The following discussion with philosopher and political scientist Wendy Brown seeks to apply her provocative and indispensable ideas to recent political events and problems, in particular focusing on her work in Undoing the Demos (2015) and returning briefly to consider Politics Out of History (2001) in today’s context. The questions were collectively authored and the interview itself was conducted by Sebastian Raza via Skype on 23 May 2017. We would like to thank Wendy Brown for the generous contribution of her (...) time and for answering the questions so directly and clearly. (shrink)

This book locates the paradoxical process of collecting (as an activity that necessarily involves displacement and dispersal) in the ways nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language literature (and in one case, cinema) attempts to represent ephemeral, discarded, and trivial things.

In this anthology, distinguished scholars--Thomas Nagel, T.M. Scanlon, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Samuela Scheffler, Conrad D. Johnson, Bernard Williams, Peter Railton, Amartya Sen, Philippa Foot, and Derek Parfit-- debate arguments for and against the moral doctrine of consequentialism to present a complete view of this important topic in moral philosophy.

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 320-333, July 2022.

'Que devrions-nous croire?' est la question centrale des débats philosophiques en éthique de la croyance, un champ complexe de philosophie contemporaine où se mêlent la normativité, les théories de la connaissance et la psychologie. Spécifiquement, ce livre aborde la question de si nous devrions croire certaines choses parce qu'elles sont vraies ou parce qu'elles sont utiles. Que croire lorsque les preuves s'opposent aux avantages pratiques d'entretenir une certaine croyance? Sous quelle condition devrions-nous croire quelque chose d'avantageux, bien que faux? Ces (...) questions ne peuvent faire l'économie d'autres débats portant sur notre autonomie et notre responsabilité quant à nos croyances. De par ces chemins sinueux vers les horizons normatifs de la croyance se dévoilent des questions sur les limites de l'activité philosophique."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Public health and service delivery programmes, interventions and policies (collectively, ‘programmes’) are typically developed and implemented for the primary purpose of effecting change rather than generating knowledge. Nonetheless, evaluations of these programmes may produce valuable learning that helps determine effectiveness and costs as well as informing design and implementation of future programmes. Such studies might be termed ‘opportunistic evaluations’, since they are responsive to emergent opportunities rather than being studies of interventions that are initiated or designed by researchers. However, current (...) ethical guidance and registration procedures make little allowance for scenarios where researchers have played no role in the development or implementation of a programme, but nevertheless plan to conduct a prospective evaluation. We explore the limitations of the guidance and procedures with respect to opportunistic evaluations, providing a number of examples. We propose that one key missing distinction in current guidance is moral responsibility: researchers can only be held accountable for those aspects of a study over which they have control. We argue that requiring researchers to justify an intervention, programme or policy that would occur regardless of their involvement prevents or hinders research in the public interest without providing any further protections to research participants. We recommend that trial consent and ethics procedures allow for a clear separation of responsibilities for the intervention and the evaluation. (shrink)

In recent scholarship, the science and religion debate has been historicized, revealing the novelty of the concepts of science and religion and their complex connections to secularization and the birth of modernity. This article situates this historicist turn in the history of philosophy and its connections to theology and Scripture, showing that the science and religion concept derives from philosophy's earlier tension with theology as it became an academic discipline centered in the medieval, then research university, with the centrality of (...) Scripture changing under the influence of historical criticism. Looking at Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Schleiermacher on theology and Scripture's connection to science, it offers a new framework for theorizing science and religion as part of the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Uno de los motivos recurrentes del pensamiento contemporáneo, es la indagación sobre el concepto, la representación y la valoración de la comunidad como una dimensión de la experiencia, en particular en su incidencia política/impolítica. Pero "comunidad" se ha manifestado como un "semantema" elusivo, es decir, una familia de nociones y asociaciones significativas, que abren y complejizan más y más la búsqueda de un concepto preciso, hasta empujarnos hacia las típicas "vías negativas" para la caracterización o definición del mismo. A modo (...) de hipótesis, sin pretender con ello construir un esquema abarcador, sostendré que hay un núcleo estético en ese semantema, aludiendo con "estética" a la presencia, en el punto pivote de la constelación que delimita "lo comunitario", de términos como sonido/silencio, diferencia, doble, forma, identidad, imagen y semejanza. Se trata mayormente, como es evidente, de significaciones construidas sobre los planos auditivo y visual de lo sensorio. Como una especificación de dicha hipótesis, ensayaré la elaboración de una noción de comunidad a partir de la pregunta acerca de cuándo hay comunidad. La respuesta a articular, es que hay comunidad cuando hay imagen, esto es, corporización de una semejanza y de un sentido, capaces de conjurar tanto la amenaza de lo informe como la de la forma sin semejanza. El fundamento último de esta hipótesis, es que nuestro ser-en-común originario toma consistencia en el plano de lo sensible porque se vincula a la insuficiencia de toda representación para subordinarlo a un concepto, pues se presenta aquí, entre comunidad y concepto, la misma distancia infranqueable que hay entre la existencia y su teorización. One of the recurrent motifs of contemporary thought is the inquiry about the concept, representation and valuation of community as a dimension of experience, particularly in its political/impolitic influence. But "community" has proved to be an elusive semanteme, i.e., a family of notions and significant associations that make the search for a precise concept very complex, pushing us to the typical "negative ways" for its characterization or definition. As a hypothesis, and with no intention of building an all-encompassing frame, I will hold that there is an aesthetic nucleus to this semanteme, understanding "aesthetic" as the presence of terms such as sound/silence, difference, double, shape, identity, image and likeness, occurring at the very pivot point of the constellation that defines "the communitarian". It refers mostly to significances related to the hearing and seeing senses. Following this hypothesis, I will try to define a notion of community answering the question of when a community occurs. The answer to this being that there is a community when there is an image; that is, the embodiment of a likeness and a sense that can thwart the threat of what is shapeless or of a shape with no likeness. The ultimate foundation of this hypothesis is that our original being-in-common becomes consistent to the senses because of its inability to subordinate to a concept, as happens with any representation, being the unbridgeable distance between community and its concept the same there is between existence and its theorization. (shrink)

This volume provides a comprehensive, learned and lively presentation of the whole range of Plato’s thought but with a particular emphasis upon how Plato developed his metaphysics with a view to supporting his deepest educational convictions. The author explores the relation of Plato’s metaphysics to the epistemological, ethical and political aspects of Plato’s theory of education and shows how Plato’s basic positions bear directly on the most fundamental questions faced by contemporary education.

Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values.

An influential thinker on the concept of singularity and its implications on politics, theology, economics, psychoanalysis, and literature.

What is the relation between ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’, especially where literary texts are concerned? This essay explores the question by recalling the author's experience with radio plays in the 195...

It is well-established that party identity biases the processing of political information and the evaluation of political actors. This is presumed to avoid cognitive dissonance and achieve positive affect. What happens, however, when individuals diverge from this pattern and do make identity-inconsistent evaluations of political actors – how does this translate into positive and negative emotions toward the candidates? The paper addresses this question using large-N data from the main televised debate of the 2017 German national election by combining survey (...) responses with viewer perceptions measured during the debate. The findings suggest that candidate ratings made during the debate have different valence depending on a person’s party identity. Strikingly, a stronger party identity does not mean a reduced impact of identity-inconsistent evaluations on emotional responses toward a candidate. Rather, only evaluations in accordance with one’s party identity, and hence with lower information value, show a reduced effect on emotional responses. (shrink)

Throughout the world, female students are less likely than males to take advanced physics courses. This mixed-methods study uses a concurrent, nested design to study an online homework intervention designed to address choice and achievement. A choice of three different contexts (biological, sports, and traditional) were offered to students for each physics problem, intending to stimulate females’ interest and enhance achievement. Informed by aspects of Artino’s social-cognitive model of academic motivation and emotion, we investigated: Which context of physics problems do (...) males and females select?; What explanations do students give for their choices?; Are there differences in the achievement of males and females?; and Is there a relationship between student achievement and the context selected? Fifty-two high school physics students from five U.S. states participated. Data included pre and post Force Concept Inventory scores, homework context choices and achievement, and rationales for choices. Findings indicate that females were most likely to select biology contexts; males, traditional. All students made more attempts on video questions over word questions, although females did not score as well. For all questions, students generally persisted until they answered them correctly, with females taking fewer attempts on problems. Context choice was mostly driven by interest, for males, and perceptions of difficulty level for females; however, rationales were indistinguishable by gender. On their first homework question attempt, females scored significantly better than the males. Initially, males had significantly higher FCI scores; post homework intervention, females increased their mean scores significantly on the FCI, erasing the initial gender gap, with no growth nor decline in males’ scores. Females with FCI growth were equally as likely to choose biology contexts as traditional contexts; males were more likely to choose biology contexts. Findings from this study suggest that modest changes to homework problems that provide choice and make the physics problems more contextually interesting - even without changes in classroom instruction - could increase interest and motivation students and increase achievement for both male and female students. Recommendations will be discussed. (shrink)