Limited research has been done among pregnant people participating in investigational drug trials. To enhance the ethical understanding of pregnant people’s perspectives on research participation, we sought to describe motives and risk perceptions of participants in a phase 1 trial of ledipasvir/sofosbuvir treatment for chronic Hepatitis C virus during pregnancy. Pregnant people with chronic HCV infection enrolled in an open-label, phase 1 study of LDV/SOF participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews to explore their reasons for participation and experiences within the study. (...) Pregnant people took 12 weeks of LDV/SOF and were interviewed at enrollment and at the end of study. We recorded the interviews, transcribed them verbatim, coded them using NVivo software, and performed inductive thematic analysis. Nine women completed the study yielding 18 interview transcripts. We identified two themes regarding motives and one regarding risk perception. Motives— Women conceptualized study participation as part of the caregiving role they associate with motherhood; participating was viewed as an act of caregiving for their infants, their families, themselves, and other pregnant women with chronic HCV. Women also noted that they faced multiple barriers to treatment prior to pregnancy that created a desire to receive therapy through trial participation. Risk perception— Women acknowledged personal and fetal risk associated with participation. Acceptance of risk was influenced by women’s concepts of motherhood, preexisting knowledge of HCV and medical research, family members, intimate partners, or by the study design. Women enrolled in a phase 1 trial for chronic HCV therapy during pregnancy acknowledged risks of participation and were motivated by hopes for fetal and personal benefit and by lack of prenatal access to treatment. Ethical inclusion of pregnant people in research should acknowledge structural factors that contribute to vulnerability and data deficiencies for treatment in pregnancy. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 2, Page 132-150, April 2022. Limited research has been done among pregnant people participating in investigational drug trials. To enhance the ethical understanding of pregnant people’s perspectives on research participation, we sought to describe motives and risk perceptions of participants in a phase 1 trial of ledipasvir/sofosbuvir treatment for chronic Hepatitis C virus during pregnancy. Pregnant people with chronic HCV infection enrolled in an open-label, phase 1 study of LDV/SOF participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews to (...) explore their reasons for participation and experiences within the study. Pregnant people took 12 weeks of LDV/SOF and were interviewed at enrollment and at the end of study. We recorded the interviews, transcribed them verbatim, coded them using NVivo software, and performed inductive thematic analysis. Nine women completed the study yielding 18 interview transcripts. We identified two themes regarding motives and one regarding risk perception. Motives— Women conceptualized study participation as part of the caregiving role they associate with motherhood; participating was viewed as an act of caregiving for their infants, their families, themselves, and other pregnant women with chronic HCV. Women also noted that they faced multiple barriers to treatment prior to pregnancy that created a desire to receive therapy through trial participation. Risk perception— Women acknowledged personal and fetal risk associated with participation. Acceptance of risk was influenced by women’s concepts of motherhood, preexisting knowledge of HCV and medical research, family members, intimate partners, or by the study design. Women enrolled in a phase 1 trial for chronic HCV therapy during pregnancy acknowledged risks of participation and were motivated by hopes for fetal and personal benefit and by lack of prenatal access to treatment. Ethical inclusion of pregnant people in research should acknowledge structural factors that contribute to vulnerability and data deficiencies for treatment in pregnancy. (shrink)

Standpoint theorists have long been clear that marginalization does not make better understanding a given. They have been less clear, though, that social dominance does not make ignorance a given. Indeed, many standpoint theorists have implicitly committed themselves to what I call the strong epistemic disadvantage thesis. According to this thesis, there are strong, substantive limits on what the socially dominant can know about oppression that they do not personally experience. I argue that this thesis is not just implausible but (...) politically pernicious; it is an excuse for ignorance and silence that stifles our ability to address many injustices. Moreover, I argue that if we are to avoid lending support to the SEDT while working within a standpoint theory framework, we must hold that the socially dominant can achieve marginalized standpoints. So, we must hold that men can achieve feminist standpoints, that white women (and men) can achieve black feminist standpoints, and so on. (shrink)

Physicists are increasingly beginning to take seriously the possibility of laws outside the traditional time-evolution paradigm; yet many popular definitions of determinism are still predicated on a time-evolution picture, making them manifestly unsuited to the diverse range of research programmes in modern physics. In this article, we use a constraint-based framework to set out a generalization of determinism which does not presuppose temporal evolution, distinguishing between strong, weak and delocalised holistic determinism. We discuss some interesting consequences of these generalized notions (...) of determinism, and we show that this approach sheds new light on the long-standing debate surrounding the nature of objective chance. (shrink)

Simple idealized models seem to provide more understanding than opaque, complex, and hyper-realistic models. However, an increasing number of scientists are going in the opposite direction by utilizing opaque machine learning models to make predictions and draw inferences, suggesting that scientists are opting for models that have less potential for understanding. Are scientists trading understanding for some other epistemic or pragmatic good when they choose a machine learning model? Or are the assumptions behind why minimal models provide understanding misguided? In (...) this paper, using the case of deep neural networks, I argue that it is not the complexity or black box nature of a model that limits how much understanding the model provides. Instead, it is a lack of scientific and empirical evidence supporting the link that connects a model to the target phenomenon that primarily prohibits understanding. (shrink)

Incomplete Archaeologies takes a familiar archaeological concept--assemblages--and reconsiders such groupings, collections and sets of things from the perspective of the work required to assemble them. The discussions presented here engage with the practices of collection, construction, performance and creation in the past (and present) which constitute the things and groups of things studied by archaeologists--and examine as well how these things and thing-groups are dismantled, rearranged, and even destroyed, only to be rebuilt and recreated. The ultimate aim is to reassert (...) an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasise the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artefacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology's seeming-seamless epistemological objects"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

There is little agreement about Aristotle’s philosophy of geometry, partly due to the textual evidence and partly part to disagreement over what constitutes a plausible view. I keep separate the questions ‘What is Aristotle’s philosophy of geometry?’ and ‘Is Aristotle right?’, and consider the textual evidence in the context of Greek geometrical practice, and show that, for Aristotle, plane geometry is about properties of certain sensible objects—specifically, dimensional continuity—and certain properties possessed by actual and potential compass-and-straightedge drawings qua quantitative and (...) continuous. For their part, the objects of stereometry are potential sensible three-dimensional figures qua quantitative and continuous. (shrink)

Research on the specific features of daydreaming compared with mind-wandering and night dreaming is a neglected topic in the philosophy of mind and the cognitive neuroscience of spontaneous thought. The extant research either conflates daydreaming with mind-wandering (whether understood as task-unrelated thought, unguided attention, or disunified thought), characterizes daydreaming as opposed to mind-wandering (Dorsch, 2015), or takes daydreaming to encompass any and all “imagined events” (Newby-Clark & Thavendran, 2018). These dueling definitions obstruct future research on spontaneous thought, and are insufficiently (...) precise to guide empirical studies. They also fail to illuminate the phenomenal core of daydreaming, namely, its dreamlike qualities. Although daydreaming is related to both mind-wandering and narrative imagination, it is not reducible to either. We argue that daydreams are experiences of spontaneous, immersive imagination in the waking state. The main task of our investigation is to distinguish daydreaming, conceptually and phenomenologically, from mind-wandering, on the one hand, and night dreaming, on the other. Although daydream experiences can vary widely, we distinguish prototypical experiences of daydreaming from adjacent imaginative activity, including fleeting imagery and “focused daydreaming,” or crafted visualization. We consider our phenomenological analysis as preparatory work for conceptually distinguishing different spontaneous and imaginative states so that they can be investigated accordingly with questionnaires and qualitative methods. We argue that precision about the phenomenal character of daydreaming can guide neurophenomenological investigations, help delimit studies on individual variance in daydreaming features, and identify differences among daydreaming, mind-wandering, and night dreaming conceptually and phenomenologically, and possibly eventually in terms of neural correlates. (shrink)

Coregulation refers to the process by which relationship partners form a dyadic emotional system involving an oscillating pattern of affective arousal and dampening that dynamically maintains an optimal emotional state. Coregulation may represent an important form of interpersonal emotion regulation, but confusion exists in the literature due to a lack of precision in the usage of the term. We propose an operational definition for coregulation as a bidirectional linkage of oscillating emotional channels between partners, which contributes to emotional stability for (...) both partners. We propose several distinctions and raise unanswered questions that will need to be addressed in order to understand the relevance of coregulation for well-being in adulthood. (shrink)

Abstract:Vulnerability is an important criterion to assess the ethical justification of the inclusion of participants in research trials. Currently, vulnerability is often understood as an attribute inherent to a participant by nature of a diagnosed condition. Accordingly, a common ethical concern relates to the participant’s decisionmaking capacity and ability to provide free and informed consent. We propose an expanded view of vulnerability that moves beyond a focus on consent and the intrinsic attributes of participants. We offer specific suggestions for how (...) relational aspects and the dynamic features of vulnerability could be more fully captured in current discussions and research practices. (shrink)

Some individuals facing dementia contemplate hastening their own death: weighing the possibility of living longer with dementia against the alternative of dying sooner but avoiding the later stages of cognitive and functional impairment. This weighing resonates with an ethical and legal consensus in the United States that individuals can voluntarily choose to forgo life‐sustaining interventions and also that medical professionals can support these choices even when they will result in an earlier death. For these reasons, whether and how a terminally (...) ill individual can choose to control the timing of their death is a topic that cannot be avoided when considering the dementia trajectory. With a focus on the U.S. context, this landscape review considers the status of provisions that would legally permit people facing dementia to hasten death with appropriate support from medical professionals. This review can be used to plan and guide clinical and legal practitioner discussion and policy development concerning evolving questions not fully covered by existing medical decision‐making provisions. (shrink)

Everything is constantly changing. Our emotions are one of the primary ways we track, evaluate, organize, and motivate responsive action to those changes. Furthermore, emotions are inherently interpersonal. We learn what to feel from others, especially when we are children. We “catch” other people’s emotions just by being around them. We get caught in escalating response–counterresponse emotional sequences. This all takes place in time, generating complex patterns of interpersonal emotional dynamics. This review summarizes theory, empirical findings, and key challenges for (...) future research regarding three processes that contribute to interpersonal affective dynamics: (a) Convergence of social partners’ emotional responses to the external world, (b) emotional reactivity of social partners to each other, and (c) interpersonal emotion regulation. (shrink)

With the normative demand to attend to social difference and an absence of universal evaluative terms with which to do so, recent theory has increasingly turned to the study of the affective rather than epistemological conditions of ethical encounter. This I call a “dispositional ethics” that construes responsibility as responsiveness. Recent articulations of such an ethics, notably in the most current work of Judith Butler, James Tully, Jade Larissa Schiff, and Ella Myers, highlight its connection to situated practices of concrete (...) bodies-in-relation, but often stop short of developing an account of what such embodied practices might be. Based on interviews with thirteen experts who take the body as their primary vocational and intellectual field and characterize their practice as an art of listening, I distinguish three dimensions of a dispositional ethics in practice and some of the specific strategies available to cultivate the conditions for responsiveness in political life. (shrink)

In this article we report relevant data that shed light on the topic of hope and patients’ expectations in the use of DBS, for standard, approved, and established indications, based on a broader qualitative study on the ethical and social challenges that healthcare providers face in the field of DBS.

Despite frequent calls by players, managers and fans, FIFA's resistance to the implementation of goal-line technology (GLT) has been well documented in national print and online media as well as FIFA's own website. In 2010, FIFA president Sepp Blatter outlined eight reasons why GLT should not be used in football. The reasons given by FIFA can be broadly separated into three categories; those dealing with the nature and value of the game of football, those related to issues of justice, and (...) those concerned with the practical implementation of GLT. This paper intends to evaluate these eight reasons in order to assess whether there are, indeed, any good arguments against GLT in football. (shrink)

In the 1930s, the Bengali philosopher K. C. Bhattacharyya proposed a new theory of rasa, or aesthetic emotion, according to which aesthetic emotions are feelings that have other feelings as their intentional objects. This paper articulates how Bhattacharyya’s theory offers a novel solution to the puzzle of how it is both possible and rational to enjoy the kind of negative emotions that are inspired by tragic and sorrowful tales. The new solution is distinct from the conversion and compensation views that (...) dominate the existing literature, and it derives its significance from how it ties aesthetic experience to self-awareness. (shrink)

In the article “Nudging and Informed Consent”, Cohen argues that the use of “nudging” by physicians in the clinical encounter may be ethically warranted because it results in an informed consent where obligations for beneficence and respect for autonomy are both met. However, the author's overenthusiastic support for nudging and his quick dismissal of shared decision-making leads him to assume that “soft” manipulation is un-problematic and that “wisdom” on the side of medical professionals will suffice to guard against abuse. Opposing (...) this view, we propose that: 1) patient preferences and values should not be boiled down to rational or irrational decisions based on cognitive reasoning alone, 2) potential threats to the physician-patient must be mitigated and could be minimized by employing alternative strategies that acknowledge the impact of cognitive heuristics in shaping decision-making but maintain transparency and trust, and 3) patient preferences and values can be legitimately influenced only under specific circumstances. The latter include: (1) exhaustion of other means; (2) evidence that nudging is effective in a specific context; (3) evidence of clear and active public misinformation (e.g., industry promoting smoking); (4) explicit pubic dialogue between various stakeholders including medical professional societies about nudging; (5) upholding shared decision-making as a preferred approach; and (6) a rich understanding of clinical reality beyond the simple dichotomy of beneficence-autonomy. (shrink)

Stigma can influence the prevention and identification of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, a leading cause of developmental delay in North America. Understanding the effects of public health practices and policies on stigma is imperative. We reviewed social science and biomedical literatures to understand the nature of stigma in FASD and its relevance from an ethics standpoint in matters of health practices and policies. We propose a descriptive model of stigma in FASD and note current knowledge gaps; discuss the ethical implications (...) of stigma based on two distinct criteria ; and describe two cases and the concerns associated with inadvertent stigmatization by public health initiatives for FASD. We recommend further empirical and ethical analyses to examine whether public health policies and practices inadvertently stigmatize and impact the success of public health initiatives and programs for FASD. (shrink)

This book explains the importance of embodiment in understanding the function of race. With chapters by expert contributors and coverage of the most recent thinking in philosophy of race, the book is ideal for upper-level students in Phenomenology, Philosophy of Race and Critical Race Theory.

The rule of rescue describes the moral impulse to save identifiable lives in immediate danger at any expense. Think of the extremes taken to rescue a small child who has fallen down a well, a woman pinned beneath the rubble of an earthquake, or a submarine crew trapped on the ocean floor. No effort is deemed too great. Yet should this same moral instinct to rescue, regardless of cost, be applied in the emergency room, the hospital, or the community clinic? (...) -/- In health care, the desire to save lives at any cost must be reconciled with the reality of resource scarcity. As one example, the estimated cost for prophylactic Factor VIII to treat one patient with hemophilia for one year is $300,000. Costs of this magnitude have been accepted by public and private insurers in the developed world, even though, in principle, these sums could provide greater overall health benefit if allocated to pay for the unmet health care needs of many other patients. Looking forward, however, broad application of the rule of rescue will be increasingly untenable. But the moral instinct will remain: the desire to help those weakest among us, especially when their small numbers allow us to see them as unique individuals. What, then, is the ethical framework that can guide coverage and reimbursement decisions for orphan drugs into the future? (shrink)

ArgumentMost social scientists today think of data sharing as an ethical imperative essential to making social science more transparent, verifiable, and replicable. But what moved the architects of some of the U.S.’s first university-based social scientific research institutions, the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, and its spin-off, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, to share their data? Relying primarily on archived records, unpublished personal papers, and oral histories, I show that Angus Campbell, Warren Miller, Philip Converse, (...) and others understood sharing data not as an ethical imperative intrinsic to social science but as a useful means to the diverse ends of financial stability, scholarly and institutional autonomy, and epistemological reproduction. I conclude that data sharing must be evaluated not only on the basis of the scientific ideals its supporters affirm, but also on the professional objectives it serves. (shrink)

Over the course of human life, health care decision‐making is often interdependent. In this article, we use “interdependence” to refer to patients’ engagement of nonclinicians—for example, family members or trusted friends—to reach health care decisions. Interdependence, we suggest, is common for patients in all stages of life, from early childhood to late adulthood. This view contrasts with the common bioethical assumption that medical decisions are either wholly independent or dependent and that independence or dependence is tightly coupled with a person's (...) decision‐making capacity. In this article, we array various approaches to decision‐making along a continuum of interdependence. An appreciation of this continuum can empower patients and elucidate ethical challenges that arise when people transition between different kinds of interdependence across the life span. (shrink)

“A Phenomenology of Seeing and Affect in a Polarized Climate,” focuses on the polarized political climate that reflects racial and class differences in the wake of the Trump election. She explores how to see differently about those with whom one disagrees—that is in this specific scenario for Lee, the Trump supporters, including Asian American members of her own family. Understanding Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the interstice between the visible and the invisible, if human beings are to see otherwise, we need (...) to disrupt the ready association between the visible and the invisible. Here, she explores the function of affect for the possibility of this break. The phenomenological understanding of emotion does not necessarily empower emotion with any sort of superlative force, especially over reason. But a subject’s emotion chiasmatically reflects the world and vice versa. The caustic and strong emotions felt by people about this presidency reflects the entrenched political climate in our society and chiasmatically the entrenched political climate embroils people in strong emotions that make it difficult to see those with whom we disagree as people we can trust and consider reasonable. To break out of this standoff, to see differently about Trump supporters, one needs to feel differently about them as well. (shrink)

In 2005, Ethiopia changed its abortion law to curb its high maternal mortality. This has led to a considerable reduction in deaths from unsafe abortions. Abortion is now legal if the woman’s pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, if her health is endangered, if the fetus has a serious deformity, if she suffers from a physical or mental deficiency, or if she is under 18 years of age. The word of the woman, if in compliance with the law, (...) is sufficient to qualify for an abortion. In this context, where the law makes the door slightly open, health workers become important in deciding who gets access to safe services and who doesn’t, thus creating considerable ethical dilemmas. The objective of this study was to explore abortion service providers’ personal experiences and reflections, perceptions of the abortion law, and ethical and dilemmas that arise. Data collection took place from March to May 2016 in Addis Ababa, at different health clinics providing abortion services. Thirty in-depth interviews and three focus group discussions were conducted with 41 abortion service providers at governmental and non-governmental clinics. Content analysis was drawn upon in the interpretation of the findings. When working in a context where the law has slightly opened the door for abortion seeking women, the health workers describe conflicting concerns, burdensome responsibilities, and ambiguity concerning how to interpret and implement the law. They describe efforts to balance their religious faith and values against their professional obligations and concern for women’s health and well-being. This negotiation is particularly evident in the care of women who fall outside the law’s indications. They usually handle ethical dilemmas and decision-making alone without guidance. Moreover, many health workers face a stigma from fellow colleagues not performing abortions and therefore keep their job a secret from family and friends. Health workers in Ethiopia experience ethical dilemmas trying to maneuver between the abortion law, their personal values, and their genuine concern for the health of women. More research is needed to further explore this. (shrink)

Coordinated group behaviour can result in conflict or social cohesion. Thus having a better understanding of coordination in social groups could help us tackle some of our most challenging social problems. Historically, the most common way to study group behaviour is to break it down into sub-processes, such as cognition and emotion, then ideally manipulate them in a social context in order to predict some behaviour such as liking versus distrusting a target person. This approach has gotten us partway to (...) understanding many important collective behaviours, but I argue that making major changes in the world will require a more integrated approach. In this review, I introduce dynamic systems theory, with a focus on interpersonal systems, where all the processes we typically study in individuals, such as cognition and emotion, become intertwined between social partners over time. I focus on the concept of coordination, defined as a temporal correlation between interacting components of a system (or systems) arising due to coupling between them. Finally, I show how this perspective could be used to guide investigations of social problems such as polarisation. (shrink)

Play is a vital component of the social life and well-being of both children and adults. This book examines the concept of play and considers a variety of the related philosophical issues. It also includes meta-analyses from a range of philosophers and theorists, as well as an exploration of some key applied ethical considerations. The main objective of The Philosophy of Play is to provide a richer understanding of the concept and nature of play and its relation to human life (...) and values, and to build disciplinary and paradigmatic bridges between scholars of philosophy and scholars of play. Including specific chapters dedicated to children and play, and exploring the work of key thinkers such as Plato, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Deleuze and Nietzsche, this book is invaluable reading for any advanced student, researcher or practitioner with an interest in education, playwork, leisure studies, applied ethics or the philosophy of sport. (shrink)

We argued last year in this journal that extensive integration of research and care is a worthy goal of health system design, and we second the call from Ruth Faden and colleagues to move toward learning health care systems. As they recognize, learning health care systems demand the coordination of research and medical ethics—two sets of normative commitments that have long been considered distinct. In offering a novel ethics framework for such systems, Faden et al. advance the scholarly debate about (...) how best to do this and challenge us to think more deeply about its practical implications. However, we believe that at least three issues they raise require additional attention. First, the research‐care distinction has more normative bite than they are willing to concede. Second, the role for independent oversight requires clarification. Finally, they neglect the concept of stewardship as a guiding obligation of learning health care systems. (shrink)

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, James Sabin and his colleagues ask what responsibility investigators in a learning health organization have to patients when research—particularly research of which patients might be unaware—illuminates problematic aspects of the patients' care. Sabin and his colleagues were confronted by this question in the midst of designing a randomized controlled trial that sought to determine if an educational intervention targeted at patients with atrial fibrillation and their clinicians reduces underuse of oral anticoagulants. Worried (...) about harm that might befall patients in the control group and fearing that they would be negligent bystanders if they knew these patients were at risk and did nothing, the investigators adopted a “workaround.” But the “workaround,” I suggest, was not a solution to the negligent bystander problem. Nor was it a solution to the problem as I would alternatively frame it—how to address instances of suboptimal patient care identified through research within learning health organizations. (shrink)

Topics related to ethical issues in agricultural production, particularly farm animal welfare, are increasingly featured in mainstream news media. Media representations of farm animal welfare issues are important because the media is a significant source of information, but also because the way that the issues are represented, or framed, defines these issues in particular ways, suggests causes or solutions, and provides moral evaluations. As such, analysis of media frames can reveal how issues are being made public and identify the cues (...) that audiences are given to help them make sense of complex ethical issues. Previous research on media frames and animal welfare has tended to focus on single issues or events; however we sought to identify whether media frames extended across different farm animal welfare-related issues to investigate whether there is any commonality between issues. We analysed articles published in the mainstream press in Australia between 2014 and 2016 related to farm animal welfare, and identified two dominant frames: that governments and the farm animal production industries cannot be trusted to ensure good farm animal welfare; and that consumers can act to improve animal welfare through ethical consumption. These frames have implications for how the Australian public interpret and understand the roles and responsibilities of different actors in the food production system. This research also contributes to discussion about the role of the media in shaping public opinion about ethical issues in agriculture and how, in turn, the media landscape itself is being shaped by consumer attitudes. (shrink)

According to Aristotle, those who seek mathematical principles of sensible things are looking in entirely the wrong place. But despite his strong opposition to mathematized metaphysics, Aristotle does not outright reject mathematical explanation of the natural world. In fact, he argues that mathematics does explain certain sensible phenomena, that the natural world has many mathematical patterns and features, and that this is often not mere coincidence. That he devotes two books of his Metaphysics to shoring up the boundary between mathematics (...) and metaphysics indicates that this issue is crucially important to him. Yet it receives little systematic scholarly discussion. I take up the issue by examining Aristotle’s treatment of the sensible phenomena that have mathematical explanations. This examination shows that—and why—on his view, mathematics explains many things about the natural world, but not the most fundamental things. (shrink)

With so much attention on the issue of voice in democratic theory, the inverse question of how people come to listen remains a marginal one. Recent scholarship in affect and neuroscience reveals that cognitive and verbal strategies, while privileged in democratic politics, are often insufficient to cultivate the receptivity that constitutes the most basic premise of democratic encounters. This article draws on this scholarship and a recent case of forum theatre to examine the conditions of receptivity and responsiveness, and identify (...) specific strategies that foster such conditions. It argues that the forms of encounter most effective in cultivating receptivity are those that move us via affective intensity within pointedly mediated contexts. It is this constellation of strategies—this strange marriage of immersion and mediation—that enabled this performance to surface latent memory, affect and bias, unsettle entrenched patterns of thought and behaviour, and provide the conditions for revisability. This case makes clear that to lie beyond the domain of cognitive and verbal processes is not to lie beyond potential intervention, and offers insight to how such receptivity might be achieved in political processes more broadly. (shrink)

Proposing and consenting to sex are things that ordinary people manage to do all the time, yet legal regulation of sex seems to be an intractable problem. No one is satisfied with rape law, but no one knows quite what to do about it.

I argue that intelligible matter, for Aristotle, is what makes mathematical objects quantities and divisible in their characteristic way. On this view, the intelligible matter of a magnitude is a sensible object just insofar as it has dimensional continuity, while that of a number is a plurality just insofar as it consists of indivisibles that measure it. This interpretation takes seriously Aristotle's claim that intelligible matter is the matter of mathematicals generally – not just of geometricals. I also show that (...) intelligible matter has the same meaning in all three places where it is explicitly invoked: Z.10, Z.11, and H.6. Since the H.6 passage involves a mathematical definition, this requires determining what the mathematician defines and how she defines it. I show that, as with natural scientific definitions, there must be a matterlike element in mathematical definitions. This element is not identical with, but rather refers to, intelligible matter. (shrink)

The majority of – usually moral – problems inherent in elite sport, such as whether athletes should be able to take particular drugs, wear particular clothing, or utilise particular tools, arguably stem from a conceptual one based on faulty logic and competing values. Sport is a human enterprise that represents a multitude of human compulsions, desires and needs; the urge to be competitive, to co-operate, to excel, to develop, to play, to love and be loved, and to find meaning in (...) one's existence. From the perspective of an amateur athlete, this pluralism is possible. When one is involved in athletics at the lower echelons, the values that one holds in relation to sport are fluid and flexible; they are prioritised according to a myriad of other influences that are contingent to a particular situation. As such, the reasons that the general population participate in athletic activities and the values they consequently ascribe to it are complex and wide-ranging and thus fall into the sociological realm. The philosophical problem with value in sport is found at the highest level, the professional platform, where discordant values are espoused, particularly the value of ever increasing quantifiable performance. The athletic events at the Olympic Games are the archetypal manifestation of this Citius , Altius , Fortius aphorism and yet when taken to its logical conclusion becomes evidently absurd. (shrink)

Racial capitalism depends on the reproduction of an existing racialized economic order. In this article, I argue that the disavowal of past injustice is a central way in which this reproduction is ensured and that market-based forms of knowledge production, such as for-profit predictive practices, play a crucial role in facilitating this disavowal. Recent debates about the fairness of algorithms, data justice, and predictive policing have intensified long-standing controversies, both popular and academic, about the way in which statistical and financial (...) modes of accounting and predicting articulate, represent and produce ascriptive categories of hierarchically ordered social difference, and reproduce unjust social hierarchies and inequalities. These debates have productively problematized the racial lives of seemingly apolitical predictive technologies and demanded the re-politicization of predictive practices. What has been missing from these debates so far, however, is a more explicit engagement with ways in which anti-racist movements and activists themselves have contested the entanglements of prediction and race making. I turn to a recent prominent example, namely the contestation over racial discrepancies in subprime lending to examine how fair lending activists have conceptualized and troubled the reproduction of a racialized economic order through for-profit predictive practices in the decade before the Great Financial Crisis. I situate this particular example in the broader historical and political context of politicizing prediction that first emerged with the ascendancy of a liberal, individualist-proprietary conception of risk, and the political problem space to which this has given rise. My analysis shows that actuarial conceptions of fairness continue to reverberate in anti-racist contestations of for-profit predictive practices, and that they tend to marginalize and undercut more radical strands of critique of the racialization of financial markets. Insofar as these modalities of contestation implicitly reproduce a liberal, proprietary-individualist conception of risk, I argue, they fail to effectively challenge the quasi-alchemical transformation of injustice into personal responsibility, and thus contribute to the disavowal of past injustice. (shrink)