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)

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

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 ...

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)

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)

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.

This volume draws together a series of thirteen essays on ancient epistemology by Gail Fine. She discusses knowledge, belief, subjectivity, and scepticism in Plato, Aristotle, and the Pyrrhonian sceptics. They consider such questions as: is episteme knowledge? Is doxa belief? Do the ancientshave the notion of subjectivity? Do any of them countenance external world scepticism? Several essays compare these philosophers with one another, as well as with more recent discussions of knowledge, belief, subjectivity, and scepticism, asking how if at all (...) the ancient discussions of these topicsdiffer from more recent ones. In exploring these issues, the essays often make use of the distinction between concepts and conceptions, between an abstract account of something, and more determinate ways of filling it in. Together they compose a rich set of investigations, illuminating ancientperspectives on the central questions in epistemology. (shrink)

Large-scale sequencing tests, including whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing, are rapidly moving into clinical use. Sequencing is already being used clinically to identify therapeutic opportunities for cancer patients who have run out of conventional treatment options, to help diagnose children with puzzling neurodevelopmental conditions, and to clarify appropriate drug choices and dosing in individuals. To evaluate and support clinical applications of these technologies, the National Human Genome Research Institute and National Cancer Institute have funded studies on clinical and research sequencing under (...) the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research program as well as studies on return of results. Most of these studies use sequencing in real-world clinical settings and collect data on both the application of sequencing and the impact of receiving genomic findings on study participants. They are occurring in the context of controversy over how to obtain consent for exome and genome sequencing. (shrink)

Narrative inquiry in a nursing practicum One approach to creating research‐based nursing education is to think and write narratively about the daily life of a BScN program student and her teacher in diverse settings and over time. Gail, as a nurse‐teacher, and Faith, as a nursing student and now Public Health Nurse, reconstruct their teaching–learning experiences in an integrated practicum in maternal–child health services as a narrative inquiry. After presenting this reconstruction of experience at a conference on maternal scholarship, further (...) inquiry into their experiences shows how narrative inquiry matters to construction of nursing praxis and to life‐long learning as a nurse. Teaching–learning relationships are seen as a template for a student's connections to people experiencing nursing care and to other clinicians. Construction of stories to live by that take into account becoming a nurse, constructing knowledge and enacting caring–healing nursing practices is illuminated through narrative inquiry. (shrink)

IN SCIENCE, PERCEPTION, AND REALITY, Sellars marvels at the power of fashion in philosophy, which all too often offers us the spectacle of a stampede rather than a careful sifting of gold from dross. Sellars was worried that the flight from phenomenalism would lead to the familiar pendulum effect and so thwart his effort to “usher analytic philosophy out of its Humean and into its Kantian stage,” as Rorty has put it. Accordingly, Sellars’s critique of the Myth of the Given (...) aimed to show that what was really wrong with phenomenalism was nothing particular to the sense-data of the positivists but the framework of givenness itself. (shrink)

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)

This essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment can be an extremely helpful ally for contemporary feminist theorists, critical race theorists, and disability studies scholars because his work suggests that the gender, race, and ability of bodies are not innate or fixed features of those bodies, much less corporeal indicators of physical, social, psychic, and even moral inferiority, but are themselves dynamic phenomena that have the potential to overturn accepted notions of normalcy, naturalness, and normativity. Taking seriously Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that (...) our bodies are the means by which we directly engage with the world, I suggest, encourages us to be attentive to how an individual’s or group’s gender, race, and bodily abilities differentially affect how their bodies are responded to by other bodies. The responses of others, in turn, directly influences the significance of an individual’s actions within that situation. This essay provides a critical examination of specific feminist philosophers, critical race scholars, and disability theorists who creatively utilize Merleau-Pontian insights to illustrate, and ultimately combat, the insidious ways in which sexism, racism, and “compulsory able-bodiedness”, impoverish the lived experience of both oppressors and the oppressed, largely by predetermining the meaning of their bodily interactions in accordance with institutionalized cultural expectations and norms. (shrink)

This essay reflects on some of the problems with characterizing collective epistemic resistance to oppression as “unthinking” or antithetical to reason by highlighting the epistemic labor involved in contending with and resisting epistemic oppression. To do so, I develop a structural notion of epistemic gaslighting in order to highlight structural features of contexts within which collective epistemic resistance to oppression occurs. I consider two different forms of epistemic echoing as modes of contending with and resisting epistemic oppression that are sometimes (...) mischaracterized as “unthinking” or “group think.” The first sense highlights the epistemic labor entailed in withdrawing from conditions of structural epistemic gaslighting that is sometimes mischaracterized as a pernicious self-sequestering that is antithetical to reason. The second sense highlights the epistemic labor entailed in actively confronting epistemic structures that gaslight what is sometimes mischaracterized as an “irrational group think.” In both cases, I highlight how epistemic acts that may appear unreasonable “within the gaslight” are, on the contrary, engaged in serious and important epistemic labor. (shrink)

This article considers some of the ways in which ‘the black woman’ as both representation and embodied, sentient being is rendered visible and invisible, and to link these to the multiple and competing ways in which she is ‘present’. The issues are engaged through three distinct but overlapping conceptualisations of ‘presence’. ‘Presence’ as conceived (and highly contested) in performance studies; ‘presence’ as conceived and worked with in psychoanalysis; and ‘presence’ as decolonising political praxis among Indigenous communities. I use these conceptualisations (...) of presence to consider the various ways in which the black woman as figure and as embodied/sentient subject has been made present/absent in different discursive registers. I also explore what is foreclosed and how this is itself linked to legacies of colonial ‘worlding’. I end with consideration of alternative modes of black women's presence and how this offers a resource for new modes of sociality. (shrink)

Lately, several commentators have argued that there are significant differences between ancient and modern skepticism. For example, it has been argued that ancient skeptics disavow belief, whereas the moderns disavow only knowledge. It has also been argued that the scope of ancient skepticism is considerably less radical than that of modern skepticism: unlike the moderns, the ancients do not question whether they have bodies or whether there is an external world furnished with the sorts of objects we generally take there (...) to be. They do not suspend judgment as to whether, for example, honey exists, but only as to whether it is sweet. One explanation that has been given for the allegedly modest scope of ancient skepticism is its practical concern: ancient skepticism is a way of life, one that is supposed to secure the skeptic’s happiness. But, according to Myles Burnyeat, “[s]uch being his primary concern, he cannot doubt in a completely general way his ability to act in the world.” Modern skepticism, by contrast, is said to be “a strictly methodological affair,” with the result that, unlike ancient skeptics, modern ones can act in the face of radical skepticism. (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)

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)

This longitudinal, qualitative study investigated the genesis and transformation of the social representations of organ transplants. A search of the West Australian newspaper, from 1954 to 1995 found 672 articles pertaining to organ transplants. Two distinct, but conflicting, representations emerged in the analyses. In the first representation, found from 1967/68, the surgeon was paramount and organ transplants were iconised as ‘spare part surgery’. In the second representation, found from 1984/85, the role of the donor was emphasised and transplants iconised as (...) a ‘gift of life’. Both representations were discernible in 1994/95. We consider the question whether there are now two conflicting representations or one representation with two conflicting sets of beliefs at its core. The results are discussed in terms of anchoring, objectification, transformation, and structure, as well as Moscovici’s notion of canonic themata. (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)

This investigation examines the discursive history and contemporary courtroom discourse of expert witnesses in Anglo-American courts, incorporating the methods of Michel Foucault into a Critical Discourse Analysis framework. The history of experts is marked by a profound discontinuity in the role of experts, during the late medieval period, with experts relegated to a witness role instead of a juror role - that of the privately knowledgeable investigator - they previously held. Examination of the discourse of contemporary experts in three high-profile (...) US trials documents a different witness status for experts along three parameters: amplification of question responses; the use of the contrastive discourse marker well to express professional disagreement with their interlocutors; and the embedding of professional practices into so clauses. These parameters stand in sharp contrast to ordinary witness discourse. The study concludes with a discussion of the stakes in legal control of expert witnesses including asymmetrical access to experts by economic status, the possible suppression of some expert testimony by recent US Supreme Court decisions, and the hierarchicalization of expert knowledge. (shrink)

With the recent death of Prof. H. Odera Oruka, founder of the ‘sage philosophy’ school of research based at the University of Nairobi, there is a need to look at some now-problematic issues. I suggest that the original impetus for starting the sage philosophy project-the defense against Euro-American skeptics who thought Africans incapable of philosophizing-has been outgrown. The present need for studies of African sages is to benefit from their wisdom, both in Africa and around the world. I also suggest (...) that the title ‘sage’ has to be problematized. While there were good reasons to focus earlier on rural elders as overlooked wise philosophers, the emphasis now should be on admiring philosophical thought wherever it may be found—in women, youth, and urban Africans as well. In such a way, philosophy will be further relevant to people’s lives, and further light will be shed and shared regarding the lived experience in Africa. (shrink)

Spellman argues that Aristotle developed his views about substance in response to Plato’s theory of forms. In particular, she argues that Aristotelian substances are as much like Platonic forms as possible, minus the latter’s separation. Whether ASs are like PFs depends, of course, not only on what one takes ASs to be like, but also on what one takes PFs to be like; accordingly, Spellman provides accounts of both. She argues that ASs are what she calls specimens of natural kinds. (...) A specimen of a natural kind is not Socrates, but Socrates-qua-human-being: Socrates insofar as he is a human being. She argues that Socrates, and Socrates-qua-human-being are numerically the same, but not identical. They are not identical, because not everything true of Socrates is true of Socrates-qua-human-being. Socrates, for example, is snub-nosed, but Socrates-qua-human-being is not; for the latter has all and only the properties contained in the definition of human being. (shrink)

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)

In The Alchemy of Race and Rights Patricia Williams notes that when people of color are asked to understand such practices as racial profiling by putting themselves in the shoes of white people, they are, in effect, being asked to, ‘look into the mirror of frightened white faces for the reality of their undesirability’ (1992, 46). While we often see understanding another as ethically and epistemically virtuous, in this paper I argue that it is wrong in some cases to ask (...) another to attempt to understand certain positions or lines of thought. In developing my argument I draw on the work of María Lugones to argue for a view of agency that is epistemically interdependent. I examine the case described by Patricia Williams to demonstrate specifically how the understanding requested in this case unfairly undermines both epistemic and non-epistemic agency. I distinguish appropriate requests for understanding from inappropriate requests so as to make clear that I am not suggesting that it is wrong to make such requests when the understanding sought after is difficult, painful, or even when it forces one to reconsider the meaning of one’s actions. Finally, I examine an example from Susan Brison to show how strategic refusals to understand may provide a pathway toward new ways of knowing and being in resistance to oppressive regimes. (shrink)