This book proposes a new, rationally-justified, evidence-based theory concerning values. It discusses practical applications of these universally-applicable values, especially to morality, society, education and upbringing. In doing so, it discusses sexism, sexuality, racism, freedom, politics, law, animal rights, environmental ethics, health-care, war, economics, psychology, science, literature, religion, and much more.

A Non-Technical Introduction to Ethnomethodological Investigations of the Foundations of Mathematics through the Use of a Theorem of Euclidean Geometry* I ...

This book tries to solve fundamental normative moral, social, political, educational, legal, etc. problems. It defends a uniquely evidence-based, objective theory. Part I mainly explains and defends the theory's foundation and general guidelines. Part II discusses specific practical applications at length.

Throughout the darkest moments of human history, evildoers have convinced communities to turn on groups that are regarded as in some way other and, by starting to think of them as less than human, persecute or even eliminate them. We can all recognize the unfathomable evils of dehumanization in slavery, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the Jim Crow South, but we are not free from its power today. With climate change and political upheaval driving millions of refugees worldwide to (...) leave their homes, we are likely to see more and more of this ugly and persistent phenomenon. What are we to do? Drawing on his deep and wide-ranging knowledge of the history, psychology, and politics of dehumanization, David Livingstone Smith shows us how to recognize it and how to fight back. (shrink)

The Harvard Graduate School of Education convocation speech, praised as "powerful" by Hillary Rodham Clinton in Teen Vogue and "inspired" by Justin Timberlake, that has offered inspiration to millions around the world In Lift Off, Donovan Livingston offers a groundbreaking rallying call about education, race, and the true nature of equality. In emotionally charged spoken-word poetry, Livingston shares a message of hope and hard truths, declaring that education can become an equalizer only if we first acknowledge the inequality and racial (...) divides holding back America's future. Livingston is dedicated to helping young people reach their celestial potential, and in his galvanizing commencement address, now adapted for the first time to the page, he calls on us to raise our voices on behalf of all children, as their brighter futures can light up our own. Together, we can lift off! Praise for Donovan Livingston "Donovan Livingston gave a powerful speech at the Harvard Graduate School of Education's convocation. In a spoken-word poem, he shared his struggles in life and urged his fellow graduates to fight inequality and inspire students. Donovan's message hit home. [He is] part of a rising generation that's. standing up to some of the biggest challenges in the world today."--Hillary Rodham Clinton, Teen Vogue "These are the words, and Donovan Livingston's voice and spirit are the music, but in any form, this rare graduation speech tells us that learning is full of bias yet can lead us to the stars."--Gloria Steinem "Donovan Livingston's Lift Offis our youth's gift to us. In this joyous young man's voice is the promise of tomorrow."--James McBride. (shrink)

The livingthinglikeness of language -- Words and things -- Thirds and wings -- The order of things in a nutshell -- Artistic interlude -- An introductory vignette -- Sometimes a cigar -- On meaning -- Fact and fiction -- How bad facts make good theories -- Self reference I -- Self reference II -- Autopoiesis -- Poetic interlude -- Performativity I -- Performativity II -- Artistic interlude: the abyss of distinction -- Performativity III -- The return to resemblance -- Gravity (...) cannot be held responsible? -- Queer in a queer world -- An alienist history. (shrink)

Kit Fine’s arguments in Essence and Modality are widely accepted as being a decisive blow against modal essentialism. A selection of replies exist that have done little to counter the general view that modally construed essence is out of touch with what we really mean when we make essentialist claims. I argue that Fine’s arguments fail to strike a decisive blow, and I suggest a new interpretation of the debate that shows why Fine’s arguments fall short of achieving their goal.

The problem of explaining consciousness remains a problem about the meaning of language: the ordinary language of consciousness in which we define and express our sensations, thoughts, dreams and memories. This book argues that the problem arises from a quest that has taken shape over the twentieth century, and that the analysis of history provides new resources for understanding and resolving it. Paul Livingston traces the development of the characteristic practices of analytic philosophy to problems about the relationship of experience (...) to linguistic meaning, focusing on the theories of such philosophers as Carnap, Schlick, Neurath, Husserl, Ryle, Putnam, Fodor and Wittgenstein. Clearly written and avoiding technicalities, this book will be eagerly sought out by professionals and graduate students in philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

In this book, Livingston develops the political implications of formal results obtained over the course of the twentieth century in set theory, metalogic, and computational theory. He argues that the results achieved by thinkers such as Cantor, Russell, Godel, Turing, and Cohen, even when they suggest inherent paradoxes and limitations to the structuring capacities of language or symbolic thought, have far-reaching implications for understanding the nature of political communities and their development and transformation. Alain Badiou's analysis of logical-mathematical structures forms (...) the backbone of his comprehensive and provocative theory of ontology, politics, and the possibilities of radical change. Through interpretive readings of Badiou's work as well as the texts of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Livingston develops a formally based taxonomy of critical positions on the nature and structure of political communities. These readings, along with readings of Parmenides and Plato, show how the formal results can transfigure two interrelated and ancient problems of the One and the Many: the problem of the relationship of a Form or Idea to the many of its participants, and the problem of the relationship of a social whole to its many constituents. (shrink)

This paper examines the reaction of Victorian Presbyterian culture to the theory of evolution in late nineteenth century Scotland. Focusing on the role played by the Free Church theologian, biblical critic and anthropological theorist, William Robertson Smith, it argues that, compared with Smith’s radical scholarship, evolutionary theories did little to disturb the Scottish Calvinist mind-set. After surveying the attitudes to evolution among a range of theological leaders, the paper examines Smith’s fundamentally threatening proposals and the circumstances that led to the (...) public spectacle of his dismissal from his Free Church professorship. It concludes by suggesting that, ironically, even while his fellow churchmen were making their peace with Darwin, Smith was mobilising an evolutionary outlook that challenged Scotland’s conservative religious culture to its very core. (shrink)

In aesthetics, the topic of intentions comes up most often in the perennial debate between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists over standards of interpretation. The underlying assumptions about the nature and functions of intentions are, however, rarely explicitly developed, even though divergent and at times tendentious premises are often relied upon in this controversy. Livingston provides a survey of contentions about the nature and status of intentions and intentionalist psychology more generally, arguing for an account that recognizes the multiple functions fulfilled by (...) intentions in the lives of temporally situated agents who deliberate over what to do, settle on ends and means, and try to realize some of their plans. Artists’ intentions are the same sorts of attitudes that we attribute to ourselves and to others as we attempt to describe, explain, and predict our actions. As such, intentions are relevant not only to debates over the interpretation of works of art but also to a range of other basic topics in the philosophy of art, including artistic creation and authorship, the ontology of art, the nature of texts, works, versions, and life-works, and the status and nature of fiction and fictional truth. With regard to the controversy over the interpretation of art, Livingston advocates a ‘partial’ intentionalism. Intentions are never infallible, so there is a conceptual gap between the completed work and the intentions that initiated and guided its making. Yet in spite of the fallibility of intentions and of our beliefs and claims about them, intentions regularly contribute to the determination of a work’s features, including implicit meanings, the recognition of which requires the uptake of the artist’s intentional design. Partial intentionalism also finds support in the idea that at least one sort of artistic value depends on the artist’s skilful accomplishment of intentions. (shrink)

Here Donald Livingston traces this distinction through all of Hume's writings and reveals its relevance for contemporary discussion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transforming Music EducationCarolyn LivingstonEstelle R. Jorgensen, Transforming Music Education ( Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003)Estelle Jorgensen's vision of the transformation of our profession is lofty but not ostentatious, exacting but not rigid. The dream she unveils in her latest book, Transforming Music Education, "challenges music educators to raise their expectations of themselves, their colleagues, their students, and their publics; to look beyond the ordinary; and to aspire (...) to distinction in every facet of its enterprise" (145). A powerfully convincing writer, Jorgensen, author of In Search of Music Education, begins appropriately in her preface by detailing the reasons why music education needs to be transformed. Many of her students and former students at Indiana University are not only satisfied with the status quo in music education, but demonstrate reluctance about even considering the need for change. Others, she has found, long for improvement, having encountered paternalistic administrators, loneliness, fear, and a loss of enjoyment in teaching and in music. Although the author is happy for the former group, she empathizes with the latter. "Gone are the hope, joy, and love of connecting with students or of the art that led them to teaching in the first place," she writes. "In their place I hear the voices of weariness, discouragement, and ennui" (x). [End Page 211]In addition, Jorgensen has observed the anti-intellectualism abroad in education, evident in a variety of symptoms. One of the most troubling is the idolization of scientific research resulting in a loss of interest in philosophical and historical inquiry. She decries the "declining regard for the long and distinguished narratives of education and for the critical insights that would help guard the profession against repeating past mistakes and making ill-conceived plans. Pretentious jargon invoked by educational scientists and theorists often cloaks a paucity of ideas frequently unintelligible to the teachers it is supposed to benefit, and few teachers read it," she asserts (x).Pointing out that we have lost much of our culture other than that promoted in the popular media, Jorgensen reminds us that, after graduation, high school students no longer play their instruments and that some churches now project words to hymns on large screens for parishioners no longer willing or able to read from a hymnal. She is as appalled as the rest of us by restaurant employees' attempts to sing "Happy Birthday" to celebrating patrons, and she notices that even consumers of culture increasingly rely on media opinions for assistance with choices about art exhibits, books, recordings, and performances.The resegregation of schools, the "back to basics" movement, and public apathy about education are other indicators that transformation is needed. If these reasons are not enough, Jorgensen states that ongoing renewal will always be a necessity for education. Since education is often defined as the process by which culture is transmitted, musicians and artists, as purveyors of culture, Jorgensen believes, can create a humane and holistic music education to serve as a model for education in general. "To conceive of music education as enculturation... requires placing culture at the heart of education," she states. "Regarding music along with other arts as important manifestations of human expression suggests that they should be central and essential to a complete education" (9).The purpose of each chapter is clear from its beginning, and the chapters are concisely summarized. The first, "Setting the Stage," discusses several problems of our present society as they affect education. Jorgensen considers possible resistance to transformation and the need for support from organizations like MENC and NASM. She maintains that transformation can only be achieved through the cooperation of many groups and individuals. One of the most difficult problems would seem to be the one that occurs when groups who have previously been oppressed, such as members of female, economic, ethnic, racial, religious, or other minorities, achieve a measure of power and then begin to behave toward others as their oppressors behaved toward them. She cites the work of Paulo Freire who believes that this phenomenon can only be eradicated through emancipatory education.Jorgensen gives homage to past and present music educators who have already recognized the need for change. She makes the point... (shrink)

Nosology is the science of defining and classifying diseases. Meta‐nosology is the study of how we do this, on what principles nosological practices are based, the quality of the resulting medical taxonomy, and primarily whether/how diseases can be defined better than they are now. In modern Western medicine, there are a wide variety of ways in which diseases are defined and categorized. Examples include by the symptoms they present with (syndromic), their underlying causes (etiological), the biological mechanisms involved (pathogenetic), available (...) treatments, historical precedent, and through diagnostic exclusion. Here, I explore the hypothesis that how we define diseases has an impact on how (and how effectively) we research and treat them. I explore the philosophical implications of this thesis and suggest a direction that the underlying metaphysics of disease definition might follow. I conclude that further research is warranted into whether our current disease definitions could be improved upon. (shrink)

The increasingly popular idea that cinematic fictions can "do" philosophy raises some difficult questions. Who is actually doing the philosophizing? Is it the philosophical commentator who reads general arguments or theories into the stories conveyed by a film? Could it be the film-maker, or a group of collaborating film-makers, who raise and try to answer philosophical questions with a film? Is there something about the experience of films that is especially suited to the stimulation of worthwhile philosophical reflections? In the (...) first part of this book, Paisley Livingston surveys positions and arguments surrounding the cinema's philosophical value. He raises criticisms of bold theses in this area and defends a moderate view of film's possible contributions to philosophy. In the second part of the book he defends an intentionalist approach that focuses on the film-makers' philosophical background assumptions, sources, and aims. Livingston outlines intentionalist interpretative principles as well as an account of authorship in cinema. The third part of the book exemplifies this intentionalist approach with reference to the work of Ingmar Bergman. Livingston explores the connection between Bergman's work and the Swedish director's primary philosophical source-a treatise in philosophical psychology authored by the Finnish philosopher, Eino Kaila. Bergman proclaimed that reading this book was a tremendous philosophical experience for him and that he "built on this ground." With reference to materials in the newly created Ingmar Bergman archive, Livingston shows how Bergman took up Kaila's topics in his cinematic explorations of motivated irrationality, inauthenticity, and the problem of self-knowledge. (shrink)

Book review of The Philosophy of Art. By STEPHEN DAVIES.. Blackwell. 2006.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transforming Music EducationCarolyn LivingstonEstelle R. Jorgensen, Transforming Music Education ( Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003)Estelle Jorgensen's vision of the transformation of our profession is lofty but not ostentatious, exacting but not rigid. The dream she unveils in her latest book, Transforming Music Education, "challenges music educators to raise their expectations of themselves, their colleagues, their students, and their publics; to look beyond the ordinary; and to aspire (...) to distinction in every facet of its enterprise" (145). A powerfully convincing writer, Jorgensen, author of In Search of Music Education, begins appropriately in her preface by detailing the reasons why music education needs to be transformed. Many of her students and former students at Indiana University are not only satisfied with the status quo in music education, but demonstrate reluctance about even considering the need for change. Others, she has found, long for improvement, having encountered paternalistic administrators, loneliness, fear, and a loss of enjoyment in teaching and in music. Although the author is happy for the former group, she empathizes with the latter. "Gone are the hope, joy, and love of connecting with students or of the art that led them to teaching in the first place," she writes. "In their place I hear the voices of weariness, discouragement, and ennui" (x). [End Page 211]In addition, Jorgensen has observed the anti-intellectualism abroad in education, evident in a variety of symptoms. One of the most troubling is the idolization of scientific research resulting in a loss of interest in philosophical and historical inquiry. She decries the "declining regard for the long and distinguished narratives of education and for the critical insights that would help guard the profession against repeating past mistakes and making ill-conceived plans. Pretentious jargon invoked by educational scientists and theorists often cloaks a paucity of ideas frequently unintelligible to the teachers it is supposed to benefit, and few teachers read it," she asserts (x).Pointing out that we have lost much of our culture other than that promoted in the popular media, Jorgensen reminds us that, after graduation, high school students no longer play their instruments and that some churches now project words to hymns on large screens for parishioners no longer willing or able to read from a hymnal. She is as appalled as the rest of us by restaurant employees' attempts to sing "Happy Birthday" to celebrating patrons, and she notices that even consumers of culture increasingly rely on media opinions for assistance with choices about art exhibits, books, recordings, and performances.The resegregation of schools, the "back to basics" movement, and public apathy about education are other indicators that transformation is needed. If these reasons are not enough, Jorgensen states that ongoing renewal will always be a necessity for education. Since education is often defined as the process by which culture is transmitted, musicians and artists, as purveyors of culture, Jorgensen believes, can create a humane and holistic music education to serve as a model for education in general. "To conceive of music education as enculturation... requires placing culture at the heart of education," she states. "Regarding music along with other arts as important manifestations of human expression suggests that they should be central and essential to a complete education" (9).The purpose of each chapter is clear from its beginning, and the chapters are concisely summarized. The first, "Setting the Stage," discusses several problems of our present society as they affect education. Jorgensen considers possible resistance to transformation and the need for support from organizations like MENC and NASM. She maintains that transformation can only be achieved through the cooperation of many groups and individuals. One of the most difficult problems would seem to be the one that occurs when groups who have previously been oppressed, such as members of female, economic, ethnic, racial, religious, or other minorities, achieve a measure of power and then begin to behave toward others as their oppressors behaved toward them. She cites the work of Paulo Freire who believes that this phenomenon can only be eradicated through emancipatory education.Jorgensen gives homage to past and present music educators who have already recognized the need for change. She makes the point... (shrink)

George Cotkin's paper is an earnest effort to resolve the supposed conflict between inherited historical circumstances and the enunciation of ethical principles-as if necessity and freedom, past and present, somehow exclude each other; as if "moral history" is something new; as if the injection of an authorial voice or point of view gets us beyond the absurdities of "objectivity." Clearly Cotkin has not been reading historical monographs published since, say, 1935. Is there a field not reanimated by the moral problems (...) of exclusion, oppression, and obligation framed by the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and then the "new social movements" organized around questions of identity and sexuality? (shrink)

Philosophical discussion of emotional responses to fiction has been dominated by work on the paradox of fiction, which is often construed as asking whether and how we can experience genuine emotions in reaction to fiction. One may also ask more generally how we ought to respond to fictional works, a question that has to do both with what we should do when reacting to fiction and with what we should and should not let happen to us. It is possible to (...) delineate any principles regarding the rationality, and more generally, the appropriateness of emotional responses to fiction? (shrink)

Some contemporary discussion about the explanation of consciousness substantially recapitulates a decisive debate about reference, knowledge and justification from an earlier stage of the analytic tradition. In particular, I argue that proponents of a recently popular strategy for accounting for an explanatory gap between physical and phenomenal facts – the so-called “phenomenal concept strategy” – face a problem that was originally fiercely debated by Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. The question that is common to both the older and the contemporary discussion (...) is that of how the presence or presentation of phenomenal experiences can play a role in justifying beliefs or judgments about them. This problem is, moreover, the same as what was classically discussed as the problem of acquaintance. Interestingly, both physicalist and non-physicalist proponents of the phenomenal concept strategy today face this problem. I consider briefly some recent attempts to solve it and conclude that, although it is prima facie very plausible that acquaintance exists, we have, as yet, no good account of it. (shrink)

Paisley Livingston here addresses contemporary controversies over the role of "theory" within the humanistic disciplines. In the process, he suggests ways in which significant modern texts in the philosophy of science relate to the study of literature. Livingston first surveys prevalent views of theory, and then proposes an alternative: theory, an indispensable element in the study of literature, should be understood as a Cogently argued and informed in its judgments, this book points the way to a fuller understanding of the (...) special contribution that literary knowledge may make within the human sciences. (shrink)