Secondary education around the world has been significantly disrupted by covid-19. Students have been forced into new ways of independent learning, often using remote technologies, but without the social nuances and direct teacher interactions of a normal classroom environment. Using data from the School Attitudes Survey—which surveys students regarding the perceived level of difficulty, anxiety level, self-efficacy, enjoyability, subject relevance, and opportunities for creativity with regards to each of their school subjects—this study examines students' responses to this disruption from two (...) very different schools with two very different experiences of the pandemic. This paper reports on the composite attitudinal profiles of students in the senior secondary levels at each school. The findings challenged our expectation that the increased difficulty and anxiety caused by the disruption would reduce perceived opportunities for creativity. Indeed, our analyses showed that the students at both schools demonstrated generally positive attitudes toward their learning and strongly associated opportunities for creativity with other attitudinal constructs including enjoyability, subject relevance, and self-efficacy. These complex associations made by the students appear to have buffered the impacts of the disruption, and they may even have supported creative resilience. (shrink)

At the outset I would like to note how much I enjoyed working with Jacques, Sean, and Solanus on this year-long project. This session today is the culmination of our combined efforts, and with Wayne – my longstanding mentor and friend – here everything has come full circle. Indeed, I am honored today to present a paper on The Rediscovered Life. As we have already heard, Jacques’ research indicates this vita was authored sometime between 1232-1239. This date alone may (...) be sufficient to assign hermeneutical priority to The Rediscovered Life when discussing the question of Franciscan theory and praxis in the 1230s. Such a claim is confirmed, however, not simply by chronology, but by the author’s intent, liturgical... (shrink)

In response to Mole 2009, I present an argument for zombie action. The crucial question is not whether but rather to what extent we are zombie agents. I argue that current evidence supports only minimal zombie agency.

In three recent papers, Wayne Myrvold and Timothy McGrew have developed Bayesian accounts of the virtue of unification. In his account, McGrew demonstrates that, ceteris paribus, a hypothesis that unifies its evidence will have a higher posterior probability than a hypothesis that does not. Myrvold, on the other hand, offers a specific measure of unification that can be applied to individual hypotheses. He argues that one must account for this measure in order to calculate correctly the degree of (...) confirmation that a hypothesis receives from its evidence. Using the probability calculus, I prove that the two accounts of unification require the same underlying inequality; thus, McGrew and Myrvold have accounted for unification in fundamentally identical probabilistic terms. I then evaluate five putative counterexamples to this account and show that these examples, far from disqualifying it, serve to clarify our notion of unification by disentangling it from a host of other concepts. (shrink)

First, some reminiscences. In the years 1973-80, when I was an undergraduate and then graduate student at Oxford, Michael Dummett’s formidable and creative philosophical presence made his arguments impossible to ignore. In consequence, one pole of discussion was always a form of anti-realism. It endorsed something like the replacement of truth-conditional semantics by verification-conditional semantics and of classical logic by intuitionistic logic, and the principle that all truths are knowable. It did not endorse the principle that all truths are known. (...) Nor did it mention the now celebrated argument, first published by Frederic Fitch (1963), that if all truths are knowable then all truths are known. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn keeping with the dominant view that skills are largely automatic, the standard view of memory systems distinguishes between a representational declarative system associated with cognitive processes and a performance-based procedural system. The procedural system is thought to be largely responsible for the performance of well-learned skilled actions. Here we argue that most skills do not fully automate, which entails that the declarative system should make a substantial contribution to skilled performance. To support this view, we review evidence showing that (...) the declarative system does indeed play a number of roles in skilled action. (shrink)

Some commentators maintain that gestational surrogates are not ‘mothers’ in a way capable of grounding a claim to motherhood. These commentators find that the practices that constitute motherhood do not extend to gestational surrogates. We argue that gestational surrogates should be construed as mothers of the children they bear, even if they fully intend to surrender those children at birth to the care of others. These women stand in a certain relationship to the expected children: they live in changed moral (...) circumstances by reason of their pregnancy, and they engage in the practices said to define motherhood in the post‐birth context. By contrast, ovum donors and embryo donors are not similarly ‘mothers’ because they do not find themselves involved in these circumstances. Not all women involved in three‐parent in vitro fertilization qualify as mothers either. Given this analysis of mothering, we note that transmen who gestate children are engaged in mothering activity even if they otherwise function as a father to those children. By itself, this defence of the maternity of gestational surrogates does not confer moral title to the children they bear; gestation would not by itself override the contractual arrangements gestational surrogates have made regarding the disposition of their children. This interpretation of gestational surrogates as mothers does, however, undercut cultural understandings of these women as mere ‘vessels’, devoid of entitlement to respect as persons and parents. We also consider the meaning of mothering for ‘brain‐dead’ women kept alive to give birth and for the prospect of extracorporeal gestation. (shrink)

Outlines the etiological theory of normative functionality. Analysis of the autonomous system; Function of systems-oriented approaches; Specifications of system identity.

I argue that when perception plays a guiding role in intentional bodily action, it is a necessary part of that action. The argument begins with a challenge that necessarily arises for embodied agents, what I call the Many-Many Problem. The Problem is named after its most common case where agents face too many perceptual inputs and too many possible behavioral outputs. Action requires a solution to the Many-Many Problem by selection of a specific linkage between input and output. In bodily (...) action the agent perceptually selects, and in this way perceptually attends to, relevant information so as to guide the execution of specific movements. Since perceptual attention is a necessary part of solving the Many-Many Problem, it is a necessary part of bodily action. Indeed, the process of implementing a solution to the Many-Many Problem, as constrained by the agent's motivational state, just is the agent's performing an intentional bodily action in the relevant way. (shrink)

Abstract: Open-mindedness is typically at the top of any list of the intellectual or "epistemic" virtues. Yet, providing an account that simultaneously explains why open-mindedness is an epistemically valuable trait to have and how such a trait is compatible with full-blooded belief turns out to be a challenge. Building on the work of William Hare and Jonathan Adler, I defend a view of open-mindedness that meets this challenge. On this view, open-mindedness is primarily an attitude toward oneself as a believer, (...) rather than toward any particular belief. To be open-minded is to be aware of one's fallibility as a believer, and to acknowledge the possibility that anytime one believes something, one could be wrong. In order to see that such an attitude is epistemically valuable even to an already virtuous agent, some details of the skills and habits of the open-minded agent are elucidated. (shrink)

Perceptual attention is essential to both thought and agency, for there is arguably no demonstrative thought or bodily action without it. Psychologists and philosophers since William James have taken attention to be a ubiquitous and distinctive form of consciousness, one that leaves a characteristic mark on perceptual experience. As a process of selecting specific perceptual inputs, attention influences the way things perceptually appear. It may then seem that it is a specific feature of perceptual representation that constitutes what it is (...) like to consciously attend to an object. In fact conscious attention is more complicated. In what follows, I argue that the phenomenology of conscious attention to what is perceived involves not just a way of perceptually locking on to a specific object. It necessarily involves a way of cognitively locking on to it as well. (shrink)

In _The Company We Keep_, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of _this_ particular encounter with _this_ particular work. Yet it (...) will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about _many_ kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us _as we read_? Who am I, _during the hours of reading or listening_? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain. (shrink)

Lyman Tower Sargent has been the preeminent scholar of utopianism in our time and has undertaken a diverse network of approaches to the study of what he has called “social dreaming.” He has written monographs, articles, and essays and has been a relentless compiler of information on utopianism heretofore largely overlooked by his peers. One of the main directions of his work has been bibliographical, as he has compiled guides to the vast corpus of utopianism that he has uncovered.

1. As John Hawthorne and Maria Lasonen-Aarnio appreciate, some of the central issues raised in their ‘Knowledge and Objective Chance’ arise for all but the most extreme theories of knowledge. In a wide range of cases, according to very plausible everyday judgments, we know something about the future, even though, according to quantum mechanics, our belief has a small but nonzero chance (objective probability) of being untrue. In easily constructed examples, we are in that position simultaneously with respect to many (...) different propositions about the future that are equiprobable and probabilistically independent of each other, at least to a reasonable approximation. (shrink)

In this dissertation we study two-cardinal phenomena—both of the admitting cardinals variety and of the Chang’s Conjecture variety—under the assumption that all our models have stable theories. All our results involve two, relatively widely accepted generalizations of the traditional definitions in this area. First, we allow the relevant subsets of our models to be picked out by (perhaps infinitary) partial types; second we consider δ-cardinal problems as well as two-cardinal problems.

On method, discursive logics, and epistemology -- Questions of medieval discursive practice -- From the middle ages to the (w)hole of Utopia -- Kepler, his Dream, and the analysis and pattern of thought -- Campanella and Bacon: concerning structures of mind -- The masculine birth of time -- Cyrano and the experimental discourse -- The myth of sun and moon -- The difficulty of writing -- Crusoe rights his story -- Gulliver's critique of Euclid -- Emergence, consolidation, and dominance of (...) a discourse. (shrink)

This book aims to give a coherent interpretation of the whole dialogue, paying particular attention to these etymologies.The book discusses the rival theories ...

The essays in this book contextualize religion within a variety of cultural transformations. The methodological proposals of theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan, S.J. provide the inspiration and framework for these studies; and each makes its own distinct contribution beyond Lonergan's original work.

We report results from two original surveys of 500 firms conducted in 2000 and 2007 in eight regions in Russia that explore the business environment for manufacturing and service sector firms. We find that the formal and informal rules of the game for everyday firms in Russia have changed dramatically in the Putin years. Most importantly, while the informal and formal rules of the game in 2000 were quite similar for firms that were investing and those that were not, in (...) 2007 regional governments had come to favor the former through a variety of informal and formal means. This shift in the rules of the game in favor of firms that invest suggests that a core group of firms in the regions under study have managed to cooperate with the regional government to temper the weak institutional environment in Russia, but also that the playing field for businesses in Russia is not level. (shrink)

Recent work by Robert Batterman and Alexander Rueger has brought attention to cases in physics in which governing laws at the base level “break down” and singular limit relations obtain between base- and upper-level theories. As a result, they claim, these are cases with emergent upper-level properties. This paper contends that this inference—from singular limits to explanatory failure, novelty or irreducibility, and then to emergence—is mistaken. The van der Pol nonlinear oscillator is used to show that there can be a (...) full explanation of upper-level properties entirely in base-level terms even when singular limits are present. Whether upper-level properties are emergent depends not on the presence of a singular limit but rather on details of the ampliative approximation methods used. The paper suggests that focusing on explanatory deficiency at the base level is key to understanding emergence in physics. (shrink)

It has often been said that 'desire' is ambiguous. I do not believe the case for this has been made thoroughly enough, however. The claim typically occurs in the course of defending controversial philosophical theses, such as that intention entails desire, where it tends to look ad hoc. There is need, therefore, for a thorough and single-minded exploration of the ambiguity. I believe the results will be more profound than might be suspected.

Antigone’s reasons for being prepared to die make good sense within a tragic world-view; but the Crito turns out to be, in an odd way, aporetic, because Socrates’ professed reasons make no sense within the Platonist world-view that we expect him to use. On Platonist principles, Socrates should have escaped from prison, and acted unjustly in not doing so. But Socrates’ real reasons for being prepared to die are not Platonist: they are tragic. Like Antigone, he regards the narrative of (...) his life as over: this is why he is incapable of taking seriously the option of escape. (shrink)

PHILOSOPHY AND LANGUAGE "What is the meaning of a word?" Thus Wittgenstein begins the set of lecture notes subsequently published as The Blue Book. ...

Garfinkel's dissertation, "The Perception of the Other," was completed and defended 15 years prior to the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology. This essay seeks hints of the familiar ethnomethodological themes (indexicality, reflexivity, accountability) within his thesis. It begins by examining the contributions of earlier social theorists, particularly Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schütz, to Garfinkel's thought. It then examines the dissertation itself seeking evidence to support the claim that Garfinkel was already moving in the direction of an 'incommensurable, asymmetric, and alternate' (...) program of sociological inquiry well before the term 'ethnomethodology' had even been coined. (shrink)

This dissertation examines Edmund Husserl's call for a "science of the life-world." It is argued that the most appropriate response is to develop such a science in specifically sociological terms. This argument is made by exploring particular themes in sociological theory and the philosophy of the social sciences. The dissertation begins by explicating Husserl's aspiration to understand the "life-world" and ends with the fulfillment of this aspiration in a "sociology of the life-world." ;The initial focus is upon Husserl's ambiguous concepts (...) of "life-world" and "intersubjectivity." These gain coherence when "intersubjectivity" is understood as the content of "life-world" and subject matter of philosophy. Husserl's argument implies that intersubjectivity should supersede subjectivity as the focus of study. Schutz contends that Husserl's conception of the life-world is artificial and that his philosophy is beset by an insurmountable solipsism. Schutz's alternative is to approach intersubjectivity as an empirical fact. This opens up everyday life to sociological investigation. Although Schutz follows Husserl's recommendations, it is argued that he misconstrues the scope of Husserl's philosophy and, subsequently, his own thought terminates in a reification of method and failure to achieve a science of the life-world. Mead provides a way to remedy this failure by beginning with the relationship between individual and society. Yet Mead's conception of intersubjectivity also fails, as it is undermined by an account of meaning premised on the individual alone. ;By introducing the idea of "universal symbol," however, Mead suggests the study of language as the central topic for a sociology of the life-world. In the final chapters this dissertation draws upon the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michael Oakeshott, and Harold Garfinkel to discuss how language can be conceived and studied as a set of practices shared within a society. While realizing Husserl's call, the solution of focusing on language raises the question of the scope and nature of sociological inquiry. The dissertation concludes by arguing that sociology, since its procedures are governed by the everyday character of phenomena it studies, should be understood as a descriptive mode of inquiry. In this way, Husserl's recommendations may be enacted in a sociology of the life-world. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of approaches to social cognition research have emerged that highlight the importance of embodied interaction for social cognition (Reddy, How infants know minds, 2008; Gallagher, J Conscious Stud 8:83–108, 2001; Fuchs and Jaegher, Phenom Cogn Sci 8:465–486, 2009; Hutto, in Seemans (ed.) Joint attention: new developments in psychology, philosophy of mind and social neuroscience, 2012). Proponents of such ‘interactionist’ approaches emphasize the importance of embodied responses that are engaged in online social interaction, and which, according (...) to interactionists, present an alternative to mindreading as a source of social understanding. We agree that it is important to take embodied interaction seriously, but do not agree that this presents a fundamental challenge to mainstream mindreading approaches. Drawing upon an analogy between embodied interaction and the exercise of expert skills, we advocate a hierarchical view which claims that embodied social responses generally operate in close conjunction with higher-level cognitive processes that play a coordinative role, and which are often sensitive to mental states. Thus, investigation of embodied responses should inform rather than conflict with research on mindreading. (shrink)

According to ontological perspectivism, there can be, in principle, multiple and alternative perspectives on the world that can be sliced, systematized, and conceptualized in different ways. Surely, such an ontological position has many categorial implications, which may vary depending on different disciplinary contexts. This paper explores parts of these implications in the realm of geography. In particular, it aims at discussing the ontological categories that one might use to describe the geographical world in an overarching perspective – that is, the (...) perspective that puts toether all the partial views coming from the different branches of the geographical investigation. We will see that if the overarching perspective is expected to include all the views on the geographical world, then such a perspective should be all-embracing in terms of contents and categories. This means that the overarching perspective might also comprehend inconsistencies that derive from how the various partial perspectives conceptualize differently the geographical world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is the chapter's first paragraph: JOHN DEWEY AND BERTRAND RUSSELL were two of the premier philosophers of the twentieth century. During their long lives (each lived to be over 90), their paths crossed on several occasions. While cordial enough when in each others presence, the two men were definitely not on the best of terms. Sidney Hook, who knew and admired them both, once said that there were only two men who Dewey actively disliked—Mortimer (...) Adler and Bertrand Russell. Russell, for his part, never tired of making disparaging remarks about the pragmatists in general and Dewey in particular. This irked Dewey immensely. Still, the two men shared many philosophical traits—an internationalist outlook, a high regard for the scientific method, a concern for social matters, and a suspicion of dogma, especially religious dogma. In this chapter, I will focus upon the educational theories of Russell and Dewey, including the curious fact that each of them (for a short period of time) ran their own elementary schools. (shrink)

N. B. Prof Williamson is now based at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.

A proof is given, at a greater level of generality than previous 'no-go' theorems, of the impossibility of formulating a modal interpretation that exhibits 'serious' Lorentz invariance at the fundamental level. Particular attention is given to modal interpretations of the type proposed by Bub.

Bioconservative commentators argue that parents should not take steps to modify the genetics of their children even in the name of enhancement because of the damage they predict for values, identities and relationships. Some commentators have even said that adults should not modify themselves through genetic interventions. One commentator worries that genetic modifications chosen by adults for themselves will undermine moral agency, lead to less valuable experiences and fracture people's sense of self. These worries are not justified, however, since the (...) effects of modification will not undo moral agency as such. Adults can still have valuable experiences, even if some prior choices no longer seem meaningful. Changes at the genetic level will not always, either, alienate people from their own sense of self. On the contrary, genetic modifications can help amplify choice, enrich lives and consolidate identities. Ultimately, there is no moral requirement that people value their contingent genetic endowment to the exclusion of changes important to them in their future genetic identities. Through weighing risks and benefits, adults also have the power to consent to—and assume the risks of—genetic modifications for themselves in a way not possible in prenatal genetic interventions. (shrink)

St Thomas Aquinas saw religion as part of the natural human propensity to worship. His ability to recognize the naturalness of this phenomenon and simultaneously to go beyond it, to explore spiritual revelation, makes his work fresh and highly readable today. While drawing on a strong distinction between theology and philosophy, Aquinas interleaved them intricately in his writings, which range from an examination of the structures of thought to the concept of God as the end of all things. This accessible (...) new translation chooses substantial passages not only from the indispensable Summa Theologicae, but from many other works, fully illustrating the breadth and progression of Aquinas's philosophy. (shrink)