In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Appreciating Susan SontagFred RushMuch education from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s was self-education. Although one might happen to take a university course that incorporated contemporary art and criticism, it was a rarity. More often one supplemented university fare with one's own reading, listening, and viewing of cutting-edge art, anthropology, music, philosophy, linguistics, etc. Susan Sontag was for many Americans of that time a preeminent guide in this process, (...) opening doors to some of the most interesting and influential European work in art and criticism. Sontag's essayistic output—and she was one of the supreme writers in that genre—was seminal. Any sociologist or intellectual historian of the period would have to take her work greatly into account. Her incisive takes on her subject matter were not for everyone. Although trained as a philosopher at the then epicenter of the Anglophone philosophical world, Harvard, she did not tiptoe through academic complexities and was, therefore, decidedly out of step with the philosophical temperament of that time. She strode in, proselytized for her favorites, excoriated her enemies, and left no one in the room ignorant of the fact that she had been there, dominated the conversation and, on the way out, rearranged the furniture.Sontag's views generally have not received much philosophical attention. Even those who prize her critical work have tended to sell short the early, programmatic essays like "Against Interpretation" and "On Style." Perhaps this neglect is self-wrought. Sontag is often at her best when engaged in what one might call first-order criticism, that is, criticism of particular works of art on their own terms. Her work in critical theory tends to be both abstracting and declamatory and, so, operates against her strong suit. Moreover, Sontag's theory of criticism commits her to [End Page 36] the precedence of critical practice over theorizing. Accordingly, she is led to reduce the importance of those early essays. Yet this is where the interest of philosopher will fall, if indeed it falls at all.Sontag's main concern relevant to the philosophy of literature and to aesthetic theory more broadly is what she takes to be the colonization of aesthetic and critical response by what she terms "theory." Critical response is always, to some degree theoretical of course, so her point cannot be one that is ascribed sometimes to her, i.e., that critical response is supposed to be non-theoretical tout court. An "erotics of art," the famous formula contained in the last sentence of "Against Interpretation," is after all an erotics, which was in the ancient world a genre of theoretical investigation, not erotic experience or even erotica. Criticism can be theoretical in many senses as well. By itself the term "theory" does not rule out much unless one appends to it constraints having to do with the internal structure of bodies of knowledge that either qualify or disqualify them as theories correctly so-called. Sontag seems most concerned about two aspects of theoretical accounts of art: (A) their systematicity and (B) their use of modes of interpretation that undercut the aesthetic nature of works. With regard to (B), she is wary particularly of accounts of literary value that appeal to unconscious or subterranean social forces as determinative of meanings of works. The problem with (A) is that systematicity, she claims, tends toward exclusion and reduction, destroying the particularity of individual works.These two contentions comprise the diagnostic and negative side of Sontag's programmatic work in literary theory, i.e., what is to be avoided in one's experience and judgment of art. What is to be avoided is "interpretation," but what is interpretation exactly? What is the scope of Sontag's claim against it? Do her early essays provide a stable, convincing account of the relation between theory, on the one hand, and experience and criticism, on the other? Is she caught between formalism and a more politically engaged kind of criticism? On the positive side, what kind of critical response to literature is appropriate to its aesthetic nature? Is Sontag's replacement for interpretation viable? Sontag presents her answers to the first set of questions in an unstructured... (shrink)

Teaching ethics is crucial to health sciences education. Doing it well requires a willingness to engage contentious social issues. Those issues introduce conflict and risk, but avoiding them ignores moral diversity and renders the work of ethics education irrelevant. Therefore, when (not if) contentious issues and moral differences arise, they must be acknowledged and can be addressed with humility, collegiality, and openness to support learning. Faculty must risk moments when not everyone will “feel safe,” so the candor implied in psychological (...) safety can emerge. The deliberative and social work of ethics education involves generous listening, wading into difference, and wondering together if our beliefs and arguments are as sound as we once thought. By forecasting the need for candid engagement with contentious issues and moral difference, establishing ground rules, and bolstering due process structures for faculty and students, a riskier and more relevant ethics pedagogy can emerge. Doing so will prepare everyone for the moral diversity they can expect in our common life and in practice. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in ethical consumer behaviour research, ambiguity remains regarding what motivates consumers to purchase ethical products. While researchers largely attribute the growth of ethical consumerism to an increase in ethical consumer concerns and motivations, widened distribution of ethical products, such as fairtrade, questions these assumptions. A model that integrates both individual and societal values into the theory of planned behaviour is presented and empirically tested to challenge the assumption that ethical consumption is driven by ethical considerations alone. Using (...) data sourced from fairtrade shoppers across the UK, structural equation modelling suggests that fairtrade purchase intention is driven by both societal and self-interest values. This dual value pathway helps address conceptual limitations inherent in the underlying assumptions of existing ethical purchasing behaviour models and helps advance understanding of consumers’ motivation to purchase ethical products. (shrink)

Fred Feldman is an important philosopher, who has made a substantial contribution to utilitarian moral philosophy. This collection of ten previously published essays plus a new introductory essay reveal the striking originality and unity of his views. Feldman's version of utilitarianism differs from traditional forms in that it evaluates behaviour by appeal to the values of accessible worlds. These worlds are in turn evaluated in terms of the amounts of pleasure they contain, but the conception of pleasure involved is (...) a novel one and the formulation of hedonism improved. In Feldman's view pleasure is not a feeling but a propositional attitude. He also deals with problems of justice that affect standard forms of utilitarianism. The collection is ideally suited for courses on contemporary utilitarian theory. (shrink)

Fred Dretske; XI*—Introspection, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 263–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/9.

Fragmented regions face a range of collective action problems on issues ranging from transportation to affordable housing. Specifically, within regions, free-rider and race-to-the-bottom problems both abound. This Article offers theoretical lenses to clarify the sources of, and barriers to solving, these problems. First, it introduces the concept of concentricity to better understand the region. The municipality and the region represent coexisting, concentric communities and nodes of competition. The geographically based identity that one espouses may toggle between the local and the (...) regional across different contexts. Second, this Article describes a community-competitor feedback loop. Drawing on social science literature, the Article shows how encouraging deep identification with a community can inspire competition with other communities. And encouraging competition between communities can deepen community identity. The Article then applies these theories to practical considerations. Given the persistent nature of hyperlocal identity, intraregional competition, and the resultant feedback loop, mandatory regional solutions may often be politically unattainable, even when they are the optimal solution. Accordingly, this Article presents two voluntary, cooperative regionalist solutions that embrace and potentially exploit regions’ concentric identities, instead of doing the more costly work of dislodging local identity. (shrink)

Historically, there has been little agreement between advocates of radical financial reform and socialist theoreticians. However, in the new circumstances of the twenty-first century, a productive synthesis of these two traditions might be possible. Drawing on the franchise model of credit creation elaborated by Robert C. Hockett and the dysfunctions created by the extreme concentration of private financial institutions, this article outlines a reform agenda that would both democratize finance and facilitate the flow of funds into valuable forms of investment (...) that are currently starved for resources. If the new institutions envisioned in this proposal were able to take root and expand, they could ultimately facilitate a transition to socialism, defined as the subordination of the market to democratic politics. (shrink)

The purpose Tarski speaks of is "to do justice to our intuitions which adhere to the classical Aristotelian conception of truth." Tarski takes this to be some form of correspondence theory. He has earlier considered and rejected an even less satisfactory formula of this sort: 'a sentence is true if it corresponds to reality'. His own semantic conception of truth is meant to be a more precise variant doing justice to the correspondence standpoint. In this spirit I shall presently suggest (...) a revised version of. (shrink)

It is far from obvious that outside of highly specialized domains such as commercial agriculture, the methodology of biometrics—quantitative comparisons over groups of organisms—should be of any use in today’s bioinformatically informed biological sciences. The methods in our biometric textbooks, such as regressions and principal components analysis, make assumptions of homogeneity that are incompatible with current understandings of the origins of developmental or evolutionary data in historically contingent processes, processes that might have come out otherwise; the appropriate statistical methods are (...) those suited to random walks, not normal distributions. A valid methodology would further require that especially close attention be paid to the difference between aspects of processes that are plastic, those that encode their own histories or biographies, and the very small fraction of quantifications that can usefully and realistically be modeled as varying by colored noise around a central tendency that itself has some quantitative meaning. This point of view—that only a vanishingly small fraction of the quantitative information borne by any living organism is worth quantifying—is illustrated by some data on a human birth defect, namely, fetal alcohol syndrome. In a suggestive metaphor, the biometrician is like the pilgrim in Friedrich’s painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, uncertain as to whether to measure the mountains or the clouds. The mountains stand for contingent history, the clouds for the subset of the data most closely matching controlled experiments suitable for quantitative biometric summary. Biometrics applies to the clouds, not the mountains. The success of statistical methods comes at the expense of all the theories that we simultaneously hold to be true about the biological materials to which they both pertain. Biometrics is thus complementary to all of the emerging reductionist sciences of biological structure. (shrink)

This article introduces the special issue on “Relational Work in Market Economies” by explaining the origins of the concept and its value in illuminating a dimension of market activity that has not been systematically addressed by social scientists. It also explains why this focus on individual economic transactions could be relevant for those whose interest centers on broader questions of political economy. Finally, there are brief descriptions of the other six articles that make up this special issue.

This chapter contains sections titled: A Triggering Causal Explanation A Structuring Causal Explanation Further reading.

This is an introduction to an English translation of a 25-page excerpt from Marx’s Manuscript of 1867–68, which was published for the first time in German in 2012 in the MEGA, Volume II/4.3. This excerpt is Marx’s first and only attempt to incorporate unequal turnover times across industries into his theory of the equalisation of the profit rate and prices of production. The introduction attempts to clarify the overall logic of this excerpt as well as to point out Marx’s many (...) small errors in this messy first draft. The introduction concludes with the implications of this excerpt for the general interpretation of Marx’s theory of prices of production. (shrink)