This book constructs a deepening, interdisciplinary understanding of adult learning and imaginatively reframes its transformative aspects. The authors explore the tension at the heart of current understanding of ‘transformative’ adult learning: that while it can be framed as both easy and imperative, personal transformation is in fact rooted in the context in which we live, our stories and relationships. At its core, transformation is never easy – nor always desirable – and the authors thus draw on interdisciplinary and auto/biographical inquiry (...) to explore what it means to change our presuppositions and frames of meaning that guide our thinking. Using their linguistic, gendered, academic and cultural differences, the authors illuminate how the social, contextual, cultural, cognitive and psychological dimensions of transformation intertwine. In doing so, they emphasise the importance of transformation as a contingent struggle for meaning and recognition, social justice, fraternity, and the pursuit of truth. This engaging book will be of interest to students and scholars of transformative learning and education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dynamic Encounters between Buddhism and the West ReportLaura Langone and Alexandra S. IlievaThe following is a summary of the 2021 Postgraduate Conference titled "Dynamic Encounters between Buddhism and the West," which took place online on June 28 and 29. The conference was conceptualized, organized, and run by three AHRC funded PhD students at the University of Cambridge: Laura Langone (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages); Alexandra (...) S. Ilieva (Faculty of Divinity); and Harry Harland (Faculty of Law). The conference took place over two days and featured eighteen presenters across six panels, and two keynote speakers. There were speakers from four continents (Europe, North America, Asia, and Oceania). A wide range of topics in multiple fields was discussed: religious studies, neuroscience, art history, politics, philosophy, literature, philology, mathematics, art, and music. Each day consisted of three panels, each with three presentations, one keynote presentation, and a networking session.The keynote speakers were Prof. Albrecht Classen (The University of Arizona) and Prof. Graham Parkes (University of Vienna).Prof. Classen opened the conference with his presentation. He taught us that we have been globalized and transcultural since at least the Middle Ages. To support this claim, he provided us with ample evidence of Buddhist-Western exchanges in Art and Literature dotted throughout the literature and architecture of Europe. Prof. Parkes observed that following Zen Master Dōgen's thought as well as Nietzsche's philosophy we can develop a saner approach to the environment, which provides us with resources to help us to tackle the challenges of the climate crisis.Our first panel was titled "Hellenistic-Buddhist Encounters," which followed on nicely from Prof. Classen's thesis that encounters between Buddhism and the West have been ubiquitous and have dated as far back as the Hellenistic period. Our second panel, "Encounters with the Contemporary World," were impressive examples of intercultural philosophy. Each participant demonstrated a unique ability to bring Buddhist ideas into dialogue with contemporary Western philosophy, specifically ethics, philosophy of mathematics, and epistemology. The third panel, titled "Therapeutic Encounters," taught us of the therapeutic value of Buddhist meditation and philosophical inquiry. As our presenters emphasized, this therapeutic value is not just an ancient artifact to be studied anthropologically, but a relevant and applicable approach to the modern idea of well-being that therefore deserves continued scholarship.On the second day, we started with our fourth panel called "Encounters through Western Conceptual Lenses," which among others gave us insight into the reception [End Page 393] of Japanese Buddhism by the German liberal protestants of the nineteenth century. Our fifth panel—"Encounters with German Philosophy"—was an excellent example of contemporary comparative work between Buddhist philosophy, ethics, and logic, and the German thinkers Hegel and Nietzsche.We learned that Nietzsche labeled Buddhism as nihilism––a position that can be challenged through Ambedkar's reading of Buddhism. On the other hand, despite Nietzsche's criticism of Buddhism, striking similarities between his approach to life and that of Mahāyāna Buddhism can be found, both elaborating a life-affirming philosophy. We also became familiar with similarities and differences between the logic of Nishida and Hegel. Finally, our last panel, "Literary and Artistic Encounters" made for a fitting conclusion, reminding us that Buddhist-Western encounters are ongoing, not just politically and intellectually but also in art, music, and literature. These encounters are dynamic in nature and fundamentally lacking in an essential core. Instead, they are entities that echo through the ages allowing for reinterpretation and reintegration across geographic and temporal scopes.Both during and after the conference we received extremely positive feedback from the participants. The level of participation and enthusiasm was highly promising, showing that the future of intercultural studies of this sort is bright. Graduate conferences like these are key for early career scholars to set up networks and find likeminded peers to engage in ongoing dynamic encounters.In conclusion, this conference served to highlight the sophisticated emerging scholarship taking place that seeks to investigate Buddhist-Western interactions and dialogue. But, perhaps more importantly, the conference itself makes a metapoint: not only has the world been transcultural for many centuries, but the conference itself and in particular the global spatial locations of... (shrink)

This article analyses ethnographic material gathered in Sweden amongst dancers in the Church of Sweden. With the help of the writings of Sarah Coakley and Simone Weil I explore if, and how, dancing could be considered a contemplative practice in the Christian traditions of the Latin West.

In this paper we report on empirical research which investigates social capital of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs). Bringing an international perspective to the work, we make a comparison between 30 firms located in West London and Munich in the sectors of food manufacturing/production, marketing services and garages. Here we present 6 case studies, which we use to illustrate the early findings from this pilot project. We identify differences in approach to associational membership in Germany and the U.K., (...) with a greater propensity to "belong" to an official group in Germany. We distinguish clear sectoral similarities across the countries, and indications that certain personality types will seek out engagement and find time beyond busy work life schedules, often merging work/home/leisure life and friends. Some of our cases illustrate that formal institutions, networks and mutual relationships can develop social capital for the SME, although we should take care not to assume a universal win-win situation for those who are engaged and contribute to the common good. Some of the obstacles to cooperation and civic engagement are outlined. (shrink)

Abstract:There is debate about the ontological status of conventional entities in Abhidharma thought. Buddhist texts often draw a distinction between two different kinds of entities, ultimately real entities (paramārtha-sat) and conventionally real entities (saṃvṛti-sat), but are often unclear about what the distinction entails. The debate about whether past and future dharmas are ultimately real reveals that Sam.ghabhadra and Vasubandhu—two prominent Abhidharma philosophers—fundamentally disagree about whether reality consists in one or many modes of being. Saṃghabhadra's Sarvāstivāda position is best understood as (...) the ontologically pluralist view that a dharma can enjoy three distinct but equally fundamental temporal modes of being. Vasubandhu's position is that reality is univocal, that everything is real in the same sense. Because Saṃghabhadra is a pluralist and Vasubandhu is not, Saṃghabhadra affirms the reality of conventional entities whereas Vasubandhu does not. (shrink)

The epoch-making revolution that has been taking place in mathematics and physics during the past hundred years is gradually changing our whole conception of reality and of the function of science in regard to it. We have discovered that the “common sense” view of the world which has become ingrained in the feeling-thought habits of Western man, especially since the seventeenth century, contains elements of serious limitation and even an illusion both from the standpoint of immediately intuited experience and from (...) that of demonstrated scientific fact. Moreover, by a long drawn out tortuous process, lasting over many centuries and involving the constant creation and correction of an enormously complicated scientific structure, we have finally arrived at an understanding of what may be the root of our difficulty. It seems that certain peculiarities of the over-all grammatical structure of those languages that have conditioned the feeling-thought world of the West have tended to lead us astray. Their correction, however, has so far been possible only through the invention of new esoteric languages, such as the symbolism of mathematics and the new logic. By means of these “languages of science” modern mathematicians and physicists have at last succeeded in freeing themselves from the shackles of their everyday speech and “common sense” concepts, at least so far as their scientific work is concerned. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s _History of Sexuality_ has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of _History of Sexuality_ in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for (...) whom issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault’s history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In _Race and the Education of Desire, _Stoler challenges Foucault’s tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of _History of Sexuality_ contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race. Drawing on Foucault’s little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as “racisms of the state.” In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault’s insights have in the past constrained—and in the future may help shape—the ways we trace the genealogies of race. _Race and the Education of Desire_ will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault. (shrink)

THE AMERICAN DREAM INCLUDES OWNING A HOME, ANDTHE BIGGER THE better. Christian responses to homelessness and housing vary. Some Christian organizations focus on fixing the person and the behaviors that contribute to homelessness. Others promote home ownership for low-income households. Employing aspects of Traci West's feminist liberationist ethical methodology, I will assess how these approaches buy into our culture's dominant ideology on housing or offer prophetic disruption. Then I will outline an advocacy approach that addresses the multiple causes of (...) homelessness and prophetically aims to make a home for all in God's compassionate community. (shrink)

Jonathan Stoltz’s Illuminating the Mind: An Introduction to Buddhist Epistemology is an excellent book that will be valuable to those familiar with analytic epistemology but unfamiliar with, and curious about, Indian philosophical traditions. It is also a valuable book for those seeking to teach Buddhist epistemology to advanced philosophy students. Philosophers interested in cross-cultural philosophical methodology will also find this book an interesting case study.With respect to cross-cultural methodology, Stoltz aims to demonstrate the philosophical legitimacy of Buddhist epistemology to a (...) “Western” audience by presenting the epistemological themes and arguments of various Buddhist thinkers in terms he thinks... (shrink)

BACKGROUND: There is a need for interdisciplinary research to better understand how pedagogical approaches in primary physical education (PE) can support the linked development of physical, cognitive and affective aspects of physical literacy and physical activity behaviours in young children. The Skill Acquisition Methods fostering Physical Literacy in Early-Physical Education (SAMPLE-PE) study aims to examine the efficacy of two different pedagogies for PE, underpinned by theories of motor learning, to foster physical literacy, especially for children living in disadvantaged areas. METHODS: (...) SAMPLE-PE will be evaluated through a cluster-randomised controlled trial targeting 5-6 year old children from schools located in areas of high deprivation in Merseyside, North-West England. Schools will be randomly allocated to one of three conditions: Linear Pedagogy, Nonlinear Pedagogy or Control. Nonlinear and Linear Pedagogy intervention primary schools will receive a PE curriculum delivered by trained coaches over 15 weeks, while control schools will follow their usual practice. Data will be collected at baseline (T0), immediately post-intervention (T1) and six months after the intervention has finished (T2). Children’s movement competence is the primary outcome in this trial. Secondary outcomes include physical activity, perceived competence, motivation, executive functions, and self-regulation. An extensive process evaluation will also examine implementation factors such as intervention context, reach, dose, fidelity and acceptability. DISCUSSION: The SAMPLE-PE project will enable better understanding surrounding how to operationalise physical literacy through enrichment of PE practices in early PE. The study will provide robust scientific evidence regarding the efficacy of underpinning PE pedagogy with theories of motor learning to promote the development of physical literacy. (shrink)

BackgroundWithholding and withdrawing treatment are deemed ethically equivalent by most Bioethicists, but intensivists often find withdrawing more difficult in practice. This can lead to futile treatment being prolonged. Time-limited trials have been proposed as a way of promoting timely treatment withdrawal whilst giving the patient the greatest chance of recovery. Despite being in UK guidelines, time-limited trials have been infrequently implemented on Intensive Care Units. We will explore the role of time in Intensive Care Unit decision-making and provide a UK (...) perspective on debates surrounding time-limited trials.MethodsThis qualitative study recruited 18 participants (nine doctors, nine nurses) from two Intensive Care Units in North West England for in-depth, one-to-one semi-structured interviews. A thematic analysis was performed of the data.ResultsOur findings show time is utilised by Intensive Care Unit staff in a variety of ways including managing uncertainty when making decisions about a patient’s prognosis or the reversibility of a disease, constructing relationships with patients’ relatives, communicating difficult messages to patients’ relatives, justifying resource allocation decisions to colleagues, and demonstrating compassion towards patients and their families.ConclusionsTime shifts the balance towards greater certainty in Intensive Care Unit decision-making, by demonstrating futility, and can ease the difficult transition for staff and families from active treatment to palliation. However, this requires clear and open communication, both within the Intensive Care Unit team and with the family, being prioritised when time is used in decision-making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Disrupting Homelessness: Alternative Christian Approaches by Laura StiversFred GlennonDisrupting Homelessness: Alternative Christian Approaches Laura Stivers Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011. 187 pp. $18.00In this book Laura Stivers describes the limitations of traditional Christian approaches to homelessness that emphasize charity (rescue missions) or home ownership (Habitat for Humanity). While these approaches do, in fact, deal with some of the effects of homelessness, they not only fail to (...) address the structural causes of homelessness and poverty but they also reinforce certain ideological assumptions—such as individualism, a pattern of “blaming the victim,” and idyllic conceptions of home ownership—that keep us from addressing the [End Page 214] causes of homelessness in the first place. If we are really going to end homelessness, Stivers contends, we have to address the structural issues that keep people homeless, such as the inadequate availability of low-incoming rental housing, unemployment, low wages, and increasing inequality between rich and poor. If Christians and churches want to end homelessness, they must collaborate more fully and develop social movements that will address the full range of factors affecting homelessness, including causes and effects. In other words, they must embody in principle and in practice not only hospitality and compassion but also social justice. The place to begin, Stivers argues, is by listening to the homeless and the poor, allowing their experiential realities to set the agenda, and working in solidarity with them to disrupt the ideologies and to challenge the policies that perpetuate the problem.This requires an education in “disruption” that enables Christians to move beyond the behavioral manifestations of homelessness so that they can see the web of oppressive structures that have generated the bonds experienced by so many poor and homeless. Stivers provides a wealth of data that illustrate and document the full extent and complexity of homelessness in our society. Drawing upon Tracy West’s ethical methodology of “disruption,” Stivers then brings to light what she considers the dominant ideological assumptions that sustain homelessness. These include the assumptions that homeowners are responsible, autonomous citizens while the homeless are deviant, dependent, and criminal; and further that excessive wealth and inequality is justified. Stivers illustrates how these assumptions fail to consider certain factors—such as power, privilege, and racial and class disparities—that underlie and perpetuate the problems of homelessness and promote private over public policies to address them. To address these factors, Stivers argues for a different approach—modeled on such groups as the Industrial Areas Foundation and the PICO (People Improving Communities through Organizing) National Network—that embodies community organizing principles that engage the victims of homelessness in meaningful dialogue about the problems, actively listens to their stories and to their solutions, and works in solidarity with them to address the causes and the policies that perpetuate their homelessness.The audience for this book is Christians and churches seeking to address the issue of homelessness in our nation. Ethicists and Christians of like mind will have few problems with Stivers’s diagnosis of and remedy for homelessness, even if her remedy comes across as a bit utopian at places. Nonetheless, her rhetoric of empowerment, solidarity, social justice, and sustainability might drive away those of a more conservative theological bent. Since many involved in ministry to the homeless today presuppose precisely the assumptions she challenges, I am not sure she has done enough to convince them to change their approach, even though she attempts to ground her approach [End Page 215] biblically in the life and ministry of Jesus. Stivers is correct in asserting that substantive change will only come about as a result of a concerted social movement that involves churches of all theological stripes. The challenge is to find ways for us to set aside our differences for the sake of greater good: disrupting and ending homelessness.Fred GlennonLe Moyne CollegeCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Berkeley’s likeness principle is the claim that “an idea can be like nothing but an idea”. The likeness principle is intended to undermine representationalism: the view (that Berkeley attributes to thinkers like Descartes and Locke) that all human knowledge is mediated by ideas in the mind which represent material objects. Yet, Berkeley appears to leave the likeness principle unargued for. This has led to several attempts to explain why Berkeley accepts it. In contrast to ‘metaphysical’ and ‘epistemological’ interpretations available in (...) the literature, in this paper I defend a ‘conceptual’ interpretation. I argue that Berkeley accepts the likeness principle on the basis of (i) his commitment to the transparency of ideas, and (ii) his account of resemblance which he sets out in his works on vision. Thus, I provide an explanation for Berkeley’s reasons for accepting the likeness principle which, appropriately, focuses on his views concerning ideas and likeness. (shrink)

Margaret Macdonald was at the institutional heart of analytic philosophy in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, her views on the nature of philosophical theories diverge quite considerably from those of many of her contemporaries. In this paper, I focus on her 1953 article ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Perception’, a provocative paper in which Macdonald argues that the value of philosophical theories is more akin to that of poetry or art than science or mathematics. I do so for two reasons. First, (...) because it reveals just how far Macdonald’s meta- philosophical views diverged from those of many of her contemporaries. Second, because the discussion in LPP pre-empts recent literature on the nature of philosophical inquiry and the efficacy of philosophical arguments. Indeed, Macdonald’s paper is just as likely to provoke discussion today as it was in the 1950s. (shrink)

In my contribution to this Concise Collection on Margaret Cavendish, I focus on teaching Cavendish’s work in the context of philosophy (and, more specifically, Early Modern Philosophy). I have three aims. First, to explain why teaching women from philosophy’s history is crucially important to the discipline. Second, to outline my own reflections on teaching Cavendish’s philosophy. Third, to defend a specific claim about the benefits of teaching Cavendish to philosophy students; namely, that introducing biographical detail alongside philosophical ideas enriches the (...) learning experience. (shrink)

William Molyneux was born in Dublin, studied in Trinity College Dublin, and was a founding member of the Dublin Philosophical Society (DPS), Ireland’s counterpart to the Royal Society in London. He was a central figure in the Irish intellectual milieu during the Early Modern period and – along with George Berkeley and Edmund Burke – is one of the best-known thinkers to have come out of that context and out of Irish thought more generally. In 1688, when Molyneux wrote the (...) letter to Locke in which he posed the now famous question about a man born blind made to see, he was an active member of the DPS and was on familiar terms with several other key figures in Irish philosophy at the time. For the most part, Irish thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries answered “no” to Molyneux’s question of whether a blind man made to see could distinguish, by sight alone, between a cube and a sphere. (shrink)

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood data collection (...) technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)

‘British Empiricism’ is a name traditionally used to pick out a group of eighteenth-century thinkers who prioritised knowledge via the senses over reason or the intellect and who denied the existence of innate ideas. The name includes most notably John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The counterpart to British Empiricism is traditionally considered to be Continental Rationalism that was advocated by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, all of whom lived in Continental Europe beyond the British Isles and all embraced innate (...) ideas. This article characterizes empiricists more broadly as those thinkers who accept Locke’s Axiom that there is no idea in the mind that cannot be traced back to some particular experience. It includes British-Irish Philosophy from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century. As well as exploring the traditional connections among empiricism and metaphysics and epistemology, it examines how British empiricists dealt with issues in moral philosophy and the existence and nature of God. The article identifies some challenges to the standard understanding of British Empiricism by including early modern thinkers from typically marginalised groups, especially women. Finally, in showing that there is nothing uniquely British about being an empiricist, it examines a particular case study of the eighteenth-century philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo, the first African to receive a doctorate in Europe. (shrink)

Over the last five decades, philosophers of language have looked into the mechanisms for doing things with words. The same attention has not been devoted to how to undo those things, once they have been done. This paper identifies and examines three strategies to make one’s speech acts undone—namely, Annulment, Retraction, and Amendment. In annulling an act, a speaker brings to light its fatal flaws. Annulment amounts to recognizing an act as null, whereas retraction and amendment amount to making it (...) null. Speakers employ retraction to cancel the deontic updates engendered by a given act. They instead use amendment to adjust its degree of strength. I will argue that annulling, retracting, and amending are second-order speech acts, whose felicity conditions vary with the type of illocution they operate on. Undoing is therefore conceived of as a form of doing. Furthermore, I claim that, in calling off our acts, we undo the conventional or illocutionary effects of our words while leaving intact their past causal or perlocutionary outcomes. (shrink)

Data documenting poor understanding among research participants and real-time efforts to assess comprehension in large-scale studies are focusing new attention on informed consent comprehension. Within the context of biobanking consent, we previously convened a multidisciplinary panel to reach consensus about what information must be understood for a prospective participant’s consent to be considered valid. Subsequently, we presented them with data from another study showing that many U.S. adults would fail to comprehend the information the panel had deemed essential. When asked (...) to evaluate the importance of the information again, panelists’ opinions shifted dramatically in the direction of requiring that less information be understood. Follow-up interviews indicated significant uncertainty about defining a threshold of understanding and what should happen when prospective participants are unable to grasp key information. These findings have important implications for urgently needed discussion of whether... (shrink)

This paper investigates the relationship between structural explanation and the New Mechanistic account of explanation. The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, to argue that some phenomena in the domain of fundamental physics, although mechanically brute, are structurally explained; and secondly, by elaborating on the contrast between SE and mechanistic explanation to better clarify some features of SE. Finally, this paper will argue that, notwithstanding their apparently antithetical character, SE and ME can be reconciled within a unified account of (...) general scientific explanation. (shrink)

In 1966, Laura Bohannan wrote her classic essay challenging the supposition that great literary works speak to universal human concerns and conditions and, by extension, that human nature is the same everywhere. Her evidence: the Tiv of West Africa interpret Hamlet differently from Westerners. While Bohannan’s essay implies that cognitive universality and cultural variation are mutually exclusive phenomena, adaptationist theory suggests otherwise. Adaptive problems ("the human condition") and cognitive adaptations ("human nature") are constant across cultures. What differs between (...) cultures is habitat: owing to environmental variation, the means and information relevant to solving adaptive problems differ from place to place. Thus, we find differences between cultures not because human minds differ in design but largely because human habitats differ in resources and history. On this view, we would expect world literature to express both human universals and cultural particularities. Specifically, we should expect to find literary universality at the macro level (e.g., adaptive problems, cognitive adaptations) and literary variation at the micro level (e.g., local solutions to adaptive problems). (shrink)

Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you claim to be true. But what about claiming that p, only to immediately put into question your evidence in support of p? In this paper, we identify and analyse a class of quasi-Moorean constructions, which we label counterevidentials. Although odd, counterevidentials can be accommodated as felicitous attempts to mitigate one’s claim right after making it. We explore how counterevidentials differ from lexicalised mitigation operators, parentheticals, and (...) anaphoric mitigation devices, and consider some cognate non-assertoric constructions. We conclude by exploring the implications of our analysis for theorising about linguistic responsibility, assertion, and lying. (shrink)

This paper sets out to unpack the pragmatic structure of refusal—its illocutionary nature, success conditions, and normative effects. I argue that our ordinary concept of refusal captures a whole family of illocutions, comprising acts such as rejecting, declining, and the like, which share the property of being ‘negative second-turn illocutions’. Only _proper refusals_ (i.e. negative replies to permission requests), I submit, require speaker authority. I construe the ‘refusal family’ as a subclass of the directives-commissives intersection. After defending my view against (...) a number of potential objections, I highlight how a theoretically grounded analysis of refusal is not only of intrinsic value, but may also have significant moral and legal implications. (shrink)

The debate over the propriety of cognitive enhancement evokes both enthusiasm and worry. To gain further insight into the reasons that people may have for endorsing or eschewing pharmacological enhancement, we used empirical tools to explore public attitudes towards PE of twelve cognitive, affective, and social domains. Participants from Canada and the United States were recruited using Mechanical Turk and were randomly assigned to read one vignette that described an individual who uses a pill to enhance a single domain. After (...) reading the vignette, participants were asked how comfortable they were with the individual using the enhancement. People were significantly more comfortable when they read about enhancement of certain CAS domains than others. We found a modest negative correlation between comfort level and the degree to which the PE was perceived as changing core features of the person. We also found a modest correlation between comfort level and the degree to which the PE was perceived as improving success in life. Finally, using a sequential mixed method technique, we found that participants who felt uncomfortable about PE use overwhelmingly focused on a lack of need and, to a lesser degree, expressed concerns about safety; those who felt comfortable about PE use most frequently mentioned the safety of the pill and its ability to provide a positive outcome. The data provide novel insights into public enthusiasms and concerns over the use of PE. (shrink)

Context: I extend the enactive account of loving in romantic relationships that I developed with Hanne De Jaegher to the love of nature. Problem: I challenge a universal conceptualization of love of nature that does not account for the differences that are inherent to nature. As an alternative, I offer a situated account of loving a place as participatory sense-making. However, a question arises: How is it possible to communicate with the other-than-human? Method: I use panpsychist and enactive conceptual tools (...) to better define this situated approach to the love of nature and to reply to the research question. In particular, I focus on Mathews’s “becoming native” and the generative tensions that unfold in a dialectic of encounter when a common language is not shared. Results: The fundamental difference experienced in encountering the other-than-human is generative for building up the human-Earth connection if we let each other be listened to. I describe the ethical dimension that permeates this type of “enactive listening” at the core of a situated account of love of nature. Implications: Love of nature is of paramount importance in our current climate crisis characterized by environmental anxiety, despair, and anger. A situated love of nature emphasizes the importance of community-based local interventions to preserve the Earth. Love, thus understood as a fundamental moral and political power, is a catalyst for environmental activism. Constructivist content: My article links to participatory sense-making as defined by De Jaegher and Di Paolo, and De Jaegher’s loving epistemology. It offers a broader understanding of participatory sense-making that includes the other-than-human. It also introduces the new concept of “enactive listening.”. (shrink)

In 1966, Laura Bohannan wrote her classic essay challenging the supposition that great literary works speak to universal human concerns and conditions and, by extension, that human nature is the same everywhere. Her evidence: the Tiv of West Africa interpret Hamlet differently from Westerners. While Bohannan’s essay implies that cognitive universality and cultural variation are mutually exclusive phenomena, adaptationist theory suggests otherwise. Adaptive problems ("the human condition") and cognitive adaptations ("human nature") are constant across cultures. What differs between (...) cultures is habitat: owing to environmental variation, the means and information relevant to solving adaptive problems differ from place to place. Thus, we find differences between cultures not because human minds differ in design but largely because human habitats differ in resources and history. On this view, we would expect world literature to express both human universals and cultural particularities. Specifically, we should expect to find literary universality at the macro level (e.g., adaptive problems, cognitive adaptations) and literary variation at the micro level (e.g., local solutions to adaptive problems). (shrink)

In 1966, Laura Bohannan wrote her classic essay challenging the supposition that great literary works speak to universal human concerns and conditions and, by extension, that human nature is the same everywhere. Her evidence: the Tiv of West Africa interpret Hamlet differently from Westerners. While Bohannan’s essay implies that cognitive universality and cultural variation are mutually exclusive phenomena, adaptationist theory suggests otherwise. Adaptive problems ("the human condition") and cognitive adaptations ("human nature") are constant across cultures. What differs between (...) cultures is habitat: owing to environmental variation, the means and information relevant to solving adaptive problems differ from place to place. Thus, we find differences between cultures not because human minds differ in design but largely because human habitats differ in resources and history. On this view, we would expect world literature to express both human universals and cultural particularities. Specifically, we should expect to find literary universality at the macro level (e.g., adaptive problems, cognitive adaptations) and literary variation at the micro level (e.g., local solutions to adaptive problems). (shrink)

Emotions ( pathè) such as anger, fear, shame, and envy, but also pity, wonder, love and friendship have long been underestimated in Plato’s philosophy. The aim of Emotions in Plato is to provide a consistent account of the role of emotions in Plato’s psychology, epistemology, ethics and political theory. The volume focuses on three main issues: taxonomy of emotions, their epistemic status, and their relevance for the ethical and political theory and practice. This volume, which is the first edited volume (...) entirely dedicated to emotions in Plato’s philosophy, shows how Plato, in many aspects, was positively interested in these affective states in order to support the rule of reason. (shrink)

Within the current mainstream research in the foundations of physics, much attention has been turned to the program of Axiomatic Reconstruction of Quantum Theory in terms of Information-Theoretic principles (ARQIT). ARQIT aims at finding a few general information-theoretic principles from which, once translated into mathematical terms, one can formally derive the structure of quantum theory. This chapter explores the role of mechanistic explanations and mathematical explanations (in particular, structural explanations) within ARQIT. With such considerations as a point of departure, we (...) investigate how ARQIT contributes to the explanation of quantum phenomena, and the possible prospects for explanations provided by mechanical interpretations of quantum theory. (shrink)

The idea at the core of the New Mechanical account of explanation can be summarized in the claim that explaining means showing ‘how things work’. This simple motto hints at three basic features of Mechanistic Explanation (ME): ME is an explanation-how, that implies the description of the processes underlying the phenomenon to be explained and of the entities that engage in such processes. These three elements trace a fundamental contrast with the view inherited from Hume and later from strict logical (...) empiricism (see Creath 2017), focused on epistemic and formal features of science and according to which issues concerning the kind of entities and processes that lie within a theory’s domain are extraneous to science and belong instead to ontology or metaphysics. Philosophers belonging to the new mechanical philosophy believe that the received view of scientific explanation (Hempel 2001), pivoting on the notion of law of nature, overshadows this insight. Since its origin in the 17th century, mechanical philosophy aimed to explain natural phenomena by reducing them to mechanisms. Traditional attempts to define the concept of mechanism involved the identification of a limited set of fundamental elements as, for instance, contact action, action at a distance, inertial motion (see e.g. Hesse 2005), and, more recently, transmission of a mark, or of a conserved quantity (see Frisch, this volume). The new mechanical philosophy rejects this austere characterization of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation and aim at providing a novel, philosophically rigorous explication of the concept of mechanism and of its role in scientific explanation and practice. ME has been adopted with profit in philosophy of special sciences (for instance in biomedical sciences, e.g. in the explanation of chemical transmission at synapses ((Machamer, Darden and Craver 2000), MDC henceforth); but also in social sciences, e.g. the three kinds of social mechanisms in Coleman’s analysis of Max Weber’s account of the role of the Protestant ethic in the growth of capitalism (Hedström and Swedberg 1998)), where exceptionless regularities are rarely ever found. In physics, it is generally possible to formulate explanations in law-based form, with the result that the plurality of explanatory forms might be overlooked. This should not come as a surprise, given that physics was the main inspiration for logical empiricists, and, in particular, Newtonian physics was a template for Hempel’s formulation of the covering law model. However, this situation is unfortunate, since, we will argue, knowing how things work is often part of the explanation of physical phenomena. In this chapter, we provide an introduction to the basic features of ME, with specific focus on its application to physics (section 1). The main part of the chapter is devoted to the defence of two theses: on the one hand, some domains of physics are not compatible with mechanistic reasoning and explanation (section 2); on the other hand, a comprehensive account of explanation in physics can’t dispense with ME (section 3). (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which Axiomatic Reconstructions of Quantum Theory in terms of Information-Theoretic principles can contribute to explaining and understanding quantum phenomena, as well as to study their explanatory limitations. This is achieved in part by offering an account of the kind of explanation that axiomatic reconstructions of Quantum Theory provide, and re-evaluating the epistemic status of the program in light of this explanation. As illustrative case studies, I take Clifton's, Bub's and (...) Halvorson's characterization theorem and Popescu's and Rohrlich's toy models, and their explanatory contribution with respect to quantum nonlocality. On the one hand, I argue that ARQITs can aspire to provide genuine explanations of quantum nonlocality. On the other hand, I argue that such explanations cannot rule out a mechanical quantum theory. (shrink)

Progress in addiction science is hampered by disagreements and ambiguity around its core construct: addiction. Addiction Ontology (AddictO) offers a path to a solution of the kind that has addressed similar problems in other areas of science: a set of clearly and uniquely defined entities to which terms such as ‘addiction’, addictive disorder’ and ‘substance dependence ’can be applied for ease of reference while recognizing that it is the construct definitions and their unique IDs that are central, not the terms.

This paper presents the contribution of the pragmatic sociology of critical capacities to the understanding of environmental conflicts. In the field of 'environmental valuation', nowadays colonised by economics, the approach of plural modes (or 'regimes') of engagement provides a sociological understanding of the unequal power of conflicting 'languages of valuation'. This frame entails a shift from 'values' to 'modes of valuation', and links modes of valuation to modes of practical engagement and coordination with the surrounding environment. Different social sources of (...) incommensurability are thus detected and reframed as critical tension within and among modes of human coordination with the environment. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article is concerned with manifestations of the memory of the Paris Commune in Britain in the decades after 1871. It is about how the Commune was incorporated into the mythology, the canon, of British socialism, and how the memory of the Commune furnished British socialism with powerful and useful symbols. In highlighting the ways in which the events of 1871 captured the British socialist imagination, what follows shows how, despite its oft-emphasised insularity, British socialism was made through the (...) incorporation and appropriation of both native and foreign ideas, symbols, and traditions. The powerful mythologies and symbolism associated with the Commune were taken up by socialists in Britain, and highlight an important intersection between British and French political cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (shrink)

Meta-governance is Earth system governance for dealing with the global commons. This article develops a whole network approach to meta-governance to explore the potential for collective action for sustainable development by a loosely coupled network of networks. Networked corporate social responsibility governance has emerged around corporate sustainability and responsibility in the first years of the 21st century. Growing agreements and interactions among CSR initiatives suggest the development, structure, and governance of networked CSR governance as a network that can analytically be (...) viewed as a whole and as a platform for learning about systemic change. Using the evolution of CSR initiatives from about 1990 to 2014, the authors differentiate four developmental stages: independent and fragmented multistakeholder networks as CSR governance, collaborative CSR governance, networked CSR governance, and integrated networked CSR governance. The authors then present a framework to analyze networked CSR governance as a whole network experimenting with meta-governance. (shrink)