In this paper I discuss some conditions forunderstanding teaching as an act ofresponsibility towards an other, rather than asan instrumental act identified throughepistemology. I first put the latter intocontext through a critical reading of teachingas it is inscribed in humanistic discourses oneducation. Within these discourses, I explorehow students are treated as objects ofknowledge that reinforce the teacher's ego. Icontend that the taking up of this positionmakes not only an ethical relation to thestudent impossible, but also disqualifies anytype of meaningful social (...) relation. Therefore Iargue that teachers have to give up theirposition on the safe side of knowledge andparticipate in the time of risk when meetingthe other means to take responsibility for thatother from a position of vulnerability.Moreover, it is precisely because of this riskthat teaching as an ethical relation becomespossible and where it begins to resound withpoetry. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against one variety of contextualism about aesthetic predicates such as “beautiful.” Contextualist analyses of these and other predicates have been subject to several challenges surrounding disagreement. Focusing on one kind of contextualism— individualized indexical contextualism —I unpack these various challenges and consider the responses available to the contextualist. The three responses I consider are as follows: giving an alternative analysis of the concept of disagreement ; claiming that speakers suffer from semantic blindness; and claiming that (...) attributions of beauty carry presuppositions of commonality. I will argue that none of the available strategies gives a response which both satisfactorily explains all of the disagreement -data and is plausible independent of significant evidence in favor of contextualism. I conclude that individualized indexical contextualism about the aesthetic is untenable, although this does not rule out alternative contextualist approaches to the aesthetic. (shrink)

Public “upstream engagement” and other approaches to the social control of technology are currently receiving international attention in policy discourses around emerging technologies such as nanotechnology. To the extent that such approaches hold implications for research and development (R&D) activities, the distinct participation of scientists and engineers is required. The capacity of technoscientists to broaden the influences on R&D activities, however, implies that they conduct R&D differently. This article discusses the possibility for more reflexive participation by scientists and engineers in (...) the internal governance of technology development. It reviews various historical attempts to govern technoscience and introduces the concept of midstream modulation, through which scientists and engineers, ideally in concert with others, bring societal considerations to bear on their work. (shrink)

Based on author's dissertation--Yale University.

The frame concept from linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence is a theoretical tool to model how explicitly given information is combined with expectations deriving from background knowledge. In this paper, we show how the frame concept can be fruitfully applied to analyze the notion of mathematical understanding. Our analysis additionally integrates insights from the hermeneutic tradition of philosophy as well as Schmid’s ideal genetic model of narrative constitution. We illustrate the practical applicability of our theoretical analysis through a case (...) study on extremal proofs. Based on this case study, we compare our analysis of proof understanding to Avigad’s ability-based analysis of proof understanding. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

BackgroundCountries are increasingly devoting significant resources to creating or strengthening research ethics committees, but there has been insufficient attention to assessing whether these committees are actually improving the protection of human research participants.DiscussionResearch ethics committees face numerous obstacles to achieving their goal of improving research participant protection. These include the inherently amorphous nature of ethics review, the tendency of regulatory systems to encourage a focus on form over substance, financial and resource constraints, and conflicts of interest. Auditing and accreditation programs (...) can improve the quality of ethics review by encouraging the development of standardized policies and procedures, promoting a common base of knowledge, and enhancing the status of research ethics committees within their own institutions. However, these mechanisms focus largely on questions of structure and process and are therefore incapable of answering many critical questions about ethics committees' actual impact on research practices.The first step in determining whether research ethics committees are achieving their intended function is to identify what prospective research participants and their communities hope to get out of the ethics review process. Answers to this question can help guide the development of effective outcomes assessment measures. It is also important to determine whether research ethics committees' guidance to investigators is actually being followed. Finally, the information developed through outcomes assessment must be disseminated to key decision-makers and incorporated into practice. This article offers concrete suggestions for achieving these goals.ConclusionOutcomes assessment of research ethics committees should address the following questions: First, does research ethics committee review improve participants' understanding of the risks and potential benefits of studies? Second, does the process affect prospective participants' decisions about whether to participate in research? Third, does it change participants' subjective experiences in studies or their attitudes about research? Fourth, does it reduce the riskiness of research? Fifth, does it result in more research responsive to the local community's self-identified needs? Sixth, is research ethics committees' guidance to researchers actually being followed? (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the possibility of the idea of emancipation within an educational philosophy that does not accept schooling as its first premise. The first part of the paper will take Sweden as an example of an educational state defined through educational policies such as life long learning, accountability and evidence-based research, and argue that these words are only meaningful within the myth of schooling and not in a language of education/emancipation. The second part of the paper discusses (...) different but related conceptions of emancipation by exploring its ambiguous nature. In the third part of the paper I specify the role and place of emancipation within a philosophy of education that seeks to articulate its social value. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the role of the immigrant in Swedish society and especially how such a role is construed through what I call the myth of schooling, that is, the normalization of an arbitrary distribution of wealth and power. I relate this myth to the idea of consensual democracy as it is expressed through an implicit idea of what it means to be Swedish. I not only critique the processes through which immigrants are discriminated against or excluded from (...) Swedish society but also try to shift the understanding of the conditions under which such exclusion is possible in the first place. Being Swedish is that which the immigrant is not. What I argue and give examples of is that the ‘no name’ immigrant becomes a possibility for democracy to happen when he or she claims his or her presence in the demos, in such a way as to make evident a split in the self‐understanding of a purely consensual Swedish democracy. In the article I argue that what is needed in order to go beyond the myth of schooling, is a pedagogy of dissensus contesting the normalizing of an unequal social order by making it contingent. (shrink)

Feyerabend claims that what is perceived depends upon what is believed ; and he maintains that among really efficient alternative theories "each theory will possess its own experience, and there will be no overlap between these experiences". According to Feyerabend "scientific theories are ways of looking at the world; and their adoption affects our general beliefs and expectations, and thereby also our experiences...". Toulmin, Hanson, and Kuhn concur with this view. Toulmin claims that men who accept different "ideals" and "paradigms" (...) will see different phenomena. He thinks theories not only give significance to facts, but also determine what facts are for us at all. Like Feyerabend, Toulmin asserts that "we see the world through" our fundamental concepts of science "to such an extent that we forget what it would look like without them". Indeed, both Feyerabend and Toulmin would have previous thinkers "live in an observational world very different from our own". Kuhn expresses quite similar views. He feels that. (shrink)

To enlarge the discussion of scientific responsibility for research integrity, this paper offers two historico-philosophical observations. First, in the broad history of ideas, modern ethics replaces social role responsibility with appeals to abstract principles; by contrast, discussions within the scientific community of responsibility for research integrity constitute a rediscovery of the continuing vitality of role responsibility. This is a rediscovery from which philosophy itself may benefit. Second, within the context of scientists’ concerns, the idea of role responsibility has undergone significant (...) evolution from “collective responsibility” to the notion of responsibility resting with a “trans-scientific community.” Further challenges nevertheless remain in order to relate scientific role responsibility for scientific integrity to the relationship between science and society. To promote a notion of integrity not just in science but in the science-society relationship, it may be useful to think in terms of a “co-responsibility” for scientific integrity. (shrink)

La filosofía de la tecnología ingenieril - La filosofía de la tecnología de las humanidades - Enfoque comparado de ambas filosofías - Ciencia e idea, tecnología e ideas - De la cuestión conceptual a la lógica y las cuestiones epistemológicas - Cuestiones de filosofía política - Cuestiones teológicas - Cuestiones metafísicas - Responsabilidad legal e industrialización - Ciencia y responsabilidad social - Los ingenieros, la responsabilidad profesional y la ética - La apelación teológica a la responsabilidad - El análisis filosófico (...) de la responsabilidad - La cuestión de la responsabilidad. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the justification of scientific change and argue that it rests on different sorts of invariance. Against this background I consider notions of observation, meaning, and regulative standards. I sketch an account of the rationale of scientific change which preserves the merits and avoids the shortcomings of the approach of Feyerabend, Hanson, Kuhn, Toulmin, and others. Each of these writers would hold that transitions from one scientific tradition to another force radical changes in what is observed, (...) in the meanings of the terms employed, and in the metastandards involved. They would claim that "incommensurable" replacement is what does, and should, occur during scientific "revolutions." Such writers, however, have trouble in comparing different scientific theories. My account permits different theories to be compared in various ways. These comparisons, I argue, are possible through appeal to "first-level" and "second-level" invariance. In this connection I argue that observation, meaning, and regulative standards should be, and in fact usually are, nontrivially invariant with respect to scientific change. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This book takes steps to develop a philosophy of engineering not to promote an ideology for engineering but to stimulate critical reflection among engineers and non-engineers alike about our engineering lifeworld.

An Approach to Rights contains fifteen previously published but mostly inaccessible papers that together show the development of one of the more important contemporary theories of the nature, grounds and practical implications of rights. In a long retrospective essay, Carl Wellman explains what he was trying to accomplish in each paper, how far he believes that he succeeded and where he failed. Thus the author provides a critical perspective both on his own theory and on alternative theories from which (...) he borrows, or that he rejects. These essays identify the problems any adequate theory of rights must solve, describe the more plausible solutions and weigh the merits of each. They will be of special interest to any reader concerned with legal theory, moral philosophy or any branch of applied ethics or social policy in which appeals to rights are frequently made but seldom rationally satisfactory. (shrink)

Aristotle launched Western knowledge on a trajectory toward disciplinarity that continues to this day. But is the knowledge management project that began with Aristotle adequate for the age of Google? Perhaps an undisciplined discourse more evocative of Plato can help us constitute new, more relevant inter- and transdisciplinary forms of knowledge. This article explores the history of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, arguing for a new, critical form of interdisciplinarity that moves beyond the academy into dialogue with the public and private sectors. (...) Contemporary knowledge production should involve not only a horizontal axis stretching across academia but also a vertical axis where academic research is integrated into contemporary life. (shrink)

Infinite time register machines (ITRMs) are register machines which act on natural numbers and which are allowed to run for arbitrarily many ordinal steps. Successor steps are determined by standard register machine commands. At limit times register contents are defined by appropriate limit operations. In this paper, we examine the ITRMs introduced by the third and fourth author (Koepke and Miller in Logic and Theory of Algorithms LNCS, pp. 306–315, 2008), where a register content at a limit time is set (...) to the lim inf of previous register contents if that limit is finite; otherwise the register is reset to 0. The theory of these machines has several similarities to the infinite time Turing machines (ITTMs) of Hamkins and Lewis. The machines can decide all ${\Pi^1_1}$ sets, yet are strictly weaker than ITTMs. As in the ITTM situation, we introduce a notion of ITRM-clockable ordinals corresponding to the running times of computations. These form a transitive initial segment of the ordinals. Furthermore we prove a Lost Melody theorem: there is a real r such that there is a program P that halts on the empty input for all oracle contents and outputs 1 iff the oracle number is r, but no program can decide for every natural number n whether or not ${n \in r}$ with the empty oracle. In an earlier paper, the third author considered another type of machines where registers were not reset at infinite lim inf’s and he called them infinite time register machines. Because the resetting machines correspond much better to ITTMs we hold that in future the resetting register machines should be called ITRMs. (shrink)

In The Moral Dimensions of Human Rights, Carl Wellman takes a broad approach to human rights by discussing all three types - moral, international, and national -at length. At the same time, Wellman pays special attention to the moral reasons that are relevant to each kind of human rights.

In this section, we apply the notions obtained above to a famous historical example of a false proof. Our goal is to demonstrate that this proof shows a sufficient degree of distinctiveness for a formalization in a Naproche-like system and hence that automatic checking could indeed have contributed in this case to the development of mathematics. This example further demonstrates that even incomplete distinctivication can be sufficient for automatic checking and that actual mistakes may occur already in the margin between (...) the degree of distinctiveness necessary for formalization and complete distinctiveness. (shrink)

The clash between religious freedom and equality for lesbians and gay men has become a controversial legal issue in the United Kingdom. Increasingly, claims are made that compliance with anti-discrimination norms impacts upon conscientious, faith-based objectors to same-sex sexual acts. This article explores this issue and draws insights from North American case law, where this question has been considered in the context of competing constitutional rights. It raises far-reaching issues concerning the distinction between belief and practice, as well as the (...) role of identity in the public sphere. The author advocates that courts and tribunals should adopt a fact-specific approach which is sensitive to the rights in a particular context, and which focuses upon the values of accommodation, tolerance and mutual respect. (shrink)

In this article I address education beyond individualism, elitism and instrumentalism and instead understand education as central for a democratic way of life. I discuss the role of education in the making of democratic forms of life in the university, in the school as well as in other contexts outside institutions. I argue for the importance of defending the “free time” of the university and school against a “time of production” as a defining characteristic of university and school. I will (...) show how a time of production undermine the very possibility of education, and which therefore also tends to negate pluralist democracy. (shrink)

Although "Middle Comedy" may best serve as a chronological label, the remains of pre-Menandrian, fourth-century comic productions suggest that certain characteristics were more dominant at this time than in earlier or later periods of Greek comedy. The possible sources for these characteristics are wide-ranging, but available evidence indicates that fifth-century satyr drama was one of the most important. Not only do fragments, titles, and plots reveal a significant generic relationship, but Aristotle even seems to link their comic mode. Fifth-century satyr (...) plays, I argue, functioned as an important model for the poets of Middle Comedy. (shrink)

Bergson's open and closed society concepts are examined in relation to war. Lots of fun facts about Bergson mixed in this insights from the author's travel.

Unlike exploitative exchanges, exchanges featuring externalities have never seemed to pose particular problems to liberal theories of justice. State interference with exchanges featuring externalities seems permissible, like it is for coercive or deceptive exchanges. This is because exchanges featuring negative externalities seem to be clear cases of the two exchanging parties harming a third one via the exchange—and thus of conduct violating the harm principle. This essay aims to put this idea into question. I will argue that exchanges featuring negative (...) externalities are not unjust in this straightforward way, i.e. because they would constitute an instance of wrongfully causing or risking a bodily or material harm. In fact, unless we are subscribing to particularly demanding variants of liberalism—e.g. perfectionist liberalism—or unless we are exclusively focusing on borderline cases of externalities—i.e. of effects of exchanges hardly to be called externalities—there is no liberal theory of how exchanges featuring externalities are unjust. (shrink)

We consider the following problem for various infinite-time machines. If a real is computable relative to a large set of oracles such as a set of full measure or just of positive measure, a comeager set, or a nonmeager Borel set, is it already computable? We show that the answer is independent of ZFC for ordinal Turing machines with and without ordinal parameters and give a positive answer for most other machines. For instance, we consider infinite-time Turing machines, unresetting and (...) resetting infinite-time register machines, and α-Turing machines for countable admissible ordinals α. (shrink)

Where has all the hilarity gone – and, with it, the ethics of the dark? In this article, I engage with our metaphysical entities of darkness and nothingness. Undermining and re-declaring are more than just pleasurable exercise for my own indigenous group – Maori; they are ethical necessities that keep one’s certainties in check. Whether it is agreeable or uncomfortable, this acknowledgement of those first beings is necessary if we are to avoid taking ourselves too seriously. I then consider one (...) controversial statement about trauma and lend my perverse, indigenous sense to it, reinterpret it and recalibrate it in light of our inherent fallibility as human citizens who are always destabilised by our own metaphysical entities. This drive to undercut ourselves by making our statements contingent on other things, I shall argue, is an ethical one. (shrink)

Infinite Time Register Machines are a well-established machine model for infinitary computations. Their computational strength relative to oracles is understood, see e.g. , and . We consider the notion of recognizability, which was first formulated for Infinite Time Turing Machines in [6] and applied to ITRM 's in [3]. A real x is ITRM -recognizable iff there is an ITRM -program P such that PyPy stops with output 1 iff y=xy=x, and otherwise stops with output 0. In [3], it is (...) shown that the recognizable reals are not contained in the ITRM -computable reals. Here, we investigate in detail how the ITRM -recognizable reals are distributed along the canonical well-ordering shrink)