In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.1 (2004) 107-108 [Access article in PDF] H. H. M. van Lieshout. The Making of Pierre Bayle's Dictionaire Historique et Critique: With a CD-ROM containing the Dictionaire's library and references between articles. Translated by Lynne Richards. Amsterdam and Utrecht: APA-Holland University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiv + 339. Cloth, + 58,00. Bayle's Dictionaire Historique et Critique was published in 1697 in Rotterdam with a (...) second edition appearing in 1702. In this journal there should be no need to point out that Bayle (1647-1706) was by vocation a professor of philosophy. His courses were divided into logic, ethics, physics, and metaphysics and their emphasis was upon science and the methods appropriate to its pursuit. That is to say that Bayle's students received a grounding in the post-Cartesian philosophy syllabus that had spread throughout continental Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. Indeed, that Bayle was no dilettante was evidenced by the fact that before embarking on the Dictionaire in 1692, he had published various monographs on natural philosophy and works of public criticism in the skeptical/rationalist tradition. The French thinker, furthermore, despite his success as an encyclopaedist, returned increasingly in the years from 1697-1706 to his first calling as a critical philosopher. [End Page 107]Nevertheless from his student days Bayle loved books for their own sake, a passion which in due course came to support his first literary enterprise, the journal of books Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (1684). As author of the Dictionaire, he attracted attention from scholars in many disciplines. This study addresses therefore the general scholar rather than the historian of philosophy, for the Dictionaire did indeed become an indispensable work of reference for lexicographers, as well as for the encyclopaedists, the philosophes, the historians, the economists, the physiocrats, the satirists, the poets, and the reformers throughout the eighteenth century and on both sides of the Atlantic. Bound within four in-folio volumes, its second edition consisted of some seventeen hundred bio-bibliographical articles rigorously annotated and devoted to the ideas of authors in print, profane and sacred.Yet how could one author, it has often been asked, have produced in a mere five years so monumental a work? The Dutch scholar Leny Van Lieshout, already author of works of distinction about Bayle, has sought to answer this question and has done so with a rigor that equals that of Bayle himself. To assist her analysis she has compiled a bibliography of all the sources cited in the text of the Dictionaire itself. She has then matched this source, which she describes as a "library for learned Europe" (177), with Bayle's prodigious and lifelong correspondence about books with an ever-expanding network of friends and associates.With such tools at her elbow, Dr. Van Lieshout has been able to throw new light on many questions about the making of the Dictionaire. For example, how far did Bayle consider his method to be a model for the sort of reference book appropriate to a post-theological culture which today we call a plural age? His medium was indeed part of the message insofar as he sought to separate fact from comment, to cite relevant evidence, and to invoke many classical and heterodox sources whether or not they might offend an apologist for Christian doctrine. And how far did Bayle's own life really lie "only in his writings" (150) as Voltaire suggested, implying that Bayle could not have achieved so much had he not been a dry Huguenot recluse who knew little or nothing of the real world? The two questions are shown to be connected. In respect of the first, Dr. Van Lieshout observes that through the very structure of the Dictionaire Bayle seeks to assert that the political authority of the Church, following the breakdown of former Catholic Christendom, had ceased to be appropriate to the pursuit of scientific... (shrink)

Anosognosia for hemiplegia is a lack of awareness about paralysis following stroke. Recent explanations use a ‘forward model’ of movement to suggest that AHP patients fail to register discrepancies between internally- and externally-generated sensory information. We predicted that this failure would impair the ability to recall from memory whether information is internally- or externally-generated . Two experiments examined this prediction. Experiment 1 demonstrated that AHP patients exhibit a reality monitoring deficit for non-motor information , whilst hemiplegic controls without anosognosia perform (...) like age-matched healthy volunteers . Experiment 2 explored if this deficit occurs when AHP patients discriminate performed, imagined, or observed movement. Results showed impaired reality monitoring for movements in AHP and nonAHP patients relative to HVs. Findings suggest that reality monitoring processes not directly related to movement, together with a failure to reality monitor movements, contribute to the pathogenesis of AHP. (shrink)

In this collection of previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory and on the resources of contemporary analytic philosophy to develop the idea that gender and race are positions ...

It is always awkward when someone asks me informally what I’m working on and I answer that I’m trying to figure out what gender is. For outside a rather narrow segment of the academic world, the term ‘gender’ has come to function as the polite way to talk about the sexes. And one thing people feel pretty confident about is their knowledge of the difference between males and females. Males are those human beings with a range of familiar primary and (...) secondary sex characteristics, most important being the penis; females are those with a different set, most important being the vagina or, perhaps, the uterus. Enough said. Against this background, it isn’t clear what could be the point of an inquiry, especially a philosophical inquiry, into “what gender is”. (shrink)

A philosophically useful account of social structure must accommodate the fact that social structures play an important role in structural explanation. But what is a structural explanation? How do structural explanations function in the social sciences? This paper offers a way of thinking about structural explanation and sketches an account of social structure that connects social structures with structural explanation.

Racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice are more than just bad attitudes; after all, such injustice involves unfair distributions of goods and resources. But attitudes play a role. How central is that role? Tommie Shelby, among others, argues that racism is an ideology and takes a cognitivist approach suggesting that ideologies consist in false beliefs that arise out of and serve pernicious social conditions. In this paper I argue that racism is better understood as a set of practices, attitudes, (...) social meanings, and material conditions, that systematically reinforce one another. Attitudes play a role, but even the cognitive/affective component of ideologies should include culturally shared habits of mind and action. These habits of mind distort, obscure, and occlude important facts about subordinated groups and result in a failure to recognize their interests. How do we disrupt such practices to achieve greater justice? I argue that this is sometimes, but not always, best achieved by argument or challenging false beliefs, so social movements legitimately seek other means. (shrink)

Across the humanities and social sciences it has become commonplace for scholars to argue that categories once assumed to be “natural” are in fact “social” or, in the familiar lingo, “socially constructed”. Two common examples of such categories are race and gender, but there many others. One interpretation of this claim is that although it is typically thought that what unifies the instances of such categories is some set of natural or physical properties, instead their unity rests on social features (...) of the items in question. Social constructionists pursuing this strategy—and it is these social constructionists I will be focusing on in this paper—aim to “debunk” the ordinary assumption that the categories are natural, by revealing the more accurate social basis of the classification.2 To avoid confusion, and to resist some of the associations with the term ‘social construction’, I will sometimes use the term ‘socially founded’ for the categories that this sort of constructionist reveals as social rather than natural. (shrink)

Recent work on social injustice has focused on implicit bias as an important factor in explaining persistent injustice in spite of achievements on civil rights. In this paper, I argue that because of its individualism, implicit bias explanation, taken alone, is inadequate to explain ongoing injustice; and, more importantly, it fails to call attention to what is morally at stake. An adequate account of how implicit bias functions must situate it within a broader theory of social structures and structural injustice; (...) changing structures is often a precondition for changing patterns of thought and action and is certainly required for durable change. (shrink)

Theorists analyzing the concepts of race and gender disagree over whether the terms refer to natural kinds, social kinds, or nothing at all. The question arises: what do we mean by the terms? It is usually assumed that ordinary intuitions of native speakers are definitive. However, I argue that contemporary semantic externalism can usefully combine with insights from Foucauldian genealogy to challenge mainstream methods of analysis and lend credibility to social constructionist projects.

The authoranalyzes the types of metaphors that are used to describe the Internetin issues of Wired magazine from before and after the dot-com collapse to understand the perceptions and expectations of some of the actors involved in the shaping of the Internet. In addition, the metaphors deployed in economics and geophysiology are used to demonstrate how metaphors can influence public debate, policy, and theory. The author argues that metaphors do not simply have a descriptive function but that they also carry (...) normative connotations. Language, alongside social practices and material objects, is an important tool in attempts to construct the future. Six overlapping metaphorical themes are identified: revolution, evolution, salvation, progress, universalism, and the “American dream.” A critical analysis of these metaphors, informed by a critique of the metaphors used in economics and geophysiology, leads the author to challenge the universalist claims made by some Internet enthusiasts for the inclusive potential of the Internet. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of social practices that reveals how they are constitutive of social agency, enable coordination around things of value, and are a site for social intervention. The social world, on this account, does not begin when psychologically sophisticated individuals interact to share knowledge or make plans. Instead, culture shapes agents to interpret and respond both to each other and the physical world around us. Practices shape us as we shape them. This provides resources for understanding why (...) social practices tend to be stable, but also reveals sites and opportunities for change. (shrink)

Much contemporary social epistemology takes as its starting point individuals with sophisticated propositional attitudes and considers (i) how those individuals depend on each other to gain (or lose) knowledge through testimony, disagreement, and the like and (ii) if, in addition to individual knowers, it is possible for groups to have knowledge. In this paper I argue that social epistemology should be more attentive to the construction of knowers through social and cultural practices: socialization shapes our psychological and practical orientation so (...) that we perform local social practices fluently. Connecting practical orientation to an account of ideology, I argue that to ignore the ways in which cognition is socially shaped and filtered is to allow ideology to do its work unnoticed and unimpeded. Moreover, ideology critique cannot simply challenge belief, but must involve challenges to those practices through which we ourselves become the vehicles and embodiments of ideology.V. (shrink)

This essay proposes a design perspective on argumentation, intended as complementary to empirical and critical scholarship. In any substantive domain, design can provide insights that differ from those provided by scientific or humanistic perspectives. For argumentation, the key advantage of a design perspective is the recognition that humanity’s natural capacity for reason and reasonableness can be extended through inventions that improve on unaided human intellect. Historically, these inventions have fallen into three broad classes: logical systems, scientific methods, and disputation frameworks. (...) Behind each such invention is a specifiable “design hypothesis”: an idea about how to decrease error or how to increase the quality of outcomes from reasoning. As problems in contemporary argumentation practice become more complex, design thinking rises in relevance and importance. A design research agenda in argumentation would focus on theorizing design innovations and on evaluating design hypotheses. (shrink)

How do we achieve social justice? How do we change society for the better? Some would argue that we must do it by changing the laws or state institutions. Others that we must do it by changing individual attitudes. I argue that although both of these factors are important and relevant, we must also change culture. What does this mean? Culture, I argue, is a set of social meanings that shapes and filters how we think and act. Problematic networks of (...) social meanings constitute an ideology. Entrenched ideologies are resilient and are barriers to social change, even in the face of legal interventions. I argue that an effective way to change culture is through social movements and contentious politics, and that philosophy has a role to play in promoting such change. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment has been widely adopted by enactivists seeking to provide an account of cognition that is both embodied and embedded. Yet very little attention has been paid to Merleau-Ponty’s later works. This is troubling given that in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty revises his conception of embodied subjectivity because he came to the realization that understanding consciousness through the concepts of subject and object imposed a dualistic framework that he was trying to escape. To overcome (...) this dichotomy Merleau-Ponty more fully develops the radically embodied ontology implicit in his earlier work by introducing the concept of flesh. I argue that the enactive account of subjectivity would be improved by “giving flesh” to the enactive subject, given that the enactive account of subjectivity as grounded in pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness is ultimately rooted in accounts of which the later Merleau-Ponty is critical. Incorporating flesh resolves the underlying problems with the enactive account of subjectivity and makes the account more consistent with the ontological commitments to embodiment and embeddedness. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPerception of emotion in the face is a key component of human social cognition and is considered vital for many domains of life; however, little is known about how this ability differs across the lifespan for men and women. We addressed this question with a large community sample of persons ranging from younger than 15 to older than 60 years of age. Participants were viewers of the television show “Tout le Monde Joue”, and the task was presented on television, with (...) participants responding via their mobile devices. Applying latent variable modeling, and establishing measurement invariance between males and females and across age, we found that, for both males and females, emotion perception abilities peak between the ages of 15 and 30, with poorer performance by younger adults and declining performance after the age of 30. In addition, we show a consistent advantage by females across the lifespan, which decreases in magnitude with increasing age. This large scale study with a wide ran... (shrink)

A very distinctive and important new option for Christian theology. McFague proposes in a clear and challenging way a theological program based on what she calls 'the organic model' for conceiving God.

Self-reported data are regarded by medical researchers as invalid and less reliable than data produced by experts in clinical settings, yet individuals can increasingly contribute personal information to medical research through a variety of online platforms. In this article we examine this ‘participatory turn’ in healthcare research, which claims to challenge conventional delineations of what is valid and reliable for medical practice, by using aggregated self-reported experiences from patients and ‘pre-patients’ via the internet. We focus on 23andMe, a genetic testing (...) company that collects genetic material and self-reported information about disease from its customers. Integral to this research method are relations of trust embedded in the information exchange: trust in customers’ data; trust between researchers/company and research subjects; trust in genetics; trust in the machine. We examine the performative dimension of these trust relations, drawing on Shapin and Schaffer’s discussion of how material, literary and social technologies are used in research in order to establish trust. Our scepticism of the company’s motives for building trust with the self-reporting consumer forces us to consider our own motives. How does the use of customer data for research purposes by 23andMe differ from the research practices of social scientists, especially those who also study digital traces? By interrogating the use of self-reported data in the genetic testing context, we examine our ethical responsibilities in studying the digital selves of others using internet methods. How researchers trust data, how participants trust researchers, and how technologies are trusted are all important considerations in studying the social life of digital data. (shrink)

Are sagging pants cool? Are cows food? Are women more submissive than men? Are blacks more criminal than whites? Taking the social world at face value, many people would be tempted to answer these questions in the affirmative. And if challenged, they can point to facts that support their answers. But there is something wrong about the affirmative answers. In this chapter, I draw on recent ideas in the philosophy of language and metaphysics to show how the assertion of a (...) generic claim of the sort in question ordinarily permits one to infer that the fact in question obtains by virtue of something specifically about the subject so described, i.e., about women, or blacks, or sagging pants. In the examples I’ve offered, however, this implication inference is unwarranted. The facts in question obtain by virtue of broad system of social relations within which the subjects are situated, and are not grounded in intrinsic or dispositional features of the subjects themselves. The background relations are obscured, however, and as a result, the assertion is at least systematically misleading; a denial functions to block the problematic implication. Revealing such implications or presuppositions and blocking them is a crucial part of ideology critique. (shrink)

During the mid-1970s the extraordinarily dangerous style of free solo climbing emerged in the collective practice of a small community of “Stonemaster” climbers actively developing new climbing routes and the new “free” style of roped climbing in what is now Joshua Tree National Park, California. While its emergence might be interpreted as an affectively-driven, macho embodied social semiotic or ethnomotricity, in actuality the evolution of free soloing in the case of Stonemaster-era climbing at Joshua Tree may be more accurately understood (...) as the logical consequence of an intensive regime of practice in which climbers developed a near absolute bodily familiarity with certain climbing routes. Eventually, the reasonableness of climbing with little and even no protection on a subset of these routes became self-evident and conventional. Free soloing, in the semiotic perspective of the later Peirce, manifested as a Normal Logical Interpretant in the Joshua Tree landscape. It embodied the living definition of self-controlled conduct, and the Symbols it cultivated testified persuasively to the growth of a creative corporeal intelligence actualizing near absolute degrees of free will. (shrink)

[Sally Haslanger] In debates over the existence and nature of social kinds such as 'race' and 'gender', philosophers often rely heavily on our intuitions about the nature of the kind. Following this strategy, philosophers often reject social constructionist analyses, suggesting that they change rather than capture the meaning of the kind terms. However, given that social constructionists are often trying to debunk our ordinary (and ideology-ridden?) understandings of social kinds, it is not surprising that their analyses are counterintuitive. This (...) article argues that externalist insights from the critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction can be extended to justify social constructionist analyses. /// [Jennifer Saul] Sally Haslanger's 'What Good Are Our Intuitions? Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds' is, among other things, a part of the theoretical underpinning for analyses of race and gender concepts that she discusses far more fully elsewhere. My reply focuses on these analyses of race and gender concepts, exploring the ways in which the theoretical work done in this paper and others can or cannot be used to defend these analyses against certain objections. I argue that the problems faced by Haslanger's analyses are in some ways less serious, and in some ways more serious, than they may at first appear. Along the way, I suggest that ordinary speakers may not in fact have race and gender concepts and I explore the ramifications of this claim. (shrink)

Argument is a pervasive feature of human interaction, and in its natural contexts of occurrence, it is organized around the management of disagreement. Since disagreement can occur around any kind of speech act whatsoever, not all arguments involve a claim supported by reasons; many involve standpoints attributed to someone but claimed by no one. And although truth and validity are often at issue in naturally occurring arguments, these do not exhaust the standards to which arguers are held. Arguers hold one (...) another accountable for cooperating in the management of disagreement, infusing argumentation with a natural normativity that exists apart from any theorized appraisal standard applied to the claim-reason relationship. Argumentation’s natural normativity is visible not only in how arguments unfold in interaction but also in how humanity continuously strives to improve its methods of disagreement management. (shrink)

Argument is a pervasive feature of human interaction, and in its natural contexts of occurrence, it is organized around the management of disagreement. Since disagreement can occur around any kind of speech act whatsoever, not all arguments involve a claim supported by reasons; many involve standpoints attributed to someone but claimed by no one. And although truth and validity are often at issue in naturally occurring arguments, these do not exhaust the standards to which arguers are held. Arguers hold one (...) another accountable for cooperating in the management of disagreement, infusing argumentation with a natural normativity that exists apart from any theorized appraisal standard applied to the claim-reason relationship. Argumentation’s natural normativity is visible not only in how arguments unfold in interaction but also in how humanity continuously strives to improve its methods of disagreement management. (shrink)

How does an object persist through change? How can a book, for example, open in the morning and shut in the afternoon, persist through a change that involves the incompatible properties of being open and being shut? The goal of this reader is to inform and reframe the philosophical debate around persistence; it presents influential accounts of the problem that range from classic papers by W. V. O. Quine, David Lewis, and Judith Jarvis Thomson to recent work by contemporary philosophers. (...) The authors take on the question of persistence by examining three broad approaches: perdurantism, which holds that change over time is analogous to change over space; exdurantism, according to which identity over time is analogous to identity across possible worlds; and endurantism, which holds that ordinary objects persist by enduring. Each of these approaches appears to be coherent, but each also has its own metaphysical problems. Persistence includes papers that argue for perdurantism, exdurantism, or endurantism, as well as papers that explore some metaphysical difficulties challenging each account. In this way the collection allows readers to balance the trade-offs of each approach in terms of intuitiveness, theoretical attractiveness, and elegance.Contributors:Yuri Balashov, William Carter, Graeme Forbes, Sally Haslanger, Katherine Hawley, H. S. Hestevold, Mark Hinchliffe, Mark Johnston, Roxanne Marie Kurtz, David K. Lewis, Ned Markosian, D. H. Mellor, W. V. O. Quine, Theodore Sider, Richard Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman. (shrink)

The False Claims Act, 31 U.S.C. § 3729, a post-Civil War law inspired by cases of defense contracting fraud, was revitalized in 1986. Since then it has been used to sue both manufacturers and providers of pharmaceuticals. In some cases, these suits were meant to target offlabel marketing of pharmaceuticals. In 2009, the 11th Circuit rendered a decision in Hopper v. Solvay Pharmaceuticals that dramatically limits the ability of private plaintiff whistle-blowers to bring qui tam suits under the FCA for (...) such marketing. In June 2010, the Supreme Court denied certiorari, making the Circuit court decision final. The Solvay decision creates a significant barrier to certain kinds of qui tam suits, requiring the plaintiff to demonstrate the intent to market off-label, including by showing specific prescriptions that were written as a result of efforts to do so. (shrink)

Although “transition” is an established area of educational research, there has been little empirically exploration of how shifts in the ways that knowledge is packaged and valued impact on students’ reading and writing as they transition into higher education. This article draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study that traced the experiences, practices and understandings of 11 students from their last year of A-levels through to their second year of undergraduate study. Analysis shows that the forms of knowledge privileged and the (...) ways that knowledge is packaged vary significantly between the two educational contexts, impacting on students’ engagement with texts as they transition into university. This article further illustrates that as a result of shifts in what counts as knowledge between these levels, students face challenges adapting to undergraduate literacies, which disrupts the simplistic notion of transition evoked in the dominant positioning of “the transition to uni... (shrink)