Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

" Notre époque ne veut croire qu'à des "réalités". Or sa réalité la plus puissante est la science, voilà pourquoi c'est de la science philosophique dont notre époque a le plus grand besoin (...) et le plus grand progrès que puisse accomplir notre époque sera de reconnaître que l'intuition philosophique bien comprise est l'appréhension phénoménologique des essences. " Ce texte, écrit en 1911, constitue bien le manifeste par quoi s'ouvre la philosophie du XXè siècle. Husserl cherche à dépasser l'opposition toujours (...) actuelle entre positivisme et historicisme, en exigeant que la philosophie s'établisse à partir d'un nouveau commencement, plus radical que tous ceux qu'elle n'a jamais pu entreprendre, et qu'elle vise une rigueur qui l'affranchisse enfin des modèles hérités des sciences de la nature. Quelle qu'ait été l'histoire de la phénoménologie Husserlienne, l'exigence exprimée dans ce manifeste ne concerne pas seulement un courant de pensée particulier ; elle est consubstantielle à la réflexion philosophique elle-même. (shrink)

A dual-language edition presenting Descartes's original Latin text of his greatest work, with a facing-page authoritative English translation.

Many individuals who have mental disorders often report negative experiences of a distinctively epistemic sort, such as not being listened to, not being taken seriously, or not being considered credible because of their psychiatric conditions. In an attempt to articulate and interpret these reports we present Fricker’s concepts of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007, p. 1) and then focus on testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice as it applies to individuals with mental disorders. The clinical impact of these concepts on quality of (...) care is discussed. Within the clinical domain, we contrast epistemic injustice with epistemic privilege and authority. We then argue that testimonial and hermeneutic injustices also affect individuals with mental disorders not only when communicating with their caregivers but also in the social context as they attempt to reintegrate into the general society and assume responsibilities as productive citizens. Following the trend of the movement of mental health care to the community, the testimonies of people with mental disorders should not be restricted to issues involving their own personal mental states. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to examine relationships among religious coping styles, the experience of daily hassles, and resiliency. Through the use of a set of questionnaires, positive and negative religious coping styles are identified and analyzed in relation to a direct measure of resiliency, level of psychological distress, and level of daily hassles. Negative religious coping is positively related to psychological distress, while individuals who experience more daily hassles but use higher levels of positive religious coping have greater (...) resiliency than individuals who use higher levels of negative religious coping. Additionally, the combination of daily hassles, major life stressors, level of positive religious coping, and resiliency accounted for a significant proportion of the variability in psychological distress. Post hoc analyses removed questions of spirituality from the resiliency scale that could possibly overlap with the measure of religious coping. These exploratory analyses indicate that negative religious coping is negatively correlated with non-spiritual resiliency. Exploratory analyses also indicate that individuals who experience more daily hassles but use higher levels of positive religious coping do not have greater levels of non-spiritual resiliency than individuals who use negative religious coping. (shrink)

Pedagogy is an inherently spatial practice. Implicit in much of the rhetoric of physical space designed for teaching and learning is an ontological position that assumes material space as distinct from human practice, often conceptualising space as causally impacting upon people’s behaviours. An alternative, and growing, perspective instead theorises infrastructure as a sociomaterial assemblage, an entanglement, with scholarly learning, teaching, institutional agendas, architectural intent, technology, staff, students, pedagogic outcomes, and built form all participants in an active symbiosis of becoming. This (...) article synthesises and works with spatial theories to elaborate on the emergent literature and illustrates a sociomaterial understanding through narratives of self and staff, teaching and learning in a university context. The terms sociomaterial, assemblage and entanglement allude to a relational ontology underlying spatial-social being-becoming. This understanding can support the realisation of the intent underlying transformations of material spaces to create collaborative and inclusive university environments, where staff and students can learn, belong, and become as part of a scholarly community. I argue that sociomaterial theory is valuable to make meaning of the inseparable mélange of people, place, technologies, interaction, discourse, feeling, value and power that is teaching and learning. (shrink)

This article (in German) discusses the scope and content of John McDowell's famous claim that human perception is "conceptual all the way out". I motivate the claim by explaining its role within McDowell's transcendental concern to account for the mind's "openness to the world", i. e. the immediate presence or givenness (no capital "G") of objective reality in human perception. I argue that (a) dissolving this problem requires us to understand human perception as a rational power, that (b) a rational (...) power is a power whose actualizations involve the actualization of conceptual capacities, and that (c) the actualizations of powers that involve the actualizations of conceptual capacities have conceptual contents. I discuss the different versions of this claim to be found in McDowell's writings since "Mind and World". Furthermore, I distinguish between two ways of reading the claim which I call the "apperceptive" and the "phenomenal" reading respectively. The first reading, I argue, is the one McDowell actually endorses, whereas the second reading, which is not a part of his position, is the one foisted on him in many of the critical engagements with his work. (shrink)

Barker, Renae In recent weeks the issue of the religious content of Australian education has been hotly debated. In February The Age reported the latest development: principals in several Victorian state schools had ceased to offer special religious instruction in their schools.

The current public debate about the role and place of religion in Australia's education system feels very much like deja vu. The Religious Freedom Review2 may be new, but we've been here before. Religious schools have regularly been at the forefront of the evolving relationship between the state and religion in Australia, from the creation and collapse of the Church and Schools Corporation in the 1830s, and the implementation of the dual board system in the 1840s, to the removal of (...) all government funding for religious schools in the 1860s-90s, and then its reintroduction in the 1960s and '70s.3 The current debate about the extent to which religious schools will continue to be permitted to discriminate against students, staff and contractors in line with the religious ethos of the school is therefore just the latest reiteration of an ongoing narrative. (shrink)

If Place Spirituality is considered as an attachment experience to a geographic place or an “object,” for Muslims this concept can be explained by the sharia or Islamic law. However, in the highest level of experience as a Muslim, one may attach to God everywhere and at all times, without consideration of any place, time, or object. This experience can clearly be understood with the explanation of the three levels for Muslims: sharia or “conceptual knowledge,” tariqa or “experiential knowledge,” and (...) ma’rifa or “divine spiritual experiences” or “spiritual consciousness”. At the first and second levels, one may have a Place Spirituality, while at the third level the understanding of and connection to God might be enhanced, and the experience to connect to God can be everywhere, all the time. (shrink)

Carl Vogt’s quarrel with Rudolph Wagner is considered to be a culmination of the materialism dispute in the 19th century. Out of this basically academic issue on the nature of human mental functions, a personal dispute quickly developed which was unrivalled in thematic incisiveness and expression. The aim of this study is the detailed linguistic analysis of the polemics and argumentation in this dispute based on extensive text excerpts, in which for the first time detailed linguistic studies on Vogt and (...) Wagner are presented. (shrink)

Virtues are standardly characterized as stable dispositions. A stable disposition implies that the virtuous actor must be disposed to act well in any domain required of them. For example, a politician is not virtuous if s/he is friendly in debate with an opponent, but hostile at home with a partner or children. Some recent virtue theoretic accounts focus on specific domains in which virtues can be exercised. I call these domain-variant accounts of virtue. This paper examines two such accounts: Randall (...) Curren and Charles Dorn’s (2018) discussion of virtue in the civic sphere, and Michael Brady’s (2018) account of virtues of vulnerability. I argue that being consistent with the standard characterization of virtue requires generalizing beyond a domain. I suggest four actions the authors could take to preserve their accounts while remaining consistent with the standard characterization. I also discuss how virtue education could be enhanced by domain-variant accounts. (shrink)

Because a title such as the one I have assigned to this contribution could either prompt all sorts of expectations or lead to forming no expectations at all, it seems important at the outset to begin by indicating what I shall not be concerned with. On the face of it the title could seem to call for a discussion of the way religious consciousness is expressed in the framework of this or that particular rational system or culture, presumably contemporary—be it (...) Hispanic, African, American Indian, Asiatic, European, or whatever. There can be no question that such a discussion would be significant, involving as it does the important contemporary concept of “acculturation,” which seeks to obviate the unfortunate identification of religion and any particular cultural or rational form of its expression. I shall not, in fact, be concerned with any particular culture or system at all, while, on the other hand, from the religious point of view I shall, like Hegel, be concerned only with Christianity, not as particular but as universal; not as a one among many but as all-embracing religious awareness. (shrink)

There is in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit a relatively brief passage at the beginning of Chapter IV, “Self-Consciousness,” which may well be one of the most difficult passages in the whole Hegelian corpus, but which is also of supreme importance for coming to grips with the movement of Hegel’s thought, not only in the Phenomenology but in the entire “system.” It is precisely the difficulty of the passage, it would seem, that explains why it has not been given by commentators (...) an attention proportionate to its significance. So much attention has been focused on the “independence of self-consciousness,” expressed in the sections on “Lordship and Bondage,” “Stoicism and Skepticism” and “The Unhappy Consciousness” — which are, it is true, important and which lend themselves most readily to extended interpretation — that not enough attention has been given to the introductory section, entitled “The Truth of the Certainty of Self,” in which are enunciated the principles which regulate the whole movement of Hegel’s thought. The section might be described as the indispensable transition from those forms of consciousness, which are merely “objective” yet try to give themselves off as authentic knowing, to what Hegel considers to be the only possible way of authenticating the objectivity of human consciousness, i.e., the self, which claims to know, progressively coming to know itself, a self-knowing which will be knowing at all only if it culminates in “absolute knowing.” Only in the light of this section will the preface be intelligible; only in its light will the whole of the Phenomenology hang together. (shrink)

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the leaders of the Genetics Society of America struggled to find an appropriate group response to Trofim Lysenko’s scientific claims and the Soviet treatment of geneticists. Although some of the leaders of the GSA favored a swift, critical response, procedural and ideological obstacles prevented them from following this path. Concerned about establishing scientific orthodoxy on one hand and politicizing the content of their science on the other, these American geneticists drew on democratic language (...) and concepts as they engaged in this political issue. The relatively weak statements that did emerge from the GSA attracted little attention in the scientific or popular press. The intensely politicized atmosphere of American science complicated the GSA’s task, as domestic concerns about protecting democracy were beginning to constrain academic freedom. In the context of American Cold War culture, Lysenko became just one example of the dangers the Cold War world presented to scientific freedom. (shrink)

W.V. Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein have been compared with regard to the analytic/synthetic distinction, propositions known a priori or a posteriori, mathematical and logical necessity and naturalism, amongst other topics. Following Pieranna Garavaso and Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, I compare how Quine and Wittgenstein conceptualize a system of beliefs. Overlooked is Wittgenstein's description of the role of propositions and Quine's description of the location of propositions. The difference between the role and location signals a difference in how these frameworks conceptualize the boundary (...) between empirical and logical propositions, and in particular the justificatory status of propositions in the system. The Wittgensteinian framework accommodates a change in the justificatory status of propositions: propositions can play at one time a rule-like role and at another time an empirical role. For Quine, change in status refers to revising the proposition (or not) in the light of recalcitrant evidence. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, a body of research has developed examining the academic dishonesty of university and college students. While research has explored academic dishonesty amongst American criminal justice and policing students, no research has specifically focused on investigating the dynamics and correlates of academic dishonesty amongst Australian criminology students. This study drew upon data obtained from a survey of 79 undergraduate criminal justice and policing students studying at an Australian university. Overall, the results suggest that male gender, viewing (...) academic dishonesty as less serious and holding justifications for engaging in this type of behaviour were significant predictors of self-reported academic dishonesty. The findings suggest that more proactive strategies need to be implemented by universities to prevent student involvement in academic dishonesty. (shrink)

Recent philosophical literature on epistemic harms has paid little attention to the difference between deliberate and non-deliberate harms. In this paper, I analyze the “Curare Case,” a case from the 1940’s in which patient testimony was disregarded by physicians. This case has been described as an instance of epistemic injustice. I problematize this description, arguing instead that the case shows an instance of “epistemic disadvantage.” I propose epistemic disadvantage indicates when harms result from warranted asymmetric relations that justifiably exclude individuals (...) from hermeneutical participation. Epistemic disadvantage categorizes harms that result from justifiable exclusions, are non-deliberate, and result from poor epistemic environments. This analysis brings out a meaningful difference between accidental and deliberate harms in communicative exchanges. (shrink)

Virtues are standardly characterized as stable dispositions. A stable disposition implies that the virtuous actor must be disposed to act well in any domain required of them. For example, a politician is not virtuous if s/he is friendly in debate with an opponent, but hostile at home with a partner or children. Some recent virtue theoretic accounts focus on specific domains in which virtues can be exercised. I call these domain-variant accounts of virtue. This paper examines two such accounts: Randall (...) Curren and Charles Dorn’s discussion of virtue in the civic sphere, and Michael Brady’s account of virtues of vulnerability. I argue that being consistent with the standard characterization of virtue requires generalizing beyond a domain. I suggest four actions the authors could take to preserve their accounts while remaining consistent with the standard characterization. I also discuss how virtue education could be enhanced by domain-variant accounts. (shrink)

Simmel begreift den Menschen als ,tauschendes Tier', der durch das Geld als universelles Äquivalent und nicht relativierbare Größe in ein Netz universeller Tauschbeziehungen eingesponnen ist. Seine systemische Analyse der Rolle des Geldes als unkontrollierbaren Fetisches ist für das Verständnis der mentalen Einstellungen der verantwortlichen Akteure in der gegenwärtigen Wirtschaftskrise durchaus aktuell, weil er nachweist, wie der Götze Geld in unsere intimsten, unbewussten Regungen vordringt und mittels seiner Indifferenz und seines Egoismus unser Bewusstsein in ein kalkulierendes, rechnendes und technokratisches eintrübt. Womit (...) nicht nur unsere Ratio, sondern auch unsere Sinnlichkeit, unser Selbstbezug und unser Bezug zu den Anderen präformiert wird. (shrink)

Many humanists and social scientists argue—if not assume—that race's centrality in social-scientific research provides an empirical justification for its reality as a constructed kind. In this paper, we first regiment these arguments, and then show that they face significant challenges. Specifically, race-concepts' social-scientific success is compatible with race being neither constructed nor real.

This study examines the communication strategies employed by MeritCare's public relations staff during the fen-phen case. The ethic of significant choice was the primary lens for the study. The study revealed that MeritCare's public relations staff members believed they did, in fact, follow the ethic of significant choice. Specifically, they perceived that the biases held by staff helped maintain the public's safety as the primary issue during the fen-phen events. They also believed that their communication strategies allowed them to avoid (...) ambiguity and emotionalized language. Finally, the staff members felt that teaming with Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota enabled them to influence the marketplace of ideas by capitalizing on the credible standing of Mayo Clinic. (shrink)

The main economic activity of the people of Eritrea is agriculture: crop production and livestock herding. Agriculture mainly comprises mixed farming and some commercial concessions. Most agriculture is rain-fed. The main rain-fed crops are sorghum, millet and sesame, and the main irrigated crops are all horticultural crops like bananas, onions and tomatoes and cotton. The major livestock production constraints are disease, water and feed shortages and agricultural expansion especially in the river frontages. The agricultural sector employs eighty percent of the (...) working population, but its production has not managed to cover internal food demand and is forced to cover nearly 50 per cent of its annual cereal requirements through imports-commercial and food assistance. Like most African countries, Eritrea is also a victim of the problem of food insecurity. In good years the country produces only about 60 per cent of its total food needs and in poor years, it produces no more than 25 per cent. On average, once in 10 years, the country is threatened with famines. Annual crop production depends on rainfall that is variable and unevenly distributed from year to year. Therefore, the primary goal of Eritrea is to guarantee food security by introducing modern technology, irrigation, terracing, soil and water conservation, with less dependence on rainwater. Thus the Government has articulated its food policy, which stresses national ownership of grant food assistance and to achieve food security in the coming five years. The policy indeed encompasses all sectoral policies and represents the Government's engagements with regard to food security. Despite the general trends of improvement in the economy of Eritrea, it has not yet fully recovered, and thus will still continue to require variable degrees of food assistance for the coming few more years. Based on this historical and recurrent food insecurity in Eritrea, an attempt is made in this paper to assess the agriculture development and food policy in the country. Furthermore, the paper captures the available food security policy proposals of Eritrea and eventually draws conclusions. (shrink)

Food security is about ensuring that all people at all times have both physical and economic access to the basic food they need. In a number of African countries chronic malnutrition and transitory food insecurity are pervasive. Like most African countries, Eritrea is also a victim of the problem of food insecurity. Based on this historical and recurrent food insecurity in Eritrea, an attempt is made in this paper to assess the possible causes of food insecurity in the country. Furthermore, (...) the paper captures the available food security policy proposals of Eritrea and eventually draws conclusions and extends possible recommendations and policy remedies suited to the country. (shrink)

Eritrean higher education faced numerous challenges over many years. It was particularly suffered during the colonial periods. Eritrea exerted its efforts to develop its dilapidated educational system with the advent of its independence. Eritrea celebrated its sixteenth birthday recently. However, the educational challenges in higher education still remain high. The government of Eritrea established different colleges in different administrative regions. The University of Asmara is the only university in the country that had to be revitalized after its devastation by the (...) 30-year war of independence. Since independence, the University has been able to contribute to the nation's skill manpower considerably. This paper examines higher education of Eritrea for about 60 years period. It delves the University of Asmara and its birth, development and apogee. The paper also gives some insights on recent educational development in Eritrea. (shrink)

All over the world, distance mode of education is gaining a momentum and becoming more popular than conventional education. It is a system in which schools, universities and other educational agencies offer instruction wholly or partly by mail. Eritrea, a newly independent country in Africa has been facing many challenges particularly in its education sector. It does not have sufficient educational institutions at tertiary level, thus, distance learning which is more cost effective, could be an alternative method of higher education (...) for this country. The distance education programme could promote higher education by providing access to large number of urban people and disadvantaged groups in rural and remote areas including working people, fighters, women and other adults. An attempt has been made in this paper to discuss various issues related to the establishment and development of distance education. It also provides the distance education programmes that so far undertaken in Eritrea and highlights the potential for the distance education in the country. (shrink)