What does the development of a truly robust contemporary theory of domination require? Ashley J. Bohrer argues that it is only by considering all of the dimensions of race, gender, sexuality, and class within the structures of capitalism and imperialism that we can understand power relations as we find them nowadays. Bohrer explains how many of the purported incompatibilities between Marxism and intersectionality arise more from miscommunication rather than a fundamental conceptual antagonism. As the first monograph entirely devoted to (...) this issue, »Marxism and Intersectionality« serves as a tool to activists and academics working against multiple systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression. (shrink)

Modern longitudinal studies collect feature data at many timepoints, often of the same order of sample size. Such studies are typically affected by dropout and positivity violations. We tackle these problems by generalizing effects of recent incremental interventions to accommodate multiple outcomes and subject dropout. We give an identifying expression for incremental intervention effects when dropout is conditionally ignorable and derive the nonparametric efficiency bound for estimating such effects. Then we present efficient nonparametric estimators, showing that they converge at fast (...) parametric rates and yield uniform inferential guarantees, even when nuisance functions are estimated flexibly at slower rates. We also study the variance ratio of incremental intervention effects relative to more conventional deterministic effects in a novel infinite time horizon setting, where the number of timepoints can grow with sample size and show that incremental intervention effects yield near-exponential gains in statistical precision in this setup. Finally, we conclude with simulations and apply our methods in a study of the effect of low-dose aspirin on pregnancy outcomes. (shrink)

Understanding everyday behavior relies heavily upon understanding our ability to improvise, how we are able to continuously anticipate and adapt in order to coordinate with our environment and others. Here we consider the ability of musicians to improvise, where they must spontaneously coordinate their actions with co-performers in order to produce novel musical expressions. Investigations of this behavior have traditionally focused on describing the organization of cognitive structures. The focus, here, however, is on the ability of the time-evolving patterns of (...) inter-musician movement coordination as revealed by the mathematical tools of complex dynamical systems to provide a new understanding of what potentiates the novelty of spontaneous musical action. We demonstrate this approach through the application of cross wavelet spectral analysis, which isolates the strength and patterning of the behavioral coordination that occurs between improvising musicians across a range of nested time-scales. Revealing the sophistication of the previously unexplored dynamics of movement coordination between improvising musicians is an important step towards understanding how creative musical expressions emerge from the spontaneous coordination of multiple musical bodies. (shrink)

I defend a new account of constitutive essence on which an entity’s constitutively essential properties are its most fundamental, nontrivial necessary properties. I argue that this account accommodates the Finean counterexamples to classic modalism about essence, provides an independently plausible account of constitutive essence, and does not run into clear counterexamples. I conclude that this theory provides a promising way forward for attempts to produce an adequate nonprimitivist, modalist account of essence. As both triviality and fundamentality in the account are (...) understood in terms of grounding, the theory also potentially has important implications for the relation between essence and grounding. (shrink)

Disability studies in education scholars have discussed the need to engage students, and certainly preservice teachers, in critical discussion of disability as a concept. To better understand what such critical discussion entails, Ashley Taylor examines the pedagogical implications of promoting an understanding of disability as a shared experience of being human. In particular, Taylor is concerned with how the appeal to a shared experience of disability might contribute to or impede students' development of critical attitudes toward ableist social and (...) educational practices. She describes two chief limitations of the shared reality view and argues that these complicate efforts to teach about disability in ways that avoid reinforcing students' existing beliefs. Taylor concludes by offering a pedagogical framework that retains valuable aspects of the shared reality view while avoiding its limitations. (shrink)

A recent, seemingly appealing version of the powerful qualities view defines properties’ qualitativity via an essentialist claim and their powerfulness via a grounding claim. Roughly, this approach holds that properties are qualities because they have qualitative essences, while they are powerful because their instances or essences ground causal-modal facts. I argue that this theory should be replaced with one that defines the powerfulness of qualities in terms of both a grounding claim and a ‘meta-grounding’ claim. Specifically, I formulate and defend (...) a view on which qualities are powerful just if instances of those qualitiesat least partiallyground dispositionsin virtue of the essences of those qualities. (shrink)

Taylor has recently argued that adopting either the standard Kimian or Davidsonian approaches to the metaphysics of events quite directly solves the regress of pure powers. I argue, though, that on closer inspection Taylor’s proposal does not succeed, given either the Kimian or the Davidsonian account of events.

In this paper, I argue that scholars who reproduce photographs of Black people for subversive purposes should pursue alternative modes of re-exhibition other than carelessly reproducing said photographs as is. Christina Sharpe’s care-based method of wake work, performed within In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), is one such form of ethical exhibitorship. Care, in this text, is the pursuit of the full context of the afterlives of slavery against oppressive narratives about Black people and their lived experience to (...) reach a clearer level of understanding and engagement with people experiencing anti-Blackness. In section one, I will analyze Mariana Ortega and Saidiya Hartman’s engagements with photographic representation. In section two, I will explicate Sharpe’s account of the wake and wake work, emphasizing the role of care. In section three, I will explore the limitations of wake work, mainly the tension between wake-filled reproductions and careful discretion. (shrink)

In his review of the field of environmental political theory in The Politics of Nature, Andrew Dobson suggested that one way for the discipline to develop was through an engagement with the history of political thought, through “bringing previously buried political theorists to our attention… forcing us to reassess the work of canonical theorists”. Over ten years after Dobson’s initial suggestion, John Meyer notes that this approach had flourished as “a new generation of political theorists” engaged in this project and (...) the results of their work have shone new light on the political canon and broke new ground in environmental political thought.However for all the good... (shrink)

Placebos are much discussed in both the medical and philosophy of medicine literatures. Once narrowly defined as inert “sugar pills,”, they now are now most often taken to be “treatments that appear similar to experimental treatments, but that lack their characteristic components”. In addition to their use in the control groups of many clinical trials, placebos are also now widely recognized by medical practitioners to be powerful therapies in themselves, often outperforming conventional drug therapies in these studies.Given this, I find (...) Haller’s book, which is divided into six chapters, “Evidence Based Medicine,” “Postmodernist Medicine,” “The Powerful Placebo,” “Politics of... (shrink)

"Dr. Montagu's The Natural Superiority of Women was a pioneer statement on sexism, first published some years before the emergence of the Women's Liberation movement. Even with the rise in women's consciousness today, the book remains a revolutionary volume, since it shows that the superiority of women is a biological fact." -- Publisher's description.

By way of the complex topography of the Phaedrus, Plato raises the question of his authorship and the consequences it has for the reader’s reception of Socrates, by likening Socrates’ changing status in the text to the complex mythological traditions surrounding the rape and abduction of Helen of Troy (amidst a grove of plane trees). As Socrates is likened to the excessive and “duplicitous” Helen and her various “eidolic” apeareances, the question of the dialogue appears to shift from “who is (...) Socrates?” to a more postmodern formulation: which Socrates? (shrink)

Chronological typologies of racial ideologies have always been somewhat controversial, but in contemporary academe, a general consensus has emerged, one that integrates the theories of Ladelle McWhorter, on the one hand, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, on the other hand. In this schema, the invention of racism in the early modern period was defined by morphological racism or, in McWhorter’s words, “physical appearance,”1 followed by the creation of a biological or scientific racism that can be roughly dated to the Industrial Revolution. After (...) the various social movements for racial justice in the mid-twentieth century, and the turn to “political correctness,” many theorists such as Carr and Bonilla-Silva have argued... (shrink)

Transgender conversion practices involve attempts to alter, discourage, or suppress a person’s gender identity and/or desired gender presentation, including by delaying or preventing gender transition. Proponents of the practices have argued that they should be allowed until proven to be harmful. Drawing on the notion of expressive equality, I argue that conversion practices are prima facie unethical because they do not fulfill a legitimate clinical purpose and conflict with the self-understanding of trans communities.

According to the powerful qualities view, properties are both powerful and qualitative. Indeed, on this view the powerfulness of a property is identical to its qualitativity. Proponents claim that this view provides an attractive alternative to both the view that properties are pure powers and the view that they are pure qualities. It remains unclear, however, whether the claimed identity between powerfulness and qualitativity can be made coherent in a way that allows the powerful qualities view to constitute this sort (...) of alternative. I argue here that this can be done, given a particular conception of both the qualitativity and powerfulness of properties. On this conception, a property is qualitative just in the sense that its essence is fixed independently of any distinct properties, and it is powerful just if its essence grounds its dispositional role. (shrink)

After a period of relative neglect, awe has been the focus of substantial empirical work in psychology and has also begun to receive some philosophical attention. Thus far, though, little attention has been devoted to a line of reasoning present in the literature on environmental ethics that moves from being awe-inspiring to being worthy of preservation. I argue here that this neglect ought to be remedied, as this argument potentially has a significant role to play in various ethical contexts involving (...) non-persons. I also identify key questions that would need to be addressed in delivering an all-things-considered verdict on this argument, and argue that the argument is largely independent of empirical work on the ‘pro-social effects’ of awe. My primary goal is to motivate, and provide a clear direction for, further work devoted to the prospects and implications of this line of reasoning. (shrink)

The permissibility of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide is actively debated worldwide. Writers such as Ruth Macklin and Steven Pinker have argued that dignity is not a useful concept in bioethics and cannot be used legitimately by either side in the debate. In this essay, the author expands on a defense of the human person based in dignity and rooted in the work of Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) and Gabriel Marcel. He defends the idea, introduced by John F. Crosby, (...) that a human person has dignity because of her “unrepeatableness,” a concept known as incommunicability. The author argues that the concept of dignity—far from being abstract, useless, or dangerous, as some writers have recently claimed—is a practical and vital protection for persons. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.3 (Autumn 2010): 529–546. (shrink)

Forty years after Dax Cowart fought to have his voice heard regarding his medical treatment, patient autonomy and rights are at the heart of patient care today. Yet, despite its centrality in patient care, the tension between a severely burned patient’s right to stop treatment and the physician’s role in saving a life has not abated. As this case study explores, barriers remain to hearing and respecting a patient’s treatment decisions. Dismantling these barriers involves dispelling the myths that burn patients (...) must grin and bear intense pain to recover and that a patient’s choice to discontinue treatment equals physician failure. Moreover, in these situations, sustained, direct engagement between physician and patient can reduce the moral distress of all involved and enable physicians to hear and better accept when a patient is calling for the end of the day. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of how economists and philosophers approach the issue of comparisons. More precisely, it is about what formal representation is appropriate whenever our ability to compare things breaks down. We restrict our attention to failures that arise with ordinal comparisons. We consider a number of formal approaches to this problem including one based on the idea of parity. We also consider the claim that the failure to compare things is a consequence of vagueness. We contrast two (...) theories of vagueness; fuzzy set theory and supervaluation theory. Some applications of these theories are described. (shrink)