The most powerful films have an afterlife. Their sensory appeal and their capacity to elicit involvement in story, character and conflict reaches beyond the screen to subtly reframe the way spectators view ethical issues and agents. This book questions how cinematic narratives relate to and affect ethical life.

The influence of film's compelling images, characters and storylines has polarized perspectives on cinema and the moral imagination. Does film stimulate the audience's imagination and foster imitation in morally dangerous ways, or elicit ethical insight and empathy? Might the presentation of images on screen denude the capacity to conjure images in the mind's eye, or cultivate the imaginative capacity for moral vision as spectators attend to the plight of protagonists? Using Imitation of Life to interrogate paradoxical perspectives on the cinematic (...) imagination, this article develops an account of the moral imagination focusing on sensory, emotional and empathic aspects of the audience's imaginative relationship with screen characters and their innermost thoughts and feelings. (shrink)

The long-form television drama series Hannibal thematises the embodied imagination and the elicitation of empathy and ethical understanding at the level of narrative and characterisation as well as through character engagement and screen aesthetics. Using Hannibal as a case study, this research investigates how stylistic choices frame the experiences of screen characters and engender forms of intersubjectivity based on corporeal and cognitive routes to empathy; in particular, it examines the capacity for screen media to facilitate what neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese terms (...) intercorporeality. As a constitutive aspect of intersubjectivity and social understanding that works through embodied simulation, intercorporeality invites a reconceptualisation of empathy and its association with ethical motivation and insight. Hannibal also introduces cannibalism as a dark metaphor for the incorporation of another into oneself, reflecting on empathy's ill-understood potential for negative affect and... (shrink)

This article sets up a neurophenomenological approach to understanding cinema spectatorship in order to investigate how embodied engagement with technologies of sound and motion can foster a sense of experiential realism. It takes as a starting point the idea that the empirical study of emotive, perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes involved in film spectatorship is impoverished without a phenomenological account of the lived experience under investigation. Correspondingly, engaging with neuroscientific studies enriches the scope of phenomenological inquiry and offers new insights (...) into the film experience. Analysis of diverse films including Interstellar, Leviathan, San Andreas and The Thin Red Line reveals how technological innovations dating from Hale’s Tours to contemporary D-BOX and Dolby Atmos systems have enhanced the audience’s sense of immersion and corporeal investment in the film experience. Building on the research of Vivian Sobchack and Vittorio Gallese, I argue that aesthetic techniques including the use of low frequency sound effects and wearable cameras facilitate shared affective engagement and a form of embodied simulation associated with kinaesthetic empathy and augmented narrative involvement. (shrink)

Dying serves so often within the narratives of Western popular culture, as an exercise in self-improvement both to the individual dying and to those looking on. It enlightens, ennobles and renders exceptional all those affected by it. Though mainstream cinema's “grammar of dying” is mired in similar myths, film has the potential to do dying differently: it can, instead, connect us, ethically, to the vulnerability of others. The aim of this article is to pursue this potential of film. Using the (...) mainstream grammar of dying as a starting point, I will consider how the moving image, and this ethical potential, is harnessed within two hybrid-media pieces about a loved-one's decline and death: George Saxon's art installation, “A Record of Undying” (2014) and photographer Briony Campbell's short film The Dad Project (2009). While these works will be located within the traditions and transformations of moving image practice, the primary concern here is with how such emotionally resonant pieces navigate our relation to, and responsibility for, our own and others' harsh realities. In this way, the question of ethics is grounded not in the solipsistic circuits of affective modes – whether as the catharsis or betterment of mainstream myths, or what Jane Stadler privileges as the ethical effects of empathy – but in something more inherently, more inevitably, political. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the contours of a picture of normative epistemology that speaks centrally to the question of how to inquire rather than just the question of what to believe. What if normative epistemology were expanded to encompass inquiry in full? I argue that while a 'zetetic epistemology' builds on traditional normative epistemology in many appealing ways, it also faces some challenges.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Firms and industries increasingly subscribe to voluntary codes of conduct. These self-regulatory governance systems can be effective in establishing a more sustainable and inclusive global economy. However, these codes can also be largely symbolic, reactive measures to quell public criticism. Cross-sector alliances (between for-profit and nonprofit actors) present a learning platform for infusing participants with greater incentives to be socially responsible. They can provide multinationals new capabilities that allow them to more closely ally social responsibility with economic performance. This paper (...) examines learning facilitators in cross-sector alliances that enrich corporate understanding of stakeholder concerns. It suggests that these organizational learning experiments can translate into globally responsible practices and processes that improve the content and effectiveness of voluntary corporate codes. (shrink)

R. S. Peters and a small group of contemporaries set the foundations for analytic philosophy of education in the 1960s, a field which continues to this day. This article asks about the value of analytic philosophy of education today, and proposes alterations to its initial aims and methods to make its value clearer. I outline some critiques of analytic philosophy of education, and respond by clarifying its aims. The key insight is that if analytic philosophy of education is explicitly aligned (...) with recent trends in social philosophy to focus on ameliorative analysis, then its value and relevance as a method in educational studies becomes clearer. Ameliorative analysis starts with the social role that a concept plays, and analyses it with this purpose in mind. I illustrate how R. S. Peters analysis of education would be approached differently with ameliorative analysis in mind, and conclude by pointing to some interesting points of discussion that arise from this approach. (shrink)

In this article, I outline three critiques of analytic philosophy; that it is irrelevant to individuals and society; unconstructive; and excessively technical. These critiques are linked to skepticism about the educational value of analytic philosophy. In response, I suggest that if analytic philosophy provides constructive guidance about prominent and pressing questions, then it holds potential educational value. I identify a body of prominent and pressing questions that are addressed by analytic philosophy as a discipline. Because analytic philosophy is often concerned (...) with the analysis of ordinary concepts, there is at least some potential educational value to analytic philosophy insofar as it provides guidance about the meaning of ordinary concepts that ground ordinary questions. Taking P. F. Strawson's paradigmatically analytic account of philosophy, I show that analytic philosophy can directly address ordinary questions in a constructive manner. Analytic philosophy is neither irrelevant, unconstructive, nor excessively technical. (shrink)

As part of a trend in modern cognitive science, cognitive linguist, George Lakoff, and philosopher, Mark Johnson claim to provide a biologically-based account of subsymbolic meaningful experiences. They argue that human beings understand objects by extrapolating from their sensory motor activities and primary perceptions. Lakoff and Johnson’s writings have generated a good deal of interest among scholars of Early China because they maintain that “our common embodiment allows for common stable truths.” Although there are many grounds on which Lakoff and (...) Johnson’s theories have been criticized, this essay focuses in particular on problems related to their schema of Self as Container. Lakoff and Johnson contend that there are no pure experiences outside of culture, while nevertheless arguing that the experience of being a closed-off container is “direct.” “The concepts OBJECT, SUBSTANCE and CONTAINER emerge directly,” they write. “We experience ourselves as entities, separate from the rest of the world—as containers with an inside and an outside.” By “emerge directly,” they do not mean emerging free of culture, but rather that some experiences within culture, specifically physical experiences, are more directly given than others. My study explores the pitfalls of presuming the “direct” experience of containment makes good sense of texts from Early China (ca. 500–100 B.C.E). (shrink)

The pervasive use of contracts in healthcare is a source of unease for many healthcare ethicists and patient advocates. This commentary examines the use of such contracts with individuals in rehabilitation settings who have complex medical and behavioural issues. The goals of this paper are to examine the many factors that can lead to contract use, to discuss some legal and ethical implications of contract use, and to assess contract use in light of concerns about health equity. The paper concludes (...) with some practical alternatives to the use of such contracts, and refers specifically to tools that might be borrowed from the field of behavioural therapy. (shrink)

The proposal to allow assisted dying for people who are not severely ill reignited the Dutch end‐of‐life debate when it was submitted in 2016. A key criticism of this proposal is that it is too radical a departure from the safe and well‐functioning system the Netherlands already has. The goal of this article is to respond to this criticism and question whether the Dutch system really can be described as safe and well functioning. I will reconsider the usefulness of the (...) suffering criterion, and I will ultimately argue this criterion should be rejected altogether. Instead, we should consider moving towards an autonomy‐only approach to assisted dying. This would resolve some significant issues occurring under the current system of assisted dying in the Netherlands and ultimately make the process safer and better functioning. I will then consider some possible objections to adopting an autonomy‐only approach and provide some preliminary responses to these also. I will finally highlight some potential areas where further research may be necessary, namely, how to mitigate the effect of external factors such as poverty or other life aspects that may have the potential to distort the individual's ability to make autonomous decisions. I will also consider some possible international lessons that can be taken from both current as well as the proposed practice in the Netherlands. (shrink)

Western schooling has been dominated by some form of broad theoretical education since classical times; this sort of education has traditionally been termed a “liberal education.”1 Providing a coherent account of why a broad theoretical education is worthwhile is an important project given the pervasiveness of this model of education. One common account of the value of liberal education links a broad theoretical education with the intrinsic value of the knowledge transmitted. In this paper, I offer a different, utility-based account (...) of the value of liberal education. (shrink)

External pressure on Higher Education Institutes in the United Kingdom has brought the question of the extrinsic value of academic philosophy into focus. One line of research into questions about the extrinsic value of philosophy comes from the Philosophy for Children (P4C) movement. There is a large body of literature about the benefits of P4C. This paper argues that the distinctive nature of the P4C pedagogy limits the claims made by the P4C literature about the extrinsic value of philosophy to (...) claims about the value of P4C. While this is not a problem within the P4C literature that recognises these limitations, the paper makes three claims about why it is sometimes inappropriate to extend claims from research into the value of P4C to claims about the value of non‐P4C philosophy. It argues that more research is needed to investigate the value of non‐P4C philosophy. (shrink)

Latin is currently being trialled as a subject in 40 state secondary schools in England. This paper focuses on one of the justifications of this trial: that teaching Latin in state secondary schools provides students with cultural capital which in turn counters social injustice. By taking the example of Latin as a starting point, I reach two conclusions about cultural capital. The first is that providing students with cultural capital can be good for some individuals, and so justified on a (...) case-by-case basis depending on context. However, this justification does not hold for curriculum policy making. My second conclusion is that in the long term, pursuing cultural capital as part of curriculum policy exacerbates the social injustices it purports to address. Wherever an activity is introduced for the sake of cultural capital rather than its educational value, educationally valuable activities risk being pushed off the curriculum, potentially degrading the educational value of the curriculum. In the case of teaching Latin, it may provide benefits to particular students, but as part of curriculum policy it risks exacerbating social injustices and undermining the educational value of school curricula. Going beyond the place of Latin on the curriculum, I argue that all appeals to cultural capital provide a poor basis for curriculum policy making. (shrink)

The New Welsh Curriculum sets itself apart from its predecessors through the use of explicit aims; these are the Four Purposes of the New Welsh Curriculum. At the same time, it sets out six Areas of Learning and Experience which incorporate traditional school subjects and emphasise the importance of providing a broad and balanced education. In this paper, I ask whether these two strands, the Four Purposes and the six Areas of Learning and Experience, can be united into a single (...) coherent curriculum. I argue that if the curriculum is entirely driven by the Four Purposes, then much of the content associated with traditional school subjects in the Areas of Learning and Experience is redundant. On the contrary, if the Areas of Learning and Experience are prioritised, then the Four Purposes are unlikely to be met. In response, I propose that the content associated with Areas of Learning and Experience can be understood a prerequisite for meeting the Four Purposes, but the content is not sufficient on its own. This reconciles some of the tension between the two curriculum strands, but means that the Areas of Learning and Experience will need to be supplemented by additional activities in order for the New Welsh Curriculum to achieve its purposes. (shrink)

Scholars of early Chinese philosophy frequently point to the non transcendent, organismic conception of the cosmos in early China as the source of China's unique perspective and distinctive values. One would expect recent works in Confucian ethics to capitalize on this idea. Reviewing recent works in Confucian ethics by P. J. Ivanhoe, David Nivison, R. P. Peerenboom, Henry Rosemont, and Tu Wei‐Ming, the author analyzes these new studies in termsof the extent to which their representation of Confucian ethics reflects and (...) is consistent with the view that in early China the cosmos was conceived to be organismic, nontranscendent, and nondualistic. (shrink)

This case study examines the ethical dimensions of isolation for patients diagnosed with tuberculosis in Australia. It seeks to explore the issues of resource allocation, liberty, and public safety for wider consideration and discussion.

This article explains what is meant by the creolizing of ideas and then demonstrates it through exploring a political observation about political illegitimacy made by eighteenth-century Genevan social and political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and creolized when the nineteenth-century African-American educator and social critic Anna Julia Cooper argued that the ideal of independence that lay at the core of political doctrines of republican self-governance relied on forms of willful blindness that cloaked the ongoing dependence of all human beings on one another. (...) In conclusion, the article considers what Cooper's expansion of Rousseau's insight and creolized readings of political philosophy imply for our pursuit of just political institutions today. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Missing Women A Case Study of Cultural Loss Cultural Wealth Regained Making the Cultural Wealth Work Agenda for the Future.

This paper presents a computational account of nonderived environment blocking (NDEB) that indicates the challenges it has posed for phonological theory do not stem from any inherent complexity of the patterns themselves. Specifically, it makes use of input strictly local (ISL) functions, which are among the most restrictive (i.e., lowest computational complexity) classes of functions in the subregular hierarchy (Heinz 2018) and shows that NDEB is ISL provided the derived and nonderived environments correspond to unique substrings in the input structure. (...) Using three classic examples of NDEB from Finnish, Polish, and Turkish, it is shown that the distinction between derived and nonderived sequences is fully determined by the input structure and can be achieved without serial derivation or intermediate representations. This result reveals that such cases of NDEB are computationally unexceptional and lends support to proposals in rule- and constraint-based theories that make use of its input-oriented nature. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur holds that the “principal ambition” characterising Husserl’s phenomenology of internal time-consciousness is that of “making time itself appear.” Ricoeur thinks that ambition is doomed to run up against an unbridgeable gulf between Husserl’s approach and that of Kant. I raise a number of doubts about Ricoeur’s reading of Husserl. After a preliminary section introducing Husserl’s understanding of his phenomenological project in relation to the work of Kant, I sketch the main lines of his analysis of time-consciousness, and then (...) go on to evaluate Ricoeur’s interpretation of it. Having shown Husserl’s work on this matter to be more subtle than Ricoeur supposes, I explain how Ricoeur’s own inquiry into the consciousness of time lacks an adequate account of the time of consciousness. The way in which Husserl’s analysis might resolve this difficulty is indicated in the closing remarks. (shrink)

Extending new verbs is important in becoming a productive speaker of a language. Prior results show children have difficulty extending verbs when they have seen events with varied agents. This study further examines the impact of variability on verb learning and asks whether variability interacts with event complexity or differs by language. Children in the United States, China, Korea, and Singapore learned verbs linked to simple and complex events. Sets of events included one or three agents, and children were asked (...) to extend the verb at test. Children learning verbs linked to simple movements performed similarly across conditions. However, children learning verbs linked to events with multiple objects were less successful if those events were enacted by multiple agents. A follow-up study rules out an influence of event order. Overall, similar patterns of results emerged across languages, suggesting common cognitive processes support children's verb learning. (shrink)

This paper takes as its starting point the phenomenon of young lawyers in ethical crisis. The teaching of ethics in the classroom and the ethos and environment of the law firm have created dissonance: knowing what it is right to do but being unable to do it. In examining this phenomenon, we develop the idea of commitment as a source of duty, loyalty, and courage that enables someone to accept and overcome reluctance to act ethically. Our conceptual framework combines two (...) models: Fineman’s radical view that vulnerability is universal, but ameliorated by the assets available to the individual, and Rest’s four component model that provides a taxonomy of precursors for ethical action and resilience. We consider how the structures and the relationships between law schools, regulators and law firms, acting in combination, support or degrade ethical resilience and development of a commitment to ethical action. We close by considering how changes to the structure planned by one regulator in England and Wales deplete the assets available to the young lawyer and thereby the profession. (shrink)

This article examines the ways that managers in a rapidly globalizing industry use gendered discourses of skill to justify and frame their search for inexperienced workers in low-wage regions, using a case of a U.S.-based apparel firm that relocated and subcontracted its sewing operations in the 1990s. It uses feminist theory to examine managers' claims that women's sewing skills in the United States were disappearing and that they needed to seek out these skills in parts of the world where women (...) were not yet active participants in labor markets. Feminist researchers have long understood the ways that naturalization of skill cheapens women's labor. The case presented here highlights the way in which the portrayal of certain skills as naturally occurring resources justifies the movement of capital in search of new pools of workers without labor market experience or union representation. (shrink)

This anthology is the first attempt to present a rounded picture of 'Kierkegaard as a philosopher' in English. After an introduction explaining how Kierkegaard viewed the task of 'becoming a philosopher', there are generous extracts from the Concept of Irony and the great pseudonymous works: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Prefaces, Johannes Climacus and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Kierkegaard's own attempts to summarize the significance of his writings are also included, so that readers have the (...) opportunity to make up their own minds about the adequacy of his retrospective accounting. The Kierkegaard who emerges from these pages is not only a penetrating analyst of temporality, individuality, and irony, but also a lithe, witty and versatile stylist. He is probably one of the greatest writers in the philosophical tradition, and surely one of the most humorous. The anthology makes use of a range of classic translations, and includes new translations by Jane Chamberlain and Jonathan Rée, explanatory introductions, an index and a glossary. (shrink)

The great Western political and social philosophers had no doubts about the importance of education. Feminist philosophers of the past also understood the significance for their own projects of educational theory and philosophy. Today, however, there is an education gap in the feminist philosophy text. Books in the field pay little attention to the subject of education and rarely cite feminist research in this area. Widely circulated bibliographies of feminist philosophy and overviews of the field have tended, in turn, to (...) make this whole area of feminist philosophical research invisible. The feminist theorist/activist Charlotte Bunch once wrote that feminist theory must, among other things, hypothesize how to change what is to what there should be. She did not say – nor would I – that every feminist who puts forward an account of what there should be must also address the practical issue of how to achieve the hoped‐for results. One wonders, however, if it is possible to achieve the transformations of marriage, family, reproduction, workplace, science, society, not to mention gender itself, that feminist philosophers espouse without effecting a correspondingly great transformation of this culture's educational theory and philosophy. (shrink)

Context and Aims:Social and cognitive processes underlying individual classical musicians' and duo performers' preparation for performance have been explored using longitudinal case studies. Social processes can be inferred fromrehearsal talkand recent studies have focused on its content and nature. Cognitive processes can be inferred from score annotations representing musicians' thoughts while practicing, rehearsing (rehearsal features), and playing or singing from memory (performance cues). We report three studies conducted by two practitioner-researchers: (1) of rehearsal talk; (2) of rehearsal features and thoughts (...) while performing; and (3) a triangulation (as it were) of the two kinds of data to gauge the potential for rehearsal talk to predict the use of performance cues.Methods:A singer and viola player formed a new duo to prepare two songs, new to them both, for two performances on the same day and a third performance 10 months later. Their practice and rehearsal sessions, over the course of seven days, were recorded and transcribed. The musicians annotated copies of the scores after rehearsing and after each performance. Each musician performed one of the two songs from memory. First, verbal data were coded and analyzed using two frameworks for categorizing socio-emotional interactions and musical dimensions, respectively. Second, their annotations were categorized and compared, and finally the frameworks were combined so that correlations between rehearsal talk and performance cues could be calculated.Results:The musicians' verbal interactions were positive and task-related; significant changes over time were observed only in the extent to which they showed solidarity toward each other. Analysis of their annotations illustrates similarities and differences between their attention to specific features of the music while rehearsing and performing, particularly from memory. Rehearsal talk predicted performance cues in the third performance, but not the first or second.Conclusion:Musicians' talk cannot be assumed to reflect musicians' actions. The study of musicians' verbal interactions may be less useful for determining cognitive than social processes underlying preparation for performance. Nevertheless, the study provides a detailed snapshot of classical musicians' “real world” preparation for performance, highlighting the role of spontaneity in performance, and underlining differences between what happens in the studio and what can happen on stage. (shrink)