Theories concerning love in the West tend to be bound by the problematic constraints of patriarchal conceptions of what counts ontologically as “true” or “universal” love. It seems that feminist love studies must choose between shining light on these constraints or bursting through them. In this article I give a feminist analysis of Augustine of Hippo's theory of love through a philosophical, psychological, and theological reading of his complicated relationships with women. I argue that, given the “embodied” nature of his (...) many loves throughout his life, there is room in Augustine's account of love for a gendered reading of love that is unconstrained by patriarchal notions concerning which gender is capable of which kind of love. Augustine's theory of love is one that is not coldly universal but bodied and personal; indeed, although it is founded inside patriarchal historical constructions, it is capable of bursting out of these constraints and suggesting an egalitarian, nongendered view of love. (shrink)

Theories concerning love in the West tend to be bound by the problematic constraints of patriarchal conceptions of what counts ontologically as “true” or “universal” love. It seems that feminist love studies must choose between shining light on these constraints or bursting through them. In this article I give a feminist analysis of Augustine of Hippo's theory of love through a philosophical, psychological, and theological reading of his complicated relationships with women. I argue that, given the “embodied” nature of his (...) many loves throughout his life, there is room in Augustine's account of love for a gendered reading of love that is unconstrained by patriarchal notions concerning which gender is capable of which kind of love. Augustine's theory of love is one that is not coldly universal but bodied and personal; indeed, although it is founded inside patriarchal historical constructions, it is capable of bursting out of these constraints and suggesting an egalitarian, nongendered view of love. (shrink)

A book review of 'Feeling Extended: Sociality as Extended Body-Becoming-Mind' by Douglas Robinson.

In his biography on Augustine, Possidius writes: “His table was frugal and sparing, though indeed with the herbs and lentils he also had meats at times for the sake of his guests or for some of the weaker brethren”.1 Given the importance of friendship in Augustine’s life, it is not surprising that he ate meat for the sake of others and not for his own pleasures. However, Augustine spends much time in Book X of his Confessions obsessing over his delight (...) in everyday activities, including eating2. Indeed, Augustine examines the relationship between desire and the object of desire throughout the Confessions, his ultimate focus being on the nature of our concupiscent hearts. In this paper, I will explore Augustine’s seemingly unhealthy relationship with food by discussing the place of food in his eschatology, his account of concupiscence and will, and his theory of interiority as given in the Confessions. Ultimately, for Augustine, there is a beauty to eating that is found in its relationship to the sensual experience of God. (shrink)

A book review of 'Feeling Extended: Sociality as Extended Body-Becoming-Mind' by Douglas Robinson. Publisher: MIT Press, 2013.

One of the most pressing and urgent academic tasks of the day is to dismantle the persistent Eurocentrism of philosophy. In the quest to remedy the white, middle-class, heteronormative, and European biases of philosophy's initial expressions, feminist theorizing has cultivated culturally and ethnically specific forms, intersectional analyses, and global articulations. Buddhism beyond Gender and Women and Buddhist Philosophy breathe new vitality into these pursuits. Both books underscore the immense potential of the core doctrines of Buddhist philosophy, such as the nonsubstantialist (...) view of self, the nondualistic outlook, and the ontological premise of the interdependence of all beings, for overcoming Western hierarchies, reified conceptions of identity, and pernicious dichotomies. The two women represented in these books—Rita Gross herself and Kim Iryŏp, a Buddhist nun —ground philosophy in a narrative, existential journey and in their personal practices as Buddhists. In contrast with Gross's second-wave methodology and revisionist aims, Park's contribution to comparative feminist scholarship underscores the originality of Iryŏp's attempt to rethink Buddhist ideas in a contemporary feminist context. Particularly compelling is that Park unequivocally defends existential narrative as a genre of philosophy largely through an analysis of the Buddhist nun's love letters. (shrink)

On his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was heralded by the New York Times as “one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers.” Controversial on the left and the right for his critiques of objectivity and political radicalism, Rorty experienced a renown denied to all but a handful of living philosophers. In this masterly biography, Neil Gross explores the path of Rorty’s thought over the decades in order to trace the intellectual and professional journey that led him to that prominence. (...) The child of a pair of leftist writers who worried that their precocious son “wasn’t rebellious enough,” Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen. There he came under the tutelage of polymath Richard McKeon, whose catholic approach to philosophical systems would profoundly influence Rorty’s own thought. Doctoral work at Yale led to Rorty’s landing a job at Princeton, where his colleagues were primarily analytic philosophers. With a series of publications in the 1960s, Rorty quickly established himself as a strong thinker in that tradition—but by the late 1970s Rorty had eschewed the idea of objective truth altogether, urging philosophers to take a “relaxed attitude” toward the question of logical rigor. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, he argued that philosophers should instead open themselves up to multiple methods of thought and sources of knowledge—an approach that would culminate in the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , one of the most seminal and controversial philosophical works of our time. In clear and compelling fashion, Gross sets that surprising shift in Rorty’s thought in the context of his life and social experiences, revealing the many disparate influences that contribute to the making of knowledge. As much a book about the growth of ideas as it is a biography of a philosopher, Richard Rorty will provide readers with a fresh understanding of both the man and the course of twentieth-century thought. (shrink)

Introduction to the Institutional Logics Perspective -- Precursors to the Institutional Logics Perspective -- Defining the Inter-institutional System -- The Emergence, Stability and Change of the Inter-institutional System -- Micro-Foundations of Institutional Logics -- The Dynamics of Organizational Practices and Identities -- The Emergence and Evolution of Field-Level Logics -- Implications for Future Research.

Banded geckos (Coleonyx variegatus) were trained, at the rate of five daily trials, on eight intradimensional spatial shifts to a criterion of 80% correct per reversal. In contrast to several previously reported failures to obtain reversal learning, Coleonyx demonstrated significant improvement on both errors and trials to criterion. Their reversal performance compares favorably with that of birds and mammals and a common index of reversal ability, the mean total error, did not differentiate between taxa.

Overview -- Locke's internal sense and Kant's changing views -- Personal identity amd its problems -- Rationalist metaphysics of mind -- Consciousness, self-consciousness, and cognition -- Strands of Argument in the Duisburg Nachlass -- A transcendental deduction for a priori concepts -- Synthesis : why and how? -- Arguing for apperception -- The power of apperception -- "I-think" as the destroyer of rational psychology -- Is Kant's theory consistent? -- The normativity objection -- Is Kant's thinker (as such) a free (...) and responsible agent? -- Kant our contemporary. (shrink)

Drawing upon research in philosophical logic, linguistics and cognitive science, this study explores how our ability to use and understand language depends upon our capacity to keep track of complex features of the contexts in which we converse.

"Evidence of a flight from reason is as old as human record-keeping: the fact of it certainly goes back an even longer way. Flight from science specifically, among the forms of rational inquiry, goes back as far as science itself... But rejection of reason is now a pattern to be found in most branches of scholarship and in all the learned professions."--from the introduction In the widely acclaimed Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, Paul R. Gross (...) and Norman Levitt offered a spirited response to the "science bashers," raising serious questions about the growing criticism of scientific practice from humanists and social scientists on the academic left. Now, in The Flight from Science and Reason, Gross and Levitt are joined by Martin W. Lewis to bring together a diverse and distinguished group of scholars, scientists, and experts to engage these questions from a wide variety of perspectives. The authors take on critics of science whose views range from moderate to extreme, from social constructivists to deconstructionists, from creationists and feminists to Afro-centrists. They discuss the rise of "alternative medicine" and radical environmentalism (here skewered as "ecosentimentalism"). They explain why the "uncertainty principle" does not work as a metaphor for ambiguity, and why "chaos theory" cannot be invoked without an understanding of mathematics. Throughout, they grapple with the paradox inherent in arguing with opponents who contend that reason itself, and thus logic, is suspect. Distributed for the New York Academy of Sciences. (shrink)

Dem Autor geht es in erster Linie darum, einen in Deutschland weitgehend vergessenen Philosophen in den Mittelpunkt des Wissenschaftsdiskurses zu stellen. Der Thuringer Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, Schuler von Fichte und Schelling in Jena, entwickelte eine eigenstandige Philosophie, die sich einerseits der epochalen abendlandischen Geistestradition verpflichtet weiss, zugleich aber auch von der Kantischen Philosophie und ihrem kritischen Geist beeinflusst wurde. Krause ist einerseits Systemphilosoph, der immer wieder die Thematik des Absoluten oder Gottes in den Vordergrund stellt - in dieser Hinsicht (...) ist er spekulativer Idealist. Andererseits muss alle Philosophie beim Ich beginnen, sofern zeigt er sich als Denker des Transzendentalen. Krauses Philosophie ist zweistrahlig aufgebaut: Zum einen will er die endliche Welt aus Gott ableiten, andererseits soll das Ich zur Erkenntnis Gottes aufsteigen. Ausgehend von der Metaphysik wird dieser Aufstieg des Ich zum Absoluten in den verschiedenen Regionalphilosophien, in der Religion, Ethik und Asthetik thematisiert.". (shrink)

Among children and adolescents, emotion understanding relates to academic achievement and higher well-being. This study investigates the role of general and emotion-specific language skills in children’s and adolescents’ emotion understanding, building on previous research highlighting the significance of domain-specific language skills in conceptual development. We employ a novel inventory (CEVVT) to assess emotion-specific vocabulary. The study involved 10–11-year-old children (N = 29) and 16–17-year-old adolescents (N = 28), examining their emotion recognition and knowledge of emotion regulation strategies. Results highlight the (...) ongoing development of emotion-specific vocabulary across these age groups. Emotion recognition correlated with general vocabulary in the younger group. In the older age group, emotion recognition was related to emotion-specific vocabulary size, but this effect only became apparent when controlling for the depth of emotion-specific vocabulary. Against expectation, there were no significant contributions of general or emotion-specific vocabulary to knowledge of emotion regulation strategies in either age group. These findings enhance our comprehension of the nuanced interplay between language and emotion across developmental stages. (shrink)

The ways in which knowledge relates to power have been much discussed in radical education theory. New emphasis on the role of gender and the growing debate about subjectivity have deepened the discussion, while making it more complex. In Getting Smart , Patti Lather makes use of her unique integration of feminism and postmodernism into critical education theory to address some of the most vital questions facing education researchers and teachers.

This important book proposes a new account of the nature of language, founded upon an original interpretation of Wittgenstein. The authors deny the existence of a direct referential relationship between words and things. Rather, the link between language and world is a two-stage one, in which meaning is used and in which a natural language should be understood as fundamentally a collection of socially devised and maintained practices. Arguing against the philosophical mainstream descending from Frege and Russell to Quine, Davidson, (...) Dummett, McDowell, Evans, Putnam, Kripke and others, the authors demonstrate that discarding the notion of reference does not entail relativism or semantic nihilism. A provocative re-examination of the interrelations of language and social practice, this book will interest not only philosophers of language but also linguists, psycholinguists, students of communication and all those concerned with the nature and acquisition of human linguistic capacities. (shrink)

The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom. In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, (...) Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science. In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life? (shrink)

Abstract:During recent years, the principle and practice of employment-at-will have been under attack. While progress has been made in eroding the practice, the principle still governs the philosophical assumptions underlying employment practices in the United States, and, indeed, EAW has been promulgated as one of the ways to address economic ills in other countries. This paper will briefly review the major critiques of EAW. Given the failure of these arguments to erode the underpinnings of EAW, we shall suggest new avenues (...) for approaching employment issues to achieve the desirable goal of employee dignity and respect. (shrink)

Traite de la conception philosophique de Jacques Maritain qui a développé tout au long de sa carrière un système de pensée proche de celui de Saint Thomas d'Aquin. Cette étude s'inscrit dans la tentative de mettre en lumière les aspects fondamentaux de la quête de l'homme et de son rapport à la beauté d'après le philosophe Maritain.

In Frege's Conception of Logic Patricia A. Blanchette explores the relationship between Gottlob Frege's understanding of conceptual analysis and his understanding of logic.

Zenon Pylyshyn argues that cognitively driven attentional effects do not amount to cognitive penetration of early vision because such effects occur either before or after early vision. Critics object that in fact such effects occur at all levels of perceptual processing. We argue that Pylyshyn’s claim is correct—but not for the reason he emphasizes. Even if his critics are correct that attentional effects are not external to early vision, these effects do not satisfy Pylyshyn’s requirements that the effects be direct (...) and exhibit semantic coherence. In addition, we distinguish our defense from those found in recent work by Raftopoulos and by Firestone and Scholl, argue that attention should not be assimilated to expectation, and discuss alternative characterizations of cognitive penetrability, advocating a kind of pluralism. (shrink)

Patricia Crone's _God's Rule_ is a fundamental reconstruction and analysis of Islamic political thought focusing on its intellectual development during the six centuries from the rise of Islam to the Mongol invasions. Based on a wide variety of primary sources--including some not previously considered from the point of view of political thought--this is the first book to examine the medieval Muslim answers to questions crucial to any Western understanding of Middle Eastern politics today, such as why states are necessary, (...) what functions they are meant to fulfill, and whether or why they must be based on religious law. The character of Muslim political thought differs fundamentally from its counterpart in the West. The Christian West started with the conviction that truth (both cognitive and moral) and political power belonged to separate spheres. Ultimately, both power and truth originated with God, but they had distinct historical trajectories and regulated different aspects of life. The Muslims started with the opposite conviction: truth and power appeared at the same time in history and regulated the same aspects of life. In medieval Europe, the disagreement over the relationship between religious authority and political power took the form of a protracted controversy regarding the roles of church and state. In the medieval Middle East, religious authority and political power were embedded in a single, divinely sanctioned Islamic community--a congregation and state made one. The disagreement, therefore, took the form of a protracted controversy over the nature and function of the leadership of Islam itself. Crone makes Islamic political thought accessible by relating it to the contexts in which it was formulated, analyzing it in terms familiar to today's reader, and, where possible, comparing it with medieval European and modern political thought. By examining the ideological point of departure for medieval Islamic political thought, Crone provides an invaluable foundation for a better understanding of contemporary Middle Eastern politics and current world events. (shrink)

Current treatments of practical rationality understand reasons as considerations counting in favor of or against some practical option, treating the positive and the negative case as symmetrical. Typically the focus is on examples of positive reasons. However, I want to shift the spotlight to negative reasons, as making a tighter or more direct link to rationality — and ultimately to morality, which is what much of the current interest in reasons is meant to clarify. Recognizing a positive/negative asymmetry in normative (...) force will let us reconcile the view of moral or other requirements as based on reasons with the denial that reasons as such, even all-thingsconsidered reasons, yield requirements — or as I like to put it, rationally compel. (shrink)

Biopolitics and Utopia explores the intersection of biopolitics and utopian thought. As an interdisciplinary work, it addresses many salient biopolitical issues (state and medical interventions in the body, fears over scientific progress, resistance to state biopower, and ethical concerns), while also engaging in the utopian drive behind biopolitical efforts. The book is structured into four main sections: Actions, Speculations, Reactions, and Reflections. The chapters in Actions examine the practices of direct, medical intervention to 'normalize' citizens' bodies. The next section, Speculations, (...) approaches the intersection of utopia and biopolitics through a literary lens, reviewing science fiction texts as expressions of cultural and social fears about scientific progress. Reactions outlines potential acts of resistance in the face of biopower. Finally, Reflections offers a more philosophical essay, which engages the reader in the potential for creating an ethics for scientific standards. (shrink)

Despite considerable growth in understanding of various aspects of sporting and exercise embodiment over the last decade, in-depth investigations of embodied affectual experiences in running remain limited. Furthermore, within the corpus of literature investigating pleasure and the hedonic dimension in running, much of this research has focused on experiences of pleasure in relation to performance and achievement, or on specific affective states, such as enjoyment, derived after completing a run. We directly address this gap in the qualitative literature on sporting (...) and exercise embodiment by contributing novel insights on the mind-body pleasures of running via focusing analytic attention towards the pleasures recalled by runners as experienced during positive, rewarding running experiences. Applying conceptual insights drawn from sociological phenomenology, we analyse data from an in-depth, event-focused interview study with distance runners who reported positive, rewarding experiences in recent recreational runs. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we present findings in relation to three themes: (1) ‘running feels like it should’; (2) sensory engagements; and (3) time out. The study contributes fresh perspectives, both conceptually and in relation to data-collection approach, to a small literature on the lived experience of pleasure in sport, exercise and physical cultures. (shrink)

Progress in the neurosciences is profoundly changing our conception of ourselves. Contrary to time-honored intuition, the mind turns out to be a complex of brain functions. And contrary to the wishful thinking of some philosophers, there is no stemming the revolutionary impact that brain research will have on our understanding of how the mind works. Brain-Wise is the sequel to Patricia Smith Churchland's Neurophilosophy, the book that launched a subfield. In a clear, conversational manner, this book examines old questions (...) about the nature of the mind within the new framework of the brain sciences. What, it asks, is the neurobiological basis of consciousness, the self, and free choice? How does the brain learn about the external world and about its own introspective world? What can neurophilosophy tell us about the basis and significance of religious and moral experiences? Drawing on results from research at the neuronal, neurochemical, system, and whole-brain levels, the book gives an up-to-date perspective on the state of neurophilosophy—what we know, what we do not know, and where things may go from here. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 109-118 [Access article in PDF] Editing the Rhetorical Tradition Patricia Bizzell The rhetorical tradition is always being edited. I know because I have edited it myself—that's a sort of pun, in which the words "the rhetorical tradition" refer both to a book and to the cultural phenomenon the book represents. Bruce Herzberg and I (2001) have co-edited an anthology entitled The Rhetorical Tradition: (...) Readings from Classical Times to the Present. That project also involved editing the tradition itself, because, at least since the days of Isidore of Seville, it is through inclusions and exclusions in anthologies such as ours that the rhetorical tradition is established, grows, and changes. Anthologies seem always to have played a large role in the definition of the rhetorical tradition because the accessibility of texts has so often been an issue in the study of rhetoric, whether transmission problems have been caused by the dissipation of classical learning at the end of the Roman period or are caused by the vagaries of print publication today. Then and now, the changing shape of the tradition may be discerned from the tables of contents of anthologies, a circumstance that has become especially evident to me now that we have had the opportunity to edit our volume twice. The tables of contents of the first edition, appearing in 1990, and the second, in 2001, show both some enduring similarities and some interesting differences.It is important to remember that what we inherit as the "rhetorical tradition," for blessing or curse, comprises at least three modalities: texts deemed worthy of rhetorical study, methods of analyzing those texts, and methods of teaching rhetoric according to precepts and principles derived from those texts. Such a description of our cultural legacy would seem to put texts at the center of the tradition, and indeed, anthologies focus our attention on the rhetorical tradition as a set of texts. Tables of contents organized chronologically suggest a neat progression of supposedly major works marching through the centuries, but why those particular works? In [End Page 109] the study of rhetoric as in the study of imaginative literature, scholars now realize that these supposedly inevitable textual monuments to an unbroken and progressively more sophisticated discipline are in fact quarried from among the masses of material each era produces by traditions, that is, methodological and pedagogical traditions, in how to study rhetoric. Although the tradition appears to be text-based, how we wish to analyze verbal productions and how we prefer to teach the art of producing them govern our choices of rhetorical texts to preserve, elevate, or delete. And modern histories of rhetoric have shown that the preferences governing these choices arise out of complex cultural factors relating to gender, race, social class, national identity, and more.Once upon a time, these choices were dominated by the preferences of socially privileged men who saw Western culture as the best in the world, and that culture itself as springing primarily from Greek and Roman roots. As Walter Ong (1981) has explained in Fighting for Life, these men believed that education in rhetoric must be for men only and that boys must be introduced to it via agonistic competition. From these assumptions sprang buttresses for what we might call the "traditional tradition" in the study of rhetoric, a progression of texts written by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Erasmus, Bacon, Blair, and so on. This kind of study of rhetoric required extensive education, first, in Latin and Greek, often inculcated with the aid of corporal punishment, as Ong describes, and it persisted well into the twentieth century (though, one trusts, with much less flogging—that went out with co-education, as Ong explains). For example, until 1936, Greek was a graduation requirement at the Jesuit college where I teach, the College of the Holy Cross, and Latin was not dropped as a graduation requirement there until 1959 (the college was still all male, but the rationale for dropping the requirement appears to have centered upon the need to make room in the curriculum for pre-professional studies). Here... (shrink)

In The Classrooms All Young Children Need, Patricia M. Cooper takes a synoptic view of Paley’s many books and articles, charting the evolution of Paley’s ...

What is morality? Where does it come from? And why do most of us heed its call most of the time? In Braintrust, neurophilosophy pioneer Patricia Churchland argues that morality originates in the biology of the brain. She describes the "neurobiological platform of bonding" that, modified by evolutionary pressures and cultural values, has led to human styles of moral behavior. The result is a provocative genealogy of morals that asks us to reevaluate the priority given to religion, absolute rules, (...) and pure reason in accounting for the basis of morality. Moral values, Churchland argues, are rooted in a behavior common to all mammals--the caring for offspring. The evolved structure, processes, and chemistry of the brain incline humans to strive not only for self-preservation but for the well-being of allied selves--first offspring, then mates, kin, and so on, in wider and wider "caring" circles. Separation and exclusion cause pain, and the company of loved ones causes pleasure; responding to feelings of social pain and pleasure, brains adjust their circuitry to local customs. In this way, caring is apportioned, conscience molded, and moral intuitions instilled. A key part of the story is oxytocin, an ancient body-and-brain molecule that, by decreasing the stress response, allows humans to develop the trust in one another necessary for the development of close-knit ties, social institutions, and morality. A major new account of what really makes us moral, Braintrust challenges us to reconsider the origins of some of our most cherished values. (shrink)

Parmenides of Elea was the most important and influential philosopher before Plato. He rejected as impossible the scientific inquiry practiced by the earlier Presocratic philosophers and held that generation, destruction, and change are unreal and that only one thing exists. In this book, Patricia Curd argues that Parmenides sought to reform rather than to reject scientific inquiry, and she offers a more coherent account of his influence on later philosophers._ _The Legacy of Parmenides_ examines Parmenides' arguments, considering his connection (...) to earlier Greek thought and how his account of what-is could have served as a model for later philosophers. Curd also explores the theories of his successors, including the Pluralists, the Atomists, the later Eleatics, and the later Presocratics. She concludes with a discussion of the importance of Parmenides' work to Plato's _Theory of Forms._ _The Legacy of Parmenides_ challenges traditional views of early Greek philosophy and provides new insights into the work of Parmenides. "_The Legacy of Parmenides_ represents a milestone... of Parmenides' interpretation. It is full of ideas and tells a coherent story about Parmenides and early Greek thought." --_ Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University___ "Professor Curd offers a genuinely original and possibly correct interpretation of the core thesis of the poem of Parmenides in a field so well worked over that saying something both new and true is profoundly difficult, this is a notable achievement." --_ Thomas M. Robinson, University of Toronto___ "This will be a substantial book in the story of early Greek philosophy, and future writers on the tradition from Thales through Plato will not be able to ignore it without missing an important interpretive alternative. It will be of value to students of Presocratic philosophy or the Greek tradition, as well as to students of the scientific revolution, cosmology, the origins of logic, or comparative mysticism." --_ Scott W. Austin, Texas A&M University___ PATRICIA CURD_ is professor at Purdue University where she works primarily in Ancient Philosophy. She is a co-editor of _Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy_, and is the editor of _A Presocratics Reader._. (shrink)

Anydomainofscientificresearchhasitssustainingorthodoxy. Thatis, research on a problem, whether in astronomy, physics, or biology, is con- ducted against a backdrop of broadly shared assumptions. It is these as- sumptionsthatguideinquiryandprovidethecanonofwhatisreasonable-- of what "makes sense." And it is these shared assumptions that constitute a framework for the interpretation of research results. Research on the problem of how we see is likewise sustained by broadly shared assump- tions, where the current orthodoxy embraces the very general idea that the business of the visual system is to (...) create a detailed replica of the visual world, and that it accomplishes its business via hierarchical organization and by operatingessentiallyindependently of other sensorymodalitiesas well as independently of previous learning, goals, motor planning, and motor execution. (shrink)

How does Kant understand the representation of an empirical self? For Kant, the sources of the representation must be both a priori and a posteriori. Several scholars claim that the a priori part of the ‘self’ representation is supplied by the category of ‘substance,’ either a regular substance (Andrew Chignell), a minimal substance (Karl Ameriks) or a substance analog (Katharina Kraus). However, Kant opens the Paralogisms chapter by announcing that there is a thirteenth ‘transcendental’ concept or category: “We now come (...) to a concept that was not entered in the above general list of transcendental concepts, and that must yet be classed with them … This is the concept – or, if one prefers, the judgment – I think.” (A341/B399). I argue that it is the ‘I think’ that provides the a priori framework for the representation of the empirical self. (shrink)

This book is a review of some of the main variations of feminist theorizing since 1970. It charts the ways in which feminist thought has reconfigured the relationship between desire, power and academic discourse. It shows how feminist theorists have profoundly challenged the assumptions of social science, freely crossing disciplinary boundaries and giving shape to a new social criticism concerned not only with sexual difference, but also with the differences of race, class, ethnicity, nationality and sexuality.