A translation of Plato's dialogue on the nature of pleasure and its relation to thought and knowledge. It includes a cogent introduction, notes, and comprehensive bibliography.

For over 20 years, the concept of “food deserts” has served as an evocative metaphor, signifying spatialized patterns of injustice associated with low access to nutritious foods through retail and social exclusion. Yet in spite of its pithy appeal, scholars and activists increasingly critique the food desert concept as stigmatizing, inaccurate, and insufficient to characterize entrenched structural inequities. These well-founded critiques demonstrate a convincing need to reframe approaches to spatialized food injustice. We argue that food desert maps, which aim to (...) visually illustrate food inequality, can reproduce problematic assumptions, stigmas, and inaccuracies that form the crux of scholarly critiques. For example, food desert maps typically overlook community assets and also utilize decontextualized and overdetermined indicators, such as proximity to supermarkets and transportation access. Although we acknowledge the contributions of food desert maps, in this paper we propose a reimagining of food access mapping. To illustrate our argument, we present a course-based food justice mapping study in Providence, Rhode Island. Our project draws inspiration from studies that interrogate the deficit-oriented framing of food deserts, as well as several alternative mapping practices: critical cartography and counter-mapping, community asset mapping, participatory geographic information systems, and radical cartography. We suggest these alternative mapping approaches have potential to move practitioners and viewers beyond the desolate “desert” vantage point and toward a more textured understanding of community food access that inspires engaged exploration. (shrink)

In this article, the authors explore the interaction of language and culture through a metaphorical analysis of the ideas written of in Gregory Stock's book, Metaman, as well as explain how education shares the implicit assumptions of Metaman, thus perpetuating and strengthening a modern-day discourse that embeds a technological manifest destiny enveloped in deficiency as a guiding metaphor.

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

In The Teaching Self: Contemplative Practices, Pedagogy, and Research in Education, a rich collection of voices from diverse settings illustrates the ways in which first-person experiences with contemplative practices lay a foundation for contemplative pedagogy and research in teacher education.

A best-seller in Europe following its original publication in 1993, this littel book takes on a big subject, offering enduring guidelines from the Greek philosopher Epicurus for achieving lasting happiness. In a letter to his friend Menoecceus, Epicurus gives sound advice on increasing life's pleasures, not through hedonistic pursuits, as commonly assumed, but through intelligence, morality, and decency. Based on a new translation of Epicurus to Menoecceus and complete with the original Greek text, Letter on Happiness expounds upon basic philosophical (...) inquiries concerning pleasure, longevity, death, and desire that are as relevant today as they were in ancient Greece, all in a compact, attractive package that makes a thoughtful gift for any occasion. (shrink)

The story of the Roman conquest of Greece - not only a thrilling tale of military conquest, but a pivotal event in the history of Rome, her empire, and the whole subsequent history of Europe.

A critique of Karl Friston's "Free Energy Principle" from a bioenactive perspective.

Sometimes form-meaning mappings in language are not arbitrary, but iconic: they depict what they represent. Incorporating iconic elements of language into a compositional semantics faces a number of challenges in formal frameworks as evidenced by the lengthy literature in linguistics and philosophy on quotation/direct speech, which iconically portrays the words of another in the form that they were used. This paper compares the well-studied type of iconicity found with verbs of quotation with another form of iconicity common in sign languages: (...) classifier predicates. I argue that these two types of verbal iconicity can, and should, incorporate their iconic elements in the same way using event modification via the notion of a context dependent demonstration. This unified formal account of quotation and classifier predicates predicts that a language might use the same strategy for conveying both, and I argue that this is the case with role shift in American Sign Language. Role shift is used to report others’ language and thoughts as well as their actions, and recently has been argued to provide evidence in favor of Kaplanian “monstrous” indexical expressions. By reimagining role shift as involving either quotation for language demonstrations or “body classifier” predicates for action demonstrations, the proposed account eliminates one major argument for these monsters coming from sign languages. Throughout this paper, sign languages provide a fruitful perspective for studying quotation and other forms of iconicity in natural language due to their lack of a commonly used writing system which is otherwise often mistaken as primary data instead of speech, the rich existing literature on iconicity within sign language linguistics, and the ability of role shift to overtly mark the scope of a language report. In this view, written language is merely a special case of a more general phenomenon of sign and speech demonstration, which accounts more accurately for natural language data by permitting more strict or loose verbatim interpretations of demonstrations through the context dependent pragmatics. (shrink)

Philosophy of science has the potential to enhance scientific practice, science policy, and science education; moreover, recent research indicates that many philosophers of science think we ought to increase the broader impacts of our work. Yet, there is little to no empirical data on how we are supposed to have an impact. To address this problem, our research team interviewed 35 philosophers of science regarding the impact of their work in science-related domains. We found that face-to-face engagement with scientists and (...) other stakeholders was one of the most—if not the most—effective pathways to impact. Yet, working with non-philosophers and disseminating research outside philosophical venues is not what philosophers are typically trained or incentivized to do. Thus, there is a troublesome tension between the activities that are likely to lead to broader uptake of one’s work and those that are traditionally encouraged and rewarded in philosophy. We suggest several ways that philosophers of science, either as individuals or as a community, can navigate these tensions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 75-95 [Access article in PDF] "Not heretofore extant in print": Where the Mad Ranters Are Kathryn Gucer In 1654 Ephraim Pagitt published the fifth edition of Heresiography, subtitled "a Description of the Hereticks and Sectaries of these latter times." On the title page Pagitt promoted this latest edition of the catalog by stressing the "Additions" he had made. Among the (...) new targets of his anti-sectarian polemic were the Ranters, whom he introduced in a pithy character sketch as "an unclean beast much of the make with our Quaker." 1 But although Pagitt claimed to introduce the sect, Ranters had been around in print since Gerrard Winstanley attacked them in defense of his group, the Diggers, in 1649. 2 In fact writers had been attacking the sects generally--Anabaptists, Seekers, Brownists, Familists--in brief pamphlets like Winstanley's Vindication and in tome-like catalogs of sectarian "errours" since the outbreak of the Civil War. The anti-Ranter pamphlets were thus an incursion into an ongoing printed dialogue about the sects in general. Pagitt himself had been an interlocutor in this dialogue, having published four previous editions of his list. Why had he not marked the Ranters in 1649 and 1650 when Winstanley and others first noticed them?This essay will answer this question by arguing that the Ranters arose in dialogue across time, that they did not emerge spontaneously in Pagitt's 1654 text. When Pagitt introduced the sect in 1654, he was in fact responding to a heated discussion about the Ranters that had been developing for four years. He thus entered the debate a moment after "Ranters" and "ranting" had been defined by other pamphleteers. In this debate about the Ranters we can see the process by which pamphleteers invented a linguistic means of talking about religious diversity before it was an accepted feature of English society. At the same time that writers were exposing the Ranters' blasphemous excesses, they were also crafting a political identity for the group by attaching characteristic words and [End Page 75] behaviors to them in print. The printed controversy over the Ranters thus raises interesting questions about the relation between textual signification and actual politics. What were the processes by which pamphleteers invented new ways of talking about groups--sects and parties--in the period? What did labeling have to do with political identity?In fact the collective dialogue about the Ranters centered on a label that pamphleteers consistently attached to the group, their "madness." Although each writer identified the Ranters with a variety of creeds and practices, anti-Ranter pamphleteers all told their readers to view the group as an absence of reason. They claimed that Ranters were incapable of recognizing and conveying God's truth to their audience. Pagitt himself participated in the cooperative assault on Ranter madness. He consistently borrowed this language from his fellow interlocutors, branding the Ranters with terms such as "nonsensicall" and "absurd." Yet I argue that the label itself was largely a red herring. Writers shrewdly focused on Ranter unreason in order to persuade their readers not to use their own reason to consider the sectarian claims to authority. Moreover, writers shaped and reshaped what they meant by Ranter unreason in order to modulate its rhetorical effect on their readers. Thus it is not surprising that the precise construction of Ranter unreason shifted with the various responses these writers wanted to elicit from their readers. 3The explosion of anti-Ranter tracts, many of which had sensational titles showcasing the word "Ranters," indicated that the sect had particular rhetorical purchase on the public in the early 1650s: The Ranters Religion (11 October 1650), The Routing of the Ranters (19 November 1650), The Ranters Bible (9 December 1650), The Ranters Recantation And their Sermon (20 December 1650), The Joviall Crew, or the Devill turn'd RANTER (6 January 1651), Ranters of both Sexes, Male and Female (3 June 1651), RANTERS MONSTER (30 March 1652). 4 Although talk about Ranters was neither confined to print nor to... (shrink)

Building upon Thornton's (1991) work on teachers as “curricular-instructional gatekeepers,” the author explores what guided the curricular decision-making for one novice teacher concerning controversial issues that center on race, social class, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues. Qualitative case study revealed context, student demographics, and teacher positionality as influencing this teacher's choices regarding these themes in her curriculum. Findings indicated that this teacher was willing and able to challenge racist views in her classroom when she was a student (...) teacher and her students more closely mirrored her own race and social class. When she was a full-time teacher of students who were of a different racial and class background, she was unable to similarly challenge their homophobic beliefs. Implications for teacher education are discussed. (shrink)

Recent advances in virtual technologies have allowed the investigation of simulated moral actions in aversive moral dilemmas. Previous studies have employed diverse populations in order to explore these actions, with little research considering the significance of occupation on moral decision-making. For the first time, in this study we have investigated simulated moral actions in Virtual Reality made by professionally trained paramedics and fire service incident commanders who are frequently faced with and must respond to moral dilemmas. We found that specially (...) trained individuals showed distinct empathic and related personality trait scores and that these declined with years of experience working in the profession. Supporting the theory that these professionals develop resilience in moral conflict, reduced emotional arousal was observed during virtual simulations of a distressing dilemma. Furthermore, trained professionals demonstrated less regret following the execution of a moral action in virtual reality when compared to untrained control populations. We showed that, contrary to previous research, trained individuals made the same moral judgments and moral actions as untrained individuals, though showing less arousal and regret. In the face of increasing concerns regarding empathy decline in healthcare professionals, we suggest that the nature of this decline is complex and likely reflects the development of a necessary emotional resilience to distressing events. (shrink)

How Doctors Think defines the nature and importance of clinical judgment. Although physicians make use of science, this book argues that medicine is not itself a science but rather an interpretive practice that relies on clinical reasoning. A physician looks at the patient's history along with the presenting physical signs and symptoms and juxtaposes these with clinical experience and empirical studies to construct a tentative account of the illness. How Doctors Think is divided into four parts. Part one introduces the (...) concept of medicine as a practice rather than a science; part two discusses the idea of causation; part three delves into the process of forming clinical judgment; and part four considers clinical judgment within the uncertain nature of medicine itself. In How Doctors Think, Montgomery contends that assuming medicine is strictly a science can have adverse side effects, and suggests reducing these by recognizing the vital role of clinical judgment. (shrink)

Philosophers of science are increasingly arguing for the importance of doing scientifically- and socially-engaged work, suggesting that we need to reduce barriers to extra-disciplinary engagement and broaden our impact. Yet, we currently lack empirical data to inform these discussions, leaving a number of important questions unanswered. How common is it for philosophers of science to engage other communities, and in what ways are they engaging? What barriers are most prevalent when it comes to broadly disseminating one’s work or collaborating with (...) others? To what extent do philosophers of science actually value an engaged approach? Our project addresses this gap in our collective knowledge by providing empirical data regarding the state of philosophy of science today. We report the results of a survey of 299 philosophers of science about their attitudes towards and experiences with engaging those outside the discipline. Our data suggest that a significant majority of philosophers of science think it is important for non-philosophers to read and make use of their work; most are engaging with communities outside the discipline; and many think philosophy of science, as a discipline, has an obligation to ensure it has a broader impact. Interestingly, however, many of these same philosophers believe engaged work is generally undervalued in the discipline. We think these findings call for cautious optimism on the part of those who value engaged work—while there seems to be more interest in engaging other communities than many assume, significant barriers still remain. (shrink)

Menstruation leave for women workers brings into the public domain of mining ongoing debates around protective legislation for women. It brings into focus the presumed tensions between gender equity and gender difference with regard to women's economic citizenship. Large-scale mining in East Kalimantan in Indonesia has offered some opportunities to poor and unskilled rural women to find formal jobs in the mines as truck and heavy equipment operators. This paper presents a case study of women in mining occupations, considers the (...) implications of current menstruation leave provisions on the employment of women in the mines and raises serious issues related to gender equity in the workplace. The involvement of women in a non-conventional workplace such as the mine pits, providing a novel site for contestation over the rights of women workers, illuminates a less-debated area in feminist studies, especially in view of the significant ongoing changes in the Indonesian framework for industrial relations. (shrink)

Plato of Athens is the first-ever biography of the world-famous philosopher. Born into a well-to-do family, he grew up in the increasing gloom of wartime Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE. Alongside a normal Athenian education, in his teens he honed his intellect by attending lectures by the many thinkers who passed through Athens, and toyed with the idea of writing poetry. He finally decided to go into politics, but became disillusioned, especially after the Athenians condemned his (...) teacher, Socrates, to death. Instead he turned to writing and teaching. In 383 he founded the Academy, the world's first higher-educational research and teaching establishment, But he also returned after a while to practical politics and spent a considerable amount of time trying to create a constitution for Syracuse in Sicily that would reflect his political ideals. The attempt failed, and Plato's disappointment can be traced in his later political works. (shrink)

This paper uses a problematic passage at Phaedo 69a–c as a case study to explore the advantages we can gain by reading Plato in his cultural context. Socrates argues that the common conception of courage is strange: people fear death, but endure it because they are afraid of greater evils. They are thus brave through fear. He proposes that we should not exchange greater pleasures, pains, and fears for lesser, like coins, but that there is the only correct coin, for (...) which we must exchange all these things: wisdom (phronēsis). Commentators have been puzzled by the precise nature of the exchange envisaged here, sometimes labelling the coinage metaphor as inept, sometimes describing this stretch of argument as “religious” and thus not to be taken seriously. The body of the paper looks at (1) the connection between money and somatic materialism, (2) the incommensurability in Plato of financial and ethical orders, (3) financial metaphors outside Plato that connect coinage with ethics, (4) intrinsic and use values in ancient coinage, and (5) Athenian laws on coinage, weights, and measures that reflect anxiety about debased coins in the fifth and early fourth centuries. It sees the Phaedo passage as the product of a sociopolitical climate which facilitated the consideration of coinage as an embodiment of a value system and which connected counterfeit or debased currency with debased ethical types. Athenians in the early fourth century were much concerned with issues of commensurability between different currencies and with problems of debasement and counterfeiting; understanding this makes Socrates’ use of coinage metaphors less puzzling. Both the metaphor of coinage and the other metaphors in this passage of the Phaedo (painting and initiation) engage with ideas of purity, genuineness, and deception. Taken as a group, these metaphors cover a large area of contemporary popular culture and are used to illustrate a disjunction between popular and philosophical ways of looking at value. (shrink)

The trial of Socrates -- Socrates in court -- How the system worked -- The charge of impiety -- The war years -- Alcibiades, Socrates, and the aristocratic milieu -- Pestilence and war -- The rise and fall of Alcibiades -- The end of the war -- Critias and Civil War --- Crisis and conflict -- Symptoms of change -- Reactions to intellectuals -- The condemnation of Socrates -- Socratic politics -- A cock for Asclepius.

This book explores the dynamic relationship between myth and philosophy in the Presocratics, the Sophists, and in Plato - a relationship which is found to be more extensive and programmatic than has been recognized. The story of philosophy's relationship with myth is that of its relationship with literary and social convention. The intellectuals studied here wanted to reformulate popular ideas about cultural authority and they achieved this goal by manipulating myth. Their self-conscious use of myth creates a self-reflective philosophic sensibility (...) and draws attention to problems inherent in different modes of linguistic representation. Much of the reception of Greek philosophy stigmatizes myth as 'irrational'. Such an approach ignores the important role played by myth in Greek philosophy, not just as a foil but as a mode of philosophical thought. The case studies in this book reveal myth deployed as a result of methodological reflection, and as a manifestation of philosophical concerns. (shrink)

Contemporary educational goals place increasing emphasis on conferring recognition and building self-esteem for people deemed to be marginalised and vulnerable. Such goals coalesce with the language, symbols and practices of therapy inscribed within a broader 'therapeutic ethos'. The paper relates these trends to broader cultural demoralisation about people's potential for human agency and evaluates their effects on educational debates. A therapeutic ethos in education appears benign and empowering. Yet, the paper argues that it produces a diminished view of people and (...) low expectations about people's capacity for resilience and autonomy. One effect is to encourage an alignment between the values and activities of education and welfare. This both legitimises and extends institutional and government influence over people's psychological and emotional states. The paper explores these trends and evaluates their implications for educational ideas about human agency. (shrink)

Among the exciting prospects raised by advocates of predictive processing [PP] is the offer of a systematic description of our neural activity suitable for drawing explanatory bridges to the structure of conscious experience. Yet the gulf to cross seems wide. For, as critics of PP have argued, our visual experience certainly doesn’t seem probabilistic.While Clark proposes a means to make PP compatible with the experience of a determinate world, I argue that we should not rush to do so. Two notions (...) of determinacy are conflated in the claim that perception is determinate: ‘univocality’ and ‘full detail’. The former, as Clark argues, is only to be expected in any PP agent that models its world for the purpose of acting on it. But as Husserl argued, and as perceptual psychology has borne out, we significantly overestimate the degree of detail with which we perceive a univocal world.This second form of indeterminacy is due not to the probabilistic nature of PP’s model, but rather to its hierarchical structure, with increasingly coarse-grained representations as we move further from the sensory periphery. A PP system may, or may not, deliver a univocal hypothesis at each of these levels. An action-oriented PP system would only be expected to do so only at the level needed for successful action guidance. A naïve reporter’s overestimation of the degree of determinate detail in their visual experience can thereby be accounted for with a more gradual version of the ‘refrigerator light’ effect: we experience determinate details just to the degree that they’re needed – immediately as they’re needed. (shrink)

The increasing complexity of human subjects research and its oversight has prompted researchers, as well as institutional review boards, to have a forum in which to discuss challenging or novel ethical issues not fully addressed by regulations. Research ethics consultation services provide such a forum. In this article, we rely on the experiences of a national Research Ethics Consultation Collaborative that collected more than 350 research ethics consultations in a repository and published 18 challenging cases with accompanying ethical commentaries to (...) highlight four contexts in which REC can be a valuable resource. REC assists: 1) investigators before and after the regulatory review; 2) investigators, IRBs, and other research administrators facing challenging and novel ethical issues; 3) IRBs and investigators with the increasing challenges of informed consent and risk/benefit analysis; and 4) in providing flexible and collaborative assistance to overcome study hurdles, mediate conflicts within a team, or directly engage with research participants. Institutions that have established, or plan to establish, REC services should work to raise the visibility of their service and engage in open communication with existing clinical ethics consult services as well as the IRB. While the IRB system remains the foundation for the ethical review of research, REC can be a valuable service for investigators, regulators, and research participants aligned with the goal of supporting ethical research. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy is now an established subdiscipline, but it began as an effort to transform the profession. Academics and activists worked together to make the new courses, and feminist theory was tested in the streets. As time passed, the "second wave" receded, but core elements of feminist theory were preserved in the academy. How can feminist philosophers today continue the early efforts of changing profession and the society, hand in hand with women outside the academy.

ABSTRACTAnna Letitia Barbauld's poem ‘To Mr. Barbauld, with a Map of the Land of Matrimony’ and its illustrated companion piece, ‘A New Map of the Land of Matrimony, Drawn from the Latest Surveys’, first published anonymously by Joseph Johnson in 1772 but attributable to Barbauld, show their creator playing in original ways with courtly and libertine variants of the map of love and marriage: a genre of allegorical and sentimental map tracing its provenance to ‘La Carte de tendre’ or ‘The (...) Map of the Country of Tenderness’, conceived by Madeleine de Scudéry for inclusion in her multi-volume prose romance Clélie and given illustrated form by François Chauveau. Taken together, map and drawing indirectly serve to illuminate Barbauld's complicated position within Enlightenment feminism and invite new insights into her relationship with the canonical male Romantics, reaffirming her status as a key transitional figure between Neoclassicism and Romanticism in the contribution she makes to the historical debate over the relationship between different arts. (shrink)

Summary Sister and brother Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin; 1743–1825) and John Aikin (1747–1822) are two famous Rational Dissenting writers who strategically appropriated republican discourse to advance the Dissenting cause. Both make the case that, far from being subversive, Rational Dissent actually granted its adherents the independence that, from a republican perspective, was considered essential to true patriotism. In a fresh formulation of republican discourse, they present the strength of the Rational Dissenting commitment to ‘free inquiry’ as security for continuing (...) independence, enabling liberal Dissenters to act as patriotic guardians of British virtue and liberty against the dangerous effects of luxury, even as they continued to contribute towards the development of the British commercial economy and to promote the benefits of commerce, traditionally regarded with hostility by classical republicans. Effectively exploiting the classical republican belief in the central role of education, Barbauld and Aikin particularly sought to publicize the role that the Dissenting academies had played in producing patriots by making ‘free inquiry’ the basis of their pedagogical philosophy and practice. (shrink)