We introduce the CUBISM system for the analysis and deep understanding of multi-participant dialogues. CUBISM brings together two typically separate forms of discourse analysis: semantic analysis and sociolinguistic analysis. In the paper proper, we describe and illustrate major components of the CUBISM system, and discuss the challenge posed by the system’s ultimate purpose, which is to automatically detect anomalous changes in participants’ expressed or implied beliefs about the world and each other, including shifts toward or away from cultural and community (...) norms. (shrink)

The 'Why ain'cha rich?' argument for one-boxing in Newcomb's problem allegedly vindicates evidential decision theory and undermines causal decision theory. But there is a good response to the argument on behalf of causal decision theory. I develop this response. Then I pose a new problem and use it to give a new 'Why ain'cha rich?' argument. Unlike the old argument, the new argument targets evidential decision theory. And unlike the old argument, the new argument is sound.

Many people suspect it is morally wrong to watch the graphically violent horror films colloquially known as gorefests. A prominent argument vindicating this suspicion is the Argument from Reactive Attitudes (ARA). The ARA holds that we have a duty to maintain a well-functioning moral psychology, and watching gorefests violates that duty by threatening damage to our appropriate reactive attitudes. But I argue that the ARA is probably unsound. Depictions of suffering and death in other genres typically do no damage to (...) our appropriate reactive attitudes, and until we locate a relevant difference between these depictions in gorefests and in other genres, we should assume that the depictions in gorefests do no damage. I consider and reject three candidate differences: in artistic merit, meaningfulness, and audience orientation. Until genre skeptics identify a relevant difference, we should accept the taste for gory fictions as we would any other morally innocuous variation in taste. (shrink)

In the late Middle Ages the philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that to know the truth you must be the truth. But how to be the truth? Eckhart's answer comes in the form of an imperative: release yourself, let be. Only then will you be able to understand that the deepest meaning of being is releasement. Only then will you become who you truly are. This book interprets Eckhart's Latin and Middle High German writings under the banner of an (...) imperative of releasement, and then shows how the twentieth-century thinker Martin Heidegger creatively appropriates this idea at several stages of his career. Heidegger had a lifelong fascination with Eckhart, referring to him as "the old master of letters and life." Drawing on archival material and Heidegger's marginalia in his personal copies of Eckhart's writings, Moore argues that Eckhart was one of the most important figures in Heidegger's philosophy. This book also contains previously unpublished documents by Heidegger on Eckhart, as well as the first English translation of Nishitani Keiji's essay "Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart," which he initially gave as a presentation in one of Heidegger's classes in 1938. (shrink)

The local food movement has been touted by some as a profoundly effective way to make our food system become more healthy, just, and sustainable. Others have criticized the movement as being less a challenge to the status quo and more an easily co-opted support offering just another set of choices for affluent consumers. In this paper, we analyze three distinct sub-movements within the local food movement, the individual-focused sub-movement, the systems-focused sub-movement, and the community-focused sub-movement. These movements can be (...) combined within any particular campaign or within the goals of any particular organization or individual activist, but they are nevertheless quite different from each other, and come out of different conceptualizations of what food, people, and locality are. We argue that most of the critiques leveled against local food are actually directed against the individual-focused sub-movement, which is most compatible with the current industrial food system, and perhaps not surprisingly receives the most mainstream attention. Further, we argue that while each movement has its own strengths and weaknesses, it is the community-focused sub-movement that has the most potential to radically transform the global food system. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation interventions are novel devices being investigated for the management of severe treatment-resistant psychiatric illnesses. These interventions require the invasive implantation of high-frequency neurostimulatory probes intracranially aiming to provide symptom relief in treatment-resistant disorders including obsessive-compulsive disorder and anorexia nervosa. In the scientific literature, these neurostimulatory interventions are commonly described as reversible and to be used as a last resort option for psychiatric patients. However, the ‘last resort’ status of these interventions is rarely expanded upon. Contrastingly, usages of (...) DBS devices for neurological symptoms have paved the way for established safety and efficacy standards when used earlier in a disease’s timeline. As DBS treatments for these neurological diseases progress to have earlier indications, there is a parallel ethical concern that early implementation may one day become prescribed for psychiatric illnesses. The purpose of this article is to build off contemporary understandings of reversible neurostimulatory interventions to examine and provide clarifications on the ‘last resort’ status of DBS to better address its ethically charged use in psychiatric neurosurgery. To do this, evaluative differences between DBS treatments will be discussed to demonstrate how patient autonomy would be a paramount guiding principle when one day implementing these devices at various points along a psychiatric disease’s timeline. In presenting the clarification of ‘last resort’ status, the ethical tensions of early DBS interventions will be better understood to assist in providing psychiatric patients with more quality of life years in line with their values. (shrink)

In her short story “Stable Strategies for Middle Management,” Eileen Gunn imagines a future in which Margaret, an office worker, seeks radical genetic enhancements intended to help her secure the middle-management job she wants. One source of the story’s tension and dark humor is dramatic irony: readers can see that the enhancements Margaret buys stand little chance of making her life go better for her; enhancing is, for Margaret, probably a prudential mistake. This paper argues that our positions in the (...) real world are sufficiently similar to Margaret’s position in Gunn’s fictional world that we should take this story seriously as grounding an argument from analogy for the conclusion that radical genetic enhancements are, for us, probably a prudential mistake. The paper then defends this method. When the question at hand is one of speculative ethics, there is no method better fit to the purpose than argument from analogy to speculative fiction. (shrink)

Toleration and respect are often thought of as compatible, and indeed complementary, liberal democratic ideals. However, it has sometimes been said that toleration is disrespectful, because it necessarily involves a negative evaluation of the object of toleration. This article shows how toleration and respect are compatible as long as ‘ respect ’ is taken to mean recognition respect, as opposed to appraisal respect. But it also argues that recognition respect itself rules out certain kinds of evaluation of persons, and with (...) these, certain bases for toleration : if recognition respect is really distinct from appraisal respect, and if the fundamental rights assigned to people on the basis of recognition respect are to be equal rights, then recognition respect must itself involve a refusal to evaluate certain basic agential capacities of persons when deliberating about how to treat them. Even where ‘ respect ’ means recognition respect, then, there is some truth both in the thesis that toleration and respect are compatible, and in the thesis that they are incompatible. The different truths in these two theses help to shed light on the nature of toleration considered specifically as a liberal democratic virtue. This point can be illustrated by showing how the foregoing analysis provides a plausible solution to the so-called ‘paradox of the tolerant racist’. (shrink)

Why are some people more mentally able than others? In an authoritative, critical and intergrated series of review essays Professor Ian Deary inquires after the cognitive and biological foundations of human mental ability differences. Many accounts of intelligence have examined the structure and number of human mental ability differences and whether they can predict sucess in education,work and social life. Few books have taken psychometric intelligence differences as a starting point and brought together the reductionistic attempts to explain them.New to (...) the highly acclaimed Oxford Psychology Series, Looking Down on Human Intelligence appraises the search for the origins of psychometric intelligence differences in terms of brain function parameters. The book provides an original and thought provoking guide to ancient and modern research on one of the most compelling questions in human psychology. (shrink)

According to the ‘starting-gate’ interpretation of equality of opportunity, individuals who enjoy equal starts can legitimately become unequal to the extent that their differences derive from choices for which they can be held responsible. There can be no coercive transfers of resources in favour of individuals who disregarded their own futures, and no limits on the right of an individual to distribute resources intrapersonally. This paper assesses two ways in which advocates of equality of opportunity might depart from the starting-gate (...) interpretation. The first involves limiting the degree to which people are liable to pay the costs of their past choices. The second involves limiting their initial opportunities so as to prevent certain risky or apparently short-sighted choices. The paper compares these alternatives in terms of their compatibility with a particular conception of persons as morally equal and temporally extended. It constructs this conception by combining reductionist premises about personal identity with the premise that our status as equals is based on the fundamental requirement of opacity respect. Two conclusions about equality of opportunity are shown to follow from this conception of persons as morally equal and temporally extended: the first is that an individual’s liability to pay the costs of her past choices does not diminish over time; the second is that the individual’s initial scope of choice, in bringing about intrapersonal distributions between her current and future selves, can nevertheless be permissibly limited. The two conclusions are consistent, and the second allows for departures from starting-gate equality of opportunity. (shrink)

An intro. to Didaktic (the heart of thinking about teaching/teacher educ in Germany) for English-speaking readers, drawing on a range of writings assoc. w/ this tradition. Throws light on assumptions, characteristics, & weaknesses of curriculum thought.

We suggest that there is a need for those who seek to explore issues associated with the implementation of citizenship education in England to clarify its specific nature. This can be done, at least in part, through a process of comparison. To that end we review some of the connections and disjunctions between 'character education' and 'citizenship education'. We argue, drawing from US and UK literature but focusing our attention on contexts and issues in England, that there are indeed some (...) broad areas of overlap between these two fields. Citizens should be of 'good' character and the educational initiatives that we consider both emerge from a concern about current trends in society. However, we suggest that the overlaps with citizenship education principally apply when character education is drawn very broadly. When we examine a particular approach to character education that is often US-based, and titled as 'citizenship', we note many contrasts with citizenship education as formulated in the National Curriculum for England. We suggest that citizenship educators in England need to interpret claims about the similarity between these two fields with caution, or meanings that apply to both character education and citizenship education will be distorted. (shrink)

Food Sovereignty is a vibrant discourse in academic and activist circles, yet despite the many shared characteristics between issues surrounding food and public health, the two are often analysed in separate frameworks and the insights from Food Sovereignty are not sufficiently brought to bear on the problems in the public health discourse. In this paper, I will introduce the concept of 'self-organised community viability' as a way to link food and health, and to argue that what I call the 'Health (...) Security' paradigm requires a 'Health Sovereignty' response modelled on Food Sovereignty. (shrink)

One serious harm facing communities in the Anthropocene is epistemic loss. This is increasingly recognized as a harm in international policy discourses around adaptation to climate change. Epistemic loss is typically conceived of as the loss of a corpus of knowledge, or less commonly, as the further loss of epistemic methodologies. In what follows, I argue that epistemic loss also can involve the loss of epistemic self-determination, and that this framework can help to usefully examine adaptation policies.

Although the individual journalist is an essential unit of ethical agency, journalists are increasingly employees of large companies or corporations whose primary aim is to maximize returns to shareholders. Consequently, many, perhaps most, of the ethical dilemmas journalists face begin with the inherent conflict between the individual's role as a journalist and his or her employer's quest for profit. My underlying argument in this article is that this situation is not unique, that other fields are confronting similar dilemmas, and consequently, (...) journalism may have much to learn from them. In the article I contend that business and journalism ethics, in particular, appear to have more in common than has generally been acknowledged and that the field of business ethics has yielded many concepts that appear to have relevance to journalism. In the article, I conclude that considering the insights offered by those who operate from the perspective of business ethics will facilitate analysis of the interface between individual journalists and the corporate forces that affect so many of them. (shrink)

Despite US policy documents which recommend that in areas of environmental risk, interaction between scientific experts and the public move beyond the so-called “Decide, Announce, and Defend model,” many current public involvement policies still do not guarantee meaningful public participation. In response to this problem, various attempts have been made to define what counts as sufficient or meaningful participation and free informed consent from those affected. Though defining “meaningfulness” is a complex task, this paper explores one under-examined dimension that concerns (...) the relationship between consent and the idea that citizens should be sufficiently informed: epistemic capacity. This paper will look at some of the work on meaningful participation and consent, give a definition of epistemic capacity, and argue that only a community with sufficient epistemic capacity can have the understanding and competence to give informed enough consent and thus participate meaningfully. (shrink)

This monograph presents a synthesis and reconstruction of Rudolf Arnheim’s theory of media. Combining both Arnheim’s well-known writings on film and radio with his later work on the psychology of art, the author presents a coherent approach to the problem of the nature of a medium, space and time, and the differentia between different media. The latent ontological commitments of Arnheim’s theories is drawn out by affirming Arnheim’s membership in the Brentano school of Austrian philosophy, which allows his theories to (...) be clarified and strengthened, particularly with the metaphysical writings of Roman Ingarden. The resulting theory is relational, portraying essential medial differences with neutral criteria and allowing for a rigorous definition of a medium. The way in which a medium is based on the inherent dispositions of medial materials creates a highly appealing theory that is determinate without being deterministic. The theory is thus highly timely as people in media studies seek to address the determinate nature of media after the post-medium condition. The book will appeal to researchers and graduate students in cultural and media studies as well as architecture and design. (shrink)

Our society invests hugely in education, but not always very thoughtfully. Key Debates in Education outlines all of the main issues involved in arriving at an intelligent understanding of education. In particular, it provides in-depth discussion of: the purpose of education; the nature of teaching, learning and assessment; education policy; the contribution of education to society. Above all, the authors convey the liveliness and excitement of educational debate--not least through the way that they take issue with each other. In the (...) process they show how and why people who care about education radically disagree with each other. This text includes questions, tasks, and further reading sections. (shrink)

The outcomes of educational assessments undoubtedly have real implications for students, teachers, schools and education in the widest sense. Assessment results are, for example, used to award qualifications that determine future educational or vocational pathways of students. The results obtained by students in assessments are also used to gauge individual teacher quality, to hold schools to account for the standards achieved by their students, and to compare international education systems. Given the current high-stakes nature of educational assessment, it is imperative (...) that the measurement practices involved have stable philosophical foundations. However, this article casts doubt on the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary educational measurement models. Aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and Bohr’s philosophy of quantum theory are used to argue that a quantum theoretical rather than a Newtonian model is appropriate for educational measurement, and the associated implications for the concept of validity are elucidated. Whilst it is acknowledged that the transition to a quantum theoretical framework would not lead to the demise of educational assessment, it is argued that, where practical, current high-stakes assessments should be reformed to become as ‘low-stakes’ as possible. This article also undermines some of the pro high-stakes testing rhetoric that has a tendency to afflict education. (shrink)

Suppose that you have to take a test tomorrow but you do not want to study. Unfortunately you should study, since you care about passing and you expect to pass only if you study. Is there anything you can do to make it the case that you should not study? Is there any way for you to ‘rationalize’ slacking off? I suggest that such rationalization is impossible. Then I show that if evidential decision theory is true, rationalization is not only (...) possible but sometimes advisable. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to bring some colour to a discussion of fraught topics in education. Though the scenes and stories (from education and elsewhere) that feature here deal with racism, the discussion aims to say something to such topics more generally. The philosophers whose work I draw on here are Stanley Cavell and Judith Butler. Both Butler and Cavell develop (or depart from) J.L. Austin's theory of the performative utterance. Butler, following Derrida, argues that in concentrating on the (...) illocutionary force of utterances (their capacity to do things), Austin fails to account for the force of words themselves. The iterability of language means that words are never at one with themselves. They carry their old contexts with them as they enter into new ones. This has important consequences for ethical issues that pertain to what Butler calls the ?performativity? of gender and race. Though we are performed by language, this performance has a dynamic quality that leads to the reshaping of identity. In contrast, for Cavell, the disappointing aspect of Austin's thought relates to the latter's neglect of the perlocutionary effect of language ? what is done ?by words?. By taking on this project, Cavell embraces the unconventional aspects of language characterised by ?passionate? expression and exchange. Butler and Cavell approach the performative utterance from different directions. In the last part of this article, the significance of this difference is discussed in relation to the provision of a moral education with regard to tackling issues surrounding racism. (shrink)

Sustainability is commonly recognized as an important goal, but there is little agreement on what sustainability is, or what it requires. This paper looks at some common approaches to sustainability, and while acknowledging the ways in which they are useful, points out an important lacuna: that for something to be sustainable, people must be willing to work to sustain it. The paper presents a framework for thinking about and assessing sustainability which highlights people working to sustain. It also briefly discusses (...) Integrated Water Resource Management and the example of the California Water Plan to explore what such a perspective brings that is overlooked in other approaches, and how this approach might be pursued. Ultimately, this framework argues that a system can only be described as sustainable if people’s work to sustain the system is biophysically possible, socially possible, and if people would freely choose to do the sustaining work. -/- Read More: http://ascelibrary.org.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/doi/abs/10.1061/%28ASCE%29WR.1943-5452.0000526. (shrink)

"First published 1957 " Campion Collection.

We explore two special challenges indigenous peoples pose to the idea of sovereigns as trustees for humanity. The first challenge is rooted in a colonial history during which a trusteeship model of sovereignty served as an enabler of paternalistic colonial policies. The challenge is to show that the trusteeship model is not irreparably colonial in nature. The second challenge, which emerges from the first, is to specify the scope and nature of indigenous peoples’ sovereignty within the trusteeship model. Whereas the (...) interaction between states and foreign nationals is the locus of cosmopolitan law, the relationship between states and indigenous peoples is distinctive. In the ordinary cosmopolitan case, foreign nationals do not purport to possess legal authority. Indigenous peoples often do make such a claim, pitting their claim to authority against the state’s. We discuss how international law has attempted to come to grips with indigenous sovereignty by requiring states to include indigenous peoples in decision-making processes that affect their historical lands and rights. A crucial fault line in the jurisprudence, however, separates a duty to consult indigenous peoples from a duty to acquire their free, prior and informed consent. The latter but not the former recognizes that indigenous peoples possess a veto over state projects on their lands, in effect recognizing in them a limited co-legislative power. We focus on recent jurisprudence from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and consider whether either the duty to consult or FPIC are enough to dispel the shadow of the trusteeship model’s colonial past. We suggest that they are a move in the right direction, and that implicitly they represent international law’s recognition that states are no longer the sole bearers of sovereignty at international law. In limited circumstances, international law recognizes indigenous peoples as sovereign actors. (shrink)

Rather than follow along the lines of many scholarly interpretations of Patañjali's "Yoga-Sūtra," which views Yoga as a radical separation or isolation of "spirit" or pure consciousness (puruṣa) from "matter" (prakṛti), this essay suggests that the "Yoga-Sūtra" seeks to "unite" or integrate these two principles by correcting a basic misalignment between them. Yoga thus does not advocate the abandonment or condemnation of the world, but supports a stance that enables one to live more fully in the world without being enslaved (...) by worldly identification. (shrink)

In this paper, I will look at what role being able to provide justification plays in several prominent conceptions of epistemology, and argue that taking the ability to provide reasons as necessary for knowledge leads to a biasing toward false negatives. However, I will also argue that asking for reasons is a common practice among the general public, and one that is endorsed by “folk epistemology.” I will then discuss the fact that this asking for reasons is done neither constantly (...) nor arbitrarily, but rather in a systematic way that produces ignorance by oppressing some knowledge and some knowers, in particular those from already marginalized groups. After looking at the implications of all this, I will ultimately argue that we must be very careful when we ask for reasons, and acknowledge it as the powerful weapon it is. (shrink)