Watershed planning has typically been approached as a technical problem in which water quality and quantity as influenced by the hydrology, topography, soil composition, and land use of a watershed are the significant variables. However, it is the human uses of land and water as resources that stimulate governments to seek planning. For the past decade or more, many efforts have been made to create democratic planning processes, which, it is hoped, will be viewed as legitimate by those the plans (...) regulate. This article uses a case study of the Cache River watershed in southernmost Illinois to analyze the complicated historical and political economic context of a specific watershed planning process that occurred from 1993 through 1995. This article assesses the claims made about the democratic, grass-roots, deliberative nature of the planning process and casts doubt on the legitimacy of its outcomes. It also proposes an alternative form of governance that would be both democratic and capable of generating outcomes viewed as legitimate by most affected parties. (shrink)

Is it generally rational to defer to official stories? On the affirmative view exemplified by Neil Levy, grounds for scepticism cannot outweigh the epistemic authority of the experts presumed to generate them. Yet sociological studies of how expertise is mediated into official communications reveal the epistemic potential of citizens’ collaboratives. These may include, or advocate hearing, dissident experts. Such groups’ epistemic position is arguably analogous to that of the ‘other institutions of civil society’ that Levy sees as underwriting the authority (...) of official stories. An added advantage is that they are able to adhere to deliberative methods of inquiry. By contrast, an official story presupposes that deliberations have concluded, and what remains is to promote the agreed story. This is achieved by strategic communication, which can involve extensive coordination by organisations committed primarily to persuasion rather than truth-seeking. Sometimes it includes blocking dissidents’ deliberative challenges. A case study highlights how even an organisation of indisputable epistemic authority can be politically influenced to block the testimony of its own scientific experts, while uncritical support for its official story is maintained by other institutions of civil society. Hence, an appropriate attitude towards official stories is critical receptiveness rather than automatic deference. (shrink)

Consider the sentence 'This sentence is not true'. It seems that the sentence can be neither true nor not true, on pain of contradiction. Certain notorious paradoxes like this have bedevilled philosophical theories of truth. Tim Maudlin presents an original account of logic and semantics which deals with these paradoxes, and allows him to set out a new theory of truth-values and the norms governing claims about truth. All philosophers interested in logic and language will find Truth and Paradox a (...) stimulating read. (shrink)

Books into Ideas uses a Philosophy for Children approach to encourage thinking in young learners. It clearly explains how facilitators can set up a Community of INquiry within the classroom and teach questioning techniques at all levels of thinking. There are detailed notes on how to use 15 picture books.

Provides the means for an in-depth collaborative inquiry into scientific concepts, the nature of science, the ethical implications of science and the links between science and students' everyday lives. The first section discusses the theoretical basis for the approach used, citing relevant research, while the second presents a wide range of 15 purpose written stories to read and discuss with a class.

This article analyses individual level support for a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) using the European Social Survey. At the country level, support is highest in South and Central Eastern Europe, but variation does not otherwise seem to follow established differences between varieties of capitalisms or welfare state regimes. At the individual level, findings are broadly in line with the expectations of the political economy literature. Left-leaning individuals facing high labour market risk and/or on low incomes are more supportive of a (...) BIG, whereas current union members are less likely to support a BIG, consistent with the insider-outsider literature. However, when controlling for confounding variables, union membership is not statistically significant, suggesting that it is not membership per se, but the characteristics of unionised workers that make them less supportive. In many countries, a coalition between centrist and left-leaning individuals therefore seems most promising, but its political feasibility depends on whether enough union members are favourable to a BIG and on the level of opposition from high income and/or conservative parts of the electorate. (shrink)

Simmels Buch gehört zu den Werken, die durch die Simmel-Gesamtausgabe, in deren Rahmen die Philosophie des Geldes 1989 erschien, erst wieder nachdrücklich in der Diskussion einer Theorie der Kultur um 1900 und darüber hinaus Berücksichtigung gefunden haben. Vormals v. a. als Soziologe bzw. unter Sozialwissenschaftlern bekannt, hat Simmel seitdem einen Ruf als Philosoph erhalten, der in Wiederaufnahme eines für ihn zeitgenössischen Streites in stellvertretend geführten Debatten erneut gegen das Pejorativum eines bloßen bzw. vulgären, jedenfalls potentiell gefährlichen Relativismus verteidigt wird.

In late August 2012, artist Paul Thomas and philosopher Timothy Morton took a stroll up and down King Street in Newtown, Sydney. They took photographs. If you walk too slowly down the street, you find yourself caught in the honey of aesthetic zones emitted by thousands and thousands of beings. If you want to get from A to B, you had better hurry up. Is there any space between anything? Do we not, when we look for such a space, encounter (...) a plenitude of other things —a slice of plaster, an old vinyl record, a flattened piece of aluminum, painted metal surfaces, nameless interstitial powder, the reflection of sky, some letters of the alphabet, roughened concrete. Between what we take to be things there exist other things, as if the universe were jammed with entities like clowns in a crowded Expressionist painting. An abyss of things that emanates from them, not a yawning void that threatens to engulf them, but a sunlit nothingness filled with dust that seems to spray out of them like dry mist sparkling with firefly swarms. In these so-called spaces, we encounter the work of causality. Look: someone painted over this crack, some sunlight rippled in a mirage, a hole appeared. When we look for causes and effects, we don't encounter a basement of efficiently whirring machinery. Rather, we encounter these in-between spaces, where we had not thought to look. What we see are stage hands moving the scenery about—they are doing it in plain sight, the best place to hide, right in front of you, in the place we call the aesthetic dimension . In Tibetan Buddhism these spaces are called bardo , which just means the between. There is no such thing as a moment of your life that is not a between, according to this view. There is the between of living. There is the between of dying. There is the between of the transition between lives. There is the between of dreaming. There is the between of meditation. There is the between of two humans holding cameras walking down a street in Sydney. The between of two buildings, a space bursting with objects as if a billion jack in the boxes had exploded at once. Some of the lids are stuck, sometimes a nose bursts out and the hinge won't open any further; at other times, the jack in the box flies right out and pulps against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Time opens up. Each surface is a poem about the past. A myriad stories begin to proliferate, as if a thing were a crisscrossing of books, a whole library of them, each page whispering parts of paragraphs and broken pieces of word. The stories tell us things—they are quite literal, look, this guy painted part of this wall, then they came and stripped off the panel and touched up the holes. Form is the past. When you look at appearance, you are looking at the past. Where is the present? And essence is the future. The hints of unknown, unseen things, the absolute impossibility of grasping everything about this plastic pipe, the way photons entering the camera lens obey a speed limit and splash onto receptors, going into and out of coherence. At the electronic level, it's quite clear that causality is aesthetic. I can't see an electron without deflecting it. Everything is a refrigerator with a light on—or off—inside. For me, for you, for this arrangement of tiles sandwiched between a door and a slab of marble. To a photon, an electron is a refrigerator with a closed door, and a light that might be on—or off—inside. How can you know whether the light is on inside? Why, you open the door of course. But then you are looking at the past. You never see the light in the refrigerator before you open the door. This future is not a predictable future that is a specific number of now-points away. You will never reach it. You will never be able to sneak up from the side and see through the refrigerator. Nor can a photon see through the refrigerator of an electron. Nor can paint see through the refrigerator of this plastic pipe. You take a photo—click—the past appears, another open refrigerator. But the thing you have just made, the photograph, the graphing of the photons—it is another thing, another story. You can read the words, but the meaning always eludes you. It always lurks just off the edge of the sentence, just at the very edge of this ragged slice of paint, just at the edge of this building, between this one and that one. Thousands of secrets, everywhere. Masks that lie and tell the truth at the same time: this pink paint is not blue paint, that's true. But the thing, the thing in itself, that paint sliding off a brush onto that pipe—it is nowhere to be seen, like a light behind a closed door. When you walk too slowly down the street, you start walking into millions of levels of pastness, levels emitted not just by the humans or the dogs and cats, but also by this garbage can, this mottled pink surface pockmarked with nail holes. You walk surrounded by as many futures as there are things. You walk, or rather you occupy a peculiar shifting ground of nowness, created by the relative motion of the past sliding against the future, not touching. You begin to realize that the present does not exist. A thing is a train station where one train is always arriving and one train is always leaving. Hundreds of train stations everywhere, hundreds of relative motions. The idea of a universal, regular, atomic sequence of instants that contains everything is absolutely ludicrous, the philosophers have known this for thousands of years, and to hide the absurdity, to get from A to B, Houston to Sydney, crossing the International Date Line without too much laughter, you have embedded piezoelectric devices in as many pieces of hardware as possible, devices in which quartz talks to electrons, making train stations where the trains seem to run on time. When you walk too slowly down the street, you begin to realize that Zeno had a point. You can seemingly divide each moment, each step, infinitesimally. So perhaps there are no moments, no steps. Or perhaps time is not a box that everything goes in. Perhaps time is, as Einstein argued after all, a way that things send out ripples. Where one house touches another house, there arise hundreds of things, hundreds of meeting places (Old English thing , meeting place). Hundreds of times. I have a thing for you. Come over here, let's do a thing. Stay in the sunlight and shadow between worlds, in the sunlit canyon between this building and that building. See how paint touches this pipe, caressing then leaving, no one will notice if a surface is left exposed, not quite filled in. See how shadows are reflected in pale cream glass—see the luminous abyss of causality spreading out before your very eyes, right in front of security. All kinds of beautiful crimes are committed right here, and as American cars keep telling you, and you never notice, OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. They are here, or rather, here is them, and now is them. Kissing in the shadow. Tim Morton Rice University. (shrink)

Valuation is portrayed here as a dynamic and interactive process, not a static notion linked to willingness to pay. Valuation through economic measures can be built upon by creating trusting and legitimising procedures of stakeholder negotiation and mediation. This is a familiar practice in the US, but it is only beginning to be recognised as an environmental management tool in the UK. The introduction of strategic environmental and landuse appraisal plans for shorelines, estuaries, river catchments and rural landscapes, combined with (...) the mobilisation of protest around landuse proposals that are not seemingly justified on the basis of 'need' suggest that a more legitimate participatory form of democracy is required to reveal valuation through consensual negotiation. (shrink)

On Classical Theism, God is ontologically distinct from the physical universe which He has created; He needn't have created any universe at all; and He could exist even if the universe didn't. By contrast, the universe couldn't have existed if God didn't and it needs God to sustain it in existence from moment to moment. Classical Theism is thus committed to the universe not being identical to God. I shall argue that Classical Theism is committed to seeing the universe as (...) God's body . It follows that it is also committed to the falsity of theories which identify people with their bodies or state that of necessity people depend on their bodies for their continued existence. (shrink)

This paper constitutes a suggested route through the well-trodden minefield that is Mill's proof of Utilitarianism. A deductive course—tramping gamely straight across from an egoistic psychological hedonism to a disinterested ethical hedonism—would seemingly be the most hazardous route across the terrain. Thus, it has become standard policy amongst guides to advise readers of Utilitarianism that this is a route which Mill neither needs nor attempts to take. I shall argue that in travelling down this route one can avoid the dangers (...) with which it is usually associated and I shall tentatively suggest that one may find oneself following Mill's footsteps in doing so. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that if the libertarian free will defence were seen to fail because determinism were seen to be true, then another solution to the problem of evil would present itself. I start by arguing that one cannot, by consideration of agents' choices between morally indifferent options, reach any conclusion as to these agents' moral qualities. If certain forms of consequentialism were false, determinism true, and if there were a God who chose to create this universe, then (...) His choice would have been between such options. Consideration of the general nature of the universe God putatively chose to create would not then license any conclusion as His moral qualities. (shrink)

First published in 1997, this book discusses the interplaying factors environmental issues have on justice and property and other social problems. Endeavouring create a discourse on what sustainability means in implementation, each of the contributors to this book approaches this via different theoretical viewpoints.

In this paper I argue that a necessary condition of one’s perceiving God is that an experience of the right phenomenological sort be caused in one ‘directly enough’ by God and - bypassing the issue of what is necessary for an experience to be of the right phenomenological sort - discuss some difficulties in finding reasons for thinking that God has or has not ‘directly enough’ caused any such experience.

The Romans commanded the largest and most complex empire the world had ever seen, or would see until modern times. The challenges, however, were not just political, economic and military: Rome was also the hub of a vast information network, drawing in worldwide expertise and refashioning it for its own purposes. This fascinating collection of essays considers the dialogue between technical literature and imperial society, drawing on, developing and critiquing a range of modern cultural theories. How was knowledge shaped into (...) textual forms, and how did those forms encode relationships between emperor and subjects, theory and practice, Roman and Greek, centre and periphery? Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire will be required reading for those concerned with the intellectual and cultural history of the Roman Empire, and its lasting legacy in the medieval world and beyond. (shrink)

In this paper, we try to confront Robert Audis moral epistemology, namely his intuitionism, based on the concept of a self-evident moral proposition, with two main problems: disagreement and dogmatism within moral discourse. Although Audi can meet those classical objections in his theory, we think that some problems remain. We proceed – after an introduction – in five sections in order to pursue this end. After a short introductory section, we first reconstruct the classical intuitionist moral epistemology. We then discuss (...) the dogmatism and the disagreement objection and, in doing so, introduce Audi’s own version of a moral epistemology. After having proposed that the disagreement objection concerns an explanatory problem, we discuss a second version, namely disagreement as a problem of rationality. In the fourth section we present a third version, disagreement as a problem of moral discourse, understood as an intersubjective enterprise. In the fifth section we propose a solution to disagreement situations of this kind. (shrink)

Evoking the old saying that ‘children should be seen and not heard’, Jana Mohr Lone’s new book presents a powerful case for not merely hearing—but more, for 'listening' 'to' - children. Lone is the Executive Director of PLATO—the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle (one of the leading forces for philosophy in schools in the USA)—and has been involved in bringing philosophical discussion into schools for over 25 years. She brings all this experience to (...) bear in this book. Before taking a good look at the book, I note that the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, seems to have produced quite a few books in the philosophy in schools field recently, including Lone’s previous book 'The Philosophical Child', and a series edited by Tom Wartenberg. That a major publisher is interested in producing such books is a welcome sign indeed. (shrink)

A reply to the lead article by Matthew Lipman: "Philosophy for Children: Some Assumptions and Implications", which discxusses the relation between Jürgen Habermas' discourse ethics and Philosophy for Children.

In response to Hand’s paper, I undertake three tasks. Firstly, I believe that his characterisation of the theory and practice of Community of Inquiry facilitation does not take account of approaches to indoctrination and the idea of philosophical self-effacement that can lessen his worries. Secondly, I will argue that Hand makes some sharp cuts—particularly between justified, controversial and unjustified moral standards—that do not stand up to scrutiny, and that he unnecessarily narrows the scope of moral inquiry. Finally, I will explore (...) the practicalities of these considerations. How should we approach the idea of directive teaching in training facilitators? What should moral inquiry cover? In doing so, I see much of value in Hand’s approach, but also recommend some modifications. (shrink)

Das Buch eröffnet mit Hans Blumenberg und Paul Ricœur einen Problemhorizont hermeneutischen Geschichtsdenkens: Die Frage, wie die Geschichte angesichts ihrer Diskontinuität in der Moderne noch zu denken sein kann, irritiert immer auch die eigene Identität und provoziert ein Denken von Geschichte und Identität, das sich möglichen Revisionen gegenüber offen zeigt. Und es erlaubt eine immer wieder neue Aneignung und Interpretation des Selbst in Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Kultur, Geschichte und Wirklichkeit.

A Neurocomputational Perspective , it comes of age as philosophy of mind as well. This book demands to be read by connectionists who wish to understand the philosophical context and ramifications of their work, and by philosophers who wish to understand connectionism and the nature of mind more generally.