bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
‘Gimme de kneebone bent’: Liturgics, Dance, Resistance and a Hermeneutics of the Knees
Authors: Carvalhaes Cláudio 
Published: July 2008

Shall we all dance to the Lord? But what Lord? To whose Lord shall we bend our knees in prayer, honour, dance and praise? Can our knees be naked? Can we open our legs? How much skin can we show without apologizing? Are we allowed to get the sensuous fever while dancing a tango, a salsa, or a samba? How should our knees behave in the house of the Lord? And whose house is God's house? Is there a proper way to dance in a worship service? What parts of our bodies can we move without distressing the proper liturgical order rooted in respect, faith, rationality, tradition and good manners?Our knees connect liturgy with ecclesiology, theology, colonialisation, dance and bodies. I was asked to write about dance in Brazil/Latin America, perhaps because Brazil is well known for its dancing spirit, as one can see in our carnival, samba, joy and beautiful women. All of that is true. But the task for this article was more specific. I had to write about dance within Christian communities. Then, the whole aspect of dance was turned upside down in my head. In truth, we do not dance in historic Protestant churches in Brazil and in that regard, we do not differ one inch from many of our brothers and sisters in Edinburgh, Rome, Geneva or the United States – at least when dance is concerned. We just do not dance. Only our Pentecostal brothers and sisters can dance.
Discrimination and Testimonial Knowledge
Authors: Greco John 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTSanford Goldberg has called our attention to an interesting problem: How is it that young children can learn from the testimony of their caregivers (their parents, teachers, and nannies, for example) even when the children themselves are undiscriminating consumers of testimony? Part One describes the importance and scope of the problem, showing that it generalizes beyond tots and their caregivers. Part Two considers and rejects several strategies for solving the problem, including Goldberg's own. Part Three defends a solution, positing a previously unnoticed social dimension to knowledge.
A Culture of Justification: The Pragmatist's Epistemic Argument for Democracy
Authors: Misak Cheryl 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTThe pragmatist view of politics is at its very heart epistemic, for it treats morals and politics as a kind of deliberation or inquiry, not terribly unlike other kinds of inquiry. With the exception of Richard Rorty, the pragmatists argue that morals and politics, like science, aim at the truth or at getting things right and that the best method for achieving this aim is a method they sometimes call the scientific method or the method of intelligence – what would now be termed deliberative democracy. Hence, the pragmatists offer an argument for democracy which appeals to the quality of the decisions supplied by democratic procedure. Why should we value decisions that are the products of voting after open debate over private decision-making and then voting, over bargaining, or over elimination of those who disagree with us? We should value them because the deliberative democratic method is more likely to give us true or right or justified answers to our questions. Rorty, of course, thinks that no inquiry aims at the truth and that nothing about pragmatism speaks in democracy's favor. This paper will show how his brand of pragmatism betrays what is good and deeply interesting in the pragmatist tradition.
Book Reviews
Authors: MORRIS MARK 
Published: July 2008

In 1925, a year central to the concerns of Advertising Tower, the short-lived short story writer Kajii Motojirô published a tale called ‘Lemon’. It has long been considered one the classics of Japanese short fiction. The climax of the story locates the focal character in one embodiment of Western-orientated Japanese modernity – the book section of Tokyo's Maruzen Department Store. The down-at-the-heel narrator has brought with him one shiny yellow lemon. He heaps up an armload of expensive, illustrated art books, sticks the lemon in the pile, and awaits the cataclysm. William O. Gardener has looked back at the decade of the 1920s in Japan in this fascinating, sometimes frustrating, always informative study of how modernism in the arts and literature were generated within Japan's particular experience of cultural, social and political modernity.
Celestial Discords: The Music of Dante's Paradise
Authors: SLAWINSKI MAURICE 
Published: July 2008

The music that I am concerned with in the present paper is not that of angelic choirs and lyre-strumming seraphim (though of course there is that too in Paradiso). Rather, it is the music of Dante's poetry, and more precisely, the relative lack of a particular kind of word-music that one might expect to feature in an account of Paradise: the music of ecstasy, or jouissance. Because if one of the poem's aims is to communicate the experience of someone who claims actually to have been there, then it might be suggested, to adapt an elegant phrase of Roland Barthes, that Dante's is a somewhat sparing ecstasy, a jouissance parsimonieuse. Setting aside the fraught issue – the subject of animated debate to this day – of whether Dante had actually experienced a vision of some kind, and therefore believed his account of the Hereafter to be in some sense ‘factual’, there is no doubt that in writing the Paradisohe intended somehow to representthe state of bliss, an intent to which he refers with the polysemic verb figurare, meaning at one and the same time depict, imagine and, in accordance with contemporary allegory and typology, identify in the things pertaining to this world intimations of the transcendent truths of the next. If therefore Dante is sparing in his celestial jouissancethis is in part because the demands of earthly representation are such that the state of blessedness, and even Heaven's more transient effects on the ‘still flesh-and-blood’ Dante-character, can only be adumbrated, rapidly suggested and just as rapidly left off. At the root of Dante's achievement, as Auerbach taught us to recognize, is his extraordinary skill as a story-teller, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Paradiso, where, beyond time, there is in a sense no celestial story to tell. Dante fills that void with a variety of earthly stories instead: exemplary human lives and the history of mankind generally as a journey whose end-purpose is the celestial city; scientific, philosophical and theological narratives explaining how everything in creation exists and operates to fulfil that end-purpose; the story of Dante's own progress through the heavens.
Credit for Making a Discovery
Authors: Rescher Nicholas 
Published: July 2008

How is one properly to allocate credit for making a discovery in science or elsewhere where the conjoint effort of several individuals is involved? When a group of investigators cooperates in making a discovery, how should the credit for this achievement be apportioned among them to assure that everyone receives their proper share?The problem being considered here is not that of assessing importance—of determining how much credit there is to go around. That is something else again. The present problem, rather, is that of how that credit, be it great or small, should be allocated to the parties responsible for the discovery at issue? It is, accordingly, not the amount of credit but its distribution that is at issue.
Boundary Work and the Science Wars: James Robert Brown'sWho Rules in Science?
Authors: Sismondo Sergio 
Published: July 2008

The Science Wars have not involved any violence, nor even threats of violence. Thus the label “wars” for this series of discussions, mostly one-sided and mostly located within the academy, is something of an overblown metaphor. Nonetheless, I will suggest that there are some respects in which the metaphor is appropriate. The Science Wars involve territory, albeit a metaphorical kind of territory. They inspire work that can be best interpreted as ideological, a result of disciplinary interests. Moreover, fellow participants in the wars and others reward that ideological work.My goal in this is to display efforts to maintain a discipline's epistemic authority, the recognition that members of that discipline have legitimate claims to knowledge on a subject. The central section of the paper takes the form of a discussion of one recent contribution to the Science Wars, James Robert Brown'sWho Rules in Science?My argument is at least somewhat generalizable beyond this book, and it therefore points to interesting phenomena related to epistemic authority.
On Dreaming and Being Lied To
Authors: Faulkner Paul 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTAs sources of knowledge, perception and testimony are both vulnerable to sceptical arguments. To both arguments a Moorean response is possible: both can be refuted by reference to particular things known by perception and testimony. However, lies and dreams are different possibilities and they are different in a way that undercuts the plausibility of a Moorean response to a scepticism of testimony. The condition placed on testimonial knowledge cannot be trivially satisfied in the way the Moorean would suggest. This has substantial implications for any non-sceptical epistemological theory of testimony.
Epistemic Value Theory and Social Epistemology
Authors: Fallis Don 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTIn order to guide the decisions of real people who want to bring about good epistemic outcomes for themselves and others, we need to understand our epistemic values. InKnowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman has proposed an epistemic value theory that allows us to say whether one outcome is epistemically better than another. However, it has been suggested that Goldman's theory is not really anepistemicvalue theory at all because whether one outcome is epistemically better than another partly depends on our non-epistemic interests. In this paper, I argue that an epistemic value theory that serves the purposes of social epistemology must incorporate non-epistemic interests in much the way that Goldman's theory does. In fact, I argue that Goldman's theory does not go far enough in this direction. In particular, the epistemic value of having a particular true belief should actually be weighted by how interested we are in the topic.
Conservatism, Basic Beliefs, and the Diachronic and Social Nature of Epistemic Justification
Authors: Koons Jeremy 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTDiscussions of conservatism in epistemology often fail to demonstrate that the principle of conservatism is supported by epistemic considerations. In this paper, I hope to show two things. First, there is a defensible version of the principle of conservatism, a version that applies only to what I will call our basic beliefs. Those who deny that conservatism is supported by epistemic considerations do so because they fail to take into account the necessarily social, diachronic and self-correcting nature of our epistemic practice. Second, I will attempt to show how our basic beliefs are justified via this principle of conservatism.
The Bias Paradox in Feminist Standpoint Epistemology
Authors: Rolin Kristina 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTSandra Harding's feminist standpoint epistemology makes two claims. The thesis of epistemic privilege claims that unprivileged social positions are likely to generate perspectives that are “less partial and less distorted” than perspectives generated by other social positions. The situated knowledge thesis claims that all scientific knowledge is socially situated. The bias paradox is the tension between these two claims. Whereas the thesis of epistemic privilege relies on the assumption that a standard of impartiality enables one to judge some perspectives as better than others, the situated knowledge thesis seems to undermine this assumption by suggesting that all knowledge is partial. I argue that a contextualist theory of epistemic justification provides a solution to the bias paradox. Moreover, contextualism enables me to give empirical content to the thesis of epistemic privilege, thereby making it into a testable hypothesis.
Masking Disagreement among Experts
Authors: Beatty John 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTThere are many reasons why scientific experts may mask disagreement and endorse a position publicly as “jointly accepted.” In this paper I consider the inner workings of a group of scientists charged with deciding not only a technically difficult issue, but also a matter of social and political importance: the maximum acceptable dose of radiation. I focus on how, in this real world situation, concerns with credibility, authority, and expertise shaped the process by which this group negotiated the competing virtues of reaching consensus versus reporting accurately the nature and degree of disagreement among them.
The Epistemology of Democracy
Authors: Anderson Elizabeth 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the epistemic powers of democratic institutions through an assessment of three epistemic models of democracy: the Condorcet Jury Theorem, the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem, and Dewey's experimentalist model. Dewey's model is superior to the others in its ability to model the epistemic functions of three constitutive features of democracy: the epistemic diversity of participants, the interaction of voting with discussion, and feedback mechanisms such as periodic elections and protests. It views democracy as an institution for pooling widely distributed information about problems and policies of public interest by engaging the participation of epistemically diverse knowers. Democratic norms of free discourse, dissent, feedback, and accountability function to ensure collective, experimentally-based learning from the diverse experiences of different knowers. I illustrate these points with a case study of community forestry groups in South Asia, whose epistemic powers have been hobbled by their suppression of women's participation.
Taking Advantage of Difference in Opinion
Authors: Bradley Richard 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTDiversity of opinion both presents problems and affords opportunities. Differences of opinion can stand in the way of reaching an agreement within a group on what decisions to take. But at the same time, the fact that the differences in question could derive from access to different information or from the exercise of different judgemental skills means that they present individuals with the opportunity to improve their own opinions. This paper explores the implications for solutions to the former (aggregation) problem of supposing that individuals exploit these opportunities. In particular, it argues that rational individual revision of opinion implies that aggregation problems are unstable in a certain sense and that solving them by exploiting the information embedded in individual opinion has profound implications for the conditions that we should impose on aggregation procedures.
No Testimonial Route to Consensus
Authors: Pettit Philip 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTThe standard image of how consensus can be achieved is by pooling evidence and reducing if not eliminating disagreements. But rather than just pooling substantive evidence on a certain question, why not also take into account the formal, testimonial evidence provided by the fact that a majority of the group adopt a particular answer? Shouldn't we be reinforced by the discovery that we are on that majority side, and undermined by the discovery that we are not? Shouldn't this be so, in particular, when Condorcet's jury theorem applies? It turns out not. There are serious problems attending any strategy of majoritarian deference.
The Epistemic Benefits of Multiple Biased Observers
Authors: Goodin Robert E. 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTWe know that we can learn much from the reports of multiple competent, independent, unbiased observers. There are also things we can learn from the reports of competent but biased observers. Specifically, when reports go against the grain of an agent’s known biases, we can be relatively confident in the veracity of those reports. Triangulating on the truth via that mechanism requires a multiplicity of observers with distinct biases, each of whose reports might be one-way decisive in that fashion. It also presupposes that all observers share the same fundamental epistemic standards.
Liberalism and Epistemic Diversity: Mill's Sceptical Legacy
Authors: Kelly Paul 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTAlthough John Stuart Mill places considerable emphasis on three information signalling devices – debate, votes and prices – he remains curiously sceptical about the prospects of institutional or social epistemology. In this paper, I explore Mill's modest scepticism about institutional epistemology and compare and contrast that with the attitudes of liberal theorists such as F. A. Hayek and John Dewey who are much more enthusiastic about the prospects of social epistemology as part of their defences of liberalism. The paper examines the extent to which Hayek and Dewey ignore concerns originally raised by Mill. I conclude that Mill's modest scepticism is reflected in the epistemological abstinence of contemporary liberal philosophers such as John Rawls, and that his elevation of philosophy over democracy remains a challenge to contemporary defenders of the political value of social or institutional epistemology.
The Case against Epistemic Relativism: Reflections on Chapter 6 ofFear of Knowledge
Authors: Rosen Gideon 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTAccording to one sort of epistemic relativist, normative epistemic claims (e.g., evidence E justifies hypothesis H) are never true or false simpliciter, but only relative to one or anotherepistemic system. In chapter 6 ofFear of Knowledge, Paul Boghossian objects to this view on the ground that its central notions cannot be explained, and that it cannot account for the normativity of epistemic discourse. This paper explores how the dogged relativist might respond.
Radically Socialized Knowledge and Conspiracy Theories
Authors: Levy Neil 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTThe typical explanation of an event or process which attracts the label ‘conspiracy theory’ is an explanation that conflicts with the account advanced by the relevant epistemic authorities. I argue that both for the layperson and for the intellectual, it is almost never rational to accept such a conspiracy theory. Knowledge is not merely shallowly social, in the manner recognized by social epistemology, it is also constitutively social: many kinds of knowledge only become accessible thanks to the agent's embedding in an environment that includes other epistemic agents. Moreover, advances in knowledge typically require ongoing immersion in this social environment. But the intellectual who embraces a conspiracy theory risks cutting herself off from this environment, and therefore epistemically disabling herself. Embracing a conspiracy theory therefore places at risk the ability to engage in genuine enquiry, including the enquiry needed properly to evaluate the conspiracy theory.
Are Conspiracy Theorists Irrational?
Authors: Coady David 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTIt is widely believed that to be a conspiracy theorist is to suffer from a form of irrationality. After considering the merits and defects of a variety of accounts of what it is to be a conspiracy theorist, I draw three conclusions. One, on the best definitions of what it is to be a conspiracy theorist, conspiracy theorists do not deserve their reputation for irrationality. Two, there may be occasions on which we should settle for an inferior definition which entails that conspiracy theorists are after all irrational. Three, if and when we do this, we should recognise that conspiracy theorists so understood are at one end of a spectrum, and the really worrying form of irrationality is at the other end.
Shit Happens
Authors: Mandik Pete 
Published: July 2008

ABSTRACTIn this paper I embrace what Brian Keeley calls in “Of Conspiracy Theories” the absurdist horn of the dilemma for philosophers who criticize such theories. I thus defend the view that there is indeed something deeply epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorizing. My complaint is that conspiracy theories apply intentional explanations to situations that give rise to special problems concerning the elimination of competing intentional explanations.
Enantioselective Michael Addition of Dicyanoolefins to α,β‐Unsaturated Aldehydes in Aqueous Medium
Authors: Lu Jun , Liu Feng , Loh Teck‐Peng 
Published: July 2008

AbstractA pool of water‐compatible catalysts, namely dialkyl‐(S)‐prolinols, has been developed for the enantioselective direct vinylogous Michael addition reaction of vinylmalononitriles to α,β‐unsaturated aldehydes in aqueous medium. In many cases, the products can be obtained in almost optically pure form (>96% ee) after a single recrystallization.
A Novel Bis‐Thiourea Organocatalyst for the Asymmetric Aza‐Henry Reaction
Authors: Rampalakos Constantinos , Wulff William D. 
Published: July 2008

AbstractA novel bis‐thiourea/2,2′‐diaminobinaphthalene (BINAM)‐based catalyst for the asymmetric aza‐Henry reaction has been developed. This catalyst promotes the reaction of N‐Boc imines with nitroalkanes to afford β‐nitroamines with good yields and high enantioselectivities. This catalyst has the advantage that it can be prepared in a single step from commercially available materials. A model is proposed for the catalyst action where both components of the reaction are activated simultaneously by hydrogen bonding. Regardless of the mechanism, the success of the present catalyst demonstrates the potential of bis‐thioureas as an interesting class of relatively unexplored catalysts.
Stereoselective Synthesis of γ‐Butyrolactones via Organocatalytic Annulations of Enals and Keto Esters
Authors: Li Yi , Zhao Zhuo‐An , He Hu , You Shu‐Li 
Published: July 2008

Abstract4,5,5‐Trisubstituted γ‐butyrolactones bearing two stereocenters including one quaternary carbon center have been synthesized in excellent yields via N‐heterocyclic carbene‐catalyzed annulations of enals and ketoesters. Chiral N‐heterocyclic carbenes were used to tune the diastereoselectivity up to an 83/17 cis/trans ratio and the enantioselectivity up to 78% ee (trans isomer).
Domino Catalysis in the Direct Conversion of Carboxylic Acids to Esters
Authors: Held I. , von den Hoff P. , Stephenson D. S. , Zipse H. 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThe combined use of high concentration conditions, auxiliary bases, and new catalysts allows for the rapid synthesis of sterically hindered carboxylic acid esters at room temperature. Mechanistic analysis indicates the intermediate formation of acid anhydrides and subsequent rate‐limiting transformation to the ester products.
Organocatalytic Asymmetric Hydrophosphination of α,β‐Unsaturated Aldehydes: Development, Mechanism and DFT Calculations
Authors: Ibrahem Ismail , Hammar Peter , Vesely Jan , Rios Ramon , Eriksson Lars , Córdova Armando 
Published: July 2008

AbstractThe development and mechanism of the highly chemo‐ and enantioselective organocatalytic hydrophosphination reaction of α,β‐unsaturated aldehydes is presented. The reactions are catalyzed by protected chiral diarylprolinol derivatives and give access to optically active phosphine derivatives in high yields with up to 99%ee. The organocatalytic addition of other phosphorus nucleophiles was also investigated. The origin of the high enantioselectivity for the reaction with diphenylphosphine as the nucleophile is investigated by density functional theory calculations.