COVID-19 has been called “a disaster for feminism” for numerous reasons. In this short piece, we make sense of this claim, drawing on intersectional feminism to understand why an analysis that considers gender alone is inadequate to address both the risks and consequences of COVID-19.

It was an afternoon in the early stages of the pandemic when Lisa Richardson and I ran into each other at the hospital coffee line. Standing six feet apart and decked out in masks, scrub caps, and face shields, we were almost unrecognizable to one another and to ourselves. The pandemic was of course top of mind, but our conversation quickly turned to what was being articulated about the pandemic and why it was being heralded as a "disaster for feminism". (...) As Audre Lorde reminds us, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives," and we were beginning to see how many issues intersected in the pandemic moment. The United Nations was calling... (shrink)

"Your confidentiality will be respected. Information that discloses your identity will not be released without your consent unless required by law or regulation." I sat there with Missy, reading the consent form line by line. When I got to the section on confidentiality, I told her she could pick a nickname, or fake name, that I would use in my research notes and later when the research was written up. She wanted to use "Missy." It wasn't exactly a pseudonym—this was (...) the same name that a number of her friends in the neighborhood knew her by. I'd also heard a couple of nurses calling her Missy when I had gone to visit with her in the hospital earlier that winter. I asked her if she was sure she wanted to use that .. (shrink)

Anonymity is accepted as necessary for the generation of empirical knowledge concerning human research participants, especially for members of “vulnerable” groups. In particular, anonymity has been given a role in easing the challenges of giving voice to experiences that disrupt familiar and convenient paradigms of knowledge. This paper troubles such a notion, on the grounds that anonymity may undermine the acceptance of such experiences as evidence and reinforce the kind of epistemic politics that treats some assertions as incontrovertible, while silencing (...) others. An uncritical acceptance of anonymity generates concerns about representation, voice, and authorship in research, particularly amongst disadvantaged communities. (shrink)

“Nocebo,” a term coined in the mid-twentieth century, refers to the onset of negative side effects in individuals who anticipate harm from biomedical treatment. Sylvia Wynter invokes nocebo effects as racializing phenomena that demonstrate the injurious impact of colonial practices. By soliciting insights from Nocebo Studies, as well as Wynter and Achille Mbembe, this article explores decolonial philosophies of selfhood, especially in terms of the meaning-making expressivity of selves. This conversation between Nocebo Studies and Wynter proffers ways to engage with (...) nocebo effects as mani-festations of the structures of colonial violence, while undercutting biomedical accounts of nocebos that presuppose an overly generic human body. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 59-61, July 2012.

Decades after Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic and History of Madness, the role of medicine in producing and sustaining classifications continues to be topical, as scholars have continued to critique normalizing judgments embedded in the practices of medicine, which stabilize identity categories within health care settings. A significant contributor to this area of scholarship, Ian Hacking has articulated a productive and extremely influential account of how certain “kinds” of people emerge hand-in-hand with the categories that are meant to classify them, (...) examining not only medical practices, but a wide range of governmental, scientific, and cultural institutions that contribute to kind-making. In this paper, I examine limitations to Hacking’s looping effects thesis, in an effort to further explore how kind-making may be embodied through intersections of subjectivity, social identity, and the practices of medicine. Employing a field study of HIV/AIDS care in Vancouver, Canada, I push at some of the boundaries of Hacking’s account, attempting to add complexity and nuance by bringing to bear considerations of memory, resistance, and embodiment on the process of looping. (shrink)

The leadership development industry regularly claims to aid in developing effective, ethical leaders, using 360-degree psychometric assessments as key tools for so doing. This paper analyses the effects of such tools on those subjected to and subjectivised by them from a Foucauldian perspective. We argue that instead of encouraging ethical leadership such instruments inculcate practices and belief systems that perpetuate falsehoods, misrepresentations and inequalities. ‘Followers’ are presumed compliant, malleable beings needing leaders to determine what is in their interests. Such techniques (...) pursue productivity and profitability, rather than ethical leadership. We examine the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, a widely used 360-degree tool that measures transformational leadership, as an illustrative case study to substantiate these criticisms. (shrink)

Resumo: Neste ensaio filosófico, discute-se o uso superficial que tem sido feito pela academia, de um modo geral, do conceito de necropolítica do filósofo camaronês Achille Mbembe, bem como da apropriação desse conceito nas redes sociais. Expõem-se as origens filosóficas do conceito e a tradição em que ele está inserido, com indicação de fontes fundamentais para sua construção. Com isso, procura-se expor, mesmo que sumariamente, uma definição da necropolítica, ao mesmo tempo que se convoca o leitor ao estudo dos textos (...) necessários para sua compreensão. Buscou-se problematizar, como pano de fundo, uma série de questões que atravessam hoje a academia, quando adota o pensamento decolonial e as tarefas que se encontram pela frente.: This essay is about discussing the superficial use that the academy has made, in general, of the concept of necropolitics, from cameroonian philosopher Achile Mbembe and its use in social media. The philosophical origins of this concept are exposed along with the tradition in which it is inserted and the the bibliographic sources necessary for its construction. It seeks to expose, even briefly, a more precise definition of necropolitics, at the same time that I invite the reader to study the texts necessary for its understanding. We try to problematize, as a background, a series of issues that cross the academy today when it adopts decolonial thinking and the tasks that lie ahead. (shrink)

Kant’s critique/doctrine distinction tracks the difference between a canon for the understanding’s proper use and an organon for its dialectical misuse. The latter reflects the dogmatic use of reason to attain a doctrine of knowledge with no antecedent critique. In the 1790s, Fichte collapses Kant’s distinction and redefines dogmatism. He argues that deriving a canon is essentially dialectical and thus yields an organon: critical idealism is properly a doctrine of science or Wissenschaftslehre. Criticism is furthermore said to refute dogmatism, by (...) which Fichte means Spinozism. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s position in his Philosophical Letters by reviving Kant’s distinction. First, ‘critique’ for Schelling names a canon that is valid for all systems—including Spinozism—and thus favours none—not even the Wissenschaftslehre. Second, Schelling coins ‘dogmaticism’ to refer to what Kant calls ‘dogmatism’: reason’s uncritical claim to doctrine. Hence, he says all systems—even Fichte’s—are susceptible to the ‘enthusiasm’ of mistaking themselves for doctrines or ‘objects of knowledge’, instead of subjectively valid ‘objects of freedom’. I reconstruct Schelling’s argument for reviving Kant’s distinction, while noting two consequences for German idealism. First, if criticism favours no system, a system’s origin cannot be an act of knowledge, e.g., intellectual intuition, but only an act of endorsement. Second, if dogmaticism entails enthusiasm, a system’s goal cannot be absolute knowledge, but only infinite striving. Hence, by retrieving Schelling’s notion of dogmaticism, we can both gain a better understanding of the Letters and register the impact of a core Kantian distinction on the German idealist project. (shrink)

Meillassoux seeks knowledge of transcendental reality, blaming Kant for the ‘correlationist’ proscription of independent access to either thought or being. For Meillassoux, correlationism blocks an account of the meaning of ‘ancestral statements’ regarding reality prior to humans. I examine three charges on which Meillassoux’s argument depends: (1) Kant distorts ancestral statements’ meaning; (2) Kant fallaciously infers causality’s necessity; (3) Kant’s transcendental idealism cannot grasp ‘the great outdoors’. I reject these charges: (1) imposes a Cartesian misreading, hence Meillassoux’s false assumption that, (...) for Kant, objects don’t exist without subjects; (2) misreads Kant, who infers causality’s necessity from the possibility of experience; (3) casts Kant’s idealism as subjective, ignoring his perspectival portrayal of it. (shrink)

Bazzocchi disposes the text of the Tractatus in a user-friendly manner, exactly as Wittgenstein's decimals advise. This discloses the logical form of the book by distinct reading units, linked into a fashioned hierarchical tree. The text becomes much clearer and every reader can enjoy, finally, its formal and literary qualities.

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge—an interconnected causal network, where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms—causal islands—such that events in different mechanisms are not thought to be related even when they belong to the same causal chain. To distinguish these possibilities, we tested whether people make transitive judgments about causal chains by inferring, given A causes B and B causes C, (...) that A causes C. Specifically, causal chains schematized as one chunk or mechanism in semantic memory led to transitive causal judgments. On the other hand, chains schematized as multiple chunks led to intransitive judgments despite strong intermediate links. Normative accounts of causal intransitivity could not explain these intransitive judgments. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

In this book William G. Lycan offers an epistemology of philosophy itself, a partial method for philosophical inquiry. The epistemology features three ultimate sources of justified philosophical belief. First, common sense, in a carefully restricted sense of the term-the sorts of contingentpropositions Moore defended against idealists and skeptics. Second, the deliverances of well confirmed science. Third and more fundamentally, intuitions about cases in a carefully specified sense of that term. The first half of On Evidence in Philosophy expounds a version (...) of Moore's method and applies it to each of several issues. This version is shown to resist all the standard objections to Moore; most of them do not even apply. It is argued, in Chapters 5 and 6, that philosophical method is far lesspowerful than most have taken it to be. In particular, deductive argument can accomplish very little, and hardly ever is an opposing position refuted except by common sense or by science. The final two chapters defend the evidential status of intuitions and the Goodmanian method of reflectiveequilibrium; it is argued that philosophy always and everywhere depends on them. The method is then set within a more general explanatory-coherentist epistemology, which is shown to resist standard forms of skepticism.In sum, William G. Lycan advocates a picture of philosophy as a very wide explanatory reflective equilibrium incorporating common sense, science, and our firmest intuitions on any topic-and nothing more, not ever. (shrink)

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Anscombe on thought, experience, sensation, and the ethics of virtue Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe is one of analytical philosophy's most prominent figures, the founder of consequentialism, and a leading mind in the field of virtue ethics. Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: The collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, Volume 2, is part of a multivolume compilation of her life's work, providing insight into the mind of a groundbreaking 20th century philosopher. This volume's work explores memory, intentionality, causality and time, (...) delving into the language, actions, and logic of perception, sensation, and more. (shrink)

A directory of archives and manuscript repositories, with links to web pages for the repositories and to online finding aids. Searchable by: collection name; city; state; National Inventory of Documentary Sources (NIDS) number; and National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) number.