Evolution Education and the Rise of the Creationist Movement in Brazil examines how larger societal forces such as religion, media, and politics have shaped Brazil's educational landscape and impacted the teaching and learning of evolution within an increasingly polarized discourse in recent years. To this end, Alandeom W. Oliveira and Kristin Cook have assembled a number of educational scholars and practitioners, many of whom are based in Brazil, to provide up-close and in-depth accounts of classroom-based evolution instruction, teacher preparation (...) programs, current educational policies, and commonly used school curricula. Contributors also present information on Brazilian teachers' and students' attitudes toward-and understanding of- evolution, emergent (mis)conceptions of evolution, and international comparisons of evolution acceptance and understanding in Brazil compared to other countries. Across the three sections of this book, readers see a nation navigating the complexity of multiple spheres of thought about evolution and its role in the K-12 and postsecondary curriculum. Suggesting the rise of an influential creationist movement in Brazil, this book illuminates the dynamic sociological processes at play in the educational sphere of Latin America in a globalized era that allows for rapid worldwide travel of competing ideologies. Scholars of Latin American studies, religion, education, sociology, and political science will find this book especially useful. (shrink)

Leibniz has been widely praised for maintaining against the Newtonians of his day the view that space and time are relative. At the same time, he has been roundly criticized for allowing that we can distinguish absolute from merely relative motion. This distribution of applause and criticism, I will argue, is in a measure unjustified. For on the one hand, those arguments, found in his correspondence with Clarke, by which Leibniz seeks to reject the view that space and time are (...) “something absolute” are for the most part unsatisfactory, and on the other hand, Leibniz was not so naive as his critics have supposed in allowing absolute motions. Sections I ‐ V of this essay will be concerned with the former issue; Leibniz's views on motion will be taken up in Section VI. The chief interest in all of this for present‐day philosophers may lie, not so much in the historical issues concerning Leibniz and the Newtonians, but in a meta‐philosophical question which inevitably arises from the historical issues, namely, the question whether developments in science can undermine the soundness of philosophical arguments which appeal to ordinary usage. (shrink)

This article argues that wittgenstein's account of religious belief is fundamentally defective because he treats religion as a language-Game and holds that language-Games arise spontaneously from prelinguistic (or primitive) reactions, And yet such reactions as wittgenstein postulates are a philosophical myth. It is further argued that his treatment of several other philosophical issues, Such as induction, Are infected with the same mistake. Wittgenstein's view of language, It is argued, Is basically behavioristic. Defenses of wittgenstein's account of religious belief by peter (...) winch and d z phillips are given particular attention. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a tendency in some quarters to see an affinity between the views of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on the subject of religious belief. It seems to me that this is a mistake, that Kierkegaard's views were fundamentally at odds with Wittgenstein's. That this fact is not generally recognized is, I suspect, owing to the obscurity of Kierkegaard's most fundamental assumptions. My aim here is to make those assumptions explicit and to show how they differ from (...) Wittgenstein's. (shrink)

Which famous twentieth-century philosopher instigated a revolution in philosophy, arguing that the philosopher’s business is not to advance general theories about reality, but rather to help release our thinking from the intellectual cramps produced by a misunderstanding of the forms of language? Wittgenstein? Wrong! according to John W. Cook. This revolution in philosophy actually had no author. Apparently, it arose through a misinterpretation of Wittgenstein’s later writings. In fact, Cook implies, Wittgenstein himself was not genuinely engaged in a (...) struggle with philosophical puzzles, but rather had an ontological theory up his sleeve: he was a conventional empiricist in the tradition of Berkeley, Ernst Mach, and Russell, though he happened to express himself so obscurely that some philosophers, believing themselves inspired by his writings, dreamed up the whole revolution by mistake, as it were. However, Cook is not arguing that the revolution should be canceled; rather he looks at Wittgenstein’s work from the standpoint of that accidental revolution, berating Wittgenstein, as it were, for not having thought to be a Wittgensteinian himself. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

It is argued that Wittgenstein was a greatly misunderstood philosopher, both as regards his own philosophical views and his ideas about philosophical method. O. K. Bouwsma's interpretation of Wittgenstein is used to illustrate the most common misunderstandings.

“How to Read Wittgenstein” is a discussion of some misinterpretations that arise when Ludwig Wittgenstein's later works are read, not in their historical context, but as though they were written for a generation of philosophers influenced by G.E. Moore and ordinary language philosophy. The criticisms are directed primarily at Oswald Hanfling's “Critical Notice” in Philosophical Investigations 19:2 (April, 1996).

Trolling—the online exploitation of website, chat, or game mechanics at another user's expense—can and does take place all over cyberspace. It can take myriad forms, as well—some verbal, like trash-talking an opponent in a game, and some silent, like refusing to include a new player in a team effort during an in-game quest. However, despite this variety, there are few to no studies comparing the effects of these differing trolling types on victims. In addition, no study has yet taken into (...) account users' offline cultural context and norms into the trolling victim experience. To fill this gap in the literature, the present study put participants from three culturally-distinct countries—Pakistan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands—in a simulated trolling interaction using the Cyberball game. Participants were either flamed or ostracized by a member of their own cultural group or a minority member, and the participants' emotional responses, behavioral intentions toward the other players, and messages sent during the game were taken as indicators of their response to the trolling. Results showed that our Taiwanese sample used the most reactive aggression when trolled and our Dutch sample was the most passive. In addition, ostracism generally produced the desire to repair relationships, irrespective of cultural context, and perpetrator culture only produced an effect in the behavioral intentions of our Pakistani sample. Overall, it would appear that online and offline culture interact to produce the variety of responses to trolling seen in extant literature. Additional implications for future research into computer-mediated communication and online aggression are also discussed. (shrink)

I find myself in profound disagreement with Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion and hence in disagreement also with those philosophers who have undertaken to elaborate and defend Wittgenstein's position. My principal objection is to the idea that religion is a language-game and that because of the kind of language-game it is, religious believers are not to be thought of as necessarily harbouring beliefs about the world over and above their secular beliefs. I reject this position, not because I think that there (...) are language-games and that religion happens not to be one, but because I find the very idea of a language-game to be indefensible. Put another way, I find myself out of sympathy with the recent idea that in philosophy of religion we ought to be discussing something called ‘religious language’ or ‘the kind of language involved in religious beliefs’. (shrink)

While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context in which that work was carried out, the papers in this volume have brought Mead’s work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy.

In one of his many metaphorical turns of phrase – a leitmotif in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity — Jürgen Habermas speaks of the path not taken by modern philosophers, a path that might have led them towards his own intersubjective notion of communicative reason. Habermas is especially critical of his predecessors, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, because, he believes, they repudiated the rational potential in the culture of modernity. Whenever Adorno and Horkheimer heard the word ‘culture’, they apparently (...) reached for their revolvers. By the 1940s, their confidence in modern culture had allegedly succumbed to bitter disillusionment. Indeed, on Habermas's view, the confidence of these early critical theorists had been shaken so badly by the emergence of Nazism and Stalinism that their scepticism finally embraced reason itself, ‘whose standards ideology critique had found already given in bourgeois ideals’. Consequently, Adorno and Horkheimer were forced to call into question their own immanent critique of modernity: ideology critique itself came ‘under suspicion of not producing truths’. These philosophers supposedly had little choice but to render their now suspect critique ‘independent even in relation to its own foundations’. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno often made reference to Immanuel Kant’s famous essay on enlightenment. Although he denied that immaturity is self-incurred, the first section of this article will show that he adopted many of Kant’s ideas about maturity in his philosophically informed critique of monopoly conditions under late capitalism. The second section will explore Adorno’s claim that the educational system could foster maturity by encouraging critical reflection on the social conditions that have made us what we are. Finally, this article will (...) demonstrate that Adorno links enlightenment to Kant’s idea of a realm of ends. (shrink)

The prevalence of psychosocial distress is increasing in the United States. At the same time, the American default lifestyle has steadily displaced household food production with industrial food production, despite increased cultural interest in cooking. An important focus of cooking research to date has been on cooking’s association with nutrition and dietary quality. Less focus has been placed on how cooking might foster the qualities that allow for mitigation of psychosocial distress and promote well-being. Rooted in its evolutionary role in (...) the human experience, cooking requires skills and knowledge that have the capacity to encourage aspects of well-being as described by Seligman as flourishing. Evidence for a beneficial role of cooking in psychosocial health exists, but the exploration is limited, potentially due to lack of a theoretical context to explain these benefits. From this perspective, we review the current literature showing the application of Seligman’s prominent well-being model, Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment (PERMA), to cooking, defined as the activity related to the preparation of food or a meal. We propose that the PERMA model as applied to cooking may function as a theoretical framework to explore psychosocial outcomes associated with cooking. Broader application of this approach may also help to further the application of positive psychology in the developing literature around psychosocial health and nutrition-related chronic diseases. (shrink)

G. W. Leibniz has been praised as an exemplar of tolerance on both theological and political grounds. His irenic efforts within Christendom as well as his positive attitude towards pagans like the Chinese is well documented. He thought that “the great majority of mankind” were already “civilized”. This paper highlights Leibniz’s political treatment of the “uncivilized” peoples, whom he termed “barbarians” and “savages”. Given Leibniz’s worldly outlook and prodigious reading, including writings detailing the horrors inflicted on the natives of the (...) Americas, he blithely ignored a reality that was quite at odds with his own vision for such peoples. The dissonance between his ideas on how to treat “barbarian” peoples (whom he considered to be fully human and deserving of mutual respect) and his awareness of their actual treatment in many nascent European colonies is striking. The only conclusion that can be reached (though Leibniz never says so explicitly) is that their conversion to Christianity and the consequent enlightenment of their posterity trumped their present suffering. (shrink)

American literary realism burgeoned during a period of tremendous technological innovation. Because the realists evinced not only a fascination with this new technology but also an ethos that seems to align itself with science, many have paired the two fields rather unproblematically. But this book demonstrates that many realist writers, from Mark Twain to Stephen Crane, Charles W. Chesnutt to Edith Wharton, felt a great deal of anxiety about the advent of new technologies – precisely at the crucial intersection of (...) ethics and language. For these writers, the communication revolution was a troubling phenomenon, not only because of the ways in which the new machines had changed and increased the circulation of language but, more pointedly, because of the ways in which language itself had effectively become a machine: a vehicle perpetuating some of society’s most pernicious clichés and stereotypes – particularly stereotypes of race – in unthinking iteration. This work takes a close look at how the realists tried to forge an ethical position between the two poles of science and sentimentality, attempting to create an alternative mode of speech that, avoiding the trap of codifying iteration, could enable ethical action. (shrink)

In the 1860s and 1870s the logic of Boole and the calculating machines of Babbage were key resources in W. S. Jevons’s attempt to construct a mechanical model of the mind, and both therefore played an important role in Jevons’s attempted revolution in economic theory. In this same period both Boole and Babbage were studied within the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos, but the Cambridge reading of Boole and Babbage was much more circumspect. Implicitly following the division of the moral sciences (...) into material and ‘real’ as established by the Rev. Grote, John Venn treated Boole’s logic as a purely formal science, while Alfred Marshall based his psychological model of the mechanical part of the human mind upon Babbage’s two-level machine. From the different perspectives of logic and psychology, Venn and Marshall did not simply incorporate their readings of Boole and Babbage, but also attempted to establish the limits to any mechanical explanation of the mind. This comparison of the attitudes to mental science of Jevons and Marshall provides a foundation from which the differing conceptions of economic theory of the two men can be established.Keywords: Alfred Marshall; Charles Babbage; George Boole; John Venn; Logic; Psychology. (shrink)

The social construction of the individual is a central theme in critical social theory. Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault address this theme throughout their work, offering important insights into individual identity and autonomy in the West. For Adorno, of course, individuation can be fully understood only with the aid of Freudian theory. However, since Foucault often criticized psychoanalysis, the paper will begin by comparing Adorno’s and Foucault’s positions on Freud’s theories of instinct and repression. Following this discussion, I shall (...) examine Adorno’s and Foucault’s distinct views on domination, comparing individuation as an effect of exchange relations in Adorno and of power relations in Foucault. This comparison will issue in a consideration of precisely what is being shaped into an individual. The final section of the paper will draw conclusions about the central features of individuation, while broaching the problem of whether power relations and exchange relations are now so powerful that resistance to them is effectively futile. (shrink)

Wittgenstein has often been criticized, and even dismissed, for being a patron of ordinary language, a champion of the vernacular, a defender of the status quo. One critic has written: 'When Wittgenstein set up the actual use of language as a standard, that was equivalent to accepting a certain set up of culture and belief as a standard ... It is lucky no such philosophy was thought of until recently or we should still be under the sway of witch doctors (...) ...' In what follows I want to show just how wide of the mark criticisms of this sort are. (shrink)

From time to time the figure of Tenes or Tennes, the eponymous hero of Tenedos, intrudes itself into discussions of larger matters connected with Greek religion, usually in order to lend support to some imaginative theory. As one of the latest examples might be instanced Dr. A. B. Cook's Zeus II., pp. 654 sqq. It is as well, however, to be certain as to the precise evidential value which attaches to the stories about Tenes before employing them to buttress (...) further hypotheses. A little intensive study of these traditions will therefore not be unprofitable, even if the result should be almost wholly negative. For in that event wemay be spared the trouble of placing much reliance upon edifices erected upon sand. (shrink)

Introduction -- Stout's proto-new-realism -- Situating G.F. Stout -- Stout's doctrine of primary and secondary qualities -- Stout and the Brentano School -- Representative function of presentations -- Sensible space and real space -- Cook Wilson's geometrical counter-example -- Stout's central question -- Ideal constructions -- Ideal constructions in psychology and epistemology -- British new realism : the language of madness -- Stout's criticisms of Alexander -- Alexander's response -- The nature of sensations, images, and other presentations -- What (...) is the metaphysical problem? -- "How can the interpretation which is supplied by the mind be a constituent of the [physical] object?" -- Some general remarks -- British new realism : the language of common-sense -- T.P. Nunn and the new realism -- Nunn and things -- Nunn's postulate -- Russell and Stout on sensible objects -- Russell, sense-data and sensibilia -- The methods of construction -- Russell's constructions and Nunn's postulate -- Constructions, psychology, and the essence of philosophy -- The methods of logical construction -- A mathematical development -- The principle of abstraction. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the ‘Cook Ding cutting up an ox’ parable, Zhuangzi advanced a doctrine on craft and its relationship with Dao. With reference to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in conjunction with an analysis of Zhuangzi’s epistemological position, we argue that Zhuangzi understood craft as involving the supersession of the cognitive. In craft, the relationship between human and world is non-cognitive and ‘pre-objective’, the living of this kind of relationship gives rise to a non-cognitive ‘practical sense’ which enables the craftsman’s movements to (...) spontaneously constitute wuwei. Zhuangzi’s ideal is that this kind of relationship is generalized to life as a whole, thereby enabling human actions to spontaneously constitute wuwei generally. This is why he stipulated ‘doing away with knowing’ as a self-cultivation technique required for attaining Dao. Thus, craft constitutes an embodiment of Dao in the double-sense of wuwei and the non-cognitive and ‘pre-objective’ relationship between human and world which enables wuwei. (shrink)

The task of the historian is not one of tracing a series of links in a temporal chain; rather, it is his task to analyze a complex pattern of change into the factors which served to make it precisely what it was. The relationship which I therefore take to be fundamental to historiography is ... a relationship of part to whole, not a relationship of antecedent to consequent.Mandelbaum's historian relates the part to the whole, leaving it for the sociologist to (...) relate the antecedent to the consequence.If that is so, then Maigret is first an historian ascertaining and accumulating the subjective meanings that individuals use to produce the facticity of their own lives. And in the course of so doing he discovers the nature of the reality in which the crime occurred. Once he finds his way into the realities of the crime there is time and need for the sociological analysis of antecedent and consequent. To suggest a comparison, Maigret practices in miniature the method of Norbert Elias in that he tries to understand his subjects as they understand themselves. Maigret's is an idiographic science and not a nomethetic one. For this reason Maigret, unlike Holmes, almost never refers to previous cases in the effort to understand the matter at hand.The temptation is to conclude that Maigret is a little like Fernand Braudel in combining history and sociology by turns. But I wonder if there is not a more profound sense in which Maigret, if not all sociologists, is an historian. If we have any knowledge it is of the past, not of the present or the future. Minerva's owl does indeed take wing only at dusk, as Hegel wrote. By the time we have understood the present, it is the past.If Maigret's aim is not the unvarnished truth, that is not because of the constraints of police work but because of the constraints of the world. The irony of Maigret's ethnomethodology is this. Simenon's style is rightly celebrated for its evocation of atmosphere. The apposite analogy occasionally offered is between Simenon's spare and laconic style and Impressionist painting. Simenon does not describe people and places in the Maigret stories but suggests them with a sentence or two. The style is not realism, whatever the effect. As Rafael Koskimies has written, Simenon selects and simplifies. Impressionism is the style of painting that accepts the surface as reality. The play of light and color on the surface of objects is suggested on the surface of the canvas with the texture and color of the paint. If Simenon is an impressionist in his art, Maigret cannot be in his. He does not settle for the surface, but goes inside of it. Once there he learns all he needs to know and all that he can know. The confessions that so frequently occur in the Maigret stories do not confirm his suppositions, but release the tensions of the drama in a catharsis. Finally, if Maigret's Maigret must admit in his Memoirs that he could not in fact go into the detail of every reality personally in the manner described above, it only proves how terribly taxing the method called Verstehen is.To conclude, Maigret has a method, but it is not a recipe that others can follow step-by-step. His method is an orientation to reality and a commitment to understanding in a certain way. To call Maigret's procedure a method requires the definition of “method” to include more than cook books, however brilliant the cook books are. Maigret's method is a part of the context of discovery. Naive realists like Méchin imagine that they live only in the context of justification.Of course, no one's understanding is perfect. Maigret makes mistakes. There are times when an explanation based on behavior would be more accurate and economical. If Simenon does not dwell on Maigret's failures it is clear that Maigret uses other methods, too. The triangulation of a variety of methods is what in fact most of us practice whatever we preach. (shrink)

Excerpt from Talks on Wrote This In The discussion of the doctrine of Concentration presented in this book is the outcome of work done in the Cook County Normal School. In 1883 I resigned my position as one of the Supervisors of the Boston schools in order to come into closer range and con tact with children's minds. The work done in Quincy was a slight beginning of something far better. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands (...) of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Serious study of Peirce began some fifty years ago, in 1931, with the publication of the first of six volumes of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Arthur Burks added two volumes to that collection in 1958. In the meantime there had appeared, and continued to appear, several one-volume editions, namely those by Morris R. Cohen, Justus Buchler, Vincent Tomas, Philip P. Wiener, and Edward C. Moore. A new era in Peirce scholarship (...) began in 1975 with the appearance of the first of three important multi-volume editions: Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to “The Nation,” edited by Kenneth L. Ketner and James E. Cook ; The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, edited by Carolyn Eisele ; and Charles Sanders Peirce: Complete Published Works, Including Selected Secondary Materials, the 149-microfiche collection edited by members of the Texas Tech University Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. (shrink)