Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health continues a trajectory of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence that undermines the normative foundation of public health — the idea that the state is obligated to provide a robust set of supports for healthcare services and the underlying social determinants of health. Dobbs furthers a longstanding ideology of individual responsibility in public health, neglecting collective responsibility for better health outcomes. Such an ideology on individual responsibility not only enables a shrinking of public health infrastructure for (...) reproductive health, it facilitates the rise of reproductive coercion and a criminal legal response to pregnancy and abortion. This commentary situates Dobbs in the context of a long historical shift in public health that increasingly places burdens on individuals for their own reproductive health care, moving away from the possibility of a robust state public health infrastructure. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page 114-115.

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race examines the development and defence of an argument that arose at the boundary between anthropology and evolutionary biology in twentieth-century America. In its fully articulated form, this argument simultaneously discredited scientific racism and defended free human agency in Darwinian terms. The volume is timely because it gives readers a key to assessing contemporary debates about the biology of race. By working across disciplinary lines, the book's focal figures--the anthropologist Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the (...) geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn--found increasingly persuasive ways of cutting between genetic determinist and social constructionist views of race by grounding Boas's racially egalitarian, culturally relativistic, and democratically pluralistic ethic in a distinctive version of the genetic theory of natural selection. Collaborators in making and defending this argument included Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin. Darwinism, Democracy, and Race will appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and academics interested in subjects including Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race, History of Biology and Anthropology, and Rhetoric of Science. (shrink)

Psychopaths constitute less than 1% of the general population, but they commit a much larger proportion of crime and violence in society. This volume chronicles the latest science of psychopathy, various ways that psychopaths challenge the criminal justice system, and the major ethical issues arising from this fascinating condition.

If the much discussed fragmentation of the West means that we can seldom hold constructive moral conversations with our near neighbors, why imagine that comparative ethics is feasible as a critical enterprise with a coherent method? How, more specifically, do we understand the relative merits of naturalism, formalism, and supernaturalism as ethical orientations? The author addresses these questions first by examining the meaning of the quoted terms, then by criticizing the inordinate optimism of most naturalisms and formalisms. The article ends (...) by briefly elaborating and defending a supernaturalist conception of Christian love. As a fruit of the Spirit, agape leaves one neither heteronomous nor autonomous, but holy. Such holiness can move one to appreciate, judiciously, cultures different from one's own. (shrink)

As a die-hard supernaturalist, someone "at two with nature" (Woody Allen) who would be at one with God, the author has mixed feelings about Theodore Nunez's defense of "naturalism." Unlike neopragmatists, the author is not troubled by Nunez's general realism about value; he takes exception not to Nunez's theoretical account of truth, but to his specific axiology. He does not share Nunez's confidence that "projective nature" can provide reliable moral inspiration, suggesting instead that such inspiration can arise only from trust (...) in the holiness of God. (shrink)

This paper critiques the biological race realism of Quayshawn Spencer. Spencer's recent embrace of “radical race pluralism” (RRP) is welcome but incomplete, because it needs methods that distinguish different communicative contexts for how American English speakers use “race” and related terms. I offer a pragmatic approach to identifying such contexts that combines pragmatic argumentation theory, rhetorical polysemy, and a pragmatic approach to definition. One consequence of embracing RRP is that Spencer's theory of “OMB race talk” is unsupportable because it collapses (...) three distinct communicative contexts: genomic research, legal and regulatory governance, and ordinary talk. By so doing, OMB race talk blocks attempts to fight racism and violates ethical standards that should allow people the agency to define their own identities. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

Book Reviews K. Robb, Literacy and Paideia in Ancient Greece. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 13o. Cloth, $45.oo. Robb's book can perhaps best be viewed in the context of previous studies of orality and literacy in the ancient Greek world, especially those of E. A. Havelock: Preface to Plato , The Literate Revolution and Its Cultural Consequences , and The Muse Learns to Write . Havelock's work has stimulated much discussion, some of it still very polemical (...) , and insofar as Robb shares some of Havelock's beliefs about the influence of alphabetic literacy on Plato and other representatives of the so-called "Literate Revolution," he is vulnerable to similar criticisms. And yet Robb claims not only Havelock among "oralist pioneers" , but also such diverse scholars as P. Friedl/inder, J... (shrink)

Aurora P. Jackson and Richard Scheines. Single Mother's Efficacy, Parenting in the Home Environment, and Children's Development in a Two-Wave Study.

In this paper, I examine some of the presuppositions that underpin the practice and interpretation of multi-person dialogue – that is, in contexts involving more than two interlocutors – with particular thought for the university seminar. I outline the ‘dialogical phenomenology’ of Beata Stawarska as useful on this count; however, I argue that Stawarska’s account is steeped in a philosophical ‘dyadic paradigm’ which has limiting consequences for practitioners of dialogue looking to understand the nature of dialogue in a group context. (...) Against this paradigm, I argue that there are many varieties of intersubjectivity that have not been widely discussed, including we-you, we-yous, I-yous and we-they intersubjective structures. I will look further at how an understanding of these structures is valuable for dialogue within educational praxes and for the Humanities more broadly. (shrink)

The global #MeToo movement has precipitated a reckoning with gendered, sexual, and other forms of harassment and bullying in higher education. In academia, harassment is rooted in the history of re...

Philosophical defenses of cognitive/evolutionary psychological accounts of racialism claim that classification based on phenotypical features of humans was common historically and is evidence for a species-typical, cognitive mechanism for essentializing. They conclude that social constructionist accounts of racialism must be supplemented by cognitive/evolutionary psychology. This article argues that phenotypical classifications were uncommon historically until such classifications were socially constructed. Moreover, some philosophers equivocate between two different meanings of “racial thinking.” The article concludes that social constructionist accounts are far more robust (...) than psychological accounts for the origins of racialism. (shrink)

The sentence ‘x is square’ might have had different truth conditions from those it in fact has. It might have had no truth conditions at all. Its having truth conditions and its having the ones it has rest on empirical facts about our use of ‘x is square’. What empirical facts? Any answer that goes into detail is inevitably highly controversial, but we think that there is a rough answer that is, by philosophers’ standards, relatively uncontroversial. It goes back to (...) Locke 1689 and beyond, and is best known to contemporary philosophers through the work of Grice 1957 and Lewis 1969. It is that we (usually implicitly) agreed, as a matter of contingent fact, to use ‘x is square’ as a way of conveying our taking it to be the case that x is square. (shrink)

I consider in this essay three possible interpretations of the infinitely rich story of Abraham and Isaac found in Genesis 22. Against the background of what I call "the traditional reading," I compare the views of William Blake, Johannes de Silentio, and Søren Kierkegaard. Blake's poetry and painting suggest a striking alternative to our usual understanding of the story, but they finally require too radical a departure from the Biblical text. The pseudonym de Silentio's views on obedience to God, presented (...) in Fear and Trembling, are even more problematic, however. They are at odds with Kierkegaard's powerful account of love of neighbor, related under his own name in Works of Love, for instance. The God who is Love would not literally require murderous intent toward a neighbor, I conclude, but that same God might issue an "ironic" command designed to lift us out of an abominable ritual. (shrink)

The phrase τά ένί διαστηματι γ ραφόμενα occurs in that part of Pappus' Collection Book VIII which deals with instrumental solutions to problems more practical than purely geometrical. In the preceding section an instrumental solution for the problem of doubling the cube has been propounded, which is dependent on the use of a ruler passing through a point about which it is turned in the generation of the locus of points known as the cissoid, and in the subsequent section a (...) solution is propounded for the problem of finding the diameter of a cylinder of which only an incomplete portion of the side remains, leaving neither base intact. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF DISCOMFORT: RICHARD RORTY AND PRAGMATISM 0 VER THE LAST twenty years, one of the most consistently incisive critics of traditional Anglo-American philosophy has been Richard Rorty. Few contemporary writers can match the vigor, breadth, and intelligence of his books and articles, even as few readers can accept the radicality of the views they express. Rorty disturbs and astonishes like spring weather. His pages mount (...) like cumulus clouds in our intellectual sky, saturated by the past and promising (ambiguously) either to irrigate or to inundate the present fields of our culture. Almost everybody complains about him, but can anything be done? This essay is an attempt to come to grips with aat least part of Rorty's multi-faceted and troubling corpus. His diagnosis of the root problems of epistemology and their larger significance (or insignificance) for Western intellectual life is often brilliant, but I shall argue that his prescription for the future is unattractive. His uncompromising war on dogmatism is based on a rejection of conventional notions of objective truth and metaphysical comfort and is presented in the name of human freedom. It represents, however, a potentially disastrous kind of pragmatism which can be criticized on both theoretical and practical grounds. Of the two, the practical considerations may perhaps be the more telling. I. The Problems of Reading Rorty In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty evaluates modern philosophy's comon self-understanding.1 One as1 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). ~70 RICHARD RORTY AND PRAGMATISM 271 sumed occupation of the discipline, on his view, is the discovery of the " foundations " of knowledge and thus the validation or invalidation of specific claims to know made in such various fields as science, ethics, art, and religion. Philosophy can claim to take the measure of these other areas of intellectual life because it claims to understand the nature of the mind and its capacity for accurate representation of reality. Philosophy can claim to be foundational with respect to the rest of culture because it claims to encompass the rest of culture, because it claims to know better than science and religion, for instance, what communion with reality they can and cannot attain to. Or so many modern philosophers would (perhaps only implicitly) believe. Rorty suggests that this conception of philosophy stems largely from intellectual developments beginning in the 17th Century, and in this vein he isolates three key contributions: (1) Descartes's idea of the mind as a separate substance, the " inner" workings of which are uniquely knowable to itself; (2) Locke's idea that a "theory of knowledge" is both necessary and possible on the basis of an understanding of the mind and how it works; and (3) Kant's idea that philosophy both can and should provide other fields with overarching canons of reason by dissecting a priori the structure of reason itself. These three contributions to modern philosophy's self-image are interrelated but nonetheless distinguishable. Each played its own crucial part in suggesting a foundation for that discipline, philosophy, which claimed to be foundational for all others. Over against this common picture of philosophy and its proper labors stand Rorty's "heroes": Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey. These three men agree, in Rorty's estimation, that the picture (common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant) of knowledge as needing certain foundations and of the mind as locus of privileged epistemic processes, needs to be abandoned. They agree that both epistemology and metaphysics can and should be " set aside as possible disciplines " 272 TIMOTHY P. JACKSON in the name of a therapeutic form of life and a postmodernist self-image.2 It is this deconstructive, therapeutic line that Rorty wishes to champion. Philosophy should no longer conceive of itself as underwriting links between the human mind and the "objective " world; we have no access to the objective world as it is in itself; so most of traditional epistemology is misguided. Rorty characterizes his efforts as more akin to moral surusion than rigorous argument, claiming that the epistemological positions with which he takes exception are immune to such argument but objectionable (or at least optional) even so... (shrink)

Philosophical defenses of cognitive/evolutionary psychological accounts of racialism claim that classification based on phenotypical features of humans was common historically and is evidence for a species-typical, cognitive mechanism for essentializing. They conclude that social constructionist accounts of racialism must be supplemented by cognitive/evolutionary psychology. This article argues that phenotypical classifications were uncommon historically until such classifications were socially constructed. Moreover, some philosophers equivocate between two different meanings of “racial thinking.” The article concludes that social constructionist accounts are far more robust (...) than psychological accounts for the origins of racialism. (shrink)

Considering recent re-assessments of Pareto and Mosca, I discuss whether these thinkers’ socio-political orientations contribute to the ‘disfiguration’ of democracy or provide a resource for the renewal of democratic institutions. Femia presents Pareto as being in the “Machiavellian tradition of sceptical liberalism,” revealing the liberal potential of Pareto’s realist political theory. Finocchiaro ameliorates the conservative consequences of Mosca’s thought by reinterpreting him as a ‘democratic elitist,’ who holds a conception of political liberty “as a relationship such that authority flows from (...) the masses to the elites.” Highlighting the significance of internal tensions within each thinker’s work foregrounded by these readings, between the causal primacy of psychic states and the ‘mutual dependence’ of social factors, and between the elite principle and ‘balanced pluralism’, I ask whether the ‘sceptical liberal’ Pareto or the ‘democratic elitist’ Mosca elude Urbinati’s unpolitical, populist and plebiscitarian ‘disfigurations’ of democracy. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine some of the presuppositions that underpin the practice and interpretation of multi-person dialogue – that is, in contexts involving more than two interlocutors – with particular thought for the university seminar. I outline the ‘dialogical phenomenology’ of Beata Stawarska as useful on this count; however, I argue that Stawarska’s account is steeped in a philosophical ‘dyadic paradigm’ which has limiting consequences for practitioners of dialogue looking to understand the nature of dialogue in a group context. (...) Against this paradigm, I argue that there are many varieties of intersubjectivity that have not been widely discussed, including we-you, we-yous, I-yous and we-they intersubjective structures. I will look further at how an understanding of these structures is valuable for dialogue within educational praxes and for the Humanities more broadly. (shrink)