One of us is a teacher educator (Margaret) and the other is a prospective teacher (Andrew). In our experiences within these roles, we increasingly see and hear little educative concern for the epistemological question "What counts as knowledge?" alongside the ontological question "What does it mean to be a teacher in classrooms?" Instead of grappling with these questions, curricular enactment in many classrooms proceeds through tightly controlled conditions with criteria that insist on pre-determined management modes with little time or (...) space for teachers to ask what ought to count as knowledge or what teaching for student understanding might feel and look like in practice. At the same time, many teachers are .. (shrink)

Embodiment as a compelling way to rethink the nature of teaching and learning asks participants to see fundamentally what is at stake within teaching/learning situations, encountering ourselves and our relations to others/otherness. Drawing predominantly on the thinking of John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty the body's role within teaching and learning is enfleshed through the concrete experiences of one middle-school science teacher attempting to teach for greater student inquiry. Personal, embodied understandings of the lived terms of inquiry enable the science teacher (...) to seek out the lived terms of inquiry in her classroom alongside students. Theories are taken up as working notions for the teacher to examine as philosophical/theoretical/pragmatic processes to be worked with, and concomitantly, working as dynamic practice at the core of the teacher's thinking and experiences. The theory/practice conjuncture of inquiry is thus enfleshed, gaining embodied understandings. Embodiment as the medium enhancing comprehension is evidenced as holding worthy implications for teacher education. Teacher education must fall into trust with the body's role in teaching and learning. (shrink)

An Innovative Learning Centre within a Faculty of Education provides the forum to study and give lived expression to the rhythmic workings of experience through documenting a Maker Movement Day for practicing educators. Dewey’s commitment to “the idea that there is an intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education” is at the heart of our Maker Day.1 The contemporary Maker Movement’s emphasis on studio-based learning attends to the experiences of meaning making from within the experiences (...) themselves.2 The rootedness of this thinking across time and traditions can be traced to many interested in revealing the experiential terrain.. (shrink)

Warming temperatures in the circumpolar north have led to new discussions around climate-driven frontiers for agriculture. In this paper, we situate northern food systems in Canada within the corporate food regime and settler colonialism, and contend that an expansion of the conventional, industrial agriculture paradigm into the Canadian North would have significant socio-cultural and ecological consequences. We propose agroecology as an alternative framework uniquely accordant with northern contexts. In particular, we suggest that there are elements of agroecology that are already (...) being practiced in northern Indigenous communities as part of traditional hunter-gatherer food systems. We present a framework for agroecology in the North and discuss its components of environmental stewardship, economies, knowledge, social dimensions and governance using examples from the Dehcho region, Northwest Territories, Canada. Finally, we discuss several challenges and cautions in creating policy around agroecology in the North and encourage community-based research in developing and testing this framework moving forward. (shrink)

In this profoundly theological reflection on illness, healing, and the doctor-patient relationship, pediatrician Margaret Mohrmann bridges the sometimes disparate worlds of medicine and faith, of high technology and ultimate concern. Drawing on her two decades of experience treating children who suffer from disease and dysfunction, Mohrmann movingly reveals the temptations of idolatry that beset our understanding of health and life, the intrinsic connectedness underlying all medical encounters, and the difficulties and riches of using scripture as a moral resource. In (...) clear, accessible language Mohrmann emphasizes the importance of interpreting the lives of the suffering as meaningful and ongoing stories - stories that require all of us to respond in healing ways. Uncovering insights from such diverse sources as the apostle Paul, Alasdair MacIntyre and Flannery O'Connor, she suggests that what is required for a truly human life is not the absence of pain, but the presence of others. Both pastoral and prophetic, Medicine as Ministry is a challenge to rethink the purposes of health care - and to better discern the human condition. (shrink)

In this interview, Margaret A. Simons describes her path to philosophy and existentialism, her struggles in the male-dominated field in the 1960s and 1970s, and her political activism in the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. She also discusses her encounters with Simone de Beauvoir and Beauvoir’s refusal to own her philosophical originality, suggesting that Beauvoir may have adopted a more conventional narrative of a female intellectual to circumvent the public’s resistance to her radical ideas in the 1950s.

Simone de Beauvoir’s early enthusiasm for the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941)—denied in her 1958 autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter—is a surprising discovery in her 1927 handwritten student diary, as I reported in 1999 and explored at more length in 2003 (Simons 1999; Simons 2003). Discovered by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir after Beauvoir’s death in 1986 and now housed in the Bibliothèque nationale, Beauvoir’s student diary first appeared in print in the 2006 volume, Diary of a Philosophy Student: (...) 1926-27, followed in 2008 by the French publication, Cahiers de jeunesse: 1926-1930. Since my 1999 analysis of the 1927 diary, the publication of the 1926 diary and other posthumously discovered texts has deepened and complicated the evidence of Bergson’s influence.1 In this chapter, I propose to take up and expand upon my earlier analyses in the light of this new evidence, arguing that Beauvoir’s methodological turn to the description of immediate experience, especially her method of writing philosophy in literature and her lifelong interest in describing the subjective experience of time, drew upon Bergson’s philosophy before her first encounter with Husserl’s phenomenology which may have come as early as 1927; that her concept of bad faith and interest in exposing distortions in perception and thinking, as in the chapters in The Second Sex on myths about women, drew upon Bergson’s philosophy long before she had read Marx; and that her earliest formulation of the problem of the Other drew upon Bergson’s distinction between the “social self and the deep self,” two years before she met Jean-Paul Sartre and two decades before she first read Hegel’s Phenomenology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes”Margaret A. Boden (bio)The theoretical work of Wright, Sloman, and Beaudoin is a significant contribution to our understanding of the nature and function of emotions, and potentially also to therapeutic method. Their message that emotions, as controlling and scheduling mechanisms, are essential to any complex intelligent system (that is: one with multiple and potentially conflicting motives, and situated in a (...) changing and unfriendly world) is important. It encourages cognitive psychologists to regard emotions as a central aspect of intelligence, not to sideline (or even to forget) them, as is too often done. In addition, it shows—at least in general outline—how emotions might be understood in computational terms.Critics of computational psychology too often assume that emotions and motivation must lie outside its scope. This is not so, although it is true that relatively little computational work has been done in this area. Interestingly, the very early days of AI saw a comparatively high proportion of models of multiple goal-seeking, affective processes, and even personality (see, for example, the papers in Tomkins and Messick 1963). But, inevitably, these were so crude as to be almost useless in illuminating the nature of emotion and motivation. As AI-workers and their psychologist colleagues found to their cost, it is difficult enough to model the pursuit of one goal, never mind the pursuit of several mutually conflicting goals. Accordingly, personality and emotion soon faded from the scene as preferred topics of computational research—but not before I too had argued that they could, in principle, be so addressed (Boden 1965; 1972).I suggested—in the sketchiest terms—that the concepts of William McDougall’s personality theory could be interpreted in a computational fashion (Boden 1965; 1972). His concept of sentiment, for example, marks what Wright et al. call “goal-sets,” and his master sentiment of self-regard relates to the descriptive and normative aspects of the self-image to which they draw our attention. He even described emotions as (conscious) control mechanisms, enabling the subject to monitor the incipient excitement of distinct types of motivation, and (sometimes) to adjust behavior so as to facilitate or inhibit the otherwise-inevitable response. What the target-authors have done is to put subtle and sophisticated computational flesh onto these minimalist theoretical bones.McDougall himself, of course, will be turning in his grave. He saw affect as partly conscious (as well as dispositional), and argued that consciousness—and purposive behavior too—cannot possibly [End Page 135] be given a mechanistic, or physicalist, explanation. Despite Wright et al.’s persuasive anti-reductionist remarks about the necessity for highly abstract (psychological) levels of explanation, he would not have accepted that such explanations could be computationally grounded. He even insisted that the neurophysiological ground of goal-seeking behavior involved a special sort of energy, or horme, intrinsically directed to specific ends. Presumably, no professional reader today would agree with McDougall on that point. But many may agree with him about consciousness. And many more will insist that consciousness is a crucial aspect—perhaps the crucial aspect—of emotion. Such critics will doubtless point out that our three authors explicitly “factor out,” or refuse to discuss, consciousness as such.Wright et al.’s rhetorical reserve on this point is defensible on two counts. First, even though emotions do involve conscious sensations, the dispositional and control aspects of affect are at least as important. Indeed, it is evident from the quotations from individuals reacting to bereavement that people often describe the phenomenology of grief in terms of these sorts of factors, rather than in a “purely qualitative” fashion (whatever that might be). Even so, these dispositional aspects of emotion are often overlooked, or regarded as less significant than the conscious phenomenology. And second, theoretical psychologists in general sideline consciousness: either they ignore it entirely, or they take it for granted philosophically and ask about the conditions under which it appears or disappears. They are well advised to do so, since we do not yet understand this concept (more accurately: this mixed bag of related concepts) at the philosophical level. Even a journal whose title has “Philosophy” as its leading... (shrink)

A collected volume of essays by renowned ethicist Margaret Farley, including articles previously published in scholarly periodicals as well as unpublished lectures and spiritual writings. Essays from throughout Farley's long scholarly career, both published and unpublished, focusing on the intersection of ethics and public life. Farley's sermons as well as her essays on ecclesiology and feminism are also included, expanding this into a far-ranging summary of her interests and contributions to theology over the past four decades. The collection is (...) edited by Jamie Manson, Farley's former student from Yale and current book review editor for the National Catholic Reporter. Both an overview of and an introduction to the work of the church's leading ethicists, this book will be a valuable resource for students of public ethics, sexual ethics, and the ethics of relationships. Some of these essays had an important impact on their filed (for example, "Celibacy Under the Sign of the Cross" is still used in seminaries and theologates), while others will help round out our understanding of this important theologian whose students are professors and ministers all over the nation. (shrink)

In a compelling chronicle of her search to understand Beauvoir's philosophy in The Second Sex, Margaret A. Simons offers a unique perspective on Beauvoir's wide-ranging contribution to twentieth-century thought. She details the discovery of the origins of Beauvoir's existential philosophy in her handwritten diary from 1927; uncovers evidence of the sexist exclusion of Beauvoir from the philosophical canon; reveals evidence that the African-American writer Richard Wright provided Beauvoir with the theoretical model of oppression that she used in The Second (...) Sex; shows the influence of The Second Sex in transforming Sartre's philosophy and in laying the theoretical foundations of radical feminism; and addresses feminist issues of racism, motherhood, and lesbian identity. Simons also draws on her experience as a Women's Liberation organizer as she witnessed how women used The Second Sex in defining the foundations of radical feminism. Bringing together her work as both activist and scholar, Simons offers a highly original contribution to the renaissance of Beauvoir scholarship. (shrink)

An essential work for anyone interested in the creativity of the human mind, "The Creative Mind" has been updated to include recent developments in artificial ...

There are vast ethical, legal, and social differences between natural death and euthanasia. In Death Talk Margaret Somerville argues that legalizing euthanasia would cause irreparable harm to society's value of respect for human life, which in secular societies is carried primarily by the institutions of law and medicine. Death has always been a central focus of the discussion that we engage in as individuals and as a society in searching for meaning in life. Moreover, we accommodate the inevitable reality (...) of death into the living of our lives by discussing it, that is, through "death talk." Until the last twenty years this discussion occurred largely as part of the practice of organized religion. Today, in industrialized western societies, the euthanasia debate provides a context for such discussion and is part of the search for a new societal-cultural paradigm. Seeking to balance the "death talk" articulated in the euthanasia debate with "life talk," Somerville identifies the very serious harms for individuals and society that would result from accepting euthanasia. A sense of the unfolding euthanasia debate is captured through the inclusion of Somerville's responses to or commentaries on several other authors' contributions. (shrink)

This title explores how human commitments, rooted in the story of God's love, are acts of free choice and love. Farley reflects on the concrete experiences of people who strive to be faithful to what they have claimed to love: 'My concern is to name something that I think is, after all, common to all of our lives - an experience, a reality, perhaps a problem, a challenge, something that is sometimes a source of joy, sometimes a cause of tragedy'. (...) Farley explores the nature nad meaning of commitment as it is played out in our lives, addressing love, fidelity, a sense of obligation, and covenant. (shrink)

The applications of Artificial Intelligence lie all around us; in our homes, schools and offices, in our cinemas, in art galleries and - not least - on the Internet. The results of Artificial Intelligence have been invaluable to biologists, psychologists, and linguists in helping to understand the processes of memory, learning, and language from a fresh angle.As a concept, Artificial Intelligence has fuelled and sharpened the philosophical debates concerning the nature of the mind, intelligence, and the uniqueness of human beings. (...) Margaret A. Boden reviews the philosophical and technological challenges raised by Artificial Intelligence, considering whether programs could ever be really intelligent, creative or even conscious, and shows how the pursuit of Artificial Intelligence has helped us to appreciate how human and animal minds are possible. (shrink)

Informed by practices of women's activism in India, this book proposes a feminist social justice framework to address the wide range of issues women face globally, including economic exploitation, sexist oppression, racial, ethnic, and caste oppression, and cultural imperialism. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book argues that current frameworks for global justice, such as human rights, need to be supplemented by a relational framework that includes resistance to economic exploitation and social oppression.

This chapter is a memoir of my efforts to solve the puzzle of Beauvoir's denials of her work in philosophy including: an account of my interviews with Beauvoir and my findings that The Second Sex influenced Sartre's later philosophy; Kate and Edward Fullbrook's discovery of clues in the posthumously published texts leading to their solution of the puzzle; and my work on the new puzzle of Beauvoir's misrepresentation in her Memoirs of her early work in philosophy and relationship with Sartre, (...) including their 1929 debate in the Luxembourg Gardens that allegedly drove her out of philosophy. (shrink)

This article seeks to understand the social and cultural factors that led to the introduction of music and art education in public schools, a process that began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Based on archival material, including institutional catalogues, school board reports, magazine articles, and tracts, I demonstrate that music and art held varied meanings in this period, one of the most important of which was denominational competition. One major element in a nationwide promotion of the arts (...) in the mid-nineteenth century was the revitalized Protestant contest for religious adherents in the wake of Catholic immigration. A second important, and often overlooked, aspect of music and art education was its vocational implications. Although some historians have relegated women's study of music and art to the reproduction of elite status, a significant aspect of these studies was vocational. In a world in which limited occupations were open to women, skill in music and art expanded women's options and, for some, made financial independence possible. In addition, although many of the factors involved in the rise of music and art education?such as nationalism, refinement, and health?were nongendered and applied to both women and men, the repercussions of these programs were quite gendered and may add to our understanding of the process by which the teaching force was feminized. (shrink)

Language does not simply symbolize a situation or object which is already there in advance; it makes possible the existence or the appearance of that situation or object for it is a part of the mechanism whereby that situation or object is created. (Mead 1934, p. 78).

Developing a boundary-crossing ethics by paying attention to our stories, myths, and moral intuition.

Some readers may have seen the re-runs, on BBC-TV recently, of the ‘Face to Face’ interviews done by John Freeman in the 1960s. One of these was with the singer Adam Faith, then a startlingly beautiful young man with the grace to be amazed at being chosen to be sandwiched between Martin Luther King and J. K. Galbraith. The re-runs were accompanied, where possible, with a further interview with the same person. What I found almost as startling as his lost (...) beauty was Faith's referring to himself-when-young in the third person. After watching the rerun interview, the now middle-aged man commented to Freeman, on several occasions, that ‘He said such-and-such’, ‘He told you so-and-so’, and the like. (shrink)

As part of Delmar's Core Introductory Nursing Textbook Series, this text examines the issues that are at the very heart of today's health care delivery system. By examining theories, models, and principles that served as guides for ethically sound behavior, the text flows from the personal level, to the professional, and finally to the global domain. Discussion of pricipled behavior on the personal level includes values clarification, moral development, and a discussion of how this behavior affects a nurse's everyday life. (...) The section related to prefessional and legal issues in nursing includes discussion of autonomy, authority, accountability, codes of practice, scholarship issues, and practice issues related to health care providers, systems within which nurses work, technology, and patient self-determination. There is an examination of global issues that affect nursing, including political, economic, social, gender, transcultural, and spiritual issues. Acknowledging changing trends in the health care field, this book is offered as a tool for student nurses to use in the process of learning to make sound choices and act in principled ways. (shrink)

What is the mind? How does it work? How does it influence behavior? Some psychologists hope to answer such questions in terms of concepts drawn from computer science and artificial intelligence. They test their theories by modeling mental processes in computers. This book shows how computer models are used to study many psychological phenomena--including vision, language, reasoning, and learning. It also shows that computer modeling involves differing theoretical approaches. Computational psychologists disagree about some basic questions. For instance, should the mind (...) be modeled by digital computers, or by parallel-processing systems more like brains? Do computer programs consist of meaningless patterns, or do they embody (and explain) genuine meaning? (shrink)