The Philosophy Outreach Project gets high school students across Indiana thinking. POP creates alternative spaces for learning in classrooms, clubs, online, and conference settings. By curating philosophical content and fostering philosophical discussion, POP provides high school students with tools and a platform to engage with each other and the world. POP is run by three teams of Ball State students with a variety of different interests and backgrounds. POP's team includes students studying philosophy, psychology, English, communications, criminal justice, and more. (...) This diversity of interests and knowledge allows for an impressive level of collaboration, which is ultimately what makes POP successful in promoting and facilitating pre-college philosophy. (shrink)

Contemporary theory of international politics faces a twofold problem: the critical engagement with legacies of national power politics in connection to 20th Century International Relations and the regeneration of notions of humanity. This book contributes to this engagement by a genealogy of thoughts on war, peace, and ethics"--Provided by publisher.

In this chapter we introduce concepts for analyzing proofs, and for analyzing undergraduate and beginning graduate mathematics students’ proving abilities. We discuss how coordination of these two analyses can be used to improve students’ ability to construct proofs. -/- For this purpose, we need a richer framework for keeping track of students’ progress than the everyday one used by mathematicians. We need to know more than that a particular student can, or cannot, prove theorems by induction or contradiction or can, (...) or cannot, prove certain theorems in beginning set theory or analysis. It is more useful to describe a student’s work in terms of a finer-grained framework that includes various smaller abilities that contribute to proving and that can be learned in differing ways and at differing periods of a student’s development. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Al Mele (2003) suggests that the Simple View of intentional action is “fiction” because it is “wholly unconstrained” by a widely shared (folk) concept of intentional action. The Simple View (Adams, 1986, McCann, 1986) states that an action is intentional only if intended. As evidence that the Simple View is not in accord with the folk notion of intentional action, Mele appeals to recent surveys of folk judgments by Joshua Knobe (2003, 2004a, 2004b). Knobe’s surveys appear (...) to show that the folk judge unintended but known side effects of actions to be performed intentionally. In this paper we will reject Mele’s suggestion that the Simple View is “fiction.” We will also discuss the relationship between surveys and philosophical theories, and the abilities of surveys to access folk core concepts. We will argue that considerations of both fail to support Mele’s suggestion. (shrink)

Twenty-first-century biology rejects genetic determinism, yet an exaggerated view of the power of genes in the making of bodies and minds remains a problem. What accounts for such tenacity? This article reports an exploratory study suggesting that the common reliance on Mendelian examples and concepts at the start of teaching in basic genetics is an eliminable source of support for determinism. Undergraduate students who attended a standard ‘Mendelian approach’ university course in introductory genetics on average showed no change in their (...) determinist views about genes. By contrast, students who attended an alternative course which, inspired by the work of a critic of early Mendelism, W. F. R. Weldon, replaced an emphasis on Mendel’s peas with an emphasis on developmental contexts and their role in bringing about phenotypic variability, were less determinist about genes by the end of teaching. Improvements in both the new Weldonian curriculum and the study design are in view for the future. (shrink)

The Gongsun Longzi is often considered the only extant work of the Classical Chinese “School of Names”, an early intellectual tradition mainly concerned with logic and the philosophy of language. The Gongsun Longzi is a heterogeneous collection of five chapters that include short treatises and largely fictive dialogues between an anonymous persuader and his opponent, which typically revolve around a paradoxical claim. Its value as a testimony to Early Chinese philosophy, however, is somewhat controversial due to the intricate textual history (...) of the text and our limited knowledge about its intellectual backgrounds. This volume gathers contributions by leading specialists in the fields of Classical Chinese philosophy, philology, logic, and linguistics. Besides an overview of the scholarly literature on the topic and a detailed account of the reception of the text throughout time, it presents fresh insights into philological and philosophical problems raised by the Gongsun Longzi and other closely-related texts equally attributed to the “School of Names”. (shrink)

This paper argues that the augmented reality gaming application for smart devices, _Pokémon GO_ shows the fate of the legal subject as a neoliberal monster subjugated to the limitations imposed by hypercapitalism. The game, derived from Nintendo’s iconic Pokémon franchise, reveals the legal subject as a frenzied, diminished and impulsive being, allowed to see, move, catch and accumulate but unable to participate in more meaningful self-narration. It is not that the game is lawless, notwithstanding, anxieties in the semiosphere about users (...) trespassing or engaging in criminal behaviour. Rather the game is over structured and highly limited, both within its game-play which is repetitive and impulsive, and in its absence of narrative. Unlike the classic Nintendo Pokémon games which are within the role-playing game genre, _Pokémon GO_ abstracts the seeing, moving, catching and accumulating features of the classic games without the overarching narrative, questing and competition. In this _Pokémon GO_ manifests the transformation of the liberal legal subject of capitalism to the neoliberal subject of a digital orientated hypercapitalism where seeing, moving, catching and accumulating is immediate and impulsive, obliterating the ‘prudent’ subject participating in their own self-narration. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the perception of actual and ideal ethical climate type among 95 nurses working in the internal medicine wards of one central hospital in the state of Israel. We also examined whether nurses’ demographic characteristics influence that perception and if a relationship between perceptions of an actual and an ideal ethical climate type influences nurses’ job satisfaction. A questionnaire composed of three subquestionnaires was administered and the responses analyzed using multiple linear regressions, analysis of variance and (...) Pearson’s correlation coefficient. The results demonstrated that demographic characteristics (such as: gender, job tenure and level of education) partially influence the perception of an ideal ethical climate. Incongruence in perceptions of ‘caring’ and ‘independence’ climate types indicated a decline in nurses’ job satisfaction, while perception of actual ‘caring’ and ‘service’ climates positively influenced all aspects of job satisfaction. We recommend constructing training programs emphasizing the ethics of nursing practice and also to help lead nurses to clarify an ethical framework and guide nursing staff in dealing with ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

Policies and position statements regarding decision-making for extremely premature babies exist in many countries and are often directive, focusing on parental choice and expected outcomes. These recommendations often state survival and handicap as reasons for optional intervention. The fact that such outcome statistics would not justify such approaches in other populations suggests that some other powerful factors are at work. The value of neonatal intensive care has been scrutinized far more than intensive care for older patients and suggests that neonatal (...) care is held to a higher standard of justification. The relative value placed on the life of newborns, in particular the preterm, is less than expected by any objective medical data or any prevailing moral frameworks about the value of individual lives. Why do we feel less obligated to treat the premature baby? Do we put newborns in a special and lesser moral category? We explore this question from a legal and ethical perspective and offer several hypotheses pertaining to personhood, reproductive choices, “precious children,” and probable evolutionary and anthropological factors. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the process of entanglement at the 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference (IPNC) at University of California at Irvine held on August 18, 2022. Representing collective work from the US, Canada, UK and Germany, our panel entitled ‘What can critical posthuman philosophies do for nursing?’ examined critical posthumanism and its operations and potential in nursing. Critical posthumanism offers an antifascist, feminist, material, affective, and ecologically entangled approach to nursing and healthcare. Rather than focusing on (...) the arguments of each of the three distinct but interrelated panel presentation pieces, this paper instead focuses on process and performance (per/formance) and performativity as relational, connected and situated, with connections to nursing philosophy. Building upon critical feminist and new materialist philosophies, we describe intra‐activity and performativity as ways to dehierarchise knowledge making practices within traditional academic conference spaces. Creating critical cartographies of thinking and being are actions of possibility for building more just and equitable futures for nursing, nurses, and those they accompany—including all humans, nonhumans, and more than human matter. (shrink)

The extremely preterm infant, born before 28 weeks of gestational age, has been the focus of much ethical discussion. These infants have a significant risk of mortality and morbidity, and it is not...

David Annis is professor of philosophy at Ball State University. In this essay, Annis offers an alternative to the foundationalist-coherent controversy: "contextualism." This theory rejects both the idea of intrinsically basic beliefs in the foundational sense and the thesis that coherence is sufficient for justification. he argues that justification is relative to the varying norms of social practices.

This study describes the implementation of a curricular tool designed for students to develop civic engagement through running a social business in one fifth-grade classroom. The One Hen unit focuses on teaching elementary students the concept of social entrepreneurship through a project where students run their own social business to address a community need. This study has the potential to contribute to our understanding of how elementary students learn economics to increase civic engagement as the One Hen unit could lead (...) to students’ becoming more aware of problems in their community and to gain experience planning for civic action. (shrink)

It is common practice for social studies in the elementary school day to be integrated into other subject areas, especially language arts. Also common in an elementary school day are unstructured spaces such as snack time or recess. In this paper, we present findings from a larger study on social studies integration within various subject areas to explore how two teachers (first and fifth grade) integrated social studies into unstructured spaces. These teachers integrated social studies concepts and experiences into morning (...) work, community building, snack time, and after-lunch reading to varying degrees. This study provides an inroad for conversation among researchers, teacher educators, and practicing teachers about the ideals and reality of elementary social studies with the hope of deepening students’ experiences. (shrink)

As laws are written in 'universal terms' they offer inadequate guidance for those difficult cases that do not fall neatly under one general rule or another. While Aristotle is clear that written laws are essential to secure justice in a political community, he is quick to recognize that alone they are insufficient to achieve this aim. Bridging the gap between legal principle and concrete situation is Aristotle's concept of epieikeia: that virtue which 'corrects' the law where it falls short. Through (...) an acute attentiveness to relevant mitigating factors, epieikeia allows the judge to discern what -- beyond rigid application the law -- a just decision entails. However, though triggered by and tied to particular circumstances, epieikeia does not sanction egregious deviation from established law. This is because it serves the ends of 'universal', or 'natural' justice and so is guided, and therefore constrained by its fixed and unchanging principles. In conclusion, this article explores the normative repercussions of incorporating epieikeia into legal decisions, specifically how it might work to transform justice into a virtue which promotes mercy, kindness, and forgiveness. (shrink)

This roundtable discussion is based on an online symposium – The Promise of Photography: Scale, Measure and Proportion in a Conflicted Visual Milieu – which took place on 17 September 2021. Since its inception, photography has promised to set things to scale, to grant them measure and proportion, a series of promises that have also entailed moments of irrationality or conflict that persist in and continue to shape the era of global networked digital imaging technologies. The symposium started out from (...) the diagnosis that, whilst photography continues to promise an ordered, proportionate and measured world in which things can be set to their proper scale, it also acts in many ways as an agent of dismeasure, disproportion and the unscalable. In light of this, the roundtable discussion presented here examines a range of different meanings that scale, measure and proportion have accrued in the photographic context and sets out to explore conceptual frameworks and research methodologies through which the current situation might be understood. (shrink)

This series of images forms part of the ongoing project Soft Ground, Hard Light, which speculates on a multiscalar spatial ontology of photography emanating from the Arditurri silver mine complex in the Basque Country. Evoking the mountainous massif around Arditurri where silver ore and galena have been extracted since Roman presence in the area, the depicted topographies are, in fact, data transcriptions from atomic force microscopy (AFM) probing the analogue film stock of an early 1930s experiment in 3D cinema, Cine (...) en Relieve, by the Basque cinematographer Teófilo Mingueza. In contrast to optical or electron microscopy, AFM uses a scanning probe to physically touch the specimen, recording its surface undulations at the atomic scale of a nanometre, or a billionth of a metre. As a haptic operation based on direct contact between instrument and sample, between apparatus and referent, AFM is literally a contact print, a ‘blind’ scan that senses not the visual content of the recorded image but ‘feels’ its underlying material substrate of silver nanoparticles within the 35 mm film emulsion. The resulting image assemblies visualize a topography resulting from the intra-action between the silver nanoparticles and the scanning probe as much as its transcription through the particular parameters afforded by the AFM analysis software. Hard Light, Soft Ground was initiated during an artist’s residency at Tabakalera Centre for Contemporary Culture, Donostia-San Sebastián, and is currently in production as part of the wider research project Esper Syndrome: Archaeotopologies of the Image at the Royal College of Art, funded by the AHRC through the London Arts & Humanities Partnership. With additional thanks to the Basque Film Archive and Gustavo Ariel Schwartz at the Materials Physics Centre, Donostia-San Sebastián. (shrink)

Background: There are numerous benefits to ethics consultation services, but little is known about the reasons different professionals may or may not request an ethics consultation. Inter-professional differences in the perceived utility of ethics consultation have not previously been studied.Methods: To understand profession-specific perceived benefits of ethics consultation, we surveyed all employees at an urban tertiary children’s hospital about their use of ethics committee services (n = 842).Results: Our findings suggest that nurses and physicians find ethics consultations useful for different (...) reasons; physicians were more likely to report normative benefits, while nurses were more likely to report communicative and relational benefits.Conclusions: These findings support an open model of ethics consultation and may also help ethics committees to better understand consultation requests and remain attuned to the needs of various professional groups. (shrink)

Despite recent critiques of agrofuels, the industry is booming, signaling transformations in the world's food and fuels systems. International financial institutions, biotechnology firms, governments, and agribusiness are restructuring control over land, genetic resources, economic space, and market power. These moves prefer transnational capital at the expense of farmers in the North and extensive areas vital to the livelihoods of small producers in the Global South. This article suggests that the agrofuels boom may be a new—and particularly destructive—stage in industry's extractive (...) transformations of agriculture. The movement-based logic of food sovereignty—people's right to define their own food and agriculture systems—suggests a rollback of the “agrofuels transition” is possible. (shrink)

Care as a concept has long been central to the nursing discipline, and care ethics have consequently found their place in nursing ethics discussions. This paper briefly revisits how care and care ethics have been theorized and applied in the discipline of nursing, with an emphasis on Tronto’s political view of care. Adding to the works of other nurse scholars, we consider that Tronto’s care ethics is useful to understand caring practices in a sociopolitical context. We also contend that this (...) vision can be used specifically to politicize nurses, by encouraging them to think critically about the context in which they work and how they can participate to change the status quo, notably by prompting the democratization of care in institutional settings. We illustrate this by demonstrating how moral distress that can occur with aggressive or futile treatments in the intensive care unit can be reduced if nurses are systematically included in the decision-making process. By showing some ways in which nursing political actions can begin to change the status quo as it pertains to futile treatments at the end of life, we can help empower nurses to strive to be included in political spaces and voice their concerns to have their professional needs met. (shrink)

Among philosophers, there are at least two prevalent views about the core concept of intentional action. View I (Adams 1986, 1997; McCann 1986) holds that an agent S intentionally does an action A only if S intends to do A. View II (Bratman 1987; Harman 1976; and Mele 1992) holds that there are cases where S intentionally does A without intending to do A, as long as doing A is foreseen and S is willing to accept A as a consequence (...) of S’s action. Joshua Knobe (2003a) presents intriguing data that may be taken to support the second view.1 Knobe’s data show an asymmetry in folk judgements. People are more inclined to judge that S did A intentionally, even when not intended, if A was perceived as causing a harm (e.g. harming the environment). There is an asymmetry because people are not inclined to see S’s action as intentional, when not intended, if A is perceived as causing a benefit (e.g. helping the environment). In this paper we will discuss Knobe’s results in detail. We will raise the question of whether his ordinary language surveys of folk judgments have accessed core concepts of intentional action. We suspect that instead Knobe’s surveys are tapping into pragmatic aspects of intentional language and its role in moral praise and blame. We will suggest alternative surveys that we plan to conduct to get at this difference, and we will attempt to explain the pragmatic usage of intentional language. (shrink)

Children acquiring languages with noun classes have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the hypothesis that children are classifying nouns optimally with respect to a distribution that does not match the surface distribution of statistical features in their input. We propose three ways in which children's apparent statistical (...) insensitivity might arise, and find that all three provide ways to account for the difference between children's behavior and the optimal classifier. A fourth model combines two of these proposals and finds that children's insensitivity is best modeled as a bias to ignore certain features during classification, rather than an inability to encode those features during learning. These results provide insight into children's developing knowledge of noun classes and highlight the complex ways in which statistical information from the input interacts with children's learning processes. (shrink)

W.E.B. Du Bois’s elegy for his infant son, “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” in The Souls of Black Folk, has received relatively scant attention from political theorists. Yet it illuminates crucial developments in Du Bois’s political thought. It memorializes a tragedy central to his turn from scientific facts to rhetorical appeals to emotion. Its rhetoric also exemplifies a broader tension in his writings, between masculinist and elitist commitments and more insurrectionary impulses. In its normalizing rhetorical mode, which dominates, the (...) elegy depicts an idealized patriarchal bourgeois household—potentially eliciting white readers’ sympathetic identification, but failing to displace the gendered and classed logic of racial exclusion. Its moments of transgressive rhetoric complicate or refuse such identification, celebrating Burghardt’s racial impurity and invoking a lineage of black maternal ambivalence. Though each is vexed and ephemeral, these moments of transgressive rhetoric reveal countervailing impulses that Du Bois would articulate in later writings. (shrink)