This article addresses two main questions: what is excellence and should epistemic excellence be the main purpose of education? Though references to excellence have become increasingly frequent in the UK education policy, these questions are perhaps especially important in Scotland where the curriculum is explicitly for excellence. Following Hirst and Peters, it is hypothesised that if the term ‘education’ implies possession of a certain breadth of general knowledge and understanding, then the term ‘excellence’ may imply a deep grasp of a (...) specific body of knowledge. However, after consideration of Dewey's suggestion that being present in the moment is an excellence of childhood, it is concluded that the development of epistemic excellence should be regarded as an educational purpose rather than the only educational purpose and pupil engagement with public traditions of knowledge provides necessary but not sufficient conditions for education. (shrink)

This article explores the themes of trust and ethical conduct in social research, with particular attention to the trust that can develop between the members of a research team as well as between researchers and the researched. The authors draw upon a three-year empirical study of destinations and outcomes for young people excluded from alternative educational provision. They also make reference to a contemporary exposition of Aristotle's writing on friendship in order to explore two sets of relevant distinctions that have (...) a bearing upon our understanding of relationships that emerge in the context of social research projects. These distinctions are between impartiality and selectivity on the one hand, and between universality and particularity on the other. The authors attempt to demonstrate that these distinctions influence the development of trust and the conduct of ethical research, arguing that the latter is not synonymous with compliance to ethical guidelines. (shrink)

Conviction Narrative Theory bears a close resemblance to the Theory of Narrative Thought, although the two were designed to address different questions. In this commentary, we detail some of the more pronounced similarities and differences and suggest that resolving the latter could produce a third theory of narrative cognition that is superior to either of these two.

Feeling bad is one thing, judging something to be bad another. This hot/cold distinction helps resolve the debate between bipolar and bivariate accounts of affect. A typical affective reaction includes both core affect (feeling good or bad) and judgments of the affective qualities of various aspects of the stimulus situation (which can have both good and bad aspects). Core affect is described by a bipolar valence dimension in which feeling good precludes simultaneously feeling bad and vice versa. Judgments of affective (...) quality of opposite valence can occur simultaneously because the stimulus situation has many aspects. Affective reaction can also include an emotional meta-experience, which can, but rarely does, embrace simultaneous emotion categories of opposite valence. (shrink)

This article explores the idea that Core Affect provides the emotional quality to any conscious state. Core Affect is the neurophysiological state always accessible as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated, even if it is not always the focus of attention. Core Affect, alone or more typically combined with other psychological processes, is found in the experiences of feeling, mood and emotion, including the subjective experiences of fear, anger and other so-called basic emotions which are commonly thought to (...) be raw, primitive, and universal. (shrink)

This article details philosophical responses to the problem posed by the existence, whether real or perceived, of priestcraft, a problem that boiled down to a fear that if the custodians of God’s tabernacle were corrupt, so too were the contents of the tabernacle. It first explores the attempts of Edward Herbert and Thomas Hobbes to guarantee the truth of revealed matters of faith in response to their perception of widespread priestcraft, arguing that, while each sought to undermine sacerdotal authority, they (...) ultimately exempted matters of faith from the litmus test of reason. This resulted in a less-than-satisfactory solution to the problem. It turns next to Locke’s Essay (1690) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), exploring how empirical notions of evidence, fact, and probability, as framed in these works, enabled a radical re-evaluation of the grounds of Christian faith, which subsequently influenced the writings of John Toland, Anthony Collins, and Peter Annet between the 1690s and 1740s. These “Lockean free-thinkers,” it argues, were in fact closer to the position of the Essay and Reasonableness than to the deism of Edward Herbert in their efforts to tackle priestcraft. Concluding, this article proposes that the problem of priestcraft served as a catalyst for early modern British philosophers to increasingly narrow the grounds of faith, until faith was deemed legitimate only when grounded upon fact. (shrink)

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn claimed that theory choice is a conversion experience and depends upon the personality or psychology of the individual scientist making the choice. Critics charged Kuhn with an irrational and a relativistic position concerning theory choice, arguing he advocated a subjective instead of an objective approach to how scientists choose one theory over another and thereby undercut epistemic accounts for the generation of scientific knowledge. In response to critics Kuhn insisted that his approach, although (...) subjective, was still rational in that the criteria—composed of epistemic values—determining theory choice operate both objectively and subjectively. Recent work in cognitive neuropsychology, particularly in the dual-process theory of cognition, supports Kuhn’s notion of theory choice. In this paper, I initially discuss Kuhn’s approach to theory choice, along with criticism of it and his response to the criticism, followed by an examination of the dual-process theory of cognition. I then explore the application of dual-process theory to Kuhn’s notion of theory choice, especially in terms of a historical case study from the biomedical sciences. I finally discuss briefly the implications of the dual-process theory for contemporary philosophy of science. (shrink)

David Hume and the Culture of Scottish Newtonianism: Methodology and Ideology in Enlightenment Inquiry. By Demeter Tamás.

Two cross-modal experiments provide partial support for O'Regan & Noë's (O&N's) claim that sensorimotor contingencies mediate perception. Differences in locating a target sound accompanied by a spatially disparate neutral light correlate with whether the two stimuli were perceived as spatially unified. This correlation suggests that internal representations are necessary for conscious perception, which may also mediate sensorimotor contingencies.

Incomplete Archaeologies takes a familiar archaeological concept--assemblages--and reconsiders such groupings, collections and sets of things from the perspective of the work required to assemble them. The discussions presented here engage with the practices of collection, construction, performance and creation in the past (and present) which constitute the things and groups of things studied by archaeologists--and examine as well how these things and thing-groups are dismantled, rearranged, and even destroyed, only to be rebuilt and recreated. The ultimate aim is to reassert (...) an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasise the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artefacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology's seeming-seamless epistemological objects"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Gilbert Meilaender argues that Christian ethics must not be consequentialist. Though Meilaender does indicate some problems which may exist with certain consequentialist theories, those problems do not exclude all types of consequentialist theories from consideration as Christian ethical theories. A consequentialism like R. M. Hare’s offers virtually all the advantages Meilaender claims for his Christian deontological view. Moreover. Meilaender has overlooked certain advantages of consequentialism and certain disadvantages of the sort of deontological theory he espouses.

This paper continues a debate about the relation between Christian philosophers and theologians begun by Gordon Kaufman, who argued that Christian theologians need not be interested in “evidentialism.” In particular it replies to a paper by William Hasker charging that an earlier defense of Kaufman’s position introduced tensions because it required judgments about the merits of “evidentialism” which could be defended only by using the evidentialist arguments whose importance Kaufman denied. This reply denies that there are the tensions Hasker claims (...) and argues that the judgments need not rest on a detailed assessment of evidentialist arguments. (shrink)

It is thought that a valid inference to a logically necessary conclusion must proceed from entirely necessary premises. Counter-examples show this is false. Perhaps while the truth of a necessary proposition may follow from non-necessary premises, its necessity cannot so follow. Counter-examples show this to be mistaken. Must anyone who comes to know the non-necessary premises employed in the various counter-examples have prior knowledge of the necessity of the conclusions of the counter-examples? I argue against this. It is true that, (...) for any necessary proposition, there must be necessary premises from which it may validly be inferred; but no one need use these, or know these, or know how to use them, in order to know the necessity of any proposition. (shrink)

The canon, this full Christian-Torah story, is the paradigm God has given us so that we too can conjugate the verbs of his activity today and know his participation in our lives now.

Bastiat emphasized the institutional infrastructure of a market economy and the principle of spontaneous order. He began with first principles — the primacy of property and consent — and derived the legitimate functions of government. As a pioneer in constitutional political economy, he examined the relation between economics and politics, employed methodological individualism, and extended the exchange paradigm to collective choice. He showed that the attenuation of economic liberty in the pursuit of distributive justice under majoritarian government would lead to (...) rent-seeking, corruption, and politicization of economic life.Bastiat met l’accent sur l’aménagement institutionnel de l’économie de marché et sur le principe de l’ordre spontané. Son analyse débute avec les principes premiers — la primauté de la propriété et du consentement — et il infère de ces principes les fonctions légitimes du gouvernement. En tant que pionnier de l’économie politique constitutionnelle, il examine les liens entre la sphère économique et la sphère politique, a recours à l’individualisme méthodologique et étend le paradigme de l’échange aux choix collectifs. Il montre que l’érosion de la liberté économique qu’entraîne la recherche d’une justice distributive sous un gouvernement majoritaire mène à la recherche de rentes, à la corruption et à la politisation de la vie économique. (shrink)

The book starts with a scandal, that is, Socrates’s mortality as entailed in the Aristotelian syllogism,All men are mortal,Socrates is a man,Therefore, Socrates is mortal. The scandal pertains to the deduction of Socrates’s death from the logical connections of premises, which, according to Braude, renders it “meaningless.” But, what does this scandal have to do with a philosophical defense of intuition in medicine? For Braude, the scandal is emblematic of a crisis in medicine and philosophy—a crisis in which human mortality (...) is severed from its morality. Braude articulates the crisis with the following question:Where, therefore, between the cracks of universal logic and reifying medicine is there a place for the individual patient, for a response to the cry of pain to which medicine responds, or to the voice of injustice upon which moral philosophy is founded? For him, intuition provides a means to answer the question and thereby to resolve the crisis. It serves as “a bridge be .. (shrink)

While taking its departure from James Doull's review of my The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought, the present note is not intended to be an author's reply to a reviewer—always in bad taste, and in this case quite unwarranted when the review in question shows all the fair-mindedness and care any author could ask for. My note is much rather part of a dialogue, agreed on in advance by both participants, in which Hegel, not a book on Hegel, is (...) the subject. (shrink)

I argue that coherentists can admit that there are facts about what systems of beliefs communities accept, without being committed to the claim that these facts are the truth conditions of sentences about what communities accept. (edited).

This original and thought-provoking volume examines organic life as subjective activity. It shows that organic life operates differently from objective thought and truth. The volume considers topics such as: the origin of life, the absorption of food, the operation of heredity, and the possible control of further evolutionary development.

The combination in the “succession narrative” of completely plausible candor about the human and confidence in the sovereign involvement of the Lord, poses the question of providence in the most profound way possible.