In feminist and cultural studies, there is a growing body of work concerned with how people’s lives are subjected to multiple, intersecting axes of differentiation and power. There is growing concern that we seem unable to address more than one difference at a time, thus failing to interrogate enactments of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in science, technology, and medicine. This article aims to contribute to the effort to conceptualize the making of and interactions between differences. It explores how (...) differences such as disability, gender, and class are made and unmade in sociotechnical practices. It shows that interactions between enactments of differences are complex, contradictory, unpredictable, and surprising and defy simple conclusions about effects and politics. These patterns of interference need to be investigated in situated practices, and we have to examine carefully how processes of differentiation interact to support and reinforce but also to challenge and undermine each other. (shrink)

It is often assumed that it was the alliance between patient associations and neuroscience, which originally made dementia a matter for intervention. In parallel ways, science and technology studies often attributes the power to define and act upon matters of life to biomedicine and science. The concern here is that the science centrism of STS contributes to the dominance of science and biomedicine by granting these analytical privileges. As a result, alternative modes of acting, for instance in care, are disarticulated (...) and made absent. This article mobilizes the sensibilities of anthropology to difference and draws upon excerpts of data from fieldwork in dementia care to show this and argue that there are different practices that act upon life and its limits; that these enact different versions of life and dementia; and that they matter because they shape how people are cared for and live and die with dementia. (shrink)

What is context and how to deal with it? The context issue has been a key concern in Science and Technology Studies. This is linked to the understanding that science is culture. But how? The irreductionist program from the early eighties sought to solve the problem by doing away with context altogether—for the benefit of worlds in the making. This special issue takes its points of departure in this irreductionist program, its source of inspirations, as well as its reworkings. The (...) aim is not to solve the context problem but rather to experiment with context and what we label contexting. (shrink)

This article asks how contexts are made in science as well as in social science, and how the making of contexts relates to political agency and intervention. To explore these issues, it traces contexting for foot-and-mouth disease and the strategies used to control the epidemic in the United Kingdom in 2001. It argues that to depict the world is to assemble contexts and to hold them together in a mode that may be descriptive, explanatory, or predictive. In developing this argument, (...) it explores how contexts are assembled in a series of different descriptive and explanatory narratives in epidemiology, policy, critical social science, and social studies of science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:178 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nathan Snaza Biopolitics without Bodies: Feminism and the Feeling of Life Against a restrictive and imperialist concept of “the human,” which has become globalized during the long march of colonialist, heterosexist modernity, Samantha Frost’s Biocultural Creatures summons “counter-concepts” of the human that might authorize new political possibilities and theories of what it means to be human. She (...) writes, “These counter-concepts of the human are creatures who are embedded in various ecologies and networks of relations and who can integrate their acknowledgement of their embodiment, animality, physicality, dependence, and vulnerability into their self-conception and their orientation toward and modes of being in the world” (3). As this formulation suggests, whatever the new theory of the human is, it has been emerging at the edges of imperialist humanism for some time in a number of distinct political and intellectual projects clustering around decolonization, feminism, queer critique, technoscience, and ecology.1 Frost’s book, 1. Vandana Shiva and Ingunn Moser, editors, Biopolitics: A Feminist and Ecological Reader on Biotechnology (London: Zed Books, 1995); Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Willey, eds., Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017); Sandra Harding, Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Sandra Harding, ed., The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 179 Nathan Snaza Books Discussed in This Essay Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human. Samantha Frost. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Flourishing Thought: Democracy in an Age of Data Hoards. Ruth A. Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. The Biopolitics of Embryos and Alphabets: A Reproductive History of the Nonhuman. Ruth A. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. The Economization of Life. Michelle Murphy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. along with recent work by Michelle Murphy and Ruth Miller, among many other feminist biopolitical thinkers, summons us to reconceive and decolonize the human by feeling it differently, and in so doing, open our intellectual and political projects toward what Miller calls “democracy as a nonhuman affair” in The Biopolitics of Embryos and Alphabets (9). My sense is that this reconception throws into question the ways that we have understood both the human and politics through specific ideas about bodies. The body has a certain phenomenological obviousness for (some) humans, which might explain why it has been so central to most political projects of modernity, many of which share at least some commitment to the liberal individual as a self-contained entity.2 However, something else is beginning to press on contemporary feminist biopolitical thought. Karen Barad’s claim that “[o]bjects are not already 2. For a rich overview of the ways in which the body has animated feminist thought and politics, especially in light of debates in the physical and biological sciences, see Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (New York: Routledge, 1990. A different sense of the body begins to appear a few years later in Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 180 Nathan Snaza there; they emerge through specific practices” attunes us to this new orientation.3 For Barad, knowledge practices are open-ended, and “the differential constitutions of human and nonhuman designate particular phenomena that are themselves implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity, including their enfolding and reconstitution in the reconfiguring of apparatuses.”4 In other words, knowledge emerges from the world through “cuts” that reconfigure it: entities—such as “the body” or “the human”—come into being through specific apparatuses. These include theoretical concepts: “Theorizing, like experimenting, is a material practice.”5 The concept of the body, then, is a material part of the intra-active becoming of the world in knowledge production—its meaning exceeds the fact of its existence. While the body has been useful to an enormous number of projects, contemporary feminist thought, in a wide variety of ways, is feeling... (shrink)

Social anxiety is highly prevalent in adolescents and is often associated with great individual suffering and functional impairment. Psychiatric comorbidity is common and further adds to this burden. The purposes of this study were: (1) to describe the occurrence of diagnosed and self-reported social anxiety among 8,199 Norwegian adolescents aged 13–19 years who participated in the population-based Young-HUNT3 study (2006–2008); (2) to examine associations between sociodemographic characteristics and different subgroups of social anxiety; and (3) to describe the psychiatric health comorbidities (...) among adolescents diagnosed with social anxiety disorder (SAD). In total, 388 (5.9%) of the adolescents screened positive for SAD and were invited into a diagnostic interview, performed by professional nurses, using Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule for DSM IV: child version (ADIS-C) (response rate = 54.6%). A SAD diagnosis was indicated in 106 individuals (50% of the interview subjects), and more than two-thirds of the adolescents diagnosed with SAD had one or more comorbid psychiatric disorders. Higher mean scores of self-reported social anxiety symptoms, poor self-rated health, sleep problems, poor family economic situation, low physical activity, and having sought professional help within the last year were associated with higher odds of being in the screening positive subgroup. Screening positive subjects who did not meet for a diagnostic interview did not differ notably from the rest of the screening positive group in terms of these sociodemographic characteristics. Based on our results and the fact that individuals with social anxiety often fear interview situations, the use of ADIS-C, screening questions and self-reports seem to be sufficient when aiming to identify epidemiologically representative cohorts of adolescents at risk of social anxiety. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between temporal continuity in nursing and temporal features of sickness. It is based on phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy, empirical studies of sickness time, and the nursing theories of Nightingale, of Benner and of Benner and Wrubel. In the first part, temporal continuity is defined as distinct from interpersonal continuity. Tensions between temporal continuity and discontinuity are discussed in the contexts of care management, of conceptualisations of disease and of time itself. Temporal limitations to the methodological (...) concept of situation are discussed. The main part of this paper explores nurses' possibilities to relate to their patients' time, and how temporal features of sickness may warrant temporal continuity of nursing. Three temporal characteristics of sickness are discussed: the immediacy of patients' suffering, the basic continuity of life through sickness and health care, and the indeterminism and precariousness of sickness. The timing of nursing acts is discussed. The paper explores how sickness is both part of the continuity of life, and threatens this continuity. It concludes that this tension is implicitly recognised in the temporal continuity of nursing, which allows for discontinuous and continuous aspects of sickness time. Nurses accordingly perceive the sick person's time at several levels of temporality, and distinguish highly complex temporal processes in their patients' trajectory. Temporal continuity provides the time, flexibility, and closeness for nurses to perceive and act into time dimensions of individual sickness. The paper shows that temporal continuity of nursing is grounded in temporal characteristics of severe sickness. It suggests that temporal continuity is an important theoretical concept in nursing. (shrink)

This paper offers a survey of some recent work in epistemology, including the following books: _A Priori Justification, by Albert Casullo; _Epistemic Justification: Internalism vs. Externalism, Foundations vs. Virtues, by Laurence Bonjour and Ernest Sosa; _New Essays on Semantic Externalism and Self-Knowledge, edited by Susana Nuccetelli; _Pathways to Knowledge: Private and Public, by Alvin Goldman; _The Skeptics: Contemporary Essays, edited by Steven Luper; and _Thinking About Knowing, by Jay F. Rosenberg.

Ten nurses at a university hospital in Norway were interviewed as part of a comprehensive investigation into the narratives of nurses and physicians about being in ethically difficult situations in surgical units. The transcribed interview texts were subjected to a phenomenological-hermeneutic interpretation. The main theme in the narratives was being close to and moved by the suffering of patients and relatives. The nurses' responsibility for patients and relatives was expressed as a commitment to act, and they needed to ask themselves (...) whether their responsibility had been fulfilled, that nothing had been left undone, overlooked or neglected, before they could leave the unit. When there was confirmation by the patients, relatives, colleagues and themselves that the needs of patients and relatives had been attended to in a morally and professionally satisfying manner, this increased the nurses' confidence and satisfaction in their work, and their strength to live with the burden of being in ethically difficult situations. (shrink)

This article contains criticisms of various interpretations of Mill's argument for Utilitarianism. An attempt is made to explain how Mill conceived the rationality of his proof, and how his justification of the Principle of Utility differs from a justification of fundamental moral principles on the basis of the logic of ethical discourse.

How can the Biblical God be the Lord and King who, being typically unseen and even self-veiled at times, authoritatively leads people for divine purposes? This article’s main thesis is that the answer is in divine moral leading via human moral experience of God (of a kind to be clarified). The Hebrew Bible speaks of God as ‘king,’ including for a time prior to the Jewish human monarchy. Ancient Judaism, as Martin Buber has observed, acknowledged direct and indirect forms of (...) divine rule and thus of theocracy. This article explores the importance of divine rule as divine direct leading, particularly in moral matters, without reliance on indirect theocracy supervised by humans. It thus considers a role for God as Über-King superior to any human king, maintaining a direct moral theocracy without a need for indirect theocracy. The divine goal, in this perspective, is a universal commonwealth in righteousness, while allowing for variation in political structure. The article identifies the importance in the Hebrew Bible of letting God be God as an Über-King who, although self-veiled at times, leads willing people directly and thereby rules over them uncoercively. It also clarifies a purpose for divine self-veiling neglected by Buber and many others, and it offers a morally sensitive test for unveiled authenticity in divine moral leading. (shrink)

Religious epistemology can benefit from the widely neglected perspective of the apostle Paul that humans can “have the mind of Christ.” This article considers whether humans can apprehend divine reality, if only partly, from a divine vantage point. Perhaps humans then can apprehend the reality and goodness of God in a salient manner, thereby gaining a vital perspective on ultimate reality. The article aims to identify the viability of a “God’s-eye standpoint” for humans in “the mind of Christ.” It contends (...) that this standpoint draws from influential volitional and affective traits of God’s personality, including “the fruit of the Spirit.”. (shrink)

Background: The brief generic Multicultural Quality of Life Index is a culturally informed self-report 10-item questionnaire used to measure health-related quality of life. QoL is an important outcome measure in guiding healthcare and is held as a substantial parameter to evaluate the effectiveness of healthcare. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in children might negatively influence the parents’ QoL. Having a validated questionnaire to measure QoL for this population will therefore be a vital first step in guiding healthcare for parents of children (...) with ADHD. We aimed to examine the reliability and validity of the Norwegian version of the MQLI in a sample of parents of children with ADHD.Methods: In a cross-sectional study, 128 parents of children with ADHD were recruited from four outpatient clinics within the Child and Adolescents Mental Health Services in Norway. They completed the MQLI along with an alternative well-being scale, the Five-item World Health Organization Well-being Index, and a form including demographic variables. Reliability and validity of the MQLI were examined. We conducted a factor analysis and calculated internal consistency and the correlation between the MQLI and the WHO-5.Results: Factor analysis of the parents reported MQLI yielded a one-factor solution. For the MQLI, Cronbach’s alpha was 0.73. The correlation between the two measures of MQLI and WHO-5 was high, reflecting convergent validity since the association between the two measures was strong.Conclusion: Results from this study support the reliability and validity of the Norwegian version of the MQLI for assessment of quality of life in parents of children with ADHD with good psychometric properties. Study findings support the use of the questionnaire in CAMHS. (shrink)

For many people the existence of God is by no means a sufficiently clear feature of reality. This problem, the fact of divine hiddenness, has been a source of existential concern and has sometimes been taken as a rationale for support of atheism or agnosticism. In this collection of essays, a distinguished group of philosophers of religion explore the question of divine hiddenness in considerable detail. The issue is approached from several perspectives including Jewish, Christian, atheist and agnostic. There is (...) coverage of the historical treatment of divine hiddenness as found in the work of Maimonides, St. John of the Cross, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard, and various Biblical writers. A substantial introduction clarifies the main problems of and leading solutions to divine hiddenness. Primarily directed at philosophers of religion, theologians, and scholars of religious studies, this collection could also serve as a textbook for upper-level courses in philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Paul Moser's book defends what has been an unfashionable view in recent epistemology: the foundationalist account of knowledge and justification. Since the time of Plato philosophers have wondered what exactly knowledge is. This book develops a new account of perceptual knowledge which specifies the exact sense in which knowledge has foundations. The author argues that experiential foundations are indeed essential to perceptual knowledge, and he explains what knowledge requires beyond justified true beliefs. In challenging prominent sceptical claims that we (...) have no justified beliefs about the external world, the book outlines a theory of rational belief. (shrink)

Many people in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic monotheistic traditions testify to their experience of being commanded by God to do something or to be a certain way. Is this kind of testimony from experience credible in some cases, and, if so, on what ground? The main thesis of this article is that it is credible in some cases and a suitable ground is available in the morally purifying experience of the human conscience. The article looks to the Hebrew Bible, the (...) New Testament, and the Qur’an for relevant testimony to the importance of righteous divine commanding experienced by humans. The relevant commands are not abstract or merely theoretical but grounded in human moral experience and potentially motivating for righteous action. The article doubts that God would be God if there were no divine commanding given directly to receptive people in their moral experience. It contends that God would not be a morally righteous guide of the divine kind needed for the worthiness of worship by humans in the absence of God’s commanding people directly in their experience. (shrink)

Paul Moser's book defends what has been an unfashionable view in recent epistemology: the foundationalist account of knowledge and justification. Since the time of Plato philosophers have wondered what exactly knowledge is. This book develops a new account of perceptual knowledge which specifies the exact sense in which knowledge has foundations. The author argues that experiential foundations are indeed essential to perceptual knowledge, and he explains what knowledge requires beyond justified true beliefs. In challenging prominent sceptical claims that we (...) have no justified beliefs about the external world, the book outlines a theory of rational belief. (shrink)

Offering a unique and wide-ranging examination of the theory of knowledge, the new edition of this comprehensive collection deftly blends readings from the foremost classical sources with the work of important contemporary philosophical thinkers. Human Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Approaches, 3/e, offers philosophical examinations of epistemology from ancient Greek and Roman philosophy ; medieval philosophy ; early modern philosophy ; classical pragmatism and Anglo-American empiricism ; and other influential Anglo-American philosophers. Organized chronologically and thematically, Human Knowledge, 3/e, features exceptionally broad (...) coverage and nontechnical selections that are easily accessible to students. An ideal text for both undergraduate and graduate courses in epistemology, it is enhanced by the editors' substantial general introduction, section overviews, and up-to-date bibliographies. The third edition offers expanded selections on contemporary epistemology and adds selections by Thomas Reid, Richard Rorty, David B. Annis, Richard Feldman and Earl Conee, Ernest Sosa, Barry Stroud, and Louise M. Antony. Human Knowledge, 3/e, offers an unparalleled introduction to our ancient struggle to understand our own intellectual experience. (shrink)

The Theory of Knowledge: A Thematic Introduction explains the main ideas and problems of contemporary epistemology while avoiding technical detail. Comprehensive and rich in illustrations and examples, it highlights contemporary debates over the definition, sources, and limits of human knowledge, and covers major topics including the nature of belief, theories of truth, epistemic justification, the Gettier problem, skepticism, and epistemic rationality. Its discussions identify important connections between traditional epistemological questions and cognitive science, the history of science, the sociology of knowledge, (...) and cross-cultural studies. The book culminates with a focus on questions regarding epistemological method and an examination of the roots of contemporary analytic approaches to epistemology. The authors defend a distinctive position regarding epistemological method, called broad explanationism, that incorporates some insights from naturalism in epistemology. The volume is enhanced by a glossary of important epistemological terms and suggestions for further reading. Easily accessible to beginning students in philosophy, The Theory of Knowledge serves as an ideal text for courses in the theory of knowledge and will also appeal to general readers interested in philosophy. (shrink)

We shall formulate an analysis of the ordinary notion of intentional action that clarifies a commonsense distinction between intentional and nonintentional action. Our analysis will build on some typically neglected considerations about relations between lucky action and intentional action. It will highlight the often- overlooked role of evidential considerations in intentional action, thus identifying the key role of certain epistemological considerations in action theory. We shall also explain why some vagueness is indispensable in a characterization of intentional action as ordinarily (...) understood. (shrink)

If God exists, where can we find adequate evidence for God's existence? In this book, Paul Moser offers a new perspective on the evidence for God that centers on a morally robust version of theism that is cognitively resilient. The resulting evidence for God is not speculative, abstract, or casual. Rather, it is morally and existentially challenging to humans, as they themselves responsively and willingly become evidence of God's reality in receiving and reflecting God's moral character for others. (...) class='Hi'>Moser calls this 'personifying evidence of God,' because it requires the evidence to be personified in an intentional agent - such as a human - and thereby to be inherent evidence of an intentional agent. Contrasting this approach with skepticism, scientific naturalism, fideism, and natural theology, Moser also grapples with the potential problems of divine hiddenness, religious diversity, and vast evil. (shrink)

This article presents a didactical concept for the development of disciplinary reading strategies with A-Level-Students in high schools. The basic idea comes from cognitive and learning psychology and has been transferred to subject-teaching-contexts in recent years. For the teaching of Philosophy, the authors diagnose the existence of a missing link between the challenges of a philosophical text comprehension that focus on primary understanding on the one hand and the methods offered on the other. They argue for the development of a (...) concept of reading strategies that takes into view three levels of text comprehension that are relevant for a philosophical understanding: the conceptual-semantic-level, the logical-pragmatic-level and the text-structural-level. Following a systematic presentation of the concept and its implementation options, the authors discuss possible connecting lines between the acquisition of philosophical reading literacy in schools and in introductory seminars at universities. (shrink)