An argument that the major metaphysical theories of facts give us no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world. -/- In this book Arianna Betti argues that we have no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world, at least as they are described by the two major metaphysical theories of facts. She claims that neither of these theories is tenable—neither the theory according to which facts are special structured building blocks of reality (...) nor the theory according to which facts are whatever is named by certain expressions of the form “the fact that such and such.” There is reality, and there are entities in reality that we are able to name, but, Betti contends, among these entities there are no facts. -/- Drawing on metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, Betti examines the main arguments in favor of and against facts of the two major sorts, which she distinguishes as compositional and propositional, giving special attention to methodological presuppositions. She criticizes compositional facts (facts as special structured building blocks of reality) and the central argument for them, Armstrong's truthmaker argument. She then criticizes propositional facts (facts as whatever is named in “the fact that” statements) and what she calls the argument from nominal reference, which draws on Quine's criterion of ontological commitment. Betti argues that metaphysicians should stop worrying about facts, and philosophers in general should stop arguing for or against entities on the basis of how we use language. (shrink)

This book examines cultural recognition and the struggle for identity in America's schools. In particular, the contributing authors focus on the recognition and misrecognition as antagonistic cultural forces that work to shape, and at times distort identity.

The stories of the remarkable women who have bravely met two challenges: the risk of space travel and the struggle to succeed in a man's world.

This study asked managers with different educational backgrounds and experience from a variety of industries of a variety of sizes representing both genders and various predominant managerial functions at different levels to “describe the skills they think are necessary to perform their jobs effectively”. In particular, they were asked to rank 178 behavioral skills presented under 22 different categories that described different aspects of management. Data were then examined first to determine the importance of ethics or integrity overall in the (...) group of managerial activities and then to explore how specific ethical activities of managers differ across various managerial and organizational characteristics. Findings indicate that ethics is still considered one of the least important skills necessary in managers’ daily work. However, once specific ethical activities are analyzed separately, significant differences are found across characteristics of managers, as well as those of the organizations at which they work. (shrink)

Le monde occidental s'interroge aujourd'hui sur la passion de la mort qui pousse de jeunes terroristes au suicide et au crime. Le présent essai traite d'une autre fascination, non moins troublante : celle qui travaille sourdement les grands textes de notre modernité. Après Alexandre Kojève, l'écriture de Georges Bataille, de Maurice Blanchot, de Jacques Derrida ou de Jacques Lacan, laisse transparaître un lyrisme de la destruction, un engouement pour l'abîme, qu'il faut savoir reconnaître sous la rigueur de la pensée. D'où (...) vient cette esthétique du malheur? Quels enjeux recouvre-t-elle? Au fil d'une minutieuse lecture, l'auteur s'attache à dénuder un complexe de valeurs et d'affects qui remontent aux origines symboliques de notre civilisation. On entrevoit peu à peu que cette revendication de la mort pourrait bien n'être que le signe inversé de la grande protestation humaine, de sa soif d'infini et de son désir d'être. Betty Rojtman, née à Paris, a dirigé le département de littérature française à l'université hébraïque de Jérusalem. Elle situe sa recherche au carrefour de la pensée contemporaine et de l'exégèse juive traditionnelle. Parmi ses publications : Feu noir sur feu blanc. Essai sur l'herméneutique juive (1986); Une grave distraction (préface de Paul Ricoeur, 1991) ; Une rencontre improbable (2002) et Moïse, prophète des nostalgies (2007). (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre’s failures in Black Orpheus have been widely and rightly explicated by a number of theorists, most notably Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Sartre has rightly been criticized for imposing a white gaze onto his reading of colonized African poetry. It would seem that his work offers us no tools for anti-racist work today. For this article, I read his failures in the text alongside his work in The Imaginary and Being and Nothingness to argue that we can learn (...) from his failures and that his failures do offer us conceptual tools for anti-racist work today. I argue that Sartre’s main contribution ought to be understood as a provocation to white people. He is provoking white people to confront how whiteness works in their imaginary. The imaginary is nothing but what one puts into it, and what one puts into it is imbued with the historical, social and cultural. The image is imbued with the individual’s experiences within a historical, social and cultural situation. If this is the case, then the confrontation with and critique of the image is a political act. In confronting and critiquing the image, one is confronting and critiquing the situation in which the image emerges. The hope is that in doing so, white people could transcend the facticity of their whiteness in particular situations for the better, which in turn would have positive consequences for the larger sociopolitical situation. (shrink)

A new study entitled “Normal gut microbiota modulates brain development and behavior”, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, requires that we reconsider the notion that the brain is an immune‐privileged site. The authors demonstrate that intestinal microbiota must be present within a set time‐frame for normal synaptogenesis to occur in the brain. In the absence of intestinal microbiota, histopathological and behavioral abnormalities arise. These observations necessitate a new look at the many interconnections of the immune system (...) and the brain, suggesting new frontiers for research and new therapeutic strategies for neurodevelopmental diseases. (shrink)

An investigation of Benjamin’s conception of the subject as fractured via a reading of Benjamin’s use of Freud, this book engages Benjamin’s writing on sovereignty and myth in the Baroque and analyzes these themes in the context of Benjamin’s writing on the 19th century.

How can we best reconstruct the origin of a notion, its development, and possible spread to multiple fields? We present a pilot study on the spread of the notion of conceptual scheme. Though the notion is philosophically important, its origin, development, and spread are unclear. Several purely qualitative and competing historical hypotheses have been offered, which rely on disconnected disciplinary traditions, and have never been tested all at once in a single comprehensive investigation fitting the scope of its subject matter. (...) As a step toward such an investigation, we trace the use of the bigram “conceptual scheme” in about 42,000 US journal articles in social sciences from 1888-1959 by using a novel method combining a quantitative procedure aided by basic computational techniques with qualitative elements informed by Betti and van den Berg (2014)’s ‘model approach to the history of ideas’. (shrink)

While it is widely assumed that greater diversity in corporate governance will enhance a firm’s corporate social performance, this study considers an alternative thesis which relates managerial control to corporate philanthropy. The study empirically evaluates both board diversity and managerial control of the board as possible predictors of corporate philanthropy. The demonstration of a positive relationship between managerial control and corporate philanthropy contributes to our understanding that corporate social performance results from a complex set of economic and social motives. Possible (...) future research and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

The History of Ideas is presently enjoying a certain renaissance after a long period of disrepute. Increasing quantities of digitally available historical texts and the availability of computational tools for the exploration of such masses of sources, it is suggested, can be of invaluable help to historians of ideas. The question is: how exactly? In this paper, we argue that a computational history of ideas is possible if the following two conditions are satisfied: (i) Sound Method . A computational history (...) of ideas must be built upon a sound theoretical foundation for its methodology, and the only such foundation is given by the use of models , i.e., fully explicit and revisable interpretive frameworks or networks of concepts developed by the historians of ideas themselves. (ii) Data Organisation. Interpretive models in our sense must be seen as topic-specific knowledge organisation systems (KOS) implementable (i.e. formalisable) as e.g. computer science ontologies. We thus require historians of ideas to provide explicitly structured semantic framing of domain knowledge before investigating texts computationally, and to constantly re-input findings from the interpretive point of view. In this way, a computational history of ideas maximally profits from computer methods while also keeping humanities experts in the loop. We elucidate our proposal with reference to a model of the notion of axiomatic science in 18th -19th century Europe. (shrink)

An analysis of movement, and particularly of dance,helps us to see in an extraordinarily effective way the meaningof embodiment. This paper then looks through the eyes ofdance theorists and at philosophers who consider dance andmovement and their meaning of embodiment. A study of movementand dance encompasses the fullest meaning of embodiment: that theembodied way of being-in-the-world is also an embedded way ofbeing in a world of others. Dance has critically importantsocial ramifications. In our own and other cultures, dance playsan important (...) role in healing and in health enhancement. (shrink)

Betty Powell; XII*—Descartes' Machines, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 June 1971, Pages 209–222, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.

Amongst the multiple key philosophers who have addressed critical issues pertaining to music education since the mid-1900s, Bennett Reimer was one voice that began a systematic examination of the nature and value of music and music education as a foundation for a philosophy of music education. With the musical experience at the center of his philosophy, Reimer sought to explain how music articulates feeling, a core of who we are as human beings. Over the sixty years of writing, Reimer’s thinking (...) continued to be influenced by other disciplines including the literature on creative thinking and cognitive neuroscience. The impact of his writing on the field is multifarious, including philosophy, advocacy, curriculum, and the role of music in school-based programs. (shrink)

Farm to school programs are at the vanguard of efforts to create an alternative agrifood system in the United States. Regionally-based, mid-tier food distributors may play an important role in harnessing the potential of farm to school programs to create viable market opportunities for small- and mid-size family farmers, while bringing more locally grown fresh food to school cafeterias. This paper focuses on the perspectives of food distributors. Our findings suggest that the food distributors profiled have the potential to help (...) institutionalize farm to school programs. Notably, their relationships with farmers may be a critical element in expanding the scale and scope of local school food procurement. Their ability to catalyze local school food procurement however, is limited by the structural context in which farm to school programs operate. Specifically, the oppositional school year and agriculture production cycle, and tight food service budget constraints disembed and limit the potential of farm to school programs to decrease the “marketness” of school food procurement and to shift it from a process based largely on price to one that is more territorially embedded. As farm to school programs continue to gain support, regionally-based food distributors that have the meaningful relationships necessary to re-embed the school food service market back into the larger society may be critical to enabling advocates to achieve their goals. (shrink)

In this profound and subtle study, a practising psychoanalyst explores the dynamics of the interaction between the patient and the analyst. Michael Feldman draws the reader into experiencing how the clinical interaction unfolds within a session. In doing so, he develops some of the implications of the important pioneering work of such analysts as Klein, Rosenfeld and Joseph, showing in fine detail some of the ways in which the patient feels driven to communicate to the analyst, not only in order (...) to be understood by him, but also in order to affect him. The author's detailed descriptions of the clinical process allow the reader to follow the actual process that enables the patient to get into contact with thoughts and feelings of which he or she was previously unconscious or only vaguely aware. Feldman makes the reader aware of the constant dynamic interaction between the patient and the analyst, each affecting the other. He shows how the analyst has to find a balance between doubt, uncertainty and confusion in himself and through this process may arrive at an understanding of what is happening, and by formulating this understanding the analyst can make a significant contribution to the process of psychic change. This collection of essays not only throws light on fascinating questions of technique, but also reflects on elements that are fundamental to psychoanalytic work. It is essential reading for practising psychoanalysts and those in training, as well as anyone with a general interest in the psychoanalytic relationship between the client and the therapist in the consulting room. (shrink)

The “American Dream” and “Working Class Promise” ideologies are ubiquitously dispersed in American society. These ideologies posit values of equality and opportunity. In this paper, I deconstruct these two ideologies in order to examine the effects these ideologies have on income inequality, social inequality, and social immobility. I argue these ideologies create a paradox in society whereby the more these ideologies are believed, the more the ideologies exacerbate income inequality, social inequality, and social immobility.

The paper [Tarski: Les fondements de la géométrie des corps, Annales de la Société Polonaise de Mathématiques, pp. 29—34, 1929] is in many ways remarkable. We address three historico-philosophical issues that force themselves upon the reader. First we argue that in this paper Tarski did not live up to his own methodological ideals, but displayed instead a much more pragmatic approach. Second we show that Leśniewski's philosophy and systems do not play the significant role that one may be tempted to (...) assign to them at first glance. Especially the role of background logic must be at least partially allocated to Russell's systems of Principia mathematica. This analysis leads us, third, to a threefold distinction of the technical ways in which the domain of discourse comes to be embodied in a theory. Having all of this in place, we discuss why we have to reject the argument in [Gruszczyński and Pietruszczak: Full development of Tarski's Geometry of Solids, The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 481—540] according to which Tarski has made a certain mistake. (shrink)