Background Cardiopulmonary resuscitation and subsequent care are subject to various ethical and legal issues. Few studies have addressed ethical and legal issues in post-resuscitation care. Objective To explore nurses’ experiences of ethical and legal issues in post-resuscitation care. Research design This qualitative study adopted an exploratory descriptive qualitative design using conventional content analysis. Participants and research context In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted in three educational hospital centers in northwestern Iran. Using purposive sampling, 17 nurses participated. Data were analyzed by conventional (...) content analysis. Ethical considerations The study was approved by Research Ethics Committees at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. Participation was voluntary and written informed consent was obtained. For each interview, the ethical principles including data confidentiality and social distance were respected. Findings Five main categories emerged: Pressure to provide unprincipled care, unprofessional interactions, ignoring the patient, falsifying documents, and specific ethical challenges. Pressures in the post-resuscitation period can cause nurses to provide care that is not consistent with guidelines, and to avoid communicating with physicians, patients and their families. Patients can also be labeled negatively, with early judgments made about their condition. Medical records can be written in a way to indicate that all necessary care has been provided. Disclosure, withdrawing, and withholding of therapy were also specific important ethical challenges in the field of post-resuscitation care. Conclusion There are many ethical and legal issues in post-resuscitation care. Developing evidence-based guidelines and training staff to provide ethical care can help to reduce these challenges. (shrink)

Epistemology -- Power I -- Power II -- Subjectivity -- Resistance -- Critique -- Ethics.

Abstract:Jane Addams’ short book The Long Road of Woman’s Memory, which has largely been ignored by philosophers, identifies two important powers of memory. In addition to consoling the elderly and enabling them to make meanings of their pasts, memories also have the power to calcify into stories that reinforce shared moral values and incite moral progress. These observations serve as the starting point for a conversation on narrative medicine and its potential for improving medical treatment for patients receiving end-of-life (...) care. In addition to filling in one of the many gaps that exists in the literature surrounding Addams’ work, I also aim to contribute to the growing scholarship on person-centered end-of-life care in the field of bioethics. (shrink)

A wealth of research documents the critical role of trust for social exchange and cooperative behavior. The ability to inspire trust in others can often be elusive, and distrust can have adverse interpersonal and ethical consequences. Drawing from the literature on social hierarchy and interpersonal judgments, the current research explores the predictive role of a structural paradox between high power and low status in identifying the actors most likely to be distrusted and monitored for ethical misconduct. Across four studies and (...) an internal meta-analysis, we found that the structural paradox was associated with distrust-related judgments and behaviors. In Study 1, high power-low status actors were judged as less trustworthy. In Studies 2 and 3, high power-low status actors were sent less money in a trust game, an effect fully mediated by feelings of dislike. Study 4 revealed that high power-low status actors were more likely to be monitored for cheating, an effect partially mediated by trust judgments. These findings contribute to business ethics research by identifying the structural paradox of high power-low status as a salient contextual influence impacting observers’ distrust and monitoring dynamics. Implications for reducing observers’ level of distrust of high power-low status actors are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Despite widespread attention to corruption and organizational change in the literature, to our knowledge, no research has attempted to understand the linkages between these two powerful organizational phenomena. Accordingly, we draw on major theories in ethics, sociology, and management to develop a theoretical framework for understanding how organizational change can sometimes generate corruption. We extend anomie theory and ethical climate theory to articulate the deinstitutionalization of the normative control system and argue that, through this deinstitutionalization, organizations have the potential to (...) become incubators for corruption. We qualify this process by proposing conditions more ripe for anomie and under which this deinstitutionalization is more likely to occur, propounding moderating relationships that influence organizational reconfiguration. Examples of turbulence in the contemporary business environment that can trigger change highlight our discussion. We conclude with managerial implications, offering means by which the deleterious effects of corruption may be arrested or controlled. (shrink)

Two pressures toward religious pluralism are the variety of religious traditions which seem equally successful in the transformation of human lives and that apparently sincere and equally capable truth-seekers reach divergent conclusions about the nature of ultimate reality. I discuss Hick’s Kantian explanation of these phenomena. I argue that his account is: neither the only nor the best account; furthermore that more reasonable accounts allow for the members of competing traditions to affirm the truth of their religious beliefs; and if (...) Hick’s explanation were accepted it would undermine the salvific power of the respective religious traditions. (shrink)

The Power of Teaching: Readings on the Philosophical, Theoretical, and Practical Issues Associated with Teaching and Learning provides preservice K-12 teachers with a collection of curated readings that help them prepare for their future in teaching. The reader is divided into five units, each addressing one broadly defined topic in education. The first unit introduces readers to the multiple complexities associated with learning to teach effectively. The second unit contains four articles that explore a variety of pedagogical perspectives. In the (...) third unit, readers are provided with a brief survey of a variety of purposes that shape the overarching mission of schools. The fourth unit features five readings that address the importance of creating a safe and nurturing learning environment for all students. The final unit posits a successful multicultural approach involves self-reflection, a deep understanding of culture, and respect for culturally and linguistically diverse families. Designed to educate and empower, The Power of Teaching is an ideal anthology for courses and programs in K-12 education. (shrink)

ExcerptIn 2021, in the pages of this journal, I contended that a coalition of interests in the United States had coalesced in opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump and duly taken power through the vehicle of Joe Biden.1 This coalition includes the Democratic Party, corporate elites, the media, academia, and—the subject of the present article—the national security (natsec) state. In that earlier piece, I focused on particular components of this coalition: legacy and social media. I went on in a (...) subsequent Telos piece to examine another of its elements: the academy.2 These fractions all appear, however, to be relatively minor players. While I argue that the legacy media have staged a counterrevolution to seize back control of the public sphere, this exhausts their parochial, pecuniary agenda; beyond this, they are simply part of a wider activist liberal cause. Contemporary liberal activism is in turn ideologically rooted in ideas propagated by sectors of the academy and hegemonic within it, but this has not, on my analysis, empowered the academy so much as the forces that make it increasingly redundant. (shrink)

Challenging the fundamental tenet of the multicultural movement -- that social struggles turning upon race, gender, and sexuality are struggles for recognition -- this work offers a powerful critique of current conceptions of identity and ...

The fidelity provided by rich, nuanced ethics consult narratives does not proscribe efforts to advance the profession by using data to assess performance and demonstrate value. While these two approaches have been described as in conflict with one another, the former sets the bar to which the latter should aim; to achieve this, consult data should, minimally, do two things: (1) tell the story of the case, as best as possible, in language easily accessible to both ethicists and non-ethicists alike; (...) and (2) do so in a way that elements of interest can be aggregated, disambiguated, and analyzed. Here we present a three-component system designed with that in mind.First, the Armstrong Clinical Ethics Coding System (ACECS) produces a set of six codes that tell a simplified story of the case. These six codes form a meta narrative, which, like meta data, can be aggregated, disambiguated, and analyzed. Second, we use a data model to uncover the stories those data tell. The results allow us to understand relationships, recognize patterns, and reveal insights that are otherwise not discoverable when using narratives alone. Third, due to tremendous heterogeneity among cases, we represent findings visually using techniques borrowed from data storytelling, a powerful means to demonstrate the value of a consult service to administrators and others. The ability to derive meta narratives from an aggregate of case narratives allows us to describe, in detail, the work of our consult service in a manner directly comparable to other services that use the system while we preserve unprecedented case-level nuance. If adopted broadly, this functionality suggests a means to undergird the legitimacy of the ethics consult practice itself in an evidence-based manner similar to that which undergirds other domains of healthcare. (shrink)

A recent development in the philosophy of religion has been the attempt to justify belief in God using Bayesian confirmation theory. My dissertation critically discusses two prominent spokesmen for this approach--Richard Swinburne and J. L. Mackie. Using probabilistic confirmation theory, these philosophers come to wildly divergent conclusions with respect to the hypothesis of theism; Swinburne contends that the evidence raises the overall probability of the hypothesis of theism, whereas Mackie argues that the evidence disconfirms the existence of God. After a (...) careful analysis of the individual authors, this dissertation critically examines the assumptions of the project. The authors consider arguments for the existence of God separately--the cosmological argument, the argument from design, apparent miracles, the problem of evil, and arguments from religious experience--and then conjoin them to assess the cumulative effect of the arguments. The assumptions are that the probability calculus may be interpreted for a successful inductive argument for or against the existence of God, that inference to best explanation is applicable to the justification of religious belief, that the justification of belief in God is analogous to the justification of a scientific theory, and that a classical foundationalist conception of rationality is correct. It is the contention of this dissertation that all of these assumptions are incorrect. All of the major interpretations of the probability calculus are examined and it is argued that there are either no interpretations for the probability assignments or no interpretations which will advance an argument for or against the existence of God. It is also argued that the usual methods for interpreting the explanatory power of theism will not determine any non-zero probabilities; however, density measuring will provide a non-zero interpretation. In the final chapter it is argued that a subjective Bayesian conception of rationality is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of rationality and that classical foundationalism is self-referentially inconsistent. An alternative approach to the rationality of religious belief is offered that proceeds along Reidian and Plantingan lines, belief in God is properly basic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“More or Less Raped”:Foucault, Causality, and Feminist Critiques of Sexual ViolenceKelly H. BallI say “freedom of sexual choice” and not “freedom of sexual acts” because there are sexual acts like rape which should not be permitted.… I don’t think we should have as our objective some sort of absolute freedom or total liberty of sexual action.—Michel Foucault, Ethics, Subjectivity, and TruthCausality in the subject, the unconscious of the subject, (...) the truth of the subject in the other who knows, the knowledge he holds unbeknown to him, all this found an opportunity to deploy itself in the discourse of sex.—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An IntroductionMost Feminist Readers Of Foucault are familiar with the case of the “simple farmhand,” Charles Jouy, whom Foucault briefly mentions in The History of Sexuality, Volume I (henceforth Sexuality One). The case of Charles Jouy and [End Page 52 ] Sophie Adam (the relatively unknown name of the “little girl” from whom Jouy “obtained a few caresses”) is instructive for Foucault, as it illustrates both the epistemic shifts and changing technologies of power—specifically the emergence of sexuality—during the late nineteenth century (Foucault 1990, 31). By the time Foucault published Sexuality One in 1976 (translated and published in English in 1978), he had already spent considerable time analyzing the Jouy-Adam case. In his 1974-75 lectures at the College de France, Les Anormaux, Foucault delivered an extended analysis of the case resulting from archival research he undertook at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. The infamously brief 1978 appearance of the case in Sexuality One, then, is only a distilled version of the case that references Foucault’s earlier argument in Les Anormaux about the expansion of sexuality as a productive technology of power-knowledge-pleasure. 1Much of the feminist response to Foucault’s use of the Jouy-Adam case in Sexuality One is bound up with obstacles of time and translation. While Sexuality One was published in English in 1978, Foucault’s 1974–75 lectures, Les Anormaux, were not published in French until 1999, and the English translation, Abnormal, only appeared in 2003. Clearly, this translation and publishing timeline complicates the reception of Foucault’s thinking about the production and regulation of sexuality for many American readers. The relatively late appearance of Abnormal has limited Anglophone feminist theorists’ ability to engage Foucault’s theories about sexuality and violence more extensively.With few exceptions, feminists have been overwhelmingly critical of what they view as Foucault’s reductive presentation of the Jouy-Adam case and his blindness to sexual violence in Sexuality One. 2 Linda Martín Alcoff’s 1996 essay “Dangerous Pleasures: The Politics of Pedophilia” is representative of this trend. The feminist concerns Alcoff raises regarding Foucault and the Jouy-Adam case both precede her essay and persist in more recent feminist analyses. Still, the essay remains symptomatic of how feminist theorists have responded generally to Foucault’s comments on sexual violence and specifically to his comments regarding the desexualization of rape. 3 Alcoff buttresses her critique of Foucault’s presentation of the Jouy-Adam case in Sexuality One by referring to his comments on children, sexual violence, and pedophilia in a transcript of a collective interview with Jean Danet and Guy Hocquenghem, “Sexual Morality and the Law” (Alcoff 1996, 102-106). 4 Her critique in “Dangerous Pleasures” centers on preserving a feminist capacity to determine what counts as violence and make judgments accordingly. The fact that this discussion has endured for more than thirty years (beginning with Monique Plaza’s 1981 response to Sexuality One) speaks to the persistence of sexual violence against women and children as a feminist concern. 5 That concern is somewhat at odds with Foucault’s conception of sexuality as a productive mode of modern biopower. [End Page 53]Reading athwart Alcoff and the feminist tradition she represents, I argue here that the practice of making judgments about sexual violence relies upon a concept of causality that is an extension of the modern framework of power-knowledge-pleasure. I do so by focusing on Foucault’s more detailed account of the Jouy-Adam case In Abnormal. Indeed, reading... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eclecticism and the Technologies of Discernment in Pietist PedagogyKelly J. WhitmerWhile the Franckesche Stiftungen (the Francke Foundations) of Halle/Saale are perhaps best known today as the institutional centre of German Pietism, throughout much of the eighteenth century they were widely regarded as a pedagogically innovative Schulstadt (or city of schools). The founder of this Schulstadt, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), was many things to many people: Pietist, radical Lutheran, theologian, (...) pedagogue, professor of Greek and Oriental languages, preacher, member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and proponent of a Protestant mission. Like most participants in what was initially a grassroots movement oriented around the personality of Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), a minister active in Frankfurt am Main around 1670 who sought to breathe new life into the Lutheran church,2 Francke rarely referred to himself as a Pietist. From his post at the University of Halle (founded in 1694), this Spenerian prote´gé set out to create a new "universal seminar" that would make the assimilation of many diverse points of view, identities, and competing strands of knowledge its [End Page 545] defining mandate. "My purpose," Francke wrote in a letter to a Pastor Ring from Grünebartau (October 29, 1712), "is to develop a universal institution, useful for bringing into a good and holy order all that is important for the Christianity of all orders of society and relates, in some way, to the healing power of the soul."3 His Schulstadt would "bring into order" a myriad of relationships around a single point and relied, quite deliberately I propose, on an eclectic methodology to do this.In recent years, the relationship of Francke's Schulstadt to the implementation of Brandenburg-Prussia's first compulsory schooling system and teacher training institutes has been better documented than in the past.4 Scholars of education have paid closer attention to the methodological innovations of Pietist pedagogy, and its points of convergence with the ideas of John Locke (1632–1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) have become subjects of mounting interest.5 Francke's significance for the history of education has been assessed mainly in terms of his ability to realize the pedagogically inclined reform projects of seventeenth-century figures, such as Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670).6 We know that the thousands of children who participated in the life of the Schulstadt very often left Halle to become actively involved as teachers and ministers throughout the German states. Several played pivotal roles in the development of the late eighteenth-century educational reform movement known as Philanthropismus and its associated practices and institutions.7 [End Page 546]Perhaps the most striking feature of Francke's Schulstadt was its curriculum, which featured innovative training regimens in applied mathematics for children from diverse social backgrounds.8 The scale and rigor of these programs were to be found nowhere else at the time and can be linked to the overtly pedagogical mandate of the Berlin Academy of Sciences (f. 1701). These regimens deliberately juxtaposed artisanal and learned knowledge and stressed the importance of the eye as a conciliatory medium.9 Despite having acquired largely anti-empiricist reputations over the years due to their lingering interest in alchemy and their roles in securing the banishment of the "rationalist" mathematician and philosopher, Christian Wolff (1679–1754), from their community in 1723, careful consideration of what Halle Pietists were teaching in their schools suggests a different view. These historical actors reconciled categories of knowledge production and transmission often framed as oppositional—despite what several scholars have recently shown to be their clear interconnectedness.10I argue here for the predominance of eclecticism in the Schulstadt, including a pronounced emphasis on the "middling" mathematical and mechanical sciences as tools of conciliation and self-improvement. I seek to illustrate how eclecticism was much more than a Philosophiebegriff that was well received by some Pietists, as Walter Sparn has argued, but that it is better understood as a set of conciliatory practices, traces of which resonate in Pietist lesson plans.11 Teachers in Francke's schools integrated experimental philosophy into an educational program that was introducing children to the exercises of... (shrink)

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty presents powerful arguments against traditional epistemology, conceived as a quest both for empirical grounds that provide certainty and for necessary truths that provide a conceptual framework within which to couch empirical findings. Rorty finds traditional epistemology in general, and specifically any appeal to representation that might ground knowledge, to be an unmitigated failure. In this paper, I show that Rorty at least considered but ultimately rejected the possibility of a type of (...) epistemically relevant, foundational representation with a normative status. Drawing on the work of Tyler Burge, I argue that Rorty was too quick in dismissing the important, epistemically foundational role of perceptual representation. A new and improved picture of foundational epistemology emerges. Throughout the paper, I aim to shed light on the fundamental disconnect between Rorty’s and Burge’s approaches to epistemology, and to philosophical investigation more generally. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's conception of the role of objects in our philosophical understanding of the logic of our language is critical for his early philosophy in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. While the important connections between Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics and Wittgenstein's Tractatus have long been recognized, recent work by Jed Buchwald has deepened our knowledge of the importance of the object-orientation of Hertz's scientific work in a manner that should also deepen our understanding of the nature of objects in the Tractatus. (...) I will argue that there are important ontological links, involving "a certain physical scheme, one that had powerful implications for thinking as well as doing," between Hertz's work and Wittgenstein's early philosophy. (shrink)

Technoscientific research, a kind of scientific research conducted within the decontextualized approach (DA), uses advanced technology to produce instruments, experimental objects, and new objects and structures, that enable us to gain knowledge of states of affairs of novel domains, especially knowledge about new possibilities of what we can do and make, with the horizons of practical, industrial, medical or military innovation, and economic growth and competition, never far removed from view. The legitimacy of technoscientific innovations can be appraised only in (...) the course of considering fully what sorts of objects technoscientific objects are: objects that embody scientific knowledge confirmed within DA; physical/chemical/biological objects, realizations of possibilities discovered in research conducted within DA, brought to realization by means of technical/experimental/instrumental interventions; and components of social/ecological systems, objects that embody the values of technological progress and (most of them) values of capital and the market. What technoscientific objects are - their powers, tendencies, sources of their being, effects on human beings and social/economic systems, how they differ from non technoscientific objects - cannot be grasped from technoscientific inquiry alone; scientific inquiry that is not reducible to that conducted within DA is also needed. The knowledge that underlies and explains the efficacy of technoscientific objects is never sufficient to grasp what sorts of object they are and could become. Science cannot be reduced to technoscience. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between the thought of Michel Foucault and that of Axel Honneth, arguing in favour of the former against the latter. I begin by considering Honneth’s early engagement in The Critique of Power with Foucault’s thought. I rebut Honneth’s criticisms of Foucault here as a misreading, one which prevents Honneth from coming to grips with Foucault’s position and hence the challenge that it poses to Honneth’s project. I then move on to offer a Foucauldian critique (...) of Honneth’s own position, arguing for a Foucauldian alternative to Critical Theory. (shrink)

There has been an explosion of interest in “innovation-oriented knowledge” and utility in early modern knowledge economies. Despite this, a healthy skepticism surrounding the category of “useful knowledge” persists, at least in part because of its association with intentional concealment. Helpful in many ways, this skepticism has fostered a tendency to overlook a variety of efforts to teach “useful knowledge” in the period: efforts that were anchored in engagement with the real and involved the cultivation of an ability to direct (...) the powers of the imagination. Indeed, for some the imagination served as a faculty central to an epistemology of use. This article takes as its example a handbook written by an early political economist who endeavored to teach readers how to imagine uses for things they observed in collections while traveling so they would be better prepared to participate in a new, transnational culture of innovation. (shrink)

Ockham’s razor is the principle that, all other things being equal, scientists ought to prefer simpler theories. In recent years, philosophers have argued that simpler theories make better predictions, possess theoretical virtues like explanatory power, and have other pragmatic virtues like computational tractability. However, such arguments fail to explain how and why a preference for simplicity can help one find true theories in scientific inquiry, unless one already assumes that the truth is simple. One new solution to that problem is (...) the Ockham efficiency theorem, which states that scientists who heed Ockham’s razor retract their opinions less often and sooner than do their non-Ockham competitors. The theorem neglects, however, to consider competitors following random strategies and in many applications random strategies are known to achieve better worst-case loss than deterministic strategies. In this paper, we describe two ways to extend the result to a very general class of random, empirical strategies. The first extension concerns expected retractions, retraction times, and errors and the second extension concerns retractions in chance, times of retractions in chance, and chances of errors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionParenting Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders During the Transition to AdulthoodKelly Dineen and Margaret Bultas, Symposium EditorsThis issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics is devoted to the personal stories of parents or guardians whose children with ASDs are transitioning or have transitioned to adulthood. The same parents who navigated the educational and health systems with little support twenty years ago once again find themselves as pioneers in somewhat unchartered (...) territory. Transition to adulthood, again, presents new terrain without well–defined parameters or reliable expectations for individuals with ASD and the parents who support them. At current, very little has been studied or written about the unique perspectives of parents during transition. What does exist suggests that parents of individuals with autism perceive their experiences as novel, even as compared with parents of children with other kinds of disabilities (Woodgate, Ateach, & Secco, 2008).One in 88 children is estimated to have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 2012, a 78% increase since 2007 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012). Although a variety of factors are certainly involved, the rate of diagnosis of individuals with ASDs has increased dramatically over the last twenty years and by all accounts the level and quality of support in health and social systems have lagged behind.While support and interventions have progressed significantly over time, attention on older populations has played a secondary role to early interventions. The proliferation of young people with ASD has outpaced supportive efforts at all levels. ASDs are usually diagnosed in childhood and funding for and access to research and interventions for children have resulted from, in no small part, the zealous efforts of parents. As this growing population of individuals with ASDs transitions to adulthood, finding appropriate supports and interventions have proven more elusive and more complicated. The hallmark symptoms of ASDs include social skill deficits and communication and behavioral difficulties—all traits that especially strain typical teenage and young adult relationships. Recent research backs up these difficulties and indicates that individuals with ASDs fare relatively poorly in traditional measures of independence such as employment, education and social relationships. Parents like the authors in this symposium continue to work to help their teenage and adult children navigate the demands, challenges and rewards of adulthood and independence with all its uncertainties and surprises.The editors of this issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics solicited the personal stories of the parents who have navigated this transition. The call for stories was distributed to autism awareness groups, autism list–serves, bloggers, and social media outlets. Personal appeals to thought leaders and advocacy groups to distribute the call for stories also produced a number of responses. The [End Page 147] people and organizations that passed along our request and responded are too numerous to list here but our gratitude is sincere: their help made this issue possible.We hope the stories will give readers a sense of what parents find rewarding as well as especially challenging during this time and what actions and supports make a difference for the better. Stories about any aspect of the transition were welcome, ranging from navigating the health system to issues surrounding romantic relationships. We welcomed parents’ thoughts on any topic, including gender, level of function, provider behavior, stigma, friendship, services (existing or needed), decision making, independent living, co–morbidities, expectations, work, school or relationships.These topics and more emerged. Stories primarily came from mothers; however one father and one uncle also contributed. Consistent with diagnostic trends, most tell stories of parenting young men. The 12 stories that were selected for this edition represent just a fraction of the diverse set of issues, needs and commonalities of this growing population of adults. We received more stories than we could put in print. Twelve were selected to represent a range of experiences. Many other stories were so powerful that they will appear on–line in the Project MUSE edition of the journal.Commentators also represent a diverse group of professionals whose work includes direct care and support of individuals with ASD and their families, education, research, scholarship and advocacy. Some of our commentators also have a child or a loved one with ASD.Patricia Bashe... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Veils: The Poetics of John Rawls*George Armstrong KellyPlutarch recounts in Sais, a holy place of Egypt, the image of Isis, understood by the Greeks to be a version of Pallas Athena, bore the inscription: “I am everything that has been, that is, and that shall ever be: no human mortal has discovered me behind my veil.” 1 This recalls a very different god, Yahweh, whose claim is also to (...) compress all knowledge into an eternal present and whose dwelling, in Solomon’s temple, is in a special sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, also guarded by a veil.There, one might say, the similarity ends. Yahweh is a masculine diety (“the father of his people”), though imagistically he remains a space or an absence filled by a name (“I Am That I Am”) indicative of the transcendent distance of the eternal. Isis is a female shape imaging carnal knowledge behind her veil (with its Machiavellian, Baconian temptations). Her truth, as Plutarch makes clear, is driven by desire, truth being a “desire for divinity,” “a study... and work more holy than the vow and obligation of chastity or the guarding and sealing of any....” 2 The almost certain wages, however, for the would-be ravisher is unfulfillment and death, whereas Yahweh, having become the God of the Christians, promises eternal life through the sacrifice of his only-begotten son and a truth above knowledge “that shall make you free” (John 8:32). [End Page 343]To the Semitic mind the name expressed and represented the power of the person: God was present in a special way wherever the “Name of Yahweh” was. 3 The content of the Holy of Holies, originally portable in the ancient Ark of the Covenant, was the two stone tablets of the Law received by Moses at Horeb (1 Kings 8:9). God’s presence, once installed in the Temple of Jerusalem, was represented as “a cloud [that] filled the house of the Lord” (ibid, 8:10; cf. 2 Chronicles 5:10, 13). God was cloud; knowledge was duty. Of the physical place of this indwelling principle of knowledge, Jesus said (John 2:19): “Destroy this sanctuary: within three days I shall raise it up again.” The evangelist explains that his metaphor is transferred to the new Christian idea of the word made flesh. 4 John’s gospel does not cite the rendering of the veil of the temple, but the synoptic gospels all recount that it was “rent in twain from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:51, Mark 16:38, Luke 23:45) at Christ’s Crucifixion. The idea is essentially that knowledge as command and duty has been surpassed by a knowledge that is love in the crucified revelation of the Son of God. This returns us, ambiguously, to the image of the goddess Isis; for even in Hebrew scripture it is foretold: “The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me” (Song of Solomon 5:7). If there is here a clear prefiguration of the fate of both Christ and the temple, there is also an echo of the likely fate of the harlot Rahab, who let Joshua’s spies into Jericho, had God not saved her from the ruin of that city (Joshua 6:17).The purpose of this essay is not to dwell on obvious imagistic and psychological attachments between wisdom and sexual knowledge, but early notice of this liaison is needed to connect the philosophical discourse on veils with motifs disclosed in figurative literature. For the veil that hides the object of desire may also hide the reality of the name or of naming; preserving the veil may be a mode of love, just as challenging it is also. For example, when John Rawls writes: “The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances,” 5 what does his image of the veil intend to convey? What exactly is on each side of this veil? From... (shrink)

We are, Julia Kristeva writes, strangers to ourselves; and indeed much of contemporary theory describes the human condition as one of alienation. Eloquently arguing that we cannot explain the developement of individuality or subjectivity apart from its social context, Kelly Oliver makes a powerful case for recognizing the social aspects of alienation and the psychic aspects of oppression.

The Mental Capacity Act 2005 came into force in England and Wales in 2007. Its primary purpose is to provide “a statutory framework to empower and protect people who may lack capacity to make some decisions for themselves.” Examples of such people are those with dementia, learning disabilities, mental health problems, and so on. The Act also gives those who currently have capacity a legal framework within which they can make arrangements for a time when they may come to lack (...) it. Toward this end, it allows for them to make advance decisions or to appoint proxy decision makers with lasting powers of attorney. (shrink)

Michael E. Zimmennan claims that the fundamental source of our society’s destructive environmental practices is our “dualistic consciousness,” our tendency to see ourselves as essentially separate from the rest of the world; he argues that only by means of the transfonnational experience of nondualistic consciousness can we develop a more life-enhancing environmental ethic. I suggest that dreams and dream interpretation may provide exactly this sort of experience. Dreams present us with powerful challenges to the ordinary categories and structures of our (...) daily lives, and they reveal in numinous, transformational images how we are ultimately members of a web of being that includes alllife. I offer Victor Tumer’s concept of communitas as a means of clarifying and unifying the issues Zimmennan and I are discussing. In conclusion I sketch out some of the practical applications of these ideas to the task of improving our society’s treatment of the environment. (shrink)

In Branden Thornhill-Miller and Peter Millican’s challenging and provocative essay, we hear a considerably longer, more scholarly and less melodic rendition of John Lennon’s catchy tune—without religion, or at least without first-order supernaturalisms, there’d be significantly less intra-group violence. First-order supernaturalist beliefs, as defined by Thornhill-Miller and Peter Millican, are “beliefs that claim unique authority for some particular religious tradition in preference to all others”. According to M&M, first-order supernaturalist beliefs are exclusivist, dogmatic, empirically unsupported, and irrational. Moreover, again according (...) to M&M, we have perfectly natural explanations of the causes that underlie such beliefs. They then make a case for second-order supernaturalism, “which maintains that the universe in general, and the religious sensitivities of humanity in particular, have been formed by supernatural powers working through natural processes”. Second-order supernaturalism is a kind of theism, more closely akin to deism than, say, Christianity or Buddhism. It is, as such, universal, empirically supported, and beneficial. With respect to its pragmatic value, second-order supernaturalism, according to M&M, gets the good of religion without its bad. Second-order supernaturalism is thus rational and inconducive to violence. In this paper, I will examine just one small but important part of M&M’s argument: the claim that religion is a primary motivator of violence and that its elimination would eliminate or curtail a great deal of violence in the world. Imagine, they say, no religion, too. Janusz Salamon offers a friendly extension or clarification of M&M’s second-order theism, one that I think, with emendations, has promise. He argues that the core of first-order religions, the belief that Ultimate Reality is the Ultimate Good, is rational and, if widely conceded and endorsed by adherents of first-order religions, would reduce conflict in the world. While I favor the virtue of intellectual humility endorsed in both papers, I will argue contra M&M that belief in first-order religion is not a primary motivator of conflict and violence. Second, partly contra Salamon, who I think is half right, I will argue that the religious resources for compassion can and should come from within both the particular and the universal aspects of religious beliefs. Finally, I will argue that both are guilty, as I am, of the philosopher’s obsession with belief. (shrink)

Hermann Cohen’s early interpretation of Kant’s theory of freedom anticipates contemporary interpretations in denying that freedom signifies a literal metaphysical power. Cohen would have been critical, however, of the view popular among contemporary Kantians that the concept of autonomy can be justified by a direct appeal to the standpoint of the one who exercises and evaluates conscious moral choices. Cohen rejects Kant’s own strategy of appealing to the moral law as a “revelation” of freedom, undertaking a strictly transcendental derivation of (...) both freedom and morality. Cohen’s own attempt to ground freedom and morality in a set of purely transcendental refl ections is a failure, but understanding the reasons for this failure enables us to draw important conclusions about the alleged priority of the value of autonomy in the normative domain, and hence about the contemporary viability of Kantian positions in the field of ethics. (shrink)

Rips et al. raise important questions about the relation between infant quantification and achievement of natural number concepts. However, they may be oversimplifying the interactions that characterize actual development in real time. Though they propose a worthwhile agenda for future research, its explanatory power will be limited if it does not address developmental issues with greater sensitivity.

Farming is undergoing a digital revolution. Our existing review of current Big Data applications in the agri-food sector has revealed several collection and analytics tools that may have implications for relationships of power between players in the food system. For example, Who retains ownership of the data generated by applications like Monsanto Corproation's Weed I.D. “app”? Are there privacy implications with the data gathered by John Deere's precision agricultural equipment? Systematically tracing the digital revolution in agriculture, and charting the affordances (...) as well as the limitations of Big Data applied to food and agriculture, should be a broad research goal for Big Data scholarship. Such a goal brings data scholarship into conversation with food studies and it allows for a focus on the material consequences of big data in society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RESPONSE TO QAMAR-UL HUDA Robert Hamerton-Kelly Stanford University Qamar and I communicated by email. The text of my response is basically what I sent him by email. Dear Qamar: Thanks for your greeting. I have read your paper with interest and learned from it. Here is a brief account of what I plan to say. My response will be chiefly from the point of view of the mimetic (...) theory which holds that religion in its human, pagan, unrevealed form is a structure of sacred violence that lives by scapegoating and sacrifice and generates culture out ofthe victim by means of, firstly ritual, the repetition of the first murder as sacrifice, secondly prohibition, religious law that enforces differentiation, and thus prevents the crisis of undifferentiation, that is the precursor of surrogate victimage and thirdly myth, the account of the originary violence told from the point of views of the perpetrators, coverup for their violence. Islam's monotheism is a powerful antidote to this pagan sacred, indeed, in terms ofmimetic theory, all the great religions are more or less in reaction against the pagan sacred, against generative violence; and one ofthe marks oftheir greatness resides in the candor with which they address the problem of the residual sacred violence in themselves. This was my problem with Rabbi Kimelman's presentation yesterday, and I confess it is my problem with your presentation. In this regard Iconsider the Buddhistcontribution to this symposiumto be the best of the lot, precisely because it is so candid about the residue of sacred 100Robert Hamerton-Kelly violence in this truly great religion. I think that the presentation on Christianity too was, in this regard, candid. Islam's monotheism is a powerful antidote to this pagan sacred, and I want to drawjust for a minute on that. As you yourself mentioned, the rise ofIslamwas aconflictual phenomenon within thepagan diversity ofArabia in the sixth century. Andthat itselfis disclosive oftherelationshipbetween this emerging monotheism and the residual pagan sacred. Now, you understand, that in terms of mimetic theory, the god is the transfigured victim. So the god is essentially a center of violence. And the emergence of monotheism emerges as a critique of the pagan sacred, the transfigured victim. Now here are some indications in the biblical tradition that illustrate this that I find are quite interesting. You recall that monotheism in the Bible first emerges in the texts of Second Isaiah, Deutero Isaiah. Where the Israelite—in this case Jewish—experience of exile leads the prophet to perceive that God is not just the God of Israel—that is, it's not just henotheism—but is the God of all the world, and that he can indeed work through Cyrus, King ofthe Medes and Persians. It is surely significant that monotheism emerges in the very same text in which the figure of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh appears. It seems as if the emergence of monotheism goes along with the emerging recognition that the victim is innocent. That, ifyou like, is the demythologization ofthe sacred victim of the pagan divinity. I refer you now, secondly, to the ten commandments, the ten words of Moses from Sinai in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 6. As we discussed in our seminar at Stanford and as René has made clear in his most recent book (ISee Satan Falling likeLightening ), the tenth commandment,"Thou shalt not covet" is indeed a prohibition on mimetic desire. This is what the Apostle Paul understood when he picked up in a book epithumesis—in Greek: "you shall not desire." By the way thuo, the root thu in Greek is the root for sacrifice. So epithumia/desire, is etymologically in Greek linked to sacrifice. "You shall not desire" is a prohibition on sacred violence. That's the last commandment and, I take it as an important summary of the previous nine commandments. What I have not seen generally appreciated is that the first commandment is a prohibition on idolatry. It is in fact the establishment of the absolute monotheism. So it is as if the ten commandments are bracketed by two stridently mimetic antimimetic injunctions: theinjunction on idolatry and the injunction on mimetic desire. And I think you can... (shrink)

One of the factors that contributes to an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness - his or her moral worth – is effort. On the one hand, agents who act effortlessly seem to have high moral worth. On the other hand, agents who act effortfully seem to have high moral worth as well. I explain this pair of intuitions and explore the contour of our views about cases in between them. This paper uses conceptual graphs for clarity and, in additional work I (...) have done on value theory, as arguments. Conceptual graphs reflect a way of doing philosophy that is new and powerful, as reflected in work over the past several decades by Derek Parfit, Shelly Kagan, Larry Temkin, and Thomas Hurka. (shrink)

This textually well-supported book takes seriously Kant’s corpus as a system, claiming that devoted attention to the whole makes each individual work in turn more intelligible, consistent, and compelling. Wuerth claims that a key to Kant’s system is Kant’s account of the self or soul. For Wuerth, Kant’s self is a simple, noumenal substance that possesses powers by which it effects accidents. This is against the familiar interpretation, associated with Patricia Kitcher, Henry Allison, Robert Pippin, Karl Ameriks, and Béatrice (...) Longuenesse, that Kant in the critical period rejects any and all ontologically significant claims about the self. Wuerth says this.. (shrink)

Policy feedback, or the process in which policies create constituencies vested in their maintenance, is a durable feature of the American welfare state. Scholars have shown that policy visibility conditions how feedback effects unfold: for public-private policies—arrangements in which the state delegates service provision to private actors, often described as “hidden” or “submerged”—policy feedback typically galvanizes not citizens but market actors that benefit indirectly from these subsidies. This article extends theories of public-private policy feedback from market actors to charitable organizations (...) through a case study of the charitable contributions deduction. The deduction’s incremental expansion is found to have mobilized charities as powerful stakeholders in the policy’s endurance. Charities’ efforts to protect the deduction, together with the efforts of lawmakers, have couched the policy in a politics of neoliberalism and disguised its effects, insulating it from reform even as elites have netted a greater share of its benefits over time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The King and the Crowd: Divine Right and Popular Sovereignty in the French Revolution Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly Stanford University We French cannot really think about politics or philosophy or literature without remembering that all this— politics, philosophy, literature—began, in the modem world, under the sign of a crime. A crime was committed in France in 1793. They killed a good and entirely likable king who was the incarnation (...) of legitimacy. We cannot not remember that this crime was horrible... When we speak about writing, the accent is on what is necessarily criminal in writing. (Jean-François Lyotard, "Discussion Lyotard-Rorty" 583; quoted in Dunn 165) The condemnation ofthe king is at the crux ofour contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God. (Albert Camus, The Rebel 120; quoted in Dunn 140) Susan Dunn makes a well-documented case that the death of Louis XVI was unconsciously understood, especially by the Jacobins, as a human sacrifice that was necessary for the founding of the republic. "Louis must die because the patrie must live," said Robespierre at the king's trial, and the representative Carra considered Louis "the source of corruption and servitude... the fatal talisman ofall our ills" whose death would cause the people to be "regenerated in morality and virtue" (Dunn 15-37). The king was a monster and the source ofall the ills, and his death 68Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly had the power to alleviate those ills and regenerate the nation. This image of the king as sacrificial victim persisted throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in French literature and politics, sometimes assimilating itself to the image of Jesus Christ who died for the sins of the world. Legitimist writers like Joseph de Maistre saw his death precisely in this light as a great Christian sacrifice that would do France and the world good (Dunn 28-37). The king as a sacred monster whose life causes all ill and whose death brings healing is the classic figure of the scapegoat or sacrificial victim identified by René Girard. Susan Dunn recognizes this but because she does not know Girard's mimetic theory she is not able to explain the significance of the scapegoat king. Her work is, indeed, as Conor Cruise O'Brien says in the foreword, a work ofdemonstration rather than argument, of evidence rather than interpretation. I offer a mimetic interpretation ofthe Jacobin claim that the death ofthe king was the human sacrifice that founded the republic, and an argument that a universally operative generative mechanism forged the historical events of the revolution.1 There is no essential difference between the sovereignty ofthe king and the sovereignty of the people. In both cases sovereignty arises from a metaphorical contract that threatens death to anyone who violates it. The royal metaphors are organic while the revolutionary metaphors are legal and rational, but they all express the sacrificial structure ofpolitical power. Revolutionary democracy imports the fiction ofrationality to obscure its sacrificial structure. The desire ofthe general will for contractual equality is a transformation of mimetic desire in search of a victim around which the bad violence ofmimetic rivalry can coalesce into the good violence of sacred order. Sovereignty, therefore, is structurally single and simple; it is violence transformed through the sacred into the powers oforder. Max Weber understood this in general ifnot in its particulars when he defined sovereignty as the monopoly of the means of violence within a single territory.2 1 Mimetic theory was discovered by René Girard. I have given an account of my understanding of it in 7Ae Gospel and the Sacred 129-52. The idea of a mechanism universally operative in human history isjustified in the emerging discipline ofevolutionary psychology. Such mechanisms are the result ofthe interaction ofgenetic and environmental factors in the process of evolution (see Robert Wright). 2 The precise quotation from Weber is as follows: "The state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a The King and the Crowd69 The transition from royal to popular sovereignty is a transformation of the basic pattern of victim and group. The... (shrink)

This book makes a case for the permissibility of reactive blame – the angry, harmful variety. Blame is a thorny philosophical problem, as it is notoriously difficult to specify the conditions under which an agent is deserving of blame, is deserving of blame in the basic sense, and furthermore why this is so. Kelly McCormick argues that sharpening the focus to reactive, angry blame can both show us how best to characterize the problem itself, and suggest a possible solution (...) to it, because even reactive blame is both valuable and deserved in the basic sense. Finally, McCormick shows how, despite the many facets of the dark side of blame, adopting an explicitly victim-centered approach highlights a powerful argument from empathy for retaining reactive blame and its attendant attitudes and practices. (shrink)

How does the term ‘free will’ refer? This question seems to lie at the center of debates about whether the attitudes and practices that depend on our successful attributions of basic-desert-entailing moral responsibility ought to be preserved or eliminated. In this paper I tackle questions about the way that different reference-fixing conventions might inform disagreement between preservationists and eliminativists about free will and moral responsibility, and argue that even recent elimination-friendly work on reference fails to offer much real support for (...) eliminativism. In fact, making explicit the role that different motivating concerns play in rendering certain reference-fixing conventions operative for eliminativists and preservationists suggests at least one powerful reference-based argument in favor of preservationism. (shrink)

We present a theoretical framework bearing on the evolution of written communication. We analyze writing as a special kind of graphic code. Like languages, graphic codes consist of stable, conventional mappings between symbols and meanings, but (unlike spoken or signed languages) their symbols consist of enduring images. This gives them the unique capacity to transmit information in one go across time and space. Yet this capacity usually remains quite unexploited, because most graphic codes are insufficiently informative. They may only be (...) used for mnemonic purposes or as props for oral communication in real-time encounters. Writing systems, unlike other graphic codes, work by encoding a natural language. This allows them to support asynchronous communication in a more powerful and versatile way than any other graphic code. Yet, writing systems will not automatically unlock the capacity to communicate asynchronously. We argue that this capacity is a rarity in non-literate societies, and not so frequent even in literate ones. Asynchronous communication is intrinsically inefficient because asynchrony constrains the amount of information that the interlocutors share and limits possibilities for repair. This would explain why synchronous, face-to-face communication always fosters the development of sophisticated codes (natural languages), but similar codes for asynchronous communication evolve with more difficulties. It also implies that writing cannot have evolved, at first, for supporting asynchronous communication. (shrink)

The images from wars in the Middle East that haunt us are those of young women killing and torturing. Their media circulated stories share a sense of shock. They have both galvanized and confounded debates over feminism and women's equality. And, as Oliver argues in this essay, they share, perhaps subliminally, the problematic notion of women as both offensive and defensive weapons of war, a notion that is symptomatic of fears of women's “mysterious” powers.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Life Worthy of the Gods: The Materialist Psychology of EpicurusKelly E. ArensonDavid Konstan. A Life Worthy of the Gods: The Materialist Psychology of Epicurus. Las Vegas-Zurich-Athens: Parmenides Publishing, 2008. Pp. xx + 176. Paper, $34.00.In this modestly expanded edition of his 1973 book, Some Aspects of Epicurean Psychology (Brill), David Konstan attempts to flesh out the Epicurean explanation of the causes of unhappiness: “empty beliefs” (kenodoxia)—most importantly, (...) the groundless fear of death—and the irrational desires that fuel and are fueled by them. Konstan’s central argument, preserved from the earlier edition, is deceptively simple: empty beliefs, according to Epicureans, are in large part the product of a symbolic association—a “linguistic confusion”—of the afterlife with certain real-life human ills, such as poverty and obscurity.In the first chapter, which is new to this edition, Konstan calls on psychology to flesh out the Epicurean understanding of empty fears and irrational desires—ancient psychology, that is: a science of the soul. Konstan’s reading of the relation between sensation (aisthēseis), the passions (pathē) of pleasure and pain, and belief (doxa) in Epicurean doctrine is unorthodox but thorough. Rather than mapping pathē onto either the soul as a whole or the body, Konstan assigns pathē to the non-rational part of the soul, the seat of sensation. He locates the emotions, which “do not seem to have a special name in Epicurean theory,” in the rational part (11). Crucial to this schema is Konstan’s claim, based on Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and Diogenes Laertius’s doxography of Epicurus, that Epicureans did not consider emotions such as fear and joy to be pathē at all, since emotions depend on memory and reasoning, whereas pathē do not. The upshot is that fear, as a rational emotion, involves belief and evaluation, and is therefore susceptible to error; whence the psychological roots of pernicious “empty beliefs.”In chapter two, Konstan addresses the Epicurean conundrum of why humans are plagued by fears and anxieties when their needs are so basic. Konstan takes as an explanation of this phenomenon Lucretius’s analysis of irrational desires and their parasitic relationship [End Page 95] with baseless fears. Out of their fear of death—the fear to beat all fears, according to Epicureans—people irrationally desire goods such as wealth, power, and glory that they mistakenly believe will delay their descent into the underworld. Konstan contends that there was a “symbolic association between poverty and death’s antechamber” that was not merely metaphorical (45); to escape poverty is not to cheat something like death, but to cheat death itself, just as to pursue wealth is literally to pursue life. In their vain quest to waylay death, people resort to greediness, crime, deceit—in short, any behavior that could result in material gain. Unfortunately, these unsavory activities serve only to augment rather than assuage fears, since wrongdoers fear being punished for their illicit deeds. The fear of punishment in turn spurs more irrational desires, forming a vicious cycle of mutually reinforcing behavior and states of mind that are incompatible with tranquility.In the final two chapters, Konstan combs Epicurean social theory for the roots of irrational fears and desires and shows how Epicurean epistemology enables the sage to avoid them. Konstan argues that harmful fears and desires emerged when words came to refer not only to visible sensory phenomena, but also to abstract notions whose referents might be phantoms—misleading accounts of the gods and the limits of desire that do not correspond with reality. In addition, laws served to foment fears of divine retribution and death as lawmakers attempted to regulate behavior by disseminating myths about the wrath of the gods and the afterlife. In the final chapter, Konstan is on well-trodden ground when he claims that the Epicurean sage is able to control fears and desires by understanding the nature of reality, pleasure, and human needs.This book will primarily be of interest to scholars of Epicureanism; the sheer number of footnotes and the technical language make it rather inaccessible to the non-specialist. And the specialist may find that Konstan’s treatment of the... (shrink)

This article integrates research on gendered organizations and the work-family interface to investigate an innovative workplace initiative, the Results-Only Work Environment, implemented in the corporate headquarters of Best Buy, Inc. While flexible work policies common in other organizations “accommodate” individuals, this initiative attempts a broader and deeper critique of the organizational culture. We address two research questions: How does this initiative attempt to change the masculinized ideal worker norm? And what do women’s and men’s responses reveal about the persistent ways (...) that gender structures work and family life? Data demonstrate the ideal worker norm is pervasive and powerful, even as employees begin critically examining expectations regarding work time that have historically privileged men. Employees’ responses to ROWE are also gendered. Women are more enthusiastic, while men are more cautious. Ambivalence about and resistance to change is expressed in different ways depending on gender and occupational status. (shrink)

The images from wars in the Middle East that haunt us are those of young women killing and torturing. Their media circulated stories share a sense of shock. They have both galvanized and confounded debates over feminism and women's equality. And, as Oliver argues in this essay, they share, perhaps subliminally, the problematic notion of women as both offensive and defensive weapons of war, a notion that is symptomatic of fears of women's "mysterious" powers.

In this chapter the author tracks the ethics of deconstruction as it moves through The Beast and the Sovereign, to see where it leads us and where it leaves us; and examines the role of the machine in Derrida's deconstructive project, particularly as it operates in this seminar. He shows how machine is another nickname for the operation of difference in so far as it is an undecidable figure or concept that both works for and against the binary oppositions and (...) dichotomies so popular in our culture, most especially Nature and Culture, Mind and Body, and Man and Animal. Derrida's invocation of the machine has powerful implications for thinking about ethics and what he calls the distinction between morality and ethics, a distinction that ultimately cannot be maintained but is nevertheless necessary to make, for the sake of thinking through ethics itself and for the hope of ethical thinking. (shrink)

According to Peter van Inwagen, there are no successful philosophical arguments for substantive conclusions. He argues for this thesis in two steps. First, he puts forward and defends a “criterion of philosophical success,” according to which a philosophical argument is a success just in case it has the power to convert any ideally rational agnostic to its conclusion. He then argues that, given the kind of disagreement we find among philosophers, we have good reason to think that no philosophical arguments (...) for substantive conclusions satisfy that criterion. This paper contests van Inwagen’s case at both steps: first, it offers objections to his proposed criterion of philosophical success; second, it argues that even if we are wrong and his criterion is correct, the kind of disagreement that we find among actual philosophers does not provide a good reason to think that no philosophical arguments meet the relevant standard. (shrink)

In Tyranny of the Gene: Personalized Medicine and Its Threat to Public Health (Knopf, 2023), James Tabery traces the ascendance of personalized or precision medicine in America, arguing that America's emphasis on genetics offers more hype than transformational power. In his examination of the power struggles, social relationships, and technological advances that centered the gene in American health policy, Tabery demonstrates how an intensive focus on genetics draws attention away from both the fundamental causes of health disparities and more‐effective changes (...) that could be made to developmental, physical, and social environments. American policy‐makers, health care institutions, funders, and bioethicists should not let the technological shine and attractive politics of personalized medicine continue to replace the hard but necessary work of addressing sociopolitical causes of disease and illness. (shrink)

This essay explores the important role played by the figure of the virgin girl at the centre of The Beast and The Sovereign. Derrida hints that she may offer a figure between the beast and the sovereign, between the two marionettes of Nature and Culture. Moreover, it seems that she is both what props up the fabled distinction between man and animal and at the same time that upon which man erects himself as sovereign lord and master. Taking Derrida's suggestions (...) further, I argue that the virgin girl both does and undoes sovereign power as phallic power. She is the figure behind the erection of sovereignty. Indeed, her appearance is both necessary and threatening insofar as she both erects sovereign phallic power and threatens to reveal its impotence. In this way, the girl operates between feminine and masculine, between Nature and Culture, between the beast and the sovereign, particularly as her virginity and its deflowering are essential to the cut between the two sides of these traditional binaries. Finally, her appearance is telling in relation to the movements and rhythms of Derrida's deconstructive approach to philosophy and literature in this seminar and in his work more generally. (shrink)

In my brief remarks, I consider what it means to return and rebind—that is to say, the significance of the re for Kristeva’s thought. Kristeva does not just talk about binding or birth, or unbinding or death, but rather rebinding and rebirth, suggesting that it is a retrospective return rather than an original moment that is crucial. The most significant moment, then, is not the moment of imaginary plenitude, nor the moment of originary loss, but rather the moment of rebirth (...) that comes through rebinding after the loss of plenitude. Indeed, Kristeva’s insistence on re-turning suggests that there is no originary moment of plenitude nor of castration or loss, but rather a constant movement of compensation for a recurrent loss. By emphasizing rebinding and rebirth, she underscores not the loss as cutting wound but rather the healing power of signification, always already inherent within loss. The flip-side of separation is reattachment. And rather than just focus on the separation or cut, Kristeva looks to that which allows us to rebind and reattach in order to create relations that sustain us. Both unbinding and binding are necessary for rebinding. Thus, by focusing on rebinding, Kristeva insists on the process of unbinding and binding, and the oscillation between them. (shrink)

Working against both Hegelian recognition and ethics based on vulnerability, I argue for response ethics or an ethics of ambivalence. While the ideal of mutual recognition is admirable, in practice, recognition is experienced as conferred by the very groups and institutions responsible for withholding it in the first place. In other words, recognition is distributed according to an axis of power that is part and parcel of systems of dominance and oppression. I both challenge the concept of vulnerability as exclusive (...) to, or constitutive of, humanity, on the one hand, and criticize the concept for leveling differences in levels of vulnerability, on the other. (shrink)

Working against both Hegelian recognition and ethics based on vulnerability, I argue for response ethics or an ethics of ambivalence. While the ideal of mutual recognition is admirable, in practice, recognition is experienced as conferred by the very groups and institutions responsible for withholding it in the first place. In other words, recognition is distributed according to an axis of power that is part and parcel of systems of dominance and oppression. I both challenge the concept of vulnerability as exclusive (...) to, or constitutive of, humanity, on the one hand, and criticize the concept for leveling differences in levels of vulnerability, on the other. (shrink)