Dennis Beach

Evidence-based policy is typically grounded in a narrow conception of evidence, one that prioritises comparative studies and quantitative meta-analyses as the preferred base for establishing causal claims. However, this prevailing theory of evidence—often implicitly adopted in policy contexts—faces serious limitations when it comes to capturing the complexity of social interventions, particularly in fields such as education. We argue that this narrow conception ignores the extensive volume of causal evidence that is generated in qualitative research fields such as meta-ethnography. Far from being epistemically inferior, we contend that meta-ethnographies could make an essential contribution to the evidential base for policy. By analysing meta-ethnography using the Evidential Pluralism framework (which scrutinises evidence of mechanisms alongside evidence of correlation), we show that meta-ethnographic studies can be fruitfully reinterpreted as providing evidence of a mechanism complex. This evidence can play a crucial role, as meta-ethnography can show how mechanisms enable, reinforce, or counteract a policy of interest. We illustrate this potential use of meta-ethnography with two examples, one from educational research (viz., a study of adolescent experiences of school belonging) and one from nursing studies (viz., a study of why some women continue smoking during pregnancy). While the article thus discusses these two fields in particular, we conclude by laying out the circumstances under which our results may generalise to other fields that make use of meta-ethnographies.

Heidegger presents the inauthenticity of everyday Dasein by focusing on the impersonal third-person use of the German "Das Man," paralleled in the English "they" or "one." Idle talk epitomizes the inauthentic possibilities of language. This essay traces the prevalence of inauthentic discourse through other grammatical structures, showing that inauthenticity indeed permeates all linguistic structures. However, the vocative dimension of all discourse is then presented, initially through an examination of the call of conscience, as a way in which we might be called by others not into inauthenticity but authenticity.

The author examines Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion to discover a variant of the usual teleological argument that abandons reliance on analogical reasoning. This second version, never refuted in the Dialogues, is termed "pragmaticist" in Peirce's sense. It relies on an abductive hypothesis that claims not logical proof but the power of instinctual conviction. The Dialogues' espousal of sound common sense may then be viewed as an imperfectly articulated precursor of Peirce's pragmaticist argument for the reality rather than the existence of God.

a product of human thought that betrays the lived uniqueness of persons, reducing ‘otherness’ to the categories of the understanding and to its historical consequences? Or is history too ‘thick’ to be synchronized in memory and historical consciousness? The article, taking its inspiration from Enrique Dussel’s ethics of liberation and particular moments of Latin American history, develops the notion of the proximity of history, phenomenologically critiquing Emmanuel Levinas’s own reduction of history to consciousness, his reading of history as a synchronizing betrayal of diachronic events. It thus reads Levinas against his own texts, arguing that historical memory and historical encounters function much as the face does in Levinas’s own ethics, not only giving rise to irrecusable responsibilities, but also demanding the work of a critical, conscious appropriation of that history. Key Words: conquest • Dussel • ethics • history • Latin America • Levinas • proximity • responsibility.

What is the relationship between knowledge and ethics? Does what we know and the reason that secures knowledge determine ethical responsibility, or might ethical responsibility itself awaken and animate the enterprise of knowing? The dissertation affirms the priority of ethics by juxtaposing two accounts of the relationship between truth and goodness. It critiques Hegel's systematic conception of absolute knowing by showing that this knowing elides the anarchical ethical demand arising from the other person. Hegel's dialectic reconciles the problem of the relation with the other by transposing it to the plane of cognition where it becomes spirit's self-knowing. However, Emmanuel Levinas's phenomenological reduction of the structures of knowing exposes an ethical level of experience that both inspires and interrupts this adventure of knowing. ;After the introduction of this problematic, Chapter 1 examines the challenge that Levinas poses to Hegel, discovering in experience and subjectivity a ground where real dialogue can take place. Chapter 2 traces the reconception of subjectivity by which Hegel brings all exteriority within the experience of self-consciousness and compares this with Levinas's notion of "lived experience." In Chapter 3, I show how Levinas's account of sensibility and enjoyment resists incorporation into Hegel's notion of self-consciousness. Chapter 4 examines the encounter with the other person and explicates why Hegel's and Levinas's accounts cannot be reconciled or made to complement one another, for the non-allergic responsibility incurred in the face to face relation is inassimilable to the antagonism of the same and the other experienced as self-consciousness. Then, in Chapter 5, I trace Hegel's pursuit of a more authentic recognition of otherness through the development of the concept of spirit, paying special attention to the role of language. The ultimate accomplishment of spiritual recognition in Hegel's account is again challenged by Levinas's notion of responsibility, which signifies as an ethical "saying" apart from the "said." Finally, I contest the absoluteness of knowing without denying the dialectic that animates it by suggesting that philosophy can be maintained as a human enterprise, a pursuit of knowing that is ever subject to and interrupted by the face of the other.

The author uses Eco's The Name of the Rose to pose the problem of the relation between the infinite aesthetic play of semiotics and pragmatic moral responsibility for human conduct. This problem is addressed through Peirce's semiotic theory, which not only links signs to objects, but situates them in an interpretant relation that is formative of human conduct. Religion is advanced as the paradigm of this relation; a "categorial semiotic" where concrete symbolic acts move beyond nominalism through real experience of the divine, to which "fallibilistic" doctrines are always subject.