What's wrong with music? -- A century of cultural earthquakes -- Crossover music : help or hindrance? -- Opera : a special case? -- Are schools the solution? -- Where do we go from here?

Conscience in Reproductive Health Care responds to the growing worldwide trend of health care professionals conscientiously refusing to provide abortions and similar reproductive health services in countries where these services are legal and professionally accepted. Carolyn McLeod argues that conscientious objectors in health care should prioritize the interests of patients in receiving care over their own interest in acting on their conscience. She defends this "prioritizing approach" to conscientious objection over the more popular "compromise approach" without downplaying the importance (...) of health care professionals having a conscience or the moral complexity of their conscientious refusals. McLeod's central argument is that health care professionals who are gatekeepers of services such as abortions are fiduciaries for their patients and for the public they are licensed to serve. As such, they owe a duty of loyalty to these beneficiaries and should give primacy to their beneficiaries' interests in accessing care. This conclusion is informed by what McLeod believes is morally at stake for the main parties to the conflicts generated by conscientious refusals: the objector and the patient. What is at stake, according to McLeod, depends on the relevant socio-political context, but typically includes the objector's integrity and the patient's interest in avoiding harm. (shrink)

Visionary quests to return to the Garden of Eden have shaped Western culture from Columbus' voyages to today's tropical island retreats. Few narratives are so powerful - and, as Carolyn Merchant shows, so misguided and destructive - as the dream of recapturing a lost paradise. A sweeping account of these quixotic endeavors by one of America's leading environmentalists, Reinventing Eden traces the idea of rebuilding the primeval garden from its origins to its latest incarnations in shopping malls, theme parks (...) and gated communities. With eloquence and insight, Merchant shows how the drive to conquer nature and to explore and settle the globe, springs from this utopian pastoral impulse throughout Western history. Time and again, human manipulation of the environment is our downfall: Eden is achieved by fencing off pristine beauty in national parks and wildlife preserves, while leaving the majority of the earth in ruins. Challenging both narratives, Merchant argues that the green veneer of city-park conservation has become a cover for the corruption of the earth and the neglect of its environment. Reinventing Eden is a bold new way to think about the earth that includes green political parties, sustainable development and a partnership between humans and earth that is nothing short of an ecological revolution. (shrink)

The authors of these essays--including Judith Butler, Elizabeth Weed, and Rosi Braidotti--shed new light on the relationship of Irigaray to many of the philosophers she has "romanced," from Aristotle to Deleuze.

Disgust is a strong aversion, yet paradoxically it can constitute an appreciative aesthetic response to works of art. Artistic disgust can be funny, profound, sorrowful, or gross. This book examines numerous examples of disgust as it is aroused by art and offers a set of explanations for its aesthetic appeal.

The Unnaturalness Objection to De-Extinction: A Critical Evaluation Carolyn Mason, University of Canterbury, New Zealand Abstract De-extinction of species has been criticised for being unnatural, as have the techniques that might be used to accomplish de-extinction. This objection of unnaturalness will be dismissed by those who claim that everything that humans do is natural, by those who claim that naturalness is a social construct, and by those who argue that ethical concerns arising from considerations of unnaturalness rest on a (...) failure properly to distinguish facts from values. However, none of these criticisms of the objection of unnaturalness is convincing, for reasons I will explain in this paper. The objection of unnaturalness might be motivated by concerns about either: (i) the attitude to nature that underpins de-extinction practices; or (ii) the consequences of interfering with nature. I show that objections of type (i) are rare in the literature, while objections of type (ii) can generally be ameliorated by working with cultures that have ties to the flora and fauna at issue, careful research into the value and nature of ecological systems, limiting risky activities, and limiting the use of de-extinction processes whenever their consequences are unclear. I conclude that the unnaturalness objection to de-extinction is of real but limited force. It gives reasons for caution rather than prohibition. (shrink)

Attention is the basis of our free will, allowing us to direct our minds as we choose. Technology poses a threat to this individual agency, writes Carolyn Dicey Jennings, but may also yield new rewards. Social media harnesses our attention for incentives that aren’t our own, sublimating it into the interests of the group. We are trading our individual power for collective power, and we need to understand the risks and benefits of doing this.

Let Carolyn Jane Bohler inspire you to consider a wide range of images of God in order to refine how you imagine God to have and use power, and how God wills ...

Things: In Touch with the Past explores the value of artifacts that have survived from the past and that can be said to "embody" their histories. Such genuine or "real" things afford a particular kind of aesthetic experience-an encounter with the past-despite the fact that genuineness is not a perceptually detectable property.

The reproductive rights of women have been a central topic in feminist bioethics. The focus has been predominantly on the right not to reproduce, and so not to be subject to pronatalist social forces that make motherhood compulsory for women. That is the case despite many women and other members of marginalized groups experiencing anti-natalism, or in other words, social pressure to avoid biological reproduction. For these groups, the right to reproduce is as important, if not more important, than the (...) right not to reproduce. This chapter concentrates on the right to reproduce and considers what form it should take in feminist bioethics. The main claim of the chapter is that feminists should ground the right in the need to protect marginalized groups from anti-natalism. (shrink)

With the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the seventeenth century, Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the nineteenth century, when New England's industrial production brought on a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region. In Ecological Revolutions, Carolyn Merchant analyzes these two major (...) transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and 1860. In a preface to the second edition, Merchant introduces new ideas about narrating environmental change based on gender and the dialectics of transformation, while the revised epilogue situates New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and climate change. Merchant argues that past ways of relating to the land could become an inspiration for renewing resources and achieving sustainability in the future. (shrink)

Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Ways of Knowing in the Humanities is a collection of original essays proposing a fresh examination of epistemological questions relevant to scholars in any discipline of the humanities. Is objective knowledge still a viable ideal? Can art produce or express knowledge of any kind? Is the body a promising medium for a knowledge less abstract or logocentric than the kind Western culture has favoured so far? How are epistemological regimes maintained with the use of established linguistic tropes? (...) Is knowledge to be resisted or employed as a tool of resistance? Distinguished as well as young, emerging scholars from disciplines such as philosophy, comparative literature, musicology and art theory discuss concrete case studies in which these questions arise. The essays share a commitment to interdisciplinary approaches and the close analysis of cultural objects, and refuse to take for granted the conventional methodologies that often guide research projects in their respective fields. The Inside Knowledge volume stages encounters between different ways of knowing, which contribute to an interdiciplinary understanding of the concept of knowledge and of epistemological questions in the humanities. (shrink)

The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century. It takes as its starting point the sudden appearance of biology as a science in the 19th-century and examines the conditions determining its particular makeup.Canguilhem analyzes the radically new way in which health and disease were defined in the early 19th-century, showing that the emerging categories of the normal and the pathological were far from being objective scientific concepts. He (...) demonstrates how the epistemological foundations of modern biology and medicine were intertwined with political, economic, and technological imperatives.Canguilhem was an important influence on the thought of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, in particular for the way in which he poses the problem of how new domains of knowledge come into being and how they are part of a discontinuous history of human thought. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "Studies in the Scientific and Mathematical Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce".

Some of the oldest and deepest questions in philosophy fall under the umbrella of consciousness and mind: What is the mind and how is it related to the body? What provides our thoughts with content? How is consciousness related to the natural world? Do we have distinctive causal powers? Analytic philosophers have made significant progress on these and related problems in the last century. Given the high volume of work on such topics, this chapter is necessarily selective. It offers major (...) touchstones but is slanted in favor of work that touches base with the sciences. The chapter starts by describing the progression of thought on the mind-body problem, from dualism and behaviorism to non-reductive materialism. It then describes the problem of intentionality, with a focus on partial solutions from Dretske and Millikan, ending with a brief discussion of 4E theories of mental content. The section on the problem of consciousness starts with the well-known knowledge and modal arguments before describing some attempted initial solutions, such as eliminative materialism and panpsychism. Finally, there is a brief section on agency and free will, which focuses on the link between free will and consciousness. (shrink)

Introduction:Can nature be controlled?. Autonomous nature -- Greco-Roman concepts of nature -- Christianity and nature -- Nature personified : Renaissance ideas of nature -- Controlling nature. Vexing nature : Francis Bacon and the origins of experimentation -- Natural law : Spinoza on natura naturans and natura naturata -- Laws of nature :Lleibniz and Newton -- Epilogue : rambunctious nature in the twenty-first century.

One understanding of conscience dominates bioethical discussion about conscience. On this view, to have a conscience is to be compelled to act in accordance with one’s own moral values for the sake of one’s “integrity,” where integrity is understood as inner or psychological unity. Conscience is deemed valuable because it promotes this quality. In this paper, I describe the dominant view, attempt to show that it is flawed, and sketch a positive alternative to it. In my opinion, conscience often fails (...) to promote inner unity (regardless of the degree of inner unity we have in mind); acting with a conscience leaves many people broken rather than unified. A better view about the value of conscience is that having a conscience encourages morally responsible agency. My goal is to prove that this alternative explains better what it means to value conscience in health care and the extent to which we ought to value it. (shrink)

A collection of essays, comments and replies on some of the contentious issues in feminist theory. Specific conversations centre on topics of debate such as feminist standpoint theory; gender as an analytic category; problems with sexual difference; and privacy and representations of the personal. Each exchange covers issues central to feminist scholarship and includes discussions from a cross-section of disciplines: political/social theory, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies and critical theory.

Emerging Adults' Religiousness and Spirituality seeks to understand how the developmental process of meaning-making encompasses American emerging adults' religiousness and spirituality. This volume does not focus on disentangling religion and spirituality conceptually, but rather emphasizes their centrality in the psychology of human development. It highlights the range of experiences and perspectives of emerging adults in the U.S. grounded in social context, social position, and religious or spiritual identification. Chapters are written by an interdisciplinary group of authors and explore topics such (...) as the benefits and detriments of religiousness and spirituality to emerging adults; contexts and socializing agents such as parents and peers, the media, religious communities, and universities; and variations of religiousness and spirituality concerning gender, sexuality, culture, and social position. (shrink)

Get ready -- Discover -- Be present -- Appreciate -- Get set, go! -- Renew.

Nicola Perullo's Taste as Experience draws on the author's philosophical background and his experience as a professor of aesthetics at a culinary institute. He aims to understand the experience of taste, analyzing it into three 'modes of access': pleasure, knowledge, and indifference. His perspective, influenced by Dewey, illuminates various elements of taste, eating, and drinking.

In this adventurous contribution to the project of combining philosophy and biology to understand the mind, Carolyn Price investigates what it means to say that mental states--like thoughts, wishes, and perceptual experiences--are about things in the natural world. Her insight into this deep philosophical problem offers a novel teleological account of intentional content, grounded in and shaped by a carefully constructed theory of functions. Along the way she defends her view from recent objections to teleological theories and indicates how (...) it might be applied to notable problems in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The power of new medical technologies, the cultural authority of physicians, and the gendered power dynamics of many patient-physician relationships can all inhibit women's reproductive freedom. Often these factors interfere with women's ability to trust themselves to choose and act in ways that are consistent with their own goals and values. In this book Carolyn McLeod introduces to the reproductive ethics literature the idea that in reproductive health care women's self-trust can be undermined in ways that threaten their autonomy. (...) Understanding the importance of self-trust for autonomy, McLeod argues, is crucial to understanding the limits on women's reproductive freedom. -/- McLeod brings feminist insights in philosophical moral psychology to reproductive ethics, and to health-care ethics more broadly. She identifies the social environments in which self-trust is formed and encouraged. She also shows how women's experiences of reproductive health care can enrich our understanding of self-trust and autonomy as philosophical concepts. The book's theoretical components are grounded in women's concrete experiences. The cases discussed, which involve miscarriage, infertility treatment, and prenatal diagnosis, show that what many women feel toward themselves in reproductive contexts is analogous to what we feel toward others when we trust or distrust them. -/- McLeod also discusses what health-care providers can do to minimize the barriers to women's self-trust in reproductive health care, and why they have a duty to do so as part of their larger duty to respect patient autonomy. (shrink)

In philosophy, the textbook case for the discussion of human motivation is the examination (and almost always, the refutation) of psychological egoism. The arguments have become part of the folklore of our tribe, from their inclusion in countless introductory texts. [...] One of my central aims has been to define the issues empirically, so we do not just settle them by definition. Although I am inclined at present to put my bets on the reward-event theory, with its internalism, monism, and (...) causal primacy of satisfaction, I think we are very far from knowing enough to settle these questions concerning motivation, human or otherwise. The winds of science will blow where they may. In the meantime, we can be a bit more circumspect about what we put in our tribal folklore. (shrink)

Some accounts of the fiduciary relationship place trust and autonomy at odds with one another, so that trusting a fiduciary to act on one’s behalf reduces one’s ability to be autonomous. In this chapter, we critique this view of the fiduciary relationship (particularly bilateral instances of this relationship) using contemporary work on autonomy and ‘relational autonomy’. Theories of relational autonomy emphasize the role that interpersonal trust and social relationships play in supporting or hampering one’s ability to act autonomously. We argue (...) that fiduciary relationships, understood through the lens of relational autonomy, can provide a means of enhancing, rather than diminishing, beneficiaries’ autonomy. (shrink)

Academic Placement Data and Analysis (APDA) has released its complete 2017 Final Report, an 81-page document that collects data on PhD-granting philosophy programs (including ratings by former students, placement rates, and diversity) and the discipline as a whole (including hiring networks, placement maps, cluster analyses of programs, job descriptions, non-academic hiring). The report was created by Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Patrice Cobb, Pablo Contreras Kallens, and Angelo Kyrilov, all of University of California, Merced. (from Daily Nous).

Exploring a fifty-mile territory, Linda and Carolyn Dufurrena vividly depict the heart of the West and its fabled ranch culture in a beautiful collaboration of essays and full color images.

Georges Bataille's powerful writings have fascinated many readers, enmeshed as they are with the themes of sex and death. His emotive discourse of excess, transgression, sacrifice, and the sacred has had a profound and notable influence on thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Kristeva. Bataille: Writing the Sacred examines the continuing power and influence of his work. The full extent of Bataille's subversive and influential writings has only been made available to an English-speaking audience in recent years. By bringing together (...) international specialists on Bataille from philosophy and literature to art history, this collection is able to explore the many facets of his writings. (shrink)