Many Global North contexts are experiencing conflict in feminist discourses between supporters of trans and gender diverse self-identification and self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists who consider this to undermine feminist goals. We argue that the channelling of contemporary feminist discourse into defensive and oppositional channels has foreclosed the space for more nuanced and future-oriented, utopian thought around freedom from sex/gender, limiting the prospect of developing a coalition of actors focused not on difference, but rather on commonality. Putting classic feminist works by (...) Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray into dialogue, we consider an alternative approach to freedom premised on an ontology of potentiality combined with acceptance of the materiality of the binary gender hierarchy, that nonetheless remains utopian and open-ended, demonstrating the capacity to transcend these impasses and potentially overcome these divides. (shrink)

From the Disney 'Teacher of the Year' and New York Times bestselling author comes a road map to enrich students' learning experiences, revised and updated for today's teachers and parents. After publishing the New York Times bestseller The Essential 55 (over 1 million copies sold), award-winning teacher Ron Clark took his rules on the road and traveled to schools and districts in 50 states. He met amazing teachers, administrators, students, parents, and all kinds of people involved in bringing up (...) great kids. These are the eleven qualities he describes in The Excellent 11: Enthusiasm, Adventure, Creativity, Reflection, Balance, Compassion, Confidence, Humor, Common Sense, Appreciation, and Resilience. Ron has filled this book with hundreds of suggestions, stories, and wonderfully funny anecdotes. You'll be smiling as you read--and finding the inspiration to change lives, one student at a time"--Back cover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 61-73 [Access article in PDF] Free Words to Free ManifestaSome Experiments in Art as Gift Sal Randolph Free Words It began this way. Standing nervously in a bookstore, in front of the section on literary theory, hidden from the eyes of the staff, I reached my hand into my bag like a thief and pulled out a hot pink book. I looked up (...) and down the aisle. No one was watching. O.K., now. I slipped it into the shelf among the F's (file under Free) and it was done.So I began my career as in infiltrator of public spaces, a thief not of books but of shelf space, of access. A bypasser of gateways, permissions, and procedures.The book was called Free Words, and was an art project of mine. Its content was a list of 13,000 words I had collected over ten years. I had uncopyrighted the text, placing it in the public domain (no rights reserved), and labeled the book as free. No price tag, no barcode, no ISBN. The back cover said only "this book belongs to whoever finds it." I had printed 1,000 copies of it, and the idea was to create a kind of situation.Someone who came across the book would have to decide what it was and who really owned it. If they wanted it, they would have to decide whether to walk out with it like a shoplifter, or whether to negotiate something [End Page 61] with the sales clerk. Bookstores would have to either purge the book or harbor it. There was a brief explanation and a web address at the back of the book, and if anyone made it to the site there was an invitation to become a distributor of the book, to join in the process of placing it in bookstores and libraries.I spent a few months like that as 2001 came to a close: October, November, December; walking through a New York stunned by September 11, developing the habit of nonobedience. 1 This was the time when the media was telling us to shop, when we were being told to agree,as if agreement and shopping were the definition and extent of our citizenship.At first I was nervous, afraid of being stopped, but after a couple hundred books I relaxed. I was never questioned. The more I did it, the more the commercial space of the city seemed like public space, my space. The city, recovering month by month, felt more like an ecology—a human social ecology, intricate and interdependent. There were more ways of living within it and participating in it than I had supposed.One of the questions raised by cities is who we are in them. How do we find ourselves as individuals, as agents? What kinds of citizenship are possible? Something about this project changed my relationship to the city from being a passive inhabitant of its structures, both social and architectural, to being more active, as I began to feel free to engage those structures more playfully, and to create new structures.As the winter deepened, the Free Words project began to develop in a surprising way. On the website I invited people to become volunteer distributors of the book. I expected that a small number of people would find their way from the book to the website and an even smaller number of those might become distributors. What happened was something quite different: a few people did find the book and the website, but they weren't all interested in simply becoming distributors themselves. Some of them told the story of Free Words on various online forums, journals, and blogs, passing it on through their internet communities. Dozens of people who had never seen a copy of the book found their way to the site, and I began shipping batches of books to volunteers all over the country and the world. I printed more, and then more again.For me the project became like a kind of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 61-73 [Access article in PDF] Free Words to Free ManifestaSome Experiments in Art as Gift Sal Randolph Free Words It began this way. Standing nervously in a bookstore, in front of the section on literary theory, hidden from the eyes of the staff, I reached my hand into my bag like a thief and pulled out a hot pink book. I looked up (...) and down the aisle. No one was watching. O.K., now. I slipped it into the shelf among the F's (file under Free) and it was done.So I began my career as in infiltrator of public spaces, a thief not of books but of shelf space, of access. A bypasser of gateways, permissions, and procedures.The book was called Free Words, and was an art project of mine. Its content was a list of 13,000 words I had collected over ten years. I had uncopyrighted the text, placing it in the public domain (no rights reserved), and labeled the book as free. No price tag, no barcode, no ISBN. The back cover said only "this book belongs to whoever finds it." I had printed 1,000 copies of it, and the idea was to create a kind of situation.Someone who came across the book would have to decide what it was and who really owned it. If they wanted it, they would have to decide whether to walk out with it like a shoplifter, or whether to negotiate something [End Page 61] with the sales clerk. Bookstores would have to either purge the book or harbor it. There was a brief explanation and a web address at the back of the book, and if anyone made it to the site there was an invitation to become a distributor of the book, to join in the process of placing it in bookstores and libraries.I spent a few months like that as 2001 came to a close: October, November, December; walking through a New York stunned by September 11, developing the habit of nonobedience. 1 This was the time when the media was telling us to shop, when we were being told to agree,as if agreement and shopping were the definition and extent of our citizenship.At first I was nervous, afraid of being stopped, but after a couple hundred books I relaxed. I was never questioned. The more I did it, the more the commercial space of the city seemed like public space, my space. The city, recovering month by month, felt more like an ecology—a human social ecology, intricate and interdependent. There were more ways of living within it and participating in it than I had supposed.One of the questions raised by cities is who we are in them. How do we find ourselves as individuals, as agents? What kinds of citizenship are possible? Something about this project changed my relationship to the city from being a passive inhabitant of its structures, both social and architectural, to being more active, as I began to feel free to engage those structures more playfully, and to create new structures.As the winter deepened, the Free Words project began to develop in a surprising way. On the website I invited people to become volunteer distributors of the book. I expected that a small number of people would find their way from the book to the website and an even smaller number of those might become distributors. What happened was something quite different: a few people did find the book and the website, but they weren't all interested in simply becoming distributors themselves. Some of them told the story of Free Words on various online forums, journals, and blogs, passing it on through their internet communities. Dozens of people who had never seen a copy of the book found their way to the site, and I began shipping batches of books to volunteers all over the country and the world. I printed more, and then more again.For me the project became like a kind of... (shrink)

Many religious people are alarmed about features of the current age - violence in the media, a pervasive hedonism, a marginalization of religion, and widespread abortion. These concerns influence politics, but just as there should be a separation between church and state, so should there be a balance between religious commitments and secular arguments calling for social reforms. Robert Audi offers a principle of secular rationale, which does not exclude religious grounds for action but which rules out restricting freedom except (...) on grounds that any rational citizen would accept. The book describes the essential commitments of free democracy, explains how religious and secular moral considerations can be integrated to facilitate co-operation in a world of religious pluralism, and proposes ideals of civic virtue that express the mutual respect on which democracy depends. Audi offers a balanced and sophisticated treatment of the relations between religion and politics in a modern, secular society. (shrink)

Although Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book IV, Chapter 2) was perhaps the first person to consider the part-whole relationship to be a proper subject matter for philosophic inquiry, the Polish logician Stanislow Lesniewski [15] is generally given credit for the first formal treatment of the subject matter in his Mereology.1 Woodger [30] and Tarski [24] made use of a specific adaptation of Lesniewski's work as a basis for a formal theory of physical things and their parts. The term 'calculus of individuals' was (...) introduced by Leonard and Goodman [14] in their presentation of a system very similar to Tarski's adaptation of Lesniewski's Mereology. Contemporaneously with Lesniewski's development of his Mereology, Whitehead [27] and [28] was developing a theory of extensive abstraction based on the two-place predicate, 'x extends over y\ which is the converse of 'x is a part of y\ This system, according to Russell [22], was to have been the fourth volume of their Pήncipia Mathematica, the never-published volume on geometry. Both Lesniewski [15] and Tarski [25] have recognized the similarities between Whitehead's early work and Lesniewski's Mereology. Between the publication of Whitehead's early work and the publication of Process and Reality [29], Theodore de Laguna [7] published a suggestive alternative basis for Whitehead's theory. This led Whitehead, in Process and Reality, to publish a revised form of his theory based on the two-place predicate, 'x is extensionally connected with y\ It is the purpose of this paper to present a calculus of individuals based on this new Whiteheadian primitive predicate. (shrink)

The Ancient Age introducesuncountless problems to the specialists of the same one. On one hand, wehave problems related with the direct sources, and, for other, with the indirectsources. Same Plato points out, in the Letter VII, that his dialogues don’tcontain the fundamental teachings, but it belon..

In this bold, challenging book, D. S. Clarke outlines reasons for accepting panpsychism and defends the doctrine against its critics.

Develops an interpretation of Marx's work as the basis of a critique of both orthodox Marxism and of both modern economics and sociology. The core of this book is an analysis of Marx's theory of alienated labour as the basis of Marx's critique of liberal social theory. This leads to both an original interpretation of Marx's work and to the liberal foundations of the subjects of economics and sociology. This critique is developed through an account of revolution, and of the (...) parallel revolution in sociology carried through by Max Weber. The conclusion relates the critique to the subsequent developments in both Marxism and sociology. (shrink)

The rise of dimensional analysis in the latter part of the nineteenth century occurred largely in the context of electromagnetism. It soon appeared that the subject, albeit seemingly straightforward, was in fact wrought with difficulties. These revealed deep conceptual issues regarding the character of physical quantities. Usually, whether or not these problems actually constituted inconsistencies was itself a matter of debate. In one instance, however, regarding the electrostatic dimensions of the magnetic pole, all protagonists agreed that the matter required attention. (...) A controversy ensued in 1882. Its resolution partly relied on the realization that it arose from differences between the scientific cultures prevalent on the Continent versus in Great Britain. These cultural differences concerned the possible relevance of the medium in which interactions involving magnetic poles take place, as well as the understanding of permeability in Ampère’s model of magnetism. The controversy around the electrostatic dimensions of the magnetic pole entailed crucial issues that were soon to play just as central a part in a wider debate about the dimensions of electromagnetic quantities in different systems of units. Why the latter topic was never raised during the 1882 controversy provides insights into the early understanding of dimensional analysis. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that the intelligibility of modal metaphysics has been vindicated. Quine's arguments to the contrary supposedly confused analyticity with metaphysical necessity, and rigid with non-rigid designators.2 But even if modal metaphysics is intelligible, it could be misconceived. It could be that metaphysical necessity is not absolute necessity – the strictest real notion of necessity – and that no proposition of traditional metaphysical interest is necessary in every real sense. If there were nothing otherwise “uniquely metaphysically significant” about (...) metaphysical necessity, then paradigmatic metaphysical necessities would be necessary in one sense of “necessary”, not necessary in another, and that would be it. The question of whether they were necessary simpliciter would be like the question of whether the Parallel Postulate is true simpliciter – understood as a pure mathematical conjecture, rather than as a hypothesis about physical spacetime. In a sense, the latter question has no objective answer. In this article, I argue that paradigmatic questions of modal metaphysics are like the Parallel Postulate question. I then discuss the deflationary ramifications of this argument. I conclude with an alternative conception of the space of possibility. According to this conception, there is no objective boundary between possibility and impossibility. Along the way, I sketch an analogy between modal metaphysics and set theory. (shrink)

An international group of distinguished scholars brings a variety of resources to bear on the major issues in the study and teaching of mathematics, and on the problem of understanding mathematics as a cultural and social phenomenon. All are guided by the notion that our understanding of mathematical knowledge must be grounded in and reflect the realities of mathematical practice. Chapters on the philosophy of mathematics illustrate the growing influence of a pragmatic view in a field traditionally dominated by platonic (...) perspectives. In a section on mathematics, politics, and pedagogy, the emphasis is on politics and values in mathematics education. Issues addressed include gender and mathematics, applied mathematics and social concerns, and the reflective and dialogical nature of mathematical knowledge. The concluding section deals with the history and sociology of mathematics, and with mathematics and social change. Contributors include Philip J. Davis, Helga Jungwirth, Nel Noddings, Yehuda Rav, Michael D. Resnik, Ole Skovsmose, and Thomas Tymoczko. (shrink)

The Description for this book, Theory and Evidence, will be forthcoming.

ABSTRACTThe emergence of dimensional analysis in the early nineteenth century involved a redefinition of the pre-existing concepts of homogeneity and dimensions, which entailed a shift from a qualitative to a quantitative conception of these notions. Prior to the nineteenth century, these concepts had been used as criteria to assess the soundness of operations and relations between geometrical quantities. Notably, the terms in such relations were required to be homogeneous, which meant that they needed to have the same geometrical dimensions. The (...) latter reflected the nature of the quantities in question, such as volume vs area. As natural philosophy came to encompass non-geometrical quantities, the need arose to generalize the concept of homogeneity. In 1822, Jean Baptiste Fourier consequently redefined it to be the condition an equation must satisfy in order to remain valid under a change of units, and the ‘dimension' correspondingly became the power of a conversion factor. When these innovations eventually found an echo in France and Great Britain, in the second half of the century, tensions arose between the former, qualitative understanding of dimensions as reflecting the nature of physical quantities, and the new, quantitative conception based on unit conversion and measurement. The emergence of dimensional analysis thus provides a case study of how existing rules and concepts can find themselves redefined in the context of wider conceptual changes; in the present case this redefinition involved a generalization, but also a shift in meaning which led to conceptual tensions. (shrink)

This paper examines three views of what an omission or an instance of refraining is. The view advanced is that in many cases, an omission is simply an absence of an action of some type. However, generally one’s not doing a certain thing counts as an omission only if there is some norm, standard, or ideal that calls for one’s doing that thing.

John Dupr argues that 'scientific imperialism' can result in 'misguided' science being considered acceptable. 'Misguided' is an explicitly normative term and the use of the pejorative 'imperialistic' is implicitly normative. However, Dupr has not justified the normative dimension of his critique. We identify two ways in which it might be justified. It might be justified if colonisation prevents a discipline from progressing in ways that it might otherwise progress. It might also be justified if colonisation prevents the expression of important (...) values in the colonised discipline. This second concern seems most pressing in the human sciences. (shrink)

From island biogeography theory, the ethic of organic diversity was posited as a precept to guide applied biogeography. It states that humanity must act in such a way as to reduce the rate of worldwide species extinction for an indefinite period of time. Almost 50 years later, the ethic of organic diversity remains relevant in the context of the debate over species translocation practices. Ultimately, matters of biodiversity conservation are too complex to expect an exceptionless moral framework to determine whether (...) species translocation is acceptable in every situation. Instead, individual cases should be judged based on the adequacy of their decision-making processes. (shrink)

Species : visions and values -- Fantasies : seeing without what was within -- Prestiges : illusions in magic and art -- Glamours : demons and virtual worlds -- Images : the reformation of the eyes -- Apparitions : the discernment of spirits -- Sights : King Saul and King Macbeth -- Seemings : philosophical scepticism -- Dreams : the epistemology of sleep -- Signs : vision and the new philosophy.

This paper provides a brief comparative overview of the development of the reproductive sciences especially in agriculture in the UK and the US. It begins with the establishment by F. H. A. Marshall in 1910 of the boundaries that framed the reproductive sciences as distinct from genetics and embryology. It then examines how and where the reproductive sciences were taken up in agricultural research settings, focusing on the differential development of US and UK institutions. The reproductive sciences were also pursued (...) in medical and biological settings, and I discuss how the intersections among all three allowed the circulation of both ideas and scientists’ careers. Across the twentieth century, scientific leadership in the reproductive sciences alternated between the UK and US, and these patterns are elucidated. I conclude with thoughts on future research that might emphasize the elaboration of industrialization processes in agriculture and new capacities to transform both reproductive processes and their products—life itself—as biopower comes to be more ambitiously understood as extending across all species. (shrink)

On the text and translation of the De mysteriis -- Iamblichus the man -- The De mysteriis : a defence of theurgy, and an answer to Porphyry's letter to Anebo -- Iamblichus's knowledge of Egyptian religion and mythology -- The nature and contents of De mysteriis -- Iamblichus, De mysteriis : text and translation.

Written by five scholars whose expertise extends across the disciplines of biblical, historical, systematic, and philosophical theology, this is a careful and ...

This book offers a unique analysis of how ideas about science and technology in the public and scientific imaginations (in particular about maths, logic, the gene, the brain, god, and robots) perpetuate the false reality that values and politics are separate from scientific knowledge and its applications. These ideas are reinforced by cultural myths about free will and individualism. Restivo makes a compelling case for a synchronistic approach in the study of these notoriously 'hard' cases, arguing that their significance reaches (...) far beyond the realms of science and technology, and that their sociological and political ramifications are of paramount importance in our global society. This innovative work deals with perennial problems in the social sciences, philosophy, and the history of science and religion, and will be of special interest to professionals in these fields, as well as scholars of science and technology studies. (shrink)

We seem, or so it seems to some theorists, to experience a rich stream of highly detailed information concerning an extensive part of our current visual surroundings. But this appearance, it has been suggested, is in some way illusory. Our brains do not command richly detailed internal models of the current scene. Our seeings, it seems, are not all that they seem. This, then, is the Grand Illusion. We think we see much more than we actually do. In this paper (...) I shall (briefly) rehearse the empirical evidence for this rather startling claim, and then critically examine a variety of responses. One especially interesting response is a development of the so-called ‘skill theory’, according to which there is no illusion after all. Instead, so the theory goes, we establish the required visual contact with our world by an ongoing process of active exploration, in which the world acts as a kind of reliable, interrogable, external memory (Noe, Pessoa and. (shrink)

Scanlon’s Being Realistic about Reasons (BRR) is a beautiful book – sleek, sophisticated, and programmatic. One of its key aims is to demystify knowledge of normative and mathematical truths. In this article, I develop an epistemological problem that Scanlon fails to explicitly address. I argue that his “metaphysical pluralism” can be understood as a response to that problem. However, it resolves the problem only if it undercuts the objectivity of normative and mathematical inquiry.

This book proposes a treatise on the Hegelian dialectical method as based on dialectical logic. Part One explores sources of dialectical logic before Hegel in ancient thought. Part Two examines dialectical logic and the dialectical method in Hegel, with attention to the relationship between dialectical logic and contemporary formal logic. Part Three concerns the dialectical method after Hegel, in which we seek to show that the method is available for uses other than the one to which the historical Hegel put (...) it. My intention has been constructive. I want to take issue with those who have contested the existence or validity of any dialectical logic, and of the dialectical method as well.1 The payoff for studying dialectical logic is the dialectical method. By using it one can reconstruct, rethink, and relive a historical course of dialectical deduction with the purpose of achieving deeper self-comprehension, i.e., comprehension of oneself by retraveling one’s past path of dialectical assumptions, contradictions, and corrections. Dialectical self-comprehension is possible when one’s present identity has historically constituted itself through such a path. It is possible when the individual is conscious of herself as triumphant over the contradictions of the past. Part Three, treating the dialectical method after Hegel, includes a reconstruction of American history since World War II in chapter 8, according to INTRODUCTION 9 1 0 Introduction the dialectical method. We will see how a Hegelian use of the method can assist in comprehending a post-Hegelian historical standpoint present to us but unknown to Hegel. (shrink)