Since the publication of Miranda Fricker’s seminal book Epistemic Injustice, philosophy of education scholarship has been mostly limited to analyses of culprit-based epistemic injustice in education. This has left structural manifestations relatively underexplored with great detriment to those who are most vulnerable to experience such injustice. This paper aims to address this oversight and open avenues for further research by exploring approaches to theorizing structural epistemic injustice in education and envisioning efficacious remedies. The author identifies three approaches: one that focusses (...) on educational institutions; one that focusses on institutional processes that impact educational outcomes; and one that focusses on epistemological processes that are internal to education. Whilst the approaches differ as to their explanatory power and ease of implementation, it is argued that all three demonstrate that epistemic injustice in education is often the result of structural factors which cannot be attributed to individual epistemic agents. The author concludes by suggesting that educational philosophers must examine each of these approaches in greater depth to make significant progress in disrupting the impact of epistemic injustice in education. (shrink)

Despite the increase in ethics education offerings of the past few decades, universities struggle to foster desirable ethical dispositions among developing professionals. Part of the reason is that the values implicit in the enculturation of students in higher education cut against the aims of explicit ethics education. To accomplish desirable ethical dispositions among future professionals we ought to broaden our understanding of what the cultivation of ethical professionals entails from a narrow focus on ethics education to a broad focus on (...) ethics enculturation. This paper offers a framework for theorizing ethics enculturation, using examples from recent engineering ethics education literature to demonstrate how the framework captures elements about the development of ethical dispositions and decision-making skills that literature with a narrow focus on ethics education overlooks. (shrink)

The root *pent-1 has achieved wide distribution in the IE. languages. In the course of its long history considerable modification of meaning has affected it, both as a primary verb and as it appears in derivative nouns, and here I refer particularly to Go. finpan ‘find’ and to Gk. πάτη ‘deceit’. With little ingenuity—against mere ingenuity, of course, the etymologist is bound to be on his guard—it is possible to trace the train of thought that connects the various forms. But (...) though the explanations here offered may well seem obvious, they have not, so far as I am aware, been previously published. The familiar dictionaries of Boisacq, Walde-Hofmann, and Walde-Pokorny do provide attempts at explanation, but these have little power of convincing. (shrink)

Etymology, especially that of an ancient language like Greek, is not as a rule a field in which one expects to get conclusive demonstration; and between rival explanations one is often provided with a choice which cannot be made with much confidence. But despite this I think that I should reply to the article by W. S. Allen on ‘The Name of the Black Sea in Greek’ , pp. 86–8), which has raised again the question dealt with in my article (...) ‘The Name of the Euxine Pontus’ , pp. 123–8). This is not so much because I do not feel satisfied with Allen's explanation , as because this particular etymology has considerable historical, in addition to linguistic, interest. (shrink)

The master-servant and self-substance dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit presents the self as reflectively negating the particularities of its natural consciousness and transcending towards the social substance in order to inscribe its culturally refined self-conception upon the universal substance. Hegel argues that the reflective and determinate negations of the subordinated self by means of participative cultural production (Bildung) lead to the overcoming of servitude and subordination. That is, the actions of the supposedly ‘inessential’ servant-selfhood lead to freedom and disallows (...) the ossification of the social substance. This Hegelian insight is employed in this article to understand dominations in contemporary liberal democracies, and the participative cultural productions of the Dalits and their politics of resistance in the Indian subcontinent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 495 Perhaps a word should be added about those who deny that Sein und Zeit (or any of Heidegger's later work) has any bearing on theology. Both K. LOwith and H. Jonas claim that Heidegger operates under certain ontic-ontological presuppositions that are taken from and lead to an ontic negation of theology.'2 In a lecture delivered at Drew University Jonas even accused Heidegger of paganism and fatalism.'3 (...) Anybody familiar with Heidegger's thinking knows, of course, how wrong this is. In an interview Heidegger granted to the magazine der Spiegel in 1966, mainly to clarify his political activity during the Nazi period, the question of God entered into the discussion. (The interview was published only after his death in 1976 as Heidegger had stipulated.) In connection with the dangers involved in our technological society Heidegger said, "Only a God may save us. For us there remains the only possible way to prepare, through thinking and poeticizing, a readiness for the appearance of God or the absence of God [and our] doom: that we will perish in the face of the absent God.",4 These are only a few examples of the many authors Siefert discusses in her instructive book. The language is complicated, but the richness of the material as well as Siefert's keen insight reward the reader. An extensive bibliography and an index are added. ELISABETHFE1STHIRSCH Trenton State College On Materialism. By Sebastiano Timpanaro. (London: NLB, 1975. Pp. 254. $15.50) Sebastiano Timpanaro has published as a classical philologist, has been a militant member of Italian socialist parties since 1945, and has been most influenced by Leopardi, a nineteenthcentury Lucretian hedonist and materialist. His socialist and Leopardian interests are brought together in this work, which is a criticism of the tendencies in Western European Marxism (dominated by the Frankfurt school, existentialists, and structuralists) toward idealism and humanism, and their "erroneous rejection" of the biological and physical aspects of Marxism, to leave only historical materialism. Timpanaro claims that the interpretations of the Frankfurt school and Althusser "allow very little of Marxism to survive"; they are falsely antiscientific and adopt a Platonistic conception of science. From materialism he takes as his own point of departure certain hedonistic and pessimistic themes (is that the genuine Marxism?) that reached their height in Leopardi: a social and historical optimism regarding "communism as a now certain goal of human history" (in this he ignores that Marx in the Manuscripts said that communism is not the goal of, but only a stage in, human history); and "pessimism with respect to nature's oppression of man, which would continue to be a cause of unhappiness even in communist society." Again Timpanaro ignores the Manuscripts and Grundrisse where Marx reminds us that nature is our body with which we are in interaction. Timpanaro's pessimism can be understood as a result of the alienation we experience because of the attitudes of conquest and domination of nature--attitudes still endorsed by him in his claim that the animal merely uses nature, while man, who can set goals for himself and use means to his ends, can master nature. But we are in a position, historically, where our very survival depends on our moving back into harmony with nature, by overcoming that alienation. Timpanaro is not yet free of that outdated, bourgeois worldview; his is in accord with the view of capitalism, of which the final contradiction may be the ecological crisis of pollution and the depletion of resources in the name of "necessary" growth. Leopardi's materialist pessimism predicated human solidarity 12On LOwithsee Siefert, pp. 173-180. "On Jonas see Siefert, pp. 180-184,esp. p. 181 n. where Siefert refers to Father Richardson's answer to Jonas. 14May 31, 1976, p. 209. 496 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY upon the foundation of the struggle against nature, whereas Marx based the overcoming of our alienation from nature on the reestablishment of an equilibrium and solidarity with nature, our body. In his treatment of structuralism, Timpanaro is not only wallowing in his nineteenthcentury worldview, but he stoops to the lowest level of labeling and name calling, often without supporting arguments, of which dogmatic Marxists are... (shrink)

I do not think that the existence of God can be proved or even that the main justification for the belief can be found in argument in the ordinary sense of that term, but I think two of the three which have, since Kant at least, been classified as the traditional arguments of natural theology have some force and are worthy of serious consideration. This consideration I shall now proceed to give. I cannot say this of the remaining one of (...) the arguments, the ‘ontological proof’, which I shall therefore not discuss here. (shrink)

In this benchmark five-volume study, originally published between 1922 and 1955, Surendranath Dasgupta examines the principal schools of thought that define Indian philosophy. A unifying force greater than art, literature, religion, or science, Professor Dasgupta describes philosophy as the most important achievement of Indian thought, arguing that an understanding of its history is necessary to appreciate the significance and potentialities of India's complex culture. Volume I offers an examination of the Vedas and the Brahmanas, the earlier Upanisads, and the six (...) systems of Indian philosophy. (shrink)

This six volume backlist collection brings together an assortment of seminal works by highly influential British philosopher A. C. Ewing. This comprehensive and diverse collection encompasses a fantastic selection of his work in the field of moral philosophy and the history of philosophy; ranging from the definition of good, through to his views on punishment and a study on the work of Emmanuel Kant. Spanning more than 30 years in Professor Ewing’s distinguished career, the reissued volumes in this collection, originally (...) published between 1924 and 1959, offer a thorough and engaging insight into Professor Ewing’s work. (shrink)

AC Grayling is Britain’s leading popular philosopher. A professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, he has written over 20 books, ranging from academic monographs such as Truth, Meaning and Realism to more accessible works such as What is Good? and The Mystery of Things. His most recent books are Towards The Light and The Choice of Hercules.

A careful and competent introduction to the Russell-Broad type of analytic philosophy.--A. C. P.

Messages describing life after death from the author's deceased brother-in-law.--A. C. P.

The point of formalisation is to model various aspects of natural language. Perhaps the main use to which formalisation is put is to model and explain inferential relations between different sentences. Judged solely by this objective, a formalisation is successful in modelling the inferential network of natural language sentences to the extent that it mirrors this network. There is surprisingly little literature on the criteria of good formalisation, and even less on the question of what it is for a formalisation (...) to mirror the inferential network of a natural language or some fragment of it. This paper takes some exploratory steps towards a quantitative account of the main ingredient in the goodness of a formalisation. We introduce and critically examine a mathematical model of how well a formalisation mirrors natural-language inferential relations. (shrink)

In her groundbreaking book, Epistemic Injustice, renowned moral philosopher and social epistemologist Miranda Fricker coined the term epistemic injustice to draw attention to the pervasive impact of epistemic oppression on marginalized social groups. Fricker’s account spurred a flurry of scholarship regarding the discriminatory impact of epistemic injustice and gave birth to a domain of philosophical inquiry that has extended far beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy. In this interview, Fricker responds to questions posed by A. C. Nikolaidis and Winston C. (...) Thompson that address the ways in which epistemic injustice intersects with education as a human endeavour and social institution. In doing so, Fricker reflects on her motivations in writing her book more than fifteen years ago and explicitly addresses some of the most significant contributions of the concept of epistemic injustice as a tool for analysing issues in education. She also offers insights on the purpose of education, outlines educational manifestations of epistemic injustice, and discusses the virtues that educators must exhibit and inculcate in their students in order for epistemic justice to obtain. (shrink)

'Updating Bertrand Russell for the 21st century... a cerebrally enjoyable survey, written with great clarity and touches of wit... The non-western section throws up some fascinating revelations' Sunday Times The story of philosophy is an epic tale: an exploration of the ideas, views and teachings of some of the most creative minds known to humanity. But since the long-popular classic Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, first published in 1945, there has been no comprehensive and entertaining, single-volume history of this (...) great intellectual journey. With his characteristic clarity and elegance A. C. Grayling takes the reader from the world-views and moralities before the age of the Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, through Christianity's dominance of the European mind to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and on to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre, and philosophy today. And, since the story of philosophy is incomplete without mention of the great philosophical traditions of India, China and the Persian-Arabic world, he gives a comparative survey of them too. Intelligible for students and eye-opening for philosophy readers, he covers epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, logic, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, political philosophy and the history of debates in these areas of enquiry, through the ideas of the celebrated philosophers as well as less well-known influential thinkers. He also asks what we have learnt from this body of thought, and what progress is still to be made. The first authoritative and accessible single-volume history of philosophy for decades, remarkable for its range and clarity, this is a landmark work. (shrink)

Although the role of morphology in evolutionary theory remains a subject of debate, assessing the contributions of morphological investigation to evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-devo) is a more circumscribed issue of direct relevance to ongoing research. Historical studies of morphologically oriented researchers and the formation of the Modern Synthesis in the Anglo-American context identify a recurring theme: the synthetic theory of evolution did not capture multiple levels of biological organization. When this feature is incorporated into a philosophical framework for explaining the (...) origin of evolutionary innovations and novelties (a core domain of inquiry in Evo-devo) two specific roles for morphology can be described: (1) the conceptualization and operational identification of the targets of explanation; and (2) the elucidation of causal interactions at higher levels of organization during ontogeny and through evolutionary time. These roles are critical components of any adequate explanation of innovation and novelty though not exhaustive of the parts played by morphology in evolutionary investigation. They also invite reflection on what counts as an evolutionary cause in contemporary evolutionary biology. (shrink)

This chapter describes the theoretical implications of Extended Synthesis and addresses the methodological options available for determining aspects of theoretical structure. It uses a “bottom-up” approach focused on evolutionary theory in particular, as opposed to a “top-down” strategy that attempts to characterize the structure of all scientific theories. The chapter shows that there are multiple stable components contained within a broad representation of evolutionary theory. It suggests that the philosophical analysis offered in the chapter regarding the structure of evolutionary theory (...) assists attempts to recover coherence through the vehicle of an Extended Synthesis. (shrink)

This paper focuses on abstraction as a mode of reasoning that facilitates a productive relationship between philosophy and science. Using examples from evolutionary developmental biology, I argue that there are two areas where abstraction can be relevant to science: reasoning explication and problem clarification. The value of abstraction is characterized in terms of methodology (modeling or data gathering) and epistemology (explanatory evaluation or data interpretation).

Logical monism is the claim that there is a single correct logic, the 'one true logic' of our title. The view has evident appeal, as it reflects assumptions made in ordinary reasoning as well as in mathematics, the sciences, and the law. In all these spheres, we tend to believe that there aredeterminate facts about the validity of arguments. Despite its evident appeal, however, logical monism must meet two challenges. The first is the challenge from logical pluralism, according to which (...) there is more than one correct logic. The second challenge is to determine which form of logicalmonism is the correct one. One True Logic is the first monograph to explicitly articulate a version of logical monism and defend it against the first challenge. It provides a critical overview of the monism vs pluralism debate and argues for the former. It also responds to the second challenge by defending a particularmonism, based on a highly infinitary logic. It breaks new ground on a number of fronts and unifies disparate discussions in the philosophical and logical literature. In particular, it generalises the Tarski-Sher criterion of logicality, provides a novel defence of this generalisation, offers a clearnew argument for the logicality of infinitary logic and replies to recent pluralist arguments. (shrink)

A traditional approach to teaching medical ethics aims to provide knowledge about ethics. This is in line with an epistemological view on ethics in which moral expertise is assumed to be located in theoretical knowledge and not in the moral experience of healthcare professionals. The aim of this paper is to present an alternative, contextual approach to teaching ethics, which is grounded in a pragmatic-hermeneutical and dialogical ethics. This approach is called moral case deliberation. Within moral case deliberation, healthcare professionals (...) bring in their actual moral questions during a structured dialogue. The ethicist facilitates the learning process by using various conversation methods in order to find answers to the case and to develop moral competencies. The case deliberations are not unique events, but are a structural part of the professional training on the work floor within healthcare institutions. This article presents the underlying theory on ethics and illustrates this approach with an example of a moral case deliberation project in a Dutch psychiatric hospital. The project was evaluated using the method of responsive evaluation. This method provided us with rich information about the implementation process and effects the research process itself also lent support to the process of implementation. (shrink)

In this series of studies A. C. Grayling looks at approaches the problem of how sceptical challenges can be met.

Scholars of epistemology have identified two conceptions of epistemic injustice: discriminatory epistemic injustice and distributive epistemic injustice. The former refers to wrongs to one’s capacity as a knower that are the result of identity prejudice. The latter refers to violations of one’s right to know what one is entitled to know. This essay advances a third conception, formative epistemic injustice, which refers to wrongs to one’s capacity as a knower that are the result of or result in malformation—the undue restriction (...) of one’s formative capacities. The author argues that formative epistemic injustice is a distinctly educational wrong and that it brings to light important epistemic injustices that standard accounts of epistemic injustice either downplay or are unable to capture. This third conception of epistemic injustice is an important analytic tool for theorizing both epistemic injustice and educational justice. (shrink)

Developmental biology is the science of explaining how a variety of interacting processes generate the heterogeneous shapes, size, and structural features of an organism as it develops rom embryo to adult, or more generally throughout its life cycle (Love, 2008b; Minelli, 2011a). Although it is commonplace in philosophy to associate sciences with theories such that the individuation of a science is dependent on a constitutive theory or group of models, it is uncommon to find presentations of developmental biology making reference (...) to a theory or theories of development. For example, in the third edition of Essential Developmental Biology (Slack, 2013), three families of approaches are described (developmental genetics, experimental embryology, and molecular and cell biology), and the appendix contains a catalogue of ‘key molecular components’ (genes, transcription factor, families, inducing factor families, cytoskeleton, cell adhesion molecules, and extracellular matrix components); however, no standard theory or group of models provides a theoretical scaffolding to the book nor is any mentioned. (shrink)