The first book to provide a full overview of human--animal studies, this volume focuses on the conceptual construction of animals in American culture and the way in which it reinforces and perpetuates hierarchical human relationships rooted ...

The distinction between clinical practice and surgical research may seem trivial, but this distinction can become a complex issue when innovative surgeries are substituted for standard care without patient knowledge. Neither the novelty nor the risk of a new surgical procedure adequately defines surgical research. Some institutions tacitly allow the use of new surgical procedures in series of patients without informing individuals that they are participating in a scientific study, as long as no written protocol or hypothesis exists. Institutions can (...) justify this practice by viewing human research in narrow terms as an activity outlined in a formal protocol. Application of limited definitions, however, erodes patients' rights and risks losing public confidence in how biomedical research is conducted. I propose an operational definition of human research also be recognised. Enforcing more rigid and less ambiguous guidelines of human research may curtail enrolment into some studies, but it will also protect patients from being used as subjects without their knowledge. (shrink)

Modern epistemology has run into several paradoxes in its efforts to explain how knowledge acquisition can be both socially based and still able to determine objective facts about the world. In this important book, Richmond Campbell attempts to dispel some of these paradoxes, to show how they are ultimately just "illusions of paradox," by developing ideas central to two of the most promising currents in epistemology: feminist epistemology and naturalized epistemology. Campbell's aim is to construct a coherent theory (...) of knowing that is feminist and "naturalized." Illusions of Paradox will be valuable for students and scholars of epistemology and women's studies. (shrink)

Dietary restriction (DR) famously extends lifespan and reduces fecundity across a diverse range of species. A prominent hypothesis suggests that these life‐history responses evolved as a survival‐enhancing strategy whereby resources are redirected from reproduction to somatic maintenance, enabling organisms to weather periods of resource scarcity. We argue that this hypothesis is inconsistent with recent evidence and at odds with the ecology of natural populations. We consider a wealth of molecular, medical, and evolutionary research, and conclude that the lifespan extension effect (...) of DR is likely to be a laboratory artifact: in contrast with captivity, most animals living in natural environments may fail to achieve lifespan extension under DR. What, then, is the evolutionary significance of the suite of responses that extend lifespan in the laboratory? We suggest that these responses represent a highly conserved nutrient recycling mechanism that enables organisms to maximize immediate reproductive output under conditions of resource scarcity. (shrink)

Collective intelligence in organizational teams has been predominantly understood and explained in terms of the quality of the outcomes that the team produces. This manuscript aims to extend the understanding of CI in teams, by disentangling the core of actual collective intelligent team behavior that unfolds over time during a collaboration period. We posit that outcomes do support the presence of CI, but that collective intelligence itself resides in the interaction processes within the team. Teams behave collectively intelligent when the (...) collective behaviors during the collaboration period are in line with the requirements of the tasks the team is assigned to and the environment. This perspective results in a challenging, but promising research agenda armed with new research questions that call for unraveling longitudinal fine-grained interactional processes over time. We conclude with exploring methodological considerations that assist researchers to align concept and methodology. In sum, this manuscript proposes a more direct, thorough, and nuanced understanding of collective intelligence in teams, by disentangling micro-level team behaviors over the course of a collaboration period. With this in mind, the field of CI will get a more fine-grained understanding of what really happens at what point in time: when teams behave more or less intelligently. Additionally, when we understand collectively intelligent processes in teams, we can organize targeted interventions to improve or maintain collective intelligence in teams. (shrink)

Many or almost all writers about truth seem to agree that the entailment by a more or less formal account of truth of all the instances of the so-called disquotational schema - (DQ) <p> is true if and only if p - is at least a necessary condition for this account to count as an adequate account of truth. My first task in this paper is to show that the correctness of the observation (DQ) does not by itself imply that (...) truth lacks substance. My second task is to establish the instances of (DQ) as not only necessary but also sufficient for a characterisation of truth. Such a minimal theory of truth would seem to rob truth of all substance but going in for a more eloquent alternative as I shall attempt to show could result in an unwanted epistemisation of truth. (shrink)

Philosophy is witnessing an “Agential Turn,” characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency––agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self‐knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make (...) appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject's rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

In his book Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, Henry Giroux bemoans, “[H]igher education increasingly stands alone, even in its attenuated state, as a public arena where ideas can be debated, critical knowledge produced, and learning linked to important social issues.”1 Colleges of education, like public schools themselves, have become more fragmented and compartmentalized in recent years. Persistent at universities is “the view that students are basically consumers and faculty providers of a saleable commodity such as a credential or a set (...) of workplace skills.”2 Professors and teachers alike feel the impact of neoliberal policies aimed at efficiency and productivity, which further alienate and emphasize data... (shrink)

Philosophy is witnessing an “Agential Turn,” characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency––agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self‐knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make (...) appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject's rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, like the philosopher’s table: (...) “an assumed background on which one writes.” Like other instruments standard to Western art music, the piano was designed to facilitate the production of a consistent and refined timbre. More than most other such instruments, the piano also facilitated a kind of sonic neutrality. With its wide pitch range and smoothing of the percussive attack of its predecessor instruments, the piano presented composers with a technological means of approaching composition from a seemingly objective vantage point. It exemplified, in Heideggerian terms, the instrumentality of the instrument, serving as a mediator between idea and expression that apparently adds no character of its own. -/- This notion of the invisibility, or transparency, of the mediations that musical technologies such as the piano enact is one of my areas of concern here. So too is its inverse: when these mediations become visible or opaque. Transparency has been a topic of significant recent theoretical attention. Stefanos Geroulanos, for example, has detailed how the supposed transparency of intersubjective, epistemological, and social relations was a major point of critique in postwar French thought, where the supposition of transparency was taken to suppress how the world was “complex, layered, structured, filled with heterogeneity” – and, as I will stress here, contingency. The thinkers Geroulanos considers, from Jean-Paul Sartre through to Jean-François Lyotard, can be said to be united in their refusal to invisibilise mediatedness. From a starting point of conceiving of the piano as a technological artifact, and in particular from John Cage’s ‘prepared piano,’ I will explore how a similar concern has appeared in musical contexts, albeit not without the risk of reversion back into a logic of transparency. (shrink)

Philosophy is witnessing an ‘Agential Turn’, characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency – agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self-knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, (...) or make appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject’s rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

Like those famous nations divided by a single tongue, my paper (this volume) and Professor P.M. Churchland's deep and engaging reply offer different spins on a common heritage. The common heritage is, of course, a connectionist vision of the inner neural economy- a vision which depicts that economy in terms of supra-sentential state spaces, vector-to-vector transformations, and the kinds of skillful pattern-recognition routine we share with the bulk of terrestrial intelligent life-forms. That which divides us is, as ever, much harder (...) to isolate and name. Clearly, it has something to do with the role of moral talk and exchange, and something to do with the conception of morality itself (and, correlatively, with the conception of moral progress). Most of this Reply will be devoted to clarifying the nature of the disputed territory. First, though (as a prophylactic against misunderstanding) I shall rehearse some points of agreement concerning moral talk and progress. (shrink)

France and New Caledonia are currently involved in an ongoing debate surrounding the independence of the latter from the former that will lead to referenda in 2018–2022. The main stakeholders in the negotiation process are France, the Caldoche population of the island agglomeration and its Kanak inhabitants. Most critical discourse studies analyse texts as expressions of power entrenched in monologues. In this paper, however, the debate between the social actors is seen as a plurilogue. The study argues that the dominant (...) interactants propagate a rhetoric of unity and homogeneity, aiming to further marginalise the Kanak people and other minority groups in New Caledonian society by rendering them invisible. It further argues that the French political power aims to persuade the other groups to accept the reality of a common destiny as a given truth. The paper combines Systemic Functional Linguistics and Pragma-dialectics, and incorporates postcolonial and poststructuralist perspectives into a critical study of discourse samples, taken from a larger corpus of French data, across various genres and registers. The analysis reveals that the French rhetoric of unity is built upon Republican principles inherent to neo-colonialist ideology. It also shows that the French rhetoric is being reproduced by local settler interactants, based on values that pertain to Caldoche nationalist ideology. Both French and Caldoche ideologies are in discord with Kanak socialist ideology. By exposing the existing power inequalities the study does not only contribute to defending the Kanak minority discourse, but also emphasises the rights for recognition and self-determination of the Kanak indigenous people of New Caledonia. (shrink)

In what follows I offer some reflections on an ethics of listening, or perhaps more generally a philosophy of listening, that can be discerned in different forms in the experimental music that, since the 1950s, has challenged and radicalised how music is understood. I situate these reflections around three of my own concert experiences as an audience member.

Part of the debate on cost containment in healthcare systems may be characterized as applied political philosophy One might say that the current debate between competing theories of justice that started with Rawls' A Theory of Justice in 1971 has acquired a small sister debate in healthcare philosophy Major participants in the debate on social justice have become an important source of inspiration for bioethicists interested in a just distribution of healthcare resources. Thus Rawls' A Theory of Justice has been (...) remodeled for healthcare philosophy by Norman Daniels. Nozick's libertarian manifesto Anarchy, State, and Utopia has been used for bioethical purposes by H.T. Engelhardt. The books of Daniel Callahan evidently belong to a family of communitarian theories, though Callahan cannot be said to follow one or another communitarian thinker in particular. In the next two sections of this article I will give a very brief sketch of the debate on social justice in political philosophy and then discuss the sister debate on social justice in healthcare. (shrink)

This essay explores the relationship between boredom, leisure, selfhood, and education in Kevin Hood Gary’s book, Why Boredom Matters, paying particular attention to connections between Aristotelian and existentialist approaches to the subject. Following Gary, the essay argues that schools force students to endure boredom or try to stimulate them with distractions, rather than helping them focus on enduring sources of meaning or cultivate stronger senses of self.

William James has long been recognized as a central figure in the American philosophic tradition, and his ideas continue to play a significant role in contemporary thinking. Yet there has never been a comprehensive exploration of the thought of this seminal philosopher and psychologist. In Experiencing William James, renowned scholar James Campbell provides the fuller and more complete analysis that James scholarship has long needed. Commentators typically address only pieces of James's thought or aspects of his vision, often in (...) an attempt to make the task of understanding James seem easier than it is or else to dismiss him as a philosophically unprepared if well-meaning amateur. The isolated nature of these examinations, too often divorced from the original contexts, badly hinders and even distorts their conclusions. Focusing on James's own ideas rather than his critiques of others, and drawing from a wealth of scholarship that includes the completed editions of his writings and correspondence, Experiencing William James provides an invaluable, comprehensive view of James as he participates in and advances the pragmatic spirit that is at the core of American philosophy. Taking the whole of the man's thinking into account, this book offers the richest perspective so far on this great but not fully comprehended intellectual. (shrink)

«Le droit et la science en action», ce titre est la parfaite illustration les domaines d’intérêts de l’auteure dont les textes ici présentés, Sheila Jasanoff, et ceux de l’auteur de la traduction et de la présentation des dits textes, Olivier Leclerc. Ce livre publié aux éditions Dalloz dans la collection Rivages du droit est une sélection et une traduction de cinq textes écrits par Sheila Jasanoff, sociologue des sciences américaine, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies au sein de la (...) très prestigieuse Université de Harvard. Ses travaux s’intéressent principalement au rôle de la science et des technologies au sein des sociétés contemporaines et notamment à leurs interactions avec le droit et la politique. Sheila Jasanoff n’est pas seulement sociologue, ce que rappelle à juste titre par Olivier Leclerc dans l’introduction de l’ouvrage. Titulaire d’un doctorat en linguistique, elle est avocate et a exercé dans le contentieux de l’environnement avant de se tourner vers .. (shrink)

Philosophers traditionally interpret Kant as a retributivist, but modern interpreters, with reference to Kant’s theory of justice and problematic passages, instead propose penal theories that mix retributive and deterrent features. Although these mixed penal theories are substantively compelling and capture the Kantian spirit, their dual aspects lead to a justificatory conflict that generates an apparent dilemma. To resolve this dilemma and clear the ground for these mixed theories, I will outline and reinterpret Kant’s penal theory by situating it in his (...) broader moral and political philosophy. This move grounds the followability requirement, which is necessary to resolve the dilemma. (shrink)

Three main issues are of cardinal interest in this paper. The first issue relates to the canons of discourse—the parameters that inform and guide any discussion—in African philosophy. These canons are accepted in one form or the other by the philosophers who have actually formulated some of them and those who have devoted their academical careers to the promotion of the positive study of African philosophy. Consequently this paper should be viewed in the same light as C.E.M. Joad's A Critique (...) of Logical Positivism in which the “Great Tradition” in philosophy is classically expounded and defended against the onslaught of the philosophical exuberance and extraordinary claims of the logical positivists in the sense that it is a rejoinder to the attack on African philosophy by those who actually may want to be known as African logical neo-positivists. (shrink)

Books have their origins in conversations and seek to extend and expand those conversations over time and with different audiences. The conversations that have culminated in this book were initially stimulated through a research project at The Hastings Center on the role of religious voices in the professional fields of bioethical inquiry. Those professional conversations have continued throughout my academic career as a member of various institutional ethics committees, organizational ethics task forces, and in local, state, and national public policy (...) settings. The professional context of bioethics conversations can sometimes miss the richness of conversations that occur in the classroom and with various communities, including family members, friends, and religious and civic communities. These conversations provide an experiential depth, a groundedness in the lives and stories of persons, which augments and corrects the professionalized perspectives. I have been particularly fortunate and appreciative of opportunities to bridge the academic and professional with the personalized and communal through conversations about the ethical commitments and moral culture cultivated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon). I was invited to develop an overview essay on "Bioethics in Mormonism" for the professional reference work, Encyclopedia of Bioethics (3rd ed., 2004), and some years later received my first invitation to make a presentation on "LDS Ethics" in an academic setting at the University of Virginia. This book is the outgrowth of these many conversations and seeks to advance my communal bridging. My aim in this book is to begin bridging these various intersections between the LDS religious community and its moral culture, the professional fields of bioethics, and practical decision-making. This work seeks to be a catalyst for expanding discourse within the interdisciplinary field of Mormon studies to include ethics and bioethics. Ethics has not been a well-developed area in Mormon studies, in contrast to studies in LDS history, theology, or literature. To remedy this oversight, I present a substantive interpretation of the sources, theological background, and moral principles of LDS ethics. The historical narratives and conceptual intertwining I offer of both bioethics and of LDS moral culture is intended to complement and expand the realm of Mormon studies. A further objective is to create opportunities for reciprocal dialogues between the bioethics community and LDS scholarship. This conversation has yet to occur within academic disciplines, professional communities, or in public policy deliberations. My exposition, analysis, and critiques will intertwine and contextualize LDS moral values and health care practices within the ethical inquiry undertaken in the broader professional scholarship of bioethics. My arguments will disclose some points of common ground as well as areas of divergence towards the end of establishing the LDS faith tradition as a community of moral discourse for the bioethics field and the healing professions (medicine, nursing, pharmacy, etc.) it informs. My claim is that given its emerging cultural prominence, LDS ethical scholarship should engage in bioethical literacy and bioethics should be LDS-literate. I am also engaged in an effort to initiate more reflective dialogues regarding LDS ethics and moral culture among LDS scholars, LDS health care professionals, and the interested general LDS reader. The focus of the book on the interrelationship of religion, ethics, medicine, and health care should present for these various audiences new opportunities for mindful reflection and creative scholarship on the ethical implications of faith commitments, the responsibilities of the healing professions, and religious dimensions of public policy and public bioethics. A religious community that is formed through narratives and practices of covenantal commitments of love of neighbor needs to have a robust discourse about its ethical character. I have understood my scholarship in biomedical ethics and in religious ethics through a linking metaphor of my moral culture, of medicine, and the law, of bearing witness. The witness offers moral realities, moral truths about the way things are, vocalizes and embodies moral experience, and prophetically critiques the hypocrisies of the powerful and their oppression of the vulnerable by offering a new story, a re-storying, of tradition and conventional practice. (shrink)

This book is based on the work done by a group of British and Italian psychoanalysts who have been meeting twice yearly since 2003 to study clinically the relationship between the mind and the body of their patients The analytical dyad became the focus of a dialectical movement between body and mind and between subject and object. Containing contributions from a range of distinguished British and Italian analysts, this book covers such key topics as somatic symptoms, the embodied unconscious, bodily (...) expressions of affect, sexuality, violence, self-harm, suicide attempts, hypochondria, hysteria, anorexia and bulimia, splits and fragmentation associated with the body. The theoretical understanding is inspired by various psychoanalytic theoreticians, including Freud, M. Klein, Winnicott and Bion and their theories on sexuality, infantile sexuality, libido, aggressiveness, dead instinct, Oedipus complex and mother-child relationship. Offering new advances in theoretical thinking and practical applications for clinical work, this book will be essential for all psychoanalysts and mental health clinicians interested in understanding serious mental disturbance that is represented in the body. (shrink)

This volume unites Peter Winch's previously unpublished work on Baruch de Spinoza. The primary source for the text is a series of seminars on Spinoza that Winch gave, first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then at King's College London in 1989. What emerges is an original interpretation of Spinoza's work that demonstrates his continued relevance to contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, and establishes connections to other philosophers - not only Spinoza's predecessors such as René Descartes, (...) but also important 20th Century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. Alongside Winch's lectures, the volume contains an interpretive essay by David Cockburn, and an introduction by the editors. (shrink)

In this article I will argue that there are two theories of distributive justice hidden in Walzer's Spheres of Justice. The first one emphasises the separation of distributive spheres. It tries to formulate distributive criteria by sticking faithfully to sphere‐specificity. I shall refer to this theory as ‘pure pluralism’. The second theory downplays the separation of spheres and emphasises ‘across spheres’ or ‘between spheres’ criteria instead. I shall call this theory ‘mitigated pluralism’. Mitigated pluralism has become popular among Walzer's friendly (...) critics who apparently do not want to charge him with a distributive theory as clear and rigid as pure pluralism. Although I consider myself another friendly critic, I shall argue in favour of pure pluralism. (shrink)

In Bearing Witness, Courtney S. Campbell draws on his experience as a teacher, scholar, and a bioethics consultant to propose an innovative interpretation of the significance of religious values and traditions for bioethics and health care. The book offers a distinctive exposition of a covenantal ethic of gift-response-responsibility-transformation that informs a quest for meaning in the profound choices that patients, families, and professionals face in creating, sustaining, and ending life. Campbell's account of "bearing witness" offers new understandings of (...) formative ethical concepts, situates medicine as a calling and vocation rooted in concepts of healing, affirms professional commitments of presence for suffering and dying persons, and presents a prophetic critique of medical-assisted death. This book offers compelling critiques of secular models of medical professionalism and of individualistic assumptions that distort the physician-patient relationship. This innovative interpretation bears witness to the relevance of religious perspectives on an array of bioethical issues from new reproductive technologies to genetics to debates over end-of-life ethics and bears witness against the oddities of a market-oriented and consumerist vision of health care that is especially salient for an era of health-care reform. (shrink)

I develop an account of the role that biology plays in the Timaeus’ view of nous and other aspects of cognitive life. I begin by outlining the biology of human cognition. I then argue that these biological views shine an important light on different aspects of the soul. I then argue that the human body is particularly friendly to nous, paying special attention to the heart and the liver. I next consider the ways that the body fails to protect our (...) nous. I conclude by comparing human nous with the cognition of non-humans. (shrink)

This book is based on the work done by a group of British and Italian psychoanalysts who have been meeting twice yearly since 2003 to study clinically the relationship between the mind and the body of their patients The analytical dyad became the focus of a dialectical movement between body and mind and between subject and object. Containing contributions from a range of distinguished British and Italian analysts, this book covers such key topics as somatic symptoms, the embodied unconscious, bodily (...) expressions of affect, sexuality, violence, self-harm, suicide attempts, hypochondria, hysteria, anorexia and bulimia, splits and fragmentation associated with the body. The theoretical understanding is inspired by various psychoanalytic theoreticians, including Freud, M. Klein, Winnicott and Bion and their theories on sexuality, infantile sexuality, libido, aggressiveness, dead instinct, Oedipus complex and mother-child relationship. Offering new advances in theoretical thinking and practical applications for clinical work, this book will be essential for all psychoanalysts and mental health clinicians interested in understanding serious mental disturbance that is represented in the body. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that human beings should reason, not in accordance with classical logic, but in accordance with a weaker ‘reticent logic’. I characterize reticent logic, and then show that arguments for the existence of fundamental Gödelian limitations on artificial intelligence are undermined by the idea that we should reason reticently, not classically.