This article considers how institutions of higher education participated in the national “racial reckoning” that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Using the work of Pan-Africanist jurist Motsoko Pheko, memoirist Sisonke Msimang, poet Audre Lorde, and Black queer feminist critics Tiffany Willoughby-Herard and M. Jacqui Alexander, the authors reflect on the principled research practices and ethos that catalyze sustainable repair. Durable forms of repair include reconnecting the feeling body with the knowing self, stillness, and tarrying. The authors (...) (two doctoral students and a professor colleague) also consider repair through attention to the material conditions of knowledge production (collaborative writing, reclaiming the sacred, and questioning what it means to make something whole without reproducing a singular dominating episteme) to disrupt academic hierarchies. Arguing that repairing society, the planet, or the ways that questions are asked and answered requires ongoing wrestling with our current climate of racial terror in higher education, this article embodies the authors’ reparative principles and envisions paths towards educational justice. (shrink)

Based on a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in October 1981. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Achilles is vindictive; he wants to get even with Agamemnon. Being so disposed, he sounds rather like many current crime victims who angrily complain that the American system of criminal justice will not allow them the satisfactions they rightfully seek. These victims often feel that their particular injuries are ignored while the system addresses itself to some abstract injury to the state or to the rule of law itself – a focus that appears to result in wrongdoers being treated with (...) much greater solicitation and respect than their victims receive. If the actual victims are noticed at all, they will likely be told that there is another branch of law – tort law – that has the job of dealing with private injuries and grievances and that, if they pursue this route at their own expense, they might ultimately get some financial compensation for the wrongs done to them. However, just as Achilles felt that mere compensation was inadequate to the kind of injury done to him by Agamemnon, many of these victims will often claim that the injuries they have suffered do not admit of financial compensation. How, they might ask, can a dollar value be set on the humiliation and degradation they have experienced? They might also note that those who injure them tend, unlike Agamemnon, to be judgment-proof – so lacking in resources as to be unable to make any meaningful contribution to any compensation package that the victim may win. (shrink)

For over forty years, Leland Ryken has championed and modeled a Christian liberal arts education. His scholarship and commitment to integrating faith with learning in the classroom have influenced thousands of students who have sat under his winsome teaching. Published in honor of Professor Ryken and presented on the occasion of his retirement from Wheaton College, this compilation carries on his legacy of applying a Christian liberal arts education to all areas of life. Five sections explore the background of a (...) Christian liberal arts education, its theological basis, habits and virtues, differing approaches, and ultimate aims. Contributors including Philip Ryken, Jeffry Davis, Duane Litfin, John Walford, Alan Jacobs, and Jim Wilhoit analyze liberal arts as they relate to the disciplines, the Christian faith, and the world. Also included are a transcript of a well-known 1984 chapel talk delivered by Leland Ryken on the student's calling and practical chapters on how to read, write, and speak well. Comprehensive in scope, this substantial volume will be a helpful guide to anyone involved in higher education, as well as to students, pastors, and leaders looking for resources on the importance of faith in learning. - Publisher. (shrink)

I argue that numerical and causal accuracy arguments can be successful only if: (1) the theories in use are known to be true, (2) computational difficulties do not exist, and (3) the experimental data are stable and resolved. When any one or more of these assumptions are not satisfied, additional justificational considerations must be invoked. I illustrate the need for range of validity and intelligibility claims with examples drawn from chemical kinetics. My arguments suggest that the realist and anti-realist accounts (...) of justification are incomplete. Finally, I sketch some reasons why additional justificatory criteria are needed. (shrink)

Simpson has claimed that “ATR0 is the weakest set of axioms which permits the development of a decent theory of countable ordinals” [8]. This paper provides empirical support for Simpson's claim. In particular, Cantor's Normal Form Theorem and Sherman's Inequality for countable well-orderings are both equivalent to ATR0. The proofs of these results require a substantial development of ordinal exponentiation and a strengthening of the comparability result in [3].

The prevalence of social pathologies in contemporary societies has triggered many critical theorists to challenge or even disrupt the status quo in the hope for a better society. Thus, the notion of social transformation or, better yet, emancipation has become one of the central themes in critical social theory. This paper aims to contribute to this scholarship through an exposition of Herbert Marcuse's attempt to socialize Georg Hegel's ontology. Inparticular, this paper aims to show how Marcuse explains the possibility of (...) social transformation by appropriating key concepts in Hegel's huge philosophical system, most particularly from Hegel's Logic and the phenomenology of mind. (shrink)

Jeffry H. Morrison offers readers the first comprehensive look at the political thought and career of John Witherspoon—a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of America’s most influential and overlooked founding fathers. Witherspoon was an active member of the Continental Congress and was the only clergyman both to sign the Declaration of Independence and to ratify the federal Constitution. During his tenure as president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, Witherspoon became a mentor to James Madison and influenced many (...) leaders and thinkers of the founding period. He was uniquely positioned at the crossroads of politics, religion, and education during the crucial first decades of the new republic. Morrison locates Witherspoon in the context of early American political thought and charts the various influences on his thinking. This impressive work of scholarship offers a broad treatment of Witherspoon’s constitutionalism, including his contributions to the mediating institutions of religion and education, and to political institutions from the colonial through the early federal periods. This book will be appreciated by anyone with an interest in American political history and thought and in the relation of religion to American politics. “I have been waiting a long time for such a book on John Witherspoon. This book is not only well-researched, but well-written. The story Morrison tells is quite wonderful.” —_Michael Novak, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research_ _ _ "Dr. John Witherspoon is at once an exceptionally influential figure in Early American history, and a sadly neglected one. Professor Morrison's book fills this gap in American political history brilliantly. It is especially revealing of 18th century views on the interrationships between education, religion, and society. Morrison presents new insights into the Early American understanding of balancing faith, government, and society. It will change our conceptions of this period and provide fresh perspectives on contemporary problems. Everyone interested in the American Founding era is indebted to Morrison for this illuminating book." —_Garrett Ward Sheldon, University of Virginia's College at Wise_ "At last we have a full and learned account, as the title states, of _JOHN WITHERSPOON aND THE FOUNDING OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC_. Including discussion of Witherspoon's direct role in the crucial events of 1775-1790 as an advocate of Independence and friend of the Constitution, as a contributor to early American religious and political thought, and most important, as a mentor to James Madison and other Princeton revolutionairies and nation-builders, Morrison reveals Witherspoon's high standing in American religious, educational, and political history. Madison remembered Witherspoon's injunction to his students to 'Lead useful Lives;' he provided an excellent role model." —_Ralph Ketcham, Syracuse University_. (shrink)

Chemists take mechanisms to be an important way of explaining chemical change. I examine the usefulness of the mechanism approach in the recent philosophical literature in explicating the explanatory use of mechanisms by organic chemists. I argue that chemists consider a mechanism to be explanatory because it accounts for the “dynamic process of bringing about” (Tabery 2004 , 10) chemical change. For chemists, mechanisms are causal explanations based on interventions that show “how some possibilities depend on others” (Woodward 2003 , (...) 375). Only possibilities are achievable because chemists face a number of challenges when they explain by means of a mechanism. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This book focuses on the degree to which certain moral and legal doctrines are rooted in specific passions that are then institutionalised in the form of criminal law. A philosophical analysis is developed of the following questions: when, if ever, should hatred be overcome by sympathy or compassion? What are forgiveness and mercy and to what degree do they require - both conceptually and morally - the overcoming of certain passions and the motivation by other passions? If forgiveness and mercy (...) indeed are moral virtues, what role, if any, should they play in the law? (shrink)

Scientists employ a variety of procedures to eliminate degrees of freedom from computationally and/or analytically intractable equations. In the process, they often construct new models and discover new concepts, laws and functional relations. I argue these procedures embody a central notion of reduction, namely, the containment of one structure within another. However, their inclusion in the philosophical concept of reduction necessitates a reevaluation of many standard assumptions about the ontological, epistemological and functional features of a reduction. On the basis of (...) the reevaluation, I advocate a continuum of reduction which proceeds from the eliminative to the constructive. The metaphysical aspects of theory use in constructive reductions are sketched. (shrink)

We show that a statement HIL, which is motivated by a lemma of Hilbert and close in formulation to Hindman’s theorem, is actually much weaker than Hindman’s theorem. In particular, HIL is finitistically reducible in the sense of Hilbert’s program, while Hindman’s theorem is not.

The search for a historically conscious individual who is disposed to “radical action” is the main thrust of this paper. This is premised on the following claims: first, that the modern society is a pathological society whose rules, most often but not necessarily, imply control and domination; thus a “refusal” to abide by these rules is the most appropriate alternative available; and, second, that there is still hope for the Enlightenment’s project of emancipation, that is, such “refusal,” which means a (...) political fight for liberation, is still winnable no matter how formidable the forces of domination may be. But this paper can only do so much. I do not offer any universal and prefab solution to the pathological society. What I do instead is argue that the emergence of a historically conscious individual who is disposed to “radical action,” which eventually leads to a “collective radical action,” is still possible today. I also argue that “radical action” presupposes an awareness of the concrete socio-historical situations, thus the importance of “historicity.” This is done through a reconstructive reading of Marcuse’sCritical Theory. In fact, my argument is just an echo on what Marcuse did more than four decades ago. (shrink)

Grand Hotel Abyss investigates the lives and afterlives of the critical theorists who formed the Frankfurt School.

We have all been victims of wrongdoing. Forgiving that wrongdoing is one of the staples of current pop psychology dogma; it is seen as a universal prescription for moral and mental health in the self-help and recovery section of bookstores. At the same time, personal vindictiveness as a rule is seen as irrational and immoral. In many ways, our thinking on these issues is deeply inconsistent; we value forgiveness yet at the same time now use victim-impact statements to argue for (...) harsher penalties for criminals. Do we have a right to hate others for what they have done to us? Providing a nuanced approach to a proper understanding of the place of our strongest emotions in moral, political, and personal life, and using lucid, easily understood prose, this volume is a classic example of philosophical thinking applied to a thorny, everyday problem. (shrink)

By stressing the act rather than the relation of approximation, I argue that the magnitude of the error introduced should not be used as the sole criterion for judging the worth of the approximation. Magnitude is a necessary but not sufficient condition for such a judgement. Controllability, the absence of cancelling errors, and the approximation's justification are also important criteria to consider when praising or blaming an approximation. Boltzmann's discussion of the types of approximations used in the kinetic theory of (...) gases at the turn of the century illustrates the use of these criteria. (shrink)

This insightful, concise story makes clearer the complexities of the revolutionary era and shows how the first president's political ideas shaped governmental..

The authors present a balanced critique of the adaptation/exaptation debate and specify some of the hard evidentiary criteria that are needed to advance our understanding of human evolution. Investigators must build more “special design” criteria into their theorizing and research. By documenting that certain traits meet these rigorous criteria, the evolutionary sciences will ultimately rest on a firmer theoretical foundation.

Two countable well orderings are weakly comparable if there is an order preserving injection of one into the other. We say the well orderings are strongly comparable if the injection is an isomorphism between one ordering and an initial segment of the other. In [5], Friedman announced that the statement “any two countable well orderings are strongly comparable” is equivalent to ATR 0 . Simpson provides a detailed proof of this result in Chapter 5 of [13]. More recently, Friedman has (...) proved that the statement “any two countable well orderings are weakly comparable” is equivalent to ATR 0 . The main goal of this paper is to give a detailed exposition of this result. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree how abstract, theoretical principles can be applied to instances. This paper generates a puzzle for law theorists, causal theorists and inductivists alike. Intractability can force scientists to use a "semi-empirical" method, in which some of an equation's theoretically-determinable parameters are replaced with values taken directly from the data. This is not a purely deductive or inductive process, nor does it involve causes and capacities in any simple way (Humphreys 1995). I argue the predictive successes of such methods require (...) us to reanalyze our views about the nature of prediction, the status of models, and the goal(s) of science. When laws and experimental evidence are neither individually nor jointly sufficient for prediction, models become the locus of understanding. I analyze an historically important debate about the use of semi-empirical methods to construct potential energy surfaces. (shrink)

Some utterances of sentences such as ‘Every student failed the midterm exam’ and ‘There is no beer’ are widely held to be true in a conversation despite the facts that not every student in the world failed the midterm exam and that there is, in fact, some beer somewhere. For instance, the speaker might be talking about some particular course, or about his refrigerator. Stanley and Szabó (in Mind and Language v. 15, 2000) consider many different approaches to how contextual (...) information might give meaning to these ‘restricted quantifier domains’, and find all of them but one wanting. The present paper argues that their considerations against one of these other theories, considerations that turn on notions of compositionality, are incorrect. (shrink)

Suppose that 〈xk〉k∈ℕ is a countable sequence of real numbers. Working in the usual subsystems for reverse mathematics, RCA0 suffices to prove the existence of a sequence of reals 〈uk〉k∈ℕ such that for each k, uk is the minimum of {x0, x1, …, xk}. However, if we wish to prove the existence of a sequence of integer indices of minima of initial segments of 〈xk〉k∈ℕ, the stronger subsystem WKL0 is required. Following the presentation of these reverse mathematics results, we will (...) derive computability theoretic corollaries and use them to illustrate a distinction between computable analysis and constructive analysis. (shrink)

This paper uses the framework of reverse mathematics to analyze the proof theoretic content of several statements concerning multiplication of countable well-orderings. In particular, a division algorithm for ordinal arithmetic is shown to be equivalent to the subsystem ATR0.

This paper contains a corrected proof that the statement “every non-empty closed subset of a compact complete separable metric space is separably closed” implies the arithmetical comprehension axiom of reverse mathematics.

The article is a critical reply to jesse kalin's "a note on singer and kant" ("ethics", 1968). Kalin had argued that kant's categorical imperative entails absurdly counterintuitive consequences--E.G. That it is wrong to punish people. Against kalin, It is argued that such consequences are not entailed by the categorical imperative if it is properly interpreted. A proper interpretation involves, For example, Distinguishing the categorical imperative's function as a criterion for imperfect duties from its function as a criterion for perfect duties.

As is usually the case, Susan Bandes has written an engaging essay that gives us much to think about.1 Of course I do not agree with her that I have “asked the wrong question” in asking if the voca...

Human mating and parenting are more complex than has been implied by many evolutionarily based theories of sex differences. While focusing on sex differences might shed some light on the evolution of mating and parenting, this level of analysis is rather imprecise. More important, it ignores several ecological variables that should have influenced mating/parenting decisions and behaviors in both sexes.

We study the effective and proof-theoretic content of the polarized Ramsey’s theorem, a variant of Ramsey’s theorem obtained by relaxing the definition of homogeneous set. Our investigation yields a new characterization of Ramsey’s theorem in all exponents, and produces several combinatorial principles which, modulo bounding for ${\Sigma^0_2}$ formulas, lie (possibly not strictly) between Ramsey’s theorem for pairs and the stable Ramsey’s theorem for pairs.

Prediction is more than testing established theory by examining whether the prediction matches the data. To show this, I examine the practices of a community of scientists, known as threaders, who are attempting to predict the final, folded structure of a protein from its primary structure, i.e., its amino acid sequence. These scientists employ a careful and deliberate methodology of prediction. A key feature of the methodology is calibration. They calibrate in order to construct better models. The construction leads to (...) knowledge of how to construct or build an object. Thus, prediction serves a cognitive goal of model construction and not just model or theory testing. The kind of knowledge that results is relevantly different than theoretical knowledge. (shrink)

This book focuses on the degree to which certain moral and legal doctrines are rooted in specific passions that are then institutionalised in the form of criminal law. A philosophical analysis is developed of the following questions: when, if ever, should hatred be overcome by sympathy or compassion? What are forgiveness and mercy and to what degree do they require - both conceptually and morally - the overcoming of certain passions and the motivation by other passions? If forgiveness and mercy (...) indeed are moral virtues, what role, if any, should they play in the law? (shrink)