An ethic of care acknowledges the centrality of the role of caring relationships in moral education. Care ethics requires a conception of ?care? that differs from the quotidian use of the word. In order to teach care ethics more effectively, this article discusses four interrelated ways that teachers? understandings of care differ from care ethics: (1) conflating the term of reference ?care? with its quotidian use; (2) overlooking the challenge of developing caring relationships; (3) tending toward monocultural understandings of care; (...) and (4) separating affect and intellect. Awareness of these conceptions of care supports teacher educators to teach care ethics in more meaningful and relevant ways. We explore stories and their dramatization as a medium to facilitate effective and in-depth teaching of care ethics. (shrink)

This is an attempt to reflect on Islam as it appears in the context of Fethullah Gulen's teachings, an influential Turkish-Muslim scholar who inspired a movement of education and interfaith dialogue. Grinell's extensive study of Islam and of Gulen allows him to pinpoint a unique expression of values and beliefs that could alter the typical understanding of Islam and Muslims in the West. He draws upon his previous studies of the Gulen Movement and comparatively places Gulen in a wider (...) context of faith and society. What is the concept of knowledge in Islam as understood by Gulen? How is faith and service to people connected? Is Gulen after building a sultanate? Does the Gulen movement have a (hidden) political agenda? How traditional or modern is Gulen? These are some of the questions Grinell attempts to answer from his perspective. As a humanistic researcher on Islam, Grinell believes we definitely have something to learn from Islam.". (shrink)

The book presents a new way of understanding Darwinism and evolution by natural selection, combining work in biology, philosophy, and other fields.

This book explains the relationship between intelligence and environmental complexity, and in so doing links philosophy of mind to more general issues about the relations between organisms and environments, and to the general pattern of 'externalist' explanations. The author provides a biological approach to the investigation of mind and cognition in nature. In particular he explores the idea that the function of cognition is to enable agents to deal with environmental complexity. The history of the idea in the work of (...) Dewey and Spencer is considered, as is the impact of recent evolutionary theory on our understanding of the place of mind in nature. (shrink)

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein “to be” or werden “to become”, and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a (...) dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein- before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently “sudden” acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. (shrink)

In Le différend Lyotard evocatively describes what remains to be heard as “the silence of feeling.” Setting Lyotard’s différend among a differentiated set of incommensurable family resemblances, including Rancière’s mésentente and Derrida’s différance, this paper argues that le différend même, far from coinciding with itself, points to the re-marks and differs from itself, silencing itself by putting itself under a conditional. This is what gives its particular affective quality that is bound up with address and listening. From this perspective, it (...) also becomes possible to develop a new analysis of the silencing said to constitute “cancel culture,” demonstrating that the marketplace-of-ideas model falsely presupposes a fictional equality of audibility and originary purity of speech. What Lyotard teaches us is that free speech cannot but silence itself. (shrink)

How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is "really" like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality , Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the reader on a grand tour of one hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science. Intended for undergraduates and general readers with no prior background in philosophy, Theory (...) and Reality covers logical positivism the problems of induction and confirmation Karl Popper's theory of science Thomas Kuhn and "scientific revolutions" the views of Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, and Paul Feyerabend and challenges to the field from sociology of science, feminism, and science studies. The book then looks in more detail at some specific problems and theories, including scientific realism, the theory-ladeness of observation, scientific explanation, and Bayesianism. Finally, Godfrey-Smith defends a form of philosophical naturalism as the best way to solve the main problems in the field. Throughout the text he points out connections between philosophical debates and wider discussions about science in recent decades, such as the infamous "science wars." Examples and asides engage the beginning student a glossary of terms explains key concepts and suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter. However, this is a textbook that doesn't feel like a textbook because it captures the historical drama of changes in how science has been conceived over the last one hundred years. Like no other text in this field, Theory and Reality combines a survey of recent history of the philosophy of science with current key debates in language that any beginning scholar or critical reader can follow. (shrink)

WE must first state the subject of our inquiry and the faculty to which it belongs: its subject is demonstration and the faculty that carries it out demonstrative science.

This review focuses on the Ogdoas scholastica by Jacob Lorhard, published in 1606. The importance of this document turns on the fact that it contains what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology.” The body of the work consists in a series of diagrams called “diagraphs.” Relevant features of this compendium of diagraphs are: 1. that it does not in fact contain the word “ontology,” and 2. that Lorhard himself was not responsible for its content.

Maynard Smith is right that one of the most striking features of contemporary biology is the ever-increasing prominence of the concept of information, along with related concepts like representation, programming, and coding. Maynard Smith is also right that this is surely a phenomenon which philosophers of science should examine closely. We should try to understand exactly what sorts of theoretical commitment are made when biological systems are described in these terms, and what connection there is between semantic descriptions (...) in biology and in other domains. (shrink)

This paper, while neutral on questions about the minimality of truth, argues for the non-minimality of truth-aptness.

In this paper, it will be argued that each time a procedure in a representational system is functioning adequately and automatically, the child steps up to a metaprocedural level and considers the procedure as a unit in its own right. Data will be drawn from microdevelopment in children's creation of external memory devices (i.e., changes in representation of a spatial task during a one hour's session) as well as from macrodevelopment in language acquisition (i.e., changes occurring over age in a (...) study of nominal determiners, pronouns and gender markers). These two aspects of development of representational systems are examined with respect to the spontaneous passage from concrete reference to abstract systems, from idiosyncratic to conventional notations, from redundant to economic marking, from unifunctional to plurifunctional meaningful units. These micro‐ and manodevelopmental changes take place in a spontaneous fashion despite the fact that the child's earlier system is adequate for successfully conveying the information required. A discussion will be made of the way in which children tend to indicate externally, by unifunctional markers, information which was implicit in their earlier use of an adult‐like system. They appear to be striving for the delicate balance between encoding and decoding efforts, ultimately leading to a felicitous representational system. Metaprocedural behavior is hypothesized to act as a control mechanism in the striving for this delicate balance of information content and information processing effort. It also appears to act as a control mechanism for the interprocedural organizotion of what was previously a plethora of juxtaposed, unconnected procedures yielding superficially analogous behavior. The stepping‐up to a metaprocedural level seems to occur each time the child has a handle on his currently functioning, goal‐oriented system. This enables the child to treat the system, or procedures which are part thereof, as units functioning in their own right. Thus there appears to be a deep‐rooted psychological tendency for a representational tool which functions well procedurally to become subsequently a problem‐space per se. (shrink)

Does ?ought? imply ?can? for collectives' obligations? In this paper I want to establish two things. The first, what a collective obligation means for members of the collective. The second, how collective ability can be ascertained. I argue that there are four general kinds of obligation, which devolve from collectives to members in different ways, and I give an account of the distribution of obligation from collectives to members for each of these kinds. One implication of understanding collective obligation and (...) ability in the proposed way is that a group can be blameworthy for failing to realize its obligation even when no member of the group is blameworthy for failing to realize her obligation. (shrink)

The expectation used to be that men would be masculine and women would be feminine, and this was assumed to come naturally to them in virtue of their biology. That orthodoxy persists today in many parts of society. On this view, sex is gender and gender is sex. -/- A new view of gender has emerged in recent years, a view on which gender is an 'identity', a way that people feel about themselves in terms of masculinity or femininity, regardless (...) of their sex. On this view, sex is dismissed as unimportant, and gender is made paramount. -/- In the rush to celebrate this new view of gender, we have lost sight of a more powerful challenge to the traditional orthodoxy, namely the feminist sex/gender distinction according to which sex is biological and gender is social. On this view, gender is something done to people on the basis of sex. Women are socialised to conform to norms of femininity (and sanctioned for failure), and masculinity and femininity exist in a hierarchy in which femininity is devalued. This view helps us to understand injustice against women, and what we can do about it. -/- Holly Lawford-Smith introduces and defends gender-critical feminism, a theory and movement that reclaims the sex/gender distinction, insists upon the reality and importance of sex, and continues to understand gender as a way that men and women are made to be, rather than a way they really are. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to explain why certain authors - both popular and academic - are making a mistake when they attribute obligations to uncoordinated groups of persons, and to argue that it is particularly unhelpful to make this mistake given the prevalence of individuals faced with the difficult question of what morality requires of them in a situation in which there's a good they can bring about together with others, but not alone. I'll defend two alternatives to (...) attributing obligations to uncoordinated groups. The first solution has us build better people, who will coordinate their actions willingly and spontaneously when the occasion arises. The second solution has us build better groups, so that when the occasion arises, there is a framework in place for coordinating members into action. (shrink)

Many of the items that humans consume are produced in ways that involve serious harms to persons. Familiar examples include the harms involved in the extraction and trade of conflict minerals (e.g. coltan, diamonds), the acquisition and import of non- fair trade produce (e.g. coffee, chocolate, bananas, rice), and the manufacture of goods in sweatshops (e.g. clothing, sporting equipment). In addition, consumption of certain goods (significantly fossil fuels and the products of the agricultural industry) involves harm to the environment, to (...) future persons, and to current persons in low-lying and developing countries, by way of their impacts on climate change. When it comes to such large-scale harms, it's easy for the individual to feel helpless. Even if she sincerely wishes things were otherwise, she may wonder what she could possibly do to make them so. In this paper I briefly explore several promising avenues for generating duties in individuals to consume ethically, and develop one in particular: that an individual ought to signal her commitments to others, as a first step in collectivizing to act against unjust global labour practices. (shrink)

There are many actions that we attribute, at least colloquially, to states. Given their size and influence, states are able to inflict harm far beyond the reach of a single individual. But there is a great deal of unclarity about exactly who is implicated in that kind of harm, and how we should think about responsibility for it. It is a commonplace assumption that democratic publics both authorize and have control over what their states do; that their states act in (...) their name and on their behalf. In Not In Their Name, Holly Lawford-Smith approaches these questions from the perspective of social ontology, asking whether the state is a collective agent, and whether ordinary citizens are members of that agent. If it is, and they are, there’s a clear case for democratic collective culpability. She explores alternative conceptions of the state and of membership in the state; alternative conceptions of collective agency applied to the state; the normative implications of membership in the state; and both culpability (from the inside) and responsibility (from the outside) for what the state does. Ultimately, Lawford-Smith argues for the exculpation of ordinary citizens and the inculpation of those working in public services. (shrink)

The essay constructs an ontological theory designed to capture the categories instantiated in those portions or levels of reality which are captured in our common sense conceptual scheme. It takes as its starting point an Aristotelian ontology of “substances” and “accidents”, which are treated via the instruments of mereology and topology. The theory recognizes not only individual parts of substances and accidents, including the internal and external boundaries of these, but also universal parts, such as the “humanity” which is an (...) essential part of both Tom and Dick, and also “individual relations”, such as Tom’s promise to Dick, or their current handshake. (shrink)

Beyond modularityattempts a synthesis of Fodor's anticonstructivist nativism and Piaget's antinativist constructivism. Contra Fodor, I argue that: (1) the study of cognitive development is essential to cognitive science, (2) the module/central processing dichotomy is too rigid, and (3) the mind does not begin with prespecified modules; rather, development involves a gradual process of “modularization.” Contra Piaget, I argue that: (1) development rarely involves stagelike domain-general change and (2) domainspecific predispositions give development a small but significant kickstart by focusing the infant's (...) attention on proprietary inputs. Development does not stop at efficient learning. A fundamental aspect of human development (“representational redescription”) is the hypothesized process by which information that isina cognitive system becomes progressively explicit knowledgetothat system. Development thus involves two complementary processes of progressive modularization and progressive “explicitation.” Empirical findings on the child as linguist, physicist, mathematician, psychologist, and notator are discussed in support of the theoretical framework. Each chapter concentrates first on the initial state of the infant mind/brain and on subsequent domain-specific learning in infancy and early childhood. It then goes on to explore data on older children's problem solving and theory building, with particular focus on evolving cognitive flexibility. Emphasis is placed throughout on the status of representations underlying different capacities and on the multiple levels at which knowledge is stored and accessible. Finally, consideration is given to the need for more formal developmental models, and a comparison is made between representational redescription and connectionist simulations of development. In conclusion, I consider what is special about human cognition by speculating on the status of representations underlying the structure of behavior in other species. (shrink)

Climate change appears to be a classic aggregation problem, in which billions of individuals perform actions none of which seem to be morally wrong taken in isolation, and yet which combine to drive the global concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) ever higher toward environmental (and humanitarian) catastrophe. When an individual can choose between actions that will emit differing amounts of GHGs―such as to choose a vegan rather than carnivorous meal, to ride a bike to work rather than drive a car, (...) or to take a reusable bag to the supermarket rather than send another plastic bag to landfill―does she have any reason to choose the lower-emitting actions? In this chapter I'll reject the claim that individuals don't make a difference when it comes to climate change. I first discuss making a difference with every action, as a way of getting clearer about how individuals' actions impact causally on the harms resulting from climate change, making a distinction so far overlooked in the climate ethics discussion between 'macro' thresholds like ice-cap melt, and 'micro' thresholds like severe weather events. I set aside making a difference with every action as implausible, and then move on to discuss both low probability of major difference, and high probability of minor difference. I argue that both of these are plausible characterizations of individuals' causal contributions to climate change. I conclude by noting some policy implications of having (probabilistic) individual difference-making back in play. (shrink)

This essay is a response to Luis M. Augusto’s intriguing paper on the rift between mainstream and formal ontology. I will show that there are in fact two questions at issue here: 1. concerning the links between mainstream and formal approaches within philosophy, and 2. concerning the application of philosophy (and especially philosophical ontology) in support of information-driven research for example in the life sciences.

Today’s debates about academic freedom in the US and the UK often echo arguments and counterarguments made by Immanuel Kant and the sovereign who censored him around the time when the modern Humboldtian university would be founded on the twin principles of critique and institutional autonomy. This article considers the limits of the criticist account by reading Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive engagement with Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties in the context of recent legislative developments and political interference which imperil these foundations. (...) To do so, it makes a turn to the ear and to the multiple senses of ‘hearing’ as auditory perception, responsiveness and judgement to explore an alternative basis for defending academic freedom that radicalizes Kant’s position and liberates scholarly inquiry from its closures. (shrink)

How is music implicated in the politics of belonging? Provocatively fusing recent European philosophy with music theory, Music and Belonging explores the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, reveals connections between listening and constructions of community, and testifies to Classical music's enduring political significance in an age of neoliberal exclusion.

In this article I argue that evolutionary psychological strategies for making inferences about present-day human psychology are methodologically unsound. Evolutionary psychology is committed to the view that the mind has an architecture that has been conserved since the Pleistocene, and that our psychology can be fruitfully understood in terms of the original, fitness-enhancing functions of these conserved psychological mechanisms. But for evolutionary psychological explanations to succeed, practitioners must be able to show that contemporary cognitive mechanisms correspond to those that were (...) selected for in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, that these present-day cognitive mechanisms are descended from the corresponding ancestral mechanisms, and that they have retained the functions of the ancestral mechanisms from which they are descended. I refer to the problem of demonstrating that these conditions obtain as “the matching problem,” argue that evolutionary psychology does not have the resources to address it, and conclude that evolutionary psychology, as it is currently understood, is therefore impossible. (shrink)

This paper defends the idea that there might be vagueness or indeterminacy in the world itself--as opposed to merely in our representations of the world--against the charges of incoherence and unintelligibility. First we consider the idea that the world might contain vague properties and relations ; we show that this idea is already implied by certain well-understood views concerning the semantics of vague predicates (most notably the fuzzy view). Next we consider the idea that the world might contain vague objects (...) ; we argue that an object is indeterminate in a certain respect (colour, size, etc.) just in case it is a borderline case of a maximally specific colour (size, etc.) property. Finally we consider the idea that the world as a whole might be indeterminate; we argue that the world is indeterminate just in case it lacks a determinate division into determinate objects. (shrink)

Expands an inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of experience with the assistance of far-flung species. Godfrey-Smith shows that the appearance of the first animal body form well over half a billion years ago was a profound innovation that set life upon a new path.

ABSTRACT:Biological, brain, and behavioral sciences offer strong and growing support for the virtue ethics account of moral judgment and ethical behavior in business organizations. The acquisition of moral agency in business involves the recognition, refinement, and habituation through the processes of reflexion and reflection of a moral sense encapsulated in innate modules for compassion, hierarchy, reciprocity, purity, and affiliation adaptive for communal life both in ancestral and modern environments. The genetic and neural bases of morality exist independently of institutional frameworks (...) and social structures. The latter not only shape moral behaviors within circumscribed limits, they also imply a plurality and compartmentalization of roles which may enable or impede the habituation of virtue. Becoming a virtuous agent entails the practical refinement of predispositionsin situas a member of a community of practitioners rather than entailing a normative ethical educational project seeking an intellectual resolution of abstract moral questions. (shrink)

A new edition of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, an important text in the history of moral and political thought.

Both biologists and philosophers often make use of simple verbal formulations of necessary and sufficient conditions for evolution by natural selection (ENS). Such summaries go back to Darwin's Origin of Species (especially the "Recapitulation"), but recent ones are more compact.1 Perhaps the most commonly cited formulation is due to Lewontin.2 These summaries tend to have three or four conditions, where the core requirement is a combination of variation, heredity, and fitness differences. The summaries are employed in several ways. First, they (...) are often used in pedagogical contexts, and in showing the coherence of evolutionary theory in response to attacks from outside biology. Second, they are important in discussions of extensions of evolutionary principles to new domains, such as cultural change. The summaries also have intrinsic scientific and philosophical interest as attempts to capture some core principles of evolutionary theory in a highly concise way. Despite their prominence, both the proper formulation and status of these summaries are unclear. Standard formulations are subject to counterexamples, and their relations to formal models of evolutionary change are not straightforward. Here I look closely at these verbal summaries, and at how they relate to formal models. Are the summaries merely rough approximations that have no theoretical role of their own? Perhaps they could operate as theoretical statements in Darwin's time, but have now been superseded by more exact treatments. (shrink)

In Insister – À Jacques Derrida Cixous declares that she will have to write ‘the book of words’, among which ‘words of power’ will be vermögen (to be able), together with Unvermöglickeit (impossibility), and tragen (to carry), along with austragen (to bear to term) and übertragen (to transfer, translate, also in the sense of metaphor). By examining Derrida's reading of Cixous in H. C. pour la vie, c'est à dire … this article deepens the association of tragen with life and (...) power that fascinates Derrida in the second year of his final seminar where he tracks a thread between Austrag, Walten, Trieb, and Vermögen. Its point of departure is a passage towards the end of H. C. pour la vie where Derrida speaks of the trap of metalanguage or, rather, metaphrasis that lurks in the c’est of c'est à dire. I link this passage both to the discussion of metaphorization in the earlier ‘Le puits et la pyramide’ and the characterization of puisse as ‘the exhaustion [ l'épuisement] of the sun before its time’ in the essay on Cixous to associate puissance with the wearing-out of the world and its usure in the double sense elaborated in ‘La mythologie blanche’. (shrink)