This article addresses what appears to be a retrenchment into narrower forms of identification and an increased suspicion of difference in the context of educational policy in the UK – especially in relation to ‘Religious Education’. The adoption of standardized management protocols – ‘managerialism’ – across most if not all policy contexts including public educational spaces reduces spaces for encountering or addressing genuine difference and for discovering something new and creative. A theory of the ‘feminization of religion’ associated historically with (...) Barbara Welter, provides some useful insights as to why this might be, suggesting that those in British society who would prefer to see greater separation from ‘religion’ in ‘secular’ schools may well also be caught up in forms of gender stereotyping. (shrink)

The Moral Habitat offers a new and systematic interpretation of Kant's moral and political philosophy. Herman introduces the idea of a moral habitat to examines the dynamic system of duties that exists between individuals and civic institutions.

A one-of-a-kind reference to the international vocabulary of the humanities This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that (...) influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages—English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Originally published in French, this one-of-a-kind reference work is now available in English for the first time, with new contributions from Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more.The result is an invaluable reference for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the multilingual lives of some of our most influential words and ideas. Covers close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms that defy easy translation between languages and cultures Includes terms from more than a dozen languages Entries written by more than 150 distinguished thinkers Available in English for the first time, with new contributions by Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more Contains extensive cross-references and bibliographies An invaluable resource for students and scholars across the humanities. (shrink)

Making room for character -- Pluralism and the community of moral judgment -- A cosmopolitan kingdom of ends --Responsibility and moral competence --Can virtue be taught?: the problem of new moral facts -- Training to autonomy: Kant and the question of moral education -- Bootstrapping -- Rethinking Kant's hedonism -- The scope of moral requirement -- The will and its objects -- Obligatory ends -- Moral improvisation -- Contingency in obligation.

This article considers the relevance of time theory for Beck's theory of reflexive modernization and vice versa. It focuses in particular on discontinuity in the context of continuity, on decontextualization, naturalization and responsibility as key concerns of both perspectives on the industrial way of life. It makes explicit the temporal underpinnings of that cultural form with respect to five Cs: the creation of time to human design (C1), the commodification of time (C2), the compression of time (C3), the control of (...) time (C4) and the colonization of time (C5). It concludes that explicit concern with temporal relations shows reflexive modernization in action and facilitates improved knowledge for deliberative change. (shrink)

I argue for the possibility of posthumous harm based on an account of the harm of murder. I start with the deep-seated intuition that when someone is murdered he (or she) is harmed (over and above the pain of injury or dying), and argue that Feinberg's account that assumes that harm is an invasion of an interest cannot plausibly accommodate this intuition. I propose a new account of the harm of murder: it is an irreversible loss of functions necessary for (...) worthwhile existence. I suggest a (partial) loss analysis of harm in general, and then go on to apply it to posthumous harm and defend the idea that there can be posthumous losses. (shrink)

Physicalism is thought to entail that mental properties supervene on microphysical properties, or in other words that all God had to do was to create the fundamental physical properties and the rest came along for free. In this paper, we question the all-god-had-to-do reflex.

An exploration of emotional life in the West, considering the varieties, transformations and constants of human emotions over eleven centuries.

In this paper I investigate central temporal and spatial notions in the second part of Plato’s Parmenides and argue that also these notions, and not only the metaphysical ones usually discussed in the literature, can be understood as a response to positions and problems put on the table by Parmenides and Zeno. Of the spatial notions examined in the dialogue, I look at the problems raised for possessing location and shape, while with respect to temporal notions, I focus on the (...) discussion of ‘being in time’ and exaiphnês (the latter notion will be shown to be also an important influence for Aristotle’s Physics). In displaying a paradoxical character and taking up crucial notions from Parmenides, the second part of the Parmenides seems to display some resemblance to Zeno’s paradoxes. I will show, however, that in contrast to Zeno, the second part of Plato’s Parmenides also demonstrates Parmenides’ One to be problematic on its own terms. Furthermore, the dialogue presents not only important problems that these spatial and temporal notions seem to lead us into, but also establishes some positive features necessary to think of time and space. In this way, Plato’s Parmenides can be seen as contributing to the development of temporal and spatial conceptualisations in ancient Greek thought. (shrink)

Evolutionary models consider hunting and food sharing to be milestones that paved the way from primate to human societies. Because fossil evidence is scarce, hominoid primates serve as referential models to assess our common ancestors’ capacity in terms of communal use of resources, food sharing, and other forms of cooperation. Whereas chimpanzees form male-male bonds exhibiting resource-defense polygyny with intolerance and aggression toward nonresidents, bonobos form male-female and female-female bonds resulting in relaxed relations with neighboring groups. Here we report the (...) first known case of meat sharing between members of two bonobo communities, revealing a new dimension of social tolerance in this species. This observation testifies to the behavioral plasticity that exists in the two Pan species and contributes to scenarios concerning the traits of the last common ancestor of Pan and Homo. It also contributes to the discussion of physiological triggers of in-group/out-group behavior and allows reconsideration of the emergence of social norms in prehuman societies. (shrink)

Frederick sits in a rowing boat trying to fight against the heavy waves of the sea. His small arms move in the wind like swords. He stares at the crests of foam while his parents sit on the beach. They look constantly at the boat which dances on the waves. After a little while they read calmly in the newspaper, because the wind is drifting Frederick toward the beach. There are many children playing with their boats and their surf-boards.

A simple description of the omnipresence of God.

In _The Angel of History_, Mosès looks at three Jewish philosophers—Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem—who formulated a new vision of history in 1920s Germany by moving away from the spirit of assimilation and the Enlightenment belief in humanity's inevitable progress. Instead, they imagined history as discontinuous, made of moments that form no totality but whose ruptures are both more significant—and more promising—than any apparent homogeneity. Their direct experience of the twentieth century's great upheavals led these three thinkers to (...) abandon the old models of causality that had previously accounted for human experience, and their cultural and religious background allowed them to turn to the Jewish experience of history. Jewish messianism always had to confront the experience of catastrophe, deception, and failure. Mosès shows how this tradition informed a genuine Jewish conception of history in which redemption may—or may not—occur at any moment, giving a new chance for hope by locating utopia in the heart of the present. (shrink)

Bioethics education now takes place outside universities as well as within them. How should clinicians, ethics committee members, and policymakers be taught the ethics they need, and how may their progress best be evaluated?

Kathryn Morgan has introduced us to a typology of ‘the ways in which women’s moral voice and her sense of moral integrity are twisted and destroyed by patriarchal ideology and lived experience.’ She claims that this experience can induce in women ‘a sense of confusion and genuine moral madness.’I am in agreement with much of what Morgan says. However, I suspect that some others might find her case less convincing than I for the reason that she supports her claims by (...) an appeal to classical philosophical literature and what we might loosely call ‘sociological observations.’ One can imagine the easy retort—‘Yes, well, it’s true that Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau and Kant did say those silly things about women, but their remarks were mere asides and no one takes them seriously in this matter any more anyway. (shrink)

We investigate the complexity of isomorphisms of computable structures on cones in the Turing degrees. We show that, on a cone, every structure has a strong degree of categoricity, and that degree of categoricity is${\rm{\Delta }}_\alpha ^0 $-complete for someα. To prove this, we extend Montalbán’sη-system framework to deal with limit ordinals in a more general way. We also show that, for any fixed computable structure, there is an ordinalαand a cone in the Turing degrees such that the exact complexity (...) of computing an isomorphism between the given structure and another copy${\cal B}$in the cone is a c.e. degree in${\rm{\Delta }}_\alpha ^0\left$. In each of our theorems the cone in question is clearly described in the beginning of the proof, so it is easy to see how the theorems can be viewed as general theorems with certain effectiveness conditions. (shrink)

This chapter reviews aspects of the way we use linguistic expressions to talk about things. After reviewing various types of NPs with respect to their possible use in referring, we turn to what it is that speakers are referring to, distinguishing real world from hypothetical and discourse referents. Figures of speech such as metonymy are briefly considered. Another important issue concerns choice of NP; for any given referent there are typically many possible expressions that could be used, and much research (...) has concerned how the choices among them are made. Finally we consider the perspective of the addressee, and what factors play a role in interpreting intended referents. (shrink)

This edited collection challenges the urban-centric nature of much feminist work on gender and education. The context for the book is the radical reconfiguration of rural areas that has occurred in recent decades as a result of globalisation. From a range of diverse national contexts, including Kenya and South Africa, Australia and Canada, and the United States and Pakistan, authors explore the intersections between masculinity, femininity, and rurality in education. In recognition of the heterogeneity of categories such as ‘rural girl’ (...) and ‘rural boy’ they attend to how educational exclusions can be magnified by differences in relation to social locations such as class, race, or sexuality. Similar critical insights are brought to bear as authors examine what it means to be a male or female teacher in rural environments. Contributors draw on data ranging from contemporary feature films to historical materials, along with detailed ethnographic work and participatory approaches, to produce a compelling narrative of the need to understand education as experienced by those who are not part of the urban majority. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Gender and Education. _. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, modal epistemology has turned its attention to ordinary modal knowledge. This paper brings to the fore a neglected but central form of ordinary modal knowledge: knowledge of agentive modality, and in particular of our own abilities, which I call ‘ability knowledge’. I argue that modal epistemology as it is does not account for ability knowledge, by looking at the most promising candidate theories: perception-based, counterfactual-based, and similarity-based modal epistemologies. I then outline a more promising epistemology (...) for our ability knowledge, which relies on the experience of our own agency, and draw out some lessons for modal epistemology in general. (shrink)

Landau also pushes the role of syntax and its mapping to semantics in learning what some would consider “easy words”—the simplest spatial prepositions in English, in and on. Taking as a starting point that the syntactic distribution of a word is a reflex of its meaning, Landau shows that careful study of how children and adults linguistically encode a range of containment and support configurations reveals a special status for “core” configurations in each domain. She proposes that children come to (...) learning spatial terms with the expectation that configurations reflecting core concepts of containment and support will be expressed with the maximally simple, unmarked, linguistic expression. (shrink)

Increasing attention is being paid to spirituality in nursing practice. Much of the literature on spiritual care uses the nursing process to describe this aspect of care. However, the use of the nursing process in the area of spirituality may be problematic, depending upon the understandings of the nature and intent of this process. Is it primarily a descriptive process meant to make visible the nursing actions to provide spiritual support, or is it a prescriptive process meant to guide nursing (...) actions for intervening in the spirituality of patients? A prescriptive nursing process approach implies influencing, and in some cases reframing, the spirituality of patients and thereby extends beyond general notions of spiritual support. In this paper we discuss four problematic assumptions that form the basis for a prescriptive approach to spiritual care. We conclude that this approach extends the nursing role beyond appropriate professional boundaries, making it ethically problematic. (shrink)

This volume examines 'domestic colonialism' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and analyzes domestic colonies empirically - across several countries using primary, archival, and secondary sources - and theoretically, through the writings of leading thinkers of the period.

This paper examines nurses’ international migration within the broader context of female migration, particularly against more studied groups of women who have migrated for employment in care‐giving roles. We analyze the similarities and differences between skilled professional female migrants (nurses) and domestic workers (nannies and in‐home caretakers) and how societal expectations, meanings, and values of care and ‘women's work’, together with myriad social, cultural, economic and political processes, construct the female migrant care‐giver experience. We argue that, as the recruitment of (...) foreign workers gains visibility, strategies are introduced to better prepare female migrant care‐givers for the marketplace. Language, specifically command of English and accent modification, is highlighted as one means to assimilate migrant care‐givers to host communities. (shrink)

This article was inspired by Georges Didi-Huberman’s keynote lecture “Que ce qui apparaît seulement s’aperçoit” delivered in 2015 at Charles University in Prague during the “Dis/appearing” conference organized by the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie. Didi-Huberman’s lecture consisted of various reflections concerning the meaning of the image as instances of flaring up and fading away. During his talk, Didi-Huberman used evocative images – recollections – which he had collected over the years; impressions while walking in the streets, melancholic musings (...) about love, and thoughts gathered from literature en route. From this, the article identifies seven cases through which Didi-Huberman has conceptualized images; the nymph, the butterfly, the passer-by, the surface, the dance, the silence, and sophrosyne. These cases attest to the influence of Aby Warburg on the writing of Didi-Huberman and, taken together, identify what these cases of the image have in common; namely, that images occupy an interspace: the fleeting instant of appearance/disappearance. Didi-Huberman explains images – “Dante’s Beatrice and Baudelaire’s fleeting beauty” as “the paradigmatic ‘passer-by.’” Through these cases, this article poetically draws the reader’s attention to what Didi-Huberman calls “non-knowledge”; those fleeting, mobile, paradoxical aspects of images that resist clear categorization and can be thought of as fireflies against the night sky. The article asks: is it possible to characterize this genre? To denominate the collection of thoughts that welcome the image as a witness to the history of thought? The study of images can be understood, following Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of Aby Warburg’s oeuvre, as “the nameless science.”. (shrink)

Los conceptos de democracia y de gobierno representativo están inevitablemente conectados y vinculados entre ellos, y uno de los principios fundamentales de la democracia representativa es el principio de mayoría. Este articulo es una aproximación a la teoría de John Stuart Mill sobre el gobierno representativo en relación con el principio de mayoría y bajo su perspectiva elitista. Mill consideró el sistema representativo el modelo político más eficaz, aunque quiso subrayar los puntos críticos y los posibles desvíos negativos de la (...) democracia y, en particular, el riesgo de una dictadura de la mayoría y el contextual aislamiento político de las minorías. El filósofo inglés propuso un ideal de democracia basado sobre el mandato representativo que supone la independencia del representante si bien una independencia restringida y condicionada. Por otra parte, insistió sobre la importancia de que cada ciudadano fuese educado en la conciencia pública y se dejase influenciar por los hombres más cultos y iluminados de la comunidad. (shrink)