Philosophers and geographers have converged on the topic of public space, fascinated and in many ways alarmed by fundamental changes in the way post-industrial societies produce space for public use, and in the way citizens of these same societies perceive and constitute themselves as a public. This volume advances this inquiry, making extensive use of political and social theory, while drawing intimate connections between political principles, social processes, and the commonplaces of our everyday environments.

This edited collection had its origins in a two-day conference held at the Tate Britain, organised collaboratively by research staff and students at Middlesex University and the London Consortium in order to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the publication of Edmund Burke's famous book on the sublime. The conference was funded by Middlesex University, the London Consortium and the Tate Britain's AHRC-funded "Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language" research project. The conference set out to critically examine the legacy of the (...) sublime in contemporary art, culture and society and to assess the value and the dangers of this concept as it is articulated in current thought and practice. The book selected from and expanded on the papers delivered at the conference in order to pursue this goal further. It was broken into themed sections (each of which had an introduction), each exploring an different issue around contemporary uses of the sublime. The sections were: 1. Nature, Ecology and the Sublime; 2. The Sublime After Kant; 3. Capitalism, Terror, Art and the Sublime; 4. Baroque and Beyond: Art, Sex and the Sublime; 5. The Cinematic Sublime. The volume reflects the interdisiplinarity of the concept of the sublime today, and includes essays whose appraoches come from aesthetics and ethics, ecological and political thought, psychoanalysis, feminism, film studies, literary studies, art history and popular culture. It includes papers by internationally renowned authors from the UK, America and Europe alongside the new voices of younger academics. The contributors were: Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), Mark Bould (University of the West of England), Eu Jin Chua (London Consortium), Gudrun Filipska (Middlesex University), Cornelia Klinger (Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna / University of Tübingen, Germany), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck), William McDonald (Middlesex Univeristy), Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck), Claire Pajaczkowska (Royal College of Art), Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds), Gene Ray (Geneva University of Art and Design), Bettina Reiber (Central St. Martins), Jan Rosiek (University of Copenhagen), Sherryl Vint (Brock University, Canada), and Luke White (Middlesex University). (shrink)

The phenomenon of medical overtesting in general, and specifically in the emergency room, is well-known and regarded as harmful to both the patient and the healthcare system. Although the implications of this problem raise myriad ethical concerns, this paper explores the extent to which overtesting might mitigate race-based health inequalities. Given that medical malpractice and error greatly increase when the patients belong to a racial minority, it is no surprise that the mortality rate similarly increases in proportion to white (...) patients. For these populations, an environment that emphasizes medical overtesting may well be the desirable medical environment until care evens out among races and ethnicities; additionally, efforts to lower overtesting in conjunction with a high rate of racist medical mythology may cause harm by lower testing when it is actually warranted. Furthermore, medical overtesting may help to assuage racial distrust. This paper ultimately concludes that an environment of medical overtesting may be less pernicious than the alternative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Doctor at War, Doctor Washing FeetLuke MillerThis man is any one of my patients. Cancer is in his body, he has been told, and now this story has become connected with some fact of bodily functioning. The tumor is now in his brain, the MRI report says, and now some weakness, headache, confusion, or dimming of his sight corroborates this finding. In the white–walled clinic room he speaks (...) with me, the resident doctor, as the attending doctor studies the pictures of his brain on a computer screen. He sits on the edge of the examining table, and his wife, or daughter, or concerned friend looks on. She is the one with the anxious face, the tightened lips; he is more open and still, relaxed into his position, sitting on the edge of this table in this white room, as the cancer sits inside him, growing and changing.The neurologic exam starts from the head and works its way down, to the very end of the big toes; at least, that is how I was taught to perform it, and that is how it is organized in my mind, so that is how I must carry it out. There is the high-est—the thinking skills that process the world and express it in intelligible language—and the lowest, the most distant nerves I imagine as simple conduits of a binary signal: off or on, yes or no. My exam, however, betrays this simple hierarchy of nerves. In everything I measure, there is some [End Page 202] participation of high and low, of brain and distant simple nerve.Two years bridged college and medical school. I lived in Rome for four months during this time, learning Italian, visiting churches large (Saint Peter’s, San Paolo Fuori le Mura) and small (San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Santa Maria della Vittoria). I had graduated from a small Midwestern Mennonite college, where most of the people I passed and greeted on campus every day were my friends (and relatives, given the tight–knit ethnic heritage of most Mennonites in the United States.) In my previous travel to Europe I had been studying Mennonite history with a class, tracing the stories of the Anabaptist martyrs, the ancestors of the Mennonites, and the centuries of persecution that started in the time of the Reformation and stretched to living memory. In my childhood their stories had mixed with stories from the Bible: the fires of the faithful burned at the stake, the tongue screws to keep them from witnessing to their beliefs as they burned, the Anabaptist prisoner who turned back during his own escape across a frozen river to save his drowning pursuer, giving his own life for his enemy’s, like Christ. We are not a people of war, these stories taught us; we are a people of God’s peace. We are not a people of this world, we were taught; my ancestors emigrated to Russia and North America to found their own separate communities to live out their vision of God’s kingdom on the earth. We are citizens of a country, but do not pledge allegiance to a national flag. We will give our lives to save others, even our enemies, we are taught, but will not kill or do violence even to protect our own. In my travels after college, my story, the martyr stories, the story of my small people, seemed so minor next to the beauty of Rome, the aqueducts, fountains, bright mosaics, ancient churches made of heavy stone.New images and new stories continued to fill my world as I began medical school. In a single afternoon’s lecture the embryo became a blastocyst, and then exploded into a multitude of cells, folding as it grew. “My” cadaver, opened with a simple blade, presented new lessons for me every day: nerves to trace, organs to map, muscles and vessels to name. Inside the whole, the human, were a hundred organs, each with its own secrets and sicknesses, a trillion cycling cells.Mennonites wash feet. It’s a ritual, or as close as a non–sacramental, non–clerical community might have to a ritual. We do... (shrink)

Reprinted with modification and permission from Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. The phenomenon of medical overtesting in general, and specifically in the emergency room, is well-known and regarded as harmful to both the patient and the healthcare system. Although the implications of this problem raise myriad ethical concerns, this chapter explores the extent to which overtesting might mitigate race-based health inequalities. Given that medical malpractice and error greatly increase when the patients belong to a racial minority, it is no surprise (...) that the mortality rate similarly increases in proportion to white patients. For these populations, an environment that emphasizes medical overtesting may well be the desirable medical environment until care evens out among races and ethnicities; additionally, efforts to lower overtesting in conjunction with a high rate of racist medical mythology may cause harm by lower testing when it is actually warranted. Furthermore, medical overtesting may help to assuage racial distrust. This paper ultimately concludes that an environment of medical overtesting may be less pernicious than the alternative. (shrink)

This article explores the cannibalistic dimensions of racial disgust and desire in Michel Houellebecq’s Submission. Situated within broader discourses of French déclinisme, Submis- sion offers a melancholic portrait of white nostalgia. Through the tastes and consumptive practices of his characters, Houellebecq depicts white identification as dependent on an ambivalent relationship to corporeal difference. Paying close attention to the mouth’s dual function as a site of ontological triage (sorting out the human from the non-human, the edible from the inedible) (...) and ontological transformation (converting dead matter into living flesh), I argue that cannibalist desire is integral to white nationalist anxiety. (shrink)

The first part of this article analyzes the Black Power movement within the context of wider debates about how black nationalism conceptualized the need to form a people as a response to white supremacy. The second part examines how white supremacy conditions the nature and form of democratic citizenship in the United States and how the formation of a “nation within a nation” is a vital adjunct to dismantling white supremacy as a political system. Part three situates (...) Black Power within a theological conception of poverty understood as powerlessness. Building on James Cone and Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, it closes by suggesting that forming a people as a response to powerlessness constitutes a double movement of healing and exorcism. (shrink)

Leszek Kolakowski, an eminent philosopher known mainly outside his native Poland for Main Currents of Marxism, was an enormously influential public figure in Poland. He was awarded the Order of the White Eagle when Poland was liberated and went into exile in 1968, first to North America, where he continued to give active support and advice to Solidarity, and then to Oxford. Kolakowski, who became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1980, was buried in Poland with military honours (...) and a minute's silence in the national Parliament. Obituary by Steven Lukes FBA. (shrink)

Discussions of extended cognition have increasingly engaged with the empirical and methodological practices of cognitive science and psychology. One topic that has received increased attention from those interested in the extended mind is music cognition. A number of authors have argued that music not only shapes emotional and cognitive processes, but also that it extends those processes beyond the bodily envelope. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the case for extended music cognition. Two accounts are examined in detail: (...) Joel Krueger’s “musically extended emotional mind” and Tom Cochrane’s “expression and extended cognition.” Each account is evaluated using three “anti-extension” arguments. I argue that Krueger and Cochrane’s accounts offer important steps toward extended music cognition, but that each account remains underdeveloped in various ways. To supplement existing approaches, I propose a complementary extended computational approach to music cognition. The claim is that music cognition forms part of an extended system in virtue of involving computational processes that range across environmental and in-the-head elements. The paper concludes by showing how the ECMC deals with each of the three anti-extension challenges and responds to objections. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in applying mechanistic thinking to computational accounts of implementation and individuation. One recent extension of this work involves so-called ‘wide’ approaches to computation, the view that computational processes spread out beyond the boundaries of the individual. These ‘mechanistic accounts of wide computation’ maintain that computational processes are wide in virtue of being part of mechanisms that extend beyond the boundary of the individual. This paper aims to further develop the mechanistic account of (...) wide computationalism by responding to two outstanding worries, what are called the parsimony and testability challenges. The first is based on considerations about wide computation’s ontological cost; the second the view’s experimental testability. The argument is that wide mechanistic computationalism can gain the necessary conceptual resources to address the challenges by embracing two further aspects of the mechanistic approach: i) the structural aspect of mechanistic explanation and ii) the notion of constitutive relevance. (shrink)

This chapter wades into the growing discussion surrounding embodied cognition and predictive processing. After surveying a recent debate between Jakob Hohwy and Andy Clark, it articulates two outstanding issues facing discussions of compatibility. It argues that headway on these issues can be made by drawing on the resources of philosophy of science.

In The Formula, Luke Dormehl takes readers inside the world of numbers, asking how we came to believe in the all-conquering power of algorithms; introducing the mathematicians, artificial intelligence experts and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are shaping this brave new world, and ultimately asking how we survive in an era where numbers can sometimes seem to create as many problems as they solve.

I argue that its appearing to you that P does not provide justification for believing that P unless you have independent justification for the denial of skeptical alternatives – hypotheses incompatible with P but such that if they were true, it would still appear to you that P. Thus I challenge the popular view of ‘dogmatism,’ according to which for some contents P, you need only lack reason to suspect that skeptical alternatives are true, in order for an experience as (...) of P to justify belief that P. I pursue three lines of objection to dogmatism, having to do with probabilistic reasoning, considerations of future or hypothetically available justification, and epistemic circularity. I briefly sketch a fall-back position which avoids the problems raised. (shrink)

I believe that Tom is the proud father of a baby boy. Why do I think his child is a boy? A natural answer might be that I remember that his name is ‘Owen’ which is usually a boy’s name. Here I’ve given information that might be part of a causal explanation of my believing that Tom’s baby is a boy. I do have such a memory and it is largely what sustains my conviction. But I haven’t given you just (...) any causally relevant information, I’ve given my grounds for my belief. I’ve given reasons that might justify me in supposing that Tom’s baby is a boy. Less naturally, the question might be taken as a request for a broader causal explanation of my holding this belief. Appropriate answers might cite all manner of facts concerning the evolution of the human race, why I chose to pursue philosophy and hence came to know Tom, the mechanisms of email transmission, the firing of various neurons, the circumstances of concept formation as a result of which I’m able to grasp the thought that Tom’s baby is a boy, and so on. It is an interesting question what distinguishes the narrower set of answers that I first suggested. I won’t pursue that here. I assume you have a good enough sense of the distinction I’m drawing. We might call the narrower set of answers justifying reasons, the kind of reasons I might cite in justifying my belief. Answers of the first sort are clearly relevant to epistemological evaluation. In assessing whether you know p or are rational in believing it to the degree you do, I will naturally want to consider what reasons you have for your belief. In deliberating myself about whether to believe p, in seeking an answer to the question of whether p, I will naturally consider what reasons or grounds I have to suppose that p. But what I want to focus on here is how explanations of the broader sort bear on such questions as whether to believe p. From a third-person perspective we can ask, ‘In assessing the epistemic status of S’s belief that p, what is the relevance of causal information that lies outside of the realm of justifying reasons?’ From the first-person standpoint we can ask ‘In seeking to answer whether p, how should such causal information affect my deliberations?’ At first it might seem that such broader causal information could have little relevance if any. Like any belief my belief that p can be traced back to innumerable causes from far and wide.. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that living kidney donation is permitted but living kidney sales are not. Call this the Received View. One way to support the Received View is to appeal to a particular understanding of the conditions under which living kidney transplantation is permissible. It is often claimed that donors must act altruistically, without the expectation of payment and for the sake of another. Call this the Altruism Requirement. On the conventional interpretation, the Altruism Requirement is a moral fact. (...) It states a legitimate constraint on permissible transplantation and is accepted on the basis of cogent argument. The present paper offers an alternative interpretation. I suggest the Altruism Requirement is a moral fiction—a kind of motivated falsehood. It is false that transplantation requires altruism. But the Requirement serves a purpose. Accepting it allows kidney donation but not kidney sale. It, in short, rationalizes the Received View. (shrink)

Introduction : situating oakeshott -- Language, practice, and individual agency -- Individuality between tradition and contingency -- Imagining the modern state -- Towards a conversational democratic ethos -- Conclusion : hearing voices.

Background: Transgender health care is a subject of much debate among clinicians, political commentators, and policy-makers. While the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care (SOC) establish clinical standards, these standards contain implied ethics but lack explicit focused discussion of ethical considerations in providing care. An ethics chapter in the SOC would enhance clinical guidelines. Aims: We aim to provide a valuable guide for healthcare professionals, and anyone interested in the ethical aspects of clinical support for gender (...) diverse and transgender people of all ages. Recognizing that the WPATH is a global association, we address broad challenges. We offer a reflection on general ethical principles, providing conceptual tools for healthcare providers, patients, and families to navigate the specific challenges they might encounter in transgender health care, in line with WPATH’s worldwide mission and scope. Method: This article employs a descriptive analysis, and our framework of reference is the four principles of biomedical ethics: respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Results: The article presents a discussion on the four ethical principles as applied to transgender health care. We address issues such as respect for patient autonomy in decision-making, the role of beneficence and nonmaleficence in clinical interventions, and the importance of justice in equitable treatment and access to care. Some of the ethical concerns we address in this article pertain to the current sociopolitical climate, where there has been increasing legal interference, internationally, for transgender and nonbinary people, particularly youth, seeking medical care. Discussion: We highlight the interplay between ethical principles and clinical practice, underscoring the need for ethical guidance in addressing the diverse challenges faced by healthcare providers and patients in transgender health care. We advocate for continuous refinement of ethical thinking to ensure that transgender health care is not only medically effective but also ethically sound. (shrink)

An introduction to Christian ethics that provides a new, constructive framework for Christian moral and political thought. It draws on and integrates classic sources and approaches with contemporary liberationist and critical voices while making the ethical relationship between human and nonhuman life a central concern.

A whirlwind tour through the utopias of modernity The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat is a brilliant fictional excursion through Western political philosophy from one of our most original thinkers. Professor Caritat, a middle-aged Candide, walks naively from his native land to the neighbouring countries of Utilitaria, Communitaria, and Libertaria on a quest to find the best of all possible worlds. Freed from the confines of his ivory tower, this wandering intellectual is made to confront the perplexed state of modern (...) thinking in a dazzling comedy of ideas. (shrink)

Many philosophical views have the surprising implication that, within the boundaries of each human being, there is not just one mind, but many: anywhere from two (the person and their brain, or the person and their body) to trillions (each of the nearly-entirely-overlapping precise entities generated by the Problem of the Many). This is often treated as absurd, a problem of ‘Too Many Minds’, which we must find ways to avoid. It is often thought specifically absurd to allow such a (...) multiplication of conscious subjects, even if we could accept it for physical objects. I consider metaphysical, phenomenological, and moral arguments for this asymmetry, and show that they all fail: many overlapping conscious minds is no more problematic than many overlapping physical objects. Theories that imply such a multiplicity may or may not be true, but they cannot be rejected simply for implying it. (shrink)

A new formulation of the Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA) for the existence of God is offered, which avoids a number of commonly raised objections. I argue that we can and should focus on the fundamental constants and initial conditions of the universe, and show how physics itself provides the probabilities that are needed by the argument. I explain how this formulation avoids a number of common objections, specifically the possibility of deeper physical laws, the multiverse, normalisability, whether God would fine-tune at (...) all, whether the universe is too fine-tuned, and whether the likelihood of God creating a life-permitting universe is inscrutable. (shrink)

This book holds classical liberalism responsible for an American concept of beauty that centers upon women, wilderness, and machines. For each of the three beauty components, a cultural entrepreneur supremely sensitive to liberalism’s survival agenda is introduced. P.T. Barnum’s exhibition of Jenny Lind is a masterful combination of female elegance and female potency in the subsistence realm. John Muir’s Yosemite Valley is surely exquisite, but only after a rigorous liberal education prepares for its experience. And Harley Earl’s 1955 Chevrolet Bel (...) Air is a dreamy expressionist sculpture, but with a practical 265 cubic inch V-8 underneath. Not that American beauty has been uniformly pragmatic. The 1950s are reconsidered for having temporarily facilitated a relaxation of the liberal survival priorities, and the creations of painter Jackson Pollock and jazz virtuoso Ornette Coleman are evaluated for their resistance to the pressures of pragmatism. The author concludes with a provocative speculation regarding a future liberal habitat where Emerson’s admonition to attach stars to wagons is rescinded. (shrink)

This book explores both scientific and humanistic theoretical traditions in anthropology through the lens of ontology. The first part of the book examines different methods for generating valid anthropological knowledge, and proposes a shift in current consensus. Drawing on western scholars of antiquity and the medieval period and moving away from twentieth century theorists, it argues that we must first make ontological assumptions about the kinds of things that can exist (or not) before we can then develop epistemologies that study (...) those kinds of things. The book goes on to apply the ontology-first theory to a set of case studies in modern day conspiracy theories, misinformation, and magical thinking. It asserts that we need to move away from unneeded metaphysical assumptions of conspiracy theories being misinformation, and argues that reconstructing particular historical events can be a fruitful zone for application of quantitative methods to humanistic questions. Theorizing the Anthropology of Belief is an excellent supplementary suitable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in anthropological theory. (shrink)

A collection of essays by Timothy W. Luke discussing social and political issues related to ecology, environmentalism, ecocriticism, global climate change, and the Anthropocene.

Cooperative relations steeped in honesty and good faith are a necessity for any viable society. This is especially relevant to the police institution because the police are entrusted to promote justice and security. Despite the necessity of societal honesty and good faith, the police institution has embraced deception, dishonesty, and bad faith as tools of the trade for providing security. In fact, it seems that providing security is impossible without using deception and dishonesty during interrogations, undercover operations, pretextual detentions, and (...) other common scenarios. This presents a paradox related to the erosion of public faith in the police institution and the weakening of the police's legitimacy. -/- The book seeks to solve this puzzle by showing that many of our assumptions about policing and security are unjustified. Specifically, they are unjustified in the way many of our assumptions about security were unjustified after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when state institutions embraced a variety of brutal rules and tactics in pursuit of perceived security enhancements. The police are likewise unjustified in their pursuit of many supposed security enhancements that rely on proactive deception, dishonesty, and bad faith. -/- There are compelling reasons to think that the police's widespread use of proactive deception and dishonesty is inconsistent with fundamental norms of political morality regarding fraud and the rule of law. Although there are times and places for such tactics in policing, those times and places should be much more limited than current practices suggest. (shrink)

Philosophers, writers, and artists throughout history have come to the conclusion that life and its pursuits are meaningless. In many ways, they are correct. Yet when life is considered in the light of the gospel message, you will find true and deep meaning."--Back cover.

Studies of animal culture have not normally included a consideration of cetaceans. However, with several long-term field studies now maturing, this situation should change. Animal culture is generally studied by either investigating transmission mechanisms experimentally, or observing patterns of behavioural variation in wild populations that cannot be explained by either genetic or environmental factors. Taking this second, ethnographic, approach, there is good evidence for cultural transmission in several cetacean species. However, only the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops) has been shown experimentally to (...) possess sophisticated social learning abilities, including vocal and motor imitation; other species have not been studied. There is observational evidence for imitation and teaching in killer whales. For cetaceans and other large, wide-ranging animals, excessive reliance on experimental data for evidence of culture is not productive; we favour the ethnographic approach. The complex and stable vocal and behavioural cultures of sympatric groups of killer whales (Orcinus orca) appear to have no parallel outside humans, and represent an independent evolution of cultural faculties. The wide movements of cetaceans, the greater variability of the marine environment over large temporal scales relative to that on land, and the stable matrilineal social groups of some species are potentially important factors in the evolution of cetacean culture. There have been suggestions of gene-culture coevolution in cetaceans, and culture may be implicated in some unusual behavioural and life-history traits of whales and dolphins. We hope to stimulate discussion and research on culture in these animals. (shrink)

I argue that there are non-trivial objective chances (that is, objective chances other than 0 and 1) even in deterministic worlds. The argument is straightforward. I observe that there are probabilistic special scientific laws even in deterministic worlds. These laws project non-trivial probabilities for the events that they concern. And these probabilities play the chance role and so should be regarded as chances as opposed, for example, to epistemic probabilities or credences. The supposition of non-trivial deterministic chances might seem to (...) land us in contradiction. The fundamental laws of deterministic worlds project trivial probabilities for the very same events that are assigned non-trivial probabilities by the special scientific laws. I argue that any appearance of tension is dissolved by recognition of the level-relativity of chances. There is therefore no obstacle to accepting non-trivial chance-role-playing deterministic probabilities as genuine chances. (shrink)

Introduction -- The genome generation -- From brawn to brains -- A mindscape -- Camouflage -- Speech bubbles -- Déjà vu -- Irregular patterns -- Thinking straight -- Yours or mine? -- Licensed dialogue -- Perfect blush -- Counting sheep -- Automatic thoughts -- Floating sounds -- Touch wood -- A horizon -- References -- Index.

This book explores a neglected philosophical question: How do groups of interacting minds relate to singular minds? Could several of us, by organizing ourselves the right way, constitute a single conscious mind that contains our minds as parts? And could each of us have been, all along, a group of mental parts in close cooperation? Scientific progress seems to be slowly revealing that all the different physical objects around us are, at root, just a matter of the right parts put (...) together in the right ways: How far could the same be true of minds? This book argues that we are too used to seeing the mind as an indivisible unity and that understanding our place in nature requires being willing to see minds as composite systems, simultaneously one conscious whole and many conscious parts. In thinking through the implications of such a shift of perspective, the book relates the question of mental combination to a range of different theories of the mind (in particular panpsychism, functionalism, and Neo-Lockeanism about personal identity) and identifies, clarifies, and addresses a wide array of philosophical objections (concerning personal identity, the unity of consciousness, the privacy of experience, and other issues) that have been raised against the idea of composite minds. The result is an account of the metaphysics of composition and consciousness that can illuminate many different debates in philosophy of mind, concerning split brains, collective intentionality, and the combination problem, among others. (shrink)

Recently in this journal, Jessica Morley and colleagues (AI & SOC 2023 38:411–423) review AI ethics and education, suggesting that a cultural shift is necessary in order to prepare students for their responsibilities in developing technology infrastructure that should shape ways of life for many generations. Current AI ethics guidelines are abstract and difficult to implement as practical moral concerns proliferate. They call for improvements in ethics course design, focusing on real-world cases and perspective-taking tools to immerse students in challenging (...) situations with relatable personal, social and environmental implications. The present paper considers the ACTWith model of moral cognition for use in such training contexts. Morley and colleagues' paper and contemporary literature are reviewed. Whistleblowing as a source for relatable case studies is discussed, and the purpose of ethics education considered. The ACTWith model is introduced, and correlations with contemporaries noted. The ACTWith model has been successfully employed in a broad range of technology ethics courses in the Netherlands and South Korea. Illustrations are offered. Correlations with contemporary efforts are drawn in the context of software engineering. Summary discussion considers strengths and limitations of the ACTWith program. Overall, the paper emphasizes training high-level moral reasoning through guided inquiry education informing lifetime professional practice, and indicates an outstanding need for teachers able to do the job. (shrink)

This study examines a recent claim that it was the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz who instituted the requirement that non-Muslims living under Muslim rule adopt distinctive dress and behavior. After showing that the evidence for the origins of the ghiyār is neither as unanimous nor as consistent as was suggested, it is argued that the ghiyār cannot be securely attributed to ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and that the problem of its origins therefore remains in question.

One of the most significant obstacles to inquiry and deliberation is citizenship education. There are few mechanisms for the development of citizens’ democratic character within most societies, and greater opportunities need to be made to ensure our democracies are epistemically justifiable. The character and quality of citizens’ interactions are a crucial aspect for any democracy; their engagement make a significant difference between a deliberative society and an electoral oligarchy. I contend that through demarchic procedures, citizens are subject to collective learning (...) process in virtue of being part of communal decision-making and in so doing can develop their capacities for deliberation with practice over time. Demarchic bodies can be utilised as communities of inquiry. By viewing democracy as both a learning process and a decision-making mechanism, the quality of deliberation and participation can improve over time as well. (shrink)