Augustine famously claimed that the virtues of pagan Rome were nothing more than splendid vices. This critique reinvented itself as a suspicion of acquired virtue as such, and true Christian virtue has, ever since, been set against a false, hypocritical virtue alleged merely to conceal pride. _Putting On Virtue_ reveals how a distrust of learned and habituated virtue shaped both early modern Christian moral reflection and secular forms of ethical thought. Jennifer Herdt develops her claims through an argument of (...) broad historical sweep, which brings together the Aristotelian tradition as taken up by Thomas Aquinas with the early modern thinkers who shaped modern liberalism. In chapters on Luther, Bunyan, the Jansenists, Mandeville, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, she argues that efforts to make a radical distinction between true Christian virtue and its tainted imitations actually created an autonomous natural ethics separate from Christianity. This secular value system valorized pride and authenticity, while rendering graced human agency less meaningful. Ultimately, _Putting On Virtue_ traces a path from suspicion of virtue to its secular inversion, from confession of dependence to assertion of independence. (shrink)

In this thesis I argue that the received view of autonomy is insufficient for both biomedical ethics and feminist theory. I begin with an examination of the received view of autonomy; I then indicate the way in which this view of autonomy has been applied to health care ethics. A feminist relational approach to autonomy is explored: I argue that such an approach has many strengths in that it gives us a more accurate picture of the self-in-relationships and that it (...) recognizes many social and structural conditions that may impede an individual's attempts to be autonomous. ;This feminist relational approach to autonomy, once defined, is applied to the medical/social practices of cosmetic surgery and contract motherhood. I do this to show the practical implications of this contextual approach to autonomy. (shrink)

A volume by leading economists and philosophers that explores the contributions that virtue ethics can make to economics. Provides historical and modern insights in both economics and philosophy and offers suggestions for incorporating the ethics of virtue into economics to make it more applicable to moral dilemmas in the world outside the models.

A presence for decades in individuals’ everyday life practices and identity formation, the Walt Disney Company has more recently also become an influential element within the "big" curriculum of public and private spaces outside of yet in proximity to formal educational institutions. _Disney, Culture, and Curriculum_ explores the myriad ways that Disney’s curricula and pedagogies manifest in public consciousness, cultural discourses, and the education system. Examining Disney’s historical development and contemporary manifestations, this book critiques and deconstructs its products and perspectives (...) while providing insight into Disney’s operations within popular culture and everyday life in the United States and beyond. The contributors engage with Disney’s curricula and pedagogies in a variety of ways, through critical analysis of Disney films, theme parks, and planned communities, how Disney has been taught and resisted both in and beyond schools, ways in which fans and consumers develop and negotiate their identities with their engagement with Disney, and how race, class, gender, sexuality, and consumerism are constructed through Disney content. Incisive, comprehensive, and highly interdisciplinary, _Disney, Culture, and Curriculum_ extends the discussion of popular culture as curriculum and pedagogy into new avenues by focusing on the affective and ontological aspects of identity development as well as the commodification of social and cultural identities, experiences, and subjectivities. (shrink)

This essay will focus on the moral issues relating to surrogacy in the global context, and will critique the liberal arguments that have been offered in support of it. Liberal arguments hold sway concerning reproductive arrangements made between commissioning couples from wealthy nations and the surrogates from socioeconomically weak backgrounds that they hire to do their reproductive labor. My argument in this paper is motivated by a concern for controlling harms by putting the practice of globalized commercial surrogacy into the (...) context of care ethics. As I will argue, the unstable situations into which children of global surrogacy arrangements are born is symbolic of the crisis of care that the practice raises. Using the Baby Manji case as my touch point, I will suggest that liberalism cannot address the harms experienced by Manji and children like her who are created through the global practice of assisted reproductive technology. I will argue that, if commissioning couples consider their proposed surrogacy contracts from a care ethics point of view, they will begin to think relationally about their actions, considering the practice from an ethical lens, not just an economic or contractual one. (shrink)

There are a number of problems associated with the classic notion of beauty understood as an experience of perceptual form. These problems are that there is an apparent incompatibility between beauty’s objectivity and subjectivity; and an incompatibility between the two self-evident theses that (i) there are no principles of beauty and (ii) there are genuine judgements of beauty. There is also the problem of explaining the possibility of a disinterested pleasure. To solve these problems I draw upon the work of (...) Glyn Humphreys & Dietmar Heinke (1998) according to whom the processing of ‘between-object’ relations draws upon view-dependent primitives and the processing of ‘within-object’ relations draws upon view-invariant primitives. I argue that if what we experience as aesthetic form or beauty is some kind of play on the processes involved in processing within-object-relations during the course of perceiving certain objects, then the apparent problems of beauty would be resolved. I speculate that perhaps the perception of certain objects employs perceptual principles in an unprecedented way or in a way which epitomizes their normal operation. The idea is that when perception is employed in such a way that our attention is drawn from the object recognized to the experience of perception as something like a solution to a problem (that is, to the experience of the construction of within-object relations), then we experience what we know of as aesthetic form and beauty. (shrink)

The participants in this Symposium gathered for a two-day conference on Pictorial Realism at the University of Adelaide. Our aim was to analyse the notion of pictorial realism with a view to its relevance for the way in which art history is conceived and appreciated. Specifically, we examined the extent to which the representational content of artworks can be ascertained independently of preconceived theoretical knowledge about the representational system within which the artwork is made. Papers focus in particular on the (...) implications for understanding pictorial realism. (shrink)

In order to establish a rational framework within which to discuss aesthetic matters, I attempt to find grounds to support the notion that objectivity in aesthetic evaluation is possible, within the visual arts. I begin by exploring the possibility that the foundations of our aesthetic response are innate, because, if this is the case, it would indicate that aesthetic considerations have a common basis within us all, rather than belonging to a purely personal and subjective realm. In Part One, in (...) search of foundations, I turn to the art of those who are relatively unprogrammed in our artistic conventions, in an attempt to distinguish between innate impulses and conditioned responses. Next, by looking for the motivation behind the aesthetic impulse, and what this can tell me about how the aesthetic is constituted, I consider the possibility that the aesthetic impulse is in some way linked to characteristics which aid survival. This includes studying the nature of perception, including various innate perceptual mechanisms and the part they play in the way our idea of the aesthetic is constituted, and some theories concerned with the psychological aspects involved in creativity, which link the aesthetic impulse with creativity in all fields of enquiry. In Part Two, I study examples of how discussions on aesthetic matters are conducted in our culture, to see whether there is evidence to support the notion of objectivity in aesthetic evaluation. While recognizing that it is common for aesthetic discussions to be conducted in a confused and even unintelligible manner, often using criteria actually irrelevant to aesthetic value (an example of which I provide), I seek out examples of reviews which are conducted in a rational and intelligible manner, based on relevant objective criteria. Also, by analysing the terms we use when discussing an art work, I ascertain whether these terms refer to properties in the actual art work, which we believe exist independently from the spectator, or whether these terms describe how we feel when viewing a work. In other words, I examine whether we have the concepts to support the idea that objectivity in aesthetic evaluation in the visual arts is possible. (shrink)

This thesis constructs an Interactive Theory of Beauty to change the way we think about beauty and aesthetic form, in order to resolve the conceptual discrepancies between the features that characterize the traditional concept of beauty and the features of the phenomenology of beauty. The assumptions that underlie these discrepancies are identified. I hypothesize an alternative assumption that would need to be the case to resolve the tensions between the traditional concept and the phenomenology. This involves rejecting the idea that (...) beauty is an objective property of the object, and instead considering the possibility that beauty is an awareness of a certain aspect of the perceptual processing of the object. As such, beauty would be neither purely subjective nor purely objective; but a relational property. This hypothesis is mapped out in terms of a computational model of perception. The argument relies on the explanatory power of this conception of beauty. I employ my central hypothesis to explain how beauty can be both universal and subjective; an experience of the aesthetic form of the object which can, in some cases, supervene on representational content; and a property which is experienced as inferred from more basic properties, yet ineffable. While I focus mainly on visual beauty, I suggest applications for musical beauty and haptic beauty, particularly in non-sighted persons. This Interactive Theory of Beauty also accounts for the instrumentality of beauty, which is a feature of scientific and mathematical beauty. If my central hypothesis is correct, then the experience of beauty may offer insights into the nature of creativity in all fields of enquiry. (shrink)

Jennifer Johnston’s fiction presents the conditions of Irish culture and society by exploring the separations between interior and exterior realms and past and present temporalities persisting within the insulating privacy of the familial home space. In _The Christmas Tree_ (1981), the home is both haven and prison for Johnston’s heroine. In this paper, I argue that the home—which assumes the form of the individual body and the familial home—is paradoxical. The protagonist leaves 1950s Ireland because of the country’s rigid (...) gender roles in order to pursue an autonomous life as a writer in England, but she is unable to publish her writing within the confines of the patriarchal publishing world. The home of her body becomes paradoxical when she becomes a single mother as an avenue for creativity but is then diagnosed with terminal cancer. She returns to her father’s home to die, which she re-orders and reclaims through the disorder of the uncanny—represented by her non-conformity and illness brought into the patriarchal home. By writing her life story and creating a brief, alternative maternal relationship with her young caretaker, the protagonist confronts her own ambivalence toward her parents, who also represent aspects of oppressive heteronormative gender expectations. (shrink)

This essay revisits Elizabeth Anscombe's ‘Modern Moral Philosophy' with two goals in mind. The first is to recover and reclaim its radical vision, by setting forth a unified account of its three guiding theses. On the interpretation advanced here, Anscombe's three theses are not independently intelligible; their underlying unity is the perceived necessity of absolute prohibitions for any sound account of practical reason. The second goal is to show that Anscombe allows for a thoroughly unmodern sense of ‘moral' that applies (...) to human actions; the paper concludes with some reasons to think that this unmodern sense of ‘moral' is worthy of further philosophical attention and defense. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that our concept of pictorial realism should include a reference to perceptual proficiency relative to a cultural context. I argue this by demonstrating the greater explanatory power of such a concept for understanding pictorial realism. The central idea is that gestalt-like mechanisms that are normally involved in object recognition can be deployed at a second order level in picture perception. Styles of picturing that exploit this second order gestalt-like mechanism are learnable and transferable. The hypothesis (...) is that once a style of picturing is internalised, a picture that exploits this style will be experienced as true and fitting. (shrink)

This book analyzes practices in the home health care industry and concludes that they are highly exploitative of both workers and patients. Under the existing system, underpaid workers are expected to perform tasks for which they are inadequately trained, in unreasonably short periods of time. This situation harms workers and puts home health care patients at risk. To the extent that the majority of patients and workers in home health care are women, I turn to feminist ethics for an alternative (...) approach. Through an understanding of individuals as social beings with obligations to others, and of home health care as a public good, I explain how to develop the social benefits of good home health care and increase the role of government in providing financial support and regulatory oversight. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that there is a deep connection between home-based care, technology, and the self. Providing the means for persons to receive care at home is not merely a kindness that respects their preference to be at home: it is an important means of extending their selfhood and respecting the unique selves that they are. Home-based technologies like telemedicine and robotic care may certainly be useful tools in providing care for persons at home, but they also (...) have important implications for sustaining selfhood in ways that are of value to individuals and those who care for them. I will argue, by appealing to Hilde Lindemann’s notion of “holding” persons’ identities in place, that technological interventions are not only useful tools for improving and sustaining health and good care at home, but that they may also help to extend our personal identities and relational capacities in ways that are practically and ethically good. Because of these important goods, I will claim that there is a prima facie moral duty to do this “holding” work and that it is best done by family members and loved ones who are well suited to the job because of their history and relationship with the individual that needs to be “held” in place. (shrink)

Cavell’s interest in aesthetic objects can be understood to be motivated by an interest in the nature of meaning and value. The idea is that perceptual objects considered as cultural artefacts under-determine the meaning and value attributed to them. The process involved in determining their meaning and value is essentially a creative one. Through his study of film, literature and music, Cavell could be said to indirectly address the axiomatic, or what is sometimes referred to as the bedrock, of our (...) value judgments. In being embedded within larger cultural commitments, such axioms are impenetrable to the traditional analytical approaches in Anglo-American philosophy. Cavell’s style of philosophy can be understood to have been pioneered to attempt to understand and clarify aspects of experience which elude traditional analytical methods. (shrink)

In this paper we analyse the ideas implicit in the style of exhibition favoured by contemporary galleries and museums, and argue that unless the audience is empowered to ascribe meaning and significance to artwork through critical dialogue, the power not only of the audience is undermined but also of art. We argue that unless (i) indeterminacy is understood, (ii) the critical rather than coercive nature of art is facilitated, and (iii) the conditions for inter-subjectivity provided, galleries and museums preside over (...) an experience economy devoid of art. (shrink)

Nonfeminist accounts of post-menopausal IVF reject the practice on four main grounds: I) scarcity of resources; 2) fairness; 3) the “inappropriateness” of post-menopausal motherhood; and 4) concerns for orphaned children. I argue that these grounds are insufficient for denying post-menopausal women IVF access. I then suggest that a feminist evaluation of the practice is more compelling; ultimately, however, we have no strong grounds for a policy denying post-menopausal women access to this technology.

Are women's requests for aid in dying honored more often than men's, or less? Feminist arguments can support conclusions either that gendered perceptions of women as self‐sacrificing predispose physicians to accede to women's requests to die — or that cultural understandings of women as not fully rational agents lead physicians to reject their requests as irrational.

Tool use research has suffered from a lack of consistent theoretical frameworks. There is a plethora of tool use definitions and the most widespread ones are so inclusive that the behaviors that fall under them arguably do not have much in common. The situation is aggravated by the prevalence of anecdotes, which have played an undue role in the literature. In order to provide a more rigorous foundation for research and to advance our understanding of the interrelation between tool use (...) and cognition, we suggest the adoption of Fragaszy and Mangalam's (2018) tooling framework, which is characterized by the creation of a body-plus-object system that manages a mechanical interface between tool and surface. Tooling is limited to a narrower suite of behaviors than tool use, which might facilitate its neurocognitive investigation. Indeed, evidence in the literature indicates that tooling has distinct neurocognitive underpinnings not shared by other activities typically classified as tool use, at least in primates. In order to understand the extent of tooling incidences in previous research, we systematically surveyed the comprehensive tool use catalog by Shumaker et al. (2011). We identified 201 tool use submodes, of which only 81 could be classified as tooling, and the majority of the tool use examples across species were poorly supported by evidence. Furthermore, tooling appears to be phylogenetically less widespread than tool use, with the greatest variability found in the primate order. However, in order to confirm these findings and to understand the evolution and neurocognitive mechanisms of tooling, more systematic research will be required in the future, particularly with currently underrepresented taxa. (shrink)

One of the ethical issues that has been raised recently regarding emerging neurotherapies is that people will be coerced explicitly or implicitly in the workplace or in schools to take cognitive enhancing drugs. This article builds on this discussion by showing how the law may pressure people to adopt emerging neurotherapies. It focuses on a range of private law doctrines that, unlike the criminal law, do not come up very often in neuroethical discussions. Three doctrines—the doctrine of mitigation, the standard (...) of care in negligence, and child custody determinations in family law—are addressed to show how the law may pressure people to consent to treatment by offering a choice between accepting medical treatment and suffering a legal disadvantage. The doctrines considered in this article apply indirect pressure to submit to treatment, unlike court-ordered medical treatment, which applies direct pressure and is not addressed here. The outcome of this discussion is to show that there is a greater range of social pressures that may encourage the uptake of novel neurotherapies than one might initially think. Once treatments that were developed and offered with therapeutic benefits in mind become available, their existence gives rise to unintended legal consequences. This certainly does not mean we should cease developing new therapies that may be of tremendous benefit to patients, but it does raise some questions for physicians and for legal policy-makers. How should physicians, who are required by medical ethical principles to obtain valid consent to treatment, react to a patient’s reluctant consent that is driven by legal pressure? From the legal policy perspective, are our legal doctrines satisfactory or should they be changed because, for example, they unduly promote the collective interest over individual freedom to reject medical treatment or because they channel us toward economically efficient treatments to the detriment of more costly but potentially superior approaches of dealing with behavioural problems? (shrink)

Neurosurgery for psychiatric disorders, also sometimes referred to as psychosurgery, is rapidly evolving, with new techniques and indications being investigated actively. Many within the field have suggested that some form of guidelines or regulations are needed to help ensure that a promising field develops safely. Multiple countries have enacted specific laws regulating NPD. This article reviews NPD-specific laws drawn from North and South America, Asia and Europe, in order to identify the typical form and contents of these laws and to (...) set the groundwork for the design of an optimal regulation for the field. Key challenges for this design that are revealed by the review are how to define the scope of the law, what types of regulations are required, and how to approach international harmonization given the potential migration of researchers and patients. (shrink)

No matter how unintuitive it might seem that aesthetic pleasure should be the point where art and morality meet, this is a noteworthy possibility that has been overshadowed by aestheticians’ more visible concerns. Here I briefly survey relevant strands in the literature over the past century, before introducing themes covered in this inaugural issue of Australasian Philosophical Review.

In this paper, I argue that thestatus of those who take care of persons withdisabilities, and persons with disabilities,are inextricably linked. That is, devaluingthe status of one necessarily devalues that ofthe other. Persons with disabilities and thosewho help care for them must form an alliance toadvance their common interests. This alliancecan gain insight and inspiration from feministthought insofar as caretaking is literallylinked to problems of the representation ofcaretaking as ``women's work,'' and morephilosophically, by borrowing from the toolboxof feminist social, political, (...) and economicanalyses. (shrink)

The law ordinarily recognises the woman who gives birth as the mother of a child, but in certain jurisdictions, it will recognise the commissioning couple as the legal parents of a child born to a commercial surrogate. Some commissioning parents have, however, effectively abandoned the children they commission, and in such cases, commercial surrogates may find themselves facing unexpected maternal responsibility for children they had fully intended to give up. Any assumption that commercial surrogates ought to assume maternal responsibility for (...) abandoned children runs contrary to the moral suppositions that typically govern contract surrogacy, in particular, assumptions that gestational carriers are not ‘mothers’ in any morally significant sense. In general, commercial gestational surrogates are almost entirely conceptualised as ‘vessels’. In a moral sense, it is deeply inconsistent to expect commercial surrogates to assume maternal responsibility simply because commissioning parents abandon children for one reason or another. We identify several instances of child abandonment and discuss their implications with regard to the moral conceptualisation of commercial gestational surrogates. We conclude that if gestational surrogates are to remain conceptualised as mere vessels, they should not be expected to assume responsibility for children abandoned by commissioning parents, not even the limited responsibility of giving them up for adoption or surrendering them to the state. (shrink)

A clear-cut concept of the aesthetic is elusive. Kant’s Critique of Judgment presents one of the more comprehensive aesthetic theories from which we can extract a set of features, some of which pertain to aesthetic experience and others to the logical structure of aesthetic judgment. When considered together, however, these features present a number of tensions and apparent contradictions. Kant’s own attempt to dissolve these apparent contradictions or dichotomies was not entirely satisfactory as it rested on a vague notion of (...) indeterminacy. He addressed the emerging tensions with his distinction between pure and dependent beauty, which is a distinction I believe a satisfactory theory of aesthetic judgment would reveal as unfounded. In addition, Kant left a crucial connection unaccounted for. This was the connection between the two aspects that he envisaged characterized an aesthetic judgment. The two aspects to which I refer are the “purposiveness of form” provided by the Imagination and the associated mental content,which Kant called “aesthetic ideas.” More recent aesthetic theories treat only a subset of the features addressed in Kant’s aesthetic theory. Even so, the standard aesthetic theories, such as expressivism, cognitivism, and formalism, entrench the kind of thinking that grounds these dichotomies. In contrast, I will demonstrate that a naturalized aesthetic theory can accommodate all the features suggested by the Kantian analysis in such a way that they are shown to be complementary rather than contradictory. (shrink)

Moral exemplarism, which insists on the centrality of particular embodiments of exemplary virtue to the moral life, is currently receiving significant attention within moral philosophy as well as theological and religious ethics. This introductory essay situates the contributions made by this focus issue on moral exemplarity in relation to the history of attention to moral exemplars, the twentieth‐century turn to virtue, philosopher Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory, Stanley Hauerwas’s particularist embrace of Christian discipleship, Foucauldian turns to critique and self‐cultivation, and (...) the significance of exemplars in Jeffrey Stout’s democratic piety. Arguing for the critical importance of articulating the authority of exemplars, this essay points to the ways in which the present focus can assist us to navigate between the shoals of nostalgic deference to tradition and dismissive critiques of authoritarianism. (shrink)

Research has shown that both physical exercise and cognitive training help to maintain cognition in older adults. The question is whether combined training might produce additive effects when the group comparisons are equated in terms of exercise intensity and modality. We conducted a systematic electronic search in MEDLINE, PsycInfo, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials databases to identify relevant studies published up to February 2021. Seven hundred and eighty-three effect sizes were obtained from 50 published intervention studies, involving 6,164 (...) healthy older adults, and submitted to a three-level meta-analysis. Results showed that combined training produced a small advantage in comparison to single cognitive training on executive functions, whereas both types of training achieved similar effects on attention, memory, language, processing speed, and global cognition. Combined training achieved higher training gains in balance than single physical training, indicating a transfer from cognitive training to balance. Performing cognitive and physical exercise simultaneously, and interactive training produced the largest gains in executive functions, speed, and global cognition, as well as the largest improvements in physical functions. Aerobic training was associated with higher effects in attention and fitness, whereas non-aerobic training produced larger effects in global cognition and balance. For all cognitive and physical outcomes, training resulted more advantageous when performed in a social context, even though individual training obtained similar results in balance as group training.Systematic Review Registration:www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/, identifier: CRD42020175632. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that bioethics suffers from a masculinist approach-what I call “ethical androcentrism.” Despite the genesis of other legitimate approaches to ethics (such as feminist, narrative, and communicative ethics), this masculinist tradition persists. The first part of my paper concerns the problem of ethical androcentrism, and how it is manifest in our typical ways of “doing” bioethics (as teachers, ethicists, policymakers, and medical practitioners). After arguing that bioethics suffers from a masculinist ethic, I consider the case of (...) maternal substance addiction to show how this ethic negatively affects the treatment of pregnant addicts. I argue that by treating maternal substance addiction from an androcentric approach, we fail to serve both pregnant addicts and their fetuses; furthermore, we misrepresent the intentional state of pregnant substance addicts and label them “prenatal abusers.” If maternal substance addiction is to be ethically addressed -- and if pregnant substance addicts are to be effectively treated -- we cannot tacitly accept an androcentric ethic. (shrink)

This paper treats the political and ethical issues associated with the new caretaking technologies. Given the number of feminists who have raised serious concerns about the future of care work in the United States, and who have been critical of the degree to which society “free rides” on women's caretaking labor, I consider whether technology may provide a solution to this problem. Certainly, if we can create machines and robots to take on particular tasks, we may lighten the care burden (...) that women currently face, much of which is heavy and repetitious, and which results in injury and care “burnout” for many female caretakers. Yet, in some contexts, I argue that high-tech robotic care may undermine social relationships, cutting individuals off from the possibility of social connectedness with others. (shrink)

Different notions of objectivity support different notions of what is required for a moral value or obligation to be experienced as objective. If the objectivity of a property requires that it can exist even when we fail to notice its existence, then experiencing a property as objective will require that we imagine it appearing in some way that is not presently available to us. Explaining what that imagining involves is the central task of this paper. Defending the epistemic value of (...) such imagining is a secondary aim. (shrink)

Since 1997 there has been a significant increase in the number and percentage of Kansas farmers who are women. Using Reskin and Roos’ model of “job queues and gender queues” I analyze changes in the agricultural industry in Kansas that resulted in more women becoming “principal farm operators” in the state. I find there are three changes largely responsible for women increasing their representation in the occupation: an increase in the demand for niche products, a decrease in the average farm (...) size, and greater societal acceptance of women as farmers. This study adds to the growing literature on women principal farm operators in developed countries, and is among the first to explore why women are becoming a larger percentage of the occupation in the United States. (shrink)

The perennial appeal of Kantian ethics surely lies in its conception of autonomy. Kantianism tells us that the good life is fundamentally about acting in accordance with an internal rather than an external authority: a good will is simply a will in agreement with its own rational, self-constituting law. In this paper, I argue against Kantian autonomy, on the grounds that it excessively narrows our concept of the good, it confuses the difference between practical and theoretical modes of knowing the (...) good, and it cannot respect the essential efficacy of the principles of practical reason. (shrink)

Constitutivism locates the ground of practical normativity in features constitutive of rational agency and rests on the concept of a constitutive norm – a norm that is internal to a thing such that...

Eudaimonism is often regarded as egoistic. If it recommends that agents pursue their own good because it is their own good, it is guilty as charged. But excellence‐prior eudaimonism offers a non‐egoistic alternative to this welfare‐prior eudaimonism. Excellence‐prior eudaimonism recommends that an agent live in a way that is in fact good for the agent, but it does not regard the agent’s own good as necessarily that for the sake of which the agent acts, nor does it regard living well (...) as justified by the fact that it is good for the agent, but simply because it is good. The Christian eudaimonisms of Augustine and Aquinas are best understood as deepened forms of excellence‐prior eudaimonism. (shrink)

This is a conversation held at the book launch for Christopher Insole’s Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), hosted jointly, in November 2020, by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, and the Australian Catholic University. The conversation covers the claim made by Insole that Kant believes in God, but is not a Christian, the way in which reason itself is divine for Kant, and the suggestion that reading Kant can open (...) up new possibilities for dialogue between Christian thinkers and contemporary forms of secular religiosity. (shrink)

In communities of inquiry, dialogue is central as both the means and the outcome of collective inquiry. Indeed, features of dialogue—including formulating and asking questions, developing hypotheses and explanations, and offering and requesting reasons—are often highlighted as playing a significant role in the quality of the dialogue that unfolds. We inquire further into the quality of dialogue by arguing that dialogue should enable the expansion of epistemic openness, rather than its contraction, and that this is especially important in multicultural communities (...) of inquiry to acknowledge the cultural, perspectival, and experiential differences that exist alongside of similarities as resources for dialogue. The purpose of this article is to highlight two discourse practices that exemplify the nature of discourse as social practice and can be used in communities of inquiry. Attending to these discourse practices may enable teachers and students to reflect upon dialogue as it unfolds. First, we situate ourselves in multicultural classrooms in British Columbia, Canada. Then we articulate three principles of communities of inquiry. Next we describe and exemplify two discourse practices: heteroglossic attunement and lexical awareness. When attended to by teachers and students, 1) heteroglossic attunement enables teachers and students to begin to identify, reflect upon, and discuss the voices and perspectives that are drawn upon as participants inquire together and 2) lexical awareness enables teachers and students to begin to identify their attributions of thinking and feeling to social actors and to recognize how naming social actors positions them in an evolving set of social relations. Rather than a neutral medium of communication, social speech and dialogue is inherently value laden. Attending closely to the discourse that constitutes dialogue in a community of inquiry is a significant pedagogical tool for both teachers and students to expand epistemic openness and make visible learning as it unfolds. (shrink)