Popular imaginings of Tanzania's Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area are founded on the idea of wilderness preserved, but this conception of the ‘park’ is based in colonial-era race-thinking. Rather than simply a colonial-era manifestation of an apparently universal conservationist ideal, Serengeti and Ngorongoro are instead racial projects that embody the historical and ongoing processes of racial formation. The creation of Serengeti and Ngorongoro enabled a racialisation of nature, a process begun by the British and reinscribed via safari ever (...) since. Recognising this racialisation of nature has larger implications for not only the treatment and perception of those in the Global South, the racialised ‘other’ to the Global North, but also for the realities of white privilege and constructions of whiteness. (shrink)

Derogatory terms can be powerful mechanisms of subordination, while re-appropriating these terms can be a strategy to fight back against social injustice. I argue that projects seeking to reclaim slurs have a performative structure that raises particular hazards. Whereas more familiar forms of protest may fail to bring about their intended result, attempts to re-appropriate slurs can fail to be understood as transgressive acts at all. When attempts at reclamation fail, their force is distorted; context and convention lead the hearer (...) to give uptake to the speech act as a traditional deployment of the slur. The force of this traditional use is to validate and re-entrench the very norms the act was intended to subvert. This is the precarious structure of reclamation projects: when successful, reclamation is the subversion of powerful mechanisms of oppression, but when unsuccessful, the act has the ironic force of constituting mechanisms of oppression. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel, qualitative approach to evaluating the outcomes of integrating humanities and ethics into a newly revised pre-clerkship medical education curriculum. The authors set out to evaluate medical students’ perceptions, learning outcomes, and growth in identity development. Led by a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this qualitative project examines multiple sources of student experience and perception data, including student essays, end-of-year surveys, and semi-structured interviews with students. Data were analyzed using deductive and inductive processes to identify key categories (...) and recurring themes. Results suggest that students not only engaged with the curricular content and met the stated learning objectives but also acknowledged their experience in the humanities and ethics curriculum as an opportunity to reflect, expand their perceptions of medicine (and what it means to be “in” medicine), connect with their classmates, and further cultivate their personal and professional identities. Results of this qualitative study show how and in what ways the ethics and humanities curriculum motivates students past surface-level memorization of factual knowledge and encourages thoughtful analysis and evaluation about how the course material relates to and influences their thinking and how they see themselves as future doctors. The comprehensive qualitative approach reflects a holistic model for evaluating the integration of humanities and ethics into the pre-clerkship medical education curriculum. Future research should examine if this approach provides a protective factor against the demonstrated ethical erosion and empathy decrease during clinical training. (shrink)

In this study, I examine the online discourse of the European refugee crisis on the micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Specifically, I analyze 100 tweets that include #refugeesnotwelcome, and explore how this hashtag is used to express negative feelings, beliefs and ideologies toward refugees and migrants in Europe. Guided by critical discourse studies, I focus on Twitter users’ discursive strategies as well as form and function of semiotic resources and multimodality. Twitter users who include this particular hashtag use a rhetoric of inclusion (...) and exclusion to depict refugees as unwanted, criminal outsiders. These tendencies align with current trends in Europe where nationalist-conservative and xenophobic right-wing groups gain power and establish a socially accepted discourse of racism. (shrink)

Andrew Aberdein recently explored whether Aristotle held a (proto-)virtue argumentation theory, which would evaluate a good argument in terms of whether the arguers engaged virtuously. Aberdein admits, however, that connections between virtue, character, and argumentation are scarce within Aristotle's works. Accordingly, here Cassie Finley approaches this question from a different angle, comparing Aristotle's concepts of dialectic and rhetoric with virtue theories of argumentation. She argues that the essential features of dialectic and rhetoric are in tension with the defining characteristics of (...) virtue argumentation theories. However, this tension raises a deeper methodological tension within virtue argumentation theories regarding their “intuitive” conception of arguments. Finley outlines a more viable route forward for virtue argumentation theorists, one that dissolves this tension through reframing their project as a virtue dialogue theory. This shift toward dialogue would help to assuage the main objections to virtue argumentation theories regarding adversariality, incompleteness, and vulnerability to ad hominems. At the same time, developing toward a virtue dialogue theory better aligns with the intuitive sense of engaging well with others that defines the virtue argumentation project, and it also more fruitfully sets up the project to encourage future scholarship connecting virtue ethics, virtue epistemology, and philosophy of education. (shrink)

This essay advocates applying a “narrative” conception of the individual self to the problem of “collective responsibility.” Participants in the debate agree that groups are composed of individuals and that group responsibility must somehow mimic individual responsibility. However, participants do not begin from a neutral and unproblematic conception of the individual. So far, most participants have assumed standard models of the individual that may unduly bias their conclusions about different forms of group responsibility. I argue that switching to a “narrative” (...) conception may provide a more comprehensive and therefore preferable starting point for considering questions of group responsibility. (shrink)

Sue felt welling disgust as the first dark drops of menstrual blood struck the tile in dime-sized drops. “For God’s sake Carrie, you got your period!’ Sue cried. ‘Clean yourself up!”Within the walls of her educational institution, classmates bombard Carrie with feminine hygiene products, chanting “plug it up!” as their disgust for her rises.1 This fictional scene in Stephen King’s Carrie is cruel but is perhaps not inconceivable as something that might occur in reality. In this scene, Carrie is dehumanized, (...) animalistic; she has been rejected for her unwilling transgression of accepted social behavior. Menstrual blood is running down her legs. What makes this scene different to what could conceivably occur in... (shrink)

L'entrée des enfants médiévaux dans la collection de « La Vie Quotidienne » vaut reconnaissance. Ce petit ouvrage clot la polémique née il y a trente ans, quand Philippe Ariès avait avançé l'idée que la rareté des sources concernant l'enfance médiévale révélait un désintérêt des gens de cette époque pour leurs enfants. L'ouvrage que nous proposent ces deux spécialistes de l'enfance médiévale, Danièle Alexandre-Bidon et Didier Lett, offre une synthèse des connaissance acquises sur les...

This paper develops its exegetical claim by building mainly on a reconstruction of a central argument in the Critique of Pure Reason and supporting it with material from Kant’s other critical works. It argues that Kant’s philosophy does not permit us any judgment about things in themselves whatsoever. This could be called a form of ignorance, albeit a unique one. On the developed reading, Kant claims that there cannot be any objectively valid judgment about things in themselves, and since so-called (...) judgments without objective validity are actually no judgments at all, there is no judgment about things in themselves available to us – not even a negative one. The paper considers the theses and antitheses of the antinomies, analytic judgments, and the practical postulates as potential candidates for such judgments, each of which fail the objectivity test. It ends by concluding that we should read Kant’s critical writings in such a way that they do not feature any judgments about things in themselves and suggests one way to do so: putative judgments of this sort could be read as higher-order judgments about the concept of a thing in itself. (shrink)

Il contributo intende mettere in primo piano il ruolo svolto dall'analogia nel _modus operandi_, oltre che nel_ modus arguendi_, dei giuristi medievali. Se ne propone inoltre una lettura "a più livelli" nell'ottica de _Il paradigma filosofico agostiniano_ (Parodi 2006). _This essay means to put the spotlight on the role that analogy played in medieval jurists' _modus operandi _and _modus arguendi_, suggesting a multi-level reading of it as well, from the point of view of _Il paradigma filosofico agostiniano_ (Parodi 2006)._.

The terrorist attack against the satirical weekly newspaperCharlie Hebdoand the subsequent hostage-taking in the kosher supermarket in Paris on the 7th and 9th January 2015 profoundly shocked the French public. The term ‘conspiracy theory’ very rapidly came to be used in the media to account for accusations of a ‘false flag operation’ and for the circulation of doubts concerning certain details relating to these events. The use of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ in these contexts seemed to show up an extremely (...) broad application of it, an application, which, in some cases, was accompanied by a rather impassioned approach to the events and one not always free from ideological presuppositions which aligned phenomena which, even though linkages between them could be shown, should more properly be distinguished one from another.This article proposes to examine the media and institutional applications of this term during the episode of the ‘anti-conspiracy theory panic’, which followed upon the Paris incidents. This study will permit the very notion of ‘conspiracy theory’ to be brought into question, both on the level of definition and from a heuristic perspective. (shrink)

Kann es sein, dass unser Denken unauflösliche Widersprüche enthält? Die Paradoxien des Unendlichen sind ein guter Kandidat dafür. Kant hat in seiner transzendentalen Dialektik behauptet, dass wir das Unendliche nicht konsistent denken können. Hegel hält mit einer faszinierenden positiven Dialektik dagegen, die das Unendliche widerspruchsfrei denken will. Bei Cantor jedoch, der die moderne Auffassung des Unendlichen revolutioniert hat, kehren die Paradoxien wieder zurück. Guido Kreis zeigt, dass unsere Begriffe vom Unendlichen relativ zu unseren besten Theorien tatsächlich inkonsistent sind, und führt (...) anhand dieser negativen Dialektik zugleich in die Grundformen der modernen Dialektik ein. (shrink)

This article presents an analysis of one docent's discussion of Michigan history to a group of third-grade children as part of a week-long state-sponsored history program. By analyzing the docent's...

Aramaic in Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity. Edited by Eric M. Meyers and Paul V. Flesher. Duke Judaic Studies Series, vol. 3. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2010. Pp. xx + 300. $49.50.

Traditional moral explorations of sexual violation are dyadic: they focus on the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, considered in relative isolation. We argue that the moral texture of sexual violation and its fallout only shows up once we see acts of sexual violation as acts that occur within an ecosystem. An ecosystem is made up of dwellers and an environment embedded in a broad, thick, interdependent, and relatively stable web of norms, practices, environments, material and institutional structures. We (...) argue that many of the important and interesting harms wrought by sexual violation can only be understood as ecological harms. To illustrate this, we focus on sexual violations that occur within a specific type of ecosystem, namely an academic department with a graduate program. We examine the possible damaging effects of sexual violation on the ecology of a department. We also consider what makes an ecosystem resilient and relatively able to self-repair, and how sexual violation within an ecosystem may weaken its self-repairing resources. We show that looking at sexual violation through this ecological lens lets us identify harms that are otherwise obscured or difficult to locate. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall discuss the assumption that Kant’s method in the Critique of Pure Reason is a transcendental analysis of experience. In order to do this, I will consider the conception of transcendental analysis that Marburg Neo-Kantianism powerfully introduced into Kant interpretation. I shall first develop a general model of transcendental analysis in the Marburg sense. I shall then ask whether this is a suitable model for the interpretation of the first Critique. Kant’s distinction between the analytic and (...) synthetic method in the Prolegomena seems to contradict this, given that it is a distinction between two different mathematical methods of demonstration. However, I shall argue that any such reading is incompatible with the Critique, and that transcendental analysis is indeed a legitimate interpretative model for understanding Kant. I shall finally turn to Strawson’s conception of descriptive metaphysics, which has strong affinities to Kant and the Marburg school. Most importantly, Strawson helps us to understand three significant aims at which transcendental analysis is directed. Finally, comparing transcendental analysis to dominant conceptions of analysis in philosophy, I shall argue that it constitutes a variety of philosophical analysis sui generis. (shrink)

This paper analyses two early Chinese ways of modeling the ethical significance of art using music as an example. I shall focus on the Xunzi 《荀子》 as a paradigmatic statement of Confucian views, and selected passages from the Zhuangzi 《莊子》 as an exemplary manifestation of Daoist aesthetics. I argue that the Xunzi opts for a direct ethical impact of music, while it does not rely on an independent aesthetic conception of the goodness of music. By contrast, I argue that the (...) Zhuangzi discusses music on the grounds of an independent aesthetic conception of its goodness, while music can only claim an indirect ethical significance. Both models are mutually exclusive. This gives reason to believe that the Xunzi and the Zhuangzi present us with the two systematically possible ways of modeling the ethical impact of art. (shrink)