There exists a variety of types of folk healers in African American society. This paper examines the sequence of dreams and visions whereby a woman realized the status of evangelical healer. "It was hypothesized that these altered states functioned as facilitating mechanisms whereby the subject could alleviate anxiety while at the same time realize a new master status. By gathering extensive interview data and employing a structuralist analysis, it was possible to relate the dreams and visions to personal crises, thus (...) substantiating the hypothesis. In addition to offering processual insight to Anthony Wallaces "mazeway reconstruction,” this analysis provides a fresh perspective from which to examine the recruitment process to the status of "healer.”. (shrink)

Strategic alliances are increasingly common, as many organizations look towards various partnering arrangements. This second edition of Strategies of Cooperation extends the first edition's clear and comprehensive survey of strategic alliances. Presenting different disciplinary perspectives and numerous examples from the corporate world. The text has been thoroughly revised and updated, taking account of new theoretical models, and its coverage of case studies has been extended. It will be ideal for business students and managers alike wishing to understand the challenges of (...) managing alliances. (shrink)

Research involving recently deceased humans that are physiologically maintained following declaration of death by neurologic criteria—or ‘research involving the recently deceased’—can fill a translational research gap while reducing harm to animals and living human subjects. It also creates new challenges for honouring the donor’s legacy, respecting the rights of donor loved ones, resource allocation and public health. As this research model gains traction, new empirical ethics questions must be answered to preserve public trust in all forms of tissue donation and (...) in the practice of medicine while respecting the legacy of the deceased and the rights of donor loved ones. This article suggests several topics for immediate investigation to understand the attitudes and experiences of researchers, clinical collaborators, donor loved ones and the public to ensure research involving the recently deceased advances ethically. (shrink)

In Child Abuse, Family Rights, and the Child Protective System: A Critical Analysis from Law, Ethics, and Catholic Social Teaching, Stephen M. Krason gathers essays by leading scholars and practitioners to comment through the prism of Catholic social thought, on the plight afflicting American families and the role of the child protective system. Here readers will find critical essays on the deleterious effect of the 1974 passage of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act; assessments of current American policies (...) on child abuse and neglect and the role of the CPS within the context of prevailing international human rights principles and Catholic social teaching; a survey of the enforcement of CPS policies from a legal and constitutional perspective; research data disputing the CPS principle that all parents are potential abusers and illustrating the greater prevalence of abuse and neglect in broken, “blended,” and “untraditional” families; and arguments for poverty and unemployment as the prime culprits in the mistreatment of children. Also included are the amicus curiae briefs that the Society of Catholic Social Scientists submitted in two U.S. Supreme Court cases on parental rights, the CPS, and state control over the family. (shrink)

BRADLEY SK and CARTER B. Nursing Inquiry 2011; 18: 303–312 Deconstructing child and adolescent mental health: questioning the ‘taken‐for‐granted’…We present a critical deconstructive reading, seeking to problematise ‘taken‐for‐granted’ assumptions in child and adolescent mental health (CAMH). The start point for this critical reading is conventional ‘history‐telling’ within CAMH. The aim is not to take issue with the detail in such histories but to critically examine the texts, so as to highlight constructions that structure the presentation of conventional histories and possible (...) purposes that such constructions may serve. The argument is that such conventional histories leave key questions not just unanswered, but unconsidered – a tendency that can be seen throughout the CAMH literature more generally. Therefore, we then pursue critical discussion of how ‘taken‐for‐granted’ constructions of CAMH enabled psychiatry to successfully expand its power and influence to establish hegemony over ‘problem children’. We do not claim any closure to this critical reading; that is, we do not claim that our critical deconstructive reading is the only reading possible. Similarly, it is not presented in any sense as ‘final word’. Rather our hope for this work is that it might stimulate readers to question the ‘taken‐for‐granteds’ that we present, and indeed others that they might identify themselves. In so doing, it is our hope that creative dialogue might ensue. (shrink)

This book provides a philosophical analysis of adult-child sex and pedophilia. The sex intuitively strikes many people, including myself, as sick, disgusting, and wrong. The problem is that it is not clear whether these judgments are justified and whether they are aesthetic or moral. By analogy, many people find it disgusting to view images of obese people having sex, but it is hard to see what is morally undesirable about such sex. Here the judgment is aesthetic. This book looks at (...) the moral status of such adult-child sex. In particular, it explores whether those who engage in adult-child sex have a disease, act wrongly, or are vicious. In addition, it looks at how the law should respond to such sex given the above analyses. (shrink)

This paper is a modified version of a talk presented by the author at the SCSS’s Capitol Hill Luncheon-Seminar on “Defending the Family,” at the Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C., April 23, 2004. It is an updated examination of the subject in question since the author’s lengthy and more comprehensive article on the subject in the SCSS’s 1998 anthology, Defending the Family; A Sourcebook. Like the earlier article, it shows that the problem of false allegations of child abuse and (...) neglect against parents continues to be massive. It identifies vague laws, attitudes of operatives in the child protective system, the ease of making reports, and the legal immunity of protective system operatives as the main reasons for this. It discusses the threats to children and innocent families posed by the system. It finds the limited protections for parents written into recent federal law an encouraging development, but points out that parents still have relatively few rights in the face of the system. It presents the case as to why the current child protective system is fundamentally flawed and should be eliminated in favor of a different approach to protecting children from true abuse and neglect. (shrink)

These two companion volumes provide a comprehensive review and critical evaluation of the major DSM-III and DSM-III-R child disorders. Their major goal is to provide diagnostic and assessment guidelines that are based on scientific literature in specific clinical domains. Each chapter contains a discussion of the historical background of a particular diagnosis, definitional issues, a critical but selective review of the literature addressing the diagnosis in question, proposed changes in the diagnostic criteria based on the available literature, and proposed assessment (...) models and methods based on the designated criteria. Given the scientific bases for many of these discussions of diagnostic criteria, these two volumes will serve professionals and graduate students in a wide variety of fields: clinical child psychology, child psychiatry, pediatrics, pediatric and school psychology, special education, social work, and other child mental health specialties. (shrink)

Nonforcible adult-child sex is thought to be morally wrong in part because it is nonconsensual. In this paper, I argue against this notion. In particular, I reject accounts of the moral wrongfulness of adult-child sex that rest on the absence of consent, concerns about adult exploitation of children, and the existence of a morally primitive duty against such sex.

These two companion volumes provide a comprehensive review and critical evaluation of the major DSM-III and DSM-III-R child disorders. Their major goal is to provide diagnostic and assessment guidelines that are based on scientific literature in specific clinical domains. Each chapter contains a discussion of the historical background of a particular diagnosis, definitional issues, a critical but selective review of the literature addressing the diagnosis in question, proposed changes in the diagnostic criteria based on the available literature, and proposed assessment (...) models and methods based on the designated criteria. Given the scientific bases for many of these discussions of diagnostic criteria, these two volumes will serve professionals and graduate students in a wide variety of fields: clinical child psychology, child psychiatry, pediatrics, pediatric and school psychology, special education, social work, and other child mental health specialties. (shrink)

This paper investigates scalar implicatures and downward entailment in child English. In previous experimental work we have shown that adults’ computation of scalar implicatures is sensitive to entailment relations. For instance, when the disjunction operator or occurs in positive contexts, an implicature of exclusivity arises. By contrast when the disjunction operator occurs within the scope of a downward entailing linguistic expression, no implicature of exclusivity is computed. Investigations on children’s computation of scalar implicatures in the same contexts have led to (...) a slightly different picture. In particular it has proven difficult to demonstrate that children compute scalar implicatures (in non- downward entailing contexts) using the Truth Value Judgment task, a technique that has been used successfully in showing children’s sensitivity to other semantic phenomena. Adopting a different experimental technique called the Felicity Judgment task, however, we demonstrated children’s knowledge of the prerequisites to the computation of scalar implicatures (Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini and Meroni, 2001). (shrink)

A common justification for abortion rights is that the death of the fetus does not violate any of the fetus’s time-relative interests. The time-relative interest account (TRIA) of harm and wrongdoing tells us that a necessary condition for harming someone is that his or her time-relative interests are frustrated. Regarding the justification for abortion, this account falls prey to impairment arguments. Impairment arguments entertain cases of prenatal injury, such as the mother using illicit drugs that disable the child. The intuition (...) is that the child who is born with such disabilities is harmed by the mother’s drug use. But it is unclear what time-relative interest is violated in cases of prenatal harm. Typical responses to impairment arguments point out that the abortion case is different because the child does not exist to experience such harms; but in prenatal injury + survival cases, the child does live to experience those harms. Thus, the TRIA justification for abortion is not impugned by impairment counter-examples. This article argues that this response to impairment arguments is viciously circular. The response must say that so long as you kill the child, no harm is done. But this assumes that killing itself is morally inconsequential and is not itself a case of harm. The response to impairment arguments, then, assumes the permissibility of abortion. (shrink)

Much recent research on child language has been inspired by linguistic principles uncovered by linguists working in the generative framework. Developmental psycholinguists have demonstrated young children’s mastery of a variety of linguistic principles; mostly syntactic principles, but also some semantic principles. The present paper contributes to research on the acquisition of semantics by presenting the findings of a new experiment designed to investigate young children’s knowledge of downward entailment, which is a basic semantic property of Universal Grammar. Section 2 describes (...) how downward entailing operators work in natural languages. Section 3 addresses the issue of how a child could master the complex behavior displayed by downward entailing operators across natural languages. That section also reviews the findings of previous research on children’s knowledge of downward entailment. Section 4 presents the new experiment which was designed to investigate whether children’s knowledge of downward entailment extends to one of its logical properties, as illustrated by one of De Morgan’s laws. Section 5 offers some brief remarks on future research. (shrink)

Since the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has become one of the most important French poets of the postwar years. At last, we have the long-awaited English translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s celebrated work, _L’Arrière-pays_, which takes us to the heart of his creative process and to the very core of his poetic spirit. In his poem, “The Convex Mirror,” Bonnefoy writes: “Look at them down there, at that crossroads, / They seem to hesitate, then go on.” (...) The idea of the crossroads haunts Bonnefoy’s work, as he is troubled by the idea that the path not taken may lead to the _arrière-pays_, a place of greater plenitude, and of more authentic being—an “elsewhere in the absolute.” Seized by this fear that what he terms “presence” exists always somewhere else, a little further on, Bonnefoy here sets out on a labyrinthine quest to find traces of this “original place,” which he locates not only in objects of knowledge and experience as diverse as the deserts of Asia, a hill fort in India, a church in Armenia, the painting of Piero della Francesca but also, crucially, in the undivided intensity of his experiences as a child. Written with a visionary grace, _The Arrière-pays_ is a spiritual testament to art, philosophy, and poetry. Enriched by a new preface by the poet, this volume also includes three recent essays in which he returns to his original account of an ethical and aesthetic haunting, one that recounts the struggle between our instinct to idealize—what he deems our eternal Platonism—and the equally strong need to combat this and to be reconciled with our nature as finite beings, made of flesh and blood, in the world of the here and now. (shrink)

Parents play an integral role in the mental health service provision of children and adolescents, and they can have significant effects on the outcomes of youth. A growing body of research has linked parents’ own mental health status to numerous outcomes for their children, and recent guidelines have emerged recommending the assessment of parent psychopathology when treating child patients. However, these recommendations present a range of ethical considerations. Mental health professionals must determine if the assessment of a parent is empirically (...) supported and that an assessment procedure appropriate for parents can be feasibly implemented. They must also respect the autonomy and confidentiality of parents while ensuring that assessment findings can be translated to meaningful benefits for child patients. This article details and discusses each of these concerns within the context of the relevant principles and standards of the 2016 American Psychological Association’s Code of Ethics. Further, it provides guidelines, relevant clinical examples, and an applied model for mental health professionals to consider the ethical implications of assessing parent mental health when serving child patients. (shrink)

A central goal of contemporary cognitive science is the explanation of cognitive abilities or capacities. [Cummins 1983] During the last three decades a wide range of cognitive capacities have been subjected to careful empirical scrutiny. The adult's ability to produce and comprehend natural language sentences and the child's capacity to acquire a natural language were among the first to be explored. [Chomsky 1965, Fodor, Bever & Garrett 1974, Pinker 1989] There is also a rich literature on the ability to solve (...) mathematical problems [Greeno 1983], the ability to recognize objects visually [Rock 1983, Gregory 1970, Marr 1982], the ability to manipulate and predict the behavior of middle sized physical objects [McClosky 1983, Hayes 1985], and a host of others. (shrink)

Much recent research on child language has been inspired by linguistic principles uncovered by linguists working in the generative framework. Developmental psycholinguists have demonstrated young children’s mastery of a variety of linguistic principles; mostly syntactic principles, but also some semantic principles. The present paper contributes to research on the acquisition of semantics by presenting the findings of a new experiment designed to investigate young children’s knowledge of downward entailment, which is a basic semantic property of Universal Grammar. Section 2 describes (...) how downward entailing operators work in natural languages. Section 3 addresses the issue of how a child could master the complex behavior displayed by downward entailing operators across natural languages. That section also reviews the findings of previous research on children’s knowledge of downward entailment. Section 4 presents the new experiment which was designed to investigate whether children’s knowledge of downward entailment extends to one of its logical properties, as illustrated by one of De Morgan’s laws. Section 5 offers some brief remarks on future research. (shrink)

Raising a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a stressful experience and has been associated with poor maternal mental health and increased maternal emotional distress. However, the experiences of fathers of children with ASD are largely unexplored and the coping strategies these men employ to cope with the challenges they face have received little research attention. This research aimed to explore the phenomenological experiences of fathers of preschool children with ASD by gaining a better understanding of the manner (...) in which these individuals attempted to cope with their situation. A multiple, single-case study design was employed and five participants were recruited via two local paediatric practices. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants and data were analysed making use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). This analysis yielded three superordinate themes, which were labelled as follows: (a) the experience of fathering a child with ASD, (b) challenges of fathering a child with ASD, and (c) coping with fathering a child with ASD. The results suggest that the fathers of children with ASD experience their parental role as stressful. The participants in the current study related the stress they experienced to a number of challenges associated directly with their children’s behaviour, as well as to the effects that parenting a child with ASD had on their own wellbeing and functioning. The participants reported making use of a number of coping strategies in order to deal with the challenges they faced. The participants used both problem-focussed and avoidant coping strategies. The results are discussed and recommendations made with regard to future research. (shrink)

A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment. The first section presents several general observations about language acquisition that linguistic theory has tried to explain and discusses the thesis that certain linguistic properties are innate because they appear universally and in the absence of corresponding experience. A third diagnostic for innateness, (...) early emergence, is the focus of the second section of the paper, in which linguistic theory is tested against recent experimental evidence on children's acquisition of syntax. (shrink)

This study is concerned with the acquisition of the disjunction operator, or, in English. Two mutually inconsistent claims have been made about the acquisition of disjunction. One claim is that the acquisition of the adult truth conditions for logical connectives, including disjunction, is a late and not fully universal, achievement. With particular reference to disjunction, the findings from several studies are interpreted as showing that only the truth conditions associated with exclusive-or are available to young children (e.g., Beilin and Lust (...) 1975; Braine and Rumain 1981, 1983; Paris 1973). There is a related claim, that even when children respond as if they have access to a broader range of truth conditions, namely those associated with inclusive-or, children's adult-like responses are the result of a failure to distinguish or from and (Paris 1973). (shrink)

Here’s a recipe for one kind of argument from the poverty of the stimulus. To start, present an array of linguistic facts to be explained. Begin with a basic observation about form and/or meaning in some language (or, even better, an observation that crosses linguistic borders). Then show how similar forms and/or meanings crop up in other linguistic phenomena. Next, explain how one could account for the array of facts using domain-general learning mechanisms – such as distributional learning algorithms, ‘cut (...) and paste’ operations or analogy. Follow this by introducing other phenomena that resist explanation on a learning-theoretic account. Make it clear that domain-general learning mechanisms would leave the learner short of the target language or would cause the learner to overshoot, resulting in ‘generalizations’ that are not characteristic of the natural language(s) under consideration. The next step in the recipe is to show how the entire array of linguistic phenomena can be explained using ‘abstract’ principles of Universal Grammar. These principles are not likely to be ‘learned’ because, as just witnessed, the kinds of mechanisms that are offered by learning-theoretic approaches to language development would direct learners away from the target, rather than towards it. This raises the alternative to learning, i.e., innate specification. From that point onward, the proof is in the pudding – the argument should contain an empirical demonstration that children never form the kinds of mistaken generalizations that are anticipated by learning-theoretic accounts of language acquisition. Instead, the argument should be supported by a demonstration that children form the correct generalizations, despite the apparent complexity of the phenomena, and in the absence of supporting evidence in the input. QED. (shrink)

Sir Leslie Stephen, the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and a writer on philosophy, ethics, and literature, was educated at Eton, King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained as a fellow and a tutor for a number of years. Though a sickly child, he later became a keen and successful mountaineer, taking part in first ascents of nine peaks in the Alps. In 1871 he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine. During his eleven-year (...) tenure, he wrote two successful books on ethics, including The Science of Ethics in 1892, which was widely adopted as a standard textbook. This two-volume work, which was first published in 1896, brings together the lectures he gave to various ethical societies, mostly in London. In Volume 2, he discusses the ethical issues surrounding a range of topics, including luxury, heredity, crime and punishment, and duty. (shrink)

In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved is logically underdetermined by experience. This view highlights the cues that are available in the input to children, as well as childrens skills (...) in extracting relevant information and forming generalizations on the basis of the data they receive. Nativists, on the other hand, contend that language-learners project beyond their experience in ways that the input does not even suggest. Instead of viewing language acqusition as a special case of theory induction, nativists posit a Universal Grammar, with innately specified linguistic principles of grammar formation. The nature versus nurture debate continues, as various poverty of stimulus arguments are challenged or supported by developments in linguistic theory and by findings from psycholinguistic investigations of child language. In light of some recent challenges to nativism, we rehearse old poverty-of stimulus arguments, and supplement them by drawing on more recent work in linguistic theory and studies of child language. (shrink)

A child poverty rate of ten percent could mean that every tenth child is always poor, or that all children are in poverty for one month in every ten. Knowing where reality lies between these extremes is vital to understanding the problem facing many countries of poverty among the young. This unique study goes beyond the standard analysis of child poverty based on poverty rates at one point in time and documents how much movement into and out of poverty by (...) children there actually is, covering a range of industrialised countries - the USA, UK, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Hungary and Russia. Five main topics are addressed: conceptual and measurement issues associated with a dynamic view of child poverty; cross-national comparisons of child poverty rates and trends; cross-national comparisons of children's movements into and out of poverty; country-specific studies of child poverty dynamics; and the policy implications of taking a dynamic perspective. (shrink)

Over the past forty years, scientists have developed models of human reasoning based on the principle that human languages and classical logic involve fundamentally different concepts and different methods of interpretation. In The Emergence of Meaning Stephen Crain challenges this view, arguing that a common logical nativism underpins human language and logical reasoning. The approach which Crain takes is twofold. Firstly, he uncovers the underlying meanings of logical expressions and logical principles that appear in typologically different languages - English (...) and Mandarin Chinese - and he demonstrates that these meanings and principles directly correspond to the expressions and structures of classical logic. Secondly he reports the findings of new experimental studies which investigate how children acquire the logical concepts of these languages. A step-by-step introduction to logic and a comprehensive review of the literature on child language acquisition make this work accessible to those unfamiliar with either field. (shrink)

The development of children’s minds raises fundamental psychological and scientific questions, from how we are able to know about and describe basic aspects of the world such as words, numbers and colours to how we come to grasp causes, actions and intentions. This is the first book to properly introduce and examine philosophical questions concerning children’s cognitive development and considers the implications of scientific breakthroughs for the philosophy of developmental psychology. Each chapter explores a central topic in developmental psychology from (...) a philosophical perspective: social interaction and the developing mind children's awareness of objects and the question of 'object permanence' knowledge of numbers children and the acquisition of knowledge of colour language acquisition and the 'mapping problem' children's knowledge of the relation between actions and goals belief acquisition and the developing mind. Throughout the book Stephen Butterfill draws on several important case studies, including experiments with children on memory, ‘false belief tasks’, and the process by which children come to see other people, not just themselves, as capable of experience. He shows how these questions can illuminate some fundamental debates in philosophy of mind, such as the mind’s possession of concepts, rationality and the mind, the possibility of objective thought, and the nature of perceptual experience. Additional features, such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary provide helpful tools for those coming to the subject for the first time. (shrink)

What is the relation between meaning and use? This chapter first defends a non-reductionist understanding of Wittgenstein’s suggestion that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’; facts about meaning cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, facts about use, characterized non-semantically. Nonetheless, it is contended, facts about meaning do supervene on non-semantic facts about use. That supervenience thesis is suggested by comments of Wittgenstein’s and is consistent with his view of meaning and rule-following. Semantic (...) supervenience is then defended against two criticisms: first, John McDowell’s suggestion that the supervenience thesis falsifies the epistemology of meaning and fails to accommodate common-sense truths about meaning; second, a series of counter-examples proposed by Stephen Kearns and Ofra Magidor, who argue that worlds may differ semantically without differing non-semantically. It is argued that neither criticism is convincing: we should accept the thesis that semantic facts supervene on non-semantic facts. (shrink)

Genetic testing technology has brought the ability to predict the onset of diseases many years before symptoms appear and the use of such predictive testing is now widespread. The medical fraternity has met the application of this practice to children with caution. The justification for their predominantly prohibitive stance has revolved around the lack of a readily identifiable medical benefit in the face of potential psychological harms to the child. We argue that predictive testing can have important psychosocial benefits and (...) that the interests of the child have been construed too narrowly. Proponents of a prohibitive stance also argue that testing in childhood breaches the child's future right to make the same decision as an autonomous adult and to maintain this information as confidential. We argue that predictive genetic testing of children is not necessarily a violation of the child's future autonomy. Indeed, in some cases, such testing may facilitate the development of autonomy in the maturing child. We argue that parents are generally best placed to judge what is in their own child's overall interests, and that a parental request for testing after appropriate genetic counselling should be respected unless there is clear evidence that the child will be harmed in an overall sense as a result of testing. (shrink)

Sir Leslie Stephen, the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and a writer on philosophy, ethics, and literature, was educated at Eton, King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained as a fellow and a tutor for a number of years. Though a sickly child, he later became a keen and successful mountaineer, taking part in first ascents of nine peaks in the Alps. In 1871 he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine. During his eleven-year (...) tenure, he wrote two successful books on ethics, including The Science of Ethics in 1892, which was widely adopted as a standard textbook. This two-volume work, which was first published in 1896, brings together the lectures he gave to various ethical societies, mostly in London. In Volume 2, he discusses the ethical issues surrounding a range of topics, including luxury, heredity, crime and punishment, and duty. (shrink)

Sir Leslie Stephen, the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and a writer on philosophy, ethics, and literature, was educated at Eton, King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained as a fellow and a tutor for a number of years. Though a sickly child, he later became a keen and successful mountaineer, taking part in first ascents of nine peaks in the Alps. In 1871 he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine. During his eleven-year (...) tenure, he wrote two successful books on ethics, including The Science of Ethics in 1892, which was widely adopted as a standard textbook. This two-volume work, which was first published in 1896, brings together the lectures he gave to various ethical societies, mostly in London. Both volumes examine the ethical issues surrounding a range of topics including politics, morality, duty, and crime and punishment. (shrink)

We present a series of arguments for logical nativism, focusing mainly on the meaning of disjunction in human languages. We propose that all human languages are logical in the sense that the meaning of linguistic expressions corresponding to disjunction (e.g. English or , Chinese huozhe, Japanese ka ) conform to the meaning of the logical operator in classical logic, inclusive- or . It is highly implausible, we argue, that children acquire the (logical) meaning of disjunction by observing how adults use (...) disjunction. Findings from studies of child language acquisition and from cross-linguistic research invite the conclusion that children do not learn to be logical—it comes naturally to them. (shrink)

Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and a writer on philosophy, ethics, and literature, was educated at Eton, King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained as a fellow and a tutor for a number of years. Though a sickly child, he later became a keen and successful mountaineer, taking part in first ascents of nine peaks in the Alps. In 1871 he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine. During his (...) eleven-year tenure, he wrote two successful books on ethics, including The Science of Ethics in 1892, which was widely adopted as a standard textbook. This two-volume work, which was first published in 1896, brings together the lectures he gave to various ethical societies, mostly in London. Both volumes examine the ethical issues surrounding a range of topics including politics, morality, duty, and crime and punishment. (shrink)

This article considers the ‘creative education’ of influential Aotearoa/new Zealand art educator Elwyn Richardson, which is based on what he calls the ‘discovery method’: the ‘concentrated study of material from [students’] own surroundings’. Through a game that his students play with tyres, we explore the role that tools play in Richardson’s classroom and in the imaginary ‘worlding’ of his students’ play. By taking the ‘early world’ of the children’s development to be a product of the tools through which they describe (...) it, we reveal Richardson’s educative process to be essentially technological. His idea of the whole child who emerges through a process of experience and observation—of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, in the well-known phrase of Wordsworth cited by Richardson—conflates the nature of the child and nature of the ‘natural’ world. By this act of ‘natural settlement’ not untypical of settler narratives in Aotearoa/new Zealand, the child’s—and, by implication, other settlers’—relation to the world of nature is naturalized. Instead, we would argue that the child’s relation to nature is altogether unnatural: it is imprinted by the technological means through which she explores the world and makes it her own—and by which she is made over. The ‘tyre-child’ is no child of nature, but a child of technology, for whom creative errors—acts of ‘mis-taking’ like the ones Richardson’s children make in playing with tyres—reveal an imaginary capacity at once theoretical and unsettling. (shrink)

When I see a mountain to be far away, there is non-reflective awareness of myself as that from which distance is measured. Likewise, there is self-awareness when I see a tree as offering shade or a hiding place. In such cases, how can the self I am aware of be the same as I who am aware of it? Can the perceived be its perceiver? Mobilizing infancy research, I offer the following thesis as to how one can be aware of (...) oneself, at a single stroke, as perceiver and as embodied entity. During face-to-face interaction at 2 or 3 months, the infant has a sensuous perception of the caregiver as well as a non-sensuous impression of something she is eyeing and vocalizing toward. This implicit target is the self as it first becomes present to the child. It is shown how the target of her attending is experienced by him as embodied, active, affective, and continuous. After acquiring language, however, the child becomes capable of playing the caregiver toward himself: He can speak in her manner while listening as the one addressed. Thus the relation is internalized. The outcome is the independent and secure self-awareness that typifies post-infancy life. Independence bears a price, which is assessed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.4 (2003) 369-372 [Access article in PDF] Unity of Agency and Volition:Some Personal Reflections Stephen Weiner The issues of unity of agency, self-as-narrative, and more generally, volition are highly personal to me. Indeed, I would say I have frequently been obsessed with them. I am 52 years old, and date the onset of my psychiatric symptoms—my long-term misery—very specifically: 11:00 pm Pacific Standard Time, (...) August 28, 1965. At almost precisely that time, I started obsessing that I was homosexual and, in fact, turning into a girl. Within days, derealization followed: for instance, the houses in my neighborhood seemed one-dimensional—they seemed as though they were painted, as though I could stick my hand or an object through them. Colors seemed less bright as well—but I hardly had words for all this at the time: it was an overwhelmingly preverbal feeling, but I found some words for it.I was also depressed, and knew I was depressed—that is, I was worried, had trouble sleeping, and had suicidal thoughts and feelings. Within weeks, I asked my parents if I could see a psychiatrist, and I did. I remember asking my psychiatrist if he ever thought about the possibility that everything might be an illusion, and he quoted the refrain from "Row, Row, Row Your Boat": "merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream." But just asking him produced a chilling feeling that he did not exist and, largely for this reason, I did not mention unreality feelings again to therapists for another 20 years.So, like Dr. Wells' patient Edward, described by James Phillips (2003), I was in trouble; like Edward, I was starting to construct a narrative. I started feeling that I had "to tell my story" at about this time—before then, I had not felt a need to do that. That may be partly because young children take life for granted (at least, I did), and it may be partly because suffering, by its very nature, demands explanation; both reasons were probably operating—certainly, both my parents told me years later that I had seemed emotionally distressed as a child, and my mother told they would have given me Ritalin if it had been available. So, to other people (my parents and my teachers) I was mentally ill in some sense, and I have some pretty clear memories of what I now recognize as depression, especially in the second and third grades; but I did not think of myself as sick and I did not think of myself as suffering—and I did not experience the duality (at least) of selves that I started to experience almost immediately in August 1965.Phillips further points out that the "future Edward" could look back in his narrative, at a later age, and reconstruct his history either as someone with a continuing mental illness, or as someone who had attained a secure, healthy adulthood and saw his experience as adolescent pain in the service of ultimate adult health and integration. I see my story, I am sorry to report, as [End Page 369] one of unremitting basic pain but with the positive dimension that I was able to go on, obtain a good education, work a good deal in my adult life, and father a child. But my narrative—and am I not, as a highly verbal person, almost constrained to think of my life as a narrative?—has been one, as Phillips (following Kleinman) realizes, of suffering. It is, above all else, an illness narrative. I find the approach of J. Melvin Woody (2003)—of privileging performing and performing arts and spatial metaphors over story—less relevant and true to myself, although I see no reason to argue with Mary's preference for such forms. It may be that the temporal discontinuities she has experienced predispose her to see herself in such terms—may, in fact, necessitate doing so. I am not exactly sure why, but it probably has to do with acting, with trying on and performing one role... (shrink)

What is art's relationship to play? Those interested in this question tend to look to modern philosophy for answers, but, as this book shows, the question was already debated in antiquity by luminaries like Plato and Aristotle. Over the course of eight chapters, this book contextualizes those debates, and demonstrates their significance for theoretical problems today. Topics include the ancient child psychology at the root of the ancient Greek word for 'play', the numerous toys that have survived from antiquity, and (...) the meaning of play's conceptual opposite, the 'serious'. What emerges is a concept of play markedly different from the one we have inherited from modernity. Play is not a certain set of activities which unleashes a certain feeling of pleasure; it is rather a certain feeling of pleasure that unleashes the activities we think of as 'play'. As such, it offers a new set of theoretical challenges. (shrink)