Stephen Mumford
Biographic Data
| ID | 3597476 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Mumford |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen |
| FAMILY NAME | Mumford |
| SIGNATURE | MUMFORD S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9614-4399 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Impact of Early Academic Experiences on EAP Teachers’ Perceptions and Practice of Teaching Writing in Higher Education
This research focuses on two key issues in areas in tertiary education, academic literacies theory, a key theory influencing directions in writing in higher education, and EMI contexts, which provide education in English in countries where English is not the first language, a fast growing, but understudied area of higher education globally. This study focuses on writing teachers’ perceptions of academic literacy(s) and the influence of early form…
Early‐Career EFL Researchers' Academic Identity Evolving through Online Translanguaging Training
This study explores the evolution of early‐career EFL researchers' academic identity through online translanguaging training. Drawing on van Veen and Sleegers' (2009) conceptual framework and integrating complexity theory, translanguaging theory, and the ecological perspective, this qualitative research examines the experiences of 20 Turkish early‐career EFL researchers from diverse institutional and geographic contexts. Data were collected throu…
A Duoethnographic Dialogue of a Literacy-Track and an Oracy-Track Researcher About Language Learning and Teaching
This study explores the perspectives of the two authors, who have very different language backgrounds, reflecting the subtleties of first and additional language development. We distinguish between a ‘literacy-track’ (i.e. starting from written language) and an oracy track (starting from spoken language). We draw on duoethnography for our dialogic inquiry. Despite very different study and career trajectories, we reach convergence in both the theo…
A Philosopher Looks at Sport
Why is sport so important among participants and spectators when its goals seem so pointless? Stephen Mumford's book introduces the reader to a host of philosophical topics found in sport, and argues that sports activities reflect diverse human experiences - including important values that we continue to contest. The author explores physicality, competition, how sport is best defined, ethics in sport, and issues of inclusion such as disability sp…
Absence and Nothing: The Philosophy of What There is Not
Nothing is not. Yet it seems that we invoke absences and nothings often in our philosophical explanations. Negative metaphysics is on the rise. It has been claimed that absences can be causes, there are negative properties, absences can be perceived, there are negative facts, and we can refer to and speak about nothing. Parmenides long ago ruled against such things. Here we consider how much of Parmenides' view can survive. A soft Parmenidean met…
Pre-service language teachers reflection development through online interaction in a hybrid learning course
Preschool English teachers gaining bilingual competencies in a monolingual context
This study examines three preschool teachers’ developmental journeys from Foreign Language to Bilingual English teachers who participated in an in-service training over the course of nine months set in preschool education in Turkey. The data were teachers’ logs, two written interviews and observation notes. The research questions addressed the evidence for a developmental growth into bilingual teacher roles and examined how such development might…
Laws and Their Exceptions
Laws and exceptions seem to be in conflict. A law is supposed to be universal, applying at all times and places, whereas an exception must be a contravention of such universality. The solution proposed here is that while laws are in a sense universal in scope, their content concerns what is disposed to happen only—what tends to be—rather than what is necessitated. What we take to be exceptions will typically be cases where those dispositions are,…
Glimpse of Light: New Meditations on First Philosophy
I firmly believed there was a world outside of our own minds ...But all around me were challenges...How could we be so sure there were such things existing apart from us? Philosopher Benedict Chilwell faces a crisis of confidence and hopes to resolve it in a self-imposed exile, far away in the north of Norway. From his cabin, he begins his meditations, pondering the mysteries of philosophy in the dark Arctic winter. Pride, a whale, love and lust,…
Powers, Non‐Consent and Freedom
There are a number of dispositionalist solutions to the free will problem based on freedom consisting in the agent's exercise of a power. But if a subject a is free when they exercise their power P, there is an objection to be overcome from the possibility of power implantation. A brainwasher, rather than directly manipulating a subject's movements, can instead implant in them a desire, to be understood as a disposition to act, and allow the subj…
Dispositions and Ethics
Dispositions have become a central issue in philosophy but the focus of attention has been on all the metaphysical issues they raise. Ethics rests on a number of notions that are either dispositional in character or involve real dispositions—some say powers—at work. Intentionality doesn't explain dispositions but dispositions explain intentionality. The modality of intentionality derives from the dispositions upon which it rests. The cerebral pal…
MAX KISTLER Causation and Laws of Nature: Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
Metaphysics A Very Short Introduction
"Metaphysics is one of the traditional four main branches of philosophy, alongside ethics, logic and epistemology. It is also an area that continues to attract and hold a fascination for many people yet it is associated with being complex and abstract. For some it is associated with the mystical or religious. For others it is known through the metaphysical poets who talk of love and spirituality. This Very Short Introduction goes right to the hea…
Getting Causes from Powers
"Causation is everywhere in the world: it features in every science and technology. But how much do we truly understand it? Do we know what it means to say that one thing is a cause of another and do we understand what in the world drives causation? Getting Causes from Powers develops a new and original theory of causation based on an ontology of real powers or dispositions. Others have already suggested that this ought to be possible, but no one…
No Power in Unger’s World
Double Prevention and Powers
Does A cause B simply if A prevents what would have prevented B? Such a case is known as double prevention: where we have the prevention of a prevention. One theory of causation is that A causes B when B counterfactually depends on A and, as there is such a dependence, proponents of the view must rule that double prevention is causation. However, if double prevention is causation, it means that causation can be an extrinsic matter, that the cause…
Passing Powers Around
Journal Article Passing Powers Around Get access Stephen Mumford Stephen Mumford University of Nottingham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 January 2009, Pages 94–111, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist20099215 Published: 24 November 2014
David Armstrong
David (D. M.) Armstrong is one of Australia s greatest philosophers. His chief philosophical achievement has been the development of a core metaphysical programme, embracing the topics of universals, laws, modality and facts: a naturalistic metaphysics, consistent with a scientific view of the natural world. In this book Stephen Mumford offers an introduction to the full range of Armstrong s thought. Beginning with a discussion of Armstong s natu…
The Ungrounded Argument
Function, structure, capacity
Powers: A Study in Metaphysics
This book sees that the solution to a number of the problems of contemporary philosophy lies in the development of an alternative to Hume's metaphysics. This alternative would have real causal powers at its centre. This book sets about developing a thorough account of powers that might persuade those who remain, perhaps unknowingly, in the grip of Hume's assumptions. This book shows both that the notion of a power is central and that it could ser…
Laws and Lawlessness
Laws in Nature
Mumford outlines a major new theory of natural laws. His book begins with the question of whether there are any genuinely law-like phenomena in nature. The discussion addresses questions currently being debated by metaphysicians such as whether the laws of nature are necessary or contingent and whether a property can be identified independently of its causal role.
Laws in nature
1. Introduction: Laws in Science and Philosophy Part One: Humean Lawlessness 2. The Lawless World 3. Regularities and Best Systems 4. Hume's Argument Part Two: Nomological Realism 5. The Nomological Argument 6. Natural Necessitation Relations 7. Necessitarian Essentialism Part Three: Realist Lawlessness 8. Are Natural Laws a Natural Kind 9. The Central Dilemma 10. Modal Properties 11. Objections and Replies 12. Conclusion: Law and Metaphor
Essences, kinds, and laws of nature
The Ungrounded Argument
Passing Powers Around
Journal Article Passing Powers Around Get access Stephen Mumford Stephen Mumford University of Nottingham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 January 2009, Pages 94–111, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist20099215 Published: 24 November 2014
Conditionals, Functional Essences and Martin on Dispositions
Journal Article Conditionals, Functional Essences and Martin on Dispositions Get access Stephen Mumford Stephen Mumford University of Nottingham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 182, January 1996, Pages 86-92, https://doi.org/10.2307/2956310 Published: 01 January 1996
Powers: A Study in Metaphysics
This book sees that the solution to a number of the problems of contemporary philosophy lies in the development of an alternative to Hume's metaphysics. This alternative would have real causal powers at its centre. This book sets about developing a thorough account of powers that might persuade those who remain, perhaps unknowingly, in the grip of Hume's assumptions. This book shows both that the notion of a power is central and that it could ser…
Dispositions, Supervenience and Reduction
Journal Article Dispositions, Supervenience and Reduction Get access Stephen Mumford Stephen Mumford University of Leeds Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 44, Issue 177, October 1994, Pages 419-438, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220243 Published: 01 October 1994
Laws and Lawlessness
Intentionality and the Physical: A New Theory of Disposition Ascription
This paper has three aims. First, I aim to stress the importance of the issue of the dispositional/categorical distinction in the light of the evident failure of the traditional formulation, which is in terms of conditional entailment. Second, I consider one radical new alternative on offer from Ullin Place: intentionality as the mark of the dispositional. I explain the appeal of physical intentionality, but show it ultimately to be unacceptable.…
Preschool English teachers gaining bilingual competencies in a monolingual context
This study examines three preschool teachers’ developmental journeys from Foreign Language to Bilingual English teachers who participated in an in-service training over the course of nine months set in preschool education in Turkey. The data were teachers’ logs, two written interviews and observation notes. The research questions addressed the evidence for a developmental growth into bilingual teacher roles and examined how such development might…
The Vasectomy Decision-Making Process
Vasectomy is greatly underutilized in most countries, in part because it is the least promoted of all modern contraceptive techniques. If providers have favorable attitudes toward vasectomy, a good understanding of the decision making process that leads to vasectomy enhances their ability to encourage the use of this method. Furthermore, thorough counseling of vasectomy seekers will significantly increase acceptance. The purpose of this article i…
Absence and Nothing: The Philosophy of What There is Not
Nothing is not. Yet it seems that we invoke absences and nothings often in our philosophical explanations. Negative metaphysics is on the rise. It has been claimed that absences can be causes, there are negative properties, absences can be perceived, there are negative facts, and we can refer to and speak about nothing. Parmenides long ago ruled against such things. Here we consider how much of Parmenides' view can survive. A soft Parmenidean met…
Powers, Non‐Consent and Freedom
There are a number of dispositionalist solutions to the free will problem based on freedom consisting in the agent's exercise of a power. But if a subject a is free when they exercise their power P, there is an objection to be overcome from the possibility of power implantation. A brainwasher, rather than directly manipulating a subject's movements, can instead implant in them a desire, to be understood as a disposition to act, and allow the subj…
No Power in Unger’s World
David Armstrong
David (D. M.) Armstrong is one of Australia s greatest philosophers. His chief philosophical achievement has been the development of a core metaphysical programme, embracing the topics of universals, laws, modality and facts: a naturalistic metaphysics, consistent with a scientific view of the natural world. In this book Stephen Mumford offers an introduction to the full range of Armstrong s thought. Beginning with a discussion of Armstong s natu…
Realism and the Conditional Analysis of Dispositions: Reply to Malzkorn
Wolfgang Malzkorn proposes, in his 'Realism, Functionalism and the Conditional Analysis of Dispositions', The Philosophical Quarterly, 50 (2000), pp. 452–69, a new conditional analysis of dispositions in which disposition ascriptions are made against a background of 'normal conditions' that exclude the possibility of electro‐finks and other such interfering conditions. I argue in reply that whenever a list of conditions is specified there will (a…
The Dispersed Famine of Today
The Dispersed Famine of Today Stephen D. Mumford CopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.71.6.648 Published Online: October 07, 2011
The Vasectomy Decision-Making Process
Vasectomy is greatly underutilized in most countries, in part because it is the least promoted of all modern contraceptive techniques. If providers have favorable attitudes toward vasectomy, a good understanding of the decision making process that leads to vasectomy enhances their ability to encourage the use of this method. Furthermore, thorough counseling of vasectomy seekers will significantly increase acceptance. The purpose of this article i…
Male attitudes towards family planning in Khartoum, Sudan
In a 1982 survey of 250 men living in Khartoum, knowledge of, attitudes towards and use of contraception among Sudanese men were explored. Particular attention was given to attitudes towards male and female sterilization. Although most of the men expressed a desire to have large families, several findings suggest that they felt that they may have to be satisfied with a lower number for economic reasons. Three-fifths of the men with wives of repro…
Menstrual pattern changes following laparoscopic sterilization with different occlusion techniques: A review of 10,004 cases
A comparison is made of menstrual pattern changes reported by 10,004 women undergoing interval and postabortion sterilization by the laparoscopic occlusive techniques of unipolar electrocoagulation, the tubal ring, the prototype spring-loaded clip, and the Rocket clip. Controlling for prior contraceptive use, the menstrual patterns in these women sterilized by the four techniques were compared with respect to six parameters: cycle regularity, cyc…
Menstrual Pattern Changes following Minilap/Pomeroy, Minilap/ring and Laparoscopy/ring Sterilization: A review of 5982 cases
Menstrual pattern changes experienced by 5982 women subsequent to sterilization by the techniques of minilap/Pomeroy, minilap/tubal ring and laparoscopy/tubal ring were tabulated. Controlling for prior contraceptive use, we examined data on the following six menstrual parameters at the time of sterilization compared to reports at follow-up visits 6 and 12 months after surgery: cycle regularity, cycle length, menstrual flow duration, amount of flo…
Male Attitudes towards Family Planning in Khartoum, Sudan
Knowledge of attitudes toward and use of contraception were investigated in a 1982 survey of 250 men living in Khartoum Sudan. Interviews were conducted at mosques marketplaces a government office building and a textile factory. 75% of respondents were ages 21-40. 92% of respondents expressed the belief that Khartoum is overcrowded although this was attributed by 57% to rural-urban migration. Despite the fact that 85-95% linked overpopulation wit…
Was the Dalkon Shield a safe and effective intrauterine devie? The conflict between case-control and clinical trial study findings
Dispositions, Supervenience and Reduction
Journal Article Dispositions, Supervenience and Reduction Get access Stephen Mumford Stephen Mumford University of Leeds Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 44, Issue 177, October 1994, Pages 419-438, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220243 Published: 01 October 1994
Conditionals, Functional Essences and Martin on Dispositions
Journal Article Conditionals, Functional Essences and Martin on Dispositions Get access Stephen Mumford Stephen Mumford University of Nottingham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 182, January 1996, Pages 86-92, https://doi.org/10.2307/2956310 Published: 01 January 1996
Intentionality and the Physical: A New Theory of Disposition Ascription
This paper has three aims. First, I aim to stress the importance of the issue of the dispositional/categorical distinction in the light of the evident failure of the traditional formulation, which is in terms of conditional entailment. Second, I consider one radical new alternative on offer from Ullin Place: intentionality as the mark of the dispositional. I explain the appeal of physical intentionality, but show it ultimately to be unacceptable.…
Miracles: Metaphysics and modality
It is argued that miracles are best understood as natural events with supernatural causes and that such causal interaction is logically possible. Such miracles may, or may not, involve violations of natural laws. If violations of laws are possible, Humean supervenience views of laws are best avoided. Where miracles violate laws, it shows that what is naturally impossible may be actual and what is naturally necessary may not be actual. Whether or …
Dispositions
Dispositions
Realism and the Conditional Analysis of Dispositions: Reply to Malzkorn
Wolfgang Malzkorn proposes, in his 'Realism, Functionalism and the Conditional Analysis of Dispositions', The Philosophical Quarterly, 50 (2000), pp. 452–69, a new conditional analysis of dispositions in which disposition ascriptions are made against a background of 'normal conditions' that exclude the possibility of electro‐finks and other such interfering conditions. I argue in reply that whenever a list of conditions is specified there will (a…
Essences, kinds, and laws of nature
Laws in Nature
Mumford outlines a major new theory of natural laws. His book begins with the question of whether there are any genuinely law-like phenomena in nature. The discussion addresses questions currently being debated by metaphysicians such as whether the laws of nature are necessary or contingent and whether a property can be identified independently of its causal role.
Laws in nature
1. Introduction: Laws in Science and Philosophy Part One: Humean Lawlessness 2. The Lawless World 3. Regularities and Best Systems 4. Hume's Argument Part Two: Nomological Realism 5. The Nomological Argument 6. Natural Necessitation Relations 7. Necessitarian Essentialism Part Three: Realist Lawlessness 8. Are Natural Laws a Natural Kind 9. The Central Dilemma 10. Modal Properties 11. Objections and Replies 12. Conclusion: Law and Metaphor
Laws and Lawlessness
The Ungrounded Argument
Function, structure, capacity
Powers: A Study in Metaphysics
This book sees that the solution to a number of the problems of contemporary philosophy lies in the development of an alternative to Hume's metaphysics. This alternative would have real causal powers at its centre. This book sets about developing a thorough account of powers that might persuade those who remain, perhaps unknowingly, in the grip of Hume's assumptions. This book shows both that the notion of a power is central and that it could ser…
David Armstrong
David (D. M.) Armstrong is one of Australia s greatest philosophers. His chief philosophical achievement has been the development of a core metaphysical programme, embracing the topics of universals, laws, modality and facts: a naturalistic metaphysics, consistent with a scientific view of the natural world. In this book Stephen Mumford offers an introduction to the full range of Armstrong s thought. Beginning with a discussion of Armstong s natu…
Double Prevention and Powers
Does A cause B simply if A prevents what would have prevented B? Such a case is known as double prevention: where we have the prevention of a prevention. One theory of causation is that A causes B when B counterfactually depends on A and, as there is such a dependence, proponents of the view must rule that double prevention is causation. However, if double prevention is causation, it means that causation can be an extrinsic matter, that the cause…
Passing Powers Around
Journal Article Passing Powers Around Get access Stephen Mumford Stephen Mumford University of Nottingham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 January 2009, Pages 94–111, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist20099215 Published: 24 November 2014
No Power in Unger’s World
Philosophy (22 works) · Epistemology (21 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (9 works) · Medicine (8 works)