Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important thinkers of this century. His work has been highly influential not only in philosophy, but particularly in the fields of politics, sociology and law. This is the first collection that explores the connections between his body of work and North America's biggest philosophical movement, pragmatism. Habermas and Pragmatism investigates the influences of pragmatism on Habermas' thought in a collection of stellar essays with contributions by Habermas himself, leading representatives of pragmatism, as well (...) as critical and legal theorists. The essays cover a range of subjects including philosophy of language, democracy, nature of rationality and social theory as well as the relation of major figures such as Hegel, Pierce, Mead and Dewey to Habermas and pragmatism. (shrink)

There are few living thinkers who have enjoyed the eminence and reown of Jürgen Hamermas. His work has been highly influential not only in philosopy, but also in the fields of politics, sociology and law. This is the first collection dedicated to exploring the connections between his body of work ahd America's most significant philosophical movement, pragmatism. Habermas and Pragmatism considers the influence of pragmatism on Habermas's thought and the tensions between Habermasian social theory and pragmatism. Essays by distinguished pragmatists, (...) legal and critical theorists, and Habermas cover a range of subjects including the philosophy of language, the nature of rationality, democracy, objectivity, transcendentalism, aesthetics, and law. The collection also addresses the relationship to Habermas of Kant, Peirce, Mead, Dewey, Piaget, Apel, Brandom and Rorty. (shrink)

Myra Hird and Harlan Weaver have been invited by the editors of this special issue to enter into discussion with each other – to conduct a series of interchanges – because of the careful attention their research has paid to the ways in which transness as a lived reality is ontologized in humans, non-human animals, bacteria, and viruses. With this issue’s interchanges, we would like to further the conversation on critically approaching the consequences of merging transness with animality. In (...) the following series of four essay questions, we particularly invited each of these scholars to consider moments of classificatory tension in which taxonomies of human and non-human become inflected and redirected by the categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and geopolitical location. (shrink)

Cultural ethical dilemmas occur when ethical research practices, as prescribed by the research ethics codes of Western research institutions, conflict with the cultural and social norms of non-Western researchers and their participants. Thus, insider-researchers working with participants from similar cultural backgrounds may experience ethical dilemmas that result in disconcerting cultural estrangement from their communities. Using reflexive narratives, the author identifies moments of cultural ethical dilemmas that necessitate a choice between two competing sets of values. Working out of a Western university, (...) the narratives reflect on cultural ethical dilemmas relating to non-coercion, confidentiality, and beneficence, encountered during interviews in the researcher’s community. Analyzed through the lens of Confucian social and ethical behavior, the paper asks whether there is a need for East–west polarization, or whether research ethics codes based on Western worldviews can be reconciled with Confucian worldviews. The paper suggests the “Middle Way” approach to reconciling and integrating the diverse worldviews of ethics, through the use of an ethical reflexive process that engenders trust in the research process and resolves cultural ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke each sought a new foundation for political order. This book serves as a reader's companion to Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Locke’s Second Treatise written for graduate students and scholars seeking a fuller understanding of these classic texts. How do these philosophers respond to perennial questions such as why anyone is ever obligated to obey a government and whether there are any limits to such an obligation. In this book, Bookman begins by sorting out (...) the hermeneutical controversy between textualists and contextualists, offers a chapter-by-chapter commentary on the texts punctuated by questions for the reader’s reflection, and finally suggests a firmer foundation for a theory of political obligation than Hobbes’s and Locke’s consent theories. Also included are bibliographical essays keyed to select bibliographies, providing readers with a wide-ranging, critical review of the secondary literature. Intended to be read alongside the primary work, the work is a full intellectual, critical, and bibliographical history, as well as a fresh examination of three classic texts in political theory and philosophy. (shrink)

The extraordinary complexity of knowledge in today's world creates a paradox. On the one hand, its sheer volume and intricacy demand disciplinary specialization, even sub-specialization; innovative research or scholarship increasingly requires immersion in the details of one's disciplinary dialogue. On the other hand, that very immersion can limit innovation. Disciplinary specialization inhibits faculty from broadening their intellectual horizons - considering questions of importance outside their discipline, learning other methods for answering these questions and pondering the possible significance of other disciplines' (...) findings for their own work. This article seeks to understand more fully the factors that enhance and impede cross-disciplinary conversations and the possible longer-term effects of those conversations. Based on 46 interviews with a sample of seminar participants, it examines the experiences of faculty members who ventured (voluntarily) into multidisciplinary waters and its implications for the organization of disciplines and universities. (shrink)

Why should the many be accorded a role in governing? In Book III of his Politics, Aristotle advances a handful of arguments on behalf of their participation (1281a39-1282a41, 1286a31-35).2 These arguments deserve examination because they have been misunderstood and have, therefore, been accepted or rejected for the wrong reasons. They deserve examination too because the Greek theory and practice of democracy continues to exercise a powerful attraction upon contemporary generations. Aristotle is, of course, among the principal sources of our knowledge (...) of the Greek experience of democracy. (shrink)

In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Myra Jehlen develops this idea through readings of works by Flaubert, James, and Nabokov.

In Sex, Gender and Science , Myra Hird outlines the social study of science and nature, specifically in relation to sex, sex differences, and sexuality. She examines how Western understandings of sex are based less upon understanding material sex differences than on a discourse that emphasizes sex dichotomy over sex diversity and argues for a feminist engagement with scientific debate that embraces the diversity and complexity of nature.

As ever more countries enter the global economy, reshaping the body has become the means by which women are encouraged to enter modernity. Once bodies were local, marked by their own local traditions. Today, variety is replaced by uniformity. The formerly plump Miss Nigeria is superseded by a thin westernized version and sets the trend for how contemporary Nigerian women are to look. Encouraged to see the body as a consuming center, a personal logo that signifies our membership of the (...) global community, bodies across the world are being commercialized and restructured. This development means that we are losing bodies as we lose mother tongue languages. Standardization is supplanting diversity as facsimile bodies become the new calling card of belonging and identity. (shrink)

Ten years after the publication of the special issue of Social Epistemology on feminist epistemology, this paper explores recent feminist interest in the inhuman. Feminist science studies, cultural studies, philosophy and environmental studies all build on the important work feminist epistemology has done to bring to the fore questions of feminist empiricism, situated knowledges and knowing as an intersubjective activity. Current research in feminist theory is expanding this epistemological horizon to consider the possibility of an inhuman epistemology. This paper explores (...) these developments through the subject of waste. Waste, as both an epistemological and material phenomenon, invites timely questions about possibilities for acknowledging an inhuman epistemology. These questions appear to be particularly urgent from an environmental perspective. (shrink)

Missouri, the "Show Me State," has become the epicenter of several important national public policy debates, including abortion rights, the right to choose and refuse medical treatment, and, most recently, early stem cell research. In this environment, the Center for Practical Bioethics (formerly, Midwest Bioethics Center) emerged and grew. The Center's role in these "cultural wars" is not to advocate for a particular position but to provide well researched and objective information, perspective, and advocacy for the ethical justification of policy (...) positions; and to serve as a neutral convener and provider of a public forum for discussion. In this article, the Center's work on early stem cell research is a case study through which to argue that not only the Center, but also the field of bioethics has a critical role in the politics of public health policy. (shrink)

This Article explores several meanings of a regulatory preference for government inaction. It explains the rise to dominance of this inaction preference in the United States and its distorting influence on the perception and understanding of regulation. Specifically, the Article demonstrates how basic terms in regulation, such as “government failure,” “regulatory capture,” and “deregulation,” acquired misleading connotations suggesting that government inaction is always superior to government action. The Article further explains how, through government inaction, the U.S. legal system accommodates rent (...) extraction - the profitable exploitation of market imperfections and favorable laws. Several developments in recent decades have considerably improved the capacity of very small groups in society to collect rents, namely, use talent and positional advantages to gain increasing levels of earnings. The Article argues that the parallel rise of the inaction preference has contributed to this trend, primarily because the availability of rent extraction opportunities draws talent that utilizes them with growing effectiveness. The purpose of the Article is to clarify several aspects of the relationships between regulation and rent extraction or, more precisely, to emphasize that government inaction may entail undesirable income effects. (shrink)

Feminist analyses have made important contributions to the sociocultural experiences of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. This article draws upon recent theorizing within science studies to focus on the mattering of these processes. Specifically, the article expands upon Mauss's notion of the ‘gift’, which Diprose develops through the idea of ‘corporeal generosity’. I am interested in corporeal generosity insofar as it circumvents descriptions of relationships in terms of a closed economy in which resources are exchanged without excess or remainder. Corporeal generosity (...) refers to the often missed but nevertheless inescapable debt that a body owes to other bodies. At the same time, this embodied ‘gifting’ is both unpredictable and intrusive – there is as much possibility of threatening the integrity of bodies as there is of opening new possibilities. (shrink)

Nigel Clark’s ‘ex-orbitant globality’ concerns the incalculability of other-than-human forces we typically fail to acknowledge, yet which haunt all considerations of environmental change. This article considers Gaia theory as a useful heuristic to register the ubiquity of bacteria to environmental activity and regulation. Bacteria are Gaia theory’s fundamental actants, and through symbiosis and symbiogenesis, connect life and matter in biophysical and biosocial entanglements. Emphasizing symbiosis might invoke the expectation of a re-inscription of the human insofar as the ubiquitous inter-connectivity of (...) life ultimately connects everything to the human. I want to argue toward the opposite conclusion: that bacterial liveliness suggests a profound indifference to human life. As such, symbiosis does not efface difference, nor its vigorous refusal to be absorbed within human formulations of world-remaking, including environmental change. Bacterial indifference’s radical asymmetry suggests the need for non-human centred theories of globality. (shrink)

Based on in-depth interviews with policymakers and archival data, we examine the policy debates over court reform in family law and criminal law in Chile after the democratic transition. We introduce the concept of “gendered expertise” to capture the set of competences and claims organized around perceived gender differences and mobilized through gendered networks that we found in these debates. We show how gender structured and valorized lawyers’ expertise and shaped the differing outcomes in these two reforms. In the power (...) struggles among law reformers, both men and women lawyers used gendered expertise as a resource for characterizing themselves and their opponents. In the end, criminal law reform not only received far more political and economic support for its implementation than any other Chilean judicial reform, but defined the appropriate political reforms in relation to gendered meanings of law and political reconciliation. (shrink)

The women's movement in East Germany went through three phases—emergence, white-hot mobilization, and demobilization—in rapid succession. These stages are analyzed with regard to the resources, political opportunities, and personal meanings of feminism that activists had available. The postunification crisis of the movement is used to examine issues of collective identity between East and West, and to highlight challenges to dichotomies between public and private, capitalism and socialism posed by the movement.

Faced with declining fertility rates, media in Britain are reacting with anxiety about cultural annihilation. To look at how nationalism inflects concerns over biological and cultural reproduction, the authors analyze coverage of falling fertility and rising immigration in Great Britain in major newspapers in 2000-2. They find pronatalist appeals to be commonand especially directed at women but varying in how women’s duty to the nation is framed. Appeals characterized as begging, lecturing, threatening, and bribing express different relationships between individual interest (...) and the national good and offer positive and negative views of women. The political leanings of specific newspapers affect how they connect biological reproduction to the cultural threat seen in immigration. Even positive views of women as making rational reproductive choices are tainted by alarmist views of immigration as a threat to national survival. (shrink)