This article addresses the demand for global content knowledge that the process of internationalization has placed on the preparation of social studies teachers. Drawing on scholarship about global perspectives in teacher education, this study examined what one cohort of preservice teachers learned about globalization during participation in a three-week, web-based, international relations simulation. The unit was part of a methods course designed to prepare preservice teachers to teach global issues and internationalize the curriculum. International simulations have long been touted as (...) a means for learning challenging knowledge about global issues yet are rarely studied in teacher education. This qualitative study drew on concept maps and written responses completed before and after the simulation to document the preservice teachers’ learning. The analysis generated two findings: (1) preservice teachers acquired a shared, conceptual vocabulary for globalization that included the events and actors represented in the simulation; and (2) they also demonstrated a more systematic and critical understanding of the ways that power and conflict shaped the events and actors. The study contributes to the question of what teachers need to know to teach with global perspectives and how efforts to internationalize teacher education programs can foster such knowledge. (shrink)

This edition's postscript includes further reflections on these themes and others, and relates them to recent writings of other philosophers and computer ...

The eminent philosopher Keith Lehrer offers an original and distinctively personal view of central aspects of the human condition, such as reason, knowledge, wisdom, autonomy, love, consensus, and consciousness. He argues that what is uniquely human is our capacity for evaluating our own mental states (such as beliefs and desires), and suggests that we have a system for such evaluation which allows the resolution of personal and interpersonal conflict. The keystone in this system is self-trust, on which reason, knowledge, (...) and wisdom are grounded. (shrink)

Humphreys and Forde (H&F) propose that greater within- category structural similarity makes living things more difficult to name. However, recent studies show that normal subjects find it easier to name living than nonliving things when these are matched across category for potential artefacts. Additionally, at the level of single pixels, visual overlap appears to be greater for nonliving things.

This paper develops an account of consciousness in action. Both consciousness and action are related to knowledge. A voluntary action is defined as a volition, or something intentionally effected by means of such volitions. Volitions are conscious mental acts whose proper function is to make their content true. A mental act is the exercise of a power of mind and a conscious mental act is identical with knowledge of its own phenomenal character. This set of definitions elucidates the relations between (...) consciousness, action and knowledge. (shrink)

This book derives from a 1993 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Knowledge, Teaching, and Wisdom. The Institute took place at the University of California, Berkeley, and was co-directed by Keith Lehrer and Nicholas D. Smith. The aims of the Institute were several: we sought to reintroduce wisdom as a topic of discussion among contemporary philosophers, to undertake an historical investigation of how and when and why it was that wisdom faded from philosophical view, and to ask (...) how contemporary epistemological theories might apply to the obviously related subjects of teaching and wisdom. In recruiting participants, Lehrer and Smith put the greatest emphasis on those with professional interests in epistemology and the history of philosophy, of the ancient Greeks especially ancient Greek philosophy (because in the writings all three subjects of the Institute were explicitly related and discussed). But in addition to these two groups, some effort was made also to include others, with academic specializations in a variety of fields other than epistemology and the history of philosophy, to ensure that a broad perspective could be achieved in our discussions. To an obvious extent, the papers in this book reflect the recruitment emphases and variety. They also testify to the extent that the Institute managed to bring life to our subjects, and to raise very old questions in a contemporary context. (shrink)

Because every single one of us will die, most of us would like to know what—if anything—awaits us afterward, not to mention the fate of lost loved ones. Given the nearly universal vested interest we personally have in deciding this question in favor of an afterlife, it is no surprise that the vast majority of books on the topic affirm the reality of life after death without a backward glance. But the evidence of our senses and the ever-gaining strength of (...) scientific evidence strongly suggest otherwise. -/- In The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death, Michael Martin and Keith Augustine collect a series of contributions that redress this imbalance in the literature by providing a strong, comprehensive, and up-to-date casebook of the chief arguments against an afterlife all in one place. Divided into four separate sections, this essay collection opens the volume with a broad overview of the issues, as contributors consider the strongest available evidence as to whether or not we survive death—in particular the biological basis of all mental states and their grounding in brain activity that ceases to function at death. Next contributors consider a host of conceptual and empirical difficulties that confront the various ways of "surviving" death—from bodiless minds to bodily resurrection to any form of posthumous survival. Then essayists turn to internal inconsistencies between traditional theological conceptions of an afterlife—Heaven, Hell, karmic rebirth—and widely held ethical principles central to the belief systems undergirding those notions. In the final section, authors offer critical evaluations of the main types of evidence for an afterlife. -/- Fully interdisciplinary, The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death brings together a variety of fields of research to make that case, including cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, personal identity, philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, psychical research, and anomalistic psychology. As the definitive casebook of arguments against life after death, this collection is required reading for any instructor, researcher, and student in philosophy, religious studies, and theology. It is sure to raise provocative issues new to readers, regardless of background, from those who believe fervently in the reality of an afterlife to those who do not or are undecided on the matter. (shrink)

My discussion in this paper is divided into three parts. In section I, I discuss some fairly familiar lines of approach to the question how moral considerations may be shown to have rational appeal. In section II, I suggest how our existence as constituents in collective entities might also influence our practical thinking. In section III, I entertain the idea that identification with collectives might displace moral thinking to some degree, and I offer Marx's class theory as a sample of (...) collective identification for the purposes of practical deliberation. (shrink)

The Historical Dictionary of Surrealism relates the history of this movement through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries on persons, circles, and groups who participated in the movement; a global entry on some of the journals and reviews they produced; and a sampling of major works of art, cinema, and literature.

This paper rejects a traditional epistemic interpretation of conditional probability. Suppose some chance process produces outcomes X, Y,..., with probabilities P(X), P(Y),... If later observation reveals that outcome Y has in fact been achieved, then the probability of outcome X cannot normally be revised to P(X|Y) ['P&Y)/P(Y)]. This can only be done in exceptional circumstances - when more than just knowledge of Y-ness has been attained. The primary reason for this is that the weight of a piece of evidence varies (...) with the means by which it is provided, so knowledge of Y-ness does not have uniform impact on the probability of X. A better updating of the probability of X is provided by P(X|Y*), where Y* is not an outcome of the chance process being observed, but the sentence 'the outcome Y has been observed', an 'outcome' of the subsequent observation process. This alternative formula is widely endorsed in practice, but not well recognized in theory, where the oversight has generated some unsatisfactory consequences. (shrink)

The paper distinguishes between epistemic and ontic divisions of qualities into primary and secondary. It identifies two functions which ontic division has been called upon to fulfill - setting the limits on what a realist philosophy of science must achieve, And providing a means of judging between rival realist philosophies of science. It argues for an interaction pattern criterion of primacy, And concludes that while this enables the first function to be achieved, No primary/secondary distinction can fulfill the second.

How did the French Revolution become thinkable? Keith Michael Baker, a leading authority on the ideological origins of the French Revolution, explores this question in his wide-ranging collection of essays. Analyzing the new politics of contestation that transformed the traditional political culture of the Old Regime during its last decades, Baker revises our historical map of the political space in which the French Revolution took form. Some essays study the ways in which the revolutionaries' break with the past was (...) prepared by competition between agents and critics of absolute monarchy to control the cultural resources and political meanings of French sought before 1789 to reconstitute their body politic; and by the invention of 'public opinion' as a new form of political authority displacing notions of 'representation', 'constitution', 'sovereignty' - and of 'the French Revolution' itself - the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that were to drive the revolutionary dynamic in subsequent years. The result is a substantial and unified set of studies, stimulating renewed reflection on one of the central themes in modern European history. (shrink)

While researching my 2001 book on sickle cell disease, I became aware of the politics of pain. In that malady—a painful disorder associated with African Americans and characterized by frequent infections and recurring painful “crises”—the politics of pain recognition and adequate relief intersect not only with drug concerns, but also with American racial politics. One cannot understand fully the history of sickle cell patients without understanding politics on two levels: the macropolitics of race in America and the micropolitics of medicinal (...) encounters. How these two kinds of politics collided in clinical decision-making about diagnosis, treatment, and pain management has long been a focus of my scholarship—not... (shrink)

(I) It is commonly held that a person cannot wittingly hold false or inconsistent beliefs. Edgley has argued that this follows from the normative implications involved in the concept of belief and the concept of a proposition, as expressed in the analytic principle 'if p, then it is right to think that p\ (II) But the principle, when taken in its analytic sense, does not have the required implications; and taken in the sense in which it would have those implications (...) it is neither analytic nor true. (III) A person can not only hold a false belief wittingly, he can assert that he does. Examples are given to exhibit the legitimacy of the claim that such irrationality does not necessarily dissolve when recognized for what it is. (IV) The phenomenon of self-confessed irrationality involves the fusion of two general features of mental life. It comprises a mental state over whose existence one has no control, but which one can in some way detach oneself from and be critical of. (shrink)

The significance which any human action carries for normative reasoning is held to include its causal preconditions as well as its causal consequences. That claim is defended against a series of natural objections. The point is then extended from actions to preferences via discussion of Barry and Dworkin. The grounds for excluding nosy preferences from aggregation must involve appeal not just to rights and intention but also to the consequences of acting on them. But then some of the features in (...) virtue of which nosy preferences are held to be objectionable will also be present in any other preference. (shrink)

This essay explores the phenomenological features of the passional response to evil that Aquinas calls ‘hatred of sin’ in Summa Thelogiae II-II Q34 A3 and I-II Q23 A1, among other places. Social justice concerns and philosophical objections, however, challenge the notion that one can feel hatred toward an agent’s vice or sin without it being the agent who is hated. I argue that a careful, contextual reading of these texts shows that Aquinas cannot be read as commending ‘hate’ in any (...) form. The texts under consideration offer no comfort to those who appeal to hatred of sin or vice to legitimate sentiments or actions that can be reasonably taken to express hatred of persons. (shrink)

In this paper we reach back to an earlier generation of discussions about both linguistic meaning and moral language to answer the still-current question as to whether and in what way some special non-descriptive feature comprises part of the semantics of identifiably ethical terms. Taking off from the failure of familiar meta-ethical theories, restricted as they are to the Fregean categories of Sense and Force (whether singly or in combination), we propose that one particular variety belonging to Frege’s humble semantic (...) category of Farbung –– what Dummett calls Tone –– holds the key. Specifically, the kinds of expressions that Dummett dubs “expressives”, when properly understood as representing a speaker’s sentiment, solve the mystery not only of moral discourse, but of evaluative language, broadly construed. On this basis we account for moral language’s special relation to action motivation in ways that avoid Moore’s paradox and honor, in unasserted contexts, what Geach calls ‘the Frege point’. Commitments to the public and social character of natural language are also respected. (shrink)