The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's rationale for supporting the development and approval of BiDil for heart failure specifically in black patients was based on under-powered, post hoc subgroup analyses of two relatively old trials , which were further complicated by substantial covariate imbalances between racial groups. Indeed, the only statistically significant difference observed between black and white patients was found without any adjustment for potential confounders in samples that were unlikely to have been adequately randomized. Meanwhile, because the accepted (...) baseline therapy for heart failure has substantially improved since these trials took place, their results cannot be combined with data from the more recent trial amongst black patients alone. There is therefore little scientific evidence to support the approval of BiDil only for use in black patients, and the FDA's rationale fails to consider the ethical consequences of recognizing racial categories as valid markers of innate biological difference, and permitting the development of group-specific therapies that are subject to commercial incentives rather than scientific evidence or therapeutic imperatives. This paper reviews the limitations in the scientific evidence used to support the approval of BiDil only for use in black patients; calls for further analysis of the V-HeFT I and II data which might clarify whether responses to H-I vary by race; and evaluates the consequences of commercial incentives to develop racialized medicines. We recommend that the FDA revise the procedures they use to examine applications for race-based therapies to ensure that these are based on robust scientific claims and do not undermine the aims of the 1992 Revitalization Act. (shrink)

In his political classic The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey offers up an observation that would surely resonate with contemporary readers.The social situation has been so changed by the factors of an industrial age that traditional general principles have little practical meaning. They persist as emotional cries rather than as reasoned ideas…. The developments of industry and commerce have so complicated affairs that a clear-cut, generally applicable, standard of judgment becomes practically impossible. The forest cannot be seen for the (...) trees nor the trees for the forest.1To clarify his point, Dewey continues with four examples in which the concepts employed by situated social actors to grasp the increasing .. (shrink)

Stem cell research has important implications for medicine. The source of stem cells influences their therapeutic potential, with stem cells derived from early-stage embryos remaining the most versatile. Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), a source of embryonic stem cells, allows for understandings about disease development and, more importantly, the ability to yield embryonic stem cell lines that are genetically matched to the somatic cell donor. However, SCNT requires women to donate eggs, which involves injection of ovulation-inducing hormones and egg retrieval (...) through laparoscopy or transvaginal needle aspiration. Risks from this procedure are fiercely debated, most notably risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS). This review examines risk of OHSS resulting from oocyte donation. We conclude that risk posed by OHSS in egg donation is not significant enough to warrant undue concern, and much of this can be eliminated when proper precautions are taken. This bears relevance to the future of stem cell research policymaking. (shrink)

Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health were developed using in-depth qualitative interviews with editorial staff from nineteen genetics journals, focusing on the methodological and conceptual mechanisms required to make race/ethnicity a genetic variable. As such, these analyses explore how and why race/ethnicity comes to be used in the context of genetic research, set against the background of continuing critiques from anthropology and related human sciences that focus on the social construction, structural (...) correlates and limited genetic validity of racial/ethnic categories. The analyses demonstrate how these critiques have failed to engage geneticists, and how geneticists use a range of essentially cultural devices to protect and separate their use of race/ethnicity as a genetic construct from its use as a societal and social science resource. Given its multidisciplinary, biosocial nature and the cultural gaze of its ethnographic methodologies, anthropology is well placed to explore the cultural separation of science and society, and of natural and social science disciplines. Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore disparities in health suggest that moving beyond genetic explanations of innate difference might benefit from a more even-handed critique of how both the natural and social sciences tend to essentialize selective elements of race/ethnicity. Drawing on the example of HIV/AIDS, this paper demonstrates how public health has been undermined by the use of race/ethnicity as an analytical variable, both as a cipher for innate genetic differences in susceptibility and response to treatment, and in its use to identify at greater risk of becoming infected and infecting others. Clearly, a tendency for biological reductionism can place many biomedical issues beyond the scope of public health interventions, while socio-cultural essentialization has tended to stigmatize and the communities where these are more prevalent. (shrink)

In a recent discussion about how scientific knowledge might potentially change our understanding of the nature and extent of human genetic, cultural, or biological variation, the sociologist David Skinner identified two competing visions of the future: one that was decidedly dystopian, which conjured up a “re-racialized” future, and an opposing utopian future in which the potential for racialized thinking might be finally overcome. We can situate the ongoing debates about the congestive heart failure drug BiDil, approved by the Food and (...) Drug Administration for use only by African Americans, in relation to these differing future prospects.When the FDA announced its approval of BiDil in June 2005, it located the drug, and perhaps the future of pharmaceutical development, within a particular vision of the future, heralding BiDil as “representing a step toward the promise of personalized medicine.” The discourse of “personalized medicine” can be characterized as part of a utopian future, one in which clinicians will be able to make increasingly individualized decisions based on each patient’s genetic makeup so that the drugs they take will be those that work best for them. (shrink)

The ongoing debate about the FDA approval of BiDil in 2005 demonstrates how the first racially/ethnically licensed drug is entangled in both Utopian and dystopian future visions about the continued saliency of race/ethnicity in science and medicine. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, this paper analyzes how scientists in the field of pharmacogenetics are constructing certain visions of the future with respect to the use of social categories of race/ethnicity and the impact of high-throughput genotyping technologies that promise to transform (...) scientific practices. (shrink)

We define two notions for intuitionistic predicate logic: that of a submodel of a Kripke model, and that of a universal sentence. We then prove a corresponding preservation theorem. If a Kripke model is viewed as a functor from a small category to the category of all classical models with morphisms between them, then we define a submodel of a Kripke model to be a restriction of the original Kripke model to a subcategory of its domain, where every node in (...) the subcategory is mapped to a classical submodel of the corresponding classical model in the range of the original Kripke model. We call a sentence universal if it is built inductively from atoms using ∧, ∨, ∀, and →, with the restriction that antecedents of → must be atomic. We prove that an intuitionistic theory is axiomatized by universal sentences if and only if it is preserved under Kripke submodels. We also prove the following analogue of a classical model-consistency theorem: The universal fragment of a theory Γ is contained in the universal fragment of a theory Δ if and only if every rooted Kripke model of Δ is strongly equivalent to a submodel of a rooted Kripke model of Γ. Our notions of Kripke submodel and universal sentence are natural in the sense that in the presence of the rule of excluded middle, they collapse to the classical notions of submodel and universal sentence. (shrink)

From classical, Fraïissé-homogeneous, ($\leq \omega$)-categorical theories over finite relational languages, we construct intuitionistic theories that are complete, prove negations of classical tautologies, and admit quantifier elimination. We also determine the intuitionistic universal fragments of these theories.

People with neurodevelopmental disorders are often considered unsuitable or incapable of working in open employment. When employment is available, tasks are often limited, and opportunities for career development are restricted. Policy and funding constraints leave people with disabilities without an opportunity to develop skills due to the additional time and costs for employers. To overcome these barriers, virtual environments have been proposed as a safe and reliable solution for training. An important prerequisite for a wider uptake of training in virtual (...) environments are demonstrations that the training leads to improved performance in the real world. This is particularly true for people with neurodevelopmental disorders, as transferring learnings from one context to another can be challenging. A systematic review was conducted to assess whether training in virtual environments can be used to improve real-world vocational skills in people with neurodevelopmental disorders. After a systematic search in six databases, eight out of the initially identified 1,806 articles met the inclusion criteria. The findings from these eight studies demonstrate that people with neurodevelopmental disorders can transfer vocational skills from virtual environments to real-world settings. With substantial technological improvements, a surge in accessibility, and improved affordability, there is a need to build upon the promising results identified in this review. (shrink)

The task of this article is to interrogate the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) model to develop a more robust understanding of a prominent trend in the charter school movement and education policy more generally. To accomplish this task, this article details the findings of a synthetic analysis that examines the KIPP model as a Hegelian whole concept operative in a specific mode of social reality. The guidance for this analysis is grounded in a rather straightforward research question. Given the (...) prominence that the KIPP model has achieved in the charter school movement in the United States, what can a synthetic analysis tell us about not only KIPP, but also the larger charter school movement? (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay considers how various European novels written and published around the turn of the millennium may be grouped together as an historically and geographically contingent literary genre, while also reflecting on the implications of this. In doing so, this essay coins the term ‘melancholy cosmopolitanism’ to best describe this genre of literary works. Ultimately, this genre suggests, first of all, that the sense of melancholy obsolescence articulated by European writers at this time is not confined to discrete national (...) literary contexts. Moreover, this essay argues, it implies a form of solidarity among these writers and their works, such that they encapsulate the possibility of working through the melancholy of history precisely through the aesthetic similarities among their literary explorations of it. Contemporaneous melancholy works of European literature are understood here as ‘cosmopolitan’ in a hermeneutic sense: their aesthetics resonate with each other beyond discrete national literary contexts, while also exemplifying individually assumed poses of melancholy amid a broader collective. In construing European melancholy aesthetics as a form of cosmopolitanism, then, the literary genre proposed by this essay suggests that mutual articulations of melancholy in various European novels collectively embody a potential for the melancholy of history to be overcome. (shrink)

Aesthetic experience has been relativized and marginalized by recent social and cultural theory. As less attention has been paid to understanding the nature of aesthetic experience than mapping the distributed social correlates of tastes, its transformative potential and capacity to animate actors’ imaginations and actions goes unexplored. In this paper we draw upon a large number of in-depth interviews with performing arts audiences around Australia to investigate the language and discourse used to describe aesthetic experiences. In particular, we begin with (...) theorizations of the subject-object nexus within object-relations theory to consider the transformative potential of aesthetic experience. Using these literatures, and extending them to others within sociology of the arts and materiality, our focus is on the way aesthetic experience can fuse human subjects with aesthetic objects. We examine how viewers take an aesthetic object into themselves and in turn project themselves into the aesthetic object by various visual and imaginative techniques. Our theoretical and empirical analysis bears out the constructive and productive capacity of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

We argue that a conceptual tension exists between “diversity” and “heterogeneity” and that glossing over their differences has practical, moral, and epistemic costs. We examine how these terms are used in ecology and the social sciences; articulate a deeper linguistic intuition; and test it with the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The results reveal that ‘diversity’ and ‘heterogeneity’ have conflicting rather than interchangeable meanings: heterogeneity implies a collective entity that interactively integrates different entities, whereas diversity implies divergence, not integration. Consequently, (...) striving for diversity alone may increase social injustice and reduce epistemic outcomes of academic institutions and governance structures. (shrink)

This article examines changing modalities of citizenship in a fast-moving, informationalized and connected world. The argument here is that, in an increasingly globalized economic, social and cultural environment, forms and practices of citizenship inevitably – and increasingly – fragment across space and time. While this tendency for citizenship to ‘shape-shift’ politically and socially is not new – and indeed while the spatial fragmentation of belonging has been frequently commented upon, particularly in relation to the claimed decline of the bordered nation-state (...) – the dimension of time in relationship to citizenship has been rather less well explored. By examining the interplay of space and time in contemporary citizenship, understood here in terms of civic and political engagement, identity and belonging, it becomes possible to understand how citizenship practices operate differentially according to degrees of spatial embeddedness, on the one hand, and degrees of temporal ‘thickness’, on the other. (shrink)

Education, Crisis, and the Discipline of the Conjuncture constructs a history of the present through conjunctural analysis and builds on this inquiry to construct a model for critical educational scholarship and pedagogical practice that can contribute to the urgent political demands of this historical moment.

I should not be here. By nearly all medical prognostication and statistical realism, I should not be here. In fact, anyone with any wagering savvy might have—and quite justifiably—placed her chips on someone else. But lives do not always adhere to probabilities, bell curves, or standard deviations. Personal will favors the long game over the short; determination and hopefulness strive for the less likely instead of the more—the extreme rather than the mean.I have lived for 28 years with quadriplegia, a (...) duration that is, in itself, far outside of the expected. However, the circumstances under which I became quadriplegic reduce the likelihood of this longevity even further.It was 1990, and I was 11 years old. In what... (shrink)

The probability of lineal extinction is sensitive to all the moments of the reproductive success probability distribution. In particular, high variance in reproductive success is associated with high probability of lineal extinction. Where male variance in reproductive success exceeds female variance, strictly patrilineal lines of descent will become extinct more rapidly than strictly matrilineal lines of descent. Patrilineal genealogies will be expected to be shallower and broader than matrilineal genealogies under such conditions. Potential implications of this genealogical asymmetry for human (...) descent systems include the greater information content of patrilineal kinship reckoning compared with any other unilineal system and the greater effectiveness of patrilineal kinship as a vehicle for corporate action. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

- In questo saggio Ralph Ellison riflette sulla natura del romanzo e sullo stretto legame tra questa forma letteraria e la democrazia americana. La riflessione va a toccare alcuni temi di grande rilievo per la cultura statunitense: la delicata questione delle distinzioni sociali, il multiculturalismo, la ferita aperta dalla guerra civile, il rapporto con la letteratura europea e l'identitÀ nazionale. In tale panorama sconfinato, Ellison si sofferma sul ruolo dei romanzieri, che a suo parere va molto oltre l'intrattenimento (...) dei lettori: chi scrive deve essere capace di interpretare una societÀ complessa, di creare attraverso l'immaginazione personaggi significativi per identitÀ e valori. Ai romanzieri č affidata quindi una grande responsabilitÀ: contribuire alla costruzione di "un'idea americana di America". (shrink)

David Ellison's book is an investigation into the historical origins and textual practice of European literary Modernism. Ellison's study traces the origins of Modernism to the emergence of early German Romanticism from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and emphasizes how the passage from Romanticism to Modernism can be followed in the gradual transition from the sublime to the uncanny. Arguing that what we call High Modernism cannot be reduced to a religion of beauty, an experimentation with narrative form, (...) or even a reflection on time and consciousness, Ellison demonstrates that Modernist textuality is characterized by the intersection, overlapping, and crossing of aesthetic and ethical issues. Beauty and morality relate to each other as antagonists struggling for dominance within the related fields of philosophy and theory on the one hand and imaginative literature on the other. (shrink)

The task of this article is to carry out a synthetic analysis of the concept of the educational marketplace as it is used in the popular discourse of education reform so as to unpack what has become a commonsensical idea in American politics. It is a conceptual framework that has opened an ever-expanding sovereign space in the American state for the colonization of a public institution by the private sphere by means of public policy. The results of this analysis suggest (...) that the reform policies associated with the concept of the educational marketplace are ineffective in raising average student achievement, have a high probability for generating significant social costs, and are a manifestation of an articulation of power now in ascendancy in the United States. (shrink)

Law, often neglected in treatments of the Republic, is essential to the philosopher-kings’ rule. Only law accomplishes the partial divinization of citizens at which philosophical politics aims. Socrates’ interrogation of Thrasymachus and Glaucon reveals law to be a command whereby citizens participate in philosophical knowledge and limit the pleonexia congenital to humanity. Law does so primarily by instilling in souls a true opinion resistant to pleonectic passion, producing a state of political virtue. This primary work is supported by the musical (...) and poetical education, itself shaped by law for the sake of law. Law persuades and compels the soul by appealing to both reason and spiritedness, enabling them to overcome the appetites. The soul’s consequent acceptance of truth and resistance to the passions indeed makes it resemble divinity. In so transforming the citizens through the law, the philosopher-king also unifies the city and makes it happy under his rule. (shrink)

The nervous system and the endocrine system interact to integrate behavior and physiolo­gy. Hormones play an important role in this interaction, particularly steroid hormones. Other molecules, notably oxytocin, can serve both as hormones in the soma and neuro­modulators in the central nervous system. Understanding the influence of the endocrine system on human behavior, both individual and social, has been a primary focus of behav­ioral endocrinology for many decades, though technical and methodological challenges have been formidable. The recent enthusiasm for enzyme-linked (...) immunoassay kits for measuring steroid hormones in saliva has been found to be largely unsound, for example. Despite these difficulties, advances in many areas have been made and new areas, such as the endocrinology of paternal behavior and the role of oxytocin in social interactions, have emerged. Reproductive ecology provides a theoretical framework for integrating the di­verse content of human behavioral ecology. (shrink)

This article focuses on one dimension of the interplay of national decline and urban corruption in Rousseau's thought -- what I call Rousseau's analysis of the moral economy of the modern city. It is perhaps fitting that E.P.Thompson has used the concept of 'moral economy' to describe a popular consensus embedded in patterns of deeply rooted assumptions, belief and conduct among the urban poor in eighteenth-century England. Food riots, rooted in a belief in the customary practice of sale of food (...) at fair prices even when production was low, were a response to prices designed to achieve the greatest profit the market allowed. (shrink)

The concept of difference has a long and important research tradition. We identify and explicate a heretofore overlooked distinction in the meaning and measurement of two different meanings of 'difference': 'diversity' and 'heterogeneity'. We argue that ‘diversity’ can describe a population well enough but does not describe a collective well. In contrast, ‘heterogeneity’ describes a collective better than a population and therefore ought to describe a collective. We argue that ignoring these distinctions can lead to a surprising and disturbing conflict (...) between diversity and heterogeneity. In particular, focusing on the 'diversity' of human communities can be self-defeating for those who truly care about the importance of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. (shrink)

Sir John Templeton (1912–2008), the Wall Street legend who has been described as “arguably the greatest global stock picker of the twentieth century,” clearly knew what it took to be successful. The most important thing, he observed, was to have strong convictions that guided your life—this was the common denominator he saw in all successful people and enterprises. Fortunately for us, he was eager to share his own blueprint for personal success and happiness with the rest of the world. In (...) The Templeton Plan, he laid out the twenty-one guiding principles by which he governed both his professional and personal life. These principles were grounded in virtues that he considered important enough to be considered the “laws of life”—they include honesty, perseverance, thrift, enthusiasm, humility, and altruism. From this moral foundation, Templeton formulated a step-by-step plan to help improve anyone’s personal and professional life. Among the steps he enumerates, readers will find: · Four exercises that will help anyone find the positive in every negative · How to be the one person in ten that will productively use more time than they waste · The secret trait that separates great workers from good workers · How to control your thoughts for effective action · The practical applications of a sense of humility · How successful people approach risks differently from most people Taken as a whole, the lessons contained within his twenty-one steps will help readers make lasting friendships, reap significant financial rewards, and find personal satisfaction. Ever a believer in the future’s vast potential, Templeton hoped that sharing his principles would inspire others to seek their own laws of life, formulate their own plans, and find success and happiness on a scale exponentially greater than his own. He freely admitted that he didn’t know everything and that there was yet much to be discovered about prosperity and joy. The Templeton Plan not only offers his recipe for success, but also shows us the way to formulate our own plans. (shrink)

Prior studies have shown a general preference among citizens for juries over judges. Researchers, however, have not considered whether race and ethnicity modify this preference. We hypothesized that minorities (African-Americans, Hispanics), who generally express less trust in the legal system, may also express less trust in juries than non-Hispanic whites. We asked a representative sample of 1,465 residents of Texas to state whether they would prefer a jury or a judge to be the decision maker in four hypothetical circumstances. Consistent (...) with expectations, non-Hispanic whites favored juries over judges, particularly if they imagined themselves as a defendant in a criminal trial. By comparison, although African-Americans and some Hispanics generally favored juries, they showed a much weaker set of jury preferences. African Americans had markedly lower support for the civil jury, but support was higher among minorities with prior jury service. Among Hispanics, respondents who took the survey in Spanish typically preferred a judge to make legal decisions. We consider the implications of our findings for trust in the jury system and trust in community members as decision makers. (shrink)

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy is a volume of especially commissioned critical essays, conversations, collaborative, creative and performative writing mapping the key contexts, debates, methods, discourses and practices in this developing field. Firstly, the collection offers new insights on the fundamental question of how thinking happens: where, when, how and by whom philosophy is performed. Secondly, it provides a plurality of new accounts of performance and performativity as the production of ideas, bodies and knowledges in the arts and beyond. (...) Comprising texts written by international artists, philosophers and scholars from multiple disciplines, the essays engage with questions of how performance thinks and how thought is performed in a wide range of philosophies and performances, from the ancient to the contemporary. Concepts and practices from diverse geographical regions and cultural traditions are analysed to draw conclusions about how performance operates across art, philosophy and everyday life. The collection both contributes to and critiques the philosophy of music, dance, theatre and performance, exploring the idea of a philosophy from the arts. It is crucial reading material for those interested in the hierarchy of the relationship between philosophy and the arts, advancing debates on philosophical method, and the relation between Performance and Philosophy more broadly. (shrink)

Contributed articles presented at the Seminar on the Intellectual Dimensions of Bhakti Tradition in India held at Sri Caitanya Prema Sansthan from 13th to 16th Oct., 1988.

Previous research in North America has supported the view that male involvement in committed, romantic relationships is associated with lower testosterone (T) levels. Here, we test the prediction that undergraduate men involved in committed, romantic relationships (paired) will have lower T levels than men not involved in such relationships (unpaired). Further, we also test whether these differences are more apparent in samples collected later, rather than earlier, in the day. For this study, 107 undergraduate men filled out a questionnaire and (...) collected one saliva sample (from which a subject’s T level was measured) at various times across the day. As in previous studies, men involved in committed, romantic relationships had lower salivary T levels, though only during later times of the day. Furthermore, additional analysis of the variation among unpaired subjects indicated that men without prior relationship experience had lower T levels than experienced men. Finally, while paired men as a group had lower T levels than unpaired men, those men at the earliest stage (less than six months) of a current relationship had higher T levels than unpaired men as well as men in longer-term relationships. These results suggest that variation in male testosterone levels may reflect differential behavioral allocation to mating effort. (shrink)

In this paper we outline the activities of young girls in a Toba community of northern Argentina and examine the effect of girl helpers on time allocation of nursing women. Activity budgets were obtained for 41 girls aged 3 to 15 using spot observations. Girls spent substantial portions of observations engaged in helping behaviors. Individual values varied with age, anthropometric characteristics, and birth order. Activity budgets of 21 nursing women were obtained through focal observation sessions. Women living in households with (...) girls aged 7 to 15 allocated 17% less time to domestic work and 9% more time to socializing during afternoon observation sessions. For nursing women in this community, direct childcare (provided by the infant’s own mother) seemed to be a priority. Living with a girl helper did not have any measurable effect on the frequency or duration of nursing, or on the time that women spent caring for their infants. Based on these findings, hypotheses are outlined for future work on the effect of girl helpers on women’s fertility. (shrink)

Consumers are becoming increasingly interested in how their food is produced. Many studies have focused on consumers’ preferences and willingness-to-pay for specific production-related claims on food products. However, few studies have asked consumers to rank the importance of different production claims. In this study, we use a best-worst scaling approach to have consumers rank the importance of seven common production claims used on food products. Rankings are obtained across four product types: beef, milk, chicken, and eggs. Results of the study (...) show that consumers often prefer specific components of more encompassing claims as opposed to the broader, more encompassing claim itself. The majority of preference shares were captured by the top three claims, though the order of these preferences appears to vary for meat and non-meat animals. (shrink)

This casebook features ten distinctive and provocative essays in addition to a generous sampling of Ellison's comments on the novel. A number of the latter are from letters never before published; also published here for the first time is Part II of Ellison's "Working Notes on Invisible Man," an undated exposition of his authorial intentions, probably written in 1946 or 1947. The ten essays are a selection of the most perceptive and comprehensive essays written on Invisible Man during (...) the last thirty-five years, including an essay by Kenneth Burke, which began as a letter to Ellison about the novel, written before its publication in 1952. Also among the essays is Larry Neal's "Ellison's Zoot Suit," in which he finds the novel an exemplary enactment in fiction of the "black aesthetic." The essays explore topics of narrative form, classical and vernacular points of reference, and the relationship between the themes of love and politics. Taken together with Ellison's "Working Notes" and later commentary on the novel, these essays account for the continuing appeal of Invisible Man more than fifty years after its publication. An editor's introduction and a full bibliography accompany the essays, selections from Ellison's writings, and informal statements on his novel. The volume offers a rich variety of interpretations of Invisible Man for students and scholars of Ellison. (shrink)

Explores the theories of democratic individualism articulated in the works of the American transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, pragmatic philosophers William James and John Dewey, and African-American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison.

Lily Furedi’s Subway (1934) is full of individuals. It is a painting of a subway car filled with people on their way home from work. At first, these individuals appear rather isolated, just doing their own thing. But upon closer examination, a viewer notices something rather peculiar, namely that these individuals are surreptitiously, unconsciously, uncontrollably interested in each other. A couple quietly leans in for a kiss; a man watches furtively as a woman applies her make-up; a woman reads over (...) the shoulder of a fellow passenger; and the viewer’s eyes fix on a sleeping man holding a violin case. Furedi places her viewer on this subway and in so doing allows her to catch sight of individualism in its private.. (shrink)