that category. This is significant because it reveals that (...) prejudice does not require the presence of any explicit cognitive or emotive attitude, nor need it manifest in behaviour: it can be solely constituted by the organisation of information, where that information may be accurate and well-founded. Nonetheless, by giving an account of ‘undue organisation’ in epistemic terms, I show that this account is compatible with an understanding of prejudice as a negatively valenced epistemic category. (shrink)

The recent wave of same-sex marriage legalization marks the most significant human rights progress in decades. Nevertheless, the valuation effects on corporate America are unclear. While the arguments supporting marriage equality are largely in the domain of law and sociology, many prominent business leaders are actively engaged in campaigns advocating marriage equality. This suggests that the LGBT civil rights movement of our generation might have valuation implications for corporate America beyond human rights equality. This paper investigates the market perception of (...) state-level same-sex marriage legalization by examining the short-window market reactions to firms headquartered in a state. We find positive market reactions to firms headquartered in states that legally recognize marriage equality. Further, we find that the market views companies more favorably in: first-mover states before the Supreme Court ruling of United States v. Windsor, and states that have stronger anti-discrimination laws for the LGBT community. Our findings complement prior research that focuses on the economic consequences of firm-level LGBT human rights policies by examining the state/nation-level legal impact, adding a new dimension to ethical practices that can have economic consequences. (shrink)

It is an apparent truism about visual perception that we can see only what is visible to us. It is also frequently accepted that visual perception is dynamic: our visual experiences are extended through, and can evolve over time. I argue that taking the dynamism of visual experience seriously renders certain simplistic interpretations of the first claim, that a subject at a given time can see only what is visible to her at that time, false: we can be meaningfully said (...) to see invisible objects. This counterintuitive result in turn focuses our attention on the relationship between perception and memory. I show that it is difficult to draw a clear or simple distinction between the two. Memory and perception rely on, and blend with, one another. Together, these claims point us away from understanding visual perception as a simple reflection of the environment, and instead as closer to a process of dynamic modelling that draws together occurrent stimulation and stored information. (shrink)

Are there ever good epistemic reasons to neglect base rates? Assuming an empiricist modal epistemology, I argue that we face an interesting tension between some very plausible epistemic norms: a norm requiring us to proportion our beliefs to the evidence may facilitate knowledge of the actual world, whilst inhibiting our acquisition of modal knowledge—knowledge of how things could be, but are not. The potential for this tension in our epistemic norms is a significant result in its own right. It can (...) also rationalize certain forms of demographic base-rate neglect. (shrink)

What kind of content must visual states have if they are to offer direct (noninferential) justification for our external world beliefs? How must they present that content if the degree of justification they provide is to reflect the nuance of our changing visual experiences? This paper offers an argument for the view that visual states comprise not only a content, but a confidence relation to that content. This confidence relation lets us explain how visual states can offer noninferential perceptual justification (...) of differing degrees for external world beliefs. These confidence relations let visual states justify beliefs in a way that is sensitive to subtle differences in the character of our visual experiences, while still allowing that visual states give us direct access to the external world in virtue of their content. (shrink)

Amidst broad debates about the “New Green Revolution” in Africa, input-intensive agriculture is on the rise in some parts of Africa. This paper examines the underlying drivers of the recent and rapid adoption of herbicides and genetically modified seeds in the Burkina Faso cotton sector. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Houndé region, this article contends that economic and cultural dynamics—often considered separately in analyses of technology adoption—have co-produced a self-reinforcing technological treadmill. On the one hand, male (...) farmers seek to increase cotton production in response to an economic squeeze. At the same time, broader cultural shifts toward individualism have created labor shortages as a result of families splitting apart, parents putting their children in school, and some women and young men refusing to provide free labor. Male cotton farmers thus increase production by turning to labor-saving inputs like herbicides, but these inputs create more debt, further locking farmers into intensive production. This article thus expands on the classic concept of the technological treadmill, demonstrating how economic and cultural processes intersect within a process of agrarian change to drive labor-saving agricultural technology adoption in the Burkinabè cotton sector. This expanded treadmill concept illuminates the complex dynamics compelling farmers’ choices to opt into input-intensive agriculture, and also helps explain rising farmer differentiation, as poorer farmers struggle to stay afloat and wealthier farmers expand. (shrink)

I identify three aspects to the puzzle of the speckled hen: A general puzzle, an epistemic puzzle, and a puzzle for the representationalist. These puzzles rely on an underlying “pictorialist” assumption, that we visually perceive general, determinable properties only in virtue of determinate properties or more specific, local features of our visual experience. This assumption is mistaken: Visual perception frequently starts from a position of uncertainty, and is routinely able to acquire information about general properties in the absence of more (...) specific information. Acknowledging that visual indeterminacy is structured this way resolves all three puzzles of the speckled hen. (shrink)

Wouldn’t it be nice if hateful people were invariably stupid to boot, if their prejudiced attitudes could be attributed to some kind of irrationality? Tempting though this prospect is, Endre Begby warns us against it. Philosophers have tended, he writes, to assume that prejudiced beliefs are always ‘a symptom of some kind of breakdown of epistemic rationality’ (p. 2). This view is Begby's target. There can, he claims, be epistemically unimpeachable instances of prejudicial belief. That claim comes bound up with (...) a broader account of what prejudice is, and of the epistemic framework we should adopt when evaluating agents. The result is a thought-provoking account of prejudice, and a case study of the tensions inherent in the non-ideal project. By intertwining discussion of prejudice with a discussion of the appropriate epistemological framework for its evaluation, the book encourages reflection on a series of important methodological questions, and ultimately a broader interrogation of the role of philosophy in the study of prejudice. (shrink)

From Chaos to Creativity is a book that teaches readers how to build a productivity system that works with their art and with their lifestyle. Author Jessie Kwak helps readers tame the chaos that often surrounds a creative career and further enhance readers' creative output.

By confronting variable use, the variationist method can reveal patterns of subjectification of grammatical morphemes. Applying this method to the analysis of salir(se) ‘go out’ variation in Mexican Spanish oral data, we conclude that subjectification is manifested structurally in the tendency for middle-marked salirse to co-occur with first-person singular or referents close to the speaker, positive polarity and the past tense. Further comparative dialectal and diachronic data indicate the origins of the se -marked form in physical spatial deviation. Usage of (...) the form then extends to situations that denote deviation from social norms. We thus propose that the locus of subjectification of this counter-expectation marker is an increasingly speaker-based construal of expectation. This semantic change appears to proceed via absorption of contextual meaning in the frequently occurring + de ‘from’ construction. (shrink)

This title examines captive animal welfare past to present including zoos and marine parks. Legislation regulating the process is discussed as are opposing viewpoints and alternatives such as virtual reality parks. A timeline, glossary, index, and historic and color photos supplement easy-to-read text. An infographic shows how the reader can learn more and get involved"--Publisher's website.

This title examines farm animal rights past to present from small farms to industrial production. Legislation regulating the process is discussed as are opposing viewpoints and solutions such as local and organic farming and alternative diets. A timeline, glossary, index, and historic and color photos supplement easy-to-read text. An infographic shows how the reader can learn more and get involved"--Publisher's website.

The case of Mrs. J is interesting not only because of the difficult questions that the clinical ethicist must confront but also because of the intriguing way in which such cases make Western clinicians and ethicists confront their own oft-unspoken cultural ethical norms and presuppositions.

Patients with Limited English Proficiency are a protected class under the Civil Rights Act. However, clinical trials continue to remain largely inaccessible to this population. This article lays out the scientific, legal, and ethical rationales for the inclusion of LEP subjects in clinical research.

Imagine that you possess an indicator for a disease or illness that has nothing to do with your body. It is not a genetic predisposition to acquire cancer or a vice that raises the probability of contracting some dread disease, though estimates of its health risks have placed it on par with having diabetes. It has nothing to do with the environmental pollutants you are exposed to or whether you can afford health care. It is not a physical susceptibility that (...) renders you more easily reachable by the clutches of pathology. No, this indicator of health hinges on certain learned abilities and skills, and it is a barrier to health that is totally within the health field's power and resources to lift.The condition hinted at above is the inability to speak English proficiently in the United States. Today, more than one-sixth of the United States population speaks a language other than English at home, and this number is increasing rapidly. (shrink)

Gordon Belot argues that Bayesian theory is epistemologically immodest. In response, we show that the topological conditions that underpin his criticisms of asymptotic Bayesian conditioning are self-defeating. They require extreme a priori credences regarding, for example, the limiting behavior of observed relative frequencies. We offer a different explication of Bayesian modesty using a goal of consensus: rival scientific opinions should be responsive to new facts as a way to resolve their disputes. Also we address Adam Elga’s rebuttal to Belot’s analysis, (...) which focuses attention on the role that the assumption of countable additivity plays in Belot’s criticisms. (shrink)