The phrase ‘teaching and learning’ has essentially replaced the word ‘teaching’ in educational discourse. The linguistic shift occurred as part of a wider movement in the 1980s and 1990s to give greater attention to learning in the educational process, and the phrase served a sloganistic function. With the learning paradigm now largely uncontroversial, the phrase—like other ex-slogans—may now be carrying implications more tied to its literal meaning. This paper suggests that the constant reference to learning in the context of teaching (...) carries the implication that teaching is always accompanied by learning. After applying Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between task and achievement verbs, the paper argues that under certain interpretations, the idea that teaching implies learning is deeply problematic. The paper proposes that we instead use ‘teaching and studying’: to communicate the deep connections between the activities carried out by teachers and students, without supporting the unhelpful idea that the activity of teaching must always lead to the achievement of learning. (shrink)

The Java® programming language is a general-purpose, concurrent, object-oriented language. Its syntax is similar to C and C++, but it omits many of the features that make C and C++ complex, confusing, and unsafe. The Java platform was initially developed to address the problems of building software for networked consumer devices. It was designed to support multiple host architectures and to allow secure delivery of software components. To meet these requirements, compiled code had to survive transport across networks, operate on (...) any client, and assure the client that it was safe to run. (shrink)

This paper offers a new account of how structural rationality, or coherence, is normative. The central challenge to the normativity of coherence – which I term the problem of “making space” for the normativity of coherence – is this: if considerations of coherence matter normatively, it is not clear how we ought to take account of them in our deliberation. Coherence considerations don’t seem to show up in reasoning about what to believe, intend, desire, hope, fear, and so on; moreover, (...) they seem awkward to take account of alongside more “substantive” considerations about the merits of such attitudes. I aim here to solve this problem, and in so doing to offer the aforementioned new account of how coherence is normative. On the view I defend, which I call the Reasons-to-Structure-Deliberation model, considerations of coherence constitute reasons for structuring deliberation in certain ways: more particularly, to treat incoherent combinations of attitudes as off-limits, and so to focus one’s deliberation on choosing between the coherent combinations. (shrink)

It's often said that it is impossible to respond to non-evidential considerations in belief-formation, at least not directly and consciously. Many philosophers think that this provides grounds for accepting a normative thesis: typically, some kind of evidentialism about reasons for belief, or what one ought to believe. Some also think it supports thinking that evidentialist norms are constitutive of belief. There are a variety of ways in which one might try to support such theses by appeal to the impossibility-claim. In (...) this paper, I put pressure on these various attempts by raising a simple yet overlooked problem for them. In brief, the problem is that it isn't true that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that don't actually constitute (good) evidence for the proposition under consideration; what is true, at most, is that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that one oneself takes to be evidentially irrelevant to that proposition. While this point is obvious once stated, its significance hasn't been appreciated, or so I'll argue. Once we take full account of it, the standard arguments from the impossibility-claim to evidentialism don't go through. (shrink)

The “affirming” healthcare model for gender-distressed youth is endorsed by the medical establishment in the United States, but many European nations have retreated from it. This controversy would be expected to attract the interest of philosophers and bioethicists, with a diverse range of opinions appearing in academic articles. However, when philosophers and bioethicists have ventured into print, they have almost invariably endorsed the affirmative approach, which involves life-changing medical interventions on children with psychological problems. This is a sign that the (...) process of academic research and writing is not functioning as it should. -/- We recount the failure of philosophy and bioethics to address the issues raised by gender-affirming healthcare. We also offer an explanation of this failure, and in the final section make some recommendations for improving academic integrity. (shrink)

Comment on Brogaard's Seeing and Saying (OUP 2018).

Indifferent lies have been proposed as a counterexample to the claim that lying requires an intention to deceive. In indifferent lies, the speaker says something she believes to be false (in a trut...

In a companion paper (Byrne and Green 2023) we disentangled the main characterizations of naïve realism and argued that illusions provide the best proving ground for naïve realism and its main rival, representationalism. According to naïve realism, illusions never involve perceptual error. We assessed two leading attempts to explain apparent perceptual error away, from William Fish and Bill Brewer, and concluded that they fail. This paper considers another prominent attempt, from Craig French and Ian Phillips, and also sketches the case (...) for representationalism. (shrink)

For Austin, Grice, and many others, undertaking a speech act like asserting or promising requires uttering something with a particular sense and reference in mind. We argue that the phenomenon of open-ended promises reveals this 'Locutionary Thesis' to be mistaken.

In clinical studies, childhood-onset gender dysphoria does not usually persist through puberty, at least if the child has not socially transitioned. If dysphoria persists into puberty, is it unlikely to abate without medical intervention? Many clinicians would give an affirmative answer. Gender dysphoria after puberty is often said to be "highly persistent.” The article examines whether this opinion is backed by good evidence, and concludes that it isn't.

In response to our critics, we clarify and defend key ideas in the report Open and Inclusive: Fair Processes for Financing Universal Health Coverage. First, we argue that procedural fairness has greater value than Dan Hausman allows. Second, we argue that the Report aligns with John Kinuthia’s view that a knowledgeable public and a capable civil society, alongside good facilitation, are important for effective public deliberation. Moreover, we agree with Kinuthia that the Report’s framework for procedural fairness applies not merely (...) within the health sector, but also to the wider budget process. Third, we argue that while Dheepa Rajan and Benjamin Rouffy-Ly are right that robust processes for equal participation are often central to a fair process, sometimes improvements in other aspects of procedural fairness, such as transparency, can take priority over strengthening participation. Fourth, while we welcome Sara Bennett and Maria Merritt’s fascinating use of the Report’s principles of procedural fairness to assess the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, we argue that their application of the Report’s principle of equality to development partners’ decision-making requires further justification. (shrink)

If I am confused, and I think two people are one and the same, that may impair my ability to refer to either of them. This is combinatory confusion. What if I am confused, and think that one person is actually two people? This is separatory confusion, and it seems quite different. After all, even in my confusion, my thoughts and my referential devices seem to track back to a single individual. Elmar Unnsteinsson has recently argued that both types of (...) confusion corrupt, i.e. they may prevent us from referring the right way. In this paper, I examine the four arguments he offers for this conclusion, and I argue that the intuitive view that separatory confusion does not corrupt can withstand his challenge. (shrink)

We summarize key messages from the World Bank report Open and Inclusive: Fair Processes for Financing Universal Health Coverage. A central lesson of the Report is that in decision-making on the path to UHC, procedural fairness matters alongside substantive fairness. Decision systems should be assessed using a complete conception of procedural fairness that embodies core commitments to impartial and equal consideration of interests and perspectives. These commitments demand that comprehensive information is gathered and disclosed and that justifications for policies are (...) publicly debated; that participation in decision-making is enabled; and that these characteristics of the decision system are institutionalised rather than up to the good will of decision-makers. Procedural fairness can improve equity in outcomes, raise legitimacy and trust, and can help make reforms last. While improving procedural fairness can be costly and there are barriers to achieving it, the range of instruments that countries at varying levels of income and institutional capacity have used with some success shows that, in many contexts, advances in procedural fairness in health financing are possible and worthwhile. (shrink)

This paper provides new examples of vagueness phenomena with comparatives. I show that comparatives of the form ‘x is ADJ-er than y’ can be vague due to a fuzziness in how much of some property makes for a difference in ADJ-ness. The sorites examples I provide cannot be assimilated to cases of indiscriminability or fuzziness in relevant dimensions, standards, or measurement procedures. A revised degree-based semantics with semiorders, a well studied threshold structure, is developed. The treatment of equatives captures the (...) truth of the claim that adjacent items in the sorites series are not relevantly distinguishable in ADJ-ness; and it avoids validating transitivities that would yield paradoxical conclusions. (shrink)

LLMs are statistical models of language learning through stochastic gradient descent with a next token prediction objective. Prompting a popular view among AI modelers: LLMs are just next token predictors. While LLMs are engineered using next token prediction, and trained based on their success at this task, our view is that a reduction to just next token predictor sells LLMs short. Moreover, there are important explanations of LLM behavior and capabilities that are lost when we engage in this kind of (...) reduction. In order to draw this out, we will make an analogy with a once prominent research program in biology explaining evolution and development from the genes eye view. (shrink)

The trend towards postponement of childbearing has seen increasing numbers of women turning towards oocyte banking for anticipated gamete exhaustion (AGE banking), which offers a realistic chance of achieving genetically connected offspring. However, there are concerns around the use of this technology, including social/ethical implications, low rate of utilisation and its cost-effectiveness. The same societal trends have also resulted in an increased demand and unmet need for donor oocytes, with many women choosing to travel overseas for treatment. This has its (...) own inherent social, medical, financial and psychological sequelae. We propose a possible pathway to address these dual realities. The donation of oocytes originally stored in the context of AGE banking, with appropriate compensatory mechanisms, would ameliorate AGE banking concerns, while simultaneously improving the supply of donor oocytes. This proposed arrangement will result in tangible benefits for prospective donors, recipients and society at large. (shrink)

Recent claims that artificial intelligence (AI) systems demonstrate “emergent abilities” have fueled excitement but also fear grounded in the prospect that such systems may enable a wider range of parties to make unprecedented advances in areas that include the development of chemical or biological weapons. Ambiguity surrounding the term “emergent abilities” has added avoidable uncertainty to a topic that has the potential to destabilize the strategic landscape, including the perception of key parties about the viability of nonproliferation efforts. To avert (...) these problems in the future, scientists, developers, policymakers, and other parties should take credible steps to strengthen the health of the scientific ecosystem around AI. (shrink)

Werner Bonefeld is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK, and Adjunct Professor at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia). He has published on topics as varied as the development of the British state during the 1980s and 1990s, Europe’s monetary union, ordoliberalism, and Marx’s critique of political economy. A ground-breaking critical theorist, Bonefeld’s contribution to an ‘open’ Marxism developed a rigorous critique of capitalist social relations without omitting the significant themes of lived (...) experience and class antagonism. The following interview marks the publication of a recent monograph titled A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation. Bonefeld discusses his reading of Frankfurt School critical theory and its relation to heterodox and open Marxist social theory with Alex Alvarez Taylor, whose research focuses on early critical theory. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom holds that C. S. Lewis was uninterested in politics and public affairs. The conventional wisdom is wrong. As Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson show in this groundbreaking work, Lewis was deeply interested in the fundamental truths and falsehoods about human nature and how these conceptions manifest themselves in the contested and turbulent public square. Ranging from the depths of Lewis' philosophical treatments of epistemology and moral pedagogy to practical considerations of morals legislation and responsible citizenship, (...) this book explores the contours of Lewis' multi-faceted Christian engagement with political philosophy generally and the natural-law tradition in particular. Drawing from the full range of Lewis' corpus and situating his thought in relationship to both ancient and modern seminal thinkers, C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law offers an unprecedented look at politics and political thought from the perspective of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers. (shrink)

More than perhaps any other major social theorist, Niklas Luhmann adopted a perspective on society at the opposite end of the atomistic-holistic spectrum to that of mainstream economics. While the position of mainstream economics is that society is nothing more than a collection of individuals, so that it can be understood simply in terms of those individuals and their interactions, Luhmann abstracts from individuals entirely, understanding social phenomena as being produced by society itself, with individuals playing a merely peripheral or (...) “enabling” role. This radical reconceptualization of society and the relation of the individual to society allowed Luhmann to build from the ground up a highly systematic theory of society which allows one to formulate economic and social questions in new ways, freed from preconceptions that are poorly grounded or simply wrong. After providing a brief overview of Luhmann’s general social theory, this article considers two questions for which Luhmann’s theory can produce a fresh point of view. The first concerns what is the nature of markets. According to Luhmann, markets are not a kind of system, but collections of observations--the observations of market participants of other market participants. The second concerns the old question of what is the appropriate degree of intervention in the economy. Mainstream economics approaches this problem through the distinction between markets and planning. According to Luhmann, this is a false dichotomy, since all economies have markets and planning. The real question is who should do the planning: private organizations or the state. The former operate on the basis of competition, that is, rivalry; the latter operates on the basis of cooperation. The problem with “socialist” or “centrally planned” economies was not that they were planned or centrally organized, since “free market” economies have planning and centralization too; it was that they relied solely on cooperation, with there being no space for competition. The paper concludes with some reflections on whether freemarket economies with minimal intervention by the state are any more sustainable than are “socialist” economies.Niklas Luhmann, peut-être plus que les autres auteurs en théorie sociale, a adopté une approche de la société qui est à l’opposé du spectre individualismeholisme des économistes orthodoxes. Alors que l’économie orthodoxe considère que la société n’est rien d’autre que la somme des individus et qu’elle ne peut être appréhendée qu’en termes d’individus et de leurs interactions, Luhmann fait totalement abstraction des individus et comprend les phénomènes sociaux comme étant produits par la société elle-même dans laquelle les individus jouent un rôle périphérique ou un rôle “d’habilitation”. Cette radicale reconceptualization de la société ainsi que la relation des individus à la société a permis à Luhmann de construire une théorie très méthodique de la société qui permet d’appréhender de façon différente les questions économiques et sociales, sans préreprésentations fragiles ou erronées. Après avoir donné un aperçu général de la théorie sociale de Luhmann, l’article considère deux questions pour lesquelles la théorie de Luhmann peut apporter un nouveau point de vue. La première traite de la nature des marchés. D’après Luhmann, les marchés ne sont pas une sorte de système mais des sommes d’observations faites par les participants au marché sur les autres participants. La seconde question concerne l’éternel problème du degré d’interventionnisme dans l’économie. Les économistes orthodoxes abordent cette question à travers la distinction entre les marchés et la planification. D’après Luhmann cette dichotomie est erronée dans la mesure où toutes les économies connaissent à la fois le marché et la planification. La véritable question est: Qui devrait planifier: les organisations privées ou l’Etat?. Les premières agissent sur la base de la concurrence, i.e de la rivalité; l’Etat agit sur la base de la coopération. Le problème avec les économies “socialistes” ou “centralement planifiées” n’est pas qu’elles sont planifiées ou qu’elles relèvent d’une organisation centralisée puisque les économies de “marché libre” connaissent aussi la planification et la centralisation. Le problème vient du fait qu’elles reposent uniquement sur la coopération et n’accordent pas de place à la concurrence. Le papier conclut en s’interrogeant sur l’idée selon laquelle les économies de libre marché avec une intervention étatique minimale sont plus viables que les économies “socialistes”. (shrink)

Geach's account of the Aristotelian logic of categorical sentences supplemented the views shared by Frege, Russell, Quine and others. I argue that this particular predicate logic approach and Geach's points apply to only one variety of natural language categorical sentences. For example, it takes the universal categorical as a universal conditional “If anything is a man, then it is mortal”. A different natural language form can and should be invoked: “Every man is a mortal.” Employing special restricted quantifiers in a (...) version of predicate logic, we justify a full square of opposition and the rules of quality and quantity that Geach rejected. (shrink)

This paper considers a form of scepticism according to which sentences, along with other linguistic entities such as verbs and phonemes, etc., are never realized. If, whenever a conversational participant produces some noise or other, they and all other participants assume that a specific sentence has been realized (or, more colloquially, spoken), communication will be fluent whether or not the shared assumption is correct. That communication takes place is therefore, one might think, no ground for assuming that sentences are realized (...) during a typical conversation. I reject both this ‘folie-a-deux’ view and the arguments for it due to Georges Rey. I do so by drawing on Gilbert Harrnan’s no-false-lemmas principle. Since testimony is a form of knowledge and, according to the principle, knowledge cannot depend essentially on false assumptions, testimony is incompatible with the claim that sentence realization is but an illusion. Much of the paper is given over to defending this appeal to the no-false-lemmas principle. After all, a more attractive option might seem to be to infer instead that the principle is itself falsified by the folie-a-deux view. (shrink)

In this paper, the author argues that the revelatory form Parmenides gives his poem poses considerable problems for the account of being contained therein. The poem moves through a series of problems, each building on the last: the problem of particularity, the cause of human wandering that the goddess would have us ascend beyond ; the problem of speech, whose heterogeneity evinces its tie to experience’s particularity ; the problem of justice, which motivates man’s ascent from his “insecure” place in (...) being, only ultimately to undermine it ; and finally the question of the good, the necessary consequence of man’s place in being as being out-of-place in being. What emerges is a Socratic reading of Parmenides’s poem, a view that Plato appears to have shared by using Parmenides and his Eleatic stranger to frame the bulk of Socrates’s philosophic activity. (shrink)

Skill building is a widely recognized teaching goal in philosophy. Some well-researched skill building techniques include scaffolded assignment design, low-stakes assignments, and peer-review. Many papers have highlighted the efficacy of these techniques by demonstrating novel course and assignment design; for example, the use of blogging in philosophy courses has been shown to have positive results on student writing. While the efficacy of skill building centered course design on student learning seems uncontroversial, two major problems are typically raised: the time investment (...) for such course design is significant and implementing these techniques in large classes is not possible. The central aim of this paper is to combat this second claim. I present a course designed around skill building that has been successfully implemented in classes of from 120 to 450 students. I show some techniques that make this implementation possible and not unwieldy, and I argue that students both improved their philosophical skills and enjoyed the course design. (shrink)

The view that moods are dispositions has recently fallen into disrepute. In this paper, we want to revitalise it by providing a new argument for it and by disarming an important objection against it. A shared assumption of our competitors (intentionalists about moods) is that moods are ‘diffuse’. First, we will provide reasons for thinking that existing intentionalist views do not in fact capture this distinctive feature of moods that distinguishes them from emotions. Second, we offer a dispositionalist alternative that (...) we think does better. Finally, we disarm the objection that is responsible for dispositionalism’s bad press. (shrink)

The emergence of a new tissue economy raises issues for the governance of risk and concepts of the body and self. This article explores the development of autologous cell therapies as a form of tissue engineering and considers how and why autologous applications are seen as less risky and more socially and politically acceptable. In a careful analysis of contemporary debates around the need for new international policies to regulate these technologies, we critically assess the discursive strategies employed to support (...) ideas of the body as a natural entity. Central to these debates are assumptions that autologous applications do not threaten the moral or corporeal integrity of the individual and that they are ‘an ethics-free zone’. Analysis reveals that concepts such as intercorporeality need to be refined if they are to assist our understanding of these cell-based therapies. We consider the biopolitics of Autologous Chondrocyte Implantation (ACI) in order to show the linkages between the culturing of cells, regulation and the reproduction of the self. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo avaliar em que medida as considerações feitas por Gilbert Simondon sobre a natureza dos _objetos técnicos_ fundamentam teses incompatíveis com a prática da _obsolescência programada_. Mais precisamente, interessa saber como o conceito de _concretização_, que está relacionado a aspectos ontológicos de tais objetos, possui implicações éticas contra o descarte de objetos produzidos pelo mundo contemporâneo industrializado. No contexto industrial capitalista, a obsolescência programada tem sido usada no sentido de uma manutenção econômica. Contudo, há vários problemas (...) resultantes dessa prática. Um deles diz respeito aos impactos destrutivos causados ao meio ambiente. Assim, haveria na proposta de Simondon elementos para encontrar respostas aos problemas causados pela obsolescência programada? Defendemos que uma saída para isso está na própria orientação ética inerente ao desenvolvimento adequado dos objetos técnicos, constituído na perspectiva da concretização de tais objetos. (shrink)

Propositional logic is understood as a set of theorems defined by a deductive system: a set of axioms and a set of rules. Superintuitionistic logic is a logic extending intuitionistic propositional logic \. A rule is admissible for a logic if any substitution that makes each premise a theorem, makes the conclusion a theorem too. A deductive system \ is structurally complete if any rule admissible for the logic defined by \ is derivable in \. It is known that any (...) logic can be defined by a structurally complete deductive system—its structural completion. The main goal of the paper is to study the following problem: given a superintuitionistic logic L, is the structural completion of L hereditarily structurally complete? It is shown that, on the one hand, there is continuum many of such logics, including \, and many of its standard extensions. On the other hand, there is continuum many superintutitionistic logics structural completion of which is not hereditarily structurally complete. It is observed that the class of hereditarily structurally complete superintuitionistic consequence relations does not have the smallest element and it contains continuum many members lacking the finite model property. The following statement is instrumental in obtaining negative results: if a Lindenbaum algebra of formulas on one variable is finite and has more than 15 elements, then a structural completion of such a logic is not hereditarily structurally complete. (shrink)

The work of Hardt and Negri offers the field of education important theoretical resources for reconceptualizing subjectivity as a site of politics. Yet recent shifts on the Left toward more articulated mobilizations, along with the emergence of new decolonizing movements that interrogate the undifferentiated character of the common, partly affirm long-standing critiques of Hardt and Negri’s theses. Rather than rejecting their arguments, we should rethink their central assertions—from the starting point of decolonial theory—in a way that responds to these concerns. (...) We argue that the notion of constituent power grounding their theorization of politics be rethought in dialogue with the ethico-political concept of obediential power ; that the “monstrous” subjectivity they propose as the mode of exodus from given forms of biopolitical production take direction from Wynter’s new Human Project; and that the insurrectionary figure of the multitude be reconsidered alongside the variegated figure of insurgent cosmopolitanism. This rethinking restores to Hardt and Negri’s project a more contextualized and less universalistic theory of politics, and establishes a foundation for a critical pedagogy that, beginning from an accountability to student agency, engages a form of insurgent leadership that responds to the centrality in capitalist education of the historical processes of colonial partition. (shrink)

A publicação de 2007, Homo Sacer II, 2, Il Regno e la Gloria, constitui marco na obra agambenana. Por um lado, o projeto Homo Sacer, que tinha por objetivo a genealogia do poder político, ascende a nova e decisiva dimensão: desvela o paradigma da teologia econômica, que permite explicar com maior precisão a articulação entre o reino e o governo, e os alcances do diagnóstico biopolítico. Por outro, Agamben crê haver encontrado nesse livro o arcano do poder: a glória. A (...) concepção da política como administração, ὀιχονομία, governo no qual a onipresença da economia expande-se por todos os aspectos da vida social é índice do movimento que alcança na glória sua máxima expressão. (shrink)

Scholars have typically viewed book 3 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics as an unsystematic array of different metaphysical problems. In this article, the author argues that Aristotle organizes them with great care. The principle behind his ordering of the problems stems from Aristotle’s concern with impressing upon his audience the difficulty of becoming thoroughly perplexed. This principle is found to make sense of the discrepancies between Aristotle’s list of the problems in 3.1 and his discussion of them in 3.2–6. In short, Aristotle’s (...) primary concern in Metaphysics 3 is to temper the ambitions of his audience of enterprising physicists, a concern that takes him from the aim of metaphysics to the tension between theology and philosophy. Borrowed as this concern is from the Platonic Socrates, the author shows that the arc of Metaphysics 3 is Socratic, and how it is Socratic. (shrink)

O objetivo desse artigo é apresentar as vias de pesquisa da filosofia de Machado de Assis. Parte-se da perspectiva não colonial para analisar o dilema da crítica literária a respeito da presença da filosofia na obra de Machado de Assis. Os argumentos da crítica justificam-se pela retórica da modernidade e pela lógica da colonialidade. Sob três critérios interpretativos distintos – o racial, o geográfico e o ideológico – mantém-se o mesmo dilema: como tornar filósofo aquele que não pode ser filósofo? (...) Novas vias de interpretação da obra de Machado de Assis podem solucionar esse dilema ao indicarem temas e métodos de pesquisa não coloniais sobre a relação entre a filosofia e a vida intelectual do autor. (shrink)

In this paper I consider ways in which seawater––both on its surface and in its depths––opens up alternative forms of thought and expression in Homer, especially with respect to the body. By tracking the relationship between body and simile as it is mediated by the surface of the sea, I argue that water emerges as an especially mobile and adaptive medium for expressing the transformation that takes place between self and simile in Homer. In the Iliad, similes are well-known for (...) bringing weather, waves, and other aspects of the natural environment into the poem, whereas in the Odyssey those aspects more often introduce similes of their own. I offer a reading of the shipwreck scene in Odyssey 5 to suggest that the body’s struggle to stay afloat is matched there, on a formal level, by the role of waves in drawing simile and body to the sea’s surface. I then address a different kind of figurative language (closer to metaphor and associated with grief) that takes place in the depths, through readings of scenes in Books 18 and 24 of the Iliad and Archilochus fragment 13. (shrink)