This article highlights the lack of human rights recognition for arguably one of the most vulnerable groups in our society, children and young people in the care of the state. Currently under New Zealand legislation and policy frameworks these children do not have their rights upheld, as per New Zealand’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This is particularly important for the care and protection of children needing state care as the government has the (...) responsibility as a state body to ensure their rights are upheld, alongside their direct responsibilities as the ‘corporate parent’. This article explores the vulnerability of this group and the ways in which their rights under UNCRC are not being met by current legislation and policy. It goes on to recommend changes to the way in which we approach legislative and policy development. (shrink)

From self-cultivation to global justice, from environmental ethics to the interrelation of religion and science, this collection of essays highlights the central role of philosophy, and comparative philosophy in particular, for understanding and appreciating the connections and discontinuities of East and West.

Formal logic has often been seen as uniquely placed to analyze mathematical argumentation. While formal logic is certainly necessary for a complete understanding of mathematical practice, it is not sufficient. Important aspects of mathematical reasoning closely resemble patterns of reasoning in nonmathematical domains. Hence the tools developed to understand informal reasoning, collectively known as argumentation theory, are also applicable to much mathematical argumentation. This chapter investigates some of the details of that application. Consideration is given to the many contrasting meanings (...) of the word “argument”; to some of the specific argumentation-theoretic tools that have been applied to mathematics, notably Toulmin layouts and argumentation schemes; to some of the different ways that argumentation is implicated in mathematical practices; and to the social aspects of mathematical argumentation. (shrink)

Recently many have argued that agents must sometimes have credences that are imprecise, represented by a set of probability measures. But opponents claim that fans of imprecise credences cannot provide a decision theory that protects agents who follow it from foregoing sure money. In particular, agents with imprecise credences appear doomed to act irrationally in diachronic cases, where they are called to make decisions at earlier and later times. I respond to this claim on behalf of imprecise credence fans. Once (...) we appreciate the complexity of our intuitions about rational decision making, we can see that diachronic cases are in fact evidence for the essential claims motivating imprecise credence models. I argue that our decision theory for imprecise agents should mirror our decision theory for agents in moral dilemmas, and I develop permissive norms that explain our intuitions about both sorts of agents. (shrink)

"In the same period Wagner was deeply inspired by the works of Shakespeare, an influence that runs throughout this volume. The title essay, "Actors and Singers," is one of Wagner's most deliberate and philosophical writings. He wrote, "Art ceases, strictly speaking, to be Art from the moment it presents itself as Art to our reflecting consciousness. " He described how the unconsciousness of art, and thus art's power, connected natural genius to cultivate traditions.

In this paper, Sarah Stitzlein considers the consequences of honesty on our democracy, especially for citizens' ability to engage in civic inquiry together as they face shared problems. Honesty is a key component of a well-functioning democracy; it develops trust and fosters the sorts of relationships among citizens that enable civic dialogue and reasoning. Post-truth attitudes and truth decay pose serious obstacles to good civic reasoning as citizens struggle to draw clear distinctions between fact and opinion, weigh personal beliefs (...) and emotions over facts, and increasingly distrust traditionally respected sources of information. Stitzlein employs a Deweyan pragmatist account of truth and a distinctly social account of democracy to build a case for foregrounding honesty in the development of citizens. She describes how schools can employ communities of inquiry to cultivate habits of honesty within citizenship education. She explains how a better democracy — one grounded in a wider understanding of social life and relationships — might head off the temptation to be dishonest for self-serving reasons, focusing on how dishonesty jeopardizes our relationships to each other as citizens and our ability to engage in civic reasoning together to fulfill shared goals. (shrink)

My commentary focuses on Khalidi's defense of episodic memory as a cognitive kind. His argument relies on merging two distinct accounts of episodic memory—the phenomenal and the etiological. I suggest that Khalidi's framework can be used to carve the contemporary memory literature differently. On this view, the phenomenal account supports constructive episodic simulation as a cognitive kind, the etiological account supports event memory as a cognitive kind, and episodic memory ceases to be. The question for Khalidi is, then, how to (...) evaluate this alternative proposal—and more broadly how to adjudicate between competing and overlapping accounts of cognitive kinds. (shrink)

"Lenaia vases" is the traditional title given to a group of some seventy fifth-century Attic vases, black- and red-figure. These vases have in common that they show a cult-image of Dionysos, consisting of a mask or masks on a column, in combination with the conventional Attic imagery of the revelling ecstatic female worshippers usually called "maenads." The vases are important and their meaning much debated because they seem to hold out the promise of providing otherwise unavailable information about historical bacchic (...) religion. There is no consensus on the character of the historical information of these scenes. In an older view the imagery records the appearance of enacted ritual; in a newer view, the imagery "discusses," in a fashion analogous to language, concepts about Dionysiac religion. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of a coherent subset of the "Lenaia vases," based on a linguistic reading of the imagery. This subset consists of twenty-eight red-figure stamnoi, a group that has traditionally been the focus of studies of the "Lenaia vases." I analyze the vases as describing, in conventional visual terms of reference, a rite of theoxenia celebrated by ecstatic female worshippers. The imagery says that these worshippers perform a thysia, offer Dionysos a banquet of meat and wine, and celebrate a symposion and komos. It also comments on the practice of such rituals by women, saying that they derive honor from these actions. These rituals find parallels in historical evidence for Dionysiac theoxenia and banquets; the scenes thus may provide additional evidence that Dionysiac celebrations took this form. The scenes, however, are not about the historical enactment of such rituals, and still less a visual record of such enactments. Rather, their message, conveyed by the interweaving of mythical and social references, is that for the worshipper of Dionysos the worlds of myth and of the polis are one. (shrink)

This study shows how, in its overall ability to shed light on the vexing complexity of human being, Maimonides’ discourse on matter—treated via metaphors or seen as itself a metaphor—emerges as a venerable guide, pointing the careful reader to the most important truths about perfected humanity within the Guide of the Perplexed. After examining and harmonizing Maimonides’ dual metaphors of matter (matter as the married harlot and the woman of valor) in this way, I show how metaphor as a literary (...) form is itself an illustration of matter’s positive role in the life of the soul. Following upon this consideration of the importance of metaphorical discourse, I end by briefly suggesting how the metaphysics of matter may itself quite generally be characterized as a kind of metaphor. (shrink)

This paper defends a version of epistemic contextualism that accounts for the ordinary judgements and theoretical principles that motivate pragmatic encroachment. Adopting this contextualist view, we can avoid the counterintuitive consequences of pragmatic encroachment, while still preserving its attractive applications.

The difficulty of making reliable interpretation from a dense cloud of unreliable correlations means that the grounds for making a testable or brain-based, theory of intelligence remain very shaky. We briefly discuss the conceptual and methodological problems that arise and suggest one possible alternative interpretation of the data.

At a crucial moment in Euripides’ Andromache, the title character throws her hands around a statue of the goddess Thetis and laments the losses that have brought her to a point of desperation and despair. When Thetis appears at the end of the play, she answers Andromache’s pleas and grants her a renewed life of marriage and motherhood. Yet in her embrace of the statue, Andromache momentarily embodies an alternative impulse: a longing to merge with the stony form of the (...) goddess and to cease from the patterns of nuptial mobility and sexual reproduction that have defined her life thus far. In this article, I argue that we should understand this embrace as “queer”—as a moment of intimate contact between mortal woman and immortal goddess that deeply unsettles the models of sexual and reproductive order that dominate Greek art and literature. While the play ends by redirecting Andromache toward the propagation of the Trojan line, the queer potential of that crucial embrace is taken up by Thetis herself, who re-scripts her own marriage to Peleus in a way that both inverts gendered patterns of movement and rejects the valorization of female fertility. Euripides’ Andromache thus concludes with the restoration of mortal sexual and reproductive order, yet through Andromache’s encounter with Thetis, it also gestures to the queer and startling freedom of a barren future. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn 1651, Alexander Ross published an attack on Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Bacon's Natural History and William Harvey's De generatione. Ross's work, Arcana Microcosmi, defended Aristotelian natural philosophy against the ‘new philosophy’ that figures like Bacon, Harvey and Browne represented. Though Ross's attacks on these authors make up no more than half of the treatise’s contents, the book’s paratextual materials emphasise scientific debate. While Ross's authorial approach advocates reading exclusively ancient authorities for the sake of glossing and transmitting their knowledge (...) to a wider public, in order to argue against the new philosophy Ross must engage with its textual production. Furthermore, his works advertise their focus on Bacon, Harvey and Browne, which would have attracted a readership drawn to new scientific approaches to knowledge formation. Ross's polemic represents an effort to model his devotion to ancient authority while also generating a reading public that would resist the new approach to reading that the new philosophy proposed. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 1 Seiten: 31-58.

Contexte : Dans les systèmes de santé universitaires complexes, les projets d’amélioration de la qualité (AQ) destinés à améliorer les soins et l’apprentissage prolifèrent, mais il existe des différences considérables quant à la manière dont ces projets sont supervisés sur le plan éthique, voire même s’ils le sont. À la suite d’un volume élevé de projets soumis à l’un de nos comités d’éthique de la recherche (CER), mais considérés comme n’étant pas de la recherche et donc non éligibles à un (...) examen, des questions ont commencé à se poser au sein de notre organisation sur la manière dont les dimensions éthiques des projets d’AQ pourraient être évaluées et sur les approbations institutionnelles qui pourraient être nécessaires pour garantir la conformité avec les normes émergentes. Méthodes : Une enquête environnementale à méthodes mixtes a conduit à une analyse quantitative rétrospective des projets d’AQ de notre organisation, associée à des consultations qualitatives approfondies avec le personnel, les médecins et les apprenants de l’ensemble de notre réseau de santé. Les exemptions de CER ont été analysées à l’aide de diagrammes d’exécution afin d’évaluer les volumes de base des projets d’AQ, et des analyses thématiques ont été menées sur les notes de terrain de 133 consultations avec les parties prenantes. Résultats : Au cours d’une période de 34 mois, 117 lettres d’exemption du CER ont été émises pour des projets d’AQ. Les consultations ont mis en évidence la nécessité d’un processus d’évaluation éthique clairement défini pour les projets d’AQ, de structures de gouvernance appropriées et de possibilités d’identifier et d’atténuer les risques. Les personnes interrogées ont également évoqué l’impératif éthique de mener des initiatives d’AQ. Le présent document explique comment ces thèmes ont contribué à l’élaboration et à la mise en place de notre comité d’examen de l’amélioration de la qualité (CEAQ). Conclusion : Depuis 2020, plus de 840 projets ont été examinés par notre CEAQ, dans le but d’atténuer les risques pour les patients, le personnel et les équipes de projet d’AQ dans l’ensemble de l’UHN. (shrink)

Hobbes was an unusual Christian, and one that recognized the potential power of the Christian story to strengthen commonwealths. This chapter discusses the account of Christianity found in Leviathan, which was designed to replace contemporary versions with one that would promote stability and obedience within the state. Hobbes’s religious ideas, like his political philosophy, began from his understanding of human beings; he insisted that religious belief was natural to humans, stemmed from anxiety, and needed to be coordinated by a sovereign (...) to prevent strife. For Hobbes, Christianity was a particularly effective remedy for such anxiety, at least when interpreted along correct lines. The theology developed by Hobbes was original, but it probably drew on ideas circulating among his Anglican acquaintances; indeed in Leviathan we see these ideas being used for a very different purpose. As Hobbes’s acquaintances realized, at the center of Hobbes’s project in Leviathan lay an extremely heterodox theology which could enhance the state while destroying the independent authority of the Church. (shrink)

Die Jahre 1808-1810 sind für Friedrich Schleiermacher sowohl privat als auch beruflich und politisch von besonderer Bedeutung: Er heiratet 1809 die junge Witwe Henriette von Willich, wirkt an der Konzeption der Berliner Universität und ihren ersten Berufungen mit und übernimmt leitende Funktion in der preußischen Schulreform. Der Kommentarband zur den Briefbänden 10 und 11 der historisch-kritischen Briefausgabe Friedrich Schleiermachers bietet neben einem Stellenkommentar zu den Briefen 1808-1810 eine Einführung in die Korrespondenz mit Informationen zu den Korrespondenzpartnern dieser Jahre sowie eine (...) Chronologie mit den wichtigsten privaten und beruflichen Ereignissen aus Schleiermachers Leben. Für jede Briefpartnerin und jeden Briefpartner wird, sofern überliefert, jeweils ein Handschriftenbeispiel als Faksimile wiedergegeben. Ein Register führt neben den Personen- und Ortsnamen auch Werke und Bibelstellen an. (shrink)

Identifying links between human personality and attributed robot personality is a relatively new area of human–robot interaction. In this paper we report on an exploratory study that investigates human and robot personality traits as part of a human–robot interaction trial. The trials took place in a simulated living-room scenario involving 28 participants and a human-sized robot of mechanical appearance. Participants interacted with the robot in two task scenarios relevant to a ‘robot in the home’ context. It was found that participants’ (...) evaluations of their own personality traits are related to their evaluations of the robot’s personality traits. The statistical analysis of questionnaire data yields several statistically significant results: Participants do not tend to assign their personality traits to match the robots’, For individual personality traits, participants rated themselves as having stronger personality characteristics compared to the robot, Specific significant correlations were found between participants’ and robot personality traits, and Significant group differences for participant gender, age and technological background are highlighted. The results are discussed in light of developing personalized robot companions. (shrink)

Using qualitative data, this article investigates women’s experiences in fantasy sports, a context that offers the potential for transformations in the gendered order of traditionally masculinized athletic environments by blurring the distinctions between real and virtual, combining active production and passive consumption, and allowing men and women to play side-by-side. We find, however, women often describe fantasy sports as a male/masculine space in which they are highly visible and have their ability to compete like men questioned, largely because of gendered (...) assumptions regarding sports knowledge. Women’s attitudes and behaviors frequently reproduce traditional gender dynamics, although women also engage in behaviors and assert definitions of themselves that are potentially transformative—implicitly and explicitly pushing the boundaries of what females are expected to be and accomplish in sport. Often, however, they simultaneously reproduce and resist men’s dominance and women’s marginalization, exercising “mediated agency” by using men to improve their fantasy sports experience and play or “conflicted agency” by reinforcing or accepting gender stereotypes about women while using those stereotypes to their advantage or positioning themselves as atypical women to whom the stereotypes do not apply. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of philosophical exemplars, focusing on two uncommon but valuable figures: Guanyin, bodhisattva of compassion, and the plumber-as-philosopher described by Mary Midgley. These figures highlight philosophical activity as benefitting from a wide variety of heterogenous sources, styles, and models, and suggest that philosophy be understood as a response to lived needs. The paper concludes with some suggestions for ways in which these exemplars might be relevant for contemporary issues in the academy.

Cet article, qui se veut exploratoire et programmatique, cherche à mesurer l’implication du protestantisme dans la révolution culturelle des années 1960. La naissance du Séminaire de culture théologique de Lausanne, en 1962, fournit un cas d’école. L’étude du contexte et surtout des sources (revues, cahiers, journaux) qui sont alors produites dans les milieux protestants de Suisse romande montre une effervescence théologique particulière. Celle-ci travaille, au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, à repenser l’implication du christianisme dans la société. Un projet (...) qui se concrétise dans le souci de démocratiser la théologie et de décléricaliser le protestantisme en créant différents lieux de formation d’adultes. Les Églises protestantes ont ainsi désamorcé elles-mêmes leur propre système d’autorité, ouvrant la porte à la génération Mai 68. (shrink)

Am 22. April 2024 war Immanuel Kants 300. Geburtstag. Sein Werk ist bis heute zentraler Bestandteil der Philosophie überhaupt und insbesondere auch der politischen Philosophie, der Rechtsphilosophie und der Sozialphilosophie. 2024 ist zudem das 240. Jubiläum von Kants wirkmächtigem Essay „Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?“ (1784). Aufklärung, so schreibt Kant darin, beinhaltet die Aufdeckung und Befreiung von der Macht politischer, sozialer und religiöser „Vormünder“[1], die die aufklärerischen Subjekte in ihrem moralischen Recht auf gleiche und freie Co-Autorschaft im „Reich der (...) Zwecke“[2] einschränken. Kants Aufklärungsbegriff gehört auch heute zu einem der bedeutendsten Schlüsselbegriffe in der zeitgenössischen Philosophie, etwa in der Frage nach der dritten oder neuen Aufklärung (Hilary Putnam, Michael Hampe, Corine Pelluchon). Dass Kants Aufklärungsverständnis auch eine zentrale Rolle in der zeitgenössischen, zentral diskutierten, neorepublikanischen Debatte um Nicht-Beherrschung (Philip Pettit) spielen könnte, wird derzeit eher weniger gesehen, auch wenn Kant in dieser Debatte natürlich präsent ist (Rainer Forst, Dorothea Gädeke, Tamara Jugov, Peter Niesen, Arthur Ripstein, Laura Valentini). Der Schwerpunkt der Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie nimmt Kants Jubiläumsjahr nun zum Anlass, um Schlaglichter auf Kants kritisch konstruktives Verständnis von Aufklärung zu werfen, es kritisch zu hinterfragen und seine Relevanz für Gegenwart und Zukunft herauszuarbeiten. Die Einleitung unternimmt dies mit Hinblick auf das Verhältnis von Aufklärung, Willkürherrschaft und Toleranz. [1] WA, 8, 35. [2] G, 4, 433. (shrink)

Public and academic discourse about big data and digital technologies in agriculture present polarizing visions of the future of food, but it is still unclear whether and to what degree farmers are taking up the narratives of proponents or critics. Building on the sociotechnical imaginaries literature, we characterize and analyze farmer imaginaries about digital agricultural technologies. We present the findings from a survey of farmers in Canada (n = 1000). To study imaginaries, the survey uses both affective image analysis and (...) an original scale with a spectrum of possible scenarios for ten key aspects of agri-food futures (e.g., labour shortages, robotics and automation, food security, and sustainability). Canadian farmers’ imaginaries simultaneously include both negative and positive views. Respondents have extremely positive top-of-mind affective associations to digital agricultural technologies. However, overall, respondents are only very mildly optimistic when anticipating the future impacts of digital agricultural technologies at the farm-level and have more pessimistic views on how these tools will impact the agriculture sector more broadly. Our analysis reveals three core narratives in the farmer sociotechnical imaginary about digital agricultural technologies: (1) a feeling of ‘winner takes all’ and exacerbating power imbalances and disparity, (2) a belief that these tools are essential to grow more food on less land with fewer environmental impacts, and (3) faith that farmers and robots can work in harmony. This research contributes to the growing global body of scholarship on farmer experiences with data and digital technologies with a new way of studying sociotechnical imaginaries. (shrink)

This essay explores the enlightenment story of Abbess Mugai Nyodai (無外如大, 1223–1298), one of the most famous and influential Zen Masters of her time, as a recommendation for a piece to use for introducing students to (Zen) Buddhist philosophy. Because this is a story that features women, as both students and teachers, a story that was intended for pedagogical purposes with a wide-ranging lay audience, and because it is densely packed with rich philosophical material yet at the same time short (...) and easily readable, I argue that it ought to be considered for use in Introduction to Philosophy or Introduction to Asian Philosophy courses, providing a variety of examples of how one might work through the text with students. (shrink)

Phenologists track the seasonal behavior of plants and animals in response to climatic change. During the second half of the twentieth century, phenologists developed a large-scale project to monitor the flowering time of the common lilac across the United States. By the 1960s, this approach offered a potential plant-based indicator of anthropogenic climate change, a biological signal amidst the emerging narrative of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As a tangible representation of changes in climate—warmer temperatures lead to earlier blooming—phenology (...) proved highly legible to scientists, politicians, and laypeople. Yet, as phenology gained broader repute in the 1960s, both in agricultural stations and as a component program of the International Biological Program, it struggled to align itself epistemically with the regnant disciplinary assumptions of mid-century ecology. Operating in the hinterlands between laboratory and field, biology and meteorology, ecological theory and agronomy practice, phenologists challenged prevailing notions of the model organism and what it meant to study biology in the field. Rebranding the discipline as a component of ecosystem modeling, scientists successfully brought phenology within the purview of mainstream ecology. In so doing, however, they obscured its climate-relevant meteorological character and stymied the development of a biological narrative of climate change. (shrink)