Parent–teacher relations are often characterized as highly conflictual in the educational literature, with scant empirical evidence of how the disagreements occur in everyday talk. Close analysis of a teacher's account of an intense conflict with a student's mother over the National Honor Society grounds the abstract discourses of merit and difference in the worlds of parents, teachers and students. Narrating primarily through reported speech, in a ‘she said, I said’ fashion, the teacher recreates her conversations about the National Honor Society (...) and the graduation ceremony. Creating the social milieu through reported speech and the inner reality by telling what she left unspoken, she captures the derision between parents and teachers. Moreover, the adult struggles obscure the adolescents' initial concerns about elitism. Exposed to reform debates, the teacher reveals her consciousness about diversity and privilege. The mother's understanding reflects traditions of individualism and meritocracy without regard to barriers created by race, sex, class and disability. The encounter ends without opportunity for fuller articulation. Notwithstanding these tendencies, the individual parent–teacher conference remains the most widely employed format in US schools, emblematic of an extremely privatized notion of that relationship. The author frames the conflict in terms of school community and public education at large to identify possibilities for more generative communication. (shrink)

Can a business be said to demonstrate moral virtues, and does being virtuous mean that it is more likely to behave ethically?

Because of its capacity to characterize mathematical concepts and structures?a capacity which first-order languages clearly lack?second-order languages recommend themselves as a convenient framework for much of mathematics, including set theory. This paper is about the credentials of second-order logic:the reasons for it to be considered logic, its relations with set theory, and especially the efficacy with which it performs its role of the underlying logic of set theory.

Human beings are social animals. A solitary life would be horrible for most of us. What makes life worthwhile is being with others and engaging in shared projects with them. To do justice to these facts, philosophers need to pay more attention to the first-person plural, we/us, and to rethink their accounts of value and virtue.

Using an approach developed in the context of human bioethics, we argue that chimpanzees in research can be regarded as vulnerable subjects. This vulnerability is primarily due to communication barriers and situational factors—confinement and dependency—that make chimpanzees particularly susceptible to risks of harm and exploitation in experimental settings. In human research, individuals who are deemed vulnerable are accorded special protections. Using conceptual and moral resources developed in the context of research with vulnerable humans, we show how chimpanzees warrant additional safeguards (...) against harm and exploitation paralleling those for human subjects. These safeguards should include empowering third parties to act as surrogate decision makers for chimpanzees, ensuring participant “assent,” and avoiding recruitment of animal subjects based merely on convenience. (shrink)

Some see the co-cognitive view of how we arrive at judgements about others' thoughts as a version of the analogy approach, where I reason from how I find things to be with me to how they will be for others. These thinkers think it a virtue of the view that it need not accept any linkage between thought and rationality. This paper will, however, defend the view that a co-cognitive view is a natural ally of theories which link thought and (...) rationality. It will try to show that exclusive stress on analogy is unduly sceptical about our cognitive capacities and overestimates our similarity to each other. (shrink)

First person authority, argues Moran, is not to be understood as a matter of having some especially good observational access to certain facts about oneself. We can imagine a person who can report accurately on her own psychological states, for example because she can perform, without conscious thought, extremely reliable psychoanalytic-style diagnoses of herself. But the ‘authority’ with which she produces her judgements resembles that which she could have about another person in that it can exist even when she does (...) not endorse or identify with the states she reports on. In imagining such a person we see that her speech about herself is very different from our more usual sort of psychological self-attributions and that something central to their authority, something we want to explain, has gone missing. Also the observational view does not illuminate why it is only psychological states to which one can have such privileged access, and only one’s own; nor does it explain why loss of such access is a serious matter. (shrink)

“Gut issues” refers to any condition that affects our digestive systems and that causes pain or discomfort. The term points to the experience of our gut being an issue for us – interfering with our plans, undermining our bodily self-control, threatening our well-being. This paper aims to do three things: (1) to introduce and justify a disability theory approach to gut issues; (2) to use this lens to argue that the experience of gut issues has a social and relational dimension (...) that could be otherwise; and (3) to argue for a shared responsibility to ameliorate this dimension. (shrink)

Beginning with the current discontent felt by prominent aesthetic theorists over the marginalization of their field within philosophy, this paper seeks to find an explanation for the discipline's apparent neglect. A meta-aesthetic examination of approaches to the study of art and of concurrent historical trends in the art world itself reveals that a methodological emphasis on the ontology of art objects and the conditions for their perception has created a gulf between art and human life that renders it unimportant to (...) central philosophical concerns. The disenfranchisement of the field, I argue, is thus due to factors internal to the discipline itself. (shrink)

Susan Stebbing's Thinking to Some Purpose is analysed along the lines of contemporary efforts in critical thinking, and some of the problematized media material of her time. It is concluded that what Stebbing recommends is difficult to achieve, but worth the effort.Export citation.

Indexical predication is possible as well as the more familiar indexical reference. ‘My curtains are coloured thus’ describes my curtains. The indexical predicate expression it contains stands to possible non‐indexical replacements as a referring indexical does to possible non‐indexical replacements , in that it calls upon the context of utterance to fix its semantic contribution to the whole. Indexical predication is the natural resource to call upon in talk about skilful human performances, where we exhibit considerable know‐how but little explicit (...) know‐that. Speech is among such performances. Both direct and indirect speech reports may be illuminated by seeing them in the light of this thought. A corollary of the approach is that the prospects of providing a formal semantic treatment of indirect speech do not look good. (shrink)

In recent decades conservation biology has achieved a high position among the sciences. This is certainly true of South Africa, a small country, but the third most biodiverse in the world. This article traces some aspects of the transformation of South African wildlife management during the 1930s to the 1960s from game reserves based on custodianship and the "balance of nature" into scientifically managed national parks with a philosophy of "command and control" or "management by intervention." In 1910 the four (...) British colonies had formed the Union of South Africa, and by the 1920s there was wide acceptance of national parks, a development influenced by their success in the United States. It was not, however, until after the Second World War, that management of the expanding conservation estate altered from a rather unsystematic laissez faire variety, into more scientifically informed management practices with an efficient bureaucracy in charge. This was achieved by modifications in organizational structures and institutional cultures initiated by a change of government in 1948 which, this article argues, impacted in turn on wildlife management and shaped and professionalized many aspects of that field science. "Management by intervention" was the hallmark of South African wildlife and conservation biology from the 1960s until recently, when there have been shifts towards "adaptive resource management" in a period of further change in the country's politics. (shrink)

An analysis of the specific yogurt and phone microcredit schemes in Bangladesh is made along three lines of argument. It is important to note that these schemes are pulled together by NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) to assist women and children in developing areas to attain financial independence—the first line employs leftist criticism of the corporate constructs, and an additional line of inquiry compares some of the programs to those in other nations. A final line of argument analyzes the specific cultural views (...) of Bengali Islam and the long tradition of Bengali literacy. It is concluded that, despite areas of difficulty, the programs are in general beneficial. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United StatesJane DuranAngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States, by Janet Wolff. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, 172 pp.AngloModern, Janet Wolff's scintillating attempt to limn the construction of modernity in the visual arts, is more than worth reading for a number of reasons. In this work, she details how modernity positioned itself against a number of strands (...) of development, and then, by a process of exclusion, formulated its own stance. As poststructuralist theory has taught us, the procedures of building an excluded body against a center, when closely examined, frequently tell us more about a rubric or label than we could otherwise have imagined.Wolff is primarily concerned with three areas of exclusion/construction for the turn in the visual arts, painting in particular, that began at the opening of the twentieth century. Toward the beginning of the work, she notes that there was always a continuous realist and figurative genre at work even in modernist circles, but it seldom achieved anything like the recognition that the more typically abstract works we associate with the rise of modernism gained. She associates this area of nonrecognition with the work of women in particular, and these two areas alone — the realist/figurative and any work done by a woman artist — constitute two of her most important foci in AngloModern. In addition, and with some difficulty, since it adds a layer of complication, she is concerned about the exclusion and marginalization of Jewish artists during thisperiod — both in galleries and in thecommentary generated by the art world — although it is clear that many of the major "abstract" works associated with modernism were, in fact, produced by Jewish artists.Wolff is at her best in laying out in precise detail how it is that the culture of the art world throws up nearly insurmountable barriers against those deemed unworthy at a fairly early point in the construction of any new movement. The single strongest chapter in the work may well be the second, "Questions of Discovery: the Art of Kathleen McEnery," in which Wolff shows how various processes of categorization kept the work of this extremely talented woman from receiving anything like the recognition it deserved for a long period of time. Wolff sums up her overall project, and how it will relate to an artist such as McEnery, in her Introduction, when she writes:The story of modern art that is challenged [in her book] is the narrative tracing the development of Western painting from France to the United States, in a lineage more or less running from Manet and Post-Impressionism, by way of Cubism and Surrealism, to Abstract Expressionism. It is a story produced and reinforced by critics, academics, curators, and museum directors.(p. 3)Women artists, for example, were frequently excluded not only becausethey were women, but because they may have tended to engage in painting that was more realist, which itself [End Page 118] became coded as "feminine," and so forth. McEnery's intriguing portraits of the early two decades of the twentieth century were "discovered," as Wolff notes for the l987 inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, despite the fact that McEnery had at one point been fairly well-known (pp. 41-42). A woman at work in a figurative tradition, and working in suburban circles far away from the geographical centers of the art world, she was quickly at the mercy of the canonical forces of art historical construction.As we attempt to educate our students about rubrics, social movements, and the relationship of the arts to the political events of an era, we can do little better than to cite, for illustrative purposes, a number of interesting cases, and Wolff does just that. In sharp and incisive prose, she not only investigates McEnery's disappearance from the approved version of the early American modernist scene, but she also examines the construction of the early group displayed at the Whitney, the notion of the "feminine" in the work of Simmel and Benjamin, and, finally, the notion of the "Jewish artist." As her exemplar for the... (shrink)

The case of the reintroduction efforts made on behalf of the California condor is examined, with a view toward discussing both the environmental difficulties and the overall cost. The work of Singer, Snyder, and others is cited, and it is concluded that the work was worthy, but that a full articulation of the problems has seldom been made.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bilingual Aesthetics:A New Sentimental EducationJane DuranBilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education, by Doris Sommer. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004, 254 pp.Doris Sommer's new work Bilingual Aesthetics is the sort of book that takes one by surprise—and for good reason. Filled with punning twists, and itself a valorizer of word games and magic, this work has not a lot to do with bilingualism (in the standard sense), not (...) a lot to do with aesthetics (again, in the standard academic sense), but a great deal to do with both. Whether the title is read (and Sommer's point is to forward the notion of alternate readings) as the aesthetics of bilingualism or as an account of what a bilingual might make of aesthetics, there is a startling amount of content in the work.Briefly, Sommer essays to make the case that our multicultural society is distinctly better off for being multicultural and multilingual (or at least, in some threatening sense, emergently bilingual) because the literal bilingual has a distinct advantage over her or his monolingual counterpart. The bilingual can play language games, and those games shock, amuse, or jolt—whatever it is that they do, they rouse us out of any state of intellectual torpor into which we might have fallen and they serve to make us all individuals who, in Du Bois' memorable phrase, have "double consciousness."Thus Sommer does in fact mean for her title to be read in at least two ways: Her work attempts to valorize and vindicate a sort of unofficial bilingualism (one of the blurbs on the back of the paperback edition begins by saying "Knowing a second language entails some unease... "), while she also attempts to let us in on the notion that there is an aesthetic that develops from the use of more than one code. Sommer plays remarkably on all these concepts: She is familiar with the standard, overt scholarship on bilingualism—she can cite work by sociolinguists and others. At the same time, as an author known for previous work on literature, especially with regard to Latin America, she is also familiar with much of the standard historical work in aesthetics, including Kant. Citing thinkers such as Kenji Hakuta, William J. Bennett, Wittgenstein, and Elena Poniatowska, Sommer leaves the reader somewhat bedazzled and breathless but better off for having read her work.Her overall thesis, if one may attempt to employ such a phrase, is that bilingualism and code-switching create for us the same sort of uneasiness and inevitable access to the unconscious that works of art and literature produce—and that the edginess that is a concomitant of code-switching is beneficial. Her first chapter "Choose and Lose" reminds Americans that the United States has always been a multilingual place and focuses on how much can be gained from attempting to forward the notion. If there is any difficulty to Sommer's work, it is that she practices what she preaches. Every page demands much of the reader, since every page itself engages in the [End Page 121] sort of rapid-fire twisting and switching that Sommer is trying to support as the ground for a new aesthetic consciousness.Early on, Sommer gives us the following:Complaints about the danger to national coherence [of multi- or bilingualism] can be downright funny.... [One irate journalist wrote:] "How can immigrants identify with America if they can't read Lincoln's words in the language in which they were spoken?(out of many, one) to a multicultural boarding house,...?" No need to be upset at this harangue. It's obviously a joke, even if the author missed it (a common asymmetry in bilingual humor). Notice that the translation from Latin assumes that English-only citizens don't understand the very slogan they hold dear.(p. 26)But of course the joke is to some extent on Sommer and on all of us, as she no doubt intends. It is highly unlikely that the journalist did get the humor, and the only funny part of the entire tirade is that we—assuming we have enough formal education—may be able to make something out of it... (shrink)

Three lines of argument are employed to show that Glymour's position on the epistemology of geometry is probably not as strong theoretically as the position of the underdeterminists whom he attempts to refute. The first argument centers on Glymour's implicit use of a realist position on intertheoretic reference, similar to that employed by Boyd and other realists. Citations are made to various portions of Glymour's work, and the relationship between the imputed theory of reference and Glymour's position spelled out. The (...) second line of argument refutes Glymour's contention that his criteria for choosing among theories are strongly based and not a priori, and a third line of argument rephrases Glymour's original position in a way which more clearly shows its implicit base and manifests as well the vagueness from which the formulation of the position suffers. It is concluded that a thorough examination of Glymour's deoccamization yields conclusions similar to those of the underdeterminists. * This paper is the result of work begun in a seminar on Philosophy of Science held at Rutgers University in the late 1970's. Work was continued at the University of California, Santa Barbara under the generosity of Grant DOE (OSERS) G0083/03651. I would like to thank colleagues from both institutions, and I owe a special debt of gratitude to an anonymous reviewer for the journal. (shrink)

Examining the writings of Katherine Parr both from the standpoint of metaphysical issues of her time and her status as a writer of the Tudor era, it is concluded that Queen Katherine had a developed humanist ontology, and one that coincided with a great deal of the new learning of the Henrician period, whether stridently Protestant or not. Analyses from James, Dubrow, and McConica are alluded to, and a comparison is made to some of the currents at work in English (...) intellectual life at that time. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine some contentions advanced by B. A. O. Williams in his books Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy . In particular I shall be concerned with the claims he makes about the nature of ethics—namely that it cannot be ‘objective’ or ‘realistic’ and that we may not hope for rational convergence in ethical judgments. My claims will be that Williams's case on these matters is importantly unclear (...) and incomplete and that we lack cogent reasons to accept the conclusions he offers us. But a good deal of scene-setting is necessary before we can pose the questions I wish to address. (shrink)

The dissertation examines the intersection of language and sense discrimination in the texts of classical Chinese philosophy . Through an analysis of the figures of speech related to language and sense discrimination, it argues that the pair 'aural and visual' forms a significant dualism within the Chinese cosmos. ;The significance of the aural/visual dualism is threefold. First, it clarifies classical Chinese epistemology. The dissertation argues that classical Chinese epistemology is a matter of matching many levels of parallels between the aural (...) and the visual. In other words, knowledge in classical China is verified through correspondences between the aural and visual. ;Second, the aural/visual dualism challenges a common assumption that in classical China sense discrimination is natural while language is conventional. The aural and visual are two aspects of sense discrimination, but they are also two aspects of language. That is, the category 'language' extends over both sides of the dualism. It is both aural and visual . As a result, the contrast of 'language as conventional' in opposition to 'sense discrimination as natural' does not develop in classical China. Both language and sense discrimination are to some extent both natural and conventional. ;Thirdly, the importance of the aural and visual is connected to the pair ming/shi. Ming/shi is typically translated 'names and reality' or 'names and objects' on the assumption that shi is more substantial and therefore more real. But as a form of the aural/visual dualism, there seems to be no justification for taking shi as 'reality'. Shi is what is seen by the eyes, just as ming is what is heard by the ears, but neither appears more intrinsically 'real'. Thus, the dissertation argues that in light of the aural/visual dualism we must reconsider what constitutes the notion of reality in classical China. (shrink)

Context and Aims:Social and cognitive processes underlying individual classical musicians' and duo performers' preparation for performance have been explored using longitudinal case studies. Social processes can be inferred fromrehearsal talkand recent studies have focused on its content and nature. Cognitive processes can be inferred from score annotations representing musicians' thoughts while practicing, rehearsing (rehearsal features), and playing or singing from memory (performance cues). We report three studies conducted by two practitioner-researchers: (1) of rehearsal talk; (2) of rehearsal features and thoughts (...) while performing; and (3) a triangulation (as it were) of the two kinds of data to gauge the potential for rehearsal talk to predict the use of performance cues.Methods:A singer and viola player formed a new duo to prepare two songs, new to them both, for two performances on the same day and a third performance 10 months later. Their practice and rehearsal sessions, over the course of seven days, were recorded and transcribed. The musicians annotated copies of the scores after rehearsing and after each performance. Each musician performed one of the two songs from memory. First, verbal data were coded and analyzed using two frameworks for categorizing socio-emotional interactions and musical dimensions, respectively. Second, their annotations were categorized and compared, and finally the frameworks were combined so that correlations between rehearsal talk and performance cues could be calculated.Results:The musicians' verbal interactions were positive and task-related; significant changes over time were observed only in the extent to which they showed solidarity toward each other. Analysis of their annotations illustrates similarities and differences between their attention to specific features of the music while rehearsing and performing, particularly from memory. Rehearsal talk predicted performance cues in the third performance, but not the first or second.Conclusion:Musicians' talk cannot be assumed to reflect musicians' actions. The study of musicians' verbal interactions may be less useful for determining cognitive than social processes underlying preparation for performance. Nevertheless, the study provides a detailed snapshot of classical musicians' “real world” preparation for performance, highlighting the role of spontaneity in performance, and underlining differences between what happens in the studio and what can happen on stage. (shrink)

This essay engages the contributions to the forum by Nathalie Etoke, Kevin Bruyneel, Michael Neocosmos, and Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun to consider what it means to creolize political identities, political memory, and political institutions.

_Mothers and Daughters and the Origins of Female Subjectivity_ challenges the theory of the Oedipus complex, which permeates psychoanalytic theory, psychology, semiotics and cultural studies. The book focuses on the re-examination of women’s development through the theories of primitive mental states. Women’s subjectivity has been profoundly limited by continuing anxieties about the mother’s body. Jane Van Buren describes how women are gradually escaping the curse of inferiority and finding a voice, enabling the mother to provide their daughters with a (...) legacy of rightful agency over their bodies and minds. Drawing on the theories of Klein, Bion and Winnicott, and incorporating recent developments in psychobiology, this book provides a novel approach to subjects including the dreams, myths and phantasies of individuals, the nature of mother and daughter relationships, sexuality, pregnancy, menstruation and the idea of the mother’s body as problematic and dangerous. This interdisciplinary investigation into curtailed female subjectivity and its many ramifications in society, culture and individual mental growth will be of great interest to all practising psychoanalysts, and those studying psychoanalytic theory and gender studies. (shrink)

The United Kingdom is a leader in genomics research, and the presence of numerous types of biobanks and the linking of health data and research within the UK evidences the importance of biobank-based research in the UK. There is no biobank-specific law in the UK and research on biobank materials is governed by a confusing set of statutory law, common law, regulations, and guidance documents. Several layers of applicable law, from European to local, further complicate an understanding of privacy protections. (...) Finally, biobanks frequently contain data in addition to the samples; the legal framework in the UK generally differentiates between data and samples and the form of the data affects the applicability of legal provisions. Biobanks must be licensed by the Human Tissue Authority; certain projects must be reviewed by Research Ethics Committees, and all projects are encouraged to be reviewed by them. Data Access Committees in biobanks are also common in the UK. While this confusing array of legal provisions leaves privacy protections in biobanking somewhat unclear, changes at the EU level may contribute to harmonization of approaches to privacy. (shrink)