Most scholars in political theory and sociology have dismissed journalism as an institutional force in the public sphere, in part because of journalists' largely self-defined and curiously marginalized role as a mere transmission apparatus for traditional news. The authors advocate a philosophy ofpublic journalism faithful to the commons, in which newspapers become a site for public dialogue accessible to all citizens, where positions that could not or would not be explored elsewhere are advanced, argued, assessed, and acted upon.

This article places the issue of quoting practices in journalism - widely debated in public and professional forums since the Masson-Malcolm (Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, 1991) dispute - into both practical and ethical contexts. It suggests that the multitude of ethical dilemmas facing journalists in the handling of quotations can be addressed by adapting Bok's (1979) test of publicity, which requires that journalists willingly imagine themselves under scrutiny. The spirit of the test asks journalists to embrace this central orienting (...) rhetorical question: Is my behavior such that I'd be comfortable having all my audiences - interview subject, editor, public, and self - simultaneously monitor my choice(s), knowing that I might later be called upon to justify my actions. (shrink)

This paper describes the major components of ImpactCS, a program to develop strategies and curriculum materials for integrating social and ethical considerations into the computer science curriculum. It presents, in particular, the content recommendations of a subcommittee of ImpactCS; and it illustrates the interdisciplinary nature of the field, drawing upon concepts from computer science, sociology, philosophy, psychology, history and economics.

This essay describes conversation as an ensemble accomplishment that can be illuminated by critics working with specific texts within a rhetorical framework. We first establish dialogue as the key concept for any criticism of conversation, specifying the rhetorical dimensions of interpersonal dialogue. Second, we show how template thinking is particularly dangerous for conversational critics and suggest a research (anti)method, based on a coauthorship, that provides a thoroughgoing dialogical access to texts. Finally, we exemplify dialogic criticism of a conversational text by (...) analyzing the famous 1957 dialogue of philosopher Martin Buber and psychologist Carl Rogers. (shrink)

A corrected and extensively annotated version of the sole meeting between two of the most important figures in twentieth-century intellectual life.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense by William GreenwayVictor AndersonA Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense William Greenway LOUISVILLE, KY: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2015. 170 PP. $30.00This book offers an apology for the reasonableness of Christian belief in the God of love and the gift of God in Jesus, agape, against its secular detractors from early modern philosophy to the late twentieth (...) century. Intentionally apologetic in tone, the argument moves from old-school Evangelical kinds of defenses that characterized early 1970s apologetic revivals by thinkers like Josh McDowell and his "evidences demanding a verdict" or Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason. Greenway, however, incrementally shifts from defense language to affirmation of the face, agape, and the gift. He discloses a philosophical spirituality embodied in Christian belief in the ethical realities of freedom, obligations, justice, and love.The book illustrates how these spiritual realities feed back into Christian substantive beliefs through expositions of scripture and doctrine, especially the parables and life of Jesus. Greenway brings insightful readings of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion to bear on these sources. What begins as a strictly philosophical defense of Christian belief movingly invites readers to travel from apologetics, evidences, and warrants to the spiritual sphere where Christians and non-Christians alike may reasonably affirm the priority of agape love. "Agape names the reality of our having been seized in and by love for others," Greenway argues (xiii).This book insightfully and passionately presents the complexities of faith and life in the world of face-to-face human encounters and our planetary ecological and environmental interactions with nonhuman others. Greenway's relational phenomenology provides an ethical pattern for human-to-human reception of divine agape, the gift, which is available to all in our moral struggles with a pluralism of faiths, even as Christians seek to demonstrate the ethical demands of agape, love, which, according to Greenway, is the spiritual essence of the Gospel.Part I, "The Secular Condition" (chapters 1–4), is classically apologetic in tone, mapping the philosophical skeptical terrain where reason and science rob Christian belief in God of any noetic validity. The Cartesian and Darwinian revolutions hold center in the production of the "secular" dismissal of reasonable belief in God, spiritual realities, and what ethical powers they bear on human face-to-face encounters with God. Part II, "The Essence of Reasonable Christianity" (chapters 5–9), draws on the French phenomenology of [End Page 194] Lévinas and Marion to restore, Greenway argues, a "spiritually attuned rationality, an awakened rationality that facilitates the unfolding of a philosophical spirituality" that considers "classic teachings of Jesus in light of this restored rationality, expecting that dimensions of Jesus' spiritual genius will shine forth with renewed brilliance" (xiii). Greenway contends that these renewed spiritual insights, informed by agape, the gift, yield spiritual understanding and appreciation of formidable Christian belief schemes: original sin, the fall, good, evil, grace, forgiveness, koinonia, salvation, faith, eternal life, and resurrection (xiii).Greenway describes his goal as a constructive philosophical spirituality. "The essence of this philosophical spirituality," Greenway argues, "is continuous with the essence of Christian spirituality," when articulated in an explicitly (although non-exclusivist) Christian voice and in accord with "common public standards of what is good and reasonable" (xiii). He concludes, "love is not something we create or do, but awakening and surrendering to that love in and by which we have been seized" (xiii). A Reasonable Belief offers a rigorous and creative engagement of modern and contemporary continental philosophy and science with Christian love ethics that seeks to restore its centrality in our postmodern moment.Victor AndersonVanderbilt UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense by William GreenwayVictor AndersonA Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense William Greenway LOUISVILLE, KY: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2015. 170 PP. $30.00This book offers an apology for the reasonableness of Christian belief in the God of love and the gift of God in Jesus, agape, against its secular detractors from early modern philosophy to the late twentieth (...) century. Intentionally apologetic in tone, the argument moves from old-school Evangelical kinds of defenses that characterized early 1970s apologetic revivals by thinkers like Josh McDowell and his "evidences demanding a verdict" or Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason. Greenway, however, incrementally shifts from defense language to affirmation of the face, agape, and the gift. He discloses a philosophical spirituality embodied in Christian belief in the ethical realities of freedom, obligations, justice, and love.The book illustrates how these spiritual realities feed back into Christian substantive beliefs through expositions of scripture and doctrine, especially the parables and life of Jesus. Greenway brings insightful readings of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion to bear on these sources. What begins as a strictly philosophical defense of Christian belief movingly invites readers to travel from apologetics, evidences, and warrants to the spiritual sphere where Christians and non-Christians alike may reasonably affirm the priority of agape love. "Agape names the reality of our having been seized in and by love for others," Greenway argues (xiii).This book insightfully and passionately presents the complexities of faith and life in the world of face-to-face human encounters and our planetary ecological and environmental interactions with nonhuman others. Greenway's relational phenomenology provides an ethical pattern for human-to-human reception of divine agape, the gift, which is available to all in our moral struggles with a pluralism of faiths, even as Christians seek to demonstrate the ethical demands of agape, love, which, according to Greenway, is the spiritual essence of the Gospel.Part I, "The Secular Condition" (chapters 1–4), is classically apologetic in tone, mapping the philosophical skeptical terrain where reason and science rob Christian belief in God of any noetic validity. The Cartesian and Darwinian revolutions hold center in the production of the "secular" dismissal of reasonable belief in God, spiritual realities, and what ethical powers they bear on human face-to-face encounters with God. Part II, "The Essence of Reasonable Christianity" (chapters 5–9), draws on the French phenomenology of [End Page 194] Lévinas and Marion to restore, Greenway argues, a "spiritually attuned rationality, an awakened rationality that facilitates the unfolding of a philosophical spirituality" that considers "classic teachings of Jesus in light of this restored rationality, expecting that dimensions of Jesus' spiritual genius will shine forth with renewed brilliance" (xiii). Greenway contends that these renewed spiritual insights, informed by agape, the gift, yield spiritual understanding and appreciation of formidable Christian belief schemes: original sin, the fall, good, evil, grace, forgiveness, koinonia, salvation, faith, eternal life, and resurrection (xiii).Greenway describes his goal as a constructive philosophical spirituality. "The essence of this philosophical spirituality," Greenway argues, "is continuous with the essence of Christian spirituality," when articulated in an explicitly (although non-exclusivist) Christian voice and in accord with "common public standards of what is good and reasonable" (xiii). He concludes, "love is not something we create or do, but awakening and surrendering to that love in and by which we have been seized" (xiii). A Reasonable Belief offers a rigorous and creative engagement of modern and contemporary continental philosophy and science with Christian love ethics that seeks to restore its centrality in our postmodern moment.Victor AndersonVanderbilt UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, butThe Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward (...) racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings--in economics, sociology, and psychology--with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy. -/- Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action. -/- Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups. Various practitioners of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science argue that dominant (...) knowledge practices disadvantage women by (1) excluding them from inquiry, (2) denying them epistemic authority, (3) denigrating their “feminine” cognitive styles and modes of knowledge, (4) producing theories of women that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only in the ways they serve male interests, (5) producing theories of social phenomena that render women's activities and interests, or gendered power relations, invisible, and (6) producing knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies. Feminist epistemologists trace these failures to flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology. They offer diverse accounts of how to overcome these failures. They also aim to (1) explain why the entry of women and feminist scholars into different academic disciplines, especially in biology and the social sciences, has generated new questions, theories, and methods, (2) show how gender has played a.. (shrink)

Religion and faith dominated much of Newton's life and work. His papers, never made available to the public, were filled with biblical speculation and timelines along with passages that excoriated the early Church fathers. Indeed, his radical theological leanings rendered him a heretic, according to the doctrines of the Anglican Church.

Creativity: Theory, History, Practice offers important new perspectives on creativity in the light of contemporary critical theory and cultural history. Innovative in approach as well as argument, the book crosses disciplinary boundaries and builds new bridges between the critical and the creative. It is organized in four parts: · Why creativity now? offers much-needed alternatives to both the Romantic stereotype of the creator as individual genius and the tendency of the modern creative industries to treat everything as a commodity. · (...) Defining creativity, creating definitions traces the changing meaning of "create" from religious ideas of divine creation from nothing to advertising notions of concept creation. It also examines the complex history and extraordinary versatility of terms such as imagination, invention, inspiration and originality. · Creation as myth, story, metaphor begins with modern re-telling of early African, American and Australian creation myths and -picking up Biblical and evolutionary accounts along the way - works round to scientific visions of the Big Bang, bubble universes and cosmic soup. · Creative practices, cultural processes is a critical anthology of materials, chosen to promote fresh thinking about everything from changing constructions of "literature" and "design" to artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. Rob Pope takes significant steps forward in the process of rethinking a vexed yet vital concept, all the while encouraging and equipping readers to continue the process in their own creative or "re-creative" ways. Creativity: Theory, History, Practice is invaluable for anyone with a live interest in exploring what creativity has been, is currently, and yet may be. (shrink)

Emotions, morals, practices -- Sympathy for a devil's chaplain -- Common compassion and the mad scientist -- Sympathy as callousness? physiology and vivisection -- Sympathy, liberty, and compulsion: vaccination -- Sympathetic selection: eugenics -- Scientism and practice.

I investigate the consequences of Nietzsche's perspectivism for notions of truth and objectivity, and show how the metaphor of visual perspective motivates an epistemology that avoids self-referential difficulties. Perspectivism's claim that every view is only one view, applied to itself, is often supposed to preclude the perspectivist's ability to offer reasons for her epistemology. Nietzsche's arguments for perspectivism depend on “internal reasons”, which have force not only in their own perspective, but also within the standards of alternative perspectives. Internal reasons (...) allow a perspectivist argument against dogmatism without presupposing aperspectival criteria for theory choice. Nietzsche also offers “internal” conceptions of truth and objectivity which reduce them to a matter of meeting our epistemic standards. This view has pluralistic implications, which conflict with common sense, but it is nevertheless consistent and plausible. Nietzsche's position is similar to Putnam's recent internalism, and this is due to their common Kantian heritage. (shrink)

Christian ethical imagination was always tempered by various social prejudices prevalent in local contexts. Particularly during modernity and subsequently through colonial expansion, the role of race and caste became central to the expansion of Christianity through missionary activity. A closer scrutiny of colonial missionary Christianity clearly suggests the significance of racialised worldview shaping theological and ethical paradigms. In particular contexts, such racialised imagination underpinned and gave credence to other forms of social prejudices, such as caste in South Asia. Through a (...) post-colonial lens, I examine the role of race and caste in shaping Christian ethical frameworks and articulate the rationale for ‘decolonising’ the modern foundations of Christian ethics in pursuit of racial justice in our contemporary society. (shrink)

This book explores the concept of punishment: its meaning and significance, not least to those subject to it; its social, political and emotional contexts; its role in the criminal justice system; and the difficulties of bringing punishment to an end. It explores how levels of criminal punishment could and should be reduced, without compromising moral standards, public safety or the rights of victims of crime. Core contents include: Why punishment matters, the salience of emotions in its various discourses and the (...) role of culture. The politicisation of punishment and legitimacy. The penal system, the prominence of the prison in research on punishment and the role of community sanctions. The aims of punishment, its limits and the role of power. The ethics of punishment and human rights. Punishment and social order. This book is essential reading for all criminologists, as well as students taking courses on punishment, penology, prisons and the criminal justice system. (shrink)

This chapter talks about to my other self reflection and existentialism in dungeons dragons. The 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide II sourcebook discusses player motivations such as these, recognizing that, for many, they are one of the main reasons to play DD. The actor plays a character that someone else has envisioned and written: a figment of someone else's imagination. The author's task looks at the other side of this coin: an author conceives of a world and characters, and then sees (...) how those characters will react to their circumstances. The very chapter owes its existence to one from whom the author learned that he had the capacity for courage and faith, to Lady Yui – to my other self. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Fact of Pluralism Common Schools and the Normative Significance of Pluralism Educational Choice and the Normative Significance of Pluralism Reconciling Common Schooling with Educational Choice Acknowledgments References.

In the first work of investigative journalism in decades to give a comprehensive view into contemporary psychiatric incarceration and forced interventions, Your Consent Is Not Required exposes how rising numbers of people from many walks of life are being subjected against their will to surveillance, indefinite detention, and powerful tranquilizing drugs, restraints, seclusion, and electroshock.

This article examines how the availability of Big Data, coupled with new data analytics, challenges established epistemologies across the sciences, social sciences and humanities, and assesses the extent to which they are engendering paradigm shifts across multiple disciplines. In particular, it critically explores new forms of empiricism that declare ‘the end of theory’, the creation of data-driven rather than knowledge-driven science, and the development of digital humanities and computational social sciences that propose radically different ways to make sense of culture, (...) history, economy and society. It is argued that: Big Data and new data analytics are disruptive innovations which are reconfiguring in many instances how research is conducted; and there is an urgent need for wider critical reflection within the academy on the epistemological implications of the unfolding data revolution, a task that has barely begun to be tackled despite the rapid changes in research practices presently taking place. After critically reviewing emerging epistemological positions, it is contended that a potentially fruitful approach would be the development of a situated, reflexive and contextually nuanced epistemology. (shrink)

The work of Michèle Le Dœuff creatively disrupts established notions of what philosophy might be. Far from being a discipline about the leader and the disciple, a hierarchy of knowledge and paternalism, Le Dœuff proposes a philosophy of dialogue and friendship. The conversations in this book explore how this philosophy can be enacted and explored, and show how openness and generosity can be the starting point of truly rigorous thinking. Introduced and curated by the late philosopher, Pamela Sue Anderson, (...) In Dialogue with Michèle Le Dœuff explores themes like contemporary feminism, joy in philosophy, memory, the significance of friendship to thinking and a key Le Dœuffian concept, the imaginary. Le Dœuff's interlocutors, including Penelope Deutscher, Elizabeth Fallaize and Meenda Dhanda, are some of the most significant thinkers in the fields of feminism and continental thought and provide insights and ways into considering philosophy as a profoundly dialogical exercise. (shrink)

In his profound and deeply personal new book, New York Times bestselling author Rob Bell explores the endless dynamic questions and connections that have shaped his life to provide powerful insight into understanding your purpose and place in the world. Our home is a universe of endless dynamic connections that never stop inviting us to participate in the great mysterious love at the heart of it all. Everything is Spiritual is a brief history of how these ideas about creation, love, (...) and connection shaped the author--and can shape every one of us. In this book, Rob Bell explores the concept that what people really want, more than anything, is to understand their purpose here--so much so that it gives them an abiding sense of awe and wonder. And when you embrace where and who you come from and your wounds and pains and regrets, you will discover that there's an invitation lurking there in the mess of life: an invitation to expand just like the universe has been doing for 13 billions years. There is a space beyond all the parts and divisions and differences and polarization where you see that it's all one connected whole and it's all rigged in favor of your growth, expansion, and joy. (shrink)

The book provides a detailed yet clear introduction to the sociology of Basil Bernstein that will be accessible to those not already familiar with it, but also of interest to those who are. It locates his thinking within the history of the field of British sociology in his life-time, explores the classical sources in Durkheim and Marx, and shows how a world-wide network of scholars continues to apply and further develop his ideas. His later ideas about knowledge structures are applied (...) to Bernstein himself in terms of a historical analysis of the fields of British sociology and the sociology of education and his position within them. The book is, in this way, about British sociology and education as well as about Bernstein and intends to provide a provocative and challenging account of both. The book is organised in four main sections that deal with: theory, research, control and pedagogy. It explores the major areas of his work and shows their inter-relatedness and their development over time. Although Bernstein had a special interest in education, he did not see himself a sociologist of education alone. His was a broad and wide-ranging programme in the social sciences and it is in these terms that his work is presented in this book. (shrink)

In responding to perceived crises—such as the COVID-19 pandemic—in routinized ways, contemporary bioethics can make us prisoners of the proximate. Rather, we need bioethics to recognize and engage with complex configurations of global ecosystem degradation and collapse, thereby showing us paths toward co-inhabiting the planet securely and sustainably. Such a planetary health ethics might draw rewardingly on Indigenous knowledge practices or Indigenous philosophical ecologies. It will require ethicists, with other health professionals, to step up and become public advocates for environmental (...) sustainability. The COVID-19 pandemic should be seen as opening a portal to planetary health ethics or ecologized bioethics. (shrink)

The “new natural lawyers” (NNLs) are a prolific group of philosophers, theologians, and political theorists that includes John Finnis, Robert George, Patrick Lee, Gerard Bradley, and Germain Grisez, among others. These thinkers have devoted themselves to developing and defending a traditional sexual ethic according to which homosexual sexual acts are immoral per se and marriage ought to remain an exclusively heterosexual institution. The sterility objection holds that the NNLs are guilty of making an arbitrary and irrational distinction between same-sex couples (...) and sterile heterosexual couples. The NNLs believe that it is a necessary condition for two people’s being morally and legally entitled to get married that they be able to perform sexual acts that are “suited to procreating.” But sterile heterosexual couples are incapable of performing such acts. Therefore, it should follow from the NNLs’ own premises that sterile heterosexual couples are not entitled to marry. But the NNLs do not draw this conclusion. Instead, they maintain that sterile heterosexuals can marry while denying that the same is true of same-sex couples. The sterility objection claims the NNLs are being inconsistent in treating the two kinds of couples differently. Although the sterility objection has been endorsed by recent critics, I don’t think it has yet been adequately defended. The NNLs have responded by arguing that there is a sense in which the sex acts of sterile heterosexual couples are as suited to reproduction as those of fertile heterosexuals. Thus they maintain that the distinction they draw between the two kinds of couple has a rational basis. A successful defense of the sterility objection must show that this response on the part of the NNLs fails. Such is the task I undertake in this paper. I argue that the NNLs’ response fails because acts of penile-vaginal intercourse between sterile heterosexuals lack the actual causal power to produce conception that sexual acts need to be considered truly reproductive, and because their assumption that penile-vaginal intercourse always functions reproductively is bad biology. (shrink)

Worldview matters -- Introducing worldview -- What is worldview? -- The importance and impact of worldview -- Worldview analysis -- Contours of Christian worldview -- The narrative contours of a Christian worldview -- The propositional contours of a Christian worldview -- Testing a Christian worldview -- Analyzing worldviews -- Western philosophical alternatives -- Global religious alternatives -- Pursuing (and living) God's perspective in a pluralistic world.

Now -- Hum -- Open -- Both -- With -- For -- Ahead -- So -- Epilogue.

Some conspicuous characteristics of argumentation as we all know this phenomenon from our shared everyday experiences are in my view vital to its theoretical treatment because they should have methodological consequences for the way in which argumentation research is conducted. To start with, argumentation is in the first place a communicative act complex, which is realized by making functional verbal communicative moves.

This article examines whether the involvement of stakeholders in the design of corporate codes of conduct leads to a higher implementation likelihood of the code. The empirical focus is on Occupational Safety and Health (OSH). The article compares the inclusion of OSH issues in the codes of conduct of 30 companies involved in International Framework Agreements (IFAs), agreed upon by trade unions and multinational enterprises, with those of a benchmark sample of 38 leading Multinational Enterprises in comparable industries. It is (...) found that codes of the IFA group have a higher implementation likelihood in OSH than the codes of the benchmark group. Further, European firms, culturally more used to stakeholder involvement, score higher than their US and Japanese competitors, and hence are more capable of addressing the safety and health issues in international supply chains. The implementation likelihood of codes seems closely related to the type of corporate CSR approach. (shrink)

The 'ethics of deconstruction'? -- Ethical (im)possibilities -- Ethics under erasure -- Ethical experience : a cinematic example.

There is a long and storied history of debates over 'realism' that has touched literally every academic discipline. Yet realism- antirealism debates play a relatively minor role in the contemporary study of consciousness. In this paper four basic varieties of realism and antirealism are explored and their potential impact on the study of consciousness is considered. Reasons are offered to explain why there is not more debate over these issues, including a discussion of the powerful influence of externalist versions of (...) physicalist realism. Examples are given of approaches to consciousness studies that challenge contemporary versions of physicalist realism. (shrink)

Wigner attempts to place Bacon within the perspectives of his time.

Dr Goffee reviews empirical evidence on the labour market position and work experience of women managers, assesses the kind of work situations which are likely to be perceived by women managers ‐ and, in some cases, their partners and colleagues ‐ as involving an “ethical” dimension, and suggests possible sources of differentiation in the experiences of European women managers which are worthy of further comparative research. The author is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School.

If one can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners, one can surely judge a society by how it treats cognitively- and learning-impaired children. In the United States children with physical and cognitive impairments are subjected to higher rates of corporal punishment than are non-disabled children. Children with disabilities make up just over 13% of the student population in the U.S. yet make up over 18% of those children who receive corporal punishment. Autistic children are among the most (...) likely to receive corporal punishment. -/- Although they may deny or redescribe particular instances of corporal punishment or their use of restraints, educators defend such actions as legitimate punishment. In this paper, I assess the logic underlying the use of restraints and corporal punishment on autistic children by educators. The rationalizations for the corporal punishment or restraint of autistics stems from the educator’s desire to control the autistic children so as to end typical autistic behaviors such as rocking, repetitive verbalizations, or “flapping” but also the autistic child’s non-affective responses such as not appearing to feel remorse or shame or the absence of a verbal acknowledgement of remorse or shame. The educators assume that the autistic’s failure to exhibit the desired responses is evidence of the autistic’s moral incorrigibility and is, therefore, evidence of the appropriateness of corporal punishment. But this assumption of the incorrigibility of the autistic child is questionable. -/- Indeed accepting this incorrigibility assumption reveals two important problems. First, instructors using physical punishment on autistic children do not understand autism. Second, they are not working with a tenable conception of punishment. Any action undertaken to induce socially acceptable behaviors (whether it be the end of autistic acts or responses such as remorse) is to fail to understand what the legitimate punishment of children is about. (shrink)

This article is about a sidebar in James Gibson's last book, The ecological approach to visual perception. In this sidebar, Gibson, the founder of the ecological perspective of perception and action, argued that to perceive an affordance is not to classify an object. Although this sidebar has received scant attention, it is of great significance both historically and for recent discussions about specificity, direct perception, and the functions of the dorsal and ventral streams. It is argued that Gibson's acknowledgment of (...) Wittgenstein's ideas of classification suggests a limited scope of his theory of direct perception?it cannot account for the classification of objects. The implications for both the specification debate and theorizing about the brain's dorsal and ventral pathways are explored. Based on a recent ecological conception of information and direct perception, we ultimately argue that both affordance perception and classification are direct. (shrink)

The Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition (Series Editor(s): Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns) -/- Questions the barriers between the humanities and the cognitive sciences. -/- Cognitive science is finding increasing evidence that cognition is distributed across brain, body and world. This series calls for a reappraisal of historical concepts of cognition in light of these findings. It engages with recent debates about the various strong or weak models of distributed cognition and brings them into discourse with research in the humanities. (...) Together, the books in this series give a wide-ranging examination of the parallels (and divergences) from these models in cultural, philosophical and scientific works, from antiquity to the mid-20th century. -/- Key Features: * Opens up our reading of Western European works in the fields of history of ideas, history of science, material culture and literary studies by bringing recent insights in cognitive science to bear on the distributed nature of cognition * Explores how sociocultural and environmental contexts lead to the manifestation of particular forms of cognitive paradigms or to their suppression * Traces the interconnections between and particular divergences across Western European history among the various concepts of distributed cognition -/- . (shrink)

A semelhança entre o padrão de interação dos neurônios do cérebro humano e a colônia de formigas torna esta última objeto da hipótese de ser uma estrutura apta a ter uma consciência. Assim, neste artigo, a definição de Thomas Nagel da consciência como algo que é ser para um organismo se torna basilar para o exame dela como um possível sujeito experiencial. A colônia de formigas, se considerada um organismo, poderia ser um sujeito apto a ter experiências internas. Por isso, (...) neste artigo, eu desenvolvo com base no Pampsiquismo, critérios de análise da colônia, apresentando quais características ela deve atender para ser qualificada como consciente. Dessa maneira, ela se torna um modelo apropriado para o exame da relação corpo-mente. Não defendo que a colônia de formigas é um organismo genuíno, mas que, caso seja, terá algum tipo de experiência consciente. No tratamento dessa questão, eu examino se a colônia é um indivíduo biológico, e, em seguida, se é possível que as mentes das formigas embasem a mente da colônia. Concluo que, a partir do modo de interação das partes com o todo, pode haver mais de uma resolução para o problema, i.e., a consciência da colônia depende do modo como seus componentes estão física e fenomenalmente integrados. (shrink)