In this paper I argue that the contemporary pathologizing of old age is directly tied to the notion of uselessness, understood entropically as that which cannot contribute energy for useful work. The elderly are configured as socially useless and thus threaten the health of the body politic. As a result, they are marginalized, ignored, and treated as waste to be jettisoned from the system. Because understanding bodies as machines able or unable to perform work accords with the second law of (...) thermodynamics, the first half of this paper discusses entropy as both scientific law and philosophical concept. The second section explores the lived experience of aging and the pathologized position of social uselessness through Simone Beauvoir’s analysis of old age. As she herself ages, the place of senescence comes to play a more pronounced role in her philosophical inquiry. Writing about the lived experience of aging adds a vital dimension to the scientific and philosophical perspectives, insofar as it foregrounds the various ways that entropy is felt: slowing, dissipating, and ultimately dying. While these should be viewed as part of the normal life cycle, they become markers of abjection which are judged harshly against the standard of social utility. (shrink)

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book traces the development of entropic themes, capturing phenomena ranging from chaos, disorder, homogenization, slackening, disspation, and ultimately death.

In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir traveled to the United States for a four-month stay, during which she toured the country extensively. Her copious notes taken during this time eventually became the travelogue, America Day by Day as well as a piece written for the May 25, 1947 edition of the New York Times Magazine, “An Existentialist Looks at Americans.” In both of these writings, Beauvoir offers an astute criticism of American culture from a foreign perspective. This paper explores Beauvoir’s treatment (...) of American abstraction and race with three goals in mind: first, to understand the American relationship to time and money as abstractions. Ignoring the past and projecting an idealistic future, leads to a strange kind of fatalism and lack of passion that profoundly impacts White and Black Americans but in distinctively different ways. The second part of the paper explores these differences through an analysis of how White Americans attempt to live with “good” consciences through the positing of and attachment to abstract values and things. This attitude, in turn, produces a largely instrumental and racist treatment of many populations, in particular, Black Americans. The final section focuses on how Beauvoir confronts the fact of her own whiteness, and in so doing undergoes the movement of race as an abstract theoretical category to one of lived embodiment. (shrink)

The deeply imaginative structure of Dungeons Dragons (DD) can allow for players to explore the intricacies of gender and sexuality in creative and potentially radical ways. One would be hard pressed to argue that cartoonishly large breasts and skin‐tight leather skirts really allow for dexterous swordplay or quick getaways. DD liberates us from the limitations of our sex by making male and female characters equal in terms of abilities. The shyest of men can be the most outspoken of wizards, the (...) most honest girl can play the most unscrupulous rogue, and the pacifist woman can don full armor and fly into a berserker rage on a group of bugbears ambushing her adventuring party because, after all, bugbears are her species enemy and she just can't help herself when they are around. (shrink)

For Beauvoir, literature provides unique access into the concrete life out of which philosophical reflection is born. Nowhere are the complications of ambiguous ethical choice more sensitively portrayed in her writings than in her fictional characters – particularly her women – as they navigate their way through webs of deceit, patriarchal control, manipulation, authenticity, desire, and passion in an attempt to ground their identities in a kind of absolute meaning. This chapter explores the theme of failed feminine identity‐formation in three (...) characters from Beauvoir's literary corpus: Françoise from She Came to Stay, Régine from All Men Are Mortal, and Monique from the short story, “The Woman Destroyed.” All three characters touch on themes surrounding the desire for and ultimate failure to obtain fixed meaning and an absolute identity. (shrink)

This paper explores Simone de Beauvoir’s response to G. W. F. Hegel’s formulation of freedom. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes freedom as a twofold, negative movement of dissolution and construction. Beauvoir takes up this distinction in terms of revolution and creative transformation, additionally describing two empty articulations of freedom found in “complaint” and “resignation.” In complaint, the existent is unable to transform the situation in a positive sense and simply reacts against it; in resignation, the existent merely submits (...) to the given. Through this analysis, Beauvoir moves beyond Hegelian optimism by naming modalities of ineffectual freedom requiring attention before the realization of social transformation and revolution. (shrink)

Much maligned for deeply problematic language describing female physiology and its peculiar use of "data," Simone de Beauvoir's chapter on biology from The Second Sex appears to be an unusual entry point into the question of woman as Other. In "Biological Data," Beauvoir traces a relationship between the female animal and the species that becomes more alarming as she moves from unicellular organisms to complex mammalian life. By the time she reaches human beings, we are bombarded with passages emphasizing woman's (...) "enslavement" to the species, the tyranny of her hormonal and reproductive life, and the impeding effects of physical limitations. Such claims lead commentators to accuse Beauvoir, for example, of adopting... (shrink)

_Essays on Beauvoir’s influences, contemporary engagements, and legacy in the philosophical tradition._.

This paper explores a dimension of the contemporary western understanding of nature as it has been shaped by the thought of Hegel. Emblematic of a tradition that struggles to think nature on its own terms but which, more often than not, formulates it as the ground upon which human progress is built, Hegel’s philosophy sacrifices nature to spiritual progress. Orienting this study through Dennis J. Schmidt’s work on death and sacrifice in the dialectic, I trace Hegel’s formulation of the natural (...) to show how the denigration of nature plays into a larger pattern evident in the western tradition, one that that positions the natural as somehow “outside” the political and spiritual, thereby subjecting it to mischaracterization and misuse. I conclude with a call for a post-sacrificial understanding of the natural world in an effort to help challenge the destructive force inherited by this tradition. (shrink)

This paper utilizes Robert Smithson's philosophy as a kind of counterpoint, rather than refutation, to many of Hegel's convictions on the nature and function of art in world historical spirit.

_The essential companion to Simone de Beauvoir's celebrated novel._.

The contributors to this volume address global, regional, and local landscapes, cosmopolitan and indigenous cultures, and human and more-than-human ecology as they work to reveal place-specific tensional dynamics. This unusual book, which covers a wide-ranging array of topics, coheres into a work that will be a valuable reference for scholars of geography and the philosophy of place.

Shannon Mussett’s _Entropic philosophy_ offers a creative and important new lens through which the history of philosophy and a number of contemporary ethical, social, and political problems can be read and interpreted. By exploring the concept of entropy not merely as a scientific certainty but as a “root metaphor” through which the inexorable finitude, fragility, and vulnerability of material reality might be re-examined, Mussett invites her readers to re-consider the nature of their responsibility for one another and (...) the material world as a whole. In this way, Mussett offers her readers a new paradigm by which they can approach philosophical and ethical problems; one which takes the tendency towards pessimism entropic thinking typically inspires and transmutes it to an invitation to care more reverently for material beings, human and nonhuman alike. As such, Mussett’s work provides a valuable new contribution to contemporary philosophy by highlighting how we might re-imagine both its history and the ethical, social, and political problems which motivate it together. (shrink)

Since her death in 1986 and the publication of her letters and diaries in 1990, interest in the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir has never been greater. In this engaging and timely volume, Margaret A. Simons and an international group of philosophers present 16 essays that reveal Beauvoir as one of the century’s most important and influential thinkers. As they set Beauvoir’s work into dialogue with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, and others, these essays consider questions such as Beauvoir’s philosophical (...) relationship with Sartre; her ethic of the erotic; her views on marriage, motherhood, and female friendship; and her interpretations of oppression and liberation. This book discusses the full range of Beauvoir’s work, including The Second Sex, her unpublished diaries, autobiographical writings, novels, and philosophical essays, and broadens the scope and interpretive context of her unique philosophy. Contributors are Nancy Bauer, Debra Bergoffen, Suzanne Laba Cataldi, Edward Fullbrook, Eva Gothlin, Sara Heinämaa, Laura Hengehold, Stacy Keltner, Michèle Le Doeuff, Ann Murphy, Shannon M. Mussett, Margaret A. Simons, Ursula Tidd, Andrea Veltman, Karen Vintges, Julie Ward, Gail Weiss. (shrink)

Continental Philosophy Beyond "the" Continent / Brian Treanor -- Prometheus' Gift of Fire and Technics: Contemplating the Meaning of Fire, Affect, and Californian Pyrophytes in the Pyrocene / Marjolein Oele -- The West as Slaughterbench: Thinking without Revolutions in the American West / Christopher Lauer -- The End of the West: The Time of Apocalypse in the Westerns of Cormac McCarthy / Amanda Parris -- The Trees of the West: Our Elders, Our Teachers / Andrew Jussaume -- Thinking Wolves / (...) Thomas Thorpe -- Robert Smith, Entropic Art, and the West / Shannon M. Mussett -- "Westering" and "BreakingThrough": Zen Buddhism on Cannery Row / Gerard Kuperus -- Life in Interregnum: Deleuze, Guattari, and Atleo / Russell Duvernoy -- Monstrous Topologies: Edward Abbey, Reiner Schürmann, and the Fate of the American West / Josh Hayes -- Turtle Island Anarchy / Jason Wirth. (shrink)

Volume Four, as indicated by the anthology's subtitle, is in honor of Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The chapters do not necessarily mention Simone de Beauvoir or Martin Heidegger. The 16 chapters (by professional philosophers and other professional scholars) are directed to issues related to death, life extension, and anti-death. Most of the 400-plus pages consist of scholarship unique to this volume. Includes index. -/- -/- The titles of the 16 chapters are as follows: -/- -/- 1. (...) Mechanism, Galileo’s Animale And Heidegger’s Gestell: Reflections On The Lifelessness Of Modern Science by GiorgioBaruchello -/- -/- 2. Simone De Beauvoir by Debra Bergoffen -/- 3. Existentialism by Steven Crowell -/- -/- 4. Time Wounds All Heels by William Grey -/- -/- 5. The Ethical Importance Of Death by Jenann Ismael -/- 6. The Poetics Of Death: Intimations And Illusions by Lawrence Kimmel -/- -/- 7. Death And Aesthetics by Keith Lehrer -/- -/- 8. Ageing And Existentialism: Simone De Beauvoir And The Limits Of Freedom by Shannon M. Mussett -/- -/- 9. Life Extension And Meaning by Carol O’Brien -/- -/- 10. Consciousness As Computation: A Defense Of Strong AI Based On Quantum-State Functionalism by R. Michael Perry -/- -/- 11. Reality Shifts: On The Death And Dying Of Dr. Timothy Leary by Carol Sue Rosin -/- -/- 12. Extraterrestrial Liberty And The Great Transmutation by Charles Tandy -/- -/- 13. A Time Travel Schema And Eight Types Of Time Travel by Charles Tandy -/- -/- 14. Boredom, Experimental Ethics, And Superlongevity by Mark Walker -/- -/- 15. Exopolitics: The Death Of Death by Alfred Lambremont Webre -/- -/- 16. Embryo Cloning: Current State Of The Medical Art And Its Far-Reaching Consequences For Multiple Applications by Panayiotis M.Zavos. (shrink)

This essay explores Adorno's neglected writings on democracy in the United States, composed in English and directed toward an American audience, to illuminate a democratic theory and practice oriented around the concepts of “democratic leadership,” “democratic pedagogy,” and “democratic enlightenment.” Bridging disciplinary divides, this essay brings the lens of artistic modernism to bear on Adorno's writings on democracy in America to illuminate the distinctive contributions of a political theory that might only appear partial and preliminary when analyzed through the lens (...) of conventional politics. Adorno's understanding of “democratic enlightenment” resonates with the modernist concept of epiphany and represents a translation of artistic modernism to the political realm. Reworking traditional readings of Adorno's politics and his relationship with the United States, this essay reads him as a democratic modernist whose lessons on the meaningful practice of democracy still speak powerfully and practically to Americans today. (shrink)

Adverse childhood experiences are known to have deleterious effects on individuals across the life span, but less is known about how they affect grit, a strong predictor of achievements and well-being. This study seeks to investigate the effect of ACEs on grit in a sample of Chinese college students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from 1,871 students across 12 universities in China. Findings indicated a significant effect of ACEs on grit, particularly abuse and neglect dimensions of ACE. Since (...) grit is particularly important for professional success, those who have experienced abuse and neglect victimization may struggle throughout their education, and subsequently, in their careers. This calls for interventions to buffer the effects of ACEs on grit. (shrink)

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of cool have informed the American ethos since at least the 1970s. Whether we strive for it in politics or fashion, cool is big business for those who can sell it across a range of markets and media. Yet the concept wasn't always a popular commodity. Cool began as a potent aesthetic of post-World War II black culture, embodying a very specific, highly charged method of resistance to white supremacy and the globalized exploitation of capital. (...) _Way Too Cool_ follows the hollowing-out of "coolness" in modern American culture and its reflection of a larger evasion of race, racism, and ethics now common in neoliberal society. It revisits such watershed events as the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, the emergence of identity politics, 1980s multiculturalism, 1990s rhetorics of diversity and colorblindness, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, as well as the contemporaneous developments of rising mass incarceration and legalized same-sex marriage. It pairs the perversion of cool with the slow erasure of racial and ethical issues from our social consciousness, which effectively quashes our desire to act ethically and resist abuses of power. The cooler we become, the more indifferent we grow to the question of values, particularly inquiry that spurs protest and conflict. This book sounds an alarm for those who care about preserving our ties to an American tradition of resistance. (shrink)

Direct Social Perception (DSP) is the idea that we can non-inferentially perceive others’ mental states. In this paper, I argue that the standard way of framing DSP leaves the debate at an impasse. I suggest two alternative interpretations of the idea that we see others’ mental states: others’ mental states are represented in the content of our perception, and we have basic perceptual beliefs about others’ mental states. I argue that the latter interpretation of DSP is more promising and examine (...) the kinds of mental states that plausibly could satisfy this version of DSP. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 2, Page 93-113, April 2022. Twitter is an increasingly common source of rich, personalized qualitative data, as millions of people daily share their thoughts on myriad topics. However, questions remain unclear concerning if and how to quote publicly available social media data ethically. In this study, focusing on 136 education manuscripts quoting 2667 Tweets, we look to investigate the ways in which Tweets are quoted, the ethical discussions forwarded and actions taken, and the extent to (...) which quoted Tweets are “discoverable.” A concerning result is that in almost all manuscripts, and for around half of all quoted Tweets, the original author could be identified. Drawing on our findings we share some ethical dilemmas, including those that arise from an apparent lack of understanding of the technical aspects of the platform, and offer suggestions for promoting ethically-informed practice. (shrink)

In our everyday social interactions, we try to make sense of what people are thinking, why they act as they do, and what they are likely to do next. This process is called mindreading. Mindreading, Shannon Spaulding argues in this book, is central to our ability to understand and interact with others. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have converged on the idea that mindreading involves theorizing about and simulating others’ mental states. She argues that this view of mindreading is limiting (...) and outdated. Most contemporary views of mindreading vastly underrepresent the diversity and complexity of mindreading. She articulates a new theory of mindreading that takes into account cutting edge philosophical and empirical research on in-group/out-group dynamics, social biases, and how our goals and the situational context influence how we interpret others’ behavior. -/- Spaulding's resulting theory of mindreading provides a more accurate, comprehensive, and perhaps pessimistic view of our abilities to understand others, with important epistemological and ethical implications. Deciding who is trustworthy, knowledgeable, and competent are epistemically and ethically fraught judgments: her new theory of mindreading sheds light on how these judgments are made and the conditions under which they are unreliable. -/- This book will be of great interest to students of philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, applied epistemology, cognitive science and moral psychology, as well as those interested in conceptual issues in psychology. (shrink)

The 2017 codetection of electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves was the first of its kind and marked the beginning of multimessenger astronomy. But this event has been treated within recent literature as something of an end as well. The 2017 detection is often regarded as an instance of falsification for all theories of modified gravity which postulate gravitational waves propagate along separate geodesics from electromagnetic radiation, perhaps most notably Jacob Bekenstein’s Tensor-Vector-Scalar gravity. I critically examine this explicit endorsement of falsification (...) by astronomers and astrophysicists. While the current state of multimetric modified gravity theories is dim, recent developments in multimessenger observation do not offer a deductive falsification. Rather such evidence should be regarded as a corroboration of the null hypothesis, following Deborah Mayo's error-statistical account. (shrink)

In response to the ubiquitous graphs and maps of COVID-19, artists, designers, data scientists, and public health officials are teaming up to create counter-plots and subaltern maps of the pandemic. In this intervention, we describe the various functions served by these projects. First, they offer tutorials and tools for both dataviz practitioners and their publics to encourage critical thinking about how COVID-19 data is sourced and modeled—and to consider which subjects are not interpellated in those data sets, and why not. (...) Second, they demonstrate how the pandemic’s spatial logics inscribe themselves in our immediate material landscapes. And third, they remind us of our capacity to personalize and participate in the creation of meaningful COVID visualizations—many of which represent other scales and dimensions of the pandemic, especially the quarantine quotidian. Together, the official maps and counter-plots acknowledge that the pandemic plays out differently across different scales: COVID-19 is about global supply chains and infection counts and TV ratings for presidential press conferences, but it is also about local dynamics and neighborhood mutual aid networks and personal geographies of mitigation and care. (shrink)

I defend the view that a significant ethical distinction can be made between justified killing in self-defense and police use of lethal force. I start by opposing the belief that police use of lethal force is morally justified on the basis of self-defense. Then I demonstrate that the state’s monopoly on the use of force within a given jurisdiction invests police officers with responsibilities that go beyond what morality requires of the average person. I argue that the police should primarily (...) be concerned with preserving public safety. As a consequence, police have additional moral permissions to use lethal force. But this also means that the principle of restraint is inherent to the policing function and therefore police are obliged to go to greater lengths to avoid killing. I concede that the just use of police force can be made difficult in extreme situations such as a mass riot. In such cases, police should take proportionate actions necessary to protect the lives of inhabitants by restoring order, which might include calling on military support. I conclude with a cautionary note opposing militarization of the policing role. (shrink)

New technologies from artificial intelligence to drones, and biomedical enhancement make the future of the human family increasingly hard to predict and protect. This book explores how the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics can help us to cultivate the moral wisdom we need to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.

Accounts of sexual experience, sexual oppression, and sexual violation, if they are not to lend support to the problems they are invoked to address, require the foundation of a phenomenological description of the character of experience. Relying on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I aim to provide this foundation, arguing that sexual experience is a domain not of detached, individual autonomy but of intrinsic susceptibility and exposure to the world. My description of sexual experience is intended to reveal the immanent norms that sexuality (...) projects and thereby to critique ways of inhabiting experience that disavow what is revealed in that description. The first section discerns three ambiguities that characterize our experience in Merleau-Ponty's notion of “flesh”: that between materiality and meaning, self and others, and self and world. The second section offers a phenomenology of sexual experience based on these ambiguities. The third section, on sexual oppression and suppression, identifies two stereotypical ways in which they are evaded: what I call the stances of “withdrawal from” and “control of” sexuality as flesh. Finally, the fourth section reveals the shortcomings of the legal-juridical domain in navigating our status as flesh, and warns against the proliferation of its terms, specifically the norm of consent. (shrink)

The responsibility gap, commonly described as a core challenge for the effective governance of, and trust in, AI and autonomous systems (AI/AS), is traditionally associated with a failure of the epistemic and/or the control condition of moral responsibility: the ability to know what we are doing and exercise competent control over this doing. Yet these two conditions are a red herring when it comes to understanding the responsibility challenges presented by AI/AS, since evidence from the cognitive sciences shows that individual (...) humans face very similar responsibility challenges with regard to these two conditions. While the problems of epistemic opacity and attenuated behaviour control are not unique to AI/AS technologies (though they can be exacerbated by them), we show that we can learn important lessons for AI/AS development and governance from how philosophers have recently revised the traditional concept of moral responsibility in response to these challenges to responsible human agency from the cognitive sciences. The resulting instrumentalist views of responsibility, which emphasize the forward-looking and flexible role of agency cultivation, hold considerable promise for integrating AI/AS into a healthy moral ecology. We note that there nevertheless is a gap in AI/AS responsibility that has yet to be extensively studied and addressed, one grounded in a relational asymmetry of vulnerability between human agents and sociotechnical systems like AI/AS. In the conclusion of this paper we note that attention to this vulnerability gap must inform and enable future attempts to construct trustworthy AI/AS systems and preserve the conditions for responsible human agency. (shrink)

The orthodox view of social cognition maintains that mentalizing is an important and pervasive element of our ordinary social interactions. The orthodoxy has come under scrutiny from various sources recently. Critics from the phenomenological tradition argue that phenomenological reflection on our social interactions tells against the orthodox view. Proponents of pluralistic folk psychology argue that our ordinary social interactions extend far beyond mentalizing. Both sorts of critics argue that emphasis in social cognition research ought to be on other elements of (...) our social practices. In this paper, I consider social explanations specifically and argue that social explanations are implicated in many of the social practices highlighted by critics of the orthodox view. (shrink)

As it turns out, accounting for the mechanics of willful wrongdoing has been a major problem for ethics from the beginning, and it has led to some very strange theories. Socrates and Plato simply deny the possibility. What does this mean for DungeonsDragons (DD)? First of all, it means that nobody chooses evil for the sake of evil, what some people call diabolic evil. The primary sources of evil are indifference and self‐deception. Both lead me to a life of convention, (...) simply living up to the code of conduct given by society. It is much more comfortable to think of evil as something done by villains in movies. There is something rather disturbing about the thought that one can become evil gradually. Because of the influence of bad habits, much about the moral life feels grey and fuzzy. (shrink)

Michel Foucault wrote only one essay explicitly on the work of Georges Bataille, “A Preface to Transgression.” The influence of Bataille on Foucault's thinking is so formative that it simply goes unmarked in his texts. In the terms of his work on locating moments of that insubordinate jouissance in various historical terms, Bataille frames insubordinate jouissance as acts of consumption that are a part of all societies. The author develops a reading of Bataille's Accursed Share alongside Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism, (...) The Birth of Biopolitics, not only to develop an example of the benefits of reading these two thinkers together, but also to argue that they help us see how homo economicus is a crucial link in our thinking about twentieth‐century biopolitics. (shrink)

DNA topoisomerases, capable of manipulating DNA topology, are ubiquitous and indispensable for cellular survival due to the numerous roles they play during DNA metabolism. As we review here, current structural approaches have revealed unprecedented insights into the complex DNA‐topoisomerase interaction and strand passage mechanism, helping to advance our understanding of their activities in vivo. This has been complemented by single‐molecule techniques, which have facilitated the detailed dissection of the various topoisomerase reactions. Recent work has also revealed the importance of topoisomerase (...) interactions with accessory proteins and other DNA‐associated proteins, supporting the idea that they often function as part of multi‐enzyme assemblies in vivo. In addition, novel topoisomerases have been identified and explored, such as topo VIII and Mini‐A. These new findings are advancing our understanding of DNA‐related processes and the vital functions topos fulfil, demonstrating their indispensability in virtually every aspect of DNA metabolism. (shrink)

Since Jonathan Shay's work with Vietnam veterans, moral injury has largely focused on the harm done to soldiers' moral character through their participation in warfare. This essay argues for the inclusion of noncombatants in the scope of inquiry involving moral injury. Specifically, it argues for the necessity of ordinary citizens assuming responsibility for the moral injury done to soldiers and civilians alike in the post‐9/11 wars.