The distinction and relationship between teaching creatively and teaching for creativity identified in the report from the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE, 1999), is examined by focusing on empirical research from an early years school, known for its creative approach. The examination uses four characteristics of creativity and pedagogy identified by Peter Woods (1990): relevance, ownership, control and innovation, to show the interdependence of the NACCCE distinctions. We conclude that although the NACCCE distinction between teaching creatively (...) and teaching for creativity has been useful as an analytical tool, it may, at the same time, have dichotomised an integrated practice and we suggest that a more useful distinction for the study of creative pedagogies would be the relationship between teaching creatively and creative learning. (shrink)

The most important thing to know about this book is that it is mostly not by Rorty. Twenty pages of this small book were transcribed from an audio recording of a public lecture by Rorty including portions of his discussion with the audience, in Turin, Spain, in 2005. A Spanish translation appeared in 2008, followed by this English version in 2011. Jeffrey W. Robbins wrote a foreword, “Richard Rorty: A Philosophical Guide to Talking About Religion,” (vii–xxii). The introduction at (...) the lecture was by Gianni Vattimo (1–5). Rorty’s section is twenty pages long (7–26). By far the largest portion of the book is the conclusion, by G. Elijah Dann, “Philosophy, Religion, and Religious Belief After Rorty” (27–76, including .. (shrink)

The idea of self-reliance is important not only because it is often taken to be definitive of the ethics of democratic individualism, but because its greatest theorists have been uncommonly forthright about a problem that, though familiar to ordinary civic experience, frequently gets ignored: that self-reliant individuality is a basis for not fully supporting otherwise endorsed social justice causes. This article turns to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bob Dylan who are unusual for so honestly reflecting upon this (...) problem and who, because of the differences in the way they conceptualize it, are instructive for civic ethics. I demonstrate that Emerson and Thoreau imbue their self-reliant withdrawal from social action with a self-satisfaction that is lacking for Dylan, who is much readier to acknowledge the moral costs of self-reliance. This acknowledgement does not invalidate self-reliance but alters its epistemological, ethical and political features, providing a variant of self-reliance more suitable to contemporary conditions. (shrink)

A fascinating study of moral languages and their discontents, Ethics after Babel explains the links that connect contemporary moral philosophy, religious ethics, and political thought in clear, cogent, even conversational prose. Princeton's paperback edition of this award-winning book includes a new postscript by the author that responds to the book's noted critics, Stanley Hauerwas and the late Alan Donagan. In answering his critics, Jeffrey Stout clarifies the book's arguments and offers fresh reasons for resisting despair over the prospects of (...) democratic discourse. (shrink)

This volume of Social Philosophy Today contains a selection of papers presented at the 30th International Social Philosophy Conference (2013), an annual event sponsored by the North American Society for Social Philosophy. The theme of the conference was "Food". This volume invites wider discussion of the issues explored at the conference, including food production, distribution, and consumption. Contributors include Susan Dielman, Erinn Gilson, Joan McGregor, José Medina, Andrew Pierce, and Sally Scholz.

The questions examined in the book speak directly to neuroscientists, computer scientists, psychologists, and philosophers.

Intelligent design (ID) raises several challenges for the relation between science and religion. One's views on these matters ramify across the other sciences, including physics. Can design, especially supernatural design, play any legitimate role in science? Is the ID question just a matter of evidence? What is the proper role for naturalism in all this? These are important questions in the philosophy of science. Before taking them up, this chapter briefly looks at the core concepts used in ID today. There (...) is a less visible but equally menacing problem for the viability of ID. Methodological naturalism (MN) gets a lot of attention, but there is another methodological shaping principle to be contended with, namely, conservatism. Conservatism is also the reason ID attracts so many theists and few nontheists. If one already believes in an intelligence that can play the role of designer, then ID‐based science is not a radical move. (shrink)

Specifically, "A New Argument Against talk is a section of an upcoming article of Brahman Extended Philosophical Atoms" is mine about Mereological Nihilism and Anti-metaphysics concerned with only the following: Quantum Atomism . The article is going Radical Empiricism..

Discussion of, and reference to, properties pervades contemporary metaphysics, physics (e.g., the electron has charge), and ordinary language (the lion is sublime). But only a specialized group of a few hundred philosophers discuss the very specific details of what is involved in..

On pourrait définir la nécessité absolue comme la vérité dans absolument tous les mondes possibles sans restriction. Mais nous devrions être capables de l’expliquer sans invoquer les mondes possibles. J’envisage trois definitions alternatives de : « Il est absolument nécessaire que p » et défends une définition contrefactuelle généralisée : ∀q(q□→p).Je montre que la nécessité absolue satisfait le principe S5 et soutiens que la nécessité logique est absolue. Je discute ensuite des relations entre la nécessité logique et la nécessité métaphysique, (...) en expliquant comment il peut y avoir des nécessités absolues non logiques. J’esquisse également une théorie essentialiste selon laquelle la nécessité a son fondement dans la nature des choses. Je discute certaines de ses conséquences, y compris concernant l’existence nécessaire de certaines propriétés et celle de certains objets. (shrink)

In “A Virtue Ethics Critique of Ethical Dimensions of Behavioral Economics,” Professor Daryl Koehn criticizes the field of behavioral economics. She argues that behavioral economists ignore many important factors that affect how people make decisions, that their results are derived from experiments where subjects make choices in overly restrictive, artificial, and thin contexts that do not capture the richness of reality, and that the approach brings up psychological motivations that affect behavior in a piecemeal, ad hoc way that does not (...) capture the overall tapestry of the factors that influence the choices that we make. In this comment, I offer responses to many of these criticisms, and note where I think we have common ground. (shrink)

The idea that the operations of the mind are carried out discursively, even linguistically, has won wide acceptance among contemporary Thomists. What has not been explored, however, is the role of persuasion in motivating the actions of the intellect and will. This paper explores the possibility that some form of persuasive discourse is employed by the mind to move the intellect and will to precipitate action. Drawing on essentialism as a foundational ontology, I offer a prefatory theory of persuasive reasoning (...) –‘natural rhetoric’– to explain how it is that we persuade ourselves (and others) to do things, including things that are defective. (shrink)

Descartes’ work on optics spanned his entire career and represents a fascinating area of inquiry from both the perspectives of the history of science and his systematic natural philosophy. The first of these entries offers a brief account of Descartes' seminal work in optics, the Dioptrique, often translated as the Optics or, more literally, as the Dioptrics. The second entry overview of Descartes’ understanding of light, his derivations of the two central laws of geometrical optics, and a sampling of the (...) optical phenomena he sought to explain. (shrink)

Aimee Barbeau advances a thoughtful critique of my article, “The Connection Between Stakeholder Theory and Stakeholder Democracy: An Excavation and Defense.” Although Barbeau does much to push forward the debate about corporate governance, she does it without undermining my thesis. For what Barbeau has shown is not that stakeholder theorists should not endorse stakeholder boards of directors, but that they should also endorse other ways for stakeholders to participate in decision-making processes within firms.

ABSTRACT Lee claims that foetuses and adult humans are phases of the same identical substance, and thus have the same moral status because: first, foetuses and adults are the same physical organism, and second, the development from foetus to adult is quantitative and thus not a change of substance. Versus the first argument, I contend that the fact that foetuses and adults are the same physical organism implies only that they are the same thing but not the same substance, much (...) as living adults and their corpses are the same thing (same body) but not the same substance. Against Lee's second argument, I contend that Lee confuses the nature of a process with the nature of its result. A process of quantitative change can produce a change in substance. Lee also fails to show that foetuses are rational and thus have all the essential properties of adults, as required for them to be the same substance. Against the pro‐choice argument from asymmetric value (that only the fact that a human has become conscious of its life and begun to count on its continuing can explain human life's asymmetric moral value, i.e. that it is vastly worse to kill a human than not to produce one), Lee claims that foetus's lives are asymmetrically valuable to them before consciousness. This leads to counterintuitive outcomes, and it confuses the goodness of life (a symmetric value that cannot account for why it is worse to kill a human than not produce one) with asymmetric value. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article engages Frater Taciturnus’s ‘Letter to the Reader’ to argue for a religious aesthetics in Kierkegaard. This religious aesthetics is designed to purify the passions and help the believer ‘see’ the religious ideal, but also to confront the aesthetic spectator with the religious reality of her own situation. My claim for this revised reading of religious poetics in Kierkegaard derives from Taciturnus’s view of a superior form of religious ideality that comes ‘after actuality’. This ideality is not an (...) envisioned ideal that is untested by actuality and thus ‘illusory’ but an ideal that is graspable only after the self has acknowledged the actuality of their sinful condition, rather than any specific actual sin. To appreciate this form of ideality, Frater Taciturnus repeatedly resorts to visual metaphors and the power of imagination, suggesting that the religious ideal must be ‘seen’ with a sort of synoptic vision capable of looking past both comedy and tragedy and resulting in the purification of our typical affective responses to aesthetic objects. Seeing in this way, the individual imaginatively engages in religious aesthetics and grasps the religious ideality by affirming the actuality of their own sinfulness and receiving forgiveness for that sinfulness. (shrink)

We suggest in this commentary an emotional origin of the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, increased living standards directly preceding the Industrial Revolution produced increased happiness and subjective well-being that, in turn, fueled the explosion of innovation and economic growth experienced in industrial England.

This article explores and categorizes the belief of what awaited the soul after bodily death held by English divine Samuel Clarke, D.D. as compared to that held by his close friend Isaac Newton. Evidence taken from the corpus of Clarke's writings reveals both he and Newton to be mortalists, but of differing types and to different degrees. While it has long been known that Clarke and Newton were often of one mind in matters of theology, a comparative study of their (...) conceptions of soul reveals that the two friends held even more parallels than has been acknolwedged. (shrink)

This essay introduces the second installment of a symposium in Common Knowledge called “Apology for Quietism.” This introductory piece concerns the sociology of quietism and why, given the supposed quietude of quietists, there is such a thing at all. Dealing first with the “activist” Susan Sontag's attraction to the “quietist” Simone Weil, it then concentrates on the “activist” William Empson's attraction to the Buddha and to Buddhist quietism, with special reference to Empson's lost manuscript Asymmetry in Buddha Faces (and to (...) Sharon Cameron's work on the topic in her book Impersonality). The author, who is also editor of the journal, argues against the effort of some contributors to substitute new terms for quietism and emphasizes instead what he calls (quoting Sontag) “the need for repose.”. (shrink)