Stewart Duncan, Materialism from Hobbes to Locke, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022, 248pp., ISBN: 9780197613009.

A powerful set of projections has constructed post-apartheid higher education in South Africa. Among these is the expectation that technikons would become universities of technology, with a mission to drive the technology of national reconstruction and development. In this paper, one of the new universities of technology serves as a case study to explore organizational structure and to highlight the ethics of university management and leadership. Building a new university provides the opportunity to place ethics “upfront”, rather than as an (...) afterthought, by constructing an organizational framework that makes ethical issues integral to management and decision-making processes. In imagining the structure of a university of technology, the authors were inspired by future scripting methods developed by Bastiaan De Laat, and by Duncan Den Boer, Arie Rip and Sandra Speller. The research process firstly involved the identification of themes related to values and ethics through an analysis of the environment. These themes were incorporated into three scenarios of possible futures for this new university type. Using these scenarios, the ethical issues that emerged, are compared with the original themes. Conclusions are then drawn with regard to management structures that are hierarchical and entrench compliance, or that are traditionally collegiate and expertise-based, or that might enable mutual appreciation and allow for leaders to emerge within any functional space at a university of technology. (shrink)

Duncan, Bruce Review(s) of: Handbook of research on development and religion, edited by Matthew Clarke (Cheltenham UK: Edward Edgar, 2013), pp viii+ 602, hb, US$280.

A certain conception of the relevance of virtue epistemology to the philosophy of education is set out. On this conception, while the epistemic goal of education might initially be promoting the pupil's cognitive success, it should ultimately move on to the development of the pupil's cognitive agency. A continuum of cognitive agency is described, on which it is ultimately cognitive achievement, and thus understanding, which is the epistemic goal of education. This is contrasted with a view on which knowledge is (...) the epistemic goal. (shrink)

We describe how the set of tools, practices, and social relations known as “precision agriculture” is defined, promoted, and debated. To do so, we perform a critical discourse analysis of popular and trade press websites. Promoters of precision agriculture champion how big data analytics, automated equipment, and decision-support software will optimize yields in the face of narrow margins and public concern about farming’s environmental impacts. At its core, however, the idea of farmers leveraging digital infrastructure in their operations is not (...) new, as agronomic research in this vein has existed for over 30 years. Contemporary discourse in precision ag tends to favour emerging digital technologies themselves over their embeddedness in longstanding precision management approaches. Following several strands of science and technology studies research, we explore what rhetorical emphasis on technical innovation achieves, and argue that this discourse of novelty is a reinvention of precision agriculture in the context of the growing “smart” agricultural economy. We overview six tensions that remain unresolved in this promotional rhetoric, concerning the definitions, history, goals, adoption, uses, and impacts of precision agriculture. We then synthesize these in a discussion of the extent to which digital tools are believed to displace farmer decision-making and whether digital agriculture addresses the biophysical heterogeneity of farm landscapes or land itself has become an “experimental technology”—a way to advance the general development of artificial intelligence. This discussion ultimately helps us name a larger dilemma: that the smart agricultural economy is perhaps less about supporting land and its stewards than promising future tech and profits. (shrink)

It used to be taken as a given in epistemology that the fundamental good from a purely epistemic point of view is truth. Such veritism is a given no longer, with some commentators advocating epistemic value pluralism, whereby truth is at most one of several irreducible epistemic goods, while others are attracted to an epistemic value monism that is centred on something other than truth, such as knowledge or understanding. It is claimed that it was premature to reject veritism. In (...) particular, it is argued that the kinds of motivations that are offered for rejecting this proposal are weak on closer inspection, as they trade on a dubious reading of veritism that is independently implausible. The attraction of this implausible way of thinking about veritism lies in the difficulty of offering any coherent alternative. A solution to this conundrum is proposed, whereby we unpack the veritist proposal in terms of the explanatorily prior notion of an intellectually virtuous inquirer. (shrink)

My interest is in how shifting from an anti-luck epistemology to an anti-risk epistemology can enable us to make sense of some important epistemic phenomena. After rehearsing the more general arguments for preferring anti-risk epistemology over its anti-luck cousin, I argue that a further advantage of this transition lies in how it puts us in a better position to understand certain trade-offs with regard to epistemic risk. In particular, there can be ways of forming beliefs that are epistemically low risk (...) along one axis of evaluation while being epistemically high risk along another axis of evaluation. I further show how this idea plays out in terms of collaborative inquiries, where the framework provided by anti-risk epistemology enables us to understand how epistemic risk can be distributed across such a collective enterprise and thereby effectively managed. (shrink)

This discussion surveys recent developments in the treatment of the epistemological problem of skepticism. These are arguments which attack our knowledge of certain truths rather than, say, our belief in the existence of certain entities. In particular, this article focuses on the radical versions of these skeptical arguments, arguments which purport to show that knowledge is, for the most part, impossible, rather than just that we lack knowledge in a particular discourse. Although most of the key recent developments in this (...) area have taken place since the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is necessary to also discuss some of the movements that have developed since 1970 in order to give these recent developments the necessary setting. The date of 1970 is dictated by the publication in that year of Fred Dretske’s seminal article “Epistemic Operators,” which both pushed a “relevant alternatives” theory of knowledge to the fore of discussion and also brought into focus one possible line of argument against the so-called “closure” principle for knowledge. In so doing, it provided one of the main sources of response to the emergent.. (shrink)

Two hundred years ago, J.M.W. Turner packed up two large leatherbound sketchbooks, pencils, and watercolors and set off for the north of England. When he returned from the tour that he regarded as one of the most important of his career, Turner had completed more than two hundred sketches - works that later became the basis of more than fifty major oil paintings and watercolors. For this illustrated book, David Hill has taken photographs of many of the actual sites (...) Turner sketched on his northern tour. The result is an look at the whole of Turner's creative process, from site to exhibited picture, and at the quality and intensity of the artist's experience. (shrink)

In the contemporary epistemological literature, ignorance is normally understood as the absence of an epistemic standing, usually either knowledge or true belief. It is argued here that this way of thinking about ignorance misses a crucial ingredient, which is the normative aspect of ignorance. In particular, to be ignorant is not merely to lack the target epistemic standing, but also entails that this is an epistemic standing that one ought to have. I explore the motivations for this claim, and show (...) how it can help us make sense of a range of cases concerning ignorance that the conventional, non-normative, accounts of ignorance struggle with. I also use this normative conception of ignorance to help elucidate the specific kind of epistemic standing the lack of which is entailed by ignorance. (shrink)

The moral crises of our time -- Ethics at the crossroads -- In search of our moral heritage -- Re-connecting with the earth -- Re-connecting with one another -- Re-connecting with the enemy.

In search of the origins of some of the most fundamental problems that have beset philosophers in English-speaking countries in the past century, Claire Ortiz Hill maintains that philosophers are treating symptoms of ills whose causes lie buried in history. Substantial linguistic hurdles have blocked access to Gottlob Frege's thought and even to Bertrand Russell's work to remedy the problems he found in it. Misleading translations of key concepts like intention, content, presentation, idea, meaning, concept, etc., severed analytic philosophy (...) from its roots. Hill argues that once linguistic and historical barriers are removed, Edmund Husserl's critical study of Frege's logic in his 1891 _Philosophy of Arithmetic_ provides important insights into issues in philosophy now. She supports her conclusions with analyses of Frege's, Husserl's, and Russell's works, including _Principia Mathematica_, and with linguistic analyses of the principal concepts of analytic philosophy. She re-establishes links that existed between English and Continental thought to show Husserl's expertise as a philosopher of mathematics and logic who had been Weierstrass's assistant and had long maintained ties with Cantor, Hilbert, and Zermelo. (shrink)

It is a matter of contention whether or not a general explanatory framework for the biological sciences would be of scientific value, or whether it is even achievable. In this paper we suggest that both are the case, and we outline proposals for a framework capable of generating new scientific questions. Starting with one clear characteristic of biological systems – that they all have the potential to make mistakes - we aim to describe the nature of this potential and the (...) common processes that lie behind it. Given that under most circumstances biological systems function effectively, an examination of different kinds of mistake-making provides pointers to mechanisms that must exist to make failure uncommon. This in turn informs a framework for systematic enquiry, which in this paper we apply to the haemostatic system, but which we believe could be applied to any system across biology. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that one strong motivation for adopting a conciliatory stance with regard to the epistemology of peer disagreement is that the non-conciliatory alternatives are incompatible with the demands of intellectual character, and incompatible with the virtue of intellectual humility in particular. It is argued that this is a mistake, at least once we properly understand what intellectual humility involves. Given some of the inherent problems facing conciliatory proposals, it is maintained that non-conciliatory approaches to epistemic peer disagreement (...) are thus on much stronger dialectical ground than many suppose, including some defenders of this line. In particular, non-conciliatory proposals can resist the idea that epistemic peer disagreement directly weakens one’s epistemic justification, as conciliatory views maintain. This means that the epistemic justification that our beliefs in this regard enjoy, and thus our knowledge, is more secure than conciliatory approaches to epistemic peer disagreement would suggest. (shrink)

Perhaps the most dominant anti‐sceptical proposal in recent literature –advanced by such figures as Stewart Cohen, Keith DeRose and David Lewis –is the contextualist response to radical scepticism. Central to the contextualist thesis is the claim that, unlike other non‐contextualist anti‐sceptical theories, contextualism offers a dissolution of the sceptical paradox that respects our common sense epistemological intuitions. Taking DeRose's view as representative of the contextualist position, it is argued that instead of offering us an intuitive response to scepticism, contextualism is (...) actually committed to a revisionist stance as regards our everyday usage of epistemic terms. In particular, it is argued that the thesis fails to present a satisfactory explication of a notion –that of‘epistemic descent’– that is pivotal to the anti‐sceptical import of the account. On the positive side, however, it is claimed that although the contextualist response to scepticism is ultimately unsatisfying, DeRose's theory does contain within it the framework for a completely different ‐ and far more persuasive ‐ account of the‘phenomenology’of scepticism which runs along non‐contextualist lines. (shrink)

Few thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century have so profoundly and radically transformed our understanding of writing and literature as Jacques Derrida. Derridian deconstruction remains one of the most powerful intellectual movements of the present century, and Derrida's own innovative writings on literature and philosophy are crucially relevant for any understanding of the future of literature and literary criticism today. Derrida's own manner of writing is complex and challenging and has often been misrepresented or misunderstood. In this (...) book, Leslie Hill provides an accessible introduction to Derrida's writings on literature which presupposes no prior knowledge of Derrida's work. He explores in detail Derrida's relationship to literary theory and criticism, and offers close readings of some of Derrida's best known essays. This introduction will help those coming to Derrida's work for the first time, and suggests further directions to take in studying this hugely influential thinker. (shrink)

Elise Scharten was a pioneering Dutch missionary who translated texts into and out of the language of the Naxi people, a Chinese minority group living in the Himalayan foothills of Yunnan province. She was the first to translate the Naxi creation story into English, and the only translator of a western text into Naxi. Her legacy has, however, been overshadowed by the achievements of more prominent Naxiologists. Today, Scharten is almost completely unknown. Nevertheless, Scharten’s unique contribution to the transmission of (...) cultural knowledge between westerners and the Naxi has been preserved in museum and library archives. From these sources we can build a clear picture of her importance to the study of this unique people. (shrink)

Artists often emphasize the importance of risk to their work. But this raises a puzzle, as on a standard probabilistic account of risk we are obliged to treat some of these cases as not involving genuine risk at all. It is argued that the way to resolve this puzzle is to recognize a crucial shortcoming in the probabilistic account of risk. With this shortcoming rectified, and hence with a revised modal account of risk in place, we are able to treat (...) the relevant cases of putative aesthetic risk as entirely genuine. (shrink)

This research takes a retrospective look at modern consumption opportunities of the U.S. poor from both sides of the marketing exchange relationship. The paper opens with a critical assessment of the consumer-behavior literature and its primary focus on middle-class Americans. The next section profiles the impoverished and their purchasing habits and closes with a summary of how both have changed over the last forty years. Then a theoretical account is presented using consumer literature from the same timeframe. The paper ends (...) with a discussion of common business practices and moral dilemmas that have continued over these decades, along with an ethical paradigm involving distributive justice to guide future management tactics. (shrink)