After a brief overview of what intellectual virtues are, I offer three arguments for the claim that education should aim at fostering ‘intellectual character virtues’ like curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and intellectual honesty. I then go on to discuss several pedagogical and related strategies for achieving this aim.

"As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don't have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism's roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the (...) structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics--the language and beliefs that separate people into an 'us' and a 'them.' He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations. He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation's past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare. These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership. By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics--charged by rhetoric and myth--can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals."--Jacket. (shrink)

Standard characterizations of virtue epistemology divide the field into two camps: virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. Virtue reliabilists think of intellectual virtues as reliable cognitive faculties or abilities, while virtue responsibilists conceive of them as good intellectual character traits. I argue that responsibilist character virtues sometimes satisfy the conditions of a reliabilist conception of intellectual virtue, and that consequently virtue reliabilists, and reliabilists in general, must pay closer attention to matters of intellectual character. This leads to several new questions and (...) (...) challenges for any reliabilist epistemology. (shrink)

Re-reads Marx in light of the contemporary critical interrogation of subjectivity.

Equipoise is an essential condition to justify a clinical trial. The term, describes a state of uncertainty: the data suggest but do not prove a drug's safety and efficacy The only way to resolve this uncertainty is further study In many cases, a clinical trial seems to be the most efficient way to prove safety and efficacy Equipoise is therefore not an esoteric philosophic construct applied to research ethics. Rather, since it is vital for the justification of clinical trials, it (...) is part of how society regulates medical progress. Where there is equipoise, drug design and development proceeds according to Food and Drug Administration and Health and Human Services regulations. When that equipoise ends, a drug is either not approved or becomes standard care. (shrink)

Comparatives are among the most extensively investigated constructions in generative grammar, yet comparatives involving attributive adjectives have received a relatively small amount of attention. This paper investigates a complex array of facts in this domain that shows that attributive comparatives, unlike other comparatives, are well-formed only if some type of ellipsis operation applies within the comparative clause. Incorporating data from English, Polish, Czech, Greek, and Bulgarian, we argue that these facts support two important conclusions. First, violations of Ross’s Left Branch (...) Condition that involve attributive modifiers should not be accounted for in terms of constraints on LF representations (such as the Empty Category Principle), but rather in terms of the principle of Full Interpretation at the PF interface. Second, ellipsis must be analyzed as deletion of syntactic material from the phonological representation. In addition, we present new evidence from pseudogapping constructions that favors an articulated syntax of attributive modification in which certain types of attributive modifiers may occur outside DP. (shrink)

Stem cell scientists and ethicists have focused intently on questions relevant to the developmental stage and developmental capacities of stem cells. Comparably less attention has been paid to an equally important set of questions about the nature of stem cells, their common characteristics, their non‐negligible differences and their possible developmental species specificity. Answers to these questions are essential to the project of justly inferring anything about human stem cell biology from studies in non‐human model systems—and so to the possibility of (...) eventually developing human therapies based on stem cell biology. After introducing and discussing these questions, I conclude with a brief discussion of the creation of novel model systems in stem cell biology: human‐to‐animal embryonic chimeras. Such novel model systems may help to overcome obstacles to extrapolation, but they are also scientifically and ethically contentious. BioEssays 26:1005‐1012, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Education for Sustainable Development is a broad and varied field of study replete with compelling advocacies for a more humane world. Across a majority of its instances however, ESD might yet be seen to labour in stealth fidelity to a mode of political economy and model of human-nature relations complicit with planetary ecocide. This essay draws largely from the thinking of Jean Baudrillard in an effort to identify the implications of ESD’s mainstay commitments, particularly as expressed in the field’s lingering (...) fidelities to anthropocentric production and modes of protagonistic optimism. Such alliances are contrasted by the immanence of inhuman planetary difference as it might habilitate more eco-centric approaches and attitudes for thinking the very possibility of sustainable development in the present era of rapid ecological transformation. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on Johann Georg Hamann has tended to focus on his relation to modernity, specifically the Enlightenment. His critique of rationalism, the obscurity of his style, and his pronounced influence on later figures are just several reasons for reconsidering his historical and literary significance. However, his writings also contain rich and relevant philosophical and theological ideas. This article demonstrates the centrality of Hamann’s concept of creation for both his critique of rationalism as well as his ideas regarding aesthetics. Hamann (...) understands nature as the book of creation. Human sensuousness, as an emergent feature of nature, indicates an intrinsic relationality underlying nature. By way of the senses, human beings discover themselves to be entangled with God through nature. Reason rejects this relationality when it seeks to purify itself from nature or the senses. In contrast, reason that is oriented to this fundamental relationality recognizes the beauty and friendliness that permeates nature. This recognition is an invitation whereby one is called to perpetuate these aesthetic ideals in the world. (shrink)

Hintikka and Sandu had argued that 'Frege's failure to grasp the idea of the standard interpretation of higher-order logic turns his entire foundational project into a hopeless daydream' and that he is 'inextricably committed to a non-standard interpretation' of higher-order logic. We disagree.

In 2006, young people were flocking to MySpace, discovering the joys of watching videos of cute animals on YouTube, and playing online games. Not many of them were watching network news on television; they got most of their information online. So when NBC and MIT launched iCue, an interactive learning venture that combined social networking, online video, and gaming in one multimedia educational site, it was perfectly in tune with the times. iCue was a surefire way for NBC to reach (...) younger viewers and for MIT to test innovative educational methods in the real world. But iCue was a failure: it never developed an audience and was canceled as if it were a sitcom with bad ratings. In _The More We Know_, Eric Klopfer and Jason Haas, both part of the MIT development team, describe the rise and fall of iCue and what it can teach us about new media, old media, education, and the challenges of innovating in educational media. Klopfer and Haas show that iCue was hampered by, among other things, an educational establishment focused on "teaching to the test," television producers uncomfortable with participatory media, and confusion about the market. But this is not just a cautionary tale; sometimes more can be learned from an interesting failure than a string of successes. Today's educational technology visionaries might keep this lesson in mind. (shrink)

This is a critical notice of Evolution's Eye by Susan Oyama, focusing on developmental systems theory primarily in relation to the nature-nurture debates and the explanation of behaviour.

The term 'sociobiology' was introduced in E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) as the application of evolutionary theory to social behavior. Sociobiologists claim that many social behaviors have been shaped by natural selection for reproductive success, and they attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary histories of particular behaviors or behavioral strategies. This survey attempts to clarify and evaluate the aim of sociobiology. Given that a neutral account is impossible, this entry does the next best thing. It takes sociobiology as (...) well as its critics seriously. On the one hand, by demonstrating that current studies of evolution and human behavior are based on Darwin's arguments for evolution (properly updated), we gain a strong rationale for thinking that something closer to sociobiology than to disconnectionism is needed to properly understand human sociality. Nevertheless, this survey reconstructs sociobiology in its best light, according to its aims. Consequently, criticism of sociobiology as it is actually practiced is not ignored or dismissed. This approach reveals what is best about sociobiology, while remaining sensitive to many of the problems it has generated. (shrink)

In Volume Three of Capital in a striking but somewhat uncharacteristic formula, Marx argues that the labor relation is the “hidden basis” of the entire social edifice including the state and politics. As an attempt to clarify and develop this insight I examine the dual nature of labor as abstract and concrete labor, arguing that the two sides of labor correspond not just to two sides of the commodity, but to different ethics and alienations of labor, and ultimately to different (...) philosophical anthropologies. (shrink)

It has been argued by philosophers and cultural historians that the notion of wilderness as it has been developed in the West problematically separates—conceptually and practically—humans from wild nature. The human/wilderness dichotomy, it is said, potentially leads even well-intentioned, environmentally minded people to work for wilderness preservation at the expense of paying attention to our local, lived environment. Although Henry David Thoreau and John Muir are often taken to be key architects of the inherited notion of wilderness, I draw from (...) their differing descriptions of spending time in wild areas in orderto argue that Thoreau provides a view of the human-nature relationship that is not susceptible to this particular worry. Thoreau, much more than Muir, provides us with reasons to not ignore our local lived space in favor of protecting only more wild (i.e., less humanized) places. The contrast between the two does not diminish the value of Muir’s work, but it does remind us that key figures—Thoreau in this case—in the development of the dominant wilderness paradigm should not be set aside as unhelpful in our own efforts to better understand our relationship with local place. (shrink)

What is?Curriculum Theory articulates the problematic of difference, diversity, and multiplicity in contemporary curriculum thought. More specifically, this essay argues that the conceptualization of difference that dominates the contemporary curriculum landscape is inadequate to either the task of ontological experimentation or the creation of non-representational ways for thinking a life. Despite the ostensible radicality ascribed to the curricular ideas of difference and multiplicity, What is?Curriculum Theory argues that these ideas remain wed to an structural or identitarian logic that derives difference (...) from the a priori conditions of the possible. Further, this essay argues that the orthodox conceptualization of difference in contemporary curriculum studies is complicit with the capitalist commitment to quantitative multiplicity, or rather, the proliferation of ‘multiple consumer choices’. Following this problematic, the task of this paper is oriented to the conceptualization of difference adequate to the creation of a people yet-to-come, or rather, a people for which no prior image exists. To accomplish this, What is?Curriculum Theory draws upon Deleuze’s Bergsonism in order to advance a conceptualization of difference that breaks from modes of dialectical negation and contradiction particular to the tyranny of representational thinking. Articulating an image of difference that no longer accords to the possible, this essay composes a thought experiment conceptualizing a pedagogical life in a manner that explicates the transversal relationship between the actual and the virtual. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the biology of species identity and the morality of crossing species boundaries in the context of emerging research that involves combining human and nonhuman animals at the genetic or cellular level. We begin with the notion of species identity, particularly focusing on the ostensible fixity of species boundaries, and we explore the general biological and philosophical problem of defining species. Against this backdrop, we survey and criticize earlier attempts to forbid crossing species boundaries in the creation (...) of novel beings. We do not attempt to establish the immorality of crossing species boundaries, but we conclude with some thoughts about such crossings, alluding to the notion of moral confusion regarding social and ethical obligations to novel interspecies beings. (shrink)

Abstract. Found in the Primeval History in Genesis, the biblical concepts of the “image of God” and the “knowledge of good and evil” remain integral to Christian anthropology, especially with regard to the theologoumena of “fall” and “original sin.” All of these symbols are remained important and appropriate descriptors of the human condition, provided that contemporary academic theological anthropology engages in constructive dialogue with the natural and social sciences. Using Paul Ricoeur's notion of “second naïveté experience,” I illustrate the hermeneutical (...) significance of contemporary bio-cultural or socio-biological evolutionary theory for reformulating these concepts of Christian anthropology today. (shrink)

This essay assesses the rationale for regulating research administrators as carefully as they regulate researchers. The reasons for such regulation are identical: protecting scientific integrity, ensuring responsible use of public funds, addressing the lack of effective recourse for victims, creating negative consequences for misbehaving actors, and addressing high incentives for misconduct. Whereas the reasons compelling us to regulate research administrators are obvious, counterarguments to administrative oversight are based on suggestions that the incidence and prevalence of cases of administrative misconduct are (...) too low to warrant formal regulation. I briefly describe examples of the phenomenon drawn from publicly available records. My analysis suggests that the misconduct of research administrators is both serious and worthy of better oversight. Improved oversight of research administration will help steward tax dollars appropriately and enhance the overall integrity of the scientific record and of the free pursuit of knowledge more generally. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Homer’s Odyssey has long served as a touchstone for environmental writers, but is this text itself a work of environmental ethics? Homer portrays, as a major and consistent purpose, the environmentally destructive consequences of hedonism, and the environmentally beneficent consequences of conservation and sustainable agriculture. The evidence of The Odyssey suggests that public critical dialectic about the treatment of animals, soil, and forests was not unknown to the ancient Greek world. Further, The Odyssey can have relevance to modern environmental ethics, (...) especially in Homer’s study of the relation between religion (especially its eating rituals) and the health of the natural environment. Finally, Homer teaches that it is not only possible but also worthwhile to code the arguments of environmental ethics in poetic/fictional terms. (shrink)

Explores the figure of the detective as a pursuer of knowledge in four noir films.

Recently, some have read Turkish political developments from the perspective of Carl Schmitt’s political theory. This paper aims to modify aspects of these readings and offer in response a Schmitti...

The Jewish tradition has important perspectives, history and wisdom that can contribute significantly to crucial contemporary healthcare deliberations. This book is an attempt to show how numerous classic Jewish texts and ideas have significant things to say about some of the most urgent debates in the world of medicine today, with the potential to significantly expand and benefit the field of bioethics. But this book is not only about applying classical Jewish values to bioethical dilemmas. It seeks to develop an (...) approach that is primarily informed by personal and communal obligations and social responsibilities. Jewish values focus on requirements, obligations, and commandments, and has thus sometimes been called an "Ethics of Responsibility," by advancing new relevant approaches that can encourage healthcare providers to remain dedicated to preventing harm and providing compassionate care to all, based on these inspiring and timeless values. Each chapter of this book explores questions such as: "Are we expected to risk our lives on behalf of others?" "When we can only help a limited number of people, how do we prioritize?" "What are the obligations and expectations of a society or government?" "Are issues of cultural sensitivity relevant in how we discharge our obligations to others?" "What should we do when obligations for others violate our own moral principles or commitments?" "Are there limits to how far one can be expected to go for others?" These and other issues are addressed in this book, as it attempts to describe a meaningful and compassionate Jewish bioethic of responsibility for our times. (shrink)