Summary A number of elite boys? schools in England have admitted girls for over 30 years, some thereby becoming mixed schools. In other schools, girls remain a very small minority. This paper focuses upon prospectuses from the latter type of school, arguing that prospectuses are particularly valuable as a basis for judging schools? policies and practices in their own terms. The researchers ask questions about the nature of this form of ?co-education?, particularly as it affects girls? educational and social opportunities. (...) On balance, the prospectuses paint a picture of boys? schools which happen to have girls in them rather than of schools whose policies and practices have become genuinely co-educational. (shrink)

Michael A PetersBeijing Normal UniversityChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 and a ‘stable release’ on February 13, 2023. It belongs to OpenAI’s GPT-3 family (generativ...

A good measure of the real significance attached to a social practice is the number of people who worry about the practice's significance being misrepresented. Perhaps we are never quite told what makes the practice so significant; but if the misrepresented social practice is science, then, so argue the four books under review, this is a cause for some alarm. These books differ in almost every respect except that their authors all believe that somebody is misrepresenting the contemporary state of (...) sci- ence to the public. The range of culprits is bewildering but not entirely surprising. Gerot Böhme, a philosopher of science of the Frankfurt School, hints at a collectively self-inflicted wound, as demonstrated by his fondness for the first person plural. Stephen Cole, a Mertonian sociologist of science, lays most of the blame on members of the rival sociological school, the constructivists. Mary Midgley, that rare philosopher who tries to draw more general meaning from recent scientific developments, finds fault with prestigious scientists who attempt a similar feat but ineptly. Finally, Milton Rothman, a physicist who seems to have spent more time fathoming the minds of creationists than the mysteries of quarks, levels an omnibus charge against the forces of "spiritualism"that have continually enlarged the gap between public and scientific understandings of reality. Most of these authors indulge in a certain rhetoric of de- mystification. The exception is Cole, whose matter-of-fact style obscures the source of heat generated by the others' rhetoric. To tackle what is at stake here, I will present Midgley as a foil to Rothman and then use Rothman to introduce Bohme, all of which will serve to foil Cole. (shrink)

Schmitz, whose insightful crudition matches that of his subject, traces the development of Wojtyla's project from the plays he wrote in the 1940s for the underground "theater of the living word," through his assimilation of the philosophical tradition as professor of ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin, then through the maturation of his own thought as Archbishop of Krakow and active participant in Vatican II, and into its flowering in the remarkable series of papal documents beginning with his Wednesday (...) talks on Genesis and first encyclical, The Redeemer of Man. Schmitz assesses the effort to integrate contemporary phenomenology into the metaphysical tradition as depending on several careful distinctions. The first is between a Husserlian bracketing of being and an algebraic one. Another is between phenomenology as a technique that presupposes a realistic metaphysics, and as an effort to establish realism that must fail because the intended object of consciousness is still consciousness itself, not an extramental world. A third is between value as a felt good and goodness as coincident with being. Only this latter allows for objective moral norms, for moral goodness that coincides with the existential fullness of human nature, and for moral obligation. The answer to the question "Why be moral?" thus has its solid answer in the potentiality of human nature for fuller, self-transcendent being. (shrink)

The thought of Edith Stein on woman brings out the fuller sense of the metaphysical notion of the being of woman. Stein’s position is that woman’s nature as biological mother affects her whole being. Woman has two essential characteristics: attraction to the personal and attraction to wholeness. It is woman’s emotions that account for these distinctly feminine traits. Woman is distinguished by her empathetic perception of persons, an intuitive grasp of a person’s being and value as “person”. Stein describes (...) empathy as a clear awareness of another person, not simply of the content of his experience, but of his experience of that content. In empathy, one takes the place of the other without becoming strictly identical to him. One does not just understand the experiences of the other, but takes them on as one’s own. Stein reinterprets traditional readings of woman, challenging claims to the woman as the “weaker sex” and to the emotions as inferior to reason. (shrink)

At its inception, the training model in the Graduate School of Clinical Psychology at George Fox University was informed by the approach inaugurated at Fuller Theological Seminary School of Psychology in the 1960s. In the original model, training in Christian religion/spirituality and theology accompanied training in professional psychology. In the interim, our culture, psychological knowledge, perceived psychological needs, and training programs have changed greatly. Here we report changes in religion/spirituality training and integration over the last two decades. We describe (...) our current spiritual formation structure and process, and program evaluation efforts. Over the past several years the GSCP has shifted from relying mainly on a cognitive approach involving Bible and theology courses toward a more personal-experiential approach that includes team teaching of the theology and religion courses, an individualized spiritual direction experience spread over two years, and more intentional integration of R/s and spiritual formation components throughout the program. We anticipate this may be an ongoing area for further development in coming years as we seek to meet the needs of a changing student body with greater R/s diversity and largely postmodern worldviews. (shrink)

Commentators frequently point to the involvement of biomedicine and bio-science in the objectification and commodification of human body parts, and the consequent potential for violation of personal, social and community meanings. Through a study of UK media coverage of controversies associated with the removal of body parts and human materials from children, we argue that an exclusive emphasis on the role of medicine and the bio-sciences in the commodification of human materials ignores the important role played by commercially motivated mass (...) media organizations. Analysis of the language of news reports covering the period of the organ retention controversies in the UK reveals the ways in which the mass media contribute to the commodification of body parts by recruiting them for use in the manufacture of a media scandal. This is achieved through use of horror language, the fetishization of certain body parts, emphasis on the fragmentation of the body, and the use of a variety of rhetorical devices to convey enormity and massive scale. Media participation in the commodification of children's body parts has profound implications for practices and policies in relation to use of body parts, and has significantly influenced the governmental regulation of science and medicine. The role of mass media deserves fuller recognition by theorists of body commodification. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics ed. by Christian Scharen and Anna Marie VigenJohn KiessEthnography as Christian Theology and Ethics Edited by Christian Scharen and Anna Marie Vigen New York: Continuum, 2011. 304 pp. $29.95Over the past decade, an increasing number of Christian theologians and ethicists have turned to ethnographic methodologies in order to attend more closely to the complexities of lived faith and the bodily character of (...) theological knowledge. For those wishing to get a glimpse of what this looks like in practice, what its implications might be for theology and ethics, and how one might set off and do it oneself, this book is an excellent introduction.Editors Christian Scharen and Aana Marie Vigen organize the book into three parts. The first part orients readers to the use of ethnography in cultural anthropology and reviews the recent “ethnographic turn” in Christian theology and ethics. This is followed by a brief survey of theological critiques of social science and a defense of ethnography against these critiques. Scharen and Vigen argue that the use of ethnography, far from compromising the integrity of theology, has the potential to renew and enrich the discipline through the incorporation of long-overlooked forms of local wisdom. As a method attuned to practical, often noncognitive forms of knowledge, ethnography can help scholars move away from an exclusive focus on texts to a deeper consideration of the theological and ethical claims “embedded and embodied” in the lives and practices of everyday communities (xxii). [End Page 190]Naturally, the best argument for such an approach is exemplification. The second part of the book presents an impressive collection of ethnographic work from contexts as diverse as Chicago, Atlanta, Oregon, Chiapas, Nairobi, and Gulu. Contributors employ ethnography to compare pastoral leadership in two African American churches, track grassroots dissent on the issue of contraception among women living with HIV/AIDS, and reimagine the debate on physician-assisted suicide from the perspective of the poor and disabled. Particularly effective are Vicini’s exploration of the liturgical response of local churches to the legacy of violence in Chiapas and Whitmore’s critical examination of his own place as a white researcher in Northern Uganda, which makes hauntingly transparent the ethical complexities of the research process itself.The final part of the book offers a more practical how-to guide for those looking to do ethnography, covering such issues as institutional review board approval, interview methodology, and accountability to research subjects. This part, like the rest of the book, will be a gift for graduate students facing down a dissertation proposal or scholars contemplating the use of ethnography in their work. Admirably reflexive, vigilantly attentive to issues of power and privilege, and articulate about the ways that research can be a form of discipleship, one can only hope this book will succeed in its aim of encouraging other scholars to “go and do likewise.”Those who have already incorporated ethnographic techniques in their scholarship or who are looking for a fuller articulation of the relation between ethnography, ethics, and theology may find themselves less satisfied with the book. Its treatment of existing options (virtue ethics, Catholic social ethics) and thinkers (David Ford, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Milbank) is thin, and a number of key figures in the broader story of the ethnographic turn in theology (Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Hans Frei) are conspicuously missing. Their absence is felt particularly strongly in the unanswered questions the volume provokes, including how to account for God’s difference when appeals to experience become primary (Barth), and how to avoid positivism when appeals to the “reality” of the church become the point of departure for ecclesiology (Bonhoeffer).Such provocations, however, are reminders that we are still at the very early stages of the ethnographic turn in Christian theology and ethics. If this volume is any indication, the future of this exciting intersection of thought and practice looks very promising indeed. [End Page 191]John KiessLoyola University MarylandCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Classical Rhetoric and the Promotion of the New WorldAndrew FitzmauriceFor many years historians have characterized the relation between the Old World and the New as an encounter in which the New was assimilated to the Old. There is a striking uniformity in the reasons given for this process. It is argued that in their “discovery” the Europeans encountered a world which was radically different from their own and for (...) which they did not possess the concepts to provide a true account. The only available descriptive tools were the categories of European experience. I shall argue that this historical characterization is unsupported by the first English representations of the New World. While it is true that the New World was represented in terms familiar to English audiences, the reason for this translation was dramatically different from that given by historians. The process of conversion to Old World values arises not from an epistemic shock but from the psychology of persuasion found in classical and humanist rhetoric.The purpose of this essay is not to superimpose a new model for under-standing the interaction between Europe and the New World but rather to contribute to recent challenges to precisely the idea that there was a collective European “response” to the New World. Historians who have stressed that the translation of the new into the familiar was imposed by the limits of the European episteme have based these interpretations largely upon accounts of the Spanish conquest, ethnography, and natural history. It has recently been stressed that Europeans differed on the basis of their nationality in their understanding of the issues raised by the conquest of the New World. 1 In this paper I shall argue that the genre of intellectual engagement was equally important to that understanding. [End Page 221]In his seminal lectures The Old World and the New J. H. Elliott compares the Europeans’ discovery of the New World with the response of the Chinese of the T’ang dynasty to the conquest of Nam Viet. Like the Europeans, the “minds and imaginations” of the Chinese “were preconditioned, so that they saw what they expected to see, and ignored or rejected those features of life in the southern lands for which they were mentally unprepared.” 2 Elliott is careful to observe that “what Europeans saw” on the “far side of the Atlantic” inevitably would “depend on the kind of Europeans involved.” 3 From the example of the Chinese experience of Nam Viet, however, he suggests that Europeans shared in a process through which the New World was assimilated, and he argues that this was epistemic: “it may well be that the human mind has an inherent need to fall back on the familiar object and the standard image, in order to come to terms with the shock of the unfamiliar.” 4Stephen Greenblatt has described this process as rhetorical. He stresses that Europeans possessed “many different and conflicting ways of seeing and describing the world” but claims that “the variety is not infinite,” arguing that Europeans shared “a lumbering, jerry built, but immensely powerful mimetic machinery.” 5 “Wonder,” he argues, is “the central figure in the initial European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference.” 6 For Greenblatt the rhetorical process by which wonder reifies and appropriates the alien arises from an epistemic crisis; that is, wonder is provoked by the “presence of radical difference.” 7 [End Page 222]Underlying many of these accounts, as Mary Fuller has recently observed, is the sense of a New World outside language, a sense that “there is something self-evident, unambiguous, unified on the other side of language.” 8 Fuller explores the rhetoric of New World narratives by demonstrating that this referent is always absent and that the “other” is inside language.For the majority of authors writing in English about the New World, however, it is not the presence or absence of the “other” that produces their conversion of the alien to the familiar. Most Elizabethan and Jacobean tracts concerning the New World were promotional: their mode was persuasion. The tracts were written in terms of the classical and humanist art... (shrink)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. Among Those Who helped greatly in the initial stages of this project by making constructive suggestions on my first "caring" papers are Nick Burbules, William Doll, Bruce Fuller, Brian Hill, William Pinar, Mary Anne ...

Plato famously promised to complement the Sophist and the Statesman with another work on a third sort of expert, the philosopher--but we do not have this final dialogue. Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher, but did not write it, in order to stimulate his audience and encourage his readers to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato's investigation (...) of knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, the second part of which presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. Gill contends that the dialogues leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher's method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato's philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato's exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose. (shrink)

Admirers of Whitehead who know him best have suggested that Wordsworth had possibly a greater influence upon him than anyone except Plato. Nowhere apparently has Whitehead admitted such an influence, as he has that of Plato and Locke and that of William James, Bergson, and Alexander among traditional and contemporary philosophers But he had a predilection for poetry, and attributes to the great poets philosophical importance. They capture uniquely, he says, “a fragrance of experience”; and “… express deep intuitions of (...) mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact.” As observers of nature both Wordsworth and Whitehead ascribed to animate and inanimate life a degree of feeling or satisfaction in the course of being and becoming. Like the poet, Whitehead must have found “joy in widest commonalty spread.” The multiplication table, he noted at one time, “… is no good to the realist. It shuts him up with Plato's ideas out of space and out of time” when “… like Wordsworth and the rest of us he wants to hear the throstle sing.”. (shrink)

In the Philippines, all transplant centers are mandated by the Department of Health (DOH) to have a Hospital Transplant Ethics Committee (HTEC) to ensure that donations are altruistic, voluntary and free of coercion/commercial transactions. This study was undertaken primarily to describe the organizational and functional profile of existing HTECs and identify areas for improvement. This is a descriptive cross‐sectional study. There was variation in their logistical arrangements (support from hospital, filing systems, office spaces), operations (length and frequency of meetings, number (...) of referrals) and membership (composition, qualifications, occupation, training). The approval rate for donor‐recipient pairs is high with the majority of cases made by living non‐related donors. Appropriate reasons were cited for rejection. The perception of HTECs is that they are competent and confident in their decision‐making. However, there is a need to standardize HTEC composition, provide operating procedures and additional training which can be done by the DOH. (shrink)

In _Michael Polanyi and His Generation_, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political (...) events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare. At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science. (shrink)

Mary Midgley argues in her powerful new book that far from being the opposite of science, myth is a central part of it. In brilliant prose, she claims that myths are neither lies nor mere stories but a network of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.

This is the first feminist special issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Introduction written by Brand [Weiser] and Korsmeyer with essays by Hilde Hein, Paul Mattick, Jr., Timothy Gould, Joanne B. Waugh, Joseph Margolis, Mary Devereaux, Noel Carroll, Flo Leibowitz, Anita Silvers, Elizabeth Ann Dobie, Renee Cox, and Ellen Handler Spitz. A fuller publication from Indiana University Press followed in 1995 edited by Brand [Weiser] and Korsmeyer entitled, Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics.

Bergin, Mary As an Australian it is a great honour to receive this award as Australian Humanist of the Year. It is often thought, mistakenly, that Humanism is somehow contrary to or opposed to religion, but of course it is not. It is simply a belief in rational and humane tolerance, and it holds that people should not be made miserable by cruel politicians or primitive moralists or superstitious beliefs. Humanists have succeeded to some considerable extent in the West (...) in removing ancient prejudices - for example against the LGBT community. We don't seem to have succeeded, to judge from the latest appointments in the NSW government, in refuting the strange idea that Christian politicians are less corrupt than atheists. (shrink)

Between 1937 and 1940 the Taxonomic Principles Committee of the newly-founded Association for the Study of Systematics in Relation to General Biology (later the Systematics Association) attempted to define the relationship between evolution and taxonomy. The people who took part in the discussion were W.T. Calman, C.R.P. Diver, J.S.L. Gilmour, J.S. Huxley, W.D. Lang, J.R. Norman, R. Melville, O.W. Richards, M.A. Smith, T.A. Sprague, H. Hamshaw Thomas, W.B. Turrill, B.P. Uvarov, A.F. Watkins, E.I. White, and A.J. Wilmott. Most of the (...) botanists asserted that taxonomy was a practical matter to be kept distinct from phylogenetic speculation, and most of the zoologists insisted that taxonomists must strive to represent evolution if they wished to be scientific. The disagreement seemed to be hardening rather than approaching compromise when World War Two stopped the committee's work. (shrink)

D.T. Suzuki. A Biography. A. Irwin Switzer III. Edited and enlarged by John Snelling. The Buddhist Society, London 1985. 63 pp. I11.

Imaging Wisdom, Seeing and Knowing in the Art of Indian Buddhism. Jacob N. Kinnard. Curzon Press, Richmond 1999. xi, 210 pp., 16 figures. £40.00. ISBN 0-7007-1083-3.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Ornaments are the most common and ubiquitous art form of the Late Pleistocene. This fact suggests a common, fundamental function somewhat different to other kinds of Paleolithic art. While the capacity for artistic expression could be considerably older than the record of preserved art would suggest, beads signal a novel development in the efficiency and flexibility of visual communication technology. The Upper Paleolithic was a period of considerable regional differentiation in material culture, yet there is remarkable consistency in the dominant (...) shapes and sizes of Paleolithic beads over more than 25,000 years and across vast areas, even though they were made from diverse materials and, in the case of mollusc shells, diverse taxonomic families. Cultural and linguistic continuity cannot explain the meta-pattern. The evidence indicates that widespread adoption of beads of redundant form was not only about local and subregional communication of personal identity or group affinity, but also an expansion in the geographic scale of social networks. The conformity of the beads grew spontaneously and in a self-organizing manner from individuals’ interest in tapping into the network as a means for spreading social and environmental risk. (shrink)

One hundred years after Gestalt views first took hold our understanding of how perceptual processes organize the visual field into objects and their local backgrounds has progressed substantially. We now know that in addition to the image-based properties that the Gestalt psychologists identified as relevant, a myriad of other image-based factors influence figure–ground organization, as do subjective factors such as past experience, attention, and intentions. Moreover, properties of grounds as well as properties of figures play a role. The recent use (...) of indirect measures and brain imaging techniques has revealed that there is much more processing of the regions ultimately perceived as grounds than is supposed in traditional approaches, and that competition and feedback are involved in figure–ground organization. These recent advances offer great promise for uncovering the mechanisms that organize the visual field into figures and grounds. (shrink)