Sophocles' Antigone is a touchstone in democratic, feminist and legal theory, and possibly the most commented upon play in the history of philosophy and political theory. Bonnie Honig's rereading of it therefore involves intervening in a host of literatures and unsettling many of their governing assumptions. Exploring the power of Antigone in a variety of political, cultural, and theoretical settings, Honig identifies the 'Antigone-effect' - which moves those who enlist Antigone for their politics from activism into lamentation. She argues (...) that Antigone's own lamentations can be seen not just as signs of dissidence but rather as markers of a rival world view with its own sovereignty and vitality. Honig argues that the play does not offer simply a model for resistance politics or 'equal dignity in death', but a more positive politics of counter-sovereignty and solidarity which emphasizes equality in life. (shrink)

Bonnie Steinbock presents The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics - an authoritative, state-of-the-art guide to current issues in bioethics.

This essay is written in two parts. The first is a commentary on the affective politics of philosophy as a discipline. The theme here is philosophy’s reverence problem, an affective bond to the teacher and the text, which is threatened or even injured by feminist philosophy. Feminist philosophy emerges as disruptive irreverence in the midst of the discipline, and injured reverence becomes a powerful prereflective motivation for resistance to feminist thought. The second part of the essay is an exploration of (...) the field of inquiry called feminist phenomenology. Is feminist phenomenology simply phenomenology from another point of view, that of the embodied female subject? Is it conducted, in other words, in a space beyond politics and power where the difference of this subject discloses values and meanings that have not yet been thematized in phenomenological inquiry, but which phenomenology is already competent to pursue? Or does feminist phenomenology disrupt or transform phenomenological practice as we traditionally understand it? In this paper, I claim that phenomenology must be critical in order to be feminist, that it must disrupt phenomenological practice rather than simply “applying” it to a new object, “woman.” In the work of Simone de Beauvoir we find a different phenomenological practice that feminists can count as a positive inheritance. The real difference of feminist phenomenology, however, only emerges in the practice itself. In order to capture something about this difference I take the phenomenon of shame as a case study, and compare three recent phenomenological accounts of shame. (shrink)

In a 2006 interview, Bruno Latour, distancing himself from the French philosopher Alain Badiou, casually remarks, “I’m the only French pragmatist, so it winds up that I have absolutely no contact with the French”. Latour’s remark is curious insofar as the work performed by the coupling reveals his own dissociation of French philosophy with pragmatism. If Latour is French, he cannot possibly be a pragmatist, but if he is a pragmatist, he cannot possibly be French, so better to refer to (...) himself by this new hybrid, “French pragmatist.”Perhaps it is not so peculiar for Latour to describe himself as a “pragmatist,” since references to classical pragmatist figures like William James and John... (shrink)

This research merges literature from organizational behavior and marketing to garner insight into how organizations can maximize the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility for enhanced CSR and organizational engagement of employees. Across two field experiments, the authors demonstrate that the effectiveness of employee co-creation activities in increasing employees’ positive CSR perceptions is moderated by self-construal. In particular, the positive effect of co-creation on CSR perceptions emerges only for employees with a salient interdependent self-construal. Moreover, the results demonstrate that increased positive (...) CSR perceptions then predict increased CSR engagement and organizational engagement. The research thus highlights the need to consider self-construal when trying to utilize co-creation to predict CSR engagement and organizational engagement, via CSR perceptions. (shrink)

Following the conquest of Algiers and its surrounding territory by the French army in 1830, officers noted an abundance of standing stones in this region of North Africa. Although they attracted considerably less attention among their cohort than more familiar Roman monuments such as triumphal arches and bridges, these prehistoric remains were similar to formations found in Brittany and other parts of France. The first effort to document these remains occurred in 1863, when Laurent-Charles Féraud, a French army interpreter, recorded (...) thousands of dolmens and stone formations south-west of Constantine. Alleging that these constructions were Gallic, Féraud hypothesized the close affinity of the French, who claimed descent from the ancient Gauls, with the early inhabitants of North Africa. After Féraud's claims met with scepticism among many prehistorians, French scholars argued that these remains were constructed by the ancestors of the Berbers, whom they hypothesized had been dominated by a blond race of European origin. Using craniometric statistics of human remains found in the vicinity of the standing stones to propose a genealogy of the Kabyles, French administrators in Algeria thereafter suggested that their mixed origins allowed them to adapt more easily than the Arab population to French colonial governance. This case study at the intersection of prehistoric archaeology, ancient history and craniology exposes how genealogical classification made signal contributions to French colonial ideology and policy between the 1860s and 1880s. (shrink)

Is it wrong to bring children who will have serious diseases and disabilities into the world? In particular, is it unfair to them? The notion that existence itself can be an injury is the basis for a recent new tort known as "wrongful life" (Steinbock, 1986). This paper considers Feinberg's theory of harm as the basis for a claim of wrongful life, and concludes that rarely can the stringent conditions imposed by his analysis be met. Another basis for maintaining that (...) it is morally wrong to have children under extremely adverse conditions is suggested: a principle of parental responsibility. We also argue that having children under such conditions may be unfair to the children, even if they have not been (in Feinberg's sense) harmed. Finally, we consider when conditions are sufficiently awful that having children might be viewed as incompatible with being a good parent and unfair to the child. (shrink)

Through examining practices of torture, extra-judicial assassination, and first person accounts of soldiers on the ground, Bonnie Mann develops a new theory of gender.

This paper reads Sophocles' " Antigone " contextually, as an exploration of the politics of lamentation and larger conflicts these stand for. Antigone defies Creon's sovereign decree that her brother Polynices, who attacked the city with a foreign army and died in battle, be dishonoured - left unburied. But the play is not about Polynices' treason. It explores the clash in 5th century Athens between Homeric/elite and democratic mourning practices. The former memorialize the unique individuality of the dead, focus on (...) the family's loss and bereavement and call for vengeance. The latter memorialize the dead's contribution to the immortal polis and emphasize the replaceability of those lost. Each economy of mourning sees the other as excessive and politically unstable. The remainders of both, managed by way of exception institutions such as tragedy and the Dionysian Festival, continue to haunt us now. (shrink)

As staggering inequality continues to be an urgent political topic, this book, illustrated with nearly seventy of Riis ’s photographs, will serve as a stunning reminder of what has changed, and what has not.

This short discussion piece invites readers to consider two questions: What does “pluralism” mean in philosophy? and What should it mean? Brian Leiter’s assault on Linda Martin Alcoff and The Pluralist’s Guide to Philosophy is taken as an opportunity to reflect on several conceptions of philosophical pluralism: the “philosophical gourmet’s” conception, the “three white men” conception, and Scott Pratt’s epistemological pluralism. In each, there is a failure to come to terms with both history and power. What is at stake in (...) philosophy’s pluralism debates is the aspiration to judgment, in the Arendtian sense, among philosophy’s others—this aspiration is both unsettling to the discipline and important for its future. (shrink)

In summary, the creation and maintenance of the Wistar Rats as standardized animals can be attributed to the breeding work of Helen Dean King, coupled with the management and husbandry methods of Milton Greenman and Louise Duhring, and with supporting documentation provided by Henry Donaldson. The widespread use of the Wistar Rats, however, is a function of the ingenuity of Milton Greenman who saw in them a way for a small institution to provide service to science. Greenman's rhetoric, as captured (...) in his Director's Reports, prepared annually from 1905 until his death in 1937, shows that he was unusually sensitive to his times and to the economics of science and of society. In the era when biology was being defined, he recognized in the rat the potential to be a living analog to the pure chemicals that legitimated experimental science. From management literature he extracted the ideals of uniformity of product, standards of quality, and efficiency of production, applying them to scientific practice to generate an animal model that thrives as standard equipment in laboratories throughout the world today.I will close with a quote from Frederick W. Taylor that is a cogent statement of the contribution to science and scientific progress made by standardized tools and their creators. Equating the surgeon and the workman, Taylor wrote: [He is given] the finest implements, each one of which has been the subject of special study and development ... [and] the very best knowledge of his predecessors; and, provided with standard implements and methods which represent the best knowledge of the world up to date, he is able to use his own originality and ingenuity to make real additions to the world's knowledge, instead of reinventing things which are old.Standardized tools, whether surgeons' implements or laboratory-bred rats, are one of the vehicles for carrying scientific knowledge forward from generation to generation. In this sense, Greenman's Wistar Rats have done their job, in his words, of “providing service to science.”. (shrink)

From the time of Augustine to the late thirteenth century, leading Christian thinkers agreed that freedom requires the ability to make good choices, but not the ability to make bad ones. If freedom required the ability to sin, they reasoned, neither God nor the angels nor the blessed in heaven could be free. This essay examines the work of Peter Olivi, the first medieval philosopher known to reject the asymmetrical conception of freedom. Olivi argues that the ability to sin is (...) essential to creaturely freedom and remains even in heaven. While Anselm is the nominal target of Olivi’s arguments on this topic, they form part of a wider critique directed even more at Aquinas and his followers. Olivi faults them for misunderstanding the nature of the created will and for failing to provide a foundation for a particular kind of moral responsibility: personal merit. (shrink)

In light of the recent emergence of predictive techniques in law enforcement to forecast crimes before they occur, this paper examines the temporal operation of power exercised by predictive policing algorithms. I argue that predictive policing exercises power through a paranoid style that constitutes a form of temporal governmentality. Temporality is especially pertinent to understanding what is ethically at stake in predictive policing as it is continuous with a historical racialized practice of organizing, managing, controlling, and stealing time. After first (...) clarifying the concept of temporal governmentality, I apply this lens to Chicago Police Department’s Strategic Subject List. This predictive algorithm operates, I argue, through a paranoid logic that aims to preempt future possibilities of crime on the basis of a criminal past codified in historical crime data. (shrink)

Applied ethics is relatively new on the philosophical scene, having grown out of the various civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the student demand that college courses be relevant. Even today, there are those who think that there are no philosophically interesting practical ethical questions, and that applied ethics is not a branch of philosophy at all. This article rejects that view, both because some of the most interesting and respectable philosophers in the world have (...) worked in applied ethics and because applied ethics has been the source of many difficult conceptual questions in theoretical ethics and even metaphysics. These include the grounds for moral status, human identity, how to conceive rights in general and the right to life in particular, the question whether existence itself can be a harm (the nonidentity problem), and the nature of moral principles. (shrink)

This paper begins with a question: can concepts generated in the Chinese context in the sociocultural relations of the periphery contribute to the development of the social sciences in the field of Health and Physical Education (HPE) that have their roots in the metropole? Setting the scene in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), a postcolonial city reverted to the rule of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1997, this paper aims to develop a critical sociology of HPE (...) by having a dialogue among Continental philosophies (e.g., Bourdieu) and Chinese philosophies around embodiment concepts. Although HKSAR is a complex meeting point of Eastern and Western ideologies, the current HPE field tends to focus on Western and ‘scientific’ ways of knowing, such as the measurement of health and physical fitness, and often at the expense of sociocultural perspectives, social justice and diversity and inclusion in HPE. In other words, the (post) positivistic research paradigm underpins the HPE field. This paper argues that in order to reap the benefits of a more holistic health education for academics and students in HPE, it is vital to de-imperialise the positivistic ways of teaching and being in HPE. In doing so, this paper creates a space for Bourdieu’s habitus to meet Chinese perspectives on embodiment to engage in a dialogue for knowledge production that extends the current knowledge base in HPE. (shrink)

At a time when some modicum of formal gender equality has been won in many late‐capitalist societies of the West, what explains the persistence of practices that extract labor and value from women and girls while granting a “surplus” of value to men and boys? Gendered shame is a central mechanism of the apparatus that secures the continued subordination of women across a number of class and race contexts in the mediatized, late‐capitalist West. Focusing on the story of Amanda Todd, (...) two forms of shame are distinguished. “Ubiquitous shame” is that shame that accrues to feminine existence as such, and is structured in relation to a futural temporality of redemption. “Unbounded shame” is a brute form of value‐extraction that has found its ecological niche in social media—and destroys all futural aspirations. (shrink)

Background: The perceptions of core professional nursing values of men in baccalaureate nursing programs are poorly understood. Objective: The study purpose was to understand and interpret the meaning of core professional nursing values to male baccalaureate nursing students. Research design and context: One-to-one interviews were conducted with male nursing students from a public university in the Midwest, following interpretive phenomenology. Ethical considerations: Measures to protect participants included obtaining Institutional Review Board approval, obtaining signed informed consent, and maintaining confidentiality. Findings: The (...) study revealed five themes and several subthemes under an overarching finding of caring. Acquisition of professional nursing values began prior to the nursing program and continued to varying degrees throughout the program. Discussion: Several implications are offered for nursing education, nursing practice, research, and public policy. These include identification of common values, teaching-learning strategies, inclusive environments, teamwork, and conflict resolution. Conclusion: Caring was revealed using a metaphor of a puzzle. (shrink)

We argue in this article that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure instead work anaphor- ically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by adverbial connectives can interact with that associated with discourse structure. We conclude by sketching out a lexicalized grammar for (...) discourse that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution, and inference. (shrink)

A growing number of states have banned abortion after twenty weeks on the grounds that the fetus at that stage experiences pain. Such laws run contrary to current abortion law, and so are almost certain to be challenged in court. In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court said that the constitutional right to abortion extends until the fetus is viable, between twenty-four and twenty-eight weeks. After viability, states may ban abortion entirely except where continuing the pregnancy would threaten the woman’s (...) life or health. The viability threshold was upheld in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Maternal health should be paramount. Why viability? The Roe court said that this is “the ‘compelling’ point..... Read More. (shrink)

The aims and approaches of the emergent field of information history are explored in a Socratic dialogue. The philosopher Aspasia and her student Socrates are on their return to Athens from the harbor town of Piraeus when they begin discussing the proper subject of information history. After some deliberation, they come to realize that information history is not about information per se. Instead, information history seeks to provide a historical understanding of the nature of information practices—activities that include collecting, organizing, (...) and preserving, among others. In the end, they conclude that information history is the study of information becoming information. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONK Negotiating Positions: The Politics of Virtue and Virtu [Virtu] rouses enmity toward order, toward the lies that are concealed in every order, ...

In this article, I examine transracial adoption in which the parents are white and gay or lesbian in the context of an America coming to tolerate, accept, embrace, and even celebrate gay family life, while increasingly retreating from basic aspirations to race-based equality and fairness. It is about the narratives of whiteness that accompany transracial adoption, and that claim families in ways that cause harm. It is also about patriotic nationalism in post 9/11 USA, and the story of sexual progressiveness (...) that has infused our national imaginary in complex and paradoxical ways over the last decade. We are called on to account for the costs of allowing our commitments to justice in relation to race and sexuality to become fragmented. (shrink)

The lies about the reasons for the U.S. war against Iraq provoked no mass public outcry in the United States against the war. What is the process of justification for this war, a process that seems to need no reasons? Mann argues that the process of justification is not a process of rational deliberation but one of aesthetic self-constitution, of rebuilding a masculine national identity. Included is a feminist reading of the National Defense University document Shock and Awe.

Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by Bonnie Honig, a collection of critical feminist essays on Hannah Arendt, illustrates both the disorientation and the insights that can result when feminist philosophers come to terms with a canonical figure who is a woman.

This book intervenes in contemporary debates about the threat posed to democratic life by political emergencies. Must emergency necessarily enhance and centralize top-down forms of sovereignty? Those who oppose executive branch enhancement often turn instead to law, insisting on the sovereignty of the rule of law or demanding that law rather than force be used to resolve conflicts with enemies. But are these the only options? Or are there more democratic ways to respond to invocations of emergency politics? Looking at (...) how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, Bonnie Honig argues that democracies must resist emergency's pull to focus on life's necessities because these tend to privatize and isolate citizens rather than bring us together on behalf of hopeful futures. Emphasizing the connections between mere life and more life, emergence and emergency, Honig argues that emergencies call us to attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic politics: that we need good citizens with aspirational ideals to make good politics while we need good politics to infuse citizens with idealism.Honig takes a broad approach to emergency, considering immigration politics, new rights claims, contemporary food politics and the infrastructure of consumption, and the limits of law during the Red Scare of the early twentieth century. Taking its bearings from Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and other Jewish thinkers, this is a major contribution to modern thought about the challenges and risks of democratic orientation and action in response to emergency. (shrink)