This volume addresses the means and ends of sacrificial speculation by inviting a selected group of specialists in the fields of philosophy, history of religions, and indology to examine philosophical modes of sacrificial speculation-especially in Ancient India and Greece-and consider the commonalities of their historical raison d'etre. Scholars have long observed, yet without presenting any transcultural grand theory on the matter, that sacrifice seems to end with (or even continue as) philosophy in both Ancient India and Greece. How are we (...) to understand this important transformation that so profoundly changed the way we think of religion (and philosophy as opposed to religion) today? Some of the complex topics inviting closer examination in this regard are the interiorisation of ritual, ascetism and self-sacrifice, sacrifice and cosmogony, the figure of the philosopher-sage, transformations and technologies of the self, analogical reasoning, the philosophy of ritual, vegetarianism, and metempsychosis. (shrink)

Foreword -- Preface -- Is Aristotle's philosophy "divine, but useless"? -- Surveying the definition of Aristotle's "man" -- Exploring the habits of Aristotle's "ethical man" -- Exploring the habits of Aristotle's "working man" -- Aristotle on becoming something -- The gods and giants grapple with "art"! -- Aristotle's "philosophical man" finds his "goods" -- Aristotle's "philosophical man" sees the world in a grain of sand -- Aristotle's "philosophical man" gets to know his limits -- Aristotle's "philosophical man" finds "God" -- (...) Aristotle's "man" competes in the philosophical marketplace -- Aristotle's "philosophical man" finds himself -- Plato's "clever modern man" loses himself. (shrink)

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper (...) is the result of a collective writing process. (shrink)

This paper focusses on our concerns about revelations about sexual harassment in universities and the inadequate responses whereby some universities seem more concerned about their own reputations than the care and protection of their students. Seldom do cases go to criminal court, instead they mostly fall within employment relations policies where the use of non-disclosure agreements are double edged, such that some perpetrators remain nameless even if the person offended against wants details made public. Of course if the staff member (...) does not resign or take retirement prior to potential dismissal, but remains in the institution, the grapevine still works. Universities too often become complicit in cover-ups at the expense of further potential victims of sexual misconduct. It has been with much dismay that we found that despite extensive training and writing about ethics some senior professors in philosophy fields have been accused and found wanting, disabusing us of the virtue assumption. Despite these recent instances where perpetrators have been named and been publicised in the media, we found that this is not in fact new, so not only does the paper look to the past, but also extensively it uses contemporary accounts, reports and documents from USA, UK, South America, Australia, and New Zealand. These seem to be the tip of the iceberg, so our hope is that all students and staff in universities (and in fact all institutions where there are inherent power imbalances) will not only feel safe, but that they will be safe as universities become genuinely ethical institutions. (shrink)

Michael A. Petersa and Fazal Rizvib aBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China; bMelbourne University, Melbourne, Australia Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘no...

Michael A PetersBeijing Normal UniversityChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 and a ‘stable release’ on February 13, 2023. It belongs to OpenAI’s GPT-3 family (generativ...

Western Marxism, since its Western deviation and theoretical development in the 1920s, developed in diverse ways that has reflected the broader philosophical environment. First, a theory of conscio...

This paper is an experiment in collective writing conducted in Autumn 2019 at the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. The experiment involves 12 international masters' students readi...

Open Peer Review: Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT)Michael A. Peters, Beijing Normal University, PR ChinaIn 2016 EPAT started experimenting with open peer review for articles that were part...

[This editorial is part of the 50th celebration issue that explored ‘what comes after postmodernism in educational theory. The special issue is being published as a monograph and this is our group...

This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that (...) ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience. (shrink)

Introduction: Western Marxism in Educational Philosophy and Theory -- Ideology and Schooling -- Marxism and Education: Will the Doctrine Bear the Weight? -- Education and Cultural Disadvantage -- Illich and Anarchism -- Knowledge and Ideology in the Marxist Philosophy of Education -- Liberal Education and Social Change -- The Continuing Conflicts Between Capitalism and Democracy: Ramifications for Schooling -- Luce Irigaray: Women becoming subjects for a divine economy -- The Nature and Limits of Critical Theory in Education -- Class Dismissed? (...) Historical materialism and the politics of 'difference' -- A Brief Commentary on the Hegelian-Marxist Origins of Gramsci's 'Philosophy of Praxis' -- Hope, political imagination, and agency in Marxism and beyond: Explicating the transformative worldview and ethico-ontoepistemology -- Knowledge socialism: the rise of peer production - collegiality, collaboration, and collective intelligence. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 11, October 2020, Page 1109-1112.

We call attention to certain cases of epistemic akrasia, arguing that they support belief-credence dualism. Belief-credence dualism is the view that belief and credence are irreducible, equally fundamental attitudes. Consider the case of an agent who believes p, has low credence in p, and thus believes that they shouldn’t believe p. We argue that dualists, as opposed to belief-firsters (who say credence reduces to belief) and credence-firsters (who say belief reduces to credence) can best explain features of akratic cases, including (...) the observation that akratic beliefs seem to be held despite possessing a defeater for those beliefs, and that, in akratic cases, one can simultaneously believe and have low confidence in the very same proposition. (shrink)

This paper scrutinises the many ways in which ‘success’ is portrayed in representing assisted reproductive technology (ART) services and illuminates how these definitions differ from those held by participant couples. A qualitative approach informed by feminist perspectives guided this study and aimed to problematise the concept of ‘success’ by examining literature from ART clinics, government reports on ART, and by analysing narratives of couples who have accessed ART services. As many ART services have varying definitions of ‘success’ and as statistics (...) are manipulated to promote further patronage of ART services, the likelihood of ‘success’ is often overstated. This paper is concerned with the effects this promotion has on the participants. We suggest that this very mobilisation of statistical success changes the ability of those who access ART services to make productive decisions about themselves inside these treatment regimes, as the basis for decision‐making is hidden by the way numbers, objectivity and clinical reasoning operate to maintain participation in the program. In such an operation, the powerful mix of hope and technology kept participants enrolled far longer than they originally planned. Moreover, how success rates are manipulated raises ethical issues for all involved: clients, counsellors, and nursing and medical professionals. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

This paper discusses the finite version of the two envelope paradox. (That is, we treat the paradox against the background assumption that there is only a finite amount of money in the world.).

We introduce two new belief revision axioms: partial monotonicity and consequence correctness. We show that partial monotonicity is consistent with but independent of the full set of axioms for a Gärdenfors belief revision sytem. In contrast to the Gärdenfors inconsistency results for certain monotonicity principles, we use partial monotonicity to inform a consistent formalization of the Ramsey test within a belief revision system extended by a conditional operator. We take this to be a technical dissolution of the well-known Gärdenfors dilemma.In (...) addition, we present the consequential correctness axiom as a new measure of minimal revision in terms of the deductive core of a proposition whose support we wish to excise. We survey several syntactic and semantic belief revision systems and evaluate them according to both the Gärdenfors axioms and our new axioms. Furthermore, our algebraic characterization of semantic revision systems provides a useful technical device for analysis and comparison, which we illustrate with several new proofs. (shrink)

Snake venoms are recognized here as a grossly under‐explored resource in pharmacological prospecting. Discoveries in snake systematics demonstrate that former taxonomic bias in research has led to the neglect of thousands of species of potential medical use. Recent discoveries reveal an unexpectedly vast degree of variation in venom composition among snakes, from different species down to litter mates. The molecular mechanisms underlying this diversity are only beginning to be understood. However, the enormous potential that this resource represents for pharmacological prospecting (...) is clear. New high‐throughput screening systems offer greatly increased speed and efficiency in identifying and extracting therapeutically useful molecules. At the same time a global biodiversity crisis is threatening the very snake populations on which hopes for new venom‐derived medications depend. Biomedical researchers, pharmacologists, clinicians, herpetologists, and conservation biologists must combine their efforts if the full potential of snake venom‐derived medications is to be realized. (shrink)

© 2016 RCNi Ltd. All rights reserved. Background Conceptual frameworks are important to ensure a clear underpinning research philosophy. Further, the use of conceptual frameworks can support structured research processes. Aim To present a partnership model for a reflective narrative for researcher and participant. Discussion This paper positions the underpinning philosophical framework of the model in social constructionism and narrative enquiry. The model has five stages - study design, invitation to share a research space and partnership, a metaphorical research space, (...) building a community story, and reading the community story to others. Core principles of the partnership model are continual reflection by the researcher, potential reflections by participants, reciprocal sharing, and partnership in research. Conclusion A 'trajectory of self' for both participants and researchers can be enhanced within reflective partnerships. Implications for practice This model can be applied to studies that use narrative enquiry and are seeking a humanistic approach with participant engagement. (shrink)

Babur: Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor, 1483–1530 By DaleStephen Frederic, xv + 242 pp. Price PB £18.99. EAN 978–1107107267.

A physical mechanical sequence is proposed representing measurement interactions ‘hidden' within QM's proverbial ‘black box'. Our ‘beam splitter' pairs share a polar angle, but head in opposite directions, so ‘led' by opposite hemisphere rotations. For orbital ‘ellipticity', we use the inverse value momentum ‘pairs' of Maxwell's ‘linear' and ‘curl' momenta, seen as vectors on the Poincare spherical surface. Values change inversely from 0 to 1 over 90 degrees, then ± inverts.. Detector polarising screens consist of electrons with the same vector (...) distributions, but polar angles set independently by A & B. The absorption/re-emission interaction process is modelled as surface vector additions at the angle of polar latitude of each interaction. This ‘collapse' of characteristic ‘wave values' is really then simply ‘re-polarisation', with new ellipticity. We then obtain the relation Cosθ at polarisers. We may simplify this to new ellipses with major/minor axis values. Considering as spherical orbital angular momentum rotation we invoke the unique quality of spheres to rotate concurrently on three axes! Rotating on y or z axes concurrent with x axis spin can return surface points to starting positions with non-integer x axis rotations, from half to infinity!. Second interactions at photomultiplier/ analysers are identical but at two orthogonal ‘channels'. Vector addition interactions at BOTH channel orientations normally produce a vector value of adequate amplitude to give a *click* from the MAJOR axis direction. At the ‘crossover' points at near circular polarity the orthogonal ‘certainty' is ~ 50:50, so both or neither channels may produce a ‘click'. The apparently unphysical but proved ‘Malus' law' relation; Cos2θ emerges physically from the 2nd set of interactions. The main departure from QM's assumptions are; That the original pair members each actually possessed two inverse momenta sets; ‘curl' and ‘linear'. Also that complex ‘vector additions' of those pairs occurs. Vector quantities allow A & B to reverse their OWN finding by reversing dial setting, reproducing experimental outputs without problematic ‘non-locality'. (shrink)