This article is concerned with the origins and evolution of the Advanced Skills Teacher initiative from its announcement in 1995 to the end of 1999. It examines the Government rationale and the contributions of the Department for Education and Employment, the Teacher Training Agency and the School Teachers' Review Body.

Jonathan Harrison teases our minds with two short stories ….

Book Symposium on The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2015). The author responds to review essays by John Heilbron, Stephen Gaukroger, and Yiftach Fehige.

It is commonly held that the ascription of truth to a sentence is intersubstitutable with that very sentence. However, the simplest subclassical logics available to proponents of this view, namely K3 and LP, are hopelessly weak for many purposes. In this article, I argue that this is much more of a problem for proponents of LP than for proponents of K3. The strategies for recapturing classicality offered by proponents of LP are far less promising than those available to proponents of (...) K3. This undermines the ability of proponents LP to engage in public reasoning in classical domains. (shrink)

In one of his Quodlibeta, William of Ockham entertains two concepts of God, one theological and the other philosophical. He argues that conclusions involving a theological concept of God are believable and can only be established in theology where recourse to faith is permissible. By contrast, conclusions involving a philosophical concept of God are knowable and can be proved in philosophy and theology. The source of these two concepts lies in the Sentences commentary of his confrère Walter Chatton,1 who explores (...) how different descriptions of God affect the provability of theological conclusions about God. Chatton himself is reacting to Ockham’s earlier Sentences commentary where Ockham suggests that a... (shrink)

In the large and complex landscape of pedagogy, the focus seems to have turned away from the concept of teaching and towards a stronger emphasis on learning, probably supported by neo‐liberal ideology. The teacher is presented more as part of the force of production than as an autonomous performer of a mandate given to him/her by society. He/she is supposed to supply knowledge that is considered useful to a society geared to production and consumption. During the past few decades, enlightenment (...) as a legitimising concept for education has been challenged from different angles, both by a self‐critique from within and from external forces. One angle of approach is the questioning of the relationship between the state and education, by way of a critique of modernity. Another approach comes from a critique of knowledge, which has lost most of its universal implications and is left with more pragmatic and utilitarian considerations. Into this landscape of lost legitimisation, I will make an attempt to visualise an impossible/possible position for teaching, featuring ancient, contemporary and phantom‐like figures. I am suggesting the concept of transformation as an alternative to development or improvement, which I find to be concepts with a close link to modernity and its linearity. By a careful and conscious use of the word transformation, taking Derrida's intensified focus of language into account, a possible active position might be intimated in spite of the fundamental critique, which has been directed at pedagogy and its imperialistic implications from different angles. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to stage some questions concerning methodology and education, inspired by Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet and by Jacques Derrida's poetic philosophical oeuvres. What are at stake are the long traditions of preferences of sanity over madness, friend over enemy, male over female and of clean, unambiguous univocal language over the poetic. I will argue that educators will have an extra responsibility towards challenging the ancient tradition of phallogocentrism, both in our teaching and in our research.

Lizard people, chemtrails, Illuminati, toxic fluoride in the water, radio-controlled chip implants, Jewish cabals, secret NASA technology, poisoned vaccinations, the shooting down of Pan Am Flight 103, government-sponsored brain washing, one-world government, JFK killed by the CIA, JFK killed by the mafia, staged moon landings, alien bodies hidden in military bunkers, Paul is dead, Tupac is alive. Conspiracy theories are endless. Not only are there many of them, but each theory is awash in details that connect innumerable dots. In thinking (...) about how to combat the more insidious kinds of conspiracy theories, legal scholars Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule make the case that conspiracists simply need to be... (shrink)

James Frederick Ferrier was one of the first post-Hegelian British idealists, developing his idealism via a rejection of Thomas Reid’s common sense philosophy and from a reappraisal of Berkeley’s idealism. This chapter is a critical consideration of his major work, the Institutes of Metaphysic in which he develops a complete system of metaphysics. From an examination of the laws of knowledge and by applying the deductive method he determines that the absolute in cognition is an indivisible subject-object synthesis and it (...) follows from this that absolute existence must involve some self in union thoughts and things. His move from knowing to being is problematic and in this way his ontology falls short of his ambitious aims. Nevertheless, Ferrier provides an unusual and astute idealist epistemology several years before idealism became influential in British philosophy. (shrink)

This book considers historical and current events from the standpoint of moral philosophy. It describes: real wars and the ways in which they have or have not been fought according to principles of justice; terrorism, torture and the effects of scientific discoveries on the way war is conducted; peace movements and the influences of religion on the ideology surrounding warfare. The book criticises the ethical theories of analytical philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The ever increasing ability of medical technology to reshape the human body in fundamental ways—from organ and tissue transplants to reconstructive surgery and prosthetics—is something now largely taken for granted. But for a philosopher, such interventions raise fundamental and fascinating questions about our sense of individual identity and its relationship to the physical body. Drawing on and engaging with philosophers from across the centuries, Jenny Slatman here develops a novel argument: that our own body always entails a strange dimension, (...) a strangeness that enables us to incorporate radical physical changes. (shrink)

Does the real difference between non-consequentialist and consequentialist theories lie in their approach to value? Non-consequentialist theories are thought either to allow a different kind of value (namely, agent-relative value) or to advocate a different response to value ('honouring' rather than 'promoting'). One objection to this idea implies that all normative theories are describable as consequentialist. But then the distinction between honouring and promoting collapses into the distinction between relative and neutral value. A proper description of non-consequentialist theories can only (...) be achieved by including a distinction between temporal relativity and neutrality in addition to the distinction between agent-relativity and agent-neutrality. (shrink)

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us (...) new models to live by--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time--that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible. In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries--physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives--or the life of the planet--is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, "saving" time-recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature-could also mean that time saves us. (shrink)

The Greek word eoikos can be translated in various ways. It can be used to describe similarity, plausibility or even suitability. This book explores the philosophical exploitation of its multiple meanings by three philosophers, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato. It offers new interpretations of the way that each employs the term to describe the status of their philosophy, tracing the development of this philosophical use of eoikos from the fallibilism of Xenophanes through the deceptive cosmology of Parmenides to Plato's Timaeus. The (...) central premise of the book is that, in reflecting on the eoikos status of their accounts, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato are manipulating the contexts and connotations of the term as it has been used by their predecessors. By focusing on this continuity in the development of the philosophical use of eoikos, the book serves to enhance our understanding of the epistemology and methodology of Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato's Timaeus. (shrink)

La question qui anime tout ce travail est de savoir comment la philosophie peut se rendre digne du retour aux choses memes. Chez Merleau-Ponty, ce retour implique, de prime abord, une critique vigoureuse de la pensee representative. La phenomenologie merleau-pontienne nous enseigne que la perception, ou plus precisement l'aisthesis, precede le domaine de la representation. C'est donc a l'aisthesis que la phenomenologie doit remonter. Et c'est la tout l'interet d'une ontologie de la peinture qui se demarque profondement d'une ontologie de (...) la representation. Or, l'etude de Jenny Slatman montre clairement que ce retour aux choses memes ne s'acheve pas simplement dans une philosophie de l'art. En effet, l'auteur developpe la these, a travers une lecture rigoureuse de l'oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty, selon laquelle le retour aux choses memes resulte en une transformation de l'expression philosophique. Comparable a une oeuvre d'art, l'oeuvre ou l'expression de la philosophie ne devrait pas s'enfermer dans des concepts figes. Mais grace a la force de la metaphore, le discours philosophique peut rester a jamais ouvert et en mouvement perpetuel. (shrink)

In William Ockham on Metaphysics, Jenny E. Pelletier gives an account of Ockham's concept of metaphysics as the science of being and God as it emerges sporadically throughout his philosophical and theological work.

This chapter asks “feminist questions” (Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) about the Myanmar Spring Revolution. Following the coup d’etat in February 2021 the Myanmar military has violently cracked down on protestors and activists opposing its rule. Taking the form of a conversation between an ethnic minority activist and feminist (Stella Naw) who recently fled Myanmar, and a feminist researcher of Myanmar (Jenny Hedström) based in Sweden, (...) we reflect on what obligations a commitment to feminist struggles and equality imposes on activism and how, and in what ways, continuities of oppression and insecurity affect feminist activism in the midst of war. We ask: What do we see when we shift our focus from the 2021 coup toward other forms of oppression and war? What does it mean to live through revolutions and upheaval as a feminist committed to ethnic equality and justice? What are the opportunities for feminist activism from within military and/or patriarchal organizations, and what do we risk by working from inside? What are the sources for joy and hope within the current protest movement, and what do we need for a true, transformative change to take place in Myanmar? (shrink)

Contesting Conformity investigates the writings of Tocqueville, Mill, and Nietzsche in order to examine the relationship between non-conformity and modern democracy. Jennie Ikuta argues that non-conformity is an intractable issue for democracy while non-conformity is often important for cultivating a just polity, non-conformity can also undermine democracy. Democracy therefore needs non-conformity, but not in an unconditional way. This book examines this intractable relationship, and offers resources for navigating the relationship in contemporary democracies in ways that promote justice and freedom.

The aim of this thematic literature review is to explore nurses' perceptions of ethical issues in the care of older people. Electronic databases were searched from September 1997 to September 2007 using specific key words with tight inclusion criteria, which revealed 17 primary research reports. The data analysis involved repeated reading of the findings and sorting of those findings into four themes. These themes are: sources of ethical issues for nurses; differences in perceptions between nurses and patients/relatives; nurses' personal responses (...) to ethical issues; and the patient—nurse relationship. The findings reveal that ageism is one of the major sources of the ethical issues that arise for nurses caring for older people. Education and organizational change can combat ageist attitudes. Wider training is required in the care of older people, workplace skills, palliative care and pain management for older people. The demands of a changing global demography will necessitate further research in this field. (shrink)