This chapter examines the early insular history of Bede's Chronica Maiora in a universal context. It considers Bede's treatment of salvation history in the Chronica Maiora's account of the archipelago in the era of the Roman conquest and the barbarian invasions, viewed within the context of contemporary world history. The chapter explains that the Chronica Maiora is located in Bede's magisterial survey of divine and human time and traces the providential unfolding of universal history through the six ages of this (...) world. (shrink)

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." --Genesis 1:24-26 In this crucial passage from the Old Testament, God grants mankind power over animals. But with this privilege comes the grave responsibility to respect life, to treat animals with (...) simple dignity and compassion. Somewhere along the way, something has gone wrong. In Dominion , we witness the annual convention of Safari Club International, an organization whose wealthier members will pay up to $20,000 to hunt an elephant, a lion or another animal, either abroad or in American "safari ranches," where the animals are fenced in pens. We attend the annual International Whaling Commission conference, where the skewed politics of the whaling industry come to light, and the focus is on developing more lethal, but not more merciful, methods of harvesting "living marine resources." And we visit a gargantuan American "factory farm," where animals are treated as mere product and raised in conditions of mass confinement, bred for passivity and bulk, inseminated and fed with machines, kept in tightly confined stalls for the entirety of their lives, and slaughtered in a way that maximizes profits and minimizes decency. Throughout Dominion , Scully counters the hypocritical arguments that attempt to excuse animal abuse: from those who argue that the Bible's message permits mankind to use animals as it pleases, to the hunter's argument that through hunting animal populations are controlled, to the popular and "scientifically proven" notions that animals cannot feel pain, experience no emotions, and are not conscious of their own lives. The result is eye opening, painful and infuriating, insightful and rewarding. Dominion is a plea for human benevolence and mercy, a scathing attack on those who would dismiss animal activists as mere sentimentalists, and a demand for reform from the government down to the individual. Matthew Scully has created a groundbreaking work, a book of lasting power and importance for all of us. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Danto and Kant Recent Danto on Kant's Aesthetics Late Danto's “Aesthetic Turn”? Danto on Works of Art as “Embodied Meanings” Danto on Metaphor Metaphor in Kant Kant on Aesthetic Ideas Aesthetic Ideas, a Contemporary Example.

From the 1970s to the early-1990s, the discourse surrounding aesthetics largely disappeared from the study of art history, theory and cultural studies. Claims for the aesthetic value of art-works were thought of as elitist and politically regressive. The 1990s witnessed a return to aesthetics, but one that stressed the independent claims of beauty, in reaction to its perceived suppression by ethical and political imperatives. However, beauty is just one aspect of the aesthetic. In recent years, increasing attention has been given (...) to the ways in which aesthetics and ethics are intertwined. In a series of paired essays and responses, a group of the English-speaking world's most distinguished thinkers consider this 'new' aesthetics, demonstrating its cross-disciplinary relevance in terms accessible to a non-specialist readership. (shrink)

Philosophically grounded, methodologically sound, and theoretically rigorous, this paradigm-challenging collection ponders the most dynamic areas of feminist inquiry into bioethical thought and practice and sketches future directions for this rapidly growing field.

Race, Crime, and the Law. Randall Kennedy. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1997, xiv + 539 pp.

Race, Crime, and the Law. Randall Kennedy. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1997, xiv + 539 pp.

What is photography? Is it primarily a source of knowledge about the world or an art? Many have said the former, because it records the world automatically, others the latter because it embodies human subjectivity. Can it photography be both or must we choose? In On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry Diarmuid Costello examines these fascinating questions and more. In so doing he introduces some of the fundamental topics and debates about the nature of photography, with the help of photographic (...) images from Paul Strand, Lee Friedlander, James Welling, Jeff Wall, and Gerhard Richter, among others. Tracing the roots of thinking about photography from its discovery, through Nineteenth Century debates about its standing as art, to Twentieth Century Modernism and post-War cultural criticism, Costello identifies the emergence of a powerful "orthodox" view of photography. The features that make photographs compelling documents are precisely those that put pressure on its standing as art; though they provide a wealth of empirical information, they cannot have the unifying vision we look for in art. He draws on the reflections of photographers and theorists, including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin and Stanley Cavell to illustrate this fundamental tension. The view comes to fruition in the work of Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. Whether pure photography is capable of representing fictions, or always presents a transparent window onto the real world becomes the key question. Recently, the orthodox view has come under increasing pressure from a new generation of philosophers who reject the contrast between machine and hand made images that underwrites it. He concludes by examining photographic agency in a digital age. Written in a clear and engaging style, On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of photography, aesthetics, art, and visual studies. (shrink)

What is photography? Is it primarily a source of knowledge about the world or an art? Many have said the former, because it records the world automatically, others the latter because it embodies human subjectivity. Can it photography be both or must we choose? In _On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry_ Diarmuid Costello examines these fascinating questions and more. In so doing he introduces some of the fundamental topics and debates about the nature of photography, with the help of photographic (...) images from Paul Strand, Lee Friedlander, James Welling, Jeff Wall, and Gerhard Richter, among others. Tracing the roots of thinking about photography from its discovery, through nineteenth-century debates about its standing as art, to twentieth-century Modernism and post-War cultural criticism, Costello identifies the emergence of a powerful "orthodox" view of photography. The features that make photographs compelling documents are precisely those that put pressure on its standing as art; though they provide a wealth of empirical information, they cannot have the unifying vision we look for in art. He draws on the reflections of photographers and theorists, including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin and Stanley Cavell to illustrate this fundamental tension. The view comes to fruition in the work of Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. Whether pure photography is capable of representing fictions, or always presents a transparent window onto the real world becomes the key question. Recently, the orthodox view has come under increasing pressure from a new generation of philosophers who reject the contrast between machine and hand made images that underwrites it. He concludes by examining photographic agency in a digital age. Written in a clear and engaging style, _On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry_ is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of photography, aesthetics, art, and visual studies. (shrink)

This book reconceives disability as a set of social relations and practices, as experienced embodiment, and as an emancipatory movement, as well as a biomedical phenomenon. The author brings new attention to complex ethical questions surrounding disability, looking at not only the biomedical understanding of impairment, but also its cultural representations and social organization.

This article considers the shift currently taking place in philosophical thinking about photography. What I call “new” theory departs from philosophical orthodoxy with respect to when a photograph comes into existence, a difference with far-reaching consequences. I trace this to Dawn Wilson on the “photographic event.” To assess the new theory's newness one needs a grip on the old. I divide this between “skeptical” and “nonskeptical” orthodoxy, where this turns on the theory's implications for photography's standing as art. New theory (...) emerges as a response to skeptical orthodoxy in particular. I divide new theory in turn between “restrictive” and “permissive” responses to skeptical orthodoxy and raise challenges for both. The restrictive version arguably divides what does and does not count as strictly photographic in arbitrary ways; the permissive version rules in images that are not obviously photographs and faces two difficulties individuating photographs. I conclude by noting several questions that need to be addressed before new theory clearly has the upper hand over orthodoxy. These concern its ability to account for photography's epistemic capacities, the extent to which it constitutes an advance over “nonskeptical” orthodoxy, and whether new theorists have yet to be new enough when it comes to photographic agency. (shrink)

This article contains a survey of recent debates in the philosophy of photography, focusing on aesthetic and epistemic issues in particular. Starting from widespread notions about automatism, causality and realism in the theory of photography, the authors ask whether the prima facie tension between the epistemic and aesthetic embodied in oppositions such as automaticism and agency, causality and intentionality, realism and fictional competence is more than apparent. In this context, the article discusses recent work by Roger Scruton, Dominic Lopes, Kendall (...) Walton, Gregory Currie, Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, Noël Carroll, and Patrick Maynard in some detail. Specific topics addressed include: aesthetic scepticism, transparency, imagination, perception, information, representation and depiction. (shrink)

cannot grasp what is at stake in it without taking both its claims and its tone seriously. Read philosophically, Danto wants to reconceive art’s aesthetic dimension as those features that ‘inflect’ our attitude towards a work’s meaning, and to distinguish, in so doing, between beauty that is and beauty that is not internal to that meaning. Although welcome, I argue that his attempt to carry this through is compromised by his countervailing tendency to conceive the aesthetic in non-cognitive terms. Read (...) as a work of philosophical confession, on the other hand, I suggest that Danto’s late turn to aesthetics may be illuminated through a comparison with Philip Guston’s late turn to figuration. To do so, I draw parallels between Guston’s development as a painter and Danto’s philosophical trajectory. Danto concludes that, though necessary to life, beauty is not necessary to art; I conclude that, on this account, only an aesthetic art makes a warranted claim on our attention. (shrink)

Stephen Scully both offers a reading of Hesiod's Theogony and traces the reception and shadows of this authoritative Greek creation story in Greek and Roman texts up to Milton's own creation myth, which sought to "soar above th' Aonian Mount [i.e., the Theogony]...and justify the ways of God to men." Scully also considers the poem in light of Near Eastern creation stories, including the Enûma elish and Genesis, as well as the most striking of modern "scientific myths," Freud's (...) Civilization and its Discontents. Scully reads Hesiod's poem as a hymn to Zeus and a city-state creation myth, arguing that Olympus is portrayed as an idealized polity and--with but one exception--a place of communal harmony. This reading informs his study of the Theogony's reception in later writings about polity, discord, and justice. The rich and various story of reception pays particular attention to the long Homeric Hymns, Solon, the Presocratics, Pindar, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Plato in the Archaic and Classical periods; to the Alexandrian scholars, Callimachus, Euhemerus, and the Stoics in the Hellenistic period; to Ovid, Apollodorus, Lucian, a few Church fathers, and the Neoplatonists in the Roman period. Tracing the poem's reception in the Byzantine, medieval, and early Renaissance, including Petrarch and Erasmus, the book ends with a lengthy exploration of Milton's imitations of the poem in Paradise Lost. Scully also compares what he considers Hesiod's artful interplay of narrative, genealogical lists, and keen use of personified abstractions in the Theogony to Homeric narrative techniques and treatment of epic verse. (shrink)

This paper considers whether Kant’s aesthetics withstands the challenge of Conceptual Art. I begin by looking at two competing views of Conceptual Art by recent philosophers, before settling on an ‘inclusive’ view of the form: Conceptual Art includes both ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ non-perceptual art (NPA). I then set out two kinds of conceptual complexity that I argue are implicated by all aesthetic judgements of art (as art) on Kant’s view: the concept of art itself, and the idea the work is (...) meant to express (dependent beauty and aesthetic ideas, respectively). I go on to demonstrate the applicability of Kant’s aesthetics to Conceptual Art by considering two works by Lawrence Weiner, which I take to be a work of work of weak and strong NPA respectively. (shrink)

The work of a bioethicist carries distinctive responsibilities. Alongside those of any worker, there are responsibilities associated with giving guidance to practitioners, policy makers and the public. In addition, bioethicists are professionally exposed to and required to identify situations of moral trouble, and as a result may find themselves choosing to work as advocates or activists, with responsibilities that are distinct from those generally acknowledged within academia. The requirement for bioethics to make normative judgements entails taking a stance, which means (...) there cannot be a sharp line between ‘academic’ or ‘objective’ bioethics, and advocacy/activism, but a continuum of bioethicists’ engagement and an associated continuum of responsibilities. (shrink)

Susan has been profoundly deaf since childhood. She is a hearing aid wearer, and likes to use the induction loops built into some public spaces, such as theaters and cinemas, to help cut down the background noise that can make hearing speech very difficult. But this depends on the building having an induction loop fitted and properly maintained. Like many other induction loop users, Susan frequently finds that the advertised loop system is either working poorly or not working at all. (...) Almost as often, she then has the experience of making a complaint about it only to have the problem denied. If she persists, she is often then met... (shrink)

This chapter examines the ways in which disabled people are subject to epistemic injustice. It starts by introducing how social epistemology models the creation of shared knowledge and then uses feminist epistemology to highlight the role of social and political power in producing epistemic privilege, exclusion, and oppression. The well-known concepts of testimonial and hermeneutic epistemic injustice are discussed in relation to disability, showing how these forms of injustice are frequently experienced within the lives of disabled people. In particular, disabled (...) experience has features that distinguish it from the experiences of sexism and racism most commonly used as illustrations of epistemic injustice. The chapter ends by arguing that the potential for epistemic injustice poses unprecedented risks for disabled people in the current context, which could be minimized by recognizing that ignorance about disabled lives is not inevitable, but something that can and should be challenged. (shrink)

Pandemics such as COVID-19 place everyone at risk, but certain kinds of risk are differentially severe for groups already made vulnerable by pre-existing forms of social injustice and discrimination. For people with disability, persisting and ubiquitous disablism is played out in a variety of ways in clinical and public health contexts. This paper examines the impact of disablism on pandemic triage guidance for allocation of critical care. It identifies three underlying disablist assumptions about disability and health status, quality of life, (...) and social utility, that unjustly and potentially catastrophically disadvantage people with disability in COVID-19 and other global health emergencies. (shrink)

abstract In this paper we question the basis on which judgements are made about the ‘quality’ of the lives of people whose embodied experience is anomalous, specifically in cases of impairments. In moral and political philosophy it is often assumed that, suitably informed, we can overcome epistemic gaps through the exercise of moral imagination: ‘putting ourselves in the place of others’, we can share their points of view. Drawing on phenomenology and theories of embodied cognition, and on empirical studies, we (...) suggest that there are barriers to imagining oneself differently situated, or imagining being another person, arising in part from the way imagination is constrained by embodied experience. We argue that the role of imagination in moral engagement with others is to expand the scope of our sympathies rather than to enable us to put ourselves in the other's place. We argue for explicit acknowledgement that our assessments of others’ QOL are likely to be shaped by the specifics of our own embodiment, and by the assumptions we make as a consequence about what is necessary for a good quality of life. (shrink)

The sharing economy has been examined from many angles, including the engagement of customers, the capabilities of the technological platforms, and the experiences of those who sell products or services. We focus on labor in the sharing economy. Labor has been regarded as one type of asset exchanged in the sharing economy, as part of the customer interface when services are sold, or as a party vulnerable to exploitation. We focus on labor as a position in relationship to owners of (...) capital. While new typologies to characterize the sharing economy are emerging, we argue that a well-established framework that has been applied across historic types of work arrangements can offer a robust analysis of enduring and new labor issues. We draw upon labor process theory from early formulations to recent applications to guide an analysis appropriate to the sharing economy. We use both central and less explored concepts from LPT and use Uber as a case to illustrate application of the framework. By considering labor, capital, and the power dynamics between them, we draw attention to unequal exchange and distributive justice, fundamental for taking a business ethics approach to labor in the sharing economy. (shrink)

We review the concepts and the physics behind electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) and lasing without inversion (LWI) for various models of the V-type configurations.

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

There is confusion about what counts as abstraction in photography: art theorists class very different kinds of photographs as abstract, and common philosophical views of photography, if true, should cause us to doubt their very possibility. I address two questions here: ‘What is Abstraction?’ and ‘What is Abstraction in Photography?’ To the answer the second, I briefly consider a third: ‘What is Photography?’ so that the resulting account is not undermined by a poor theory of photography. In answer to my (...) target question, I outline a schematic typology of kinds of work generically typed as ‘abstract’ in order to bring out some differences between them. I distinguish ‘proto’, ‘faux’, ‘constructed faux’, ‘weak’, ‘strong’, ‘constructed’ and ‘concrete’ abstraction, although the differences between them are not always clear-cut and there is room for debate about borderline cases. My goal is not to resolve all such cases, but to show: that there is a range of broadly identifiable kinds of abstraction in photography; that images can be abstract in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons; and why certain images are not abstract, despite being widely typed as such. (shrink)

Time pressure has been shown to have a negative impact on ethical decision-making. This paper uses an experimental approach to examine the impact of an antecedent of time pressure, whether it is anticipated or not, on participants’ perceptions of unethical behaviour. Utilising 60 business school students at an Australian university, we examine the differential impact of anticipated and unanticipated time deadline pressure on participants’ perceptions of the likelihood of unethical behaviour occurring. We find the perception of the likelihood of unethical (...) behaviour occurring to be significantly reduced when time pressure is anticipated rather than unanticipated. The implications of this finding for both professional service organisations and tertiary institutions are considered. (shrink)

To grasp what might exist beyond neoliberalism, we need to rethink the history of development before neoliberalism. This article makes two arguments. First, for poorer countries, processes of commodification which are highlighted as evidence of neoliberalism often predate the neoliberal era. Third World development policies tended to make social and economic life more precarious as a corollary to capital accumulation before neoliberalism as an ideology took hold. Second, the intense theoretical and discursive focus on neoliberalism has obscured a tangible shift (...) towards de-commodification in much of the global South. The most salient examples today are state-led social assistance programs that have been implemented across the former Third World. These emerged not out of technocratic fixes from above but often out of political and social struggles from below. The rise and spread of these programs are not only in stark contrast to popular conceptions of a neoliberal reinforcement, but are also specifically targeted at social strata whose precarity commonly originated in developmental policies before the neoliberal era. Utilizing a database of 183 active flagship social assistance programs in 84 developing countries, we present macro-level quantitative evidence of the rise and spread of social protection policies over the past two decades in the global South. We then detail these programs for four middle-income countries—China, Brazil, India, and South Africa. To those who lament that the 2008 crisis has produced no Polanyian double movement, we argue that these state-driven social assistance policies are such a mechanism. (shrink)

The question of whether activism should be overtly embraced as part of the bioethicist's role deserves serious consideration. Like others, we agree that bioethics is inescapably partisan; bioethical deliberation is based on trying to determine morally relevant features of situations and morally justifiable outcomes. Where disagreement arises is over the degree to which bioethicists should be activists. Meyers argues for a somewhat circumscribed role, limited to action on ethically concerning institutional matters, for those who are financially independent of the institutions. (...) We take a broader view, arguing that some issues are so morally egregious that there is a duty to take a stand against them, even if the prospects of success are dim. There is a need for further debate, sharing of experiences, and analysis of case studies, to support bioethicists who take a stand. (shrink)