_Sexual Subjects,_ a psychoanalytic book informed by gender theory, queer theory and feminism, addresses the tensions inherent in writing about lesbians and sexuality in the postmodern age. Adria Schwartz masterfully intertwines clinical anecdotes with engaging theoretical questions that examine the construction of important categories of identity--woman, feminist, mother, lesbian, and homo/hetero/bisexual. Schwartz also addresses specific issues which are problematic but nonetheless meaningful to self-identified lesbians such as roles in gender play, lesbian "bed death," and raising non-traditional families. Written from a (...) psychoanalytic and postmodern perspective, this book is a significant contribution to the work done on the conceptualization of lesbian sexuality and identity. (shrink)

There are two important traditions in the philosophy of induction. According to one tradition, which has dominated for the last couple of centuries, inductive arguments are warranted by rules. Bayesianism is the most popular view within this tradition. Rules of induction provide functional accounts of inductive support, but no rule is universal; hence, no rule is by itself an accurate model of inductive support. According to another tradition, inductive arguments are not warranted by rules but by matters of fact. Norton’s (...) material theory of induction (MTI) is an influential view within this tradition. Norton’s MTI fails to provide an account of inductive support, but it provides a good account of inductive warrant that can help us define the domain of validity of each rule of induction. Despite their limitations, both approaches to induction are illuminating important aspects of how relations of inductive support work. In this article I present a hybrid theory of induction (HTI), in which I acknowledge and articulate the role of both rules and matters of fact in our understanding of inductive support. According to the HTI, rules of induction accurately describe relations of inductive support when they are warranted, and a rule of induction is warranted if the right facts about the matter of the induction obtain. Crucially, the HTI allows us to address the main challenges that each tradition faces while retaining their strengths, thus obtaining a functional and accurate account of inductive support. The HTI also provides a useful general framework to examine and understand induction, to make sense of how different rules of induction can coexist and to tackle some problems in epistemology. Moreover, the HTI allows us to clarify and resolve some current debates on induction, like the apparent divide between Norton and rule-based theorists. (shrink)

In recent decades, cognitive and behavioral scientists have learned a great deal about how people think and behave. On the most general level, there is a basic consensus that many judgments, including ethical judgments, are made by intuitive, even unconscious, impulses. This basic insight has opened the door to a wide variety of more particular studies that investigate how judgments are influenced by group identity, self-conception, emotions, perceptions of risk, and many other factors. When these forms of research engage ethical (...) issues, they are sometimes called empirical ethics. This essay argues that the field of religious ethics would benefit from a more robust engagement with empirical ethics than it has thus far undertaken. In doing so, it offers a brief account of how issues of moral psychology and moral anthropology have been treated in religious ethics, and it highlights ways that the scientific findings challenge some prevailing norms in religious ethics. It ends by suggesting avenues by which religious ethics research could productively engage empirical ethics. (shrink)

The paper focuses on religious nationalism, particularly on the one developed in Peru during the Interwar period. Thus, it presents the results of a research on the political writings published in the Revista de la Universidad Católica del Perú [Journal of the Catholic University of Peru] in a period of time that goes from 1932, year in which the publication was founded, to 1944, year in which the main sponsor of the Universidad Católica del Perú –the historian and catholic political (...) thinker José de la Riva Agüero–died. A praise and a presentation of fascism published in 1937 reveals a thread that leads to a concealed editorial line. Such a line makes possible to connect the catholic Peruvian intellectuals with the agenda of European nationalism. (shrink)

The following dramatic scenes were taken from a full-length play that was inspired by my reading of The Mamie Papers. This remarkable collection of letters written to Fanny Quincy Howe, a Boston aristocrat and woman of letters, chronicled the life and times of Mamie Pinzer. Mamie was a “working girl” in the fullest sense of the word. Her struggle to live with autonomy and dignity often placed her at odds with standards of decency preferred by a society that looked with (...) suspicion upon those values in women, if they implied independence from male hegemony. The letters are unique in their detail and passion, as well as the proto-feminist consciousness that emerges through daily confrontation with patriarchy. (shrink)

This essay uses empirical studies to engage Richard Miller’s advocacy of a “cultural turn” in the study of religious ethics found in Friends and Other Strangers. The particular kind of empirical research I highlight here, cultural cognition, emphasizes the ways that belonging to a cultural group influences one’s reasoning when faced with controversial issues involving disputed facts. This approach underscores the significance of the cultural turn, but it also raises some important challenges for Miller’s accounts of moral psychology and public (...) reason. I work to elucidate what those challenges are and point to some ways that taking cultural cognition seriously might open up fresh avenues for addressing perennial ethical issues. (shrink)

Guizot aprendió el oficio de historiador preparando con su esposa,Pauline de Meulan, una edición crítica en francés de _Decline and Fall_ de Gibbon. Las personalidades históricas de Gibbon y Guizot fueron muy distintas. También sus respectivos “estilos de historia”. Pero en las obras de Guizot, en especial en su _Historia de la civilización en Europa_, es reconocible el legado de Gibbon. Así, en la eliminación de la barrera entre historia civil y historia religiosa, en la amplitud temática, en la ambición (...) cronológica y en una idea de Europa concebida como algo más que la suma de sus partes. Asimismo en la adopción de la misma palabra _civilización_ y en el hecho de que la interpretación guizotiana de la historia europea hunda sus raíces en tres factores presentes en Gibbon: lo que sobrevivió de las instituciones romanas, el impacto del cristianismo y el aporte germánico. (shrink)

Why do some invertebrates store so much carotenoids in their tissues? Storage of carotenoids may not simply be passive and dependent on their environmental availability, as storage variation exists at various taxonomic scales, including among individuals within species. While the strong antioxidant and sometimes immune-stimulating properties of carotenoids may be beneficial enough to cause the evolution of features improving their assimilation and storage, they may also have fitness downsides explaining why massive carotenoid storage is not universal. Here, the functional and (...) ecological implications of carotenoid storage for the evolution of invertebrate innate immune defenses are examined, especially in crustaceans, which massively store carotenoids for unclear reasons. Three testable hypotheses about the role of carotenoid storage in immunological (resistance and tolerance) and life-history strategies (with a focus on aging) are proposed, which may ultimately explain the storage of large amounts of these pigments in a context of host–pathogen interactions. (shrink)

Taboo, as a space where the prohibited resides, delimits the form of the thinkable in a society. Freud, in Totem and Taboo, attempted to trace an explanation beyond the ‘categorical imperative’ of morality and custom. A century later the YouTuber PrankInvasion (Chris Monroe) seems to continue Freud’s account to his advantage. Through ‘Kissing my actual sister prank’, one of his most controversial videos, he challenged his own followers to fulfil an especially controversial challenge: kiss his own stepsister. It is through (...) these contacts with the limits of the moral, of the acceptable, that capitalism expands the colonized territory, absorbing the profane under its new exposure value. The unthinkable, the purported profanation of dogma (in this case, taboo of incest), disappears under the standardization of all rites as standardized consumable objects. But as Agamben warns about the nature of desecration it can not be related, in its new use, with the consumption realm. And that is not the case with PrankInvasion. Through the apparent absence of ordinary moral limits, Chris Monroe expresses his heartfelt attachment to the most extraordinary limit of capitalism: economic growth. (shrink)

Siguiendo la definición de Osvaldo Pessoa Jr., un “escenario contrafáctico” sería “una situación posible que no se realizó, como una posibilidad futura en algún instante del pasado”. Este concepto no es nuevo. De hecho, tiene una presencia significativa en campos como la filosofía analítica, la economía, las ciencias experimentales o la psicología. La pretensión de este texto es presentar, mediante el rigor teórico, conceptual, y el método inductivo, una reflexión no derivada de investigación. Esta reflexión es la importancia de la (...) relación entre los escenarios contrafácticos y el mundo del arte desde una perspectiva institucional. La observación inicial en la que se sustenta este texto es que, en una época en la que cualquier cosa puede ser arte y, sin embargo, no todo lo es, las razones por las que algo pudo ser arte, pero no lo fue, cobran una gran importancia para comprender la base de su valor económico y cultural y ahondar en nuestras categorías lingüísticas del presente; en este caso, la de arte. (shrink)

Thinking History Globally means thinking about the past and the present beyond national borders, language barriers, and enclosed regions. There are four thinking strategies to gain global perspectives: comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing. Comparing is about contrasting between several cases and drawing new conclusions. Connecting is tracking the interdependences between cases and assessing their importance. Conceptualizing is recognizing that developments in one or several cases belong within a larger recurring pattern. Contextualizing is making sense of one case amidst developments world-wide. (...) This book offers a practical guide into these strategies of thinking by applying them to multiple historical cases, ranging from the first civilizations and up to the First World War. While doing that, Olstein also presents the twelve branches of history that outstand in the application of these four strategies and in thinking history globally: comparative, relational, international, transnational, oceanic, global, world, and big histories, historical sociology, civilizational analysis, world-system approach, and history of globalization. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 1 Seiten: 26-50.

Can deconstruction be accomplished not through the close reading of just one discourse, but through its combination with another? This paper aims at exploring this second way of performing deconstruction through a particular case study: Marxism and psychoanalysis. In the body of the essay, the history of Freudo-Marxism is divided into two parts, depending on which psychoanalyst stands as point of reference: Freud or Lacan. We proceed by studying the four main strategies by virtue of which a genuine combination between (...) Marxism and psychoanalysis has been historically attempted: separation (Reich), domination (Marcuse), contradiction (Althusser) and, finally, deconstruction (Laclau). (shrink)