R. A. Davies

Thought experiments are characteristically armchair operations. The key thought experiment in Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, the “veil of ignorance”, calls on us to imagine having complete knowledge of the social sciences at the same time as lacking all knowledge about the positions we occupy in the society of which we are members. It is harder to imagine having – and using – knowledge we do not have than it is to imagine not having knowledge we do have. Even when we think we can imagine not having knowledge of what is to our advantage, we may nevertheless be partial about our priorities in drawing consequences from the thought experiment.

In Adelaster (2016), A. G. Conte proposes a distinction between de dicto and de re attributions of truth and falsity, which he illustrates mostly with documents of legal standing, but also with an artificial object (a false tooth). The present aim is to propose an analogous distinction between monadic (one-place) and polyadic uses of “true” and “false”, and to sketch some features of its logical functioning with closer attention to the monadic pole than is usual. One proposal is that, in these uses, “true” and “false” do not function as opposites under negation.

_Education, Ethics and Experience_ is a collection of original philosophical essays celebrating the work of one of the most influential philosophers of education of the last 40 years. Richard Pring’s substantial body of work has addressed topics ranging from curriculum integration to the comprehensive ideal, vocational education to faith schools, professional development to the privatisation of education, moral seriousness to the nature of educational research. The twelve essays collected here explore and build on Pring’s treatment of topics that are central to the field of philosophy of education and high on the agenda of education policy-makers. The essays are by no means uncritical: some authors disagree sharply with Pring; others see his arguments as useful but incomplete, in need of addition or amendment. But all acknowledge their intellectual debt to him and recognise him as a giant on whose shoulders they stand. This book will be a welcome and lively read for educational academics, researchers and students of Educational Studies and Philosophy

Most commentators agree that the Protestant Missionary effort really got under way in the late eighteenth century with the formation of the Baptist Missionary Society. Bearing in mind that the Reformation began in the early 16th Century the obvious question that arises is 'Why did it take Protestants nearly 3 centuries to act on Jesus' Great Commission mandate?' This book goes some of the way to explaining why. We are introduced to five Protestant, Christian thinkers who had a mind for mission, long before the Protestant World as a whole became aware of the need. From the celebrated Jonathan Edwards to the comparatively unknown Jan Amos Comenius, we see how these five men were ahead of their time. They influenced thinking about mission and their comments ultimately led to the missionary explosion which began at the end of the eighteenth century and which carries on to the present day.

In their Introduction, the editors of the volume briefly describe how ontological questions have been taken as fundamental since the very origins of analytic philosophy, eventually gaining centrality during the last decades, and how they have been coming to the centre of interest in Italian-speaking analytic-style philosophy since the mid-1990s. The editors give a schematic outline of the overall structure of the volume and say how it can be grounded on the distinction between formal and material ontology.

In IV, xvii, 19–22 of his Essay, Locke employs Latin labels for four kinds of argument, of which one (ad hominem) was already in circulation and one (ad judicium) has never had much currency. The present proposal seeks to locate and clarify what Locke was aiming to describe, and to contrast what he says with some subsequent uses that have been made of these labels as if they named fallacies. Though three of the four kinds of argument that Locke picks out are often less than decisive, he casts no aspersion on the legitimacy of their use in debate.

In this paper I explore the implications of the increasing social and sociable uses of new, mobile internet associated technologies for online learning. In particular I focus on tablet computers as at the vanguard of this shift. Drawing on discourses of technobiophilia and phatic communion, the propositions explored in this paper are that: that internet associated technologies have been shaped by and reflect the ways in which humans engage with objects and each other in the physical world, that of particular significance for MIATs are frequent small scale social interactions between users, and that a more detailed consideration of these affordances would enhance online learning. I develop this account by considering the potential role of relationships for supporting the development of socially cohesive learning groups and the enhancement of online learning. In particular I focus on the need for partiality within a learning group and mechanisms for managing conflict. I conclude by offering two broad principles for a more sociable online learning experience.

In Documentalità, Maurizio Ferraris presents marriage as a paradigmatic instance of a social object whose essence is constituted by the generation of documents. This claim appears to hold good for some of the standard forms of matrimony recognised within the Roman Law tradition. The case is put for saying that, nevertheless, the appeal to documents puts the cart before the horse: the validity of a marriage depends, if anything, on the behaviour of the participants in it as much before as after any supposed document-generating ceremony.

There remains a concern in philosophy of education circles to assert that teaching is a social practice. Its initiation occurs in a conversation between Alasdair MacIntyre and Joe Dunne which inspired a Special Issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education. This has been recently utilised in a further Special Issue by Chris Higgins. In this article I consider two points of conflict between MacIntyre and Dunne and seek to resolve both with a more nuanced understanding of the implications of applying the concept ‘social practice’ to teaching. I critique both Dunne's and Higgins' focus on schools and school teaching. It is their focus on school teaching, rather than a broader account of teaching, that leads them astray. The result is that Dunne and Higgins have not shown that teaching is a social practice. School teaching is not a complex activity, but a complex set of different activities co-located in one place and engaged in by the same agents. In a final section I offer an account of ‘school teaching’ as a multi-practice activity which is consistent with MacIntyre's approach, and argue that schoolteachers have both an institutional and an educative role

Taking account of two recent anthologies on virtue ethics, the paper locates the moral virtues relative to Aristotle's description of natural endowments, capacities, rational potentials, arts, character traits, and habits. The distinctions operative in this scheme are then brought to bear on the specific question of whether a burglar can be exhibiting the virtue of courage. The suggestion is made that it may not be because burglary is often unjust that it is not a proper exercise of the virtue, but because the end and manner of its execution are disconnected from what is noble.

IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic required more responsibilities from teachers, including implementing prevention strategies, changes in school policies, and managing their own mental health, which yielded higher dissatisfaction in the field.MethodsA cross-sectional web survey was conducted among educators to collect information on their experiences teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic throughout the 2020–2021 academic year. Qualtrics, an online survey platform, fielded the survey from May 6 to June 8, 2021 to a national, convenience sample of 1,807 respondents.ResultsFindings revealed that overall, 43% of K-12 teachers reported a greater intention to leave the profession than previously recalled prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Intention to leave was multi-level, and associated with socio-demographic factors, individual factors, and teachers’ agency. We also found demographic disparities with respect to race and gender around teachers’ ability to provide feedback to schools on opening/closing and overall dissatisfaction with school/district COVID-19 prevention strategies implementation and policies.ConclusionThese findings are consistent with the Job-Demand and Resources Model, which posits that lack of organizational support can exacerbate job stressors, leading to burnout. Specifically, dissatisfaction with the way school policies were implemented took a toll on teachers’ mental health, leading to a desire to leave the profession. These findings are also consistent with research conducted once in-person teaching resumed in 2020–2021, specifically that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated preexisting teacher shortages that led to self-reported issues of stress, burnout, and retention.ImplicationsFurther research is necessary to understand the resources that may be most useful to reduce the demands of teaching in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some teachers are more likely to leave the field, and educational agencies may wish to target their teacher-retention efforts with emphasis on strong employee wellness programs that help educators to manage and reduce their stress. Education agency staff may wish to review policies and practices to provide meaningful opportunities to give input to school/district decisions and enable proactive communication channels.

Contract cheating is a major problem in Higher Education because it is very difficult to detect using traditional plagiarism detection tools. Digital forensics techniques are already used in law to determine ownership of documents, and also in criminal cases, where it is not uncommon to hide information and images within an ordinary looking document using steganography techniques. These digital forensic techniques were used to investigate a known case of contract cheating where the contract author has notified the university and the student subsequently confirmed that they had contracted the work out. Microsoft Word documents use a format known as Office Open XML Format, and as such, it is possible to review the editing process of a document. A student submission known to have been contracted out was analysed using the revision identifiers within the document, and a tool was developed to review these identifiers. Using visualisation techniques it is possible to see a pattern of editing that is inconsistent with the pattern seen in an authentic document.

Learning to map words onto their referents is difficult, because there are multiple possibilities for forming these mappings. Cross-situational learning studies have shown that word-object mappings can be learned across multiple situations, as can verbs when presented in a syntactic context. However, these previous studies have presented either nouns or verbs in ambiguous contexts and thus bypass much of the complexity of multiple grammatical categories in speech. We show that noun word learning in adults is robust when objects are moving, and that verbs can also be learned from similar scenes without additional syntactic information. Furthermore, we show that both nouns and verbs can be acquired simultaneously, thus resolving category-level as well as individual word-level ambiguity. However, nouns were learned more quickly than verbs, and we discuss this in light of previous studies investigating the noun advantage in word learning