This article reconsiders a graffitied riddle from Pompeii (CIL 4.1877). It argues that slavery is one possible dimension of the puzzle, and that acknowledging the existence of slavery in this text testifies to the potential of Pompeian graffiti as a source for overlooked social histories.

This article revisits a famous graffiti poem from Pompeii (CIL 4.9123). It argues that the poem is both more erotically charged and more cleverly metaliterary than previously recognized; and that this reading of the poem offers new evidence for the literary richness of Pompeii's graffiti culture.

By the 1940s, the Municipal Council of Nairobi had enacted a host of By-Laws to control the presence of Africans, especially women, and had set up several agencies to implement them. Consequently, women street vendors were not only denied access to legal trade, but remained unwanted in the town except under very special circumstances. Nonetheless, pushed by their adversity, a number of them resorted to illegal hawking and demonstrated their resilience against the odds. However, as the hawkers’ earnings subsidised the (...) colonial low wage migrant labour system, it became difficult for the colonial administration in Nairobi to resolutely stamp out their activities, especially in Eastlands. Besides, by the end of the 1940s, the Council’s fight against hawking had slackened owing to unsustainable expenses. This paper examines the effect of colonial repression of African women street traders in Nairobi’s Eastlands area in the 1940s. Using the Gender and Development perspective along with data mainly from libraries, archives and oral sources, it interrogates the women’s attractions to Nairobi and the logic behind their street trading activities. It also examines the colonial dynamics that exploited the attitudes and beliefs of African male elders to validate the colonial government’s gender marginalisation policies against women, particularly the hawkers. The paper concludes that the gender-based constraints against African women traders notwithstanding, propelled by need, the women irrepressibly struggled to find space in the prosperous economy of Nairobi in the 1940s. Keywords Racism, gender discrimination, patriarchy, street trading, hawkers, licensing. (shrink)

Background:Nursing as an ethical practice requires courage to be moral, taking tough stands for what is right, and living by one’s moral values. Nurses need moral courage in all areas and at all levels of nursing. Along with new interest in virtue ethics in healthcare, interest in moral courage as a virtue and a valued element of human morality has increased. Nevertheless, what the concept of moral courage means in nursing contexts remains ambiguous.Objective:This article is an analysis of the concept (...) of moral courage in nursing.Design:Rodgers’ evolutionary method of concept analysis provided the framework to conduct the analysis.Data sources:The literature search was carried out in September 2015 in six databases: PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, Web of Science, PsycINFO, and The Philosopher’s Index. The following key words were used: “moral” OR “ethical” AND “courage” OR “strength” AND “nurs*” with no time limit. After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, 31 studies were included in the final analysis.Ethical considerations:This study was conducted according to good scientific guidelines.Results:Seven core attributes of moral courage were identified: true presence, moral integrity, responsibility, honesty, advocacy, commitment and perseverance, and personal risk. Antecedents were ethical sensitivity, conscience, and experience. Consequences included personal and professional development and empowerment.Discussion and conclusion:This preliminary clarification warrants further exploring through theoretical and philosophical literature, expert opinions, and empirical research to gain validity and reliability for its application in nursing practice. (shrink)

Empathy is a form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective‐taking. It is also the unique source of a particular form of understanding, which I will call humane understanding. Humane understanding consists in the direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions. This apprehension is an epistemic good whose ethical significance is multifarious. In this paper, I focus on elaborating the sense in which humane understanding of others is non‐instrumentally valuable to its recipients. People have a complex but profound need to be (...) humanely understood. Because we respond to others’ very real need when we pursue this sort of understanding of their emotions, empathy is best understood as itself a way of caring, rather than just a means to promote other caring behavior. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview, Dave Elder-Vass discusses his main contributions to critical realist theory over two decades. In the first half, he explains his early work on emergence, agency, str...

In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke articulates a form of scepticism about meaning. Even though there is considerable disagreement among critics about the reasoning in which the sceptic engages, there is little doubt that he seeks to offer constraints for an adequate account of the facts that constitute the meaningfulness of expressions. Many of the sceptic's remarks concern the nature of the guidance involved in a speaker's meaningful uses of expressions. I propose that we understand those remarks (...) as seeking to give shape to the idea that to use an expression under the guidance of one's understanding is to have a reason for that use, which one's understanding allows one to discern and act on. Any philosophical elucidation of meaning must adequately capture the rational nature of our linguistic acts. (shrink)

Controlled Human Infection Model (CHIM) research involves the infection of otherwise healthy participants with disease often for the sake of vaccine development. The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasised the urgency of enhancing CHIM research capability and the importance of having clear ethical guidance for their conduct. The payment of CHIM participants is a controversial issue involving stakeholders across ethics, medicine and policymaking with allegations circulating suggesting exploitation, coercion and other violations of ethical principles. There are multiple approaches to payment: reimbursement, wage (...) payment and unlimited payment. We introduce a new Payment for Risk Model, which involves paying for time, pain and inconvenience and for risk associated with participation. We give philosophical arguments based on utility, fairness and avoidance of exploitation to support this. We also examine a cross-section of the UK public and CHIM experts. We found that CHIM participants are currently paid variable amounts. A representative sample of the UK public believes CHIM participants should be paid approximately triple the UK minimum wage and should be paid for the risk they endure throughout participation. CHIM experts believe CHIM participants should be paid more than double the UK minimum wage but are divided on the payment for risk. The Payment for Risk Model allows risk and pain to be accounted for in payment and could be used to determine ethically justifiable payment for CHIM participants.Although many research guidelines warn against paying large amounts or paying for risk, our empirical findings provide empirical support to the growing number of ethical arguments challenging this status quo. We close by suggesting two ways (value of statistical life or consistency with risk in other employment) by which payment for risk could be calculated. (shrink)

An important argument against removing donor anonymity is that such state-mandated policies might validate bionormative attitudes about the importance of genetic relatedness in families. Bionormative attitudes can be unjustly disparaging and harmful to a wide range of families including donor-conceived, adopted, and single-parent families. However, studies show that the majority of donor-conceived individuals want donor anonymity removed. This paper explores the question of how to weigh these desires for knowing the donor—which may be grounded in biased and bionormative assumptions—against the (...) competing concern that removing donor anonymity perpetuates attitudes that may be harmful. (shrink)

In this article, the authors assess the still limited literature on domestic violence among immigrant women in major receiving countries so as to begin delineating a framework to explain how immigrant-specific factors exacerbate the already vulnerable position—as dictated by class, gender, and race—of immigrant women in domestic violence situations. First, a review of this scholarship shows that the incidence of domestic violence is not higher than it is in the native population but rather that the experiences of immigrant women in (...) domestic violence situations are often exacerbated by their specific position as immigrants, such as limited host-language skills, isolation from and contact with family and community, lack of access to dignified jobs, uncertain legal statuses, and experiences with authorities in their origin countries. The authors then examine the various responses at the national and local community levels to this issue in receiving countries. (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Ginsborg's attempt to address the challenge raised by Saul Kripke's meaning sceptic. I start by identifying the two constraints that the sceptic claims must be met by a satisfactory answer. Then I try to show that Ginsborg's proposal faces a dilemma. In the first instance, I argue that it is able to meet the second constraint, but not the first. I then amend the proposal in order to make room for the first constraint. I go on (...) to argue that, under this new interpretation, it cannot meet the second constraint. (shrink)

Several studies have illuminated how processing manual action verbs (MaVs) affects the programming or execution of concurrent hand movements. Here, to circumvent key confounds in extant designs, we conducted the first assessment of motor–language integration during handwriting—a task in which linguistic and motoric processes are co‐substantiated. Participants copied MaVs, non‐manual action verbs, and non‐action verbs as we collected measures of motor programming and motor execution. Programming latencies were similar across conditions, but execution was faster for MaVs than for the other (...) categories, regardless of whether word meanings were accessed implicitly or explicitly. In line with the Hand‐Action‐Network Dynamic Language Embodiment (HANDLE) model, such findings suggest that effector‐congruent verbs can prime manual movements even during highly automatized tasks in which motoric and verbal processes are naturally intertwined. Our paradigm opens new avenues for fine‐grained explorations of embodied language processes. (shrink)

Are extremists (incels, neo-nazis, and the like) characteristically answerable for their moral and political convictions? Is it necessary to offer them reasoned arguments against their views, or is it instead appropriate to bypass that kind of engagement? Discussion of these questions has centered around the putative epistemic autonomy of extremists. The parties to this discussion have assumed that epistemic autonomy is solely (or at least primarily) a matter of epistemic independence, of believing based on epistemic reasons one has assessed for (...) oneself. Here, though, I make the case for shifting the terms of the debate. Epistemic independence is not sufficient to make one answerable for one’s beliefs. Epistemic autonomy, in the sense that matters for answerability, is also a matter of what I call epistemic receptivity. Extremists may be fiercely epistemic independent, but that commitment is characteristically paired with severe deficiencies in empathic orientation. Severe deficiencies in empathic orientation undermine extremists’ ability to adequately engage with competing evaluative perspectives, and thus compromise extremists’ epistemic autonomy. I consider how this conclusion should inform our thinking about what we owe to extremists. (shrink)

This article discusses the triage response to the COVID-19 delta variant surge of 2021. One issue that distinguishes the delta wave from earlier surges is that by the time it became the predominant strain in the USA in July 2021, safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19 had been available for all US adults for several months. We consider whether healthcare professionals and triage committees would have been justified in prioritising patients with COVID-19 who are vaccinated above those who are unvaccinated (...) in first-order or second-order triage. Given that lack of evidence for a correlation between short-term survival and vaccination, we argue that using vaccination status during first-order triage would be inconsistent with accepted triage standards. We then turn to notions of procedural fairness, equity and desert to argue that that there is also a lack of justification for using vaccination status in second-order triage. In planning for future surges, we recommend that medical institutions base their triage decisions on principles meant to save the most lives, minimise inequity and protect the public’s trust, which for the time being would not be served by the inclusion of vaccination status. (shrink)

Background:Moral courage is required at all levels of nursing. However, there is a need for development of instruments to measure nurses’ moral courage.Objectives:The objective of this study is to develop a scale to measure nurses’ self-assessed moral courage, to evaluate the scale’s psychometric properties, and to briefly describe the current level of nurses’ self-assessed moral courage and associated socio-demographic factors.Research design:In this methodological study, non-experimental, cross-sectional exploratory design was applied. The data were collected using Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale and analysed (...) statistically.Participants and research context:The data were collected from a convenience sample of 482 nurses from four different clinical fields in a major university hospital in Finland for the final testing of the scale. The pilot comprised a convenience sample of 129 nurses.Ethical considerations:The study followed good scientific inquiry guidelines. Ethical approval was obtained from the university ethics committee and permission to conduct the study from the participating hospital.Findings:Psychometric evaluation showed that the 4-sub-scale, 21-item Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale demonstrates good reliability and validity at its current state of development showing a good level of internal consistency for a new scale, the internal consistency values ranging from 0.73 to 0.82 for sub-scales and 0.93 for the total scale, thus well exceeding the recommended Cronbach’s alpha value of >0.7. Principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis supported the theoretical construct of Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale. Face validity and expert panel assessments markedly contributed to the relevance of items in establishing content validity.Discussion and conclusion:Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale provides a new generic instrument intended for measuring nurses’ self-assessed moral courage. Recognizing the importance of moral courage as a part of nurses’ moral competence and its assessment offers possibilities to develop interventions and educational programs for enhancement of moral courage. Research should focus on further validation measures of Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale in international contexts. (shrink)

In this article it will be concluded that systematic menstrual tracking in women’s sport has the potential to cause harm to athletes. Since the ruling of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) in the United States, concerns regarding menstrual health tracking have arisen. Research suggests that the menstrual tracking of female athletes presents potential risks to “women’s autonomy, privacy, and safety in sport” (Casto 2022, 1725). At present, the repercussions of systematic menstrual tracking are particularly under-scrutinized, and this paper (...) seeks to combine novel research in the sport sciences with present ethical debates in the philosophy of sports. Utilizing Beauvoir’s feminist philosophy (2011), this paper argues that systematic menstrual tracking may contribute to the wider system of women’s oppression by exploiting female athletes, as well as enabling the internalization of submissive behaviour in cultures where athletes are expected to comply unquestioningly. Five policy recommendations are made concerning autonomy, informed consent, education, safeguarding and data access. The overall findings of this paper propose that a more in-depth understanding of the links between data, privacy, and the menstrual cycle are required by sports organizations and governing bodies if athletes are to be protected in a future where systematic menstrual tracking is inevitable. (shrink)

Anna Wexler and Laura Specker Sullivan (2023) draw on their positionality as Global North early career neuroethics scholars to initiate a meaningful and timely conversation on Translational Neuroet...

In this article, it will be concluded that the major automotive racing league, Formula 1, is failing in its efforts to be a truly unisex sport. In the current Formula 1 series, there are no female drivers. Although women have never been officially prohibited from competing in Formula 1, there have been fewer than 10 female drivers since its inception. This inquiry focuses on why women drivers have been prevented from securing professional driving positions in Formula 1 and racing on (...) equal terms with men. I argue that there are five major barriers which perpetuate women’s exclusion from this league: historical and current attitudes, assumed physical and mental inferiority, sexualisation, money, and representation and visibility. In this cultural examination, I demonstrate that the situation for women in Formula 1 appears to be bleaker than in other sports that are making progress in their quest for gender equality. However, I also suggest that, despite ethical issues, W Series – a new, women-only, single-seater car racing championship – could potentially motivates positive change for women’s car racing by promoting gender equity through a new league which enables women to improve themselves in a protected category. This article also considers the impact of sex in Formula 1, which is pertinent to the discussion surrounding alleged biological differences. The discussion employs Simone de Beauvoir’s conceptualisation of ‘Otherness’, as well as Helmut Pflugfelder’s account of female embodiment in motorsport. The overall findings are that more focused research is required for gender issues in Formula 1 to be accurately addressed. (shrink)

This study analysed teaching of nurses’ codes of ethics in basic nursing education in Finland. A total of 183 educators and 214 students responded to a structured questionnaire. The data was analysed by SPSS. Teaching of nurses’ codes was rather extensive. The nurse-patient relationship was highlighted. Educators assessed their teaching statistically significantly more extensive than what students’ perceptions were. The use of teaching and evaluation methods was conventional, but differences between the groups concerning the use of these methods were statistically (...) significant. Students’ knowledge of and their ability to apply the codes was mediocre. Most educators and students assessed educators’ knowledge of the codes as adequate for teaching. These educators also taught the codes more extensively and these students perceived the teaching as more extensive. Otherwise educators’ and students’ socio-demographic variables had little association with the teaching. Research should focus on the organization and effectiveness of ethics education, and on educators’ competence. (shrink)

My name, Liv, is the number fifty four in Roman numerals. Is fifty five, then, the sum of me plus my disease? It is a larger number, but the “i” has been taken out. To become something more than myself, and at the same time, something less: that is the essence of receiving a..

This article aims to make an analysis of the cultural and anthropological issues raised by synthetic biology. The novelty of the field makes it relatively difficult to compose a comprehensive analysis, even for philosophers with experience, but who are not familiar with the specifics of the field. The article will follow the synthesis of the models of ethical decision applicable in the field of ethical evaluation of technologies from a cultural and anthropological perspective, their critical analysis and will highlight the (...) limitations of each model, as well as a possible synthesis of a model of ethical evaluation of technologies. Afterwords, it can be decided whether a particular technology - such as those involved in synthetic biology - poses risks to the environment, to those involved in research, to future generations, to humanity as a whole or to present or future ecosystems. (shrink)

The use of perfumes, incense, colognes, and plant and flower essences in Amazonian healing practices is a hallmark feature of vegetalismo, a form of healing in Peru’s Amazonian regions. Sprayed, smoked, rubbed on bodies, and poured in medicinal baths, these odorous tools are vital allies to the curandero for cleansing bodies and spaces, for protection, or to add potency to medicinal plants. Certain perfumes are more common than others, particularly the citrusy Agua de Florida, an 18th Century eau de cologne (...) from the United States. Focusing in on the history of Agua de Florida and its ubiquity in Western Amazonia, I suggest the necessity of a sensory anthropology for exploring the vast healing potential of vegetalismo. Going beyond the visual to consider other sensory experiences lends insight into the various healing mechanisms in Amazonian shamanism that are often overlooked by western epistemologies of health and healing. (shrink)

Are there limits to what it is morally okay to imagine? More particularly, is imaginatively inhabiting morally suspect perspectives something that is off-limits for truly virtuous people? In this paper, I investigate the surprisingly fraught relation between virtue and a familiar form of imaginative perspective taking I call empathy. I draw out a puzzle about the relation between empathy and virtuousness. First, I present an argument to the effect that empathy with vicious attitudes is not, in fact, something that the (...) fully virtuous person can indulge in. At least one prominent way of thinking about the psychology of the virtuous person excludes the possibility that the virtuous could emotionally apprehend the world in a less than virtuous way, and empathizing with vicious outlooks does seem to run afoul of that restriction. Then, I develop an argument that runs in the contrary direction: virtue in fact requires empathy with vicious outlooks, at least in some situations. There is reason to think that a crucial part of being virtuous is ministering effectively to others’ needs, and there is also reason to think that other people may need to be empathized with, even if their emotional outlooks are at least minorly vicious. Finally, I outline two different solutions to this puzzle. Both solutions hold some promise, but they also bring new challenges in their train. (shrink)

In this essay Olivia Newman critically examines two opposing rights claims: the liberal claim that children have a right to become liberal choosers and the fundamentalist claim that children have a right to not become liberal choosers. These positions reflect differing views regarding the value of critically choosing, rather than simply accepting, a way of life. Given their assumptions regarding preference formation, both of these rights appear untenable in light of recent scholarship in psychology: we can neither select a (...) way of life independent of our social milieu, as liberals often imply, nor can we predict how different experiences will affect our preferences, as fundamentalists assume. Nevertheless, each position points to important concerns. Children have a substantive right of exit from constraining social milieus, as liberals purport, as well as a right to respect in public institutions, as fundamentalists insist. When liberals and fundamentalists assert these more modest rights claims, educators can and should strive to satisfy both. (shrink)

A sensibility is, on a rough first pass, an emotional orientation to the world. It shapes how things appear to us, evaluatively speaking. By transfiguring things’ evaluative appearances, a change in sensibility can profoundly alter one’s overall experience of the world. I argue that some forms of sensibility change entail (1) risking one’s knowledge of what experiences imbued with one’s prior sensibility were like, and (2) surrendering one’s grasp on the intelligibility of one’s prior emotional apprehensions. These costs have consequences (...) for Laurie Paul’s ‘problem of transformative experience.’ Paul has argued that when we are poised to become someone new, our inexperience generates problems for authentic choice about our own futures. By reckoning with the epistemic losses involved in sensibility change, I show that this problem must not be confined to novel transformations. Prior experience does not guarantee the knowledge or understanding necessary for choosing authentically (in Paul’s sense). If the problem Paul highlights is indeed a problem _at all,_ then, it is a still more pervasive and intractable one than it has been taken to be. (shrink)

According to the sceptic Saul Kripke envisages in his celebrated book on Wittgenstein on rules and private language, there are no facts about an individual that determine what she means by any given expression. If there are no such facts, the question then is, what justifies the claim that she does use expressions meaningfully? Kripke’s answer, in a nutshell, is that she by and large uses her expressions in conformity with the linguistic standards of the community she belongs to. While (...) Kripke’s sceptical problem has gripped philosophers for over three decades, few, if any, have been satisfied by his proposed solution, and many have struggled to come up with one of their own. The purpose of this paper is to show that a more satisfactory answer to Kripke’s challenge can be developed on the basis of Donald Davidson’s writings on triangulation, the idea of two individuals interacting simultaneously with each other and the world they share. It follows from the triangulation argument that the facts that can be regarded as determining meaning are irreducible. Yet, contra Kripke, they are not mysterious, for the argument does spell out what is needed for an individual’s expressions to be meaningful. (shrink)

Our collective enthusiasm for empathy reflects a sense that it is deeply valuable. I show that empathy bears a complex and surprisingly problematic relation to another social epistemic phenomenon that we have reason to value, namely testimonial trust. My discussion focuses on empathy with and trust in people who are members of one or more oppressed groups. Empathy for oppressed people can be a powerful tool for engendering a certain form of testimonial trust, because there is a tight connection between (...) empathy and a approval of another's outlook. I then argue that the qualities of empathy that make it such a powerful tool for bridging differences and building trust also have a problematic upshot: they make it the case that reliance on empathy will sometimes have a distorting effect upon the ways we extend testimonial trust. (shrink)

The reality-virtuality continuum encompasses a multitude of objects, events and environments ranging from real-world multisensory inputs to interactive multisensory virtual simulators, in which sensory integration can involve very different combinations of both physical and digital inputs. These different ways of stimulating the senses can affect the consumer’s consciousness, potentially altering their judgements and behaviours. In this perspective paper, we explore how technologies such as Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality can, by generating and modifying the human sensorium, act on consumer consciousness. (...) We discuss the potential impact of this altered consciousness for consumer behaviour while, at the same time, considering how it may pave the way for further research. (shrink)

This paper examines the meaningfulness of pointing in great apes. We appeal to Hannah Ginsborg’s conception of primitive normativity, which provides an adequate criterion for establishing whether a response is meaningful, and we attempt to make room for a conception according to which there is no fundamental difference between the responses of human infants and those of other great apes to pointing gestures. This conception is an alternative to Tomasello’s view that pointing gestures and reactions to them reveal a fundamental (...) difference between humans and other apes. (shrink)

Queer Inclusion in Teacher Education explores the challenges and promises of building queer inclusive pedagogy and curriculum into teacher education. Weaving together theory, research findings, and practical "how-to" strategies and materials, it fills an important gap by offering a clear roadmap and resources for influencing the knowledge, beliefs, and actions of faculty working with pre-service teachers. While the book has implications for policy change, most immediately, readers will feel empowered with ideas for faculty development they can implement in their own (...) teacher education programs. Looking at both the politics and practices of teacher education and the ways in which queer issues manifest in schools, it is hopeful in suggesting that if teachers and pre-service teachers can critically reflect on homophobia and heteronormativity, they can begin to think about and relate to queer youth in a different, more positive and inclusive way. A Companion Website [http: //queerinclusion.com] with additional activities and materials for teacher educators and faculty development and a practical guide enhances the usefulness of the book. (shrink)

Professional codes of ethics are regarded as elements of nurses' ethical knowledge base and consequently part of their ethics education. However, research focusing on these codes from an educational viewpoint is scarce. This study explored the need and applicability of nursing codes of ethics in modern health care, their importance in the nursing ethics curriculum, and the need for development of their teaching. A total of 183 Finnish nurse educators and 212 nursing students answered three structured questions, with an opportunity (...) to justify their responses, and one open-ended question. Descriptive statistics and content analysis were used to analyse the data. The results suggest that the existence of the codes was seen as important and their applicability mainly as appropriate, despite new challenges posed by modern health care. The codes were regarded as an important part of nurses' ethics education, but current integrated teaching methods require development. (shrink)

Anne Conway (1631–1679) is often described as a vitalist. Scholars typically take this to mean that Conway considers life to be ubiquitous throughout the world. While Conway is indeed a vitalist in this sense, I argue that she is also committed to a stronger view: namely, the panpsychist view that mental capacities are ubiquitous and fundamental in creation. Reading Conway as a panpsychist highlights several aspects of her philosophy that deserve further attention, especially her accounts of emanative causation and universal (...) perfectibility. There are also historical benefits to interpreting Conway as a panpsychist. Through its history, ‘vitalism’ has often been used to describe philosophies that draw a sharp line between living and non-living nature; surely, Conway is not a vitalist in this way. Moreover, some of Conway’s contemporaries (for instance, Ralph Cudworth and Henry More) are sometimes regarded as vitalists, but were not panpsychists. It is important to distinguish between Conway’s vitalism and her version of panpsychism and to add a term like ‘panpsychism’ to the interpretive lexicon. Otherwise, we run the risk of undervaluing Conway’s originality within her own context and beyond. (shrink)

This chapter weighs a challenge to the attractive notion that by enabling empathy, fiction affords wide-ranging knowledge of what others’ experiences are like. It is commonly held that ‘seeing the world through others’ eyes’ often requires the empathizer to undergo an imaginative shift in sensibility, and we might naturally think that fiction helps us to effect that shift. However, some recent work on empathy and imagination encourages the conclusion that we are actually rigidly restricted to our own sensibilities even in (...) the wildest flights of imagination great literature can inspire. Drawing on the work of the novelist Zadie Smith, the chapter argues that while our imaginative capacities are not entirely unconstrained by our sensibilities, fiction can still help us to learn about a wide range of human experiences, including the experiences of people whose sensibilities substantially diverge from our own. Notably, fiction can work on our patterns of attention in such a way that we become temporarily ‘not ourselves.’. (shrink)

This book introduces a set of methods and techniques for studying mathematical theories and relating them to each other through the use of Grothendieck toposes.

This major essay collection takes a fresh look at how differences among people matter for music and musical thought.

In Australia, the twin discoveries that resulted in Dolly the Sheep and the isolation of human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s prompted the then Minister for Health to request that the Australian Health Ethics Committee (AHEC) examine the issue of cloning and stem-cell science more closely. It is the AHEC’s job to report—in an ad hoc manner at the Minister’s request—on “any issues deemed to be pertinent to the Australian community.” Cloning and stem-cell science were big news worldwide, and (...) the Australian Government needed to be seen to act on it. What happened next was partly a reflection of the cultural values of the Australian community, and partly an expression of the social context of the use of .. (shrink)

Streaming in secondary schools is not beneficial for improving student outcomes of education with vast amounts of educational research indicating that it does not improve academic results and increases inequity. Yet teachers often prefer working in streamed classes, and research shows that teachers mediate the effects of streaming on students. This study sought to add to the understanding of teachers’ role in student learning by investigating how teachers conceptualise the students in streamed classes. A qualitative case study approach was used, (...) where 18 teachers were interviewed in-depth to create narrative examples, three of which are presented here. These narratives summarise the research findings that teachers saw students in high and low streams as having homogenous characteristics according to five dichotomous categories: approach to learning, attitude to learning, learning style, autonomy and background. Students in mixed-ability classes were viewed along these same continua, but as more heterogeneous groups. Furthermore, these views of students had direct implications for how teachers planned for learning and the expectations that they held of their students. The discussion links streaming research with teacher expectation research, suggesting that teachers of streamed classes in this secondary school hold specific whole-class ideas that affect student learning. The article concludes with recommendations for further inquiry that links these two important fields of educational research. (shrink)

What is the cognitive role of things — sometimes but not always expressed as nouns — that appear in texts? What kind of literary affordances are the material furnishings that appear in a piece of literary writing? These questions are explored in this essay through the example of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, a long work of literary philosophy that plays with the evolving conventions of its genre. Fusing methodologies borrowed from anthropology and linguistics, this essay reveals the extent (...) and type of work done by two of Locke's things, manna and porphyry. In doing so it tests a way of tracing the cognitive action of the Essay's contemporary readership without recourse to modern experimental methods. (shrink)

Dans une perspective systémique, les auteurs, spécialistes de la psychologie de l’enfant, relèvent toute l’importance de la fratrie et de sa dynamique propre au sein de la famille. Cet article vise à apporter des éléments théoriques sur la dynamique fraternelle, dans le cadre d’un placement fraternel. L’observation d’une fratrie de deux enfants prolonge une réflexion sur le placement fraternel conjoint ou séparé. Il est souligné l’intérêt de réaliser une évaluation avant le placement afin de dégager des indicateurs sur la dynamique (...) de la relation fraternelle. Dans l’étude de cas présentée, un placement fraternel séparé a été privilégié pour favoriser l’individuation et la protection de chacun des enfants. Une évaluation tout au long du placement reste également nécessaire, concernant tant le développement individuel des enfants que l’évolution de la relation fraternelle. (shrink)