This qualitative study explores the experiences and challenges SPED teachers face amidst the new normal of education. Employing Heidegerian Phenomenology and Interpretative Phenomenology analysis, findings suggest that the SPED teachers can’t enjoy their life outside work because of a lack of support from the government, physically and financially; thus, they experience burnout. Also, the salary they earn is not even enough to raise a family, and the fact that they almost shoulder the learning resources in the class makes it worse. (...) Moreover, the participants need practical training to adapt to the needs of their students amidst the challenges of the new learning modality. (shrink)

Epigenetic research has brought several important technological achievements, including identifying epigenetic clocks and signatures, and developing epigenetic editing. The potential military applications of such technologies we discuss are stratifying soldiers’ health, exposure to trauma using epigenetic testing, information about biological clocks, confirming child soldiers’ minor status using epigenetic clocks, and inducing epigenetic modifications in soldiers. These uses could become a reality. This article presents a comprehensive literature review, and analysis by interdisciplinary experts of the scientific, legal, ethical, and societal issues (...) surrounding epigenetics and the military. Notwithstanding the potential benefit from these applications, our findings indicate that the current lack of scientific validation for epigenetic technologies suggests a careful scientific review and the establishment of a robust governance framework before consideration for use in the military. In this article, we highlight general concerns about the application of epigenetic technologies in the military context, especially discrimination and data privacy issues if soldiers are used as research subjects. We also highlight the potential of epigenetic clocks to support child soldiers’ rights and ethical questions about using epigenetic engineering for soldiers’ enhancement and conclude with considerations for an ethical framework for epigenetic applications in the military, defense, and security contexts. (shrink)

In Globalization and Global Justice, Nicole Hassoun presents a new andfundamental challenge to libertarian political thought. Her LegitimacyArgument tries to show that natural rights libertarians are committed bytheir own principles to a requirement that their states recognize and meetthe positive welfare rights of certain merely potentially autonomous persons.Unfortunately, this argument suffers from two flaws. Hassoun needs to show,but has not shown, that the libertarian state would have to infringe any ofthe negative rights of the merely potentially autonomous in such (...) a way asto require consent from them. Moreover, the libertarians could arrange theirinstitutions, justifiably by their own lights, so as to expel all indigent, merelypotentially autonomous persons from their territory. This second solution isintuitively unpalatable, but may be no more morally problematic than thebasic natural rights libertarian view itself. (shrink)

Background and ProcessIn February 2012, the European Commission launched “The ONLIFE Initiative—a Concept Reengineering Exercise” within the context of the Digital Agenda for Europe. Initiated by Nicole Dewandre of the EC and chaired by Luciano Floridi , scholars from various academic backgrounds were invited to discuss the impact of information and communication technologies on individual, social and public lives. Of particular concern were the policy-relevant consequences of ICT-related developments. Taking Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition To begin with, we took (...) the following from the prologue to The Human Condition as the opening motto of the Background Document. Arendt calls for “… a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and most recent fears”—vis-à-vis what she observed to be a prevailing thoughtlessness, “the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of .. (shrink)

In teasing out the diverse origins of our “modern, ecological understanding of epidemic disease” Greater than the parts: holism in biomedicine, 1920–1950, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998), historians have downplayed the importance of parasitology in the development of a natural history perspective on disease. The present article reassesses the significance of parasitology for the “invention” of medical ecology in post-war France. Focussing on the works of microbiologist Charles Nicolle and on that of physician and zoologist Hervé Harant, I argue (...) that French “medical ecology” was not professionally insulated from some major trends in parasitology, especially in Tunis where disciplinary borders in the medical sciences collapsed. This argument supports the claim that ecological perspectives of disease developed in colonial context but I show that parasitologists such as Harant built on the works of medical geographers who had called attention to the dynamic and complex biological relations between health and environment in fashioning the field of medical ecology in the mid-1950s. As the network of scientists who contributed to the global emergence of “disease ecology” is widening, both medical geography and parasitology stand out as relevant sites of inquiries for a broader historical understanding of the multiple “ecological visions” in twentieth-century biomedical sciences. (shrink)

"Charles Taylor presents a fundamental challenge to neoliberal apologists for the new world order--but not only to them.

The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

Many cognitive accounts of emotional processing assume that emotions have representational content that can be influenced by beliefs and desires. It is generally thought that emotions also have non-cognitive, affective components, including valence and arousal. To clarify the impact of cognition on these affective components we asked participants to rate sentences along cognitive and affective dimensions. For the former case, participants rated the believability of the material. For the latter case, they provided valence and arousal ratings. Across two experiments, we (...) show that valence and arousal are differently influenced by beliefs, suggesting that these two largely independent affective components of emotion differ in their cognitive penetrability. While both components depended upon overall comprehension of sentence meaning, only valence was influenced by the consistency of the sentences with participants’ beliefs (i.e., whether it was believable or unbelievable). We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding cognition–emotion relationships. (shrink)

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Nicole Oresme raises a question that he is apparently the first to ask in these terms, in such a context: do all beings have the desire to persevere into being? Before him, this question is not found in any of the medieval commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics. But after him it became canonical until at least the 16th century, since it can be found in Pietro Pomponazzi’s works for example. The novelty here consists in (...) questioning the validity of Averroes’ thesis, in his own commentary on the Physics, according to which all beings have the desire to persist into being, using the Augustinian analysis of voluntary death and suicide. How can we explain that one can freely put an end to his days if he is naturally inclined by a desire for life and even for eternity? Oresme’s solution consists in justifying not only the possibility, but also the moral obligation to accept death under certain conditions. In most cases, we do not really want to die. The desperate man wishes to cancel his misfortune and the heroic man who sacrifices himself for his country wishes to immortalize himself in the memory of other men. From a moral point of view, Nicole Oresme justifies only one case of voluntary death: that of individual sacrifice for the common good. The aim of this paper is to analyze precisely this important turning point in the long history of the notion of conatus in the West by comparing this quaestio from the commentary on the Physics with the glosses that accompany the French translation of the Nicomachean Ethics realised by Oresme at the court of Charles V. (shrink)

This is a major and comprehensive study of the philosophy of Hegel, his place in the history of ideas, and his continuing relevance and importance. Professor Taylor relates Hegel to the earlier history of philosophy and, more particularly, to the central intellectual and spiritual issues of his own time. He engages with Hegel sympathetically, on Hegel's own terms and, as the subject demands, in detail. This important book is now reissued with a fresh new cover.

"This is a marvelous book, full of subtle, thoughtful, and original argument.

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience.

The propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF) is commonly taken to be subject to a set of simple counterexamples. We argue that three of the most important of these are not counterexamples to the PIF itself, but only to the traditional mathematical model of this propensity: fitness as expected number of offspring. They fail to demonstrate that a new mathematical model of the PIF could not succeed where this older model fails. We then propose a new formalization of the PIF that (...) avoids these (and other) counterexamples. By producing a counterexample-free model of the PIF, we call into question one of the primary motivations for adopting the statisticalist interpretation of fitness. In addition, this new model has the benefit of being more closely allied with contemporary mathematical biology than the traditional model of the PIF. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch and moral philosophy -- Understanding the other: a Gadamerian view on conceptual schemes -- Language not mysterious? -- Celan and the recovery of language -- Nationalism and modernity -- Conditions of an unforced consensus on human rights -- Democratic exclusion (and its remedies?) -- Religious mobilizations -- Themes from a secular age -- The immanent counter-enlightenment -- Notes on the sources of violence: perennial and modern -- The future of the religious past -- Disenchantment-re-enchantment -- What does secularism (...) mean? -- Die blosse Vernunft ("reason alone") -- Perils of moralism -- What was the Axial revolution? (shrink)

Of laws in general -- Of laws directly derived from the nature of government -- Of the principles of the three kinds of government -- That the laws of education ought to be relative to the principles of government -- That the laws given by the legislator ought to be relative to the nature of government -- Consquences of the principles of different governments, with respect to the simplicity of civil and criminal laws, the form of judgements, and inflicting of (...) punishments -- Consquences of the different principles of the three governments, with respect to sumptuary laws, luxury, and the condition of women -- Of the corruption of the principles of the three governments -- Of the laws in the relation they bear to defensive force -- Of laws, in the relation they bear to offensive force. (shrink)

The Spirit of the Laws is, without question, one of the central texts in the history of eighteenth-century thought, yet there has been no complete, scholarly English-language edition since that of Thomas Nugent, published in 1750. This lucid translation renders Montesquieu's problematic text newly accessible to a fresh generation of students, helping them to understand quite why Montesquieu was such an important figure in the early enlightenment and why The Spirit of the Laws was, for example, such an influence upon (...) those who framed the American constitution. Fully annotated, this edition focuses attention upon Montesquieu's use of sources and his text as a whole, rather than upon those opening passages towards which critical energies have traditionally been devoted, and a select bibliography and chronology are provided for those coming to Montesquieu's work for the first time. (shrink)

This book provides a novel interpretation of the ideas about language in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Travis places the "private language argument" in the context of wider themes in the Investigations, and thereby develops a picture of what it is for words to bear the meaning they do. He elaborates two versions of a private language argument, and shows the consequences of these for current trends in the philosophical theory of meaning.

Etrange personnage que Pierre Nicole. La postérité l'a rangé parmi les deuxièmes rôles de Port-Royal, une sorte de permanent du parti janséniste. Il a secondé le grand Arnauld, instruit Racine dans les Petites Ecoles, aidé Pascal et traduit en latin ses Provinciales. Fidèle entre les fidèles, et en même temps mal à l'aise dans cette atmosphère de fronde et de résistance que représente le milieu de Port-Royal, au sein de la France du XVII e siècle, ce latiniste timoré ne (...) songeait qu'aux Moyens de conserver la paix avec les hommes - titre de l'un de ses essais les plus célèbres. Dès que les tensions semblent s'apaiser, pendant la trêve appelée "la Paix de l'Eglise", Nicole peut enfin laisser libre cours à sa vocation de moraliste et de psychologue. Il publie, volume après volume ses Essais de morale : le succès sera tel que le libraire, après la mort de Pierre Nicole, s'ingéniera à en augmenter la série jusqu'à atteindre vingt-cinq volumes. Depuis la fin du XVIII e siècle, ce classique de la littérature morale était devenu pour ainsi dire inaccessible. On en publie parfois quelques pages choisies, défigurées par les coupures et les corrections. Il est proposé ici au lecteur moderne de redécouvrir dix essais de Nicole, donnés dans leur intégralité. Certains nous replongent dans les principes moraux d'un autre âge (et tirent de cet exotisme une part de leur valeur). D'autres présentent les qualités de finesse, le piquant, le goût du paradoxe qui ont longtemps fait juger Nicole comme un des grands représentants, à côté de Pascal et de La Rochefoucauld, de la littérature morale classique. L'oeuvre morale de Nicole s'avère ainsi demeurer passionnante pour un lecteur moderne, au moins à trois égards : 1/ ses considérations sur l'amour-propre, qui constituent les premiers jalons d'un utilitarisme économique ; 2/ ses réflexions sur la sociabilité et une approche originale de la civilité ; 3/ ses observations pédagogiques, émanant d'un des principaux maîtres des Petites Ecoles de Port-Royal. (shrink)

In Part 1, I contend (using Coriolanus as my mouthpiece) that Keeley and Clarke have failed to show that there is anything intellectually suspect about conspiracy theories per se. Conspiracy theorists need not commit the ‘fundamental attribution error’ there is no reason to suppose that all or most conspiracy theories constitute the cores of degenerating research programs, nor does situationism - a dubious doctrine in itself - lend any support to a systematic skepticism about conspiracy theories. In Part 2. I (...) argue (in propria persona) that the idea that there is something suspect about conspiracy theories is one of the most dangerous and idiotic superstitions to disgrace our political culture. (shrink)