This paper sets Scott’s original film Blade Runner (1982) and Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) in a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ in order to provide critical analyses of both films with respect to some complex configurations of the body along two axes: bio-politics and the spectacle. We offer a reading of these configurations by focusing on the relationships between the human (organic), the non-human (android) and the immaterial (holographic); the eye (optics), the hand (haptics), and aesthetics; slavery, instrumental labour and free-play; the (...) politics of bodies and of memories; the potentialities of revolution and the transmission of ‘tradition of the oppressed’. In this, we foreground two seemingly marginal characters – J. F. Sebastian and Ana Stelline. These ‘little people’ embody and inhabit the convolutions of Blade Runner’s ‘more human than human’ world through ‘free use’ of the body and playfulness which, superficially innocent, nevertheless bear within them the promise of radical political change. (shrink)

If Alison McQueen is right that there is a broad ‘family’ of realist approaches to political theory, then it follows there are several ways of ‘doing’ realism, as illustrated by this collection. Here, I set out one such way, normative behaviourism, by explaining its realist character on four fronts: Its starting point; its values; its ambitions; and its treatment of a shared problem. The argument then considers two key objections to the described approach, both of which affect a range of (...) possible realisms. (shrink)

Bong Joon Ho's Parasite has been globally praised for presenting a new perspective on class conflict and for placing the precarious working class at its center. Prestigious awards such the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Festival or the unprecedented Oscar for the Best Film of the Year only corroborate this global consensus. But I think it's the opposite. Parasite is an overworked and convoluted narrative about the impossibility of overcoming, dismantling, or exiting neoliberal capitalism. Literally, the South Korean film is (...) a cinematic version of Fredric Jameson's infamousthat "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism." Therefore, the interesting thing to analyze is how we all have enjoyed globally, in almost ecclesiastical communion, our last cinematic surrender to the ideology of late capitalism. And at that, it must be admitted, Bong Joon Ho's film is a work of genius. Parasite is also a pertinent departure point to revisit some of Žižek’s theories on the issue of neoliberalism’s global fantasies and on Lacan’s four discourses. (shrink)

In recent years, a multitude of datasets of human–human conversations has been released for the main purpose of training conversational agents based on data‐hungry artificial neural networks. In this paper, we argue that datasets of this sort represent a useful and underexplored source to validate, complement, and enhance cognitive studies on human behavior and language use. We present a method that leverages the recent development of powerful computational models to obtain the fine‐grained annotation required to apply metrics and techniques from (...) Cognitive Science to large datasets. Previous work in Cognitive Science has investigated the question‐asking strategies of human participants by employing different variants of the so‐called 20‐question‐game setting and proposing several evaluation methods. In our work, we focus on GuessWhat, a task proposed within the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities that is similar in structure to the 20‐question‐game setting. Crucially, the GuessWhat dataset contains tens of thousands of dialogues based on real‐world images, making it a suitable setting to investigate the question‐asking strategies of human players on a large scale and in a natural setting. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of computational tools to automatically code how the hypothesis space changes throughout the dialogue in complex visual scenes. On the one hand, we confirm findings from previous work on smaller and more controlled settings. On the other hand, our analyses allow us to highlight the presence of “uninformative” questions (in terms of Expected Information Gain) at specific rounds of the dialogue. We hypothesize that these questions fulfill pragmatic constraints that are exploited by human players to solve visual tasks in complex scenes successfully. Our work illustrates a method that brings together efforts and findings from different disciplines to gain a better understanding of human question‐asking strategies on large‐scale datasets, while at the same time posing new questions about the development of conversational systems. (shrink)

Previous studies have reportedstudents' widely held belief that they are moreethical than businessmen. On the other hand,widespread cheating among college students hasbeen reported. This paper examines thisinconsistency between the beliefs of collegestudent regarding the need for ethical behaviorin a business setting and their actions in anacademic setting.The results of this study indicate that whilestudents are generally upset with cheating intheir class, a large proportion of themnonetheless engage in such behavior. It wasfurther found that students have a goodunderstanding of what constitutes (...) ethicalbehavior in the business world and the need forsuch behavior. However, they also believe thatbusiness people fail to act in an ethicalmanner, and that they may need to actunethically to advance their careers. (shrink)

The reality of resource limitation during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic has deeply challenged established approaches to healthcare system emergency response. Early preparation du...

Most clinical neurofeedback studies based on functional magnetic resonance imaging use the patient's own neural activity as feedback. The objective of this study was to create a subject-independent brain state classifier as part of a real-time fMRI neurofeedback system that can guide patients with depression in achieving a healthy brain state, and then to examine subsequent clinical changes. In a first step, a brain classifier based on a support vector machine was trained from the neural information of happy autobiographical (...) imagery and motor imagery blocks received from a healthy female participant during an MRI session. In the second step, 7 right-handed female patients with mild or moderate depressive symptoms were trained to match their own neural activity with the neural activity corresponding to the “happiness emotional brain state” of the healthy participant. The training was carried out using the rt-fMRI NF system guided by the brain-state classifier we had created. Thus, the informative voxels previously obtained in the first step, using SVM classification and Effect Mapping, were used to classify the Blood-Oxygen-Level Dependent activity of the patients and converted into real-time visual feedback during the neurofeedback training runs. Improvements in the classifier accuracy toward the end of the training were observed in all the patients [Session 4–1 Median = 6.563%; Range = 4.10–27.34; Wilcoxon Test, 2-tailed p = 0.031]. Clinical improvement also was observed in a blind standardized clinical evaluation [HDRS CE2-1 Median = 7; Range 2 to 15; Wilcoxon Test, 2-tailed p = 0.016], and in self-report assessments [BDI-II CE2-1 Median = 8; Range 1–15; Wilcoxon Test, 2-tailed p = 0.031]. In addition, the clinical improvement was still present 10 days after the intervention [BDI-II CE3-2_Median = 0; Range −1 to 2; Wilcoxon Test, 2-tailed p = 0.50/ HDRS CE3-2 Median = 0; Range −1 to 2; Wilcoxon Test, 2-tailed p = 0.625]. Although the number of participants needs to be increased and a control group included to confirm these findings, the results suggest a novel option for neural modulation and clinical alleviation in depression using noninvasive stimulation technologies. (shrink)

Mele uses survey methods of experimental philosophy to argue that folk notions of freedom and responsibility do not really require any dubious mind–body dualism. In his comment, Nadelhoffer questions Mele's interpretation of the experiments and adds contrary data of his own. Vargas then suggests that Mele overlooks yet another threat to free will—sourcehood. Mele replies by reinterpreting Nadelhoffer's data and rejecting Vargas’ claim that free will requires sourcehood.

The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s associated with Harvard, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America's distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand's bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James - appear in this book, alongside other thinkers such as John Dewey who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the (...) full story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains thirty-seven important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors' three introductions to the volume's sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought from the Metaphysical Club. (shrink)

For which infinite cardinals $\kappa $ is there a partition of the real line ${\mathbb R}$ into precisely $\kappa $ Borel sets? Work of Lusin, Souslin, and Hausdorff shows that ${\mathbb R}$ can be partitioned into $\aleph _1$ Borel sets. But other than this, we show that the spectrum of possible sizes of partitions of ${\mathbb R}$ into Borel sets can be fairly arbitrary. For example, given any $A \subseteq \omega $ with $0,1 \in A$, there is a forcing (...) extension in which ${A = \{ n :\, \text {there is a partition of } {{\mathbb R}} \text { into }\aleph _n\text { Borel sets}\}}$. We also look at the corresponding question for partitions of ${\mathbb R}$ into closed sets. We show that, like with partitions into Borel sets, the set of all uncountable $\kappa $ such that there is a partition of ${\mathbb R}$ into precisely $\kappa $ closed sets can be fairly arbitrary. (shrink)

Companies that are serious about corporate governance and business ethics are turning their attention to gender diversity at the most senior levels of business . Board gender diversity has been the subject of several studies carried out by international organizations such as Catalyst , the World Economic Forum , and the European Board Diversity Analysis . They all lead to reports confirming the overall relatively low proportion of women on boards and the slow pace at which more women are being (...) appointed. Furthermore, the proportion of women on corporate boards varies much across countries. Based on institutional theory, this study hypothesizes and tests whether this variation can be attributed to differences in cultural settings across countries. Our analysis of the representation of women on boards for 32 countries during 2010 reveals that two cultural characteristics are indeed associated with the observed differences. We use the cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede to measure this construct. Results show that countries which have the greatest tolerance for inequalities in the distribution of power and those that tend to value the role of men generally exhibit lower representations of women on boards. (shrink)

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a nonmonotonic logical model of this process which defines unique minimal preferred models and efficiently simulates a kind of closed-world reasoning of particular interest for (...) human cognition. Byrne's “suppression” data (Byrne, 1989) are used to illustrate how variants on this logic can capture and motivate subtly different interpretative stances which different subjects adopt, thus indicating where more fine-grained empirical data are required to understand what subjects are doing in this task. We then show that this logical competence model can be implemented in spreading activation network models. A one pass process interprets the textual input by constructing a network which then computes minimal preferred models for (3-valued) valuations of the set of propositions of the text. The neural implementation distinguishes easy forward reasoning from more complex backward reasoning in a way that may be useful in explaining directionality in human reasoning. (shrink)

The problem of Kant's first Critique is the problem of pure reason: how are synthetic judgments possible a priori? Many of his readers have believed that the problem depends upon a delimitation within the class of a priori truths of a class of irreducibly synthetic truths—a delimitation whose possibility is doubtful—because absent this it is not excluded that all a priori truths are analytic. I argue, on the contrary, that the problem depends on nothing more than the human knower's everyday (...) consciousness of her own finitude: her dependence in thinking and knowing on what is given to her. The problem is a difficulty about how the concepts which figure in metaphysical judgments could represent reality given that they cannot do so in the way in which concepts figuring in empirical judgments do. Empirical judgment here functions as exemplary of thought and knowledge because it is exemplary of finite thought and knowledge. Mere analysis could not, therefore, dissolve the problem even in principle, because to say that a concept can be analyzed is not yet to explain the possibility of its real representative power. The significance of the analytic-synthetic distinction in the context of the problem of pure reason is that its formulation allows Kant to say this. (shrink)

Reality has become an increasingly prominent topic in contemporary philosophy. The book’s contributors are responding to the challenge to use the philosophically underexplored potential of film to disclose what the editors propose to call “the real of reality.”.

Catholic doctrine makes metaphysical claims about the Eucharist, but the distinctive language of “transubstantiation” is often treated as an historically contingent, and disposable, way of articulating these claims. Attempts to translate the metaphysics implied by “transubstantiation” into other terminology should begin by attending to the semantic assumptions of those who first articulated it. This chapter argues that the notion of substantial predication in realist semantics helps communicate a metaphysical claim which even well-intended efforts at translation into other semantic frameworks often (...) fail to capture. An implication of the argument is that, not only does realist semantics help us understand the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, but the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation helps us recapture realist semantics and the Aristotelian notion of substance. (shrink)

In her recent book Gillian Brock argues that states’ legitimacy depends on their being part of a just state system that protects human rights. Here I discuss some practical limitations raised by Brock’s legitimacy framework: mainly, (1) the problematic real-world implications of such an account, and (2) the epistemic challenges that judgements inspired by this account would have to face, were we to proceed solely on the basis of it.

J. L. Mackie's famous claim that Locke ‘anticipates’ Kripke's Causal Theory of Reference rests, I suggest, upon a pair of important misunderstandings. Contra Mackie, as well as the more recent accounts of Paul Guyer and Michael Ayers, Lockean Real Essences consist of those features of an entity from which all of its experienceable properties can be logically deduced; thus a substantival Real Essence consists of features of a Real Constitution plus logically necessary objective connections between them and (...) features of some particular Nominal Essence. Furthermore, what Locke actually anticipates is the most significant contemporary challenge to the CTR: the qua‐problem. (shrink)

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a nonmonotonic logical model of this process which defines unique minimal preferred models and efficiently simulates a kind of closed-world reasoning of particular interest for (...) human cognition. Byrne's “suppression” data (Byrne, 1989) are used to illustrate how variants on this logic can capture and motivate subtly different interpretative stances which different subjects adopt, thus indicating where more fine-grained empirical data are required to understand what subjects are doing in this task. We then show that this logical competence model can be implemented in spreading activation network models. A one pass process interprets the textual input by constructing a network which then computes minimal preferred models for (3-valued) valuations of the set of propositions of the text. The neural implementation distinguishes easy forward reasoning from more complex backward reasoning in a way that may be useful in explaining directionality in human reasoning. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, Hilda Diana Oakeley set out a new kind of British idealism. Oakeley is an idealist in the sense that she holds mind to actively contribute to the features of experience, but she also accepts that there is a world independent of mind. One of her central contributions to the idealist tradition is her thesis that minds construct our experiences using memory. This paper explores the theses underlying her idealism, and shows how they are intricately connected (...) to the wider debates of her period. I go on to explain how the parts of Oakeley's idealism are connected to further areas of her thought – specifically, her views on history and her growing block theory of time – to provide a sense of Oakeley's philosophy as a system. As there is no existing literature on Oakeley, this paper aims to open a path for further scholarship. (shrink)

In Spain before the 1990s there was no clear and explicit comprehensive training for future engineers with regard to social responsibility and social commitment. Following the Spanish university curricular reform, which began in the early 1990s, a number of optional subjects became available to students, concerning science, technology and society (STS), international cooperation, the environment and sustainability. The latest redefinition of the Spanish curriculum in line with the Bologna agreements has reduced the number of non-obligatory subjects, but could lead to (...) improving preparation for social responsibility due to the requirement that the design of curricula and the assessment of students should be based on competencies, some of which include human values and attitudes. (shrink)

Occasionally, people are called upon to estimate probabilities after an event has occurred. In hindsight, was this an outcome we could have expected? Could things easily have turned out differently? One strategy for performing post hoc probability judgements would be to mentally turn the clock back and reconstruct one's expectations before the event. But if asked about the probability of an alternative, counterfactual outcome, a simpler strategy is available, based on this outcome's perceived closeness to what actually happened. The article (...) presents five studies exploring the relationship between counterfactual closeness and counterfactual probability. The first study indicates that post hoc probabilities typically refer to the counterfactual rather than the factual outcome. Studies 2-5 show that physical, temporal, or conceptual proximity play a decisive role for post hoc probability assessments of counterfactual events. When margins are narrow, the probabilities of, for instance, winning a match (when losing), and of losing (when actually winning) may even be rated higher than the corresponding probabilities of what really happened. Closeness is also more often referred to, and rated to be a better reason for believing there is a ''good chance" of the counterfactual rather than of the factual result occurring. Finally, the closeness of the alternative outcome in success and failure stories is shown to be significantly correlated to its rated probability. (shrink)

1. The Urgent Need for an Intellectual Revolution 2. Two Fundamental Problems 3. Autobiographical Remarks 4. What Kind of Inquiry Can Best Help Life of Value to Flourish? 5. How is Life of Value Possible in the Physical Universe? 6. Connections between the Two Problems .

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 3, Page 425-437, May 2022.

Social policy questions in the U.S. are often framed in terms of individual rights, valorizing individual freedom and self‐determination. But this focus obscures the social and economic bases of health and disease. U.S. bioethics, as its counterparts in Africa and Asia have done, needs to restructure its philosophical framework and expand its moral criteria to consider how to define a global ethics.

이 논문은 메타윤리학의 대표적인 문제들 가운데 하나인 도덕적 쌍둥이 지구 논증에 대한 응답을 제시한다. 통상적으로 그것은 자연주의적 도덕 실재론의 의미론적 측면인 인과적 지시 이론에 대해 제기된 것으로, 도덕적 용어가 과연 자연종 용어와 같이 취급될 수 있는지를 묻는 것으로 알려져 있다. 이곳에서 나는 그 논증이 가정하는 직관적 자명성을 의문시하는 기존의 몇몇 답변들이 그럴듯하지만, 그 문제를 제기함으로써 드러나는, 배후에 있는 보다 근본적인 문제에 대해서는 별로 알려주는 바가 없다는 점을 지적할 것이다. 그 문제는 자연주의적 입장을 취한다고 할 때, 자연 과학 이론에 비견될 수 (...) 있는 도덕 이론은 무엇인가라는 문제이다. 내가 보기에, 이는 관련 논의 당사자들이 명시적 혹은 암묵적으로 가정하듯, 우리가 흔히 떠올릴 수 있는 규범 윤리학 이론들 가운데 하나가 아니며, 그런 가정이 오히려 도덕적 쌍둥이 지구 논증의 진짜 문제를 발생시키는 원천이 된다. 나는 경험적 인간학의 일종으로 볼 수 있는, “덕 이론”이 자연주의적 도덕 실재론에 부합하는 도덕 이론에 가까울 것이라는 견해를 제안할 것이다. (shrink)

Based on empirical data from a qualitative study, this paper explores the complexity of ‘real world’ management in Hong Kong’s public sector, as contrasted with various paradigmatic claims under ‘new public management’ (NPM). A plurality of sub-worlds within the broad public sector is identified, which makes the management roles and responsibilities much less ‘homogenised’ than depicted in NPM exhortations. The instrumental rationality underpinning NPM is identified as too restrictive in understanding the way in which public managers reach decisions. When (...) the daily challenges of reconciling values and practices arising from the complexities of politics, policies and service delivery are considered it is necessary to incorporate ideas related to procedural and expressive rationality to fully appreciate the nature of management in public organisations. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek, alongside Quinton Meillassoux, takes up the position that correlationism – the idea that one can only know the world as it appears for one’s subjective perception of it – fails to account for its own articulation, and thus depoliticizes the formal space from which it can arise. Through his reading of Hegel and locating of the Kantian thing-in-itself within reality, Žižek claims that he can subvert Kantian correlationism and its consequent political ‘celebration of failure’. [i] This paper, however, (...) argues that Žižek’s Hegelian move, with its corresponding notion of the Act, fails to politicize the formal space that he criticizes Kantianism and the contemporary left for failing to consider. That is, Žižek’s alternative, his use of Marxism to delineate and politicize the formal Real space of capital, falls short. His Marxist construction and analysis of capital, since it relies upon the labor theory of value, which Žižek himself criticizes, results in an unwarranted speculation. Without a plausible construction, his claim to avoid Kantian impotence has little ground to stand on. The left is forced back to the drawing board; without Žižek’s alternative it is forced to revise Žižek’s concept of the Act, Marxist construction, or re-confront the political limits of Kantian finitude and correlationism. [i] Žižek, Enjoyment as a political Factor, xii, xvii. (shrink)

: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that HIV testing be routinely offered to certain patients in hospitals with a high prevalence of HIV infection and on all pregnant women. The CDC does not, however, offer implementation level guidelines for obtaining informed consent. We provide a moral justification for requiring informed consent for HIV testing and propose guidelines for securing such consent. In particular we argue that genuine informed consent can be secured without elaborate counseling, such (...) as that currently used at Counseling and Testing Sites, provided that sufficient written notice is given to the patients before testing and that they are specifically asked for permission. (shrink)

The importance of non-codifying DNA polymorphism for the administration of justice is now well known. In Spain, however, this type of test has given rise to questions in recent years: Should consent be obtained before biological samples are taken from an individual for DNA analysis? Does society perceive these techniques and methods of analysis as being reliable? There appears to be lack of knowledge concerning the basic norms that regulate databases containing private or personal information and the protection that information (...) of this type must be given. This opinion survey and the subsequent analysis of the results in ethical terms may serve to reveal the criteria and the degree of information that society has with regard to DNA databases. In the study, 73.20% of the population surveyed was in favour of specific legislation for computer files in which DNA analysis results for forensic purposes are stored. (shrink)

While Ingarden makes only infrequent reference to Aristotle, The Philosopher’s presence can be discerned throughout his published works. Perhaps mostsignificantly, when Ingarden returned to work on Controversy over the Existence of the World in 1938, he immersed himself in the study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and the entire framework of Controversy appears to have been inspired by reflection on central Aristotelian concepts. Ingarden’s understanding of the Aristotelian conception of the relation between form and matter, and indeed the Aristotelian character of Ingarden’s (...) ontology as a whole, stands in sharp contrast not only to Husserl’s transcendental idealism, but also to the materialist orientation of current mainstream research in cognitive science. It is hoped that this brief examination might serve to introduce to this research a realist phenomenological orientation that is capable of embracing and elucidating insights from both materialist and idealist approaches to the study of cognition. (shrink)

Community standards, ethical norms, and perceptions of fairness often serve as constraints on pure profit maximizing behavior. Consider the following examples: Most hardware stores refrain from raising prices on snow shovels after a major snow storm, even where short term profits might be increased. Most employers do not lower wages for existing employees, even as unemployment in the area increases. Automobile dealerships rarely raise sticker prices to cope with the long waiting periods for a popular model. Each of these anomalies (...) is consistent with the proposition that firms increase profits subject to fairness constraints.This paper examines perceptions of fairness in the residential real estate industry and explores how community standards affect economic decision-making. The residential real estate industry is unique. One party to the transaction (the landlord) frames decisions as pure business decisions. The other party to the transaction (the tenant) frames decisions more broadly. While a tenant's choice of apartments is in part viewed as a business decision, tenants consider a broad spectrum of non-business issues, as well. (shrink)

We argue that standard experiments supporting the existence of do not represent many cooperative situations outside the laboratory. More representative experiments that incorporate rather than wealth also do not provide evidence for the impact of strong reciprocity on cooperation in contemporary real-life situations or in evolutionary history, supporting the main conclusions of the target article.

The present book explores a variety of fundamental questions that all of us secretly share. Its twenty-one chapters, written by some of the world’s leading Melville and Conrad scholars, indicate possible directions of comparativist insight into the continuity and transformations of western existentialist thought between the 19th and 20th centuries. The existential philosophy of participation—so mistrustful of analytical categories—is epitomized by the lives and oeuvres of Melville and Conrad. Born in the immediacy of experience, this philosophy finds its expression in (...) uncertain tropes and faith-based actions; rather than muffle the horror vacui with words, it plunges head first into liminality, where logos dissolves into a “positive nothing.” Unlike analytical philosophers, both Melville and Conrad refrain from talking about reality: they expose those who would listen to a first-hand experience of participation in an interpretive act. Employing literary tropes to denude the essence of the human condition, they allow their readers to transgress the limitations of language. Mistrustful of language, they accept the necessity of discourse which, to make sense, must be actively reshaped, endlessly questioned, and constantly revised. And if uncertainty is the only certainty available to us, our lowly human condition also necessitates compassion: an existential cure against the liquid, capricious reality we are afforded. (shrink)

The millennial vision quest -- Who are the changers? -- The great name debate -- How to read this book -- Magicians, manipulators, and muses -- The trouble with generalization -- History speaks -- The world of men and everyday affairs -- First things first -- Coming to your senses -- Hearing -- Smell -- Taste -- Sight -- Touch -- Emotion -- What to do with all of this information -- Activities -- Allies -- The importance of support -- (...) The ally relationship -- Who are the allies? -- Who allies are not! -- Ally-inviting conversations -- A note to you allies out there -- Strength : a warning label -- Ambivalence -- The trouble with change -- Safety first -- Building a net -- Walking against traffic -- Among other things -- Confidence and doubt -- A word about cultural ambivalence -- Structure and routine -- Morning, noon, and night -- Realistic routines -- Breaking it down -- When the heart is hurting -- When nothing seems to work -- The forest for the trees -- Living the daily life -- Stages of growth -- The stages of change -- Identifying your stage -- The stuff of myth and legend -- Haunted by the past -- The way-back-when time -- Rituals, ceremonies, and celebrations -- Setting goals -- Rules for successful goals -- Rewarding growth -- Inviting witnesses -- Obstacles to goals and growth -- Failure -- Boredom -- Giving away credit -- Reaffirming vows -- The final chapter. (shrink)

Steven D. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City takes its place alongside James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars as one of the two truly indispensable books on today’s Culture Wars. It advances our understanding of today’s conflict by situating it historically and focusing our attention on its religious dimension. Smith argues that today’s conflict is the latest episode in a longstanding conflict between immanent forms of religiosity which locate the sacred in the world of space and time, and transcendent forms (...) of religiosity which locate the divine beyond space and time. As compelling as it is, the volume’s argument would have been strengthened by a more sustained treatment of the nature of the political community and the essential role played within it by the truths held in common by the members concerning God, man, nature, and history. (shrink)

Many women today prepare for a big meeting by reading a stack of folders and applying lipstick. They order their male colleagues around, then wait for those same men to help them on with their coats. They have higher-status jobs than some of the men they date, yet they never call men socially or ask them out. What's going on? Why such seemingly contradictory behaviors? Have women completely failed feminism--or has feminism failed them? In The Lipstick Proviso , Karen Lehrman--hailed (...) by the New York Times as the "sharpest" of the new feminist thinkers--shows that women today are failing neither feminism nor themselves. Rather, they've entered a new stage of feminism, one in which the personal is not political, differences between the sexes need to be respected, and courtship, chivalry, and the nuclear family don't have to be jettisoned just because they existed before the sixties. Thirty years after the women's movement liberated women from narrowly defined roles, Lehrman argues, we are finally beginning to see which traditionally feminine behaviors are more deeply rooted in biology and which are more heavily influenced by culture. Lehrman asserts that the result--whatever it is--will not undermine feminism as long as women still retain equal rights, opportunities, and responsibilities. Dispensing with the outdated notion of sisterhood, Lehrman offers women a "lipstick proviso": women don't have to sacrifice their complex individuality in order to be equal. As the first book to move beyond a critique of orthodox feminism, The Lipstick Proviso sets a radically new course for the future of the women's movement. While there's still much political work to be done, Lehrman argues that women should now focus on the personal sides of their lives. Women can't rightly be called autonomous if they stay with abusive or even emotionally challenged lovers; say "yes" to sex when they really mean "no"; overeat or undereat to hide their sexuality. With wit and grace, Karen Lehrman offers in The Lipstick Proviso a way to complete the feminist revolution, and clearly establishes herself as the definitive voice of the next generation of feminism. (shrink)

This is a short introduction to a book symposium on Paul Gowder's recent book, _The Rule of Law in thee Real World_ (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The book symposium will appear in the St. Luis University Law Journal, 62 St. Louis U. L.J., -- (2018), with commentaries on Gowder's book by colleen Murphy, Robin West, Chad Flanders, and Matthew Lister, along with replies by Paul Gowder.

This research illuminates struggles over cultural definitions of femininity by examining how cultural gatekeepers respond to girls' vocal critique of inauthentic media images. Interviews with 10 editors at two national girls' magazine organizations provide a rare glimpse into their contradictory responses to requests for depicting “real girls.” Editors legitimate and share in the critique, claiming they should change images but cannot. In these accounts, they reveal struggles over altering narrow images of femininity at the organizational and institutional levels. Editors (...) also delegitimate girls' critique as misguided by calling on the media organizations' norms and schemas about how the reader is supposed to understand the images. Paradoxically, here, editors claim that they can change images but should not. Ultimately, the power of girls' resistance is tempered, as both sets of responses lead to the girls' critique being inefficacious in redefining femininity. The study contributes to an understanding of how femininity-defining cultural institutions operate to create and sustain gender stratification. (shrink)