Margaret Whitford's study provides the ideal introduction to Irigaray's thought, offering a sustained interpretation of her whole corpus, including previously untranslated French texts. Whitford suggests that Irigaray's work should be seen as "philosophy in the feminine," actively opposing the complicity of philosophy with other social practices which exclude or marginalize women.

Through the use of particular pedagogies and the adoption of new modes of thinking, physical literacy promises more realistic models of physical competence and ...

For those open to the possibility that philosophical thought can improve life, David Hume's Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary have something to say. In the first comprehensive study of the Essays, Margaret Watkins engages closely with these neglected texts and shows how they provide important insights into Hume's perspective on the breadth and depth of human life, arguing that the Essays reveal his continued commitment to philosophy as a discipline that can promote both social and individual progress. Addressing topics (...) such as politics, war, slavery, the priesthood, the development of industry, aesthetics, emotional disorders, egoism, friendship, sexuality, gender relations, and the nature of philosophy itself, the volume examines Hume's purposes and aims against the backdrop of the eighteenth century society in which he lived. It will be of interest to scholars of modern thought in philosophy, politics, history, and economics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt by Tim MilnesMargaret WatkinsTim Milnes. The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 278. Hardback. ISBN: 9780198812739. $91.00.In his brief autobiography, “My Own Life,” Hume reports that “almost all [his] life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations” (E-MOL: xxxi). This is one (...) of at least ten places in this brief work in which he associates himself with “letters” or “literature”—as compared to at most four associations with philosophy. The moral to be inferred is not that Hume considered himself not to be a philosopher. Rather, he conceived of philosophy as a kind of literature. The Treatise was itself a “literary attempt.” Indeed, opposition between the “literary” and “philosophical” aspects of a text would have been foreign to Hume and his contemporaries—a notion for a later age, despite his occasional loose distinction between the relevant genres, as in his list of writings “historical, philosophical, or literary” in “My Own Life” (E-MOL: xxxvi).Yet despite Hume’s own understanding of the continuity between philosophy and literature, broadly conceived, it is still common for contemporary philosophers to ignore literary questions in their examination of Hume’s work, or to presume that one can easily distinguish the “philosophical” parts from the “literary” ones. Tim Milnes’s The Testimony of Sense is therefore a welcome addition to the Hume literature (pun intended). With a particular focus on the essay—a genre of great importance to Hume—Milnes contributes to the small set of engagements with Hume from the disciplinary perspective of English literature. With training in both philosophy and literature, as well as established expertise on Romanticism and its own essays, Milnes is well-qualified for the task. The Testimony of Sense includes sustained engagement with Hume’s contemporaries and successors, but for the purposes of this review, I engage the book primarily as a Hume scholar for Hume scholars.Milnes’s story plays out in three acts. The first establishes the need for public trust created by a skeptical crisis, itself a product of Hume’s criticism of the epistemic program of thinkers in the Cartesian and Lockean traditions. The second explains how the essays of the long eighteenth century constitute a response to that need in various ways. The third reveals in detail how the Romantic essayists, particularly William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, both respond to and deviate from the “neoclassical” essayists, typified by Hume and Samuel Johnson.The first chapter, “Self and Intersubjectivity,” lays the groundwork by articulating how Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart identify the need for what we now call intersubjectivity. Milnes describes the common thread as a kind of “natural transcendentalism.” In what sense are these thinkers properly understood as [End Page 175] transcendentalists? The central idea seems to be that all posit things other than reason as “conditions of meaningful thought” (72). For Hume, it is the social, linguistic experience of a community of virtuous judges. The intricate relations between self and other essential to such a community get “internalized within the specular drama of the impartial spectator” (72) in Smith’s writing, which itself takes part in the drama through his “halting, qualified syntax” that mimics “everyday speech” (44). Reid posits a “prescience” of trust, which grounds our reliance on both human testimony and the uniformity of nature, itself undergirded by the design of a benevolent God. Stewart, who posits axiomatic truths that help constitute the “stamina of intellect,” goes furthest, actually calling these truths transcendental (55). This chapter also puts these eighteenth-century thinkers in conversation with twentieth-century theorists, including Habermas, Davidson, and Rorty.Chapter 2, “The Subject of Trust,” deepens the analysis by situating these “natural transcendentalisms” in the broader enlightenment context. In contrast to Descartes, Bacon, and Locke, who were suspicious of our reliance on the opinions of others, the eighteenth-century thinkers understand trust as prior to reason in various ways—though not prior to solidarity. The particulars in each case depend on their responses to skepticism and their accounts of the relation between... (shrink)

Drawing on the work of a wide range of thinkers, the authors offer a program for organizing and leading human activity in all types of organizations, based a ...

This article argues that Hume's brief essay, "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion," offers resources for three claims: (1) Delicate taste correlates with self-sufficiency and thus with a particularly Humean form of Magnanimity -- greatness of mind; (2) Delicate taste improves the capacity for profound friendships, characterized by mutual admiration and true compassion; and (3) magnanimity and compassion are thus not necessarily in tension with one another and may even proceed from and support harmony of character. These claims, in (...) turn, provide reasons to take seriously Hume's view that moral character depends, in part, on aesthetic character. (shrink)

One of the most famous, and most derided, arguments against the morality of abortion is the argument from potential, which maintains that the fetus' potential to become a person and enjoy the valuable life common to persons, entails that its destruction is prima facie morally impermissible. In this paper, I will revisit and offer a defense of the argument from potential.

This essay argues that Hume’s criticism of slavery in “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” despite its contribution to the British Enlightenment’s anti-slavery movement, is not truly abolitionist in character. Hume’s aim was not to put an end to contemporary slave practices or forestall their expansion. Nonetheless, the criticism of slavery proves significant for reasons that transcend the demographic questions of the essay. It supports an argument that Hume develops throughout the Essays and Political Discourses. The conclusion of this argument (...) warns against reverence for either ancient systems or modern progress. Like all forms of factionalism, these divisive tendencies threaten to compromise both our moral sensibility and our rational judgment. (shrink)

One argument used by detractors of human embryonic stem cell research (hESCR) invokes Kant's formula of humanity, which proscribes treating persons solely as a means to an end, rather than as ends in themselves. According to Fuat S. Oduncu, for example, adhering to this imperative entails that human embryos should not be disaggregated to obtain pluripotent stem cells for hESCR. Given that human embryos are Kantian persons from the time of their conception, killing them to obtain their cells for research (...) fails to treat them as ends in themselves. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 321-343.

Moral epistemology investigates sources and patterns of moral understanding. Its questions include: To what extent does morality consist in or depend on knowledge, and of what kind(s)? What makes possible moral knowledge, and how is such knowledge grounded or justified? What is the relation between philosophical claims about morality and the moral understanding any of us has, that is, what has ethics – the philosophical representation of morality – to do with morality itself? Feminist moral epistemology asks how social divisions (...) of labor, opportunity, power, and recognition which reproduce gender and other hierarchies affect both the ways these questions have in fact been answered, and the ways they might be. (shrink)

The claim that Spinoza has a conception of animal mentality and consciousness that is superior to Descartes's is criticized. It is also argued that Spinoza fails to provide a coherent way of establishing what he considers to be our morally unconstrained “rights” with regard to brutes. Despite Spinoza's claim that brutes “feel,” i.e., are capable of sentience, his view that we are nonetheless entitled to treat animals in any way convenient to us is criticized. Questions are also raised as to (...) whether Spinoza is entitled to distinguish human from bestial nature on the basis of the possession of reason. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the use of imaginative play in child psychotherapy, yet the theoretical conceptualization of the meaning of play is lacking behind its application in practice. In search of a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of imaginative play, the author turns to Merleau-Ponty's ontology and to his phenomenology of structure, of the lived body, of perception, and of expression. In light of his work, play is an embodied mode of being in the (...) world and a body-world phenomenon. Imaginative play in particular exemplifies the human order in that it enables the child to create and re-create his own meanings within his play world. In a therapeutic context, the evocation of play imagery and the expressive shaping and reshaping of play meanings lead to surprising insights and new discoveries relevant to the child's life-world. A central therapeutic value of imaginative play lies in its promise for facilitating change and healing. A clinical case illustration of a young boy is provided, and the meaning of his imaginative play is exemplified in light of Merleau-Ponty's thought. Some implications are drawn for the theory of play in child psychotherapy. (shrink)

In his original metabletic research on the nature of neurosis. Van den Berg revealed how, towards the 19th century, the increasingly complex and dividing nature of Western society led to the emergence of neurosis as a form of divided existence. By the mid 20th century, the manifestations of neurosis itself changed from a crystalized disorder to vague neurotic disturbances which Van den Berg related to the societal disorder, incoherence and instability which followed the second world war. He identified a series (...) of neuroticizing factors at the time including the ambivalence of society, the increased mobility, a changed sense of time, the disappearance of small groups, the weakening of family ties and the fear of death. In our postmodern world today, the nature of neurosis has changed once again and awaits a new metabletic investigation to reveal its nature and its particular manifestations. (shrink)

In 2008, many states sought to pass Human Life Amendments, which would extend the definition of personhood to encompass newly fertilized eggs. If such an amendment were to pass, Roe v. Wade, as currently defended by the Supreme Court, may be repealed. Consequently, it is necessary to defend the right to an abortion in a manner that succeeds even if a Human Life Amendment successfully passes. J.J. Thomson's argument in “A Defense of Abortion” successfully achieves this. Her argument is especially (...) strong when one considers that her central thesis—that one person's right to life does not entail the right to use another's person's body for continued sustenance—is pervasive in legal policies in the U.S.A. (shrink)

The book examines issues related to the way modeling and simulation enable us to reconstruct aspects of the world we are investigating. It also investigates the processes by which we extract concrete knowledge from those reconstructions and how that knowledge is legitimated.

The explanatory role of natural selection is one of the long-term debates in evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, the consensus has been slippery because conceptual confusions and the absence of a unified, formal causal model that integrates different explanatory scopes of natural selection. In this study we attempt to examine two questions: (i) What can the theory of natural selection explain? and (ii) Is there a causal or explanatory model that integrates all natural selection explananda? For the first question, we argue that (...) five explananda have been assigned to the theory of natural selection and that four of them may be actually considered explananda of natural selection. For the second question, we claim that a probabilistic conception of causality and the statistical relevance concept of explanation are both good models for understanding the explanatory role of natural selection. We review the biological and philosophical disputes about the explanatory role of natural selection and formalize some explananda in probabilistic terms using classical results from population genetics. Most of these explananda have been discussed in philosophical terms but some of them have been mixed up and confused. We analyze and set the limits of these problems. (shrink)

In 2008, many states sought to pass Human Life Amendments, which would extend the definition of personhood to encompass newly fertilized eggs. If such an amendment were to pass, Roe v. Wade, as currently defended by the Supreme Court, may be repealed. Consequently, it is necessary to defend the right to an abortion in a manner that succeeds even if a Human Life Amendment successfully passes. J.J. Thomson's argument in “A Defense of Abortion” successfully achieves this. Her argument is especially (...) strong when one considers that her central thesis—that one person's right to life does not entail the right to use another's person's body for continued sustenance—is pervasive in legal policies in the U.S.A. (shrink)

In their paper 'After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?' Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue that because there are no significant differences between a fetus and a neonate, in that neither possess sufficiently robust mental traits to qualify as persons, a neonate may be justifiably killed for any reason that also justifies abortion. To further emphasise their view that a newly born infant is more on a par with a fetus rather than a more developed baby, Giubilini and Minerva (...) elect to call this 'after-birth abortion' rather than infanticide. In this paper, I argue that their thesis is incorrect, and that the moral permissibility of abortion does not entail the moral permissibility of 'after-birth' abortion. (shrink)

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had an enormous influence on twentieth-century philosophy even though only one of his works, the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in his lifetime. Beyond this publication the impact of his thought was mainly conveyed to a small circle of students through his lectures at Cambridge University. Fortunately, many of his ideas have survived in both the dictations that were subsequently published, and the notes taken by his students, among them Alice Ambrose and the late Margaret Macdonald, (...) from 1932 to 1935. These notes, now edited by Professor Ambrose, are here published, and they shed much light on Wittgenstein's philosophical development. Among the topics considered are the meaning of a word and its relation to common usage, rules of grammar and their relation to fact, the grammar of first person statements, language games, and the nature of philosophy. This volume is indispensable to any serious discussion of Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

In this paper, I appeal to two aspects of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy – his metaphysics and ethics – in defense of abortion rights. Many Kantian pro-life philosophers argue that Kant’s second principle formulation of the categorical imperative, which proscribes treating persons as mere means, applies to human embryos and fetuses. Kant is clear, however, that he means his imperatives to apply to persons, individuals of a rational nature. It is important to determine, therefore, whether there is anything in Kant’s philosophy (...) that permits regarding embryos and fetuses as persons, since they lack the capacity for sentience (at least until mid-gestation), let alone rational thought. In the first part of the paper, I will illustrate why there are difficulties maintaining, from a Kantian perspective, that conception marks the genesis of a new person. Even granting that embryos and fetuses are persons, however, this alone would not entail the moral impermissibility of abortion rights, mainly because prohibiting abortion, and compelling women to gestate, violates the formula of humanity against them. Developing this thesis encompasses the second part of my essay. Finally, although I argue that Kant’s philosophy lends strong support to abortion rights, this does not thereby entail that it allows for the complete dehumanization of the human fetus. By appealing to the writings of Kantian scholar Allen Wood, I will argue that a fetus’ status as a potential person does render it worthy of some degree of respect and moral value. (shrink)

In recent years, the free market position has been gaining strength. In this book, Radin provides a nuanced response to its sweeping generalization.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in hospitals yields many advantages but also confronts healthcare with ethical questions and challenges. While various disciplines have conducted specific research on the ethical considerations of AI in hospitals, the literature still requires a holistic overview. By conducting a systematic discourse approach highlighted by expert interviews with healthcare specialists, we identified the status quo of interdisciplinary research in academia on ethical considerations and dimensions of AI in hospitals. We found 15 fundamental manuscripts by constructing (...) a citation network for the ethical discourse, and we extracted actionable principles and their relationships. We provide an agenda to guide academia, framed under the principles of biomedical ethics. We provide an understanding of the current ethical discourse of AI in clinical environments, identify where further research is pressingly needed, and discuss additional research questions that should be addressed. We also guide practitioners to acknowledge AI-related benefits in hospitals and to understand the related ethical concerns. (shrink)

This book is about the methods used for unifying different scientific theories under one all-embracing theory. The process has characterized much of the history of science and is prominent in contemporary physics; the search for a 'theory of everything' involves the same attempt at unification. Margaret Morrison argues that, contrary to popular philosophical views, unification and explanation often have little to do with each other. The mechanisms that facilitate unification are not those that enable us to explain how or (...) why phenomena behave as they do. A feature of this book is an account of many case studies of theory unification in nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics and of how evolution by natural selection and Mendelian genetics were unified into what we now term evolutionary genetics. (shrink)

Fish stocks, as common pool resources, are more and more managed by giving fishermen exclusive access rights as Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQ). These have been widely discussed, with focus on social, economic and ecological issues. While equity aspects have been of great concern, there is very limited analysis about how to assess issues of equity and fair distribution when introducing ITQs. This paper applies an existing framework for assessing equity in resource use systems to tradable quota systems in fisheries. The (...) framework defines the perspectives of distributive fairness, the stakeholders who are bound by fair practice rules, and instruments of fairness, and identifies metrics to assess equity in practice. We assess if the framework provides practical guidance for evaluating whether a given ITQ system operates under an equitable framework programme. (shrink)

In their brilliant and thought-provoking book Recognizing Wrongs, John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky offer a vindicatory interpretation of the law of torts. As part of this, they offer a justification for what they call the “principle of civil recourse.” This is the principle that “a person who enjoys a certain kind of legal right, and whose right has been violated by another, is entitled to enlist the state’s aid in enforcing that right, or to make demands in response to its (...) violation, as against the person who has violated it.” To defend the principle of civil recourse, Goldberg and Zipursky appeal to three values: equality, fairness, and individual sovereignty. In this essay, we make two critical points. First, we argue that Goldberg’s and Zipursky’s defense errs by omitting a justificatory appeal to our moral rights and duties as part of the normative foundation of the tort law. Second, we argue that Goldberg’s and Zipursky’s arguments do not explain certain institutional features of the tort law, including the fact that legal duties of redress emerge only at the conclusion of court cases and the fact that lawsuits are opted int.o by tort victims who must initiate these actions themselves. To retain what is philosophically valuable in Goldberg’s and Zipursky’s impressive defense of the principle of civil recourse, we conclude with a strategic suggestion on their behalf: they should split their defense of the principle of civil recourse into two parts, with the first part justifying the existence of some institution of civil recourse or other and the second part justifying specific details that this institution should have. (shrink)

Clough's theological account of animals critiques the familiar negative identification of animals as not-human. Instead, Clough highlights both the distinctive particularity of each animal as created by God and the shared fleshly creatureliness of human and nonhuman animals. He encourages Christians to recognize Jesus Christ as God enfleshed more than divinely human, and consequently to care for nonhuman animals as those who share with human animals in the redemption of all flesh. This move risks downplaying the possibilities for creaturely specific (...) forms of redemption; limiting the cosmic efficacy of salvation in Christ; and losing the particularity of Christ's divine and human natures. Another, possibly less risky, direction to take Clough's insights about creatureliness and well-formed theological ethics might attend to the perverse ways that humans assess the worthiness of human and nonhuman animals by substituting particularities of use and abuse for the particularities of creation and salvation. (shrink)

This paper analyses conceptual and experimental work in synthetic biology on different types of interactions considered as minimal examples or models of communication. It discusses their pertinence and relevance for the wider understanding of this biological and cognitive phenomenon. It critically analyses their limits and it argues that a conceptual framework is needed. As a possible solution, it provides a theoretical account of communication based on the notion of organisation, and characterised in terms of the functional influence exerted by the (...) sender upon the receiver. It shows that this account can be operationalised in synthetic biology, and that it can supply criteria and guidelines for the design and evaluation of synthetic models. (shrink)