Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform is an invaluable resource for policymakers, faculty, students, and anyone interested in how decisions made about the education system ultimately affect the quality of education, educational access, and social justice.

Previous research has successfully used feature integration theory to operationalise the predictions of Perceptual Load Theory, while simultaneously testing the predictions of both models. Building on this work, we test the extent to which these models hold up in a 3D world. In two experiments, participants responded to a target stimulus within an array of shapes whose apparent depth was manipulated using a combination of monoscopic and stereoscopic cues. The search task was designed to test the predictions of feature integration (...) theory, as the target was identified by a single feature or a conjunction of features and embedded in search arrays of varying size, and perceptual load theory, as the task included congruent and incongruent distractors presented alongside search tasks imposing high or low perceptual load. Findings from both experiments upheld the predictions of feature integration theory, regardless of 2D/3D condition. Longer search times in conditions with a combination of monoscopic and stereoscopic depth cues suggests that binding features into three-dimensional objects requires greater attentional effort. This additional effort should have implications for perceptual load theory, yet our findings did not uphold its predictions; the effect of incongruent distractors did not differ between conjunction search trials and feature search trials. Individual differences in susceptibility to the effects of perceptual load were evident and likely explain the absence of load effects. Overall, our findings suggest that feature integration theory may be useful for predicting attentional performance in a 3D world. (shrink)

This article seeks to advance a Thomistic metaphysics of creation in light of certain claims made by Stephen Hawking on the beginninglessness of the universe. I start with an exploration of Hawking's proposal that a beginningless universe entails an uncreated universe. This propels me into Aquinas's contention that a created beginningless universe is indeed possible, and thence I consider the metaphysics behind Thomas's position in this regard. Given this metaphysics of creation, I contend that there follow some interesting conclusions (...) with regard to our notion of a creator God and the means for establishing the existence of such. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 415-416, June 2012.

This article provides a critical assessment of some aspects of Ann Kerr and Tom Shakespeare's Genetic Politics: from eugenics to genome. In particular, I evaluate their claims: (a) that bioethics is too ‘top down’, involving normative prescriptions, whereas it should instead be ‘bottom up’ and grounded in social science; and (b) that contemporary bioethics has not dealt particularly well with people's moral concerns about eugenics. I conclude that several of Kerr and Shakespeare's criticisms are well-founded and serve as (...) valuable reminders to the bioethics community. These include the claims: that bioethics ought not to consist entirely of applying moral theory to cases; that bioethics must take account of relevant empirical evidence; and that bioethicists should be on the look out for those subtle social forces which can undermine the voluntariness of people's choices and consents. However, we should reject some of Kerr and Shakespeare's other criticisms and I conclude (amongst other things) that even ‘mainstream’ bioethics is better able to deal with difficult issues like eugenics than Kerr and Shakespeare suggest. (shrink)

This article provides a critical assessment of some aspects of Ann Kerr and Tom Shakespeare's Genetic Politics: from eugenics to genome. In particular, I evaluate their claims: (a) that bioethics is too ‘top down’, involving normative prescriptions, whereas it should instead be ‘bottom up’ and grounded in social science; and (b) that contemporary bioethics has not dealt particularly well with people's moral concerns about eugenics. I conclude that several of Kerr and Shakespeare's criticisms are well-founded and serve as (...) valuable reminders to the bioethics community. These include the claims: that bioethics ought not to consist entirely of applying moral theory to cases; that bioethics must take account of relevant empirical evidence; and that bioethicists should be on the look out for those subtle social forces which can undermine the voluntariness of people's choices and consents. However, we should reject some of Kerr and Shakespeare's other criticisms and I conclude (amongst other things) that even ‘mainstream’ bioethics is better able to deal with difficult issues like eugenics than Kerr and Shakespeare suggest. (shrink)

When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book Stephen C. Levinson explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication.

The essays in this volume commemorate the 70th anniversary of Jacques Maritain's Pour la Justice, in which the French Thomist and future drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights grappled with the moral, political, and religious challenges facing Europe in the aftermath of World War II. During this time Maritain reflected on humanism, Christian philosophy, the relation between freedom, religion and politics, and increasingly, on education. Several scholars reflect on the historical impact of Maritain's own writings during World War (...) II, Vatican II, and the Spanish Civil war. In other sections, contemporary Thomists suggest ways a resurgent Thomism can engage with the pressing issues of our own day. Essays on Thomistic ethics address problems in bioethics, the philosophy of love, and the foundations of Natural Law, while others tackle perennial problems in metaphysics and epistemology, such as the problem of free will, subjectivity, and the role of creative intuition in aesthetics. Still other essays apply Maritain's work on education to current challenges facing religious universities today. The contributors to this volume include: Noel Adams, Florian Michel, Sr. Anne Frances Ai Le, Brian Kemple, Stephen Chamberlain, Walter Schulz, Francisco Eduardo Plaza, James Jacobs, John Dunaway, Greg Kerr, Megan Furman, Karen Chan, Justin Gable, Federico Tedesco, Michael Torre, Richard Schenk, OP, and Gregory Reichberg. (shrink)

Although physicalism has been the dominant position in recent work in the philosophy of mind, this dominance has not prevented a small but growing number of philosophers from arguing that physicalism is untenable for several reasons: both ontologically and epistemologically it cannot reduce mentality to the realm of the physical, and its attempts to reduce subjectivity to objectivity have thoroughly failed. The contributors to After Physicalism provide powerful alternatives to the physicalist account of the human mind from a dualistic point (...) of view and argue that the reductive and naturalistic paradigm in philosophy has lost its force. The essays in this collection all firmly engage in a priori metaphysics. Those by Uwe Meixner, E. J. Lowe, John Foster, Alvin Plantinga, and Richard Swinburne are concerned with ways to establish the truth of dualism. Essays by William Hasker, A. D. Smith, and Howard Robinson deal with the relation between physicalism and dualism. Benedikt Paul Göcke argues that the “I” is not a particular and Stephen Priest that “I have to understand myself not as a thing but as no-thing-ness.” In the final essay, Thomas Schärtl argues that there are limits to dualism as indicated by the concept of resurrection. By including two classical essays by Plantinga and Swinburne, the volume conveniently brings together some of the best and the newest thinking in making the philosophical case for dualism. "Seven of these essays are by eminent philosophers: Lowe, Foster, Plantinga, Swinburne, Hasker, Smith, and Robinson, each recapitulating his well-known position in the debate. To have these seven essayists together under one cover constitutes a remarkable book, which can be used as a textbook in philosophy of mind as well as in philosophy of religion courses, and which also opens up the debate in an original way among colleagues at an advanced level." —Fergus Kerr, University of Edinburgh. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our (...) present and future world. "By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."—Richard M. Rorty, University of Virginia "[Toulmin] has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all.... His aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium."—Quentin Skinner, New York Review of Books. (shrink)

The original claim made in the introduction to this classic volume was that it broke fresh ground: that it set a new agenda for the philosophy of religion and was a reaction against a narrow conception of the discipline that had little to say philosophically about human experience, or subjectivity, or about the religious imagination, or the idea of 'spirituality'. In a new Foreword to the book, Michael McGhee reflects on how the discipline has changed or remained the same in (...) the intervening twenty-five years since first publication. He argues that the connections between 'philosophy' and 'spirituality' are still developing; and that what we think of as 'religious' or 'spiritual' is shifting, along with ideas about self-knowledge. The book contains pertinent chapters by some of the leading thinkers in the field, including Rowan Williams, Janet Soskice, Fergus Kerr, Stephen Clark and Paul Williams, who offers a comparative piece on Tibetan Buddhism. (shrink)

Here we challenge the orthodoxy according to which abduction is an a posteriori mode of inference. We start by providing a case study illustrating how abduction can justify a philosophical claim not justifiable by empirical evidence alone. While many grant abduction's epistemic value, nearly all assume that abductive justification is a posteriori, on grounds that our belief in abduction's epistemic value depends on empirical evidence about how the world contingently is. Contra this assumption, we argue, first, that our belief in (...) abduction’s epistemic value is not and could not be justified a posteriori, and second, that attention to the roles experience plays in abductive justification supports taking abduction to be an a priori mode of inference. We close by highlighting how our strategy for establishing the a priority of abduction positively contrasts with strategies in Bonjour (1998), Swinburne (2001), and Peacocke (2004) aiming to establish the a priority of certain ampliative modes of inference or abductive principles. (shrink)

1 Introducing Monsieur Foucault Stephen J. Ball Michel Foucault is an enigma, a massively influential intellectual who steadfastly refused to align himself ...

In The Things We Mean I argue that there exist such things as the things we mean and believe, and that they are what I call pleonastic propositions. The first two chapters offer an initial motivation and articulation of the theory of pleonastic propositions, and of pleonastic entities generally. The remaining six chapters bring that theory to bear on issues in the theory of content: the existence and nature of meanings; knowledge of meaning; the meaning relation and compositional semantics; the (...) relation between content-involving facts and underlying physical facts; vagueness and indeterminacy; conditionals; normative discourse; and the role of propositional content in explanation, prediction, and knowledge acquisition. (shrink)

This entry provides an overview of theories of concepts that is organized around five philosophical issues: (1) the ontology of concepts, (2) the structure of concepts, (3) empiricism and nativism about concepts, (4) concepts and natural language, and (5) concepts and conceptual analysis.

_Bodies for Sale: Ethics and Exploitation in the Human Body Trade _explores the philosophical and practical issues raised by activities such as surrogacy and organ trafficking. Stephen Wilkinson asks what is it that makes some commercial uses of the body controversial, whether the arguments against commercial exploitation stand up, and whether legislation outlawing such practices is really justified. In Part One Wilkinson explains and analyses some of the notoriously slippery concepts used in the body commodification debate, including exploitation, harm (...) and consent. In Part Two he focuses on three controversial issues outlining contemporary regulation and investigating both the moral issues and the arguments for legal prohibition. (shrink)

In this volume, Stephen M. Gardiner and David A. Weisbach present arguments for and against the relevance of ethics to global climate policy. Gardiner argues that climate change is fundamentally an ethical issue, since it is an early instance of a distinctive challenge to ethical action, and ethical concerns are at the heart of many of the decisions that need to be made. Consequently, climate policy that ignores ethics is at risk of.

In light of many recent critiques of Western modernity and its conceptual foundations, the problem of adequately justifying our most basic moral and political values looms large. Without recourse to traditional ontological or metaphysical foundations, how can one affirm — or sustain — a commitment to fundamentals? The answer, according to Stephen White, lies in a turn to “weak” ontology, an approach that allows for ultimate commitments but at the same time acknowledges their historical, contestable character. This turn, White (...) suggests, is already underway. His book traces its emergence in a variety of quarters in political thought today and offers a clear and compelling account of what this might mean for our late modern self-understanding. (shrink)

Stephen Darwall presents a series of essays that explore the view that morality is second-personal, entailing mutual accountability and the authority to address demands. He illustrates the power of the second-personal framework to illuminate a wide variety of issues in moral, political, and legal philosophy.

In these essays Stephen White examines the forms of psychological integration that give rise to self-knowable and self-conscious individuals who are responsible, concerned for the future, and capable of moral commitment. The essays cover a wide range of basic issues in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, moral psychology, and political philosophy, providing a coherent, sophisticated, and forcefully argued view of the nature of the self. Beginning with mental content and ending with Rawls and utilitarianism, each essay argues a distinctive line. (...) Together they are a unified and powerful philosophical position of considerable scope, one that provides a unique vision of the mind, consciousness, personhood, and morality. White argues that the unity of the self revealed in personal identity and moral responsibility is best understood in normative terms. Basic to such features of the self are the patterns of self-concern in which they are characteristically displayed and the internal justification that supports such concern. The treatment of intentionality and consciousness that grounds this account emphasizes privileged selfknowledge and practical rationality and their corresponding contributions to the unity of the self. A final source of unity emerges from the analysis of our fundamental commitments, an analysis that ensures a central place in moral theory for the notion of the self. (shrink)

Introduction by Ralph McInerny The essays in this volume, indebted in great part to Jacques Maritain and to other Neo-Thomists, represent a contribution to an understanding of beauty and the arts within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. As such they constitute a different voice in present-day discussions on beauty and aesthetics, a voice which nonetheless shares with many of its contemporaries concern over questions such as the relationship between beauty and morality, public funding of the arts and their educational role, objective and (...) universal standards of what is beautiful. In the tradition in which the contributors of this volume reflect, beauty manifests itself in the order of the universe, an order that provides human reason with a window onto the transcendent. For Aristotle and Aquinas the natural order grounds both art and morality, and yet it is this very order which has been called into question by modern science and philosophy. Instead of pointing us to a suprahuman order, the beautiful then points to the order of human freedom and creativity. Reflection on the beautiful since the modern philosopher Immanuel Kant has thus often taken a subjectivistic turn. Because of the importance of beauty and art in human existence, in man's education and life as a moral and political being, an alternative should be sought to any reduction of the beautiful to a purely subjective experience or cultural construct. The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, in dialogue with modern and contemporary conceptions of the beautiful, provides us with just that alternative, and thus the essays herein represent a decisive step in the "journey for Thomistic aesthetics." THE CONTRIBUTORS: In addition to the editor, the contributors to the volume are: Brian J. Braman, Matthew Cuddeback, Christopher M. Cullen, S.J., Patrick Downey, Desmond J. FitzGerald, Donald Haggerty, Wayne H. Harter, Jeanne M. Heffernan, Thomas S. Hibbs, Gregory J. Kerr, Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., Daniel McInerny, Ralph McInerny, James P. Mesa, John F. Morris, Ralph Nelson, Katherine Anne Osenga, Carrie Rehak, Stephen Schloesser, S.J., Francis Slade, John G. Trapani, Jr., and Henk E. S. Woldring. ABOUT THE EDITOR: Alice Ramos is associate professor of philosophy at St. John's University. (shrink)

Stephen Darwall expands upon his argument for a second-personal framework for morality, in which morality entails mutual accountability and the authority to address demands. He explores the role of the framework in relation to cultural ideas of respect and honor; the development of "modern" moral philosophy; and interpersonal relations.

The concept of "practices"—whether of representation, of political or scientific traditions, or of organizational culture—is central to social theory. In this book, Stephen Turner presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities. Understood broadly as a tacit understanding "shared" by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty, Turner argues: there is no plausible mechanism by which a (...) "practice" is transmitted or reproduced. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea. Turner's conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion. This first book-length critique of practice theory is sure to stir discussion and controversy in a wide range of fields, from philosophy and science studies to sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and political and legal theory. (shrink)

Towards the end of his life, Descartes published the first four parts of a projected six-part work, The Principles of Philosophy. This was intended to be the definitive statement of his complete system of philosophy, dealing with everything from cosmology to the nature of human happiness. In this book, Stephen Gaukroger examines the whole system, and reconstructs the last two parts, 'On Living Things' and 'On Man', from Descartes' other writings. He relates the work to the tradition of late (...) Scholastic textbooks which it follows, and also to Descartes' other philosophical writings, and he examines the ways in which Descartes transformed not only the practice of natural philosophy but also our understanding of what it is to be a philosopher. His book is a comprehensive examination of Descartes' complete philosophical system. (shrink)

Our knowledge of the world comes from various sources. But it is sometimes said that testimony, unlike other sources, transmits knowledge from one person to another. In this book, Stephen Wright investigates what the transmission of knowledge involves and the role that it should play in our theorising about testimony as a source of knowledge. He argues that the transmission of knowledge should be understood in terms of the more fundamental concept of the transmission of epistemic grounds, and that (...) the claim that testimony transmits knowledge is not only defensible in its own right, but indispensable to an adequate theory of testimony. This makes testimony unlike other epistemic sources. (shrink)

This ambitious and important book, first published in 2001, provides a truly general account of Francis Bacon as a philosopher. It describes how Bacon transformed the values that had underpinned philosophical culture since antiquity by rejecting the traditional idea of a philosopher as someone engaged in contemplation of the cosmos. The book explores in detail how and why Bacon attempted to transform the largely esoteric discipline of natural philosophy into a public practice through a program in which practical science provided (...) a model that inspired many from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Stephen Gaukroger shows that this reform of natural philosophy was dependent on the creation of a new philosophical persona: a natural philosopher shaped through submission to the dictates of Baconian method. This book will be recognized as a major contribution to Baconian scholarship, of special interest to historians of early-modern philosophy, science, and ideas. (shrink)

This chapter explores some fundamental consequences of the correspondence between physical process and computations. Most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts of computation. Those that concern idealized limits of infinite time, volume, or numerical precision can require arbitrarily long computations, and so be considered formally undecidable. The behavior of a physical system may always be calculated by simulating explicitly each step in its evolution. Much of theoretical physics has, however, been concerned with devising shorter methods of calculation (...) that reproduce the outcome without tracing each step. Computational irreducibility is common among the systems investigated in mathematics and computation theory, but it may well be the exception rather than the rule, since most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts of computation. (shrink)

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1771-1831) is now recognized to be one of the most important modern thinkers. His influence is to be found in Marx's conception of historical dialectic, Kierkegaard's existentialism, Dewey's pragmatism and Gadamer's hermeneutics and Derrida's deconstruction. Until now, however, it has been difficult for the non-specialist to find a reasonably comprehensive introduction to this important, yet at times almost impenetrable philosopher. With this book Stephen Houlgate offers just such an introduction. His book is written in an (...) accessible style and covers a range of topics: the philosophy of history, logic and phenomenology, political philosophy, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. In the course of the book the author relates Hegel's ideas to those of many other thinkers, including Luther, Descartes, Kant and Thomas Kuhn. (shrink)

Persons registered to vote in Seattle, Washington for the November, 1986 general election and a September, 1987 primary election were randomly assigned to treatments in two telephoneconducted experiments that sought to increase voter tumout. The experiments applied and extended a "self-prophecy” technique, in which respondents are asked simply to predict whether or not they will perform a target action. In the present studies, voting registrants were asked to predict whether or not they would vote in an election that was less (...) than 48 hours away. This technique, which previously increased turnout in a small study done during the 1984 U.S. Presidential election, was again effective among moderate prior-turnout voters in the second of the present much larger experiments. The failure of the effect in Experiment 1 was plausibly a ceiling effect due to very high turnout for a U.S. Senate contest in the 1986 election. Successful applications of the self· prophecy technique are facilitated by social desirability of the target action (which leads subjects to predict that they will perform it). However, social desirability of the target behavior is not a sufficient condition for the effect, as indicated by an unexpected nonoccurrence of the effect among low prior-tumout voters in Experiment 2. (shrink)

Since 2000, 11 human uterine transplantation procedures (UTx) have been performed across Europe and Asia. Five of these have, to date, resulted in pregnancy and four live births have now been recorded. The most significant obstacles to the availability of UTx are presently scientific and technical, relating to the safety and efficacy of the procedure itself. However, if and when such obstacles are overcome, the most likely barriers to its availability will be social and financial in nature, relating in particular (...) to the ability and willingness of patients, insurers or the state to pay. Thus, publicly funded healthcare systems such as the UK9s National Health Service (NHS) will eventually have to decide whether UTx should be funded. With this in mind, we seek to provide an answer to the question of whether there exist any compelling reasons for the state not to fund UTx. The paper proceeds as follows. It assumes, at least for the sake of argument, that UTx will become sufficiently safe and cost-effective to be a candidate for funding and then asks, given that, what objections to funding there might be. Three main arguments are considered and ultimately rejected as providing insufficient reason to withhold funding for UTx. The first two are broad in their scope and offer an opportunity to reflect on wider issues about funding for infertility treatment in general. The third is narrower in scope and could, in certain forms, apply to UTx but not other assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). The first argument suggests that UTx should not be publicly funded because doing so would be inconsistent with governments’ obligations to prevent climate change and environmental pollution. The second claims that UTx does not treat a disorder and is not medically necessary. Finally, the third asserts that funding for UTx should be denied because of the availability of alternatives such as adoption and surrogacy. (shrink)

It is argued that there are good reasons for believing that commercial surrogacy is often exploitative. However, even if we accept this, the exploitation argument for prohibiting (or otherwise legislatively discouraging) commercial surrogacy remains quite weak. One reason for this is that prohibition may well 'backfire' and lead to potential surrogates having to do other things that are more exploitative and/or more harmful than paid surrogacy. It is concluded, therefore, that those who oppose exploitation should concentrate on: (a) improving the (...) conditions under which paid surrogates 'work'; and (b) changing the background conditions (in particular, the unequal distribution of power and wealth) which generate exploitative relationships. (edited). (shrink)

Stephen Moroney's fascinating study examines the frequently neglected topic of the noetic effects of sin, a phenomenon in which sin distorts human thinking. Drawing on the detailed models formulated by John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, and Emil Brunner, Moroney sets forth a more contemporary model of the subject. He extends beyond all previous views by relating the noetic effects of sin to the complex and unpredictable interaction between the object of knowledge and the knowing subject. Moroney also futher examines some (...) of the implications of the noetic effects of sin for the rationalist theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg and the Reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Lastly, Moroney undertakes an interdisciplinary study of what social psychology and Christian theology contribute to our understanding of the noetic effects of sin. An invaluable addition to current conversations on theology and epistemology, The Noetic Effects of Sin will be of interest to scholars of theology, religion, and social psychology. (shrink)

What are ethical judgments about? And what is their relation to practice? How can ethical judgment aspire to objectivity? The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in metaethics, placing questions such as these about the nature and status of ethical judgment at the very center of contemporary moral philosophy. Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches is a unique anthology which collects important recent work, much of which is not easily available elsewhere, on core metaethical issues. Naturalist (...) moral realism, once devastated by the charge of "naturalistic fallacy," has been reinvigorated, as have versions of moral realism that insist on the discontinuity between ethics and science. Irrealist, expressivist programs have also developed with great subtlety, encouraging the thought that a noncognivist account may actually be able to explain ethical judgments' aspirations to objectivity. Neo-Kantian constructivist theories have flourished as well, offering hope that morality can be grounded in a plausible conception of reasonable conduct. Together, the positions advanced in the essays collected here address these recent developments, constituting a rich array of approaches to contemporary moral philosophy's most fundamental debates. An extensive introduction by Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton is also included, making this volume the most comprehensive and up-to-date work of its kind. Moral Discourse is ideally suited for use in courses in contemporary ethics, ethical theory, and metaethics. (shrink)

Heidegger’s analysis of human existence has long been criticized for ignoring the full possibilities of human encounter. This article finds a basis for the criticism in recent infancy research. It presents evidence for a second-person structure in our earliest encounters: An infant first becomes present to herself as the focal center of a caregiver’s gazing, smiling, or vocalization. The exchange in which the self thus appears is termed a You–I event. Such an event, it is held, cannot be assimilated into (...) Heidegger’s Dasein analysis. The article locates the origins of temporality in the early playful exchanges that make up You–I events. The dread of losing the You is seen as the original form of what Heidegger calls dread in the face of death. The apparently self-sufficient self of the cogito first emerges, it is held, when the child becomes capable of playing the role of a You toward herself. This happens especially through talking “with oneself,” as in “inner” speech. The postinfancy self is here interpreted as a derivative of the You–I event. It is argued that because inner speech frees the child from a felt dependence on others for self-awareness, they are no longer experienced in their full significance. The loss of fullness extends to all beings, including the self, with the result that beings are, as Heidegger puts it, depleted of being. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

How did we come to have a scientific culture -- one in which cognitive values are shaped around scientific ones? Stephen Gaukroger presents a rich and fascinating investigation of the development of intellectual culture in early modern Europe, a period in which understandings of the natural realm began to fragment.

Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified (...) picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners.The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development---and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer. (shrink)

In this chapter I consider the prospects of globalizing expressivism. Expressivism is a position in the philosophy of language that questions the central role of representation in a theory of meaning or linguistic function. An expressivist about a domain D of discourse proposes that utterances of sentences in D should not be seen, at the level of analysis as representing how things are, but as expression of non-representational states. So, in the domain of value-utterances, the standard idea is that speakers (...) are expressing affective-states, such as approval or disapproval focused on objects or conditions. Global expressivism is the thesis that for all domains of discourse, we treat utterances, at the level of analysis, as expressing non-representational states. I set out several conceptions of how one might formulate this programme. The first involves minimalism about truth and semantic content – and only partially gives up representationalism (viz., the thesis that some utterances express representational states). The second is Price’s conception, which incorporates minimalism, Brandomian inferentalism, and concepts from Carnap, but still clings to representationalism. I then arrive at my favoured third conception, which does not employ minimalism or inferentialism, and eliminates vestiges of representationalism. It does the latter by embracing expressivism about meaning-attribution. Having set out key aspects of the approach I then address the question of metaphysics. What metaphysical conception of reality goes with global expressivism so understood? I argue it implies a form of metametaphysical nihilism. This is that idea that reality lacks any ultimate nature. (shrink)

One widely held view of prenatal screening is that its foremost aim is, or should be, to enable reproductive choice; this is the Pure Choice view. The article critiques this position by comparing it with an alternative: Public Health Pluralism. It is argued that there are good reasons to prefer the latter, including the following. Public Health Pluralism does not, as is often supposed, render PNS more vulnerable to eugenics-objections. The Pure Choice view, if followed through to its logical conclusions, (...) may have unpalatable implications, such as extending choice well beyond health screening. Any sensible version of Public Health Pluralism will be capable of taking on board the moral seriousness of abortion and will advocate, where practicable, alternative means of reducing the prevalence of disease and disability. Public Health Pluralism is at least as well-equipped as the Pure Choice model to deal with autonomy and consent issues. (shrink)

My goal is to illuminate truth-making by way of illuminating the relation of making. My strategy is not to ask what making is, in the hope of a metaphysical theory about is nature. It's rather to look first to the language of making. The metaphor behind making refers to agency. It would be absurd to suggest that claims about making are claims about agency. It is not absurd, however, to propose that the concept of making somehow emerges from some feature (...) to do with agency. That's the contention to be explore in this paper. The way to do this is through expressivism,. Truth-making claims, and making-claims generfally, are claims in which we express mental states linked to our maipulation of concepts, like truth. In particular, they express disposition to undertake derivations using inference rules, in which introduction rules have a specific role. I then show how this theory explains our intuitions about truth's asymmetric dependence on being. (shrink)

In the nineteenth century, there was substantial and sophisticated interest in neuroscience on the part of social theorists, including Comte and Spencer, and later Simon Patten and Charles Ellwood. This body of thinking faced a dead end: it could do little more than identify highly general mechanisms, and could not provide accounts of such questions as `why was there no proletarian revolution?' Psychologically dubious explanations, relying on neo-Kantian views of the mind, replaced them. With the rise of neuroscience, however, some (...) of the problems of concern to earlier thinkers, such as imitation, have revived because of the discovery of neuronal mechanisms, or through fMRI studies. The article reviews the history and discusses the implications of current work for the reconsideration of traditional social theory concepts. It is suggested that certain kinds of bridging work with neuroscience would enable us to answer many questions in social theory that empirical sociology has failed to answer. (shrink)