At the heart of Youth Justice Conferencing, a form of restorative justice aimed at addressing youth crime, is the notion that young persons who have committed an offence should be ‘reintegrated’ into their communities (Braithwaite in Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989). This paper focuses on the role of parents as support persons, in particular the ‘crying mum’, an identity often leveraged by the Convenor when prompting the young person to express remorse to the circle. We explore (...) an Avouchment genre that we have observed whereby support persons vouch for the character of the young person. Our analysis considers the ways in which values are composed (as ideational categories are coupled with evaluative interpersonal ones) and unfold in discourse as invitations for participants to align. In Knight’s (2010) terms, when shared, couplings of ideation and evaluation engender bonds through which participants may commune. (shrink)

Haag’s theorem cries out for explanation and critical assessment: It sounds the alarm that something is (perhaps) not right in one of the standard ways of constructing interacting fields to be used in generating predictions for scattering experiments. Viewpoints as to the precise nature of the problem, the appropriate solution, and subsequently-called-for developments in areas of physics, mathematics, and philosophy differ widely. In this paper, we develop and deploy a conceptual framework for critically assessing these disparate responses to Haag’s theorem. (...) Doing so reveals the driving force of more general questions as to the nature and purpose of foundational work in physics. (shrink)

5-43 This article aims to consider the robust field of environmental history as a whole, as it stands and as it has developed over the past twenty-five years around the world. It necessarily adopts a selective approach but still offers more breadth than depth. It treats the links between environmental history and other fields within history, and with other related disciplines such as geography. It considers the precursors of environmental history, its emergence since the 1970s, its condition in several settings (...) and historiographies. Finally it touches on environmental history’s relationship to social theory and to the natural sciences as they have evolved in recent decades. It concludes that while there remains plenty of interesting work yet to do, environmental history has successfully established itself as a legitimate field within the historical profession, and has a bright future, if perhaps for discouraging reasons. (shrink)

Biologically, pain is neither intrinsically good nor bad, but is a communication mechanism designed to serve organismal ends. Pain for any given person at any given time should be evaluated on the basis of “success” (or not) in serving those purposes. Yet, the physiological, psychological, and cultural complexity of the experience makes moral consideration of pain complicated. This is especially the case with infants in pain. The competence of the infant as a “decision maker” cannot, of course, be assumed. Even (...) if the child “thinks” about pain, an epistemological barrier exists in that the child cannot clearly communicate about the pain experience. Furthermore, any expressions of pain from the child may be necessary for diagnosis. Just coercion criteria provide a means of evaluating when and to what extent pain in infants should be controlled under the authority of surrogate decision makers. (shrink)

Though it is frequently pointed out that Whitehead’s process philosophy is a hermeneutic philosophy, the author makes the additional claims that the philosophical hermenutics of the 19th and 20th centuries are frequently process philosophies. This is especially true of Paul Ricoeur’s interpretation theory, which describes the ego as engaged in an unending transformative dialectic process with its environment. This insight, coupled with Ricoeur’s insistence on the efficacy of a pre-linguistic reality upon experience, makes him a provocative conversation partner for Whiteheadians (...) and uncovers the possibility of a process metaphysic arising out of the “subjectivist” programs of phenomenology and linguistic analysis. (shrink)

Whatever good or ill it did to Guy Fawkes, his resuscitation at the hands of Bernard Williams has, by any utilitarian reckoning, been a Good Thing. A casual glance at the literature that has accumulated over the past thirty five years leaves no doubt that the topic has been reduplicated many times over, to the great enjoyment of undergraduates, who have been able to write science fiction under the guise of essays in the Philosophy of Mind, and of dons, who (...) in an age of cvs and Assessments, have been able to notch up page after page of counter-replies to replies to rebuttals of previous papers, not to mention an often welcome tally of references in the citation index. But the actual arguments adduced by Williams can be turned to support a much more traditional view of the self, as a necessarily unique agent whose individuality is established by his capacity for autonomous action. (shrink)

Este libro es un ensayo filosófico que expresa la relevancia que para John Stuart Mill tiene la educación, hasta el punto de considerarla como un derecho fundamental de las personas, teniendo en cuenta que en su tiempo no existían los hoy conocidos Derechos Humanos. Stuart Mill se adelanta a nuestra época y presenta a la educación como ese derecho básico de toda persona que ha de ser protegido, potenciado y proporcionado por los diversos Estados.

An outgrowth of the Bicentennial. White examines the metaphysics, epistemology, and moral philosophy which influenced American revolutionary thought. Focusing on the doctrines of self-evident truth and natural law expressed in the Declaration of Independence, he elucidates them by erudite explications and critical analyses of such 17th and 18th century thinkers as John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, and Jean Jacques Burlamaqui. Traditional interpretations, best represented by Carl Becker’s The Declaration of Independence, have stressed the role of Locke. More recently, intellectual historians have (...) reassessed the Scottish influence on American thought, apparent in White’s own Science & Sentiment in America, chap. 3, and in Garry Wills’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Wills claims for Hutcheson the place formerly reserved for Locke as the philosopher who most directly shaped Jefferson’s thought and style in the Declaration. Now White makes a case for the neglected 18th century Swiss legal philosopher, Jean Jacques Burlamaqui. (shrink)

From the perspective of the old politics-right, left, and liberal—the New Left is nothing more than incoherent social commentary that should be dismissed in the manner of academic psychological explanation. But even with all the psychologizing that flourished in the interests of soothing troubled consciences the fact remains that the New Left uncovered the "process of the political." Those who remain content with the psychological explanation of the New Left and those who regard the New Left as no more than (...) a historical relic will simply ignore. Howard’s philosophical treatment of the meaning of the New Left; the Left Orthodoxy will find nothing here but further testimony to the heresy of the New Left. (shrink)

XLRI, in association with a few Tata Group companies, established the XLRI-JRD Tata Foundation in Business Ethics in 1991 to mark their long-standing commitment and contribution to business ethics in India. The foundation seeks to address this by publicly affirming the urgent need for ethics in business and the need to bring about a conducive culture in which it can thrive.

Philosophical hermeneutics provides a model of interreligious dialogue that acknowledges the interpretive variability of truth claims while maintaining their relation to a preinterpretive reality. The dialectic and tensive structure of philosophical hermeneutics directly parallels the tension between the diversity of belief and the ultimacy of the sacred. By placing philosophers like Gadamer, Ricoeur, Peirce, and Whitehead in conversation, J. R. Hustwit describes religious truth claims as coconstituted by the planes of linguistic convention and uninterpreted otherness. Only when we recognize that (...) religious claims emerge from a dalliance back and forth across the limits of the understanding can we appreciate the engagement between religions. In terms of dialogue, this approach treats religious truth claims as tentative hypotheses, but hypotheses that are frequently commensurable and rationally contestable. Interreligious dialogue goes beyond facilitating bonhomie or negotiating tolerance; dialogue can and should be a disciplined space for rationally adjudicating claims about what lies beyond the limits of human understanding. (shrink)

That space and time should be integrated into a single entity, spacetime, is the great insight of Einstein's special theory of relativity, and leads us to regard spacetime as a fundamental context in which to make sense of the world around us. But it is not the only one. Causality is equally important and at least as far as the special theory goes, it cannot be subsumed under a fundamentally geometrical form of explanation. In fact, the agent of propagation of (...) causal influence is electromagnetic radiation. In this examination, the authors find support for a rationalist approach to physics, never neglecting experimentation, but rejecting a simple empiricist or positivist view of science. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact that recent advances in clinical neurology, introspectionist psychology and neuroscience have upon the philosophical psycho?neural Identity Theory. Topics covered include (i) the nature and properties of phenomenal consciousness based on a study of the ?basic? visual field, i.e. that obtained in the complete dark, the Ganzfeld, and during recovery from occipital lobe injuries; (ii) the nature of the ?body?image? of neurology and its relation to the physical body; (iii) Descartes? error in choosing extension in space (...) as the criterion for distinguishing the physical and the mental; (iv) the technical distinction between sensing and perceiving; (v) why phenomenal Direct Realism is incorrect whereas epistemic DR and the representative theory are correct; (vi) the ontological and topological status of phenomenal space and physical space. This leads to considerations of the current ?binding problems? in neuroscience; the role of the brain mechanisms that construct the sensory fields of phenomenal consciousness; the ?homunculus? fallacy; the key difference between epistemic and non?epistemic perception as revealed by brain injury studies; and how the brain codes information, contrasting topological and vectorial coding, with particular reference to the binding problem. My conclusion is that the Identity Theory is incompatible with the scientific evidence from an integrated approach to modern introspectionist psychology, clinical neurology, and neuroscience. However, Cartesian Dualism is even more incompatible with the evidence. This leaves only two viable theories. The first is Bohr's theory of brain?consciousness complementarity. The second is the Broad?Price?Smythies theory of extension, which is a topological theory of the relation between phenomenal space and physical space. (shrink)

Current research on the neural basis of consciousness is based mainly on neuroimaging, physiology and psychophysics. This target article reviews what is known about biochemical factors that may contribute to the development of consciousness, based on loss of consciousness (i.e., coma). There are two theories of the biochemical mode of action of general anaesthetics. One is that anaesthesia is a direct (i.e., not receptor-mediated) effect of the anaesthetic on cellular neurophysiological function; the other is that some alteration of receptor function (...) occurs. General anaesthetics are mainly GABA agonists but some (such as ketamine) are glutamate antagonists. They also affect other systems, particularly cholinergic ones. There are various comas of metabolic origin. For example, a combination of small doses of the iron chelators desferrioxamine and prochlorperazine induce a profound and long lasting coma in humans. The mechanisms that might mediate this include redox mechanisms at the glutamate synapse, post-synaptic endocytosis of dopamine and iron, and intracellular iron-dopamine complexes, which are powerful dismuters of the superoxide anion. New findings in cell biology relating to endocytosis and recycling of receptors are discussed in a wider context. These biochemical events may induce coma by two mechanisms: (i) Consciousness may depend on widespread cortical (or cortico-thalamic) activation. (ii) Whereas these biochemical changes are widespread, only the changes in a subset of consciousness' neurons may count. An experimental program to distinguish between these two alternatives is proposed. (shrink)

In this article I examine the metaphysical foundations of Guido de Ruggiero’s liberalism and ask what these can tell us about his changing view of Giovanni Gentile's actualism, which was such an influence on de Ruggiero before the First World War. I argue that de Ruggiero’s ‘actualism’ was never the same as Gentile’s, but was drawn from the same intellectual sources; that the actualist conception of free and self-conscious agency runs through both versions of the doctrine, though interpreted in different (...) ways; and finally that the contrasts between de Ruggiero’s and Gentile’s political allegiances result from something other than their differing interpretations of actualism, which serves, in the end, not so much as a theory as a set of basic principles, images and ideals that each philosopher tried to modify and match to the political circumstances in which he found himself. (shrink)

This article traces the multiple enactments of sex in clinical practices of transgender medicine to argue against the presumed singularity of ‘transexuality’. Using autoethnography to analyse my own experience as a trans patient, I describe my clinical encounters with doctors, psychiatrists and surgeons in order to theorise sex as multiple. Following recent developments in science and technology studies (STS) that advance the work of Judith Butler on sex as performatively reproduced, I use a praxiographic approach to argue that treatment practices (...) produce particular iterations of what sex (and transexuality) ‘is’ and how these processes limit and foreclose other trans possibilities. I consider the ethical, political and material-discursive implications of treatment practices and offer a series of reflections about the effects and effectiveness of current clinical practices and the possibilities for intervening in such processes in order that, following Annemarie Mol, we might (re)make sex (and transexuality) differently. (shrink)