The inhuman in the humanities : Darwin and the ends of man -- Deleuze, Bergson, and the concept of life -- Bergson, Deleuze, and difference -- Feminism, materialism, and freedom -- The future of feminist theory : dreams for new knowledges -- Differences disturbing identity : Deleuze and feminism -- Irigaray and the ontology of sexual difference -- Darwin and the split between natural and sexual selection -- Sexual difference as sexual selection : Irigarayan reflections on Darwin -- Art and (...) the animal -- Living art and the art of life : women's painting from the western desert. (shrink)

This new and important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. In the last few decades there has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based on (...) data taken out of context. This book is the first detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy. (shrink)

We examined two potential correlates of hypnotic suggestibility: dissociation and cognitive inhibition. Dissociation is the foundation of two of the major theories of hypnosis and other theories commonly postulate that hypnotic responding is a result of attentional abilities . Participants were administered the Waterloo-Stanford Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form C. Under the guise of an unrelated study, 180 of these participants also completed: a version of the Dissociative Experiences Scale that is normally distributed in non-clinical populations; a latent inhibition (...) task, a spatial negative priming task, and a memory task designed to measure negative priming. The data ruled out even moderate correlations between hypnotic suggestibility and all the measures of dissociation and cognitive inhibition overall, though they also indicated gender differences. The results are a challenge for existing theories of hypnosis. (shrink)

This book explores the tradition of the 'science of man' in French medicine of the era 1750-1850, focusing on controversies about the nature of the 'physical-moral' relation and their effects on the role of medicine in French society. Its chief purpose is to recover the history of a holistic tradition in French medicine that has been neglected because it lay outside the mainstream themes of modern medicine, which include experimental, reductionist, and localistic conceptions of health and disease. Professor Williams also (...) challenges existing historiography, which argues that the 'anthropological' approach to medicine was a short-term by-product of the leftist politics of the French Revolution. This work argues instead that the medical science of man long outlived the Revolution, that it spanned traditional ideological divisions, and that it reflected the shared aim of French physicians, whatever their politics, to claim broad cultural authority in French society. (shrink)

Liberal egalitarians face unappreciated challenges in explaining why the state should assist citizens in disaster recovery and why the state should ever assist in rebuilding in high-risk areas. Addressing these challenges and justifying state-funded disaster recovery assistance requires invoking the most politically salient aspect of disasters: their tendency to increase social inequality. A liberal egalitarian principle of equal opportunity justifies assistance in recovery, at least for disadvantaged citizens. But further argument is required to show why the state should ever subsidize (...) rebuilding as opposed to relocation, if citizens can have access to equally good opportunities in a low-risk area. I argue that displacement has costs which matter under equal opportunity – but this rationale for disaster recovery extends to other causes of displacement, such as gentrification. (shrink)

This paper argues for answers to two questions, and then identifies a tension between the two answers. First, regarding the implications of moral ignorance for moral responsibility: “Do false moral views exculpate?” Does believing that one is acting morally permissibly render one blameless? It does not. Second, in moral epistemology: “Can moral testimony provide moral knowledge?” It can (even granting some worries about moral deference). The tension: If moral testimony can provide moral knowledge, then surely it can provide justified false (...) moral belief. But surely there is no blameworthiness in a case in which a person acts on a justified false moral belief. So surely some false moral views do exculpate. This tension can be resolved by adoption of the view that moral testimony cannot provide justified false moral belief; this view relies on the fact that whether a belief is justified is sensitive to an agent’s total evidence. (shrink)

Amartya Sen’s ethical theorizing helps feminists resolve the tensions between the claims of women’s particular perspectives and moral objectivity. His concept of ‘‘positional objectivity’’ highlights the epistemological significance of value judgments made from particular social positions, while holding that certain values may become widely shared. He shows how acknowledging positionality is consistent with affirming the universal value of democracy. This article builds on Sen’s work by proposing an analysis of democracy as a set of institutions that aims to intelligently utilize (...) positional information for shared ends. This epistemological analysis of democracy offers a way to understand the rationale for reserving political offices for women. From a political point of view, gendered positions are better thought of as an epistemological resource than as a ground of identity politics – that is, of parochial identification and solidarity. (shrink)

Of other ancient writers, call into question the traditional view that katharsis in the Poetics is a homeopathic process - one in which pity and fear affect emotions like themselves. She maintains, instead, that Aristotle considered katharsis to be an allopathic process in which pity and fear purge the soul of shameless, antisocial, and aggressive emotions. While exploring katharsis, Tragic Pleasures analyzes the closely related question of how the Poetics treats the.

This investigation explores the methodological implications of choosing an unusual example for phenomenological description (here, a bodily awareness practice allowing spontaneous bodily shifts to occur at the leading edge of the living present); for example, the matters themselves are not pregiven, but must first be brought into view. Only after preliminary clarifications not only of the practice concerned, but also of the very notions of the “body” and of “protentionality” is it possible to provide both static and genetic descriptions of (...) the phenomena in question, leading to concluding meditations on the differences between an “integrating” consciousness engaged in a project of knowing and an “improvisational” consciousness open to radical transformation. In the end, however, the Urzeitigung in which what is protended is simply “more time” holds good as the invariant governing the deep structure of both of these styles of consciousness. (shrink)

Objective moral facts are supposed to be independent from us, but it has proven difficult to provide a clear account of this independence condition. Objective moral facts cannot be overly independent of us, as even an objective morality would depend, in important respects, on features of us. The challenge is to respect these moral mind-dependencies without inappropriately counting too many moral facts as objective. In this paper, I delineate and evaluate several different versions of the independence condition in moral objectivity. (...) I raise problems for these ways of formulating moral objectivity and then develop a better account of moral objectivity, one that avoids the pitfalls of other proposals. (shrink)

This article will examine the phase of Nishida’s thought in which he turns to the historical world and present the benefits of this turn to his overall philosophical project. In “The Philosophy of History in the ‘Later’ Nishida,” Woo-Sung Huh claims that Nishida Kitaro’s attempt to integrate history into his earlier writings on self-consciousness is a “wrong turn.” I will demonstrate how Huh’s criticism of Nishida’s writings on history stems from Huh’s own ontological assumption that consciousness and the historical world (...) occupy distinct realms. Leveling this criticism against Nishida causes the reader to miss Nishida’s greatest insight, namely that there is no such distinction; there is only one reality of consciousness and materiality. Nishida’s emphasis on the historical world makes his earlier claim that consciousness is inseparable from things more robust. I will argue that by expanding his earlier focus on consciousness to include the formative power of created physical objects and human bodies on consciousness, Nishida’s philosophy is actually strengthened. (shrink)

The hexameter poems of Theodore Metochites are perhaps the most determinedly baroque of all Byzantine literary productions to have survived. The tortuous constructions of Metochites' prose rhetoric are transmuted into his rather imprecise concept of the hexameter, with a vocabulary that is ostensibly Homeric but in fact ranges over the whole spectrum of Greek literature, with not a few coinages of his own. The twenty poems, in just over 9,000 lines, were written probably towards the end of his period in (...) high office; several clearly date from the period immediately before his fall from power in 1328, with others written in the years between his return from exile to his beloved monastery of the Chora and his death in 1332. The topics treated by Metochites range from solipsistic musings on his youth and the troubles that afflicted his old age to bombastic funerary memorials. Although the poems are preserved in several manuscripts, it has been demonstrated (by Ihor Ševčenko) that Par.Gr. 1776 stands at the head of the tradition. It is in a format similar to that, for example, of another luxury copy of Metochites' own works, Vindob. Phil. Gr. 95, while the corrections to the verses have been shown to be in the hand of Metochites himself. (shrink)

Twentieth-century ideologies, from liberalism to fascism, are rooted in humanism—the faith in the sovereignty of human reason and potential that grew out of Renaissance thought and discovery. This special issue asks if it is true that all vestiges of humanism have been dismantled, or whether humanism has taken on new forms. Have new versions of historical analysis and cultural studies reanimated humanist themes? What is posthumanism? These essays examine relationships among structuralism, poststructuralism, and the subject; explore the challenge of anticolonialist (...) critique to the coherence of antihumanism; reconsider the canon of antihumanists such as Heidegger and Foucault, and broach the intractable problems posed by efforts to comprehend the Holocaust, the camps, and ethnic cleansing. _Contributors_. Athena Athanasiou, Etienne Balibar, Mara de Gennaro, Carolyn J. Dean, Brady Thomas Heiner, Lynne Joyrich, Jacques Lezra. (shrink)

This article continues the rejection of certain myths about the right to life at the end of life commenced in an article in the previous issue of the journal Clinical Ethics. It focuses upon ethical arguments that seek to exclude two categories of human beings from the usual protection of human life: those described as ‘non-persons’ and those ‘designated for death’. The article argues that, while the protection offered to life by means of the right to life is far from (...) absolute, the right remains applicable to all human beings, irrespective of their life expectancy or mental capacity. (shrink)

The healthcare system—the assemblage of hospitals, insurers, professional associations, policymakers, patients, caregivers, and other entities oriented toward health in the United States—does more than cure illness. It is, and in some cases ought to be but falls short, attentive to endpoints other than cure, such as comfort, participation in desired activities, and the creation of families—things that may broadly be understood as promoting well-being. In the United States, health care utilization is prohibitively expensive. As a result, most people can only (...) access care through insurance. While the care available within the broad U.S. healthcare system may be oriented toward a wide variety of endpoints, insurance... (shrink)

Michel Foucault showed by his genealogical method that history is random. It comprises sites of disarray and dispersal. In those sites, Simone de Beauvoir wrote philosophy through lived experience of woman as Other in relation to man as the Absolute. Here lies a fecund site for revisionist analysis of female cultural production and its relevance to a philosophy of education. The paper works with a feminist approach to the politics of knowledge, examining textual and political strategies in the recording of (...) history and the ‘othering’ of women through dominant cultural discourses. Infusing this discussion is a feminist politics of interrogation on cultural change for women. The paper investigates contributions of women to fields of art, politics, education and philosophy, and to the ways their contributions have been considered, received, positioned. Different approaches to feminism become apparent in the different conditions of knowledge under discussion. This leads to a final consideration of femi... (shrink)

According to the coercive approach to distributive justice, the coercive nature of the political state requires justification in the form of distributive benefits owed only to members of the state. In this paper I analyze and dismiss traditional objections to the coercive approach, and I proceed to raise two novel objections. First, according to my equivocation objection, I contend that the coercive approach’s leap from coercive burdens to certain distributive benefits is based on an equivocation. When this equivocation is clarified, (...) the conclusion of the coercive approach is undermined. Attempts to circumvent the equivocation inevitably lead to my second objection, the coercion as cooperation objection. Through this objection it becomes clear that the coercive approach collapses into the cooperative approach, an approach to distributive justice that may change the scope of distributional obligations beyond that of the political state. (shrink)

The frequency of earnings restatements has been increasing over the last decade. Restating previous earnings erodes perceived trustworthiness and competence of management, giving firms strong incentives to take actions to enhance perceived credibility of future financial reports [Farber, D. 2005, The Accounting Review 80, 539-561.]. Using an experimental case, we examine the ability of post-restatement actions taken by a firm to positively influence nonprofessional investors' perceptions of management's financial reporting credibility. Our examination considers credibility judgments following two types of restatements (...) -those resulting from fraud in which the character, ethics, and values of an organization may be called into question [cf. Copeland, Jr., J. E.: 2005, Accounting Horizons 19, 35-43.], and those resulting from non-fraud. Based on the information in the experimental case, non-professional investors take the role of potential equity investors and make a judgment about management's financial reporting credibility after reviewing a set of postrestatement actions taken by a firm. The possible actions include changes in four corporate governance mechanisms and a buyback of company stock. Our results provide an important contribution to the literature by demonstrating that among non-professional investors, perceptions of management's financial reporting credibility are affected both by the postrestatement action taken and the nature of the restatement. These results offer insight into the formation of a key credibility judgment made by non-professional investors following a trust-destroying event, an earnings restatement. (shrink)

This is the first of two volumes announcing the emergence of the new legal realism as a field of study. At a time when the legal academy is turning to social science for new approaches, these volumes chart a new course for interdisciplinary research by synthesizing law on the ground, empirical research, and theory. Volume 1 lays the groundwork for this novel and comprehensive approach with an innovative mix of theoretical, historical, pedagogical, and empirical perspectives. Their empirical work covers such (...) wide-ranging topics as the financial crisis, intellectual property battles, the legal disenfranchisement of African-American landowners, and gender and racial prejudice on law school faculties. The methodological blueprint offered here will be essential for anyone interested in the future of law-and-society. (shrink)

En el presente escrito pretendo analizar las acciones humanas; partiendo de la pregunta ¿cómo podemos dar cuenta de las razones de las acciones humanas? Y si es que, se ha desarrollado una teoría que ayude a dar cuenta de por qué actuamos como lo hacemos. Por lo que, para responder a esta cuestión, recurrí a la teoría de la explicación causal; esta teoría nos dice que las razones pueden ser las causas de las acciones, por lo que para poder argumentar (...) en favor de esta teoría hay algunos puntos a analizar y explicar con el fin de que se pueda argumentar en su favor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 31, Number 1, April 2005, pp. 63-92 Utilitarianism with a Humean Face ELIZABETH ASHFORD Introduction There is a long-standing debate over whether or not Hume's moral theory1 should be viewed as some version of utilitarianism.2 Among opponents of a utilitarian reading, many contrast the subtlety and psychological plausibility of Hume's account of morality with what they take to be utilitarianism's failure both to capture the (...) complexity of morality and to be suited to the nature of human beings.3 Geoffrey Sayre-McCord is, in my view, one of the most incisive and forceful advocates of this position.4 He interprets Hume as an exponent of what he calls the "Bauhaus theory" of ethics. The Bauhaus theory avoids a commitment to a single overarching moral principle by which to solve all moral questions. On this view, the virtues are each well-suited to solving a particular problem which we find collectively salient when we take up the general point of view, " and different problems may demand dramatically different, sometimes incompatible solutions" (282). Sayre-McCord contrasts this with what he considers the overly systematic nature of utilitarianism, which identifies traits as virtues solely on the grounds of their tendency to realise or promote well-being. In addition, he contrasts the Bauhaus theory, which "portrays morality's demands as grounded in the expansive interests and affections, generous and not, of real people looking for... solutions to problems they face," with what he takes to be utilitarianism's psychological implausibility. The question of whether Hume's moral theory should be viewed as a version of utilitarianism will, of course, largely depend on how utilitarianism is defined. It is important to separate utilitarianism's key tenets from claims that have come to Elizabeth Ashford is Lecturer in Moral Philosophy, University of St. Andrews, Edgecliffe, The Scores, St Andrews, KY16 9AL, United Kingdom, e-mail: [email protected] 64 Elizabeth Ashford he associated with the theory but that do not follow from these tenets. My discussion of whether Hume's moral theory is utilitarian will focus on Sayre-McCord's argument that "no version of utilitarianism... sits comfortably as an interpretation of Hume." One of the strengths of Sayre-McCord's argument is that he bases it on the most uncontentious and ecumenical account of utilitarianism's core tenets. He argues that there are three ways in which a theory may fail to qualify as utilitarian, and that Hume's theory fails on all three counts: (i) a theory might rely on neither actual nor expected utility as the determinants of evaluation; or (ii) it might not take into account all the consequences for everyone affected; or (iii) it might not take utility to be a single measure of interpersonal value. I will argue that Hume's account of morality adheres to the first two tenets that Sayre-McCord rightly identifies as definitive of utilitarianism, welfarism and impartiality. This means that Hume's theory is a version of what Thomas Scanlon calls "philosophical utilitarianism, " according to which "all that counts morally is the well-being of individuals, no one of whom is singled out as counting for more than the others."5 By showing that Hume's account is a version of philosophical utilitarianism I hope to demonstrate that a moral theory's adherence to these two fundamental tenets of utilitarianism is compatible with its having considerable complexity and psychological plausibility. I will then argue that Hume also takes welfare to be "a single measure of interpersonal value," and so also adheres to what Sayre-McCord takes to be essential to the third tenet of utilitarianism. I will argue, contra Sayre-McCord, that Hume's account of the moral point of view is based on the interests of all, rather than the interests of each seriatim (as on contractualist accounts) or the individual selfinterest of the participants (as on Hobbesian contractarian accounts). Admittedly, though, Hume shows no commitment to maximizing the net sum total of welfare. Such a commitment has come to be viewed as definitive of classical utilitarianism. In fact, as I will argue, Hume does not seriously address the problem of interpersonal conflicts... (shrink)

. The time of violence: Deconstruction and value. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 190-205.

Suicide is a major problem in the United States, with the number of suicides annually exceeding the number of homicides by 10,000. Many studies have examined the relationship between media coverage of suicides and the suicide rate. This article reviews literature on imitative suicide and discusses implications of suicide stories on people in crisis. In addition, it explores the options for suicide coverage and gives suggestions for more ethical coverage that could save people's lives, rather than reinforcing suicide as an (...) option. (shrink)

According to Cornell moral realists, we can know about moral facts in much the same way that we do the empirical facts of the natural sciences. In “Can Cornell Moral Realism Adequately Account for Moral Knowledge?” (2012), I argue that this positive comparison to scientific knowledge hurts, rather than helps, the moral realist position. Joseph Long has recently defended Cornell moral realism against my concerns. In this article, I respond to Long's arguments and clarify important issues in the present debate.

This paper examines discourses of stakeholders regarding global climate change to assess whether and how they construct industrial animal agriculture as posing a risk. The analysis assesses whether these discourses have shifted since the release of Livestock’s Long Shadow, a report by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which indicated that the industrial animal agriculture sector as a whole contributes more to global climate change than the transportation sector. Using Ulrich Beck’s theorizing of the “risk society,” this paper examines (...) how various animal rights and welfare groups, environmental organizations, meat industry stakeholders, governmental agencies, and newspapers in Canada, the United States, and internationally investigate and construct industrial animal agriculture as a risk, if at all, and how their respective discourses conflict. The findings indicate that while some stakeholders acknowledge industrial animal agriculture’s contribution to global climate change, for the most part the problematization of animal agriculture has not increased since the release of Livestock’s Long Shadow, and the animal agriculture industry has seemingly not lost its power to “rationalize risk.”. (shrink)

Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 26-34.