The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the (...) many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a 'must read' that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture and Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law's representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Australia. (shrink)

This paper explores a middle way between realism and eliminativism about grounding. Grounding-talk is intelligible and useful, but it fails to pick out grounding relations that exist or obtain in reality. Instead, grounding-talk allows us to convey facts about what metaphysically explains what, and about the worldly dependence relations that give rise to those explanations.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Verification and validation of numerical models of natural systems is impossible. This is because natural systems are never closed and because model results are always nonunique. Models can be confirmed by the demonstration of agreement between observation and prediction, but confirmation is inherently partial. Complete confirmation is logically precluded by the fallacy of affirming the consequent and by incomplete access to natural phenomena. Models can only be evaluated in relative terms, and their predictive value is always open to question. The (...) primary value of models is heuristic. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race provides up-to-date explanation and analyses by leading scholars of contemporary issues in African American philosophy and philosophy of race. These original essays encompass the major topics and approaches in this emerging philosophical subfield that supports demographic inclusion and diversity while at the same time strengthening the conceptual arsenal of social and political philosophy. Over the course of the volume's ten topic-based sections, ideas about race held by Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are (...) supplemented by suppressed thought from the African diaspora, early twentieth-century African American perspectives and Native-, Asian-, and Latin-, American views. The contributors bring philosophical analysis to bear on the status of racial divisions as categories of humanity in the biological sciences, as well as within contemporary criticism and conceptual analysis. Essays present the special applications of American philosophy and continental philosophy to ideas of race as methodological alternatives to more analytic approaches. As a collection of analyses and assessments of 'race' in the real world, the volume pays trenchant and relevant attention to historical and contemporary racism and what it means to say that 'race' and racial identities are socially constructed. The essays analyze contemporary social issues including the importance of racial difference and identity in education, public health, medicine, IQ and other standardized tests, and sports. Additionally, the essays consider the societal limitations and structures provided by public policy and law. As a critical theory, the volume compares the study of race to feminism. Historical and contemporary, academic and popular, racisms pertaining to male and female gender receive special consideration throughout the volume. While this comprehensive collection may have the effect of a textbook, each of the original essays is a fresh and authentic development of important present thought. (shrink)

Author note: Naomi Zack is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Albany. She herself is of mixed race: Jewish, African American, and Native American.

Grounding talk has become increasingly familiar in contemporary philosophical discussion. Most discussants of grounding think that grounding talk is useful, intelligible, and accurately describes metaphysical reality. Call themrealistsabout grounding. Some dissenters reject grounding talk on the grounds that it is unintelligible, or unmotivated. They would prefer to eliminate grounding talk from philosophy, so we can call themeliminitivistsabout grounding. This paper outlines a new position in the debate about grounding, defending the view that grounding talk is intelligible and useful. Grounding talk (...) does not, however, provide a literal and veridical description of mind-independent metaphysical reality. This irrealismabout grounding treads a path between realism and eliminativism. (shrink)

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. -/- Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and (...) scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. -/- Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of metaphysical explanation according to which metaphysical explanations are answers to what-makes-it-the-case-that questions. On this view, metaphysical explanations are not to be considered entirely objective, but are subject to epistemic constraints imposed by the context in which a relevant question is asked. The resultant account of metaphysical explanation is developed independently of any particular views about grounding. Toward the end of the paper an application of the view is proposed that takes metaphysical explanations conceived in (...) this way to characterize reality's structure. According to this proposal, reality's structure is partly constituted by a projection of our explanatory practices onto reality. (shrink)

Ethics for Disaster addresses the moral aspects of the aftermath of natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes. The book explores how these catastrophes illuminate the existing inequalities in society, combining a unique philosophical approach with new moral thinking. Zack stresses the obligation of both individuals and government in preparing for and responding to dangerous times, forcefully arguing for the preservation of normal moral principles even in times of crisis and national emergency.

Peopling the donor world -- The meaning of family in a changing world -- Creating families -- Creating communities across families -- The laws of the donor world: parents and children -- Law, adoption, and family secrets: disclosure and incest -- Reasons to regulate -- Regulating for connection -- Regulating for health and safety: setting limits in the gamete world -- Why not to regulate -- Conclusion: challenging and creating kinship.

Buddhism and Jainism share the concepts of karma, rebirth, and the desirability of escaping from rebirth. The literature of both traditions contains many stories about past, and sometimes future, lives which reveal much about these foundational doctrines. Naomi Appleton carefully explores how multi-life stories served to construct, communicate, and challenge ideas about karma and rebirth within early South Asia, examining portrayals of the different realms of rebirth, the potential paths and goals of human beings, and the biographies of ideal (...) religious figures. Appleton also deftly surveys the ability of karma to bind individuals together over multiple lives, and the nature of the supernormal memory that makes multi-life stories available in the first place. This original study not only sheds light on the individual preoccupations of Buddhist and Jain tradition, but contributes to a more complete history of religious thought in South Asia, and brings to the foreground long-neglected narrative sources. (shrink)

Examining racial profiling in American policing, Naomi Zack argues against white privilege discourse while introducing a new theory of applicative justice. Deepening understanding without abandoning hope, Zack shows why it is more important to consider black rights than white privilege as we move forward through today's culture of inequality.

The proposed national PrEP program would serve people who are uninsured as well as those enrolled in Medicaid. In this article, the authors propose a set of recommendations for the proposed program’s implementers as well as state Medicaid agencies and Medicaid managed care organizations to ensure PrEP access for people enrolled in Medicaid, addressing gaps without undermining the important role of the Medicaid program in covering and promoting PrEP.

Naomi Zack pioneers a new theory of justice starting from a correction of current injustices. While the present justice paradigm in political philosophy and related fields begins from John Rawls’s 1970 Theory of Justice, Zack insists that what people in reality care about is not justice as an ideal, but injustice as a correctable ill.

It is commonly assumed that grounding relations are asymmetric. Here I develop and argue for a theory of metaphysical structure that takes grounding to be nonsymmetric rather than asymmetric. Even without infinite descending chains of dependence, it might be that every entity is grounded in some other entity. Having first addressed an immediate objection to the position under discussion, I introduce two examples of symmetric grounding. I give three arguments for the view that grounding is nonsymmetric (I call this view (...) ‘metaphysical interdependence’). These arguments are: (i) that metaphysical interdependence is the only theory able to reconcile competing intuitions about grounding; (ii) that it is the only theory consistent with both ‘gunk’ and ‘junk’; and (iii) that offers a satisfactory solution to the problem concerning whether or not grounding is itself grounded. (shrink)

This book joins epistemic and socio-political issues, using Wittgenstein and diverse liberatory theories to reorient epistemology as an explicitly political endeavor, with trustworthiness at its heart. Each essay was an attempt to grasp a particular set of problems, and they appear together as a model of passionate philosophical engagement.

This chapter argues that a central division among accounts of joint attention, both in philosophy and developmental psychology, turns on how they address two questions: What, if any, is the connection between the capacity to engage in joint attention triangles and the capacity to grasp the idea of objective truth? How do we explain the kind of openness or sharing of minds that occurs in joint attention? The chapter explores the connections between answers to both questions, and argues that theories (...) can be divided into two distinct types according to how these connections are developed. (shrink)

Who cares about details? As Naomi Schor explains in her highly influential book, we do-but it has not always been so. The interest in detail--in art, in literature, and as an aesthetic category--is the product of the decline of classicism and the rise of realism. But the story of the detail is as political as it is aesthetic. Secularization, the disciplining of society, the rise of consumerism, the invention of the quotidian, have all brought detail to the fore. In (...) this classic work of aesthetic and feminist theory, now available in a new paperback edition, Schor provides ways of thinking about details and ornament in literature, art, and architecture, and uncovering the unspoken but powerful ideologies that attached gender to details. Wide-ranging and richly argued, Reading in Detail presents ideas about reading (and viewing) that will enhance the study of literature and the arts. (shrink)

of presence cannot be explained by appeal to the notion of non-representational of experience. world see John Campbell, 'The Role of Physical Objects in Thinking', in Representation: Problems Perceptual Intentionality, and.

Attempts to elucidate grounding are often made by connecting grounding to metaphysical explanation, but the notion of metaphysical explanation is itself opaque, and has received little attention in the literature. We can appeal to theories of explanation in the philosophy of science to give us a characterization of metaphysical explanation, but this reveals a tension between three theses: that grounding relations are objective and mind-independent; that there are pragmatic elements to metaphysical explanation; and that grounding and metaphysical explanation share a (...) close connection. Holding fixed the mind-independence of grounding, I show that neither horn of the resultant dilemma can be blunted. Consequently, we should reject the assumption that grounding relations are mind-independent. (shrink)

Philosophy of Race: An Introduction provides plainly written access to a new subfield that has been in the background of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. Part I provides an overview of ideas of race and ethnicity in the philosophical canon, egalitarian traditions, race in biology, and race in American and Continental Philosophy. Part II addresses race as it operates in life through colonialism and development, social constructions and institutions, racism, political philosophy, and gender. This book constructs an outline that will (...) serve as a resource for students, nonspecialists, and general readers in thinking, talking, and writing about philosophy of race. (shrink)

Naomi Scheman argues that the concerns of philosophy emerge not from the universal human condition but from conditions of privilege. Her books represents a powerful challenge to the notion that gender makes no difference in the construction of philosophical reasoning. At the same time, it criticizes the narrow focus of most feminist theorizing and calls for a more inclusive form of inquiry.

In this book, Naomi Fisher provides a cohesive interpretation of Schelling's philosophical work from 1792-1802 as a mystical Platonism. According to this interpretation, Schelling is guided by two overarching commitments during this time. First, Schelling is committed to mysticism regarding the absolute. That is, the absolute is ineffable; it cannot be described in conceptual terms. For this reason, it remains inferentially external to any given philosophical system. Second, Schelling is committed to a priority monism: All things are grounded in (...) the absolute, but finite things possess an integral unity all their own, and so have a distinct and relatively independent existence. This book shows how these two commitments cohere in a project that fulfils the distinctive aims of post-Kantian philosophy, and it traces their inspiration to Schelling's early engagement with Plato's dialogues and to his education, which was Neoplatonic in orientation. In presenting Schelling's philosophy of this decade as guided by these two fundamental commitments, this book poses a challenge to those readings of Schelling's philosophy according to which it shifts frequently in its basic commitments during this time. According to the interpretation presented in this book, Schelling's appropriations of various strands of Platonism distinguish him from his contemporaries and give rise to his idiosyncratic approach to the projects of post-Kantian philosophy. Mysticism, Platonism, monism, Schelling, Neoplatonism, philosophy of nature, identity philosophy, German Idealism, Romanticism In this book, Naomi Fisher provides a cohesive interpretation of Schelling's philosophical work from 1792-1802 as a mystical Platonism. According to this interpretation, Schelling is guided by two overarching commitments during this time. First, Schelling is committed to mysticism regarding the absolute. That is, the absolute is ineffable; it cannot be described in conceptual terms. For this reason, it remains inferentially external to any given philosophical system. Second, Schelling is committed to a priority monism: All things are grounded in the absolute, but finite things possess an integral unity all their own, and so have a distinct and relatively independent existence. This book shows how these two commitments cohere in a project that fulfils the distinctive aims of post-Kantian philosophy, and it traces their inspiration to Schelling's early engagement with Plato's dialogues and to his education, which was Neoplatonic in orientation. In presenting Schelling's philosophy of this decade as guided by these two fundamental commitments, this book poses a challenge to those readings of Schelling's philosophy according to which it shifts frequently in its basic commitments during this time. According to the interpretation presented in this book, Schelling's appropriations of various strands of Platonism distinguish him from his contemporaries and give rise to his idiosyncratic approach to the projects of post-Kantian philosophy. Mysticism, Platonism, monism, Schelling, Neoplatonism, philosophy of nature, identity philosophy, German Idealism, Romanticism In this book, Naomi Fisher provides a cohesive interpretation of Schelling's philosophical work from 1792-1802 as a mystical Platonism. According to this interpretation, Schelling is guided by two overarching commitments during this time. First, Schelling is committed to mysticism regarding the absolute. That is, the absolute is ineffable; it cannot be described in conceptual terms. For this reason, it remains inferentially external to any given philosophical system. Second, Schelling is committed to a priority monism: All things are grounded in the absolute, but finite things possess an integral unity all their own, and so have a distinct and relatively independent existence. This book shows how these two commitments cohere in a project that fulfils the distinctive aims of post-Kantian philosophy, and it traces their inspiration to Schelling's early engagement with Plato's dialogues and to his education, which was Neoplatonic in orientation. In presenting Schelling's philosophy of this decade as guided by these two fundamental commitments, this book poses a challenge to those readings of Schelling's philosophy according to which it shifts frequently in its basic commitments during this time. According to the interpretation presented in this book, Schelling's appropriations of various strands of Platonism distinguish him from his contemporaries and give rise to his idiosyncratic approach to the projects of post-Kantian philosophy. Mysticism, Platonism, monism, Schelling, Neoplatonism, philosophy of nature, identity philosophy, German Idealism, Romanticism. (shrink)

Socrates was not a moral philosopher. Instead he was a theorist who showed how human desire and human knowledge complement one another in the pursuit of human happiness. His theory allowed him to demonstrate that actions and objects have no value other than that which they derive from their employment by individuals who, inevitably, desire their own happiness and have the knowledge to use actions and objects as a means for its attainment. The result is a naturalised, practical, and demystified (...) account of good and bad, and right and wrong. Professor Reshotko presents a freshly envisioned Socratic theory residing at the intersection of the philosophy of mind and ethics. It makes an important contribution to the study of the Platonic dialogues and will also interest all scholars of ethics and moral psychology. (shrink)

In “The Promise and Reality of Public Engagement in the Governance of Human Genome Editing Research,” Conley et al. raise (2023) important critiques of several public engagement practices in the re...

This article argues that while Charles Taylor's commitment to anti-naturalism in the human sciences has been constant, the grounds for that commitment have changed significantly over time. What began as his critique of naturalism on empirical grounds was refashioned into a commitment on moral grounds, or more accurately, on the basis of there being no distinctly separable grounds between the scientific and the moral. Taylor shifted his descriptive phenomenological defence of anti-naturalism to cast a much broader critique against an empiricist (...) epistemology he saw underpinning all naturalist approaches in the human sciences. He calls attention to the speciousness of the ontological commitments of an empiricist epistemological outlook that tries to separate human agency from moral ontology, which he argues is itself a moral position. Whether we want to go along with Taylor's specific moral outlook or not, what his arguments about the human sciences teach us is twofold: (1) Taylor's descriptive phenomenology shows how the scientific language of the natural sciences often cannot explain human phenomena without contradiction; (2) Taylor's hermeneutic realism teaches us the extent to which defending an anti-naturalist philosophy of human sciences today necessitates moral argument. (shrink)

Naomi Zack brings us an indispensable work in the ethics of race through an inquiry into the history of moral philosophy. The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy enters into a web of ideas, ethics, and morals that untangle our evolving ideas of racial equality straight into the twenty-first century.

We are morally obligated to plan for disaster because it affects human life and well-being. Because contemporary disasters affect the public, such planning should be public in democracies and it should not violate the basic ethical principles of normal times. Current Avian Flu pandemic planning is restricted to a response model based on scarce resources, or inadequate preparation, which gives priority to some lives over others. Rather than this model of ‘Save the Greatest Number,’ the public would be more ethically (...) served by a model of ‘Save All Who Can Be Saved,’ which is based on adequate preparation. And where events exceed adequate preparation, scarce resources should be allocated fairly. (shrink)

Femtech, apps gericht op de reproductieve gezondheid van vrouwen, belooft vrouwen te empoweren door hen kennis en controle te geven over hun lichaam. Maar femtech is niet zonder problemen: de ervaring van de gebruiker past niet altijd in de tot data gereduceerde werkelijkheid van de app. Bovendien pretenderen de apps inclusief te zijn maar zijn zij heteronormatief. Ook verzamelen en verkopen de fertiliteitapps intieme informatie. Femtech kan daarmee een bron van kwetsbaarheid zijn voor gebruikers.

Naomi Zack begins this extraordinary book with the premise that if one is to understand Western conceptions of racialized and gendered identity, one needs to go back to a period when such categories were not salient and examine how notions ...

This ambitious philosophical anthology combines analyses and surveys of contemporary theorising on social identity.