The term “sexual minority” functions in social, cultural, and political contexts as a catchall for minority sexuality categories. Yet, apart from serving as an umbrella term, its uses are contradictory. On the one hand, the term emphasizes “sexuality,” which serves the purposes of religious fundamentalist and political groups that demonize minority sexualities to the exclusion of identity, background or family status. On the other hand, the term can be useful for readers and researchers in sexuality studies to become more globally (...) aware of, and to reconceptualize, sexuality outside of tightly contained LGBT boxes. Such a contradiction has implications for education practice and policy. We suggest, for instance, using the term cautiously when describing same-sex sexualities because, as an umbrella term, it can homogenize people who represent a highly diverse spectrum of racialized categories, class backgrounds, genders, sexualities, and other social markers of difference. As a pedagogical heuristic device, the term is useful in delineating the differences between queer and sexual minority pedagogies when deciding upon the approach that will best draw an audience into the discussion. Our overall goal through this critical exploration is to support new understandings and insights of sexual diversity in ways that effectively challenge heterosexism and homophobia. (shrink)

This article analyzes and discusses the notion of including multivocality as an autoethnographic method to: (a) illustrate that there is no single and temporally-fixed voice that a researcher possesses, (b) unfix identity in a way that exposes the fluid nature of identity as it moves through particular contexts, and (c) deconstruct competing tensions within the autoethnographer as s/he connects the personal self to the social context. After providing a short, multivocal vignette based on the author’s previous work assignment as a (...) teacher educator in Kosovo, the author offers a reflective analysis of his approach. His analysis includes a critical discussion around the benefits and challenges of using such a method in autoethnography. The author concludes that research-oriented institutions might be resistant to validating multivocality as research practice given the myopic view that “voice” is linear, categorizable, and one-dimensional. In this way, the use of multivocality in autoethnography can also be understood as a way to liberate research practices from oppressive institutional rules and restrictions. (shrink)

A central goal of modern generative grammar has been to discover invariant properties of human languages that reflect “the innate schematism of mind that is applied to the data of experience” and that “might reasonably be attributed to the organism itself as its contribution to the task of the acquisition of knowledge” (Chomsky, 1971). Candidates for such invariances include the structure dependence of grammatical rules, and in particular, certain constraints on question formation. Various “poverty of stimulus” (POS) arguments suggest that (...) these invariances reflect an innate human endowment, as opposed to common experience: Such experience warrants selection of the grammars acquired only if humans assume, a priori, that selectable grammars respect substantive constraints. Recently, several researchers have tried to rebut these POS arguments. In response, we illustrate why POS arguments remain an important source of support for appeal to a priori structure-dependent constraints on the grammars that humans naturally acquire. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging philosophical work, Koons takes on two powerful dogmas--anti-realism and materialism.

There has been a long-standing debate about the relationship of predictability and determinism. Some have maintained that determinism implies predictability while others have maintained that predictability implies determinism. Many have maintained that there are no implication relations between determinism and predictability. This summary is, of course, somewhat oversimplified and quick at least in the sense that there are various notions of determinism and predictability at work in the philosophical literature. In this essay I will focus on what I take to (...) be the Laplacean vision for determinism and predictability. While many forms of predictability are inconsistent with this vision, I argue that a suitably restricted notion of predictability, consistent with the practice of physicists, is implied by the Laplacean notion of determinism. It is argued that limitations on predictability are of an in principle nature in the Appendix. (shrink)

Argumentation involves offering and/or exchanging reasons – either reasons for adopting various attitudes towards specific propositional contents or else reasons for acting in various ways. This paper develops the idea that the force of reasons is through and through a normative force because what good reasons accomplish is precisely to give one a certain sort of entitlement to do what they are reasons for. The paper attempts to shed light on what it is to have a reason, how the sort (...) of entitlement arising from reasons differs from other species of entitlement and how the norms by which such entitlement is assessed obtain their status as norms. (shrink)

The virtue of moral psychology is that it emphasizes what is most human in business, as opposed to the more bloodless conceptsof “obligation,” “duty,” “responsibility” and rights.” The heart of moral psychology is to be found in such concrete phenomena as fear, love, affection, antipathy, loyalty, jealousy, anger, resentment, avarice, ambition, pride, and cowardice. In this essay, I want to explore two of the core virtues of the corporation, conceived of as a community, the “sentiments” of care and compassion. These (...) were taken to be the very core of ethics by Adam Smith. I want to distinguish care and compassion from each other and both from the more principled and rule-bound conceptions of ethics that still dominate philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This paper highlights the difference between Lilian Bermejo-Luque’s account of warrants with the quite different accounts of warrants offered by Toulmin, Hitchcock, and myself, and lays out some of the reasons why I think a “Toulminesque” account of warrants captures crucial aspects of arguing more adequately than her account does.RESUMEN: Este artículo subraya la diferencia entre el análisis de los garantes que nos propone Lilian Bermejo-Luque con los de Toulmin, Hitchcok y el mío propio. Presento algunas razones por las (...) que pienso que un análisis toulminiano de los garantes capta mejor que el suyo algunos aspectos cruciales de la argumentación. (shrink)

Religion in Late Modernity runs against the grain of common suppositions of contemporary theology and philosophy of religion. Against the common supposition that basic religious terms have no real reference but are mere functions of human need, the book presents a pragmatic theory of religious symbolism in terms of which the cognitive engagement of the Ultimate is of a piece with the cognitive engagement of nature and persons. Throughout this discussion, Neville develops a late-modern conception of God that is defensible (...) in a global theological public. Against the common supposition that religion is on the retreat in late modernity except in fundamentalist forms, the author argues that religion in our time is a stimulus to religiously oriented scholarship, a civilizing force among world societies, a foundation for obligation in politics, a source for healthy social experimentation, and the most important mover of soul. (shrink)

Explores ultimate realities in a range of world religions and discusses the issue and philosophical implications of comparison itself.

Evolutionary models can explain the dynamics of populations, how genetic, genotypic, or phenotypic frequencies change with time. Models incorporating chance, or drift, predict specific patterns of change. These are illustrated using classic work on blood types by Cavalli-Sforza and his collaborators in the Parma Valley of Italy, in which the theoretically predicted patterns are exhibited in human populations. These data and the models display properties of ensembles of populations. The explanatory problem needs to be understood in terms of how likely (...) an observed change, in either a population or an ensemble, would be under drift alone; this is fundamentally a matter of chance. Understood in this way, issues of drift and chance undercut most recent philosophical, but not biological, discussions of the role of "genetic drift.". (shrink)

The logical treatment of the nature of religious belief (here I will concentrate on belief in Christianity) has been distorted by the acceptance of a false dilemma. On the one hand, many (e.g., Braithwaite, Hare) have placed the significance of religious belief entirely outside the realm of intellectual cognition. According to this view, religious statements do not express factual propositions: they are not made true or false by the ways things are. Religious belief consists in a certain attitude toward the (...) world, life, or other human beings, or in what sorts of things one values. On the other hand, others (such as Swinburne, 1981, Chapers 1 and 4) have taken religious belief to include (at least) being certain of the truth of particular factual religious propositions. The strength of a person's religious belief is identified with his degree of confidence in the truth of those propositions, measured by the "subjective probability" which those propositions have for that person. I propose a third alternative, according to which, (1) contrary to the first view, religious belief does involve a relation to factual religious propositions, such as that God exists, that Jesus was God and man, etc., -- propositions which are made true or false by the way things actually are -- but, (2) contrary to the second view, the strength of religious belief is measured, not by the degree of one's confidence1 in the truth of these propositions, but rather by the way in which the value or desirability to oneself of the various ways the world could be is affected by their including or not including the truth of these religious propositions. Thus, religious belief does consist in what one values or prizes, not in what.. (shrink)

One hundred and twenty-seven college students were recruited for an experimental investigation of the effect of body posture on religious attitudes. Roughly half of the participants were placed in lower, contractive body postures while the other half were placed in higher, expansive body postures. After five minutes in these postures, all were asked to fill out a measure of religious attitudes. As expected, participants in the lower, contractive positions expressed more agreement with conventional religious beliefs than those in the higher, (...) expansive positions. (shrink)

We offer a systematic examination of propensity interpretations of fitness, which emphasizes the role that fitness plays in evolutionary theory and takes seriously the probabilistic character of evolutionary change. We distinguish questions of the probabilistic character of fitness from the particular interpretations of probability which could be incorporated. The roles of selection and drift in evolutionary models support the view that fitness must be understood within a probabilistic framework, and the specific character of organism/environment interactions supports the conclusion that fitness (...) must be understood as a propensity rather than as a limiting frequency. (shrink)

Do human beings share a common morality? Natural Law: A Lutheran Reappraisal presents engaging essays from contemporary Lutheran scholars, teachers, and pastors, each offering a fresh reappraisal of natural law within the context of historic Lutheran teaching and practice. Thought provoking questions following each essay will help readers apply key Bible texts associated with natural law to their daily lives.

Although the topic of emotions was long ignored in British and American analytic philosophy and psychology, it remained a rich and exciting subject in Continental Philosophy. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche celebrated the passionate life. In phenomenology Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean‐Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Gabriel Marcel, and Paul Ricoeur all made major contributions. Heidegger pursued a highly original thesis concerning the vital role of moods in human life, notably angst and boredom. Jean‐Paul Sartre added the tantalizing thesis that our (...) emotions are strategies to help us cope with the difficulties in life. Max Scheler gave us the stunning expression, “the emotional a priori,” the idea that emotions are basic structures of human existence. In this essay, I want to expand on the contributions of the classic phenomenologists and existentialists and do more of what they were doing by way of an “original” project of phenomenological investigation. (This follows publication of the first two volumes of a three‐part study of the emotions, Not Passion's Slave and In Defense of Sentimentality, both published by Oxford University Press.). (shrink)