Deep Questions Research Articles

Promoting vicarious learning of physics using deep questions with explanations

Two experiments explored the role of vicarious ''self'' explanations in facilitating student learning gains during computer-presented instruction. In Exp. 1, college students with low or high knowledge on Newton's laws were tested in four conditions: (a) monologue (M), (b) questions (Q), (c) explanation (E), and (d) question + explanation (Q + E). Those with low pre-experimental knowledge levels showed marginally significant yet consistently greater gains than those with high levels and condition Q + E outperformed the other three (M, Q, E). Among those with high knowledge, the Q + E presentations actually inhibited learning. In Exp. 2, high school physics students in standard and honors classes were studied during their introduction to Newton's laws. Brief (12 min) computer videos that introduced key Newtonian concepts preceded teacher presentations in seven daily sessions. Both standard and honors students who received Q + E presentations prior to regular classroom activities learned more in daily sessions than those who received either M or Q presentations. It was concluded that when key concepts are introduced in the context of deep questions along with explanations new learning was facilitated both in vicarious environments and in subsequent standard classroom activities.

‘It sounds like they shouldn't be here’: immigration checks on the streets of Sydney

Australian state police have historically held wide-ranging powers which reflect their origins as all-encompassing administrators and agents of control over unruly colonial subjects. Contemporary police powers to stop and question individuals to establish whether they are lawfully present stem from at least 1958 when they were incorporated into section 188 of the Migration Act. There is no official monitoring of the use of stop and search powers in this or any other context, and the capacity for police to make on-the-spot checks has been enhanced by the establishment of the Immigration Status System which provides immediate feedback about immigration status, 24 hours a day. This paper will draw on statistical data, survey responses and interviews with senior New South Wales police to build up a picture of their immigration status checking practices, concentrating on opportunistic street encounters. The reported starting point – of directing attention to those who are perceived to be ‘out of place’ – embeds street-level border control into everyday practices of order maintenance policing. Questions of immigration status are found to be closely intertwined with determinations of identity, highlighting the importance in a globalising world of marking non-citizens as ‘surveillable subjects’, and raising deeper questions about entitlement and belonging.

El lenguaje de género como violencia y promotor de la misma.

El tema de esta investigación radica en la honda cuestión del género en relación con la violencia. Nuestro enfoque peculiar se sitúa en el estudio de su particular lenguaje. Describimos cómo se desarrolla ese discurso acerca del género, y qué efectos tiene con respecto a la violencia. Nos preguntamos si es una comunicación concorde con la realidad, o más bien un nuevo caso de la manipulación y del control social a través del lenguaje. Finalmente, proponemos un modo de expresión que hable de la persona real, y no del género, fundado en la relación entre los diversos sexos, no en su confrontación.

Revolution I – Takin' it to the streets!

Revolution I – Takin' it to the streets!

Pandora’s Well

The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico—the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history—represents far more than an oil rig “accident” caused by human error, mechanical failure, or poor engineering decisions driven by an industry mantra of “Drill, Baby, Drill!” At its roots are deeper questions about corporate power, corruption, and accountability; technological risk; government deregulation; fossil fuel dependence; and the inability of most Americans to envision a shift to a clean and renewable energy future. In this article and commentary, the author draws on various media accounts and disaster studies to trace some of the key events leading up to the catastrophe, as well as its preliminary and evolving impacts. The author then offers some critical observations about our ability to prevent future energy-driven disasters in an era marked by corporate power; congressional timidity; and the control that the fossil fuel industry exercises over our economy, culture, and energy policy. As with the 9/11 tragedy a decade ago, the BP blowout represents yet another national wake-up call for the United States to heed the disaster lessons of the last 40 years, reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, and begin the transition to a sustainable energy economy.

Medically Self-Sabotaging Behavior and Multiple Symptoms on the Review of Systems

To the Editor: A minority of primary care patients report multiple symptoms during routine reviews of systems. We explored any correlation between intentionally sabotaging one's own medical care (ie, an overall psychological need to maintain numerous physical symptoms, authentic or not) and multiple somatic symptoms as reported on a review of symptoms. Method. Participants were men and women, aged 18 years or older, in an outpatient internal medicine clinic staffed predominantly by residents. We excluded individuals with medical, intellectual, cognitive, or psychiatric symptoms that would preclude the ability to complete a survey. One of the authors (C.L.) remained in the lobby, approached incoming patients, and informally assessed exclusion criteria. With potential candidates, she reviewed the project and invited each to complete a survey. The survey consisted of 3 sections: (1) a demographic query; (2) the Self-Harm Inventory,1 from which we selected 3 items related to medical sabotage: “Have you ever intentionally, or on purpose, prevented wounds from healing,” “made medical situations worse on purpose,” or “abused prescription medication?”; and (3) a symptom checklist of 35 items, adapted from a preappointment questionnaire by Sinsky,2 which were preceded by the question, “Have you experienced any of the following symptoms in the past week?” with yes/no response options. Results. At the outset, 417 of 471 individuals approached agreed to participate, for a participation rate of 88.5%. Of these, 367 completed all study measures—124 men and 243 women, aged 19–97 years (mean = 50.13, SD = 15.46). Most (88.0%) were white (African American, 7.9%; other, 2.2%; Hispanic, 1.1%; Asian, 0.8%). All but 6.6% reported having attained at least a high school diploma, with 28.7% of the sample reporting a bachelor's degree or higher. Nineteen (5.2%) indicated ever having prevented wounds from healing, 25 (6.8%) indicated ever having made a medical situation worse on purpose, and 36 (9.8%) indicated ever having abused prescription medication. The number of endorsed symptoms in the review of systems ranged from 0 to 32 (mean = 6.87, SD = 5.95), with 89.9% endorsing at least 1 symptom. The mean number of such symptoms was greater for respondents who indicated a history of preventing wounds from healing (mean = 12.68, SD = 6.01) than for those who denied such a history (mean = 6.56, SD = 5.79; F1,365 = 20.07, P < .001). Similarly, the mean number of such symptoms was greater for respondents who indicated a history of having made medical situations worse (mean = 11.12, SD = 7.65) than for those who denied such a history (mean = 6.56, SD = 5.70; F1,365 = 14.13, P < .001). However, the mean number of endorsed symptoms was not greater for those who indicated a history of abusing prescription medication (mean = 8.43, SD = 6.25) than for those who denied such a history (mean = 6.71, SD = 5.91; F1,365 = 2.69, P < .12). These findings suggest that 2 forms of volitional medical self-sabotage—preventing wounds from healing and making medical situations worse on purpose—may be associated with and contribute to numerous physical symptoms on a review of systems. They also broach the deeper question of whether, in some patients, medical self-sabotaging symptoms and multiple self-reported symptoms in the review of systems purposefully function to engage health care professionals, maintain an illness identity, and/or self-sabotage a healthy lifestyle by promoting a sense of disability. Only further research will tease out the underlying psychological functions of these patient behaviors.

New genomes, new taxa and deep questions in the eukaryotic tree of life: a meeting report on the EMBO comparative genomics conference

A report on the meeting Comparative Genomics of Eukaryotic Microorganisms: understanding the complexity of diversity. Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Spain. October 15-20, 2011.

Best Friends

Like many topics of psychological research, the explanation for friendship is at once intuitive and difficult to address empirically. These difficulties worsen when one seeks, as we do, to go beyond “obvious” explanations (“humans are social creatures”) to ask deeper questions, such as “What is the evolved function of human friendship?” In recent years, however, a new window into human behavior has opened as a growing fraction of people’s social activity has moved online, leaving a wealth of digital traces behind. One example is a feature of the MySpace social network that allows millions of users to rank their “Top Friends.” In this study, we collected over 10 million people’s friendship decisions from MySpace to test predictions made by hypotheses about human friendship. We found particular support for the alliance hypothesis, which holds that human friendship is caused by cognitive systems that function to create alliances for potential disputes. Because an ally’s support can be undermined by a stronger outside relationship, the alliance model predicts that people will prefer partners who rank them above other friends. Consistent with the alliance model, we found that an individual’s choice of best friend in MySpace is strongly predicted by how partners rank that individual.

Exact point-distributions over the complex sphere

We study point-distributions over the surface of the unit sphere in unitary space that generate quadrature rules which are exact for spherical polynomials up to a certain bi-degree. In this first stage, we explore several different characterizations for this type of point sets using standard tools such as, positive definiteness, reproducing kernel techniques, linearization formulas, etc. We find bounds on the cardinality of a point-distribution, without discussing the deeper question regarding best bounds. We include examples, construction methods and explain, via isometric embeddings from real to complex spheres, the proper connections with the so-called spherical designs.

What Kind of Difference Do We Want to Make?

Behind the question of whether communication research has made a difference in communication practices or outcomes lies a deeper question about the specific quality of our discipline's contribution...

Synthetic Histories: Possible Futures for Papuan Pasts

This article considers the case for synthetic histories—broad narratives of historical process that critically combine the insights and perspectives of research from multiple disciplines. Drawing on the 28 contributions to the edited volume Papuan Pasts, on the deep history of the Papuan peoples, a brief synthesis of findings is offered in the form of a narrative. This enables the identification of a series of gaps, not just in the spatial and temporal coverage of research but also in the range of perspectives employed. The absence of Papuan voices is particularly challenging, and suggests that the future of Papuan histories lies in the closer articulation of a concern for deep time and questions of the genesis and immediate past of living Papuan communities.

Mark Schroeder’s Hypotheticalism: agent-neutrality, moral epistemology, and methodology

Mark Schroeder’s Slaves of the Passions is the most systematic defense yet constructed of a broadly ‘Humean’ conception of normative reasons for action, according to which all of one’s reasons are ultimately explained by facts about one’s psychology. This, however, radically undersells the book, which is breathtaking in its scope, originality, and density of powerful ideas. So: if you care about deep questions in ethics, you should read it. It is also rhetorically Humean, written so engagingly that even those without prior interest in its subject may enjoy thinking through such a superb example of philosophical argument. Despite admiring much in this book, I will play the usual role of symposium commentator here, and focus on sketching three brief objections to Schroeder’s account, in the hopes that they will spur him to develop and clarify his views. Section 1 argues that Schroeder’s crucial account of agent-neutral reasons cannot be made to work. Section 2 argues that a core element of his distinctive proposal in moral epistemology has awkwardly limited scope. Finally, Sect. 3 identifies a tension between Schroeder’s view and its central methodological motivation.

The Global Security Perspective on the Effects of Executive Cognitive Function on Complex Behavioral Screening Intervention and HIV/AIDS

The purpose of this quantitative study is to understand the global security perspective on the effects of executive cognitive function (ECF) on Complex Behavioral Screening Intervention and HIV/AIDS. The HIV/AIDS pandemic is as much a social, political, economic, and cultural problem as a biomedical one. HIV/AIDS is associated centrally with the collapse not just of communities and families but potentially of states, with some of the largest public health interventions ever and enormous questions about governance, a huge population of orphans, and deep questions about intergenerational relations and cultural transmission. This study also is to develop a screening instrument that improves quality of life for individuals with executive cognitive impairments and behavior problems in our communities and the global society.

Ten Years

Ten Years Douglas Burton-Christie This year marks the tenth anniversary of the journal Spiritus—a modest milestone, but one worth pausing over, if only to consider where we have been and where we are going. The Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality (SSCS) was founded in 1991 and soon after that the Christian Spirituality Bulletin came into existence. The present journal grew out of that earlier effort and has continued to give expression to the fundamental ideals of the SSCS: to publish thoughtful, critical scholarship in Christian spirituality that deepens our understanding of this ever-expanding field of inquiry. Looking back on the statement of purpose from the inaugural issue in 2001 (which continues to appear in each issue of the journal), it is sobering to consider how expansive and inclusive those ideals were and still are. Have we lived up to them? Perhaps we have done so in some measure. But considering that one of the underlying goals of both the SSCS and Spiritus is to expand and deepen our understanding of a field that is itself relatively young and still developing its own distinctive language, methods and ethos, it is perhaps to be expected that ten years in the life of a journal would serve simply as a beginning to that work. Still, it is enough time to offer a glimpse of some of the key questions that are emerging in the field and to reflect on the meaning of these questions as we look to the future. Among the most consistently pressing questions has been how to retrieve historical traditions of spiritual thought and practice in terms that honor the historical particularity of those traditions while also facilitating their reinterpretation for contemporary use. The impulse to retrieve the wisdom of these traditions is often rooted in a profound existential hunger, a sense that somehow they possess the capacity to help us address our own deepest questions. But how to access that wisdom? How to read and interpret these ancient traditions in a way that allows them to speak again, to heal and renew the Spirit—all the while retaining their own distinctive character and integrity? Scholarship in Christian spirituality is not always aimed explicitly at such renewal; but it can and often does contribute significantly to it. The Symposium on Ignatian spirituality in the current issue of Spiritus reflects this ongoing concern, while [End Page ix] also revealing the particular challenges involved in retrieving and reinterpreting historical traditions of spiritual practice. The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola are widely recognized as being one of the most important and enduring expressions of Christian spiritual thought and practice. The renewed attention to the Exercises in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—among Jesuits as well as among a wide range of other religious and lay persons—suggests something about their continued capacity to speak to our most pressing spiritual questions. Still, while some of our questions no doubt remain similar to those that originally gave rise to the Exercises, others have changed dramatically. Thus, for example, the question of how, if at all, the Exercises can speak to the conditions of crushing poverty and social injustice that have come to mark our experience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has taken on new urgency. Can the spiritual vision of the Exercises help us address and respond to these realities honestly and courageously? These were among the most pressing questions for the Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuría as he prepared his lectures on the Exercises at the University of Central America in El Salvador in 1974. Translated into English here for the first time (and introduced) by Matt Ashley, these lecture notes reflect the pathos and profound challenge of that particular historical moment in El Salvador. But they also reveal a challenge that is still very much with us, namely how a particular tradition of spiritual practice can be (re)read as liberating. A related question occupies the center of William Reiser's essay, namely whether the Spiritual Exercises, which are after all rooted in a very particular understanding of God, can be translated into a wider cultural and religious context in which...

Two aspects along the continuum of pigeon evolution: A South-Pacific radiation and the relationship of pigeons within Neoaves

Phylogenetics explores the continuum of shallower to deeper genetic divergences between taxa. Along this continuum increasing lengths of DNA sequence can be used to answer deeper and deeper questions about biological relationships. We use shorter, and then longer mitochondrial DNA sequences to address two aspects of pigeon evolution. Firstly, we examine the phylogenetic relationships of the eight genera within the South Pacific Ducula–Ptilinopus radiation, and examine how this radiation fits into pigeons generally. Within Ducula, taxa are closely related, whereas Ptilinopus is very diverse, and paraphyletic. One third of all pigeon species are within the Ducula–Ptilinopus radiation, however all are very similar ecologically. Secondly, we study the deeper phylogenetic question regarding the relationship of pigeons to other birds. To this end, we report the complete mitochondrial genome of Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae, a member of the Ducula–Ptilinopus radiation. We use this mitochondrial genome, along with additional sandgrouse ( Pterocles namaqua) mitochondrial genes to assess various candidates for the closest relative of pigeons. Of parrots, shorebirds, and sandgrouse, we find highest support for the sandgrouse–pigeon grouping. Furthermore in these analyses the pigeon and sandgrouse group closer to the falcons than any other included taxon. The finding that pigeons and sandgrouse may be more closely related to falcons than to previous candidates such as shorebirds or parrots invites further investigation.

CAPITAL CONTROVERSY FROM BÖHM-BAWERK TO BLISS: BADLY POSED OR VERY DEEP QUESTIONS? OR WHAT “WE” CAN LEARN FROM CAPITAL CONTROVERSY EVEN IF YOU DON'T CARE WHO WON

The author's path from heterodoxy to economic history to the history of economics is used as a case study to explore tensions between “doing economics” and “doing the history of economics,” between the ideological vision (Schumpeter) motivating a research agenda and the even-handed execution of research. These same tensions appear in the history of capital controversy, which contains deep questions of history and path dependence versus equilibrium models, limitations of aggregate production functions, and the roles of vision and ideology in the reluctance to abandon insights of one-commodity models when results are not robust.

Transforming leadership: reflective practice and the enhancement of happiness

Happiness, reflective practice and ethical leadership are interrelated. This paper begins with a discussion about change, since the impact of accelerated change requires leadership responses that are constantly evolving. The second section explores the incorporation of reflective practice in leadership efforts, and the need for constant adaptability and creativity in leadership decisions. Reflective practice serves to identify implicit questions. Exposure of implicit questions, which are often personally biased and limiting, provides opportunities for expanding perspective and generating options. Questions, whether implicit or explicit, guide the direction of change. The importance and relevance for developing awareness of implicit questions is to encourage the ability to generate new, often more conscious, explicit questions. The third section examines how the innate desire for happiness leads to and flows from our deepest questions and concerns. The final section reveals how one function of reflective practice is the cultivation of happiness. Ultimately happiness is a dynamic state which enhances personal and organizational change processes. Transformational and ethical characteristics are intrinsic to this dynamic state.

International Trends in Library History

International Trends in Library History Donald G. Davis Jr. (bio) In 1998 Mary Niles Maack, faculty member at UCLA and longtime colleague in the Library History Round Table (LHRT) of the American Library Association, presented a paper entitled "International Dimensions of Library History: Leadership and Scholarship, 1978–1998." Her brief survey reviewed the progress and significance of three types of conference initiatives: awards and programs within the American Library Association, the Library History Seminars held every five years, and the number of international conferences—all of which had grown in their inclusion of international topics and speakers. Maack closed by suggesting two ongoing complementary trends—the expansion of interest in international topics by American scholars and the broadening scope for library historians, one that embraces the history of books, publishing, reading, and scholarship. In addition to covering the activities of the LHRT, Maack also noted the founding of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) in 1991 as evidence for these trends. She closed her survey by reminding her readers of the impact of electronic communication technology on libraries as they have been known historically. This, she says, has significant implications for the library, which, as a social agency, has for almost all its history been associated with a place, a building, and a collection of physical materials. As we enter the twenty-first century, we are already experiencing the issue of dealing with digital records that can be simultaneously accessed from many locations, and we are being forced to ask some deep questions about what libraries have been in the past, what they have done for us, and what profound effects they have had on scholarship and on society.1 More than a decade later, what are the identifiable trends in the international world of library history? The three types of program [End Page 123] events that Maack pointed out have continued with ripples, if not tidal waves, across our subdiscipline, although they seem to have declined in attendance. The two complementary developments—more interest in international topics and the coupling of library history with book history and reading history—also continue, though they have taken a slightly different direction than she might have envisioned. Moreover, there are new trends that warrant notice that are a consequence of earlier developments. Without striving to be comprehensive, this article seeks to outline with a broad brush the evolution and current status of international library history as we move into the new century's second decade. It is not intended to be a bibliographical review. In preparation for this review I queried several international colleagues.2 Together we identified four trends that have resulted from the efforts put forward in the twentieth century. With regard to library history, they are 1) a broader base of scholarship that incorporates new approaches, 2) a wider scope of related research and publishing that reaches special groups of readers, 3) a greater appreciation of the role of libraries that considers varying audiences, and 4) more pragmatic considerations that make for new challenges. A Broader Base of Scholarship That Incorporates New Approaches Library history writing in the United States has exhibited an international emphasis to a greater degree than in the past, possibly because international graduate students have been attracted to researching the history of libraries in their homelands.3 Another part of this picture is the number of substantial national histories of libraries that have appeared, are in progress, or are projected.4 These endeavors, supported by a number of scholars within and outside the profession, have codified the library history of a nation or region in an encyclopedic form. Finally, there is evidence that more and more trained library historians are utilizing primary source materials more extensively in their research, resulting in more analytical approaches and treatments, in contrast to progressive and celebratory treatments.5 A Wider Scope of Research and Publishing That Reaches Special Groups of Readers The production of library history has always appealed to a certain literary elite and to antiquarians in the library profession. The result has been a relatively narrow scope of types of history: biographical [End Page 124] and institutional as well as histories that...

Phonologist, Africanist, Typologist: George N. (Nick) Clements: (October 5, 1940 -- August 30, 2009)

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2010) Phonologist, Africanist, Typologist: George N. (Nick) Clements: (October 5, 1940 – August 30, 2009) Larry M. Hyman (University of California, Berkeley) To appear in Linguistic Typology; submitted February 27, 2010; revised March 2, 2010 On last August 30, linguistic typology lost a great colleague and a good friend, Nick Clements. Although known primarily as a theoretical phonologist and Africanist, Nick’s linguistic concerns were the same as many typologists, as he strove both to establish language universals and to characterize exactly how languages could differ from one another. On the way he put several major grammatical and phonological phenomena on the map and elevated others up to new heights. The five books and nearly 100 articles published during his career established Nick Clements as a unique scholar whose innovative approach to formal description and comparison resulted in deep and insightful studies which will continue to impact generations of scholars. Nick Clements received his PhD in linguistics in 1973 from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His dissertation, “The verbal syntax of Ewe”, was just the first of several grammatical studies, in which he offered insightful formal interpretations of typologically significant phenomena, e.g. gerundive nominalization and verb serialization (cf. Clements 1975a), each time enlarging the scope of coverage to address new and deeper questions. Two further influential studies drawing from Ewe were his thorough-going investigation into logophoricity (Clements 1975b), and his ground-breaking study of the syntax- phonology interface (Clements 1978). Turning his attention to East African Bantu, Clements’ (1984a) rigorous work on binding domains and the focus marker ni in Kikuyu extended our understanding of the scope of focus marking in African languages and in general. While Nick’s last syntactic publication dates from over 25 years ago, his extensive phonological contributions start in the mid 1970s and continue to the end of his life. Work on West African vowel harmony systems (Clements 1974, 1977, 1981), as well on Turkish (Clements & Sezer 1982), not only helped establish the framework of autosegmental phonology, but also increased our awareness of the complexities. He would continue this interest in later developing a multilinear framework to do capture the properties and relationship between the ATR vowel harmony systems known primarily from West Africa and the vowel-height harmony systems further East in Bantu (Clements 1991, 1993). Also from this period is Nick’s extensive work on tone. Besides the aforementioned seminal work on the syntax-phonology interface (Clements 1978), which dealt with tone in Ewe, Clements & Ford (1979) and Clements (1984b) provide deep insights into the analysis of tone, with Kikuyu representing the extraordinary morphotonemic complexities found in Bantu languages. Nick rightly took a lot of pride in the important Clements & Goldsmith (1984) volume whose co-authored introduction laid out the basic issues in Bantu tonology. As Clements & Ford were developing their autosegmental analysis of (high tone) downstep as a non-linked low tone wedged between two linked high tones, Clements (1979) presented his first theory of tonal downstep, which he would follow up with a multitiered analysis of multiple tone heights and downstep (Clements 1983).

An Interview with Andreas Eshete

An Interview with Andreas Eshete* Dagmawi Woubshet (bio) WOUBSHET: Andreas, thank you for this opportunity to dialogue with you; it's a pleasure and a privilege. Perhaps we could start discussing your writing as a philosopher; then, transition to talk about your work as a public intellectual, the ways in which you have connected philosophy to political practice; and end with your thoughts on Ethiopian culture. You have written that the general perception of philosophy as "an incubation inquiry" is misguided. What do you mean by that and also what kind of metaphor do you think aptly characterizes philosophical inquiry? ESHETE: I think the incubation idea comes from the history of philosophy. Philosophy used to be kind of an all-encompassing discipline and so for example most of the famous treatises in natural science were called treatises in natural philosophy. So many of the great English scientists—Newton, Bacon, and so on—were natural philosophers. So, usually the idea was that a subject would reach a certain level of maturity in philosophy and then it would become an independent science. Of course, there is still this phenomena going on, perhaps most significantly and most recently, in Cognitive Sciences. For a long time nobody studied the mind except people in psychology, who were very much behavioristi-cally inclined—famously, of course, Skinner and many others. But when people realized that we don't know very much about the mind, and we still don't, particularly the most interesting aspects of our mental life—for example, consciousness, or what it is like to experience yellow or experience pain, about which we still have no clear idea—that search took the form of an incubation inquiry or science. To come back to your question, with all the progress made in natural science, if we were to take a measure of our scientific knowledge, we still have to ask philosophical questions. The same is true with the mind. If we want to know, for example, developments in the cognitive sciences, we have to attend to philosophical questions. Even people who are practitioners—clinical practitioners who deal with mental life and illness—end up, at least the best ones, asking philosophical questions. So, my thought is philosophy's work is never done. And the fact that it has all these progeny in the sciences, not just in the natural sciences but also the social science, doesn't mean that philosophy is supplanted by other more rigorous sciences. [End Page 102] WOUBSHET: It's interesting that you position philosophy within the sciences. But, at the same time, you have written that "what makes philosophy as a field of inquiry very special is that no area of intellectual activity is alien to philosophy," which reminds me of Terence's observation—"I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me." This characterization of philosophy speaks to the endeavor of literature. Can you say more about the ways in which philosophy, on the one hand, is situated in the sciences and, on the other, is within the domain of the humanities. It seems philosophy is unique in straddling these two realms. ESHETE: Its kinship to literature is probably the most important in my mind—why? Because first like literature philosophy addresses in one way highly deep and difficult questions, and in another way questions that everyone asks, like what is it to be moral, what is it to do the right thing, and so on. These are not just technical question, but questions that everybody asks. What is beautiful is a concern of everyone. So in a way literature and philosophy share that concern. And it's very important that inquiry be rooted in questions that exercise common sense. So, that is one area of kinship. Secondly, I believe literature is endlessly many things but, at least for me, one of the morally important things literature does is explore more imaginative possibilities, and I mean that in a very broad sense. Writers that I admire, for example my favorite short story writer is V. S. Pritchett and what I admire most about his writing, skills apart, is that he focuses on perfectly ordinary people...