A Philosophy of the Essay : Scepticism, Experience, and Style

© Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2018.Erin Plunkett draws from both analytic and continental sources to argue for the philosophical relevance of style, making the case that the essay form is uniquely suited to address the sceptical problem. The authors examined here-Montaigne, Hume, the early German Romantics, Kierkegaard and Stanley Cavell-bring into relief the relationship between scepticism and ordinary life and situate the will to know within a broader frame of meaningful human activity. The formal features of the essay call attention to time, subjectivity, and language as the existential conditions of knowledge. In contrast to foundationalist approaches, which expect philosophy to reach empirical or rational certainty, Plunkett demonstrates through these writings the philosophical advantages of a fragmentary, non-dogmatic style of writing. A Philosophy of the Essay shows how this medium can help us come to terms with the contingency and uncertainty of life

Learning Group Formation Factors in a Career and Technical Education Networking Program

Team based learning based on the transformation of permanent student groups into powerful learning teams is widely and successfully used as an instructional strategy in postsecondary career and technical education. Failure of groups to reach the learning team status is a major learning drawback of this approach. Factors affecting the transformation of groups to teams are applied consistently to the whole class, with the exception of group formation and membership. Career and technical education populations differ from other postsecondary populations and examination of group formation factors may result in improvement of student results.Abstract / Introduction / Problem Statement / Purpose of Study / Literature Review / Method / Results / Conclusion / References / Appendix 1 - Consent Form / Appendix 2 Student Questionnaire - Group Selection / Appendix 3 Student Response Dat

Contraceptive Sabotage

This Article responds to the alarm recently sounded by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists over “birth control sabotage”—the “active interference [by one partner] with [the other] partner’s contraceptive methods in an attempt to promote pregnancy.” Currently, sabotage is not a crime, and existing categories of criminal offenses fail to capture the essence of the injury it does to victims. This Article argues that sabotage should be a separate crime—but only when perpetrated against those partners who can and do get pregnant as a result of having sabotaged sex. Using the principle of self-possession—understood as a person’s basic right to self-ownership—this Article argues that women have a self-possessory interest in maintaining their reproductive capacity in its non-pregnant state during and after having sex to the extent they seek to establish with the use or planned use of contraception. Sabotage by sexual partners—typically male—violates this interest and merits criminal punishment. This Article proposes statutory language to criminalize sabotage that should be added to the revision of the Model Penal Code currently underway. Not only would this addition likely survive any Equal Protection challenge, it would arguably serve to strengthen the existing constitutional right to non-procreative sex by setting meaningful limits on one partner’s ability to interfere unilaterally with the other partner’s contraceptive decisions

Convergence rates for finite element problems with singularities. Part 1: Antiplane shear

The problem of a finite crack in an infinite medium under antiplane shear load is considered. It is shown that the nodal forces at the tip of the crack accurately gives the order of singularity, that n energy release methods can give the strength to better than 1 percent with element size 1/10 the crack length, and that nodal forces give a much better estimate of the stress field than do the elements themselves. The finite element formulation and the factoring of tridiagonal matrices are discussed

A Guided Tour Of Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics

In this Introduction, we aim to introduce the reader to the basic topic of this book. As part of this, we explain why we are using two different expressions (‘conceptual engineering’ and ‘conceptual ethics’) to describe the topics in the book. We then turn to some of the central foundational issues that arise for conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics, and finally we outline various views one might have about their role in philosophy and inquiry more generally

Quasi-Expressivism about Statements of Law: A Hartian Theory

Speech and thought about what the law is commonly function in practical ways, to guide or assess behavior. These functions have often been seen as problematic for legal positivism in the tradition of H.L.A. Hart. One recent response is to advance an expressivist analysis of legal statements (Toh), which faces its own, familiar problems. This paper advances a rival, positivist-friendly account of legal statements which we call “quasi-expressivist”, explicitly modeled after Finlay’s metaethical theory of moral statements. This consists in a descriptivist, “rule-relational” semantics combined with a pragmatic account of the expressive and practical functions of legal discourse. We argue that this approach is at least as well-equipped as expressivism to explain the motivational and prescriptive features of “internal” legal statements, as well as a fundamental kind of legal disagreement, while being better positioned to account for various “external” uses of the same language. We develop this theory in a Hartian framework, and in the final part of the paper argue (particularly against Toh’s expressivist interpretation) that Hart’s own views in The Concept of Law are best reconstructed along such quasi-expressivist lines