En suspendant la violence de ses passions et de ses désirs, l'homme se montre capable d'une relation harmonieuse et respectueuse avec lui-même, les êtres et les choses, dans un dialogue avec la douceur de la vérité et la beauté de l'art qui la recrée. On étudiera comment, à l'âge humaniste et classique, les modernes ont pensé la douceur à partir de la relecture des sources antiques et chrétiennes dans les divers champs du savoir de la poétique à l'éthique, de la (...) métaphysique à l'esthétique et dessiné un idéal difficilement définissable et aisément rompu."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In 1878 two ‘Nightingale’ nurses arrived in the British colony of Ceylon to initiate a training programme for indigenous women in the skills and values of what was then termed ‘scientific nursing’. These two women were the first of a succession of British women who went to the colony to nurse in its hospitals and to train Ceylonese women for the profession. Using the official records of the colonial government held in the National Archives, Kew and the records of the (...) Overseas Nursing Association in the Rhodes House Collection, Oxford, this paper explores both the professional and social experiences of these women. This paper also analyses the role that these representatives of the colonial state played in the development of an indigenous nursing profession and concludes that their presence in the colony ultimately left an ambiguous legacy. In their role as trainers of indigenous women, they furthered the development and spread of a Western nursing profession in the colony's hospitals. At the same time, however, their continuing dominance of training and the positions of responsibility was an inhibiting factor in the ability of indigenous nurses to organise and professionalise. Whereas the doctors, trained in the colony's Medical College, achieved registration as early as 1905, the nurses had to wait until 1949, a year after independence, before their qualification was recognised and protected. Nursing remained throughout the colonial period therefore, even more so than at the metropolitan centre, the ‘Cinderella’ of the medical professions. (shrink)

The ethical problem in the present time.--The ethical principle.--A defence of the ethical principle.--Evolution of the ethical principle.--Morality and religion.--The present status of morality.

Two university English seminars were video-recorded to provide data for a pilot project investigating how English is produced or 'actualized' in teaching and learning encounters. The project is positioned within three contexts: national policy about higher education teaching; current research about higher education pedagogy; and, the history and politics of university English. The main aim of the article is to explicate a methodology that takes as its data actual moments of teaching, captured on video tape, and the teachers' commentary on (...) them. It analyses these records with reference to theories about rhetoric. (shrink)

Moral psychology studies the features of cognition, judgement, perception and emotion that make human beings capable of moral action. Perspectives from feminist and race theory immensely enrich moral psychology. Writers who take these perspectives ask questions about mind, feeling, and action in contexts of social difference and unequal power and opportunity. These essays by a distinguished international cast of philosophers explore moral psychology as it connects to social life, scientific studies, and literature.

A central theme in the scholarly literature on Enlightenment Europe concerns the increased focus on the role of reason in the development of European thought, especially in the development of the new science by the natural philosophers. As a consequence, there is a tendency in both philosophical scholarship and teaching to bind philosophy and science tightly together. While there is certainly much that is correct in this approach, one motivation for pluralizing philosophy’s past is that this story leaves out a (...) great deal that is important in Enlightenment views of reason. We argue, using as an example the work of figures like Margaret Cavendish, that reason was significantly broader in scope—and that developments in science were paralleled by equally important advances in music, art, literature, medicine, philosophy, and other areas. In recognizing the lack of a sharp boundary between these areas, an inclusive canon of Enlightenment philosophy gives us this richer notion of reason. Integrating figures such as Cavendish into the canon helps us to see that the narrow focus on the scientific version of reason within Enlightenment scholarship creates a false distinction between science and the humanities and misses out on the humanistic ends for which we engage in philosophy. (shrink)

feminist scholars studying gender in the Pacific have analyzed the conditions of Pacific Islander women with an acute analysis on how the intersections of gender, culture, colonization, and strategies of decolonization aid in framing the experiences of Pacific Islander women. Like many introduced Western institutions in Hawai'i, medical practices in hospitals and clinics have been both criticized and welcomed among Pacific Islanders. Feminist anthropologists Vicki Lukere and Margaret Jolly have diagnosed these conflicting receptions to medical institutions in the Pacific (...) Islands as a reliance on a problematic binary of "modern" and "traditional" medical care. According to Lukere and Jolly, the... (shrink)

In 1913 the British Idealist Sir Henry Jones (1852-1922) spoke of journalism as an 'organic filament'2 that helped unite individuals in a greater citizenship. This Idealist perception of the media coalesced with the contemporaneous growth of a broader notion of journalism as a fourth estate. Beginning with the social philosophy of Edward Caird (1835-1908) and its extension into the Idealist conception of journalism, this article explores the attitudes of Idealist thinkers in Britain and Australia toward print and radio media. (...) It further examines how Idealist belief in journalism translated into publication of Idealist thought. The media and academic publications of four Australian Idealists are considered. Also identified is a sympathetic Australian media environment. Through this study emerges an Australian Idealism that, whilst anchored within the broader empire of Idealist philosophy, acquired a local, public form through a consistent and, at times, intensive use of print and radio media. (shrink)

Is the universe really governed by a small set of unifying fundamental laws, as many thinkers have claimed since ancient times? Philosophers who call themselves naturalists believe that the way to settle such questions is to look carefully at what empirical science tells us. In this book, Margaret Morrison argues that if we really do this, we find that science currently does not give us any reason to believe the common picture of the world in which everything can be (...) reduced to a vanishingly small set of entities and forces. Like Nancy Cartwright and John Dupree, Morrison believes that science reveals a world of numerous different sorts of entities and processes, described by different sorts of explanation. Trying to come up with unified descriptions of phenomena does play an important role in science, says Morrison, but there are different types of unification. The sort in which one set of entities can be reductively identified with another occurs rarely. What we find more often are various ways of subsuming different phenomena under similar mathematical formalisms. An urge to unify, in different guises, is an important research motivator, Morrison argues, but it is not the sort of monolithic engine of science that many make it out to be. (shrink)

The everyday concept of a social group is approached by examining the concept of going for a walk together, an example of doing something together, or "shared action". Two analyses requiring shared personal goals are rejected, since they fail to explain how people walking together have obligations and rights to appropriate behavior, and corresponding rights of rebuke. An alternative account is proposed: those who walk together must constitute the "plural subject" of a goal. The nature of plural subjecthood, the thesis (...) that social groups are plural subjects, and the relation of these ideas to Rousseau's and Hobbes 's, are briefly explored. (shrink)

Seneca stands apart from other philosophers of Greece and Rome not only for his interest in practical ethics, but also for the beauty and liveliness of his writing. These twelve in-depth essays take up a series of interrelated topics in his works, from his relation to Stoicism, Epicureanism, and other schools of thought; to the psychology of emotion and action and the management of anger and grief; to letter-writing, gift-giving, friendship, and kindness; to Seneca's innovative use of genre, style, and (...) humor. Recalling Socrates's critique of philosophical writing in Plato's Phaedrus, this volume gives particular attention to Seneca's ideas about the techniques of reading, writing, and study that make philosophy beneficial to the individual and to society. Clear explanations and careful translations make the volume accessible to a wide range of readers. (shrink)

A comprehensive exploration of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. This work is a comprehensive study of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. Mystics claim to experience reality in a way not available in normal life, a claim which makes this phenomenon interesting from a philosophical perspective. Richard H. Jones’s inquiry focuses on the skeleton of beliefs and values of mysticism: knowledge claims made about the nature of reality and of human beings; value claims about what is significant and (...) what is ethical; and mystical goals and ways of life. Jones engages language, epistemology, metaphysics, science, and the philosophy of mind. Methodological issues in the study of mysticism are also addressed. Examples of mystical experience are drawn chiefly from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but also from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Daoism. “This is a significant extension of the seminal work by Walter Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy. That work has stimulated much literature, all of which Jones manages to review here. He critically extends Stace’s universal core and embeds it in a sophisticated discussion of the extent, range, and metaphysical implications of mysticism.” — Ralph W. Hood, Jr., coauthor of The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach. (shrink)

Addressing central questions in the debate about Foucault's usefulness for politics, including his rejection of universal norms, his conception of power and power-knowledge, his seemingly contradictory position on subjectivity and his ...

This book, the last volume in the Social Morphogenesis series, examines whether or not a Morphogenic society can foster new modes of human relations that could exercise a form of 'relational steering', protecting and promoting a nuanced version of the good life for all. It analyses the way in which the intensification of morphogenesis and the diminishing of morphostasis impact upon human flourishing. The book links intensified morphogenesis to promoting human flourishing based on the assumption that new opportunities open up (...) novel experiences, skills, and modes of communication that appeal to talents previously lacking any outlet or recognition. It proposes that equality of opportunity would increase as ascribed characteristics diminished in importance, and it could be maintained as the notion of achievement continued to diversify. Digitalization has opened the cultural 'archive' for more to explore and, as it expands exponentially, so do new complementary compatibilities whose development foster yet further opportunities. If more people can do more of what they do best, these represent stepping stones towards the 'good life' for more of them. (shrink)

Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand Irigaray's original contribution to philosophical and feminist thought.

The prominence of Bayesian modeling of cognition has increased recently largely because of mathematical advances in specifying and deriving predictions from complex probabilistic models. Much of this research aims to demonstrate that cognitive behavior can be explained from rational principles alone, without recourse to psychological or neurological processes and representations. We note commonalities between this rational approach and other movements in psychology – namely, Behaviorism and evolutionary psychology – that set aside mechanistic explanations or make use of optimality assumptions. Through (...) these comparisons, we identify a number of challenges that limit the rational program's potential contribution to psychological theory. Specifically, rational Bayesian models are significantly unconstrained, both because they are uninformed by a wide range of process-level data and because their assumptions about the environment are generally not grounded in empirical measurement. The psychological implications of most Bayesian models are also unclear. Bayesian inference itself is conceptually trivial, but strong assumptions are often embedded in the hypothesis sets and the approximation algorithms used to derive model predictions, without a clear delineation between psychological commitments and implementational details. Comparing multiple Bayesian models of the same task is rare, as is the realization that many Bayesian models recapitulate existing (mechanistic level) theories. Despite the expressive power of current Bayesian models, we argue they must be developed in conjunction with mechanistic considerations to offer substantive explanations of cognition. We lay out several means for such an integration, which take into account the representations on which Bayesian inference operates, as well as the algorithms and heuristics that carry it out. We argue this unification will better facilitate lasting contributions to psychological theory, avoiding the pitfalls that have plagued previous theoretical movements. (shrink)

Illuminating the complex relationships between tribal informants and twentieth-century anthropologists such as Boas, Parker, and Fenton, who came to their communities to collect stories and artifacts"--Provided by publisher.

Presents a concise and comprehensive analysis of George Berkeley’s thought and the impact of his intellectual contributions to philosophy In this latest addition to the Blackwell Great Minds series, noted scholar of early modern philosophy Margaret Atherton examines Berkeley’s most influential work and demonstrates the significant conceptual impact of his ideas in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. A concise and rigorous primer on Berkeley’s essential writings and contributions to modern philosophy Written by a leading scholar of early modern (...) philosophy Offers insight into the foundations of modern metaphysical and religious philosophy Equips readers to find firm footing in Berkeley’s wider body of published work in the canon of Western philosophy. (shrink)

Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones was an English logician and contemporary of Bertrand Russell, as well as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. In this book, originally published in 1911, she argues for the existence of another fundamental law of thought to join the Law of Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle: the Law of Significant Assertion. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in logic or in Jones' work.

Research in anthropology has shown that kin terminologies have a complex combinatorial structure and vary systematically across cultures. This article argues that universals and variation in kin terminology result from the interaction of (1) an innate conceptual structure of kinship, homologous with conceptual structure in other domains, and (2) principles of optimal, “grammatical” communication active in language in general. Kin terms from two languages, English and Seneca, show how terminologies that look very different on the surface may result from variation (...) in the rankings of a universal set of constraints. Constraints on kin terms form a system: some are concerned with absolute features of kin (sex), others with the position (distance and direction) of kin in “kinship space,” others with groups and group boundaries (matrilines, patrilines, generations, etc.). Also, kin terms sometimes extend indefinitely via recursion, and recursion in kin terminology has parallels with recursion in other areas of language. Thus the study of kinship sheds light on two areas of cognition, and their phylogeny. The conceptual structure of kinship seems to borrow its organization from the conceptual structure of space, while being specialized for representing genealogy. And the grammar of kinship looks like the product of an evolved grammar faculty, opportunistically active across traditional domains of semantics, syntax, and phonology. Grammar is best understood as an offshoot of a uniquely human capacity for playing coordination games. (shrink)