The article begins with an overview of the historic moment of ?the end of the Cold War?, and of the paradoxically deepening moral, social, and environmental problems posed by the military system. It demonstrates that historical and contemporary analyses of defence and war have dogmatically presupposed the military paradigm, and have therefore failed to recognize the self?reproducing structure of covert premisses and inferences upon which it rests. In laying bare this underlying system of unreason, the analysis demonstrates that the military (...) paradigm's ultimately self?contradictory concepts of ?security? and ?defence? repose on unstated interests of social and political rule. Proposing new distinctions between pathological and life?enabling forms of war, and between guilty and innocent combatants, the argument develops alternative, non?military principles of war to guide rational and moral agency. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the underlying conflicts between the principles of education and the market. After identifying an international movement towards justifying excellence in education in terms of a goal external to education, namely “to compete effectively in the international marketplace”, the paper shows that: (i) this justification of education has been increasingly presupposed or prescribed by corporate, government and educational leaderships, and (ii) education as a social institution has been correspondingly subordinated to international market goals, including the language and (...) self-conceptualization of educators themselves. The argument of the paper demonstrates that there are fundamental contradictions between the market and education models in terms of (1) Goals, (2) Motivations, (3) Methods and (4) Standards of Excellence. Counter-arguments to this analysis are presented, and replies are given. The article concludes that the long-term development of education and of civilization itself requires the autonomy of education from market command. (shrink)

This paper analyses the underlying conflicts between the principles of education and the market. After identifying an international movement towards justifying excellence in education in terms of a goal external to education, namely “to compete effectively in the international marketplace”, the paper shows that: (i) this justification of education has been increasingly presupposed or prescribed by corporate, government and educational leaderships, and (ii) education as a social institution has been correspondingly subordinated to international market goals, including the language and self-conceptualization (...) of educators themselves. The argument of the paper demonstrates that there are fundamental contradictions between the market and education models in terms of (1) Goals, (2) Motivations, (3) Methods and (4) Standards of Excellence. Counter-arguments to this analysis are presented, and replies are given. The article concludes that the long-term development of education and of civilization itself requires the autonomy of education from market command. (shrink)

Most infonnallogic texts and articles assume a verbal account of reasoning which defines "argument" as a set of sentences. The present paper broadens this definition in order to account for "visual arguments" which are communicated with nonverbal visual images. Standard approaches to verbal arguments are extended in a way that allows them to explain and evaluate visual argumentation.

Since its publication in 1971, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice has defined the terrain of political philosophical debate concerning the principles, scope, and material implications of social justice. Social justice for Rawls concerns the principles that govern the operation of major social institutions. Major social institutions structure the lives of citizens by regulating access to the resources and opportunities that the formulation and realization of human projects require. Rawls’ theory of social justice regards major institutions as just when they (...) distribute what he calls “primary goods” in a manner that he regards as egalitarian. Hence, the subsequent social justice debate has been shaped by and large as a debate about the meaning and implications of egalitarianism. While on the surface a debate about egalitarianism as a distributional principle seems to uncover the core problem of social justice—how much of what everyone should get as a matter of right—the entire history of the debate has been conducted in abstraction fr om what matters most to people’s lives. It is as a corrective to such abstractions that the life-value approach to social justice has been developed. (shrink)