The purpose of this study was to determine if reading achievement of students from high-poverty US schools differs as a function of participation in summer tutoring versus access to books. Data fro...

In this book, leading Christian political thinkers and practitioners critique the Rawlsian concepts of “justice as fairness” and “public reason” from the perspective of Christian political theory and practice. It provides a new level of analysis from Christian perspectives, including implications for such hot topics as the culture war.

In the last half century, oral history has emerged as a historical approach that is being considered by archivists involved with the collection and accessibility of archival collections for researchers and interested members of the public. The approach to ethics by oral historians has emerged from two major fears: the fear of failing as researchers and the fear of failing the narrators and doing harm. Archivists also need to be cognisant of these fears when collecting oral history. Confronting these fears (...) makes it possible to understand the complex questions behind oral historians’ and archivists’ preoccupations and sheds light on how oral history has evolved and expanded as a field. The research objectives of this article are to determine the three principles identified from the Belmont Report that relate and should be applied to the collection of oral histories by archivists and historians from communities and individuals residing and working in and alongside the Kruger National Park. The theoretical framework for this article is the critical race theory to address historical accounts from communities and individuals sidelined by the mainstream media in South Africa. For the purposes of this article, the study was conducted with the Makuleka and Tsonga communities to determine what ethical implications need to be respected when conducting oral history projects with communities.Contribution: This article will contribute to ethics concerning social sciences and specifically the collection of oral history. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article considers Michel Foucault's theories of ethical speech and militant life in the context of Occupy Wall Street's encampments in Zuccotti Park. Focusing on the encampments and the production and circulation of resources to meet bodily needs, the article concludes that occupation was a self-inflicted form of precarity as well as an extension of an already existing vulnerability, a living that is at once a form of social death. I read the occupations as a mode of militant (...) life, which is to say, that which enacts precarity while at the same time transforming it into the object of radical speech. (shrink)

This important new book explores the contemporary refugee crisis and the untold realities and experiences of refugees themselves. A team of top scholars offer a critical and necessary diagnosis of the challenges, complexities, and contradictions impacting our philosophical approaches to the contemporary figure of the refugee.

W. V. Quine assumed that in _Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology Rudolf Carnap was attempting to dodge commitment to abstract entities--without either renouncing quantification over them or demonstrating their dispensability--by wielding the analytic/synthetic distinction against ontological issues. Quine's interpretation of Carnap's intent--and his criticism of it--is widely endorsed. But Carnap objected, I argue, not to abstract entities, but to his critics' suggestion that empiricism implies nominalism. Quine's and Carnap's views are therefore more akin than Quine ever suspected. Unfortunately, Quine's misinterpretation of (...) Carnap's position has led to a misunderstanding of the implications of Quine's own naturalistic turn for contemporary ontology. (shrink)

During his period of exile in Scandinavia, Bertolt Brecht wrote “I don’t think the traditional form of theatre means anything any longer. Its significance is purely historic; it can illuminate the way in which earlier ages regarded human relationships […] [but] a modern spectator can’t learn anything from them”. To create a modern theatre fit for a modern audience, Brecht holds that not only would the content of plays have to change, but the experience of theatrical spectatorship itself. To fully (...) capture how Brecht’s work differs from that of previous playwrights, a close analysis of spectatorial experience and perception is required. In this paper, I compare the aesthetic techniques used in Brecht’s epic theatre to the genetic phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Reading Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt through a Husserlian lens, I argue that Brecht mobilizes phenomenological methodology in order to suspend the audience’s preconceived notions of theatre and to cultivate self-conscious, critically aware, and socially motivated spectatorship. Just as Husserl describes phenomenology as a presuppositionless science, so too does Brecht offer epic theatre as a way to free “[…] socially-conditioned phenomena from the stamp of familiarity”. (shrink)

This paper investigates the transformative influence of generative AI on the arts, connecting it with Walter Benjamin's insights regarding the aura of art in the mechanical reproduction era. It scrutinizes how generative AI not only redefines art's traditional aura but also introduces a dynamic interplay between technological liberation and dependency. The analysis extends to the democratization of artistic expression and its broader societal impacts, highlighting a shift in art creation, perception, and interpretation in the digital age. This research encapsulates the (...) evolving nature of authenticity, creativity, and human–machine collaboration, marking a significant paradigm shift in art's conception and its role in society. (shrink)

Through a close analysis of Zen encounter dialogues and Huayan Buddhist philosophy, Buddhism and Postmodernity offers a new ethical paradigm for Buddhist-postmodern philosophy.

The sensitivity principle is a compelling idea in epistemology and is typically characterized as a necessary condition for knowledge. This collection of thirteen new essays constitutes a state-of-the-art discussion of this important principle. Some of the essays build on and strengthen sensitivity-based accounts of knowledge and offer novel defences of those accounts. Others present original objections to sensitivity-based accounts and offer comprehensive analysis and discussion of sensitivity's virtues and problems. The resulting collection will stimulate new debate about the sensitivity principle (...) and will be of great interest and value to scholars and advanced students of epistemology. (shrink)

Using video recordings of draft meetings conducted as part of an intramural basketball program as data, this conversation analytic study examines the use of an incomplete utterance in a joint evaluative activity. In particular, we focus on how the participants, volunteer coaches, who meet to draft players for their respective teams, produce a syntactically incomplete utterance as a means to critically assess a player, a non-present third party to the interaction. Analysis reveals that the participants use an incomplete utterance as (...) part of dispreferred design; it allows them to withhold articulating overt criticism of others. By trailing off where the criticism is due, the participants display reluctance to verbalize what is to be said and treat its articulation as delicate. The syntactic structure of the utterance that includes a contrastive conjunction and accompanying embodied actions such as head shakes help them convey a critical stance. We examine the use of incomplete utterances in both agreement and disagreement sequences; the recipients display their unproblematic understanding of the critical assessment and respond by providing their own assessments that either affiliate or disaffiliate with the conveyed critical stance. (shrink)

Concentrating on Hegel's political philosophy, George Armstrong Kelly pursues three lines of inquiry. The first is the broad question of the connection of philosophy, politics, and history within Hegel's system of thought. Second, the author explores Hegel's relationship with his surrounding political culture and his rejection of aestheticism for the higher goal of politics. Finally, he analyzes Hegel's theory of the state, its historical and structural foundations, its demolition by a later generation, and its relevance. Professor Kelly explains (...) how Hegel's total philosophical method and system convey his apprehension of the meaning of European culture and its links with a political harmony accessible to modern times. Professor Kelly explains how Hegel's total philosophical method and system convey his apprehension of the meaning of European culture and its links with a political harmony accessible to modern times. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

We devise imperative programming languages for verified real number computation where real numbers are provided as abstract data types such that the users of the languages can express real number computation by considering real numbers as abstract mathematical entities. Unlike other common approaches toward real number computation, based on an algebraic model that lacks implementability or transcendental computation, or finite-precision approximation such as using double precision computation that lacks a formal foundation, our languages are devised based on computable analysis, a (...) foundation of rigorous computation over continuous data. Consequently, the users of the language can easily program real number computation and reason about the behaviours of their programs, relying on their mathematical knowledge of real numbers without worrying about artificial roundoff errors. As the languages are imperative, we adopt precondition–postcondition-style program specification and Hoare-style program verification methodologies. Consequently, the users of the language can easily program a computation over real numbers, specify the expected behaviour of the program, including termination, and prove the correctness of the specification. Furthermore, we suggest extending the languages with other interesting continuous data, such as matrices, continuous real functions, et cetera.Abstract taken directly from the thesis.E-mail: [email protected]: https://sewonpark.com/thesis. (shrink)

The use of smartphones has become commonplace, even among people with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of smartphone use on the negative emotions of people with visual impairment. This study analyzed data from 30 respondents with visual impairments obtained from the 2016 Internet Overdependence Survey in South Korea. The analysis was based on partial least squares regression with information search, leisure, communication, and online transactions as independent variables, and negative emotions comprising depression, anxiety, and (...) loneliness as the dependent variables. Among people with visual impairment, the use of smartphones as a means of communication decreased negative emotions while their use for leisure or information search was related to an increase in negative emotions such as depression and loneliness. Use for information retrieval was found to be associated with a low level of anxiety, and use for online transactions was associated with low loneliness. The results of this study showed that the use of the Internet can be a means of providing interaction opportunities and reducing negation emotions for people with visual impairment. (shrink)

Here is the usual way philosophers think about science and induction. Scientists do many things— aspire, probe, theorize, conclude, retract, and refine— but successful research culminates in a published research report that presents an argument for some empirical conclusion. In mathematics and logic there are sound deductive arguments that fully justify their conclusions, but such proofs are unavailable in the empirical domain because empirical hypotheses outrun the evidence adduced for them. Inductive skeptics insist that such conclusions cannot be justified. But (...) “justification” is a vague term— if empirical conclusions cannot be established fully, as mathematical conclusions are, perhaps they are justified in the sense that they are partially supported or confirmed by the available evidence. To respond to the skeptic, one merely has to explicate the concept of confirmation or partial justification in a systematic manner that agrees, more or less, with common usage and to observe that our scientific conclusions are confirmed in the explicated sense. This process of explication is widely thought to culminate in some version of Bayesian confirmation theory. (shrink)

Whatever we take “life” to mean, it must involve an attempt to describe the objective reality beyond scientists’ biases. Traditionally, this is thought to involve comparing our scientific categories to “natural kinds.” But this approach has been tainted with an implicit metaphysics, inherited from Aristotle, that does not fit biological reality. In particular, we must accept that biological categories will never be specifiable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions or shared underlying physical structures that produce clean boundaries. Biology blurs (...) all lines and failure to embrace this unique feature has blocked attempts to reach consensus on the meaning of “life.” Thus, while the three classical accounts all fall short of offering a complete definition, their advocates fail to realize that they share the same view of life’s ultimate, functional hallmark: its uniquely rich adaptive capacity. I develop an account of life as adaptive capacity that sidesteps debates about the relative importance of specific mechanisms and the precise location of boundaries to bring the three classical accounts together under a shared conceptual framework. (shrink)

These posthumous essays by Joan Kelly, a founder of women's studies, represent a profound synthesis of feminist theory and historical analysis and require a realignment of perspectives on women in society from the Middle Ages to the present.

In Truth and Method, Gadamer tries to show that the understanding of art is scientific (wissenscaftlich). But even though the understanding of art is a kind of science, it is different from natural sciences. As objects of human sciences (Geisteswissenschaft), works of art should be dealt differently than in dealing with theobjects of natural sciences. But if the understanding of art is somewhat scientific, it means that in artistic understanding there is a claim to truth which is different from such (...) a claim as in the natural sciences. Then how can this truth be assured? The task of assuring truth in art understanding can be achieved by the hermeneutical circle. Thus, we investigated the role and significance of the hermeneutical circle in scientific understanding of art. (shrink)

This paper discusses how growth and aging became interrelated phenomena with the creation of gerontology in the United States. I first show that the relation of growth to senescence, which had hardly attracted scientific attention before the twentieth century, started to be investigated by several experimental scientists around the 1900s. Subsequently, research on the connection between the two phenomena entered a new domain through the birth of gerontology as a scientific field comprised of various disciplines, many of which addressed growth. (...) Due to gerontologists’ efforts, the association between aging and growth became stronger and more multifaceted within the discursive and organizational matrix constituting the new science, leading to a broader definition of senescence with an ambiguous connection to chronological age. Furthermore, as gerontologists borrowed the cultural agendas as well as research methods from studies of growth, aging began to be defined as a phenomenon that could be actively controlled and managed in both social arenas and laboratory environments. (shrink)

Previous research has shed light on the detrimental effects of abusive supervision. To extend this area of research, we draw upon conservation of resources theory to propose a causal relationship between abusive supervision and psychological distress, a mediating role of psychological distress on the relationship between abusive supervision and employee silence, and a moderating effect of the supervisor–subordinate relational context on the mediating effect of abusive supervision on silence. Through an experimental study, we found the causal path linking abusive supervision (...) and psychological distress. Results of both the experimental study and a field study provided evidence that psychological distress mediated the relationship between abusive supervision and silence. Lastly, we found support that this mediation effect was contingent upon the relational context in Study 2 but not in Study 1. We discuss implications for theory and practice. (shrink)

I raise the following six moral objections to the way God evaluates us. (i) He violates the human right to free thought. (ii) He makes the dubious assumption that it is praiseworthy and blameworthy, respectively, to believe and disbelieve that he exists. (iii) He excessively rewards believers and excessively punishes disbelievers. (iv) He only assigns to his evaluatees the two extreme grades: eternal bliss and eternal damnation. (v) He overlooks diverse factors related to the belief of God. (vi) He is (...) silent on the issue of whether to evaluate animals. Therefore, God, who is allegedly omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, does not exist. (shrink)

In light of rampant fake news and disinformation in today's press and social media, I provide a new consequentialist argument that regulations on the media pertaining to certain false verifiable empirical facts are warranted. This contention is based in part on a collection of pre-existing empirical findings that I newly piece together from political science and psychology demonstrating that a post-truth society is likely with current media. My position is then defended from several counters, such as that it violates deontological (...) rights to free speech and to freedom of the press, that free speech leads to the acquisition of truth, and that government regulators can be biased and corrupt. (shrink)

Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise. From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies (...) have become powerful weapons in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In _Women as Weapons of War_, Kelly Oliver reveals how the media and the administration frequently use metaphors of weaponry to describe women and female sexuality and forge a deliberate link between notions of vulnerability and images of violence. Focusing specifically on the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oliver analyzes contemporary discourse surrounding women, sex, and gender and the use of women to justify America's decision to go to war. For example, the administration's call to liberate "women of cover," suggesting a woman's right to _bare_ arms is a sign of freedom and progress. Oliver also considers what forms of cultural meaning, or lack of meaning, could cause both the guiltlessness demonstrated by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the profound commitment to death made by suicide bombers. She examines the pleasure taken in violence and the passion for death exhibited by these women and what kind of contexts created them. In conclusion, Oliver diagnoses our cultural fascination with sex, violence, and death and its relationship with live news coverage and embedded reporting, which naturalizes horrific events and stymies critical reflection. This process, she argues, further compromises the borders between fantasy and reality, fueling a kind of paranoid patriotism that results in extreme forms of violence. (shrink)

In my paper “Parental Love and the Ethics of Sex Selection,” published in the previous issue of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, I set out to determine whether a plausible argument could be constructed in support of a common intuition about the ethics of sex selection. The intuition in question is that sex selection for nonmedical reasons is incompatible with a proper parental love: that is, with the sort of love that a parent ought to have for her child (...) or, equivalently, with the sort of love that someone accurately describable as a good parent will have for her child. I concluded that there is a prima facie compelling argument that fits the bill, though I did little more than introduce and set that argument out. In the current paper, my aim will be to subject it to closer scrutiny, by considering a number of possible objections to it. I will start by asking why the argument should be thought to apply only to sex selection for nonmedical reasons and not to cases in which selection is employed in order to prevent the birth of children with serious sex-linked genetic conditions. (shrink)

Rival applied ethicists have constructed arguments for and against affirmative action independently of Rawls’s theory of justice. Those arguments do not resolve the dispute about affirmative action. I reformulate them with the use of Rawls’s theory of justice and conclude that the reformulated arguments do not resolve the dispute about affirmative action either. Therefore, Rawls’s theory of justice is not useful in resolving the dispute about affirmative action. This point applies to affirmative action in science, contrary to what some writers (...) suggest. (shrink)

In accordance with standards published by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH), ethics consultants are expected to provide recommendations that align with scholarly literature, professional society statements, law, and policy. However, there are no studies to date that characterize the specific references that ethics consultants and educators use to inform their work. To address this gap, a convenience sample of clinical ethics consultants and educators was surveyed online through two major listservs for clinical ethics, the ASBH Clinical Ethics (...) Consultation Affinity Group (CECAG) and the Association of Bioethics Program Directors (ABPD). Ninety-five ethics consultants and/or educators with diverse educational background, credentials, and experience provided responses. In total, 451 references, 315 of which were unique, were reported. These references were broken into 6 categories after analysis: bioethics literature (divided into articles and books), professional society documents (divided into professional society statements and codes of ethics), federal/state/uniform/case law, hospital/health system policies, official religious teachings, and other. We found extensive variation and minimal overlap in the references respondents used for ethics consultation and education, even when referring to the same topics. Future research directions should include conducting more systematic efforts to characterize the references used by ethics consultants across the US; determining whether demographic characteristics of consultants influence the references used; and ascertaining whether the variation in references used reflects genuine disagreements in consultants’ and educators’ bioethical analysis or recommendations. (shrink)

Today there is a tendency to do ethics on the basis of what I should like to call the “self-other model.” On this view, an action has no moral worth unless it benefits others–and not even then, unless it is motivated by altruism rather than selfishness. This radical rift between self-interest and virtue traces back at least to Philo of Alexandria, according to whom, “lovers of self, when they have stripped and prepared for conflict with those who value virtue, keep (...) up the boxing and wrestling until they have either forced their opponents to give in, or have completely destroyed them.” More recently, the distinction between those who value themselves and those who “value virtue” has been drawn sharply by Bernard Williams: “[I]n moral theory … it is not the Kantian leap from the particular and the affective to the rational and universal that makes all the difference; it is rather the Humean step–that is to say, the first Humean step–from the self to someone else.”. (shrink)

In 2003, the United Kingdom's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority published a report entitled Sex Selection: Options for Regulation. The report outlined the findings of a 2-year review of available sex selection techniques and recommended that the United Kingdom ought not to permit any regulated technique to be used other than for medical reasons. In so doing, it reflected the widespread opinion—repeatedly expressed in the public consultations that formed the cornerstone of the HFEA's review—that there is something ethically unacceptable, or (...) at least ethically suspect, about sex selection for nonmedical, or “social,” reasons. (shrink)

In this essay, I take as a starting point Foucault’s rejection of two different ways of thinking about the future, prophecy and utopianism, and use this rejection as a basis for the elaboration of a more detailed rejection of them, invoking complexity-based epistemic limitations in relation to thinking about the future of political society. I follow Foucault in advocating immanent political struggle, which does not seek to build a determinate vision of the future but rather focuses on negating aspects of (...) the current conjuncture. I extend this argument into an ethical register, arguing that the same arguments apply mutatis mutandis to our personal lives. I conclude by engaging with Jacques Lacan’s account of subjectivity, and the interpretation of its political import furnished by Yannis Stavrakakis, drawing from these additional supports for my position, in particular the rejection of utopianism as an attempt to avoid limitation by the real. (shrink)

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has become a global buzz word since the World Economic Forum adopted it as an annual issue in 2016. It is represented by hyper automation and hyper connectivity based on artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, and Internet of things. AI, big data, and robotics can contribute to developing hyper automation that can increase productivity and intensify industrial production. Particularly, robots using AI can make decision by themselves as human being on complicated processes. Along with the hyper (...) automation, the hyper connectivity increases not only at national, but also global level by using information and communication technologies. IoT is the core technology to create the hyper connectivity in Cyber Physical System that connects technology, nature, and human being. Accordingly, a perfect convergence between ICT and manufacturing can be completed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution era and an extremely efficient flexible production system by spreading IoT in CPS will be established. Under such a condition, innovative clusters must play their traditional roles in cradles of technology innovation and commercialization. It must be difficult challenges for innovative clusters to meet their targets and to be adjusted by the changing new environment at the same time. This paper argues how the Fourth Industrial Revolution can change the global production chain and how core technologies function in industries. Furthermore, it focuses on how innovative clusters have to evolve to respond the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Last, but not least it also analyzes whether or not innovative clusters can play their roles as technology innovation hubs in the real world and CPS in the Fourth Industrial Revolution era. (shrink)

Does democracy lead to more ethical or just systems of welcoming, of hospitality? Derrida considers an analysis of sovereignty as pivotal to any re-evaluation of contemporary politics and ethics, tying such a project in with deconstructions of democracy and hospitality: ‘what is “living together”? …must one live together only with one's like, with someone semblables?’ he asks in Rogues, prompting us to think through what it means to be, at once, democratic and hospitable. In this paper I propose that Derrida (...) provides us with a way of re-orienting democracy and hospitality that complicates conditions of citizenship and belonging, of the nation-state and sovereignty and of justice and unconditionality. It is the contention of this paper that deconstructing sovereignty is essential for any re-orientation of practices of hospitality within liberal democratic countries. The figure of the foreigner and questions of hospitality reveal a deep ambivalence at the core of democracy in the sense that it provokes the desire for openness and closure simultaneously. In closing, I raise questions concerning the potential for deconstructive practice to engage in a future politico-ethics of the border in light of this critical evaluation of democracy. In so doing, I consider the role of deconstruction in relation to liberal modalities of hospitality. (shrink)

This paper presents a new explanation of how preferring the simplest theory compatible with experience assists one in finding the true answer to a scientific question when the answers are theories or models. Inquiry is portrayed as an unending game between science and nature in which the scientist aims to converge to the true theory on the basis of accumulating information. Simplicity is a topological invariant reflecting sequences of theory choices that nature can force an arbitrary, convergent scientist to produce. (...) It is demonstrated that among the methods that converge to the truth in an empirical problem, the ones that do so with a minimum number of reversals of opinion prior to convergence are exactly the ones that prefer simple theories. The approach explains not only simplicity tastes in model selection, but aspects of theory testing and the unwillingness of natural science to break symmetries without a reason. (shrink)

Faced with interminable combat over some piece of philosophical terrain, someone will inevitably suggest that the contested ground is nothing more than a philosophically manufactured mirage that is therefore not worth fighting for. Arthur Fine has long advocated such a response—the ‘Natural Ontological Attitude,’ or NOA—to the realism debate in the philosophy of science. Notwithstanding the prima facie incompatibility between the realist’s and anti-realist’s positions, Fine suggests that there is in fact enough common ground for NOA to stand on its (...) own as a minimal alternative, one that enjoys the advantage of being free of the philosophical burdens of its overweight contenders. (shrink)

The articles published in our Winter 2016 edition are connected loosely under the themes of pop culture and public memory. Our annual conference, held in late April, featured Dr. Kelly MacFarlane as our keynote lecture to speak on the interplay between history, public memory, and pop culture. We are thrilled to present to you eight excellent articles in our Winter 2016 edition: An ideological examination of the US-Russian Space Race and public memory of the event during the cold war (...) is offered in "Narrative Memory in the Space Race"; The article "The Swastika and the Maple Leaf: National-socialism and anti-semitism in Canada" returns to the 1930s to explore anti-semitist ideologies in our country preceeding the second world war;"The Monumentalization of our Disgrace" is a captivating look at the manner in which concentration and death camps standing after the Holocaust are memorialized today and the local residents' public perception of such memorials; "Hegemony without Tears: Defenitions and uses of hegemony from Gramsci onwards" explores the works of Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci and his influence upon other writers through several case studies, ultimately commenting on the subsequent reinterpretation of Gramsci's definition of hegemony; "Confrontation and Cooperation: the hidden history of national parks and Indigenous groups in Canada" takes the reader through a historical analysis of Canada's national parks and the indigenous groups originally inhabiting them, arguing the erasure of these groups by the National Parks system; "War and Faith: Memories of the Great Patriotic War in the Russian Orthodox church" examines the Church's modern conceptualization of the Soviet Union as a "holy battle for survival; "Administering State Legislation: The kirk and witchcraft in early modern Scotland" is a fascinating look at the relationship between the duties performed by the Royal Court and the Calivinist church in Scotland; and finally, we have "The Limits of Rationalism: Early modern geography and the idea of Europe", an investigation of cartogropher's contributions in the 16th and 17th century towards the concept of 'Europe' and the growth of a scientific worldview. We wholly hope you enjoy our Winter 2016 edition as much as our staff has enjoyed curating it. Editors Emily Kaliel Ellen Sutherland Assistant Editors Jean Middleton Kayla Pituka Senior Reviewers Kyler Chittick Emily Hoven Katarina Hoven Faculty Advisor Jeremy Caradonna. (shrink)

Reliabilism is a theory that countenances basic knowledge, that is, knowledge from a reliable source, without requiring that the agent knows the source is reliable. Critics (especially Cohen 2002 ) have argued that such theories generate all-too-easy, intuitively implausible cases of higher-order knowledge based on inference from basic knowledge. For present purposes, the criticism might be recast as claiming that reliabilism implausibly generates cases of understanding from brute, basic knowledge. I argue that the easy knowledge (or easy understanding) criticism rests (...) on an implicit mischaracterization of the notion of a reliable process. Properly understood, reliable processes do not permit the transition from basic knowledge to understanding based on inference. (shrink)

No longer is pregnancy a repulsive or shameful condition in Hollywood films, but an attractive attribute, often enhancing the romantic or comedic storyline of a female character. Kelly Oliver investigates this curious shift and its reflection of changing attitudes toward women's roles in reproduction and the family. Not all representations signify progress. Oliver finds that in many pregnancy films, our anxieties over modern reproductive practices and technologies are made manifest, and in some cases perpetuate conventions curtailing women's freedom. Reading (...) such films as _Where the Heart Is_ (2000), _Riding in Cars with Boys_ (2001), _Palindromes_ (2004), _Saved!_ (2004), _Quinceañera_ (2006), _Children of Men_ (2006), _Knocked Up_ (2007), _Juno_ (2007), _Baby Mama_ (2008), _Away We Go_ (2009), _Precious_ (2009), _The Back-up Plan_ (2010), _Due Date_ (2010), and _Twilight: Breaking Dawn_ (2011), Oliver investigates pregnancy as a vehicle for romance, a political issue of "choice," a representation of the hosting of "others," a prism for fears of miscegenation, and a screen for modern technological anxieties. (shrink)

Reliabilism furnishes an account of basic knowledge that circumvents the problem of the given. However, reliabilism and other epistemological theories that countenance basic knowledge have been criticized for permitting all-too-easy higher-level knowledge. In this paper, I describe the problem of easy knowledge, look briefly at proposed solutions, and then develop my own. I argue that the easy knowledge problem, as it applies to reliabilism, hinges on a false and too crude understanding of ‘reliable’. With a more plausible conception of ‘reliable’, (...) a simple and elegant solution emerges. (shrink)