From the arguments I have presented, I hope it is clear that the distinction between basic and applied research is tenuous. Certain areas of research and methods may be favoured over others because of intrinsic biases, which are predictive of the type of application possible. Believing in the neutrality of pure knowledge is like wearing blinders: scientists need not be too concerned about the way in which the knowledge they generate is used. In my own case, this belief led to (...) my participation in a system of agriculture to which I do not subscribe. Scientists should be willing to take responsibility for how they function in the system as a whole. Given the social structure of science, it is difficult for basic researchers to see their connections with the larger issues, much less to control them. Perhaps new ways of constructing knowledge-generating societies will be necessary in order to encourage individual responsibility. (shrink)

Biotechnology increases commercialization of food production, which competes with food for home use. Most people in the world grow their own food, and are more secure without the mediation of the market. To the extent that biotechnology enhances market competitiveness, world food security will decrease. This instability will result in a greater gap between rich and poor, increasing poverty of women and children, less ability and incentive to protect the environment, and greater need for militarization to maintain order. Therefore, biotechnology (...) should be discouraged. An active program to protect and strengthen local food production and to decrease reliance on industrial agriculture should be promoted. (shrink)

A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum.

In this critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect.

Living related organ transplantation is morally problematic for two reasons. First, it requires surgeons to perform nontherapeutic, even dangerous procedures on healthy donors—and in the case of children, without their consent. Second, the transplant donor and recipient are often intimately related to each other, as parent and child, or as siblings. These relationships challenge our conventional models of medical decisionmaking. Is there anything morally problematic about a parent allowing the interests of one child to be risked for the sake of (...) another? What exactly are the interests of the prospective child donor whose sibling will die without an organ? Is the choice of a parent to take risks for the sake of her child truly free, or is the specter of coercion necessarily raised? (shrink)

Virtue ethics is standardly taught and discussed as a distinctive approach to the major questions of ethics, a third major position alongside Utilitarian and Kantian ethics. I argue that this taxonomy is a confusion. Both Utilitarianism and Kantianism contain treatments of virtue, so virtue ethics cannot possibly be a separate approach contrasted with those approaches. There are, to be sure, quite a few contemporary philosophical writers about virtue who are neither Utilitarians nor Kantians; many of these find inspiration in ancient (...) Greek theories of virtue. But even here there is little unity. Although certain concerns do unite this disparate group (a concern for the role of motives and passions in good choice, a concern for character, and a concern for the whole course of an agent''s life), there are equally profound disagreements, especially concerning the role that reason should play in ethics. One group of modern virtue-theorists, I argue, are primarily anti-Utilitarians, concerned with the plurality of value and the susceptibility of passions to social cultivation. These theorists want to enlarge the place of reason in ethics. They hold that reason can deliberate about ends as well as means, and that reason can modify the passions themselves. Another group of virtue theorists are primarily anti-Kantians. They believe that reason plays too dominant a role in most philosophical accounts of ethics, and that a larger place should be given to sentiments and passions -- which they typically construe in a less reason-based way than does the first group. The paper investigates these differences, concluding that it is not helpful to speak of virtue ethics, and that we would be better off characterizing the substantive views of each thinker -- and then figuring out what we ourselves want to say. (shrink)

The idea of 'flirting' with space is central to this book. Space is conceptualised as being in constant flux as we make our way through various contexts in our daily lives, and is considered in relation to encounters with complexities and flows of material culture. This book focuses on journeys, which are perceived as dynamic processes of contemporary life and its spaces, and how creativity happens in the inter-relations of space and journeys encourage creativity. Unravelled through a range of empirical (...) case studies of journeys through and encountered with space, this book builds new critical syntheses of the intertwining of space and life. Based on investigations undertaken by the author over the past 20 years, it explores the mundane and the exotic, the 'lay' and the 'artistic', combining and inter-relating them in a diversity of time and expression, fleeting and surviving. Such investigations, using both visual and non-visual material, include examinations of allotment holding, the work of artists, caravanning and tourism, photography and parish maps. The analyses of such seemingly disparate subjects are linked together and build on each other to create a fascinating and original view of humanity's interaction with space. Included are fresh discussions of belonging, disorientation and the working of identity and play. The notion of 'gentle politics' is introduced. (shrink)

This book introduces the idea of sustainability and its aesthetic dimension, suggesting that the role of the aesthetic is an active one in developing an ecologically, economically and culturally healthy society. With an introduction by Christopher Crouch and an afterword by John Thackara, the book gathers together a range of essays that address the issue of the aesthetics of sustainability from a multitude of disciplinary and cultural perspectives.

The ethics of Aristotle , and virtue ethics in general, have enjoyed a resurgence of interest over the past few decades. Aristotelian themes, with such issues as the importance of friendship and emotions in a good life, the role of moral perception in wise choice, the nature of happiness and its constitution, moral education and habituation, are finding an important place in contemporary moral debates. Taken together, the essays in this volume provide a close analysis of central arguments in Aristotle's (...) Nicomachean Ethics and show the enduring interest of the questions Aristotle raises. (shrink)

Crouch's provocative argument in Post-Democracy has in many ways been vindicated by recent events, but these have also highlighted some weaknesses of the original thesis and shown that the situation today is even worse.

“Made for Learning” is the result of 60 years of research and theory building by Australian educator Brian Cambourne, articulated and described with abundant classroom examples by American educator Debra Crouch. This book describes a Discourse of Meaning-Making and explain and illustrate how to make that discourse the dominant language of the classroom. When the Conditions of Learning are coupled with four Processes That Empower Learning, an extension of the theory in the last three decades, teacher decision-making promotes the (...) active participation of learners in their own literate journey. How that active learning looks, sounds, and feels becomes tangible in the multitude of classroom examples found throughout the book. These classroom examples bring the Conditions of Learning to life and are unpacked to explore and analyze the specific teaching decisions leading to student learning. The authors offer educators concrete tools to use the Conditions of Learning as a framework to explore their own practices to strengthen learning experiences for every student. (shrink)

Language does not simply symbolize a situation or object which is already there in advance; it makes possible the existence or the appearance of that situation or object for it is a part of the mechanism whereby that situation or object is created. (Mead 1934, p. 78).

This chapter contains sections titled: The Absence of the Ethical Reflective Equilibrium Straightness and Surprise Perception and Method Perception and Love Literary Theory and Ethical Theory.

In the contemporary world, voices are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. In The Voice as Something More, Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin tackle these paradoxes with a bold and rigorous collection of essays that look at voice as both object of desire and material object. Using Mladen Dolar’s influential A Voice and Nothing More as a reference point, The Voice as Something More (...) reorients Dolar’s psychoanalytic analysis around the material dimensions of voices—their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that offers reflections on these vocal aesthetics and paradoxes, this authoritative, multidisciplinary collection, ranging from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from classics and music to film and literature, will serve as an essential entry point for scholars and students who are thinking toward materiality. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: A Home for Love and Violence Capabilities: Each Family Member as End The Family: Not “by Nature” Political Liberalism and the Family: Rawls's Dilemma Love, Dignity, and Community.

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance. In this classic work, Martha Nussbaum maintains that these Hellenistic schools have been unjustly neglected in recent philosophic accounts of what the classical "tradition" has to offer. By examining texts of philosophers such as Epicurus, Lucretius, and Seneca, she recovers a valuable source for current moral and political thought and encourages us (...) to reconsider philosophical argument as a technique through which to improve lives. Written for general readers and specialists, The Therapy of Desire addresses compelling issues ranging from the psychology of human passion through rhetoric to the role of philosophy in public and private life. (shrink)

What is a philosophy of education ? -- Using a worldview approach to develop one's philosophy of education -- Defining education -- Determining the aim or "end" of education -- Nature of the pupil and learning -- Commonalities : special creation and moral nature -- Commonalities : actional and developmental nature -- Implications : the actional nature -- Human differences -- The role of the teacher -- The nature of the curriculum -- The purpose of the curriculum -- Worldview integration (...) in the design of the curreculum -- Conclusion -- Appendices : Summary of some of the philosophies of education held in the 21st century ; Developing the integrating core model. (shrink)

This book is a study of ancient views about "moral luck." It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This updated edition contains a new preface.

What drives us to do good things, and to avoid doing bad? This book offers an integrative examination of the role of motivation in shaping moral cognition, judgement, and behavior.

Data Transfer Service (DTS) is an open-source project that is developing a document-centric message model for describing a bulk data transfer activity, with an accompanying set of loosely coupled and platform-independent components for brokering the transfer of data between a wide range of (potentially incompatible) storage resources as scheduled, fault-tolerant batch jobs. The architecture scales from small embedded deployments on a single computer to large distributed deployments through an expandable ‘worker-node pool’ controlled through message-orientated middleware. Data access and transfer efficiency (...) are maximized through the strategic placement of worker nodes at or between particular data sources/sinks. The design is inherently asynchronous, and, when third-party transfer is not available, it side-steps the bandwidth, concurrency and scalability limitations associated with buffering bytes directly through intermediary client applications. It aims to address geographical–topological deployment concerns by allowing service hosting to be either centralized (as part of a shared service) or confined to a single institution or domain. Established design patterns and open-source components are coupled with a proposal for a document-centric and open-standards-based messaging protocol. As part of the development of the message protocol, a bulk data copy activity document is proposed for the first time. (shrink)

Visual Agnosia is a comprehensive and up-to-date review of disorders of higher vision that relates these disorders to current conceptions of higher vision from cognitive science, illuminating both the neuropsychological disorders and the nature of normal visual object recognition.Brain damage can lead to selective problems with visual perception, including visual agnosia the inability to recognize objects even though elementary visual functions remain unimpaired. Such disorders are relatively rare, yet they provide a window onto how the normal brain might accomplish the (...) complex task of vision. Visual Agnosia reviews a century of case studies of higher-level visual deficits following brain damage, places them in the general context of current neuroscience, and draws relevant conclusions about the organization of normal visual processing. It is unique in drawing on research in cognitive psychology, computational vision, visual neurophysiology, and neuropsychology to interpret the agnosias and draw inferences from them about visual object recognition.Following a historical account of agnosia research, Visual Agnosia offers a taxonomy of a wide range of agnosia syndromes, describing and interpreting the syndromes in terms of the latest theoretical models of visual processing and ultimately bringing them to bear as evidence on a variety of questions in the study of higher vision.Martha J. Farah is Associate Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Visual Agnosia is included in the Issues in Biology of Language and Cognition series, edited by John Marshall. (shrink)

The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical and psychological health and well-being throughout the life course. In our previous work, we argued that narratives emerging from and about this research field tend to focus on harm and lasting damage with little discussion of reversibility and resilience. However, as the Science and Technology Studies literature has demonstrated, scientific research can be actively taken up and transformed as it moves through social worlds. Drawing on (...) fieldwork with actors in education and juvenile corrections in the US Pacific Northwest, we found that they employed the biology of early life adversity not only to promote prevention but also to argue for changes within their own institutions that would allow them to better serve children and youth who have experienced adversity and trauma. Our study shows that biosocial narratives are neither inherently liberatory nor inherently oppressive but that the situated narrative choreographies in which they are enrolled are essential for their political effects. In our case, we show how these biosocial narratives have been articulated with knowledge and practices from restorative justice and trauma-informed care to reimagine the social meaning of the biology of early life adversity. (shrink)

Applying the insights of Donna Haraway (1989, 1991) and Helen Longino (1989, 1990), this paper reviews Sandra Harding's (1986a) tripartite model of feminist critiques of science-empiricist, standpoint, and postmodern-and argues that it is based on misunderstandings of the relationship between scientific inquiry, objectivity, and values. An alternative view of scientific inquiry makes it possible to see feminist scientists as postmodern and postmodern feminists as having standpoints.

Available for the first time in paperback, this volume contains text with translation of De Motu Animalium, Aristotle's attempt to lay the groundwork for a general theory of the explanation of animal activity, along with commentary and interpretive essays on the work.

Shepherd propounds a theory of mind with a fair claim to be better than Hume’s at explaining the sources of commonly held human beliefs about causal necessity due largely to her relational theory of sense perception. In comparison with Hume’s account, it incorporates a more sophisticated treatment of mental representation, especially the role of relational structure and logical form. Most important, perhaps, Shepherd’s theory enforces the division, obscured by Hume, between the evidence of necessity and the metaphysical foundation of necessity.