Alexis de Samos impute à des prostituées athéniennes accompagnatrices de Périclès l’installation d’un culte d’Aphrodite à Samos en 439 av. J.-C. Après analyse du passage et de son contexte, il est proposé qu’Alexis a écrit une œuvre nationaliste, partisane et critique de Périclès et d’Aspasie, et que le sanctuaire a été fondé, sans l’intervention de prostituées, après une victoire navale, en remerciement à Aphrodite, déesse de la navigation en mer.Alexis, the Prostitutes and Aphrodite in Samos. According to (...) Alexis of Samos, Athenian prostitutes founded a cult of Aphrodite in Samos in 439 BC. A reappraisal of the information and its context leads to the hypothesis that Alexis wrote his Samian Chronicles criticising Perikles and Aspasia, and, therefore, that prostitutes were not involved in founding the cult, which was established after a naval victory and in honor of Aphrodite, goddess of seafaring. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics are branches of philosophy concerned with questions about how to assess and ameliorate our representational devices (such as concepts and words). It's a part of philosophy concerned with questions about which concepts we should use (and why), how concepts can be improved, when concepts should be abandoned, and how proposals for amelioration can be implemented. Central parts of the history of philosophy have engaged with these issues, but the focus of this volume is on applications (...) to work in contemporary philosophy of language and mind, epistemology, gender and race theory, ethics, philosophy of science, and philosophical logic. This is the first volume devoted entirely to conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. The volume explores the possibilities, benefits, problems, and applications of conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. It consists of twenty chapters written by leading philosophers. (shrink)

In Against Purity, Alexis Shotwell proposes a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures. Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems.

This book reimagines the compositional semantics of comparative sentences using words such as more, as, too, and others. The book's central thesis entails a rejection of a fundamental assumption of degree semantic frameworks: that gradable adjectives like tall lexicalize functions from individuals to degrees, i.e., measure functions. I argue that comparative expressions in English themselves introduce “measure functions”; this is the case whether that morphology targets adjectives, as in *taller* or *more intelligent*; nouns, as in *more coffee*, *more coffees*; verbs, (...) such as *run more*, *jump more*; or expressions of other categories. Furthermore, she suggests that expressions that comfortably and meaningfully appear in the comparative form should be distinguished from those that do not in terms of a general notion of "measurability": a measurable predicate has a domain of application with non-trivial structure. This notion unifies the independently motivated distinctions between, for example, gradable and non-gradable adjectives, mass and count nouns, singular and plural noun phrases, and telic and atelic verb phrases. Based on careful examination of the distribution of dimensions for comparison within the class of measurable predicates, I tie the selection of measure functions to the specific nature and structure of the domain entities targeted for measurement. The book ultimately explores how, precisely, we should understand semantic theories that invoke the "nature" of domain entities: does the theory depend for its explanation on features of metaphysical reality, or something else? Such questions are especially pertinent in light of a growing body of research in cognitive science exploring the understanding and acquisition of comparative sentences. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage retrace le mouvement de la pensée du philosophe anglais Francis Bacon, depuis les essais qu'il compose par petites touches pour construire une philosophie morale, jusqu'à New Atlantis, qui est à la fois utopie, programme scientifique, et mise en oeuvre des grands principes de sa philosophie naturelle.

In response to the introduction of the Reformation in France, constituting a trauma for the royal power and the ecclesiastical personnel, Gallicanism was able to serve for conciliatory projects testifying to the attitude of ecclesiastical tolerance in the sense which is its own 16th century. It is then an opportunity to rethink the interactions between the king and the Church, but also the definition of Christianity. Indeed, ecclesiastical tolerance seems to support claims of autonomy of the Gallican Church as a (...) solution to the schism. What must then take precedence is the religious integrity of the kingdom. However, these projects were aborted, notably due to the closure of the Council of Trent. (shrink)

In the present paper, I analyze the complex relationship of tension between Critical Theory and phenomenology from a sociological-theoretical perspective. I start from two theses. The first one is that one of the primary reasons for the antagonism between these two paradigms lies in their ideal-typically opposed assessments of the role of ‘meaning-adequacy’ in social research. The second one is that in recent years, there has been a strong rapprochement of Critical Theory with (social) phenomenology. This shift, fundamentally embodied in (...) Hartmut Rosa’s work, can be understood as the culminating point of a progressive turn towards meaning-adequacy within the Frankfurt School. In order to unfold these two theses, I will proceed in three steps. First (1), I will present the main outlines of the relationship of tension between the two traditions from both a historico-intellectual and a systematic perspective. Second (2), I will focus on the contemporary readings of the Schutzian notion of ‘meaning-adequacy’ and discuss their value for better understanding the historical opposition between the two paradigms, as well as their recent rapprochement. Third (3), I will sketch the key features of Rosa’s sociology of world-relations, understood as a phenomenological Critical Theory that shows a strong commitment to a radicalized version of the meaning-adequacy postulate. (shrink)

This paper explores the hypothesis that all comparative sentences— nominal, verbal, and adjectival—contain instances of a single morpheme that compositionally introduces degrees. This morpheme, sometimes pronounced much, semantically contributes a structure-preserving map from entities, events, or states, to their measures along various dimensions. A major goal of the paper is to argue that the differences in dimensionality observed across domains are a consequence of what is measured, as opposed to which expression introduces the measurement. The resulting theory has a number (...) of interesting properties. It characterizes the notion of ‘measurement’ uniformly across comparative constructions, in terms of non-trivial structure preservation. It unifies the distinctions between mass/count nouns and atelic/telic verb phrases with that between gradable and non-gradable adjectives. Finally, it affords a uniform characterization of semantically anomalous comparisons across categories. (shrink)

The majority of women who freeze their eggs for non-medical or social reasons, commonly referred to as elective egg freezing (EEF), do not eventually utilize their frozen eggs. This would result in an accumulated surplus of unused frozen eggs in fertility clinics worldwide, which represents a promising source of donation to infertile women undergoing IVF treatment. Rigorous and comprehensive counseling is needed, because the process of donating one’s unused surplus frozen eggs involves complex decision-making. Prospective EEF donors can be broadly (...) categorized into those who have achieved motherhood and those who remained childless and have given up on motherhood aspirations. A two-step systematic counseling protocol is proposed. Firstly, it is imperative to verify and ensure that these women do not want to conceive any children with their surplus frozen eggs before proceeding with further counseling and signing of consent forms. Secondly, various motivating and dissuading factors in the donation of unused surplus frozen eggs should then be comprehensively discussed with egg freezers to facilitate informed decision-making. Key motivating factors for donation include reciprocity in wanting to share the joys of motherhood among egg freezers who already have children, goodwill to help others in need, and avoiding the wastage of surplus frozen eggs after expending so much money, time, and effort. Key dissuading factors include fear of accidental incest between natural and unknown donor-conceived offspring, as well as apprehension of unexpected future contact with unknown donor-conceived offspring due to either donor anonymity being abolished in their jurisdiction or widespread consumer DNA testing. (shrink)

Digital records, from chat transcripts to social media posts, are being used to create chatbots that recreate the conversational style of deceased individuals. Some maintain that this is merely a new form of digital memorial, while others argue that they pose a variety of moral hazards. To resolve this, I turn to classical Chinese philosophy to make use of a debate over the ethics of funerals and mourning. This ancient argument includes much of interest for the contemporary issue at hand, (...) including the use of impersonators of the dead to help the bereaved to deal well with their grief. I connect this historical discussion with a modern trend in clinical psychology that reframes therapeutic interventions with bereaved individuals. The trend directs practitioners away from facilitating detachment and toward affirming continuing bonds. I conclude that these chatbots can offer an important source of support to mourners, but also discuss parameters and features of social context that will be important to avoid the moral hazards identified by sceptics. (shrink)

Singapore, a highly affluent island city-state located in Southeast Asia, has increasingly leveraged new assisted reproductive technologies (ART) to overcome its dismal fertility rates in recent years. A new frontier in ART is preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) for polygenic risk scores (PRS) to predict complex multifactorial traits in IVF (in vitro fertilisation) embryos, such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and various other characteristics like height, intelligence quotient (IQ), hair and eye colour. Unlike well-known safety risks with human genome editing, (...) there are negligible risks with PGT-P, because there are no man-made genetic modifications that can be transmitted to future generations. Nevertheless, the current efficacy of using PGT-P to select IVF embryos for either increased or decreased probability of developing specific polygenic traits is still far from certain. Hence, the regulatory safeguards proposed here will be based on the assumption that the efficacy of this new technology platform has already been validated. These include: (1) restricting the application of PGT-P only for prevention of clinically relevant polygenic disease traits, (2) securely blocking patients’ access to the raw genomic DNA sequencing data of their IVF embryos, (3) validating diagnosis of polygenic disease traits in the prospective parents/grandparents of IVF embryos, and restricting PGT-P only for preventing specifically diagnosed polygenic disease traits and (4) mandating rigorous and comprehensive genetic counselling for IVF patients considering PGT-P. There is an urgent and dire need to prevent abuse of the PGT-P technique, as well as protect the interests and welfare of patients if its clinical application is to be permitted in the country. (shrink)

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...) this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology. (shrink)

This volume reflects the breadth of Alexy's philosophy, identifies new areas of inquiry and offers a new impetus to the discourse theory of law.

"Draws on philosophers, political theorists, activists, and poets to explain how unspoken and unspeakable knowledge is important to racial and gender formation; offers a usable conception of implicit understanding"--Provided by publishers.

Whether sociology should be part of bioethics has been extensively debated and critiqued. Feminist bioethics has long recognized the role of empirical work in bioethical inquiry; however, much feminist work in bioethics has been sidelined due to critiques of the role of social and sociological theory in bioethics research. In this essay, I examine how sociology plays a much deeper role in bioethical inquiry beyond the contribution of empirical methods. Building on these approaches, I show, through a case study, how (...) social and sociological theory play as vital a role in conducting comprehensive bioethical inquiry as sociological methods and methodology, and thus should no longer be sidelined in empirical bioethics. (shrink)

In the recent Hegel literature there has been an effort to portray Hegel's philosophy as compatible with naturalism, or even as a form of naturalism (see for example Pippin 2008 and Pinkard 2012). Despite the attractions of such a project, there is, it seems to me, another, and potentially more interesting way of looking at the relationship of Hegel to naturalism. Instead of showing how Hegel's philosophy can be compatible with naturalism, I propose to show how Hegel's philosophy offers a (...) challenge to naturalism. Naturalism has become the dominant ideology in much of contemporary analytic philosophy (Kim 2003: 84), but also within other disciplines. Evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics, which attract a lot of media attention, attempt to explain the human mind and human behavior in purely naturalistic terms, usually in terms of the biological past and makeup of humans (Pinker 2002). Philosophy's task is, among other things, to examine the assumptions of human practices including its own. In that vein I am interested in showing how Hegel can be seen as someone offering a challenge to our contemporary philosophical culture and its underlying naturalist premise.Of course that Hegel never explicitly talks about naturalism in his writings already presents us with the problem of risking anachronism. The other great problem is the fact that naturalism is an elusive philosophical position. There are a few different versions of the key theses of naturalism, so that if our aim is to diagnose Hegel's philosophy as naturalist or anti-naturalist it would seem we have to pick which version of naturalism we are going to work with. (shrink)

Reseña Benjamin, Walter – Auerbach, Erich. Correspondencia Benjamin & Auerbach (1935-1937). Buenos Aires, Godot, 2015, E-Book.

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world, and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...) this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology. (shrink)

Philosophical and sociological approaches in technology have increasingly shifted toward describing AI (artificial intelligence) systems as ‘(moral) agents,’ while also attributing ‘agency’ to them. It is only in this way – so their principal argument goes – that the effects of technological components in a complex human-computer interaction can be understood sufficiently in phenomenological-descriptive and ethical-normative respects. By contrast, this article aims to demonstrate that an explanatory model only achieves a descriptively and normatively satisfactory result if the concepts of ‘(moral) (...) agent’ and ‘(moral) agency’ are exclusively related to human agents. Initially, the division between symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, the black box character of (deep) machine learning, and the complex relationship network in the provision and application of machine learning are outlined. Next, the ontological and action-theoretical basic assumptions of an ‘agency’ attribution regarding both the current teleology-naturalism debate and the explanatory model of actor network theory are examined. On this basis, the technical-philosophical approaches of Luciano Floridi, Deborah G. Johnson, and Peter-Paul Verbeek will all be critically discussed. Despite their different approaches, they tend to fully integrate computational behavior into their concept of ‘(moral) agency.’ By contrast, this essay recommends distinguishing conceptually between the different entities, causalities, and relationships in a human-computer interaction, arguing that this is the only way to do justice to both human responsibility and the moral significance and causality of computational behavior. (shrink)

Cet article esquisse un rapprochement entre un courant de pensée politique, le néoréalisme, et une méthode en sciences humaines, le structuralisme. Ce courant et cette méthode ont suivi des trajectoires séparées, de l’après-guerre à la fin des années soixante-dix, jusqu’à ce que Kenneth Waltz croise ces deux problématiques. Après avoir défini respectivement réalisme et structuralisme, cet article établit leur connexion et tente d’éclairer les raisons pour lesquelles ce rapprochement n’avait pas été conduit jusqu’alors.

In , Sartre elevates the premature death of his father to the rank of a providential event which, by depriving him of a Super-Ego and relieving him of any legacy, consigned him to contingency and condemned him to be free. In this way, Sartre derives his uniqueness from this happy lack, this salutary void, i.e. a negated father, and casts himself in the role of an Aeneas liberated from the weight of his Anchises. Fatherless son, Sartre was nonetheless condemned to (...) return incessantly to a father who was destined to remain imaginary. The omnipresence of paternal figures in his oeuvre, from “Childhood of a Leader” to by way of and , is the expression of a double project, as systematic as it is paradoxical: to incarnate the Father, interrogate him and place him centre-stage—as he does with Flaubert's father—in order to eliminate all the better, through an unrelenting prosecution, that of which the Father is, in Sartre's view, the crystallization: the past, inheritance, the temptation of inauthenticity, the alienation of freedom by a foreign power. The Sartrean Father reveals in a privileged way the heart-rending paradoxes of freedom. French Dans Les Mots , J.-P. Sartre hisse la mort précoce de son père à la hauteur d'un événement providentiel qui, le privant de Surmoi et le délestant de tout héritage, le livra à la contingence et le condamna à être libre. Ainsi Sartre tire sa singularité de ce manque heureux, de ce vide salutaire, un père nié, et se dépeint en Enée libéré du poids de son Anchise. Fils sans père, Sartre n'en fut pas moins condamné à revenir sans fin à ce père voué à demeurer imaginaire : l'omniprésence des figures paternelles dans son œuvre, de L'Enfance d'un chef à L'Idiot de la famille , en passant par Le Scénario Freud et Les Séquestrés d'Altona , est l'expression d'un double projet, aussi systématique que paradoxal : incarner le Père, l'interroger et le mettre en scène - ainsi du père de Flaubert -, pour mieux liquider, par une mise en procès permanente, ce dont la figure du Père est, à ses yeux, la cristallisation : le passé, l'héritage, la tentation de l'inauthenticité, l'aliénation de la liberté par une puissance étrangère. Le Père sartrien se révèle dès lors comme le révélateur privilégié des paradoxes déchirants de la liberté. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the little examined relationship between time and patient autonomy. Using the findings from a study on the experience of premenopausal cancer patients making fertility preservation decisions during their treatment, I focus on how the patients in the study understood time, and how this understanding interacted with and influenced their decision-making. I then analyse in more depth the importance of time in patient decision-making, and the relationship of time to concepts of patient autonomy and decision-making in (...) the field of bioethics more generally. Focusing on the relational conception of autonomy, I conclude that time is an integral part of patient autonomy which warrants further research, such that it can be better integrated into concepts of patient autonomy, and the policy and guidelines that they inform and influence. (shrink)

Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But can they offer us real friendship? In this book, Alexis Elder outlines a theory of friendship drawing on Aristotle and contemporary work on social ontology, and then uses it to evaluate the real value of social robotics and emerging social technologies. In the first part of the book Elder develops a (...) robust and rigorous ontology of friendship: what it is, how it functions, what harms it, and how it relates to familiar ethical and philosophical questions about character, value, and well-being. In Part II she applies this ontology to emerging trends in social robotics and human-robot interaction, including robotic companions for lonely seniors, therapeutic robots used to teach social skills to children on the autism spectrum, and companionate robots currently being developed for consumer markets. Elder articulates the moral hazards presented by these robots, while at the same time acknowledging their real and measurable benefits. In the final section she shifts her focus to connections between real people, especially those enabled by social media. Arguing against critics who have charged that these new communication technologies are weakening our social connections, Elder explores ways in which text messaging, video chats, Facebook, and Snapchat are enabling us to develop, sustain, and enrich our friendship in new and meaningful ways. (shrink)

This is a concise, advanced introduction to current philosophical debates about truth. A blend of philosophical and technical material, the book is organized around, but not limited to, the tendency known as deflationism, according to which there is not much to say about the nature of truth. In clear language, Burgess and Burgess cover a wide range of issues, including the nature of truth, the status of truth-value gaps, the relationship between truth and meaning, relativism and pluralism about truth, and (...) semantic paradoxes from Alfred Tarski to Saul Kripke and beyond. Following a brief introduction that reviews the most influential traditional and contemporary theories of truth, short chapters cover Tarski, deflationism, indeterminacy, realism, antirealism, Kripke, and the possible insolubility of semantic paradoxes. The book provides a rich picture of contemporary philosophical theorizing about truth, one that will be essential reading for philosophy students as well as philosophers specializing in other areas. (shrink)

Reconstructing the philosophical project of William James, Alexis Dianda deploys a concept of experience that avoids both foundationalist epistemology and an account of the subject rooted in immediately given objects of consciousness. In doing so, Dianda rethinks the role of experience as well as the aims and resources of pragmatic philosophy.

Recent research on patient decision-making reveals a disconnect between theories of autonomy, agency, and decision-making and their practice in contemporary clinical encounters. This study examines these concepts in the context of female patients making oncofertility decisions in the United Kingdom in light of the phenomenon of “being guided.” Patients experience being guided as a way to cope with, understand, and defer difficult treatment decisions. Previous discussions condemn guided decision-making, but this research suggests that patients make an informed, autonomous decision to (...) be guided by doctors. Thus, bioethicists must consider the multifaceted ways that patients enact their autonomy in medical encounters. (shrink)

Contemporary research in compositional, truth-conditional semantics often takes judgments of the relative unacceptability of certain phrasal combinations as evidence for lexical semantics. For example, observing that completely full sounds perfectly natural whereas completely tall does not has been used to motivate a distinction whereby the lexical entry for full but not for tall specifies a scalar endpoint. So far, such inferences seem unobjectionable. In general, however, applying this methodology can lead to dubious conclusions. For example, observing that slightly bent is (...) natural but slightly cheap is not (that is, not without a “too cheap” interpretation) leads researchers to suggest that the interpretation of bent involves a scalar minimum but cheap does not, contra intuition—after all, one would think that what is minimally cheap is (just) free. Such claims, found in sufficient abundance, raise the question of how we can support semantic theories that posit properties of entities that those entities appear to lack. This paper argues, using theories of adjectival scale structure as a test case, that the (un)acceptability data recruited in semantic explanations reveals properties of a two-stage system of semantic interpretation that can support divergences between our semantic and metaphysical intuitions. (shrink)

This is the fourth paper in the invited collection. Shotwell examines the work of direct-action activists as forms of medical activism that express a non-reductionist and complex intersectional science and technology practice, bridging lay and professional medical contexts. Shotwell draws on Lorraine Code’s generative theory of the importance of “ecological thinking” as one way to practice what she calls “epistemic responsibility,” and to think about the varied and complex early responses of activists in Canada to AIDS. Activists made wide-ranging, theoretically (...) sophisticated, and socially significant interventions in how AIDS manifested in Canada; their interventions manifested a kind of political work welcoming to unpredictable and emergent medical and social situations. Three preliminary insights are offered, from an ongoing research project investigating the history of AIDS activism in the Canadian context: the usefulness of Code’s conception of the social imaginary for understanding how calcified social relations shape and limit the conditions for responsible knowing; the importance of recognizing the communal and social nature of knowledge as a key piece of epistemic responsibility, articulated in terms of collective epistemic privilege; and the possibility for practices of epistemic responsibility to create virtuous epistemic effects beyond what is known or intended by particular agents. (shrink)

Alexis Tadié | : Dans cet essai, on analyse la relation entre fait et fiction dans le contexte du développement de la forme romanesque. Je suggère que l’on peut approcher la nature du récit en examinant les manières dont les fictions et les histoires fictionnelles en sont venues à constituer des artefacts philosophiques complexes, la question du genre littéraire étant subordonnée à celle de fictionnalité. | : In this essay, I would like to analyse the relationship between fiction and (...) fact within the context of the development of the novel. I suggest that we may approach narratives by looking at the ways in which fiction and fictional stories came to constitute complex philosophical artefacts — the question of genre being dependent on the idea of fictionality. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been growing discussion amongst philosophers about “conceptual engineering”. Put roughly, conceptual engineering concerns the assessment and improvement of concepts, or of other devices we use in thought and talk (e.g., words). This often involves attempts to modify our existing concepts (or other representational devices), and/or our practices of using them. This paper explores the relation between conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics, where conceptual ethics is taken to encompass normative and evaluative questions about concepts, words, and (...) other broadly “representational” and/or “inferential” devices we use in thought and talk. We take some of the central questions in conceptual ethics to concern which concepts we should use and what words should mean, and why. We put forward a view of conceptual engineering in terms of the following three activities: conceptual ethics, conceptual innovation, and conceptual implementation. On our view, conceptual engineering can be defined in terms of these three activities, but not in a straightforward, Boolean way. Conceptual engineering, we argue, is made up of mereologically complex activities whose parts fall into the categories associated with each of these three different activities. (shrink)

Ets proteins are a family of transcription factors that regulate the expression of a myriad of genes in a variety of tissues and cell types. This functional versatility emerges from their interactions with other structurally unrelated transcription factors. Indeed, combinatorial control is a characteristic property of Ets family members, involving interactions between Ets and other key transcriptional factors such as AP1, SRF, and Pax family members. Intriguingly, recent molecular modeling and crystallographic data suggest that not only the ETS DNA-binding domain, (...) but also the DNA recognition helix α3, are often directly required for Ets partner's selection. Indeed, while most DNA-binding proteins appear to exploit differences within their DNA recognition helices for sites selection, the Ets proteins exploit differences in their surfaces that interact with other transcription factors, which in turn may modify their DNA-binding properties in a promoter-specific fashion. Taken together, the gene-specific architecture of these unique complexes can mediate the selective control of transcriptional activity. BioEssays 24:362–370, 2002. ©2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The nineteenth-century French writer examines the development of democratic government in the United States and the state of political and social life.

Robert Alexy develops his influential theory of legal reasoning exploring the nature of legal argumentation and its relation to practical reasoning. In doing so he sheds light on fundamental questions of law and rationality, which are as crucial to practising lawyers and law students as they are to scholars of legal theory.

Alfred Schutz is, without a doubt, one of the phenomenologists that contributed the most to the reflection on how to apply insights from phenomenological philosophy to the, empirical and theoretical, human and social sciences. However, his work tends to be neglected by many of the current advocates of phenomenology within these disciplines. In the present paper, I intend to remedy this situation. In order to do so, I will systematically revisit his mundane and social-scientifically oriented account of phenomenology, which, as (...) I shall show, emerges from a theoretical confrontation with the Husserlian distinction between transcendental phenomenology and phenomenological psychology. (shrink)

The best classes have a life of their own, powered by student-led conversations that explore texts, ideas, and essential questions. In these classes, the teacher’s role shifts from star player to observer and coach as the students ▪ Think critically, ▪ Work collaboratively, ▪ Participate fully, ▪ Behave ethically, ▪ Ask and answer high-level questions, ▪ Support their ideas with evidence, and ▪ Evaluate and assess their own work. The Spider Web Discussion is a simple technique that puts this kind (...) of class within every teacher’s reach. The name comes from the weblike diagram the observer makes to record interactions as students actively participate in the discussion, lead and support one another’s learning, and build community. It’s proven to work across all subject areas and with all ages, and you only need a little know-how, a rubric, and paper and pencil to get started. As students practice Spider Web Discussion, they become stronger communicators, more empathetic teammates, better problem solvers, and more independent learners—college and career ready skills that serve them well in the classroom and beyond. Educator Alexis Wiggins provides a step-by-step guide for the implementation of Spider Web Discussion, covering everything from introducing the technique to creating rubrics for discussion self-assessment to the nuts-and-bolts of charting the conversations and using the data collected for formative assessment. She also shares troubleshooting tips, ideas for assessment and group grading, and the experiences of real teachers and students who use the technique to develop and share content knowledge in a way that’s both revolutionary and truly inspiring. (shrink)

I defend social media’s potential to support Aristotelian virtue friendship against a variety of objections. I begin with Aristotle’s claim that the foundation of the best friendships is a shared life. Friends share the distinctively human and valuable components of their lives, especially reasoning together by sharing conversation and thoughts, and communal engagement in valued activities. Although some have charged that shared living is not possible between friends who interact through digital social media, I argue that social media preserves the (...) relevantly human and valuable portions of life, especially reasoning, play, and exchange of ideas. I then consider several criticisms of social media’s potential to host friendships, and refute or weaken the force of these objections, using this conception of a distinctively human shared life. I conclude that we should use the shared life to evaluate features of specific social media and norms for users’ conduct. (shrink)