The idea of culture has been subject to critical debate in anthropology during the past decade as the result of a shift in emphasis from the bounded local culture to transnational cultural flows. But at the very same time that cultural mobility is being emphasized by anthropologists, the people they study are recasting culture as a place of belonging as they construct local identities. Siting Culture argues that it is only through rich ethnographic studies that anthropologists may explore the significance (...) of place in the global space of relations which mold the lives of people throughout the world. By examining the concept of culture through case studies from Europe, Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean, it probes the methodological and theoretical implications of the divergent scholarly and popular concepts of culture. (shrink)

Is arguing over ontology a mistake? A recent proposal by Karen Bennett suggests that some metaphysical disputes, such as those over constitution and composition, can be dismissed on epistemic grounds. Given that both sides in a dispute try to minimize the differences between them, there are no good metaphysical grounds for choosing between them. In this paper, I expand on her epistemic dismissivism, arguing that given the Quinean conception of the task and method of metaphysics, we are warranted in (...) believing that all ontological disputes will end in a draw, even if they have not yet done so. By a draw, I mean that while both sides in a dispute are genuinely disagreeing about what there is and there are still moves open to them, there are no moves remaining that will advance the discourse further. (shrink)

Drawing on insights from causal theories of reference, teleosemantics, and state space semantics, a theory of naturalized mental representation. In A Mark of the Mental, Karen Neander considers the representational power of mental states—described by the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn as the “second hardest puzzle” of philosophy of mind. The puzzle at the heart of the book is sometimes called “the problem of mental content,” “Brentano's problem,” or “the problem of intentionality.” Its motivating mystery is how neurobiological states can (...) have semantic properties such as meaning or reference. Neander proposes a naturalistic account for sensory-perceptual representations. Neander draws on insights from state-space semantics, causal theories of reference, and teleosemantic theories. She proposes and defends an intuitive, theoretically well-motivated but highly controversial thesis: sensory-perceptual systems have the function to produce inner state changes that are the analogs of as well as caused by their referents. Neander shows that the three main elements—functions, causal-information relations, and relations of second-order similarity—complement rather than conflict with each other. After developing an argument for teleosemantics by examining the nature of explanation in the mind and brain sciences, she develops a theory of mental content and defends it against six main content-determinacy challenges to a naturalized semantics. (shrink)

Recently much has been made of the grounding relation, and of the idea that it is intimately tied to fundamentality. If A grounds B, then A is more fundamental than B (though not vice versa ), and A is ungrounded if and only if it is fundamental full stop—absolutely fundamental. But here is a puzzle: is grounding itself absolutely fundamental?

The paper is an extended discussion of what I call the ‘dismissive attitude’ towards metaphysical questions. It has three parts. In the first part, I distinguish three quite different versions of dismissivism. I also argue that there is little reason to think that any of these positions is correct about the discipline of metaphysics as a whole; it is entirely possible that some metaphysical disputes should be dismissed and others should not be. Doing metametaphysics properly requires doing metaphysics first. I (...) then put two particular disputes on the table to be examined in the rest of the paper: the dispute over whether composite objects exist, and the dispute about whether distinct objects can be colocated. In the second part of the paper, I argue against the claim that these disputes are purely verbal disputes. In the third part of the paper, I present a new version of dismissivism, and argue that it is probably the correct view about the two disputes in question. They are not verbal disputes, and the discussion about them to date has not remotely been a waste of time. At this stage, however, our evidence has run out. I argue that neither side of either dispute is simpler than the other, and that the same objections in fact arise against both sides. (For example, the compositional nihilist does not in fact escape the problem of the many, and the one-thinger does not in fact escape the grounding problem.). (shrink)

An outstanding reference source for the wide range of philosophical contributions made by women writing in Europe from about 1560 to 1780. It shows the range of genres and methods used by women writing in these centuries in Europe, thus encouraging an expanded understanding of our historical canon.

David Lewis famously takes mereology ‘to be perfectly understood, unproblematic, and certain". In this chapter, the author proceeds by articulating four theses that Lewis holds about composition. Three of them are familiar; Lewis himself explicitly articulates and relies upon them. The fourth remains implicit, but it is nonetheless important. The four theses include: composition is unique (the same things cannot have two different fusions); composition is unrestricted (any two things whatsoever have a fusion); composition is ontologically innocent (composed entities do (...) not "count" beyond their parts); and composition is unmysterious (it is not problematic to treat it as primitive, and can function in demystifying explanations). The author devotes a section to each thesis: explaining what it says, pointing to the texts that illustrate that Lewis believes it, and explaining why Lewis believes it. Lewis uses the label ‘uniqueness’ and explicitly endorses the thesis. (shrink)

To date, research into socially responsible investment (SRI), and in particular the socially responsible investment funds industry, has focused on whether investing in SRI assets has any differential impact on investor returns. Prior findings generally suggest that, on a risk-adjusted basis, there is no difference in performance between SRI and conventional funds. This result has led to questions about whether SRI funds are really any different from conventional funds. This paper examines whether the portfolio allocation across industry sectors and the (...) stock-picking ability of SRI managers are different when compared to conventional fund managers. The study finds that SRI funds exhibit different industry betas consistent with different portfolio positions, but that these differences vary from year to year. It is also found that there is little difference in stock-picking ability between the two groups of fund managers. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Original and Derived Meaning The Causal‐Historical Theory The Crude Causal Theory The Asymmetric Dependency Theory Teleosemantics Informational semantics.

This innovative critical study reinterprets Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy for the study of modernist and contemporary literature and brings Wittgenstein into literary conversations around problems of difficulty, ethical instruction, and the yearning for transformation. Central to Karen Zumhagen-Yekple͹'s book are her critical readings of key modernist texts by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Throughout, Zumhagen-Yekplé brings to bear an interpretive framework that she derives from Wittgenstein's gnomic "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" (first published in English in 1922, the "annus mirabilis" of (...) modernism), which she treats not as a theory of logic or metaphysics but as a complex mock-theoretical puzzle. The book's final chapter turns to recent fiction by J. M. Coetzee, a living author conscious of his debts both to Wittgenstein and his modernist literary precursors. This book will interest students of literary modernism, Wittgenstein, and the interconnections between fiction and ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Stephan Leuenberger, Erica Shumener and Naomi Thompson for their excellent and thoughtful commentaries on Making Things Up. I have learned a lot from thinking through their replies. As it happens, they focus on pretty disparate aspects of the book: necessitation, relative fundamentality, and what builds the building facts, respectively. I will thus engage with their remarks separately.

Recent research and theory highlights the distinctive features of shame vs. guilt, as well as the important implications of that distinction for typical and atypical behaviour regulation. Briefly, shame is characterised by withdrawal and hiding from judgemental others, and guilt by making amends–repairing and confessing. The present study was aimed at determining whether a shame-relevant and a guilt-relevant pattern of responses to a standard violation could be distinguished in toddlers.Two-year-old children participated in a play session, during which a mishap occurred (...) that the children appeared to have caused. Based upon whether or not children avoided the experimenter (E) after the mishap, they were dichotomised into a shame-relevant group of subjects (Avoiders) who avoid E after the mishap, are slow to make reparation, and are slow to tell E about the mishap; and a guilt-relevant group (Amenders) showing the opposite pattern. All guilt-relevant behaviours were greater for Amenders than Avoiders, and all but one shame-relevant behaviour was greater for Avoiders than for Amenders, suggesting coherence in the organisation of responses. Moreover, convergent evidence from a maternal report questionnaire indicated that in non-laboratory settings as well, Amenders manifested greater guilt relative to shame than did Avoiders. Further research is needed to determine developmental antecedents and consequences of the Avoider/Amender dichotomy. (shrink)

Seventeen philosophical thinkers ask: What is creativity? What are the criteria of creativity? Should we assign logical priority to creative persons, processes, or products? How do various forms of creativity relate to different domains of human activity?

Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel have offered somewhat different accounts of what they call the ‘Radical Enlightenment’, that is those elements of enlightenment thought which resulted in the radical political upheavals of the late eighteenth century and the rise of democratic republicanism. Jonathan Israel, in particular, insists that the radical enlightenment was radical both in its secular rejection of all providentialist and teleological metaphysics, as well as radical in its democratic tendencies. This paper looks at the way in which Catharine (...) Macaulay’s very influential defence of the equal rights of men, during the lead up to the American and French revolutions, poses problems for Israel’s account of the radical enlightenment and argues that the religious foundation of her political radicalism was characteristic of many of her contemporaries and fits in better with Jacob’s more ecumenical account of the radical enlightenment than with Israel’s purely secular characterisation. (shrink)

Although databases have been well-defined and thoroughly discussed in the computer science literature, the actual users of databases often have varying definitions and expectations of this essential computational infrastructure. Systems administrators and computer science textbooks may expect databases to be instantiated in a small number of technologies, but there are numerous examples of databases in non-conventional or unexpected technologies, such as spreadsheets or other assemblages of files linked through code. Consequently, we ask: How do the materialities of non-conventional databases differ (...) from or align with the materialities of conventional relational systems? What properties of the database do the creators of these artifacts invoke in their rhetoric describing these systems—or in the data models underlying these digital objects? To answer these questions, we conducted a close analysis of four non-conventional scientific databases. By examining the materialities of information representation in each case, we show how scholarly communication regimes shape database materialities—and how information organization paradigms shape scholarly communication. These cases show abandonment of certain constraints of relational database construction alongside maintenance of some key relational data organization strategies. We discuss the implications that these relational data paradigms have for data use, preservation, and sharing, and discuss the need to support a plurality of data practices and paradigms. (shrink)

History of women philosophers in Australia delivered as part of a series of of lectures on many aspects of philosophy in Australia.

Since the 1980s, microenterprise development programs have proliferated in the United States, where they are widely praised as strategies for economic development and poverty alleviation, especially for low-income women and welfare mothers. Based on research in a highly respected urban center for women, this article argues that microenterprise development is more detrimental and problematic than it is purported to be. Two reasons are isolated. First, gender constraints mean women tend to choose small-scale, undercapitalized, and barely profitable “pink-collar” businesses, largely home-based (...) operations based on work women are already doing as part of their gender-specific role. Second, microenterprise training programs reinforce this business segregation by discounting the sociocultural conditions women bring with them to business and instead emphasizing the personal growth of individuals. The result is that women are encouraged to maintain their economic vulnerability and social peripheralization rather than become part of the mainstream business world. (shrink)

This paper gives a philosophical outline of the initial foundations of politics as presented in the work of Plato and argues why this traditional philosophical approach can no longer serve as the foundation of politics. The argumentation is mainly based on the work of Latour (1993, 1997, 1999a, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008) and consists of five parts. In the first section I elaborate on the initial categorization of politics and science as represented by Plato in his Republic. In the second (...) section I discuss the gap between humans and non-humans and how they are tied together in actual real life political topics. In the third section I elaborate on the concepts of political and scientific discourse and how they are thought of as separated fields based on the ancient constitution of human society. In the fourth section I link the concepts of matter of fact and matter of concern. In a final section I present a redefinition of the nature of politics as represented in the work of Bruno Latour as an alternative foundation for the study of political systems. (shrink)

Based on interviews with a random sample of white women who are in a second marriage, this article examines changes in women's marital power across marriage, divorce, and remarriage. In some marriages, women's market work is not considered a resource and hence does not have a positive effect on marital power, particularly when husbands are employed in low-status occupations. Conversely, women who are domestically oriented do not necessarily suffer a loss of power. Hochschild's concept of “economy of gratitude” illuminates the (...) way that marital power is affected by the meanings couples assign to women's paid and unpaid labor. Furthermore, women's previous market work and marital and divorce experiences affect the meaning of their paid and unpaid labor upon remarriage, as well as their desire for each. (shrink)

This is a volatile time for health insurance policy. Medicare and Medicaid are in turmoil, as is the private health insurance market. Public and private health insurance costs constitute eighty percent of healthcare spending in the United States. Public health professionals depend on the insurance system to behave in ways that are responsive to public health in prevention and crisis management.Seventy-five percent of the American population, excluding the elderly, has coverage through the private health insurance system. Ninety percent of this (...) group receives their insurance through employer-sponsored programs, and the remaining ten percent buy their own coverage. Approximately ten percent of the non-elderly population has insurance through a government program, and fifteen percent of the non-elderly population, almost forty-one million Americans, is uninsured. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is dedicated to the timely publication of new work in metaphysics, broadly construed. These volumes provide a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. They offer a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighboring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. This book is the 13th volume in (...) the series. It is divided into three parts. Part I concerns parts and pluralities. It begins with Peter van Inwagen’s proposed paraphrase techniques to help nihilists handle certain challenging sentences. In chapter two, Simon Thunder defends manyism: the view that each composite object is simply its many parts. The third chapter presents Joshua Spencer’s puzzle that affects prominent answers to the Special Composition Question. Part II looks at causation, counterfactuals, and essence. It opens with chapter four, where Bradford Skow categorizes varieties of causal relevance and compares them to varieties of relevance found in other domains. In chapter five, John Hawthorne and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri propose a novel translation scheme from the language of quantified model logic into the language of counterpart theory. In chapter six, Sungil Han argues against the definitional model of essence. Topics in Part III include persistence, time, and change. Chapter seven, by Kristie Miller and Caroline West, contends that the normative argument against perdurantism fails. In chapter eight, Martin Pickup proposes a new solution to the problem of change: situationalism. Then, in the final chapter of the volume, Alexander Kaiserman articulates a novel tense logic and uses it to argue that past alteration is possible. (shrink)

A paper exploring what we can learn about part/whole by focusing on the differences in the existence conditions of fusions and ordinary things, rather than the differences in their persistence conditions.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Sunstein's characterization of moral blunders jointly indicts an intuitive process and the structure of heuristics. But intuitions need not lead to error, and the problems with moral heuristics apply also to moral principles. Accordingly, moral development may well involve more, rather than less, intuitive responsiveness. This suggests a novel trajectory for future research into the development of appropriate moral judgments.

Social scientists have provided rich descriptions of the ascendant cultural ideologies surrounding motherhood and paid work. In this article, I use in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of 40 employed mothers to explore how they navigate the “intensive mother” and “ideal worker” ideologies and construct their own accounts of good mothering. Married mothers in this sample construct scripts of “extensive mothering,” in which they delegate substantial amounts of the day-to-day child care to others, and reframe good mothering as being “in (...) charge” of and ultimately responsible for their children’s well-being. Single mothers describe extensive mothering in different ways, and their narratives suggest less accountability to the “intensive mothering” model. Mothers in this sample also justify employment in novel ways: They emphasize the benefits of employment for themselves—not only their children—and they reject the long work hours imposed by an ideal worker model. The article ends with the implications of extensive mothering for the motherhood and employment literatures and for gender equality. (shrink)

This research presents the results of an exploratory empirical study that assessed perceived organizational preparedness for coping with a major crisis or disaster. A scale was developed and tested to measure perceptions of organizational preparedness. Hypotheses were tested to examine variations in perception of crisis preparedness. Potential for occurrence of crises was also examined and demographics collected. Findings indicate that top-level and middle-level managers have a higher level of perceived preparedness than employees, no differences in perceived preparedness based on size (...) of the city where organizations operate, government organizations expressed a higher perception of crisis preparedness than for-profit organizations, and the highest perception of preparedness was exhibited by organizations employing more than 500 employees. (shrink)

The development of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century has created a framework where issues concerning funding dynamics can be easily accommodated. It combines the historical-philosophical approach of Thomas Kuhn. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, [1962] ) with the sociological approach of Robert K. Merton The sociology of science. Theoretical and empirical investigations. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 267–278, [1942] ), linking the ‘exact’ sciences to economy and politics. Out of this came a new domain, (...) namely the study of scientific practices : Science as practice and culture. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992). Given this broad theoretical framework, we will specify by looking at the case of STEM education and its variant Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics with Art education as an example par excellence. Without going into the technical details of the financial support of the projects, we prefer to open a philosophical debate on the way how policies on academic subjects influence a whole society and the personal life of both researchers and people/pupils involved in education. (shrink)

Metadata helps users locate resources that meet their specific needs. But metadata also helps us to understand the data we find and helps us to evaluate what we should spend our time on. Traditionally, staff at libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) create metadata for the content they manage. However, social metadata—content contributed by users—is evolving as a way to both augment and recontextualize the content and metadata created by LAMs. Many cultural heritage institutions are interested in gaining a better understanding (...) of social metadata and also learning how to best utilize their users' expertise to enrich their descriptive metadata and improve their users' experiences. (shrink)

Nursing homes and other institutionsdesigned for persons with impairments are not,in fact, designed for persons with impairments.They are typically designed for theimpairments, not the persons, and therebybecome a part of the problem by reinforcingphysical and cultural manifestations of theimpairments. In the essay that follows, Idescribe an architectural design project inwhich students were asked to make changes to anexisting nursing home for the persons who livedthere. This requires not only becoming familiarwith the spaces, but with the personsthemselves and designing space to (...) helparticulate their voices and being. (shrink)

This article investigates the work of mourning following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Combining discussions of mourning, kitsch and sentimentality, I examine the perverse transformation of grief into patriotic nationalism. Linking Freud’s description of mourning as work with Derrida’s articulation of grief as ‘a work working at its own unproductivity’, I explore how grief has been paired with icons of American nostalgia, such as Norman Rockwell, as well as kitschy souvenirs from Ground Zero (...) vendors, and, through this pairing, been transformed into a motive force for war. A central part of this operation, I argue, is the process of identification with the traumatic event. Identification, what Freud describes as a ‘binding force’, takes place across diverse fields - from White House speeches, to kitsch memorabilia made available immediately following the attacks. Identification with the event enables identification with the nation - an operation immediately reifying the official rhetoric of ‘Us against Them’ propounded by President Bush and his advisers. As grief over 9/11 is transformed into a perpetual rationale for war, that day becomes a new origin conveniently obliterating all that came before regarding the history of US nation-building and its own brand of terrorism. (shrink)

Despite the expansion of post-school education and incentives to participate in lifelong learning, institutions and labour markets continue to interlock in shaping life chances according to starting social position, family and private resources. The dominant view that the economic and social returns to public investment in adult learning are too low to warrant large-scale public funding has been challenged by recent LLAKES research that shows significant returns to participants in lifelong learning with improvements in both their employability and employment prospects. (...) It is argued that, under conditions of growing social polarisation and economic uncertainty, lifelong learning can have a significant protective effect by keeping adults close to a changing labour market. In this paper we review research from different disciplinary and epistemological traditions, providing evidence of the beneficial effects of lifelong learning, especially when taking into account the dynamics of the life course. Transitions and turning-points in youth and in adult life are markers of diversification of the life course; how far these diversifications amount to 'de-standardisation' of the life course is debated. They involve biographical negotiation, in which any decision is consequential upon previous decisions and involves the exercise of contextualised preferences as well as the calculations of 'rational choice'. Gaining a better understanding of how changing demands are negotiated at different life stages offers a new perspective, moving from narrow versions of rational choice theory towards models of biographical negotiation as promising avenues for effective policy-making. (shrink)