Ever since it was first published 1930, William Empson's "Seven Types of Ambiguity" has been perceived as a milestone in literary criticism - far from being an impediment to communication, ambiguity now seemed an index of poetic richness and expressive power. Little, however, has been written on the broader trajectory of Western thought about ambiguity before Empson; as a result, the nature of his innovation has been poorly understood. This book remedies this omission. Starting with classical grammar and rhetoric, and (...) moving on to moral theology, law, biblical exegesis, German philosophy, and literary criticism, the author explores the many ways in which readers and theorists posited, denied, conceptualized, and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts between antiquity and the twentieth century. This process took on a variety of interconnected forms, from the Renaissance delight in the "elegance" of ambiguities in Horace, through the extraordinary Catholic claim that Scripture could contain multiple literal - and not just allegorical - senses, to the theory of dramatic irony developed int he nineteenth century, a theory intertwined with discoveries of the double meanings in Greek tragedy. Such narratives are not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, they provide an insight into the foundations of modern criticism, revealing deep resonances between acts of interpretation in disparate eras and contexts. This book lays bare the long tradition of efforts to liberate language, and even a poet's intention, from the strictures of a single meaning. (shrink)

In 1956 Jacques Lacan proposed as interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter" that at once challenged literary theorists and revealed a radically new conception of psychoanalysis. Lacan's far-reaching claims about language and truth provoked a vigorous critique by Jacques Derrida, whose essay in turn has spawned further responses from Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Irene Harvey, Norman Holland, and others. The Purloined Poe brings Poe's story together with these readings to provide, in the words of the editors, "a structured exercuse (...) in the elaboration of textual interpretation. The Purloined Poe reprints the full text of Poe's story, followed by Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" along with extensive commentary by the editors. Marie Bonaparte's and Shoshana Felman's discussions of traditional and contemporary approaches to "psychoanalysing" texts precede Alan Bass's new translation of Derrida's "Purveyor of Truth." The subsequent essays join the Lacan-Derrida debate and offer alternative readings by literary theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. The Purloined Poe convenes much of the most important current scholarship on "The Purloined Letter" and presents a rich sampling of poststructuralist discourse. (shrink)

Henry Richardson argues that we can determine our ends rationally. He constructs a rich and original theory of how we can reason about our final goals. Richardson defuses the counter-arguments for the limits of rational deliberation, and develops interesting ideas about how his model might be extended to interpersonal deliberation of ends, taking him to the borders of political theory. Along the way Richardson offers illuminating discussions of, inter alia, Aristotle, Aquinas, Sidgwick, and Dewey, as well as (...) the work of several contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

Henry Richardson argues that we can determine our ends rationally. He constructs a rich and original theory of how we can reason about our final goals. Richardson defuses the counter-arguments for the limits of rational deliberation, and develops interesting ideas about how his model might be extended to interpersonal deliberation of ends, taking him to the borders of political theory. Along the way Richardson offers illuminating discussions of, inter alia, Aristotle, Aquinas, Sidgwick, and Dewey, as well as (...) the work of several contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

As the aftershocks of the latest economic meltdown reverberate throughout the world, and people organize to physically occupy the major financial centers of the West, few experts and even fewer governments have dared to consider a world without the powerful markets that brought on the crash. Yet, as François Morin explains in _A World Without Wall Street?_, this is the very step that needs to be taken as quickly as possible to avoid a perpetual future of dehumanizing working conditions, devastated (...) ecosystems, and the submission of public policies to private interests. In this insightful and radical take on global finance, Morin recommends nothing less than a revolutionary reconstruction of the international monetary system. More, he recommends that the laws of societies be reformed so that the power of management may be shared among all of the actors involved in production, not concentrated in the hands of the few. This shift, argues Morin, will transform the monetary system into a common good for all of humanity, rich or poor. With Wall Street at the center of the very power structure that needs to be dismantled, Morin takes broad aim at the purely speculative financial games and arcane instruments by which the global economy and its citizens are held captive. In this very timely and provocative book, Morin bravely offers a way forward—instead of simply triaging a hemorrhaging system, he persuasively asks us to consider a subversive reinvention. (shrink)

Finding solutions to complex health problems, such as obesity, violence, and climate change, will require radical changes in cross-disciplinary education, research, and practice. The fundamental determinants of health include many interrelated factors such as poverty, culture, education, environment, and government policies. However, traditional public health training has tended to focus more narrowly on diseases and risk factors, and has not adequately leveraged the rich contributions of sociology, anthropology, economics, geography, communication, political science, and other disciplines. Further, students are often not (...) sufficiently trained to work across sectors to translate research findings into effective, large-scale sustainable actions. During the past 2 decades, national and international organizations have called for more effective interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and translational approaches to graduate education. Although it has been difficult to work across traditional academic boundaries, some promising models draw on pedagogical theory and feature cross-disciplinary training focused on real-world problems, linkage between research, professional practice, community action, and cultivation of leadership skills. We describe the development the Doctor of Public Health program at the University of California, Berkeley, USA and its efforts to improve transdisciplinary and translational research education. We stress the need for international collaboration to improve educational approaches and better evaluate their impact. (shrink)

The text- and argument-focused histories of philosophy that we have are mainly interested in teasing out the details of the positions taken on philosophical issues by individual philosophers. But this is a long way from having a historical explanation of the larger-scale trajectory of philosophical development. An empirical history of philosophy, however, examines the institutionalized places and venues for philosophical work that provide a rich, shared structure for the promotion of particular sorts of work. Mid-twentieth-century philosophers of science such as (...) Herbert Feigl and Philipp Frank knew what they were doing—they were creating the space to promote certain sorts of work in venues such as the Institute for the Unity of Science and the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science and, ultimately, in publication venues such as Daedalus and the Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science. Here the engine of progress is the institution-building activity of committed philosophers making a space within the institutional structures of philosophy for their own projects and other projects aligned with them and transmitting these as live philosophical projects to the next generation. (shrink)

Biographer Richardson has written a moving portrait of James--pivotal member of the Metaphysical Club and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. The biography, ten years in the making, draws on unpublished letters, journals, and family records. Richardson paints extraordinary scenes from what James himself called the "buzzing blooming confusion" of his life, beginning with childhood, as he struggled to achieve amid the domestic chaos and intellectual brilliance of Father, brother Henry, and sister Alice. James was a beloved (...) teacher who taught courage and risk-taking, and served as mentor to W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, and many other Harvard outsiders. Richardson also illuminates James's hugely influential works. One of the great figures in mysticism here brought richly to life, James is a man "whose leading ideas are still so fresh and challenging that they are not yet fully assimilated by the modern world they helped to bring about."--From publisher description. (shrink)

Psychology may have to get seriously political as human aims in living and selfhood itself are increasingly influenced in a deleterious manner by the vicissitudes of living in a neoliberal political economy and one-sided “enterprise culture” (Martin & McLellan, 2013; Sugarman, 2015). This article reviews recent writings of several social critics, including Jackson Lears (2015), Sebastion Junger (2015), Philip Blond (2010), and Christopher Lasch (1995), who richly flesh out the picture of this detrimental state of affairs. We note that many (...) of these critics have little to say about credible alternatives to neoliberalism. The article then seeks to identify resources within theoretical and philosophical psychology, including hermeneutic philosophy and interpretive social science, for helping to overcome neoliberalism. They might help clarify and nurture a renewed democratic populism or engaged democratic politics and contribute to gaining what Lasch termed a much-needed “wisdom of limits” in today’s society. (shrink)

In the past, work on racial and ethnic variation in brain and behavior was marginalized within genetics. Against the backdrop of genetics’ eugenic legacy, wide consensus held such research to be both ethically problematic and methodologically controversial. But today it is finding new opportunistic venues in a global, transdisciplinary, data‐rich postgenomic research environment in which such a consensus is increasingly strained. The postgenomic sciences display worrisome deficits in their ability to govern and negotiate standards for making postgenomic claims in the (...) transdisciplinary space between human population variation research, studies of intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.Today some researchers are pursuing the genomics of intelligence on a newly grand scale. They are sequencing large numbers of whole genomes of people considered highly intelligent (by varying empirical and social measures) in the hope of finding gene variants predictive of intelligence. Troubling and at times outlandish futurist claims accompany this research. Scientists involved in this research have openly discussed the possibility of marketing prenatal tests for intelligence, of genetic engineering or selective embryo implantation to increase the likelihood of a high‐IQ child, and of genotyping children to guide their education. In this permissive and contested environment, what would trustworthy research on the genomics of high intelligence look like? (shrink)

Sridhar Venkatapuram's Health Justice argues that health is a ‘metacapability’ – specifically, as the metacapability of having the ten ‘central human capabilities’ described by Martha Nussbaum. This cannot be right, as it provides no basis for distinguishing health from education, riches, or love. An amendment correcting this problem is suggested, namely that health is the involuntary, bodily aspect of the metacapability for the central capabilities. This amendment is defended against the objection that it fails to capture some important aspects of (...) mental health. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface That an overtly white-nationalist misogynist demagogue was voted into power in the United States is cause for alarm and despair. As the election results sink in and analyses take shape, we at Feminist Studies mark this moment via poetry, a tradition of feminist expression that we have long nurtured. We include in this issue a special section on poems responding to the election. Raw by necessity, they allow (...) for a collective processing of feelings experienced in this moment, even as we prepare for the courage and acuity needed in days ahead. The scholarly works in this issue offer reflections on the travels of the term gender: in French Canadian feminist circles; the misreadings of gender and sexuality in histories of post-WWII New York City; and the gains and gaps in activism against gender-based violence and inequality. Geneviève Pagé recounts how the term gender was taken up in French Canadian scholarship, while Alix Genter offers a visual history of what butchness meant in 1950s and 1960s New York City. Julie R. Enszer tracks the representation of women writers through literary grants offered by the National Endowment for the Arts and in Norton anthologies, making the case that gender parity remains an elusive goal. Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck narrates the 1980 horror film The Shining as a commentary on violence against women and child abuse that uses the Gothic form to salutary effect. Nikki Lane reviews recent scholarship in black queer ethnography, and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor introduces us to the feminist eco-art of Pamela Longobardi. Our featured poets, apart from our special section, are Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Karen An-hwei Lee. Our closing forum on trigger warnings narrates the innovative practices that Alexis Lothian and Ramzi Fawaz propose in response to a contentious pedagogical debate. 560Preface Geneviève Pagé describes the history of the journey of the term gender in feminist circles in Montreal, using this case to comment on the dilemmas that arise from Anglocentrism in feminism. Pagé argues that in many ways, the term gender was not well suited to the context she highlights: Quebec feminists already possessed an intellectual infrastructure for referencing the meanings of the term gender through alternative phrasing, such as rapport sociaux de sexe. Furthermore, the grammatical concept of genre was “a concept central to the French language, but only peripheral in the English language,” and therefore, its use in French carried a potential “naturalizing” connotation. Nonetheless, given the dominance of English in feminist theory, Pagé concludes that “the polysemic nature of gender” allowed “for a fluid and multiple account of the local and global processes at work in the construction of women and men” in this context. Alix Genter gives us a nuanced understanding of butch genders and butch-femme aesthetics. Rather than relying on a stereotypical version of the 1950s queerly legible butch in masculine clothes, Genter argues that butchness itself was visually nuanced and coded in different ways than expected. Referencing a rich archive of 1950s-era photographs, Genter demonstrates that butch-identified women “conveyed their identities through alternate means that included clandestine codes and plays on women’s fashions.” This approach to butch aesthetics and lesbian self-representation opens up the common notion of a strict butch-femme contrast and introduces the concept of conscious mutual survival between the two lesbian identities. The appreciation of nuance continues in Nikki Lane’s review essay of reflexive ethnographic research about black queer communities. Lane’s review of recent work by Jafari S. Allen, Marlon Bailey, Mignon Moore, and Mireille Miller-Young highlights the attention these authors give to the complex politics of sexuality in everyday experiences of black communities. With an emphasis on the illuminating potential of ethnography and qualitative methodologies, Lane discusses how each text adds to our understanding of processes of “racialization, gendering, and sexualization.” Lane concludes that black queer and feminist ethnographic methods help accrue an embodied knowledge—the “flesh”—of black queer experience. Preface 561 The art featured in this issue is by Pamela Longobardi, who uses found-plastic objects to create painting, sculptures, installations, assemblages, photographs, and community-art projects. As an artist with training in biology, Longobardi focuses on the... (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap is principally renowned for stating with remarkable precision and rigor a rich variety of philosophical doctrines — doctrines which, thanks mainly to Carnap’s meticulous formulations, the philosophical world now holds to be clearly and fundamentally mistaken. Thus, it is Carnap who, in Meaning and Necessity (Carnap 1947), presents in detail the linguistic doctrine of logical truth and the semantic underpinnings of the analytic/synthetic distinction, providing thereby the grist for the mill of Quine’s highly influential and important attacks on (...) precisely these doctrines. Again, it was Carnap who, more than any other, precisely delineated the program of inductive logic. This program is now, thanks largely to Goodman’s (1983) New Riddle of Induction, also considered hopeless. Carnap is now firmly associated with a bewildering variety of discredited views: reductionism and the unity of science; the verification criterion of meaning; logic as an uninterpreted calculus; Russellian logicism even in the face of Gödel’s devastating incompleteness results; etc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Science in a Democratic Society by Philip KitcherHenry S. RichardsonReview: Philip Kitcher, Science in a Democratic Society, Prometheus Books, 2011In examining the place of science in a democratic society, Philip Kitcher is ultimately asking what standards scientific activity is answerable to. Here, as in Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2001), he rejects two extreme possibilities: first, the suggestion that science is autonomous, in the sense that (...) it is answerable only to its own standards; and, second, the suggestion that it is answerable to “vulgar democracy”—that is, to unconstrained majority rule by untutored citizens. In this book, as in the earlier book, he deploys the idea of “well-ordered science,” which he seeks to characterize in part by leaning on the idea of a hypothetical, ideal conversation. Crucially informing this newer book is a much fuller account of nonvulgar democracy. Underlying that account is a much broader picture of “the ethical project”—the title idea of another important Kitcher book from 2011 (Harvard University Press).In order to motivate the friends of science to turn to these broader ethical ideas, Kitcher persuasively rehearses the case against value neutrality in science. Much current distrust of science and scientists, he argues, derives from scientists falsely pretending—whether deludedly or cynically—that science can proceed in a value-neutral way. It cannot do so in resolving competitions among theories, let alone in setting the research agenda or weighing in on practical problems of public concern. By wearing a false mask of value neutrality, scientists succeed only in convincing the public that they are ideologically driven. This, in turn, gives an opening for dissenters motivated by religion or by their own ideologies to develop supposedly scientific counter-claims of their own, such as those that assert creationism or deny the reality of climate change. Better, then, for science and scientists to be frank about its lack of value neutrality. [End Page E-106]What values ought to inform science? To answer this question, Kitcher turns to his conception of the ethical project, of which Chapter 2 gives a summary. As he conceives of ethics, it arose pre-historically as a set of mechanisms helping us to deal with deficiencies in altruistic motivation. Although inspired by evolutionary theory, Kitcher spurns the sociobiologist’s identification of the good with the adaptive. Instead, while giving an elaborate reconstruction of how our ethical practices may actually have arisen, he gives pride of place to the idea of conversation. On his reconstruction, the “egalitarian plateau” touted by Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy [Oxford University Press, 1990], p. 5) and others as the great achievement of the Enlightenment was merely a delayed philosophical echo of the ethical project’s initial feature, one that would have been found in the ethical discussions of human hunter-gatherer bands of forty-thousand years ago. Being more focused on how life is lived than on philosophy, Kitcher, fairly enough, is unwilling to see the Enlightenment as an egalitarian age. Rather, most recent incarnations of the ethical project have been distorted by hierarchies and inequalities. Emphasizing the word, Kitcher writes, “I propose... that we undo the distortion,” and model the ethical project, going forward, as involving an egalitarian conversation. This frankness disarms any worry about the move from ‘was’ to ‘ought’ that might have arisen in the minds of those already puzzled by the current popularity of the cave-man diet; and in any case, since Kitcher’s account of the ethical project is defended at length in his contemporaneous book of that title, doubts about it would be better addressed in that context. Rhetorically, since the ideal of treating persons fundamentally as equals is even more popular than eating meat, he is on strong ground here.The book develops this core egalitarian proposal in three distinct ways, thereby gaining a rich evaluative basis for considering the place of science in society. The first is an account of the purposes to which science is answerable. Kitcher dismisses as unrealistically high-minded and ultimately elitist a conception of scientists as driven by a disinterested quest for truth and a simple love of knowledge for its own sake. Rather, his... (shrink)

We respond to Morris and Richardson 's claim that Pickering and Chater's arguments about the lack of a relation between cognitive science and folk psychology are flawed. We note that possible controversies about the appropriate uses for the two terms do not affect our arguments. We then address their claim that computational explanation of knowledge-rich processes has proved possible in the domains of problem solving, scientific discovery, and reasoning. We argue that, in all cases, computational explanation is only possible (...) for aspects of those processes that do not make reference to general knowledge. We conclude that consideration of the issues raised by Morris and Richardson reinforces our original claim that there are two fundamentally distinct projects for understanding the mind, one based on justification, and the other on computational explanation, and that these apply to non-overlapping aspects of mental life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (2021) by Sarah RichardsonQuill KuklaQuill Kukla, review of Sarah Richardson's The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (2021)I had been eagerly anticipating the release of Sarah Richardson's meticulously researched The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (2021) for several years, and I was not disappointed. A leading feminist scholar of the history and (...) philosophy of science, Richardson traces the scientific history of the idea that pregnant people's bodies control the future health, character, and well-being of their offspring. She also explores how this science is translated into social messaging and shaped by social ideology. Richardson delves into the details of the methodology, motivations, results, and communication of the science of maternal influences. She reveals a history of shaky results, contested methods, and socially loaded messaging, unified by a sustained interest in framing maternal bodies as sites of risk and responsibility for birth outcomes.A central narrative of the book is that the perceived location and mechanism through which pregnant bodies control fetal development keeps shifting around; over time, scientists have located this maternal influence in the uterine environment, the cytoplasm, the methylation of DNA, maternal nutrition, and even in the emotions, thoughts, and imagination of the mother, among other locations.1 Each time a version of the maternal influence hypothesis re-emerges, targeting a different bodily location and mechanism, it comes along with similar social messaging: pregnant people are distinctively responsible for the 'quality' of their children; their bodies are distinctive sites of risk, in need of social management; and their influence can be understood and controlled independent of the context in which they live. Given how many times this scientific hypothesis and its accompanying social messaging has died and been reborn, it is hard not to conclude, with Richardson, that background ideology compels us to keep searching for new stories that take this same form. The idea that pregnant people's bodies are understood as decontextualized and heightened sites of risk and responsibility for birth outcomes, in need of systematic discipline (both self-discipline and social discipline) in order to ensure their production of proper offspring, is one that has been explored [End Page e-1] in quite a bit of depth within feminist theory and reproductive ethics over the last thirty years. To name just a few, Barbara Duden's Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (1993), Deborah Lupton's "Risk and the Ontology of Pregnant Embodiment" (1999), Lisa Mitchell's Baby's First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects (2001), and my own Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers' Bodies (2005) are all works firmly within this tradition. What is new about Richardson's book is not the development and exploration of this cultural narrative and imaginary, but rather her rigorous and skillful analysis of the science that has grown out of and undergirded it. Richardson is a masterful writer, who makes scientific details comprehensible and fascinating. Her historical and epistemological analyses of exactly what shaped the science at each stage, what each scientific iteration did and didn't manage to show, and how these different scientific movements were translated into public messaging, is sharp and compelling. Richardson shows us the inner workings of how scientific programs build momentum; how scientists make methodological decisions; and how results feed into ongoing research programs. From this book, we also develop a rich sense of just how much uncertainty is baked into the science of human development, and how both scientific and public excitement about a given research program are mostly independent of the success and security of the science that comes out of it. The book traces 150 years of the history of the science of maternal influences, culminating in the current focus on epigenetics—which, like various past maternal influence theories, has ignited our broader social imagination. Epigenetics, roughly, is the study of molecular changes outside our DNA that control how genes express themselves. Environmental stimuli (such as stress) can cause changes in methylation, and thereby influence the expression of the genome: "Epigenetic markers that help determine whether a... (shrink)

Alan Richardson’s Carnap’s Construction of the World is a well-researched, richly-detailed, and highly instructive study of a crucial moment in the history of the analytic tradition: the transitional stage between the classical or early period dominated by Frege, Moore, and Russell, and the neo-classical or middle period dominated by Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. This stage marks a shift from ontic analysis to linguistic analysis; from platonism to conventionalism; from realistic metaphysics to anti-metaphysics; from rationalism to empiricism; and from (...) logicism to logical positivism. Only the firm commitments to antipsychologism, to “logic as the essence of philosophy,” and to semantics remain the same. But above all it is the moment at which the positive influence of Kant upon analytic philosophy—in the form of a vestigial neo-Kantianism—is finally extinguished. All this and more is packed into Rudolf Carnap’s 1928 treatise Der logische Aufbau der Welt ; hence Richardson aptly concentrates his account by unpacking the philosophical content, context, and consequences of the Aufbau. (shrink)

This paper discusses the attempt in this issue of the journal by Peter Singer, John McKie, Helga Kuhse and Jeff Richardson, to defend QALYs against the argument from double jeopardy which I first outlined in 1987. In showing how the QALY and other similar measures which combine life expectancy and quality of life and use these to justify particular allocations of health care resource, remain vulnerable to the charge of double jeopardy I am able to clarify some of the (...) central issues concerning the value of life. In particular, the idea that the value of a life varies with its life expectancy and with its quality, understood in terms of its richness, variety, success etc, is subjected to special examination. It is shown how defenders of QALYs are committed to the view that so far from all lives being of equal value, all lives are necessarily of subtly different value. The paper then analyses the use to which the notorious 'veil of ignorance' has been put both by Singer et al and by others and shows how this device of John Rawls's cannot do the work so often assigned to it. The paper then considers the issue of hypothetical consent and the role that it can play in justifying disposing of the lives of people who have not in fact consented to their lives being disposed of in particular ways. Finally, the paper makes some points about the comprehensive nature of the data collection and storage which would be required by QALY advocates and points out the independent problems attaching to licensing such comprehensive collection and use of personal data. (shrink)

Although the influence of Homer on Western literature has long commanded critical attention, little has been written on how various generations of readers have found menaing in his texts. These seven essays explore the ways in which the Illiad and the Odyssey have been read from the time of Homer through the Renaissance. By asking what questions early readers expected the texts to answer and looking at how these expectations changed over time, the authors clarify the position of the Illiad (...) and the Odyssey in the intellectual world of antiqueity while offering historical insight into the nature of reading. The collection surveys the entire field of preserved ancient interpretations of Homer, beginning with the fictional audiences portrayed within the poems themselves, proceedings to readings by Aristotle, the Stoics, and Aristarchus and Crates, and culminating in the spritiualized allegorical reading current among Platonists of the fifth and sixth centuries C.E. The influence of these ancient interpretations is then examined in Byzantium and in the Latin West during the Renaissance. Contributors to this volume are Robert Browning, Anthony Grafton, Robert Lamberton, A.A. Long, James Porter, Nicholas Richardson, and Charles Segal. Robert Lamberton is Assistant Professor of Classics and John J. Keaney is Professor of Classics, both at Princeton University. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the question of whether certain experiences that originate in causes other than bereavement are properly termed ‘grief’. To do so, we focus on widespread experiences of grief that have been reported during the Covid-19 pandemic. We consider two potential objections to a more permissive use of the term: grief is, by definition, a response to a death; grief is subject to certain norms that apply only to the case of bereavement. Having shown that these objections are unconvincing, (...) we sketch a positive case for a conception of grief that is not specific to bereavement, by noting some features that grief following bereavement shares with other experiences of loss. (shrink)

Researchers do not owe their subjects the same level of care that physicians owe patients, but they owe more than merely what the research protocol stipulates. In keeping with the dynamics of the relationship between researcher and subject, they have limited but substantive fiduciary obligations.

In this paper I argue that olfactory experience, like visual experience, is exteroceptive: it seems to one that odours, when one smells them, are external to the body, as it seems to one that objects are external to the body when one sees them. Where the sense of smell has been discussed by philosophers, it has often been supposed to be non-exteroceptive. The strangeness of this philosophical orthodoxy makes it natural to ask what would lead to its widespread acceptance. I (...) argue that philosophers have been misled by a visuocentric model of what exteroceptivity involves. Since olfaction lacks the spatial features that make vision exteroceptive the conclusion that olfaction is nonexteroceptive can appear quite compelling, particularly in the absence of an alternative model of exteroceptivity appropriate to olfaction. I offer a model according to which odours seem to be external to the body because they seem to be brought into the nose from without by sniffing and breathing through the nostrils. I argue that some natural-seeming objections to this model rely on substantive assumptions about how the senses are distinguished from one another, and how perceptual experience is put together out of its modality-specific parts, that require defence. (shrink)

If there is a movement or school that epitomizes analytic philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century, it is logical empiricism. Logical empiricists created a scientifically and technically informed philosophy of science, established mathematical logic as a topic in and tool for philosophy, and initiated the project of formal semantics. Accounts of analytic philosophy written in the middle of the twentieth century gave logical empiricism a central place in the project. The second wave of interpretative accounts was constructed to (...) show how philosophy should progress, or had progressed, beyond logical empiricism. The essays survey the formative stages of logical empiricism in central Europe and its acculturation in North America, discussing its main topics, and achievements and failures, in different areas of philosophy of science, and assessing its influence on philosophy, past, present, and future. (shrink)

Abstract: In this paper I offer an account of a particular variety of perception of absence, namely, visual perception of empty space. In so doing, I aim to make explicit the role that seeing empty space has, implicitly, in Mike Martin's account of the visual field. I suggest we should make sense of the claim that vision has a field—in Martin's sense—in terms of our being aware of its limitations or boundaries. I argue that the limits of the visual field (...) are our own sensory limitations, and that we are aware of them as such. Seeing empty space, I argue, involves a structural feature of experience that constitutes our awareness of our visual sensory limitations, and thus, in virtue of which vision has a field. (shrink)

It is natural to think that social groups are concrete material particulars, but this view faces an important objection. Suppose the chess club and nature club have the same members. Intuitively, these are different clubs even though they have a common material basis. Some philosophers take these intuitions to show that the materialist view must be abandoned. I propose an alternative explanation. Social groups are concrete material particulars, but there is a psychological explanation of nonidentity intuitions. Social groups appear coincident (...) but nonidentical because they are perceived to be governed by conflicting social norms. (shrink)

The notion that it is useful to specify norms progressively in order to resolve doubts about what to do, which I developed initially in a 1990 article, has been only partly assimilated by the bioethics literature. The thought is not just that it is helpful to work with relatively specific norms. It is more than that: specification can replace deductive subsumption and balancing. Here I argue against two versions of reliance on balancing that are prominent in recent bioethical discussions. Without (...) meaning to address the substance or the overall merits of either view I criticize, I attack Gert, Culver and Clouser's implicit reliance on some overall dimension of balancing as a basis of resolving conflicts among norms and Beauchamp and Childress's residual acceptance of 'justified balancing'. The former authors' description of resolving conflicts depends upon a type of value commensurability that (as they otherwise seem to admit) does not obtain, while the latter authors' role for justified balancing would be better served by continued specification. (shrink)

Photo by Jonathan Ford on Unsplash ABSTRACT Since 2008, an average of twenty million people per year have been displaced by weather events. Climate migration creates a special setting for a duty to rescue. A duty to rescue is a moral rather than legal duty and imposes on a bystander to take an active role in preventing serious harm to someone else. This paper analyzes the idea of expanding a duty to rescue to climate migration. We address who should have (...) the duty and to whom the duty should extend. The paper discusses ways to define and apply the duty to rescue as well as its limitations, arguing that it may take the form of an ethical duty to prepare. INTRODUCTION Climate migration creates a special setting for a duty to rescue. A duty to rescue is a moral rather than legal duty and imposes on a bystander to take an active role in preventing serious harm to someone else. Examples of circumstances range from person-to-person intimate rescue to saving those in poverty, even in distant parts of the world.[1] Since 2008, an average of twenty million people per year have been displaced by weather events.[2] Circumstances like being thrust from homes under the threat of fire, mudslide, and flooding vary greatly from long-term changes like land becoming too arid for crops or temperatures increasing annually gradually pushing up the number of heat-related deaths, with the area slowly becoming uninhabitable. Imminence in fleeing affects resettling and need for rescue with important implications for how the duty to rescue might apply. This paper reevaluates the ethical framing of the duty to rescue and, while it is arguably a stretch, applies it to climate migration. Climate migration has become common and is expected to increase due to rises in sea level, increases in weather events that make areas uninhabitable, and changes to land that preclude farming or other necessary land uses. We argue that a duty to rescue may help highlight who has moral obligations to whom. Because the problem is so large in scope, we suggest a change in the ethical limits to humans' duty to rescue other humans who are in distress. We imagine an expansion or extension of the duty to rescue to meet some of the basic needs created by climate migration. Yet how it should expand, and how much depend on ethical framing and practical limitations. l. Expanding the Geographical Boundaries Two commonly recognized emergencies, Hurricane Katrina in the case of weather events and the current COVID-19 pandemic, provide a historical and current backdrop to evaluate ethical obligations as more disasters displace people. A significant reassessment of the ethical scope of an obligation to rescue in the case of weather events will be limited by the ability to render aid to those in distress in the case of a planet-wide weather catastrophe. The problems may overwhelm the ability to rescue or the reasonableness of attempting rescue. The extent of the moral obligation borne by humans to other humans in the case of a weather event has been largely defined by its locality and limited geographic influence. Whether we are imagining the scope of ethical obligation in the case of hurricane, flood, tornado, drought, or wildfire events, the perceived ethical obligation is significantly defined by the limited impact of these weather events on people outside the zone of the weather event's direct impact, yet close to that zone. A hurricane affecting New Orleans will not have immediate impact on the residents of California or even those on the northeast coast of the United States until a later time. Wildfires in the Pacific Northwest do not impair the ability of those in the rest of the country to come forward with assistance. But as climate migration crosses international borders, and climate events occur simultaneously in many regions, a more expansive duty to rescue may provide the ethical impulse to help those who live afar or migrate long distances. In this respect, the need for help in the event of widespread climate migration due to global warming is more like a pandemic than a weather event. Its broad impact area diminishes the capability of nearly the entire balance of the human population to help due to those populations' awareness that they will, in short order, have the same need for the same resources, from the same cause. Those living near current flood zones may find their historically safe havens are also a flood zone. Those previously best positioned to rescue may find themselves also needing to relocate. Thus, we may observe the need for new rescuers. ll. The Rule of Rescue The Rule of Rescue as defined by Al Jonsen describes the moral impetus or knee jerk reaction to save identifiable people facing death.[3] A duty to rescue has since been expanded beyond imminent death and beyond the near and identifiable. But there are limitations. For example, by most accounts, the ethical duty tends not to require extreme bodily risk or financial depletion. In comparing Good Samaritans to humanitarians, Scott M. James argues the duty to rescue arises from unique dependence, but the ethical obligation to help strangers through humanitarian aid is of a different nature.[4] The wrongness of failing to help is arguably more egregious when one is in a unique position to help. Like in the tragedy of the commons, where there is no unique positioning, when the global community is called upon to help, each individual in it may feel less obliged to do so. Climate migration falls in between—it requires helping strangers, yet it may move forward without anyone seeing themselves as uniquely positioned to help until those strangers become part of communities, at which time, there may be more moral justification to help a community member in need. Generally, arguments about Good Samaritans hinge on extraordinary acts, praiseworthy because they are acts of compassion, not obligation. Now all US states have Good Samaritan laws[5] which protect helpers from liability for help gone wrong or for a failure to succeed once engaged in an act of rescue. Extraordinary help as a moral good is thus somewhat encouraged through legal protection, but not imposed. Conversely, jobs like firefighting, search and rescue, and emergency medical care tend to oblige employees to take on risks that would be extraordinary if undertaken by the average bystander, yet they are rendered ordinary rescue as part of the job. Three states, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Vermont have a broad duty to rescue, adding legal considerations to an otherwise moral conundrum. The laws do not require bystanders to take on risk for the sake of rescuing strangers.[6] The moral duty will require looking beyond law, but it is unclear how the moral duty to rescue should be distributed in the case of climate migration. A bare minimum would prevent taking advantage of newcomers, paying sub-minimum wage, and discriminating against them. Yet such a minimum is hardly rescue. lll. An Ethical Rather than Legal Duty The difficulty in defining the duty to rescue as a legal obligation is that it is difficult to determine the extent of risk a rescuer ought to be required to take. The nature of this ethical duty is also arguably tied to the experiences of both the rescuer and the rescued. There are subjective aspects like what someone perceives as a danger that make it difficult to write enforceable laws requiring rescue. It is one thing to expect a rescuer to step into several inches of relatively warm water to lift a person lying face down in a pond and enable them to breathe. It is something altogether different to expect that rescuer to dive into frigid water and attempt to extricate someone trapped in a submerged automobile. As the legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart observed, it is always easier to define application of the core intention of any rule, whether law or ethical norm. It is more difficult to create legal certainty about how the law applies to what he described as “penumbra circumstances”. In the case of a hurricane, it is easier to define what surplus resources are available in areas geographically remote from the impact of the storm and demand, as a moral obligation, that those nearby but outside the area provide assistance. It is more difficult to obligate people, organizations, or governments to supply a quantity of medication or some number of ventilators to an adjacent community when they expect to imminently need them for their own community. In the early stages of climate migration, the ethics of extreme weather event assistance, a common application of the duty to rescue, will be useful and appropriate. The rising sea levels first experienced by island nations in the South Pacific[7] will not render those living in other coastal communities, those with greater available “high ground”, unable to supply resources to those in need. But when sea level rise and climate change affect more communities simultaneously, albeit in varying degree, the task of defining what response is ethically obligatory becomes increasingly complicated. Pinpointing the obligations of those communities which are resource rich to those communities which are resource deprived, and of those partly affected to those more severely affected may become necessary. The limitations of the traditional duty to rescue could expand to meet the needs. lV. Contribution to the Problem Many argue that the duty to rescue may depend on any appropriate claim of those needing rescue. One issue is whether preferential claims among those who can identify the source of the harm should call for a greater duty or whether everyone in need should be approached as like candidates for rescue, shaping the duty as equal across those on the receiving end. As climate change does have human-made causes, there are strong arguments to impose a greater ethical duty on any entity that caused the climate-related problems leading to the mass exodus. While the global north is often implicated in pollution that causes migration, industries like energy, transportation, and agriculture are tied to climate change and associated with significant greenhouse gas emissions.[8] Practices like directing agriculture to less sustainable single crop growth generally made land less farmable. Yet it is difficult to place blame and identify specific causal relationships as most migration is due to many factors. A movement toward greater accountability can be reframed as a greater duty to rescue, a duty to engage in the extraordinary. The fossil fuel industry, for example, should have a larger obligation than the average person. Similarly, some may argue anyone unjustly enriching themselves while contributing to climate change or people who over-consume have an elevated duty to rescue.[9] Climate change lawsuits demonstrate an eagerness to hold governments and corporations accountable, despite difficulty proving causation. V. The Most Vulnerable One ethical dimension of climate migration that remains unexplored is how a duty to rescue applies to vulnerable populations who stand to be left behind or unable to migrate without assistance. Researchers from the Global North working across the Global South are increasingly observing the phenomenon of ethics dumping, where the research ethics of some countries are imposed on research subjects in other countries.[10] In that vein, rescuers should be careful not to impose unwelcome cultural standards or exploit people who are in the process of migrating. There is a gap in discussions reflecting voices that have been left out. The duty to rescue is incomplete without an attempt to understand the ethical experiences of those being rescued. The actual people affected by climate migration who are the least likely to have the means to migrate, or to do so without extreme hardship, should have a voice informing the global community including those in a position to carry out rescue. People who have the means and are young and healthy may easily make decisions to avoid the catastrophic consequences that climate migration brings. However, what about those who are left behind? For example, especially recognizing cultural differences, the homeless community, disabled community, refugees, the elderly community, and women[11] and children may suffer differently and call for more attention. In some parts of the world, human rights are severely constrained. An ethical duty to rescue, with many considerations and variables, may be more justified in the case of those most in need. As climate migration continues and increases significantly, it may be reasonable to ask the local and global community to focus on those least well positioned to migrate successfully. In this context, the use of phenomenology to understand the lived experiences of those migrating, sometimes termed “ethical experiences”, may help flesh out how a duty to rescue takes shape. The discussion of duty and obligation requires an articulation of the ethical experiences (how the local community in need of rescue views the proposed rescue). Then, the obligation to interpret the duty as ‘one shall not’ or ‘one must’ can be focused on the migrants’ needs rather than the rescuers’ feelings of obligation.[12] A revised theory of the duty to rescue taking into account the asymmetrical experiences of communities involved could ensure that the needs of people whose living situations, gender, ethnicity, age, or race impact their ability to even begin the migration process are considered. In this discussion, the rescuing is directed toward communities /collectives of persons migrating, whether at once or across a period of time. Often, the climate migrant may not be in a state to articulate the nature of this event when it happens, given its subjective proximity. Yet, when communities are given the space and opportunity to articulate their shared values, the ethical action of rescue derives its meaningfulness from the community rather than the rescuers. In other words, allowing climate migrants to explain their feelings can add complexity to what some see as a binary receiver-giver (of rescue) dynamic. This is necessary because the concept of vulnerable populations is fraught with problematic assumptions. There have been various definitions and criteria to determine what would constitute vulnerable populations.[13] For example, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change[14] identifies and assesses vulnerable populations. These criteria may be helpful. However, they do not provide the full picture. Rather than identifying categorical criteria of vulnerable populations, engaging with people who are experiencing climate migration and listening to their current experiences and concerns helps determine need. Knowing what people need may prevent the kneejerk reaction to label people who are quite resilient yet have appropriate needs “vulnerable”. Proceeding with caution is important because the duty to rescue has hierarchical underpinnings of "us" and "them." Often when people swoop in to save, there are good and bad consequences of the intervention. We should proceed with caution because often the helper misses the actual needs of those in need. The only way to combat this would be to make sure that people are empowered to inform those agencies that are able to help. In addition to more practical approaches, large scale oral histories could allow those who have migrated already to share their experiences. It would be important to capture the lived experiences of people who are already experiencing the consequences of climate migration or of other migration like that due to political or economic extreme events. These experiences could shape our analysis of whether people in fact wish for rescue. If so, further conversations can determine best actions as well as give important insight into what resources might be necessary to empower people now and in the future. Vl. A Duty to Rescue as a Duty to Prepare If we view Good Samaritans as going above and beyond, then a duty to rescue, something ethically compelled, must bring rescue out of the framework of charity and place it in the context of humanity and obligations. Such a view would also support expanding the geographical reach of the otherwise more proximate duty. The duty may be stronger and take shape in a more workable way if it applies to preparing places expecting to see an influx of people due to climate migration and to helping those most in need. The duty may arise out of expectations of what type of community the place welcoming those migrating due to climate should be—does it want to offer good housing, schooling, and medical care as well as economic opportunity to new people? And if so, at what cost, or with which risks? If the newcomers are viewed as community members rather than strangers, a model of acceptance may lead to better preparation. Some considerations like whether the actions will reasonably help the persons in need of rescue[15] will shape the application of a duty to rescue in the context of climate migration. Similarly, ensuring that people have the chance to articulate their values may help communities support the newcomers. New relationships should not be defined as migrant and rescuer. Voluntariness in participation and not forcing any action deemed rescue would help ensure the human rights of those migrating. In the United States, President Biden issued an executive order addressing impending climate migration steeped in a duty to prepare by making plans for resettlement and to address the impact of climate migration.[16] Vll. At What Risk? As we investigate the ethical obligations to meet even basic needs, we must also ask what level of risk is ethically compelled. There is an extraordinary need to integrate newcomers successfully, but it is difficult to stretch an ethical duty to rescue to require all the prerequisites for successful climate migration. Even defining success would create deep ethical arguments. As observed in almost all migrations, extraordinary charitable acts may be the key to success, while an ethical duty to rescue must try to require the important government and community-based basics and ensuring respect for human rights. That is, the migrating people should be rescued from circumstances that contradict basic human rights. Rather than comparing communities to bystanders, mere places where people will arrive and need to hash out how to find housing, jobs, education, and opportunity, a duty of preparation may be the key to rescue those disenfranchised by migration. There are cultural, personal, physical, psycho-social, and geopolitical issues surrounding how to best help those needing to permanently relocate. Ethics arguments will certainly range from “do nothing”, which may fail people, to “do everything”, which could waste taxpayer money in futile over-preparation while failing to actually help. Communities must avoid planning exclusively for one scenario only to have it not take place. Striking the balance, a duty to rescue as it could apply to climate migration should set goals of societal integration, and providing the basics like education, housing, food, health care, and job opportunity, the precursors to flourishing. Recommending the extraordinary, morally preferred but perhaps not compulsory, when charitable actors are participating, or when wrongdoers are compensating, may be more workable than seeing the duty to rescue as compelling people or local governments to take on significant financial and personal risk for newcomers. While humanitarian ethics supports helping everyone, it is likely that people who resettle in advance of a need to flee will find themselves with more choices and opportunities. Help is warranted for those with more dire needs. Preparing for them may do just that. Vlll. Rescue Prior to Migration and Rescue in the Process of Resettlement The duty to enable the migration in the first-place hints to the inadequacy of a duty to prepare. The traditional duty to rescue perhaps steps in if rescue looks like those geographically just out of harm's way rescuing those in danger. That resembles the traditional moral requirement, or duty to rescue according to the Rule of Rescue. Humanitarian aid typically provided by many institutions makes sense and is in place, although financial support for additional humanitarian aid is always needed. Despite having moved to purportedly more capable communities, migrant communities may be able to develop more egalitarian orders of living. Rather than continually being identified as having been rescued, it is important to make sure people keep or make social ties during and after migration. Immigrants often face social isolation.[17] Small shifts in gestural language also have the potential to welcome people and show they are valued. For instance, some migrants may not like questions like “Where are you from?” and “What brings you here?” as they emphasize differences over fitting in. CONCLUSION The ethical duty to rescue should be expanded to better match those in need of relocation with a welcome environment and the resources needed to achieve success and fully integrate socially and culturally. Expanding a dialogue that includes the voices of people who have recently migrated whether due to violence, poverty, or climate, could properly frame the extent of the duty. If we are to apply the duty of rescue to climate migration, rescuers should avoid labeling people vulnerable, dependent, or needy, although there is reason to focus on those whose needs are the most dire. A soft duty to rescue people during the course of climate migration can come in the form of preparation. People will need help finding housing, education, access to food, and employment. Ultimately, to help them help themselves may be the best goal. While the obligations should be borne differently by people, whether due to a special responsibility, or a special relationship that creates a clearer duty, the global community must prepare for its role in rescuing those displaced by climate events. By helping those displaced at the start of the climate migration process according to a more commonly held notion of the duty to rescue, and by preparing to incorporate newcomers successfully according to an expanded duty to rescue, effectively a duty to prepare, countries that take on climate refugees may find themselves rewarded by the cultural diversity and workplace talents that people bring. A duty to those at a distance is a reasonable expansion of the duty to rescue. But what one ought to do in the global community varies somewhat from the traditional Rule of Rescue. - [1] Singer, P. (1972). Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1(3): 229-43. [2] Irfan, U. (2022, March 16). Why We Still Don’t Yet Know How Bad Climate Migration Will Get. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2022/3/16/22960468/ipcc-climate-change-migration-migrant-refugee, citing the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2022). Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2022, Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/ [3] McKie, J., Richardson, J. (2003) The Rule of Rescue. Social Science & Medicine, 56(12): 2407-2419. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(02)00244-7. [4] James, S.M. (2007). Good Samaritans, Good Humanitarians. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 24(3):238-254. [5] Overview of Good Samaritan laws. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/good-samaritan-law-states [6] Fifield, J. (2017, Sept. 19). Why It’s Hard to Punish ‘Bad Samaritans’. Stateline Blog, Pew Charitable Trusts, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2017/09/19/why-its-hard-to-punish -bad-samaritans [7] Cassella, C. (2019). There’s a Climate Threat Facing Pacific Islands That’s More Dire Than Losing Land, Science Alert, https://www.sciencealert.com/pacific-islanders-are-in-a-climate-crisis-as-rising-sea-levels-threaten -water; Hassan, H. R., and Cliff, V. (2019). For Small Island Nations, Climate Change is not a Threat. It’s Already Here, World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/island-nations-maldives-climate-change/ [8] For example, Lyons, K. (2019). Australia Coal use is Existential threat to Pacific Islanders, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/12/australia-coal-use-is-existential-threat-to-pacific-is lands-says-fiji-pm [9] Cripps, E. (2013). Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [10] Schroeder, D., Chatfield, K., Singh, M., Chennells, R., and Herissone-Kelly, P.. Ethics Dumping and the Need for a Global Code of Conduct. In Cham. (Ed.)(2019). Equitable Research Partnerships. SpringerBriefs in Research and Innovation Governance. Springer. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15745-6_1 [11] Giudice L.C., Llamas-Clark E.F., DeNicola N., Pandipati, S., Zlatnik, M.G., Decena, D.C.D., Woodruff, T.J., Conry, J.A. (2021). Climate Change, Women’s Health, and the Role of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Leadership, International J Gynecol Obstet, 155(3), 345-356. 10.1002/ijgo.13958 [12] See Ferrarello, S. and Zapien, N. (2020). Ethical Experience: A Phenomenology, Bloomsbury. (for understanding phenomenological determinants of ethical action). [13] McLeman, R.A., Hunter, L.M., (2010). Migration in the context of vulnerability and adaptation to climate change: insights from analogues. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Clim Change, 1(3): 450-461. [14] Least Developed Countries Expert Group. (2018). Considerations Regarding Vulnerable Groups, Communities and Ecosystems in the Context of the National Adaptation Plans: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. [15] Jecker, N.S. 2013. "The Problem with Rescue Medicine." J Med Philos, 38(1):64-81. [16] White House Report. (February 9, 2021), Executive Order (E.O.) 14013, “Rebuilding and Enhancing Programs to Resettle Refugees and Planning for the Impact of Climate Change on Migration.” (calls on the National Security Advisor to prepare a report on climate change and its impact on migration. “This report marks the first time the U.S. Government is officially reporting on the link between climate change and migration.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/27/executive-order-on-tackling -the-climate-crisis-at-home-and-abroad/ [17] Torres, J.M., Casey, J.A. (2017) The centrality of social ties to climate migration and mental health. BMC Public Health, 17: 600. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4508-0. (shrink)

Does the practice of psychology make a significant and positive contribution to human welfare and the struggle for a good society? This book presents a reinvigorating look at psychology and its societal purpose, offering a bold new philosophical foundation from which professionals in the field can deeply examine their work.

Whatever the answer to Molyneux's question is, it is certainly not obvious that the answer is ‘yes’. In contrast, it seems clear that we should answer affirmatively a temporal variation on Molyneux's question, introduced by Gareth Evans. I offer a phenomenological explanation of this asymmetry in our responses to the two questions. This explanation appeals to the modality-specific spatial structure of perceptual experience and its amodal temporal structure. On this explanation, there are differences in the perception of spatial properties in (...) different modalities, but these differences do not stand in the way of the objectivity of perceptual experience. (shrink)

This paper develops the conceptual framework of ’sex contextualism’ for the study of sex-related variables in biomedical research. Sex contextualism offers an alternative to binary sex essentialist approaches to the study of sex as a biological variable. Specifically, sex contextualism recognizes the pluralism and context-specificity of operationalizations of ’sex’ across experimental laboratory research. In light of recent policy mandates to consider sex as a biological variable, sex contextualism offers constructive guidance to biomedical researchers for attending to sex-related biological variation. As (...) an alternative to and critique of biological binary sex essentialism, sex contextualism contributes to current debates in philosophy of biology, feminist science studies, and social ontology on the construction of categories of gender/sex differences in scientific research. (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum has powerfully argued in Frontiers ofJustice and elsewhere that John Rawls’s sort of social-contract theory cannot usefully be deployed to deal with issues pertaining to justice for the disabled. To counter this claim, this article deploys Rawls’s sort of social-contract theory in order to deal with issues pertaining to justice for the disabled—or, since, as Nussbaum stresses, we all have some degree of disability—for the severely disabled. In this way, rather than questioning one by one Nussbaum’s interpretive claims (...) about Rawls’s view, one can simply see how the Rawlsian framework can work in application to this issue. Following Rawls’s lead, the paper utilizes the idealized “initial choice situation” as an analytic and comparative device for examining alternative principles of justice, developing three different interpretations of the initial choice situation that each correspond to a different set of principles that apply to people of all levels of disability. One of these sets of principles is a simple extension of Rawls’s, one is very close to what Nussbaum herself recommends, and the third is a kind of hybrid. In this way, it is shown not only that Rawls’s social-contract device can usefully be applied to these issues, but also that it is helpful for exploring the deep commitments underlying each of these competing sets of principles. (shrink)

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, philosophers of various sorts, including Helmholtz, Avenarius, Husserl, Russell, Carnap, Neurath, and Heidegger, were united in promulgating a new, “scientific” philosophy. This article documents some of the varieties of scientific philosophy and argues that the history of scientific philosophy is crucial to the development of analytic philosophy and the division between analytic and continental philosophy. Scientific philosophy defined itself via criticisms of old-fashioned systematic metaphysics and, in the twentieth century, of Lebensphilosophie. It (...) offered a modernist vision of philosophy participating in a progressive, problem-solving, piecemeal, and collaborative scientific ethos. The article argues that the rise of scientific philosophy indicates a change of the conception of science as well as philosophy in the late nineteenth century and notes some tensions in the accounts of science offered by scientific philosophers. The article offers some preliminary lessons for the interpretation of logical empiricism and phenomenology as episodes within a larger history of scientific philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Susan Laird, “Musical Hunger: A Philosophical Testimonial of Miseducation”Estelle R. JorgensenSusan Laird’s lament of her “musical under-education,” her youthful lack of opportunity for the sorts of experiences for which she hungered and its life-long after-effects, and her invocation of hunger as a metaphor for music education raise compelling questions. In a feminized field such as music, particularly piano playing, her hunger is particularly poignant. Also, the (...) notion of “musical taste” takes on new meaning, and the musical, educational, and ethical questions this metaphor evokes reveal its richness as a means of thinking about music education. This metaphor joins others such as Barbara Thayer Bacon’s metaphor of the quilt, Jane Roland Martin’s metaphor of the home, Iris Yob’s metaphor of pilgrimage, Elizabeth Gould’s metaphor of the nomad, Virginia Richardson’s metaphor of the steward, and Randall Allsup’s metaphor of the garage band, each of which illumines music education differently.1 Without one, we miss important insights into the thought and practice of music education; when taken together, they offer a richer view than were we to see music education in terms of one alone. [End Page 75]Although metaphor evokes imaginative thought and practice in music education, it is also limited. As Nelson Goodman aptly puts it, metaphor is a “matter of teaching an old word new tricks” and an “expedition abroad in which associations with one realm are applied in another.”2 Its power lies in its evocative and imaginative quality as it startles and surprises, challenges familiar ways of thinking and doing, and opens new possibilities for how we might think, act, and be differently. Although Laird would not want to literalize musical hunger or equate it with physical hunger—physical and spiritual realms intersect but they are not equivalent—it is possible to freeze a metaphor or literalize the vitality out of it. Testing it systematically, we enter the ground between metaphor and model, or what Iris Yob thinks of as the metaphorical model.3 While metaphor may prompt an intellectual journey, it cannot take us the entire way. In its particularistic and imaginative appeal, it opens reflection though it cannot suffice. A metaphor may also have a dark side. For example, envisaging the teacher’s role as salvific in providing bread for the hungry or preventing gluttony or food addictions may foster a paternalistic view that substitutes the teacher’s view of a student’s long term interests for the student’s directly-known and immediately perceived needs and interests, thereby subverting Laird’s expressed interest in the student’s desires. The educational “sin” of addiction may also be “redeemed” in Schefflerian fashion by pointing to important contributions of musicians who were doubtless excessive in their musical engagements.4 These possibilities suggest that we shall need to examine critically the metaphor and what it means for music education and move beyond the metaphor to its related models of music education.One of the interesting questions that Laird’s metaphor of hunger raises is the possibility of spiritual hunger, especially in a pervasively materialistic world. Matters related to spirituality have been addressed variously by writers in music education, whether it be the “healing” and ecologically-oriented approach of June Boyce-Tillman, the evolutionary and anthropologically grounded holistic approach of Anthony Palmer, the ethically-based approach of David Carr, the introspective and politically-charged writing of Cathy Benedict and Randall Allsup, the feminist perspectives of Elizabeth Gould, Charlene Morton, Roberta Lamb, and Deanne Bogdan, or the religiously grounded work of Iris Yob.5 Notions of spiritual hunger might be seen differently within the various lenses that these writers bring to music education but they all underscore the importance of knowing that goes beyond the literal, utilitarian, generalizable, and vocational to address the life of mind and body that Susanne Langer terms “feeling” and with which the arts, myths, rituals, and religions have to do.6 As such, they rebuke general education that is limited to reading, writing, and arithmetic, and driven by tests, standards, and mandates that often give short shrift to matters of human spirituality. Still, as the recent unanimous resolution in favor of... (shrink)

This very long book sets out to track and trace the working-class men and, less commonly, women who, against the limited expectations of their social position, learned Greek and Latin as an aspiration for personal change. The ideology of the book is clear and welcome: these figures “offer us a new ancestral backstory for a discipline sorely in need of a democratic makeover.” The book's twenty-five chapters explore how classics and class were linked in the educational system of Britain and (...) in its cultural performativity: Is he a gentleman? Does he have Greek? became the paradigmatic questions, as the study of classics became a sign of cultural attainment and social exclusion. This book sets out to explore the counterstory of the cobblers and shepherds who, like Jude the Obscure, fought against society's oppressiveness to access classical learning.The book's breadth is exemplary. It looks at the issue through genres and media, through different communities and national identities, through the prosopography of ragged-trousered philanthropists, beggar-lecturers, body-building performers, and through other institutions and people who helped, including adult-education teachers, kind bosses, supportive vicars, and fiery communists. This breadth, and the fascinating research that it encapsulates, will make this book a fantastic resource for future scholarship: it outlines the richness of a field that has been all too rarely explored properly. If you do not know Stephen Duck, “the thresher poet,” or Hawkie, the crutch-wielding beggar who performed from the books he sold on the streets of Glasgow, then this book is the place to the meet them. The cast list alone is worth the entrance ticket.Yet this very breadth is also the source of the book's limitations. The sheer number of cases listed, treated at similar length and depth, repeatedly conceals the complexity and even the interest of individual figures or events. So, the numerous representations of Vesuvius in shows around London in the first half of the nineteenth century—after the discoveries at Pompeii—are duly noted as a source of excitement and knowledge about antiquity, but against the recent treatment by Clare Pettitt in Serial Forms (which came out the same year) this mere noting looks desperately thin. There is little discussion of how the characters themselves talked about or negotiated class. This deficiency is particularly important for someone like Charles Kingsley, who was very active in the Chartist movement but also became Queen Victoria's chaplain and the professor of history at Cambridge. There are hilarious descriptions of Kingsley's stammering engagement with the working-class leaders he actively supported, which capture how awkward the interaction of classes could be even and especially when the participants shared a goal of transformation. (Ed Richardson's Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in the Pursuit of Antiquity is good on these moments of awkwardness but is one of several books whose absence from the notes looks pointed.) The authors list cases of working men who were picked up by fashionable society as poets or scholars, many of whom were dropped almost as quickly back into penury—but the telling description of such a case in Kingsley's Alton Locke is passed over, although it reveals an acute self-consciousness about such narratives in a best-selling novel.The very structure of the book tends toward listing cases rather than analyzing them in depth. It is not clear why “Shoemaker classicists” should take up a chapter, bar there having been some. Nor is it clear why some figures are not included. John Brown was an uneducated Scottish shepherd who taught himself Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He was discovered by a professor, one John Pringle, when he went into a shop to buy a secondhand Greek Testament (though his own church thought this newfound and inexplicable linguistic brilliance suspicious or even satanic). Brown went on to write the wonderfully titled The Self-Interpreting Bible, which remained in print and sold very widely for more than a century after its publication in 1778—especially after it was championed by the evangelical preacher Charles Simeon. It is a pity that Brown escaped the authors’ net, but religion, one of the main reasons to learn the classical languages, is downplayed throughout this study, although its imbrication with classics is everywhere in evidence. The book, significantly enough, leads rather toward a rosy-eyed depiction of posh classical communists like Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and George Thompson, and other such heroes of the authors.The authors are much more at home in the years of ardent republicanism in the decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, when socialism and communism became embedded in British life. The last half of the nineteenth century, when classics really established itself institutionally as a discipline, and its revolutionary potential moved away from the zeal of the Romantic philhellenists into the artistic idealism of a Richard Wagner or the sexual freedom of an Oscar Wilde, are less adequately explored. The huge attendance at art galleries and the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace as a route to encountering the past of antiquity in material form are barely addressed (Kate Nichols's Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace would have helped); nor do shows like Astley's Circus get air time (Rachel Bryant Davies's Troy, Carthage, and the Victorians is revealing). It is particularly noticeable in such a voluminous study that there is no discussion of how turning to Greek was a crucial route for the self-understanding of what was considered transgressive male sexuality—and for a particular engagement between the classes. To understand the social force of classics requires a deeper appreciation of the dynamics between conservatism and transformation, disciplinarity and self-discovery. The big picture of how classics matters is lost in the gems picked out by the authors. Gems they are, but their facets need more attention and their setting a broader perspective. (shrink)

A comprehensive, systematic, and historical collection of essays on Rudolf Carnap's philosophy and legacy, written by leading international experts. This volume provides a redressing of Carnap's place in the history of analytic philosophy, through his approach to metaphysics, values, politics, epistemology and philosophy of science.

This Element offers a new account of the philosophical significance of logical empiricism that relies on the past forty years of literature reassessing the project. It argues that while logical empiricism was committed to empiricism and did become tied to the trajectory of analytic philosophy, neither empiricism nor logical analysis per se was the deepest philosophical commitment of logical empiricism. That commitment was, rather, securing the scientific status of philosophy, bringing philosophy into a scientific conception of the world.

In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philosophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects' descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence experiences, I will argue, (...) the absence of a person as a condition on various possibilities is made manifest in the structure of experience over time. Thus, by paying close attention to grief, we can see that even accounts of absence experience that are presented as in competition with one another may not be so, and that to explain all kinds of absence experience we sometimes need to appeal to something overlooked in other accounts, and which is neither straightforwardly perceptual or cognitive. I also suggest that we would have good reason to take such experiences to be part of and not merely psychological effects of grief. (shrink)

In lieu of a programmatic argument about the general relations of history of science and philosophy of science, this essay offers a particular topic in the history of philosophy of science that should be of interest to both historians and philosophers of science. It argues that questions typical of contemporary history of science could illuminate the recent history of philosophy of science and analytic philosophy. It also suggests that the history of scientific philosophy is a particularly fruitful arena for historians (...) of science interested in issues of marginal science. (shrink)

This article explores the rhetoric, and mass mediation, of the national Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration ceremony, as broadcast on British television. I argue that the televised national ceremonies should be approached as an example of multi-genre epideictic rhetoric, working up meanings through a hybrid combination of genres, author/animators and modes. Epideictic rhetoric has often been depreciated as simply ceremonial ‘praise or blame’ speeches. However, given that the topics of praise/blame assume the existence of social norms, epideictic also acts to presuppose (...) and evoke common values, in general, and a collective recognition of shared social responsibilities, in particular. My methodology draws on the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, given, first, its central prominence in analysing argumentative strategies in discourse and, second, the ways it facilitates a reflexive ‘shuttling’ between text-discursive features, intertextual relations and wider contexts of society and history. Here, I examine how a catastrophic past is invoked in speech and evoked through image and music, in response to the demands that uncertainty of the future ‘places upon one’s conscience’. (shrink)

We investigated the coupling between a speaker's and a listener's eye movements. Some participants talked extemporaneously about a television show whose cast members they were viewing on a screen in front of them. Later, other participants listened to these monologues while viewing the same screen. Eye movements were recorded for all speakers and listeners. According to cross-recurrence analysis, a listener's eye movements most closely matched a speaker's eye movements at a delay of 2 sec. Indeed, the more closely a listener's (...) eye movements were coupled with a speaker's, the better the listener did on a comprehension test. In a second experiment, low-level visual cues were used to manipulate the listeners' eye movements, and these, in turn, influenced their latencies to comprehension questions. Just as eye movements reflect the mental state of an individual, the coupling between a speaker's and a listener's eye movements reflects the success of their communication. (shrink)