Race and Gender in the Classroom explores the paradoxes of education, race, and gender, as Laurie Cooper Stoll follows eighteen teachers carrying out their roles as educators in an era of “post-racial” and “post-gendered” politics.

This article explores and compares cross-gender interactions of first and third graders in one child care center. Three prevalent forms of interaction are discussed: teasing, disputing, and playing. The author argues that these three forms of interaction are related to the use of space: Teasing often occurs when space is constricted, disputing is often the result of invaded space, and playing requires shared space and varying levels of cooperation. By focusing on the relationship between space and interaction, important power asymmetries (...) appear. Since boys are more likely to initiate invasions and more likely to determine the rules and terms of the play, they maintain a greater amount of power and control. (shrink)

The coevolution of humans with their intestinal microflora has resulted in cooperative relationships that have shaped the biology and the genomes of these symbiotic partners. Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron is one such bacterial symbiont that is a dominant member of the intestinal microbiota of humans and other mammals. The recent report of the genome sequence of B. thetaiotaomicron1 is the first reported for an abundant Gram‐negative organism of the human colonic microbiota and, as such, provides the first glimpse on a genomic scale (...) of the genetic arsenal used by a Gram‐negative symbiont to dominate in this ecosystem. The genome has revealed large expansions of many paralogous groups of genes that encode products essential to the organism's ability to successfully compete in this environment. Most noteable is the organism's abundant machinery for utilizing a large variety of complex polysaccharides as a source of carbon and energy. The proteome also reveals the organism's extensive ability to adapt and regulate expression of its genes in response to the changing ecosystem. These factors, as well as others highlighted below, suggest an incredibly flexible and adaptable organism that is exquisitely equipped to dominate in its challenging and competitive niche. BioEssays 25:926–929, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This article argues for separating the institutions of marriage and parenting, conceptually and legally. Marriage is neither necessary nor adequate for fostering cooperative and stable co-parenting. Because promoting marriage fails to protect all children, the state should develop a more suitable formal mechanism whereby co-parents can commit to cooperate in good faith in order to best serve the interests of their children. Like civil marriage, many of the terms of these contracts are aspirational and not enforceable, though they can guide (...) arrangements for custody and financial support. Co-parenting agreements need not be limited to two parents, nor need they be limited to legal parents, but can include de facto parents, such as stepparents, foster parents, and other support parents. One important aim of these agreements is to recognise and support the valuable work that married or unmarried co-parents perform, and to protect the parental rights of caregivers in different kinds of situations. (shrink)

Strong reciprocity is not the only account that can explain costly punishment in the lab; it can also be explained by reputation-based accounts. We discuss these two accounts and suggest what kinds of evidence would support the two different alternatives. We conclude that the current evidence favors a reputation-based account of costly punishment.

Biomedical research increasingly relies on long-term studies involving use and re-use of biological samples and data stored in large repositories or “biobanks” over lengthy periods, often raising questions about whether and when a re-consenting process should be activated. We sought to investigate the views on re-consent of participants in a longitudinal biobank. We conducted a qualitative study involving interviews with 24 people who were participating in a longitudinal biobank. Their views were elicited using a semi-structured interview schedule and scenarios based (...) on a hypothetical biobank. Data analysis was based on the constant comparative method. What participants identified as requiring new consent was not a straightforward matter predictable by algorithms about the scope of the consent, but instead was contingent. They assessed whether proposed new research implied a fundamental alteration in the underlying character of the biobank and whether specific projects were within the scope of the original consent. What mattered most to them was that the cooperative bargain into which they had entered was maintained in good faith. They saw re-consent as one important safeguard in this bargain. In determining what required re-consent, they deployed two logics. First, they used a logic of boundaries, where they sought to detect any possible rupture with their existing framework of cooperation. Second, they used a logic of risk, where they assessed proposed research for any potential threats for them personally or the research endeavour. When they judged that a need for re-consent had been activated, participants saw the process as way of re-actualising and renewing the cooperative bargain. Participants’ perceptions of research as a process of mutual co-operation between volunteer and researcher were fundamental to their views on consent. Consenting arrangements for biobanks should respect the cooperative values that are important to participants, recognise the two logics used by research volunteers, and avoid rigidity. Agility may be favoured by tiered consent combined with strong oversight mechanisms; this approach requires evaluation. (shrink)

: Catholic teaching has no moral difficulties with research on stem cells derived from adult stem cells or fetal cord blood. The ethical problem comes with embryonic stem cells since their genesis involves the destruction of a human embryo. However, there seems to be significant promise of health benefits from such research. Although Catholic teaching does not permit any destruction of human embryos, the question remains whether researchers in a Catholic institution, or any researchers opposed to destruction of human embryos, (...) could participate in research on cultured embryonic stem cells, or whether a Catholic institution could use any therapy that ultimately results from such research. This position paper examines how such research could be conducted legitimately in a Catholic institution by using an ethical analysis involving a narrative context, the nature of the moral act, and the principle of material cooperation, along with references to significant ethical assessments. It also offers tentative guidelines that could be used by a Catholic institution in implementing such research. (shrink)

I Deliberation, Practical Syllogisms , and Intuition. Introduction Aristotle's views on moral reasoning are a difficult and much disputed subject. ...

This paper examines what it is for a condition to be a disease. It falls into two sections. In the first I examine the best existing account of disease (as proposed by Christopher Boorse) and argue that it must be rejected. In the second I outline a more acceptable account of disease. According to this account, by disease we mean a condition that it is a bad thing to have, that is such that we consider the afflicted person to have (...) been unlucky, and that can potentially be medically treated. All three criteria must be fulfilled for a condition to be a disease. The criterion that for a condition to be a disease it must be a bad thing is required to distinguish the biologically different from the diseased. The claim that the sufferer must be unlucky is needed to distinguish diseases from conditions that are unpleasant but normal, for example teething. Finally, the claim that for a condition to be a disease it must be potentially medically treatable is needed to distinguish diseases from other types of misfortune, for example economic problems and legal problems. (shrink)

Computability theory originated with the seminal work of Gödel, Church, Turing, Kleene and Post in the 1930s. This theory includes a wide spectrum of topics, such as the theory of reducibilities and their degree structures, computably enumerable sets and their automorphisms, and subrecursive hierarchy classifications. Recent work in computability theory has focused on Turing definability and promises to have far-reaching mathematical, scientific, and philosophical consequences. Written by a leading researcher, Computability Theory provides a concise, comprehensive, and authoritative introduction to contemporary (...) computability theory, techniques, and results. The basic concepts and techniques of computability theory are placed in their historical, philosophical and logical context. This presentation is characterized by an unusual breadth of coverage and the inclusion of advanced topics not to be found elsewhere in the literature at this level. The book includes both the standard material for a first course in computability and more advanced looks at degree structures, forcing, priority methods, and determinacy. The final chapter explores a variety of computability applications to mathematics and science. Computability Theory is an invaluable text, reference, and guide to the direction of current research in the field. Nowhere else will you find the techniques and results of this beautiful and basic subject brought alive in such an approachable and lively way. (shrink)

Classifying Madness (Springer, 2005) concerns philosophical problems with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, more commonly known as the D.S.M. The D.S.M. is published by the American Psychiatric Association and aims to list and describe all mental disorders. The first half of Classifying Madness asks whether the project of constructing a classification of mental disorders that reflects natural distinctions makes sense. Chapters examine the nature of mental illness, and also consider whether mental disorders fall into natural kinds. The (...) second half of the book addresses epistemic worries. Even supposing a natural classification system to be possible in principle, there may be reasons to be suspicious of the categories included in the D.S.M. I examine the extent to which the D.S.M. depends on psychiatric theory, and look at how it has been shaped by social and financial factors. I aim to be critical of the D.S.M. without being antagonistic towards it. Ultimately, however, I am forced to conclude that although the D.S.M. is of immense practical importance, it is unlikely to come to reflect the natural structure of mental disorders. (shrink)

is a term introduced by Ian Hacking to refer to the kinds of people—child abusers, pregnant teenagers, the unemployed—studied by the human sciences. Hacking argues that classifying and describing human kinds results in feedback, which alters the very kinds under study. This feedback results in human kinds having histories totally unlike those of natural kinds (such as gold, electrons and tigers), leading Hacking to conclude that human kinds are radically unlike natural kinds. Here I argue that Hacking's argument fails and (...) that he has not demonstrated that human kinds cannot be natural kinds. Introduction Natural kinds Hacking's feedback mechanisms 3.1 Cultural feedback 3.2 Conceptual feedback. (shrink)

This collection of Habermas's recent essays on philosophical topics continues the analysis begun in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In a short introductory essay, he outlines the sources of twentieth-century philosophizing, its major themes, and the range of current debates. The remainder of the essays can be seen as his contribution to these debates.Habermas's essay on George Herbert Mead is a focal point of the book. In it he sketches a postmetaphysical, intersubjective approach to questions of individuation and subjectivity. In (...) other essays, he develops his distinctive, communications-theoretic approach to questions of meaning and validity. The book as a whole expands on his earlier efforts to define a middle ground between nostalgic revivals of metaphysical conceptions of reason and radical deconstructions of reason. Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt.The Essays: The Horizon of Modernity is Shifting. Metaphysics after Kant. Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking. Toward a Critique of the Theory of Meaning. Peirce and Communication. The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices. Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead's Theory of Subjectivity. Philosophy and Science as Literature? (shrink)

NEITHER in the scholarly nor in the philosophical literature on Aristotle does his account of friendship occupy a very prominent place. I suppose this is partly, though certainly not wholly, to be explained by the fact that the modern ethical theories with which Aristotle’s might demand comparison hardly make room for the discussion of any parallel phenomenon. Whatever else friendship is, it is, at least typically, a personal relationship freely, even spontaneously, entered into, and ethics, as modern theorists tend to (...) conceive it, deals rather with the ways in which people are required to regard, and behave toward, one another, than with the organization of their private affairs. To the extent, then, that one shares this modern outlook one will tend to neglect, or treat merely as an historical curiosity, Aristotle’s efforts to define friendship and to place it within the framework of human eudaimonia, the theory of which is central to moral philosophy as he understands it. Yet in the Nicomachean Ethics the two books on φιλία make up nearly a fifth of the whole, and this seems to me a fair measure of the importance of this subject to the complete understanding both of Aristotle’s overall moral theory and even of many of the more circumscribed topics to which so much scholarly and philosophical attention has been devoted. If, as I suggest, the failure of commentators to appreciate its importance is partly the effect of distortions produced by the moral outlook that has predominated in modern moral philosophy, the careful study of these books may help to free us from constricting prejudices and perhaps even make it possible to discover in Aristotle a plausible and suggestive alternative to the theories constructed on the narrower base characteristic of recent times. (shrink)

I discuss the division of the soul in plato's "republic". i concentrate on the arguments and illustrative examples given in book iv, but i treat the descriptions of different types of person in viii-ix and elsewhere as further constituents of a single, coherent theory. on my interpretation plato distinguishes three basic kinds of motivation which he claims all human beings regularly experience in some degree. reason is itself the immediate source of certain desires. in addition, there are appetitive and also--quite (...) distinct from either of the other two--competitive motivations. (shrink)

In this article, I compare and evaluate R. D. Laing and A. Esterson’s account of schizophrenia as developed in Sanity, Madness and the Family, social models of disability, and accounts of extended mental disorder. These accounts claim that some putative disorders should not be thought of as reflecting biological or psychological dysfunction within the afflicted individual, but instead as external problems. In this article, I consider the grounds on which such claims might be supported. I argue that problems should not (...) be located within an individual putative patient in cases where there is some acceptable test environment in which there is no problem. A number of cases where such an argument can show that there is no internal disorder are discussed. I argue, however, that Laing and Esterson’s argument—that schizophrenia is not within diagnosed patients—does not work. The problem with their argument is that they fail to show that the diagnosed women in their study function adequately in any environment. (shrink)

Paradigmatically, natural kinds are the kinds of thing or stuff that are classified by the natural sciences. The periodic table provides perhaps the best example of the potential importance of natural kinds for science. In the philosophy of psychiatry, debates over whether mental disorders can be natural kinds emerge because kinds of mental disorder are manifestly different from chemical kinds in various ways. While chemical kinds are precise, psychiatric kinds are fuzzy. While chemical kinds are objective, the identification of psychiatric (...) kinds is value-laden. Psychiatric classification involves classifying people, and unlike chemical elements, those people can respond to being classified in various ways. This chapter goes through these differences, one-by-one, and argues that despite them, mental disorders may be natural kinds. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently revived the study of the ancient Greek topics of virtue and the virtues—justice, honesty, temperance, friendship, courage, and so on as qualities of mind and character belonging to individual people. But one issue at the center of Greek moral theory seems to have dropped out of consideration. This is the question of the unity of virtue, the unity of the virtues. Must anyone who has one of these qualities have others of them as well, indeed all of (...) them—all the ones that really do deserve to be counted as virtues? Even further, is there really no set of distinct and separate virtuous qualities at all, but at bottom only a single one—so that the person who has this single condition of “virtue” is entitled also to the further descriptions “honest” and “well-controlled” and “just” and “friendly” and “courageous” and “fostering” and “supportive,” and so on, as distinguishable aspects or immediate effects of his unitary “virtue”? (shrink)

David E. Cooper; I*—The Presidential Address: Analytical and Continental Philosophy, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, P.

This paper addresses an apparent tension between a familiar claim about meaning in general, to the effect that the meaning of anything owes to its place, ultimately, within a ‘form of life’, and a claim, also familiar, about the meaning of human life itself, to the effect that this must be something ‘beyond the human’. How can life itself be meaningful if meaning is a matter of a relationship to life? After elaborating and briefly defending these two claims, two ways (...) of amending and thereby reconciling them are considered and rejected. These ways involve either spiriting away the issue of life's meaning or encouraging unwelcome metaphysical views. The author then argues that, rather than remove the tension between the two claims, each should be viewed as expressing an aspect of a delicate metaphysical position. This position is distinguished from ones, like transcendental idealism and constructivism, with which it might be confused, and is then related to Daoist and Zen thought and to the later philosophy of Heidegger. Crucial to the position is the proposal that the ‘beyond the human’ which enables life to be meaningful is both ineffable and ‘intimate’ with life itself. (shrink)

British equality law protections for sex and gender reassignment have grown fraught as activists tussle over legal and social categories of gender, gender transitioning, and sex. This article considers the future of gender-related equality protections in relation to ‘decertification’—an imagined reform that would detach sex and gender from legal personhood. One criticism of decertification is that de-formalising gender membership would undermine equality law protections. This article explores how gender-based equality law could operate in conditions of decertification, drawing on legal thoughtways (...) developed for two other protected characteristics in equality law—religion and belief, and disability—to explore the legal responses and imaginaries that these two grounds make available. Religious equality law focuses on beliefs, communities, and practices, deemed to be stable, multivarious, and subject to deep personal commitment. Disability equality law focuses on embodied disadvantage, approached as social, relational, and fluctuating. While these two equality frameworks have considerable limitations, they offer legal thoughtways for gender oriented to both its hierarchies and its expression, including as disavowal. (shrink)

The DSM is the main classification of mental disorders used by psychiatrists in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. Although widely used, the DSM has come in for fierce criticism, with many commentators believing it to be conceptually flawed in a variety of ways. This paper assesses some of these philosophical worries. The first half of the paper asks whether the project of constructing a classification of mental disorders that ‘cuts nature at the joints’ makes sense. What is (...) mental disorder? Are types of mental disorder natural kinds (that is, are the distinctions between them objective and of fundamental theoretical importance, as are, say, the distinctions between the chemical elements)? The second half of the paper addresses epistemic worries. Even if types of mental disorder are natural kinds there may be reason to doubt that the DSM will come to reflect their natural structure. In particular, I examine the extent to which the DSM is theory-laden, and look at how it has been shaped by social and financial factors. Ultimately, I conclude that although the DSM is of immense practical importance it is not likely to become the best possible classification of mental disorders. (shrink)

Increasingly, Deaf activists claim that it can be good to be Deaf. Still, much of the hearing world remains unconvinced, and continues to think of deafness in negative terms. I examine this debate and argue that to determine whether it can be good to be deaf it is necessary to examine each claimed advantage or disadvantage of being deaf, and then to make an overall judgment regarding the net cost or benefit. On the basis of such a survey I conclude (...) that being deaf may plausibly be a good thing for some deaf people but not for others. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ImagesDiana Cooper lives and works in New York City. She received her BA from Harvard College and MFA from Hunter College, and has been the recipient of a Rome Prize (2003–04), a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2000), and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2000).Cooper has exhibited extensively both in the United States and abroad. She has had solo shows at Postmasters Gallery in New York (...) City; the Drawing Room and Hales Gallery in London; Chapter in Cardiff; Staubkohler Galerie in Zürich; Carl Berg Gallery in Los Angeles; and Numark Gallery in Washington DC. She has participated in numerous group shows at venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria; the Brooklyn Museum; the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; the Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen; the Sharjah Museum of Art, UAE; the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs; and PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City.In 2007 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland will devote a major exhibition to her work.Please contact Postmasters Gallery for further [email protected] www.postmastersart.com Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1 Diana Cooper Speedway (front) (2002). Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2 Diana Cooper Speedway (back) (2002). Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 3 Diana Cooper And I Couldn’t Find You (1998). Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 4 Diana Cooper And I Couldn’t Find You (1998). Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 5 Diana Cooper Emerger (detail) (2005–06). Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 6 Diana Cooper My Eye Travels (2001–2004). Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 7 Diana Cooper Push Gently (2002). Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 8 Diana Cooper Swarm (2003–05). Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 9 Diana Cooper The Black One (1997). Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 10 Diana Cooper Mechanical Cloud (2004–05). Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 11 Diana Cooper Moving Targets (2003).Copyright © 2005 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In 1924, not quite two years after receiving his doctorate from the University of Vienna, Eric Voegelin was named a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fellow and thus given the opportunity to pursue postdoctoral studies in the United States. For the next twenty-four months, Voegelin worked with some of the most creative scholars in America and at several of the country's great universities, an experience that undoubtedly influenced his scholarly and personal perspectives throughout his life. A more immediate result was the (...) publication in 1928 of _On the Form of the American Mind,_ the young philosopher's first major work, in which his acute perceptions and analyses combine with a conceptual vocabulary struggling to find its own coherence and form. Voegelin begins his inquiry into the form of the American mind with a complex discussion of the concepts of time and existence in European and American philosophy and continues with an extended interpretation of George Santayana, a study of the Puritan mystic Jonathan Edwards, a presentation on Anglo-American jurisprudence, and a consideration of the historian, economist, and political scientist John R. Commons. Although admitting that this diversity of themes seems only loosely connected," Voegelin demonstrates the actual overall unity of these various subjects: each concerns linguistic expressions of a theoretical nature. Analysis of _On the Form of the American Mind_ indicates that Voegelin integrated the approaches of _Lebensphilosophie_ into what Georg Misch called the "philosophical combination of anthropology and history," which characterized contemporary trends within the discourse of the _Geisteswissenschaften_ and finally resulted in a theoretical paradigm of philosophical anthropology. Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper provide access to this brilliant study with their two-part introduction. The first part considers _On the Form of the American Mind_ in the context of methodological debates ongoing in Germany at the time Voegelin was writing the book; the second describes Voegelin's American experience and compares his work with similar studies written during the post-World War I period. (shrink)

It is a common complaint against moral philosophers that their abstract theorising bears little relation to the practical problems of everyday life. Professor Braithwaite believes that this criticism need not be inevitable. With the help of the Theory of Games he shows how arbitration is possible between two neighbours, a jazz trumpeter and a classical pianist, whose performances are a source of mutual discord. The solution of the problem in the lecture is geometrical, and is based on the formal analogy (...) between the logic of the situation and the geometry of a parabola. But an appendix provides the alternative algebraic treatment of a general two-person collaboration situation. (shrink)

Prior to the productive encounters that can be staged between Emmanuel Levinas’sthought and cinema at the level of reception, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne introducehis philosophy to their filmmaking at its moment of inception.1Luc Dardenne’s diary Audos de nos images documents their filmmaking from 1991 to 2005, and isinterspersed with brief but erudite references to Levinas’s work. While Levinasianthinking is one among many cited influences in this text, which also features quotationsfrom the writings of novelists, poets, and other philosophers, along with (...) detailedreferences to other filmmakers, his work is a signal point of inspiration and ethicalaspiration for their filmmaking. The Dardenne brothers seek permanently to unsettlereceived ideas of what cinema is. In this, their approach is bound up explicitly, but notexclusively, with the ethical underpinnings of Levinas’s thought. Levinas’s reformulationof ethics as first philosophy creates a fissure at the root of the philosophy of being. TheDardennes’ films, in turn, perform a Levinasian-inspired challenge to the being ofcinema. At its most extreme moments, to kill or not to kill is the key question that theircinema raises. This tacit rewriting of the interrogative opening to Hamlet’s infamous soliloquy, shifts attention away from a self-centered concern with being or non-being,and towards the survival of the other. The passage from being to non-being, whichwould involve the death of the subject, is displaced here by a preoccupation with killing,or failing to kill, someone else. This particular move from dying to killing lies at the heartof the Dardennes’ mortal ethics. (shrink)

For the past two decades, the humanistic disciplines have been dominated by poststructuralist theories and, more recently, a not unrelated curricular philosophy best defined as hardline multiculturalism, much discussed and often misunderstood. When linked together, they form an internal contradiction that is the moral challenge of liberal education today. Traditional political alignments cannot explain current divisions among the humanities professoriate. Ideological quarrels only obscure a deeper moral debate between an ascendant poststructuralism and a resurgent liberal humanism. It is important to (...) reappropriate liberal humanism in an effort to revitalize humanistic inquiry and renew its place in creative public discourse, and check a danger posed by poststructuralism's fascination with power and epistemological relativism which threaten to erase the ethical border between education and indoctrination. (shrink)

Any account of knowledge has to take account both of the contribution of the world and the contribution of man. Every human endeavour, every activity, every art, every science is a product of a unique interaction between man and the world. Where man is most passive, he merely reflects and reports the world; this is pure discovery, if it ever exists. Where man is most active, the world's contribution lies merely in the provision of the raw material; this is pure (...) invention, if it ever exists. All the arts, all the sciences can be ordered in a continuous array or spectrum ranging from pure discovery to pure invention. That they are all at some point on this continuum gives them a common but fragile thread, justifying our thinking and talking of the unity of the arts and sciences. Philosophy is neither pure discovery nor pure invention; it bears resemblances to both a science and an art. In this paper I propose to try to give reasons why we should regard the philosopher as an artist and philosophy as an art; or, at any rate, I shall try to show that there is an Art of Philosophy. (shrink)

This paper aims to strengthen the liberal theory of public justification defended by John Rawls and his followers, by arguing that advocates of political liberalism can have more to say about how citizens can come to endorse and give priority to liberal justice than has been commonly supposed. The political conception of the person, complete with the two powers of moral personality, contains within it all the resources we need to illustrate why reasonable persons would have at least one good (...) reason to endorse and uphold liberal justice, and to make it regulative of their pursuit of their conceptions of the good. This is achieved by citizens’ feelings of care and affective concern toward their higher-order interests—their sense of justice, and their conception of the good. (shrink)

There is a long history of controversy in ecology over the role of competition in determining patterns of distribution and abundance, and over the significance of the mathematical modeling of competitive interactions. This paper examines the controversy. Three kinds of considerations have been involved at one time or another during the history of this debate. There has been dispute about the kinds of regularities ecologists can expect to find, about the significance of evolutionary considerations for ecological inquiry, and about the (...) empirical credentials of theoretical studies of competition. Each of these elements is examined with an eye toward gaining philosophical clarification of the issues involved. In the process, certain shortcomings of contemporary philosophical theories are revealed. In particular, I argue that plausibility arguments based on background considerations are an important part of the model building tradition, but that current accounts of the structure and evaluation of scientific theories do little to illuminate this side of theoretical ecology. (shrink)

This book argues for a radically different approach to traditional and important problems of moral philoosphy. The book discusses three theses; the diversity of moralities and moral judgements, their normativesness, and their possible rationality.