In this paper, I demonstrate how the Passover Haggadah exploits certain features of conversational interaction in both the production formats of its texts and in its performance formats (or ways it indicates it should be performed) during the Passover Seder. Some conversational methods used include the use of dispreferred second pair parts which creates an impression that at least part of the Haggadah's text resembles a kind of conversational argument. Furthermore, as a recitable text, the Haggadah exploits the use of (...) and changes in footings in a manner reminiscent of how reported speech is used in ordinary conversation to introduce participant roles and virtual participants with their own commitments, orientations and positions which may not represent those of the animators of the recited text. While the Haggadah is not an actual argument in conventional terms, it is a script of ritual texts organized according to a logic similar to the one by which certain kinds of conversational arguments are organized. Participants are able to animate participatory roles and assess the positions, orientations and commitments such roles represent in a manner that rehearses how such positions, orientations and commitments might be accomplished in actual argumentation. (shrink)

Examining a fragment of interaction that occurred during a surgery at a teaching hospital, we explore how particular instructed experiences are produced for two trainees, a surgeon in the residency program and a medical student in a surgical clerkship. We are concerned with what is produced as learnable in each case. Stated slightly differently, we are interested in the ways in which the attending surgeon uses demonstrations as instruction and the ways in which recipients of that instruction, in this case (...) the resident and the clerk, respond with enactments of those demonstrated actions. The recipients of this kind of instruction participate in a form of experiential learning in which they enact their own versions of the instructor’s demonstrated actions to be observed and assessed by the instructor. These enactments provide learners with experiential access to the instructor’s demonstrated actions. They are designed to be experiences that learners may draw upon to make experientially warranted claims at some later time. (shrink)

There is no one such thing as the continental tradition in philosophy, but rather a whole discordant family of notably distinct traditions. They are, nevertheless, broadly recognisable to each other. For much of the last century, however, most of those engaged in or with philosophy in continental Europe, on the one hand, and in the English-speaking world, on the other hand, had surprisingly little knowledge of, interest in or even respect for what was going on in the other. Happily, the (...) situation today is vastly improved on each side of the philosophical channel. What follows is an attempt to gain some understanding of the background to this long-standing (and still to some diminishing extent persistent) mutual incomprehension from the standpoint of one who came to philosophy as a PPE student in the Oxford of the late 1940s. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that stressful conditions can facilitate evolutionary change. The mechanisms elucidated thus far accomplish this with a generic increase in heritable variation that facilitates more rapid adaptive evolution, often via plastic modifications of existing characters. Through scrutiny of different meanings of stress in biological research, and an explicit recognition that stressors must be characterized relative to their effect on capacities for maintaining functional integrity, we distinguish between: (1) previously identified stress-responsive mechanisms that facilitate evolution by maintaining an (...) adaptive fit with the environment, and (2) the co-option of stress-responsive mechanisms that are specific to stressors leading to the origin of novelties via compensation. Unlike standard accounts of gene co-option that identify component sources of evolutionary change, our model documents the cost-benefit trade-offs and thereby explains how one mechanism—an immediate response to acute stress—is transformed evolutionarily into another—routine protection from recurring stressors. We illustrate our argument with examples from cell type origination as well as processes and structures at higher levels of organization. These examples suggest a general principle of evolutionary origination based on the capacity to switch between regulatory states related to reproduction and proliferation versus survival and differentiation. (shrink)

Pragmatism established a philosophical presence over a century ago through the work of Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey, and has enjoyed an unprecedented revival in recent years owing to the pioneering efforts of Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. The essays in this volume explore the history and themes of classic pragmatism, discuss the revival of pragmatism and show how it engages with a range of areas of inquiry including politics, law, education, aesthetics, religion and feminism. Together they provide (...) readers with an overview of the richness and vitality of pragmatist thinking and the influence that it continues to exert both in philosophy and other disciplines. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of pragmatism, American philosophy and political theory. (shrink)

Incidents are peripheral, rather than central, phenomena. This Collision considers sound and installation artist Inouk Demers, whose recent work explores the incidental in both its geographical and conceptual relationships to the megalopolis of Los Angeles. In Zine-o-file, Conveyance, Wireless Landscape, and Custom Audio Products, Demers offers the incidental as an alternative to straightforward themes and fleshed-out narratives.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 19, Issue 6, Page 1201-1212, December 2011.

The authors focus on the ways in which various models of the distribution of power in society treat interest groups and evaluate their significance.

This book studies education and curriculum from the perspective of the teacher’s stance in the classroom. Writing through the lenses offered by autobiography, a lifetime in the classroom serving as teacher, and drawing heavily on Jewish and secular scholarly texts, Block offers a vision of education that serves as an alternative to the increasingly instrumentalist, managerial, standards-driven impersonal nature of contemporary schools. He advocates not for a pedagogy of ethics, but for the original ethical stance every teacher already assumes by (...) entering into the classroom. It is from this stance in ethics, he argues, that all pedagogy derives. (shrink)

J'examine d'abord trois sortes de fondations métaphysiques de l'éthique : ontologique (Aristote, G. E. Moore), non-cognitiviste (Stevenson, Havre), et rationnelle épistémologique (Kant). Ces théories ne donnent pas des fondations catégoriques et déterminées. Ensuite, je présente une esquisse de ma théorie selon laquelle l'action humaine donne la fondation ontologique et rationnelleépistémologique de l'éthique. First I examine three kinds of metaphysical foundations f or ethics: ontological (Aristotle, G. E. Moore), non-cognitivist (Stevenson, Hare) and rational-epistemological (Kant). These do not provide foundations that are (...) categorical and determinate.Then I briefly sketch my own theory that human action provides the ontological and rational-epistemological foundation of ethics. (shrink)

The 'individualizability objection' to the universalizability thesis asserts that the thesis is trivial because both the reason for a singular moral judgment and the corresponding universal principle may be so individualized that they apply to only one person. Purported reasons which are thus individualized, However, Fail to fulfill two general requirements of a reason: specificity and relevance. If the reasons do fulfill these requirements and also seem to support the individualizability objection, Than either they are logically comparative, In which case (...) they apply to more than one person in a proportional way, Or they indicate unique properties which are nonetheless similar to those of other persons. (shrink)

For many contemporary liberals, Anglo-American democracy seems unimpeachably the best political form. In contrast, adherence to democratic values seems an area in which most Marxian regimes, and perhaps Marx himself, are strikingly deficient. Further, Marxian theory insists on the existence of oppressive ruling classes in all capitalist societies and on the need for class struggle and violent revolution to achieve a more cooperative regime – theses which liberal social theories tend to dismiss peremptorily. From the perspective of modern liberal democratic (...) theory, Marxian arguments seem prima facie outlandish and even morally objectionable. (shrink)

The dramatic resurgence of American Pragmatism was one of the most important intellectual developments in the Twentieth Century. As the influence of this revitalised movement continues to spread across a variety of disciplines ranging from law to literary theory, the time is ripe for a considered reassessment of both its origins in the works of Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey and its later revival in the hands of thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. This three-volume collection (...) gathers together the necessary material for just such an 'assessment'. As such, it will an invaluable research tool for scholars and students who need to understand the significance of Pragmatism's unique place in the history of ideas. Alan Malachowski is an Honorary Lecturer in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of East Anglia. (shrink)

The study of coordination, collaboration, and cooperation brings to the fore a number of questions concerning the cognitive status of the various forms of behaviors that are involved. In this article, we will briefly consider coordination, collaboration, and cooperation in terms of their respective time courses and how they relate to such topics as intentionality, consciousness, role perspective, mental models, and mental simulation. Taken together, the study of coordination, collaboration, and cooperation provides a rich area for interaction between the behavioral (...) and cognitive sciences. (shrink)

The essays present both an introduction to and aesthetic analysis of Cohen's work, while the interview discusses the intractable problems of history and memory that his photographs so uniquely capture.