There has been in recent years a plethora of defenses of theism from analytical philosophers such as Plantinga, Swinburne, and Alston. Richard Gale's important book is a critical response to these writings. New versions of cosmological, ontological, and religious experience arguments are critically evaluated, along with pragmatic arguments to justify faith on the grounds of its prudential or moral benefits. A special feature of the book is the discussion of the atheological argument that attempts to deduce a contradiction from (...) the theist's way of conceiving of God's nature. In considering arguments for and against the existence of God, Gale is able to clarify many important philosophical concepts including exploration, time, free will, personhood, actuality, and the objectivity of experience. (shrink)
Abstract Of the many ways in which identity is constructed and performed online, few are as strongly ‘anchored’ to existing offline relationships as in online social networks like Facebook and Myspace. These networks utilise profiles that extend our practical, psychological and even corporeal identity in ways that give them considerable phenomenal presence in the lives of spatially distant people. This raises interesting questions about the persistence of identity when these online profiles survive the deaths of the users behind them, via (...) the practice of ‘memorialising’ social network profile pages. I situate these practices within a phenomenology of grief that accounts for the ways in which the dead can persist as moral patients, and show how online survival in this case illuminates an important difference between persons and selves within contemporary philosophy of personal identity. Ultimately, the online persistence of the dead helps bring into view a deep ontological contradiction implicit in our dealings with death: the dead both live on as objects of duty and yet completely cease to exist. Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0050-7 Authors Patrick Stokes, Philosophy Group, School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB, UK Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)
This is an accessible introduction to the full range of the philosophy of William James. It portrays that philosophy as containing a deep division between a Promethean type of pragmatism and a passive mysticism. The pragmatist James conceives of truth and meaning as a means to control nature and make it do our bidding. The mystic James eschews the use of concepts in order to penetrate to the inner conscious core of all being, including nature at large. Richard Gale (...) attempts to harmonize these pragmatic and mystical perspectives. This introduction is drawn from and complements the author's much more comprehensive and systematic study The Divided Self of William James, a volume that has received the highest critical praise. With its briefer compass and non-technical style this new introduction should help to disseminate the key elements of one of the great modern philosophies to an even wider readership. (shrink)
The flying professor: discovering Hanson Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9636-z Authors George Gale, Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, MO 64110, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.
In this book, Donald Stokes challenges Bush's view and maintains that we can only rebuild the relationship between government and the scientific community when we understand what is wrong with that view.Stokes begins with an analysis of the ...
This paper considers an orectic penetration hypothesis which says that desires and desire-like states may influence perceptual experience in a non-externally mediated way. This hypothesis is clarified with a definition, which serves further to distinguish the interesting target phenomenon from trivial and non-genuine instances of desire-influenced perception. Orectic penetration is an interesting possible case of the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience. The orectic penetration hypothesis is thus incompatible with the more common thesis that perception is cognitively impenetrable. It is of (...) importance to issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, epistemology, and general philosophy of science. The plausibility of orectic perception can be motivated by some classic experimental studies, and some new experimental research inspired by those same studies. The general suggestion is that orectic penetration thus defined, and evidenced by the relevant studies, cannot be deflected by the standard strategies of the cognitive impenetrability theorist. (shrink)
Experiences of art involve exercise of ordinary cognitive and perceptual capacities but in unique ways. These two features of experiences of art imply the mutual importance of aesthetics and cognitive science. Cognitive science provides empirical and theoretical analysis of the relevant cognitive capacities. Aesthetics thus does well to incorporate cognitive scientific research. Aesthetics also offers philosophical analysis of the uniqueness of the experience of art. Thus, cognitive science does well to incorporate the explanations of aesthetics. This paper explores this general (...) framework of expansionism : a research strategy that suggests that the explanatory goals and resources of both aesthetics and cognitive science should expand to include those of the other. Two relations are considered. First, what is the relation between aesthetics and more traditional cognitive science? Second, what is the relation between aesthetics and new developments in cognitive science that de-emphasize mental representation and emphasize body and action? (shrink)
Amongst philosophers and cognitive scientists, modularity remains a popular choice for an architecture of the human mind, primarily because of the supposed explanatory value of this approach. Modular architectures can vary both with respect to the strength of the notion of modularity and the scope of the modularity of mind. We propose a dilemma for modular architectures, no matter how these architectures vary along these two dimensions. First, if a modular architecture commits to the informational encapsulation of modules, as it (...) is the case for modularity theories of perception, then modules are on this account impenetrable. However, we argue that there are genuine cases of the cognitive penetrability of perception and that these cases challenge any strong, encapsulated modular architecture of perception. Second, many recent massive modularity theories weaken the strength of the notion of module, while broadening the scope of modularity. These theories do not require any robust informational encapsulation, and thus avoid the incompatibility with cognitive penetrability. However, the weakened commitment to informational encapsulation significantly weakens the explanatory force of the theory and, ultimately, is conceptually at odds with the core of modularity. We then propose a non-modular notion of functionally independent system that, we argue, achieves the explanatory force sought by modularity theorists. (shrink)
We will give a new cosmological argument for the existence of a being who, although not proved to be the absolutely perfect God of the great Medieval theists, also is capable of playing the role in the lives of working theists of a being that is a suitable object of worship, adoration, love, respect, and obedience. Unlike the absolutely perfect God, the God whose necessary existence is established by our argument will not be shown to essentially have the divine perfections (...) of omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, and sovereignty. Furthermore, it is not even shown that he is contingently omnipotent and omniscient, just powerful and intelligent enough to be the supernatural designer-creator of the exceedingly complex and wondrous cosmos that in fact.. (shrink)
There are good, even if inconclusive reasons to think that cognitive penetration of perception occurs: that cognitive states like belief causally affect, in a relatively direct way, the contents of perceptual experience. The supposed importance—indeed some would argue, the essence—of this possible phenomenon is that it would result in important epistemic and scientific consequences. One interesting and intuitive consequence entirely unremarked in the extant literature concerns the perception of art. Intuition has it that knowledge about art changes how one aesthetically (...) evaluates artworks. A profound explanation of this intuitive fact is that perceptual experiences vary with artistic expertise. Cognitive penetration provides an explanatory mechanism for this latter effect. What one knows about art may affect, in one of two ways sketched below, how one perceives art. Differences in aesthetic evaluation follow, either because high-level aesthetic properties can be perceptually represented or because they supervene on low-level perceptible properties. Either way, the hypothesis is that the expert better judges art because she better sees art. And she better sees art because she better knows art. (shrink)
Our paper ‘A new cosmological argument’ gave an argument for the existence of God making use of the weak Principle of Sufficient Reason (W-PSR) which states that for every proposition p, if p is true, then it is possible that there is an explanation for p. Recently, Graham Oppy, as well as Kevin Davey and Rob Clifton, have criticized the argument. We reply to these criticisms. The most interesting kind of criticism in both papers alleges that the W-PSR can be (...) justifiably denied by the atheist, and constitutes no improvement on the strong Principle of Sufficient Reason (S-PSR) which claims that every true proposition in fact has an explanation. The criticism is predicated on the fact that it can be shown that the W-PSR entails the S-PSR. We argue that the W-PSR's plausibility remains despite the criticisms. From this it can be seen to follow that the entailment relation between the W-PSR and the S-PSR gives one reason to believe the S-PSR. (shrink)
A fiction may prescribe imagining that a pig can talk or tell the future. A fiction may prescribe imagining that torturing innocent persons is a good thing. We generally comply with imaginative prescriptions like the former, but not always with prescriptions like the latter: we imagine non-evaluative fictions without difficulty but sometimes resist imagining value-rich fictions. Thus arises the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Most analyses of the phenomenon focus on the content of the relevant imaginings. The present analysis focuses instead (...) on the character of certain kinds of imaginings, arguing that we resist in such cases given the rich evaluative character of the imaginings prescribed, and the agent-dependent constraints on imagining in such ways. (shrink)
Perception is typically distinguished from cognition. For example, seeing is importantly different from believing. And while what one sees clearly influences what one thinks, it is debateable whether what one believes and otherwise thinks can influence, in some direct and non-trivial way, what one sees. The latter possible relation is the cognitive penetration of perception. Cognitive penetration, if it occurs, has implications for philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper offers an analysis of the phenomenon, (...) its theoretical consequences, and a variety of experimental results and possible interpretations of them. The paper concludes by proposing some constraints for analyses and definitions of cognitive penetrability. (shrink)
It is my purpose to explore some of the problems concerning the relation between divine creation and creaturely freedom by criticizing various versions of the Free Will Defense (FWD hereafter).1 The FWD attempts to show how it is possible for God and moral evil to co-exist by describing a possible world in which God is morally justified or exonerated for creating persons who freely go wrong. Each version of the FWD has its own story to tell of how it is (...) possible that God be frustrated in his endeavor to create a universe containing moral good sans moral evil. The value of free will is supposed to be so great that God is morally exonerated under such circumstances for creating the Mr. Rogers type persons you know, the very same people who are good sometimes are bad sometimes. If it is objected that God could not be unlucky in this manner, that it necessarily is within his power to create goody-goody persons, either by supernaturally willing in his own inimitable manner that it be so, which is the theological compatibilist objection, or by a judicious selection of the initial state of the universe and operant causal laws which together entail that every free action be morally right, which is the causal compatibilist objection, the response is that it is logically incompatible that a creaturely free action be determined by God or by anything external to the agent, such as causes outside of the agent. (shrink)
This article examines critically Popper's arguments for a "unity of method" between natural science and social science. It discusses Popper's writings on the goals of science, the objects of scientific inquiry, the logic of scientific method, and the value of objectivity The major argument is that, despite his unifying intention, Popper himself provides good reasons for treating the two sciences differently. Popper proposes that social scientists follow a number of rules that are not required for, and that have no direct (...) equivalent in, natural science. For most of the cases examined here, these requirements are not simply marginal amendments to a basic methodological core; they are essentially moral or ethical in character and mark out a radically different intellectual and political enter prise. From this perspective, much of Popper's work on social science method ology has the character of an ethical treatise. It is argued further that Popper's accounts of the differences between natural and social science, and his call for moral responsibility, are based largely upon his understanding of the distinctive political threat that social science poses for the conduct of critical reason. (shrink)
I have long admired Richard Swinburne's work, not only for the way it has raised the level of discussion in the philosophy of religion by the introduction of technical sophistication and rigour, but even more for its courageous honesty in espousing and defending to the hilt his deepest beliefs and convictions, regardless of whether they are currently in vogue. He is a true professor whose concern is not to look good but to seek the truth, and for this he deserves (...) our deepest respect as a philosopher. (shrink)
Creativity has received, and continues to receive, comparatively little analysis in philosophy and the brain and behavioural sciences. This is in spite of the importance of creative thought and action, and the many and varied resources of theories of mind. Here an alternative approach to analyzing creativity is suggested: start from the bottom up with minimally creative thought. Minimally creative thought depends non-accidentally upon agency, is novel relative to the acting agent, and could not have been tokened before the time (...) it is in fact tokened, relative to the agent in question. Thoughts that meet these three conditions—agency, psychological novelty, and modal—are what may be called cognitive breakthroughs. Even if such breakthroughs are not necessary to or definitive of richer creativity, they are indeed central to much of creativity. The minimal analysis provides a more workable explanandum for theories of creativity of varied motivation and method. (shrink)
Many traditional theories of creativity put heavy emphasis on an incubation stage in creative cognitive processes. The basic phenomenon is a familiar one: we are working on a task or problem, we leave it aside for some period of time, and when we return attention to the task we have some new insight that services completion of the task. This feature, combined with other ostensibly mysterious features of creativity, has discouraged naturalists from theorizing creativity. This avoidance is misguided: we can (...) maintain unconscious incubated cognition as (sometimes) part of the creative process and we can explain it in scientifically responsible ways. This paper, focusing on the effects of attention on the functional networking of the brain, attempts just such an explanation. It also serves to assuage the naturalist's scepticism about other features of creative cognition. The broad upshot, one would hope, is that philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists return some attention to the long neglected topic of creativity. (shrink)
The claim that selves are narratively constituted has attained considerable currency in both analytic and continental philosophy. However, a set of increasingly standard objections to narrative identity are also emerging. In this paper, I focus on metaphysically realist versions of narrative identity theory, showing how they both build on and differ from their neo-Lockean counterparts. But I also argue that narrative realism is implicitly committed to a four-dimensionalist, temporal-parts ontology of persons. That exposes narrative realism to the charge that the (...) narratively constituted self, on the one hand, and the self that is the object of much of our everyday self-reference and self-experience, on the other, can't be the same thing. This conclusion may well force narrativists to abandon metaphysical realism about narrative selves—which, in turn, may leave the invocation of ‘narrativity’ as identity-constituting somewhat under-motivated. (shrink)
God -- On the cognitivity of mystical experiences -- The problem of evil -- God eternal and Paul helm -- A new cosmological argument, co-authored with Alexander Pruss -- A response to oppy and to Davey and Clifton -- Co-authored with Alexander Pruss -- The ecumenicalism of William James -- Time -- Is it now now? -- McTaggart's analysis of time -- The egocentric particular and token-reflexive analyses of tense -- The impossibility of backward causation -- An identity theory of (...) the A- and B-series -- Co-authored with Michelle Beer -- Disanalogies between space and time -- Nonbeing -- Negative statements -- On what there isn't -- Nonbeing and the receptacle -- Could logical space be empty? (shrink)
Personal Identity theorists as diverse as Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman and Galen Strawson have noted that the experiencing subject (the locus of present psychological experience) and the person (a human being with a career/narrative extended across time) are not necessarily coextensive. Accordingly, we can become psychologically alienated from, and fail to experience a sense of identity with, the person we once were or will be. This presents serious problems for Locke's original account of “sameness of consciousness” constituting personal identity, given (...) the distinctly normative (and indeed eschatological) focus of his discussion. To succeed, the Lockean project needs to identify some phenomenal property of experience that can constitute a sense of identity with the self figured in all moments to which consciousness can be extended. I draw upon key themes in Kierkegaard's phenomenology of moral imagination to show that Kierkegaard describes a phenomenal quality of experience that unites the experiencing subject with its past and future, regardless of facts about psychological change across time. Yet Kierkegaard's account is fully normative, recasting affective identification with past/future selves as a moral task rather than something merely psychologically desirable (Schechtman) or utterly contingent (Parfit, Strawson). (shrink)
It was important to James's philosophy, especially his doctrine of the will to believe, that we could believe at will. Toward this end he argues in The Principles of Psychology that attending to an idea is identical with believing it, which, in turn, is identical with willing that it be realized. Since willing is identical with believing and willing is an intentional action, it follows by Leibniz's Law that believing also is an intentional action. This paper explores the problems with (...) James's thesis that attending=will=belief. An attempt is made to show that it has a salvageable core that is of considerable philosophical interest and importance. (shrink)
R. M. Adams’s essay, “Must God Create the Best?” can be interpreted as offering a theodicy for God’s creating morally less perfect beings than he could have created. By creating these morally less perfect beings, God is bestowing grace upon them, which is an unmerited or undeserved benefit. He does so, however, in advance of the free moral misdeeds that render them undeserving. This requires that God have middle knowledge, pace Adams’s version of the Free Will Theodicy, of what would (...) result from his actualization of possible free persons. It is argued that God’s possession of such middle knowledge negates the freedom of created beings, since God completely determines every action of every created person. And since they are not free, they cannot qualify as morally unmeritorious or undeserving. And, with that, Adams’s theodicy of grace-in-advance collapses. (shrink)
My review of Swinburne's elaborate and ingenious higher-good type theodicy will begin with an examination of his argument for why the theist needs a theodicy in the first place. After a preliminary sketch of his theodicy and its crucial free-will plank, its rational-choice theoretic arguments will be critically scrutinized.
In this paper I do two things: (1) I support the claim that there is still some confusion about just what the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument is and the way it employs Quinean meta-ontology and (2) I try to dispel some of this confusion by presenting the argument in a way which reveals its important meta-ontological features, and include these features explicitly as premises. As a means to these ends, I compare Peter van Inwagen’s argument for the existence of properties with (...) Putnam’s presentation of the indispensability argument. Van Inwagen’s argument is a classic exercise in Quinean meta-ontology and yet he claims – despite his argument’s conspicuous similarities to the Quine-Putnam argument – that his own has a substantially different form. I argue, however, that there is no such difference between these two arguments even at a very high level of specificity; I show that there is a detailed generic indispensability argument that captures the single form of both. The arguments are identical in every way except for the kind of objects they argue for – an irrelevant difference for my purposes. Furthermore, Putnam’s and van Inwagen’s presentations make an assumption that is often mistakenly taken to be an important feature of the Quine-Putnam argument. Yet this assumption is only the implicit backdrop against which the argument is typically presented. This last point is brought into sharper relief by the fact that van Inwagen’s list of the four nominalistic responses to his argument is too short. His list is missing an important – and historically popular – fifth option. (shrink)
History and philosophy complement and overlap each other in subject matter, but the two disciplines exhibit conflict over methodology. Since Hempel's challenge to historians that they should adopt the covering law model of explanation, the methodological conflict has revolved around the respective roles of the general and the particular in each discipline. In recent years, the revival of narrativism in history, coupled with the trend in philosophy of science to rely upon case studies, joins the methodological conflict anew. So long (...) as contemporary philosophy of science relies upon history's methodology to construct its case studies, it subjects itself to a paradoxical situation: the better the history, the worse the philosophy. An example of the methodological conflict is presented in the case of Antoine Lavoisier. This example also serves our ultimateconclusion, which is that distinctively philosophical methods of case-study design promise enhanced prescriptive powers for philosophy of science. (shrink)
Kasher and Nishi interpret James as holding an expressivist theory about epistemic duties, as well as other normative sentences. On this interpretation, James's claim that we have a will-to-believe type option to believe an epistemic duty winds up being inconsistent. For one can believe only that which is either true or false; but, for the expressivist, normative claims are neither. It is argued that Feldman's essay is not only a wildly anachronistic account of Clifford and James but also is of (...) no philosophical merit in its own right. (shrink)
Within each of the great religions there is a well established doxastic practice (DP) of taking experiential inputs consisting of apparent direct perceptions of God (M experiences) as giving prima facie justification, subject to defeat by overriders supplied by that religion, for belief outputs that God exists and is as he presents himself. (This DP is abbreviated as "MP.") William Alston's primary aim in his excellent book, Perceiving God, is to establish that we have epistemic justification for believing that MPs (...) are reliable in that for the most part their belief outputs are true and moreover true of an objective or experience independent reality, unlike the belief outputs of the DPs based on sensations and feelings, along with the introspective DP whose intentional accusatives, although existing independently of being introspected, fail to be objective because they are themselves conscious states. (shrink)
A rigorous extension of the full Lorentz group is found which is parameterized by interframe velocities v(t) and which reduces to Special Relativity for acceleration-free cases and to Galilean relativity for low velocity cases. Full group properties are exhibited. Four-momentum is defined and particle masses are shown to be invariants. Four-force is introduced and pseudoforces are shown to enter the equations of particle dynamics. Maxwell's equations are shown to take on pseudocurrent terms in accelerating frames. A four-vector Green function solution (...) to the modified Maxwell equations is presented. Finally, a discussion is offered concerning philosophical questions such as the operational definition of time. (shrink)
This paper explores Kierkegaard's recurrent use of mirrors as a metaphor for various aspects of moral imagination and vision. While a writer centrally concerned with issues of self-examination, selfhood and passionate subjectivity might well be expected to be attracted to such metaphors, there are deeper reasons why Kierkegaard is drawn to this analogy. The specifically visual aspects of the mirror metaphor reveal certain crucial features of Kierkegaard's model of moral cognition. In particular, the felicity of the metaphors of the "mirror (...) of possibility" in Sickness Unto Death and the "mirror of the Word" in For Self-Examination depend upon a normative phenomenology of moral vision, one in which the success of moral agency depends upon an immediate, non-reflective self-referentiality built into vision itself. To "see oneself in the mirror" rather than simply seeing the mirror itself is to see the moral content of the world as immediately "about" oneself in a sense that goes beyond the conceptual content of what is perceived. These metaphors gesture towards a model of perfected moral agency where vision becomes co-extensive with volition. I conclude by suggesting directions in which explication of this model may contribute to discussions in contemporary moral psychology. (shrink)
The employment of mythological language and imagery by an Epicurean poet - an adherent of a system not only materialist, but overtly hostile to myth and poetry - is highly paradoxical. This apparent contradiction has often been ascribed to a conflict in the poet between reason and intellect, or to a desire to enliven his philosophical material with mythological digressions. This book attempts to provide a more positive assessment of Lucretius' aims and methodology by considering the poet's attitude to myth, (...) and the role which it plays in the De Rerum Natura, against the background of earlier and contemporary views. The author suggests that Lucretius was not only aware of the tension between his two roles as philosopher and poet, but attempted to resolve it by developing his own, Epicurean poetic, together with a bold and innovative theory of the origins and meaning of myth. (shrink)
The ancient problem of whether our asymmetrical attitudes towards time are justified (or normatively required) remains a live one in contemporary philosophy. Drawing on themes in the work of McTaggart, Parfit, and Heidegger, I argue that this problem is also a key concern of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843). Part I of Either/Or presents the “aesthete” as living a temporally volatilized form of life, devoid of temporal location, sequence and direction. Like Parfit’s character “Timeless,” these aesthetes are indifferent to the direction of (...) time and seemingly do not experience McTaggart’s “A-Series” mode of temporality. The “ethical” conception of time that Judge William offers in Part II contains an attempt to normativize the direction of time, by re-orienting the aesthete towards an awareness of time’s finitude. However, the form of life Judge William articulates gives time sequentiality but not necessarily the robust directionality necessary to justify (and make normative) our asymmetrical attitudes to time. Hence while Either/Or raises this problem it remains unanswered until The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Only with the eschatological understanding of time developed in The Concept of Anxiety does Kierkegaard answer the question of why directional and asymmetrical conative and affective attitudes towards time are normative. (shrink)
In recent years a significant debate has arisen as to whether Kierkegaard offers a version of the “narrative approach” to issues of personal identity and self-constitution. In this paper I do not directly take sides in this debate, but consider instead the applicability of a recent development in the broader literature on narrative identity—the distinction between the temporally-extended “narrative self” and the non-extended “minimal self—to Kierkegaard's work. I argue that such a distinction is both necessary for making sense of Kierkegaard's (...) claim that we are ethically enjoined to become selves, and can indeed be found in Either/Or and the later The Sickness Unto Death . Despite Kierkegaard's Non-Substantialism, each of these texts speaks (somewhat obliquely) of a “naked self” that is separable from the concrete facticity of human being. In both cases, this minimal self is linked to issues of eschatological responsibility; yet the two works develop very different understandings of “eternity” and correspondingly divergent accounts of the temporality of selfhood. This complicates the picture of Kierkegaardian selfhood in interesting ways, taking it beyond both narrativist and more standard neo-Lockean models of what it is to be a self. (shrink)
In Warranted Christian Belief, Alvin Plantinga makes use of his earlier two books, Warrant: the Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function, to show how it is possible for someone to have a warranted belief that God exists and that all of the great things of the Christian Gospel are true even if the believer is unable to give any argument to support these beliefs. Three objections are lodged against Plantinga’s position. First, the alleged sensus divinitatis and the internal instigation (...) of the Holy Spirit are crucially disanalogous to the cognitive faculties, such as memory and perception, in the standard package, thereby destroying his argument based on an analogy between the former and the latter. Second, in order to defeat defeaters for these beliefs one must give arguments, thus merely relocating the point at which the believer must produce argumentative support for her belief. Third, there are moral defeaters for exclusivist basic theistic and Christian beliefs based on the undesirable consequences of such beliefs. (shrink)
"This book gathers together eighteen of the most important and influential scholarly articles of the last 60-70 years (three of which are translated into ...
In Australian schools, "inclusion" is a term that is used to challenge a previously narrow focus on students with disabilities and their integration within and distribution amongst "mainstream" schools and classrooms. Nevertheless, this article argues that, as a concept, "inclusion" requires further broadening and deepening, particularly in arenas of practice, if it is to serve the interests of all students. Informed by notions of recognitive justice, the paper advocates rethinking inclusion to accommodate student differences in more socially just ways - (...) emphasising students' contributions rather than their disabilities - and what this means for the organisation of classrooms and schools. Within the article, research data are focused primarily on students with learning disabilities and draw on twenty semi-structured interviews conducted with parents and teachers across six Australian state primary and secondary schools. Three sets of conditions are proposed as necessary for inclusive classroom and school processes: specifically, those that promote self-identity and respect, self expression and development and selfdetermination and decision-making. (shrink)
In September 2008, 10 years after the untimely death of Pere Alberch (1954–1998), the 20th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology gathered a group of Pere’s students, col- laborators, and colleagues (Figure 1) to celebrate his contribu- tions to the origins of EvoDevo. Hosted by the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) outside Vienna, the group met for two days of discussion. The meeting was organized in tandem with a congress held in May 2008 at the Cavanilles Institute (...) for Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (ICBiBE) in Valencia, Spain. The talks at the KLI were equal parts: nostalgic remembrance, excitement over new ways of thinking about old problems, and an unrepressed vitriol against the resurgence of reductionist thinking in EvoDevo. Here we highlight some of the key aspects of Pere’s life and work that informed and infused the talks. (shrink)
Introduction -- Part I: Growth, inquiry, and unity -- Problems with inquiry -- Aesthetic inquiry -- Inquiry, inquiry, inquiry -- Why unification? -- Part II: The metaphysics of unity -- The quest for being QUA being -- Time and individuality -- The Humpty-Dumpty intuition -- The mystical.
Personal identity theory has become increasingly sensitive to the importance of the first-person perspective. However, certain ways of speaking about that perspective do not allow the full temporal aspects of first-person perspectives on the self to come into view. In this paper I consider two recent phenomenologically-informed discussions of personal identity that end up yielding metaphysically divergent views of the self: those of Barry Dainton and Galen Strawson. I argue that when we take a properly temporally indexical view of the (...) first-person perspective, and thereby resist the assumption that phenomenally-figured and theoretically-figured identity claims must have a common object, the metaphysically awkward accommodations each of these authors is compelled to make cease to be necessary. (shrink)
Visual forms of episodic memory and anticipatory imagination involve images that, by virtue of their perspectival organization, imply a notional subject of experience. But they contain no inbuilt reference to the actual subject, the person actually doing the remembering or imagining. This poses the problem of what (if anything) connects these two perspectival subjects and what differentiates cases of genuine memory and anticipation from mere imagined seeing. I consider two approaches to this problem. The first, exemplified by Wollheim and Velleman, (...) claims that genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations are phenomenally unselfconscious, with the co-identity of the notional and actual subjects secured by a determinate causal history. The second approach posits some distinctive phenomenal property that attaches to genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations and serves to experientially conflate the notional and actual subject. I consider a version of the second approach, derived from Kierkegaard’s discussions of phenomenal contemporaneity, and argue that this approach can better account for the possibility of affective alienation from the selves we were and will be: the way in which our sense of self and awareness of our causal history can sometimes come apart. (shrink)
“In this article we sketch out the landscape for this Special Issue on anticipating and embedding the societal challenge of nanotechnologies. Tools that actors may choose to employ for these processes are articulated, and further explored through the introduction of the seven articles which comprise this Issue. Taken together, these articles create a cogent narrative on the societal challenges posed by nanotechnologies. They are drawn together by three distinct themes, each of which is briefly considered within this context of this (...) Introductory article”. (shrink)
