Complex responsive processes theory is utilised in an original way to critique leadership myths and explore the alternative, deeper meanings of educational transformation. The theory opens up new forms of understanding about how ordinary practitioners negotiate the meanings of 'improvement' in their everyday practice. It is in the gap between the emergence of these local interactions and the predetermined designs of policy-makers that educational transformation can be lost or found.--.

Mobsters and others engaged in risky forms of social coordination and coercion often communicate by saying something that is overtly innocuous but transmits another message ‘off record’. In both ordinary conversation and political discourse, insinuation and other forms of indirection, like joking, offer significant protection from liability. However, they do not confer blanket immunity: speakers can be held to account for an ‘off record’ message, if the only reasonable interpreta- tions of their utterance involve a commitment to it. Legal liability (...) for speech in the service of criminal behavior displays a similar profile of significant protection from indirection along with potential liability for reasonable interpretations. Specifically, in both ordinary and legal contexts, liability depends on how a reasonable speaker would expect a reasonable hearer to interpret their utterance in the context of utter- ance, rather than on the actual speaker’s claimed communicative intentions. (shrink)

We sley Salmon, in his influential and detailed book, Four Decades of Scientific Explanation, argues that the pragmatic approach to scientific explanation, “construed as the claim that scientific explanation can be explicated entirely in pragmatic terms” (1989, 185) is inadequate. The specific inadequacy ascribed to a pragmatic account is that objective relevance relations cannot be incorporated into such an account. Salmon relies on the arguments given in Kitcher and Salmon (1987) to ground this objection. He also suggests that Peter Railton’s (...) concepts of the ideal explanatory text and explanatory information (Railton 1981) can provide what the pragmatic approach lacks. This suggestion is not a conclusion of course; we read it as the promotion of part of a research program aimed at forging a greater consensus on scientific explanation-an admirable goal. However, we do not see the pragmatic approach as inadequate. We will show that a synthetic account inspired by Salmon’s adaptation of Railton would be equivalent to van Fraassen’s pragmatic account in three respects: accepting or rejecting requests for explanation; the practice of giving scientific explanations; and the evaluation of the goodness of explanations. We include all three under the general rubric of explanatory “practice.” Admittedly these are not the only three features by which an account of explanation might be evaluated. Roughly, we mean to show that a synthetic account cannot do a better job of accounting for the scientific practices which are of importance to the constructive empiricist, and therefore no argument can be presented to the constructive empiricist to convince her that by her own standards the synthetic account is superior. (shrink)

In recent years, the integration of philosophical with scientific theorizing has started to yield new insights. This chapter surveys some recent philosophical and empirical work on the nature and structure of action, on conscious agency, and on our knowledge of actions.

Readings in Health Care Ethics provides a wide-ranging selection of important and engaging contributions to the field of health care ethics. The second edition adds a chapter on health care in Canada, and the introduction has been expanded to include discussion of a new direction in feminist naturalized ethics. The book presupposes no prior knowledge, only an interest in the bioethical issues that are shaping our world.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.4 (2000) 577-593 [Access article in PDF] Machina Ex Deo: William Harvey and the Meaning of Instrument Don Bates Introduction Since our clocks do consistently disclose each hour of the day and night--do they not seem to partake of another body (beyond the elements), and that more divine? But if, under the dominion and management of [our human] Art, such splendid things (...) are daily achieved beyond the powers of the objects themselves,... And if, in serving men they carry out such things as are to be marvelled at, what I ask, may we expect from them when they be instruments in the hand of God? These words come near the end of William Harvey's De generatione animalium. 1 As he does often in this work, he is arguing that it is possible for a material object to behave supra vires elementorum, i.e., in a manner that exceeds what can be explained merely from the qualities of the elements from which it is made. In fact, just before this, he argues that human craftsmanship enables the elements of air and water to make ships sail in opposite directions, fire to do one sort of thing in the kitchen, another in the shops of metal-workers, including the production of iron, which in its turn peacefully tills the soil or besieges the town in war. So if even human Art is capable of making something as wonderful as a clock out of the elements, how much more might God be able to do with them? [End Page 577]Not only is it entirely conceivable that the (divinely) artful manipulation of these same elements can account for the wonders of God's nature--such as the generation of a chick out of an egg--there is also no need to infer the existence of additional entities such as faculties, qualities, agents, and the like. All that is needed is the concept of "instrument." Today such things as his appeal to a clock, his reference to "art," and the word "instrument" itself, are liable to arouse in our minds a fairly mechanical sort of image. Therefore, we need to put this idea in its intellectual context, by looking at where Harvey's notion of instrument is coming from.First, our much more mechanical world view was just coming into being as Harvey (1578-1657) wrote these words. Although the philosophy of his younger contemporary, René Descartes (1596-1650) was not yet in full bloom (he died a year before Harvey's book appeared), Cartesianism was certainly on the explanatory horizon, 2 as was the work of another contemporary and contributor to the "new philosophy," Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655). 3 And, of course, Harvey had certainly known Francis Bacon (1561-1626). 4 Nevertheless, Harvey was a devout Aristotelian who was adamantly opposed to the efforts of these contemporaries to replace Aristotle. 5 Moreover, it was from the Aristotelian tradition, not from the new mechanics, that Harvey had derived the concept of instrument.If, broadly speaking, the "new philosophy" was about a universe that was built like a clock, then the "old" natural philosophies, whether dominated by Platonism, Aristotelianism, Christian theology, or some combination, were about a universe that was socially constructed. 6 Not only was man at the center, to a large extent the workings of the universe were envisioned in terms of social experience. The regularity, predictability, harmony, and wonder of natural phenomena seemed best explained in the language of reason, moral values, motives, responsibilities, hierarchies, laws (in the social sense), and the like, explanatory resources that, in the late ancient and medieval intellectual cultures of Europe, far outweighed either those that appealed to the passively material and the mechanical, or to the random and the chance.But very central to that social model of nature was the concept of instrument, which gave to it something of a mechanical twist. To see how this was so, we need to go back temporarily to the works of Aristotle, the influence of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.4 (2000) 635-655 [Access article in PDF] The Mystery of Truth: Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin's Enlightened Mysticism David Bates "... what truth! and what error!" --Goethe on Saint-Martin 1It is hardly surprising that Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803), the philosophe inconnu of late Enlightenment Europe, remains almost completely unknown outside of the marginalized and exotic disciplines of esoterism, theosophy, and mysticism. Although influential in (...) certain circles, Saint-Martin failed to penetrate the mainstream of Enlightenment thought, and what influence he did have in philosophy was largely felt outside of this period altogether, revealing itself in figures such as Maistre, 2 Lamartine, 3 and German Romantics like Franz von Baader. 4 In his own lifetime Saint-Martin was met with incredulity by the forces of rationalism. Voltaire was given a copy of Saint-Martin's 1775 text Des erreurs et de la vérité by a friend of d'Alembert. Voltaire later commented to the mathematician, "I don't believe anyone has ever printed anything more absurd, [End Page 635] more obscure, more crazy, and more stupid." 5 In the Tableau de Paris, Mercier described Saint-Martin and his martinist followers as a sect which turned its back on the paths opened up by sound physics, chemistry, and all natural history in order "to run headlong into an invisible world only they perceived." Saint-Martin taught that the objects we see around us are only "fantastic and deceptive images" and that the truth lies precisely where we cannot see it, Mercier explained. "Physical experiences," the cornerstone of the dominant sensationalist doctrine, were for the martinists only "errors," an "eternal source of folly and deception," wrote Mercier. 6 One review of Saint-Martin's works described their effect as analogous to that of a "pyramid covered in hieroglyphs, erected by an unknown man in a public square," in other words, completely mystifying. 7 The revolutionary Barnave would link martinism with all the other "metaphysical follies," which were, he believed, the result of an overly speculative tendency in eighteenth-century thought. 8For his part Saint-Martin rejected what he considered to be the anti-spiritual tendency of Enlightenment thought. Responding (as a mature student) to the professor Garat, one of the idéologue followers of Condillac, at the École normale in 1795, Saint-Martin wrote: I always admire how you protect youself from materialism by endorsing... the teachings of Condillac. Although I read little, I have just gone through (very quickly, it is true) his Essai sur les origines des connaissances humaines and his Traité des sensations. Whether I have poorly grasped it, or I haven't your secret, I have come across almost no passages which do not repel me; and, I can say, have not encountered one which attracts me. His statue, for example... seems to be a mockery of nature... For me, each of the author's ideas appears to be an attack against man, a veritable homicide. 9Mystic thought, it seems, must oppose Enlightenment. At best, mysticism during the period of Enlightenment will be seen as its "underside" 10 or as the [End Page 636] preparation for coming anti-Enlightenment Romantic doctrines. 11 Indeed, the end of the Enlightenment in France saw a marked interest in esoteric thought and a mystic sensibility. 12 However, the attempt to link mysticism and Enlightenment has almost always been a critical attempt to discover the "superstitious" core of eighteenth-century rationalist thought. In this perspective the study of mystic thought in its own terms can only have antiquarian value, for the mystic approach to truth is, it is claimed, always in the form of a secret, revealed knowledge that can never withstand disciplined analysis. Saint-Martin finds his way into history as either a footnote in large books on Romantic thinking, or as the protaganist in largely incomprehensible ones examining esoteric thought. 13Here, I do not want to claim that Saint-Martin should be "included" in the Enlightenment, but a sympathetic reading of this complex... (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

Der Tagungsband zielt auf Grundsatzliches in der Verwendung von Begriffen ab und versteht sich als Beitrag zu einer interdisziplinar gefuhrten Diskussion um Genese und Geltung von Kategorien in der gegenwartigen geistes-, kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Ausgehend von einer vorlaufigen Differenzierung in metaphysische, analytische oder kulturhistorische Kategorien zeigen die versammelten Beitrage gerade die Verschranktheit und wechselseitige Abhangigkeit dieser Dimensionen auf. Kategorien als methodische Werkzeuge zur wissenschaftlichen Einordnung und Unterscheidung von beobachteten Phanomenen stehen neben Kategorien als Untersuchungsgegenstand der Begriffs- und Ideengeschichte und (...) werfen daruber hinaus die Frage nach der Kategorialitat in den Bedingungen menschlichen Denkens und den allgemeinen Aufbauprinzipien von Welt auf. Unterschiedliche theoretische und methodologische Ansatze sowie konkrete Anwendungsbeispiele aus Anglistik, Amerikanistik, Filmwissenschaft, Germanistik, Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Kunstwissenschaft, Philosophie und Sprachwissenschaft zeugen von der Brisanz des Themas. (shrink)

Elisabeth Porter's guide to the development of feminist thought on ethics & moral agency surveys feminist debates on the nature of feminist ethics, intimate relationships, professional ethics, politics, sexual politics, abortion and reproductive choices.

From antiquity, Galenic physicians extensively discussed the active powers of simple and compound drugs. In their views, simple drugs, that is, single ingredients, acted according to their material qualities and the properties of their substance. As for compound drugs, their efficacy resulted from the mutual interaction of their ingredients and their modes of preparation. In the late Renaissance, Galenic physicians and naturalists, such as Leonhart Fuchs and Pietro Andrea Mattioli, attempted to explain these pharmacological properties or “faculties” at the intersection (...) of medicine, botany, and natural philosophy. This chapter examines the case of the Italian physician and botanist Andrea Cesalpino. His pharmacological treatise De medicamentorum facultatibus [On the Faculties of Drugs, 1593] was particularly significant for its reception of ancient and medieval texts on drug properties, materia medica, and the role of the senses in the knowledge of bodies. (shrink)

Aeschylus’ Oresteia supports Aristotle’s claim about the naturalness of the city and the city’s role in shaping justice for humans. In the Oresteia, Aeschylus shows how the city’s justice is the only way to control the wrath of the Furies. Aeschylus shows that the city and its justice tames the Furies and provides for the only way by which the husband-wife relation, which is not a blood tie but provides the basis for which the family is even possible, can be (...) preserved and be secure from the passions the Furies release in their quest for revenge. The Furies and their desire for vengeance for the violation of the blood bond, threaten to undermine the very basis on which the family is founded: the husband-wife bond. Thus Aeschylus gives support and aids Aristotle’s position that the husband-wife bond is a political bond and rests within the realm of the city and the political. (shrink)

A vital and timely contribution to the growing scholarship on the political thought of Alain Badiou.

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

La période périnatale suscite un bouleversement psychique de la famille où le passé, le présent et le futur s’entremêlent. Quand des traumatismes ont affecté des générations en amont, il est possible qu’un passé non élaboré resurgisse à la naissance d’un enfant. Des organisations défensives délétères se transmettent sans transformation. Une confusion des temps peut s’installer, entre passé et présent, obturant le futur, plongeant la nouvelle famille dans de la désorganisation, faisant apparaître des symptômes. Les autrices proposent un éclairage théorique, puis (...) des vignettes cliniques dont un accompagnement de thérapie familiale psychanalytique périnatale pour permettre à la nouvelle famille de se différencier et de construire un avenir détoxifié et « déconfusionné ». Le développement favorable de l’enfant et une parentalité plus harmonieuse peuvent en découler au bénéfice de tous. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.1 (2005) 83-105 [Access article in PDF] Does Malebranche Need Efficacious Ideas? The Cognitive Faculties, the Ontological Status of Ideas, and Human Attention Susan Peppers-Bates But whatever effort of mind I make, I cannot find an idea of force, efficacy, of power, save in the will of the infinitely perfect Being. Malebranche, Elucidation 15 One of the signatures of 17th century rationalists (...) is their replacement of the Scholastics's dependence on the deliverances of the senses with a dependence on the deliverances of the intellect as the key to gaining knowledge.1 Correct use of the intellect leading to freedom from the passions and to certain knowledge figures prominently in the works of Spinoza and Leibniz. Descartes's Meditations uses skeptical doubt to withdraw the mind from the senses, and his reliance on the meditative genre not only reveals to his readers the intellect as a distinct source of knowledge, but also trains them to use properly their will or faculty of judgment. Commentators have argued persuasively that overthrowing the sense-based epistemology and metaphysics of the Aristotelians depended on "discovering" the primacy of one's intellect over the senses, and using the deliverances of the mind to establish solid foundations for a new metaphysics and epistemology.2 Indeed, [End Page 83] outlining the proper use of the mind's faculties arguably lay at the basis of the Cartesian program in particular. This importance can be seen in Arnauld and Nicole's influential Port-Royal Logic, which aimed at training its readers in the proper use of the intellect.3Few would question Nicolas Malebranche's inclusion in the rationalist tradition.4 For while Malebranche famously takes ideas out of the Cartesian mind and transports them to God's—thus privileging the divine over the natural light—he shares Descartes's belief that our intellect, not our senses, holds the key to metaphysical truths such as the essence of matter, the mind-body distinction, and the existence of God.5 Yet, recently, Nicholas Jolley has contended that Malebranche's later commitment to "efficacious ideas" undermines his earlier belief in the power of the cognitive faculties: he believes that Malebranche abandons his view that the mind makes "real use" of the intellect to know intelligible objects.6 Jolley's position builds upon Alquié and Robinet's claims that around 1694-95 Malebranche moved from a vision "in" God to a vision "by" God. Now God's ideas act on and modify the soul with both sensations and intellectual concepts, rather than the human intellect contemplating ideas in the Divine Reason.7Alquié and Robinet argue that Malebranche, pushed by the battles with Arnauld and Régis over the status of ideas, introduced the language of "efficacious" ideas to explain how the union of the human and the divine mind is supposed to work.8 Robinet in particular suggests that in cashing out the metaphor of God enlightening human minds, Malebranche moved from a static "ontologist" view of idea-objects in God to an active "illuminationist" view whereby divine ideas cause(intellectual [End Page 84] and sensory) perception by modifying the soul.9 Once one accepts this view of the place and function of efficacious ideas in Malebranche's metaphysics, it seems natural to accept Jolley's declaration that the only way for the mind to apprehend ideas in God is if those ideas "act directly on the mind; [if] they thereby cause cognitive states to arise in a substance which is devoid of all genuine cognitive capacities of its own."10 Indeed, Jolley suggests that Malebranche ultimately made the soul passive in all its states, including its volitional ones.11In this paper, I argue that a strong interpretation of efficacious ideas, whereby they appear to become true causal agents, must be rejected precisely because it pushes us into an incorrect reading of Malebranche's theory of the divine and human faculties. Making ideas true causal agents within God privileges divine reason at the... (shrink)

Resumen En el presente estudio se aborda la descripción de la semántica de los marcadores evidenciales por lo visto y se ve que en el marco de la teoría de la relevancia (TR). Tomando como punto de partida el análisis que Albelda, M. (2018). ¿Atenuación del compromiso del hablante?: El caso de los evidenciales por lo visto y se ve que. Rilce, 34.3, 1179–1214. traza de ambos evidenciales en un corpus oral, se realizó un estudio tanto cuantitativo como cualitativo de (...) los patrones y el rango de interpretaciones de cada expresión en una muestra de géneros escritos formales procedentes del Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA). Los resultados cuantitativos mostraron algunas diferencias con respecto a los obtenidos por Albelda, M. (2018). ¿Atenuación del compromiso del hablante?: El caso de los evidenciales por lo visto y se ve que. Rilce, 34.3, 1179–1214: por lo visto es principalmente inferencial y, en menor medida, reportativo en la escritura formal. En contraste con los géneros orales, tiende a introducir inferencias genéricas, y en ocasiones también precede conjeturas. Se alinea con el parámetro de la objetividad, permitiendo al emisor mostrar una menor implicación hacia la evidencia, así como un mayor compromiso epistémico hacia la fiabilidad de la información. Se ve que, por el contrario, es generalmente un marcador inferencial, tanto en géneros escritos como orales. Se emplea, principalmente, para encabezar inferencias conjeturales. Con se ve que, el emisor muestra una mayor implicación y subjetivización, y un menor compromiso epistémico hacia la evidencia que se introduce en el discurso. Los diferentes patrones de comportamiento discursivo exhibidos por ambos evidenciales pueden explicarse en el marco de la teoría argumentativa del razonamiento (Mercier, H. y Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34.2, 57–74; Mercier H. y Sperber, D. (2017). The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.). Por lo visto y se ve que tienden a introducir, respectivamente, conclusiones intuitivas y reflexivas que deben ser verificadas y aceptadas por la audiencia. Se ve que apunta, generalmente, a la activación de los mecanismos cognitivos de vigilancia epistémica y lectura de la mente, mientras que por lo visto tiende a desencadenar los procesos de vigilancia epistémica y de razonamiento. (shrink)

Widmer sheds light on a neglected aspect of the Western philosophical tradition. Following an era of Hegelianism, the members of the neo-Kantian "Marburg School," such as Friedrich Albert Lange, Hermann Cohen, Rudolf Stammler, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer defended socialism or left-wing ideals on Kantian principles. In doing so, Widmer breaks with two mistaken assumptions. First, Widmer demonstrates that the left-Hegelian and Marxist traditions were not the only significant philosophical sources of socialist critique in nineteenth-century Germany, as the left-Kantians identified (...) problems of normativity that the left-Hegelians could not adequately address. Second, Widmer challenges the prevailing assumption that the political philosophies developed in the Marburg School can be comprehensively characterized as a unified school of "ethical socialism." By showing that they varied fundamentally regarding their political views and their philosophical foundations of socialism, Widmer fills a gap in the studies of neo-Kantianism that is long overdue. (shrink)

On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor, speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean another. A variety of theorists have recently challenged this view; they offer criteria for distinguishing what is said from what is merely meant, and argue that these support classifying metaphor within 'what is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I conclude by sketching how we might extract a (...) workable notion of 'what is said' from ordinary intuitions about saying. (shrink)

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)