This paper criticizes an empirical reading of On Perpetual Peace. It is also equally critical of the approach taken by philosophically minded scholars to give preference to Kant's philosophical outlook. Instead, it focuses on the peculiar oscillation between the philosophical and political aspects of the essay. Contrary to current concerns to update the conceptual framework of On Perpetual Peace—to rescue it from becoming obsolete—its salient irony, which mediates between both aspects, is singled out as a clue to an interpretation which (...) seeks to account for both of them. Thus, the essay can still be a source of inspiration for peace research. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: “God is a woman” From Mother Goddesses to Classical Theism It's Like This “Defective and misbegotten” “The true mother of life and all things” Mothers Made in the Image of God Notes.

In a host surrogate motherhood arrangement, the surrogate agrees to be implanted with, and carry to term, an embryo created from the commissioning couple9s gametes. When the surrogate child is born, it is the surrogate mother who, according to UK law, holds the legal status of mother. By contrast, the commissioning mother possesses no maternal status and she can only attain it once the surrogate agrees to the completion of the arrangement. One consequence of this is that, in the event (...) that a host arrangement fails, the commissioning mother is left without maternal status. In this paper, I argue that this denial of maternal status misrepresents the commissioning mother9s role in the host arrangement and her relationship with the surrogate child. Consequently, I suggest that commissioning mothers participating in host surrogacy arrangements ought to be granted the status of mother in the event that the arrangement fails. (shrink)

The generation of asymmetric cell shapes is a recurring theme in biology. In budding yeast, one form of cell asymmetry occurs for division and is generated by anisotropic growth of the mother cell to form a daughter cell bud. Previous genetic studies uncovered key roles for the small GTPase Cdc42 in organizing the actin cytoskeleton and vesicle delivery to the site of bud growth,1,2 but a recent paper has also raised questions about how control of Cdc42 activity is integrated into (...) a proposed hierarchical regulatory pathway that specifies a unique site of bud formation.3 BioEssays 25:833–836, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Through a close analysis of various moments within two hours of video-taped interaction, we investigate properties of the setting that the participants cannot ignore even as they transform them in various ways. These properties are not under local control. What is under control is revealed in the participants' “play” with the properties, including dangerous, “deep” play. In this process, some properties of the participants are rarely mentioned (e.g., that the laboring woman is an MD), others are repeatedly emphasized (e.g. the (...) strength of contractions). And others appear in ways that have not been dealt with adequately in current theoretical frameworks. To deal with life-threatening lies, and jokes about lies, we must move away from theories of hegemonic particularity that rely on a habitus. Rather we must acknowledge the practical understandings revealed in the collective submergence of that which may be actively noted as potentially relevant and then set aside so that other tasks can be foregrounded and achieved. (shrink)

On 5 July 1996 a sheep named Dolly was born in Scotland, the result of the transfer of the nucleus of an adult mammary tissue cell to the enucleated egg cell of an unrelated sheep, and gestation in a third, surrogate mother sheep. Although for the past ten years scientists have routinely cloned sheep and cows from embryo cells, this was the first cloning experiment that apparently succeeded using the nucleus of an adult cell.

It is impolite to discuss matters of religion or politics in mixed company. So goes the popular adage which all of us were supposed to have learned as children from our mothers. Let's call it Mom's Maxim. We tend to accept Mom's Maxim. But is it philosophically sound? In this short essay, we raise some objections to Mom's Maxim and make a case for an alternative which we call Mill's Principle.

Research suggests that typically developing children begin to understand verbal irony around 5 or 6 years of age. Children's production of verbal irony, however, has not previously been examined. This study was a preliminary investigation of children's irony production, including both verbal and gestural (nonverbal) forms. We coded instances of irony in interactions within 118 family triads, each consisting of 1 parent and 2 children, aged 3 to 15 years. Triads performed an 8-min cooperative task with dominos. In this context, (...) gestural irony was used more frequently than verbal irony: 80% of the families used gestural irony at least once and 32% used verbal irony at least once. Children produced gestural irony as early as 4 years of age, and verbal irony as early as 5 years of age. Children's use of irony was not related to their general cognitive ability or vocabulary, but was related to use of irony by other members of the triad. Results suggest that social context is important to the emergence of irony production. (shrink)

Stay-at-home fathers challenge norms related to masculinity and gendered divisions of parenting roles. We conduct a content analysis of 94 print news articles about at-home fathers published 1987–2016 in the United States, identifying key themes and comparing results with our earlier research on news depictions of at-home mothers. We also analyze national trends in fathers staying home using Current Population Survey data to understand contexts in which articles were published. Articles were family-centric and disproportionately focused on economic elites, emphasizing their (...) “choice” to stay home, but economic reasons for fathers staying home were described more commonly than in portrayals of mothers. Stigmatization experiences were pervasive in articles, appearing more commonly when staying home was reported as discretionary, but less commonly when staying home resulted from involuntary unemployment in recent periods. Portrayals reflect, reinforce, contribute to, and challenge father-as-provider norms, mirroring changes in masculinity norms over time and revealing cultural ambivalence toward at-home fathers. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Socrates Café Café Philosophique Philosophy for Everyone Sophistry The Examined Life Oblivion Conclusion (Who is Ben's Mom?).

Cliff Landesman provides a vivid description of a case where we have no best outcome available to us. He poses this as a problem for utilitarians who advise us to do the best we can. This does indeed make such advice impractical. I begin by contrasting older versions of utilitarianism with newer ones that have appeared in deontic logic and that were designed precisely to accommodate Landesman's sort of scenario. (I cast matters in terms of the Limit Assumption and world-theoretic (...) versions of utilitarianism.) I then make three points. First, Landesman's problem does not pose any special problem for these newer theories. Secondly, I note that it is an interesting consequence of these newer theories being utilitarian theories, that--contrary to the tradition--utilitarianism isn't automatically a no conflicts theory of obligation. Thirdly, and most importantly, I identify a new, deeper and wider theoretical problem: "The Confinement Problem". This problem infests the newer versions of utilitarianism. Worse still, the infestation spreads to satisficing consequentialism (cf. Scheffler, Slote), the direction Landesman points to for a solution to his problem, and this new problem is one where the theoretical rulings of these theories clearly conflict with intuition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.1 (2003) 81-85 [Access article in PDF] "What's in the Box Then, Mum?"—Death, Disability, and Dogma Sheila Colman OVERHEARD IN AN EXCHANGE between a bereaved woman and her son outside the church just prior to a funeral service: "What's in the box, then?" "Daddy." The son is in his late 30s and has a learning disability. His mother had prepared him as well as she (...) could; his father had been ill for some time and was not expected to recover. Death, and the rituals surrounding it, had been explained and it was not the first family funeral he had attended.Trying to field such childlike questions is typical of living with a person with a learning disability; trying to find the right words is difficult enough without the added pressure of personal emotional distress.The generally accepted norm in life is that a child is parented within the home until adulthood and then independence is attained. Roles may well be reversed in later life in that the "child" may find responsibilities in caring for, and making decisions for, elderly parents. Few people can stop parenting when their offspring are fledged—even though it is at arms length and any advice may be ignored. Life with a child with a learning disability is unbalanced in this respect; as carers we do not lead lives considered to be normal because our children continue to be childlike for the rest of their, and our, lives. Some of us know that our sons and daughters do not have "apparently limitless potential... to develop skills and autonomy if only they are given the right help" (but try, as a parent or carer, saying that to a professional working in the field of learning disability!) and know that the best we can hope for is mature, rather than immature, dependence.No one tells parents of a learning disabled child—or any other, for that matter—what their responsibilities to that child are. Food, warmth, love, support, and so on are givens, but it takes a conscious effort to move a child toward adulthood when it involves changes in life, for example, moving away from the family home. The debate rages; is it letting go or getting rid of?We all delight in the pleasures our children experience in childhood; we know the magic has gone from the family Christmas once realisation dawns on the youngest child. If you consider that your son or daughter has been dealt a very poor hand in life, the temptation to prolong and promote that innocence is very tempting. It is much easier to prevaricate than to admit that life has its unpleasant sides; that failure and disappointment exist: my son was a great fan of Thomas the Tank engine videos until he was in his early teens, long after it was age appropriate. I passed them onto a younger child, having told him the videos were lost. The fall-out was spectacular [End Page 81] (but fortunately short lived!) and he eventually became very interested in Formula 1 motor racing. I had to push him to grow up.For all of us, the transition from childhood to adulthood is a process, not an event. Although I agree with the professionals that the child with a learning disability should be part of any discussions concerning his or her future, if that child does not have the intellectual capacity to make informed choices, someone else has to do it. That someone else is usually a parent, but is it a parent who is prepared to let go to help that person become an adult with his or her own life away from the family home, or is it a parent who has protected and coddled the child by promising they will never have to go?Lest you think I am a particularly hard, confrontational, and unfeeling mother, I would point out that I have almost 50 years of experience of living with learning disability in the immediate family; my son is 20 but my brother... (shrink)

Secondary lymphoid organs form in utero through an inherited and well‐established developmental program. However, maternal non‐heritable features can have a major impact on the gene expression of the embryo, hence influencing the future health of the offspring. Recently, maternal retinoids were shown to regulate the formation of immune structures, shedding light on the role of maternal nutrition in the genetic signature of emergent immune cells. Here we highlight evidence showing how the maternal diet influences the establishment of the immune system, (...) and we also discuss how unbalanced maternal diets may set the response to infection and vaccination in the progeny. (shrink)

The first half of the 17th century was a time of intellectual ferment when wars of natural philosophy were echoes of religious wars, as we illustrate by a case study of an apparently innocuous mathematical technique called adequality pioneered by the honorable judge Pierre de Fermat, its relation to indivisibles, as well as to other hocus-pocus. André Weil noted that simple applications of adequality involving polynomials can be treated purely algebraically but more general problems like the cycloid curve cannot be (...) so treated and involve additional tools–leading the mathematician Fermat potentially into troubled waters. Breger attacks Tannery for tampering with Fermat’s manuscript but it is Breger who tampers with Fermat’s procedure by moving all terms to the left-hand side so as to accord better with Breger’s own interpretation emphasizing the double root idea. We provide modern proxies for Fermat’s procedures in terms of relations of infinite proximity as well as the standard part function. (shrink)

It is well known that Franz Brentano was the first to suggest intentionality, the property of being about something, as a criterion for demarcating the domain of the mental. He suggested that intentionality is a necessary and sufficient condition for something to qualify as a mental event. It is important, for the purposes of this paper, to pay attention to the fact that Brentano’s theory came from within a broader philosophical outlook that was thoroughly dualistic. He sought a total separation (...) of the mental from the physical, and his appeal to intentionality as a defining criterion for the mental is in the service of producing such a separation. In Brentano’s view, only mental events have intentionality, and it is in virtue of this feature that they differ from the events of the physical world. The aim of this paper is to explore whether Brentano’s intentionality criterion for defining the domain of the mental is committed to the broader dualism from which it originated. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article considers how five single mothers, who used adoption or donor conception to bring children into their lives, negotiate a persistent and pervasive discourse of ‘problematic single motherhood’ in their interview talk. Tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall [2005]. Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614.), especially the overlapping strategies of distinction, authorisation and illegitimation, are shown to be particularly salient for these parents, as they work to legitimise their routes to motherhood by distancing (...) themselves from widely stigmatised positions such as young motherhood, working-class motherhood and unplanned motherhood. I argue that these single women’s intersubjective positioning serves to protect them against stigma and discrimination, but often relies on the reproduction of other polarising and discriminatory discourses, which feed into idealised constructions of mothers as responsible, middle-class, and appropriately aged citizens. Overall, the analysis suggests that it is difficult for these single mothers to challenge the multiple and intersecting discriminatory discourses, ideals and stereotypes that converge in exclusionary and limiting constructions of single motherhood, whilst maintaining a recognisably legitimate social position for themselves. (shrink)

This narrative symposium examines the relationship of bioethics practice to personal experiences of illness. A call for stories was developed by Tod Chambers, the symposium editor, and editorial staff and was sent to several commonly used bioethics listservs and posted on the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics website. The call asked authors to relate a personal story of being ill or caring for a person who is ill, and to describe how this affected how they think about bioethical questions and the (...) practice of medicine. Eighteen individuals were invited to submit full stories based on review of their proposals. Twelve stories are published in this symposium, and six supplemental stories are published online only through Project MUSE. Authors explore themes of vulnerability, suffering, communication, voluntariness, cultural barriers, and flaws in local healthcare systems through stories about their own illnesses or about caring for children, partners, parents and grandparents. Commentary articles by Arthur Frank, Bradley Lewis, and Carol Taylor follow the collection of personal narratives. (shrink)

When I was first invited by Prof. Kim Yong -pyo, editor of the IJBTC, to review this book, I declined, due to the fact that Prof. Park was my teacher and mentor at SUNY Stony Brook, not only as a graduate student, but as an undergraduate as well. For this reason I was afraid that I would not be able to bring the requisite critical distance to the task. After having had the opportunity to read the book, however, I changed (...) my mind, for two main reasons: I realized that it might be personally satisfying to take the opportunity to re-engage myself in the kind of Buddhist soteriological discourse that originally attracted me to Buddhist Studies to begin with, and the potential for lapses in proper critical distance notwithstanding, I felt that there is some sense in which I could bring some insights into the appraisal of this book probably only accessible to myself, given my long relationship with Sung Bae Park and my deep personal interest in his project. So I hope readers of this review will accept it with these factors in mind. There is one question that we may want to ask before dealing with a book like this: Is there a place in our Buddhist Studies academia for the discussion of personal religious experience, or for the investigation of the phenomenon of religiosity? I know of more than a few who would answer such a question with an outright "no." Others might say, "It depends upon how one goes about it." And still others may be very excited by such a prospect. (shrink)