Such an absence seems ultimately fatal. Yet as this volume amply demonstrates, the richness of his social theory can be opened up by contemporary feminism.

As has been widely observed, histories of feminism have often been conceived via notions of generation where feminism is positioned as a kind of familial property, a form of inheritance and legacy which is transmitted through generations. Thus feminism and its history have been imagined as following a familial mode of social reproduction. Despite the dominance of this model, it has nonetheless been subject to critique, not least because of its reliance on teleological and progressive notions of history. Judith Roof, (...) for example, has called for new conceptualizations of temporality in an attempt to decouple histories of feminism from a generational model. This need to move away from a generational model is also underscored by what commentators such as Angela McRobbie have identified as a dispersal of feminism – a broad-scale circulation of feminist values in popular culture – as well as by the emergence of a certain kind of reflexivity whereby past and current feminist practices are increasingly subject to critique. For McRobbie such developments are understood as part of the articulation of a post-feminism in which feminism can no longer be passed on as it is positioned as having already passed away. However, in this article via an exploration of recent accounts of the passing of feminism it is suggested that what allows for a declaration of this passing is an attachment to feminism as a particular way of knowing as well as to a particular arrangement of the social. Indeed, it will be suggested that recent histories of feminism and commentaries on the state of contemporary feminism are driven not only by generational logics but also by these attachments – attachments which lose and fix both feminism and women in time. (shrink)

In this article the increasing significance of Bourdieu’s social theory is mapped in recent sociological accounts of gender in late-modern societies. What is highlighted in particular is the influence of Bourdieu’s social theory, and especially his arguments regarding critical reflexivity and social transformation, on a specific thesis which is common to a number of contemporary feminist accounts of gender transformations in late modernity. Here it is suggested that in late modernity there is a lack of fit between habitus and field (...) in certain public spheres of action via an increasing transposition or movement of the feminine habitus from private to public spheres, which is linked to a heightened critical reflexivity vis-à-vis gender and to detraditionalization. In this article, however, a number of limits regarding this line of argument are highlighted, especially those flowing from the unproblematic coupling of reflexivity with detraditionalization. This exploration in turn leads to a critical discussion of Bourdieu’s ideas regarding social transformation. In particular it is asked why, when thinking about social transformation, does Bourdieu abandon his own principles regarding practice? (shrink)

This article focuses on the new economy. While a number of recent analyses have considered how new economic arrangements rework a range of material relations, this article suggests that such considerations have tended to stop short of considering how material relations may be reconstituting vis-à-vis the people who are working in the new economy. This is so, it will be argued, because there is a pervasive assumption of what is termed a social contract model of personhood, where people are assumed (...) to own or at least to strive to accumulate skills, capacities and abilities as forms of property in the person. However, what this article underscores is that the relations between people and their labour in the new economy are being reworked. In particular, it highlights how qualities previously associated with people are being disentangled and are becoming the object of processes of qualification and re-qualification. However, such qualities do not take the form of property in the person as claims towards the ‘ownership’ of this labour lie in the domain of audience effects - that is, in relations external to the person. This shift, it is argued further, locates labour in the new economy firmly in the domain of the production and circulation of cultural value. Indeed, more broadly this article suggests that the now commonplace idea that economy and culture are de-differentiating involves a previously unrecognized restructuring of the relations between people and property and even the end of the modern notion of personhood. (shrink)

This article engages the crisis of measure currently being articulated within social and cultural theory and the associated claim that this crisis should compel an embrace of methods which seek to know the heterogeneous, the multiple, the complex and the vague. Taking the rise of immaterial forms of labour and value as paradigmatic of the crisis of measure, it questions the use of the figure of a domestically labouring woman who lacks ownership of her labour to illuminate this crisis, as (...) well as the structural equivalence currently being forced between ‘women’s work’ (especially the work of social reproduction) and productive activities. It does so with reference to the changing relationship between women and social reproduction, a changing relationship which suggests that at the heart of the crisis of measure is a restructuring of time. This article therefore adds fuel to the view that the relations of temporality are now a key ground for feminist theory. (shrink)

While Minsky’s work is often identified with the critique of financial speculation, this paper argues that there is a different side to his work. We argue that Minsky can be read as offering a post-foundational perspective on political economy that recognizes the speculative dimension of all economic activity. This post-foundational reading allows for an understanding of neoliberal policymaking in terms of the provision of liquidity to too-big-to-fail constituencies. The article discusses how some segments of Western societies have been able to (...) participate in the inflationary logic of this too-big-to-fail dynamic, whereas others are locked out and face increasingly tight liquidity constraints. This differential access to liquidity is an increasingly central aspect of the stratifying rationality of contemporary capitalism. By connecting Minsky’s insights into the temporal logic of capital to key issues in social theory, the article presents a new theorization of (il)liquid life that advances on extant accounts. (shrink)

Recent social and cultural theory has emphasized that in risk culture the achievement of a reflexive self-identity is a key resource, for example, in terms of employment, citizenship and intimacy. Commentators on shifts in the organization of health have also stressed the significance of achieving a self-reflexive identity. So, for example, knowing, self-monitoring subjects have emerged as optimal citizens in relation to health. While there is certainly some critical commentary on these kinds of moves, nevertheless reflexive sexual subjects in relation (...) to health have received less critical attention. In this article, through an analysis of HIV antibody testing and, in particular, by looking at the making of reflexivity through the practice of testing, I consider the emergence of a heterosexuality defined in terms of reflexivity. In so doing I suggest that reflexivity should not be understood - as many commentators suggest - as an effect but rather as constitutive of risk culture. (shrink)

Bourdieusian Prospects considers the ongoing relevance of Bourdieu's social theory for contemporary social science. Breaking with the tendency to reflect on Bourdieu's legacies, it brings established and emergent scholars together to debate the futures of a specifically Bourdieusian sociology. Driven by a central leitmotif in Bourdieu s oeuvre, namely, that his work not be blindly appropriated but actively interpreted, contributors to this volume set out to map the potentials of Bourdieusian inflected social science. While for many social scientists the empirical (...) and theoretical developments of the twenty-first century mark a limit point of Bourdieusian social theory, this collection charts both how and why a Bourdieusian sociology has a future, which is crucial for the ongoing development and roll out of an engaged, relevant and critical social science. ". (shrink)

In recent social theory, there has been an emphasis on the emergence of non-market, non-cash nexus or what are sometimes referred to as `traditional' forms of organization in the economic sphere. These are sometimes represented as vital to innovation and as constituting the cutting edge of socioeconomic change. In this article, my concern is to interrogate these new modes of organization. Its main argument is that such traditional forms may go hand in hand with a retraditionalization of gender in terms (...) of employment. The innovation and creativity associated with such new economic formations is therefore called into question. (shrink)

Within the social sciences the widespread impact of the social capital concept has prompted strong critique on the part of feminists, for it is a concept which appears to reinstate a version of social worlds which for the past thirty years or more feminist social scientists have sought to problematize and move beyond. Yet do these critiques go beyond the social capital paradigm? It is the contention of this article that they do not and in particular that such critiques fail (...) to problematize the association of women with collective social goods found in the social capital literature. It will be suggested further that this association relates to the use of a dualism of instrumentality versus freedom, whereby women are overwhelmingly associated with the latter. This article therefore delineates a gendered subtext operative within the social capital debates. Recognition of this subtext should lead feminists to disengage with the social capital concept, for this is a concept whose use will always trap women in the social-historical time of industrial society. (shrink)

What can money do? Can it be put to work to address deepening forms of social and economic inequality associated with the financial crisis, ongoing recession and still unfolding politics of austerity? Can we have faith in money as an injustice-remedying substance in a crisis-ridden and (still thoroughly) financialised reality? While the latter scenario is implied in recent feminist calls to redistribute resources to redress widening socio-economic inequalities under austerity, in this article I suggest that such a redistributive logic fails (...) to account for the shifting capacities of resources, including the capacities of money. To track these shifting capacities, I revisit the demands of the 1970s women's liberation movement and especially the assumptions at play in these demands that money both measure and distribute justice. While these assumptions were arguably politically efficacious in that moment, in the contemporary present, pervasive financialisation has involved a material transformation to the capacities of money, a transformation that, I will suggest, leaves its justice-distributing potential in doubt. This article therefore not only calls for careful exploration of the capacities of resources in analyses of crisis, recession and austerity, but also for feminist theory to rethink redistributive justice in the light of such transformations. Central to these considerations is money in the wages form. (shrink)

What is it to base a belief on reasons? Existing attempts to give an account of the basing relation encounter a dilemma: either one appeals to some kind of neutral process that does not adequately reflect the way basing is a content-sensitive first-personal activity, or one appeals to linking or bridge principles that over-intellectualize and threaten regress. We explain why this dilemma arises, and diagnose the commitments that are key obstacles to providing a satisfactory account. We explain why they should (...) be rejected anyway, and then offer a new, knowledge-first virtue epistemological theory of the basing relation that shows how we can substantially theorize about mental processes without these commitments. The resulting view plausibly captures the way in which basing is an inherently mental and content-sensitive process. (shrink)

The thesis of Weak Unrestricted Composition says that every pair of objects has a fusion. This thesis has been argued by Contessa and Smith to be compatible with the world being junky and hence to evade an argument against the necessity of Strong Unrestricted Composition proposed by Bohn. However, neither Weak Unrestricted Composition alone nor the different variants of it that have been proposed in the literature can provide us with a satisfying answer to the special composition question, or so (...) we will argue. We will then go on to explore an alternative family of purely mereological rules in the vicinity of Weak Unrestricted Composition, Cardinal Composition: A plurality of pairwise non-overlapping objects composes an object iff the objects in the plurality are of cardinality smaller than $$\kappa $$ κ. As we will show, all the instances for infinite $$\kappa $$ κ s determine fusion and are compatible with junk, and every instance for a $$\kappa > \aleph _0$$ κ > ℵ 0 is furthermore compatible with gunk and dense chains of parthood. (shrink)

Dr Jardine finds a unifying principle in Bacon's preoccupation with 'method', the evaluation and organisation of information as a procedure of investigation or ...

Lisa Tessman’s Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality raises important questions about ideal theory, oppression, and the role of action guidance in normative philosophy. After a brief overview of feminist and anti-racist philosophers’ critiques of ideal theory, I examine Tessman’s claim that nonideal oppression theorists focus too narrowly on action guidance and thereby obscure other important normative issues, such as the problem of moral failure. Although I agree with Tessman’s advocacy of a wider focus—and with her suggestion (...) that situations of inevitable moral failure are particularly important to examine in contexts of oppression—I question whether nonideal oppression theorists actually emphasize action guidance to the exclusion of other concerns. I conclude with a brief examination of the way that ideal and nonideal theory have been defined and understood in debates about normative methodology, and I suggest that a move away from Rawls’s account of the ideal/nonideal distinction would benefit feminists and other oppression theorists. (shrink)

What about Confucian bioethics should compel our interest? Apart from the fact that Confucianism grounds the belief system of a great number of people, a Confucian bioethics poses a profound challe...

Im Zeitalter des sogenannten »Anthropozäns« werden wir Zeugen einer ontologischen Verschiebung: Die modernen Grenzziehungen zwischen Kultur und Natur, Subjekt und Objekt sowie die Vorstellung einer Welt, die aus unabhängigen Entitäten besteht, werden in der aktuellen Umbruchskonfiguration weitreichend destabilisiert. So ist die »Krise« der Moderne auch als eine »Krise« des Seins zu lesen, die die Möglichkeit eines (Anders-)Werdens relationaler Welt/en eröffnen könnte. Aus einer medienphilosophischen Perspektive fragt Lisa Handel danach, wie dieses Aufsprengen der Seinsontologie von der Frage der Medialität her (...) zu denken und situieren ist. Ontomedialität ist »Kartenkunde und Reisebericht« einer Welt, in der Medialität und Ontologie je schon implodiert und ununterscheidbar geworden sind. (shrink)

Good epistemic practices are essential to the well-functioning of organizations. Epistemic practices are adopted norms, policies, procedures, and general methodologies that further our epistemic aims or realize our epistemic values. This chapter argues for the importance of organizational good epistemic practices through an analysis of the failures of risk management implicated in JPMorgan’s notorious ‘London Whale’ trading losses, which roiled the financial markets in 2012. A number of these failures of risk management exemplified ways in which we, as fallible reasoners, (...) may be prone to error individually and collectively. Good epistemic practices inter alia anticipate and endeavor to correct for erroneous patterns of reasoning. They help guard against future epistemic failings, and they support good reasoning within and on the part of organizations. In so doing, they constitute some of the key structural elements of organizational epistemic virtues. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHilary Putnam provides an anti-skeptical argument motivated by semantic externalism. He argues that our best theorizing about what it takes to experience, think, and so on, entails that the world is much as we take it to be. This fact eliminates the possibility of radical skeptical scenarios, where from our perspective everything seems as it does in the actual case, but we are widely and systematically mistaken. I think that this approach is generally correct, and that it is the most (...) promising strategy for undermining radical skepticism. There are, however, well-discussed difficulties with Putnam's way of pursuing this strategy. I argue that in order to avoid these objections we will have to be more radical externalists than Putnam proposed; in particular, we will have to beperspectival externalists. According to perspectival externalism, a subject's reliable relations to her environment play a crucial role in determining not only the contents of her mental events, but also what it is like for her to grasp those contents. While semantic externalism is widely accepted in epistemology, perspectival externalism is not. I argue that perspectival externalism is independently more plausible than mere semantic externalism, and that such an account can enable us to better pursue Putnam's anti-skeptical strategy. (shrink)

This paper argues that the diversity of conflicting comprehensive doctrines in liberal pluralist societies raises a problem of estrangement between citizens and the basic structure of society that Rawls' version of political liberalism does not successfully solve. 'Political estrangement' occurs when someone refuses to accept a political outcome that favors a comprehensive doctrine she rejects, based on what she imagines, correctly or incorrectly, to be true of her fellow citizens' comprehensive doctrines and their effect on political outcomes. Rawls argues that (...) the political conception of justice and the use of public reason ensure the incompatibility of our comprehensive doctrines will not undermine our willingness to to accept political decisions contrary to our own values. However, public reason does not guarantee this result. Imagination can allow us to see that the influence of some reasonable comprehensive doctrines can lead to oppressive political outcomes and public reason restricts us from addressing this fact. Yet, widening public reason to account for this problem is likely to increase the conditions that cause estrangement. The paper concludes that the political conception of justice and public reason may sometimes fail to adequately justify political outcomes in the sense Rawls hopes. (shrink)

Drawing on her 35-year plus experience in the classroom, Lisa Lee has transformed her extensive and authentic teaching experience into a contagious passion and energy with a specialization in Gifted and Talented programs and a focus on the students who don't always fit in a box. The Heart of Teaching is a book about her experience as a teacher, and the students she both taught and learned from, and the lessons she garnered as someone who always taught from the (...) heart. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore how the prospect of artificial placenta technology (nearing clinical trials in human subjects) should encourage further consideration of the loss experienced by individuals when their pregnancy ends unexpectedly. Discussions of pregnancy loss are intertwined with procreative loss, whereby the gestated entity has died when the pregnancy ends. However, we demonstrate how pregnancy loss can and does exist separate to procreative loss in circumstances where the gestated entity survives the premature ending of the pregnancy. In outlining (...) the value that can be attached to pregnancy beyond fetal-centric narratives, we illustrate how pregnancy loss, separate to procreative loss, can be experienced. This loss has already been recognised among parents who have experienced an unexpected early ending of their pregnancy, resulting in their child being cared for in neonatal intensive care unit. Artificial placentas, however, may exacerbate these feelings and make pregnancy loss (without procreative loss) more visible. We argue that pregnancy is an embodied state in which gestation is facilitated by the body but gestation itself should be recognised as a process—and one that could be separable from pregnancy. In demarcating the two, we explore the different ways in which pregnancy loss can be understood. Our objective in this paper goes beyond contributing to our philosophical understanding of pregnancy towards practical-orientated conclusions regarding the care pathways surrounding the artificial placenta. We make recommendations including the need for counselling and careful consideration of the language used when an artificial placenta is used. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers have questioned whether liberal theory can account for the phenomenon of adaptive preferences, specifically women’s preferences that are formed under conditions of sexist oppression. In this paper, I examine the argument of one feminist who addresses the problem of women’s “deformed desires” by relying on a liberal framework. Assessing her argument, I conclude that liberalism provides inadequate resources for responding to this issue since it errs in understanding adaptive preferences as exceptional, provides little explanation of how changes in (...) individual preferences are motivated, and often fails to identify the adaptive nature of such preferences. I illustrate my arguments through a brief discussion of women’s choices around motherhood and sexuality, and I conclude by offering several suggestions of how an alternative theory might better address the problems raised by preference adaptation in the context of oppression. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to the emerging field of the philosophy of money and finance. The field addresses philosophical issues about the nature of money and the normative foundations of financial systems. Although philosophical theorizing about money and finance dates back to Antiquity, the topic has only recently emerged as a central research focus. The chapter also introduces the present anthology and locates its parts and chapters in the broader field. More specifically, the anthology is divided into four main (...) parts: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, and Political Philosophy. Each part contains four chapters on different but interrelated topics, which are all introduced here. (shrink)

Much insect sounding is beyond the limits of typical human hearing ability. This sonic separation is exacerbated by a socialized narrative of fear and avoidance of insects in many western societies. With the use of audio technologies to expand our senses, we can embrace opportunities to get to know sensory and communicative insect sound-worlds beyond our own. Ecological sound art – sound art that has an environmentalist intent – is a tangible and accessible means of listening to these sounds. In (...) the series Built Hidden Soundscapes, the primary author (Schonberg) composes imagined soundscapes existing solely of sounds that are beyond the limits of typical human hearing ability. In this article we introduce two compositions in this series, Reserva Florestal Adolpho Ducke and Pipeline Road. These compositions offer a temporary expansion of our aural senses that can increase listeners’ awareness of cryptic insect existences/ecologies. We suggest that this listening practice might prompt future auralization (sounding or hearing in the mind) of insect sound for the listener. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the power of corporations as epistemic agents. Corporations need to hold certain forms of knowledge in order to develop and produce goods and services. Intellectual property is meant to incentivize them to do so, in ways that orient their activities towards the public good. However, corporations often use their knowledge strategically, not only within markets, but also in the processes that set the rules for markets. I discuss various historical examples, including the so-called “tobacco strategy” (...) of creating doubt about scientific evidence, and argue that as long as corporations are set up as profit-oriented entities, it is a dangerous strategy to provide them with too much epistemic power. I suggest various policies for reigning in this form of corporate power, for example regulations on PR activities. I then turn to the power of digital corporations, which is based on their collection and analysis of data. These kinds of companies, and the technologies they use, make the control of corporations as epistemic agents all the more urgent for democratic societies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 433-452 [Access article in PDF] When Ideas Matter: The Moral Philosophy of Fontenelle Gregory Matthew Adkins Introduction There has been a recent trend in the historiography of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectual culture to analyze that culture from a sociological perspective. This perspective, a necessary corrective to a pure history of ideas, takes knowledge as a socially constructed phenomenon and thus (...) subject to sociological analysis. The point of the sociology of knowledge, however, is not to re-hash and bolster old externalist arguments but to do away with the whole debate over whether ideas or social conditions are more important in intellectual history and the history of science. A focus on sociology does not mean that ideas do not matter. This becomes apparent when analyzing the ethics of early modern intellectuals.For example, Anne Goldgar's recent work, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (1995), gives much attention to the sociology of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Republic of Letters--but at the cost of relegating the role of ideas to the sidelines. According to Goldgar, if one wants to understand early modern intellectuals as a community, including their ethics and sense of morality, one should focus on forms of sociability rather than the ideas and philosophies they put forth in their writings. An aristocratic ethic dominated early modern scholarship, she argues, and even took precedence over knowledge claims: "[i]n striving to make its inner workings acceptable to the outside community the Republic of Letters chose, like the aristocracy, to empty its internal relationships of content, choosing instead to concentrate on form.... [A]rguments were often judged on the politeness with which they were presented, rather than on their intrinsic merit." 1 Men of [End Page 433] letters, although often of humble origin, cultivated nobility by emulating aristocratic modes of decorum and noble interests in status and reputation. One way they promoted these ideas was through a literary genre adopted from classical antiquity, the éloge (eulogy), which presented exemplary modes of behavior by praising the lives of the "heroes" of the Republic of Letters. Interestingly, the years on which Goldgar focuses her analysis almost precisely encompass the period of Bernard le Bouyer de Fontenelle's mature intellectual production. Yet Fontenelle (1657-1757), widely hailed during his lifetime as having perfected the art of the éloge, plays no role in her argument.From 1699 to 1740 Fontenelle, as secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie Royale des Sciences, composed some sixty-nine éloges in honor of recently deceased members of the academy and of other notable savants. Even a brief glance at Fontenelle's eulogies reveals an intimate link between philosophy and morality. A more careful examination of them in the context of his life and works shows that this link was logically commensurate with his genuinely held notions of human nature, happiness, reason, and the good. In fact the relationship in the eulogies between notions of nobility and the virtues proper to the savant or philosopher is highly intellectualized. Fontenelle was not as concerned with status and reputation or with self-fashioning as one might think. 2 We can only assimilate his ethics to those of the court aristocracy if we ignore what he actually wrote.Through his eulogies and other writings, Fontenelle's thoughts on philosophy and morality have had a lasting impact on western culture. He presented an image of what would come to characterize the proper, objective, modern scientist and thinker. 3 In order to understand the éloge as an institution in the Republic of Letters (and by extension the early modern intellectual ethic) it is therefore important to examine Fontenelle's moral philosophy more carefully. It is a philosophy expressed in his eulogies but understood clearly only in the context of his life and works. On the ÉlogesAs noted above, one way to contextualize the institution of the éloge is to place it within a Republic of Letters concerned with adopting the manners of the nobility: the éloges... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Taking On Your Natural Human Role by Killing Non‐Human Animals Discover Nature by Killing Non‐Human Animals The Paradox of Ethical Hunting Hunting and Environmentalism Notes.