This chapter contains sections titled: The Benthamite Legacy The Regulation of Proof The “New” Evidence Scholarship Future Directions of the Law of Evidence References.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Evidence of Augustinian 'Ressourcement' in the Franciscan Summa Halensis:The Cases of Contra Faustum and De spiritu et litteraMichael S. HahnAmong the thornier issues surrounding the Parisian Franciscan collaborative compilation Summa Halensis1 is the matter of its sources, consideration of which most often involves discernment of its contributing authors and their engagement with near-contemporary texts and trends in twelfth- and thirteenth-century scholastic theology.2 Hiding in plain sight, and thus (...) easily overlooked in this array of detailed concerns, is the privileged place afforded to Augustine of Hippo—and more precisely, to historically underexamined and underutilized of his works—within certain sections of the Franciscan Summa, a dynamic that seems to indicate a deliberate Augustinian ressourcement alongside more standard scholastic uses of stock textual auctoritates.3 [End Page 59]In order to establish the plausibility and general contours of such ressourcement, the present study examines the deployment of Augustine's Contra Faustum and De spiritu et littera in the Franciscan Summa's treatise on law, outlining both the originality and significance of this usage. The study falls into three main parts. In the first part, I offer a brief introduction to these two works, noting their import vis-à-vis Augustine's broader corpus. In the second, I provide a rough sketch of their respective reception histories, limning the standards of use that obtain in twelfth- and thirteenth-century scholastic writings prior to the Franciscan Summa. And in the third part, I detail the employment of these two works in the Summa itself, attending to where and how they are used, and how this usage variously coheres with and moves beyond the preceding theological tradition. Finally, by way of conclusion, I gesture at the immediate impact of this usage, taking as my primary example the later Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. As I aim to show, although these important Augustinian works were not entirely unknown in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, there is little evidence of their first-hand utilization in scholastic theology prior to that of the Summa Halensis. Moreover, the Franciscan Summa's ample and markedly astute use of these works can be seen not only to undergird the Augustinian cast of its teaching on the distinction and relation of law and grace, but also to initiate and direct a broader return to these sources among the next generation of mendicant scholastics, Franciscan and Dominican alike.I. Augustine's Contra Faustum and De spiritu et litteraThe present inquiry concerns two very different polemic texts of Augustine that originate from the first decade and a half of the fifth century: the Contra Faustum, composed from around 400 to 403, one of the latest—and by far the longest and most biblically focused—of Augustine's anti-Manichaean works;4 and De spiritu et littera, composed in 412, [End Page 60] among the first of his works against the Pelagians.5 The length and sprawl of the former work is noted by Augustine in his Retractationes, where he presents this as a function of the scattered array of attacks by the Manichaean Faustus of Mileve:Against Faustus the Manichaean, who blasphemed the law and the prophets and their God and the incarnation of Christ, and who asserted that the scriptures of the New Testament by which he is refuted were falsified, I wrote a massive work (grande opus), giving my replies to his words that are set forth. There are thirty-three debates (disputationes), but why may I not call them books (libros) as well? For even if some among them are brief, they are nonetheless books.6Although Augustine touches on many other points in this "massive work," his main task centers on defending and elucidating the divinely ordered harmony of the Old and New Testaments in proclaiming Christ.7 The procedure he employs is chiefly exegetical, involving assertion of the prophetic nature of the Old Testament and illustration of this via figural interpretation of particular passages. What is most distinctive about the Contra Faustum is this specific approach to the Old Testament and its signature emphasis on the prophetic status of those from whom Christ takes his flesh, who especially through the giving... (shrink)

This chapter examines critically both the idea of ‘a multidisciplinary field’ or ‘an integrated science’ of evidence, and scepticism about and resistance to this idea from the standpoint of a jurist who has been involved with interdisciplinary work on evidence in law for many years. The chapter is organized as follows. Part I presents an overview of the intellectual history of the academic study of evidence in law in the Anglo‐American tradition and shows how important aspects of (...) the field came to be recognised as inherently multidisciplinary. Part II identifies some limitations of legal perspectives on evidence, especially when the focus is on contested trials. It recounts the story of attempts to move beyond law in the direction of constructing a general field of evidence that formed part of the background of the UCL programme. Part III examines some of the reasons for suspicion of and resistance to the idea of ‘an integrated science of evidence’. Part IV restates the case for recognition and institutionalisation of evidence as a special focus of attention at the present time and puts forward a personal agenda of general questions that still need to be tackled. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian EconomyDaniel J. GargolaDennis P. Kehoe. Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xiv 1 269 pp. Cloth, $42.50, £29.95 (UK, Europe).This book is more than an investigation into an aspect of Roman law and legal thought. At the very beginning, Dennis Kehoe clearly identifies his goal: “My (...) purpose in this study is to clarify the basic relationships characterizing the agrarian economy of the early Roman Empire by analyzing the economic mentality that guided upper-class Romans in managing their wealth. My conviction is that the type of agrarian planning based on upper-class conceptions of investment and profit played a fundamental role in shaping the Roman economy as a whole.... In this study, I propose to address this problem by analyzing the assumptions that the Roman jurists in the Digest of Justinian and in other classical sources made about investment and profit in agriculture as they addressed legal issues involving private property. I base my analysis on the legal sources because, as I shall demonstrate, they offer a more comprehensive picture of the economic interests of upper-class Romans than we can gain from other types of evidence, including literary evidence, documentary papyri, and inscriptions” (vii).The author’s awareness of the problems in using legal evidence to shed light on larger issues and his openness about his own assumptions and about the limitations of the methods and the sources he has chosen to employ are among the work’s great strengths. In marked contrast with some other investigations of such matters, Kehoe does not assume that laws provide a simple, straightforward, and transparent entry into the structure and organization of economy and society. The work opens with an examination of the legal sources as evidence. Their condition offers one problem. The writings of the late Republican and early Imperial jurists are preserved largely in relatively brief citations included in the great collections of the sixth-century a.d.: Justinian’s Digest and Code. As Kehoe notes, this presents a major problem for investigators: to what extent do these passages represent the original—that is, was obsolete material removed systematically, and were the passages adjusted to fit the compilers’ concerns? Following authorities such as M. Kaser and F. Wieacker, the author takes an optimistic view of the matter, suggesting that “contemporary scholarship is justified in moving away from the suspicion that the Digest is so thoroughly interpolated that the opinions of the classical jurists can only be recovered after exhaustive reconstruction of the texts” (9). While accepting the possibility of interpolation in individual cases, he has based his study on the “belief that the existing collections of legal texts do allow us to trace the thinking, in particular the economic thinking, of the classical Roman legal authorities” (10).Having declared his intention to regard the citations as reasonably accurate reflections of their originals, Kehoe then turns to a more central question: the extent to which juristic writings reflect actual conditions. One school of [End Page 323] thought, represented by scholars such as Alan Watson (The Spirit of Roman Law [Athens, Ga., 1995]), suggests that Roman jurists operated within a system of traditional representations, maintained as if fossilized long after the conditions that had given rise to them had changed, and that legal writers largely wrote about internal problems in interpretation that had arisen within this system. The jurists, then, did not address problems of their own day, nor were they interested in adapting the law to new circumstances, and their opinions need bear little resemblance to actual arrangements in their own time and place. Others, however, are more convinced of the timeliness of Roman legal writing. Scholars such as B. W. Frier (Landlords and Tenants in Imperial Rome [Princeton 1980]) and S. D. Martin (The Roman Jurists and the Organization of Private Building in the Late Republic and Early Empire [Brussels 1989]) maintain that Roman jurists consciously and directly addressed in their writings the social and economic concerns of their contemporaries in the governing elite.Once again, Kehoe takes care to situate... (shrink)

The portrait of John Locke as a secular advocate of Enlightenment rationality has been deconstructed by the recent 'religious turn' in Locke scholarship. This book takes an important next step: moving beyond the 'religious turn' and establishing a 'theological turn', Nathan Guy argues that John Locke ought to be viewed as a Christian political philosopher whose political theory was firmly rooted in the moderating Latitudinarian theology of the seventeenth-century. Nestled between the secular political philosopher and the Christian public (...) theologian stands Locke, the Christian political philosopher, whose arguments not only self-consciously depend upon Christian assumptions, but also offer a decidedly Christian theory of government. Finding Locke's God identifies three theological pillars crucial to Locke's political theory: (1) a biblical depiction of God, (2) the law of nature rooted in a doctrine of creation and (3) acceptance of divine revelation in scripture. As a result, Locke's political philosophy brings forth theologically-rich aims, while seeking to counter or disarm threats such as atheism, hyper-Calvinism, and religious enthusiasm. Bringing these items together, Nathan Guy demonstrates how each pillar supports Locke's Latitudinarian political philosophy and provides a better understanding of how he grounds his notions of freedom, equality and religious toleration. Convincingly argued and meticulously researched, this book offers an exciting new direction for Locke studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.3 (2001) 183-206 [Access article in PDF] Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the Philosophy of Culture 1 Richard Buchanan In a seminal article on the study of rhetoric in the Middle Ages, Richard McKeon proposed a strategy for inquiry that illuminated the development of the art in a period where traditional histories had found little of intellectual significance. 2 He argued that instead (...) of studying rhetoric as a simple verbal discipline with a more or less constant subject matter drawn from style or the interpretation of the works of poets and orators or the law, one could study the changing conceptions of subject matter and purpose by which rhetoricians thought to distinguish and oppose their doctrines. By studying the basic philosophic differences that are implicated in changing conceptions of rhetoric, one could discover intelligible patterns in the development of the art that otherwise may appear whimsical, haphazard, arbitrary, or merely verbal. What followed was the discovery of how the doctrines and devices of rhetoric in the Middle Ages spread with little recognition to subject matters far from those ordinarily ascribed to it. McKeon summarized the patterns in three lines of intellectual development. First was the tradition of rhetoricians themselves; second was the tradition of philosophers and theologians; and third was the tradition of logicians. The article concludes with a discussion of how these lines of development were extended in the Renaissance, with implications for the changing relationship of art and science that continues to unfold in the twentieth century around the development of technology.What would a study of rhetoric in our own period look like if rhetoric were explored by McKeon's strategy? Among rhetoricians the record of past meetings of organizations such as the Rhetoric Society of America provides evidence for how the lines of intellectual development revealed by McKeon are extended in contemporary culture. For example, we find continuing attention to the study of rhetoric as a simple verbal discipline [End Page 183] with a more or less constant, traditional subject matter of style and literature. The problems of writing and speaking remain with us, and the traditional resources of rhetoric continue to inform new investigations. In addition, we find growing interest in expanding rhetorical studies to incorporate the interpretation of new kinds of literature as well as other creative works in the cultural arts, philosophy, and the sciences and technology. These studies are often innovative, though they are also easily recognized as an extension of traditional rhetorical arts. As Thomas Conley has remarked, "the present in rhetorical studies is prelude to an encouraging future." 3Following McKeon's strategy, however, the study of rhetoric in our period would not stop with the work of formally recognized rhetoricians and scholars of rhetoric. McKeon argued that rhetoric is an unusually clear example of a general tendency among the arts and sciences for doctrines and devices to move across disciplinary boundaries and stimulate innovation in new circumstances. Rhetoric provides this example precisely because it is universal in scope and shared among all intellectual disciplines. Furthermore, only rhetoric is traditionally characterized from antiquity by many of its leading theorists and practitioners as an art of invention and discovery. Whatever their primary focus in subject matter and purpose, all disciplines are concerned at some point with invention and the eventual disposition of inventions in a medium of communication and application. Therefore, it is only proper that whatever our concern about the problems of writing and speaking well, rhetoricians should also direct their attention to innovations in other fields and disciplines, particularly sensitive to the movement of their own doctrines and devices and the consequent innovations that have occurred as a result. The focal question is one of the central issues that concerned McKeon in his study of rhetoric in the Middle Ages. How may we profitably consider the many innovations that have occurred in fields far removed from those traditionally associated with rhetoric, but with a degree of independence from the field in which they are usually celebrated?This is what McKeon himself pursued... (shrink)

In seeking general accounts of evidence, confirmation, or inference, philosophers have looked to logical relationships between evidence and hypotheses. Such logics of evidential relationship, whether hypothetico-deductive, Bayesian, or instantiationist fail to capture or be relevant to scientific practice. They require information that scientists do not generally have (e.g., an exhaustive set of hypotheses), while lacking slots within which to include considerations to which scientists regularly appeal (e.g., error probabilities). Building on my co-symposiasts contributions, I suggest some directions in (...) which a new and more adequate philosophy of evidence can move. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education by Randall Everett AllsupJuliet HessRandall Everett Allsup, Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016).As a leading voice in music education, Randall Allsup works continually to reconceptualize music education toward democratic and socially just praxis.1 He routinely challenges the field to become self-conscious of practices that limit forward movement, providing (...) powerful critiques2 and urging music education toward open possibilities.3 Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education is work that will shift our field. His comprehensive philosophy of music education looks, longs, for moral openings4 through which twenty-first-century music education may become a space of possibility. His writing interweaves stories and theory toward what he calls an "open philosophy," drawing upon the ideas of John Dewey, Maxine Greene, and Roland Barthes. Allsup introduces stories of Dapper Dan, Jiro Ono, Kafka, Atul Gawande, and the Orpheus Orchestra in New York City to illustrate powerful points about current and possible paradigms of music education.Chapter 1, "Toward Open Encounters," discusses the making and breaking of the law (tradition) and explores how tradition and the Master-Apprentice model restrict what is possible in music education. Allsup explores the nature of music education and the limitations it places upon its participants. Chapter 2, "Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise," asks fundamental questions of our field and [End Page 100] explores and challenges the "place and purpose of public schooling in a democratic society."5 Allsup speaks to the function of education and critiques music education. Chapter 3, "learning in laboratories," puts forward a Deweyan laboratory model in which a museum is at the center of the school with learning laboratories situated around it. He explores what this structural fluidity might enable and develops notions of lawmaking and lawbreaking, extending possibilities of the open encounter. The final chapter, "looking, Longing, for Moral Openings," calls on music educators to embrace a more open music education paradigm. Allsup draws upon Greene to challenge music education to move "from the predictable to the possible."6 He puts forward the Orpheus Orchestra, a conductorless orchestra, as one possibility.I situate myself as an anti-racist, anti-colonial, feminist scholar rooted in anti-oppression scholarship.7 locating my review through this framework, I elaborate upon what I see as the major strengths and limitations of this work, drawing upon Judith Butler8 and postcolonial theory. significantly, Allsup's book calls upon music education to "give an account of [it]self" and promotes a self-consciousness crucial for our field in the age of high stakes accountability measures. I contend that he provides a music education philosophy for what stuart Hall terms the "postcolonial moment"9 and ultimately positions music education as a space of possibility. Alongside these strengths, I offer a challenge toward what I view as the open possibilities of closed forms and a critique of his "pedagogy of travel and surprise."Judith Butler points to the impossibility of giving an account of oneself. she notes,I speak as an 'I,' but do not make the mistake of thinking that I know precisely all that I am doing when I speak in that way. I find that my very formation implicates the other and me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others.10Butler notes the subject's "partial opacity to [her]self."11 In Remixing the Classroom, Allsup calls upon music educators to account for the practices and traditions continually reinscribed in the field. He poses challenging but fundamental questions in the work in music education, asking readers to consider what they do unconsciously. Butler asserts we can never fully account for ourselves. Allsup challenges the field to try, pushing music educators to face hard truths and limitations of what music education is and has been. In chapter 1, for example, he argues:To call a studying musician "unmusical" is to extinguish a light; it is to act as if the future is certain and that human potential is somehow fixed. It is to act [End Page 101... (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Moral Distress: The Face of Workplace BullyingJohn S. MurrayAfter a 28–year long distinguished military career I accepted a research position in a tertiary academic health science center, which I considered to be my dream job following retirement. Initially I was to be responsible for one department. A second was added because of my expertise with disaster preparedness. Following my orientation, I immersed myself into my new roles recognizing that (...) there was much to be done to achieve the goal of getting both departmental research programs up to par with the rest of the organization. In a short time, I began to recognize one of my bosses was going to be challenging to work with.She expected that her name be included on all grant proposals and manuscripts despite making no substantial intellectual contributions to either. Additionally, she wanted unwarranted control over all research and scholarship activities I was engaged in with staff despite having no research experience. Even meeting with her to discuss my plans for the direction of research in this department, my efforts were met with argumentative and condescending behavior. She would agree to discuss my plans. When I showed up for meetings in her office she would get angry with me oftentimes for situations, which she herself created. I continued to move forward with my work feeling that how I had conducted research and scholarly work in the past, with integrity and uncompromising ethical standards, was going to be threatened. This created great moral stress for me. I felt overwhelmed, powerless and frustrated as a result of the uncertainty as to whether or not I could fulfill my responsibilities while still meeting moral obligations.Over time, my moral compass prevented me from deviating from the principles, which helped me to build a long–standing stellar reputation as a leader in the field of pediatric nursing. However, this came with a cost. Working for this particular boss was like being on an emotional rollercoaster. One day I would feel like she was pleased with my work, but the next day my efforts could be met with anger, demeaning and dismissive behaviors. Once she praised me in front of staff for the “great” work I was doing with the evidence–based practice initiative nurse leaders. The following day she reprimanded me for not working closely with this group. She was extremely well versed at singing my praises in front of staff. Behind her closed office door was a very different experience.I confided in some colleagues in this department how I was being treated. I quickly learned that all staff were treated in this manner by this one individual. They shared that condescending language and fear and intimidation were the norm. When [End Page 112] I asked them why no one had the awareness or courage to say this treatment was not right, they quickly shared with me that staff were deterred from speaking up for fear of greater bullying behaviors. Sadly, while everyone knew what was the right thing to do, institutional constraints made it nearly impossible to pursue the right course of action. It was readily apparent these nurses were missing advocacy. At that point, I decided it was important to seek a remedy to this problem recognizing it would be no easy task.Progressively, my work environment with this particular boss became intolerable. Despite working relentlessly to develop a research program, unwarranted criticism, unjustified blame, exclusion, isolation, unreasonable demands and denied opportunities persisted. By this time, I was suffering from nightmares, headaches, fear, anxiety, depression, difficulty concentrating, and problems with self–esteem. I felt like my professional competence and reputation was being unjustifiably denigrated by this one individual.In the past, I confided in trusted organizational leaders for guidance when faced with difficult situations. As such, I approached my other boss and shared what was happening. She was deeply concerned. She encouraged me to seek guidance from a safe and confidential environment where staff members can share concerns and receive assistance with how to handle these apprehensions. I had used a program like this in the past when dealing with moral distress. This experience was very helpful. In fact, I returned on multiple... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Augustine's Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to ChristianityTravis E. AblesBrian Dobell. Augustine's Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to Christianity. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii + 250. Cloth, $82.00.The question of Augustine's Platonism is famously vexed. Since Peter Brown, the standard reading holds that Augustine did not move beyond the Neoplatonism of his early dialogues until he studied the writings of the apostle Paul (...) in the mid-390s CE, after which his distinctive theology begins to emerge. In this book, Brian Dobell's basic claim is that, whatever the validity of the "volitional conversion" of book 8, Augustine is not truly converted to orthodox Christianity until he discards the Photinian (adoptionist) Christology he admits to in Confessions [hereafter conf.] 7.19.25, and discards the Platonic ascent as a means to contemplative union with God, both of which take place with the reading of Paul. But the book is equally motivated by a concern to defend the historicity of conf.; Dobell claims it is perfectly reliable, once we understand the latter half of book 7 not as a few months in 386, but as a compressed narrative spanning Augustine's entire development until his true conversion to Christianity around 395. [End Page 137]Dobell develops this argument by isolating Augustine's twofold way of salvation in the writings of the late 380s. First is the "way of authority," in which Augustine's putative Photinian Christology portrays Christ as a kind of "poor man's Plato, sent to provide a path to salvation for the uneducated masses" (96). The human Jesus is "assumed" by God and is as "a man of outstanding wisdom" (73) but is not the incarnate Son. Dobell analyzes the homo assumptus/susceptus language of the early writings, arguing that Augustine does not truly hold an orthodox Christology until 396, concordant with the development of his theology of operative grace. The second, much longer section of the book concerns the "way of reason," the intellectualist path of salvation expressed in Augustine's early obsession with the liberal disciplines. Dobell dissects the Platonic ascents of conf. 7, adducing verbal and conceptual parallels from texts ca. 387–390 (De immortalitate animae, De ordine, De libero arbitrio, De vera religione) showing how Augustine's métaphysique des degrés d'être, a concept Dobell borrows from Olivier Du Roy, provides both a means of articulating these ascents and an answer to the problem of evil. But by De doctrina christiana, Augustine has decisively rejected the Platonic ascent and the liberal disciplines, and it simply remains for his Christology to come in line for the "intellectual conversion" to be complete.Dobell's book is a significant addition to the current debate. His knowledge of the first decade or so of Augustine's literary output is impressive, and his familiarity with the secondary literature is considerable, though not encyclopedic—he misses the work of J. Patout Burns, which complicates the Pauline thesis through consideration of the anti-Donatist literature. Dobell offers magisterial and invaluable discussions of famously fraught topics such as Augustine's indecisiveness about the preexistence of the soul, or the volitional solution to the problem of evil. There are some problems with Dobell's argument, though. While his main thesis that conf. 7.9.13ff. is a kind of précis of almost a decade of intellectual development deserves serious consideration, and is an elegant solution to debates about the historicity of Augustine's narrative in conf., the supporting arguments Dobell employs are less persuasive. A major portion of his book revolves around the contention that Augustine's early, heretical Photinian Christology extends much longer than modern scholarship has realized, that Augustine rectifies this Christology in conjunction with a Pauline soteriology of grace, and that all of this has to happen before Augustine's conversion is complete. If we suspend the question of normativity inherent in deciding Augustine's "orthodoxy" (particularly prior to Chalcedon), Dobell still does not succeed in showing that the early "pedagogical" homo assumptus Christology is, in fact, adoptionist; indeed, his evidence is often rather weak (for a tacit admission, see 73). On the flip... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment by Frederick C. BeiserJohn W. YoltonFrederick C. Beiser. The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 332. Cloth, $39.50.Beiser characterizes the methodology of his study as historical and philosophical: historical in placing texts in their own context and in uncovering the intentions (...) of their authors; philosophical in reconstructing and appraising arguments (ix). Both methods are necessary for good historical work. The second is often practiced without the first, to the detriment of philosophy and its history. “A philosopher who reconstructs arguments without the aid of history indulges in mere guesswork and anachronism, measuring the standards of philosophical relevance and importance by the concerns of his own age” (x). Equally, understanding the arguments and ideas of, e.g., seventeenth-century writers, “also involves testing their truth: seeing how they cohere with one another, what their consequences are, whether they follow from the evidence adduced for them, and if they reply to the objections made against them” (x). This splendid study of the role of reason in seventeenth-century religion, science, and philosophy is a fine example of careful textual-historical scholarship with rigorous philosophical analysis.The goal of his study is to tell “the story of how rationalism, in the very specific sense of the sovereignty of reason, arose in seventeenth-century England” (5). Starting with an introduction which discusses such topics as “The Paradox of the English Enlightenment,” “Rationalism in the English Church,” “The Enlightenment and the New Sciences,” Beiser proceeds to detailed presentations and discussions of “The Protestant Challenge” (Chap. 1); Richard Hookers’s defense of reason (Chap. 2); the views of the Great Tew Circle, e.g., Falkland, Chillingworth, Hammond, Hales (Chap. 3); the Cambridge Platonists (Chap. 4); the nature of Enthusiasm (Chap. 5); John Toland and Deism (Chap. 6); and ethical rationalism (Chap. 7).Many of the topics covered have been the subjects of other books and articles. What marks Beiser’s account is the freshness of his approach, the many new insights and suggestions about the tensions between the holders of traditional doctrines and newer challenges. Beiser’s writing is clear, and the issues are carefully presented and analyzed. One of the central themes is the mistake of equating “rationalism with the critique or rejection of religion” (15), of identifying enlightenment with secularization (14). The appeals to reason often emerge from within orthodox religion, whose defenders were trying to cope with their own internal tensions. “Once we consider the Cambridge Platonists’ early reaction to predestination, it becomes clear that it was not Hobbes but Calvin who first posed the danger of atheism for them. For it was Calvin’s theology, and not Hobbes’s materialism, that inspired the fear of God that [End Page 138] they regarded as the source of atheism. In the eyes of the Cambridge Platonists, Hobbes’s materialism was only a false remedy for that fear...” (147). A similar point is made later: “the foundations of a rational theology” in Whichcote “did not arise from any need to combat a creeping Hobbesianism. Rather, it grew up from the inner struggles and torments of the Protestant soul” (165).Equally significant is Beiser’s analysis of enthusiasm, the appeals to divine inspiration rather than to reason or evidence: “We should be aware of accepting the contemporary caricature of the enthusiasts, which portrayed them as zealous and ignorant anti–intellectuals with no cogent or coherent philosophical position of their own” (187). His analysis of the enthusiasts stresses the epistemological nature of their position, rather than the usual theological, ethical, or political dimensions (193). He insists that “enthusiasm is essentially a philosophical concept. Historically, it arose as a response to the problem of the sources and criteria of religious knowledge” (187). The search for criteria is a pervasive feature of Beiser’s study: Luther’s and Calvin’s efforts to draw the boundary between faith and reason (24); Richard Hooker’s failure to “provide an epistemological foundation for his theory of natural law” (67); the need for a criterion to distinguish genuine from false revelation... (shrink)

The Italian scholar Giovanni Battista Vico is widely viewed as the first modern philosopher of history, a judgment largely based on his obscure 1744 masterpiece, New Science. In this new study Mark Lilla complicates this picture by presenting Vico as one of the most troubling of anti-modern thinkers. By combing Vico's neglected early writings on metaphysics and jurisprudence, Lilla reveals the philosopher's deep reservations about the modern outlook and shows how his science of history grew out of these very doubts. (...) In works such as the untranslated Universal Right (1720-1722), a treatise on natural law, Vico emerges as a profoundly political and theological thinker who contrasted the authoritative traditions of an idealized Rome against the corrupting skepticism endemic in modern life. Vico explicitly blamed this skepticism on the founders of modern philosophy, particularly Descartes. Placed in the context of his critique of skepticism, Vico's "new science" of history appears in a wholly new light. Though modern in form, it can be seen here for what it was: a pessimistic vindication of divine authority directed against the freedom and reason that characterize the modern age. This first truly comprehensive introduction to Vico ties his concerns for authority, politics, and civil religion to his theory of history. As such, it raises provocative questions about the subsequent intellectual development of the anti-modern tradition as it relates to the historical and social sciences of our time. It is a brilliant antidote to the "standard" reading of Vico and will transform studies of his work. (shrink)

Photo ID 279661800 © Sidewaypics|Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT Decolonization is complex, vast, and the subject of an ongoing academic debate. While the many efforts to decolonize or dismantle the vestiges of colonialism that remain are laudable, they can also reinforce what they seek to end. For decolonization to be impactful, it must be done with epistemic and cultural humility, requiring decolonial scholars, project leaders, and well-meaning people to be more sensitive to those impacted by colonization and not regularly included in the discourse. (...) INTRODUCTION Decolonization is complex. To successfully achieve decolonization, projects should incorporate the voices of those subjugated or silenced. Including such voices requires sincerely exploring who has been affected by colonialism or neocolonialism and how, as well as cultural sensitivity. In its basic use, decolonization refers to countries under colonial rule gaining independence or freedom from forms of subjugation. Additionally, scholars use the term to refer to efforts to dismantle neocolonialism and vestiges of colonialism. The process includes de-silencing subjugated voices.[1] I use decolonization in the latter way to refer to countries with technical independence. While arguably colonization ended formally with independence from colonizing powers, neocolonialism is the indirect, informal, and sometimes subtle control of the people, their economy, and political life despite formal independence from colonizing authorities. I conceptualize neocolonialism as a system that involves direct and involuntary control of another’s political, economic, or social life, impacting their worldview and ways of encountering the world. Decolonization may target actions, places, or systems like health care or AI to overcome the ills of colonialism and neocolonialism. It also may target knowledge and require rethinking how people develop their knowledge base. For example, if people grew up seeing an outside colonizer as superior, they would need to change their knowledge of superiority. Decolonization may target power, for example, changing who owns and distributes COVID-19 vaccines and who distributors exclude in the distribution of vaccines. Decolonization could require looking at those disempowered in the distribution process. Additionally, decolonization may target autonomy of persons by freeing people, ensuring human and individual rights, and respecting cultural traditions. Decolonization projects that try to de-silence by including the voices of those affected by colonialism and neocolonialism must examine inclusiveness in the context of the culture of the subrogated individuals. Examples of decolonization projects include making datasets inclusive of diverse peoples and places, returning to traditional food and eating practices, making sure hospitals in developing countries are led by locals and respectful of cultural traditions, returning unethically obtained artefacts or objects. Another project would be laying the groundwork for equality in formerly colonized countries to ensure that business ownership, education, and financial success will flow fairly to those previously victimized by colonization. Summarily, there are many strategies for decolonizing. However, it is worth asking whether the strategies have risks that undermine the goal of decolonization. I. Understanding Decolonization Discourses Many fields, from AI to politics, economics, health care, aviation, and academia, discuss decolonization. The content of the discourse on decolonization depends on the region and field discussing it. Rather than just reporting on decolonization, the discussions may be calls to action. For example, decolonization discourses reflect activism for cognitive justice, such as equal consideration of Indian or African knowledge systems in global health discourses.[2] In politics and political science, some scholars frame decolonization as an anti-western, anti-colonial movement by Africans to emancipate Africa/ns from subjugation or shift the continent to postcolonialism and post-neo-colonialism. This framing walls off non-African participants and may undermine their capacity to benefit the conversation.[3] There are other political scientists who actively support decolonization and see it as a field of activism in support of anyone and countries where colonization harmed people and development.[4] The point is that two ways of conceptualizing decolonization in politics and political science are discernible. One conceptualization is less inclusive since it alienates scholars and professionals from Western, high-income, or developed countries. The other is more inclusive. In humanitarian studies, including philosophy, some decolonization articles and conversations are efforts to end the destructive force of colonization. They focus on either the form, such as ecocide, genocide, and many others, or the geographic location, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.[5] Finally, the feelings one brings into this conversation can adversely impact how one engages in them and who they listen to or are willing to hear from. For example, anger, rage, bitterness, and hatred are emotions that are not uncommon in spaces of decolonization conversations. Decolonization conversations that originate from a place of negativity risk deepening the psychological state of victimhood and prevent people from disrupting constructively or critically engaging in the conversation.[6] II. Understanding Decolonization Strategies Decolonization strategies mainly aim to de-silence victims of domination or subjugation. People have proposed many strategies for decolonizing. These strategies may be informed by what the target is for decolonization. Decolonization can target power relations in global health. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health organizations noted the power imbalance in vaccine distribution. Decolonization could involve de-silencing those affected by neocolonialism to bring about a more balanced distribution of power and a more fair distribution of the vaccine. By analyzing who was adversely impacted by the distribution and who ought to wield power, those engaged in decolonizing advocated for positive change and equitable power relations. Equally, when being is the target of decolonization, the language of unlearning or relearning and mental decolonization take centre stage in the decolonization discourse. For example, the quest to decolonize colonized minds aims to demythologize African inferiority and Western superiority. Demythologizing African inferiority enables those engaged in the decolonization discourse to cultivate and foster African agency.[7] Finally, when knowledge production is the target of decolonization, scholars use inclusion and cognitive justice. For example, they try to alter the knowledge that underlies global health ethics.[8] “[D]decolonizing researchers aim to respectfully understand and integrate theory from Other(ed) perspectives, while also critically examining the underlying assumptions that inform their Western research framework.”[9] One common strategy that scholars use in decolonization is inclusion. It is worth asking, does including people who have been subrogated foster decolonization? Whether that is effective depends on whether included people are more heard or whether the strategies to include them create new forms of silencing. III. Inclusion and the Quest to Decolonize Evaluating how effective inclusion is in the quest to de-silence subjugated voices is important. First, inclusive strategies are not neutral. They are epistemically situated. This situatedness constrains meaning-making in different ways: how and what questions are asked, how social roles are constructed, organized or assigned, and who is admitted to the room where these conversations occur.[10] Inclusion strategies may reinforce (unchallenged) assumptions. For example, to address prejudices and stereotypes in global health images, Arsenii Alenichev and his colleagues[11] successfully inverted “one stereotypical global health image” by prompting a generative AI to produce “an image of a traditional Indian or African healer healing a White Child.” Although there were some problems with the image of the White child, this innovation is a significant, useful effort to de-embed or strip global health images of problematic pictures that mythologize White superiority and Black inferiority. Yet it is possible that using categories like traditional Indian or African reinforces unchallenged assumptions, raising key questions regarding how language and words create new stereotypes. It is common to define traditional as non-conventional, unorthodox, and informal. Yet studies continue to reveal that non-scientifically appraised healing approaches in India or Africa are not only effective but also real, meaningful, fundamental, and primary care-seeking behaviours in many communities in these regions.[12] Suppose inclusive strategies are not un-situated. These conversations may be had within the structures, language, and spaces built by or connected to colonialism. The spaces, language, places, and structures in which these conversations occur can limit who can participate and how they participate. Importantly, some conditions are not conducive to participation as equals. The allocated time for the discussion could also constrain how individuals express themselves. It is unclear who is ultimately heard. Furthermore, epistemic situatedness of inclusion can impact decolonization conversations when participants are beneficiaries of, products of, and trained by structures and systems they seek to dismantle. To enhance the decolonization project and its goals, a pressing task is to unveil and question how the circumstances may inhibit activism. If the vestiges of colonialism continue to structure the decolonization discourse invisibly, the vestiges may undermine decolonization. For example, a public health discussion that includes white Western doctors and Western pharmaceutical executives in Africa may have many local Africans at the table but could still effectively devalue their input based on built-in assumptions and biases that are vestiges of colonialism. Second, exclusion and inclusion are also not binary. Individuals may experience exclusion, even while included (the phenomenon called internal exclusion). In other words, inclusion can fail to be substantial or become a means of enhancing optics, “a way of (un)consciously weakening the radical claims being pursued.”[13] For example, in South Africa, many institutions have made significant efforts to diversify their faculties due to the promulgation of the Employment Equity Act 55.[14] The act requires South African institutions to implement employment equity that redresses the history of harmful discrimination in the country. The act further requires transforming departments and institutional administrations. Although many recognize and support the need to transform departments in South Africa, the rhetoric of transformation departs sharply from the lived experiences.[15] This misalignment between the plan and practice is evident in the underrepresentation of black people and females in senior management teams, professorships in many universities and health departments, and positions of power in some South African institutions. Those selected in the transformation of the departments have also complained of being overworked. The burden of extra work undermines their ability to develop agency and voice in the space they now occupy or fulfil key requirements that have implications for their career trajectory.[16] This is called the minority tax. Notably, "the minority tax… is the burden of extra responsibilities [placed] on faculty of colour to achieve diversity and inclusion and contributes to attrition and impedes academic promotion."[17] One challenge for decolonializing projects will be for decolonial scholars and those selected for decolonization objectives to have the humility to decline invitations, requests, roles, and platforms for which they are either unqualified or lack the capacity to fulfil. At its heart, decolonization strategies must empower those included rather than weaken them. Finally, inclusion can lead to a phenomenon known as elite capture.[18] Elite capture occurs when socially advantaged individuals in a group monopolize or exploit activism to their own benefit at the expense of the larger, struggling group. Elite capture weakens decolonization efforts from within, revealing that those likely to benefit from global inclusive efforts are those who fulfil globally constructed standards, those “already present in the room.” There is no better strategy to weaken decolonial movements than weakening the project from within by strategically positioning individuals who share physical properties with the victims of exclusion and silencing but intellectually, behaviourally, psychologically, and emotionally share more common ground with the colonizer. Such insiders may be unaware they are furthering neocolonial conditions rather than decolonizing. In relation to decolonization, particularly in global health, elite capture reveals that those whose voices are loudest in the room are not necessarily those more impacted by colonialism. They may benefit more from reinforcing colonialism. Opportunism weakens meaningful activism from within, preventing good initiatives and strategies from having their intended impact or taking substantive root.[19] This paper cannot do justice to elite capture, but it is worth noting its negative impacts. IV. Improving the Impact of Decolonization To end neo-colonialism, it is important to understand how it manifests and what to do at each level. Beyond the academic discourse, many tangible efforts exist to decolonize through de-silencing. Examples of these efforts include the ME2 movement that seeks to centre the concerns and experiences of sexually abused or harassed victims in the public discourse. At the funding level, many grant-awarding agencies like Wellcome Trust have dedicated huge budgets to studies that help them understand how they may have perpetrated colonialism or neocolonialism and what they can do differently going forward.[20] In South Africa, promulgating the Employment Equity Act 55 was a tangible attempt to entrench decolonization concerns in a country's regulatory framework. Yet, these decolonization efforts could fail to be substantive if they do not reflect cultural sensitivity. Two key components of cultural sensitivity are worth highlighting here: epistemic and cultural humility. Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue described as knowing one’s limitations and the limitations of the learning methods employed. At its simplest, it is the ability to admit when one is wrong. Cultural humility includes genuine attempts to learn about and embrace other cultures. Epistemic and cultural humility are signs of academic excellence and strength. Epistemic and cultural humility seriously acknowledge how the state of our knowledge, cognitive limitations, experiences, and backgrounds, while constraining us, also invite us to listen, learn, grow, and change. The limitations-owing account of epistemic and cultural humility suggests that “a person who is aware of her cognitive limitations and owns them is much better positioned to achieve such epistemic goods as true beliefs and understanding than someone who… simply has insight into the epistemic status of her beliefs.”[21] Epistemic and cultural humility may help prevent decolonization projects that unintentionally reinforce what they seek to dismantle. Epistemic humility calls on decolonizers to defer tasks for which they are not qualified to suitably qualified persons. Beyond this, humility supports brave scholarship that imagines and reimagines how featuring the same voices, faces, and perspectives possibly introduces new forms of domination or silencing. Cultural knowledge can lead to a more intentional way of seeking out the right people or a more diverse group than those frequently featured in decolonization conversations. This would give others more opportunities to navigate these spaces and should do so in ways that are familiar to them. One ought to be more sensitive to those who would ordinarily not be included in these conversations. Unless we radically and boldly reimagine these discussions, we risk alienating those most negatively impacted by neocolonialism. CONCLUSION Decolonization conversations are complex and the subject of academic debate. The strategies employed to decolonize can harm or help the victims of neo-colonialism. Inclusion of previously silenced individuals may not be enough to overcome the vestiges of colonialism, leading to a false inclusion, where those included feel excluded or contribute in ways reflecting their own biases and circumstances. Inclusion of an elite or people who do not truly represent the subjugated can lead to elite capture. For decolonization strategies to be impactful, for example, in the context of global health, project leaders and participants must engage in conversations employing epistemic and cultural humility. In many ways, epistemic and cultural humility can help us demythologize our assumptions of any cultural superiority or cognitive authority, allowing for diverse voices, cultures, and perspectives to emerge without domination. - [1] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [2] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [3] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh 2023. Is decolonisation Africanisation? The politics of belonging in the truly African university. Social Dynamics, 1-20. [4] Rianna Oelofsen 2015. Decolonisation of the African mind and intellectual landscape. Phronimon, 16, 130-146. [5] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [6] Pedro Alexis Tabensky 2008. The Postcolonial Heart of African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 27, 285-295. [7] Nicholas M. Creary 2012. African Intellectuals and Decolonization, Ohio, Ohio University Press. [8] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [9] Vivetha Thambinathan & Elizabeth Anne Kinsella 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Creating Spaces for Transformative Praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 16094069211014766. [10] Abimbola Seye 2023. Knowledge from the global South is in the global South. Journal of Medical Ethics, 49, 337. [11] A. Alenichev, P. Kingori & K. P. Grietens 2023. Reflections before the storm: the AI reproduction of biased imagery in global health visuals. Lancet Glob Health. [12] Jonathan K. Burns & Andrew Tomita 2015. Traditional and religious healers in the pathway to care for people with mental disorders in Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 50, 867-877. [13] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh & Cornelius Ewuoso 2023. What type of inclusion does epistemic injustice require? Journal of Medical Ethics, jme-2023-109091. [14] 1998. Employment Equity Act. In: GOVERNMENT, S. A. (ed.) 19370. [15] Dina Zoe Belluigi & Gladman Thondhlana 2019. ‘Why mouth all the pieties?’ Black and women academics’ revelations about discourses of ‘transformation’ at an historically white South African university. Higher Education, 78, 947-963. [16] Juliet Ramohai & Khomotso Marumo 2016. Women in Senior Positions in South African Higher Education: A Reflection on Voice and Agency. 231, 135-157. [17] J. Trejo 2020. The burden of service for faculty of color to achieve diversity and inclusion: the minority tax. Mol Biol Cell, 31, 2752-2754. [18] Olufemi Taiwo 2020. Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference. The Philosopher, 108, 7. [19] Margarita Kurbatova & Elena Kagan 2016. Opportunism of University Lecturers As a Way to Adaptate the External Control Activities Strengthening. Journal of Institutional Studies, 8, 116-136. [20] Jeremy Farrar. 2022. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme [Online]. Available from: https://wellcome.org/news/update-wellcomes-anti-racism-programme [Accessed August 10, 2022 2022]. [21] Katherine Dormandy 2018. Does Epistemic Humility Threaten Religious Beliefs? Journal of Psychology and Theology, 46, 292-304. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE ROLE OF AN ULTIMATE AUTHORITY IN RESTORATIVE JUSTICE: A GIRARDIAN ANALYSIS Sara Osborne I. Restorative or Retributive Justice South African Episcopal Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu's account of the gritty practicality of reconciliation versus retribution in his book, No Future Without Forgiveness, focuses long overdue attention on Restorative Justice, a law reform movement probably better known in international than in American legal circles. A persuasive assertion of Restorative Justice (...) advocates in their critique of increasingly retributive practices such as mandatory minimum sentencing, mandatory arrest, death penalty, juvenile incarceration, "three strikes" legislation, no parole, diminished prisoner services, to name a few, is that reintegrating offenders back into a community is a much more effective deterrence to anti-social violence than punishment alone. They have also observed that communitarian ideals and practices, more visible in traditional cultures1 are more conducive to Restorative goals ofreconciliation and reintegration than are practices of retributive justice rooted in ideals of individual rights. Therefore, such adjudicatory practices should serve as models for preferable alternatives. 1An examination ofrestorative justice under code-based systems of law (European, Roman Law) might also reveal more affinities since the focus ofthese systems is to define the permissible, rather than the impermissible. Code-based law begins with the commons; rightsbased law begins with the individual. 80Sara Osborne However, Western-style retributive justice remains the primary model for international law and Restorative Justice is the prophetic "outsider" voice. So, it is appropriate to ask to what extent and under what conditions are Western retributive justice systems able to incorporate or accommodate adjudicatory practices ofnon-Western or traditional cultures? How critical a factor is religion? These questions will appear wherever Western Law struggles to bring more cultural diversity under a unifying umbrella and they deserve close scrutiny. René Girard's insights into the relationship between law, religion, culture and violence are helpful in identifying practical implications ofthe restorative vision and systemic weaknesses ofretribution, and perhaps illuminating a third way. The metaphor of an organ transplant may be useful: without a genetic match between host and donor both risk destruction. It is the thesis of this paper that that genetic material is a very inclusive conceptualization of "religion" which I have named "Ultimate Authority," drawing on Girard's mimetic theory for the theoretical analysis. In other words, "religion" is indeed, always and everywhere, a critical factor in culture-specific institutions ofjustice. A Girardian understanding ofthe relationship between Ultimate Authority and criminaljustice systems indicates that while there are valuable lessons to be learned from trans-cultural dialogue, wholesale transplants may not be possible, or even advisable because conditions essential for comparable success do not exist in Western legal culture. This paper first presents some background about Restorative Justice, followed by an outline ofRené Girard's mimetic theory to define "Ultimate Authority." The second half of the paper describes alternative adjudicatory processes which have attracted the attention of Restorative Justice advocates and concludes with suggestions about future directions for criminal justice policy discussion. Restorative Justice is a movement which drew its initial energy from Civil Rights era non-violent social action. It has found avid supporters among those whose activism for socialjustice is faith-based as well as those whose activism is rooted in more secular communitarian ideologies. Perhaps because of its international following, a significant contribution ofthe movement has been to initiate trans-cultural dialogue about criminal justice, fostering an increased use of alternative dispute resolution techniques, primarily mediation. Restorative Justice doctrine insists that all crime is personal, evidence ofa broken relationship between victim, offender, and community. Restoring "right relationship" between all parties is both a moral and legal obligation; "justice" to be just must go well beyond addressing the specifics of the act which effected the break. In contrast, the focus of The Role ofAn Ultimate Authority81 retributive justice appears abstract, procedural, and narrow in pursuit of impartiality or neutrality, the ideal of Blind Justice.2 Howard Zehr, a consultant on criminal justice and a Canadian Mennonite who wrote the classic Restorative Justice primer, Changing Lenses: A New Focusfor Crime andJustice, describes the retributive criminaljustice process as "a drama between two abstractions," meaning a criminal and a victim, where the "victim" is even further abstracted... (shrink)

The Meditations on the Life of Christ was the most popular and influential devotional work of the later Middle Ages. With its lively dialogue and narrative realism, its poignant and moving depictions of the Nativity and Passion, and its direct appeals to the reader to feel love and compassion, the Meditations had a major impact on devotional practices, religious art, meditative literature, vernacular drama, and the cultivation of affective experience. This volume is a critical edition, with English translation and (...) commentary, of a hitherto-unpublished Italian text that McNamer argues is likely to be the original version of this influential masterpiece. Livelier and far more compact than the Latin text, the Italian "short text" possesses a stylistic and textual integrity that appears to testify to its primacy among early versions of the Meditations. The evidence also suggests that it was composed by a woman, a Poor Clare from Pisa--an author whose work McNamer contends was obscured by the anonymous Franciscan friar who subsequently altered and expanded the text. In bringing to light this unique Italian version and building a case for its origins and importance, this book will encourage a fresh look at the Meditations and serve as a foundation for further scholarship and debate concerning some of the most compelling subjects in Italian and European literary and cultural history, including the role of women in the invention of new genres and spiritual practices, the early development of Italian prose narrative, the rise of vernacular theology, and the history of emotion. McNamer's volume will be of significant interest to medievalists, especially those who study medieval women, devotional literature, manuscript studies, and textual criticism. The linguistic analysis expands that audience to include those of a philological bent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 533 Grammar of Assent. Yet whereas Reid had urged a fundamental agree· ment on first principles on the intuitive basis of common sense, Newman thought such principles were discovered inductively and that there might he much disagreement. It was the disagreement itself that led to the need for a better understanding of the reasoning process. In place of common sense, Newman appealed to the illative sense. In (...) l:his regard, Newman directly rejeots Locke's distinction between demon· stration and probability. Various kinds of probabilistic reasoning for Newman can lead to a certainty beyond reasonable doubt. Ferreira claims that in this regard Newman is following a strategy not unlike l:hat of Reid. Both Reid's common sense and Newman's illative sense are natural. However, the former can discover only self-evident 'truths while the latter is part of the process of reasoning itself. Ferreira pro· vides a very full discussion of the manner in which these outlooks led Newman into the tradition of a naturalistic response to scepticism. Both philosophers and intellectual historians will find Professor Ferreira's volume useful and informative. In a very sprightly man· ner she has explored a tradition of British intellectual life that often has remained ignored. She has displayed very considerable daring in attempting to cover two centuries of thought. The most valuable sec· tions are no doubt those on Reid and Newman where she has care· fully illuminated a major intelleotual path not.taken hy most late nine· teenth· and twentieth-century British philosophers hut which exerted very considerable influence during the first three-quarters of rthe nine· teenth century. The volume also prepares the way for intellectual his· torians to examine what were the social and struotural reasons within British intellectual life for these particular anti-sceptical strategies. FRANK M. TURNER Yale University New Haven, Connecticut The Later Wittgenstein: The Emergence of a New Philosophical Meth· od. By S. STEPHEN HILMY. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Pp. viii+ 340. This is a hook of extraordinary scholarly density. Its 226 pages of text are complemented hy 94 pages of notes, 6 pages of bibliography, and 14 pages of indices. A heavy texture of relentlessly documented argument, Hilmy's hook is neither for philosophical novices nor for!:hose whose interest in Wittgenstein is merely moderate. To profit from 534 BOOK REVIEWS this hook, the reader must share the intense concern that led the author to plough through Wittgenstein's vast Nachlass. But readers must also he willing to contend with a style of writing that is often forbiddingly and needlessly convoluted, and with a tone that is sometimes snide. More will he said about these problems below, after a discussion of the hook's purposes. Hilmy believes Wittgenstein scholarship to he in a sorry state. The problem stems, he thinks, from blunders committed hy the literary executors. He writes, " The unhappy state of Wittgenstein scholarship is in large part due to the fragmented and ahistorical character of the potpourri of published remarks wirth which scholars have been work· ing" (viii). Indeed, his confidence in the published materials is so low that he often refers to them as Wittgenstein's "works" (in quotation marks) to signal his disdain for the editors' selections and arrange· ments. The scope of this volume is intentionally limited; little or no assess· ment of Wittgenstein's conclusions is offered. But Hilmy does claim to he taking a necessary first step which, he says, "much of the volumin· ous literature... has dismally failed to take" (3); namely, an examination of.the historical development of Wittgenstein's later way of thinking (Denkweise) as chronicled in the Nachlass. His appeal to the manuscript material is based on his belief that rthe "conglomerated fragments" (9) in the published works are best understood in their original contexts and in light of later contexts into which Wittgenstein placed them in the process of revision. Much of the stylistic character of Hilmy's hook stems from.the necessarily laborious nature of trac· ing these origins and transpositions, and from his sense of getting Witt· genstein right for the first time. After sorting through some preliminary issues concerning Wittgenstein 's compositional style, Hilmy produces an... (shrink)

Historians are now generally agreed that the Darwinian recognition and institutionalization of the polygenist position was more than merely nominal.194 Wallace, Vogt, and Huxley had led the way, and we may add Galton (1869) to the list of those leading Darwinians who incorporated a good deal of polygenist thinking into their interpretions of human history and racial differences.195 Eventually “Mr. Darwin himself,” as Hunt had suggested he might, consolidated the Darwinian endorsement of many features of polygenism. Darwin's Descent of Man (...) was published in the same year that the Anthropological Institute was founded, and it was no coincidence that it was broadly congruent with Knoxian/ Anthropological race science. Recent scholarship has stressed the derivative character of the Descent, and Darwin's views on race were clearly influenced by the earlier interpretations of the abovecited Darwinians.196However, although the Descent was written in the light of the anthropological struggles of the 1860s, it is essential to acknowledge its origins in Darwin's notebooks of the late 1830s and early 1840s. A good deal of the congruence between Darwinian and Knoxian conceptions of race may be traced back to these early notebook constructions. As these document, Darwin, like Knox, brought to his very earliest conceptions of human evolution a “commitment to the idea of human races as discrete biological units with distinct moral and mental traits.”197 The young Darwin had been concerned with the same sorts of questions on racial biological and cultural differences that preoccupied Knox around the same time, and he was committed to as ruthless a naturalism. Apart from their individual and independent debts to Quetelet's “moral statistics,” both Darwin and Knox drew heavily on the general themes of struggle and adaptation in the contemporary “common context” of biological and social thought.198 Given their common context, the broad general similarities between the Knoxian laws of race antagonism and subordination and the Darwinian struggle for existence between races need occasion no strained historical explanation of direct influence.199Nevertheless, in more explicit ways, the Descent does show the conflation of Knoxian/Anthropological and Darwinian racial views, and Darwin located his discussion of these issues squarely within the dispute “of late years” between polygenists and monogenists.200 His mature views on race were shaped by the contemporaneous confrontations and negotiations between the Darwinians and the Anthropologicals. It is within this context that the minor historical puzzle of Darwin's failure to acknowledge Knox's “generic descent” may be explained. Apart from the difficulties of integration and interpretation of his scattered theoretical writings, Knox, through his adoption by Hunt and the Anthropologicals, became identified with anti-Darwinism and therefore with antievolutionism.201 Moreover, Knox, the disreputable and marginal “savage radical” and lately resurrected and equally unsavory “Anthropological,” was hardly an acceptable “precursor.” Yet, paradoxically, it was via the antithetical medium of the Anthropological platform that Knox's race science made an indirect and unacknowledged, but lasting, impact on the Darwinian anthropological model.In the Descent, Darwin argued that racial traits arose very early in the prehistory of man, were not biologically adaptive, and were therefore relatively fixed in character. By viewing race formation as a distant and closed episode of human history, Darwin endorsed the Knoxian categories of race as fixed and unalterable types. Although he thought it irrelevant whether human races were called species or subspecies, he conceded more to the Knoxian view than Huxley by granting that a naturalist confronted for the first time by specimens of Negro and European man “might feel himself fully justified in ranking the races of man as distinct species.”202 Consistent with the Knoxian interpretation, struggle, competition, and survival occurred between racial units rather than between individuals and, in Darwin's view, accounted for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and the inevitable triumph of the more intellectual and moral races over the lower and more degraded ones.Darwin was as insistent as Knox on the biological basis of intellectual and moral differences, and, through his tendency to reduce social and cultural differences to biology, he maintained the essential Knoxian/Anthropological link between race and culture.203 For above all, the Descent did much more than offer a naturalistic explanation of human evolution: it proffered social interpretation, justification, and prescription, and its timely appearance gave a powerful boost to the “moralizing naturalism” of Huxley and Galton, and to Spencer's “Social Darwinism.”204 We may draw a straight line from Knox's “moral anatomy,” through Hunt's “anthropology,” and on to “Social Darwinism” and the “social surgeons” of the eugenics movement.The Darwinians did not, of course, we their tendency to naturalize existing economic and social relations to Knox or Hunt and the Anthropologicals—they were simply reflecting the same general intellectual trend that had affected Knox and the Anthropologicals as well. And in the larger context, the forces that had created a climate receptive to Knox's racism had intensified: in the seventies, the need to justify white imperialism and class and racial inequalities was greater than ever. Scientific racism no longer appeared an aberration but the very essence of the scientific study of man, taking on a newfound respectability in the “new” evolutionary anthropology. But in more specific ways, through the struggle between the Darwinians and Anthropologicals for scientific and ideological hegemony, Knox's “moral anatomy” was institutionalized and perpetuated in late Victorian scientific racism. In the process, the delicate balance that Knox had maintained between his radicalism and his racism was outweighed by conservative institutional and social needs, and his “moral anatomy” was retooled — first by Hunt, and then by the Darwinians — to fit those needs. (shrink)

What is the relationship between fear, danger, and the law? Cass Sunstein attacks the increasingly influential Precautionary Principle - the idea that regulators should take steps to protect against potential harms, even if causal chains are uncertain and even if we do not know that harms are likely to come to fruition. Focusing on such problems as global warming, terrorism, DDT, and genetic engineering, Professor Sunstein argues that the Precautionary Principle is incoherent. Risks exist on all sides of social situations, (...) and precautionary steps create dangers of their own. Diverse cultures focus on very different risks, often because social influences and peer pressures accentuate some fears and reduce others. Instead of adopting the Precautionary Principle, Professor Sunstein argues for three steps: a narrow Anti-Catastrophe Principle, designed for the most serious risks; close attention to costs and benefits; and an approach called 'libertarian paternalism', designed to respect freedom of choice while also moving people in directions that will make their lives go better. He also shows how free societies can protect liberty amidst fears about terrorism and national security. Laws of Fear represents a major statement from one of the most influential political and legal theorists writing today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Meeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of ThoughtDeborah SommerMeeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of Thought. Edited by Irene Bloom and Joshua A. Fogel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Pp. 391.Meeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of Thought, a volume of eleven essays written in honor of Wing-tsit Chan and William Theodore (...) de Bary, proposes to explore how Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions have responded to and have influenced other traditions (Buddhist, Taoist, folk, Japanese nativist, and so on) in China and Japan. The essays are arranged first geographically (seven articles on China precede four on Japan) and then roughly chronologically. All essays, save one, describe Sung or post-Sung developments. A few sentences per essay must suffice in this review.Irene Bloom's "Three Visions of Jen" is the only essay on the classical period. Informed especially by Wing-tsit Chan's work on jen and shaped by Sung and later notions of the transmission of the way, the essay examines the notion of jen in the Analects, the Mencius, and Chu Hsi's "Jen shuo" (Discussion of jen), succinctly [End Page 318] emphasizing the significant differences of perspective therein. Nodding to the book's larger intent of examining intellectual interactions with other traditions, some attention is given in the conclusion to comparisons with the Mohist, Yangist, and Ch'an traditions. Rodney Taylor's "Chu Hsi on Meditation" is also deeply indebted to Wing-tsit Chan and starts by resurveying much terrain already explored in Chan's 1989 "Chu Hsi and Quiet-Sitting" (in Chu Hsi: New Studies, published by University of Hawai'i Press). Taylor enlarges upon Chan's work especially in his discussion of Chu Hsi's practices of breath-control techniques to improve health. In keeping with the larger direction of the book, Taylor contrasts Chu's emphasis on quiet sitting as a support for study with the different spiritual goals of Ch'an Buddhism.Patricia Ebrey's "Sung Neo-Confucian Views on Geomancy" examines a topic that is seldom encountered in American scholarship: the attitudes of such figures as Ssu-ma Kuang, Ch'eng I, Chu Hsi, and Ts'ai Yan-ting toward popular practices governing the placement of graves. Ebrey outlines the views of those who, as it were, are "for" or "against" geomancy (Chu and Ts'ai took geomancy seriously, although Ssu-ma and Ch'eng viewed it with apprehension) but also provides textual evidence that allows one to see the grayer areas between support for, and condemnation of, feng shui and other arts. Julia Ching's "Chu Hsi and Taoism" considers Chu's interpretations of such classical texts as the I ching, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Ch'u tzu and also assays his commentaries on such later texts as the Ts'an-t'ung-ch'i (an alchemical text Chu commented on with the assistance of Ts'ai Yan-ting) and the Yin-fu-ching (a commentary that Ching concludes is most likely not Chu's work). She also explores in some detail the specifics of Chu's regimen of breathing practices.Moving from specific thinkers of the Sung to general developments in the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties, Chn-fang Y's "The Cult of Kuan-yin in Ming-Ch'ing China: A Case of Confucianization of Buddhism?" describes how the cult of Kuan-yin served the aims of Confucian family values and facilitated the realization of women's domestic expectations of filiality and fertility. Y explores the little-studied practice of ke-ku, or the cutting off of one's flesh to feed another, and relates Kuan-yin's role as a protector of those who engage in such filial excisions.Koichi Shinohara's "Ta-hui's Instructions to Tseng K'ai: Buddhist 'Freedom' in the Neo-Confucian Context" returns to the Sung but continues the focus on Buddhism, finding an example of Buddhist-Confucian interaction in the religious instruction given by the monk Ta-hui to a vice minister of rites. But what is particularly Confucian about minister Tseng K'ai's interest in Buddhism? The... (shrink)

Gay Ethics is an anthology that addresses ethical questions involving key moral issues of today--sexual morality, outing, gay and lesbian marriages, military service, anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action policies, the moral significance of sexual orientation research, and the legacy of homophobia in health care. It focuses on these issues within the social context of the lives of gay men and lesbians and makes evident the ways in which ethics can and should be reclaimed to pursue the moral good for gay men (...) and lesbians. Gay Ethics is a timely book that illustrates the inadequacies of various moral arguments used in regard to homosexuality. This book reaches a new awareness for the standing and treatment of gay men and lesbians in society by moving beyond conventional philosophical analyses that focus exclusively on the morality of specific kinds of sexual acts, the nature of perversion, or the cogency of scientific accounts of the origins of homoeroticism. It raises pertinent questions about the meaning of sexuality for private and public life, civics, and science.Some of the issues covered: Sexual Morality Outing Same-Sex Marriage Military Service Anti-Discrimination Laws Affirmative Action Policy The Scientific Study of Sexual Orientation Bias in Psychoanalysis Homophobia in Health Care Gay Ethics presents a wide range of perspectives but remains united in the common purpose of illuminating moral arguments and social policies as they involve homosexuality. The chapters challenge social oppression in the military, civil rights, and the social conventions observed among gay men and lesbians themselves. This book is applicable to a broad range of academics working in gay and lesbian studies and because of its current content, is of interest to an educated lay public. It will be a standard reference point for future discussion of the matters it addresses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:,178 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in accord with Thomas on certain important points, but his own theology is more in the spirit of Plato and Augustine. Professor Kristeller's vast learning is at the service of admirably balanced conclusions. Not everyone will agree with all his interpretations; Ficino perhaps did not imagine himself to be "constructing a system of philosophy" (p. 96) since the very title of his work, Theologia platonica, (...) suggests that he continues, with new materials, the labor of mediaeval theolo#ans. And Ficino's doctrine of the continuity of the supernatural life of the soul in this world and the next (p. 120) seems to be completely in accord with Thomas. But the author's very careful scholarly method and sound general conclusions are beyond criticism. Two hitherto unpublished Latin texts are printed in critical edition at the end of the French lecture, the Opus aureum in Thomistas by Baptists Mantuanus, which is anti-Thomas, and the Opusculum ad Laurentium Medicem on beatitude, by Vincentius Bandellus, which is pro-Thomas. Like Professor Kristeller's fine lecture, these new texts are a permanent contribution to scholarship. PAUL J. W. MILLER University of Colorado The Anatomy of Leviathan. By F. S. McNeilly. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968. Pp. 264. $8.50) The one thing about which Hobbes's commentators have agreed is the absence of any significant process of development in the several statements of his philosophic views. This has been most evident in their willingness to use the various texts as a common repository from which evidence for their interpretations could be drawn with little regard for its specific textual origin. Notoriously, no consensus has emerged from such endeavors and McNeilly believes this method of interpreting Hobbes far too indiscriminate. He contends that careful examination of the differing expressions and contexts of apparently recurrent arguments will show, in many cases, not the same argument repeated several times, but several different arguments. And these, properly discriminated, reveal a definite pattern of development culminating, in Leviathan, with a political theory substantially different from that of the earlier works. While the political theory of the Elements of Law and De Cive consists of a series of predictions founded on the known psychological tendencies of men, the theory of Leviathan, MeNeilly contends, is independent of any particular concept of human nature. Rather it is a "formal system of necessarily true propositions" (p. 213) constituting "a systematic analysis of value systems generally" (p. 245). Excepting two introductory chapters, the whole of McNeilly's argument is given over to substantiating this radical thesis, his point of departure being Hobbes's allegedly shifting views on method which are taken to vary somewhat inconsistently in the earlier works among self evidence, conventionalist and hypothetico-deductive theories and combinations of these. By contrast, in Leviathan, McNeilly argues, Hobbes expounds a conventionalist view with "clarity and persistence" (pp. 84-85). When this BOOK REVIEWS 479 conventionalism is combined with the adoption of mathematics as the paradigm of sound science, it leads Hobbes to the view that pohtical theory can be constructed as a formal system of necessary propositions because he believes that mathematics is about the world and extends this mistake to formal systems generally. These methodological commitments then, render any concept of human nature irrelevant to political theory. McNeilly's task in the second main section of the book is to show that in contrast to the earlier works, and contrary to all appearances, the Leviathan's account of human nature is completely neutral with regard to any possible set of motives and hence, wholly formal. Specifically he argues that materialism and mechanism play no active role in Hobbes's account of the passions and that the psychological egoism characteristic of the Elements and the fourth part of De Corpore is abandoned. (Throughout it is assumed that De Corpore was substantially complete before Leviathan was composed; this may not be true of the fourth part, as McNeilly recognizes, but he is undeterred.) The formal account of the passions in Leviathan then is formally compatible with either egoistic or nonegoistic interpretations of human motivation. Similarly, it is argued that Hobbes gives up his pessimism about men as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 277-278 [Access article in PDF] John Hedley Brooke, Margaret J. Osler, and Jitse M. van der Meer, editors. Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Journals Division, 2001. Pp. xiii + 376. Cloth, $39.00. Paper, $25.00. Some twenty years ago, when I submitted a dissertation proposal to explore connections between theologies of creation and views of scientific (...) knowledge in the seventeenth century, my doctoral committee was not initially enthusiastic—my idea might make a good dissertation in religion, but was it really history of science? I doubt I would have a similar experience today. Not only has the "warfare" thesis of science and religion been laid permanently to rest, historians have begun seriously to question whether it makes sense even to treat "religion" and "science" in an essentialist manner as separate ways of thinking that do not ordinarily interact. Many detailed case studies demonstrating a variety of fascinating, often important connections between science and religion have appeared from leading scholars in the past two decades. This trend continues in the latest volume of Osiris, which contains sixteen essays documenting various ways in which religious beliefs have influenced the actual content and presentation of science.The volume opens with two companion essays laying out the terrain. First, Brooke engages the new methodological and conceptual problems that confront historians following the demise of the "warfare" thesis. Then Stephen Wykstra offers criteria for sorting out the various roles for metaphysical and religious beliefs (which he distinguishes) in shaping scientific knowledge. The case studies begin with E. Jamil Ragep's essay on medieval Islamic astronomy, arguing that religion sometimes had a constructive role—a rather novel claim for Islamic science, he points out. Noah J. Efron and Menachem Fisch show how early modern Jewish exegetical practices influenced David b. Solomon Gans's interpretations of astronomical texts, and quite possibly his interpretation of nature also. A Christian astronomer is next, as Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein detail how Johannes Kepler's theology contributed directly to the discovery of scientific laws. Maurice A. Finnocchiaro then reviews various accounts of the Galileo affair, finding far more conflict in the subsequent historiography of the events than in the trial itself.Moving from astronomy to natural philosophy, Margaret G. Cook's essay on Robert Boyle examines the web of connections between theology, the mechanical philosophy, and [End Page 277] "the Aristotelian philosophy that he sought to replace." She demonstrates that Boyle used the classical art/nature distinction "to interpret the biblical account of the Creation and to argue that chemical techniques offered experimental confirmation that the world, created by art, worked by the same mechanical principles as artificial objects, not by the inherent agency of Aristotelian nature" (136). Margaret J. Osler also writes about Boyle. Contrary to the traditional view that final causes were expunged from science by the mechanical philosophy—a view that originated in the "positivism and scientific optimism" of the postwar period (168)—she proves that final causality remained central to the thought of Boyle and Pierre Gassendi. The essay by Stephen D. Snobelen presents substantial evidence that the famous General Scholium, appended to the second edition of Isaac Newton's Principia, was a carefully worded declaration of Newton's heterodox theology. "A Trinitarian," Snobelen concludes, "could not have written the General Scholium" (186). He also shows the degree to which Newton's theology shaped his overall natural philosophy, decisively debunking the late Richard S. Westfall's view that such influences could not be found.The final seven essays are mainly devoted to nineteenth-century science. Michael J. Crowe documents several ways in which Christian beliefs about divine goodness and the Incarnation affected astronomy. Martin Fichman shows how Alfred Russel Wallace's theism—not merely a vague spiritualism, as traditional accounts claim—"shaped the cognitive content of his mature evolutionary synthesis, which included a theoretical reconceptualization of the scope of natural selection" (227). In a revisionist account of Charles Darwin's philosophy of "nature," Phillip R. Sloan challenges the received view that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images of Ancient Rome in Late Eighteenth-Century Neapolitan HistoriographyMelissa CalaresuThe case of the late Neapolitan enlightenment, the variety and sophistication of which has been little recognized outside of Italian scholarship, illustrates the significance of particular regional concerns and intellectual traditions in the development of enlightened movements in Europe. 1 This becomes apparent when examining how Neapolitans looked to their own past in relation to the unique set of (...) political and social problems of the Kingdom of Naples. In this article I shall examine a number of historical writings published in the 1780s. This was a decade of intense intellectual activity which saw the publication of the defining works of the later Neapolitan enlightenment, such as Gaetano Filangieri’s Scienza della legislazione from 1780 and Francesco Mario Pagano’s Saggi politici between 1783 and 1785. 2 It was also the decade in which Giuseppe Maria Galanti’s Storia filosofica e politica delle nazioni antiche e moderne [End Page 641] introduced in translation important texts of the British and French Enlightenments, and the journal Scelta miscellanea briefly became an important focal point of collaboration and intellectual exchange for reform-minded intellectuals in Naples. 3 The impetus which bound together these many projects of the 1780s was twofold: on one hand, the growing awareness of the particular problems of Neapolitan society and of the urgent need for reform, expressed through the language and concerns of the wider enlightened movement; and at the same time a revived sense of a distinct cultural and political identity. The writing of history, even of the most remote age, did not escape these concerns.The cultural renewal of the 1780s brought new histories of the Kingdom, and in these Rome played an essential role. As Naples’s most powerful neighbor in ancient times, Rome defeated the Samnites, the tribe which had inhabited the Kingdom, and brought the region under Imperial control. From the Middle Ages the universal pretensions of the Roman papacy had continually threatened the temporal authority of Neapolitan rulers, and the symbol of these pretensions had survived into the eighteenth century with the offering each year of a feudal homage, the Chinea, to Rome. It was against this threat which Pietro Giannone’s anti-clericalism in the Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (1723) was directed. 4 The symbol of Rome, ancient and modern, served as an effective foil for Neapolitan intellectuals who believed that the development of good government in the Kingdom had been frustrated by the interference of outside powers.This interference was perceived as having broken the natural bond between the rulers of Naples and their subjects. The Spanish viceroys already had an established and especially reviled place in this history of misgovernment in Naples. 5 The arrival of Charles III in 1734 and the establishment of an autonomous monarchy in the Kingdom broke this history and brought a new optimism for the possibility of reform. As regalisti, the reformers of the end of the [End Page 642] eighteenth century continued their efforts to strengthen the jurisdictional rights of the now autonomous Bourbon monarchy against both the Papacy and the feudal nobility within the Kingdom. 6 Within these historiographical and political traditions Rome was clearly recognized as a recurring symbol of oppression and obstacle to Naples’s sovereignty, and late eighteenth-century historians looked back to a period before the arrival of the ancient Romans to find a native tradition which could inform contemporary reform and upon which a cultural identity could be constructed.Italian writers, from the Renaissance, had charted the early history of the various city-states, duchies, and kingdoms in the Italian peninsula relative to the rise and fall of ancient Rome. Despite the local patriotism which these histories expressed, Rome remained a powerful symbol and model of civilization, and it was from such a model that both politics and culture were discussed and compared in Europe. Consequently, interest in pre-Roman Italy most often related to the reconstruction of the origins and early history of Rome, and it was towards this which most antiquarians and historians worked in their attempts to understand the causes for its rise. 7 In any case antiquarian interest in pre-Roman... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:82 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY phy) than the aspects considered in the earlier chapters. The attempts of these men to formulate theories of the cosmos and of natural phenomena, to take the place of Aristotle's natural philosophy, are described as honest and original speculative endeavors, with a few features which can be construed as anticipations of seventeenth-century scientific philosophy, but basically lacking the soundness of method and evidence that (...) could make them adequate substitutes for the Aristotelian system. "The Aristotelian tradition of natural philosophy," as Kristeller states, "was not overthrown by the outside attacks of the humanists or Platonists, nor by the suggestive theories of the natural philosophers. It yielded only in and after the seven~ teenth century, when the new science of Galileo and his successors was able to deal with its subject matter on the basis of a firmly established and superior method" (p. 96). All of the essays in this book are distinguished by their concern for historical truth and objectivity, by their attempt to present the thought of the eight authors in the context of the times and in terms of the interests and purposes of the writers themselves, and by the rich and enlightened perspectives of historical understanding brought to bear on the subjects discussed. But what is most attractive, and indeed striking, in this work of Kristeller, as in the other books and essays he has written on Renaissance thought, is his own conviction that the cultural and philosophical ideals which characterized the Italian Renaissance are of intrinsic and enduring value in their own right.Unlike many other expositers and partisans of Renaissance thought, who extol it because it anticipated modem science, or because it was secularist,or anti-scholastic, or "this-worldly"rather than "other-worldly", Kristeller admires it for just what it was. And to those who define philosophy as logical analysis, or as existentialism,or as pragmatism or neo=seholasticism, and on that basis claim that the Italian Renaissance made no contribution to philosophy, Kristeliermakes no apologies. There is no necessary repugnance between scholarship and philosophy, or between original thought and an understanding and appreciation of the classics,nor is cultural barbarism a necessary prerequisite of the pursuit of truth. The values which Kristellerdefends in our time are very much those which Erasmus defended in the sixteenth century. "There is such a thing as the autonomy of culture," Kristeller remarks (p. 94), "and it has always been the task and duty of scholars to defend this territory against the deeper inroads of religious and politicalinfluences." The inroads in our time have been made by differentfanaticisms than those of the sixteenth century, but the defense of the integrity of scholarship and of liberal culture has been a task and duty to which Paul Kristeller has been faithful throughout his long and fruitfulcareer. ER~S~ A. MooDY University of California, Los Angeles Ren$ Descartes: Regulae ad direct~onem ingenii. Texte critique ~tabli par Giovanni Crapulli, avec la version hollandaise du XVH ~m~ si~ele. (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. -" Archives Intemationales d'histeire des iddes, t. 12. Pp. xxxiii + 80 + 80* + 40. Guilders 38.75.) This edition of the Regulae is important because for the first time since the great AdamTannery edition of 1896--1913 a major work of Descartes has been independently re-edited from the sources according to the most advanced editorial principles. The historian of philosophy -the user--will ask four questions: (1) Why a new edition? (2) What does it offer? (3) How does it affect the AT text? (4) What edition should be used and cited? Here briefly, are the answers as one user sees them. 1. The Regulae were posthumously published in 1701. Besides this edito princeps (A) there exists the so-called Hanover manuscript (H) with emendations by Leibniz (L). These were kdam's sources. But the Regulae became known first through the Dutch translation of Glazemaker, published in 1684 (N) which Adam knew but did not use. This led Dr. Crapulli to a review of the whole editorial problem. He concluded that A, H and N were prepared from BOOK REVIEWS 83 three different manuscripts, none of them Descartes's original (which is lost... (shrink)

The study of masculinity, particularly in peacebuilding and transitional justice contexts, is gradually emerging. The article outlines three fissures evident in the embryonic scholarship, that is the privileging of direct violence and its limited focus, the continuities and discontinuities in militarised violence into peace time, and the tensions between new masculinities and wider inclusive social change. The article argues for the importance of making visible the tensions between different masculinities and how masculinities are deeply entangled with systems of power (...) and post-conflict social, political and economic outcomes. An analysis of masculine power within and between the structures aimed at building the peace in societies moving out of violence is considered essential. The article argues for an analysis that moves beyond a preoccupation with preventing violent masculinities from manifesting through the actions of individuals to considering how hidden masculine cultures operate within a variety of hierarchies and social spaces. (shrink)

In this article, I consider a curious blind spot in constitutional scholarship concerning the resurging rural/urban divide—a readily evident phenomenon closely associated with political resentment and anti-establishment sentiments—and how we may begin to address that challenge through creative constitutional designs. Specifically, I draw upon insights from comparative constitutionalism to discuss four main areas of constitutional law and theory that appear to hold some intellectual promise in this context: formal constitutional commitment at the national level to recognizing the urban/rural divide (...) and commitment to addressing it; creative electoral system designs that take into account the spatial dimension of politics; spatial pluralization based on concepts such as “mixed constitutions,” “community standards,” and “margin of appreciation”; and rethinking elements of equalization and fiscal federalism more generally. Taken together, the four directions I discuss here offer a repertoire of constitutional design possibilities that hold promise in mitigating the resurging rural/urban gulf. More generally, they serve as an invitation to constitutional thinkers to shake up the rather stagnant constitutional thought of spatial governance, and to think creatively about the ever-expanding urban/rural divide and its consequences for the theory and practice of 21st century constitutional democracy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Paul Oskar Kristeller Memorial NoticeRichard H. PopkinPaul Oskar Kristeller, the most eminent scholar of renaissance philosophy, was born in Berlin in 1904 to secularized Jewish parents. He died June 7, 1999, in his apartment in New York shortly after his 95th birthday. Kristeller studied in Heidelberg under Martin Heidegger and received his doctorate in 1927 for his work on Neo-Platonism. He was a lecturer and an assistant at Heidelberg (...) until 1933 when he had to leave Germany because of his Jewish ancestry. He went to Italy where he continued his studies and taught at Pisa. He was awarded another doctorate for his work on the Florentine Platonist, Marsilio Ficino.A few years later when Italy adopted anti-semitic racial laws, Kristeller had to leave a country a second time and went to the United States in 1939. Soon he became a lecturer and instructor at Columbia University and continued on the faculty there, retiring in 1973 as the Frederick Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy.Kristeller brought both the rigor and wealth of German scholarship in Renaissance studies to America. He helped to make materials available for American students. He was a founding member and later president of the Renaissance Society of America and gave lectures all over the United States as well as in Europe, encouraging interest and concern for serious scholarship and Renaissance Studies.He wrote voluminously, over eight hundred articles and many books on his chosen subject. One of his accomplishments was the preparation of an immense catalogue of manuscripts in Italian libraries, the Iter Italicum, and he guided the development of the vast catalogue of manuscripts of classical, medieval, and renaissance authors.Kristeller's erudition and precise and careful scholarship greatly influenced the level of research and publication in the history of philosophy in America. While his students worked mostly on topics in the Renaissance and the later medieval period, Kristeller encouraged many others like myself in branching off in directions other than those in which he was primarily interested. [End Page 141]In 1946 I showed him a seminar paper I had written on Hume and Sextus Empiricus, since part of my interest came from Kristeller's course that I had taken. He looked over the paper carefully, and then in his inimitable way, told me that I should look into whether there had been a sceptical tradition in European thought prior to Hume. This became my major concern for years thereafter. Kristeller continuously discussed my work with me and encouraged further studies. He helped greatly in bringing my work to publication, although only a small amount of it was in his chief area of interest.Kristeller was the last of the great German scholars in the humanities who became refugees in America and helped to transform the level of scholarship in many fields in this country. From early on until the end of his life, he remained a neo-Kantian. He did not find much of interest in the prevailing forms of contemporary thought. Although he spent his entire academic career in philosophy departments, he wrote little of philosophical exposition or argument about the views he held. He was mainly concerned to expound philosophers, to trace their sources and their influences. He left an enormous legacy of work, research tools, and outlook. As the various twentieth century philosophical movements became more and more antihistorical, they cut themselves off linguistically and culturally from the actual sources of their issues and theories.His focus was on the Renaissance, but he was willing to play a role in wider intellectual enterprises, seeking to improve the level of scholarship and the opportunities for research and publication. He gave much advice to those of us who in 1960 were attempting to start the Journal of the History of Philosophy. Though he did not personally get involved in our early problems, he did watch over what we produced like a hawk and gave us his critical evaluation of each issue as it appeared as well as much other advice. This was the case with the International Archives of the History of Ideas, that was also started in 1960. He evaluated proposals, advised us about publication plans, recommended scholars... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A New Direction for Comparative Studies of Buddhists and Christians:Evidence from Nāgārjuna and John of the CrossAbraham Vélez de CeaIs Nāgārjuna's emptiness a means to point out the inadequacy of logic and concepts to express the nature of the Ultimate Reality? Similarly, are John of the Cross's concepts of nothingness and emptiness examples of the apophatic path to God? In sum, is emptiness in Nāgārjuna and John (...) of the Cross comparable to the Christian via negativa and the apophatic path to God?If you answered yes to any of these questions, I believe you might be interested in reading this article carefully. You are not alone; in fact most if not all previous discussions of Nāgārjuna and John of the Cross in the field of Buddhist-Christian studies have assumed an affirmative answer to the former questions. The comparisons of D.T. Suzuki, Thomas Merton, and the Kyoto school between the Christian God and Buddhist emptiness, as well as the comparisons of members of the Masao Abe–John Cobb group, have greatly contributed to this apophatic interpretation of emptiness. The enormous contributions of D. T. Suzuki, Thomas Merton, the Kyoto school, and the Abe-Cobb group to the field of Buddhist-Christian studies cannot be sufficiently praised and appreciated. However, the future of Buddhist-Christian studies and Buddhist-Christian dialogue requires a new comparative direction, a shift from comparative theory to comparative praxis, from doctrinal comparisons to more ethical and spiritually relevant comparisons.This new direction provides Buddhist-Christian studies with a more practical orientation necessary for the urgent needs of our planet as well as for the needs of a growing number of members of different religions with pluralist attitudes. By pluralist attitudes, I do not mean a relativistic standpoint, but rather an attitude of intellectual humbleness and dialogical openness toward other religions. That humble and dialogical openness seeks neither to proselytize nor to create a new religion. Rather, the objective is to build bridges of understanding and solidarity among religious communities and to be personally enriched by the contributions of all religions.In order to justify the need for this new and more practically oriented comparative [End Page 139] direction, it is imperative to review previous scholarship in the field of Buddhist-Christian studies. A comprehensive analysis of all past scholarship would be too ambitious a goal for the purpose of this article. Thus, in the first part of this article I limit myself to reviewing those questionable hermeneutical tendencies that I have identified in former Buddhist-Christian discussions of John of the Cross and Nāgārjuna. In the second part, I continue the justification of this new direction for Buddhist-Christian studies by providing a specific example, namely, a comparison of the instrumental ethical function of emptiness in Nāgārjuna and John of the Cross.Hermeneutical Tendencies in Previous Buddhist-Christian Studies of John of the Cross and NāgārjunaHermeneutical Tendencies in Comparisons of John of the Cross and BuddhismIn the case of John of the Cross, I have identified three questionable hermeneutical tendencies. The first one is to exaggerate the similarity between John of the Cross and Buddhism. Take, for example, what Thomas Merton—whose pioneering work on Buddhist-Christian dialogue deserves careful study—said in 1968: "Frankly, I would say that Zen is nothing but John of the Cross without the Christian vocabulary" (quoted in Nugent 1996: 53). This comparison suggests that the teachings of Zen and John of the Cross are virtually identical, neglecting important differences between them.Similarly, Christopher Nugent compares John's experience of one's own true self to the experience of Buddha-nature, and describes satori as a fusion of all and nothing, and the coincidence of opposites. For Nugent, John of the Cross is not only a Zen master, but also "more Taoist than dualist" (1996: 62–64). These comparisons of John of the Cross to Zen and Taoism concepts fail to bring justice to his ideas. John of the Cross cannot be categorized a nondualist because he maintains a clear distinction between God and creatures. Similarly, from an ethical... (shrink)

In 1992, the United States Supreme Court, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, upheld the ruling in Roe v. Wade, namely that women have a right “to choose to have an abortion before viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the State.”1 However, since this ruling, some states have imposed regulations that greatly limit this right by restricting access. Texas is a recent example of this. Two proposed restrictions in House Bill 2, which will be discussed (...) in detail below, will force all but eight clinics that are located in metropolitan areas to shut down. The U.S. Supreme Court put the proposed restrictions on hold in October 2014, allowing several clinics to remain open while the restrictions are being appealed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. If the restrictions are passed, however, those clinics will be forced to shut down and, as a result, many women in Texas will be required to travel more than 100 miles in order to access a safe and legal abortion. Much of the focus of these restrictions has been on women and rightly so. However, I want to turn the attention to physicians. The requirements exacerbate unfair treatment of abortion providers compared with other physicians. Abortion providers face threats from the public—some of which turn into violent attacks—and they are often ostracized by their fellow medical practitioners. There are so few abortion providers to begin with and the proposed requirements limit these physicians’ opportunities to practice the branch of medicine of their choosing. Although the HB 2 requirements may not result in an unconstitutional undue burden on physicians, the challenges created by the bill limit physicians’ abilities to provide abortions. As a result of these limits, HB 2 creates an unconstitutional undue burden for women seeking abortions by creating barriers directed at abortion providers and clinic staff who are willing and able to provide abortions. The first of the two controversial HB 2 requirements is the admitting privileges requirement: “A physician performing or inducing an abortion must, on the date the abortion is performed or induced, have active admitting privileges at a hospital that is located not further than 30 miles from the location at which the abortion is performed or induced.”2 The second requirement is the ambulatory surgical center requirement: “The minimum standards for an abortion facility must be equivalent to the minimum standards adopted under [Texas Health & Safety Code] [...] for ambulatory surgical centres.”3 In order to meet these state-mandated obligations, some abortion clinics would have to spend more than $1 million in upgrades if they wish to remain open. The District Court decided that the ambulatory surgical center requirement places an unconstitutional undue burden on women, and that the two requirements together place an undue burden on women in Texas and especially in the Rio Grande Valley where the nearest clinic is a couple hundred miles away.4 Later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the District Court’s decision and argued, “the admitting privileges requirement is constitutional on its face.”5 While the regulations are being appealed, the Supreme Court granted a stay of injunction, allowing about twelve abortion clinics to reopen until a final decision regarding the regulations is made. The District Court ruled that the purpose of the two regulations was to create a substantial obstacle for women seeking abortions in Texas. While the defendants argued that the regulations were designed to make abortions safer and reduce risk, the Court decided that this was not the case. An abortion, especially a first-term abortion, is a very safe procedure and is safer than many other routine surgical procedures. As stated in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “Unnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion impose an undue burden on the right.”6 The undue burden in this case is imposed, not through restricting women’s access directly, but by restricting physicians’ freedom to perform abortions. The admitting privileges requirement has reduced the number of physicians who can perform abortions and the ambulatory surgical center requirement has reduced the number of clinics where abortions can be performed. The American Medical Association states, “[t]he Principles of Medical Ethics of the AMA do not prohibit a physician from performing an abortion in accordance with good medical practice and under circumstances that do not violate the law.”7 This means that physicians are not required to perform abortions, except in emergency situations, but can as long as the procedure is done safely and does not violate the law. The new Texas regulations, however, are so restrictive that few abortion providers, limited to only four urban areas, can legally perform abortions. Physicians do not have an absolute right to perform abortions as opposed to women who have an absolute right to have access to an abortion. Physicians do face many challenges that other professionals face in terms of obtaining qualifications and finding work. Abortion providers, however, face challenges that most other physicians do not. The restrictions imposed by these regulations exacerbate unfair treatment toward abortion providers and place further obstacles in their path in terms of providing the service they want and are qualified to provide. Both abortion clinics and abortion providers are being treated differently from other medical clinics and physicians. For instance, “grandfathering of existing facilities and the granting of waivers from specific requirements is prohibited for abortion providers, although other types of ambulatory surgical facilities are frequently granted waivers or are grandfathered.”8 Many abortion clinics cannot afford the necessary upgrades. Furthermore, it is extremely expensive to open a brand new clinic that complies with the ambulatory surgical center requirements. Being grandfathered in would be the only option available to abortion clinics that cannot afford the upgrade. However, unfair treatment of abortion clinics and providers is preventing those clinics from being grandfathered into the new system. As a result, many abortion clinics may be forced to close. Admitting privileges are proving difficult or impossible for physicians both to obtain and, for those who have already been granted privileges, to keep. Dr. Sherwood Lynn, an obstetrician-gynecologist who has performed abortions for decades, describes the process of obtaining admitting privileges and the difficulties abortion providers face. After sending in an application a physician must wait for the hospital to send them the required materials, “but if the address of the practice on the application is of an abortion provider or clinic, [the hospital] won’t send [them] the package of materials required. [They] simply can’t apply.”9 Dr. Lynn and several other physicians have surmised that hospitals are only withholding privileges from qualified physicians who perform abortions and that other physicians do not face this discriminatory treatment. Hospitals have also revoked privileges granted to physicians after learning that the physicians perform abortions. For instance, in Texas two doctors, “received notices [...] informing them that their admitting privileges to the University General Hospital of Dallas have been revoked, with the hospital’s CEO claiming the hospital was unaware they were providing abortion care and that the hospital believed such care would damage its reputation.”10 What is curious about this revocation is that, “federal and state laws [...] forbid hospitals from discriminating against doctors who perform abortions,” and yet hospitals are clearly doing just that.11 Dr. Pamela Richter, another abortion provider in Texas, had her temporary admitting privileges revoked with no explanation and because of this, the clinic where she performed abortions, Reproductive Services, can no longer provide abortions at all.12 As the hospital gave no reason for the revocation, it not clear Dr. Richter’s privileges were revoked because she performs abortions. Dr. Richter, however, has performed over 17,000 abortions and her privileges were revoked soon after HB 2 was introduced.13 According to the Texas Hospital Association, giving admitting privileges to doctors who do not work for the hospital is expensive and time-consuming but this does not account for the fact that hospitals are revoking previously granted privileges from physicians whom they learn are providing abortion services.14 As mentioned previously, the District Court found that the admitting privileges requirement and the ambulatory surgical center requirement do not further ensure the health and safety of women undergoing an abortion. Several physicians have testified to this fact. Dr. Lynn stated in an interview: The admitting privileges requirements are [...] absolutely unnecessary. If you have a number of patients waiting for procedures, and something happens and a patient needs to be transferred to a hospital, you’re not going to leave everyone else and go to the hospital. That makes no sense. You’re going to refer that person to a gynecologist at the hospital. There is no safety issue involved here. If a patient shows up with an emergency, every hospital is required to admit that patient. They have to by law.15 It is rare that complications will arise from an abortion performed in a clinic. Dr. Richter, for example, has performed more than 17,000 abortions and not once had to send a patient to a hospital because of complications resulting from the procedure. According to Dr. Lynn even if abortion providers were granted privileges to hospitals, it is unlikely that they will exercise them. In essence, having admitting privileges at a hospital does nothing to further ensure the safety of an already safe procedure. The only result of the admitting privileges requirement is to limit certain physicians’ ability to perform legal abortions. Not only do the HB 2 requirements fail to further ensure the health and safety of women, the HB 2 requirements may actually create more health risks to women who cannot access the eight remaining clinics. The first risk is that the remaining clinics would have an influx of patients that they may not be able to handle, forcing women to wait longer for an appointment. As stated by the District Court, “[e]ven assuming every woman in Texas who wants an abortion [...] could travel to one of the four metropolitan areas where abortions will still be available, the cumulative results of HB 2 are that, at most, eight providers would have to handle the abortion demand of the entire state.”16 Furthermore, “[t]hat the State suggests that these seven or eight providers could meet the demand of the entire state stretches credulity.”17 Abortion is a time sensitive procedure. It is safest when performed early in a pregnancy. The increase in patients to these remaining clinics, assuming all women in Texas can access them, will increase wait times and may force women to have abortions later in pregnancy. In the worst-case scenario, a woman would not see an abortion provider at all before viability. Such instances may be rare, but they are possible. In such cases, women’s access to legal abortions becomes impossible and thereby violate the ruling in Roe. Clinics may be able to avoid the aforementioned problems if they hire more physicians. However, there are two barriers to hiring more physicians. First, as mentioned previously, admitting privileges to Texas hospitals are difficult, if not impossible, for abortion providers to obtain. Second, given the negative treatment of abortion providers by anti-abortion groups, many physicians are not willing to perform abortions. The harassment abortion providers face is unique to those physicians and many physicians will not perform abortions for that reason. In an article published in the Austin Chronicle, anti- abortion activist Abby Johnson, “discusses how her group investigated appraisal district records to find the new location of where an Austin abortion physician plans to work.”18 Johnson states, “These abortionists are feeling the pressure from the pro-life movement in Texas. I think they feel like they’re on the run. And that’s how we want to keep it.”19 If the HB 2 requirements are passed and there remain at most eight abortion providers in Texas, these activists will concentrate on those clinics and, “the dangerous impact of their intimidation tactics will be exacerbated.”20 Even if the number of physicians needed to meet the demand in Texas can obtain admitting privileges and work at one of the remaining clinics, they may choose not to do such work because they are putting themselves at risk. The harm abortion providers face from such anti-abortion groups is not unique to Texas. There are stories from all over the country and from other countries where abortion is legal of physicians receiving death threats. Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider in Kansas, was killed outside his church and had received numerous death threats prior to this. The HB 2 requirements are making it so that abortion providers either cannot provide their services any longer or will face increased threats and increased danger to themselves. Physicians are allowed to conscientiously object to providing medical interventions in certain circumstances for moral and religious reasons. However, there are limits on this right. According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “[w]hen conscientious refusals conflict with moral obligations that are central to the ethical practice of medicine, ethical care requires that the physician provide care despite reservations or that there be resources in place to allow the patient to gain access to care in the presence of conscientious refusal.”21 I would argue fear for one’s safety in the face of immediate threats is perhaps a stronger ground on which to refuse to provide care than a personal belief that abortion is immoral or against one’s religion. ACOG also states, “[p]roviders with moral or religious objections should either practice in proximity to individuals who do not share their views or ensure that referral processes are in place so that patients have access to the service that the physician does not wish to provide.”22 This responsibility has been largely disputed by the medical community but in cases of rape, incest, and health risks to women, referrals must be made without exception. However, under the requirements of HB 2, working in proximity to an abortion provider may not be possible because they are so geographically limited. Referrals are supposed to be made within reason. Some areas of Texas, such as the Rio Grande Valley, are up to 200 miles away from the nearest clinic that would remain open if HB 2 is passed. Referrals may simply not be feasible given the geographical distances and the decreasing number of available physicians. As mentioned above, there are two risks to the health and safety of women as a result of HB 2. The second of these is that if a woman cannot access one of the remaining clinics, she may seek out a more convenient but illegal and unsafe abortion, which is far more likely to result in a dangerous complication. Dr. Lynn states, “[b]ecause of the restrictions lawmakers impose, women will seek abortions illegally, and we’re going to see a rise in septic abortions.”23 Some areas of Texas might effectively revert back to a pre-Roe era where abortions were performed in unsanitary conditions by unqualified people resulting in dangerous medical complications far more often than legal abortion procedures do now. Physicians like Dr. Lynn who want to prevent this from happening generally cannot do so without facing legal sanction. Physicians have a duty to provide safe medical care and if they cannot obtain admitting privileges, they cannot exercise this duty. ACOG released a statement expressing their objections to the new requirements. They state that HB 2 is, “plainly intended to restrict the reproductive rights of women in Texas through a series of requirements that improperly regulate medical practice and interfere with the patient-physician relationship.”24 Executive Vice-President of ACOG, Hal C. Lawrence III stated: The Texas bills set a dangerous precedent of a legislature telling doctors how to practice medicine and how to care for individual patients. ACOG opposes legislative interference, and strongly believes that decisions about medical care must be based on scientific evidence and made by licensed medical professionals, not the state or federal government.25 Abortion is one of only a few areas of medicine where the legislature imposes so many regulations restricting particular physicians’ ability to practice medicine. Not only are abortions providers being regulated by the state, they are also facing clear discrimination from others within the medical community. The state is closing down clinics that do not meet the ambulatory surgical center requirements and hospitals are denying physicians admitting privileges because they perform abortions. In summary, abortion providers are being discriminated against both by the legislature and other members of the medical community. Other physicians who do not perform abortions are not denied admitting privileges on discriminatory grounds. Clinics that cannot afford upgrades to become an ambulatory surgical center are being grandfathered in, while abortion clinics are being forced to close down. Ob-Gyns who conscientiously object to performing abortions and who are not located in close proximity to at least one abortion provider cannot effectively fulfill their duty to refer patients. Lastly, given the barriers these regulations will create, there will likely be a rise in complications resulting from abortions provided under grossly unsafe conditions. Physicians, whose duty it is to provide safe and effective medical care, are being denied the right to exercise this duty. While this denial may not be unconstitutional, it is certainly unjust and discriminatory and creates obstacles that other physicians do not face. Most importantly, these obstacles are creating an undue burden for women. The HB 2 requirements do not increase the health and safety of abortions; all they do is create substantial obstacles for women. In light of these observations, the requirements seem to me to be in clear violation of Casey, in which it was decided that, “[u]nnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion impose an undue burden on that right.”26 These regulations do just what Casey was meant to prohibit and this is accomplished through limiting physicians’ ability to practice safe abortions across the state of Texas. Therefore, the HB 2 requirements may not impose an undue burden on doctors but they do impose an undue burden on women. PDF available: Rachel Hill, "Texas HB 2," Voices in Bioethics. References: 1 Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, pg. 2. 2 Whole Women’s Health v. Lakey, pg. 2. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 4. 5 Ibid., 2. 6 Planned Parenthood v. Casey, pg. 16 7 AMA Code of Medical Ethics, “Opinion 2.01 – Abortion,” American Medical Association. 8 Whole Women’s Health v. Lakey, pg. 10. 9 Dr. Sherwood Lynn, “A Texas Ob-Gyn Details the Horrific Consequences of Abortion Restrictions,” Cosmopolitan. 10 Feminist Newswire, “Texas Hospitals Revoke Admitting Privileges to Abortion Providers,” Feminist Majority Foundation Blog. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Glenn Hegar, “Texas Hospital Association’s Statement of Opposition to Section 2 of the Committee Substitute for Senate Bill 5,” Texas Hospital Association. 15 Dr. Lynn, “A Texas Ob-Gyn.” 16 Whole Women’s Health v. Lakey, pg. 10. 17 Ibid. 18 Mary Tuma, “Undercover Audio Reveals Anti-Abortion Tactics: Anti-abortion activists monitor and track providers, patients,” Austin Chronicle. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Committee on Ethics, “The Limits of Conscientious Refusal in Reproductive Medicine,” The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. 22 Ibid. 23 Dr. Lynn, “A Texas Ob-Gyn.” 24 “Ob-Gyns Denounce Texas Abortion Legislation: Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 2 Set Dangerous Precedent,” The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. 25 Ibid. 26 Planned Parenthood v. Casey, pg. 16. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Paul Oskar Kristeller 1905–1999Edward P. MahoneyPaul Oskar Kristeller was without doubt one of the most productive and accomplished scholars of this century. He received an excellent education in the classics at the Mommsen-Gymnasium in his native Berlin before going to the University of Heidelberg in 1923. There he pursued studies in a wide range of subjects, including medieval history, German literature, physics, and art history. The philosophy professors who (...) much influenced him both at Heidelberg and at Freiburg and Marburg were Ernst Hoffman, Karl Jaspers, Richard Kroner, and Martin Heidegger. In 1929 he received his doctorate from Heidelberg for his dissertation Der Begriff der Seele in der Ethik des Plotin, which was directed by Hoffman and published at Tübingen the same year. He then went to Berlin, where he engaged in formal studies in classical philology before going to Freiburg to do postgraduate work in philosophy with Heidegger during the years 1931 to 1933. Heidegger approved a study of Marsilio Ficino as Kristeller’s Habili-tationschrift and helped him to secure a fellowship enabling him to do research on Ficino and to begin writing. After visiting Italy during this period and taking into account the changed political scene in Germany, Kristeller decided in 1934 to move to Italy permanently. He taught in Florence in a high school for German Jewish students until he secured in 1935, with the help of Giovanni Gentile, a lectureship in German at the Scuola Superiore and the University of Pisa. He maintained throughout his academic career a personal and warm attachment to the Scuola Superiore. Moreover, he enjoyed throughout his subsequent career a warm and personal friendship with various Italian scholars that was first developed during his Italian stay in the thirties.While still in Italy, Kristeller completed his book on Ficino in 1937; he prepared an Italian version the next year. However, both the German and Italian versions would be published only years later. During this period he also engaged in manuscript studies in the major Italian cities, searching in particular for Ficino manuscripts. The result of these labors was his two-volume work, Supplementum Ficinianum: Marsilii Ficini Philosophi Platonici Opuscula Inedita et Dispersa, which was published by the Scuola Normale in 1937. He considered his “teachers” in manuscript studies to be Giovanni Cardinal Mercati, Monsignor Auguste Pelzer, and Ludwig Bertalot. Giovanni Gentile aided the publication of Kristeller’s Supplementum Ficinianum and subsequently helped him to emigrate to the United States. Kristeller always maintained a loyalty to Gentile and felt gratitude to him for extending him such help.In 1938 Kristeller lost his position at Pisa because of the Fascist anti-Semitic laws, but he was permitted to go to Rome where he assisted Bertalot in manuscript research at the Vatican library. Through the intervention of Roland H. Bainton, Dean P. Lockwood, Dom Anselm Strittmater, O.S.B., and other American [End Page 758] friends Kristeller was able to leave for the United States. He arrived at New York in February 1939 and spent the Spring term at Yale University. He was given an adjunct position at Columbia University for the fall term, holding the rank of Associate until 1948, when he was made an Associate Professor of Philosophy. By that time he had established himself as a major force in the development of Renaissance studies in the United States. His book on Ficino was translated into English as The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino and published in 1943 by the Columbia University Press. The Italian version was published at Florence in 1953; a revised edition, containing a new bibliography that had been brought up to date, appeared in 1988.Kristeller published a large number of articles on a wide range of topics, establishing himself as a major interpreter of the significance of Renaissance humanism as well as a leading authority not only on Ficino and Renaissance Platonism but also on Pietro Pomponazzi and Renaissance Aristotelianism. He developed at Columbia bonds of friendship with Ernest A. Moody and John Herman Randall, Jr., both of whom had strong interests in late-medieval Aristotelianism. With Randall and Ernst Cassirer he prepared what would become a bestseller, the Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Selections... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This issue of Feminist Studies explores the ways institutions—legal, governmental, medical, educational, and household—participate in the gendering of bodies and are themselves gendered. At any given historical moment, dominant and resistant meanings of “women,” “gender,” and “sexuality” are socially and politically constituted in institutions through cultural struggles. The authors in this issue discuss how birth control, assisted reproduction, transsexual transition, hegemonic masculinity, abortion, and domestic violence are each (...) articulated and contested in imperial law and economic discourses (Sreenivas), in medical procedures (Whitehead et al. and DasGupta), in university research regulations (Barnes and Munsch), and in the official practices of presidents (Mattingly ). Our authors elucidate how such institutions are gendered, not just in terms of staffing by males, females, and nongender conforming people, but also in the ways they constitute gender relations in their everyday operations. The articles point to the continuing need for institutional histories and ethnographies that are feminist in conception and design. They also provide openings into more progressive gender and sexuality politics by underscoring the contradictions within all institutions. Mytheli Sreenivas’s “Birth Control in the Shadow of Empire: The Trials of Annie Besant, 1877–1878” visits the contradictory history of institutions of reproduction control. She traces Besant’s contraception advocacy in the 1870s, reminding us of its intimate and unsavory entanglements with the politics of empire. Annie Besant is a complicated figure. South Asianists familiar with her later campaign against British colonialism in India might well be surprised by this earlier incarnation, but Sreenivas demonstrates how and why the early Besant held contradictory positions. As an individual, Besant questioned gender norms and challenged the inequality of women in marriage and divorce. She recognized sexual desire as “natural” (albeit only properly expressed via heterosexual marriage). Yet a signature feature of her political writing 504Preface was an embrace of neo-Malthusianism. Over the course of her activist life, Besant redirected her attention from poverty and women’s health in Britain to contraception as the solution to starvation and overpopulation in India. She did so in “a broader context in which a defense of empire and class-race hierarchy enjoyed far greater legitimacy than a critique of gender and sexual norms.” The repercussions of her actions were global: “Besant’s efforts rendered contraception into a sexual technology that claimed to address the economies of impoverishment in an emerging imperial world. Birth control thus emerged as both an imperial responsibility and as a demonstration of British humanitarianism in support of starving colonized populations.” Sreenivas explicates what the Besant trials reveal about the multiple histories of reproduction control and the conditions under which birth control continues to be both a technology for large-scale population control and “a vehicle for women’s reproductive freedom and gender justice.” Institutions are saturated with power, but they are also arenas where political struggles between different social groups are staged. This is especially evident in White House politics in the United States. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter appointed a large number of women to bureaucratic offices. Many were feminists. Why did they fail to deliver gender justice? This is the puzzle Doreen J. Mattingly seeks to answer in “The Limited Power of Female Appointments: Abortion and Domestic Violence Policy in the Carter Administration.” The article is set in the broader context of a moment in history when the US feminist movement was moving from the streets to state bureaucracies, when women of color had broadened the movement’s mandate, and when the need for government programs to support poor women was a clearly articulated feminist goal. There was an excitement about transforming gender relations as feminists populated multiple organizations and came together to collaborate. However, two important legislative efforts—government funding for abortions for poor women and a national anti-domestic violence bill—failed. Mattingly traces the back and forth between Carter and his Assistant Secretary for Public Liaison, Margaret “Midge” Costanza, drawing on new archival sources. Mattingly’s article underscores how women in public office can be discursively valorized as symbols of change even while politically powerful men oppose meaningful policy that would provide women greater autonomy over their reproductive or violently transgressed bodies. Mattingly’s careful reconstruction... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface At a time when access to safe abortions is being curtailed in the United States under the pretext of a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this Feminist Studies issue focuses on abortion and women’s embodiment. The essays by Melissa Oliver-Powell, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, and Jennifer L. Holland each contribute new approaches to the stillvexed topic of abortion, positioning movements for abortion access in relation to historical and (...) ecological change. Two collaboratively written essays, by South American authors María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra and Tania Pérez-Bustos, and by North American and European authors Laura Bisaillon with six colleagues, both center the body within feminist labor, exploring how the embodied experience of work can also be a site of knowledge-making. Other authors push us to move beyond humanistic understandings of affect and the body in feminist work, as Nathan Snaza shows in a review essay of four recent books engaging “Biopolitics without Bodies.” Poems by Rosetta Marantz Cohen, Darlene Taylor, and Abby Minor also feature experiences of bodily violence and bodily pleasure, while Ellyn Weiss discusses the distinctive representations of bodies in the visual art of Swedish-American artist Anna U. Davis. To close the issue, two News and Views pieces by Pang Laikwan and Sealing Cheng on the recent protest movement in Hong Kong provide two complementary perspectives on living through tumultuous political times. Our next issue will include content directly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first essay, Melissa Oliver-Powell’s “Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France” addresses the complexities of anti-​ abortion 8 rhetoric in France. Placing Varda’s 1977 film in the historical context of French nationalistic anxiety about low birthrates in the twentieth century, Oliver-Powell argues that the film deconstructs polarized narratives about abortion. While dominant cultural representations of abortion typically depicted it as the result of female irresponsibility or traumatic victimization, Varda’s film rejects the binary concepts of villain and victim and questions the presumption that women always suffer when exercising their reproductive choice. Oliver-Powell situates Varda alongside the 343 eminent French female cultural leaders who composed a famous 1971 Manifesto publicly declaring themselves criminals for having had illegal abortions and presents simultaneous histories of French feminism and French cinema. Varda’s film constructs a feminist representation of abortion that avoids foregrounding women ’s suffering and instead emphasizes empowerment and solidarity. Its narrative features two women friends, both treated unjustly by France’s abortion laws, who participate in the movement for reform over a fourteen -year span. Varda represents the interplay of motherhood with women ’s lives as a continuum, not a disruptive episode, and she blends documentary -style devices with imaginative musical interludes: she shows actual women seeking abortions in Holland and includes songs about abortion, pregnancy, and motherhood. Oliver-Powell claims that Varda dramatizes unprecedented representations “of female friendship without pathology, of abortion without guilt, death or persecution, of motherhood without objectification....” A second essay, Rachel Hurst’s “Abortion as a Feminist Pedagogy of Grief in Marianne Apostolides’s Deep Salt Water,” proposes that the championing of women’s reproductive rights could better account for the context of difficult emotions and an imperfect world. Hurst uses reproductive justice approaches to critique simplistic rights-based arguments for abortion, premised on liberal concepts of choice and autonomy, which fail to understand the material conditions of poor women and especially women of color. Such analyses emphasize the necessity of rights discourses that include the right to bear and parent one’s own children free from violence and economic hardship, and they advocate the transformative possibilities of acknowledging rather than suppressing women’s ambivalence about their own abortions as well as others’ choices. Hurst describes a collaboration between two contemporary Canadian feminists, writer Marianne Apostolides and visual artist  9 Catherine Mellinger, in their mixed-media text, Deep Salt Water, which is organized according to the weeks of a pregnancy and the aftermath of its termination. Rather than falling back into familiar polarizations for and against “choice,” they use the story of Apostolides’s abortion seventeen years earlier... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 463-482 [Access article in PDF] The "Antiquarianization" of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653-57) Peter N. Miller The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the heroic age of the antiquaries. Roaming from text to context and back again, these scholars completed the revolution begun by the humanists who realized that Greek and Roman texts could never be understood isolated (...) from the men and societies that made them. These scholars, from Petrarch to Poggio, from Panvinio to Peiresc to Perizonius, looked beyond the page and collected, described, and compared the material remains of the ancient world. That these investigations transformed the understanding of the past and effected a revolution in the method of historical inquiry was insisted upon by Arnaldo Momigliano beginning half a century ago. 1 In recent years these antiquaries have also attracted the attention of historians of early modern art, science, archaeology, politics, and scholarship. 2 [End Page 463]This renewed focus on antiquaries as agents of late humanism has tended to concentrate on their contribution to understanding ancient Greece and Rome, but they were also responsible for the first generation of serious scholarship about the ancient and modern Near East. Drawing on the same methods to ask the same questions they had asked of classical antiquity these antiquaries directed their attention to the extra-European world. Like the study of the earlier Renaissance of Greece and Rome, that of Israel and Egypt was stimulated by a profusion of new materials, streaming back to scholars' studies from the missionaries, merchants, and diplomats traveling to the Ottoman East in greater and greater numbers. It is breadth of inquiry that characterizes this new approach--more texts in more languages--but also a much greater explanatory weight placed on objects as evidence and more confidence in using knowledge provided by people presently living in far-away places to shed light on those who lived there long ago. In this approach to a region and its culture as a whole early modern antiquaries created oriental studies.Because so much of the contemporary interest in the Near East was driven by the ingrained association of these lands and their peoples with the history narrated in the Bible, early oriental studies is inseparable from biblical scholarship. Pietro della Valle's letters from the East were, after all, signed "Il Pellegrino," and Fabri de Peiresc's efforts to recover the Samaritans and their history were triggered by his desire to contribute to the publication of their Pentateuch. It is because oriental studies like these were shaped by the ways and means of antiquaries that so much seventeenth-century biblical scholarship can be described as having been "antiquarianized." Like the earlier humanists who had given Virgil and Horace a context, those fascinated and obsessed with understanding every jot and tittle of the sacred text turned to the Bible's context for help: the history of the ancient Near East as it could be reconstructed from texts, objects, and the long-lived traditions preserved by marginal groups like the Samaritans or in out of the way places like the Coptic monasteries of Wadi Natrûn. This antiquarianization reflects the move from the word to the world that had begun with Petrarch. Early modern sacred philologists--the Englishman Thomas Fuller called this figure "The True Church Antiquary"--set out to prove, by the most sophisticated methods available, that sacred history was historical.At the heart of this inquiry lay a belief in historia sacra, understood as both a theory of providential history and a methodology of historical scholarship. The theory gave them the confidence to pursue with reason the truth of revelation because all had to reflect the plan of the One Creator. The practice encouraged scholars to recruit the evidence of history, philosophy, archaeology, and geography to the service of the sacred, all confirming the triumph of Christianity. They [End Page 464] were convinced that erudition could only amplify, and not undermine, the conclusions already reached by faith. 3 It was this... (shrink)

In the last two decades, the philosophy of criminal law has undergone a vibrant revival in Canada. The adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has given the Supreme Court of Canada unprecedented latitude to engage with principles of legal, moral, and political philosophy when elaborating its criminal law jurisprudence. Canadian scholars have followed suit by paying increased attention to the philosophical foundations of domestic criminal law. Because of Canada's leadership in international criminal law, both at the level of (...) the International Criminal Court and of specific war crimes tribunals, they have also begun to turn their attention to international criminal law per se. This collection seeks to bring all these Canadian voices together for the first time, and evidence the fact that criminal law theory is no longer to be associated exclusively with the older British, German and American traditions. The topics covered include questions of philosophical methodology, the legitimate scope of domestic and international criminalization, rationales for criminal law defences in both domestic and international law, the philosophical underpinnings of specific crimes and forms of joint responsibility, as well as the theorization of criminal procedure and evidence law. ENDORSEMENTS "In continental Europe, academic commentary on the criminal law has long manifested large philosophical ambitions. Less so in common-law countries, where the dominance of jury trial and the piecemeal development of case-law, together with the famously robust attitudes of common lawyers, have militated against detailed philosophical engagement with doctrine. Over the last 20 years or so, however, new generations of philosophically-literate lawyers and legally-informed philosophers have overcome the historic resistance. Nowhere more so, it seems, than in Canada, where the common law and civilian traditions meet. In 'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory', François Tanguay-Renaud and James Stribopoulos have joined with 14 talented Canadian colleagues to showcase the tremendous breadth and depth of their contemporary national contribution to the subject. Ranging across topics as diverse as emergency, obscenity, and insanity, these essays - without exception insightful and penetrating -set a high standard for the rest of us to aspire to.'' John Gardner, University of Oxford "'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory' is an excellent collection of essays demonstrating the vigour, creativity and range of Canadian criminal justice scholarship. It covers a wide range of problems and issues both in the domestic and the international context. Core questions are examined in depth and new questions are brought to the fore. I recommend it very highly to criminal lawyers and philosophers of the criminal law." Professor Victor Tadros, University of Warwick "'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory 'is packed with outstanding contributions from criminal law theorists who are among the best not only in Canada, but in the whole English-speaking world. Broad and deep in its coverage, the collection offers fresh approaches to a wide range of cutting-edge issues in the field. It provides a resource readers will come back to repeatedly." Stuart Green, Professor of Law and Justice Nathan L Jacobs Scholar, Rutgers University. (shrink)

The new evidence scholarship addresses three distinct approaches: legal probabilism, Bayesian decision theory and relative plausibility theory. Each has major insights to offer, but none seems satisfactory as it stands. This paper proposes that relative plausibility theory be modified in two substantial ways. The first is by defining its key concept of plausibility, hitherto treated as primitive, by generalising the standard axioms of probability. The second is by complementing the descriptive component of the theory with a normative decision (...) theory adapted to legal process. Because this version of decision theory is based on plausibilities rather than probabilities, it generates plausibilistic expectations as outputs. Because these outputs are comparable, they function as relative plausibilities. Hence the resulting framework is an extension of relative plausibility theory, but it retains deep ties to legal probabilism, through the proposed definition of plausibility, and to Bayesian decision theory, through the normative use of decision theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:1. The impetus of Herbert Grundmann's work on researching the religious lives of women in the thirteenth century has led to a reinterpretation of many aspects of this complex subject. Even today, some points remain unclear. At times it seems as if we are confronted with a play in which the actors – the sisters, friars and the papal curia – move in a manner which is difficult to (...) decipher and could even be described as contradictory.In particular, Herbert Grundmann carried out a study on the development of female forms of monastic life which were linked with both the Franciscan and Dominican Friars; however, he neglected to give sufficient attention to the role of the papal curia in both Orders. The action of the papacy was considered merely an answer to demands made by nuns or friars – without grasping the fact that such decisions were due to a complex papal design in the reorganization of regular life.The history of the development of regular communities of religious women has a clear and systematic development. The women originally known as the pauperes dominae inclusae were not institutionally linked to the Order of Friars Minor until 1227, indicating the emergence of Apostolic guidelines to establish and build a new form of monastic life for women which was directly subject to papal authority. Until now, this aspect of religious foundations has not been the subject of scholarly attention, which has instead focused on the initiatives of the "founders" and risked taking the actual work out of context.The present article outlines the steps in the gradual legalization of the "Dominican" Sisters. Its findings are largely based on Jordan of Saxony's correspondence, which has not been given adequate scholarly consideration. Jordan was a Parisian master who entered the Order in 1220. He was subsequently elected Provincial Superior of Lombardy and in the following year until his death in 1237 was General Master of the Order. He also played a significant role in the foundation of the monastery of St. Agnese in Bologna.2. The complexity of the correspondence poses various problems. Not only because its very composition is based on continual discovery but also because of an almost total absence of historical information, which makes certain aspects difficult to interpret. Despite this, there is great interest in the reconstruction of significant moments in the constitutional history of the Order of Friars Preachers – a subject which has been enriched by the studies of Gert Melville as well as those of Sonderforschungsbereich himself.Jordan of Saxony's correspondence is composed of thirty-seven letters addressed to Diana of Andalo, who had professed religious vows before Dominic, and had played a leading role in creating the convent of St. Agnese in Bologna . Five of Jordan's letters were sent to Diana's convent and a further eight were sent to the general community.Beginning with the valuable observations of Angelo Walz, the most studied aspect of the correspondence has been feminine religious life with a particular focus on the spiritual themes which were elaborated on by Jordan. This is evident simply by referring to the observations of Raoul Manselli and Andrea Tilatti. The survival of Jordan's letters is due to the need to prove both their origins and their institutional link to the Order of Preachers. Since the 1430s, the nuns understood that by convincing both the Order and the Roman Curia of this, they might avoid the danger of losing the continued cura of the friars.Using this collection as a starting point, I intend to consider the institutional developments of the Bolognese Monastery, as well as female monasticism linked to the Order of Preachers.3. The Vita beatae Dianae was composed shortly after the middle of the thirteenth century. Despite its title, it primarily.. (shrink)

Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book I, Radical Scholarship, published in modified open-access form by Punctum Books, Brooklyn, New York, in association with the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons/The New School, New York, New York, launches a three-volume “anthology” series that will survey forms of contemporary scholarship and issues related to Intellectual Property Rights in the age of Cognitive Capital. The primary focus of the critical project is the Moral Rights of Authors, foremost as scholarship and artistic production confronts (...) the post-digital age, and as quantitative and pseudo-scientific operations overtake both conventional and avant-garde forms of humanistic research. -/- The six essays contained within Book One function as a preliminary summary for an extended “phenomenology of scholarship” based in creative and hybrid forms of publication, presentation, and dissemination, plus the editioning of works of scholarship as forms of art, and works of art as forms of scholarship. Begun in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in August 2014, the book concludes with an up-to-date summary (“Publishing Advisory”) for meeting, exceeding, and subverting the standards of present-day scholarship in the Arts and Humanities. The philosophical and pragmatic project privileges a “down-market” strategy for scholarship (albeit, toward moving “upstream”) –- in part by renouncing digital rights (formulated in “Franciscan” mode as “the right to have no digital rights”). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 348 A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory. By RussELL RITTINGER. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987. Pp. vi +232. $26.95. Dr. Hittinger's book causes us to remember how genuinely delicate and refined is the balance between reason and faith in St. Thomas' view of human knowledge and its relationship to reality. This enabled St. Thomas to develop with discernment his notion of (...) the natural law, because St. Thomas understood that an act of genuine intellection distinguished in order to unite, not separate. Therefore, there was an intrinsic unity to truth and a unity to philosophical experience which reflected reality-something which has gotten lost in the contemporary morass of interminable dialectics. Have the contemporary attempts to retrieve a notion of the natural law succeeded in maintaining this balance? If such attempts have not succeeded in maintaining the requisite balance, what are the consequences of the loss of this balance for the success of their endeavor? When in the history of philosophical experience this balance cannot be maintained, one is forced to move in one of two directions. The first is towards a kind of fideism in which the fundamental questions raised by reason are only resolvable by the faith; thus philosophy is absorbed into theology. The second is towards the claim that reason can answer all that is answerable (which may be very limited) and thus faith becomes subordinate to reason. The latter either leads to rationalism or a variety of positivism. For Rittinger what appears to be a contemporary attempt to retrieve natural law moral philosophy has proven itself unable to avoid a fideistic solution to moral philosophy; for faith in the end resolves all the fundamental issues raised in regard to moral philosophy. The beginning of the discussion of moral philosophy and man as the author of his actions was very carefully placed in the writings of St. Thomas. It is only after St. Thomas had established certain fundamental truths and principles in natural theology and the philosophy of human nature that he begins to discuss moral philosophy. St. Thomas first established the existence of a personal God, who is both the efficient and final cause of all finite being. God's being is also discovered to be identical to truth, goodness, and beauty. God is recognized as that which all men seek even though only the beatific vision will present this to the intellect and will with an all-consuming necessity. "Beings" are ordered in two ways, as parts of totality, and as things to an end. The ordering of things to an end is the most important, since the final cause is the cause of all the other causes. Therefore an identification of the final cause makes all the other causes and the 344 BOOK REVIEWS order in things intelligible. Also it is only after a great deal is known about human goods, and human nature, and the ordination of human goods that St. Thomas is ready to begin a discussion of the first principle that states the good is to be pursued or the good is to be done. St. Thomas has also established, through reason, that man by nature desires and should desire in justice to give God his due. There· fore religion properly understood is natural to man. The above pro· vided St. Thomas with the knowledge prerequisite for the development of a natural law moral philosophy. If one perceives that we are at a juncture in the history of philosophy where one no longer can develop or defend the kind of knowledge that is a prerequisite to the successful development of a natural law ethics, then this must he faced with all its consequences. Is a natural law ethics still viable? This is true even if one believes that any attempt to establish such knowledge would drag the ethician into an in· terminable debate in regard to the is-ought dilemma announced by Hume or the positivist rejection of metaphysics and the philosophy of nature. Is the direct or indirect avoidance of dealing with these issues acceptable? The inventors of the new natural law theory attempt to replace the knowledge required for the... (shrink)

The world of international relations and law is constantly changing. There is a risk of the systematic undermining of international organisations and law over the next years. Feminist approaches to international law will need to adapt accordingly, to ensure that they continue to challenge inequalities, and serve as an important and critical voice in international law. This article seeks to tell the story of feminist perspectives on international law from the early 1990s till today through a discussion between three generations (...) of feminist international legal scholars: Hilary Charlesworth, who, with her colleagues, contributed to the area in the immediate post-Cold War years, Gina Heathcote, who over the past decade has published extensively on feminist perspectives on the use of force and collective security, and Emily Jones, an early career scholar working on feminist approaches to international law. The conversation, which began as a Skype discussion, considers both the ways in which feminist approaches to international law have changed over the past two decades, as well as the ways in which they have been shaped by global politics, before turning to consider the future for feminist approaches to international law. The impact of feminist approaches to international law has been considerable. However, it seems that feminist approaches still lack legitimacy and credibility in many mainstream circles, remaining on the disciplinary periphery. Charlesworth, Heathcote and Jones discuss potential ways in which to manage some of these tensions, noting both the importance of ‘speaking to ourselves’ as a creative and nurturing space, as well as the need to be seen as a more credible voice in the mainstream. They note the need, too, for further feminist work beyond the realms of sexual violence and women’s representation. While the great amount of work in this area is, indeed, foundational, having achieved many important legal and political outcomes, feminist approaches should now develop beyond these areas. Doing so will not only propel this area of scholarship in new and exciting directions, but it might help feminist scholarship gain further traction by avoiding categorisation only under the umbrella of “women’s issues” and thus ready dismissal as just another specialist area of international law in the era of fragmentation. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of ArtJoe WinstonOnly a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, by Alexander Nehamas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007, 186 pp., $29.95 cloth.We cannot doubt that, since the turn of the new millennium, there has been something of what Michael Bérubé has called a "Return to Beauty" in cultural and (...) literary scholarship.1 Bérubé locates the beginning of this return in an article written by Marjorie Perloff for the Chronicle of Higher Education in December 4, 1998, and in an opinion that he shares with Rita Felski, he sees it as a misguided attack on cultural studies.2 It is clear that when Elaine Scarry spoke disparagingly of "the enemies of beauty" in her influential book On Beauty and Being Just, she had the more extreme relativists of cultural studies in her sights.3 Far from being a short-lived spat, however, the renewed scholarly interest in beauty has grown, moved on a pace, and shows no sign of intellectual exhaustion; and most of this work has not, as Bérubé would have us believe, directed itself against postmodern aesthetics. Wendy Steiner, in The Trouble with Beauty, took Modernism and the art of the twentieth-century avant-garde as her target;4 whereas John Armstrong's The Secret Power of Beauty provided a sustained and accessible look at the history of aesthetic thought and reminded us of the significance of beauty in our lives, as both a concept and as a value.5 Arthur Danto's The Abuse of Beauty traced, like Steiner, the rejection of beauty to the rise of Modernism. Significantly, he did not attack Modernist art but recognized how it drove a wedge between beauty and the arts, showing us in the process that art need not be beautiful to be of value. In reassessing Modernism's rejection of beauty, however, Danto concluded by arguing forcefully that if beauty need not be excluded from art, it cannot be excluded from everyday living: "Beauty is an option for art but not a necessary condition. But it is not an option for life. It is a necessary condition for life as we would want to live it"6When a scholar with the reputation of Alexander Nehamas turns his attention to beauty, then we know it is still on the agenda in a big way. As with John Armstrong's work, one of the many delights of this book is its clarity of expression and the accessibility of its prose. In no way is Nehamas ever talking down to or patronizing the reader, however. He takes us on a philosophical journey that is rigorously argued and backed up by a wide selection of examples drawn chiefly from the world of art, which is indeed the subject of the writer's attention. If he has cultural studies in his sights, then he is very quiet about it. In fact, the canonical writers of cultural studies, whether they be Foucault, Bourdieu, Williams, or Gramsci, are entirely absent from the text. Instead, the central role goes to Plato—on whom Nehamas has written in two previous publications7—with important [End Page 124] contributions from Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietszche, and Clive Bell, not to mention Proust and Thomas Mann or the artworks themselves. This has a strong whiff of the canon about it perhaps; be that as it may, only a reviewer with a very large ideological drum to beat could remain deaf to the argument itself. For these individuals are all supportive of Nehamas's own thinking and of the argument he has himself developed, which, I think, is not only important to the world of art and art education but, more broadly, to the aesthetics of contemporary schooling itself.Before beginning to look at this argument in detail, it is worth noting that Nehamas has something telling to say about the principles and role of the reviewing process, something that cannot but make me feel wryly self-conscious as I begin it here. A review, he tells us, is a kind of advertisement to help... (shrink)

There are several models of the use of geometric and feature cues in reorientation. The adaptive combination approach posits that people integrate cues with weights that depend on cue salience and learning, or, when discrepancies are large, they choose between cues based on these variables. In a new paradigm designed to evaluate integration and choice, disoriented participants attempted to return to a heading direction, in a trapezoidal enclosure in which feature and geometric cues both unambiguously specified a heading, but (...) later the feature was moved. With discrepancies greater than 90 degrees, participants choose geometry. With smaller discrepancies, integration appeared in three of five situations; otherwise, participants used geometry alone. Variation depended on direction of feature movement and whether the nearest corner was acute or obtuse. The results have implications for contrasting adaptive combination and modularity theory, and for future research, offering a new paradigm for reorientation research, and for testing cue integration more broadly. (shrink)

The motto of the Royal Society—Nullius in verba—was intended to highlight the members’ rejection of received knowledge and the new place they afforded direct empirical evidence in their quest for genuine, useful knowledge about the world. But while many studies have raised questions about the construction, reception and authentication of knowledge, Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences is the first to examine the problem of evidence at this pivotal moment in European intellectual history. What constituted (...) evidence—and for whom? Where might it be found? How should it be collected and organized? What is the relationship between evidence and proof? These are crucial questions, for what constitutes evidence determines how people interrogate the world and the kind of arguments they make about it. In this important new collection, Lancaster and Raiswell have assembled twelve studies that capture aspects of the debate over evidence in a variety of intellectual contexts. From law and theology to geography, medicine and experimental philosophy, the chapters highlight the great diversity of approaches to evidence-gathering that existed side by side in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this way, the volume makes an important addition to the literature on early science and knowledge formation, and will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students in these fields. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:388 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Beyond the Edge of Certainty: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy. Edited with an Introduction by Robert G. Colodny. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965.) This is the second volume of lectures on various current topics in the philosophy of the physical, biological, and social sciences which has been published under the auspices of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of (...) Pittsburg. Volume I, Frontiers o] Science and Philosophy, also edited by Professor Colodny, appeared in 1962. Five of the seven lectures contained in this volume treat topics which fall within the philosophy of physics. The persistent student who is without a technical background in either logic or physics will find these for the most part quite readable. Considering this, it is worthy of note that, while the lectures are not of uniform quality in this respect, several problems are treated with sufficient freshness of insight to justify the interest of the philosopher of science as such. Since I cannot discuss all of the lectures, I will restrict my comments, for the most part, to those the significance of which I think I understand best and which deal significantly with some aspect of the history of philosophy. In "Newton's First Law: A Philosopher's Door into Natural Philosophy," Norwood Russell Hanson exhibits what has become a widely accepted analysis of Newton's First Law as a model to be applied to theories in science which must be regarded as, in some sense, true, but which, in principle, are not empirically demonstrable. Briant Ellis, in "The Origin and Nature of Newton's Laws of Motion," deals in a somewhat parallel way with all three of Newton's laws of motion. It is argued that these laws are primarily conceptual in origin. Evidence is marshalled that they were derived from Cartesian physics. That no amount of empirical work could establish or provide support for a principle of natural motion is held by Ellis to be due to the fact that "force" is conceived as something that exists only in order to explain effects. "Since we are at liberty to choose to regard whatever changes or states we please as natural (i.e., as not being effects) it follows that the forces which we should say are operative in nature depend upon the choices we actually make" (65). It would, I think be difficult to show that any one of the points Ellis makes, with the exception of his interesting historical note on the probable origin of Newton's laws of motion, has not previously been made. All, or nearly all, of these points were set forth, at least in outline, for example, by William Werkmeister in A Philosophy o] Science. The approach Ellis makes to his development of the concept of "force," however, is both fresh and incisive and worthy of careful study. In "A Philosopher looks at Quantum Mechanics," Hillary Putnam exhibits the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics of Bohr and Heisenberg, viewed in historical perspective, as the most adequate of several unsatisfactory theories. He finds the locus of the problem to lie in a suitable definition of "measurement." Noting that Heisenberg's definition (improperly) appeals to the macrocosm conceived in terms of classical mechanics, he seeks to clarify some of the issues that must follow the attempt to define measurement within the context of quantum mechanics. Putnam holds the relative sharpness of macroobservables for Bohr and Heisenberg to be an underived assumption of their theory. Since the quantities of which macro-observables are supposed to be averages are not (in quantum mechanics) required always to exist, this assumption cannot be derived from a plausible definition of macro-observables together with a suitable formulation of the laws of quantum mechanics. Moving from Bohr and Heisenberg's conclusion that measurement requires interaction of a system (or part of a system) measured with respect to an outside system, and that macroobservables do not exist unless measured, measurement for quantum mechanics is defined as "an interaction in which a system A (the 'measured' system), which was previously isolated, interacts with a system B (the 'measuring' system) in such a way as to cause a... (shrink)

Racism as an independent topic of investigation in philosophy has considerably developed since the 1990s, when it appeared as part of growing debates that, on the one hand, investigated the political meaning of race and, on the other, its ontology and whether it existed at all. Likewise, with the idea of racism, its broadly normative meaning is critiqued by some philosophers, while others ask how best to conceive of it and identify its immorality. There were a few early and significant (...) forays in philosophy about the nature of racism, of which three works stand out because of the way they set the terms of the debate: David Theo Goldberg's Racist Culture, Charles W. Mills’ The Racial Contract, and Jorge L.A. Garcia's “The Heart of Racism.”1 This collection reacts to the latter fork in the discussion but does so in ways that significantly touch on the former.The collection begins with Jorge L. Garcia's “Virtue Ethics in Social Theory: Defending a Volitional Analysis of Racism from Tommie Shelby's Challenges.” It is a clarification and defense of his influential volitional analysis of racism (VAR) from three prominent objections: that VAR inadequately accounts for the immorality of racism because it relies on the assumed wrongness of racism built into ordinary usage of the term ‘racist;’ that it mistakenly separates intention from belief; and that it does not fully account for the racism of some troubling mental states that cannot be traced back to a racist ill-will. Garcia's account of racism as fundamentally rooted in racist ill-will, along with Lawrence Blum's, is representative of agent-centered theories of racism. Not only do they attempt to explain individual or personal racism, but they also hold that racism in institutions, structures, or systems traces back to the racism of persons.Current accounts of structural racism, however, claim that it exists and operates independently of infection from intentionally racist persons, that the focus on racist persons cannot adequately account for how racism works in society, and that, instead, we should concentrate on structures and ideologies. Amelia Wirts sharply defends this view in her, “What does it mean to say ‘The Criminal Justice System is Racist’?” She explains how structural racism applies to America's criminal justice system and other “intermediate” (between individual and societal level) structures. Wirts argues that personal accounts of racism, and in particular Garcia's VAR, do not adequately account for the patterns of racial disparity in the criminal justice system or its disproportionate harm to black people. She advocates, instead, for a patterned view of structural racism, the patterns of which operate “as if it were designed to disproportionately harm” some racialized group. Additionally, Wirts adds that such patterns are particularly racist when they fuel racist ideological symbols, as the criminal justice system does in relation to the idea of the black criminal.Structural analyses of racism are powerfully instructive, and Alisa Bierria, in “Structural Racism Within Reason,” offers an account that takes an epistemic turn that advances our understanding of their meaning. More than the idea that personal and structural racism beget each other in continuous looping effects, and more than the view that racism is best understood as an ideology that provides the content to racist attitudes or policy proscriptions, she argues that structural racism structures reason. Drawing on the 2012 case of Marissa Alexander, who unsuccessfully tried to use Florida's Stand Your Ground Law to justify her firing a warning shot at her estranged, abusive husband to protect herself from his murderous threat, Bierra argues that structural racism extends constructed and controlling intentions onto its targets, and, as in the case she discusses, it uses those constructed and fictional intentions to justify their punishment and depriving them of equal justice.Structural analyses of racism are essential additions to the philosophical understanding of racism that have appropriately challenged the centrality of agent-centered accounts. The increasing academic focus on structural explanations, however, along with the current overuse of “systemic racism” in popular discourse, threatens to eclipse the value of accounts of agent-centered accounts. In “Is Racism Essentially Systemic?” Michael Hardimon counsels against this trend. He reminds us that racism is not essentially systemic, and that the dominance of structural explanations could obscure its other forms and even the proper understanding of structural racism. Indeed, structures once constructed might operate independently of human intention, but they are designed, initiated, and often operated by persons.After considering the direction of the current philosophical discussion about the meaning of racism and its immorality, the next set of articles expands the discussion into matters of class, xenophobia, and white nationalism. Lawrence Blum's “Race and Class Together” starts it off. Blum builds class into his analysis of racism and critiques its absence in anti-racist theory. He argues that paying attention to class is required to secure justice for the victims of racism because pursuing justice is often a matter of both. Blum contends that race and class are “normatively distinct axes of injustice” and that, depending on the question, racial injustice needs to be addressed separately. However, there are aspects of racial injustice that can only be dealt with through a class analysis and require class or combined class–race focused policies. Pointing to the fact that many of the members of groups targeted by racism (he considers blacks, Indigenous peoples, and Latinxs) share cross-class interests, which includes shared interests with some whites, which they do not share with more economically privileged members of their own groups, Blum argues that these interests should be addressed through “class-focused policies,” in a manner that will secure justice for disadvantaged racial groups.Shifting from the class-race analysis, José Jorge Mendoza, in “‘Go Back to Where You Came From!’ Racism, Xenophobia, and White Nationalism,” turns our attention toward white nationalism to examine whether it is best understood as an expression of racism or xenophobia. Although he recognizes the importance of xenophobia in white nationalism, Mendoza does not neglect its connections with racist ideas. However, he acknowledges that emphasizing the role of race in condemnations of white nationalism risks overextending the concept of race, i.e., in regards to pan-racial groups, because some members of those groups are racially identified as white. Thus, the charge of racism against white nationalism in such cases may not clearly apply. To deal with those cases, Mendoza cleverly decouples the ideas of “radicalization” and “racial formation,” and he puts forward a new concept, “racial disintegration,” to account for the operation and shifting targets of white nationalism.In the final piece, David H. Kim and I discuss xenophobia and racism in the case of “Anti-Asian Racism.” We move from general theories of racism to inquire about what is at the base of anti-Asian racism. Little is said in contemporary accounts of racism about anti-Asian racism. This is due, in part, to the high level of abstraction in those discussions but also because much of the literature takes anti-blackness as the model of racism. Our piece addresses this lacuna in a manner not beholden to the black-white binary. We discuss how the idea of anti-Asian racism is a conceptual problem in the American context dominated by that binary. We then argue that xenophobia as a form of civic ostracism, and to some extent xenophilia, play a particular role in how anti-Asian racism functions and its immorality.The pieces in this collection resonate with current events and controversies involving racism and illustrate the potential of the debate to relate to and speak those events, not just to the specialized interests of a cloistered academic conversation. Each piece demonstrates the potential for extending vital lines of debate and discussion that touches the raw nerve of the public discussion of racism. (shrink)

For some time we have seen a shift away from direct marketing, a core feature and dominant exchange form in the alternative food world, towards a greater role for intermediation. Yet, we still need to better understand to what extent and in what ways new mediated Alternative Food Networks represent an evolution of or departure from core tenets of alternative food systems. This paper focuses on AFNs with new intermediaries that connect small-scale producers with urban end-consumers. Based on original research (...) in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Calgary, we analyze three different types of mediated AFNs: one driven by consumers, one by an external intermediary, and one by producers. Our cases include non-capitalist, capitalist, and alternative capitalist economic practices as identified by Gibson-Graham. Conceptually, we base our analysis on the three-pillar-model of alternative agri-food systems, which we further refine. Besides comparing our cases with each other, for heuristic purposes we also compare them with an ideal-type model that adheres to core tenets of alterity in all three pillars. Our empirical analysis shows that intermediary organizations can bring important benefits and that mediated AFNs are in principle able to hold true to the core tenets of alternative agri-food systems. However, it is very important to develop models of democratic control and ownership as well as economic arrangements in which created value is fairly shared. Only then can the potentials of new mediated models be realized while the pitfalls of the conventional systems they seek to replace be avoided. (shrink)

Despite the prodigious inventiveness of the Middle Ages, the era is often characterized as deeply suspicious of novelty. But if poets and philosophers urged caution about the new, Patricia Clare Ingham contends, their apprehension was less the result of a blind devotion to tradition than a response to radical expansions of possibility in diverse realms of art and science. Discovery and invention provoked moral questions in the Middle Ages, serving as a means to adjudicate the ethics of invention and opening (...) thorny questions of creativity and desire. The Medieval New concentrates on the preoccupation with newness and novelty in literary, scientific, and religious discourses of the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. Examining a range of evidence, from the writings of Roger Bacon and Geoffrey Chaucer to the letters of Christopher Columbus, and attending to histories of children's toys, the man-made marvels of romance, the utopian aims of alchemists, and the definitional precision of the scholastics, Ingham analyzes the ethical ambivalence with which medieval thinkers approached the category of the new. With its broad reconsideration of what the "newfangled" meant in the Middle Ages, The Medieval New offers an alternative to histories that continue to associate the medieval era with conservation rather than with novelty, its benefits and liabilities. Calling into question present-day assumptions about newness, Ingham's study demonstrates the continued relevance of humanistic inquiry in the so-called traditional disciplines of contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

This book marks the retirement of Donald Harris as Director of the Socio-Legal Studies Institute, Oxford University. Dr Harris was at the forefront of the move in legal scholarship from traditional black-letter approaches to one supplemented by a socio-legal perspective, making use of the insights of the social sciences. His success can be seen in this unique volume of original essays by some of the most distinguished scholars in this field, all of whom have connections with the Centre. The (...) essays range from an economic analysis of the law, the behaviour of lawyers in the business world, the property and financial consequences of divorce, to current tensions between judges and politicians. All are fused by their achievement in providing a succinct summary of the current state of research while making a considered assessment of future directions. (shrink)

The hermeneutic movement in philosophy and criticism has done us a service by directing our attention to the role of critical interpretation in understanding the humanities. But it has done us a disservice also because it does not recognize any comparable role for interpretation in the natural sciences and in this way sharply separates the two fields of scholarship and experience.1 Consequently, I shall argue, the central truths and virtues of hermeneutics have become encumbered with a whole string of (...) false interferences and misleading dichotomies. These distortions have had two effects. On the one hand, they have rationality which are crucial goals of the natural sciences; and, on the other hand, they have encouraged an exaggerated idea of the extent to which difference in personal and/or cultural standpoint rule out any such goal for the humanities. Once we recognize that the natural sciences too are in the business of "construing" reality, we shall be better able to preserve the central insights of the hermeneutic method, without succumbing to the misleading implications of its rhetorical misuse.Physics, in particular, has always required its participants to adopt an interpretive standpoint, and this standpoint has changed more than once during the historical development of that science. Yet this variable standpoint has done nothing to undercut the commitment of physicists to rationality and objectivity: on the contrary, they have made it one of their chief aims to discover just what aspects of reality, or nature, lend themselves to interpretation and understanding as considered from any particular standpoint. If we can drive this wedge between scientific objectivity and hermeneutic relativity in the case of physics, we are free to return to the humanities and apply the same distinction there too. It has too often, and too readily, been assumed that whatever needs to be interpreted in order to be understood will, to that extent, become a matter of taste or subjectivity; and, as a result, any claims to rationality and objectivity in the critical realms–whether moral or aesthetic, political and intellectual–have been too hastily surrendered.The current sharp distinction between scientific explanations and hermeneutic interpretation was launched by Wilhelm Dilthey nearly a century ago; and, in justice to Dilthey, we need to bear in mind that the interpretive element in natural science was far less evident then than it is today. Scientists nowadays view the world from a new and less rigid standpoint. This period which Frederick Ferre calls "postmodern science," differs from the older one of "modern science" in just those respects that enable us to reconcile the rational claims that have always been central to the natural sciences with a new hermeneutic richness and variability.1. Some will respond that Edmund Husserl, for one, spoke of the natural sciences as being, in their own way, "interpretive"; but the role allotted to natural science by the phenomonologists and their successors—I have in mind Hans Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermass much as Martin Heidegger and Husserl—I an impoverished and unhistorical one. The hermeneutic philosophers have not, in this respect, fully recognized either the plurality or the historical variability of the interpretive modes adopted in one or another of the natural sciences for different intellectual purposes and at different stages in their historical development.Stephen Toulmin is a professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He is author of, among other works, Foresight and Understanding, Human Understanding, and Knowing and Acting and is currently at work on volume 2 of Human Understanding. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "The Inwardness of Mental Life," appeared in the Autumn 1979 issue. (shrink)