A theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad elaborates her theory of agential realism, a schema that is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.

This paper argues that a minimal notion of function and a notion of normal-proper function are used in explaining how bodies and brains operate. Neither is Cummins’ notion, as originally defined, and yet his is often taken to be the clearly relevant notion for such an explanatory context. This paper also explains how adverting to normal-proper functions, even if these are selected functions, can play a significant scientific role in the operational explanations of complex systems that physiologists and neurophysiologists provide, (...) despite a lack of relevant causal efficacy on the part of such functions. (shrink)

Over 700,000 copies of the original hardcover and paperback editions of this stunningly popular book have been sold. Karen Armstrong's superbly readable exploration of how the three dominant monotheistic religions of the world—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have shaped and altered the conception of God is a tour de force. One of Britain's foremost commentators on religious affairs, Armstrong traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present. From classical (...) philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern age of skepticism, Armstrong performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism into one compelling volume. (shrink)

In the ninth century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all secondary flowerings of the original Israelite vision. Now, in (...) The Great Transformation , Karen Armstrong reveals how the sages of this pivotal “Axial Age” can speak clearly and helpfully to the violence and desperation that we experience in our own times. Armstrong traces the development of the Axial Age chronologically, examining the contributions of such figures as the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides. All of the Axial Age faiths began in principled and visceral recoil from the unprecedented violence of their time. Despite some differences of emphasis, there was a remarkable consensus in their call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. With regard to dealing with fear, despair, hatred, rage, and violence, the Axial sages gave their people and give us, Armstrong says, two important pieces of advice: first there must be personal responsibility and self-criticism, and it must be followed by practical, effective action. In her introduction and concluding chapter, Armstrong urges us to consider how these spiritualities challenge the way we are religious today. In our various institutions, we sometimes seem to be attempting to create exactly the kind of religion that Axial sages and prophets had hoped to eliminate. We often equate faith with doctrinal conformity, but the traditions of the Axial Age were not about dogma. All insisted on the primacy of compassion even in the midst of suffering. In each Axial Age case, a disciplined revulsion from violence and hatred proved to be the major catalyst of spiritual change. (shrink)

Prinz claims that empirical work on emotions and moral judgement can help us resolve longstanding metaethical disputes in favour of simple sentimentalism. I argue that the empirical evidence he marshals does not have the metaethical implications he claims: the studies purporting to show that having an emotion is sufficient for making a moral judgement are tendentiously described. We are entitled to ascribe competence with moral concepts to experimental subjects only if we suppose that they would withdraw their moral judgement on (...) learning that they were fully explained by hypnotically induced disgust. Genuine moral judgements must be reason-responsive. To capture the reason-responsiveness of moral judgement, we must turn to either neo-sentimentalism or to a non-sentimentalist metaethics, either of which is fully compatible with the empirical evidence Prinz cites. (shrink)

This innovative critical study reinterprets Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy for the study of modernist and contemporary literature and brings Wittgenstein into literary conversations around problems of difficulty, ethical instruction, and the yearning for transformation. Central to Karen Zumhagen-Yekple͹'s book are her critical readings of key modernist texts by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Throughout, Zumhagen-Yekplé brings to bear an interpretive framework that she derives from Wittgenstein's gnomic "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" (first published in English in 1922, the "annus mirabilis" of (...) modernism), which she treats not as a theory of logic or metaphysics but as a complex mock-theoretical puzzle. The book's final chapter turns to recent fiction by J. M. Coetzee, a living author conscious of his debts both to Wittgenstein and his modernist literary precursors. This book will interest students of literary modernism, Wittgenstein, and the interconnections between fiction and ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Aristotle's account of sexual difference in Generation of Animals, arguing that Aristotle conceives of the production of males as the result of a successful teleological process, while he sees the production of females as due to material forces that defeat the norms of nature. My suggestion is that Aristotle endorses what I call the "degrees of perfection" model. I challenge Devin Henry's attempt to argue that Aristotle explains sex determination exclusively with reference to material necessity (...) (in particular, levels of "vital heat" in the male semen), for Aristotle's notion of "sufficient" or "deficient" vital heat is itself teleological. If, as Aristotle is aware, male and female embryos appear with approximately equal frequency in most species, how, in light of Physics II, can he conceive of the former as in accordance with nature, and the latter as somehow contrary to nature? My proposal is that Aristotle's notion of what happens usually (ως επì τò πoλυ) is bifurcated: the usual need not be more frequent. (shrink)

The assessment of pragmatic skills in a foreign or second language (L2) is usually investigated with regard to language learners, but rarely with regard to non-native language instructors, who are simultaneously teachers and (advanced) learners of the L2. With regard to English as the target language, this is a true research gap, as nonnative English-speaking teachers (non-NESTs) constitute the majority of English teachers world-wide (Kamhi-Stein 2016). Addressing this research gap, this paper presents a modified replication of Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s (1998) (...) renowned study on grammatical vs. pragmatic awareness, carried out with non-NEST candidates. While the original study asked the participants for a global indication of (in)appropriateness/ (in)correctness and to rate its severity, the participants in the present study were asked to identify the nature of the violation and to suggest a repair. Inspired by Pfingsthorn and Flöck (2017), the data was analyzed by means of Signal Detection Theory with regard to Hits, Misses, False Alarms and Correct Rejections to gain more detailed insights into the participants’ metalinguistic perceptions. In addition, the study investigated the rate of successful repairs, showing that correct problem identification cannot necessarily be equated with adequate repair abilities. Implications for research, language teaching and language teacher education are derived. (shrink)

Scientific disputes about how often different processes or patterns occur are relative frequency controversies. These controversies occur across the sciences. In some areas—especially biology—they are even the dominant mode of dispute. Yet they depart from the standard picture of what a scientific controversy is like. In fact, standard philosophical accounts of scientific controversies suggest that relative frequency controversies are irrational or lacking in epistemic value. This is because standard philosophical accounts of scientific controversies often assume that in order to be (...) rational, a scientific controversy must reach a resolution and be about a scientifically interesting question. Relative frequency controversies rarely reach a resolution, however, and some scientists and philosophers are skeptical that these controversies center on scientifically interesting questions. In this paper, I provide a novel account of the epistemic contribution that relative frequency controversies make to science. I show that these controversies are rational in the sense of furthering the epistemic aims of the scientific communities in which they occur. They do this despite rarely reaching a resolution, and independent of whether the controversies are about scientifically interesting questions. This means that assumptions and about what is required for a controversy to be rational are wrong. Controversies do not need to reach a resolution in order to be rational. And they do not need to be about anything scientifically interesting in order to make valuable epistemic contributions to science. (shrink)

This study develops a scale to measure consumer sensitivity to corporate social performance (CSCSP) using the factor analysis procedure to generate a valid and reliable 11-item scale. Results from a U.S. sample of M.B.A. students suggest that women are more sensitive to CSP than men and that Democrats are more sensitive to CSP than Republicans. Future research can use this scale to measure the correlation between attitudes toward CSP and actual behavior.

This 1994 book examines the development of the ideas of the new Austrian school from its beginnings in Vienna in the 1870s to the present. It focuses primarily in showing how the coherent theme that emerges from the thought of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Lachman, Israel Kirzner and a variety of new younger Austrians is an examination of the implications of time and ignorance for economic theory.

This article is an investigation into Hegel's claim that teleology is the truth of mechanism, which Hegel puts forward in the objectivity section in the Science of Logic. Contrary to most accounts of this section of the Logic, I make a case for a reading of Hegel's conception of external purposiveness according to which the latter makes a positive contribution to the structural development of the concepts of the Logic. I argue that external purposiveness plays a major role in understanding (...) the Hegelian claim of teleology as the truth of mechanism. More specifically, I argue that structures of external purposiveness provide the conditions for the individuation of mechanical objects. (shrink)

Systemic Constellation Work is a rapidly growing experiential healing process that is being embraced by a variety of helping professionals, both traditional and alternative, worldwide. This book explores the history, principles and methodology of this approach, and offers a detailed comparison with psychodrama - the original mind-body therapy - explaining how each method can enhance the other. Constellation work is based on the notion that people are connected by unseen energetic forces and suggests that the psychological, traumatic and survival experiences (...) of our ancestors are genetically passed forward to the next generation and may live within us. Using insightful case studies from a variety of client groups, this book shows how Systemic Constellation Work can expand the possibilities of psychodrama techniques, and can be successfully integrated with psychodramatic enactment, guided imagery, ritual, concretization and other methods of healing and personal growth. This book will be essential reading for students and practitioners of psychodrama and Constellation work, as well as counselors, mental health professionals, experiential therapists, creative and expressive arts therapists and alternative practitioners looking to widen their knowledge of mind-body therapies. (shrink)

Ecological feminism is a feminism which attempts to unite the demands of the women's movement with those of the ecological movement. Ecofeminists often appeal to “ecology” in support of their claims, particularly claims about the importance of feminism to environmentalism. What is missing from the literature is any sustained attempt to show respects in which ecological feminism and the science of ecology are engaged in complementary, mutually supportive projects. In this paper we attempt to do that by showing ten important (...) similarities which establish the need for and benefits of on-going dialogue between ecofeminists and ecosystem ecologists. (shrink)

The obesity epidemic among children and adolescents in the United States continues to worsen. The most recent analysis of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey showed that the prevalence of overweight among children and adolescents – defined as a Body Mass Index at or above the 95th percentile on gender-specific BMI-for-age growth charts developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – increased significantly between 1999-2000 and 2003-2004. Over this period, the prevalence of overweight among children (...) and adolescents aged 2-19 increased 23% – from 13.9% to 17.1%. In 2003-2004, 18.8% of children aged 6-11 and 17.4% of adolescents aged 12-19 were overweight. Roughly comparable proportions of each age group were considered to be at risk of becoming overweight. (shrink)

We examine recent work in cognitive neuroscience that investigates brain networks. Brain networks are characterized by the ways in which brain regions are functionally and anatomically connected to one another. Cognitive neuroscientists use various noninvasive techniques (e.g., fMRI) to investigate these networks. They represent them formally as graphs. And they use various graph theoretic techniques to analyze them further. We distinguish between knowledge of the graph theoretic structure of such networks (structural knowledge) and knowledge of what instantiates that structure (nonstructural (...) knowledge). And we argue that this work provides structural knowledge of brain networks. We explore the significance of this conclusion for the scientific realism debate. We argue that our conclusion should not be understood as an instance of a global structural realist claim regarding the structure of the unobservable part of the world, but instead, as a local structural realist attitude towards brain networks in particular. And we argue that various local approaches to the realism debate, i.e., approaches that restrict realist commitments to particular theories and/or entities, are problematic insofar as they don't allow for the possibility of such a local structural realist attitude. (shrink)

This is a volatile time for health insurance policy. Medicare and Medicaid are in turmoil, as is the private health insurance market. Public and private health insurance costs constitute eighty percent of healthcare spending in the United States. Public health professionals depend on the insurance system to behave in ways that are responsive to public health in prevention and crisis management.Seventy-five percent of the American population, excluding the elderly, has coverage through the private health insurance system. Ninety percent of this (...) group receives their insurance through employer-sponsored programs, and the remaining ten percent buy their own coverage. Approximately ten percent of the non-elderly population has insurance through a government program, and fifteen percent of the non-elderly population, almost forty-one million Americans, is uninsured. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to investigate Hegel’s relation to Spinoza’s account of teleology by discussing Spinoza and Hegel’s stance to two straightforward objections against teleological views of reality: the anthropomorphism objection and the backward causation objection. I show that both argue against a teleological account that would be committed to the anthropomorphism objection by raising the same argument: such a divine intelligence would lack what it desires to realize. I then argue that their dealing with the backward causation (...) objection differs. Whereas Spinoza finds the backward causation objection against natural purposiveness to be valid, Hegel uses this objection to build his own case: natural purposiveness obtains to a different aspect of reality than effective causality. In contrast, Spinoza defends the backward causation objection because he believes there is only one fundamental principle that reality is subject to. Not only has the issue of Spinoza and Hegel’s relationship on teleology been neglected, I also argue that such a discussion can prove illuminating with respect to Hegel’s stance to monism, as, in contrast to Spinoza, Hegel must assume that there are different fundamental principles governing reality and not merely one. (shrink)

Using qualitative data based on interviews with 22 married infertile couples living in western New York State, we describe the ways in which husbands and wives interact in the process of constructing their infertility. The wives experienced infertility as a cataclysmic role failure. Husbands tended to see infertility as a disconcerting event but not as a tragedy. Couples tended to see infertility as a problem for wives. Frustration and lack of communication were typical consequences of the confrontation of husbands' and (...) wives' perspectives on infertility. Interactions with medical professionals tended to reinforce these consequences. These interactions between wives, husbands, and medical professionals may lead to taking wrong directions in treatment and to ignoring treatment options. Some of the problems we describe could be lessened by adopting a model of couple-centered treatment in a setting that incorporated routine counseling. (shrink)

Within the realm of nano-, bio-, info- and cogno- (or NBIC) technosciences, the ‘power to change the world’ is often invoked. One could dismiss such formulations as ‘purely rhetorical’, interpret them as rhetorical and self-fulfilling or view them as an adequate depiction of one of the fundamental characteristics of technoscience. In the latter case, a very specific nexus between science and technology, or, the epistemic and the constructionist realm is envisioned. The following paper focuses on this nexus drawing on theoretical (...) conceptions as well as empirical material. It presents an overview of different technoscientific ways to ‘change the world’—via contemplation and representation, intervention and control, engineering, construction and creation. It further argues that the hybrid character of technoscience makes it difficult (if not impossible) to separate knowledge production from real world interventions and challenges current science and technology policy approaches in fundamental ways. (shrink)

In the last five years there have been a number of results about the computable content of the prime, saturated, or homogeneous models of a complete decidable theory T in the spirit of Vaught's "Denumerable models of complete theories" combined with computability methods for degrees d ≤ 0′. First we recast older results by Goncharov, Peretyat'kin, and Millar in a more modern framework which we then apply. Then we survey recent results by Lange, "The degree spectra of homogeneous models," which (...) generalize the older results and which include positive results on when a certain homogeneous model of T has an isomorphic copy of a given Turing degree. We then survey Lange's "A characterization of the 0-basis homogeneous bounding degrees" for negative results about when does not have such copies, generalizing negative results by Goncharov, Peretyat'kin, and Millar. Finally, we explain recent results by Csima, Harizanov, Hirschfeldt, and Soare, "Bounding homogeneous models," about degrees d that are homogeneous bounding and explain their relation to the PA degrees. (shrink)

Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 86-89.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.1 (2001) 21-37 [Access article in PDF] Conscience and the Concealments of Metaphor in Hobbes's Leviathan Karen S. Feldman Introduction Conscience is not a topic of terribly heated debate in Hobbes research. 1 Nevertheless, my claim in this article is that conscience in the Leviathan, which Hobbes poses as an example of the dangers of metaphor, is not merely an example of the dangers of (...) metaphor, but rather is the most dangerous metaphor, the metaphor that corrupts knowledge and thereby makes error and deception possible. Hobbes's brief account of conscience, which appears in the chapter of Leviathan on the ends of discourse, tells the story of the insinuation of metaphor into proper nomenclature; however, his example of the metaphorical use of the word conscience turns the story into one in which public knowledge itself is made private and thereby corrupted. Moreover, according to the story, private conscience is itself invented by means of a metaphor; it is in effect metaphorized into being. 2 With the emergence of private conscience, the potential of privatization expands from the privatization of the meaning of words to an entire private sphere of opinion. The metaphorical corruption of conscience invents a new understanding of knowledge as isolated from other witnesses, and the resultant privatization of truth lends itself to the corruption of that truth. Thus, whereas Hobbes characterizes the wrong use of names (of which metaphor is an instance) as a threat to accurate judgment and reason (L 22-23, 34, 161-62), as I will argue in the sections following, Hobbes's demand for the preservation of proper meaning in Leviathan corresponds to an anxiety regarding privacy and its peculiar potential for corrupting truth and knowledge. Hobbes's worries as to the dangers that metaphor poses to the stability of the commonwealth thereby converge with his worries about the dangers of conscience to the principle of public authority (cf. Strong 1993). [End Page 21] Hobbes's condemnations of conscience In Leviathan, conscience is condemned as a source of principles of human decision and action in a commonwealth. The problem with conscience as a principle of action is that it renders each individual inventor of his own rules and judge of his own actions. In brief, individual conscience is incommensurable with the public authority that defines a commonwealth: Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is, that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience, and his judgment is the same thing, and as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous. Therefore, though he that is subject to no civil law, sinneth in all he does against his conscience, because he has no other rule to follow but his own reason; yet it is not so with him that lives in a commonwealth; because the law is the public conscience, by which he hath already undertaken to be guided. Otherwise in such diversity, as there is of private consciences, which are but private opinions, the commonwealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the sovereign power, further than it shall seem good in his own eyes. (L 311) In this account, conscience is not just inferior to civil law as a principle guiding action, but at odds with civil society and the good of the commonwealth. The fact that conscience is private renders it problematic for the commonwealth for several reasons: First, as privately invented, it may be erroneous. Likewise, because it is private, conscience does not possess any binding power outside the individual, private sphere. Each person may be bound by his own conscience, but insofar as consciences differ, standards of action differ, and this leads to the undermining and distraction of the commonwealth. Likewise, private consciences may be divergent from one another, and the conflicts in private judgment produce conflicting actions that disturb the peace of the commonwealth. This rule of privacy is, moreover, associated with primitive life and with the state of nature... (shrink)

This is a reply to Steve Latham's Article for the Republicanism special issue.

A distinction is made between structural and semantic knowledge, focusing on the possible influences of the latter. To the extent that early vision may be influenced by object-identity, it would seem necessary to evoke compiled transducers to explain such an influence. Compiled transducers may furnish a way in which vision can be and is penetrated.

Autour de 1900, Maria Pognon est une des féministes françaises les plus fougueuses, intrépides et visibles. Née en 1844 dans une riche famille commerçante d’Honfleur, Maria Rengnet a épousé Raymond Pognon en 1873 et donné rapidement naissance à un fils et une fille. Son mari meurt de typhoïde en 1876. À la fin des années 1880, elle déménage à Paris où elle tient une pension de famille haut de gamme. Maria Pognon se convertit à la cause des droits des femmes (...) lors des congrès internationaux de... (shrink)