How good gets better and bad gets worse: measuring the face of emotion Given the history of the past, black South African students from different settings face unique academic and emotional climate. Using the Differential Emotions Scale which focuses on ten discrete emotions, and building upon Boyle's seminal work, this study reports a repeated-measure multiple discriminant function analysis for individual items across raters. The findings further indicate that majority of the DES items are sensitive indicators of the different innate and (...) universal facial expressions. However, the construct requires revision so that it offers the examiner maximum flexibility in assessment at diverse levels, in terms of more extensive norming and programmatic replication. In brief, the DES potentially has much to offer provided that it is adequately developed for use in non-Western nations or contexts. (shrink)

Inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Williams launches an all-out attack on what he calls "phenomenalism," the idea that our knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation.

Science education researchers have long advocated the central role of the nature of science for our understanding of scientific literacy. NOS is often interpreted narrowly to refer to a host of epistemological issues associated with the process of science and the limitations of scientific knowledge. Despite its importance, practitioners and researchers alike acknowledge that students have difficulty learning NOS and that this in part reflects how difficult it is to teach. One particularly promising method for teaching NOS involves an explicit (...) and reflective approach using the history of science. The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of a historically based genetics unit on undergraduates’ understanding of NOS. The three-class unit developed for this study introduces students to Mendelian genetics using the story of Gregor Mendel’s work. NOS learning objectives were emphasized through discussion questions and investigations. The unit was administered to undergraduates in an introductory biology course for pre-service elementary teachers. The influence of the unit was determined by students’ responses to the SUSSI instrument, which was administered pre- and post-intervention. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted that focused on changes in students’ responses from pre- to post-test. Data collected indicated that students showed improved NOS understanding related to observations, inferences, and the influence of culture on science. (shrink)

It is often claimed that one cannot locate a notion of causation in fundamental physical theories. The reason most commonly given is that the dynamics of those theories do not support any distinction between the past and the future, and this vitiates any attempt to locate a notion of causal asymmetry—and thus of causation—in fundamental physical theories. I argue that this is incorrect: the ubiquitous generation of entanglement between quantum systems grounds a relevant asymmetry in the dynamical evolution of quantum (...) systems. I show that by exploiting a connection between the amount of entanglement in a quantum state and the algorithmic complexity of that state, one can use recently developed tools for causal inference to identify a causal asymmetry—and a notion of causation—in the dynamical evolution of quantum systems. (shrink)

A crucial test for the dominant Rawlsian ‘consensus’ brand of public reason is whether it is complete – sufficient in content, that is, to yield determinate answers to the political questions put before it. Yet while doubts about the incompleteness of Rawlsian public reason have been often voiced, critics have thus far carried out relatively little of the philosophical spadework needed to substantiate them. This paper contributes to remedying this omission, via a detailed analysis of the implications of Rawlsian public (...) reason for an important bioethical problem arising at the end of human life. This is the problem of how to define and diagnose the death of a person, or determine at what point the clinical and legal practices conventionally associated with death, such as the removal of vital organs, may take place. My thesis is that this is a matter on which Rawlsian public reason does indeed have a grave incompleteness problem: the model produces indeterminacy, I argue, between a broad range of legal definitions of death. I also aim to go beyond existing articulations of the incompleteness objection, moreover, by examining what Rawlsian consensus liberalism implies about how decision-makers ought to respond to indeterminacies in public reason. Insofar as the route to a reasoned choice between competing criteria of death is foreclosed, I contend, the Rawlsian view requires that selection among policy options proceed in an intolerably arbitrary fashion. The latter finding alters the cast of the familiar incompleteness objection, by closing the gap between it and what I have elsewhere called the ethical objection – the objection, that is, that public reason can in some cases generate determinate but morally unacceptable decisions. (shrink)

Exploring the intricacy and complexity of Walter Pater's prose, Transfigured World challenges traditional approaches to Pater and shows precise ways in which the form of his prose expresses its content. Carolyn Williams asserts that Pater's aestheticism and his historicism should be understood as dialectically interrelated critical strategies, inextricable from each other in practice. Williams discusses the explicit and embedded narratives that play a crucial role in Pater's aesthetic criticism and examines the figures that compose these narratives, including rhetorical (...) tropes, structures of argument such as genealogy, and historical or fictional personae. (shrink)

The everyday sense of pragmatic involves ideas of sensible practice, cautious realism about current situations, flexibility allied to technical knowledge, and the prioritisation of what works, as opposed to unrealistic and damaging ideals. I argue against this technical and sensible flavour of pragmatism, pre-sent in many of its historical and contemporary versions. Pragmatism can be taken as technically-minded, realistic and practical, thereby avoiding the excesses of abstract ideologies. Instead, I will defend the thesis that pragmatism should be fantastic, in the (...) precise sense of metaphysically inventive. In making this latter argument, my main critical point will be against the metaphysically «quietist» version of pragmatism, in particular as defended by David Macarthur. My claim is counter-intuitive, since it seems to commit pragmatism to the forms of idealism that it has sought to criticise and escape. If metaphysics propose ideal pictures of the world, as opposed to detailed, local and evidence-based descriptions - allied to rigorous experimentation - then the fantasies of metaphysics are exactly what pragmatism should avoid. In response to this critical counter, I will argue that pragmatism should be metaphysically inventive because it cannot avoid being metaphysical. However, I also argue that it should be self-critical in its fantastic creativity. (shrink)

Is social science really a science at all, and if so in what sense? This is the first real question that any course on the philosophy of the social sciences must tackle. In this brief introduction, Malcolm Williams gives the students the grounding that will enable them to discuss the issues involved with confidence.

The rapid advances made in genetic research and technology over the last few decades have led to a host of important discoveries that have allowed for the detection (and hopefully soon the treatment) of a number of genetic conditions and diseases. Not surprisingly, these advances have also raised numerous ethical concerns about how result­ ing technologies will be implemented, and the impact they will have on different com­ munities. One particular concern is the enormous costs involved in conducting genetic research (...) and the fact that the private sector has become heavily involved; the desire to commercialize the results and technology derived from genetic research is considered problematic. In September 1998, the Second International Conference on DNA Sampling, titled "The Commercialization of Genetic Research: Ethical, Legal and Policy Issues," was held of the conference, and of this book, was to in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The goal facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion of the legal, ethical, and policy implications arising from the commercialization of genetic research. We solicited contributions for the book from authors in fields as diverse as ethics, law, medicine, health policy, and the social sciences. The papers included, while based on presentations given at the conference, have been substantially expanded and enhanced by the commentary received and discussions held at the conference. (shrink)

This paper shows that species are individuals with respect to evolutionary theory in the sense that the laws of the theory deal with species as irreducible wholes rather than as sets of organisms. 'Species X' is an instantiation of a primitive term of the theory. I present a sketch of a proof that it cannot be defined within the theory as a set of organisms; the proof relies not on details of my axiomatization but rather on a generally accepted property (...) of speciation; hence the same argument should work for any axiomatization which captures this generally accepted property of speciation. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this paper, I outline Du Bois’s WWI-era theory of democracy, which comprises three parts: first, an historically specific explanation of the racially exclusionist character of the modern struggle for democracy; second, a justification of universal suffrage; and third, an account of democratic culture, the promotion of which he believed was necessary to supplement the enfranchisement of black people where white supremacy still threated the achievement of justice.

Inconsistency and contradiction are important concepts. Unfortunately, they are easily confused. A proposition or belief which is inconsistent is one which is self- contradictory and vice-versa. Moreover two propositions or beliefs which are contradictories are inconsistent with each other. Nonetheless it is a mistake to suppose that inconsistency is the same as contradiction.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Will to Power in Nietzsche’s Published Works and the NachlassLinda L. WilliamsIt is universally acknowledged by scholars of Nietzsche’s work that will to power is one of the most important notions in Nietzsche’s writings, but strangely, like the other “central” notions of eternal recurrence and the Übermensch, there are relatively few aphorisms in either the published or unpublished material that include the term. In the case of will to (...) power, however, Nietzsche promises in a footnote in On the Genealogy of Morals to discuss and explore the notion of will to power in a book entitled The Will to Power. 1 Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, among others, have argued persuasively that Nietzsche abandoned this project. 2 Nevertheless, the phrase “will to power” remains the most notorious feature of Nietzsche’s philosophy, probably due to its unfortunate and mistaken connections with the Third Reich. As Walter Kaufmann notes, the notion of will to power did not “spring fully formed from Nietzsche’s brow like Pallas Athena.” 3 This was an idea that evolved over time. This paper examines both the published and his unpublished writings (the Nachlass) to gain a better understanding of how this important phrase developed.The Nachlass can be divided roughly into three different kinds of work. 4 The first kind is comprised of the works Nietzsche was editing right before his collapse. These works are Ecce Homo, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and The Antichrist, and they were so polished that we can safely take them as [End Page 447] equal in status to the works that Nietzsche had already published or, like Twilight of the Idols, were being published at the time of his collapse. The second kind are Nietzsche’s early, finished pieces that were never published, the so-called Schriften, primarily his lectures and writings while he was employed at Basel. These pieces are presumably complete and polished, although Nietzsche chose not to publish them, but they do not affect this inquiry, since will to power was a relatively late concept for Nietzsche.The third kind of work consists of Nietzsche’s notes, which vary from sentence fragments or single sentences to sketchy outlines of various projects to several long paragraphs in essay form. Nietzsche’s notebooks looked like anyone’s notebook, with passages lined out, words jotted in the margins, and overwriting. Some of the entries in the Nachlass can be found with only minor revisions in the books Nietzsche had published, and since he painstakingly recopied his books in his neatest handwriting right before he sent them to his editor, these strikingly similar entries are most probably the penultimate copy drafts of the published aphorisms.The writings that did not find their way into publication in any form are problematic. Are they rough drafts of some future work which Nietzsche was unable to complete due to his illness? If so, some of these controversial notes would have been waiting for years. Are they ideas that Nietzsche entertained but ultimately rejected? If so, we should not place them on par with the ideas in his published works. Even if we consider these notes rough drafts of future works, it remains unclear whether we should consider what is written in these notes to be as indicative of what Nietzsche thought as the works he authorized for publication. Sometimes what is written in the unpublished notes on a particular topic is very different from what is written on that topic in the published works. Bernd Magnus made this kind of case against the Nachlass notes concerning eternal recurrence, 5 and I want to make a similar claim about the notes concerning will to power. Reviewing the Nachlass notes in conjunction with the published aphorisms will give us a better understanding of how the published and unpublished notes differ.The term “will to power” (Wille zur Macht) first appeared in publication in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 6 In the aphorism “On 1001 Goals” Nietzsche describes a people’s tablets of good and bad as the voice of its will to power. Wille zur Macht appears in only two more aphorisms in the course of this long work, in “On Self-Overcoming” and in... (shrink)

In arguing that Nietzsche's _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism—that is, of the possibility of radical cultural change through the creation of new values—the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy. Nietzsche takes up the problem of modernism by inventing Zarathustra, a self-styled cultural innovator who aspires to subvert the culture of modernity by creating new values. By showing how Zarathustra can become a creator of new values, notwithstanding the forces (...) that hinder his will to innovate, Nietzsche answers the skeptic who proclaims that new-values creation is impossible. _Zarathustra_ is a story of repeated clashes between Zarathustra's avant-garde, modernist intentions and figures of doubt who condemn those intentions. Through a close reading of _Zarathustra_, the author reconstructs Nietzsche's explanation of the possibility of modernism. Showing how parody, irony, and plot organization frame that explanation, he also demonstrates the central significance of Zarathustra's speeches on the body and the will to power. The author argues that Nietzsche's critique of the modern philosophy of the subject revises Kant's concept of the dynamical sublime and makes allegorical use of the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Dionysus. He also proposes an original interpretation of the thought of eternal recurrence. Breaking with conventional Nietzsche scholarship, the author conceptualizes the thought not as a theoretical or a practical doctrine that Nietzsche endorses, but as a developing drama that Zarathustra performs. (shrink)

According to Fred Dretske, the debate between externalists and internalists in epistemology is about “Whether there are epistemic rights without corresponding duties or obligations. Externalists believe and internalists deny that there are such unjustified justifiers. Dretske’s first fundamental thesis is: externalists are right. Unjustified justifiers can be thought of as “given,” not because they are certain or indubitable, but because they are “free of justificational encumbrances.” Even knowledge—the supreme entitlement—requires no justification.

Investigates the concept of recognition (anerkennen) under which term the German idealists discussed the Other, intersubjectivity, the interhuman.

This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom, Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume (...) will be welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other distinguished thinkers in the field. (shrink)

Most anyone interested in such topics as creation mythology, Jungian theory, or the idea of "secret teachings" in ancient Judaism and Christianity has found "gnosticism" compelling. Yet the term "gnosticism," which often connotes a single rebellious movement against the prevailing religions of late antiquity, gives the false impression of a monolithic religious phenomenon. Here Michael Williams challenges the validity of the widely invoked category of ancient "gnosticism" and the ways it has been described. Presenting such famous writings and movements (...) as the Apocryphon of John and Valentinian Christianity, Williams uncovers the similarities and differences among some major traditions widely categorized as gnostic. He provides an eloquent, systematic argument for a more accurate way to discuss these interpretive approaches.The modern construct "gnosticism" is not justified by any ancient self-definition, and many of the most commonly cited religious features that supposedly define gnosticism phenomenologically turn out to be questionable. Exploring the sample sets of "gnostic" teachings, Williams refutes generalizations concerning asceticism and libertinism, attitudes toward the body and the created world, and alleged features of protest, parasitism, and elitism. He sketches a fresh model for understanding ancient innovations on more "mainstream" Judaism and Christianity, a model that is informed by modern research on dynamics in new religious movements and is freed from the false stereotypes from which the category "gnosticism" has been constructed. (shrink)

Volume 34, Issue 8, December 2020, Page 1632-1645.

This article explores, in the French context, an aspect of what Terence McLaughlin (1991) has described in an unpublished paper as the ‘dilemma of substantiality’ faced by any school system endeavouring to promote neutrality. In France, in order that the public or common school be genuinely open to all students, not only is the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols forbidden but so too is any direct teaching of religion. The cultural consequences resulting from this prohibition have led to the mandating (...) of cross-curricular teaching about religion. This article aims to show that the civic principles (la laïcité) on which this teaching is based pose in an acute and problematic form the ‘dilemma of substantiality’. (shrink)

In his “Reply to Williams” (2013), a response to my “David-Hillel Ruben’s ‘Traditions and True Successors’: A Critical Reply.” (2013), David Ruben reports that there is much that we disagree about concerning the nature of true succession. I am not entirely persuaded by what he says of these disagreements.

Huw Lloyd Williams looks at the critical debate surrounding John Rawls' The Law of Peoples. He responds to the work of cosmopolitan theorists and Amartya Sen, arguing that Rawls offers a persuasive and prescient moral approach to issues of global poverty and development.

To advance our understanding of both the Book of Zhuāngzǐ 莊子 (c. fourth to third century BCE) and Qián Mù 錢穆 (1895–1990)’s Zhuāngzǐ studies 莊學, I aim to squarely face one of the more obscure passages in the former with recourse to an explanation from the latter. The passage in question is that from the second chapter beginning with the claim ‘there is a beginning’ (有始也者) and culminating with the claim that ‘there has not yet begun to be a “there (...) has not yet begun to be nothing”’ (有未始有夫未始有無也者). I hope to show that Qián offers a compelling and novel interpretation of this difficult passage worthy of our consideration. (shrink)