Bred to provide human companionship, dogs eclipse all other species when it comes to reading the body language of people. Dog owners hunger for a complete rapport with their pets; in the dog the fantasy of empathetic resonance finds its ideal. But cross-species communication is never easy. Dog love can be a precious but melancholy thing. An attempt to understand human attachment to the _canis familiaris_ in terms of reciprocity and empathy, _Melancholia’s_ _Dog_ tackles such difficult concepts as intimacy and (...) kinship with dogs, the shame associated with identification with their suffering, and the reasons for the profound mourning over their deaths. In addition to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Alice A. Kuzniar turns to the insights and images offered by the literary and visual arts—the short stories of Ivan Turgenev and Franz Kafka, the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Rebecca Brown, the photography of Sally Mann and William Wegman, and the artwork of David Hockney and Sue Coe. Without falling into sentimentality or anthropomorphization, Kuzniar honors and learns from our canine companions, above all attending to the silences and sadness brought on by the effort to represent the dog as perfectly and faithfully as it is said to love. (shrink)

By the turn of the twenty-first century, women writing about electing to share their lives with female canines directly confront a strange sort of backlash. Even as their extensions of the feminist forms of personal criticism contribute to significant developments in theories of sex, gender, and species, they become targets of criticism as “indulgent” for focusing on their dogs. Comparing these elements in and around popular memoirs like Caroline Knapp's Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond between People and Dogs (1998) (...) and Deirdre McCloskey's Crossing: A Memoir (1999), as well as academic studies like Alice Kuzniar's Melancholia's Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship (2006) and Donna Haraway's When Species Meet (2007), this essay elaborates the ways in which living with and writing about female canine companions informs poststructuralist and feminist questions about the embodiment and performance of structures of authority, including those of academic writers, “dog-mom” stereotypes, and reproductively silenced bodies. Situating these texts amid discussions of form in and around feminist/dog-writing, I argue that together they move narrative beyond the abstract model of the lone “authoritative” human individual, reframing feminist politics as intra-active, even trans-species, from the ground up. (shrink)

BackgroundThis study aimed at standardizing and providing preliminary evidence on the clinical usability of the Italian telephone-based Verbal Fluency Battery, which includes phonemic, semantic and alternate verbal fluency tasks.MethodsThree-hundred and thirty-five Italian healthy participants and 27 individuals with neurodegenerative or cerebrovascular diseases were administered the t-VFB. Switch number and cluster size were computed via latent semantic analyses. HPs underwent the telephone-based Mental State Examination and Backward Digit Span. Construct validity, factorial structure, internal consistency, test-retest and inter-rater reliability and equivalence with (...) the in-person Verbal Fluency tasks were assessed. Norms were derived via Equivalent Scores. Diagnostic accuracy against clinical populations was assessed.ResultsThe majority of t-VFB scores correlated among each other and with the BDS, but not with the MMSE. Switch number correlated with t-PVF, t-SVF, t-AVF scores, whilst cluster size with the t-SVF and t-AVF scores only. The t-VFB was underpinned by a mono-component structure and was internally consistent. Test-retest and inter-rater reliability were optimal. Each t-VFB test was statistically equivalent to its in-person version. Education predicted all t-VFB scores, whereas age t-SVF and t-AVF scores and sex only some t-SVF scores. Diagnostic accuracy against clinical samples was optimal.DiscussionThe t-VFB is a valid, reliable and normed telephone-based assessment tool for language and executive functioning, equivalent to the in-person version; results show promising evidence of its diagnostic accuracy in neurological populations. (shrink)

In the late 1940s, a microanatomist from London Ontario, Murray Barr, discovered a mark of sex chromosome status in bodily tissues, what came to be known as the ‘Barr body’. This discovery offered an important diagnostic technology to the burgeoning clinical science community engaged with the medical interpretation and management of sexual anomalies. It seemed to offer a way to identify the true, underlying sex in those whose bodies or lives were sexually anomalous . The hypothesis that allowed the Barr (...) body to stand in for ‘chromosomal’ or ‘genetic’ sex was provisional, but it supported the expectation that genetic information established one’s primary identity, and the conviction that the animal world could be neatly divided into two, and only two, sexes. Ultimately, this provisional hypothesis, and its status as an unambiguous arbiter of true sex, was overturned. But during much of the 1950s, Barr’s thesis about the identity of the Barr body was consistent with a coherent set of theories and evidence explaining sexual development and sexual pathology. Though provisional, the scientific status of the sex chromatin within this system of knowledge was good enough to support a flourishing research enterprise in the clinical sciences. (shrink)

Dietrich von Hildebrand, widely regarded as one of the great Catholic philosophers of the 20th century, is well-known for his numerous books, but, until this present work, not much has been known of his remarkable and inspiring life. Written by his wife, Alice, also a highly respected Catholic thinker, this is a fascinating, moving and, at times, gripping account of a truly great man of the Church who suffered much for the faith. Based on a very long "letter" Dietrich (...) wrote to his wife late in his life, it tells his story from his glorious youth with a unique intellectual and cultural formation, his coversion to Catholisism, his great passion for truth and beauty, his extensive writing on Christian philosophy and theology, and his steadfast, determined opposition to Nazism that made him a marked man who miraculously escaped execution. A powerful biography of a relentless fighter against injustice, a devoted son of the Church, a man who had the "soul of a lion". Illustrated. (shrink)

DNA evidence has rapidly become a significant and routine feature of modern criminal prosecutions. The first introduction of DNA evidence in a U.S. Court occurred in 1987. By 1994, 42 percent of local prosecutors reported that they had used DNA evidence in a felony case at least once. By 2001 that number had increased to 68 percent. Moreover, from a technical point of view, the potential benefits of DNA testing are substantial. Early hurdles to admissibility during trial have been overcome (...) by the adoption of rigorous standards for DNA analysis. Rapid development of identification technology, fueled in significant part by the Human Genome Project, and the resultant development and expansion of national forensic DNA databases, has increased the potential of DNA to play a major role in crime solving. Indeed, over three million offender profiles, collected by state and federal authorities, now reside in the National DNA Index System. This number is likely to increase as more states and the federal government are expanding compelled DNA collections to individuals arrested for certain crimes. (shrink)

This paper is one of four interrelated papers resulting from the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control convened in June 2008 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Society of Law, Medicine, Ethics. Each of the papers deals with one of the four core elements of legal preparedness: laws and legal authorities for public health practitioners; legal competencies public health practitioners and legal and policy decision makers need (...) for use of these laws and authorities; crossdisciplinary and cross-jurisdiction coordination of law-based public health actions; and information on public health law best practices. Collectively, they are referenced as the “white papers.”Our purpose is to offer action options that will help to improve the legal competencies of public health practitioners and policy decision makers with respect to drafting, interpreting. (shrink)

Do democratic systems that include binding referendum and initiative processes violate a core principle of democracy, namely that legislators should be accountable? Some have argued that they do: these popular vote processes would grant the right to legislate to ordinary voters even though they cannot be held accountable—i.e., face possible consequences imposed by others for their actions and decisions. As a result, we should favor conventional representative systems over systems with popular vote processes. In this article, I analyze this ‘accountability (...) objection’ to referendums and initiatives and the conception of voters as ‘legislators’ on which it relies and argue that it does not withstand scrutiny. I first demonstrate that there is no sound basis to characterize only voters in popular votes, and not voters in elections, as ‘legislators’. Therefore, the scope of the objection is broader than anticipated by its proponents: it cannot be consistently used to dismiss popular votes without also being fatal to elections. I then argue that voters’ lack of accountability is not fatal to either mass voting process. The institutional role of ordinary voters provides them with co-lawmaking powers; but these are not the kind of special powers that justify holding certain actors accountable in democratic systems. This does not exclude that voters have responsibilities. I close by highlighting that, compared to conventional representative systems, democratic systems including well-designed popular vote processes could offer voters more supportive conditions to meet such possible responsibilities. (shrink)

Andrew Abbott's Department and Discipline calls to mind an exchange I once had with an economist—prompted by my characterization of a recent work of urban sociology as part of the “Chicago‐school tradition”—who reminded me that in his profession “Chicago school” was associated with Milton Friedman, free market ideology, and a world made up of rational, self‐interest‐maximizing actors. What I had in mind could hardly be further from that: the highly contextual, neighborhood‐based mode of analysis that became a hallmark of the (...) University of Chicago Department of Sociology from the late 1910s through the 1930s and that explained such phenomena as juvenile delinquency, race relations, poverty, and urban ennui as the products of complex, historically rooted social processes, ecologies, and group interactions.The essays that make up Department and Discipline ask that we rethink “conventional” notions of “Chicago‐school” sociology as a body of work produced by a particular group of faculty and students in a bygone era. Instead, in an engaging, unapologetically polemical, and ultimately prescriptive blend of historical analysis and disciplinary critique, Abbott conceptualizes the Chicago school as a tradition that was invented and reinvented over time, and within the ever‐changing relationship between the department and the broader discipline over the first half of the twentieth century. With this as his central theme, Abbott contemplates the—highly contested—meaning of the Chicago school in historiography and departmental history; the historical transformation of the Chicago‐based American Journal of Sociology from early, shaping influence to a mere organ of an increasingly narrow, professionalized discipline; and the capacity of the discipline to transcend what Abbott believes to be its contemporary state of professional and intellectual exhaustion.Even within sociology, “Chicago school” has had varying connotations over the years. Some associate it with Robert Park and his cyclical, assimilationist vision of race relations; others with the organic, ecological view of urban growth and mobility patterns captured in such still‐ubiquitous concepts as ethnic “succession”; still others with symbolic interactionism, the social psychological study of how people engage with, give meaning to, and ultimately act within the object world around them. More recently there has been talk of a “second Chicago school,” a post–World War II generation of qualitative and interactionist scholars who kept those traditions alive even as the discipline was headed in more quantitative, grand theoretical directions. Complicating matters still further, members of the initial, now‐legendary founding generation did not think of themselves as engaged in a single intellectual project or “school” of thought. Indeed, Abbott tells us that it was not until the 1970s, decades after Chicago lost its dominance in the discipline, that “the loose tangle of maxims and practices that had sustained the department in its glory years” was actually presented as “the Chicago school” .So does it make sense to talk about a or the Chicago school of sociology? Abbott argues that it does, albeit not as something that exists in the ideas, the body of research, or the considerable institutional apparatus that characterized the department during its interwar “glory years.” Rather, it existed in the interactions among a methodologically diverse, often deeply conflicted department faculty, out of which emerged an eclectic tradition of inquiry dedicated to understanding social processes in the context of time and place. Ironically, it took a moment of crisis—a year‐long self‐study in 1951–1952 prompted by administrative pressure and foundation efforts to define sociology as a bona fide science—to bring this vision of the Chicago‐school tradition into full view. By then, the tradition was on the way out: its practitioners retiring or moving elsewhere; its sensibilities displaced by a type of analysis C. Wright Mills would scornfully refer to as abstracted empiricism, dedicated to the construction and manipulation of variables outside of time and place.Though not a book for the uninitiated—Abbott's detailed rendering of behind‐the‐scenes personalities and squabbles requires some knowledge of the department and its landmark works—Department and Discipline makes an important contribution to social science history as well as to the literature on the Chicago school. Informed by extensive archival research, the book is animated by a powerful argument that is likely to resonate with historians, if not with the AJS editors who declined to publish the essay they had commissioned from Abbott for the journal's centenary: that sociology must reconnect with and reinvigorate the tradition of contextual analysis. While intriguing, Abbott's argument that the Chicago “school” exists in departmental processes and faculty relationships is less fully realized—occasional references to the Chicago‐school tradition in its 1920–1930s “heyday” sound awfully like the conventional view. It also makes for a book that gives short shrift to the actual ideas and body of research associated with Chicago sociology—and to their extraordinarily enduring influence among social practitioners and analysts alike. Still, when Abbott does turn to the work, the discussion is, like the rest of the book, original, thought provoking, and rewarding to read. (shrink)

The paper defends a compatibilist solution to the problem of the relationship between divine and human freedom. It is argued that the asymmetry of ability constituted by our ability to foreknowledge influence the future and our inability to control the past results from the asymmetry of openness between fixed past and open future interpreted in terms of the asymmetry of counterfactual dependence. Therefore, if the asymmetry of openness is not true of some types of facts, then we may be able (...) to control them even if they are facts about the past. It turns out that widely shared accounts of the nature and source of God’s foreknowledge entail that the asymmetry of openness does not apply to God’s past beliefs about future contingencies. Thus, it is unjustified to claim that we are unable to now do anything such that, if we were to do it, God’s past beliefs would have been different. (shrink)

This paper provides and justifies a broader definition of a ‘law-breaking event’ than that adopted by D. Lewis who identifies this concept with the notion of an event that falsifies the laws of nature in his sense of ‘falsification’. It is pointed out that the broader definition is the key to answering C. Ginet’s objection against local miracle compatibilism. It also allows a neutral reconstruction of one of the disagreements underlying the compatibilism debate about the ability to do otherwise, i.e., (...) the disagreement over nomological possibility of alternative action in a deterministic world. Under this reconstruction, neither the incompatibilist nor the compatibilist can take advantage of the concept of a law-breaking event to show that their opponent’s view is false. (shrink)

Wider possibilities for moral thought -- Objectivity revisited: a lesson from the work of J.L. Austin -- Ethics, inheriting from Wittgenstein -- Moral thought beyond moral judgment: the case of literature -- Reclaiming moral judgment: the case of feminist thought -- Moralism as a central moral problem.

The Darwinian argument in metaethics can have its memetic counterparts based on the assumption that our moral beliefs were formed in the process of cultural evolution by means of memetic natural selection. Is there any difference with respect to the debunking force of these two kinds of genealogical critiques? In this paper, I argue that there might be such difference. Therefore, it is not true that any possible naturalistically respectable causal mechanism is equally undermining for our moral beliefs. Yet, there (...) is a more profound question to be asked: should we leave the rationality of our deepest moral beliefs at the mercy of the results of empirical investigations into their causal origin? This paper argues that we should not. However, if this approach is to be justified, the autonomy of moral beliefs must be defended in a principal manner. Only then may a different account of knowledge as well as different standards of objective propositional rationality be legitimately adopted for moral beliefs — i.e. different from those proper to non-normative beliefs. It turns out that only expressivists are in a position to claim that the property in virtue of which moral beliefs perform their distinctive practical function confers autonomy on moral discourse. (shrink)

Artykuł zawiera prezentację teorii konstruktywizmu metaetycznego Sharon Street i stanowi próbę ustalenia, czy koncepcja ta posiada status adekwatnej teorii metaetycznej pociągającej wiarygodne konsekwencje normatywne. W toku analizy okazuje się, że konstruktywizm Street jest stanowiskiem niedookreślonym w szczegółach, a jego relacja do ekspresywizmu pozostaje niejasna. Normatywne konsekwencje konstruktywizmu głębokiego są nieintuicyjne i kontrowersyjne – przede wszystkim dlatego, że teoria ta uzależnia sferę powinności od dokonywanych przez jednostkę wartościowań, o ile tylko wartościowania te są ze sobą wzajemnie spójne i są instrumentalnie racjonalne (...) w świetle prozaicznych faktów. Konstruktywizm pada ofiarą problemu autoreferencji, który to problem może być sformułowany w postaci następującego pytania: czy konstruktywistyczne ujęcie warunków prawdziwości twierdzeń normatywnych wynika z każdego praktycznego punktu widzenia, czy też jego trafność jest niezależna od praktycznego punktu widzenia w ogóle? Problem jest poważny, ponieważ stawia pod znakiem zapytania wewnętrzną spójność dyskutowanego stanowiska. Ponadto jest rzeczą wątpliwą, czy konstruktywizm jest najmocniejszym poglądem antyrealistycznym w metaetyce – wydaje się, że teorie odwołujące się do reakcji podmiotów znajdujących się w idealnych okolicznościach posiadają przewagę. Te ostatnie są zasadnie bardziej restrykcyjne w dziedzinie etyki normatywnej, nie wchodzą w konflikt z wnioskami wyciąganymi przez Street z tzw. dylematu darwinowskiego oraz w mniejszym stopniu niż konstruktywizm dopuszczają wpływ nieistotnych procesów przyczynowych. (shrink)

Metaetyka jest prężnie rozwijającą się dziedziną dociekań filozoficznych, której pytania należą do problemów określających przedmiot refleksji filozoficznej od czasów jej zarania. Metody tych dociekań również mają starożytny rodowód, sięgający wysiłków analitycznych Sokratesa. W dziedzinie tej cały czas pojawiają się kolejne zagadnienia, ciekawe i doniosłe teorie, a nawet nowe paradygmaty badawcze. Metaetyka jest przedsięwzięciem interdyscyplinarnym, w którym wykorzystuje się i rozwija teorie z zakresu m.in. filozofii języka, ontologii i epistemologii, odnosząc się także do wyników innych nauk, w szczególności psychologii i biologii. (...) Niniejszy, poświęcony problematyce metaetycznej, numer Etyki bardzo dobrze ilustruje przedstawiony stan rzeczy; znalazły się w nim teksty obejmujące szerokie spektrum tematów. (shrink)

Artykuł poświęcony jest realizacji celu badawczego, na który składają się trzy zadania. Pierwszym z nich jest zarysowanie głównych cech ekspresywizmu metaetycznego, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem różnic i podobieństw zachodzących między tym typem teorii a tradycyjnym emotywizmem. Drugim zadaniem jest przedstawienie podstawowych twierdzeń najbardziej wyrafinowanej wersji współczesnego ekspresywizmu – koncepcji Allana Gibbarda – z uwzględnieniem miejsca uczuć moralnych w analizie sądów moralnych. Po trzecie w artykule omawia się podjęte przez Gibbarda zastosowanie podejścia ekspresywistycznego w metateorii znaczenia i jego metaetyczne konsekwencje, zwłaszcza w (...) zakresie relacji między ekspresywizmem a antynaturalizmem. (shrink)