Cadherins are a large family of single‐pass transmembrane proteins principally involved in Ca2+‐dependent homotypic cell adhesion. The cadherin molecules comprise three domains, the intracellular domain, the transmembrane domain and the extracellular domain, and form large complexes with a vast array of binding partners (including cadherin molecules of the same type in homophilic interactions and cellular protein catenins), orchestrating biologically essential extracellular and intracellular signalling processes. While current, contrasting models for classic cadherin homophilic interaction involve varying numbers of specific repeats found (...) in the extracellular domain, the structure of the domain itself clearly remains the main determinant of cell stability and binding specificity. Through intracellular interactions, cadherin enhances its adhesive properties binding the cytoskeleton via cytoplasmic associated factors α‐ catenin, β‐catenin and p120ctn. Recent structural studies on classic cadherins and these catenin molecules have provided new insight into the essential mechanisms underlying cadherin‐mediated cell interaction and catenin‐mediated cellular signalling. Remarkable structural diversity has been observed in β‐catenin recognition of other cellular factors including APC, Tcf and ICAT, proteins that contribute to or compete with cadherin/catenin functioning. BioEssays 26:497–511, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Don Quijote and the Law of LiteratureCarl Good (bio)The part is one of these beings, the whole minus this part the other. But the whole minus a part is not the whole and as long as this relationship persists, there is no whole, only two unequal parts.—Rousseau, Social Contract, cited by Paul de Man in Allegories of ReadingBut it is not just that, because it is also a (...) performative.... There is first a performative, the act of positing..., which then moves to a system of tropes; a kind of anamorphosis of tropes takes place, in which all the tropological systems are engendered, as a result of this original act of positing.... It is circulation which is out of hand,... the sheer circulation or play of the signifier, and which is, as you know, the root of error, madness, stupidity and all other evil.—Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony”Amid a confusion of narrative inversions, misleading appearances, and unresolvable disputes, at least two things are consistent in Don Quijote de la Mancha: first, the knight’s singular fidelity to what I will refer to as a law of literature, which persists like a phantasm of continuity throughout the larger narrative; and, second, the many interruptions of this narrative by the stories, or episodes, recounted by the characters who cross don Quijote’s path (including the knight himself), in the form of speeches, testimonies, plays, jokes, poems, and so on. In at least one strict sense, these other stories have nothing to do with that path other than their interruptions of it and by it. Such a claim has its own strategic value and does not entirely contradict the reasonings of a long history of critics of the Quijote who have tended to argue from a variety of different standpoints for some kind of ideological cohesion that would bind the smaller episodes to the larger story that they interpolate. But at a certain ground zero of interpretation—albeit a paradoxical ground that prohibits a scholarly shelter to be built on it—no argument would be sufficient to establish such a coherence among the work’s separate narrative parts, since such an argument would live in the brief, oneiric intensity of the critic’s testimony and that testimony’s potential effects rather than in the composition of the work itself somewhere beyond its apprehension by reading. Nonetheless, out of the dismembered ensemble of the Quijote what does perhaps effect its own strange kind of life is the very play of ironic interruptions and frictions between the dismembered parts, the profusion of which seems to impose itself as the work’s own aggressive insistence on itself as something which makes sense possible by constantly provoking and unsettling sense. That is where we could begin to speak of don Quijote himself, not only as the phantasmatic agent of this unsettling but also as the mad promise of justice that could be said to motivate it.The play of interruptions in don Quijote’s own story begins to outline the shifting contours and living contradictions of this novel as a “text” in the sense in which Derrida [End Page 44] and others have used the term: that which “names or relates in its way... [a] conflict without encounter between law and singularity” [“Before the Law” 187]. Although the story of this “encounter” has been often recounted, it bears another citation here, at least because it seems to be forgotten more often than it is told. Even when it is told, the story is often muted in homage to the name of Derrida by writers who tacitly assume that Derrida’s is the only possible version of this “conflict without encounter.” That version would be better described as merely one particular ethical shaping or forcing—a powerful one—of a story that has been told, and remains untold, in uncountable ways. Nonetheless, such a democratic assessment of Derrida does not quite justify a dismissal of his version as merely one among others, since, for one thing, it would be unable to account for the astonishing hold that different versions of Derridean “deconstruction” continue to have on the imagination of North American... (shrink)

Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and guided (...) by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

Although he had intermittently toiled over his translation of Hegel's Science of Logic for nearly half a century without finding a publisher, Henry Conrad Brokmeyer, the petulant visionary of St. Louis Hegelian fame, concluded it was naive to expect an infant nation to devote itself to philosophical reflection while it was "carving civilization out of wilderness." Brokmeyer's difficulties may have had more to do with his disdain for the grammatical and spelling conventions of the English language than he cared (...) to admit.1 Nonetheless, his observation about the culture of his adopted homeland brings into sharp relief a tension between high intellectual pursuits and more practical concerns. Brokmeyer's juxtaposition of "civilization" and "wilderness" also highlights the... (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of (...) the themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

In Republic II Glaucon assigns to Socrates the task of praising justice for itself. What it means to praise justice for itself is unclear. A new interpretation is offered on the basis of an analysis of Glaucon's division of goods. A distinction is developed between criterial benefits, those valuable consequences of a thing which provide a standard for evaluating a thing as a good instance of its type, and fringe benefits, valuable consequences which do not provide such (...) a standard. Socrates is expected to praise justice by describing the benefits it constitutes as a valuable activity of soul. He may also use the criterial benefits of justice but not its fringe benefits. This account of Socrates' task is superior to those interpretations which rule out all use of valuable consequences in praising justice and to those interpretations which fail to preserve the distinction between the second and third classes of goods. (shrink)

Rousseau's Emile has attracted an avalanche of critical responses. His theme of negative education, or as he defines it, “well-regulated freedom”, has been denounced as outright manipulation in disguise, which instead of respecting the child's autonomy and dignity, places him at the whim of the teacher's machinations and stratagems. His recommendation that the child's imagination be curtailed (that he may not acquire desires which cannot be satisfied) is widely held to militate against one of the most cherished goals of education: (...) the fostering of the natural curiosity of the child. Rousseau is also accused of professing an “ideology of childhood” which ignores the real needs of children. In the sterilized environment which Rousseau proposes for the growing child, affection, praise and approval, are some of the sacrifices made to this ideology. Furthermore, his views on women are considered degrading, outrageous and blatantly sexist. Yet despite the myriad criticisms leveled against his work, Rousseau's Emile highlights one of the most exacting challenges for education — how to educate the child without alienating him. Rousseau connects this issue with the larger problem of alienation: namely, that experienced by man within the modern social order. Rousseau's views anticipate the contemporary debate between virtue-based and deontological ethics. The purpose of this paper is (i) to describe Rousseau's diagnosis of the problem of alienation as it arises in the various spheres of human life, paying special attention to the moral domain, and (ii) to assess the solutions he offers to the problem of alienation. These solutions are based on a conception of the good life which, I argue, is unacceptable. I also argue that this conception dissipates one form of alienation only at the expense of creating another. The paper begins by tracing the changes which the concept of alienation has undergone, and consequently I draw a distinction between two kinds of alienation — conscious and unconscious. I demonstrate that even if Rousseau is successful in offering a remedy for conscious alienation, this very remedy itself gives rise to unconscious alienation. (shrink)

This paper challenges the widely held view that ‘good for’, ‘well-being’, and related terms express a distinctive evaluative concept of central importance for ethics and separate from ‘simply good’ as used by G. E. Moore and others. More specifically, it argues that there's no philosophically useful good-for or well-being concept that's neither merely descriptive in the sense of naturalistic nor reducible to ‘simply good’. The paper distinguishes two interpretations of the common claim that the value ‘ (...) class='Hi'>good for’ expresses is distinctively ‘subject-relative’. One concerns the ground of this value, or the properties that make something good for you; it says these must involve some relation to you. The other concerns the resulting value itself, or what supervenes on this ground; it says that too involves a relation. Neither interpretation, the paper argues, yields a significantly distinct evaluative concept. The ethically fundamental evaluative concept is just ‘simply good’. (shrink)

Science increasingly deals with human behavior: biology, neuroscience, genetics, psychology, evolutionary theory, and ethology all bring new insights into our actions and uncover new facts about our agency. However, what is the philosophical significance of their findings? The answer to this question varies according to one's background philosophical views. On the one hand, the dominant empiricist view contends that the sciences can in principle tell us everything there is to know about human agency. On the other hand, there are other (...) non-empiricist views - such as Kantian or Aristotelian perspectives - which hold that although science can contribute to our understanding of agency, agency itself cannot be reduced to mere scientific facts. This collection of original essays brings together a number of experts from different philosophical fields (history of philosophy, philosophy of action, ethics, and philosophy of science) to discuss how recent scientific developments about human behavior may be interpreted by, and may be relevant for, non-empiricist conceptions of agency. Contributors share the project of reconciling the scientific and the manifest images of the world in order to reach a stereoscopic vision of reality, with the conviction that philosophy is an attempt to establish coherence among our beliefs, while taking, at least prima facie, all the aspects of our experience at face value. (shrink)

... Press for their editorial perspicacity, to the National Institutes of Health for the partial financial support they gave me while I was writing some of the chapters, and to Donald Michie for suggesting the title Good Thinking.

"A distinctive voice somewhere between Mark Twain and Michel Montaigne" is how Psychology Today described A.C. Grayling. In Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God, readers have the pleasure of hearing this distinctive voice address some of the most serious topics in philosophy--and in our daily lives--including reflections on guns, anger, conflict, war; monsters, madness, decay; liberty, justice, utopia; suicide, loss, and remembrance. A civilized society, says Grayling, is one which never ceases having a discussion with (...) class='Hi'>itself about what human life should best be. In this book, Grayling adds to this discussion a series of short informal essays about ethics, ideas, and culture. A recurring theme is religion, of which he writes "there is no greater social evil." He argues, for instance, that liberal education is better than religion for inculcating moral values. "Education in literature, history, and appreciation of the arts," he says, "opens the possibility for us to live more reflectively and knowledgeably, especially about the nature and variety of human experience. That in turn increases our capacity for understanding others better, so that we can treat them with respect and sympathy, however different their outlook on life." Thought provoking rather than definitive, these essays don't tell readers what to think, but only note what has been thought about how it is best to live. A person who does not think about life, the author reminds us, is like a stranger mapless in a foreign land. These brief and suggestive essays offer us the outlines of a map, with avenues of thought that are a pleasure to wander down. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that in Republic ii Glaucon and Adeimantus contend that being just is not a good of any kind; it is the good consequences of seeming just that place it in Glaucon’s third and lowest class of goods. The brothers challenge Socrates to prove that being just has good consequences. They do not ask him to prove that being just is good for itself apart from its consequences, nor is this something (...) he attempts to prove. (shrink)

Knowledge, Nature, and the Good brings together some of John Cooper's most important works on ancient philosophy. In thirteen chapters that represent an ideal companion to the author's influential Reason and Emotion, Cooper addresses a wide range of topics and periods--from Hippocratic medical theory and Plato's epistemology and moral philosophy, to Aristotle's physics and metaphysics, academic scepticism, and the cosmology, moral psychology, and ethical theory of the ancient Stoics.Almost half of the pieces appear here for the first time or (...) are presented in newly expanded, extensively revised versions. Many stand at the cutting edge of research into ancient ethics and moral psychology. Other chapters, dating from as far back as 1970, are classics of philosophical scholarship on antiquity that continue to play a prominent role in current teaching and scholarship in the field. All of the chapters are distinctive for the way that, whatever the particular topic being pursued, they attempt to understand the ancient philosophers' views in philosophical terms drawn from the ancient philosophical tradition itself.Through engaging creatively and philosophically with the ancient texts, these essays aim to make ancient philosophical perspectives freshly available to contemporary philosophers and philosophy students, in all their fascinating inventiveness, originality, and deep philosophical merit. This book will be treasured by philosophers, classicists, students of philosophy and classics, those in other disciplines with an interest in ancient philosophy, and anyone who seeks to understand philosophy in philosophical terms. (shrink)

Elliott Sober''s selection for/selection of distinction has been widely used to clarify the idea that some properties of organisms are side-effects of selection processes. It has also been used, however, to choose between different descriptions of an evolutionary product when assigning biological functions to that product. We suggest that there is a characteristic error in these uses of the distinction. Complementary descriptions of function are misrepresented as mutually excluding one another. This error arises from a failure to appreciate that selection (...) processes can be described at several different theoretical levels. (shrink)

In the First Section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant argues that a good-willed person “under subjective limitations and hindrances” (G 397) is required “never to act except in such a way that [she] could also will that [her] maxim should become a universal law” (G 402).2 This requirement has come to be known as the Formula of Universal Law (FUL) version of the Categorical Imperative, an “ought” statement expressing a command of reason that “represent[s] an (...) action as objectively necessary of itself, without reference to another end” (G 414). The question of how to understand and apply the FUL has received a great deal of attention in recent years. But Kant’s reasoning for the claim that a good-willed person (of a certain kind) acts in accordance with the FUL has not been investigated with the same degree of thoroughness. My purpose in this paper is to render the structure of Kant’s argument perspicuous, and thereby contribute to its proper evaluation by identifying its true strengths and weaknesses.3 Let us call Kant’s argument “K” and its conclusion “C”. The task at hand requires identification of K’s premises and of the reasoning by means of which C is derived. One of the advantages of clarifying K’s structure in this way is that doing so permits us to answer questions that continue to puzzle even the most sympathetic readers of the First Section. Some of these questions concern three “Propositions” to which Kant 1 draws our attention in the course of his presentation. The First Proposition (call it “P1”) is left unstated, but most commentators agree that it (or at least part of it) should be rendered as follows: (P1) A human action has moral worth only if it is done from duty.4 Kant states the other two propositions (call the Second “P2” and Third “P3”) explicitly: (P2) An action from duty has its moral worth not in the purpose to be attained by it but in the maxim in accordance with which it is decided upon. (G 399). (shrink)

Fred Feldman's fascinating new book sets out to defend hedonism as a theory about the Good Life. He tries to show that, when carefully and charitably interpreted, certain forms of hedonism yield plausible evaluations of human lives. Feldman begins by explaining the question about the Good Life. As he understands it, the question is not about the morally good life or about the beneficial life. Rather, the question concerns the general features of the life that is (...) class='Hi'>good in itself for the one who lives it. Hedonism says (roughly) that the Good Life is the pleasant life. After showing that received formulations of hedonism are often confused or incoherent, Feldman presents a simple, clear, coherent form of sensory hedonism that provides a starting point for discussion. He then presents a catalogue of classic objections to hedonism, coming from sources as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Brentano, Ross, Moore, Rawls, Kagan, Nozick, Brandt, and others. One of Feldman's central themes is that there is an important distinction between the forms of hedonism that emphasize sensory pleasure and those that emphasize attitudinal pleasure. Feldman formulates several kinds of hedonism based on the idea that attitudinal pleasure is the Good. He claims that attitudinal forms of hedonism - which have often been ignored in the literature -- are worthy of more careful attention. Another main theme of the book is the plasticity of hedonism. Hedonism comes in many forms. Attitudinal hedonism is especially receptive to variations and modifications. Feldman illustrates this plasticity by formulating several variants of attitudinal hedonism and showing how they evade some of the objections. He also shows how it is possible to develop forms of hedonism that are equivalent to the allegedly anti-hedonistic theory of G. E. Moore and the Aristotelian theory according to which the Good Life is the life of virtue, or flourishing. He also formulates hedonisms relevantly like the ones defended by Aristippus and Mill. Feldman argues that a carefully developed form of attitudinal hedonism is not refuted by objections concerning 'the shape of a life'. He also defends the claim that all of the alleged forms of hedonism discussed in the book genuinely deserve to be called 'hedonism'. Finally, after dealing with the last of the objections, he gives a sketch of his hedonistic vision of the Good Life. (shrink)

This study demonstrates that Dewey did not reject Hegelianism during the 1890s, as scholars maintain, but developed a humanistic/historicist reading that was indebted to an American Hegelian tradition. Scholars have misunderstood the "permanent Hegelian deposit" in Dewey's thought because they have not fully appreciated this American Hegelian tradition and have assumed that his Hegelianism was based primarily on British neo-Hegelianism. ;The study examines the American reception of Hegel in the nineteenth-century by intellectuals as diverse as James Marsh and Frederic Henry (...) Hedge and how it flowered in late nineteenth-century St. Louis. The St. Louis Hegelians read Hegel as a particularly practical and politically liberal philosopher whose social philosophy promoted both social diversity and unity. Led by W. T. Harris, they studied Hegel in German and published their own scholarship, as well as translations of German scholarship, in their Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Their efforts to make "Hegel talk English" and to base the St. Louis public schools on Hegel's philosophy of education won them national, and even, international attention. The St. Louis Hegelians sought to adapt Hegel's thought to their American context by assuaging elitist elements within it; Dewey's intellectual development was profoundly shaped by their appropriation of his philosophy. ;Dewey drew upon Hegel's argument that humans form societies because of their differences, not in spite of them. Hegel's rejection of the self-sufficient, atomistic individual entailed that the individual is dependent upon others for the satisfaction of material needs. Moreover, like Hegel, Dewey rejected the hedonistic basis of the British political tradition by arguing that humans seek recognition from their equals as well as satisfaction of material needs. Dewey believed Hegel's emphasis upon equality and diversity provided a model of society in which there was fertile ground for the individual to conceive and articulate cultural criticism. The study ends by comparing recent Hegel scholarship to Dewey's, demonstrating that American Hegelianism has returned, in important ways, to a Deweyan reading of Hegel. (shrink)

Nietzsche regarded nihilism as an outgrowth of the natural sciences which, he worried, were bringing about “an essentially mechanistic [and hence meaningless] world.” Nihilism in this sense refers to the doctrine that there are no values, or that everything we might value is worthless. In the last issue of Modern Horizons, I offered this conditional explanation of the relation of science and nihilism: that a scientific worldview is nihilistic insofar as it rules out the existence of anything that cannot in (...) principle be precisely picked out or identified.i What kinds of entities would a scientific worldview eliminate on the basis of such an assumption? The list is long and various, but it includes those intentional (mentalii) entities of our consciousness that underwrite the existence of persons, and more basically of thought itself – e.g., belief, value, agency, truth, and meaning. I argued in that previous paper that intentional concepts are ultimately inscrutable, and yet impossible coherently to deny. I claimed that we could no more doubt the existence of values than we could doubt reality itself – and when I spoke of values I had in mind the (suspicion-engendering) concept of the good, and was even toying with the related idea of the Logos (an even more suspect concept). There are a several attractive reasons why the idea of the good, or the Logos, might be regarded with suspicion, and why either might reasonably be discarded as a pseudo concept. Leaving the latter concern until later, we might worry that insisting on the possibility of an overarching good supports the idea of a total worldview, or that we are gradually progressing towards a single correct vision of things. A progressivist, totalising vision would seem to foreclose on outlooks, values, and persons that deviate from its most likely trajectory, and may stymie or interfere with incommensurate forms of otherness,iii awkward disturbances, and idiosyncrasies threatening its more well-established precincts – perhaps whatever stands out as strange, rare, and indissolubly individual. The idea of an emerging universal standard of values thus might amount to a source of oppression, e.g., if it provides a warrant to transform a currently limited universally prescriptive set of global practices and institutes into an ever more elaborate totalising hierarchy. In the discussion below, I will say why the good, conceived as the Logos, suggests a more salutary trajectory for individuals, and erodes support for either a totalitarian vision or a dissolving nihilistic outlook on the world. (shrink)

An aesthetic distinction between good music and the good in music is crucial for a philosophy of music education. Ultimately, it is not the music's fault, as it were, that someone may view it as being 'not good' in either a social or aesthetic context. Regardless of how music is colored it remains an entity unto itself and thus untouched by our pronouncements. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations recognized the falseness of such propositions as biased pronouncements taking the (...) form of bad 'x' or good 'x.' Thus we may seek the good within the music if we know how to define what we mean by that. This approach allows music to be conceptualized and framed in a meaningful educational context. In such a way Plato and Aristotle attempted a conceptualization of the 'good' and the 'ungood' in the music of their time, as did Adorno in the preceding century. Although this context still does not allow pronouncements of music as good or bad, it does allow a seeking of its educational utility and unlimited potentiality in the name of an aesthetic and moral understanding. (shrink)

The author offers an accessible, non-dogmatic guide to sharing secrets of the Direct Path that are rarely revealed. Rather than a prescriptive, step-by-step book, After Awareness is a presentation of how the Direct Path works, examining lesser-known aspects of the path and providing context, examples, and critiques of its methods. You'll learn how to use the tools of non-dual self-inquiry-as well as when to discard them-and find a set of less doctrinaire terms and pointers for discussing non-dual awareness and the (...) Direct Path in a twenty-first-century context. With this open, pragmatic, and deconstructive approach, you'll see the Direct Path from all angles and be able to draw your own conclusions. You'll also discover ways to talk about self-inquiry and non-dual awareness in mixed settings. Most important, you'll learn how an exploration that begins with everyday perspectives and experiential investigations into the nature of the "I" can lead to a sense of true peace, free from all judgments and self-consciousness. (shrink)

The good in nature and humanity brings together 20 leading thinkers and writers - including Ursula Goodenough, Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, Carl Safina, David Petersen, Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Lopez - to examine the divide between faith and reason, and to seek a means for developing an environmental ethic that will help us confront two of our most imperiling crises: global environmental destruction and an impoverished spirituality. The book explores the ways in which science, spirit, and (...) religion can guide the experience and understanding of our ongoing relationship with the natural world and examines how the integration of science and spirituality can equip us to make wiser choices in using and managing the natural environment. The book also provides compelling stories that offer a narrative understanding of the relations among science, spirit, and nature. Grounded in the premise that neither science nor religion can by itself resolve the prevailing malaise of environmental and moral decline, contributors seek viable approaches to averting environmental catastrophe and, to achieving a more harmonious relationship with the natural world. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that play and games contribute to the good life. One might naturally wonder how games in particular so contribute? Granted, games can be very good, what exactly is so good about them when they are good? Although a natural starting point, this question is perhaps naive. Games come in all shapes and sizes, and different games are often good in very different ways. Chess, Bridge, Bingo, Chutes and Ladders, Football, Spin the (...) Bottle, Dungeons & Dragons, Pac-Man, Minecraft and Charades are all games, and can all contribute to a good life, but each will characteristically enrich someone’s life in its own distinctive way. Some games facilitate socializing and sociability, other games improve physical fitness, some develop a sense of fair play and reciprocity, while others enhance concentration and analytic skills. Asking ‘what is good about games?’ and assuming a simple answer is as naïve as asking ‘what is good about fiction?’ or ‘what is good about sex?’ However, a less naïve question and philosophically interesting question is not hard to formulate. Plausibly, much of the heterogeneity of the value of games stems from the different kinds of instrumental value of different games. Perhaps we should therefore ask in what ways the activity of playing games is characteristically good for its own sake. Unfortunately, the philosophical literature on the non-instrumental value of playing games is sparse. One of the few sustained treatments of the topic can be found in an underappreciated exchange between Thomas Hurka and John Tasioulas. Interestingly, despite taking different views of what it is to play a game, they both make room for the non-instrumental value of play and achievement in game play and they both argue that these two goods stand in important an important explanatory relation. However, they take diametrically opposed views as to which of these good is more basic. Roughly, on Hurka’s view, the good of achievement is more basic, and it is because of the non-instrumental value of achievement that what Hurka calls “playing in a game,” which involves playing, is itself non-instrumentally good because of the non-instrumental value of achievement. The idea is that if something is non-instrumentally good then loving that thing is also non-instrumentally good, and that playing in a game involves loving the activity for its own sake. In this way, the value of achievement in a game grounds the value of playing in a game. Tasioulas takes exactly the opposite approach. He argues that there must be something independently good about playing a game which grounds the value of achievement in that game. On his view, the typical grounding good or “framing value” of games is play itself – what I am here calling “playing.” In this essay, I raise some objections to both Hurka’s view and Tasioulas’s view and develop a positive alternative conception of the non-instrumental value of games. I argue that while each view is insightful in its own way, neither gets things exactly right. For a start, the way in which they characterize the key concepts is problematic. Hurka’s definition of ‘play a game’, which he lifts from Suits, is problematic, while both of their characterizations of play are problematic for reasons I rehearse here. They also take an unduly narrow view of the possible role of achievement in game play, both effectively conflating achievement with “excellence.” I argue, by contrast, that there is an important sense in which even someone who is not very good at the game by any objective standard can still reap the goods of achievements in games. At the same time, those who play games typically do not do so for the sake of achievements as such, though they may do something which is in a sense tantamount to this, or so I shall argue. Finally, I argue that neither Hurka’s “achievement first” order of explanation nor Tasioulas’s “play first” order of explanation is fully correct. I argue for what I call a “variable priority” view. On this view, the value of play sometimes grounds the value of achievement in a game, while in other cases the independently grounded value of achievement in a game provides a further ground for the value of play, though even in that case play is independently good for its own sake. I begin by laying out Hurka’s and Tasioulas’s views. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricœur by Michael SohnLevi CheckettsThe Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricœur Michael Sohn WACO, TX: BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014. 172 PP. $69.95Michael Sohn's book The Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricœur explores the philosophical and (...) religious writings of two of twentieth-century France's most significant thinkers, Paul Ricœur and Emmanuel Lévinas, "to gain, by thinking with and through them, an insight into the phenomenon of recognition" (128). Recognition, to these authors, is not merely an act of re-cognition (identifying something one already knows), nor is it simple cognition (consciousness of something). For Lévinas, to whom Ricœur is indebted for his own work, recognition precedes ontological identification and is a "sensation of the infinite" in the Other (29). Recognition entails "a primordial ethical claim by the other" (57), up to and including self-sacrifice. For Ricœur, on the other hand, recognition of the other is situated in the "loving struggle for existence" between people seeking mutual recognition (72) and presents itself as "one among many sources of value and motivation" [End Page 207] for moral decision (81). In other words, while recognition of the other is a central concept in both authors' ethical writings, Sohn notes that "Lévinas' phenomenological description of recognition emerges out of a fundamental project to uncover the principle of all principles," while "Ricœur's attention to the locus of will integrates passivity and activity as it is taken up within the dialectic of the voluntary and the involuntary," making recognition one value among others (127).In highlighting the different positions of each of these authors, Sohn structures his writing in a highly systematized and clear way. He first divides the book broadly by author, then for each author devotes a chapter each to philosophical and religious approaches to recognition. Within each chapter, he outlines the intellectual influences for the given author, then articulates in turn the phenomenon, the ethics, and the politics of recognition. This tactic serves as a helpful reference for readers interested in Sohn's comparative project, though it sometimes leads to repetition insofar as there are overlaps in how different thinkers, philosophical schools, or principles function for each area. The overall project is framed by an introductory chapter that briefly outlines the main points of discussion throughout the book and a conclusion that summarizes, compares, and contextualizes the significance of the project. Sohn offers this text as a clarifying study of the phenomenon of recognition, a term the application of which "touches upon a broad spectrum of issues ranging from battles over multiculturalism to questions of national sovereignty and from matters of international human rights to social movements within feminism and human rights" (135). With such a broad range of applications, this relatively short examination of two pivotal thinkers' works on recognition is highly valuable.This work will be of interest to ethicists hoping to use the works of Ricœur or Lévinas, or to philosophers and historians interested in the development of recognitionbased ethics. Sohn provides thorough citations from the broad corpuses of both authors, giving students of either philosopher a helpful resource both for summarizing ideas and for carrying out research. Sohn also provides deep intellectual genealogies for each author, noting how thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Karl Barth, G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and their interpreters influenced Lévinas and Ricœur; he downplays the influence of thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, and Gabriel Marcel. This book does offer useful and clear summaries of the main ideas discussed, but it may be difficult for newer students unfamiliar with French language or philosophical concepts. Overall, this book is a valuable reference tool for Lévinas and Ricœur studies, especially those that focus on the phenomenology, religious thought, ethics, or politics of these two men. [End Page 208]Levi CheckettsGraduate Theological UnionCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The aim of Language for those who have Nothing is to think psychiatry through the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Using the concepts of Dialogism and Polyphony, the Carnival and the Chronotope, a novel means of navigating the clinical landscape is developed. Bakhtin offers language as a social phenomenon and one that is fully embodied. Utterances are shown to be alive and enfleshed and their meanings realised in the context of given social dimensions. The organisation of this book corresponds with carnival (...) practices of taking the high down to the low before replenishing its meaning anew. Thus early discussions of official language and the chronotope become exposed to descending levels of analysis and emphasis. Patients and practitioners are shown to occupy an entirely different spatio-temporal topography. These chronotopes have powerful borders and it is necessary to use the Carnival powers of cunning and deception in order to enter and to leave them. The book provides an overview of practitioners who have attempted such transgression and the author records his own unnerving experience as a pseudopatient. By exploring the context of psychiatry's unofficial voices: its terminology, jokes, parodies, and everyday narratives, the clinical landscape is shown to rely heavily on unofficial dialogues in order to safeguard an official identity. (shrink)

BackgroundHuman infection studies (HIS) are valuable in vaccine development. Deliberate infection, however, creates challenging questions, particularly in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) where HIS are new and ethical challenges may be heightened. Consultation with stakeholders is needed to support contextually appropriate and acceptable study design. We examined stakeholder perceptions about the acceptability and ethics of HIS in Malawi, to inform decisions about planned pneumococcal challenge research and wider understanding of HIS ethics in LMICs.MethodsWe conducted 6 deliberative focus groups and 15 (...) follow-up interviews with research staff, medical students, and community representatives from rural and urban Blantyre. We also conducted 5 key informant interviews with clinicians, ethics committee members, and district health government officials.ResultsStakeholders perceived HIS research to have potential population health benefits, but they also had concerns, particularly related to the safety of volunteers and negative community reactions. Acceptability depended on a range of conditions related to procedures for voluntary and informed consent, inclusion criteria, medical care or support, compensation, regulation, and robust community engagement. These conditions largely mirror those in existing guidelines for HIS and biomedical research in LMICs. Stakeholder perceptions pointed to potential tensions, for example, balancing equity, safety, and relevance in inclusion criteria.ConclusionsOur findings suggest HIS research could be acceptable in Malawi, provided certain conditions are in place. Ongoing assessment of participant experiences and stakeholder perceptions will be required to strengthen HIS research during development and roll-out. (shrink)

Syntactic and structural models specify relationships between their constituents but cannot show what outcomes their interaction would produce over time in the world. Simulation consists in iterating the states of a model, so as to produce behaviour over a period of simulated time. Iteration enables us to trace the implications and outcomes of inference rules and other assumptions implemented in the models that make up a theory. We apply this method to experiments which we treat as models of the particular (...) aspects of reality they are designed to investigate. Scientific experiments are constantly designed and re-designed in the context of implementation and use. They mediate between theoretical understanding and the practicalities of engaging with the empirical and social world. In order to model experiments we need to identify and represent features that all experiments have in common. We treat these features as parameters of a general model of experiment so that by varying these parameters different types of experiment can be modelled. (shrink)

This paper attempts to define Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) more precisely than usual, and to produce the beginnings of a philosophy of this topical and somewhat novel branch of statistics. A data set is, roughly speaking, a collection of k-tuples for some k. In both descriptive statistics and in EDA, these k-tuples, or functions of them, are represented in a manner matched to human and computer abilities with a view to finding patterns that are not "kinkera". A kinkus is a (...) pattern that has a negligible probability of being even partly potentially explicable. A potentially explicable pattern is one for which there probably exists a hypothesis of adequate "explicativity", which is another technical probabilistic concept. A pattern can be judged to be probably potentially explicable even if we cannot find an explanation. The theory of probability understood here is one of partially ordered (interval-valued), subjective (personal) probabilities. Among other topics relevant to a philosophy of EDA are the "reduction" of data; Francis Bacon's philosophy of science; the automatic formulation of hypotheses; successive deepening of hypotheses; neurophysiology; and rationality of type II. (shrink)

I use Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to consider the requirements of existentialism to be relevant to racialized experience. Black existentialism is distinguished from white existentialism by its focus on anti-black racism. However, black existentialism is similar to white existentialism in its moral requirement that agents take responsibility so as to be in good faith. Ralph Ellison's invisible man displays good faith at the end of the novel by assuming responsibility for his particular situation. The idiosyncratic development of the (...) novel can be interpreted as an example of the ways in which existentialist values ought to be instantiated through unique individual experience. However, blackness, or any racial identity, is not itself an existential structure because it is not universal. Rather, existentialist requirements for good faith can be applied to racialized situations by both whites and blacks. (shrink)

Educational practice is concerned in profound ways with what is pedagogically good and right for children, and as parents and teachers we intend to help each child to cultivate his or her personal and educational potential in a human fashion. In the spirit of ancient Aristotle and Plato, Continental pedagogues and philosophers have for centuries explored the meaning of pedagogical practice/praxis and of the pedagogical good, the quality of both being regarded not as a means to an educational (...) end, but as the end itself. But what, indeed, is the pedagogical good, and what is the significance of the pedagogical good for students? Somehow we know the good, and yet we know it not. We recognize the good experientially, but the real meaning of what we intuit eludes our grasp. So how do we explore this elusive pedagogical quality - and is it possible to explore it? Based on phenomenological interviews with both young students and adults recalling episodes from school, as well as artistic narratives, this paper aims to illuminate experiential aspects of the pedagogical good and to reflect on the significance of the good in terms of pedagogical relational practice. It is suggested that the pedagogical good is not a quality that we as teachers can possess, or do, or practise, but rather a relational force beyond our pedagogical practice that opens up the world to children and preconditions the pedagogical relation. (shrink)

One approach to Kant’s argument for the Formula of the End in Itself takes Kant to ground FEI as a possible categorical imperative with a regressive argument that rests on a non-moral conception of rational nature. This paper presents a new, logical pluralism version of this approach. In conjunction with three other steps of argument, the logical pluralism version of the regressive argument grounds FEI by showing that an agent is rationally required to adopt a self-affirming plural standpoint, and (...) thus to take it to have absolute worth. A logical pluralism version of the regressive argument thereby avoids three objectionable claims relied on by other versions: that a rational agent must take their end to be objectively good; that if an agent values their own rational nature, then they must also value others’ rational nature; and that any source of value must itself be of unconditional value. (shrink)

The Souls of Black Folk is Du Bois’s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, “What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?” Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois’s interpretation of black politics. For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics capable of countering Jim Crow (...) had to uplift the black masses while heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of modernizing “self-realization” that expressed a collective spiritual identity. Highlighting Du Bois’s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller’s social thought, the German debate over the Geisteswissenschaften, and William Wordsworth’s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs Souls’ defense of this “politics of expressive self-realization,” and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass sketches in My Bondage and My Freedom. Through a novel reading of Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois’s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black underclass. Coming to Bondage and then to these debates by looking backward and then forward from Souls, Gooding-Williams lets Souls serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America. (shrink)

This paper considers the potentially important role played by non-verbal communication in constraining pragmatic processing. Attention is paid to claims about the role of emotion in memory encoding and recall, its role in the formulation of plans and goals, and the creation of a shared emotional sense through various interpersonal processes. It is argued that ignoring these factors can lead to pragmatic theories which overestimate the processing demands facing the conversationalist, and that this overestimation will be problematic for any systems (...) which seek to build on these theories in the future. (shrink)

According to the Guise of the Good, an agent only does for a reason what she sees as good. One of the main motivations for the view is its apparent ability to explain why action for a reason must be intelligible to its agent, for on this view, an action is intelligible just in case it seems good. This motivation has come under criticism in recent years. Most notably, Kieran Setiya has argued that merely seeing one’s action (...) as good does not suffice to make the action intelligible. In this paper, I show that this objection has bite only because the Guise of the Good’s theory of intelligibility has yet seen little sustained articulation. Properly understood, this theory holds that an action is intelligible to an agent only if it appears to them to possess some substantive evaluative property. I then argue that this response to the objection has a significant implication for contemporary Guise of the Good theories, for it shows that the currently ascendant version of the theory, the attitudinal theory, cannot avail itself of the intelligibility motivation. (shrink)

This paper presents a study of the generation, manipulation and use of visual representations in different episodes of scientific discovery. The study identifies a common set of transformations of visual representations underlying the distinctive methods and imagery of different scientific fields. The existence of common features behind the diversity of visual representations suggests a common dynamical structure for visual thinking, showing how visual representations facilitate cognitive processes such as pattern-matching and visual inference through the use of tools, technologies and other (...) cultural resources. This dynamical model suggests a way of theorizing the interaction of cognitive, socio-cultural and technological aspects of science without losing sight of the essential contribution each makes to the processes of discovery. Whereas scientific work is often construed epistemically, as having the aim of improving the fit between theories and phenomena or culturally given notions of what counts as reality, this study shows that scientists use transformations to modify visual representations in ways that achieve other kinds of match: between a representation and the cognitive demands of a task or between an emerging representation and the social need to communicate and negotiate new meanings in a context of culturally embedded conventions. By showing how images connect each of the overlapping contexts of scientific work the proposed model negotiates the sometimes contested boundary between cognitive and social aspects of science. (shrink)

This article draws on data from a qualitative research study undertaken in an old UK university with the main aim of investigating the issue of the gender dimension of academic careers. It examines the idea of an individualistic academic career that demands self-promotion, which is still used as a measure of achievement by those in senior positions. However, there is a basic contradiction. While this idea is upheld, men simultaneously gain by an in-built patriarchal support system. They do not have (...) to make a conscious effort to be helped by it, thereby perpetuating the cultural hegemony of individualism. Women are not admitted to this support system, and if they are seen as needing or wanting to set up their own system, this is viewed as a weakness. The answer appears to be for women to strategically harness feminist ways of working in a collaborative and supportive way. (shrink)

From 1882 to 1903, Dewey explicitly espoused a Hegelian philosophy. Until recently, scholars agreed that he broke from Hegel no later than 1903, but never adequately accounted for what he called the "permanent deposit" that Hegel left in his mature thought. I argue that Dewey never made a clean break from Hegel. Instead, he drew on the work of the St. Louis Hegelians to fashion a non-metaphysical reading of Hegel, similar to that championed by Klaus Hartmann and other Hegel scholars (...) since the 1970s. This reading of Hegel is remarkably consistent with Dewey's mature philosophy. Although Dewey abruptly repudiated Hegel during World War I, I contend this reflected the exigencies of war rather than philosophical concerns. (shrink)

Educational practice is concerned in profound ways with what is pedagogically good and right for children, and as parents and teachers we intend to help each child to cultivate his or her personal and educational potential in a human fashion. In the spirit of ancient Aristotle and Plato, Continental pedagogues and philosophers have for centuries explored the meaning of pedagogical practice/praxis and of the pedagogical good, the quality of both being regarded not as a means to an educational (...) end, but as the end itself. But what, indeed, is the pedagogical good, and what is the significance of the pedagogical good for students? Somehow we know the good, and yet we know it not. We recognize the good experientially, but the real meaning of what we intuit eludes our grasp. So how do we explore this elusive pedagogical quality – and is it possible to explore it? Based on phenomenological interviews with both young students and adults recalling episodes from school, as well as artistic narratives, this paper aims to illuminate experiential aspects of the pedagogical good and to reflect on the significance of the good in terms of pedagogical relational practice. It is suggested that the pedagogical good is not a quality that we as teachers can possess, or do, or practise, but rather a relational force beyond our pedagogical practice that opens up the world to children and preconditions the pedagogical relation. (shrink)