On the Connection between Normative Reasons and the Possibility of Acting for those Reasons

According to Bernard Williams, if it is true that A has a normative reason to Φ then it must be possible that A should Φ for that reason. This claim is important both because it restricts the range of reasons which agents can have and because it has been used as a premise in an argument for so-called ‘internalist’ theories of reasons. In this paper I rebut an apparent counterexamples to Williams’ claim: Schroeder’s (2007) example of Nate. I argue that this counterexample fails since it underestimates the range of cases where agents can act for their normative reasons. Moreover, I argue that a key motivation behind Williams’ claim is compatible with this ‘expansive’ account of what it is to act for a normative reason.     

Exploring perceptions about the feasibility of educational video resources as a strategy to support parental involvement in youth soccer

ObjectivesThe purpose of this study was to explore parents’ and coaches’ perceptions about educational video resources to support parents’ involvement in youth soccer.DesignUsing an instrumental, qualitative case study design, 21 parents and coaches were recruited to participate in an individual interview. All participants were involved in one of the developmental stages of youth sport participation (sampling, specialising or investment years) in soccer in South Australia. Elicitation tools were used in the individual interviews in the form of educational video resources designed for parents involved in youth soccer to prompt dialogue. All interview data was analysed thematically.ResultsThree main themes were developed from the thematic analysis, including ‘Importance of targeted curriculum’, ‘Integrated delivery model’ and ‘Strategies to maximise impact’ of video-based parent education. Overall, parents and coaches perceive educational video resources as a promising addition to broader strategies aimed at enhancing parental involvement in youth soccer.ConclusionsThe findings highlight parents’ and coaches’ perceptions about the potential utility of educational video resources as a tool to communicate, support and educate parents involved in youth soccer. However, the findings also highlight the need to consider how such an approach can be optimised, tailored, and supported within a broader intervention strategy.     

The educative value of Dewey’s religious attitude for spirituality

John Dewey’s ‘religious attitude’ has great potential for the educative development of children’s spirituality. This is because it enables their spiritual understandings to become more intelligently composed – not just in a cognitive or hyper‐rational sense, but as a way of being. This paper provides an outline of Dewey’s approach, which is described as being democratic, inquiry based, and ‘scientific’. Such an approach therefore offers a contrast to other more epistemologically focused curricula which attempt to educate a person’s spirituality. In order to make the case for the potential educative value of such an attitude, a brief review of Dewey’s approach to education shall be offered, in which the notions of inquiry, democracy, and ‘science’ shall be highlighted to make the case that such attributes might be necessary for spiritual education if the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization’s goal of attaining world peace is to ever become possible.     

The Decision-Theoretic Lockean Thesis

Abstract

Certain philosophers maintain that there is a ‘constitutive threshold for belief’: to believe that p just is to have a degree of confidence that p above a certain threshold. On the basis of this view, these philosophers defend what is known as ‘the Lockean Thesis’, according to which it is rational to believe that p just in case it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p above the constitutive threshold for belief. While not directly speaking to the controversy over the Lockean Thesis, this paper defends the general idea behind it—namely, the thesis that there is some threshold such that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence greater than that threshold. This paper identifies the threshold in question—not with the alleged constitutive threshold for belief—but with what I call ‘the practical threshold for rational belief’. Roughly, the thesis defended here is that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p that rationalizes engaging in certain types of practical reasoning.     

South[ern] Africa’s Dar ul-‘Ulums: Institutions of Social Change for the Common Good?

Muslim communities in principally non-Muslim nation states (e.g. South Africa, United States of America, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands) established a plethora of Muslim theological institutions. They have done so with the purpose of educating and reinforcing their Muslim identity. These educational structures have given rise to numerous questions that one encounters as one explores the rationale for their formation. Some are: have these institutions contributed towards the growth of Muslim extremism as argued by American and European Think Tanks? If so, then in which and why did they do so? If not, then why have they been falsely accused, and how should Muslims counter these erroneous criticisms? And, more importantly, have some of these educational institutions—as agents of ‘social change’—contributed towards the ‘common good’ of the society? In response, the article attempts to investigate the reasons for the formation of these Muslim educational institutions within a broad Southern Africa democratic context. It prefaces the discussion by first constructing ‘social change’ as a viable theoretical frame and it thereafter places the madrasas and Dar ul-‘Ulums within the mentioned context prior to reflecting upon the notion of the ‘common good.’ It then proceeds by making reference to the Dar ul-‘Ulum curriculum that plays a significant role in shaping and moulding the theologians’ thinking and behaviour. It concludes by questioning to what extent the type of theological curriculum that they constructed assists them to contribute towards the ‘common good’ of Southern Africa’ societies.     

Experiencing Shared Inquiry Through the Process of Collaborative Learning

This article is based on an analysis of a qualitative research case study involving three British adult educational‐theological sites which were experimenting with collaborative learning. The focus of this practice‐based research was listening to and observing adults engaged in collaborative learning in order to elucidate what they perceived to be some integral values inherent in this learning approach. ‘Experiencing Shared Inquiry’ emerged as one of the hallmarks of collaborative learning. The dynamic engagement of hearts and minds in collaborative learning harnesses the collective wisdom of God's people. Two movements are enfolded within ‘Experiencing Shared Inquiry’: stimulating thinking through dialogue process and drawing upon the resources of the learning community.     

Blending Arendtian Exemplarity with Weberian Ideal-Typic Analysis: Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ as a Vehicle for Social Critique

Arendt uses the exemplary validity of Socrates to think and value the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in our present juncture. In this way Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is not a mythic, historic, or dramatic individual, but offers an example of the best of the human condition. Unfortunately, because Arendt held the social conditioning and constraining of Socrates’ possibilities at arm’s length, his status as an exemplar is problematic and he ends up referring to a historical rather than contemporary possibilities. While Arendt had resources in her notion of the ‘world’ to better ground her simultaneously analytic and normative construction of ‘Socrates’, the lack of a social grounding makes ‘Socrates’ a significantly unmoored and shifting signifier. After showing the vacillations of ‘Socrates’ in Arendt, I supplement her normatively laden account with a Weberian grounding. With this firmer social grounding, ‘Socrates’ can refer to the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in ancient Athens and thereby highlight how our world makes a contemporary version unlikely or impossible. Yet, this Weberian grounding comes at a cost. The normative dimension essential in Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is lost due to Weberian value-neutrality. ‘Socrates’ can name a contemporary unlikelihood or impossibility, but if the enveloping social order does not value what it renders impossible, Weberian ideal-types on their own are incapable of offering normative resources for critique. I conclude by blending a Weberian social mooring with Arendt’s value-laden framework for social analysis and thereby recuperate the missing normative dimension. In short, by accepting the relational, necessarily plural, and dynamic root of human action we can, much like Arendt’s intended use of ‘Socrates’, value orientations that best express these norms, and criticize contemporary conditions that constrain their realization.     

Against Educational Humanism: Rethinking Spectatorship in Dewey and Freire

In this essay, I investigate the human act of spectatorship as found in the work of John Dewey and Paulo Freire. I will show that each is thoroughly anti-watching when it comes to educational practices. I then problematize their positions by looking at their spectatorial commitments in the realm of aesthetics. Both Dewey and Freire have a different opinion about spectatorship when it is a matter of watching art. I claim that this different in opinion derives from the practice of ‘educational humanism’. By educational humanism, I mean the tendency to posit stock human traits that derive from pedagogical practices. Ultimately, I will take a stand against educational humanism, against the process of back-forming, from educational circumstances, the desirability, or the undesirability, of human traits.     

聋人阅读中的副中央凹视觉注意增强效应——来自消失文本的证据

为适应失聪后的复杂环境, 聋人视觉注意资源的空间分布发生改变, 这对聋人的阅读加工产生了影响。本研究尝试提出“聋人阅读中的副中央凹视觉注意增强效应”, 并采用消失文本范式考察这一效应对聋人读者副中央凹及中央凹处词汇信息视觉编码效率的影响。结果发现, 在词n+1短暂呈现时, 聋生快速编码副中央凹处文本信息的加工效率与其生理年龄匹配组相近, 高于阅读能力匹配组; 但在词n短暂呈现时, 聋生快速编码中央凹处文本信息的加工效率落后于健听控制组, 其词汇通达和总阅读效率均受阻。综上所述, 本研究证实了聋人阅读中的副中央凹视觉注意增强效应, 表现为副中央凹加工效率增强, 但中央凹加工效率受阻。     

Blaming the Kids: Children's Agency and Diminished Responsibility

Children are less blameworthy for their beliefs and actions because they are young. But the relationship between development and responsibility is complex. What exactly grounds the excuses we rightly give to young agents? This article presents three distinct arguments for children's diminished responsibility. Drawing on significant resources from developmental psychology, it rejects views which base the normative adult/child distinction on children's inability to participate in certain kinds of moral communication or to form principled self‐conceptions which guide their actions. The article then argues that children's responsibility ought to be diminished because (and to the degree that) they are less competent at using features of their moral agency to meet social demands. This ‘normative competence’ view is philosophically defensible, supported by research in developmental psychology, and provides us with a method to evaluate whether things like peer pressure are relevant to responsibility.     

Formation of gender identity in the Islamic republic of Iran: does educational institution matter?

This article focuses on the process of gender identity construction through the educational system from a socio-cultural perspective. Socialisation operates as a strategy to protect social unity and group superiority. Although socialisation is an enduring process involving various institutions, childhood is a vital period of gender socialisation whereby schools and school textbooks play a substantial role as the first official sources of socialisation in children. Using content analysis method, this article focuses on Iran’s primary school textbooks. The results support the pattern of ‘gender bias’, rather than ‘gender fairness’. This is a more evident observation in the higher educational grades. The patterns highlighted here are evidently incompatible with socio-demographic progresses in women’s status over recent years, which call for revision in the school education resources in this context.     

Beyond Components of Wellbeing: The Effects of Relational and Situated Assemblage

Despite multiple axes of variation in defining wellbeing, the paper argues for the dominance of a ‘components approach’ in current research and practice. This approach builds on a well-established tradition within the social sciences of attending to categories whether for their identification, their value or their meanings and political resonance. The paper critiques the components approach and explores how to move beyond it towards conceptually integrating the various categories and dimensions through a relational and situated account of wellbeing. Drawing on more fluid social sciences, wellbeing is framed as an effect, dependent on the mobilisation of resources from everyday encounters with complex assemblages of people, things and places. Through such a framing, wellbeing can be conceived of as stable and amenable to change, as individual and collective and as subjective and objective. Policy interventions then need to attend to the relationalities of particular social and spatial contexts.     

The Future of the Christian Past: Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor on the Essence of Religion and its Evolution

This article explores the differences between Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor with respect to their theories of secularization. It starts by looking at their resemblances; it continues by distinguishing a two‐fold difference in their approach. The variation within their similar methodologies is examined, and then the consequences of these divergent definitions of religion are investigated. We focus on four themes: the role of the Axial religions, the significance of Incarnation and Reformation, the significance of Christianity as the ‘religion of the departure from religion’, and the possibility of religious ‘conversion’. Taylor's and Gauchet's views on the future of religion diverge as a function of their different interpretations of ‘fulfilment’ and ‘hunger for meaning’.     

Function and Functional Explanation in Social Capital Theory: A Philosophical Appraisal

Social capital is frequently offered up as a variable to explain such educational outcomes as academic attainment, drop-out rates and cognitive development. Yet, despite its popularity amongst social scientists, social capital theory remains the object of some scepticism, particularly in respect of its explanatory ambitions. I provide an account of some explanatory options available to social capital theorists, focussing on the functions ascribed to social capital and on how these are used as explanatory variables in educational theory. Two of the most influential writers in this field are Coleman and Bourdieu. I explore their commonalities and differences, both in respect of their writing and in respect of some of the many theorists they have influenced. I argue that social capital theorists have made substantial progress in responding to sceptically minded critics, but that significant questions remain, especially about the success of the more ambitious explanatory variants as these apply to educational outcomes—functional explanation in particular. Functional explanation, and its association with Bourdieu, is discussed in ‘Bourdieu and functional explanation’; thereafter I discuss the more modest ambition of identifying the functions associated with social capital. In ‘Coleman, intergenerational closure and educational outcomes’ I show how Coleman provides resources for revealing how social structure features in social explanation in an educational context, and in ‘Inequality, class and ethnicity’ I suggest that some of the questions raised in his account are most satisfactorily responded to by educational theorists who adopt Bourdieu’s emphasis on social class and inequality.     

Rethinking Sellars’ Myth of the Given: From the Epistemological to the Modal Relevance of Givenness in Kant and Hegel

ABSTRACT

Here, I pursue consequences, for the interpretation of Sellars’ critique of the ‘Myth of the Given’, of separating the modal significance that Kant attributed to empirical intuition from the epistemological role it also played for him. It is argued that Kant’s approach to modality in the Critique of Pure Reason can best be understood as a transcendental variation on Leibniz’s earlier ‘possibilist’ approach that treated the actual world as just one of a variety of possible alternative worlds. In this context, empirical intuitions seem to work like the mythical Givens subject to Sellars’ critique. This Kantian possibilism is then contrasted with an ‘actualist’ alternative approach to modality found in the contemporary work of Robert Stalnaker, but also recognizable in Hegel. In particular, the role of immediate perceptual judgments in Hegel is likened to that played by ‘witness statements’ in Robert Stalnaker’s attempt to distinguish the logic of judgments about the actual world from those about its alternate possibilities.     

Negotiating Indigenous Metaphysics as Educational Philosophy in Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, the history of the use of modern philosophical categories in education is short. This is because the country’s modern education itself is barely 100 years old. What is not so short, however, is the history of the use of indigenous metaphysics in temehert (traditional education), which goes back as far as the introduction of Christianity to Ethiopia—to the fourth century A.D. Since its inception, education has had a close, if ambivalent, relationship with different philosophical tenets, with the advocates of each tenet trying to formulate educational philosophy around its own unique metaphysical narrative. While some narratives arose from indigenous legends, others were imported (and domesticated in some cases) from abroad. The recent tendency of educational philosophy in Ethiopia has a slightly ‘(post)modernist’ philosophical flavor to it, even though it might not be self-consciously postmodernist in nature. In this essay, I intend to show how a deliberate, or unwitting, de-link with indigenous metaphysics could affect the trajectory, and also the success, of the educational system in Ethiopia. After a brief paradigmatic characterization of two metaphysical categories and their underlying narratives, I critically unravel the ethno-federalist metaphysics of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). I focus on the ethno-federalist system because it is an incumbent philosophy. After discussing a nascent remedy proposed by Maimire Mennasemay, viz., the notion of ‘nostalgic memory,’ best known as tezeta, I argue for the primacy of the notion of ‘covenant thinking,’ also known as qal-kidan, as a better alternative.     

‘Thank God We Are in Syria!’ Modernization,Interfaith Relations and Women’s Rights in Syria Before the ‘Arab Spring’ (2000–2010)

The status of women is generally considered a measure of ‘modernity’ and it has often been exploited by the West to highlight the ‘backwardness’ of non-Western countries and to justify colonialism and ‘civilization’ endeavours. The question of women’s rights and its connection to ‘modernity’, however, is not simple. This article considers the example of Syria immediately before the revolts of 2011, and highlights that the government’s approach to the issue of women’s rights appears to have been inspired by a peculiar idea of ‘modernity’ that is not in line with the Western mainstream view, because it is not based on the centrality of the individual and does not include a view of secularization that underestimates the social and political importance of religious beliefs. Reflections on the peculiarities of the Syrian approach may help avoid simplifications and – more generally – may help us reflect on the premise of the mainstream Western approach to the issue in countries considered as ‘other’.     

‘Anorexic’ Adolescents: Negative and Positive Resistances in Narrative Therapy1

This article draws on notions of negative and positive resistances in exploring alternative understandings of ‘anorexia’, in a narrative therapy based approach for ‘anorexic’ adolescents. In doing so, it posits ‘anorexic’ lifestyles as forms of coping mechanisms against dominant social discourses. Narrative treatment is to facilitate a movement away from subjection of dominant social discourses, and should enable intentional movements towards ethical subjectivities. This means that adolescents should then find no need to embrace ‘coping’ mechanisms that lead to lifestyles of ‘anorexia’, and treatment can shift away from food, weight, and body image, to dealing with ‘problems in living’.     

In Defence of Conceptual Integration

According to the ‘integration approach’, interpretations of political concepts should (1) explain that they stand for rights we ought to respect and (2) be both compatible and mutually supporting. I start by clarifying what this means, and proceed to an examination of Ronald Dworkin’s latest argument for value holism. I argue that his argument fails to provide a convincing case for the integration approach. I go on to argue that we nonetheless should accept that interpretations of political concepts should be compatible, because denying it would be inconsistent with (1), and the fact that ‘ought implies can’. I then provide reasons for thinking that we also cannot really satisfy (1) for any particular concept without giving reasons in term of what fall under other concepts—that is, interpreting the concepts as mutually supporting. We thus have reasons to accept both parts of (2). Finally, I defend the integration approach from three important objections: First, that it conflates different values; secondly, that it is inconsistent with ordinary language-usage; and thirdly, that it overlooks important telic values. I conclude that none of these compels us to abandon the integration approach.