Este trabajo tiene como fin analizar el teatro como una representación de los conflictos del ser y su relación con el mundo. Se centra en el teatro de Gustavo Ott, para quien el Espectáculo es la Alteridad de la sociedad contemporánea, sus obras dramáticas plantean en el tema y la puesta en escena conflictos existenciales del hombre, así como la violencia, la muerte, lo absurdo, lo oscuro, la crueldad y el humor. Por ello, la investigación pretende describir cómo el autor (...) estetiza la violencia y experimenta puestas en escenas teatrales con la literatura y el cine, utilizando teorías y de La Alteridad de M. Bajtín; La Sociedad del Espectáculo, M. Vargas Llosa y El Cine de Q. Tarantino, por medio de una investigación cualitativa, con lectura analítica y amplios registros documentales. (shrink)

Resumen: Este trabajo tiene como fin analizar el teatro como una representación de los conflictos del ser y su relación con el mundo. Se centra en el teatro de Gustavo Ott, para quien el Espectáculo es la Alteridad de la sociedad contemporánea, sus obras dramáticas plantean en el tema y la puesta en escena conflictos existenciales del hombre, así como la violencia, la muerte, lo absurdo, lo oscuro, la crueldad y el humor. Por ello, la investigación pretende describir cómo el (...) autor estetiza la violencia y experimenta puestas en escenas teatrales con la literatura y el cine, utilizando teorías y de La Alteridad de M. Bajtín; La Sociedad del Espectáculo, M. Vargas Llosa y El Cine de Q. Tarantino, por medio de una investigación cualitativa, con lectura analítica y amplios registros documentales.: This article is intended to analyse the Teatro, As A Representation of the conflicts of the self and its relationship with the world. Search the Through the actors--the characters, the Other being no more than the Self, evidencer A Concienc Cultural heritage in a Show society. The Research focuses on the theatre of Gustavo Ott, for whom The Show is la Alteridad of contemporary SocietyTheir Dramatic works Pose in the subject and staging existential conflicts of man, as well as Violence, death, the Absurd, the dark, the cruelty And The humour. Therefore, the article intends to describe as the author merely aestheticised the violence and experiments in theatrical scenes with literature and cinema, using Theories and methods of La Alteridad of M. Bakhtin; La Sociedad of the Show, M. Vargas Llosa, The Cinema of Q. Tarantino, Through qualitative research, with analytical reading and extensive documentary records. (shrink)

School achievement and failure have become growing political and social concerns due to the negative consequences of school failure for individuals and society. The inclusive educational movement, which calls for equal access, permanence, participation, and promotion of all students worldwide, poses many challenges for schools and school systems. As a public policy strategy, some countries have provided additional funds for incorporating non-teaching professionals such as school psychologists and social workers in regular K-12 schools. However, there is lack of research on (...) the effects of these psychosocial professionals on student outcomes. This national multilevel study explored the effect of psychologists (n= 8,469) and social workers (n= 3,524) on indicators of eighth-grade (n= 147,531) and 10th-grade (n= 106,347) students' academic achievement and dropout in Chile. A multilevel secondary analysis was performed using national records of non-teaching professionals working as school staff members, achievement scores on the national SIMCE test, and dropout rates based on official records. Results showed that after controlling for individual and school variables known to affect achievement and dropout, schools with psychologists and social workers working as staff members had lower short- and long-term dropout rates. The presence and higher number of school psychologists per school was positively associated with higher math achievement, with a reduced effect in low-SES schools. Lower-SES schools with more social workers had higher math scores. These results support policies that increase funding for school psychologists and social workers, since their incorporation partly explains better school achievement and less school failure when controlling for individual and school characteristics, but emphasize the need to further explore the mechanisms through which school achievement and failure are developed with the support of psychologists and social workers in schools. We discuss the need to regulate the type of prevention and intervention strategies from a whole-school, evidence-based approach, as well as to incorporate psychosocial training modules and comprehensive guidelines as part of professional training programs and as certified requisites for working in schools. (shrink)

Brain processes and social processes are not as separated as many of our Social Psychology and Neuroscience departments. This paper discusses the potential contribution of social neuroscience to the development of a multi-level, dynamic, and context-sensitive approach to prejudice. Specifically, the authors review research on event related potentials during social bias, stereotypes, and social attitudes measurements, showing that electrophysiological methods are powerful tools for analyzing the temporal fine-dynamics of psychological processes involved in implicit and explicit prejudice. Meta-theoretical implications are drawn (...) regarding the social psychological modeling of social attitudes, and for the integration of social neuroscience into a multi-level account of cultural behavior. (shrink)

Adolescence is the period of growth between childhood and adulthood. This period of development, which goes from 13 to 18 years, is usually presented as critical, due to the profound modifications of physiological and psychological order in this research we worked with a sample of 60 students, from Secondary School No. 8, morning and evening shift. An instrument was made with 45 variables, 5 of them signalytic: age, gender, an average of the previous cycle, performing some extracurricular activity, and shift. (...) The information was processed in the SPSS and STATISTIC programs. The conclusions showed that the student, by showing a need to learn, is able to develop different academic skills through different factors, such as motivation, thus improving their school performance. Thus proposes the development of an intervention model, for training teachers, on motivation methods in the classroom; As well as conferences on the importance of the topic of adolescent motivation and the factors involved in improving academic performance, teachers and parents will be taught and publicity will be developed on the importance of school motivation in adolescents and how it intervenes from home, at school and how this influences academic results. (shrink)

La figura de Roberto Navarrete Troncoso fue parte fundamental del Teatro de la Universidad de Concepción, porque contribuyó desde la escena -como actor, director y dramaturgo- en el desarrollo artístico de un elenco que fue motor importante del crecimiento cultural de la ciudad, pero también del país. El artículo se propone levantar su obra del olvido. Para ello analiza Su día gris desde el comentario dramatológico. Se afirma que la obra está en sintonía con una vertiente de la dramaturgia chilena (...) de comienzos de 1960, en que los dramaturgos escenifican la crisis de la vida y valores de una clase media citadina. (shrink)

According to Margaret Cavendish the entire natural world is essentially rational such that everything thinks in some way or another. In this paper, I examine why Cavendish would believe that the natural world is ubiquitously rational, arguing against the usual account, which holds that she does so in order to account for the orderly production of very complex phenomena (e.g. living beings) given the limits of the mechanical philosophy. Rather, I argue, she attributes ubiquitous rationality to the natural world in (...) order to ground a theory of the ubiquitous freedom of nature, which in turn accounts for both the world's orderly and disorderly behavior. (shrink)

A theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad elaborates her theory of agential realism, a schema that is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.

We frequently speak of certain things or phenomena being built out of or based in others. Making Things Up concerns these relations, which connect more fundamental things to less fundamental things: Karen Bennett calls these 'building relations'. She aims to illuminate what it means to say that one thing is more fundamental than another.

Between 1653 and 1655 Margaret Cavendish makes a radical transition in her theory of matter, rejecting her earlier atomism in favour of an infinitely-extended and infinitely-divisible material plenum, with matter being ubiquitously self-moving, sensing, and rational. It is unclear, however, if Cavendish can actually dispense of atomism. One of her arguments against atomism, for example, depends upon the created world being harmonious and orderly, a premise Cavendish herself repeatedly undermines by noting nature’s many disorders. I argue that her supposed difficulties (...) with atomism expose a deeper tension in her work between two fundamental metaphysical commitments each of which has substantial philosophical support: her monist theory of the material world (which maintains that there exists just one natural substance which is the single principal cause) and her occasional theory of causation (which requires multiple finite principal causes in nature -- causes that might be considered individual substances). Her monism undermines atomism while her theory of occasional cause seems to rest on a conception of nature that would be especially friendly to atomism. I argue further that we can solve this tension within a Cavendishian framework in such a way as to preserve her theory of causation and her monism, but that this solution depends upon our taking her monism in a particular (and weak) form. I finally note that we can best make sense of her unique and interesting form of monism by acknowledging her social-political motivations in addition to her motivations in natural philosophy. (shrink)

The search for mechanisms has been a common practice in scientific research. However, since the empiricist critique of causality, and especially during the second third of the twentieth century, other non-mechanistic perspectives—especially deductivism—gained predominance. But the sustained effort of authors such as Michael Scriven, Mario Bunge and especially Wesley Salmon contributed to restoring the respectability of causality and mechanisms in philosophy of science. Some members of the causal family, usually lumped under the name of “new mechanistic philosophy”, emphasize the description (...) of mechanisms, especially causal ones, as a central aspect of explanation and other research practices in several areas of science. This approach offers viable solutions to the various ontological and methodological objections that are opposed to the two traditional approaches. In this work the basic characteristics of three philosophies that highlight the description of mechanisms as a central element to explanation and their suitability for the science of ecology are discussed. (shrink)

Al intentar clarificar lo que Spinoza, Schopenhauer y Nietzsche entienden por deseo encontramos que este concepto está asociado en ellos a una particular acepción de la idea de voluntad. En Spinoza y en Schopenhauer se encuentra presente esta identificación. En Nietzsche el deseo se encuentra oculto, disimulado y encerrado en las figuras metafóricas de lo dionisíaco y lo melódico. Desire, Will and Pain in Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche In attempting to clarify what Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche understand by desire, we (...) find this concept to be associated, for them, to a particular meaning of the idea of will. This identification is present both, in Spinoza and Schopenhauer. In Nietzsche, desire is hidden, disguised and locked up in the metaphorical figures of the Dionysian and the melodic. (shrink)

In the ninth century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all secondary flowerings of the original Israelite vision. Now, in (...) The Great Transformation , Karen Armstrong reveals how the sages of this pivotal “Axial Age” can speak clearly and helpfully to the violence and desperation that we experience in our own times. Armstrong traces the development of the Axial Age chronologically, examining the contributions of such figures as the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides. All of the Axial Age faiths began in principled and visceral recoil from the unprecedented violence of their time. Despite some differences of emphasis, there was a remarkable consensus in their call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. With regard to dealing with fear, despair, hatred, rage, and violence, the Axial sages gave their people and give us, Armstrong says, two important pieces of advice: first there must be personal responsibility and self-criticism, and it must be followed by practical, effective action. In her introduction and concluding chapter, Armstrong urges us to consider how these spiritualities challenge the way we are religious today. In our various institutions, we sometimes seem to be attempting to create exactly the kind of religion that Axial sages and prophets had hoped to eliminate. We often equate faith with doctrinal conformity, but the traditions of the Axial Age were not about dogma. All insisted on the primacy of compassion even in the midst of suffering. In each Axial Age case, a disciplined revulsion from violence and hatred proved to be the major catalyst of spiritual change. (shrink)

Recently much has been made of the grounding relation, and of the idea that it is intimately tied to fundamentality. If A grounds B, then A is more fundamental than B (though not vice versa ), and A is ungrounded if and only if it is fundamental full stop—absolutely fundamental. But here is a puzzle: is grounding itself absolutely fundamental?

In this paper I describe and defend an account of virtuous motivation that differs from what we might call ordinary moral motivation. It is possible to be morally motivated without being virtuously motivated. In the first half of the essay, I explore different senses of moral motivation and the philosophical puzzles and problems it poses. In the second half, I give an account of virtuous motivation that, unlike ordinary moral motivation, requires the motivational structure characteristic of a fully virtuous person. (...) I draw on Aristotle's account of virtuous action to argue that a fully virtuous agent's judgment reflects a robust form of moral knowledge about what features of an action render it virtuous and hence, choiceworthy. Virtuously motivated actions are chosen in light of those features and are accompanied by the affective state appropriate to the overall moral landscape in which the judgment is made. (shrink)

This article examines the reflection of the essay Los hijos del limo on the development of the Anglo-American, French and Latin American avant-garde. After exploring its aesthetic and ideological ties with Spanish-American narrative production, it is considered the way in which the latter forged a separate imagery in the context of the paradigm shift worked in occidental thought, following the fall of the Christian paradigm.

A variety of relations widely invoked by philosophers—composition, constitution, realization, micro-basing, emergence, and many others—are species of what I call ‘building relations’. I argue that they are conceptually intertwined, articulate what it takes for a relation to count as a building relation, and argue that—contra appearances—it is an open possibility that these relations are all determinates of a common determinable, or even that there is really only one building relation.

This book discusses the notion that quantum gravity may represent the "breakdown" of spacetime at extremely high energy scales. If spacetime does not exist at the fundamental level, then it has to be considered "emergent", in other words an effective structure, valid at low energy scales. The author develops a conception of emergence appropriate to effective theories in physics, and shows how it applies (or could apply) in various approaches to quantum gravity, including condensed matter approaches, discrete approaches, and loop (...) quantum gravity. (shrink)

Dummett's output has been prolific and highly influential, but not always as accessible as it deserves to be. This book sets out to rectify this situation.

In this paper I argue that some human reproductive genome editing interventions can be therapeutic in nature, and thus that it is false that all such interventions just create healthy individuals. I do this by showing that the conditions established by a therapy definition are met by certain reproductive genome editing interventions. I then defend this position against two objections: (a) reproductive genome editing interventions do not attain one of the two conditions for something to be a therapy, and (b) (...) some reproductive genome editing interventions are therapeutic but in a nonstandard way. In the Conclusion I call for a more nuanced discussion of the nature of reproductive genome editing interventions. (shrink)

The basic form of the exclusion problem is by now very, very familiar. 2 Start with the claim that the physical realm is causally complete: every physical thing that happens has a sufficient physical cause. Add in the claim that the mental and the physical are distinct. Toss in some claims about overdetermination, give it a stir, and voilá—suddenly it looks as though the mental never causes anything, at least nothing physical. As it is often put, the physical does all (...) the work, and there is nothing left for the mental to do. (shrink)

A lot of people believe that distinct objects can occupy precisely the same place for the entire time during which they exist. Such people have to provide an answer to the 'grounding problem' – they have to explain how such things, alike in so many ways, nonetheless manage to fall under different sortals, or have different modal properties. I argue in detail that they cannot say that there is anything in virtue of which spatio-temporally coincident things have those properties. However, (...) I also argue that this may not be as bad as it looks, and that there is a way to make sense of the claim that such properties are primitive. (shrink)

The paper is an extended discussion of what I call the ‘dismissive attitude’ towards metaphysical questions. It has three parts. In the first part, I distinguish three quite different versions of dismissivism. I also argue that there is little reason to think that any of these positions is correct about the discipline of metaphysics as a whole; it is entirely possible that some metaphysical disputes should be dismissed and others should not be. Doing metametaphysics properly requires doing metaphysics first. I (...) then put two particular disputes on the table to be examined in the rest of the paper: the dispute over whether composite objects exist, and the dispute about whether distinct objects can be colocated. In the second part of the paper, I argue against the claim that these disputes are purely verbal disputes. In the third part of the paper, I present a new version of dismissivism, and argue that it is probably the correct view about the two disputes in question. They are not verbal disputes, and the discussion about them to date has not remotely been a waste of time. At this stage, however, our evidence has run out. I argue that neither side of either dispute is simpler than the other, and that the same objections in fact arise against both sides. (For example, the compositional nihilist does not in fact escape the problem of the many, and the one-thinger does not in fact escape the grounding problem.). (shrink)

In times of climate change and public debt, a concern for intergenerational justice should lead us to have a closer look at theories of intergenerational justice. It should also press us to provide institutional design proposals to change the decision-making world that surrounds us. This book provides an exhaustive overview of the most important institutional proposals as well as a systematic and theoretical discussion of their respective features and advantages. It focuses on institutional proposals aimed at taking the interests of (...) future generations more seriously, and does so from the perspective of applied political philosophy, being explicit about the underlying normative choices and the latest developments in the social sciences. It provides citizens, activists, firms, charities, public authorities, policy-analysts, students, and academics with the body of knowledge necessary to understand what our institutional options are and what they entail if we are concerned about today's excessive short-termism. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider Descartes’ Sixth Meditation dropsy passage on the difference between the human body considered in itself and the human composite of mind and body. I do so as a way of illuminating some features of Descartes’ broader thinking about teleology, including the role of teleological explanations in physiology. I use the writings on teleology of some ancient authors for the conceptual (but not historical) help they can provide in helping us to think about the Sixth Meditation (...) passage. From this, I draw several points, most notably that the Sixth Meditation passage is primarily concerned with the natures of body and composites, and that the issue of teleological explanation is derivative of this primary interest. So, we – and Descartes – must come to terms with what he takes the nature of the composite to be such that it has an intrinsic end-referred nature which grounds teleological explanations. I consider three possibilities: the human composite is a third type of substance – a hylomorphic substance; there is a sort of “satisfaction” relationship between mind and body (each of which retains its own distinct nature in the composite) such that the mind confers teleological value on the body; and there is a sort of “satisfaction” relationship between mind and body (each of which retains its own distinct nature in the composite) such that the mind recognizes teleological value in the body. None of these interpretations is without problems. So in the concluding section, I sketch a program for future research, specifically, trying to render Descartes’ teleological thinking consistent by distinguishing between the metaphysical natures of things (the concern of his Sixth Meditation passage) and the physical natures of things (his concern in his physiological writings). (shrink)

El presente artículo estudia las representaciones de mujeres con VIH/sida, en el libro Tiempos del SIDA. Relatos de la vida real, de Myriam Francis. El trabajo inicia con un análisis sobre la exclusión de los sujetos femeninos de la literatura “seropositiva” latinoamericana. Se plantea que las pocas representaciones que existen se enfocan en “mujeres sospechosas”, lo cual se repite, hasta cierto punto, en los textos de Francis seleccionados: “La última puerta”, “La viuda alegre” y “La chica alegre”. Luego, se ofrece (...) una explicación sobre el contexto en el que surgen las historias, un “pabellón-moridero” que se describe más bien como un espacio ameno, el cual, sin embargo, enfatiza la tragicidad que rodea a cada “caso”. Después, se estudian los tres relatos mencionados, en los que se mueven los símbolos primarios del mal (la mancilla, el pecado y la culpabilidad), de manera que una mujer es representada como una “víctima inocente” y otras, como “víctimas culpables” (fundamentalmente por sus “estilos de vida nocivos”). Finalmente, el trabajo concluye que la narrativa de Francis moviliza algunos principios de la “teoría de la degeneración”, para explicar las situaciones experimentadas por los personajes femeninos y ofrecer un mensaje didáctico-moralizante. (shrink)

How much of philosophical, scientific, and political thought is caught up with the idea of continuity? What if it were otherwise? This paper experiments with the disruption of continuity. The reader is invited to participate in a performance of spacetime (re)configurings that are more akin to how electrons experience the world than any journey narrated though rhetorical forms that presume actors move along trajectories across a stage of spacetime (often called history). The electron is here invoked as our host, an (...) interesting body to inhabit (not in order to inspire contemplation of flat-footed analogies between ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ worlds, concepts that already presume a given spatial scale), but a way of thinking with and through dis/continuity – a dis/orienting experience of the dis/jointedness of time and space, entanglements of here and there, now and then, that is, a ghostly sense of dis/continuity, a quantum dis/continuity. There is no overarching sense of temporality, of continuity, in place. Each scene diffracts various temporalities within and across the field of spacetimemattering. Scenes never rest, but are reconfigured within, dispersed across, and threaded through one another. The hope is that what comes across in this dis/jointed movement is a felt sense of différance, of intra-activity, of agential separability – differentiatings that cut together/apart – that is the hauntological nature of quantum entanglements. (shrink)

In this chapter, I examine similarities and divergences between Du Châtelet and Descartes on their endorsement of the use of hypotheses in science, using the work of Condillac to locate them in his scheme of systematizers. I conclude that, while Du Châtelet is still clearly a natural philosopher, as opposed to modern scientist, her conception of hypotheses is considerably more modern than is Descartes’, a difference that finds its roots in their divergence on the nature of first principles.

I think that there is an awful lot wrong with the exclusion problem. So, it seems, does just about everybody else. But of course everyone disagrees about exactly _what_ is wrong with it, and I think there is more to be said about that. So I propose to say a few more words about why the exclusion problem is not really a problem after all—at least, not for the nonreductive physicalist. The genuine _dualist_ is still in trouble. Indeed, one of (...) my main points will be that the nonreductive physicalist is in a rather different position vis à vis the exclusion problem than the dualist is. Properly understanding nonreductive physicalism—and clearly recognizing that it is, after all, a form of _physicalism_—goes a long way toward solving the exclusion problem. (shrink)

This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty.

I argue that it is intuitive and useful to think about composition in the light of the familiar functionalist distinction between role and occupant. This involves factoring the standard notion of parthood into two related notions: being a parthood slot and occupying a parthood slot. One thing is part of another just in case it fills one of that thing's parthood slots. This move opens room to rethink mereology in various ways, and, in particular, to see the mereological structure of (...) a composite as potentially outreaching the individual entities that are its parts. I sketch one formal system that allows things to have individual entities as parts multiple times over. This is particularly useful to David Armstrong, given Lewis's charge that his structural universals must do exactly that. I close by reflecting upon the nature and point of formal mereology. (shrink)

Relationships between current theories, and relationships between current theories and the sought theory of quantum gravity (QG), play an essential role in motivating the need for QG, aiding the search for QG, and defining what would count as QG. Correspondence is the broad class of inter-theory relationships intended to demonstrate the necessary compatibility of two theories whose domains of validity overlap, in the overlap regions. The variety of roles that correspondence plays in the search for QG are illustrated, using examples (...) from specific QG approaches. Reduction is argued to be a special case of correspondence, and to form part of the definition of QG. Finally, the appropriate account of emergence in the context of QG is presented, and compared to conceptions of emergence in the broader philosophy literature. It is argued that, while emergence is likely to hold between QG and general relativity, emergence is not part of the definition of QG, and nor can it serve usefully in the development and justification of the new theory. (shrink)

Concerns about ‘mental causation’ are concerns about how it is possible for mental states to cause anything to happen. How does what we believe, want, see, feel, hope, or dread manage to cause us to act? Certain positions on the mind-body problem—including some forms of physicalism—make such causation look highly problematic. This entry sketches several of the main reasons to worry, and raises some questions for further investigation.

Nursing staff of many specialities are taking on and developing their roles in new and advanced practice areas. Patients will be offered new services from highly skilled advanced nurse practitioners. Such nurses need guidance, direction and information to assist them in their new roles. This book will offer insight and guidance on a variety of issues that are likely to be encountered by the Nurse Practitioner in everyday practice.

Although for a long time, Dutch academic philosophy was characterized by a pluralism of – imported – philosophical frameworks and paradigms, in more recent decades, a type of ‘normal philosophy’, in the Kuhnian sense, has become dominant which aims to solve ethical and political problems and dilemmas through rational-normative argumentation. Contrary to what is often claimed, the new 'normal philosophy' amounts not to thinking ‘beyond the analytic-continental divide’ in a fruitful synthesis, but to the subsumption of continental philosophical themes and (...) concepts under the analytic tradition. The potentially critical tenor of continental philosophy threatens to be ‘solved’ by this subsumption. ‘Normal philosophy’, with its emphasis on rational-normative argumentation, risks leading to a state philosophy that fits in with existing policy questions, ignoring systemic and structural power inequalities. I argue that the journal Krisis, in keeping with its original principles, should hang on to critical philosophical reflection, which today is needed more than ever, specifically – pace current right-wing and left-wing populist attacks on identity politics – on systemic, multiple forms of deprivation and oppression. (shrink)

It is widely held that there is a distinctive norm of assertion. A plausible idea is that there is an analogous, perhaps weaker, norm for indirect communication via implicatures. I argue against this type of proposal. My claim is that the norm of assertion is a social norm governing public updates to the conversational record. Off the record implicatures are not subject to social norms of this type. I grant that, as happens in general with intentional actions, off the record (...) communicative acts may be subject to normative assessments on different levels (for instance, regarding their moral or prudential appropriateness). However, such assessments do not generate distinctive norms that apply to all cases of implicature. (shrink)

Recent defenses of shaming as an effective tool for identifying bad practice and provoking social change appear compatible with feminism. I complicate this picture by examining two instances of online feminist shaming that resulted in shame backlashes. Shaming requires the assertion of social and epistemic authority on behalf of a larger community, and is dependent upon an audience that will be receptive to the shaming testimony. In cases where marginally situated knowers attempt to “shame up,” it presents challenges for feminist (...) uses. (shrink)

Two versions of global supervenience have recently been distinguished from each other. I introduce a third version, which is more likely what people had in mind all along. However, I argue that one of the three versions is equivalent to strong supervenience in every sense that matters, and that neither of the other two versions counts as a genuine determination relation. I conclude that global supervenience has little metaphysically distinctive value.

Despite the expansion of post-school education and incentives to participate in lifelong learning, institutions and labour markets continue to interlock in shaping life chances according to starting social position, family and private resources. The dominant view that the economic and social returns to public investment in adult learning are too low to warrant large-scale public funding has been challenged by recent LLAKES research that shows significant returns to participants in lifelong learning with improvements in both their employability and employment prospects. (...) It is argued that, under conditions of growing social polarisation and economic uncertainty, lifelong learning can have a significant protective effect by keeping adults close to a changing labour market. In this paper we review research from different disciplinary and epistemological traditions, providing evidence of the beneficial effects of lifelong learning, especially when taking into account the dynamics of the life course. Transitions and turning-points in youth and in adult life are markers of diversification of the life course; how far these diversifications amount to 'de-standardisation' of the life course is debated. They involve biographical negotiation, in which any decision is consequential upon previous decisions and involves the exercise of contextualised preferences as well as the calculations of 'rational choice'. Gaining a better understanding of how changing demands are negotiated at different life stages offers a new perspective, moving from narrow versions of rational choice theory towards models of biographical negotiation as promising avenues for effective policy-making. (shrink)

History of women philosophers in Australia delivered as part of a series of of lectures on many aspects of philosophy in Australia.