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A legal system's 'official story' is its shared account of the law's structure and sources, which members of its legal community publicly advance and defend. In some societies, however, officials pay lip service to this shared account, while privately adhering to their own unofficial story instead. If the officials enforce some novel legal code while claiming fidelity to older doctrines, then which set of rules—if either—is the law? We defend the legal relevance of the official story, on largely Hartian grounds. Hart saw legal rules as determined by social rules accepted by a particular community. We argue that this acceptance requires no genuine normative commitment; agreement or compliance with the rules might even be feigned. And this community need not be limited to an official class, but includes all who jointly accept the rules. Having rejected these artificial limits, one can take the official story at its word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is possible that truth as we know it is obsolete. Sometimes it seems that different groups in the United States live in completely different worlds. If "post-truth" means truth has been shattered, segmented, and distributed among different groups, then perhaps post-truth has arrived. Several philosophers have claimed that truth is indeed relative to a person's language or conceptual framework. I examine four arguments philosophers use to support their theory, and try to show that none of these arguments is sound. We may live in a post-truth society, but if so, it's not because truth is relative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with philosopher Achille Mbembe is presented. Topics include talks about the book "Brutalisme" dedicated to ‘three countries, in equal parts' as how far did they feed into book and how did each of them hold up; and examines to see two adoptive countries, France and the United States; and focuses on seeing unprecedented figures of the human appear.

This paper critiques philosophical efforts to biologize race as racial projects (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States). The paper argues that the deeply social phenomenon of race defies the analytic schema employed by biologizing philosophers. The very (social) act of theorizing race is already in an involuted relationship with its target concept: analyzing race must be seen as a racial project, in that it simultaneously helps to manage how race is represented in society and helps organize society's resources along particular racial lines. Such biologizing projects are rife with moral and political dimensions and have a depoliticizing effect that has the potential to camouflage, defuse, or explain away the social‐structural reproduction of white power/privilege. The paper begins by considering two recent philosophic‐scientific biologizations of race, showing how they conform to the analytic schema, reviewing received critical points, and offering several novel ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pragmatism, especially the works of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, is in the midst of a revival in American sociology. American sociologists have drawn on these authors in their addressment of contemporary debates in the wider disciplinary field. Placing these contemporary applications of pragmatist thought alongside the broader intellectual tradition of pragmatic philosophy, however, demonstrates tensions associated with this revival. This paper draws on the work of John Dewey as a particularly stark case of the conflict between the philosophy of social science espoused by the original pragmatist philosophers and the use of their ideas in American sociology today. This treatment affords the opportunity to recover a vision for social science which has been overlooked in the contemporary pragmatist revival with deep implications for the practice of social science today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'One of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture [is] the nature of art.'1 Over millennia, philosophers have failed to agree on what 'art' is or have resorted to an apparently circular reductivism, such as, art is what is found in an art gallery. Despite this uncertainty, it is not unusual for tax laws to initially place an interpretative duty on Revenue or Customs services to decide which things constitute artworks under particular pieces of legislation. This power to construct meaning is, however, constrained. In performing their hermeneutic function, officials construe laws and regulations created by lawmakers, and the ultimate interpretative power lies with the courts. The most famous, albeit not unique, example of officials engaging with artworks is the Bird in Space case which arose from customs officials in the United States categorising one of Constantin Brâncuși's modernist sculptures as a hospital and kitchen supply. This article surveys tax laws that require officials to engage in aesthetic judgment and analyses notable cases to elicit key issues. The principal purpose of the article is to consider whether a customs or revenue service, which presumably represents a broad cross-section of society but not art experts, should be charged with making such decisions. While the discussion is specific, it remains relevant to drafting tax statutes in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses the philosophical idea of Bernard Lonergan about the natural knowledge of God based on three texts such as "Insight" (1957), "Natural Knowledge of God" (1968), and "Method in Theology" (1972). Topics include the increasing number American adults who considered themselve as atheist, the religious belief of Roman Catholic theologians, and the results of the report "America's Changing Religious Landscape," from the Pew Research Center.

This paper is rooted in my investigation of the artistic processes and practices of artists with disabilities through field observations at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California. Through this investigation, I develop the concept of a pedagogy of waiting, which allows for a consideration of embodied differences. This pedagogy of waiting is conceptualized by and with 1) the everyday artistic processes and practices of artists at Creative Growth; 2) my positionality of being a Chinese art educator and researcher in an art studio, Creative Growth, in the United States; and 3) my conceptual and theoretical exploration with philosophers and disability studies scholars. Among the artists who informed the pedagogy of waiting is Latefa Noorzai, a native Farsi speaker and immigrant to the United States. The temporalities demonstrated through Latefa's art practice and the pedagogical practice at Creative Growth challenge the normative temporalities in art learning and art making. The pedagogy of waiting is both informed by people with disabilities and as an alternative to able-bodied and able-minded pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with American philosopher Richard J. Bernstein is presented. He discussed various topics including his intellectual background, his dissertation on metaphysics, his meeting with philosopher John Dewey, his book "Experience and Education," his literary works on education and educational reform policies.

The article discusses the relation of philosophy to the evolution of civilization in the U.S. It is difficult to imagine any philosopher in the atomic age being taken seriously enough to cause him to be silenced by the powers. There is no age can afford to do without wisdom, but there are peculiarities of different ages which may emphasize the need of wisdom. Man is endowed with rational, moral, and spiritual potentialities which were he will use and apply. It would be sufficient for him to make it possible to live and get along with his fellows.

This paper elaborates on Romano's landmark book as a paradigm extension from philosophy as a doctrine to philosophy as a personal disposition to think reflectively. Romano's pragmatism highlights philosophy as a reflective tendency in the service of the relevant and for the benefit of a better life as it is actually lived. Rather than staying within its own territory, the point is to enter what might seem like non-philosophical realms of action with the idea of cultivating them. Breaking away from the overtly academic boundaries of philosophy, Romano's book paves the way for a positive philosophy movement and for philosophy that contributes to people's actual conduct of their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is impartiality possible or desirable within the conduct of political judgment? Many philosophers and democratic theorists have answered this question with a resounding "no." This article provides an affirmative answer to this question based upon the empirical study of deliberative democracy within "mini-publics." Through a reconstruction of the phenomenology of deliberative democracy within groups, this article offers an alternative conception of impartiality that can overcome many of the political and philosophical challenges that have been raised about this quality. "Deliberative impartiality" is a group-mediated orientation born from reflective civic collaborations within deliberative processes that prioritize free, equal, and inclusive communicative participation. This process-dependent form of mutually enacted deliberative impartiality differs from the individual, cognitive "standpoint" model of impartiality that still informs much of the theoretical literature, and it is for this same reason an intriguing and overlooked approach to impartiality that is worthy of empirical and theoretical consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with American philosopher Richard J. Bernstein is presented. Topics discussed include the difference between undergraduate education in the U.S. and Europe, studies regarding pragmatism and Bernstein's first encounter with pragmatism at Columbia University, and the radical revolution in philosophy in the country after World War II.

The article focuses on the laws made for regulating the copyright protection. Topics discussed include copyright protections under the moral rights and the development of arts and sciences, needs of copyright protection to the audio and video production works and views of philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer on the copyright protection of the literary works. It further analyzes the aesthetic judgments on the copyright protection of taste.

In this paper, I argue that Dewey's pragmatist aesthetics, and in particular, his concept of consummatory experience, should be engaged anew to rethink the merits of the Philosophy for Children (PFC) programme, which arose in the 1970s in the US as an innovative educational programme that aims to use philosophy to help school children (aged 6-18) improve their ability to become more conscious of and make judgments about the aspects of their experience that have ethical, aesthetic, political, logical, or even metaphysical meaning. Although an international success, the PFC programme has attracted many criticisms from a variety of directions. I claim that Deweyan concept of consummatory aesthetic experience is broad and flexible enough to provide a robust framework to make sense of the pedagogical horizon of PFC and therefore fruitfully engage the various critics of the movement coming from religious and social conservatives, educational psychologists, critical theorists, postmodernists/posthumanists, and professional philosophers themselves. The goal of this paper is to offer in a preliminary fashion the basic elements of Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which was principally elucidated in his Art as Experience, to defend PFC as a viable pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the possibility that a priori philosophical commitments continue to result in a narrowing of inquiry in moral psychology and education where theistic worldviews are concerned. Drawing from the theories of Edward L. Thorndike and John Dewey, we examine naturalistic philosophical commitments that influenced the study of moral psychology and moral education in the USA. We then address the question of whether these foundational naturalistic commitments can be rendered as compatible with theistic commitments, using both modernist and postmodern philosophical approaches that might be viewed as attempts at compatibility. Arguing that these attempts at compatibility fail, we draw from contemporary approaches to moral psychology and education in order to illustrate how naturalistic commitments might prevent these approaches from adequately addressing theistic understandings and experiences of morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the emotional engagement of individuals on fictional films and novels in the U.S. The author mentions that several individuals like fictional characters and they cry or get terrified by horror books. Moreover, the perspectives of philosophers on the issue are also mentioned.

The article discusses the "veil of ignorance," a phrase from philosopher John Rawls, rules in the election law of the U.S. It informs about the controversy between Senator Lisa Murkowski and Joe Miller, ruling that write-in ballots must be spelled correctly and the rule that a candidate must be a "resident" of the city in which he plans to run for mayor, including the candidate Rahm Emanuel for the election for Mayor of Chicago, Illinois. It explores the meaning of neutrality.

The article provides profiles of several teachers, educators, and philosophers who have helped students in their academic achievement and contributed to the education discipline. Profiled individuals include B.F. Skinner, who is noted for advocating the inclusion of behaviorism as a psychology of learning, Jean Piaget, who studied the education and maturation of middle class children in Geneva, Switzerland, and Ralph Tyler, who developed a pattern for curriculum development and writing lesson plans.

The question 'what is life?' has long been a source of philosophical debate and in recent years has taken on increasing scientific importance. The most popular approach among both philosophers and scientists for answering this question is to provide a 'definition' of life. In this article I explore a variety of different definitional approaches, both traditional and non-traditional, that have been used to 'define' life. I argue that all of them are deeply flawed. It is my contention that a scientifically compelling understanding of the nature of life presupposes an empirically adequate scientific theory (vs. definition) of life; as I argue, scientific theories are not the sort of thing that can be encapsulated in definitions. Unfortunately, as I also discuss, scientists are currently in no position to formulate even a tentative version of such a theory. Recent discoveries in biology and biochemistry have revealed that familiar Earth life represents a single example that may not be representative of life. If this is the case, life on Earth today provides an empirically inadequate foundation for theorizing about life considered generally. I sketch a strategy for procuring the needed additional examples of life without the guidance of a definition or theory of life, and close with an application to NASA's fledgling search for extraterrestrial life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of the curriculum differentiation in the American comprehensive high school deeply embedded in the philosophy of Plato, Greek philosopher. It mentions that the practice of differentiation curriculum advocates supplying different subject content to different students and evaluating their learning differently. It mentions that such a practice reproduces unequal social relations within schools. It mentions that it is the concept of ideology consisting of beliefs, attitudes and assumptions which has kept the idea of curriculum differentiation intact. It also refers to Plato's view with regard to education of children stating that stating that all children need to be brought up in communally so that their intellect can be gauged.

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