This distinctive collection by scholars from around the world focuses upon the cultural, educational, and political significance of Richard Rorty's thought. The nine essays which comprise the collection examine a variety of related themes: Rorty's neopragmatism, his view of philosophy, his philosophy of education and culture, Rorty's comparison between Dewey and Foucault, his relation to postmodern theory, and, also his form of political liberalism.

The original innovation talents and their achievements promote the development of natural science and are regarded as a symbol of the national comprehensive power. This study explores the process that causes original innovation talents’ personality, uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, and explores the linkage between configurations made up of early growth experiences and personality. We took Nobel Prize winners as samples and discovered that high responsibility was inspired by high family democracy driving, high family size driving, high family function driving, (...) and high teaching democracy driving; high extroversion was inspired by high family size driving, high family democracy driving, and high family status driving; high openness was inspired by high family status driving, high family democracy driving, high family size driving, both high open teaching and educational level driving, as well as high peer support driving; high or non-high family status brought high extroversion or openness; non-high teacher accomplishments and teacher-student relationships produced high openness; non-high extroversion came with non-high teacher-student relationship. We proposed strategies for strengthening the positive effects or avoiding the negative effects of early growing-up experiences on personality. (shrink)

In Beyond Disruption: Technology's Challenge to Governance, experts from academia, media, government, and the military wrestle with understanding the nature of these technologies' threats to our societies and their great potential for our economies. In a series of vivid analyses and colorful commentary from a conference as Stanford University's Hoover Institution, the authors expand upon their first-hand interpretations of what's at stake for the global operating system in the midst of turbulent change. In the dynamic game of world order, it's (...) a primer for decision makers on where the puck is headed. (shrink)

Exploring a wide range of sonic practices, from birdsong in the Marshall Islands to Zulu ululation, the contributors reorient the field of sound studies toward the global South in order to rethink and decolonize modes of understanding and listening to sound.

This paper focuses on the structure and substance of the Core Content Framework (CCF), a controversial document which stipulates content that providers of teacher education in England must incorporate in their programmes. We identify both a concept of instrumental trainability and a lack of coherence in the CCF which suggests it is unsuitable as a guide to a curriculum for teacher education. Drawing on Bernstein’s work and its application by other sociologists of educational knowledge, we identify how the CCF embeds (...) a ‘generic mode’ in teacher education that has roots outside of disciplinary structures of knowledge production and therefore foregrounds a type of official pedagogy that sees teaching as a technical performance and leaves gaps in the knowledge and understanding a new teacher requires to make sound educational judgements. Employing Muller’s distinction between conceptual and contextual coherence, we argue that the CCF is based upon an imaginary notion of instructional practice that does not fully grasp the context of teachers’ work. We illustrate the argument via an analysis of the language, structure, and three of the eight sections in the CCF. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 8, July 2020, Page 838-843.

In Lewis Carroll's AliceThroughtheLooking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty said: neither more nor less.” One may not agree with this approach, but it may well be preferable to using a word: (a) with only a vague idea of its meaning, or (b) with many possible meanings.

In light of recent technological innovations and discourses around data and algorithmic analytics, scholars of many stripes are attempting to develop critical agendas and responses to these developments. In this mutual interview, three scholars discuss the stakes, ideas, responsibilities, and possibilities of critical data studies. The resulting dialog seeks to explore what kinds of critical approaches to these topics, in theory and practice, could open and make available such approaches to a broader audience.

The demanding frontier life of My Ántonia or Little House on the Prairie may be long gone, but the idyllic small town still exists as a cherished icon of American community life. Yet sprawl and urban density, rather than small towns and farms, are the predominant features of our modern society, agribusiness and other commercial forces have rapidly taken over family farms and ranches, and even the open spaces we think of as natural retreats only retain the barest façade of (...) their former frontier austerity. The fading communities, social upheaval, and enduring heritage of the Northern Plains are the subject of Jim Dow’s Marking the Land, a stirring photographic tribute to the complex and unyielding landscape of North Dakota. Jim Dow began making pilgrimages to this remote territory in 1981 and, with a commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art, he took photographs of the passing human presence on the land. The simple, stolid pieces of architecture carved out against the Dakota skies—whether the local schoolhouse, car wash, prison, homes, hunting lodge, or churches—evoke in their spare lines and weather-battered frames the stoic and toughened spirit of the people within their walls. Folk art is also an integral part of the landscape in Dow’s visual study, and he examines the subtle evolution of local craftsmanship from homemade sculptures, murals, and carvings to carefully crafted pieces aimed at tourists. Anchoring all of these explorations is the raw and striking landscape of the North Dakota plains. Marking the Land is a moving reflection by a leading American photographer on the state of the Northern Plains today, forcing us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier. (shrink)

This paper presents a counterfactual account of what a mechanism is. Mechanisms consist of parts, the behavior of which conforms to generalizations that are invariant under interventions, and which are modular in the sense that it is possible in principle to change the behavior of one part independently of the others. Each of these features can be captured by the truth of certain counterfactuals.

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

"We become what we love," states Jim Garrison in Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. This provocative book represents a major new interpretation of Dewey's education philosophy. It is also an examination of what motivates us to teach and to learn, and begins with the idea of education of eros (i.e., passionate desire)-"the supreme aim of education" as the author puts it-and how that desire results in a practical philosophy that guides us in recognizing what (...) is essentially good or valuable. Garrison weaves these threads of ancient wisdom into a critical analysis of John Dewey's writings that reveal an implicit theory of eros in reasoning, and the central importance of educating eros to seek "the Good." Chapters: Plato's Symposium: Eros, the Beautiful, and the Good • Care, Sympathy, and Community in Classroom Teaching: Feminist Reflections on the Expansive Self • Play-Doh, Poetry, and "Ethereal Things" • The Aesthetic Context of Inquiry and the Teachable Moment • The Education of Eros: Critical and Creative Value Appraisal • Teaching and the Logic of Moral Perception This book can be used in graduate courses in foundations, teacher education, philosophy of education, qualitative research, arts and education, language and literacy, and women and education. Jim Garrison is Professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. He is pastpresident of the John Dewey Society and a winner of the Society's Outstanding Achievement Award. (shrink)

A startling look at one of this century's most influential philosophers, the book chronicles every stage of Foucault's personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.

There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.–Gregory Bateson, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind...

Donald Davidson finds folk-psychological explanations anomalous due to the open-ended and constitutive conception of rationality which they employ, and yet monist because they invoke an ontology of only physical events. An eliminative materialist who thinks that the beliefs and desires of folk-psychology are mere pre-scientific fictions cannot accept these claims, but he could accept anomalous monism construed as an analysis, merely, of the ideological and ontological presumptions of folk-psychology. Of course, eliminative materialism is itself only a guess, a marker for (...) material explanations we do not have, but it is made plausible by, inter alia, whatever difficulties we have in interpreting intentional folk-explanations realistically. And surely anomalous monism does require further explanation if it is to be accepted realistically and not dismissed as an analysis of a folk-idiom which is to be construed instrumentally at best. Some further explanation is needed of how beliefs, desires, etc. can form rational patterns which have ‘no echo in physical theory’ and yet those beliefs, desires etc. be physical events. To this end I propose to graft on to anomalous monism a modest version of functionalism. (shrink)

The conclusion of this paper will be that e-sports are not sports. I begin by offering a stipulation and a definition. I stipulate that what I have in mind, when thinking about the concept of sport, is ‘Olympic’ sport. And I define an Olympic Sport as an institutionalised, rule-governed contest of human physical skill. The justification for the stipulation lies partly in that it is uncontroversial. Whatever else people might think of as sport, no-one denies that Olympic Sport is sport. (...) This seeks to ensure that those who might wish to dispute my conclusion might stay with the argument at least for as long as possible. Secondly, the justification for the stipulation lies partly in its normativity—I have chosen an Olympic conception of sport just because it seems to me to offer some kind of desirable version of what sport is and might become. Thirdly, I give examples which show how prominent promoters of e-sports agree with my stipulation, as evidenced by their strenuous attempts to comply with it i... (shrink)

Scientists obtain a great deal of the evidence they use by observingnatural and experimentally generated objects and effects. Much of thestandard philosophical literature on this subject comes from20th century logical positivists and empiricists, theirfollowers, and critics who embraced their issues and accepted some oftheir assumptions even as they objected to specific views. Theirdiscussions of observational evidence tend to focus on epistemologicalquestions about its role in theory testing. This entry follows theirlead even though observational evidence also plays important andphilosophically interesting roles (...) in other areas including scientificdiscovery and the application of scientific theories to practicalproblems. (shrink)

Using Jim Woodward's Counterfactual Dependency account as an example, I argue that causal claims about indeterministic systems cannot be satisfactorily analysed as including counterfactual conditionals among their truth conditions because the counterfactuals such accounts must appeal to need not have truth values. Where this happens, counterfactual analyses transform true causal claims into expressions which are not true.

This is a provocative international and interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars of Nietzsche and philosophers of religion. Nietzsche, famous for declaring the death of God, nevertheless was responsible throughout his writing for the most telling modern meditation on the nature of the religions of the world, mysticism, the divine as a principle in culture, and the relation of mankind to the infinite. This collection deals with the full scope of Nietzsche's thought on this topic, encompassing Greek, Hebraic, Asian and Mystic religion. (...) Nietzsche scholarship has flourished immeasurably in recent years, not least in respect to the religious question. Nietzsche and the Divine will be an essential underpinning of this area for Nietzsche scholars and theological scholars alike. (shrink)

Addressing central questions in the debate about Foucault's usefulness for politics, including his rejection of universal norms, his conception of power and power-knowledge, his seemingly contradictory position on subjectivity and his ...

Contextualists offer "high-low standards" practical cases to show that a variety of knowledge standards are in play in different ordinary contexts. These cases show nothing of the sort, I maintain. However Keith DeRose gives an ingenious argument that standards for knowledge do go up in high-stakes cases. According to the knowledge account of assertion (Kn), only knowledge warrants assertion. Kn combined with the context sensitivity of assertability yields contextualism about knowledge. But is Kn correct? I offer a rival account of (...) warranted assertion and argue that it beats Kn as a response to the "knowledge" version of Moore's Paradox. (shrink)

Victor Reppert’s paper (pp. 33-45) supposes that there are objectively indistinguishable properties between possible worlds that resultin the property of intentionality existing in one world but not in another objectively indistinguishable world, differing only in their histories. It is also a supposition of Reppert’s paper that proposed ensembles of purely natural properties that lead to the emergence of intentionality fail to do so, but instead only have referential power on the basis of imputed or projected intentionality from human beings. This (...) brief essay examines this supposition and consequence and attempts to provoke more detailed examination of the underlying issues. (shrink)

This paper suggests and discusses an answer to the following question: What distinguishes causal from non-causal or coincidental co-occurrences? The answer derives from Elizabeth Anscombe’s idea that causality is a highly abstract concept whose meaning derives from our understanding of specific causally productive activities, and from her rejection of the assumption that causality can be informatively understood in terms of actual or counterfactual regularities.Keywords: Elizabeth Anscombe; Causality; Explanation; Inhibition.

Interventionist Theories of Causation in Psychological Perspective.

We discuss the typography of the notation used by Gottlob Frege in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik.

Machamer, Darden, and Craver argue that causal explanations explain effects by describing the operations of the mechanisms which produce them. One of this paper’s aims is to take advantage of neglected resources of Mechanism to rethink the traditional idea that actual or counterfactual natural regularities are essential to the distinction between causal and non-causal co-occurrences, and that generalizations describing natural regularities are essential components of causal explanations. I think that causal productivity and regularity are by no means the same thing, (...) and that the Regularists are mistaken about the roles generalizations play in causal explanation. Humean, logical empiricist, and other Regularist accounts of causal explanation have had the unfortunate effect of distracting philosophers’ from important non-explanatory scientific uses of laws and lesser generalizations which purport to describe natural regularities. My second aim is to characterize some of these uses, illustrating them with examples from neuroscientific research. (shrink)

Counterfactuals all the way down? Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9437-9 Authors Jim Woodward, History and Philosophy of Science, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Barry Loewer, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA John W. Carroll, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8103, USA Marc Lange, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB#3125—Caldwell Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125, USA Journal Metascience Online (...) ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796 Journal Volume Volume 20 Journal Issue Volume 20, Number 1. (shrink)

The electronic and muonic hydrogen energy levels are calculated very accurately [1] in Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) by coupling the Dirac Equation four vector (c ,mc2) current covariantly with the external electromagnetic (EM) field four vector in QED’s Interactive Representation (IR). The c -Non Exclusion Principle(c -NEP) states that, if one accepts c as the electron/muon velocity operator because of the very accurate hydrogen energy levels calculated, the one must also accept the resulting electron/muon internal spatial and time coordinate operators (ISaTCO) (...) derived directly from c without any assumptions. This paper does not change any of the accurate QED calculations of hydrogen’s energy levels, given the simplistic model of the proton used in these calculations [1]. The Proton Radius Puzzle [2, 3] may indicate that new physics is necessary beyond the Standard Model (SM), and this paper describes the bizarre, and very different, situation when the electron and muon are located “inside” the spatially extended proton with their Centers of Charge (CoCs) orbiting the proton at the speed of light in S energy states. The electron/muon center of charge (CoC) is a structureless point that vibrates rapidly in its inseparable, non-random vacuum whose geometry and time structure are defined by the electron/muon ISaTCO discrete geometry. The electron/muon self mass becomes finite in a natural way due to the ISaTCOs cutting off high virtual photon energies in the photon propagator. The Dirac-Maxwell-Wilson (DMW) Equations are derived from the ISaTCO for the EM fields of an electron/muon, and the electron/muon “look” like point particles in far field scattering experiments in the same way the electric field from a sphere with evenly distributed charge “e” “looks” like a point with the same charge in the far field (Gauss Law). The electron’s/muon’s three fluctuating CoC internal spatial coordinate operators have eight possible eigenvalues [4, 5, 6] that fall on a spherical shell centered on the electron’s CoM with radius in the rest frame. The electron/muon internal time operator is discrete, describes the rapid virtual electron/positron pair production and annihilation. The ISaTCO together create a current that produce spin and magnetic moment operators, and the electron and muon no longer have “intrinsic” properties since the ISaTCO kinematics define spin and magnetic moment properties. (shrink)

Throughout philosophical history, there has been a recurring argument to the effect that determinism, naturalism, or both are self-referentially incoherent. By accepting determinism or naturalism, one allegedly acquires a reason to reject determinism or naturalism. _The Epistemological Skyhook_ brings together, for the first time, the principal expressions of this argument, focusing primarily on the last 150 years. This book addresses the versions of this argument as presented by Arthur Lovejoy, A.E. Taylor, Kurt Gödel, C.S. Lewis, Norman Malcolm, Karl Popper, J.R. (...) Lucas, William Hasker, Thomas Nagel, Alvin Plantinga, and others, along with the objections presented by their many detractors. It concludes by presenting a new version of the argument that synthesizes the best aspects of the others while also rendering the argument immune to some of the most significant objections made to it. (shrink)

l examine the degree to which the so-called “deep ecology” movement embodies a feminist sensibility. In part one I take a brief look at the ambivalent attitude of “eco-feminism” toward deep ecology. In part two I show that this ambivalence sterns largely from the fact that deep ecology assimilates feminist insights to a basically masculine ethical orientation. In part three I discuss some of the ways in which deepecology theory might change if it adopted a fundamentally feminist ethical orientation.

The main concepts of the free energy (FE) neuroscience developed by Karl Friston and colleagues parallel those of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology. In Hobson et al. ( 2014 ) these include an innate virtual reality generator that produces the fictive prior beliefs that Freud described as the primary process. This enables Friston's account to encompass a unified treatment—a complexity theory—of the role of virtual reality in both dreaming and mental disorder. In both accounts the brain operates to minimize (...) FE aroused by sensory impingements—including interoceptive impingements that report compliance with biological imperatives—and constructs a representation/model of the causes of impingement that enables this minimization. In Friston's account (variational) FE equals complexity minus accuracy, and is minimized by increasing accuracy and decreasing complexity. Roughly the brain (or model) increases accuracy together with complexity in waking. This is mediated by consciousness-creating active inference—by which it explains sensory impingements in terms of perceptual experiences of their causes. In sleep it reduces complexity by processes that include both synaptic pruning and consciousness/virtual reality/dreaming in REM. The consciousness-creating active inference that effects complexity-reduction in REM dreaming must operate on FE-arousing data distinct from sensory impingement. The most relevant source is remembered arousals of emotion, both recent and remote, as processed in SWS and REM on “active systems” accounts of memory consolidation/reconsolidation. Freud describes these remembered arousals as condensed in the dreamwork for use in the conscious contents of dreams, and similar condensation can be seen in symptoms. Complexity partly reflects emotional conflict and trauma. This indicates that dreams and symptoms are both produced to reduce complexity in the form of potentially adverse (traumatic or conflicting) arousals of amygdala-related emotions. Mental disorder is thus caused by computational complexity together with mechanisms like synaptic pruning that have evolved for complexity-reduction; and important features of disorder can be understood in these terms. Details of the consilience among Freudian, systems consolidation, and complexity-reduction accounts appear clearly in the analysis of a single fragment of a dream, indicating also how complexity reduction proceeds by a process resembling Bayesian model selection. (shrink)

This paper side-steps the question of whether ‘the’ concept of sport exists, or can be usefully analysed. Instead, I try to explain the much more modest aim of exhibition-analysis, which is to seek a description of an actually existing example of some concept of sport internal to a normative position. My example is that of Olympic-sport. I try to set out its logically necessary conditions, which of course are conditioned by its context within a theory that emphasises the values of (...) formal competition, citius-altius-fortius, and excellence in contest, as well as rule-based procedural values related to fairness, justice and equality. In so doing, I readily accept that other kinds of sport can be similarly analysed, and I do not press the value claims of Olympic-sport. Instead, I try to show how Olympic-sport, properly construed, can accommodate the concerns of my critics with regard to sport’s play and game-like characteristics. (shrink)

Do fetuses have a right to life in virtue of the fact that they are potential adult human beings? I take the claim that the fetus is a potential adult human being to come to this: if the fetus grows normally there will be an adult human animal that was once the fetus. Does this fact ground a claim to our care and protection? A great deal hangs on the answer to this question. The actual mental and physical capacities of (...) a human fetus are inferior to those of adult creatures generally thought to lack a serious right to life, and the mere fact that a fetus belongs to our species in particular seems morally irrelevant. Consequently, a strong fetal claim to protection rises or falls with the appeal to the fetus's potentiality, for nothing else can justify it. (shrink)