In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:100 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Carla Pascoe Leahy From the Little Wife to the Supermom? Maternographies of Feminism and Mothering in Australia since 1945 Men didn’t do anything.... The mother did for the child. The father went out to work.... I was a very determined, modern woman, but I didn’t mind being the little wife. —Marjorie, 1950s mother1 There were (...) competing narratives. One was a woman’s place is full time mothering in the home.... And then there was the feminist movement which said women can do it all.... There was level of unreality about both of them. I did feel really conflicted. —Sally, 1970s mother I read a headline today that said I send my kids to childcare and I refuse to feel guilty.... I feel the guilt a little bit but not enough to stop me from sending them, and I still know that in the long run... it’s far better for me to work and... I don’t want to be a stay at home mum for the rest of my life. —Ariana, 2010s mother 1. All interviewees are referred to by pseudonyms. Where permission is granted by the interviewee, interview material is preserved at Museums Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. All interviews are in the possession of the author. “Marjorie” was interviewed by the author on June 27, 2014; “Sally” was interviewed by the author on March 8, 2014; “Ariana” was interviewed by the author on April 5, 2017. Carla Pascoe Leahy 101 The daily lives and long-term aspirations of Australian mothers have undergone significant changes over the past seventy years, alongside shifting cultural and personal concepts of mothering, employment, and female identity. At face value, these quotes from three generations of Australian mothers imply a trajectory of shifting understandings of care, work, gender, and subjectivity, with women’s self-identity increasingly associated with paid work outside the home. Each of these women positions herself in relation to the dominant gender culture at the time she experienced matrescence.2 Marjorie, who had her children in the 1950s, characterizes herself as “the little wife” and recalls being contented with her role as a stay-at-home mother. Sally, who became a mother in the late 1970s, remembers wanting to believe that “women can do it all” without sacrificing family or career, but she experienced this radical ideal as conflicted at both a cultural and personal level. Ariana, a twenty-first-century mother, feels ambivalent about sending her children to childcare, but had always assumed that she would combine paid work with mothering. Despite this seemingly linear progression from a female identity centered on mothering to one focused on paid work, I argue that closer attention to these maternal narratives reveals that changing gender discourses were experienced as riven with internal contradictions by individual mothers. Drawing on a new collection of fifty-six oral history interviews co-created with Australian women about their experiences of becoming mothers, I will analyze the ways in which changing cultural understandings of selfhood, work, care, and gender have played out in the lives of mothers from 1945 to the present. When I started this project, I envisaged it partially as a history of my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and my own maternal generations. In this sense, it is a record of the living memory of Australian mothering; an archive of the maternal memories still circulating in contemporary Australia. But it is also a history of Australian mothering before, during, and after the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. The women’s movement initiated fundamental shifts in the ways Australians thought about women’s role in society, 2. Matrescence is a term coined by Dana Raphael to describe the experience of becoming a mother for the first time. See Dana Raphael, “Matrescence, Becoming a Mother, a ‘New/Old’ Rite de Passage,” in Being Female: Reproduction, Power, and Change, ed. Dana Raphael (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975). 102 Carla Pascoe Leahy their relationships to men and children, and their capabilities in relation to paid and unpaid work. My contention is that the women’s liberation movement unsettled and complicated Australian women’s relationships to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface Within the current context in the United States, we tend to think of “choice” as the leading slogan of the liberal movement to expand women’s reproductive rights, particularly the right to elective abortion. But choice depends on context: on what is available, what is mandated, what is prohibited or discouraged, and what has not yet been imagined. This issue of Feminist Studies expands our thinking about available and (...) potential choices, both individual and social. The issue opens with Stephanie Yingyi Wang’s ethnographic study of companionate marriage in China, in which she describes cooperative marriage partnerships that look heterosexual and appear to fulfill traditional familial expectations, but that facilitate same-sex liaisons and so create new family structures. Other essays in this issue describe the kinds of choices available to those who seek nontraditional or less conventional family and erotic bonds. Leila J. Rupp discusses the “queer dilemmas of desire” that perplex undergraduate queer women in US colleges, and Sonny Nordmarken opens possibilities for new trans epistemologies that disrupt and produce new gender practices, claiming that queer instability provides “infinite possibilities” for individual and social change. More traditional choices and families take differing shapes in other historical and cultural contexts. Carla Pascoe Leahy compares the levels of maternal satisfaction felt by three historical cohorts of Australian women: those of the immediate post-World War II generation, the later generation of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the current generation. Miriam Kienle examines how two designers, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, decided to explore alternatives to big data by sending each other weekly postcards that quantified their lives according to “small/slow data” points. Other essays and poems emphasize constraint rather than choice about the kinds of identities that take shape within current social structures. Bettina Judd ponders the effects on herself and others of her own rage at racial injustice and of the stereotype of raging black women perpetuated by a society that has chosen not to 8Preface deal with its endemic racism. Similarly, Vivyan Adair’s memoir on the stigmata of growing up in poverty exposes the limitations of individual choice in the context of violence, a theme echoed in the poems by Elisabeth Blair, which dramatize her experiences in an abusive institution for troubled teens. Trysh Travis reviews four books published in 2017 that together, but differently, tackle the difficult situations of the “drug-using woman” and her recovery. Marilyn Strathern and Jade S. Sasser review Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway’s edited volume Making Kin, Not Population : Reconceiving Generations, with responses from multiple authors featured in the book. Finally, a short story by Mary Anna Evans and poetry by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Abigail G. H. Manzella voice other individual dilemmas related to choice. We end the issue with a News and Views piece by Sonja Thomas that offers more context on the recent Women’s Wall protest in Kerala, India. In “When Tongzhi Marry: Experiments of Cooperative Marriage between Lalas and Gay Men in Urban China,” Stephanie Yingyi Wang frames cooperative marriage in mainland China between gay men and lalas (same-sex loving women), or tonghzi marriage, as an experiment in queer kinship. Such marriages appear to fulfill traditional roles on the surface, providing women and men who desire same-sex relationships a sanctioned institution—marriage—within which to fulfill these desires. According to Wang, these relational strategies are shaped simultaneously by China’s heteronormative policies and by the global circulation of gay rights narratives, “transforming the heteronormative family institution from within.” In this ethnography, Wang describes relationships as varied as those in which married partners are mutually supportive close friends who confide in one another about their same-sex relationships, to others in which subjects suffered from differing expectations between the partners, sometimes with gay husbands expecting deferential behavior from their lala wives, or between the couples and their parents and in-laws. Wang suggests applying a “decolonizing feminist methodology” to go beyond dichotomies of public/private, local/global, and success/failure and thus to better understand tongzhi marriage and critical queer subjectivities at this global juncture. Wang’s article is a co-winner of the 2018 Feminist Studies Award for the... (shrink)

This Element examines Kant's innovative account of labour in his political philosophy and develops an intersectional analysis of Kant. By demonstrating that Kant's analysis of slavery, citizenship, and sex developed in inter-linked ways over several decades, culminating in his development of a 'trichotomy' of Right, the author shows that Kant's normative account of independence is configured through his theory of labour, and is continuous with his anthropological accounts of race and gender, providing a systemic justification for the dependency of women (...) and non-whites embedded in his philosophy of right. By examining Kant's arguments about slavery as intertwined with his account of domestic labour, the author argues that his ultimate rejection of slavery may owe more to his changing conceptualization of labour than to his theory of race, and that his final arguments against slavery rehearse strategies for embedding intersectional patterns of domestic dependence in his account of the rightful state. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. Public discourse about ethics in the COVID-19 pandemic has tended to focus on scarcity of resources and the protection of civil liberties. We show how these preoccupations reflect an established disaster imaginary that orients the ethics of response. In this paper, we argue that pandemic ethics should instead be oriented through a relational account of persons as vulnerable vectors embedded in existing networks of care. We argue for the creation of a new disaster imaginary to shape our own understandings (...) of the interrelated social, political, and economic hardships under conditions of social distancing. We develop a pandemic ethics framework rooted in uBuntu and care ethics that makes visible the underlying multidimensional structural inequities of the pandemic, attending to the problems of resource scarcity and inequities in mortality while insisting on a response that surges existing and emergent forms of solidarity. (shrink)

This paper formulates a response to standard accounts of Kantian sexual morality, by first clarifying why sex should be understood as a case of using a person as a thing, rather than merely as a means. The author argues that Kant’s remedy to this problem is not sexual consent, but a model of setting and sharing sexual ends. Kant’s account of sexual morality, read in this way, is a critical framework for contemporary moves to think beyond consent, and to grapple (...) with concerns about sexual violation and “bad sex” that have gained uptake in the wake of the MeToo movement. The author defends an account of sex as a process of setting and sharing sexual ends in a Kantian key, which provides us with resources for thinking about the robust ongoing project of making our sexual selves in nonideal conditions, as well as for identifying the wrongs of both “bad” sex and sexual harassment. In doing so, they offer a critical middle ground between contemporary accounts of sexual morality that center questions of individual agency or autonomy, and those that foreground the intersubjective nature of sex. (shrink)

The Western world is currently gripped by an obsessive concern for the rights of animals - their uses and abuses. In this book, Leahy argues that this is a movement based upon a series of fundamental misconceptions about the basic nature of animals. This is a radical philosophical questioning of prevailing views on animal rights, which credit animals with a self-consciousness like ours. Leahy's conclusions have implications for issues such as bloodsports, meat eating and fur trading.

This paper explores the dynamics of women's public nudity in the early Roman empire, centering particularly on two festival occasions—the rites of Venus Verticordia and Fortuna Virilis on April 1, and the Floralia in late April—and on the respective social and spatial contexts of those festivals: the baths and the theater. In the early empire, these two social spaces regularly remove or complicate some of the markers that divide Roman women by sociosexual status. The festivals and the ritual nudity within (...) them focus attention on the negotiations of social boundaries within these spaces, and the occasions for cross-class identification among women they provide. (shrink)

Abstract Utterances of counterfactual conditionals are typically attended by the information that their antecedents are false. But there is as yet no account of the source of this information that is both detailed and complete. This paper describes the problem of counterfactual antecedent falsity and argues that the problem can be addressed by appeal to an adequate account of the presuppositions of various competing conditional constructions. It argues that indicative conditionals presuppose that their antecedents are epistemically possible, while subjunctive conditionals (...) bear no presupposition. Given this arrangement, utterance of the counterfactual results in an antipresupposition, that is, a scalar implicature generated from the presuppositions of competing alternatives rather than from the at-issue content of competing alternatives. The content of the antipresupposition is the negation of the presupposition of the competing indicative, i.e., that the antecedent of the conditional is known to be false by the speaker. (shrink)

Community resilience, a system’s ability to maintain its essential functions despite disturbance, is a cornerstone of public health preparedness. However, as currently practiced, community resilience generally focuses on defined neighborhood characteristics to describe factors such as vulnerability or social capital. This ignores the way that residents of some neighborhoods (as ‘essential workers’’) were required during the COVID-19 pandemic to sacrifice their wellbeing for the sake of others staying at home in more affluent neighborhoods. Using the global care chain theory, we (...) analyze the way that the resilience of affluent neighborhoods depends on siphoning off the labor of other, less affluent neighborhoods, creating what we call the parasitic nature of resilience. We argue that understanding this neighborhood interdependence—and accounting for its parasitic nature— should be prioritized by public health authorities to prevent unintentional harm in future pandemics. Otherwise, any public health emergency response that relies on this labor (as did the COVID-19 pandemic response) depends on exploitative practices that produce the very disparities the response is trying to address. We explore the theoretical grounding and practical effects of this idea to provide the preparedness enterprise with an initial set of theoretical tools to move from a model of community resilience to one of community renewal. The community renewal model is based on an underlying ethics of care, in which systems are redesigned to become more prosocial during a public health response. We believe this model can more successfully address the tragic inequities in labor and health outcomes that we see during public health emergencies. (shrink)

I defend the right to an abortion at any stage of pregnancy by drawing on a Kantian account of consent and innate right. I examine how pregnant women are positioned in moral and legal debates about abortion, and develop a Kanitan account of bodily autonomy in order to pregnant women’s epistemic authority over the experience of pregnancy. Second, I show how Kant's distinction between innate and private right offers an excellent legal framework for embodied rights, including abortion and sexual consent, (...) and I draw on the legal definition of sexual consent in order to show how abortion discourse undermines women's innate right. I then explore Kant’s treatment of the infanticidal mother, and draw out the parallels between this case and contemporary abortion rights in order to develop a distinctly Kantian framework of reproductive rights in non-ideal conditions. Finally, I explore the implications of this non-ideal approach for contemporary abortion discourse, arguing that debates about the legality of abortion should more broadly engage the barbaric conditions of reproductive injustice. (shrink)

Children approach counterfactual questions about stories with a reasoning strategy that falls short of adults’ Counterfactual Reasoning (CFR). It was dubbed “Basic Conditional Reasoning” (BCR) in Rafetseder et al. (Child Dev 81(1):376–389, 2010). In this paper we provide a characterisation of the differences between BCR and CFR using a distinction between permanent and nonpermanent features of stories and Lewis/Stalnaker counterfactual logic. The critical difference pertains to how consistency between a story and a conditional antecedent incompatible with a nonpermanent feature of (...) the story is achieved. Basic conditional reasoners simply drop all nonpermanent features of the story. Counterfactual reasoners preserve as much of the story as possible while accommodating the antecedent. (shrink)

In this essay, I draw on Kant’s legal philosophy in order to defend the right to voluntary motherhood by way of abortion at any stage of pregnancy as an essential feature of women’s basic rights. By developing the distinction between innate and acquired right in Kant’s legal philosophy, I argue that the viability standard in US law (as established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) misunderstands the nature of embodied right. Our body is the site of innate right; it is the (...) means through which we can set and pursue ends in the world. The law, therefore, cannot adjudicate the relationship between the will and the body: it cannot require us to allow our bodies to be used against our will. By comparing unwanted pregnancy to sexual assault, I problematize the notion that consent to pregnancy, like consent to sex, can ever be conclusive. I examine Kant’s own account of unwanted pregnancy, in which he describes mother and child finding themselves “in a state of nature” in order to rethink the status of the fetus in law, and I argue that we should understand the fetus’s right to life as provisional, rather than as enforceable by law. (shrink)

Natural law contains much social thought that predates sociology and related disciplines, and can be seen as part of the prehistory of the human sciences. Key concerns of natural law thinkers include the achievement of social life and society, and the individual’s place therein. However, there is an enduring tendency within sociology to dismiss the ahistoricism and universalism of natural law, and therefore to reject natural law thought in its entirety. This article proposes an approach that rescues the sociological relevance (...) of natural law. It draws on the respective methods of Chris Thornhill and Gary Wickham, who each seek to recover the importance of natural law for sociology. Thornhill treats natural law as a valid sociological object by focusing on its functions within society rather than engaging with its ahistorical concepts. His focus on the external functions of natural law, however, leads to a neglect of the internal conceptualisations of the social world in natural law thought. This in turn leads to a misinterpretation of Hobbes and voluntarist natural law. Wickham, on the other hand, explores in detail Hobbesian conceptions of society and the individual that Wickham argues can be utilised within contemporary sociology. This article revises Thornhill’s methodological framework in order to secure a space for the recovery of natural law as social thought. This approach allows for the recognition of natural law as an important piece of the epistemological background against which contemporary understandings of the human and society emerged. (shrink)

This paper explores Kant's account of marriage and its relevance to contemporary debates over same-sex marriage. Kant's defense of marriage is read against debates unfolding in Prussia in the 1790s, when the question of whether marriage was a "universal estate" was a central point of debate surrounding the Prussian Legal Code of 1794. By reading Kant's arguments in light of this historical context, and in comparison with those offered by his contemporaries, Fichte and von Hippel, this article shows both that (...) the debates about marriage in the 1790s mirror contemporary tensions, and that Kant took a "middle path" that innovatively defended marriage as a basic feature of the state. (shrink)

The author of handbooks that reflected the Victorian emphasis on bettering one's prospects, Charles Eyre Pascoe addressed the topic of female education in this work of 1879, at a time when the Cambridge colleges of Girton and Newnham were in their infancy. 'Chiefly designed for the use of persons of the upper middle class', the guide aims to assist parents in making informed choices about their daughters' education. The coverage extends from kindergarten through to university, before focusing on career (...) options for women in the late nineteenth century, in fields such as teaching, the arts and medicine. Throughout, Pascoe's recommendations are based on consideration of the breadth of the curriculum, the qualifications of the teaching staff and the results achieved in examinations. For higher education, details of entrance examinations are provided, together with information on the subjects and lectures that were open to women at that time. (shrink)

In “Rethinking Race and Gender in Kant: Toward a Non-Ideal, Intersectional Kant,” Jordan Pascoe argues that Kant’s moral philosophy is productively read through the “non-ideal” lens of the sociopolitical concerns he faced and espoused. This lens in turn offers possibilities for thinking differently about the particular articulation that his formal principles take. She defends a non-ideal, modified methodological approach in which Kant’s problematic conception of race and gender are opportunities for expanding our reflection on Kant’s moral philosophy as a (...) whole. (shrink)

The #MeToo movement generated a feminist insistence that we “believe women.” But the men accused of assault, harassment, and other violations frequently defended themselves with the insistence that they had always “respected women” – sometimes, going so far as to get numerous women to sign letters swearing that these men had always respected them. This common MeToo defense reveals the core inconsistency – and the core entitlement – at the heart of misogyny and sexual injustice: some women deserve respect. But (...) the duty to respect those women relies on an invisible entitlement to disrespect – indeed, to assault, harass, dominate, or exploit – others. This chapter explores consent’s role within the superstructure of misogyny and sexual injustice, arguing what consent is a key apparatus of white supremacy. It argues that consent has been constructed through dynamics of colonial and racist sexual entitlement, mapping some (white) women as deserving of respect and the right to consent, while marking other women as expendable or disposable within the sexual economy. This means not only that consent is historically constructed as white, but also that whiteness, and in particular, white womanhood, is constructed through consent. Thus, white women’s right to consent – or to refuse – is premised upon the inability of other women to do so. In this way, the right to sexual consent does not disrupt the norm of male sexual entitlement. Consent has always been premised on non-consent, from coloniality and slavery to contemporary porn, which offers a vision of the world without proper consent, so that granting consent to actual women is an exceptional practice, an “act of respect.” By including race and class alongside gender in my analysis of consent, I argue that contemporary feminist visions of sexual justice must do more than defend or ameliorate consent, but develop intersectional interrogations of sexual justice that reckon with the complicities of consent. (shrink)

Why do utterances of counterfactual conditionals typically, but not universally, convey the message that their antecedents are false? I demonstrate that two common theoretical commitments–commitment to the existence of scalar implicature and of informative presupposition—can be supplemented with an independently motivated theory of the presuppositions of competing conditional alternatives to jointly predict this information when and only when it appears. The view works best if indicative and counterfactual conditionals have a closely related semantics, so I conclude by undermining two familiar (...) arguments for a nonunified semantics of indicative and counterfactual conditionals. (shrink)

Pascoe, David The notion of stewardship is an emerging reality in the Catholic Church,1 albeit somewhat confined to some Western localities, particularly the USA, and also developing in the Australian context. While the notion is not new to the wider Christian Church, there remain questions as to the theological foundation for stewardship as a principle of Christian living in its Catholic context. There is, for example, a question of how stewardship is a lived reality for the people who are (...) the Catholic Church, when stewardship is understood as giving expression to the nature and mission of the church. If, as the Second Vatican Council teaches, the one sole purpose of the church is 'that the kingdom of God may come and the salvation of the human race may be accomplished' (GS 45), how does stewardship play a part in accomplishing this purpose? And, perhaps more importantly, there is the question what is it about stewardship in our time that presents the Church with a renewed impetus to take up its central purpose as noted in Gaudium et spes, with more deliberate vigour? (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism aims to show that the conjunction of contemporary evolutionary theory (E) with the claim that there is no God (N) cannot be rationally accepted. Where R is the claim that our cognitive faculties are reliable, the argument is: The probability of R given N and E is low or inscrutable.Anyone who sees (1) and accepts (N&E) has a defeater for R, and this defeater cannot be defeated or deflected.Anyone who has an undefeated, undeflected defeater (...) for R has an undefeated, undeflected defeater for everything she believes.Therefore she has an undefeated, undeflected defeater for (N&E).Plantinga (2011) defends the second premise. It examines and rejects several candidate defeater defeaters and defeater deflectors. One candidate is Millikan’s teleosemantics. I show that Plantinga’s motives for rejecting teleosemantics as a defeater deflector are inadequate. I then show that teleosemantics is not on its own an adequate defeater deflector. Then I offer an additional premise that constitutes a defeater deflector in conjunction with teleosemantics. (shrink)

In a recent essay, Tasos Kazepides has used the later Wittgenstein’s account of religious beliefs as either ‘superstitions’ or non-rational to condemn such beliefs as ‘doctrines’. By this term he means teachings which close minds to alternative truth-claims. In this paper we criticise his interpretation and use of Wittgenstein and argue that, far from closing minds, an appropriate education in religious beliefs can open minds to possible realms of existence unconsidered in other subjects of the curriculum.

The Laches features two Athenian generals (Laches and Nicias) and Socrates discussing the essential meaning of courage. Laches defines it as “a certain perseverance of the soul,” while Nicias argues that it consists in “knowledge of what is to be feared and hoped for both in war and in all other matters.” This paper, with the aid of several Plato scholars, argues that although most scholars agree that Socrates does not present his own view of the matter, hence leaving the (...) dialogue without a proper resolution, it may still be surmised that for Socrates, courage means willful yet wise perseverance. (shrink)

Is contemporary media society still interested in truth? This paper will try to unravel the vaguely suspicious epistemic relationship between information marketers and information consumers in today's society. There seems to have been forged a feeling of quasi-omniscience within the private and public spheres wherein people, due to the sheer volume of inforntation readily accessible for viewing at any time, become predisposed to exhibit an intriguingly relaxed relationship with knowledge. If the current systems of information seem to trivialize the question (...) of truth or falsehood, and since the public is apparently just interested in spectacles, then how must we view epistemologically the status of contemporary media discourse? Does it still reveal truth or is it simply empry talk? To address this question, the paper explores a possible parallelism between Plato's critique of rhetoric in his dialogue, Gorgias, and Jean Baudrillard's critique of contemporary media society. (shrink)

This article explores the early history of Roman exemplary literature through the case study of the elder Cato’s account of his imitation of the parsimony and self-sufficiency of M’. Curius Dentatus. I reconstruct from Cicero, Plutarch, and other sources a Catonian prose text that unified the exemplary narrative of Curius’ refusal of a bribe from Samnite emissaries with an evocative location at the hearth of a humble Sabine farmstead, an approving “audience” in Cato himself, and a model for the replication (...) of Curius’ virtue. The narrative itself served as the monumentum for the exemplum, and its details are often evoked in place of the exemplary deed itself. I argue that this narrative is both a very early instance of exemplary literature and a self-conscious reflection on the power of literature to transcend temporal and spatial limitations and to extend cultural models for the familial replication of elite virtues to a broader audience. (shrink)

Ronald S Laura, Michael Leahy; Religious Upbringing and Rational Autonomy, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 23, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 253–265, h.

Professor Weiss' article assumes the point of view of the critical realist with an emphasis I would characterize as partly aesthetic and partly plain commonsense. In this article I would like to submit a pragmatic analysis of the same general concept--i.e., past, present, and future--placing more emphasis on the actual function of these concepts in cognitive inquiry and in the general activities of understanding and control in experience. Notwithstanding this difference in points of view and emphasis I do not intend (...) to deny the general force of Professor Weiss' article. Within the framework of critical realism there can be little doubt that his arguments are on the whole valid. But I intend here to place special emphasis on certain aspects of the problems and concepts involved, and to entertain several changes of principle and terminology which to my mind will render our cognitive inquiries more intelligible. (shrink)

Traditionally, self-control is conceptualized in terms of internal processes such as willpower or motivational mechanisms. These processes supposedly explain how agents manage to exercise self-control or, in other words, how they act on the basis of their best judgment in the face of conflicting motivation. Against the mainstream view that self-control is a mechanism or set of mechanisms realized in the brain, several authors have recently argued for the inclusion of situated factors in our understanding of self-control. In this paper, (...) we review such recent attempts from the perspective of situated accounts of cognition and argue that even though these accounts integrate situational features, they ultimately still rely on an orthodox, neurocentric view of self-control. Instead, we will argue that in order to develop a really situated account it is necessary to radically rethink what self-control is. Building on recent work on extended skill, we will develop an outline of a really situated account of self-control. (shrink)

Since the publication of Ruth Millikan's Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories in 1984, a great deal of literature has discussed her so-called teleosemantic or biosemantic solution to the problem of intentionality. Only recently, though, has much attention been paid to her co-ordinated solution to the problem of productivity. This article, first, clearly describes the problems of intentionality, productivity, and compositionality, and describes their relationships and their relevance for the theory of meaning. It then describes Millikan's proposal with respect to (...) the problem of intentionality and shows how this buys her a novel solution to the problem of productivity. The article closes by discussing some alternative teleosemantic theories and some issues that will contribute to deciding between them. (shrink)