This book applies Augustine's thought to current questions of teaching and learning. The essays are written in an accessible style and is not intended just for experts on Augustine or church history.

In this international and interdisciplinary collection of critical essays, distinguished contributors examine a crucial premise of traditional readings of Plato's dialogues: that Plato's own doctrines and arguments can be read off the statements made in the dialogues by Socrates and other leading characters. The authors argue in general and with reference to specific dialogues, that no character should be taken to be Plato's mouthpiece. This is essential reading for students and scholars of Plato.

Sober (1992) has recently evaluated Brandon's (1982, 1990; see also 1985, 1988) use of Salmon's (1971) concept of screening-off in the philosophy of biology. He critiques three particular issues, each of which will be considered in this discussion.

The contribution of this book to the field of reconciliation is both theoretical and practical, recognizing that good theory guides effective practice and practice is the ground for compelling theory. Using a Girardian hermeneutic as a starting point, a new conceptual Gestalt emerges in these essays, one not fully integrated in a formal way but showing a clear understanding of some of the challenges and possibilities for dealing with the deep divisions, enmity, hatred, and other effects of violence. By situating (...) discourse about reconciliation within the context of Girardian thought, it becomes clear that like Peter who vowed he would never deny Jesus but ended up doing it three times any of us is susceptible to the siren call of angry resentment and retaliation. It is with a profound awareness of the power of violence that the emergence of mimetic discourse around reconciliation takes on particular urgency.". (shrink)

The contribution of this book to the field of reconciliation is both theoretical and practical, recognizing that good theory guides effective practice and practice is the ground for compelling theory. Using a Girardian hermeneutic as a starting point, a new conceptual Gestalt emerges in these essays, one not fully integrated in a formal way but showing a clear understanding of some of the challenges and possibilities for dealing with the deep divisions, enmity, hatred, and other effects of violence.

Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

Agora, Academy, and the Conduct of Philosophy offers extremely careful and detailed criticisms of some of the most important assumptions scholars have brought to bear in beginning the process of (Platonic) interpretation. It goes on to offer a new way to group the dialogues, based on important facts in the lives and philosophical practices of Socrates - the main speaker in most of Plato's dialogues - and of Plato himself. Both sides of Debra Nails's arguments deserve close attention: the (...) negative side, which exposes a great deal of diversity in a field that often claims to have achieved a consensus; and the positive side, which insists that we must attend to what we know of these philosophers' lives and practices, if we are to make a serious attempt to understand why Plato wrote the way he did, and why his writings seem to depict different philosophies and even different approaches to philosophizing. From the Preface by Nicholas D. Smith. (shrink)

All markets are embedded in ethical relations and moral discourses. This is often forgotten or ignored in alternative agrofood studies, where there has been a frequent assumption that ‘ethics’ can be inserted into markets (Trentmann, 2007), or are only acknowledged in products certified as ‘ethical’ and suchlike (Barnett, Cloke, Clarke, & Malpass, 2005). This paper takes a different approach, choosing to explore how a mainstream commodity, widely associated with the development of capitalist agriculture (Mintz, 1985), is unavoidably embedded in both (...) a set of moral discourses and a web of ethical relations (Goodman, Maye, & Holloway, 2010). Specifically, I offer a critical reading of the moral discourses that circulated between the Caribbean Sugar Protocol signatories and the European Union in the context of the 2006–2009 European Union Sugar Reform. The paper looks at how both Caribbean and European actors negotiated ‘fairness’ and in doing so, reconfigured their historical relationship. I discuss how a relational—or ethical—approach to fairness was evoked in certain instances, disrupting the European Union's (EU) neoliberal rhetoric. Contributing to the literature around ‘moral geographies’ (Jackson & Ward, 2008; Proctor et al., 1999; Smith, 1999) and also to agrofood studies, I conclude by affirming the significance of a relational approach to how the ‘fairness’ of the EU Sugar Reform might be comprehended and to how the ethics of neoliberal market reform can be more generally understood and critiqued. (shrink)

This symposia-papers volume is the second volume of essays from the PSA 2008 program. The vast majority of the work in putting together this volume fell to the program committee. The members of this committee began the adjudication process with over 200 submitted papers and went through two rounds of selection, first for the program and then for this volume. Throughout, they all worked diligently and in good humor. So, I would like to thank Ken Aizawa, Rachel Ankeny, Davis Baird, (...) Paul Bartha, Anjan Chakravartty, Hasok Chang, Sharyn Clough, Carla Fehr, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Brad Monton, Mark Risjord, Laura Ruetsche, Kyle Stanford, Friedrich Steinle, and Peter Vranas. In addition to papers from symposia presented at PSA 2008, we hope the selection of symposia reveals the widening range of philosophical expertise within the PSA. (shrink)

This contributed-papers volume is the first volume of essays from the PSA 2008 program. The vast majority of the work in putting together this volume fell to the program committee. The members of this committee began the adjudication process with over 200 submitted papers and went through two rounds of selection, first for the program and then for this volume. Throughout, they all worked diligently and in good humor. So, I would like to thank Ken Aizawa, Rachel Ankeny, Davis Baird, (...) Paul Bartha, Anjan Chakravartty, Hasok Chang, Sharyn Clough, Carla Fehr, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Brad Monton, Mark Risjord, Laura Ruetsche, Kyle Stanford, Friedrich Steinle, and Peter Vranas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deception in Psychological ResearchJohn P. Gluck and Stephen Hahn-SmithMadam: In the March 1995 issue of the KIEJ, Sissela Bok adds meaningfully to her consistent and important analysis of the harms associated with deception in biomedical and behavioral research. She reminds us that investigator and review committee domination of the analysis of costs and benefits deprives the prospective research subjects of the opportunity to apply their unique sense of values (...) and preferences, an obligation that flows from an authentic respect for persons and a recognition of the importance of autonomy.She also correctly points out that the American Psychological Association (APA) is unique in that it acknowledges the harms of deception by requiring scientific [End Page 386] justification, limiting the scope of what factors can be part of the deception, and supporting minimal duration of deception, at the same time as it maintains a very permissive stance toward its use. For example, the APA code of conduct requires that alternatives to deception be implemented only when they are deemed to be "equally effective."What Bok omits in her critique is that a common justification for the use of deception by psychologists is the belief that many research subjects actually benefit from being deceived. This impression is based on studies that interview subjects at some point in time after their experimental experience. For example, Smith and Richardson (1983, p. 1080) concluded that: "In general, respondents who have been deceived while participating in psychological research did not report negative effects of their experience. In fact, they perceived their experiences more positively that did respondents who had not participated in studies employing deception." Christensen (1988, p. 668), after reviewing the literature on subject reaction to deception, states that the evidence supports the notion that deception experiments are perceived as "more enjoyable and beneficial than nondeception experiments." He goes on to say that in the face of these data it may be that deception has gotten its bad name from philosophers!Basing the acceptability of deception on direct sampling of subjects' highly personal reactions assumes that the procedure yields responses that are valid on their face. If this is true, it would seem to undermine the typical justification for deception in the first place, which is that subjects when asked for personal information are likely to respond in misleading ways. It is important to note that evidence suggests that if subjects are queried about the acceptability of deception prior to actual participation, substantial proportions of subjects judge deception to be unacceptable (Korn 1987). These results are consistent with our own recently completed research, which shows that subjects asked about their reactions following participation in a deception experiment did indeed tend to indicate its acceptability. However, when asked to make a judgment about what reactions other students had to the same experiment, they expressed concern that others may have been harmed by the deception.For psychologists to selectively disregard the distinct possibility of dynamically motivated minimization of harm in order to justify deceptive research practices further supports Bok's characterization of today's competitive research environment and the standards of personal integrity that it challenges.Stephen Hahn-SmithDepartment of Psychology The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NMReferencesChristensen, Larry. 1988. Deception in Psychological Research: When is it Justified? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 14: 664-75. Google ScholarKorn, James H. 1987. Judgements of Acceptability of Deception in Psychological Research. Journal of General Psychology 114: 205-6. [End Page 387]Google ScholarSmith, Steven S., and Richardson, Deborah. 1983 Amelioration of Deception and Harm in Psychological Research: The Important Role of Debriefing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44: 1075-82. [End Page 388]Google ScholarCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In the final edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Smith recommends several literary authors—Racine and Voltaire, Richardson, Marivaux, and Riccoboni—as “much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus,” specifically in their illustrations of relationships of love and friendship as well as the “private and domestic affections,” like “parental tenderness” and “filial piety” (III.3.13-4). Smith does not here explain how literature performs this instructive function, and his remarks on the function of literature are scattered across TMS (...) and the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. This chapter contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Smith and literature by focusing closely on this recommendation, elucidating the instructive potential of the early novel, and showing how well-suited the techniques of that form are to the goals and challenges of Smith’s sentimentalist moral philosophy. By examining shared themes and formal features of the novels of Samuel Richardson, Pierre Marivaux, and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, I show how a reader’s engagement with these novels helps to enable and train her skills as an impartial and sympathetic spectator. (shrink)

In Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, philosopher Debra Satz takes a penetrating look at those commodity exchanges that strike most of us as problematic. What considerations, she asks, ought to guide the debates about such markets? What is it about a market involving prostitution or the sale of kidneys that makes it morally objectionable? How is a market in weapons or pollution different than a market in soybeans or automobiles? Are laws and social policies banning the (...) more noxious markets necessarily the best responses to them? Satz contends that categories previously used by philosophers and economists are of limited utility in addressing such questions because they have assumed markets to be homogenous. Accordingly, she offers a broader and more nuanced view of markets--one that goes beyond the usual discussions of efficiency and distributional equality--to show how markets shape our culture, foster or thwart human development, and create and support structures of power. (shrink)

While the bioethics literature demonstrates that the field has spent substantial time and thought over the last four decades on the goals, methods, and desired outcomes for service and training in bioethics, there has been less progress defining the nature and goals of bioethics research and scholarship. This gap makes it difficult both to describe the breadth and depth of these areas of bioethics and, importantly, to gauge their success. However, the gap also presents us with an opportunity to define (...) this scope of work for ourselves and to help shape the broader conversation about the impact of academic research. Because of growing constraints on academic funding, researchers and scholars in many fields are being asked to demonstrate and also forecast the value and impact of their work. To do that, and also to satisfy ourselves that our work has meaningful effect, we must understand how our work can motivate change and how that change can be meaningfully measured. In a field as diverse as bioethics, the pathways to and metrics of change will likewise be diverse. It is therefore critical that any assessment of the impact of bioethics research and scholarship be informed by an understanding of the nature of the work, its goals, and how those goals can and ought to be furthered. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model that connects individual bioethics projects to the broader goals of scholarship, describing the translation of research and scholarly output into changes in thinking, practice, and policy. One of the key implications of the model is that impact in bioethics is generally the result of a collection of projects rather than of any single piece of research or scholarship. Our goal is to lay the groundwork for a thoroughgoing conversation about bioethics research and scholarship that will advance and shape the important conversation about their impact. (shrink)

Congdon (2017), Giladi (2018), and McConkey (2004) challenge feminist epistemologists and recognition theorists to come together to analyze epistemic injustice. I take up this challenge by highlighting the failure of recognition in cases of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice experienced by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. I offer the #MeToo movement as a case study to demonstrate how the process of mutual recognition makes visible and helps overcome the epistemic injustice suffered by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. (...) I argue that in declaring “me too,” the epistemic subject emerges in the context of a polyphonic symphony of victims claiming their status as agents who are able to make sense of their own social experiences and able to convey their knowledge to others. (shrink)

Casuistry, or case-based reasoning, should be used in environmental ethics. Casuistry came to prominence during the transition from medieval to modern, when historical circumstances challenged settled moral perspectives. Similarly, environmental ethics arose in response to real-life dilemmas that also challenged existing moral theories. Casuistry’s focus on cases means that it can resolve individual environmental dilemmas without needing to solve every other problem (theoretical or practical) in the field. It is a “taxonomic” form of moral reasoning that operates by analogy to (...) paradigm cases, appeals to authorities in the field, and application of moral rules of thumb. Analogy to just-war reasoning and medical ethics and appeal to ecological reasoning yields four basic principles for environmental casuistry, justice, prudence, diversity, and a presumption toward preservation, and provides guidance in selecting paradigms and sources of authority within the field of environmental ethics. (shrink)

The hypothesis that excessive early infant crying evolved to reduce the risk of withdrawal of parental care is disputed on the grounds that excessive infant crying is irritating and imposes fitness losses rather than gains. Alternative explanations for the early crying curve that take into account development on the part of the infant and the emerging infant-caregiver bond are proposed.

The mystery of the rise of the affirmative, declarative (periphrastic) use of do in the thirteenth century and its decline by the start of the eighteenth century remains one of the principal unsolved problems for linguists working in historical research. Some of the main arguments on the origins of do discuss the needs of poetic rhyme (e.g., Engblom 1938), the positioning of the adverb (e.g., Ogura 1993), the elimination of awkward consonant clusters (e.g., Stein 1990), and the ambiguities of object (...) referents in questions (Hudson 1997), much of the earlier historical research relying on hypotheses relating to internal problems of the system. The present study examines the early causative origins of do, viewed from a diachronic, construction-based approach, and offers an explanation in which the reanalysis and subsequent loss of do as a declarative, affirmative auxiliary took place via a process known as hyperanalysis (Croft 2000), resulting in the gradual process of co-lexicalization of the causative verb meaning within the semantics of the main verb across an ever-increasing range of main verb environments. (shrink)

Because it consists of an entire family of specific theories derived from the same first principles, rational choice offers one approach to generate explanations that provide for micro-macro links, and to attack a wide variety of empirical problems in macrosociology. The aims of this paper are (1) to provide a bare skeleton of all rational choice arguments; (2) to demonstrate their applicability to a range of macrosociological concerns by reviewing a sample of both new and classic works; and (3) to (...) discuss the weaknesses of current rational choice theory and the possibilities for its future development. (shrink)

Dissecting Bioethics, edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Hayry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics. The department is dedicated to the idea that words defined by bioethicists and others should not be allowed to imprison people’s actual concerns, emotions, and thoughts. Papers that expose the many meanings of a concept, describe the different readings of a moral doctrine, or provide an alternative angle to seemingly self-evident issues are particularly appreciated. To submit a paper or to discuss (...) a suitable topic, contact Tuija Takala [email protected].:This article examines some of the assumptions and implications associated with the Belmont era context in which the concept of therapeutic misconception was forged. We argue that the justification of therapeutic misconception should be reconsidered based on less paternalistic and more participatory models of research. Finally, we identify conceptual and practical approaches that might better reflect contemporary research practice. (shrink)

Having a self is associated with important advantages for an organism.These advantages have been suggested to include mechanisms supporting elaborate capacities for planning, decision-making, and behavioral control. Acknowledging such functionality offers possibilities for obtaining traction on investigation of neural correlates of selfhood. A method that has potential for investigating some of the brain-based properties of self arising in behavioral contexts varying in requirements for such behavioral guidance and control is functional brain imaging. Data obtained with this method are beginning to (...) converge on a set of brain areas that appear to play a significant role in permitting conscious access to representational content having reference to self as an embodied and independent experiencer and agent. These areas have been identified in a variety of imaging contexts ranging from passive state conditions in which they appear to manifest ongoing activity associated with spontaneous and typically ‘self-related’ cognition, to tasks targeting explicitly experienced properties of self, to demanding task conditions where activity within them is attenuated in apparent redirection of cognitive resources in the service of task guidance and control. In this paper, these data will be reviewed and a hypothesis presented regarding a significant role for these areas in enabling degrees of self-awareness and participating in the management of such behavioral control. (shrink)

The concept of ‘accounts’ (Scott and Lyman, 1968) – or linguistic strategies for neutralizing the negative social meanings of norm violation – has a long history in sociology. This work examines British and American women's accounts of cosmetic surgery. In the medical literature, feminist writings and the popular press, aesthetic plastic surgery has been associated with narcissism, psychological instability and self-hatred. Given these negative connotations, cosmetic surgery remains a practice requiring justification even as its popularity increases. Drawing on interview data, (...) I argue that respondents' efforts to account for cosmetic surgery vary according to the ‘repertoires of evaluation’ (Lamont and Thévenot, 2000) made available by their own nation and, particularly, by its healthcare culture. In the market-based US healthcare system, women justify cosmetic surgery by referring to their personal and financial ‘investments’ in physical attractiveness and well-being. Such explanations are less legitimate in Britain, where healthcare is considered a social right rather than a consumer good. In the latter context, women employ narratives that medicalize the pre-surgical body by stressing the physical pain and emotional distress that it caused. (shrink)

The People of Plato is the first study since 1823 devoted exclusively to the identification of, and relationships among, the individuals represented in the complete Platonic corpus. It provides details of their lives, and it enables one to consider the persons of Plato's works, and those of other Socratics, within a nexus of important political, social, and familial relationships. Debra Nails makes a broad spectrum of scholarship accessible to the non-specialist. She distinguishes what can be stated confidently from what (...) remains controversial and--with full references to ancient and contemporary sources--advances our knowledge of the men and women of the Socratic milieu. Bringing the results of modern epigraphical and papyrological research to bear on long-standing questions, The People of Plato is a fascinating resource and valuable research tool for the field of ancient Greek philosophy and for literary, political, and historical studies more generally. In discrete sections, Nails discusses systems of Athenian affiliation, significant historical episodes that link lives and careers of the late fifth century, and their implications for the dramatic dates of the dialogues. The volume includes a rich array of maps, stemmata, and diagrams, plus a glossary, chronology, plan of the agora in 399 B.C.E., bibliography, and indices. (shrink)

In his article "How Certain Boundaries and Ethics Diminish Therapeutic Effectiveness", Lazarus asserts that many clinicians are adhering to strict therapeutic boundaries and ethics in a fear-driven effort to avoid unwarranted malpractice claims. Although I agree that maintenance of conventional therapeutic boundaries is apt to minimize malpractice claims in most cases, I believe that is because such boundaries are critical to protect patients' welfare and thereby promote effective treatment. My reasoning, discussed next, revolves around the following premises: 1. For many, (...) if not most, types of patient problems and patient populations, boundaries and the personal meaning of the therapeutic boundaries are an arena in which critical emotional issues are manifested and worked through. 2. Clear, consistent boundaries provide a structure and safety for many patients that is a curative factor in itself. 3. Patients' reactions to alterations in usual therapeutic boundaries are often unpredictable ahead of time (even if requested by the patient) and typically complex, ambivalent, and heavily colored by transferential meaning. 4. Because alterations in therapeutic boundaries typically add a new therapist role or activity that involves potential gratification of personal needs of the therapist, objectivity in evaluating such a change may be compromised by the inherent self-interest. 5. Consistent, clear boundaries need have no impact on therapist warmth and empathy. (shrink)

This book brings together some of the best minds in neurology and philosophy to discuss the concept of personal identity and the moral dimensions of treating ...

Understanding everyday behavior relies heavily upon understanding our ability to improvise, how we are able to continuously anticipate and adapt in order to coordinate with our environment and others. Here we consider the ability of musicians to improvise, where they must spontaneously coordinate their actions with co-performers in order to produce novel musical expressions. Investigations of this behavior have traditionally focused on describing the organization of cognitive structures. The focus, here, however, is on the ability of the time-evolving patterns of (...) inter-musician movement coordination as revealed by the mathematical tools of complex dynamical systems to provide a new understanding of what potentiates the novelty of spontaneous musical action. We demonstrate this approach through the application of cross wavelet spectral analysis, which isolates the strength and patterning of the behavioral coordination that occurs between improvising musicians across a range of nested time-scales. Revealing the sophistication of the previously unexplored dynamics of movement coordination between improvising musicians is an important step towards understanding how creative musical expressions emerge from the spontaneous coordination of multiple musical bodies. (shrink)

An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences. In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of "choice points" that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result in (...) divergent explanatory models. Describing decomposition as the attempt to differentiate functional and structural components of a system and localization as the assignment of responsibility for specific functions to specific structures, Bechtel and Richardson examine the usefulness of these heuristics as well as their fallibility—the sometimes false assumption underlying them that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchically organized. When Discovering Complexity was originally published in 1993, few philosophers of science perceived the centrality of seeking mechanisms to explain phenomena in biology, relying instead on the model of nomological explanation advanced by the logical positivists (a model Bechtel and Richardson found to be utterly inapplicable to the examples from the life sciences in their study). Since then, mechanism and mechanistic explanation have become widely discussed. In a substantive new introduction to this MIT Press edition of their book, Bechtel and Richardson examine both philosophical and scientific developments in research on mechanistic models since 1993. (shrink)