This article explores the contrasting arguments for the place of the arts in education made by the two distinguished arts educators—the American Elliot Eisner and British dance and physical education theorist Graham McFee. Both scholars begin with the premise that the arts should be central to a liberal education and then diverge. McFee argues, from his success in seeing dance as part of the National Curriculum in the UK, that a conceptually precise and closely focused philosophical rationale is critical, whereas (...) Eisner takes the opposite path—arguing for the inclusion of the arts because they embody the most profoundly central task of all education—the nuanced development of mind. (shrink)

Most healthcare providers work from ethical principles based on a Western model of practice that may not adhere to the cultural values intrinsic to Indigenous peoples. Breaking bad news is an important topic of ethical concern in health research. While much has been documented on BBN globally, the ethical implications of receiving bad news, from an Indigenous patient perspective in particular, is an area that requires further inquiry. This article discusses the experiences of Māori lung cancer patients and their families, (...) in order to investigate the ethical implications of receiving bad news. Data collection occurred through 23 semistructured interviews and nine focus groups with Māori lung cancer patients and their families in four districts in the Midland Region of New Zealand: Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Lakes and Tairāwhiti. The findings of this study were categorised into two key themes: communication and context. Avenues for best practice include understanding the centrality of the HCP–patient relationship and family ties in the healthcare journey, and providing patients with the full range of viable treatment options including hope, clear advice and guidance when the situation calls for it. Overall, the findings of this study hold implications for providing culturally safe and humanistic cancer care when BBN to Māori and Indigenous patients. (shrink)

This article reflects on childhood times based on the words chrónos, kairós and aión, which the Greeks use to conceptualize time, in dialogue with different authors, such as Kohan, Pohlmann, Skliar, Kohan and Fernandes. In the pedagogical field, we explore how Pedagogy of Childhood has focused on the importance of childhood temporality and children’s agency, with contributions from Hoyuelos, Parrini, Aguilera et al., Barbosa, Oliveira-Formosinho e Araújo, Oliveira-Formosinho, Pinazza and Gobbi. We reflect on what forms of organizing time are possible (...) when we think about children and their childhoods. Would it be a continuous and chronological time, a time of opportunity for the instant or the timeless intensity of the aiónic? Would it be possible to open spaces in school for other temporalities, given its immersion in chronological time, and its extreme emphasis on routine? We seek a relationship between forms of temporality, philosophy, and early education in order to explore alternative possibilities in the relationship between child and the school context, and conclude that, since the child’s is the aiónic time of intense experience, it is in the heightened dynamic immediacy and the multiple symbolic languages of play that it may be possible to create pedagogical structures that provide a dwelling for childhood temporality. (shrink)

This important text introduces students to both feminism and other social and political theories via an examination of the inter-relationship between different feminist positions and key contemporary debates. The book takes each debate in turn, outlines the main themes, discusses different feminist responses and evaluates the implications for real-life political and social issues. This user-friendly structure effectively redraws the map of contemporary feminist thought, offering a fresh and succinct summary of an extensive range of material and graphically demonstrating the ongoing (...) relevance and value of a feminist perspective. (shrink)

The Right and the Good, a classic of twentieth-century philosophy by the great scholar Sir David Ross, is now presented in a new edition with a substantial introduction by Philip Stratton-Lake, a leading expert on Ross. Ross's book is the pinnacle of ethical intuitionism, which was the dominant moral theory in British philosophy for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Intuitionism is now enjoying a considerable revival, and Stratton-Lake provides the context for a proper understanding (...) of Ross's great work today. (shrink)

This provocative book paved the way for nursing research informed by f eminist scholarship, critical theory, and post-modern thought. Controv ersial then, relevant today.

We draw on three illustrative vignettes to examine how REBs manage participants’ agency in the context of qualitative research. We ask: Who owns a participant’s consent? Central to informed consent is the principle of Respect for Persons, which privileges the autonomy of individuals to make decisions about what happens (or not) to them. Yet, REBs sometimes require researchers to get permission from organizations to conduct research on their current and former members, even when the research is not about those organizations. (...) Our aim is to raise awareness about the inherent contradictions of this practice and to consider guidelines for determining the appropriateness of involving organizations that may be tangentially connected to the research objectives or potential participants. (shrink)

What considerations place genuine constraints on an adequate semantics for normative and evaluative expressions? Linguists recognize facts about ordinary uses of such expressions and competent speakers’ judgments about which uses are appropriate. The contemporary literature reflects the widespread assumption that linguists don’t rely upon an additional source of data—competent speakers’ judgments about possible disagreement with hypothetical speech communities. We have several good reasons to think that such judgments are not probative for semantic theorizing. Therefore, we should accord these judgments no (...) probative value for the development of a semantics for our moral terms. Such judgments can no longer be presumed to put pressure on theories according to which our moral expressions share a semantics with ordinary, descriptive terms. Many rivals to pure, Descriptivist theories count among their advantages the ability to accommodate these judgments. If these judgments have no probative value, such theories lose an important source of support. (shrink)

Many UK public companies invest considerable resources in charitable donations and community involvement. Using semi‐structured interviews with public company officers, the author sought to investigate the motivations behind this activity. Was it undertaken because of an expectation of commercial benefit, out of a sense of obligation, or for other reasons? It appeared that public companies were increasingly anxious to make connections between corporate activity in the community and business activities. Public companies linked with local communities clearly felt a sense of (...) connection with them. Corporate officers were constantly dealing with the management of reputation, which was seen as a valuable business asset, and community links made this task easier. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to assess Rosabeth Moss Kanter's work on tokenism in light of more than a decade of research and discussion. While Kanter argued that performance pressures, social isolation, and role encapsulation were the consequences of disproportionate numbers of women and men in a workplace, a review of empirical data concludes that these outcomes occur only for token women in gender-inappropriate occupations. Furthermore, Kanter's emphasis on number balancing as a social-change strategy failed to anticipate backlash from (...) dominants. Blalock's theory of intrusiveness suggests that surges in the number of lower-status members threaten dominants, thereby increasing gender discrimination in the forms of sexual harassment, wage inequities, and limited opportunities for promotion. Although Kanter's analysis of the individual consequences of tokenism was compelling to researchers and organizational change agents, continued reliance on numbers as the theoretical cause of, and as the solution to, gender discrimination in the workplace neglects the complexities of gender integration. (shrink)

Ross, Alf Loar, Brian, Editor.Directives and Norms. New York: Humanities Press, [1967]. ix, 188 pp. Reprint available April 2009 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN-13: 978-1-58477-961-2. ISBN-10: 1-58477-961-6. Cloth with dust jacket. $65.00 * Reprint of the first American edition. One of the most interesting jurists of the post-World War II era, Ross [1899-1979] was a legal and moral philosopher, scholar of international law and the leading representative of Scandinavian Legal Realism. This book and On Law and Justice (...) (1958) are his principal works. In Directives and Norms Ross asks whether imperatives (or, to use his term, 'directives') are subject to logic in the same way as indicatives. He shows the difference between indicative and directive discourse and explains the concepts 'directive' and 'norm' as they function in the social sciences, especially in the study of law. A contemporary essay in the Modern Law Review (32:544), though critical of this work, was still impressed by its "clear and convincing account" of these processes. (shrink)

Ross P. Cameron argues that the flow of time is a genuine feature of reality. He suggests that the best version of the A-Theory is a version of the Moving Spotlight view, according to which past and future beings are real, but there is nonetheless an objectively privileged present. Cameron argues that the Moving Spotlight theory should be viewed as having more in common with Presentism than with the B-Theory. Furthermore, it provides the best account of truthmakers for claims (...) about what was or will be the case. Cameron goes on to defend an account of the open future, and argues that this is a better account than that available to the Growing Block theory. (shrink)

The aim of this workshop was to ask potential end-users of the citizens’ information pack on legal and ethical issues around ICTs the following questions: What is your knowledge of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, and what actions have you taken in response to these regulations? What challenges are you experiencing in ensuring the protection and security of your project data, and compliance with the GDPR, within existing data management processes/systems? What information/tools/resources do you need to overcome these challenges? (...) What are the best formats/channels for receiving, sharing and acting upon this information? What is the most appropriate structure/format for the citizens’ information pack? (shrink)

The phenomenon of industrial melanism became widely acknowledged as a well-documented example of natural selection largely as a result of H.B.D. Kettlewell’s pioneering research on the subject in the early 1950s. It was quickly picked up by American biology textbooks starting in the early 1960s and became ubiquitous throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. While recent research on the phenomenon broadly supports Kettlewell’s explanation of IM in the peppered moth, which in turn has strengthened this example of natural selection, textbook (...) IM entries have actually declined in recent years in favor of other examples. In a previous paper, we drew attention to the pivotal role visual aspects played in the introduction of IM into textbook accounts. The present article continues this investigation by analyzing textual passages on industrial melanism within a stratified random sample of textbooks from the 1960s to the 2000s. The fact that this example of natural selection was included by multiple publishers independently, in a short period of time, makes it uniquely qualified for a textbook study of this kind. The purpose of the present project was to determine whether these textbooks contain what has come to be known as the standard peppered moth story. Three complete series were also inspected for change across time. Our analysis focused on the amount of text devoted to industrial melanism; what specific science content elements were present; and what, if any, nature of science aspects were included. The study documents an increase in the amount of text devoted to industrial melanism over the decades. In spite of this increase, only modest changes in science content and NOS aspects were found. (shrink)

This chapter discusses three puzzles about practical conditionals and inferences and shows how the flexible, contextualist semantic framework for “ought”. The chapter develops elsewhere resolves all three puzzles more satisfactorily than any of its three most prominent rivals, the relativist account of Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane, the wide-scoping account of John Broome, and the “trying on” account of James Dreier. The chapter first introduces the puzzle cases and six desiderata for their solutions, and then shows how only flexible contextualism (...) about “ought” is able to resolve each while satisfying all six desiderata. (shrink)

Perhaps more controversial than whether physicalism is true is what exactly would have to be true for physicalism to be true. Everyone agrees that, intuitively at least, physicalism is the thesis that there is nothing over and above the physical. The disagreements arise in how to get beyond this intuitive formulation. Until about ten years ago, participants in this debate were concerned primarily with answering two questions. First, what is it for a property, kind, relation, or individual to be a (...) physical one? (shrink)

This article begins by examining the concept of the pharmakon that is developed in Derrida’s essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, as it is here that the idea of a medium that is simultaneously poisonous and therapeutic is developed in relation to the discursive effects of writing. The author then goes on to look at Stiegler’s attempt to reconfigure the ‘orthographic economy’ of deconstruction, particularly his account of how the ‘tertiary supports’ of virtual and information technologies have transformed the experience of the real (...) in the regime of global capitalisation. Finally, he argues that the appearance of the pharmakon as a matrix idea in his work, sharpens his account of the aporia of technological society: for the impossibility of human culture being reduced to either the disorientated life industrial populism, or to idealist notions of reflexivity, is what, for Stiegler, offers the chance of a new politics of spirit. (shrink)

Original essays by leading philosophers of science explore the question of whether metaphysics can and should be naturalized--conducted as part of natural science.

The aim of this study was interpret the existential construct of family caring following Acute Coronary Syndrome. Family support is known to have a positive impact on recovery and adjustment after cardiac events. Few studies provide philosophically-based, interpretative explorations of carer experience following a spouse’s ischaemic event. As carer experiences, behaviours and meaning-making may impact on the quality of the support they provide to patients, further understanding could improve both patient outcomes and family experience. Fourteen spouses of people experiencing Acute (...) Coronary Syndrome in Sydney, Australia were engaged in a single, semi-structured interview. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed using hermeneutic interpretation within a Heideggerian phenomenological framework. Acute Coronary Syndrome disrupts lived temporality, and the projected potential for carers’ being-alongside. Carers experienced an existential uncertainty that arose from difficulty in diagnosis, and situated fear as an attuned, being-towards-death. They constructed protective strategies to insulate their partner and themselves from further stress and risk, however, unclear boundaries for protection heightened carer anxiety. The existential structure of care included one of two possible Heideggerian modes: leaping-in care was a dominating mode that required a high level of carer vigilance; leaping-ahead care was a metaphorical walking alongside, as carers gave back control, freeing opportunities for the person to ‘own’ care. Supporting carers through the intensive phase of leaping-in care, and equipping them for informed leaping-ahead care should be a focus in both the acute and post-discharge care phases. (shrink)

'Chains of Being' argues that there can be infinite chains of dependence or grounding. Cameron also defends the view that there can be circular relations of ontological dependence or grounding, and uses these claims to explore issues in logic and ontology.

This article examines birthday party decorations as a way of understanding the materiality and religious place-making of an expanding Baptist congregation in central Sweden in the early twentieth century. The fiftieth birthday party for Magnus Johanson, held at Salem Chapel in Falun, Dalarna county, in 1906, was decorated with birch branches, large Swedish flags and bunting and an elaborately laid table featuring coffee cups and refreshments. From an analysis of these material elements and a deeper investigation into the lives of (...) Johanson and his wife Kristina, it can be seen that evangelicals had a flexible approach to their ‘sacred’ spaces. Social activities and the act of decorating them created not only a sense of congregational fellowship and belonging but also the opportunity for congregations to display their connection to external cultural and political identities. Through the construction of chapel buildings and their subsequent decoration, male and female members were able to demonstrate a complementary creativity. Together they contributed to the cre-ation of Salem as a multi-purpose, comfortable and accepted place within Falun’s evolving religious landscape. (shrink)

This article analyzes organizational mechanisms, and their contexts, leading to gender inequality among stockbrokers in two large brokerages. Inequality is the result of gender differences in sales, as both firms use performance-based pay, paying entirely by commissions. This article develops and tests whether performance-support bias, whereby women receive inferior sales support and sales assignments, causes the commissions gap. Newly available data on the brokerages’ internal transfers of accounts among brokers allows measurement of performance-support bias. Gender differences in the quality and (...) quantity of transferred accounts provide a way to measure gender differences in the assignment of sales opportunities and support. Sales generated from internally transferred accounts, controlling for the accounts’ sales histories, provide a “natural experiment” testing for gender differences in sales capacities. The evidence for performance-support bias is women are assigned inferior accounts and women produce sales equivalent to men when given accounts with equivalent prior sales histories. (shrink)

The Cultural Career of Coolness: Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan. Edited by Ulla Haselstein, Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Catrin Gersdorf, and Elena Giannoulis. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2013. Pp. vi + 283. $100.

Kindheit in der japanischen Geschichte: Vorstellungen und Erfahrungen / Childhood in Japanese History: Concepts and Experiences. Edited by Michael Kinski, Harald Salomon, and Eike Grossmann. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015. Pp. xv + 542. $133.

Animalism, according to its strongest proponents, is the view that human beings are ‘essentially or most fundamentally animals’. Specifically, ‘we are essentially animals if we couldn’t possibly exist without being animals’ (Olson 2008). Although contemporary animalism offers an account superior to its Lockean competitors, Olson’s ‘biological approach’ has certain limitations, particularly in its denial of any psychological continuity whatsoever as either necessary or sufficient for individual persistence through time. I propose a number of amendments towards a Thomistic variety of animalism (...) that avoids these difficulties. Although prone to misinterpretation, animalism understood properly is compatible with Aquinas’s theory of subsistent intellect. Against recent challenges, I defend the view that Thomistic animalism not only is intelligible, but is indeed crucial for understanding Aquinas’s view of human nature and rationality. (shrink)

This essay argues that religion is a distinctive form of human activity, and offers a philosophical account of what religion fundamentally is (and what it is not), within the context of the Free Exercise Clause. §I promotes religion as an action-theoretic concept. §II presents the claim that atheism can be regarded as a religion: this claim is rejected on the basis that religion cannot be defined as a set of propositional beliefs concerning metaphysics and morality. §III defends a paradigmatic account (...) of religion as a kind of activity ordered to a concept of transcendence or superior nature, and argues that morally excellent human actions can be identified as religious, but only in a secondary or derivative way. §IV contends with the problem of including act-omissions as instantiations of religious exercise, and proposes a solution with reference to recent arguments implicating two-way powers. (shrink)

This thesis develops a disjunctivist approach to action as an alternative to the standard causal theory, or 'causalism'. The standard theory promotes a concept of action as constituted by a bodily event joined to certain mental conditions by a bond of causation. A disjunctivist approach, in contrast, claims that action must be distinguished by more than merely its etiology: action and mere movement are fundamentally different kinds. Recent objections to the causal theory of action are first surveyed, and the common (...) causalist assumption claiming Aristotle as the progenitor of the causal theory is examined and dismissed. More refined interpretations of Aristotle's thought on action yield two different concepts: action as change, and action as a unified psychophysical process. The latter in particular is argued to hold promise as a basis for developing the disjunctivist approach to action. The remainder of the thesis therefore considers a contemporary account of psychophysicality, known as 'embodiment theory', with the conclusion that the intelligibility of the account depends on appeal to a recent variant of top-down causation. The thesis also concludes that consideration of the concept of an animal agent makes it entirely unsurprising that the mental and physical are always found together in voluntary movement, and that the embodiment theory’s central notion of ‘property fusion’ potentially complements a naturalistic variant of top-down causation in explanations of agency. (shrink)

This thesis develops a disjunctivist approach to action as an alternative to the standard causal theory, or 'causalism'. The standard theory promotes a concept of action as constituted by a bodily event joined to certain mental conditions by a bond of causation. A disjunctivist approach, in contrast, claims that action must be distinguished by more than merely its etiology: action and mere movement are fundamentally different kinds. Recent objections to the causal theory of action are first surveyed, and the common (...) causalist assumption claiming Aristotle as the progenitor of the causal theory is examined and dismissed. More refined interpretations of Aristotle's thought on action yield two different concepts: action as change, and action as a unified psychophysical process. The latter in particular is argued to hold promise as a basis for developing the disjunctivist approach to action. The remainder of the thesis therefore considers a contemporary account of psychophysicality, known as 'embodiment theory', with the conclusion that the intelligibility of the account depends on appeal to a recent variant of top-down causation. The thesis also concludes that consideration of the concept of an animal agent makes it entirely unsurprising that the mental and physical are always found together in voluntary movement, and that the embodiment theory’s central notion of ‘property fusion’ potentially complements a naturalistic variant of top-down causation in explanations of agency. (shrink)

The mechanism(s) by which lentiviruses and related non‐oncogenic retroviruses (e.g. HTLV‐III, the etiologic agent of AIDS) escape immune surveillance, and thereby create long term progressive disease conditions, has been unknown until recently. Studies with two lentiviruses have begun to illuminate the mechanisms. In one, antigenic drift in the virus appears to be the primary mechanism of escape from immune surveillance; in the second, selective masking of the viral envelope glycoprotein epitope, which normally elicits neutralizing anti‐body, appears to provide the means (...) of escape. (shrink)

What are the ontological commitments of a sentence? In this paper I offer an answer from the perspective of the truthmaker theorist that contrasts with the familiar Quinean criterion. I detail some of the benefits of thinking of things this way: they include making the composition debate tractable without appealing to a neo-Carnapian metaontology, making sense of neo-Fregeanism, and dispensing with some otherwise recalcitrant necessary connections.

The connection between whole and part is intimate: not only can we share the same space, but I’m incapable of leaving my parts behind; settle the nonmereological facts and you thereby settle what is a part of what; wholes don’t seem to be an additional ontological commitment over their parts. Composition as identity promises to explain this intimacy. But it threatens to make the connection too intimate, for surely the parts could have made a different whole and the whole have (...) had different parts. In this paper I attempt to offer an account of parthood that is intimate enough but not too intimate: the parts generate the whole, but they are not themselves the whole. (shrink)

In this paper I further elucidate and defend a metaontological position that allows you to have a minimal ontology without embracing an error-theory of ordinary talk. On this view 'there are Fs' can be strictly and literally true without bringing an ontological commitment to Fs. Instead of a sentence S committing you to the things that must be amongst the values of the variables if it is true, I argue that S commits you to the things that must exist as (...) truthmakers for S if it is true. I rebut some recent objections that have been levelled against this metaontological view. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.