This book is about an ecological-interpretive image of "the basics" in teaching and learning. The authors offer a generous, rigorous, difficult, and pleasurable image of what this term might mean in the living work of teachers and learners. In this book, Jardine, Clifford, and Friesen: *sketch out some of the key ideas in the traditional, taken-for-granted meaning of "the basics"; *explain how the interpretive-hermeneutic version of "the basics" operates on different fundamental assumptions; *show how this difference leads, of necessity, (...) to very different concrete practices in our schools; *illustrate richly how it is necessary for interpretive work to show, again and again, how new examples enrich, transform, and correct what one thought was fully understood and meaningful; and *explore the challenges of an interpretive approach in relation to child development, mathematics education, science curriculum, teacher education, novel studies, new information technologies, writing practices in the classroom, and the nature of interpretive inquiry itself as a form of "educational research." This text will be valuable to practicing teachers and student-teachers in re-imagining what is basic to their work and the work of their students. Through its many classroom examples, it provides a way to question and open up to conversation the often literal-minded tasks teachers and students face. It also provides examples of interpretive inquiry that will be helpful to graduate students and scholars in the areas of curriculum, teaching, and learning who are pursuing this form of research and writing. (shrink)

This text articulates how and why suffering can be pedagogical in character and how it is often key to authentic and meaningful acts of teaching and learning. This collection threads through education, nursing, psychiatry, ecology, and medicine, and blends together affinities between hermeneutic conceptions of the cultivation of character and Buddhist meditations on suffering and its locale in our lives.

A morally objectionable outcome can be overdetermined by the actions of multiple individual agents. In such cases, the outcome is the same regardless of what any individual does or does not do. (For a clear example of such a case, imagine the execution of an innocent person by a firing squad.) We argue that, in some of these types of cases, (a) there exists a group agent, a moral agent constituted by individual agents; (b) the group agent is guilty of (...) violating a moral obligation; however, (c) none of the individual agents violate any of their moral obligations. We explicate and defend this view, and consider its applications to problems generated by anthropogenic climate change and electoral politics. (shrink)

Frege's historical milieu is investigated under the rubric of the "neo-Kantian paradigm." This term is used loosely to describe those philosophers in the fourth generation after Kant who went back to Kant in protest to the vulgar or scientific materialism which had prevailed in the previous decades. This paradigm is characterized in a linguistic or conceptual fashion, after the historical precedent of the so-called "Cambridge school" . ;Frege's relation to the neo-Kantians of his own day, to Lotze, and to Herbart (...) and the Brentano school are examined. Correlations are traced between the motivations and the impetus for the development of the "new logic" in light of the increasing emphasis upon logic and its relation to thought by such figures as Lotze, Cohen, Natorp, and Husserl. Frege's own developments are then outlined by illustrating how the functional innovations of his Begriffsschrift made possible new accounts of negation, numerical and existential quantification, and the notion of the object, but are accomplished nonetheless against the backdrop of the work of such thinkers as Herbart, Lotze, Stumpf, and Marty. Finally, this historical interpretation is brought to bear on a much-debated topic in the recent literature: Frege's two stipulations of the logical form of the statement of number. (shrink)

Mr Sylvester assesses Lowe's career and political importance, and argues for a reconsideration of his somewhat reactionary reputation.

We fear that the growing threat of violent attack has upset the balance between existential concepts of political power, which emphasize security, and traditional notions of constitutional limits meant to protect civil liberties. We worry that constitutional states cannot, during a time of war, terror, and extreme crisis, maintain legality and preserve civil rights and freedoms. David Williams Bates allays these concerns by revisiting the theoretical origins of the modern constitutional state, which, he argues, recognized and made room for (...) tensions among law, war, and the social order. We traditionally associate the Enlightenment with the taming of absolutist sovereign power through the establishment of a legal state based on the rights of individuals. In his critical rereading, Bates shows instead that Enlightenment thinkers conceived of political autonomy in a systematic, theoretical way. Focusing on the nature of foundational violence, war, and existential crises, eighteenth-century thinkers understood law and constitutional order not as constraints on political power but as the logical implication of that primordial force. Returning to the origin stories that informed the beginnings of political community, Bates reclaims the idea of law, warfare, and the social order as intertwining elements subject to complex historical development. Following an analysis of seminal works by seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, Bates reviews the major canonical thinkers of constitutional theory (Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau) from the perspective of existential security and sovereign power. Countering Carl Schmitt's influential notion of the autonomy of the political, Bates demonstrates that Enlightenment thinkers understood the autonomous political sphere as a space of law protecting individuals according to their political status, not as mere members of a historically contingent social order. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is a dominant paradigm in normative political philosophy. Deliberative democrats want politics to be more than a clash of contending interests, and they believe political decisions should emerge from reasoned dialogue among citizens. But can these ideals be realized in complex and unjust societies? Deliberative Democracy in Practice brings together leading scholars who explore debates in deliberative democratic theory in four areas of practice: education, constitutions and state boundaries, indigenous-settler relations, and citizen participation and public consultation. This dynamic (...) volume casts new light on the strengths and limitations of deliberative democratic theory, offering guidance to policy makers and to students and scholars interested in democratic justice. Contributors inlcude James Bohman, Harry Brighouse, Simone Chambers, Glen Coulthard, James Fishkin, John Forester, Duncan Ivison, Micheline Milot, Henry S. Richardson, Jorge M. Valadez, and Paul Weithman. (shrink)

Research has indicated that 13% of students in the UK experience a high degree of assessment‐related stress/anxiety, which may have debilitating health, emotional and educational effects. Recent policy initiatives have attempted to encourage a responsibility for promoting well‐being in schools; however, at present there is little known about what, if any, support is provided for students over assessment stress/anxiety. The purpose of this exploratory study was to gather data on the conceptualisation and understanding of assessment stress/anxiety in key stage 4 (...) students, and what current policy and practice are adopted to support students experiencing a high degree of assessment stress/anxiety. Data were collected from semi‐structured interviews conducted with 34 students and nine members of staff from six schools in the north of England and analysed using an abbreviated form of grounded theory according to the principles, as described by Strauss and Corbin. Teachers conceptualised assessment stress/anxiety as resulting from KS4 assessment demands requiring skills and knowledge beyond the current capabilities of students. Support was mostly structured along academic lines, theorised as reducing stress by increasing the students’ ability to cope with assessment demands. Students who experienced a strong degree of manifest anxiety during examinations were moved to alternative venues, but students were not routinely identified in all schools prior to their final GCSE examinations. Staff and students also emphasised the importance of a “good” relationship in receiving both emotional and academic forms of support. These strategies were theorised as “bolt‐on” policies. Schools had few specific strategies for dealing with assessment stress/anxiety directly but used existing policies related to behaviour management and the promotion of achievement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the DiasporaDavid William Foster (bio)Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. xxvii + 242 pp.Is "queer" a particularly relevant denomination for Puerto Rican cultural production because of the deep and abiding contradictions of Puerto Rican society, which swings back and forth between two dominant parties (statehood vs. commonwealth status), but with (...) a firm imaginary in a party that cannot seem to win elections (independence)? Or is it because of the peculiar relationship it has with the U.S. mainland, which hardly prizes its Spanish-speaking heritage and its quality as a nation of people of color? Or is it simply because, as Puerto Ricans profit from the dynamics of queer American society they only seem to exist in greater abundance than in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil? Can the influence of American feminism account for the appreciable concentration of Puerto Rican lesbians? Does the possibility of unrestricted residence in the United States. mainland enhance access to a wider array of movement politics, performance spaces, publications venues, and university and other institutional positions than would be possible in Puerto Rico or in any other Latin American society? Finally, does the stateside training of so many outstanding Puerto Rican scholars like Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes simply mean that there is a larger pool of critical voices to register, analyze, and—yes—promote Puerto Rican queers? Certainly, whatever the other reasons, it was the availability of the latter that allowed us to give a particularly prominent representation of Puerto Ricans in the 1994 Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook.Let me underscore from the outset that La Fountain-Stokes's point of reference is the extensive representation of Puerto Rican queers in American society, a large majority of whom write in English, work with U.S.-based institutions, and publish in English-language and U.S.-based forums. While some may move back and forth between the mainland and the island and publish in Spanish outside the mainland (in Puerto Rico or elsewhere), the emphasis of his study is on Puerto Rican queers in the U.S. Indeed, as La Fountain-Stokes articulates at the outset of his study, his purpose is to overcome the elision of sexuality in examinations of mainland-island patterns of migration [End Page 66] and to "transform Puerto Rican migration studies paradigms by showing how attitudes toward stigmatized forms of same-sex sexuality and gender variance provoke and affect migration, and how artists, writers, filmmakers, dancers, choreographers, and performers have documented and discussed this fact" (ix).La Fountain-Stokes, who is himself a highly accomplished queer Puerto Rican writer and a scholar with well-established credentials in the field, makes use of a range of three theoretical perspectives in organizing this study: (1) the sociohistorical question of migratory patterns between the U.S. mainland and the island of Puerto Rico, a question that has mostly been cast in political and economic terms, but which the author insists must be revised in terms of an inventory of sexualities and sexual identities that are exercised and performed in terms of the differences between life in one or another locale and, one might add, in terms of the experience of life in the United States in differing locales; (2) the question of theorizing sexuality, particularly the axis/continuum between heterosexual and nonheterosexual and the continuum between different and differing instantiations of the nonheterosexual, but primarily between gay and queer; and (3) theoretical postulates relating to queerness that may or may not intersect and collide with matters of national and/or ethnic identity. The very phrase "queer [Puerto] Ricans" is structurally ambiguous: are we talking about Puerto Ricans who are queer (as opposed to Puerto Ricans who are not queer, a restrictive qualification), or are we talking about all Puerto Ricans, one of whose characteristics is that they are queer, an extensive qualification)? La Fountain-Stokes's inventory of analysis makes clear that the former is the basic emphasis of his research, but the actual performative content of many of the examples of cultural production he... (shrink)

In a recent paper McCain (2012) argues that weak predictivism creates an important challenge for external world scepticism. McCain regards weak predictivism as uncontroversial and assumes the thesis within his argument. There is a sense in which the predictivist literature supports his conviction that weak predictivism is uncontroversial. This absence of controversy, however, is a product of significant plasticity within the thesis, which renders McCain’s argument worryingly vague. For McCain’s argument to work he either needs a stronger version of weak (...) predictivism than has been defended within the literature, or must commit to a more precise formulation of the thesis and argue that weak predictivism, so understood, creates the challenge to scepticism that he hopes to achieve. The difficulty with the former is that weak predictivism is not uncontroversial in the respect that McCain’s argument would require. I consider the prospects of saving McCain’s argument by committing to a particular version of weak predictivism, but find them unpromising for several reasons. (shrink)

We introduce the $\Sigma _1$ -definable universal finite sequence and prove that it exhibits the universal extension property amongst the countable models of set theory under end-extension. That is, the sequence is $\Sigma _1$ -definable and provably finite; the sequence is empty in transitive models; and if M is a countable model of set theory in which the sequence is s and t is any finite extension of s in this model, then there is an end-extension of M to a (...) model in which the sequence is t. Our proof method grows out of a new infinitary-logic-free proof of the Barwise extension theorem, by which any countable model of set theory is end-extended to a model of $V=L$ or indeed any theory true in a suitable submodel of the original model. The main theorem settles the modal logic of end-extensional potentialism, showing that the potentialist validities of the models of set theory under end-extensions are exactly the assertions of S4. Finally, we introduce the end-extensional maximality principle, which asserts that every possibly necessary sentence is already true, and show that every countable model extends to a model satisfying it. (shrink)

Research indicates that the well‐being and productivity of over 100 million people in the global workforce may be compromised by posttraumatic stress (PTS). Given that work‐related experiences are often the source of the trauma that leads to PTS, and that PTS due to any cause can interfere with employees’ job performance, organizations would do well to consider the antecedents and consequences of PTS. This review of research—primarily within fields adjacent to business—on the types, antecedents, consequences, and organizational implications of PTS (...) is presented to advance inquiry within the field of business. The definition of PTS requires attention to the new classification of complex posttraumatic stress disorder that can result from threats that are not life‐threatening such as bullying and sexual harassment. PTS antecedents include organizational and extraorganizational traumas, and risk and resilience factors. Absenteeism, impaired cognitive functioning, strained relationships, and growth are among the consequences of PTS. Organizations can assist through disaster planning, empathetic leaders, mental health literacy initiatives, and employee assistance programs. Many research questions arise that, when answered, will allow organizations to better understand how they can improve employee productivity and well‐being by attending to PTS. (shrink)

The public often believes that parents have a right to make medical decisions about their child. The idea that, in respect of children, doctors should do what parents tell them to do is problematic on the face of it. The effect of such a claim would be that a doctor who acted deliberately to harm a child would be making a morally correct decision, providing only that it is what the child’s parents said they wanted. That is so obviously nonsense (...) that it cannot be what people who claim it actually mean. In this paper, I suggest that the claim actually represents either or both of two misunderstandings. It can be a result of wrongly appealing to the principle of respect for autonomy, or a belief that doctors are not committed to acting in the interests of the child. In this paper, I show that, while neither belief is entirely justified, there are elements of truth in both. I argue that if ethically correct decisions are those that are directed to improving the quality of a child’s existence, then neither parents nor doctors are in a position to make ethically correct decisions about a child except in discussion with one another. Where such discussion is not possible, I suggest there should be a national Children’s Interests Panel to agree on the child’s interests. The panel should include, but not be limited to, paediatricians and lawyers and its decisions should be legally binding on all parties. (shrink)

This is a masterly introduction to the modern, and rigorous, theory of probability. The author emphasises martingales and develops all the necessary measure theory.

This book argues that Western studies of East-Asian politics are generally flawed due to their adherence to the premise that liberal democracy is the best form of governance. The book rejects the three main schools of the Western interpretation of Oriental politics and instead examines the border-transcending powers of Confucianism that have, over more than twenty-two centuries, transformed the politics of East Asia. By circumventing the fundamental methodical and ethical assumptions of the Anglophone hegemonic discourse on the politics of the (...) non-Western world, it effectively presents an alternative to traditional Western interpretations of East Asian politics. Written in an erudite and engaging way this book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of Asian studies, Asian politics and political philosophy. (shrink)

A representationalist-friendly introduction to representationalism which covers a number of central problems and objections.

What is the status of the dichotomy proposed and the nosological validity of the contrasting pathologies described in the target article? How plausibly can dysregulated imprinting explain the array of features described, compared with other genetic models? We believe that considering alternative models is more likely to lead in the long term to the correct classification and explanation of the component behaviours.

Book reviewed in this article: Madness and the Criminal Law. By Norval Morris. The Insanity Plea: The Uses and Abuses of the Insanity Defense. By William J. Winslade and Judith Wilson Ross.

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)

New to English law? Need to know how rules are made, interpreted and applied? This popular and well-established textbook will show you how. It simplifies legal method by combining examples with an account of rules in general: the who, what, why and how of interpretation. Starting with standpoint and context, it identifies factors that give rise to doubts about the interpretation of a rule and recommends a systematic approach to analysing those factors. Questions and exercises integrated in the text and (...) on the accompanying website will help you to develop skills in reading, interpreting and arguing about legal and other rules. The text is fully updated on developments in the legislative process and the judicial interpretation of statutes and precedent. It includes a new chapter on 'The European Dimension' reflecting the changes brought about by the Human Rights Act 1998. (shrink)

A stellar group of philosophers offer new works on themes from the great philosophy of Wittgenstein, honoring one of his most eminent interpreters David Pears. This collection covers both the early and the later work of Wittgenstein, relating it to current debates in philosophy. Topics discussed include solipsism, ostension, rules, necessity, privacy, and consciousness.

Patricia Williams made a number of claims concerning the methods and practise of cladistic analysis and classification. Her argument rests upon the distinction of two kinds of hierarchy: a divisional hierarchy depicting evolutionary descent and the Linnean hierarchy describing taxonomic groups in a classification. Williams goes on to outline five problems with cladistics that lead her to the conclusion that systematists should eliminate cladism as a school of biological taxonomy and to replace it either with something that is philosophically coherent (...) or to replace it with pure methodology, untainted by theory (Williams 1992, 151). Williams makes a number of points which she feels collectively add up to insurmountable problems for cladistics. We examine Williams' views concerning the two hierarchies and consider what cladists currently understand about the status of ancestors. We will demonstrate that Williams has seriously misunderstood many modern commentators on this subject and all of her five persistent problems are derivable from this misunderstanding. Some persons believe and argue, on grounds approaching faith it seems to me, that phylogeny comes from our knowledge of evolution. Others have found to their surprise, and sometimes dismay, that phylogeny comes from our knowledge of systematics. Nelson (1989, 67). (shrink)

A collection of 14 essays honoring the life and work of Oxford philosopher Wiggins touching on topics from ancient philosophy to ethics, metaphysics and the theory of meaning. The contributing scholars debate many of the seminal issues of Wiggins' work, including the determinancy of distinctness, relative identity, naturalism in ethics, logic and truth in moral judgments, and the practical wisdom of Aristotle. The collection uniquely features replies by Wiggins to each of the papers. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, (...) OR. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the Cartesian paradigms of clarity and univocity and how these inform contemporary educational theory and practice. Phenomenology is discussed as a way of disrupting Descartes' visions of clarity and distinctness as paradigms of knowledge and as a return of inquiry to life as it is actually lived. Analogical discourse is examined as a way of giving a voice to this sort of inquiry. Heidegger's notions of inquiry as obedience and thanksgiving are discussed.

This paper is a combination of a grandfather's musings over his grandson's drawings, combined with a reconsideration of hermeneutics as an early childhood educational theory.

The transcripts of the three Kyoto School roundtable discussions of the theme of 'The standpoint of world history and Japan' may now be judged to form the key source text of responsible Pacific War revisionism. Published in the pages of Chuo Koron, the influential magazine of enlightened elite Japanese opinion during the twelve months after Pearl Harbor, these subversive discussions involved four of the finest minds of the second generation of the Kyoto School of philosophy. Tainted by controversy and shrouded (...) in conspiratorial mystery, these transcripts were never republished in Japan after the war, and they have never been translated into English except in selective and often highly biased form. David Williams has now produced the first objective, balanced and close interpretative reading of these three discussions in their entirety since 1943. This version of the wartime Kyoto School transcripts is neither a translation nor a paraphrase but a fuller rendering in reader-friendly English that is convincingly faithful to the spirit of the original texts. The result is a masterpiece of interpretation and inter-cultural understanding between the Confucian East and the liberal West. Seventy years after Tojo came to power, these documents of the Japanese resistance to his wartime government and policies exercise a unique claim on students of Japanese history and thought today because of their unrivalled revelatory potential within the vast literature on the Pacific War. The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance may therefore stand as the most trenchant analysis of the political, philosophic and legal foundations of the place of the Pacific War in modern Japanese history yet to appear in any language. (shrink)

This introduction to the review symposium on Ryan Patrick Hanley’s works on the relatively neglected early modern philosopher François Fénelon provides a brief overview of the symposium itself before turning to Hanley’s treatment of Fénelon’s work on the intersection of politics and religion, culminating in a comparison of Fénelon with his most celebrated admirer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The article sketches how both francophone thinkers employ conceptions of divine justice as a measure to counter the dangers of amour-propre, contrasting Fénelon’s thick theology (...) with Rousseau’s thin theology. (shrink)

Oxford Scholarly Classics brings together a number of great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in a uniform series design, they will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science argues that Eurocentric blindness is a scientific failing, not a moral one. In a way true of no other political system, Japan's greatness has the potential to enliven and reform almost all the main branches of Western Political Science. David Williams criticizes Western social science, Anglo-American Philosophy and French Theory and explains why mainstream economists, historians of political thought and postculturalists have ignored Japan's modern achievements. Williams demonstrates why the renewal of (...) social science and the nurturing of a "a philosophy of the Pacific Century" requires a sustained act of intellectual demolition. (shrink)

Sir David Ross was one of the most distinguished and influential Aristotelians of this century; his study has long been established as an authoritative survey ...

Various deficits in the cognitive functioning of people with autism have been documented in recent years but these provide only partial explanations for the condition. We focus instead on an imitative disturbance involving difficulties both in copying actions and in inhibiting more stereotyped mimicking, such as echolalia. A candidate for the neural basis of this disturbance may be found in a recently discovered class of neurons in frontal cortex, 'mirror neurons' (MNs). These neurons show activity in relation both to specific (...) actions performed by self and matching actions performed by others, providing a potential bridge between minds. MN systems exist in primates without imitative and ‘theory of mind’ abilities and we suggest that in order for them to have become utilized to perform social cognitive functions, sophisticated cortical neuronal systems have evolved in which MNs function as key elements. Early developmental failures of MN systems are likely to result in a consequent cascade of developmental impairments characterised by the clinical syndrome of autism. (shrink)

David Williams explores the complex links between Condorcet as visionary ideologist and pragmatic legislator, and between his concept of modernity and the management of change. The Marquis de Condorcet was one of the few Enlightenment thinkers to witness and participate in the French Revolution. Based on an extensive array of printed and original manuscript sources, Williams' analysis of Condorcet's politics will be a major contribution to Enlightenment studies.