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)

What counts as an individual in the living world? What does it mean for a living thing to remain the same through time, while constantly changing? Immunology answers these questions with its theory of "self" and "nonself" which has dominated the field since the 1940s. Thomas Pradeu argues that this theory is inadequate, because immune responses to self constituents and immune tolerance of foreign entities are the rule, not the exception.

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)

Communication, when defined as an act intended to affect the psychological state of another individual, demands the use of inference. Either the signaler, the recipient, or both must make leaps of understanding which surpass the semantic information available and draw from pragmatic clues to fully imbue and interpret meaning. While research into human communication and the evolution of language has long been comfortable with mentalistic interpretations of communicative exchanges, including rich attributions of mental state, research into animal communication has balked (...) at theoretical models which describe mentalized cognitive mechanisms. We submit a new theoretical perspective on animal communication: the model of inferential communication. For use when existing proximate models of animal communication are not sufficient to fully explain the complex, flexible, and intentional communication documented in certain species, specifically non-human primates, we present our model as a bridge between shallower, less cognitive descriptions of communicative behavior and the perhaps otherwise inaccessible mentalistic interpretations of communication found in theoretical considerations of human language. Inferential communication is a framework that builds on existing evidence of referentiality, intentionality, and social inference in primates. It allows that they might be capable of applying social inferences to a communicative setting, which could explain some of the cognitive processes that enable the complexity and flexibility of primate communication systems. While historical models of animal communication focus on the means-ends process of behavior and apparent cognitive outcomes, inferential communication invites consideration of the mentalistic processes that must underlie those outcomes. We propose a mentalized approach to questions, investigations, and interpretations of non-human primate communication. We include an overview of both ultimate and proximate models of animal communication, which contextualize the role and utility of our inferential communication model, and provide a detailed breakdown of the possible levels of cognitive complexity which could be investigated using this framework. Finally, we present some possible applications of inferential communication in the field of non-human primate communication and highlight the role it could play in advancing progress toward an increasingly precise understanding of the cognitive capabilities of our closest living relatives. (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)

This book looks at business ethics from the perspective of the business practitioner, but with the rigour of the moral philosopher. Intended for introductory students of business, commerce and management studies, Business Ethics at Work begins by setting business clearly in the context of creating value for its owners, and develops a practical ethical decision model which can be simply and relevantly applied to the hard moral choices with which business people are faced day to day. Against this background, some (...) of the major ethical issues which arise in business are explored, for example, in human resource management, finance, marketing and advertising, the management of the environment and corporate governance. In conclusion the book looks at the nature of ethical audit and argues that for the business of the future, the identification of its ethical values and their integration into its policies and practices will be a crucial ingredient of success. (shrink)

We argue that we have obligations to future people that are similar in kind to obligations we have to current people. Modifying Michael Bratman’s account, we argue that as planning agents we must plan for the future to act practically in the present. Because our autonomy and selfhood are relational by nature, those plans will involve building affiliative bonds and caring for others. We conclude by grounding responsibility to future others by the way we plan through our social institutions. Our (...) account fills out the story of responsibility to future generations by referring only to ourselves, our practical identities, and practical reason. (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.

What exactly does it mean to “trust your gut”? What use are gut-level insights when a person is attempting to consciously and deliberately navigate life altering decisions, such as those surrounding marriage, divorce, job changes, home buying, etc.? This essay provides a partial answer to those questions by leveraging the account of “emotional bodily feelings” offered in Tom Cochrane’s The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States. This essay shows why “trusting your gut” is a reasonably good path to (...) emotional self-awareness in decision-making. The first half of the essay offers an analysis of what many people mean by the colloquial advice to “trust your gut,” at least when they deploy that advice in context of an ongoing dialogue about a friend or family member’s major life-decision. In the second half, this article briefly summarizes Cochrane’s account of emotions and emotional bodily feelings, and spells out how these concepts might be deployed to understand the advice to “trust your gut” as nearly tantamount to saying “pursue emotional self-awareness.”. (shrink)

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)

In a controlled laboratory experiment, we found evidence for our predictions that participants who received fair distributive treatment were more likely to lie to give a supervisor a good performance evaluation than those treated unfairly, and those who received unfair distributive treatment were more likely to steal money from a supervisor than those treated fairly. We further proposed that the presence of an ethical code of conduct would moderate these relationships such that when the code was present these relationships would (...) be weaker than when the code was absent, but we failed to find support for these moderating effects. Our findings suggest that the relationship between distributive justice and unethical behavior is likely more complex than previously considered. Both researchers and managers may benefit from a broader understanding of the factors that motivate and inhibit unethical behaviors intended to benefit and harm supervisors and/or organizations. (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)

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)

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 Internet has been used as a place for and site of an array of research activities. From online ethnographies to public data sets and online surveys, researchers and research regulators have struggled with an array of ethical issues around the conduct of online research. This paper presents a discussion and findings from Buchanan and Ess's study on US-based institutional review boards and the state of internet research ethics.

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)

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)

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

Transgender people and issues have come to the forefront of public consciousness over the last year. Caitlyn Jenner' very public transition, heightened media coverage of the murders of transgender women of color, and the panicked passage of North Carolina's “bathroom bill”, mean that conversations about transgender health and well-being are no longer happening only within small communities. The idea that transgender issues are bioethical issues is not new, but I think that increased public awareness of transgender people and the ways (...) that their health is affected by systems that bioethics already engages with offers an opportunity for scholarship that works to improve transgender health in meaningful ways. (shrink)