It is a familiar point that we can use generic sentences to express generalisations that are tolerant to exceptions and then go on to state those exceptions explicitly. It is a less familiar point that switching the order of the generics has deleterious effects on their felicity. For example, the sequences ‘Ravens are black, but albino ravens aren’t’ is perfectly felicitous and judged to be true, whereas its reverse ‘Albino ravens aren’t black, but ravens are’ is infelicitous and contradictory-sounding. This (...) paper argues that such sequences pose a problem for extant theories of generics: while they have no trouble predicting the felicity of the first sequence of generics, they are unable to explain why reversing the order results in infelicity. I propose to account for these observations by adopting a dynamic semantic theory of generic sentences. (shrink)

Dwellers in the Land focuses on the realistic development of these bioregionally focused communities and the places where they are established to create a ...

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Contemporary picturebooks open up spaces for philosophical dialogues between people of all ages. As works of art, picturebooks offer unique opportunities to explore ideas and to create meaning collaboratively. This book considers censorship of certain well-known picturebooks, challenging the assumptions on which this censorship is based. Through a lively exploration of children's responses to these same picturebooks the authors paint a way of working philosophically based on respectful listening and creative and authentic interactions, rather (...) than scripted lessons. This dialogical process challenges much current practice in education. The authors propose that a courageous and critical practice of listening is central to the facilitation of mutually educative dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of education studies, philosophy of education, literacy teaching and learning, children's literature, childhood and pedagogy. (shrink)

There are two philosophical commitments requisite to Christian belief: that God is the ultimate mystery and that God is present and active in the world. Attempting to avoid the trappings of a radical distantiation and the immanent collapse of God and world, Frank Kirkpatrick argues for a theory of agency and action that preserves the mystery of God while providing a philosophically robust account of divine action in created time and space. Kirkpatrick proposes a way around the stalemates (...) that have stymied thought on divine agency and enters into conversation with significant figures in systematic theology."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the Hole Argument can be formulated without using the notion of isomorphism, and for this reason it is not threatened by the criticism of Halvorson and Manchak (Br J Philos Sci, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1086/719193). Following Earman and Norton (Br J Philos Sci 38, pp. 515–525, 1987), I divide the Hole Argument into two steps: the proof of the Gauge Theorem and the transition from the Gauge Theorem to the conclusion of radical indeterminism. In the analaysis (...) of the first step, I argue that the Gauge Theorem does not rely on the notion of isomorphism but on the notion of the diffeomorphism-invariance of the equations of local spacetime theories; however, for this approach to work, the definition of local spacetime theories needs certain amendments with respect to Earman and Norton’s formulation. In the analysis of the second step, I postulate that we should use the notion of radical indeterminism instead of indeterminism simpliciter and that we should not decide in advance what kind of maps are to be used in comparing models. Instead, we can tentatively choose some kind of maps for this purpose and check whether a given choice leads to radical indeterminism involving empirically indistinguishable models. In this way, the use of the notion of isomorphism is also avoided in the second step of the Hole Argument. A general picture is that physical equivalence can be established by means of an iterative procedure in which we examine various candidate classes of maps, and, depending on the outcomes, we need to broaden or narrow these classes. The Hole Argument can be viewed as a particular instance of this procedure. (shrink)

“One is not born a woman, but becomes one”, Simone de Beauvoir A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir's unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex. But despite her successes, she wondered if she had sold herself short. Her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has been billed as one of the most legendary love affairs of the twentieth (...) century. But for Beauvoir it came at a cost: for decades she was dismissed as an unoriginal thinker who 'applied' Sartre's ideas. In recent years new material has come to light revealing the ingenuity of Beauvoir's own philosophy and the importance of other lovers in her life. This ground-breaking biography draws on never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how Simone de Beauvoir became herself. (shrink)

W artykule przedstawiam genezę wprowadzenia w 2002 roku do brytyjskich szkół sektora państwowego przedmiotu obywatelstwo (Citizenship), omawiam jego założenia oraz prezentuję tłumaczenie jego sylabusa. Klasyfikuję przy tym ten przedmiot jako formę edukacji etycznej. W liberalnej tradycji angielskiej państwo unikało wpływania na rozstrzygnięcia aksjologiczne w obszarze wychowania, stąd wykazanie inicjatywy w sferze edukacji etycznej jest faktem znaczącym. W pierwszej części artykułu, odwołując się do historii państwowego szkolnictwa w Wielkiej Brytanii, rekonstruuję kontekst historyczny, w którym sytuuję wprowadzenie przedmiotu obywatelstwo i wskazuję na (...) czynniki, które doprowadziły do przełamania powściągliwości państwa w tej kwestii. W części drugiej wskazuję na bezpośrednie okoliczności wprowadzenia nowego przedmiotu przez brytyjską Partię Pracy. W części trzeciej analizuję teoretyczne podstawy programu przedmiotu obywatelstwo, które zostały przedstawione w dokumencie znanym jako „Raport Cricka”, opublikowanym w 1998 roku. Moim celem jest pokazanie, że edukacja obywatelska jest wartym rozważenia wariantem edukacji etycznej, a casus angielski może stanowić okazję do przyjrzenia się wyzwaniom, ograniczeniom i możliwościom, jakie wiążą się z wdrażaniem tego rodzaju edukacji. (shrink)

A scientifically proven method to overcome obstacles and make choices that lead us closer to our goals. WITH A FOREWORD BY MARTINA NAVRATILOVA What do weight gain, poor employee engagement, and climate change all have in common? All three are persistent problems for which solutions are known and readily available. Yet, on an individual and collective level, we continually make choices that lead us not closer to but further away from our stated objectives. Whether we choose the burger and fries (...) over the salad, top-down management over collaboration, or leniency over rigor in combatting climate change, it all comes down to the same thing. The Choice Point. The moment at which we each choose to take an action that we know will undermine our success, but we do it anyway. The Choice Point explains how we experience thousands of thoughts every day: 80 percent are negative, while only 5 percent are new thoughts. We make most of our decisions within two seconds, using mental autopilot systems that we've built through years of experiences, and some of our thoughts (like quitting during a challenge) can compromise our goals. But there's a strategy to change this: Functional Imagery Training (FIT). FIT teaches us how to pick the thoughts that deserve our attention, and how to stop the other, negative thoughts from impacting our actions. Through FIT, we can pause decisions that would typically conflict with our goals, lengthen our Choice Point, and go from passenger to driver of our own minds. Initially developed in 2005 by academics in the UK and Australia, with formal principles emerging through research in 2018, FIT blends motivational interviewing with imagery into a user-friendly model so we can learn, adapt, and adjust our behavior to go beyond what we think is possible. (shrink)

Provides character education through different scenarios that demonstrate children being responsible.

Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. (...) Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life--understood as both a biological and social phenomenon--it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. "Anthropocene" names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe. Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink "life" and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist's method; it also includes a photographic project by the author."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has (...) changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? (shrink)

Artykuł ma na celu przybliżenie specyfiki aktorstwa radiowego. Wskazuje na podobieństwa i różnice z teatralną i telewizyjną formą sztuki aktorskiej, określa cechy wyróżniające grę w teatrze radiowym w stosunku do innych mediów. Omawia także metody pracy reżyserów Teatru Polskiego Radia z aktorami podczas prób i nagrań słuchowisk.

For her entire childhood, Joanna's father, Bob, had a ritual: wake up at dawn, walk the dog, and sit down at the kitchen table with a blank pad of paper and plenty of colored markers to craft notes for his two children. Over the years, word games and puzzles for five-year-olds morphed into thoughtful guidance and reflections for his teenagers approaching adulthood. Now, with more than 3,500 of her father's colorful notes in hand, Joanna has decided that the (...) lessons tucked inside are worth sharing. Folded Wisdom highlights the collection of Bob's notes, telling a story filled with universal values that encourages meaningful self-reflection about how we all face successes and failures; express happiness and sadness; and communicate frustration, praise, and love to one another. Heartfelt and full of possibility for the future, a father's folded notes and drawings are timeless reminders of love. (shrink)

The question of whether AI systems such as robots can or should be afforded moral agency or patiency is not one amenable either to discovery or simple reasoning, because we as societies constantly reconstruct our artefacts, including our ethical systems. Consequently, the place of AI systems in society is a matter of normative, not descriptive ethics. Here I start from a functionalist assumption, that ethics is the set of behaviour that maintains a society. This assumption allows me to exploit the (...) theoretical biology of sociality and autonomy to explain our moral intuitions. From this grounding I extend to consider possible ethics for maintaining either human- or of artefact-centred societies. I conclude that while constructing AI systems as either moral agents or patients is possible, neither is desirable. In particular, I argue that we are unlikely to construct a coherent ethics in which it it is ethical to afford AI moral subjectivity. We are therefore obliged not to build AI we are obliged to. (shrink)

In this case study, I consider Mr. A, a Jehovah’s Witness with chronic vertebral osteomyelitis in need of surgical debridement. Prior to proceeding to the OR, he was unwilling either to explicitly consent to or refuse blood transfusion, while indicating he was open to transfusion intraoperatively, if the team judged it necessary. Ethics was consulted to determine if it would be morally justifiable for the team to proceed with blood transfusion during the course of surgery without Mr. A’s documented consent (...) to being transfused. I argue that in this case, what might be termed indirect consent—namely, delegating decision-making regarding some possible course of action without explicitly consenting to the course of action itself—may be sufficient for discharging the clinician’s ethical obligation to obtain consent. Identifying information has been changed or omitted to protect patient confidentiality. (shrink)

A person who is liable to defensive harm has forfeited his rights against the imposition of the harm, and so is not wronged if that harm is imposed. A number of philosophers, most notably Jeff McMahan, argue for an instrumental account of liability, whereby a person is liable to defensive harm when he is either morally or culpably responsible for an unjust threat of harm to others, and when the imposition of defensive harm is necessary to avert the threatened unjust (...) harm. Others may favour a purely noninstrumental account of liability: one that looks only to the past behaviour of the potentially liable person. We argue that both views are vulnerable to serious objections. Instead we develop and defend a new view of liability to defensive harm: the pluralist account. The pluralist account states that liability to defensive harm has at least two bases. First, if an attacker is morally or culpably responsible for an unjust attack then he has forfeited what we call his agency right, and in doing so he has made himself partially liable to defensive harm. Whether the attacker is fully liable to defensive harm depends, however, on whether the imposition of defensive harm would infringe a different right held by the attacker: his humanitarian right. Humanitarian rights are rights to be provided with urgently needed resources or to be protected from serious harms when others can do so at reasonably low cost. We argue the pluralist account avoids the objections to which the instrumental and noninstrumental views are vulnerable, coheres with our intuitive reactions in a wide range of cases, and sheds new light on the way different rights combine to determine a person's liability to suffer harm. (shrink)

In the recent philosophical literature, several counterexamples to the interpretative principle that symmetry-related models are physically equivalent have been suggested The Oxford handbook of philosophy of physics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, Noûs 52:946–981, 2018; Fletcher in Found Phys 50:228–249, 2020). Arguments based on these counterexamples can be understood as arguments from scientific practice of roughly the following form: because in scientific practice such-and-such symmetry-related models are treated as representing distinct physical situations, these models indeed represent distinct physical situations. In (...) this paper, a strategy for analysing arguments of this type is presented and applied to the examples that can be found in the literature. I argue that if we are exclusively interested in models understood as representing entire possible worlds, arguments from scientific practice should involve some additional assumptions to guarantee they are relevant for models understood in this way. However, none of the examples presented in the literature satisfy all these additional assumptions, which leads to the conclusion that arguments from scientific practice based on these examples do not undermine the interpretative principle that different symmetry-related models represent the same possible world. (shrink)

Kevin Dorst has recently pointed out an apparently puzzling consequence of denying epistemic luminosity: given some natural-sounding bridging principles between knowledge, credence, and indicative conditionals, the denial of epistemic luminosity licenses the knowledge and assertability of abominable-sounding conditionals of the form ⌜If I don’t know that ϕ, then ϕ⌝. We provide a general and systematic examination of this datum by testing Dorst’s claim against various semantics for the indicative conditional in the setting of epistemic logic. Our conclusion is that, regardless (...) of whether knowledge is luminous, the knowability of these conditionals is highly sensitive to the correct semantic analysis of the indicative conditional. Moreover, standard pragmatic resources can explain away the infelicity of such assertions. As it stands, the datum does not tell against epistemic non-luminosity. (shrink)

Conferring legal personhood on purely synthetic entities is a very real legal possibility, one under consideration presently by the European Union. We show here that such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome. While AI legal personhood may have some emotional or economic appeal, so do many superficially desirable hazards against which the law protects us. We review the utility and history of legal fictions of personhood, discussing salient precedents where such fictions resulted in abuse or incoherence. We (...) conclude that difficulties in holding “electronic persons” accountable when they violate the rights of others outweigh the highly precarious moral interests that AI legal personhood might protect. (shrink)

Draws on a lifetime of wisdom to offer a re-focus on the natural world, where readers can find the strength and spiritual nourishment to envision a new future for humanity built on a sustainable relationship with the earth.

Draws on a lifetime of wisdom to offer a re-focus on the natural world, where readers can find the strength and spiritual nourishment to envision a new future for humanity built on a sustainable relationship with the earth.

Written specifically for education studies students, this accessible text offers a clear introduction to philosophy of education. It skilfully guides readers through this challenging and sometimes complex area bringing key philosophical ideas and questions to life in the context and practice of education. Considering the implications of educational trends and movements through a variety of philosophical lenses such as Marxism, feminism, ethics and democracy, the book explores enduring themes in philosophy of education. Features include: individual tasks and group activities to (...) promote discussion case studies notes boxes to highlight further reading; chapter overviews and summaries Drawing on readers' own experiences of education, the book reveals the connections between philosophical ideas and educational policy and practice. Part of the Foundations in Education Studies series, this timely textbook is essential reading for students coming to the study of philosophy of education for the first time. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the processes of racialisation on the example of biomedical research. We argue that applying the concept of racialisation in biomedical research can be much more precise, informative and suitable than currently used categories, such as race and ethnicity. For this purpose, we construct a model of the different processes affecting and co-shaping the racialisation of an individual, and consider these in relation to biomedical research, particularly to studies on hypertension. We finish with a discussion on (...) the potential application of our proposition to institutional guidelines on the use of racial categories in biomedical research. (shrink)

Of late, resistance has become a central notion in political theory, standing at the heart of attempts to respond to the dilemmas of contemporary times. However, many accounts tend to ascribe to an idealised, heroic view. In this view, resistance represents a clearcut action against injustice and stems from individuals’ conscious choice and their unwavering ethical commitment to the cause. Some liberal scholars, most notably Candice Delmas and Jason Brennan, have argued that citizens of democratic societies have a moral duty (...) to resist state-sanctioned injustice. This resistance occurs either through ‘principled – civil or uncivil – disobedience’ or through ‘defensive actions’. While acknowledging that pervasive injustice can compromise our cognitive and moral capacities, however, their articulation of our political obligation to resist refrains from a sustained examination of the moral dilemmas, uncertainties and risks that arise when fighting systemic oppression. (shrink)