Critiques of Knowing explores what happens to science and computing when we think of them as texts. Lynette Hunter elegantly weaves together such vast areas of thought as rhetoric, politics, AI, computing, feminism, science studies, aesthetics and epistemology. This book shows us that what we need is a radical shake-up of approaches to the arts if the critiques of science and computing are to come to any fruition.

_Critiques of Knowing_ explores what happens to science and computing when we think of them as texts. Lynette Hunter elegantly weaves together vast areas of thought: rhetoric, politics, AI, computing, feminism, science studies, aesthetics and epistemology. _Critiques of Knowing_ shows us that what we need is a radical shake-up of approaches to the arts if the critiques of science and computing are to come to any fruition.

Diverse Nations, Diverse Responses provides a rich overview of the historical, demographic, and political forces that shape social cohesion. It also provides a comparative analysis of the policy goals that have been pursued, the programs that have been implemented, the ways that social cohesion has been defined and measured, and the effects of such issues on immigrants, minorities, and host communities. The volume provides a cross-national conversation on approaches to social cohesion and will appeal to researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners interested (...) in immigration, diversity management, and the factors that affect policy choice, diversity, and outcomes. (shrink)

This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to concepts of the self associated with the development of humanism in England, and to strategies for both inclusion and exclusion in structuring the early modern nation state. It addresses writings about rhetoric and behavior from 1495–1660, beginning with Erasmus’ work on sermo or the conversational rhetoric between friends, which considers the reader as an ‘absent audience’, and following the transference of this stance to a politics whose broadening democratic constituency needed a legitimate structure (...) for governance-at-a-distance. Unusually, the book brings together the impact on behavior of these new concepts about rhetoric, with the growth of the publishing industry, and the emergence of capitalism and of modern medicine. It explores the effects on the formation of the ‘subject’ and political legitimation of the early liberal nation state. It also lays new ground for scholarship concerned with what is left out of both selfhood and politics by that state, studying examples of a parallel development of the ‘self’ defined by friendship not only from educated male writers, but also from women writers and writers concerned with socially ‘middling’ and laboring people and the poor. (shrink)

Ethics is enabling of agency, but also normative and conventional. At the moment a gendered ethics, or the gendering of ethics, is a helpful approach because it is concerned with issues to do with people often peripheral to and excluded from power. At the moment it can work to keep ethics responsive, but how do we halt the drift into the normative, both as prescriptive and as ideological? A feminist ethics maintains the responsive and undermines prescriptive categories, and is committed (...) to involving disempowered voices in the conversation. The article is particularly concerned with the articulation of the situated, and raises questions about attending to, learning how to listen to and learning how to speak, so that many people from different places can get involved in ethics. Otherwise ethics isn’t ethical. (shrink)

This book discusses affective practices in performance through the study of four contemporary performers – Keith Hennessy, Ilya Noé, Caro Novella, and duskin drum – to suggest a tentative rhetoric of performativity generating political affect and permeating attempts at social justice that are often alterior to discourse. The first part of the book makes a case for the political work done alongside discourse by performers practising with materials that are not-known, in ways that are directly relevant to people carrying out (...) their daily lives. In the second part of the book, four case study chapters circle around figures of irresolvable paradox – hendiadys, enthymeme, anecdote, allegory – that gesture to what is not-known, to study strategies for processes of becoming, knowing and valuing. These figures also shape some elements of these performances that make up a suggested rhetorical stance for performativity. (shrink)

Allegories, rhetoric, imagery, commonplaces, cliches and archetypes are discussed in connection with the literary work of authors such as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Emile Zola and James Joyce.

Theoretical commentaries on AI often operate as a metadiscourse on the way in which science represents itself to a wider public. The sciences and humanities do the same kind of work but in different fields that encourage them to talk about their work differently: science refers to a natural world that does not talk back, and the humanities refer continually to a world with communicative people in it. This paper suggests that much AI commentary is misconceived because it models itself (...) on the way that science represents itself, rather than on the actual practice of science.AI theorists have become increasingly worried about the lack of evaluation in AI, the lack of reflexivity, and the lack of contact with society. Frequently these writers turn to concepts of tacit knowledge to work through these worries. In doing so they are recognising the problem of AI's second-order representation of science and trying to deal with it. However, this recognition of a problem with the representations of science simply turns back to the legitimation crisis of Western politics where many commentators use science precisely as a ‘model’ for western political institutions. They do so because science is one of the few areas of knowledge where it has been legitimate to use plausible methodology for representation that allows for arbitrary designations of authority as well as parallel systems of different authority. However, the plausible rejects any control on reflexivity, assumes an ethnocentric club culture and does not address social context.It is in this sense that the problems of legitimation in political liberalism are similar to those of legitimation in sciences, both are rooted in their uses of representation. AI's link with the representation of science places it in the heart of this debate about legitimacy. This paper suggests that AI does need to learn about reflexivity and that it might well do so by looking at the recent work on experimentation and representation by historians of science, and by looking to the debates about representation by historians of science, and by looking to the debates about representation within the humanities. However, reflexivity may not be enough. Devising rules of thumb for the appropriate halting of reflexivity, is also needed to address social context and take action. (shrink)

Developing original accounts of the many aspects of belief, On Believing puts the believer at the heart of the story. Developing a novel account of the normativity of belief, Hunter argues that the ethics of belief concern how a believer ought to be positioned in a world of possibilities.

In their article, “Rare Disease, Advocacy and Justice: Intersecting Disparities in Research and Clinical Care,” Halley et al. (2023) use three case examples to describe challenges patients with rar...

The feminist in academe, says Paula Bennett, is like Procne married to Tereus, "inextricably wedded to the sources of her harm." An ethical justification of academic feminism can be found, not in cooperation and affiliation, but in the strategies currently necessary to ensure curricular and cultural diversity. Historically contextualized and strategically politicized, this ethic is founded on the claim that universities are places where we may all learn to know what is other than ourselves.

Basileia and tyrannis: exploding myths -- Arete and the right to rule -- Ruling families -- Rulers in the polis -- Epilogue: Athens, ruling and arete.

Contentivo de las memorias del "III Seminario de Filosofía y Derecho Contemporáneo", en homenaje al profesor Günther Jakobs, en el cual se analizan algunos de los componentes del derecho penal al tenor de la filosofía del derecho. Esta obra retoma los conceptos de Günther Jakobs, Jaime Bernal Cuéllar, Manuel Cancio Meliá y Teresa Manso Porto, entre otros.

The multi-disciplinary unit Social Responsibility in Action was developed for students with an interest in ethics who were completing undergraduate degrees in Arts, Commerce, Design or Science at an Australian research-intensive university. The academic objectives of this unit were to increase student awareness, knowledge, understanding and critical thinking skills related to various ethical issues. Lecturers from five disciplines collaborated in the design and delivery of SRA, which comprised lectures, tutorials and a research-based project. Anonymous surveys were administered at the start (...) and end of the semester to obtain feedback on student expectations and learning experience, respectively. Data across three student cohorts showed that at the start of semester, 80% of student comments indicated a desire to expand their interest of ethical matters, 59% a desire to gain understanding and knowledge and 59% to gain critical thinking or communication skills. SRA was extremely well received by students, with 98% of respondents indicating that this multi-disciplinary ethics unit had met their expectations. Students also found that the variety of teaching styles, unit content and multi-disciplinary approach stimulated learning. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is possible to knowingly believe something while judging that one ought not to believe it and (so) viewing the belief as manifesting a sort of failure. I offer examples showing that such ‘alienated belief’ has several potential sources. I contrast alienated belief with self-deception, incontinent (or akratic) belief and half-belief. I argue that the possibility of alienated belief is compatible with the so-called ‘transparency’ of first-person reflection on belief, and that the descriptive and expressive difficulties (...) it involves stem from well-understood sources. I conclude by speculating that endorsed belief is in important respects like intentional action. Reflection on the possibility of alienated belief may thus help us to see one respect in which an agent can be responsible for her attitudes. (shrink)

In this essay, I draw out some implications of a position called “Wittgensteinian Quasi-Fideism” for the theory and practice of interreligious communication. After setting out the main tenets of that position, I articulate what its theoretical and practical implications in this area would be if it were true. I thereby sketch a new, Wittgensteinian model of interreligious communication, concluding with a number of suggestions as to some points of focus for further work in this area.

This enlightening text analyses the origins of Western complaints, prevalent in the late nineteenth century, that Japan was characterised at the time by exceptionally low standards of ‘commercial morality’, despite a major political and economic transformation. As Britain industrialised during the nineteenth century the issue of ‘commercial morality’ was increasingly debated. Concerns about standards of business ethics extended to other industrialising economies, such as the United States. Hunter examines the Japanese response to the charges levelled against Japan in this (...) context, arguing that this was shaped by a pragmatic recognition that Japan had little choice but to adapt itself to Western expectations if it was to establish its position in the global economy. The controversy and criticisms, which were at least in part stimulated by fear of Japanese competition, are important in the history of thinking on business ethics, and are of relevance for today’s industrialising economies as they attempt to establish themselves in international markets. (shrink)

In writing about `whiteness' we are trying to enact a `way of talking' that draws in part on Aboriginal ideas about how to conduct a conversation or tell a story. We also use Homi Bhabha's ideas of `third space' (an `interruptive, interrogative, and enunciative' space) and hybridity as a related way to think through the problems of essentializing binaries and rigid identities. In Aboriginal cultures in Australia and Canada, rather than adopting the `neutral' or `objective' stance common in the academy, (...) it is customary to introduce oneself to one's audience, providing a context to assist in interpretation and exchange. Without such an introduction, real stories cannot be told and productive conversations cannot happen. We thus begin our conversation with each other and with you by examining our personal relationship to the idea of whiteness in order to reveal some of its complexity in Canada and Australia. `Whiteness' as an abstraction has proved useful in moving the invisible norm to visibility, but we show how an awareness of `whiteness' in the two locations can be recuperated to re-privilege the already privileged. Aboriginal speakers and writers have theorized `whiteness', in many cases from outside the academy, in the process `hybridizing' traditional genres. For many of them, Aboriginality, like whiteness, is a construct that often stands in the way of thinking clearly about where to go next in the fight against racism. (shrink)

ExcerptCarl Schmitt (1888–1985) is known as the most consequential German legal and political mind of the twentieth century.1 Many crimes of the Nazi regime found support in his conceptual justifications, and Schmitt is called the “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich with good reason. Historians, political scientists, and sociologists must grapple with the author in order to understand the course of totalitarianism in modernity. Whether literary historians should do so is far less settled, though he was fascinated by their object (...) of study. His writings on literary topics are said to reveal much about Schmitt’s person, politics, and period, but little about literature itself.2 This explains why his “Don Quijote und das Publikum” (“Don Quixote and the Public”), published in the arts and cultural journal Die Rheinlande in 1912, was almost unknown in literary studies for a century.3 Schmitt’s text on the novel by Miguel de Cervantes has not been reprinted, and until recently it had not been translated from the original German. Size has a role too. At under two thousand words, the text has probably escaped notice due to its small scale.4 Recent English and Italian translations in major humanistic journals may signal the end of its obscurity though.5 “Don Quixote and the Public” is at the door of literary studies. The question now is not whether to respond, but how. (shrink)

Beginning with the familiar -- The difference between families and political communities -- States of nature and social contracts -- Order, but not order alone -- On freedom (and liberty) -- Justice -- A brief attempt at describing good politics -- Focus on the Christian contribution -- Concluding thoughts.

In Canada, laws and policies consistently reject the commodification of human organs and tissues, and Canadian practice is consistent with international standards in this regard. Until the Assisted Human Reproduction Act of 2004, gamete donation in Canada was an exception: Canadians could pay and be paid open market rates for gametes for use in in vitro fertilization. As sections of the AHR Act forbidding payment for gametes and permitting only reimbursement of receipted expenses gradually came into effect in 2005, Canada (...) did away with this anomaly. Medical practice and legal prohibitions in assisted human reproduction are now consistent with other areas of medicine where tissues and organs are taken from one person to benefit others: Altruistic donation, rather than selling and buying, will be the norm. (shrink)

The interrogation of Meletus in the Apology at 24c4–28al is not infrequently seen as a typical case of all that is intellectually and artistically dissatisfying in Plato's practice of the genre of philosophical dialogue: not only are we presented with a philosopher who makes some claim to being committed to setting a particularly stringent standard for honesty in argumentation making sophistical arguments, but we are presented also with a cardboard interlocutor who is forced by the hand of Plato to acquiesce (...) to those arguments in a fashion that is completely dissatisfying to the reader. The best anyone seems to do to save Plato from these charges of artistic incompetence and intellectual dishonesty is to appeal to such a level of historical accuracy for the text that the stupidity of Meletus' responses can be attributed to the stupidity of Meletus himself, or to point out features of the political and legal situation that might prevent Meletus from answering the questions by drawing on his true motivation—which is presumably more coherent. Taylor says of this passage:The humour of the situation is that the prosecutor cannot venture to say what he means by either of his charges without betraying the fact that, owing to the ‘amnesty’, the matters complained of are outside of the competency of the court… Hence, when Meletus is pressed to explain what he means, he has to take refuge in puerile nonsense. (shrink)

Some ethicists assert that there is a consensus that maximising medical outcomes takes precedence as a principle of resource allocation in emergency triage of absolutely scarce resources. But the nature of the current severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2 pandemic and the history of debate about balancing equity and efficiency in resource allocation do not support this assertion. I distinguish a number of concerns with justice and balancing considerations that should play a role in critical care triage policy, focusing on (...) discrimination and on fundamental egalitarian and social justice concerns. (shrink)

This is a précis of David Hunter’s On Believing: being right in a world of possibilities, which is the topic of an author-meets-critics symposium with comments by Daniel Drucker, Miriam Schleifer McCormick, and Mark Richard.