This handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of education combined with an up-to-date selection of the central themes. It includes 95 newly commissioned articles that focus on and advance key arguments; each essay incorporates essential background material serving to clarify the history and logic of the relevant topic, examining the status quo of the discipline with respect to the topic, and discussing the possible futures of the field. The book provides a state-of-the-art overview of philosophy (...) of education, covering a range of topics: Voices from the present and the past deals with 36 major figures that philosophers of education rely on; Schools of thought addresses 14 stances including Eastern, Indigenous, and African philosophies of education as well as religiously inspired philosophies of education such as Jewish and Islamic; Revisiting enduring educational debates scrutinizes 25 issues heavily debated in the past and the present, for example care and justice, democracy, and the curriculum; New areas and developments addresses 17 emerging issues that have garnered considerable attention like neuroscience, videogames, and radicalization. The collection is relevant for lecturers teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of education as well as for colleagues in teacher training. Moreover, it helps junior researchers in philosophy of education to situate the problems they are addressing within the wider field of philosophy of education and offers a valuable update for experienced scholars dealing with issues in the sub-discipline. Combined with different conceptions of the purpose of philosophy, it discusses various aspects, using diverse perspectives to do so. Contributing Editors: Section 1: Voices from the Present and the Past: Nuraan Davids Section 2: Schools of Thought: Christiane Thompson and Joris Vlieghe Section 3: Revisiting Enduring Debates: Ann Chinnery, Naomi Hodgson, and Viktor Johansson Section 4: New Areas and Developments: Kai Horsthemke, Dirk Willem Postma, and Claudia Ruitenberg. (shrink)

There is a parallel between Plato's argument for the forms at 74b7-c5 in the Phaedo and Frege's argument for the claim that proper names express senses. There is also, I claim, an important asymmetry. The asymmetry explains why it is consistent to accept the conclusion of the Phaedo argument without accepting the conclusion of Frege's argument. The Phaedo argument turns on the possibility of a specific kind of mistaken judgement that may be termed "brute error". Frege's argument does not so (...) depend on the possibility of brute error. (shrink)

This book contains a defense of representationalism—the thesis that all mental facts are representational facts. Some mental facts—such as facts about what a person believes—seem obviously to be representational facts—that is, facts about how things are represented to be. Other mental facts—such as certain facts about the character of sense experience, for example the painfulness of pain, or the fact that one’s knowledge of it is immediate and authoritative— seem less obviously to be facts about how things are represented to (...) be. In this book, Dretske takes on the task of explaining in representational terms such features as the qualitative nature of sense experience and the source of the special authority we have about our own minds. (shrink)

Kant and the Mind is for philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists as well as Kant scholars. Brook's central claim is that Kant's discoveries have not been assimilated in current theorizing about the mind, much less superseded. Of course, Kant's general framework has affinities with contemporary functionalism and representationalism. What Brook shows is that more specific Kantian themes and arguments can continue to bear fruit. These include Kant's account of synthesis--the tying of elements together into a single representation, his account (...) of the unity of consciousness, and most centrally, Kant's account of apperceptive self-awareness. (shrink)

In this anthology of new and classic articles, fifteen noted feminist philosophers explore contemporary ethical issues that uniquely affect the lives of women. These issues in applied ethics include autonomy, responsibility, sexual harassment, women in the military, new technologies for reproduction, surrogate motherhood, pornography, abortion, nonfeminist women and others. Whether generated by old social standards or intensified by recent technology, these dilemmas all pose persistent, 'nagging,' questions that cry out for answers.

In Canions be Causes, David Johnson defends the view that abstractions can have causal force. He offers as his own example of natural kinds ecological niches, arguing that the causal force of these niches in nature is akin to the force of Aristotelian final causes. He concludes that, rooted as it is in seventeenth century mechanism, the currently-accepted model of causality which recognises only efficient causes is inadequate to the needs of contemporary science. In Natural Kinds and Ecological Niches — (...) Response to Johnson ''s Paper, Melinda Hogan offers a critique of Johnson ''s paper which, by begging the question in favor of the very sort of causality Johnson seeks to supplement, misses the epistemological implications of his idea. In this paper I will attempt to clarify and defend Johnson ''s position, pointing out some of its implications for the epistemology of science in general. (shrink)

Overconfidence is typically damaging to one’s reputation as a trustworthy source of information. Previous research shows that the reputational cost associated with conveying a piece of false information is higher for confident than unconfident speakers. When judging speaker trustworthiness, individuals do not exclusively rely on past accuracy but consider the extent to which speakers expressed a degree of confidence that matched the accuracy of their claims (their “confidence-accuracy calibration”). The present study experimentally examines the interplay between confidence, accuracy and a (...) third factor, namely evidence, in the assessment of speaker trustworthiness. Experiment 1 probes the hypothesis that overconfidence does not backfire when a confident but inaccurate claim is justified: the trustworthiness of a confident speaker who turns out to be wrong is restored if the confidence expressed is based on strong evidence (good confidence-evidence calibration). Experiment 2 investigates the hypothesis that confidence can backfire if a confident and accurate claim is not justified: the trustworthiness of a confident speaker who turns out to be right is damaged if the confidence expressed is based on weak evidence (bad confidence-evidence calibration). Our results support both hypotheses and thus suggest that “confidence-evidence calibration” plays a crucial role in the assessment of speaker trustworthiness. (shrink)

According to the Asymmetry, it is wrong to bring a miserable child into existence but permissible not to bring a happy child into existence. When it comes to procreation, we don’t have complete procreative liberty. But we do have some discretion. The Asymmetry seems highly intuitive. But a plausible account of the Asymmetry has been surprisingly difficult to provide, and it may well be that most moral philosophers – or at least most consequentialists – think that all reasonable efforts to (...) provide such an account have by now been exhausted. In this paper, I argue that, despite the difficulties, the Asymmetry is too important to be set aside. I also note a handful of accounts of the Asymmetry that have been proposed and why they fail. It seems, for example, that it will not do to say that some people matter morally and others don’t, or that a person matters morally in some worlds but not others. My own conclusion is that, while we are bound to say all people matter morally – you, me and the merely possible – we are not bound to say that all their losses– or all ours– matter morally. We can instead distinguish between morally significant and insignificant losses, with the distinction between the two being a matter of where the loss is incurred in relation to the person who incurs it. This way of looking at things – which I call Variabilism– provides the basis for a plausible account of the Asymmetry. The availability of such an account suggests, I think, that our prospects for rescuing the Asymmetry are bright. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Broome and others have argued that it makes no sense, or at least that it cannot be true, to say that it is better for a given person that he or she exist than not. That argument can be understood to suggest that, likewise, it makes no sense, or at least that it cannot be true, to say that it is worse for a given person that he or she exist than that he or she never have existed at (...) all. This argument is of critical importance to the question of whether consequentialist theory should take a traditional, aggregative form or a less conventional, person‐affecting, or person‐based, form. I believe that, potentially, the argument represents a far more serious threat to the person‐based approach than does, for example, Parfit's two medical programmes example. Parfit's example nicely illustrates the distinction between aggregative and person‐based approaches and raises important questions. But the example — though not, I think, by Parfit — is sometimes pressed into service as a full‐fledged counterexample against the person‐based approach. As such, I argue, the example is not persuasive. In contrast, the Broomeian argument, if correct, is definitive. For that argument relies on certain metaphysical assumptions and various uncontroversial normative claims — and hence nicely avoids putting into play the controversial normative claims that lie at the very heart of the debate. The purpose of the present paper, then, is to evaluate the Broomeian argument. I argue that this potentially definitive challenge to a person‐based approach does not in fact succeed. (shrink)

Imagine that you are a teenager and have cancer. You undergo a year of chemotherapy and after a brief return to normal life, you have a relapse. Your physician says that chemotherapy and radiation therapy could be tried, but a bone marrow transplant is your only chance of a real cure. He tells you and your parents that you could die as a result of complications from the transplant, but without it you would only be expected to live one year. (...) You and your family discuss the alternatives and decide to have the transplant. You ask what will happen if the BMT fails, but both your physician and your family tell you that right now you must fight to get better and not think negative thoughts. You do not ask any more questions. (shrink)

The present study investigated whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them. We examined a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment, typically involving the elaboration of “conceptual pacts,” or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we manipulated lexical entrainment in a referential communication task and measured the effect of this manipulation on epistemic and practical trust. Our results showed that participants were more likely to trust a coordinated partner than an (...) uncoordinated one, but only when the latter broke previously established conceptual pacts. (shrink)

This book aims to give an account, called Variabilism, of the moral significance of merely possible persons and to use Variabilism to illuminate abortion. In doing so it lays the groundwork for a more productive discussion on abortion.

Anthropology of Consciousness, EarlyView.

We describe a first order axiom set which yields the classical first order Euclidean geometry of Tarski when used with classical logic, and yields an intuitionistic Euclidean geometry when used with intuitionistic logic. The first order language has a single six place atomic predicate and no function symbols. The intuitionistic system has a computational interpretation in recursive function theory, that is, a realizability interpretation analogous to those given by Kleene for intuitionistic arithmetic and analysis. This interpretation shows the unprovability in (...) the intuitionistic theory of certain “nonconstructive” theorems of the classical geometry. (shrink)

During the 1920s and 1930s geneticist L. C. Dunn of Columbia University cautioned Americans against endorsing eugenic policies and called attention to eugenicists' less than rigorous practices. Then, from the mid-1940s to early 1950s he attacked scientific racism and Nazi Rassenhygiene by co-authoring Heredity, Race and Society with Theodosius Dobzhansky and collaborating with members of UNESCO on their international campaign against racism. Even though shaking the foundations of scientific discrimination was Dunn's primary concern during the interwar and post-World War II (...) years, his campaigns had ancillary consequences for the discipline. He contributed to the professionalization of genetics during the 1920s and 1930s and sought respectability for human genetics in the 1940s and 1950s. My article aims to elucidate the activist scientist's role in undermining scientific discrimination by exploring aspects of Dunn's scientific work and political activism from the 1920s to 1950s. Definitions are provided for scientific discrimination and activist scientist. (shrink)

This article looks at the increasing prominence of bioterrorist threat scenarios in recent US foreign policy. Germ warfare, it argues, is being depicted as the paradigmatic threat of the post-Cold War era, not only because of its affinity for cross-border movement but also because it blurs the lines between deliberate attack and spontaneous natural catastrophe. The article looks at the possible implications of this move for understandings of war, strategy and public health. It also seeks to contextualize the US’s growing (...) military interest in biodefence research within the commercial strategies of the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. In its methodology, the article weaves together elements from defence literature, scientific perspectives on infectious disease, catastrophe theory and political economy. The conceptual underpinnings of the strategy of pre-emptive warfare, it argues, lie as much in the theory of biological emergence as in official US defence strategy. (shrink)

In a critical intervention into the bioethics debate over human enhancement, philosopher Melinda Hall tackles the claim that the expansion and development of human capacities is a moral obligation. Hall draws on French philosopher Michel Foucault to reveal and challenge the ways disability is central to the conversation. The Bioethics of Enhancement includes a close reading and analysis of the last century of enhancement thinking and contemporary transhumanist thinkers, the strongest promoters of the obligation to pursue enhancement technology. With (...) specific attention to the work of bioethicists Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu, the book challenges the rhetoric and strategies of enhancement thinking. These include the desire to transcend the body and decide who should live in future generations through emerging technologies such as genetic selection. Hall provides new analyses rethinking both the philosophy of enhancement and disability, arguing that enhancement should be a matter of social and political interventions, not genetic and biological interventions. Hall concludes that human vulnerability and difference should be cherished rather than extinguished. -/- This book will be of interest to academics working in bioethics and disability studies, along with those working in Continental philosophy (especially on Foucault). (shrink)

Focusing on the speculative methodologies used to generate models of the financial and meteorological future, this article develops a series of theses on the ‘evental’ and ‘atmospheric’ quality of contemporary power. What is at stake in the circulation of capital today, I argue, is not so much the exchange of equivalents as the universal transmutability of fluctutation. Whether we are dealing with the turbulence of world financial markets or that of complex earth systems, the non-dialectical relation can itself be extracted, (...) recombined and liquefied, as it were, in a dimension of its own. In the same way that financial derivatives price the variable relation between and across national currencies, weather derivatives now make it possible to issue contracts on the unknowable contingencies embedded in complex atmospheric relations. This reconfiguration of value requires a thorough rethinking of classical sociological conceptions of debt, promise and political violence. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 9, Page 26-28, September 2012.

This paper focuses on a specific aspect of a Japanese rite of passage called Shichigosan. Although its origins go back to premodern Japan, its contemporary pattern truly reflects the modern living conditions of the Japanese. Today the ritual is one of the most popular family celebrations. Commercialization has significantly influenced the pattern of celebration in the postwar period and as a result, consumption practices have become inherent parts of the ritual. The paper examines this development from a historical perspective. Furthermore, (...) it discusses the process through which consumption practices contribute to the event’s significance, not diminishing but rather enhancing its importance in the observers’ eyes. Conspicuous consumption thus becomes a creative two-directional process, one which is sustained by families’ aspirations and desires, and one which is informed by forces emanating from the commercial sector and from the media. (shrink)

The politics of Mary Kaldor -- Militarism and the state -- European nuclear disarmament -- Linking peace and human rights -- Politics "from below" -- Independent civil society -- Dealignment, Helsinki citizens, and Moscow -- The problem of intervention to stop war -- The politics of violence -- Safe havens and protectorates -- New wars -- Rethinking intervention -- Human security -- The future of security?

Motile bacteria respond to environmental cues to move to more favorable locations. The components of the chemotaxis signal transduction systems that mediate these responses are highly conserved among prokaryotes including both eubacterial and archael species. The best‐studied system is that found in Escherichia coli. Attractant and repellant chemicals are sensed through their interactions with transmembrane chemoreceptor proteins that are localized in multimeric assemblies at one or both cell poles together with a histidine protein kinase, CheA, an SH3‐like adaptor protein, CheW, (...) and a phosphoprotein phosphatase, CheZ. These multimeric protein assemblies act to control the level of phosphorylation of a response regulator, CheY, which dictates flagellar motion. Bacterial chemotaxis is one of the most‐understood signal transduction systems, and many biochemical and structural details of this system have been elucidated. This is an exciting field of study because the depth of knowledge now allows the detailed molecular mechanisms of transmembrane signaling and signal processing to be investigated. BioEssays 28:9–22, 2006. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The identification and valorization of unacknowledged, feminized forms of economic productivity has been an important task for feminist theory. In this article, we expand and rethink existing definitions of labour, in order to recognize the essential economic role women play in the stem cell and regenerative medicine industries, new fields of biomedical research that are rapidly expanding throughout the world. Women constitute the primary tissue donors in the new stem cell industries, which require high volumes of human embryos, oöcytes, foetal (...) tissue and umbilical cord blood. Such material is generally given for free in the advanced industrial democracies, constituted as a surplus (‘spare’ embryos) or waste (umbilical cord ‘afterbirth’, cadaveric foetuses, poor quality oöcytes) whose generative powers should not be withheld from others. At the same time, among impoverished female populations in developing nations, such biological material is now often procured through frankly transactional relations, where women undertake risky procedures for small fees. In each case, female bodily productivity is mobilized to support bioeconomic research, yet the economic value involved in these relations is largely unacknowledged. In this article, we consider both the gift economy and the transactional economy for reproductive tissues as a form of labour. In order to fully conceptualize the specificities of feminized productivity in the bioeconomy, we distinguish between earlier feminist theories of reproductive labour and the emerging practices generated by stem cell research, which we term regenerative labour. We consider how historical transformations in the regulation of feminized labour and the technical repertoires of stem cell research renegotiate the productivity limits of female reproductive biology, opening it out to novel and profitable forms of surplus value and enrolling women in complex negotiations over their role in bioeconomic activity. (shrink)

In this article we explore ethical issues arising in a study of home Internet use by low-income families. We consider questions of our responsibility as educational researchers and discuss the ethical implications of some unanticipated consequences of our study. We illustrate ways in which the principles of research ethics for use of human subjects can be ambiguous and possibly inadequate for anticipating potential harm in educational research. In this exploratory research of personal communication technologies, participants experienced changes that were personal (...) and relational. These unanticipated changes in their way of being complicated our research relationships, testing the boundaries of our commitment to the principle of trustworthiness and forcing us to reevaluate our responsibilities. (shrink)

Eric Voegelin's _Israel and Revelation_ is the opening volume of his monumental _Order and History,_ which traces the history of order in human society. This volume examines the ancient near eastern civilizations as a backdrop to a discussion of the historical locus of order in Israel. The drama of Israel mirrors the problems associated with the tension of existence as Israel attempted to reconcile the claims of transcendent order with those of pragmatic existence and so becomes paradigmatic. According to Voegelin, (...) what happened in Israel was a decisive step, not only in the history of Israel, but also in the human attempt to achieve order in society. The uniqueness of Israel is the fact that it was the first to create history as a form of existence, that is, the recognition by human beings of their existence under a world-transcendent God, and the evaluation of their actions as conforming to or defecting from the divine will. In the course of its history, Israel learned that redemption comes from a source beyond itself. Voegelin develops rich insights into the Old Testament by reading the text as part of the universal drama of being. His philosophy of symbolic forms has immense implications for the treatment of the biblical narrative as a symbolism that articulates the experiences of a people's order. The author initiates us into attunement with _all_ the partners in the community of being: God and humans, world and society. This may well be his most significant contribution to political thought: "the experience of divine being as world transcendent is inseparable from an understanding of man as human.". (shrink)

James Bohman’s Democracy across borders: from demos to demoi is a rich and deep text. It is also deceptively short in length in comparison to those authors he engages and compactly reconstructs. Bohman puts forward strong normative arguments for a ‘reconstructed’ ideal of transnational democracy and provides models for realizing these ideals that also aim to meet standards of practicability. Bohman articulates the minimum necessary conditions for any democratic ideal in terms of freedom from domination and freedom to initiate and (...) engage in efficacious democratic deliberation across the borders of currently existing political communities. The argument charts a novel democratic ideal in terms of the global deliberative situation that is fundamentally different from the authors he discusses in light of existing facts about globalization, institutions, and the pluralism of demoi. In these comments I will focus on two main areas. (shrink)

The Voice of Virtue illuminates the musical practices at the heart of the Neostoic movement that spread across French lands during the Wars of Religion in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Guided by twin reparative traditions granting music and philosophy therapeutic power, composers and performers across the embattled Catholic and Protestant confessions turned to moral song as a means of repairing personal and collective virtue damaged by the ongoing conflict. Moral song collections enlarged interest in Stoic philosophy by (...) circulating its ethical program to a broader audience through attractive paraphrases of Stoic maxims set to music. Even more importantly, this skillfully composed repertoire of polyphonic song offered a multi-sensory moral practice that would have resonated powerfully for those well-versed in the paradoxes of the Stoic tradition. Bringing together a repertoire of little-known music prints, a rich visual culture, and an impressive body of literary and philosophical sources, The Voice of Virtue not only illuminates the influence of Stoicism on music, but also reveals that we cannot fully understand Neostoicism as an intellectual or cultural movement without accounting for its vibrant musical sounds. Virtue, as voiced in these Stoic practices, proves to be both rational and fully invested in the sensory processes of the singing body. (shrink)

Since 1991, the Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA) has required all health care institutions that receive Federal funds to inform patients upon admission of their rights to make decisions about medical care and to execute advance directives. Implementation of the PSDA presents a special challenge for state mental hospitals. The relevance and possible negative therapeutic impact of discussing end of life decisions at the time of an acute psychiatric admission has recently been raised in the literature. Other ethical dilemmas arising from (...) the interplay between mental illness and informed consent for medical treatment, particularly for older patients committed to state mental hospitals, have been highlighted by the PSDA. In this article we discuss some of the issues raised by implementation of the PSDA in this setting. (shrink)

Imagine that you are a teenager and have cancer. You undergo a year of chemotherapy and after a brief return to normal life, you have a relapse. Your physician says that chemotherapy and radiation therapy could be tried, but a bone marrow transplant is your only chance of a real cure. He tells you and your parents that you could die as a result of complications from the transplant, but without it you would only be expected to live one year. (...) You and your family discuss the alternatives and decide to have the transplant. You ask what will happen if the BMT fails, but both your physician and your family tell you that right now you must fight to get better and not think negative thoughts. You do not ask any more questions. (shrink)

Margaret Monahan Hogan; Catholic Health Care Institutions: Dinosaurs Awaiting Extinction or Safe Refuge in a Culture of Death, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenic.

Rufus of Ephesus's treatise Quaestiones Medicinales is unique in the known corpus of ancient medical writing. It has been taken for a procedural handbook serving an essentially operational purpose. But with its insistent message that doctors cannot properly understand and treat illnesses unless they supplement their own knowledge by questioning patients, and its distinct appreciation of the singularity of each patient's experience, Rufus's work shows itself to be no mere handbook but a treatise about the place of questioning in the (...) clinical encounter. This paper concentrates on two aspects of Rufus's thought that are unusual by comparison with other ancient medical texts: his distinctively person-centred rather than disease-based concept of questioning, and his extension of ‘habits’ beyond the dietary and occupational to include an indeterminate range of individual characteristics whose relevance to illness is not immediately obvious. In his quest for subjective information to set alongside ob.. (shrink)

Child Versus Childmaker investigates a "person-affecting" approach to ethical choice. A form of consequentialism, this approach is intended to capture the idea that agents ought both do the most good that they can and respect each person as distinct from each other. Focusing on cases in which a conflict of interest arises between "childmakers"—parents, infertility specialists, embryologists, and others engaged in the task of bringing new people into existence—and the children they aim to create, the author considers what we today (...) owe those who will come into existence tomorrow. (shrink)

The Asymmetry consists of two claims. (A) That a possible person's life would be abjectly miserable –less than worth living – counts against bringing that person into existence. But (B) that a distinct possible person's life would be worth living or even well worth living does not count in favour of bringing that person into existence. In recent years, the view that the two halves of the Asymmetry are jointly untenable has become increasingly entrenched. If we say all persons matter (...) morally whether they exist or not and on that basis try to explain the first half of the Asymmetry, we lose the second half of the Asymmetry. If we say that some persons do not matter morally and some do and on that basis try to explain the second half of the Asymmetry, we lose the first half of the Asymmetry – or else find ourselves with a principle that is either inconsistent or otherwise deeply troubled in some way that has nothing to do with the content of the Asymmetry itself. In this article, I propose an alternative approach to the Asymmetry which I will call Variabilism. By understanding each and every person, whether existing or not, to matter morally but variably– such that the moral significance of any loss incurred by any person is considered to depend, not on who incurs that loss and whether that person matters morally, but rather on where that loss is incurred in relation to the person who incurs it – we can both nicely ground the two halves of the Asymmetry and avoid the conceptual difficulties that have plagued competing approaches. (shrink)