From this post-reflective point of view, the book argues for an intimate relationship between cognition, sensorimotor embodiment, and the integrative character ...

Many philosophers subscribe to the view that philosophy is a priori and in the business of discovering necessary truths from the armchair. This paper sets out to empirically test this picture. If this were the case, we would expect to see this reflected in philosophical practice. In particular, we would expect philosophers to advance mostly deductive, rather than inductive, arguments. The paper shows that the percentage of philosophy articles advancing deductive arguments is higher than those advancing inductive arguments, which is (...) what we would expect from the vantage point of the armchair philosophy picture. The results also show, however, that the percentages of articles advancing deductive arguments and those advancing inductive arguments are converging over time and that the difference between inductive and deductive ratios is declining over time. This trend suggests that deductive arguments are gradually losing their status as the dominant form of argumentation in philosophy. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that public discourse as we know it is less than ideal from an epistemological point of view. In this paper, we develop an underappreciated aspect of the trouble with public discourse: what we call the Listening Problem. The listening problem is the problem that public discourse has in giving appropriate uptake and reception to ideas and concepts from oppressed groups. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser, we develop an institutional response to the (...) listening problem: the establishment of what we call Receptive Publics, discursive spaces designed to improve listening skills and to give space for counterhegemonic ideas. (shrink)

Inspiring and empowering, this journey behind the scenes of humanity's greatest creations reveals the surprising way we make something new. What do Thomas Jefferson's ice cream recipe, Coca Cola, and Chanel No. 5 have in common? They all depended on a nineteenth-century African boy who, with a single pinch, solved one of nature's great riddles and gave birth to the multimillion-dollar vanilla industry. Kevin Ashton opens his book with the fascinating story of the young slave who launched a flavor (...) revolution to show that invention and creation come in unexpected shapes and sizes. From the crystallographer's laboratory where the secrets of DNA were first revealed by a long-forgotten woman, to the electromagnetic chamber where the stealth bomber was born on a 25-cent bet, Ashton weaves tales of humanity's greatest creations to unpack the surprising true process of discovery. Drawing on the Amish and the iPhone, Kandinsky and cans of Coke, Lockheed, South Park, and the Wright brothers--who set out to "fly a horse"--he showcases the seemingly unremarkable individuals, gradual steps, multiple failures, and countless ordinary--and usually uncredited--acts that led to our most astounding breakthroughs. Creators, he shows, apply everyday, ordinary thinking that we are all capable of in particular ways, taking thousands of small steps, working in an endless loop of problem and solution. He explores why innovators meet resistance and how they overcome it, why most organizations stifle creative people, and how the most creative organizations work. In a passionate and profound narrative that amazes and inspires, Ashton's book sheds new light on how "new" comes to be. (shrink)

(Re)presentations of evil in media, philosophy and literature -- The dangerous ones : when evil was a woman -- Space/times of evil : political life and social worlds.

Feminist epistemologies hold that differences in the social locations of inquirers make for epistemic differences, for instance, in the sorts of things that inquirers are justified in believing. In this paper we situate this core idea in feminist epistemologies with respect to debates about social constructivism. We address three questions. First, are feminist epistemologies committed to a form of social constructivism about knowledge? Second, to what extent are they incompatible with traditional epistemological thinking? Third, do the answers to these questions (...) raise serious problems for feminist epistemologies? We argue that some versions of two of the main strands in feminist epistemology – feminist standpoint theory and feminist empiricism – are committed to a form of social constructivism, which requires certain departures from traditional epistemological thinking. But we argue that these departures are less problematic than one might think. Thus, (some) feminist epistemologies provide a plausible way of understanding how (some) knowledge might be socially constructed. (shrink)

" With this succinct formulation, Murray Bookchin launches his most ambitious work, The Ecology of Freedom.

The “received wisdom” in contemporary analytic philosophy is that intuition talk is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating back to the 1960s. In this paper, we set out to test two interpretations of this “received wisdom.” The first is that intuition talk is just talk, without any methodological significance. The second is that intuition talk is methodologically significant; it shows that analytic philosophers appeal to intuition. We present empirical and contextual evidence, systematically mined from the JSTOR corpus and HathiTrust’s Digital Library, (...) which provide some empirical support for the second rather than the first hypothesis. Our data also suggest that appealing to intuition is a much older philosophical methodology than the “received wisdom” alleges. We then discuss the implications of our findings for the contemporary debate over philosophical methodology. (shrink)

In this paper I make the case for a feminist hinge epistemology in three steps. My first step is to explain hinge epistemologies as contemporary epistemologies that take Wittgenstein’s work in On Certainty as their starting point. My second step is to make three criticisms of this literature as it currently stands. My third step is to introduce feminist epistemologies, which argue that social factors like race and gender affect what different people and groups justifiably believe, and argue that developing (...) a feminist hinge epistemology is both plausible and desirable. (shrink)

There are strong moral reasons to acknowledge that third parties can have the standing to forgive. Third-party refusals to forgive can reinforce the moral agency and value of women and disrupt the gendering of forgiveness. Third-party forgiveness can also be crucial for restorative justice aims, like recognizing the value of wrongdoers. Lastly, many victim-only accounts of forgiveness are problematic and utilize an individualistic conception of the self that reinforces the logic of misogyny. Victim-only accounts of forgiveness can also restrict focus (...) to the victim's suffering, thereby neglecting the importance of healing and the relevance of third-party forgiveness for facilitating healing. (shrink)

Increasingly, Western culture embraces confusion as a virtue and decries certainty as a sin. Those who are confused about sexuality and identity are viewed as heroes. Those who are confused about morality are progressive pioneers. Those who are confused about spirituality are praised as tolerant. Conversely, those who express certainty about any of these issues are seen as bigoted, oppressive, arrogant, or intolerant. This cultural phenomenon led the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary to name "post-truth" their word of the (...) year in 2016. How can Christians offer truth and clarity to a world that shuns both? By accurately describing the Culture of Confusion and how it has affected our society, author Abdu Murray seeks to awaken Westerners to the plight we find ourselves in. He also challenges Christians to consider how they have played a part in fostering the Culture of Confusion through bad arguments, unwise labeling, and emotional attacks. Ultimately, Saving Truth provides arguments from a Christian perspective for the foundations of truth and how those foundations apply to sexuality, identity, morality, and spirituality. For those enmeshed in the culture of confusion, the book offers a way to untangle oneself and find hope in the clarity that Christ offers. (shrink)

A challenging new work of cultural and political theory rethinks the concept of hegemony.

The role of audiences in mathematical proof has largely been neglected, in part due to misconceptions like those in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca which bar mathematical proofs from bearing reflections of audience consideration. In this paper, I argue that mathematical proof is typically argumentation and that a mathematician develops a proof with his universal audience in mind. In so doing, he creates a proof which reflects the standards of reasonableness embodied in his universal audience. Given this framework, we can better understand (...) the introduction of proof methods based on the mathematician’s likely universal audience. I examine a case study from Alexander and Briggs’s work on knot invariants to show that we can fruitfully reconstruct mathematical methods in terms of audiences. (shrink)

According to Duncan Pritchard, there are two kinds of radical sceptical problem; the closure-based problem, and the underdetermination-based problem. He argues that distinguishing these two problems leads to a set of desiderata for an anti-sceptical response, and that the way to meet all of these desiderata is by supplementing a form of Wittgensteinian contextualism with disjunctivist views about factivity. I agree that an adequate response should meet most of the initial desiderata Pritchard puts forward, and that some version of Wittgensteinian (...) contextualism shows the most promise as a starting point for this, but I argue, contra Pritchard, that the addition of disjunctivism is unnecessary and potentially counter-productive. If we draw on lessons from Michael Williams's inferential contextualism then it is both possible, and preferable, to meet the most important of Pritchard's desiderata, undercutting both closure-based and underdetermination-based sceptical problems in a unified way, without the need to resort to disjunctivism. (shrink)

This volume assesses the ethical, quantitative, and qualitative questions posed by the current financing of biomedical research.

Formal logic has often been seen as uniquely placed to analyze mathematical argumentation. While formal logic is certainly necessary for a complete understanding of mathematical practice, it is not sufficient. Important aspects of mathematical reasoning closely resemble patterns of reasoning in nonmathematical domains. Hence the tools developed to understand informal reasoning, collectively known as argumentation theory, are also applicable to much mathematical argumentation. This chapter investigates some of the details of that application. Consideration is given to the many contrasting meanings (...) of the word “argument”; to some of the specific argumentation-theoretic tools that have been applied to mathematics, notably Toulmin layouts and argumentation schemes; to some of the different ways that argumentation is implicated in mathematical practices; and to the social aspects of mathematical argumentation. (shrink)

By drawing on the writings of both Jungian and psychoanalytic thinkers as well as on poetry, mythology and art, and by illustrating these ideas with dreams and ...

This work represents Murray Bookchin's riposte to the antihumanism, mysticism and antirationalism which are influencing many people's attitudes to environmental problems. Bookchin offers a critique of, among others, social Darwinists, deep ecologists, new agers, technophobes, Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard.

In this paper I explore the relationship between social epistemology and relativism in the context of feminist epistemology. I do this by focusing on one particular branch of feminist epistemology - a branch known as standpoint theory - and investigating the connection between this view and epistemic relativism. I begin by defining both epistemic relativism and standpoint theory, and by briefly recounting the standard way that the connection between these two views is understood. The literature at the moment focuses on (...) an aspect of standpoint theory called the epistemic advantage thesis, and on an aspect of relativism which has been called equality. I then show that the connection between relativism and standpoint theory actually turns on a different aspect of standpoint theory, known as the standpoint thesis, and on an aspect of relativism which has been called non-neutrality. I argue that shifting our attention to these other aspects reveals that standpoint theory is clearly and unavoidably relativist, but that this isn’t a problem - standpoint theory can capture everything that it set out to, even on a relativist understanding of the view. (shrink)

A qualitative analysis of societal silences, demonstrating how the unsaid directs social action and shapes individual and collective lives.

Do people hold robots responsible for their actions? While Clark and Fischer present a useful framework for interpreting social robots, we argue that they fail to account for people's willingness to assign responsibility to robots in certain contexts, such as when a robot performs actions not predictable by its user or programmer.

In his new introduction to this current edition of this classic in the field originally published in 1982 (Humanities Press), Hoppe (economics, U. of Nevada, Las Vegas--as was the late author) extols Rothbard's marriage of the "value-free" science of economics with the normative enterprise of ethics and their offspring: libertarianism. Discussion areas are: natural law, a theory of liberty, the state vs. liberty, modern alternative theories of liberty, and toward a theory of strategy for liberty. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, (...) Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Roots present first‐hand accounts of discoveries in genetics, molecular biology, cellular biology, and developmental biology. In the following article, Murray L. Barr describes the background to and the events surrounding the discovery of the cytogenetic evidence for inactive × chromosomes in mammals. In the accompanying article, Michael W. McBurney reviews current molecular knowledge about the inactive × and proposes a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon.

In this study of the works of Sren Kierkegaard, Murray Rae focuses on his understanding of the Christian faith and the nature of Christian conversion. The transformation of an individual under the impact of revelation is explored both in terms of the New Testament concept of metanoia and in comparison with claims to cognitive progress in other fields.

Citizenship education in established democracies is challenged by declining youth participation in democracy. Youth disenchantment and disengagement in democracy is primarily evident in formal political behaviour, especially through voting, declining membership of political parties, assisting at elections, contacting politicians, and the like. If citizenship education is to play a major role in addressing these concerns it will need to review the impact it is making on young people in schools. This paper reviews a major national project on youth participation in (...) democracy in Australia set in the context of a national citizenship education programme. The Youth Electoral Study found that citizenship education in Australian schools has at best been marginally successful and substantially more is required to raise levels of democratic engagement. The paper explores many opportunities available to education systems and schools to address these issues through reconceptualising aspects of the formal and the informal curriculum. (shrink)

Defences of perspectival realism are motivated, in part, by an attempt to find a middle ground between the realist intuition that science seems to tell us a true story about the world, and the Kuhnian intuition that scientific knowledge is historically and culturally situated. The first intuition pulls us towards a traditional, absolutist scientific picture, and the second towards a relativist one. Thus, perspectival realism can be seen as an attempt to secure situated knowledge without entailing epistemic relativism. A very (...) similar motivation is behind feminist standpoint theory, a view which aims to capture the idea that knowledge is socially situated, whilst retaining some kind of absolutism. Elsewhere I argue that the feminist project fails to achieve this balance; its commitment to situated knowledge unavoidably entails epistemic relativism (though of an unproblematic kind), which allows them to achieve all of their feminist goals. In this paper I will explore whether the same arguments apply to perspectival realism. And so I will be asking whether perspectival realism too is committed to an unproblematic kind of relativism, capable of achieving scientific goals; or, whether it succeeds in carving out a third view, between or beyond the relativism/absolutism dichotomy. (shrink)

‘Relativism’ is often treated as a dirty word in philosophy. Showing that a view entails relativism is almost always considered tantamount to showing that it is nonsensical. However, relativistic theories are not entirely unappealing – they have features which might be tempting if they weren’t thought to be outweighed by problematic consequences. In this paper I argue that it’s possible to secure the intuitively appealing features of at least one kind of relativism – epistemic relativism – without having to accept (...) any problematic consequences. I do this by defending what I call 'stratified relativism'. (shrink)

Background If trials of therapeutic interventions are to serve society's interests, they must be of high methodological quality and must satisfy moral commitments to human subjects. The authors set out to develop a clinical - trials compendium in which standards for the ethical treatment of human subjects are integrated with standards for research methods. Methods The authors rank-ordered the world's nations and chose the 31 with >700 active trials as of 24 July 2008. Governmental and other authoritative entities of the (...) 31 countries were searched, and 1004 English-language documents containing ethical and/or methodological standards for clinical trials were identified. The authors extracted standards from 144 of those: 50 designated as ‘core’, 39 addressing trials of invasive procedures and a 5% sample of the remainder. As the integrating framework for the standards we developed a coherent taxonomy encompassing all elements of a trial's stages. Findings Review of the 144 documents yielded nearly 15 000 discrete standards. After duplicates were removed, 5903 substantive standards remained, distributed in the taxonomy as follows: initiation, 1401 standards, 8 divisions; design, 1869 standards, 16 divisions; conduct, 1473 standards, 8 divisions; analysing and reporting results, 997 standards, four divisions; and post-trial standards, 168 standards, 5 divisions. Conclusions The overwhelming number of source documents and standards uncovered in this study was not anticipated beforehand and confirms the extraordinary complexity of the clinical trials enterprise. This taxonomy of multinational ethical and methodological standards may help trialists and overseers improve the quality of clinical trials, particularly given the globalisation of clinical research. (shrink)

This paper focuses on invasive therapeutic procedures, defined as procedures requiring the introduction of hands, instruments, or devices into the body via incisions or punctures of the skin or mucous membranes performed with the intent of changing the natural history of a human disease or condition for the better. Ethical and methodological concerns have been expressed about studies designed to evaluate the effects of invasive therapeutic procedures. Can such studies meet the same standards demanded of those, for example, evaluating pharmaceutical (...) agents? This paper describes a research project aimed at examining the interplay and sometimes apparent conflict between ethical standards for human research and standards for methodological rigor in trials of invasive procedures. The paper discusses how the authors plan to develop a set of consensus standards that, if met, would result in substantial and much-needed improvements in the methodological and ethical quality of such trials. (shrink)