Power is everywhere. But what is it and how does it infuse personal and institutional relationships in higher education? Power, Knowledge and the Academy: The Institutional is Political takes a close-up and critical look at both the elusive and blatant workings and consequences of power in a range of everyday sites in universities. Chapters focus on specific locations in which power shapes personal and institutional knowledge including student-supervisor relationships, research teams, networking, the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK, and literature (...) reviews. (shrink)

An explicit linking of the minutiae of everyday parenting practices and the good of society as a whole has been a feature of government policy. The state has taken responsibility for instilling the right parenting skills to deal with what is said to be the societal fall-out of contemporary and family change. ?Knowledge? about parenting is seen as a resource that parents must access in order to fulfil their moral duty as good parents. In this policy portrait, caring for children (...) is posed as a classless and gender-neutral activity. A key theme of this article is that parents from different social class groups are positioned and understand themselves in quite distinct ways in relation to parenting skills advice and expert intervention into their family and home lives. We take a ?relational? perspective to show how mothers and fathers from different social class groups see themselves, and are located by policy and practice, as clients or consumers, and as commonplace or pioneers, in relation to parenting support for themselves and the education system for their children. We identify the lived gendered and classed disparities of power, and associated moral worth, attached to particular parenting practices. (shrink)

Go to John Cantwell’s response to the original paper from here › Go to Grazia Ietto-Gillies’ original paper from here ›.

In this much-needed account of what has gone wrong in our thinking about the environment, Val Plumwood digs at the roots of environmental degradation. She argues that we need to see nature as an end itself, rather than an instrument to get what we want. Using a range of examples, Plumwood presents a radically new picture of how our culture must change to accommodate nature.

Why is understanding causation so important in philosophy and the sciences? Should causation be defined in terms of probability? Whilst causation plays a major role in theories and concepts of medicine, little attempt has been made to connect causation and probability with medicine itself. Causality, Probability, and Medicine is one of the first books to apply philosophical reasoning about causality to important topics and debates in medicine. Donald Gillies provides a thorough introduction to and assessment of competing theories of (...) causality in philosophy, including action-related theories, causality and mechanisms, and causality and probability. Throughout the book he applies them to important discoveries and theories within medicine, such as germ theory; tuberculosis and cholera; smoking and heart disease; the first ever randomized controlled trial designed to test the treatment of tuberculosis; the growing area of philosophy of evidence-based medicine; and philosophy of epidemiology. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine, as well as those working in medicine, nursing and related health disciplines where a working knowledge of causality and probability is required. (shrink)

Women, Humanity and Nature Val Plum wood There is now a growing awareness that the Western philosophical tradition which has identified, on the one hand, maleness with the sphere of rationality, and on the other hand, femaleness with the sphere...

Philosophy's traditional "man of reason"—independent, neutral, unemotional—is an illusion. That's because the "man of reason" ignores one very important thing—the woman. Representing Reason: Feminist Theory and Formal Logic collects new and old essays that shed light on the underexplored intersection of logic and feminism.

I argue that Janna Thompson’s critique of environmental ethics misrepresents the work of certain proponents of non-instrumental value theory and overlooks the ways in which intrinsie values have been related to valuers and their preferences. Some of the difficulties raised for environmental ethics are real but would only be fatal if environmental ethics could not be supplemented by a wider environmental philosophy and practice. The proper context and motivation for the development of non-instrumental theories is not that of an objectivist (...) value theory but rejection of the human domination and chauvinism involved in even the broadest instrumental accounts of nature as spiritual resource. (shrink)

Two of the most important political movements of the late twentieth century are those of environmentalism and feminism. In this book, Val Plumwood argues that feminist theory has an important opportunity to make a major contribution to the debates in political ecology and environmental philosophy. _Feminism and the Mastery of Nature_ explains the relation between ecofeminism, or ecological feminism, and other feminist theories including radical green theories such as deep ecology. Val Plumwood provides a philosophically informed account of the relation (...) of women and nature, and shows how relating male domination to the domination of nature is important and yet remains a dilemma for women. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Method examines the remarkable advances made in the field of AI over the past twenty years, discussing their profound implications for philosophy. Taking a clear, non-technical approach, Donald Gillies shows how current views on scientific method are challenged by this recent research, and suggests a new framework for the study of logic. Finally, he draws on work by such seminal thinkers as Bacon, Gdel, Popper, Penrose, and Lucas, to address the hotly-contested question of whether computers (...) might become intellectually superior to human beings. (shrink)

This paper has three main goals. First, to motivate a puzzle about how ignorance-expressing terms like maybe and if interact: they iterate, and when they do they exhibit scopelessness. Second, to argue that there is an ambiguity in our theoretical toolbox, and that exposing that opens the door to a solution to the puzzle. And third, to explore the reach of that solution. Along the way, the paper highlights a number of pleasing properties of two elegant semantic theories, explores some (...) meta-theoretic properties of dynamic notions of meaning, dips its toe into some hazardous waters, and offers characterization theorems for the space of meanings an indicative conditional can have. (shrink)

The last couple of decades has brought a renewed interest in American conservatism among historians. Yet most recent studies have focused on the emergence of neoconservatism after World War II and virtually no recent scholarly work has pursued the history of conservatism before the 1920s. Both Richard Hofstadter and Clinton Rossiter agreed that the late nineteenth century was an important watershed in the evolution of American conservative thought. Hofstadter argued that the new laissez-faire conservatism that became dominant during the Gilded (...) Age was remarkable in that “it lacked many of the signal characteristics of conservatism as it is usually found.” Yet some conservatives refused to accept key features of what Clinton Rossiter once branded this new “contradictory conservatism.” This essay focuses mostly on Protestant clerical intellectuals who dissented from the new orthodoxy and attempted to preserve older conservative principles. Against the laissez-faire conservatives' hyperindividualism, these dissenting conservatives stressed an organic view of the social order and the importance of mediating institutions such as family and church. To the others' secularism, they offered a social theory suffused with evangelical Protestantism. This analysis highlights where these dissidents differed from their fellow conservatives and seeks also to elucidate their alternative conservative vision of the American republic. Such a study serves to clarify just how profound an ideological shift occurred among conservatives during the Gilded Age and illuminates some of the persistent tensions within American conservatism still evident today. (shrink)

Outlines the key concepts in the work of Foucault, showing how his concepts of discourse, of power/knowledge, and of governmentality offer a way to understand how ideas of educational leadership and management have emerged, how they serve to establish a discipline, and how they construct individuals in particular ideological ways.

The paper briefly summarises the historical evolution of transnational corporations and their activities. It then introduces the major theories developed to explain the TNC. There is an attempt to place the theories historically, within the context of the socio-economic … More ›.

Obligation describing language is hooked up with preference, a relation of what-is-better-than-what. But ordinary situations underdetermine such relations of what-is-better-than-what. Even so, there are plainly true sentences describing our obligations in those situations. This mismatch is trouble-making and getting out of the trouble requires either giving up the easy link between “ought” and preference or re-thinking the kind of things preferences can be.

Timothy Mahoney discovers and champions an ecologically benign account of Plato in opposition to my own critical analysis of the reason-centeredness, reason-nature dualism, and nature and body devaluation in the Platonic dialogues, in which multiple linked dualisms of reason and nature associated with systems of oppression provide major organizing principles for Platonic philosophy. I show first that Mahoney's criticisms of my interpretation involve some careless and mistaken readings of my own text. Second, I argue that Mahoney* s account of nature (...) is significantly different from Plato's. Mahoney's interpretation of Plato is an overly generous and idealized one which plays on the multiplicity and elasticity of the concept of nature and the notorious vagueness of the concept of participation to conflate, among other things, Plato's attitude to celestial nature with his attitude to biological nature. Mahoney's interpretation involves setting aside Plato's gender politics, playing down some of Plato's most offensive and revealing passages of earth disparagement, and ignoring the network of social meanings from which Plato's philosophy emerges. Finally, I give some reasons why Mahoney's accounts of participation and nature, even considered as a reworking of Plato, would be highly problematic as the foundation for an ecological philosophy. (shrink)

Yule, Val A series of before-and-after pictures shows the cost to a city that is bombed. A recent example is the UNESCO-listed sites in the Syrian city of Aleppo - one example is given above. After bombing these sites were all rubble.

The propensity interpretation of probability was introduced by Popper ([1957]), but has subsequently been developed in different ways by quite a number of philosophers of science. This paper does not attempt a complete survey, but discusses a number of different versions of the theory, thereby giving some idea of the varieties of propensity. Propensity theories are classified into (i) long-run and (ii) single-case. The paper argues for a long-run version of the propensity theory, but this is contrasted with two single-case (...) propensity theories, one due to Miller and the later Popper, and the other to Fetzer. The three approaches are compared by examining how they deal with a key problem for the propensity approach, namely the relationship between propensity and causality and Humphreys' paradox. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to consider whether critical rationalism has any ideas which could usefully be applied to the internet. Today we tend to take the internet for granted and it is easy to forget that it was only about two decades ago that it began to be used to any significant extent. Accordingly in section 1 of the paper, there is a brief consideration of the history of the internet. At first sight this makes it looks implausible (...) that any of Popper’s ideas could be applicable to the internet, since Popper died before the internet came into general use. However, section 2 argues that Popper’s theory of World 3 does apply very well to the internet. This application is significant because, as shown in section 3, it leads to the problem of misinformation, which is one of the most significant problems generated by the internet. In section 4 there is an attempt to solve this problem using ideas taken from Popper’s epistemology. It is argued that there should be changes in education designed to prepare students for the internet age. Teaching in the internet age should focus on presenting to the students not just the accepted theories but also the evidence on which they are based. An illustration of how this might be done is given by considering an example from science teaching, namely the teaching of Newtonian mechanics in the last years of school or first years of university. (shrink)

Why are art and the aesthetic so vitally important to our liberty, and to the re-creation of liberty in our living? How do they evoke the Ultimate in us? And why is that so important to our modern living? These are the vital questions that moved this author to a three-month personal exploration of aesthetic, artistic and ultimate meaning in its relation to liberty. The article is written pedagogically to lead the reader along the chain of ideas, thoughts and further (...) questions that the author explores in response to her questions. (shrink)

This paper suggests a new principle for confirmation theory which is called the principle of explanatory surplus. This principle is shown to be non-Bayesian in character, and to lead to a treatment of simplicity in science. Two cases of the principle of explanatory surplus are considered. The first (number of parameters) is illustrated by curve-fitting examples, while the second (number of theoretical assumptions) is illustrated by the examples of Newton's Laws and Adler's Theory of the Inferiority Complex.

Ideal for undergraduate students in philosophy and science studies, Philosophy of Technology offers an engaging and comprehensive overview of a subject vital to our time. An up-to-date, accessible overview of the philosophy of technology, defining technology and its characteristics. Explores the issues that arise as technology becomes an integral part of our society. In addition to traditional topics in science and technology studies, the volume offers discussion of technocracy, the romantic rebellion against technology. Complements The Philosophy of Technology : The (...) Technological Condition: An Anthology, edited by Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek. (shrink)

This is a handbook article about indicative conditionals.

The creation of poetry can be an intensely healing process, as therapeutic as the other arts and talking therapies. This paper examines three areas. First, it sets out some opinions about the specific qualities of poetry that make it particularly valuable as part of a therapeutic process. It goes on to give exemplified information about how poetry is used within healthcare in Britain. Finally, it indicates the current growth of interest in this area, with brief descriptions of pilot research studies (...) where poetry has been offered by a writing therapist, or by nursing or medical practitioners. (shrink)

Teaching students to ask and answer questions is critically important if they are to engage in reasoned argumentation, problem-solving, and learning. This study involved 35 groups of grade 6 children from 18 classrooms in three conditions (cognitive questioning condition, community of inquiry condition, and the comparison condition) who were videotaped as they worked on specific inquiry-based science tasks. The study also involved the teachers in these classrooms who were audio-taped as they interacted with the children during these tasks. The results (...) show that while there were no significant differences in the children's explanatory behaviour across the two time periods, there were significant differences in the total verbal interactions between the children in the cognitive questioning condition and their peers in the community of inquiry and comparison conditions. Furthermore, the children in the cognitive questioning condition obtained higher reasoning and problem-solving scores than peers in the other conditions. Interestingly, while there were no significant differences between the teachers’ basic and extended mediating behaviours in the three conditions at Times 1 and 2, there was a significant difference in extended mediation behaviours with the teachers demonstrating nearly three times more extended mediation to promote students’ learning at Time 2 than they did at Time 1. Teacher intervention in providing guidance in how to interact during cooperative, inquiry-based science appears to be critical to helping students engage in higher-level thinking and learning. (shrink)