In The Ethics of Food, Gregory E. Pence brings together a collection of voices who share the view that the ethics of genetically modified food is among the most pressing societal questions of our time. This comprehensive collection addresses a broad range of subjects, including the meaning of food, moral analyses of vegetarianism and starvation, the safety and environmental risks of genetically modified food, issues of global food politics and the food industry, and the relationships among food, evolution, and human (...) history. (shrink)

In 1988, the control of the American Psychological Association shifted to those advocating the interests of professional practice and a substantial segment of the scientific community in psychology seceded to form the American Psychological Society, devoted to scientific psychology and scientific-based practice. In this climate, it has become increasingly difficult for scientists and practitioners to maintain analytical discussions of the philosophical and methodological issues that divide these two groups. For over 25 years, the authors have been fortunate to have the (...) professional and intellectual luxury of just such a discussion, and present here a dialogue that attempts to capture their initial stark differences in perspective and the process by which differences have been clarified, and areas of agreement established. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Lev Vygotsky has acquired the status of one of the grand masters in psychology. Following the English translation and publication of his Collected Works there has been a new wave of interest in Vygotsky, accompanied by a burgeoning of secondary literature. Ronald Miller argues that Vygotsky is increasingly being 'read' and understood through secondary sources and that scholars have claimed Vygotsky as the foundational figure for their own theories, eliminating his most distinctive contributions and distorting his theories. (...) class='Hi'>Miller peels away the accumulated layers of commentary to provide a clearer understanding of how Vygotsky built and developed his arguments. In an in-depth analysis of the last three chapters of Vygotsky's book Thinking and Speech, Miller provides a critical interpretation of the core theoretical concepts that constitute Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory, including the development of concepts, mediation, the zone of proximal development, conscious awareness, inner speech, word meaning and consciousness. (shrink)

As the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology works to encourage greater genuine dialogue among proponents of disparate philosophical positions and traditions related to psychology, I am pleased for the second time in three years to have the opportunity to publish another set of commentaries on a paper previously published in Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology , together with the author's reply. I am also delighted to know that the future of the Journal has been placed in the wise (...) and energetic care of Thomas Teo, but more of that in the announcement to follow. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This book encompasses the complexities without sacrificing the other main virtue of the collection: to definitively illuminate the debate for all.

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

Few recent advances in science have generated as much excitement and controversy as human embryonic stem cells. The potential of these cells to replace diseased or damaged cells in virtually every tissue of the body heralds the advent of an extraordinary new field of medicine. Controversy arises, however, because current techniques required to harvest stem cells involve the destruction of the human blastocyst. This even-handed, lucidly written volume is an essential tool for understanding the complex issues—scientific, religious, ethical, and political—that (...) currently fuel public debate about stem cell research. One of the few books to provide a comprehensive overview for a wide audience, the volume brings together leading scientists, ethicists, political scientists, and doctors to explain this new scientific development and explore its ramifications. (shrink)

Since publication of the 1986 Carnegie Commission report, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, the professional teaching standards movement has gained noticeable momentum. The professional standards movement in teaching has been fueled by national organizations such as the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the Interstate New Teachers Assessment and Support Consortium, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, and by close collaboration among these four entities. Further, nearly all (...) of the fifty states are embracing the professional standards movement through formal participation in the work of one or more of these organizations. Although the professional standards movement in teaching is strong and growing stronger, its implications are not clear for instructional programs in social foundations of education, either at the teacher preparation or the advanced graduate levels. In response to the standards movement, social foundations educators have a number of options before them, three of which are to (1) largely ignore these developments, as "this too shall pass"; (2) critically interpret and resist these developments through scholarship and collective professional action, as social foundations scholars did with Competency Based Teacher Education in the 1970s; and (3) critically interpret these developments while working to strengthen the potential of the professional teaching standards movement to achieve its stated goal of providing caring and qualified teachers for every classroom in the nation. Of these three options, the last is most advisable, but it presents a considerable challenge to social foundations educators. Although the absence of social foundations skills, perspectives, and understanding should make it very difficult for teacher candidates and teachers to perform well on standards-based teaching assessments, there is no guarantee that these assessments will hold candidates accountable for social foundations learning. Implications for social foundations educators and activists are significant. (shrink)

The fiction of Australian novelist Alex Miller has long been exploring the dynamics of friendship, but in Landscape of Farewell (2007) he provides the most ambitious, and in my view the most comprehensive and perceptive, treatment of the subject of any contemporary novel, Australian or otherwise. This essay explores this profound view of friendship, which goes quite beyond mateship, and examines the ways in which Miller represents and embodies that vision in fiction. Through its brilliant handling of the (...) complexities of tone and its rich deployment of the dynamics of gift exchange, Landscape of Farewell confronts the stark realities of suffering and death and finds within the darkness itself the deepest sources of light. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Philosophy of GardensRonald MooreA Philosophy of Gardens, by David E. Cooper. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 173 pp., $35.00 cloth.It is very likely that more people devote more aesthetic attention to gardens and their contents than they do to any other set of objects in the art world or in natural environments. Despite this, however, there has been very little philosophical writing devoted specifically to the aesthetics (...) of the garden experience. Mara Miller (The Garden as an Art, 1993) and Stephanie Ross (What Gardens Mean, 1998) have written important studies of gardens from the philosophical point of view. John Dixon Hunt has written several philosophically informed studies from the historical point of view (The Figure [End Page 120] in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century, 1976; Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture, 1992; Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 1600-1750, 1996). But apart from this valuable handful of discussions, the subject area has received scant scholarly attention. David Cooper's new book, A Philosophy of Gardens, is a very welcome addition to this underscrutinized field of inquiry.Cooper makes it clear at the outset that he does not aim to answer the questions regarding gardens that have attracted most philosophical attention to date, questions like "How do we define 'garden'?" "What are the standards of comparative aesthetic garden quality?" and "Should gardens be regarded as chiefly works of art or as products of nature?" Such questions are both important and quite predicable in the context of late-twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. Cooper aims to redirect attention to what he calls the deeper question of the significance of gardens, a question that turns out ultimately to be about the way in which gardens represent a serious contribution to "the good life." The good life, as he speaks of it, is neither la dolce vita nor the life of strict moral virtue. Rather, it is something approximating Aristotelian eudaimonia, a life in which inculcated capacities and strengths of character lead to informed and appropriate ways of acting, feeling, and evaluating.This is an attractive and unconventional project, one that spills over from aesthetics into ethics, philosophical anthropology, and (ultimately) theology. The clever argument that Cooper develops makes the project intriguing and informative, even in a few areas where its conclusions are not altogether convincing. Key to Cooper's distinctive approach is his insistence on regarding gardens not merely as focal objects of aesthetic regard and appreciation but also, and more importantly, as settings in which people engage in a range of distinctive, virtue-inducing practices. Some of these practices (for example, planting, cultivating, and pruning) foster personal virtues by requiring the submission to the discipline of caring and informed superintendence. Others (for example, conducting garden parties, swimming in a garden pool, indulging in solitary reverie) foster both personal and communal virtues by locating human pursuits in a setting that itself exemplifies vitality, change, and thriving. Cooper insists that it is only through the infusion of human activity in working cooperatively with nature to create them and then in dwelling in them appreciatively that gardens reveal their true meaning.The proper notion of garden meaning, Cooper argues, does not conform to either of the two canons of appreciation that have dominated discussion to date—the art model and the nature model. The art model fails because, in its effort to align the appreciation of gardens with that of landscape painting and other familiar aesthetic artifacts, it neglects gardens' fundamental condition as places where living, growing things call upon us to tend them and cooperate in their vitality. The nature model fails because gardens are unlike meadows and mountains in that they are—to some extent—contrived by humans and imbued with purpose by them. Moreover, Cooper argues, the distinctive meaning of gardens cannot be captured by combining (or "factorizing") the two models, that is, by regarding gardens as mixed phenomena of art-and-nature. This is because there is nothing in the two, taken separately, that can account for what is peculiar to our experience of garden aesthetics when they... (shrink)

Rather than assume a unitary cybernetics, I ask how its disunity mattered to the history of the human sciences in the United States from about 1940 to 1980. I compare the work of four prominent social scientists – Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, and Talcott Parsons – who created cybernetic models in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology with the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and relate their interpretations of cybernetics to those of such well-known cyberneticians as Norbert (...) Wiener, Warren McCulloch, W. Ross Ashby, and Heinz von Foerster. I argue that viewing cybernetics through the lens of disunity – asking what was at stake in choosing a specific cybernetic model – shows the complexity of the relationship between first-order cybernetics and the postwar human sciences, and helps us rethink the history of second-order cybernetics. (shrink)

Can global justice simply be seen as social justice writ large? According to Miller it cannot. Seen from the viewpoint of justice there are fundamental differences between the national and international sphere. Just like Nagel he strongly rejects monism. Yet unlike Nagel, Miller does not confine duties of justice to sovereign states. Different forms of human association require different principles of justice. Strangely enough, however, Miller does not replace Nagel’s dualism with a multi‐level ethical position, but with (...) a split‐level one. In this article we argue that – contrary to Miller’s own claims – his contextualist view of justice contains the necessary tools for accepting the importance of multiple contexts of justice beyond the nation‐state. Even if one is committed to seeing nation‐states as the privileged sites of social justice, there is no reason not to recognize substantial amounts of social justice above the nation‐state level. (shrink)

Can global justice simply be seen as social justice writ large? According to Miller it cannot. Seen from the viewpoint of justice there are fundamental differences between the national and international sphere. Just like Nagel he strongly rejects monism. Yet unlike Nagel, Miller does not confine duties of justice to sovereign states. Different forms of human association require different principles of justice. Strangely enough, however, Miller does not replace Nagel’s dualism with a multi‐level ethical position, but with (...) a split‐level one. In this article we argue that – contrary to Miller’s own claims – his contextualist view of justice contains the necessary tools for accepting the importance of multiple contexts of justice beyond the nation‐state. Even if one is committed to seeing nation‐states as the privileged sites of social justice, there is no reason not to recognize substantial amounts of social justice above the nation‐state level. (shrink)

This paper stands at the confluence of two streams in contemporary political thought. One stream is composed of those critics of liberal political philosophy who are often described collectively as ‘communitarians’. What unites these critics is a belief that contemporary liberalism rests on an impoverished and inadequate view of the human subject. Liberal political thought – as manifested, for instance, in the writings of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin – claims centrally to do justice to individuality: to (...) specify the conditions under which distinct individuals, each with his own view about how life should be lived, can pursue these visions to the best of their ability. But, the critics claim, liberalism is blind to the social origins of individuality itself. A person comes by his identity through participating in social practices and through his affiliation to collectivities like family and nation. An adequate political philosophy must attend to the conditions under which people can develop the capacity for autonomy that liberals value. This, however, means abandoning familiar preoccupations of liberal thought – especially the centrality it gives to individual rights – and looking instead at how social relationships of the desired kind can be created and preserved. It means, in short, looking at communities – their nature and preconditions. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Perspectives on the Unity and Integration of Knowledge Garth Benson, Ronald Glasberg & Bryant Griffith Intercultural Communication: pragmatics, genealogy, deconstruction Robert Young.

Abstract: To respond to globalization-related challenges, many contemporary political theorists have argued for forms of democracy beyond the level of the nation-state. Since the early 1990s, however, political theory has also witnessed a renewed normative defense of nationhood. Liberal nationalists have been influential in claiming that the state should protect and promote national identities, and that it is desirable that the boundaries of national and political units coincide. At first glance, both positions—global democracy and nationalism—seem to contradict each other. We (...) do not share this oppositional picture. Developing a more harmonic picture of nationalist ideals and cosmopolitan visions is the aim of this essay. (shrink)

We address two points. First, one must explain how different, rare mutations ultimately lead to common psychopathological conditions. The developmental instability model offers one solution. Second, Keller & Miller perhaps miss the major processes other than variation fueled by rare deleterious mutations that account for interesting genetic variation in psychopathology, particularly when single alleles have non-negligible effects: Red Queen processes.

To respond to globalization-related challenges, many contemporary political theorists have argued for forms of democracy beyond the level of the nation-state. Since the early 1990s, however, political theory has also witnessed a renewed normative defense of nationhood. Liberal nationalists have been influential in claiming that the state should protect and promote national identities, and that it is desirable that the boundaries of national and political units coincide. At first glance, both positions - global democracy and nationalism -seem to contradict each (...) other. We do not share this oppositional picture. Developing a more harmonic picture of nationalist ideals and cosmopolitan visions is the aim of this essay. © 2009 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin’s theory of equality has exerted a strong gravitational force over Canadian equality rights doctrine for more than two decades. And although Dworkin is never cited in the Supreme Court of Canada’s equality rights cases, his shadow is plainly visible in the reception of the right to ‘equal concern and respect’ in Andrews (1989), and the ‘right to moral independence’ in Law v Canada (1999).Although this paper assesses the extent to which Dworkin’s theory of equality has been received (...) in Canadian law, it also engages in debates between Dworkin and his critics that developed as Dworkin defended and modified his theory of rights and equality over the years. The debates between Dworkin and his critics are invaluable for interpreting Canadian constitutional jurisprudence, I will argue, because the Supreme Court does not always adequately justify the conceptions of equality, dignity, etc. that it incorporates into constitutional law. Indeed, it is not always evident that the Court is aware that it is choosing among alternative conceptions, rather than straightforwardly interpreting a determinate constitutional text. The payoff from a parallel study of Dworkin and the equality rights doctrine of the Supreme Court is the identification of resources from the academic debate that can be commended for the development of a more sound and stable constitutional doctrine. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Defining the Terms The Global Democratic Potentials of Liberal Nationalism's Main Tenets David Miller's Account The Exclusion Problem Acknowledgments References.

To respond to globalization‐related challenges, many contemporary political theorists have argued for forms of democracy beyond the level of the nation‐state. Since the early 1990s, however, political theory has also witnessed a renewed normative defense of nationhood. Liberal nationalists have been influential in claiming that the state should protect and promote national identities, and that it is desirable that the boundaries of national and political units coincide. At first glance, both positions—global democracy and nationalism—seem to contradict each other. We do (...) not share this oppositional picture. Developing a more harmonic picture of nationalist ideals and cosmopolitan visions is the aim of this essay. (shrink)

The civic republican tradition in political thought includes Niccolo Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alexis de Tocqueville. The belief that it is imperative that citizens participate actively and disinterestedly in public affairs, i.e., that they possess "civic virtue" or "public spirit" is a prominent family resemblance between its members. Civic republican thought has undergone a recent resurgence, and one consequence is that political philosophers and other theorists have begun to ask whether liberals can take civic virtue seriously. Certain critics of liberalism, (...) including Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor, have answered this question in the negative. They give a variety of reasons for this answer, ranging from the inability of the atomistic ontologies underlying many liberal theories to make sense of the existence of a common good to the inability of the liberal state to concern itself with the character of its citizens. ;For the most part, unsurprisingly, these antiliberals direct their arguments at the work of twentieth-century "deontological" liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. While Rawls and Dworkin say relatively little about civic virtue, many earlier liberals believed firmly in its importance. John Stuart Mill's centrality to the liberal tradition and the thoroughgoing nature of his liberalism make him an especially interesting "civic liberal." My central thesis is that the civic and liberal components of his political philosophy combine to form a coherent whole. In my early exegetical chapters I provide the first systematic exposition of the frequently ignored civic component. I then address the work of several of Mill's interpreters who either explicitly or implicitly point to possible problems with his attempt to weave together the civic and liberal strands in his thought, and conclude that these problems are either not real or not insoluble. Finally, I consider whether the arguments which Sandel and Taylor, et. al., have given to show that contemporary liberal theories cannot consistently incorporate the civic republican belief in the importance of active and disinterested civic participation might have force against Mill. I show that they do not, and not simply because On Liberty is not A Theory of Justice but because the many of the objections are poorly reasoned. (shrink)