An interview with Gail Weiss concerning her interests and influences, especially the body and embodiment.

Attempts to reclaim mindfulness from the commercial and corporate juggernaut it has become and to demonstrate its usefulness in spiritual (including Christian) life.

The literature on epistemic injustice has been helpful for highlighting some of the epistemic harms that have long troubled those working in area studies that concern oppressed populations. Nonetheless, a good deal of this literature is oriented toward those in a position to perpetrate injustices, rather than those who historically have been harmed by them. This orientation, I argue, is ill-suited to the work of epistemic decolonization. In this essay, I call and hold attention to the epistemic interests of those (...) who are epistemically marginalized on account of relations of dominance and oppression. To do so, I draw on Kristie Dotson’s work, which uses a systems approach focused on epistemic agency. I develop Dotson’s insights further to argue that epistemic inclusions may be just as pernicious as epistemic exclusions Specifically, I highlight some of the ways in which epistemic agents can be included in epistemic systems in a manner that is epistemically exploitative—extracting epistemic labor coercively or in ways that are distinctly non-reciprocal. I then turn to María Lugones’ distinction between horizontal and vertical practices to discuss avenues of resisting both exclusions and inclusions that thwart the epistemic agency of marginalized knowers. (shrink)

This article explores the development of a novel biomedical research organism, and its potential to remake the species and spaces of translational medicine. The humanized mouse is a complex experimental object in which mice, rendered immunodeficient through genetic alteration, are engrafted with human stem cells in the hope of reconstituting a human immune system for biomedical research and drug testing. These chimeric organisms have yet to garner the same commentary from social scientists as other human–animal hybrid forms. Yet, they are (...) rapidly being positioned as central to translational medicine in immunological research and pharmaceutical development. This article explores the complex relations between species and spaces they seek to enact. Humanizing mice simultaneously moves these animal forms towards the intimate geographies of corporeal equivalence with humans and the expansive geographies of translational research. These multiple trajectories are achieved by the way humanized mice function as both uncertain ‘epistemic things’ and as expansive ‘collaborative things’, articulating mouse genetics with other research, notably stem cell science. In the context of post-genomics, their indeterminacy is critical to their collaborative value; their expansive potential follows as much from their biological openness as from specific expectations. Yet, these new research organisms have both accumulative and disruptive capacities, for there are patterns of interference between these trajectories, remaking boundaries between experimental practices and clinical contexts. (shrink)

In this article we investigate how speakers contribute to the interactive rise and fall of emotion in problematic interactions in a data set of in-bound telephone conversations collected from call centres in the Philippines. These interactions are between the Filipino Customer Service Representatives and American clients who initiate the calls to seek information, clarification, or resolution to a problem. The study draws on Appraisal theory to analyse the contribution of the caller and the CSR to initiating, maintaining and adjusting the (...) interpersonal intensity of the interaction. Findings point to a limited reliance on explicit attitude on the part of both speakers, with attitude more often implied rather than expressed explicitly. Of note, too, is the interdependence of the attitudinal choices on the part of each speaker, and the role that concessive contractors such as just, already, once, yet and actually, as well as moments of silence can play in the management of the emotive intensity. While we intend the outcomes to make a contribution to professional training in the industry, we also look beyond that context to contribute in theoretical and methodological terms to the analysis of interactions in other contexts where problems need to be resolved through talk. (shrink)

This article highlights the long accomplishments of Claude Sumner, S.J. in the field of African philosophy. During his lifetime he published over 33 books and 184 articles. He lived and worked in Ethiopia for 44 years. He translated into English and analysed several key historical works in Ethiopian philosophy, written originally in Ge’ez. He argued that modern rationalist philosophy began in Africa with Zera Yacob at the same time that it began in France with Descartes. He then set to work (...) recording and analyzing oral philosophical sources found in proverbs and songs. He theorized on the definitions of philosophy and the methods to explore philosophy found in different sources. (shrink)

The last withdraws itself from all reckoning.... how then will we be able to measure up to the unusual beckoning of the last god?1.

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the (...) way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world. (shrink)

Plato on Knowledge and Forms brings together a set of connected essays by Gail Fine, in her main area of research since the late 1970s: Plato's metaphysics and epistemology. She discusses central issues in Plato's metaphysics and epistemology, issues concerning the nature and extent of knowledge, and its relation to perception, sensibles, and forms; and issues concerning the nature of forms, such as whether they are universals or particulars, separate or immanent, and whether they are causes. A specially written (...) introduction draws together the themes of the volume, which will reward the attention of anyone interested in Plato or in ancient metaphysics and epistemology. (shrink)

The Peri ide^on is the only work in which Aristotle systematically sets out and criticizes arguments for the existence of Platonic forms. Gail Fine presents the first full-length treatment in English of this important but neglected work. She asks how, and how well, Aristotle understands Plato's theory of forms, and why and with what justification he favors an alternative metaphysical scheme. She examines the significance of the Peri ide^on for some central questions about Plato's theory of forms--whether, for example, (...) there are forms corresponding to every property or only to some, and if only to some, then to which ones; whether forms are universals, particulars or both; and whether they are meanings, properties or both. Fine also provides a general discussion of Plato's theory of forms, and of our evidence about the Peri ide^on and its date, scope, and aims. While she pays careful attention to the details of the text, she also relates it to contemporary philosophical concerns. The book will be valuable for anyone interested in metaphysics ancient or modern. (shrink)

Meno's Paradox from Socrates to Sextus Gail Fine. sense that they consider the issues it raises; and they argue, against its conclusion, that inquiry is possible. Like Plato and Aristotle, they also explain what makes inquiry possible; and they do ...

If social, political, and material transformation is to have a lasting impact on individuals and society, it must be integrated within ordinary experience. Refiguring the Ordinary examines the ways in which individuals' bodies, habits, environments, and abilities function as horizons that underpin their understandings of the ordinary. These features of experience, according to Gail Weiss, are never neutral, but are always affected by gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and perceptions of bodily normality. While no two people will experience (...) the ordinary in exactly the same way, the multiplicities, possibilities, overlaps, and limitations of day-to-day horizons are always intersubjectively constituted. Weiss turns her attention to changing the conditions and experiences of oppression from ordinary to extraordinary. This book is an impressive phenomenological, feminist reading of the complexities of human experience.M. V. Marder, University of Toronto, Feb. 2009. (shrink)

(1995). A Feminist Sociologist Responds to Daniel's 'Exclusion and Emphasis Reframed as a Matter of Ethics' Ethics & Behavior: Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 369-371.

"Blending literary and photo-journalism, history, and storytelling, essays examine eighteen Texas dance halls in terms of their music, culture, and community. Also considers the predominantly Czech and German heritage from which these halls evolved, as we.

In recent years a new approach to the study of religion in the social sciences has emerged. It differs from the classical approach in four important ways. First, it treats all specific religious traditions as subsets or specific expressions of some underlying domain that is universal across all groups. Second this new approach treats religion as generally beneficent, and in this way it differs from both those theoreticians like Durkheim and Weber, who saw a more complex relationship between religion and (...) society, and those such as Marx and Freud, who generally took a negative view of the effect of religion. Third, adherents of this new approach claim to be able to identify a therapeutic effect of religion on the physical and mental health of individuals, treating religion as a “health behavior”. This chapter asks whether this new approach accomplishes the goals of its proponents. It examines the Jewish identities felt by American Jews sixty-five years of age and older as a test case. (shrink)

This article examines the role and reputation of Ellen Terry, the most eminent British Shakespearean actress of the late-Victorian period, and the extent to which she interrogated her function on the eminently spectacular stage of London’s Lyceum theatre. The article contends that in her writing – her autobiography, annotations of playscripts and lectures – Terry self-consciously and deliberately repositions herself as a Shakespeare commentator, and hence as one no longer subject to the temporal and visual limitations of the spectacular stage.

What initiates vertebrate limb development and induces limbs to form where they do? For several years the answer to this intriguing question has been framed in terms of a working model that limb induction depends on a dialogue between two members of the Fibroblast Growth Factor (FGF) family of intercellular signaling molecules, FGF8 and FGF10. Now, a recent paper has written roles for signals encoded by WNT genes, the vertebrate relatives of the Drosophila wingless gene, into the script.(1) BioEssays 23:865–868, (...) 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

SummaryThis study seeks to investigate what influences intelligence in early childhood. The Singapore Cohort Study of the Risk Factors of Myopia is used to assess determinants of childhood IQ and changes in IQ. This longitudinal data set, collected in 1999, includes a wealth of demographic, socioeconomic and prenatal characteristics. The richness of the data allows various econometric approaches to be employed, including the use of ordered and multinomial logit analysis. Mother's education is found to be a consistent and key determinant (...) of childhood IQ. Father's education and school quality are found to be key drivers for increasing IQ levels above the average sample movement. (shrink)

The pressing and universally relevant issue of euthanasia is debated in this volume. Euthanasia has become increasingly contentious as populations age, and medical and scientific advances continue to transform and extend life. Euthanasia - Choice and Death examines the key philosophical arguments that have underpinned thinking and practice up till now: the centrality of choice to our notion of the human being, and the challenge of changes to our concept of death in the face of medical, scientific and technological advances. (...) Gail Tulloch develops a conception of dignity that does not depend on religious assumptions and can promote a broad ethical consensus in a liberal democracy. Examination of landmark cases and the approaches adopted by key countries - the U.S.A., the U.K., the Netherlands, and Australia - ground the book. (shrink)

This book opens the door to the effects of intellectual, educational, and economic colonization of young children throughout the world. Using a postcolonial lens on current educational practices, the authors hope to lift those practices out of reproducing traditional power structures and push our thinking beyond the adult/child dichotomy into new possibilities for the lives that are created with children.

Over the last decade, the international media has devoted increasing attention to operations that separate conjoined twins. Despite the fairly low odds that a child or adult will survive the operation with all of their vital organs intact, most people fail to question the urgency of being physically separated from one’s identical twin. The drive to surgically tear asunder that which was originally joined, I suggest, is motivated in part by a refusal to acknowledge intercorporeality as a basic condition of (...) human existence that doesn’t undermine identity but makes it possible in the first place. (shrink)

This article traces Plato's views on literary production, his relation with his mentor Socrates and the founding of the Academy. The article also traces the impact that politics and philosophy as subjects had on Plato's thoughts. The influence of the Sophists has also been included. The article provides various angles according to which the idea of the whole as given by Plato is perceived.

Cancer susceptibility testing is likely to become routine in medical practice, despite many limitations and unanswered questions. These uncertainties greatly complicate the process of informed consent, creating an excellent opportunity to reconsider exactly how it should be conducted. Research with women's reactions to the availability of genetic susceptibility testing for breast cancer dramatically underscores that informed consent ought to be highly individualized, taking care to discern what patients believe about the disease and its causes and what role they want their (...) physician to play. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Confessions of a Poisoner, Written by HerselfGail K. Hart (bio)Confessions of a Poisoner, Written by Herself. Translated and introduced by Raleigh Whitinger and Diana Spokiene. New York: MLA, 2009. xliii + 196 pp. $12.95.Confessions of a Poisoner is an epistolary, autobiographical novel, first published anonymously in German as Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin in 1803. Lurid accounts of sex, incest, murder, and other crimes contributed to its status as a (...) sensational document in its day, especially in light of the illicit activities of the Countess Charlotte Ursinus, who was arrested and prosecuted for multiple poisonings allegedly committed between 1779 and 1803. Readers were eager for details of the countess's affairs and crimes, and the novel can indeed be read as an account, perhaps her account, of a very busy life of iniquity.The book is extremely engaging, and absorbing because our autobiographical narrator has unusually acute insight into human affairs and human character. From early youth, she finds pleasure in the art of seeming and she is proud of the skill with which she reads those who have something to offer her. Indeed the book could double as a seminar in social manipulation as the narrator negotiates her culture's obstacles to women's self-fulfillment. One is often reminded of George Lillo's murderous Millwood from The London Merchant, who in 1731 made the observation:It is a general maxim among the knowing part of mankind that a woman without virtue, like a man without honor or honesty, is capable of any action, though never [End Page 68] so vile. And yet what pains will they not take, what arts not use, to seduce us from our innocence and make us contemptible and wicked, even in their own opinions?(I:3)The narrator of Poisoner, though she might agree with Millwood, sees her part in the vile actions as both determined and chosen. The early steps of corruption were abetted by passion (incited with some calculation by early lovers) but also by the education she received, which she describes as being more masculine than feminine. Her father's failure to guide and restrain her thirst for knowledge has apparently left her with the ambitions of a conquerer and the social duties of an aristocratic woman—and, as Countess Orsina would have it, where men use daggers, women use poison. Yet she also accepts responsibility for all that she has done, quite convinced that most of it was wrong. The moral philosophy of the piece is somewhat peculiar, but she strives in the space of the one long letter that makes up the book to give an honest account of her duplicitous deeds.This intriguing life story also has significant scholarly value, and the editors/translators, Raleigh Whitinger and Diana Spokiene, have appended an excellent introduction that examines the poisoner's confessions as a document of its time. Our narrator is both wise and well-educated, and she discourses frequently on contemporary literature and philosophy, inserting herself into a variety of cultural debates. For example, her opinions on the value of Richardson's novels for the education and protection of young woman—that Richardson's ideals of virtue are delusional and therefore dangerous—run counter to prevailing wisdom on what young ladies should read. Her struggles with Kant and critical philosophy, which, she claims, diminished her pulchritude, are also instructive. Additionally, the editors make a very convincing case for the authorship of Friederike Helene Unger, whose husband was the publisher, and whose other works bear certain strong resemblances to the prose and the ideas of Poisoner.All of this excitement and knowledge comes to us in a supremely lucid and readable translation. I rarely read fiction in translation without being regularly reminded in some way of the translator. One sees an odd word, puzzles out a sentence and thinks about how one might have done that differently—and one gets distracted. That is not the case with this text, and this is especially surprising because the original German is that "of an era both culturally and historically distant" (xxvii). Whitinger and Spokiene have done a superb job of resurrecting a forgotten German text, embedding it in... (shrink)

It is an ancient view, to be found even in Aristotle’s analysis of friendship, that the other is an alter ego, another myself. More recently, this conception has provoked spirited debate within and without the phenomenological tradition. It can be found in a wide variety of texts, from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations to Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” The basic position can be summarized as follows. Intentional experiences are subjective, first-person experiences, not objective, third-person experiences.

Plato is the best known, and continues to be the most widely studied, of all the ancient Greek philosophers. The twenty-one commissioned articles in The Oxford Handbook of Plato provide in-depth and up-to-date discussions of a variety of topics and dialogues. The result is a useful state-of-the-art reference to the man many consider the most important philosophical thinker in history.

Access to human biospecimens is widely regarded as essential to the progress of medical research, and in particular, to the success of “personalized medicine.” Understanding the influence of genetic variation on human health and disease requires that researchers conduct genetic and other studies on thousands of human specimens. Over the past decade, human “biobanks” — vast collections of human biospecimens — have proliferated both in the United States and internationally. These biobanks are subject to a heterogeneous mix of standards that (...) govern the collection and use of biospecimens. (shrink)