Arts-Based Thought Experiments is a highly visual offering that engages visual arts, photography, poetry, creative non-fiction, memoir and speculative fiction. In this novel book, the authors lean deeply into concepts of the imaginary, and through artful experiments with thought, trouble the tensions between the human, the posthuman and the more than human. In the Anthropocene, with its intractable challenges and cataclysms, engaging posthuman positions when thinking of learning in socioecological terms is paramount to human survival. In this sense, the arts (...) offer creative and critical thought for the possibilities of a post-Anthropocene earth. Contributors are: Raoul Adam, Marilyn Ahearn, William Boyd, Euan Boyd, Adrienne Brown, Shae L. Brown, Teresa Carapeto, Philemon Chigeza, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, David Ellis, Katie Hotko, Marianne Logan, Ferdousi Khatun, Alexandra Lasczik, Yaw Ofosu-Asare, Maia Osborn, Marie-Laurence Paquette, Jemma Peisker, Ziah Peisker, Adrienne Piscopo, David Rousell, Benjamin Ryan, Billy Ryan, Lisa Siegal, Helen Widdop Quinton, Thilinika Wijesinghe and Tracy Young. (shrink)

Growing literature has linked attention bias variability to the experience and treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. Unlike assessments of attention bias in only one direction, A...

The most widely debated conception of democracy in recent years is deliberative democracy--the idea that citizens or their representatives owe each other mutually acceptable reasons for the laws they enact. Two prominent voices in the ongoing discussion are Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. In Why Deliberative Democracy?, they move the debate forward beyond their influential book, Democracy and Disagreement.What exactly is deliberative democracy? Why is it more defensible than its rivals? By offering clear answers to these timely questions, Gutmann and (...) Thompson illuminate the theory and practice of justifying public policies in contemporary democracies. They not only develop their theory of deliberative democracy in new directions but also apply it to new practical problems. They discuss bioethics, health care, truth commissions, educational policy, and decisions to declare war. In "What Deliberative Democracy Means," which opens this collection of essays, they provide the most accessible exposition of deliberative democracy to date. They show how deliberative democracy should play an important role even in the debates about military intervention abroad.Why Deliberative Democracy? contributes to our understanding of how democratic citizens and their representatives can make justifiable decisions for their society in the face of the fundamental disagreements that are inevitable in diverse societies. Gutmann and Thompson provide a balanced and fair-minded approach that will benefit anyone intent on giving reason and reciprocity a more prominent place in politics than power and special interests. (shrink)

This collection of original essays explores the social and relational dimensions of individual autonomy. Rejecting the feminist charge that autonomy is inherently masculinist, the contributors draw on feminist critiques of autonomy to challenge and enrich contemporary philosophical debates about agency, identity, and moral responsibility. The essays analyze the complex ways in which oppression can impair an agent's capacity for autonomy, and investigate connections, neglected by standard accounts, between autonomy and other aspects of the agent, including self-conception, self-worth, memory, and the (...) imagination. (shrink)

Power is clearly a crucial concept for feminist theory. Insofar as feminists are interested in analyzing power, it is because they have an interest in understanding, critiquing, and ultimately challenging the multiple array of unjust power relations affecting women in contemporary Western societies, including sexism, racism, heterosexism, and class oppression. In "The Power of Feminist Theory," Amy Allen diagnoses the inadequacies of previous feminist conceptions of power, and draws on the work of a diverse group of theorists of power, including (...) Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Hannah Arendt, in order to construct a new feminist conception of power. The conception of power developed in this book enables readers to theorize domination, resistance, and solidarity, and, perhaps more importantly, to do so in a way that illuminates the interrelatedness of these three modalities of power. (shrink)

The puzzle of imaginative desire arises from the difficulty of accounting for the surprising behaviour of desire in imaginative activities such as our engagement with fiction and our games of pretend. Several philosophers have recently attempted to solve this puzzle by introducing a class of novel mental states—what they call desire-like imaginings or i-desires. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the i-desire solution to the puzzle of imaginative desire. The introduction of i-desires is both ontologically profligate and (...) unnecessary, and, most importantly, fails to make sense of what we are doing in the imaginative contexts in question. (shrink)

Contents: 1) Peter Kung, Why We Need Something Like Imagery; 2) Derek Lam, An Imaginative Person’s Guide to Objective Modality; 3) Rebecca Hanrahan, Crossing Rivers: Imagination and Real Possibilities; 4) Michael Omoge, Imagination, Metaphysical Modality, and Modal Psychology; 5) Joshua Myers, Reasoning with Imagination; 6) Franz Berto, Equivalence in Imagination; 7) Christopher Badura, How Imagination Can Justify; 8) Antonella Mallozzi, Imagination, Inference, and Apriority; 9) Margherita Arcangeli, Narratives and Thought Experiments: Restoring the Role of Imagination; 10) Margot Strohminger, Two Ways (...) of Imagining Galileo’s Experiment; 11) Eric Peterson, Attention to Details: Imagination, Attention, and Epistemic Significance; 12) Amy Kind, Bridging the Divide: Imagining Across Experiential Perspectives; 13) Julia Langkau, On Imagining Being Someone Else; 14) Luke Roelofs, “Imagine If They Did That to You!”: The Complexity of Empathy; 15) Nick Wiltsher and Bence Nanay, Imagination, Selves, and Knowledge of Self: Pessoa’s Dreams in The Book of Disquiet . (shrink)

Hardt and Negri’s Empire series has inspired twenty years of debate and experimentation across the social sciences and humanities in fields as divergent as international re...

Purpose: This study explores social networkers' interest in and attitudes toward personal genome testing (PGT), focusing on expectations related to the clinical integration of PGT results. Methods: An online survey of 1,087 social networking users was conducted to assess 1) use and interest in PGT; 2) attitudes toward PGT companies and test results; and 3) expectations for the clinical integration of PGT. Descriptive statistics were calculated to summarize respondents' characteristics and responses. Results: Six percent of respondents have used PGT, 64% (...) would consider using PGT, and 30% would not use PGT. Of those who would consider using PGT, 74% report they would use it to gain knowledge about disease in their family. 34% of all respondents consider the information obtained from PGT to be a medical diagnosis. 78% of those who would consider PGT would ask their physician for help interpreting test results, and 61% of all respondents believe physicians have a professional obligation to help individuals interpret PGT results. Conclusion: Respondents express interest in using PGT services, primarily for purposes related to their medical care and expect physicians to help interpret PGT results. Physicians should therefore be prepared for patient demands for information and counsel on the basis of PGT results. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, as philosophers of mind have begun to rethink the sharp divide that was traditionally drawn between the phenomenal character of an experience (what it’s like to have that experience) and its intentional content (what it represents), representationalist theories of consciousness have become increasingly popular. On this view, phenomenal character is reduced to intentional content. This article explores a key motivation for this theory, namely, considerations of experiential transparency. Experience is said to be transparent in that (...) we ‘look right through it’ to the objects of that experience, and this is supposed to support the representationalist claim that there are no intrinsic aspects of our experience. (shrink)

In a late discussion of Kant’s essay, “Was ist Aufklärung?,” Foucault credits Kant with posing “the question of his own present” and positions himself as an inheritor of this Kantian legacy.1 Foucault has high praise for the critical tradition that emerges from Kant’s historical-political reflections on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; Kant’s concern in these writings with “an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves” is, he says, characteristic of “a form of philosophy, from Hegel, through Nietzsche and (...) Max Weber, to the Frankfurt School,” a form of philosophy in which Foucault, perhaps surprisingly, situates his own work. (shrink)

Although Judith Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender has been highly influential in feminist theory, queer theory, cultural studies, and some areas of philosophy, it has yet to receive its due from critical social theorists. This oversight is especially problematic given the crucial insights into the study of power – a central concept for critical social theory – that can be gleaned from Butler’s work. Her analysis is somewhat unique among discussions of power in its attempt to theorize simultaneously (...) both the features of cultural domination in contemporary societies and the possibilities of resistance to and subversion of such domination. Although I will maintain here that this attempt is not entirely successful, I nevertheless argue that Butler’s account makes crucial contributions to a feminist critical theory of power; as a result, it merits much more serious attention from critical theorists. (shrink)

The Cratylus begins with a paradox; it ends with a paradox; and it has a paradox in between. But this disturbing characteristic of the dialogue has been overshadowed, not to say ignored, in the literature. For commentators have seen it as their task to discover exactly what theory of language Plato himself, despite his declared perplexity, intends to adopt as he rejects the alternatives of Hermogenes and Cratylus. A common view, then, has been to suppose that the πορίαι of the (...) dialogue are mere camouflage for the hidden dogma, whatever that may be. A favoured candidate, of course, has been the theory of transcendent forms, in some preliminary version. As a consequence, the dialogue has often been seen as a precursor to the great metaphysical works of Plato's middle period such as the Phaedo or the Republic. Not so, I shall argue. My case is that this dialogue centres upon a series of paradoxes which are both powerful and unsettling. Their final effect is to attack the theory of forms, not to defend it. They are, I suggest, genuine proposals of philosophical difficulty, rather than mere artifice to disguise an idealist truth. As such, they belong, and may clearly be seen to belong, with works of the critical period which subject the theory of forms to scrutiny. Thus the πορίαι of the Cratylus have their counterparts in the Parmenides, the Theaetetus and the Sophist. I propose, then, that the dialogue was written during the late, critical period of Plato's philosophical activity. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 3, March 2025, Page 44-46.

In modern pluralist societies, political disagreement often reflects moral disagreement, as citizens with conflicting perspectives on fundamental values debate the laws that govern their public life. Any satisfactory theory of democracy must provide a way of dealing with this moral disagreement. A fundamental problem confronting all democratic theorists is to find a morally justifiable way of making binding collective decisions in the face of continuing moral conflict.

Excerpt from A Study in Ethical Theory A. Unsophisticated Utilitarianism; B. The, Approach to Thorough-going Utilitarianism; C. The Stresses and Strains of Thorough. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, (...) such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

While Okin's feminist appropriation of Rawls's theory of justice requires that principles of justice be applied directly to the family, Rawls seems to require only that the family be minimally just. Rawls's recent proposal dulls the critical edge of liberalism by capitulating too much to those holding sexist doctrines. Okin's proposal, however, is insufficiently flexible. An alternative account of the relation of the political and the nonpolitical is offered by Jürgen Habermas.

Philosophical Studies 104: 143-162 (2001).

In this article, I take up one strand – arguably the central one – of the Foucault/Habermas debate: their respective accounts of subjectivation. Against those who hold that Foucault and Habermas occupy such drastically different theoretical perspectives as to preclude the integration of their views into a common framework, I begin to lay the groundwork for an account of subjectivation that draws on the conceptual insights to be found on each side of the debate. While both Foucault and Habermas offer (...) a one-sided analysis of subjectivation – Foucault emphasizes its power-ladenness, and Habermas its communicative, rational, intersubjective aspects – I argue that subjectivation necessarily entails both communicative rationality and power relationships. I then consider the implications of my comparative argument for both Foucault and Habermas’s broader philosophical projects. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hannah Arendt's political theory offers key insights into the power that binds together the feminist movement - the power of solidarity. Second-wave feminist notions of solidarity were grounded in notions of shared identity; in recent years, as such conceptions of shared identity have come under attack for being exclusionary and repressive, feminists have been urged to give up the idea of solidarity altogether. However, the choice between (repressive) identity and (fragmented) non-identity is a false opposition, and (...) the Arendtian account of solidarity developed here allows us to move beyond this opposition. Thus, Arendt provides us with a model of solidarity that can stand a post-identity politics feminist theory in good stead. (shrink)

One of the central pedagogical strategies employed in the "Analects" consists in the suggestion of models worthy of emulation. The text's most robust models, the dramatic personae of the text, emerge as colorful figures with distinctive personal styles of action and behavior. This is especially so in the case of Confucius himself. In this essay, two particularly notable features of Confucius' style are considered. The first, what is termed "everyday" style, consists in Confucius' unusual command of conventional norms in ordinary (...) circumstances; the second, termed "deviant" style, consists in Confucius' occasional and sometimes puzzling departures from conventional norms. The combind effect of these two aspects of Confucius' personal style is shown to yield a productive pedagogical tension for the moral learner who would emulate, but cannot imitate, Confucius. (shrink)

This paper argues that Descartes conceives of theoretical reason in terms derived from practical reason, particularly in the role he gives to the passions. That the passions serve — under normal circumstances — to preserve the union of mind and body is a well-known feature of Descartes's defense of our native make-up. But they are equally important in our more purely theoretical endeavors. Some passions, most notably wonder, provide a crucial source of motivation in the search after truth, and also (...) serve to reinforce memory. Our cognitive successes and failure scan also be tracked by passions and trains of passions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 399-424 [Access article in PDF] Representation and the Body of Power in French Academic Painting Amy M. Schmitter [Figures] Reputation of power, is Power... Hobbes, Leviathan, Bk. I, ch. x Introduction It seems natural, even obvious, to distinguish between representations and what they are representations of. A picture of a dog is no more a dog than the word "dog" is (...) a furry, tail-wagging mammal. Nor are properties belonging to the object of a representation necessarily properties of the representation: a picture of a big dog need not be big, a picture of a dog that resembles Fido need not resemble Fido; even a picture of brown Fido need not be brown. And no number of pictures of Fido will sympathetically induce changes in Fido or any other dog. But however clear-cut this distinction may be when what is in question are pictorial references to ordinary, middle-sized material particulars such as dogs, it is much less clear in other cases. It is no violation of common-sense to consider "representations" of such things as gender norms or national identities or selves as non-neutral in the face of what they represent. The representations of gender norms, for example, can extend and enforce them, can change or undermine them, and may well lend a hand in constituting them in the first place.My theme here is a form of pictorial representation, one found in the theory and practice of that strain of French Academic painting under Louis XIV associated with Charles LeBrun. LeBrun held the titles of First Painter to the King and Director of the French Royal Academy of Painting, and the works I will examine were devoted to the royal power. That one effect of royal power is the ability to command resources and to cause the proliferation of representations, especially flattering representations, is no surprise. But I intend to suggest something stronger: not only did these Academic representations present an expenditure [End Page 399] of royal power, they were meant to embody and therefore extend royal power—even to constitute royal power. The view under examination does not simply collapse the common-sense distinction between signifying properties and what is signified; indeed those relations play an important role in one concept of representation modeled on language and written texts. But to this the academicians added another, more robust concept, one that does not distinguish clearly between the representation and its object.Implausible as this view may seem at first blush, I think it can prove genuinely explanatory: explanatory for thinking about pictorial representation, about how it can operate (on both its object and its viewer), and about its relation to power. But to see its explanatory value demands considering the nature and needs of state power. For unlike middle-sized material particulars, state power requires recognition to exist. Although that recognition need not be explicit, conscious, or voluntary, it must be widespread, and pictorial representations can be a powerful device for eliciting such recognition. Yet state power in general— or at least the particular form in question here—may demand that the constitutive role of recognition be disguised. Indeed many of the views and concepts of pictorial representation developed by the Academy reverse the dependence of power on recognition; they function in an ideology of representation. Nonetheless, I think that certain "formal," or structural, features of LeBrun's works can be explained in terms of how they elicit recognition and constitute this particular form of royal power. I make no claim that LeBrun's works must be explained so: for one, the royal power represented by LeBrun's works is long gone, and his representations do not now have any miraculous power to raise the dead. For any representations actually to operate as I suggest requires the support of a whole complex of institutions and activities committed to the care and feeding of state power. It is only because such a complex did exist that LeBrun's representations could have a recognizable object, i... (shrink)

Plato's Socrates denies that he knows. Yet he frequently claims that he does have certainty and knowledge. How can he avoid contradiction between his general stance about knowledge and his particular claims to have it? Socrates' disavowal of knowledge is central to his defence in the Apology. For here he rebuts the accusation that he teaches – and thus corrupts – the young by telling the jury that he cannot teach just because he knows nothing. Hence his disavowal of knowledge (...) is important to Socrates. Why does he make this claim? And how then can he justify engaging in any philosophical activity at all? (shrink)

Latin American Immigration Ethics advances philosophical conversations and debates about immigration by theorizing migration from the Latin American and Latinx context.

By briefly sketching some important ancient accounts of the connections between psychology and moral education, I hope to illuminate the significance of the contemporary debate on the nature of emotion and to reveal its stakes. I begin the essay with a brief discussion of intellectualism in Socrates and the Stoics, and Plato's and Posidonius's respective attacks against it. Next, I examine the two current leading philosophical accounts of emotion: the cognitive theory and the noncognitive theory. I maintain that the noncognitive (...) theory better explains human behavior and experience and has more empirical support than the cognitive theory. In the third section of the essay I argue that recent empirical research on emotional contagion and mirroring processes provides important new evidence for the noncognitive theory. In the final section, I draw some preliminary conclusions about moral education and the acquisition of virtue. (shrink)

Introspection is the process by which someone comes to form beliefs about her own mental states. We might form the belief that someone else is happy on the basis of perception – for example, by perceiving her behavior. But a person typically does not have to observe her own behavior in order to determine whether she is happy. Rather, one makes this determination by introspecting.

This short paper is based on a presentation delivered by four young people from Sunderland Children Services—Amy, Claire, Jordan and Glen (supported by Grace Roddam, Young People's Training and Development Mentor, and Dave Laverick, Workforce Development Consultant)—at the ‘Learning Professional Wisdom: Courage and Compassion’ Ethics and Social Welfare conference, which took place on 15 May 2009 at St Mary's College, Durham University, UK. The conference was organized by the newly formed Ethics and Social Welfare network, with support from the Social (...) Work and Policy Subject Centre (SWAP), Durham University and Ethics & Social Welfare journal. The conference focused on the contested nature of ‘moral character’ in professional education, whether this can be learnt and developed and how it links with judgements about ‘suitability for practice’. The four young people, drawing on their specific experiences of the looked after system, provided a valuable contribution which will assist understanding of what is meant by the term ‘ethical practitioner’ and the values and attributes they believe practitioners should have in order to fulfil their ethical obligations. (shrink)

Contemporary educational reformers have claimed that research on social class differences in child raising justifies programs that aim to lift children out of poverty by means of cultural interventions. Focusing on the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), Ruby Payne's “aha! Process,” and the Harlem Children's Zone as examples, Amy Shuffelton argues that such programs, besides overstepping the social science research, are ethically illegitimate insofar as they undermine the equitable development of civic agency. Shuffelton invokes Aristotelian civic friendship, particularly as interpreted (...) by Danielle Allen and Sibyl Schwarzenbach, as key to a politics that avoids relations of domination and subordination. She concludes that social justice requires that educators involved with culturally interventionist programs recognize the workings of power within schooling and society, that they accept the limits of their own perspectives, and that they remain open to what is of value in child-raising practices other than those associated with the contemporary middle class. (shrink)

This distinguished collection of essays has been produced to honour Donald McKinnon, who retired from the Norris-Hulse Professorship of Divinity in the ...

A growing number of studies show that a significant proportion of patients, who meet the clinical criteria for the diagnosis of the vegetative state (VS), demonstrate evidence of covert awareness through successful performance of neuroimaging tasks. Despite these important advances, the day-to-day life experiences of any such patient remain unknown. This presents a major challenge for optimizing the patient’s standard of care and quality of life (QoL). We describe a patient who, following emergence from a state of complete behavioral unresponsiveness (...) and a clinical diagnosis of VS, reported rich memories of his experience during this time. This case demonstrates the potential for a sophisticated mental life enabled by preserved memory in a proportion of patients who, similarly, are thought to be unconscious. Therefore, it presents an important opportunity to examine the implications for patient QoL and standard of care, both during the period of presumed unconsciousness and after recovery. (shrink)

Essay Review of New Waves in the Philosophy of Technology (Olsen/Selinger). Treats issue of difference of technology in Marx and Heidegger at some length.

Philosophy of mind in the phenomenological tradition / Philip J. Walsh and Jeff Yoshimi -- The mind-body problem in the 20th century / Amy Kind -- A short history of philosophical theories of consciousness in the 20th century / Tim Crane -- 20th century theories of perception / Nico Orlandi -- 20th century theories of personal identity / Jens Johansson -- Introspecting in the 20th century / Maja Spener -- Mental causation / Julie Yoo -- Intentionality: from Brentano to representationalism (...) / Michelle Montague -- Wittgenstein and his legacy / Severin Schroeder -- The boundaries of the mind / Katalin Farkas -- The rise of cognitive science in the 20th century / Carrie Figdor -- Future directions for philosophy of mind / Susan Schneider and Pete Mandik. (shrink)

Natural language processing is a critical part of the digital transformation. NLP enables user-friendly interactions between machine and human by making computers understand human languages. Intelligent chatbot is an essential application of NLP to allow understanding of users’ utterance and responding in understandable sentences for specific applications simulating human-to-human conversations and interactions for problem solving or Q&As. This research studies emerging technologies for NLP-enabled intelligent chatbot development using a systematic patent analytic approach. Some intelligent text-mining techniques are applied, including document (...) term frequency analysis for key terminology extractions, clustering method for identifying the subdomains, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation for finding the key topics of patent set. This research utilizes the Derwent Innovation database as the main source for global intelligent chatbot patent retrievals. (shrink)

In their contribution to the rapidly developing field of research on psychedelic medicine, Glenn Cohen and Mason Marks shed light on a frequently overlooked but critical aspect of ethical considera...

Karl Marx claims that alienation inheres in all wage labor. I raise questions about the applicability of this claim to subjects of patriarchy. In the first section, I discuss industrial wage labor and its allure for women who were trying to escape the norms of familial patriarchy. In the second section, I extend this criticism of Marx’s claim by considering the racially enslaved subjects of the Antebellum American South, for whom economicallyrecognized wage labor was still a bloody political battle. Finally, (...) I turn to the identification of working class women and sexuality, in order to show how wage labor offered liberation from narrow bourgeois sexual strictures. I conclude by reassessing the viability of Marx’s critique of alienation, taking into account the standpoints from which wage labor itself was a considerable political achievement. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a volume of articles containing highlights from the fifty-third Annual Meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) hosted by Loyola University–New Orleans with Tulane University from October 23–25, 2014. Many of the articles included here mine the rich and productive vein of post-Kantian critical philosophy that inspires so much work in Continental philosophy; hence the title of our volume is “Legacies of Critique.” The volume opens with the “Co-director’s Address” by outgoing SPEP (...) co-director Amy Allen. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider the philosophical purposes served by Seneca’s insistently violent imagery and argue that Seneca appears to provide what I term an “erotica of death.” In the Roman context, a context in which violence and violent death are regular features of popular entertainment, there is a worry that Seneca’s vivid depictions of violent death can only aim at eliciting more of the intoxicating pleasure Romans derived from their spectacles. However, where the spectacle features as a species of (...) death denial, a “pornography” in which death is stripped of its emotive and symbolic content, Seneca provides an “erotica” in which raw physical detail serves to announce and evoke emotive responses to death. He thus works against the Roman taboo on expressing fear and the equation of fear with cowardice in order to court the dismay and disgust necessary as a precondition for a robust therapy for death anxiety. (shrink)