In this article, we examine citizenship inequalities in paid reproductive labor. Through an analysis of elder care in Los Angeles, California, based on interviews with Filipina home care agency workers and owners, we delineate citizen divisions made up of two interlocking dimensions. The longstanding U.S. welfare state abdication of responsibility for elder care for its citizens generates a racialized, gendered citizenship division that facilitates another citizenship division between women of color. The outsourcing of elder care by the government to the (...) private sector including small business in the ethnic economy allows Filipina immigrants with legal citizenship to become middle-women minorities who hire undocumented Filipinas to provide care for white, middle-class, older adult women and their families. Through this new social organization of reproductive labor, responsibility is directed away from the state and generating tensions between women of color with different legal statuses. Our findings show how racialized, gendered inequalities are reinforced through this new social organization of reproductive labor but also demonstrate potential for undermining intersecting inequalities. (shrink)

The author critiques one of the arguments commonly used by opponents of scientific realism—namely, the thesis that scientific theories are underdetermined by empirical data.

Palabras en el tiempo -- Abecedario filosófico de Emilio Lledó -- Semblanza.

El que en el presente libro se confronten "lenguaje" e "historia" pretende indicar que una parte especial de los que hemos sido se hace presente como "lenguaje"; pero, además, según se analiza en sus páginas, la función del historiador tuvo, en principio, algo elemental y simple. La misma etimología de la palabra significa alguien a quien se le pide consejo sobre un hecho porque "él vio lo que pasó". Al decir lo que ve, lo que interpreta, el historiador compromete la (...) veracidad de su propio ser. Colección Clásicos - Dykinson (títulos publicados)?Serie estudios?? - Sobre la democracia ateniense. Luis Gil Fernández. - Derecho natural y dignidad humana. Ernst Bloch. - Alejo Carpentier. Poética del Mediterráneo Caribe. Inmaculada López Calahorro. - P. Szondi. Teoría del drama moderno. Ensayo sobre lo trágico. - El concepto poíesis en la filosofía griega. Emilio Lledó. - Lenguaje e historia. Emilio Lledó.?Serie textos? - Heródoto. Historia. Libro I. Ed. bilingüe de J. M. Floristán. - Sófocles. Electra. Ed. bilingüe de Luis Gil Fernández. - Platón. Fedro. Ed. bilingüe de Luis Gil Fernández. - Aristóteles. Poética. Ed. bilingüe de Paloma Ortiz García. - Horacio. Arte poética. Ed. bilingüe de Luis Gil Fernández. - Boileau. El arte poética y otras sátiras. Ed. bilingüe de Alberto Torrego Salcedo. - Lezama Lima. Escritos de Estética. Ed. de Pedro Aullón de Haro. - República poética. Textos programáticos de la literatura española (siglos XVIII y XIX). Ed. de Germán Garrido Miñambres. (shrink)

The idea of conceptual schemes is one of the most influential and widely used notions in contemporary philosophy. Within the analytic tradition the idea occupies a fundamental position in positivist views as well as in replacing them post-positivist conceptions. Outside the analytic tradition a similar idea is of key importance in structuralist and post-structuralist theories. Despite the broad applicability of the notion of a conceptual scheme, its precise sense is far from being evident in the context of various philosophical trends. (...) Moreover, the well-known American philosopher Donald Davidson's position is that any clear, non-metaphorical meaning cannot be as - cribed to that notion at all – the statement which he tried to substantiate in his famous paper On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme published in 1974.The present paper is aimed, firstly, at outlining the historico-philosophical evolution of the idea of conceptual scheme, concentrating on its development in logical positivism and post-positivist theories of such philosophers as Quine, Sellars, Kuhn, et al., and, secondly, at examining Davidson's criticism of both the idea and the position of conceptual relativism which was raised on its ground, revealing the assumptions which that criticism relies on and which concern relations between language and thought, truth and translation, as well as the role of the scheme-content dualism for empiricism and the place of extensionalism in semantics, etc. Our purpose, on the one hand, is to evaluate the historico-philosophical significance of Davidson's criticism; on the other hand, it is to show that his critical arguments remain to be actual since they shed a new light on the idea of conceptual schemes and allow us to determine their place in tackling the fundamental philosophical question of a relation between reality, thought and language. (shrink)

Filosofía del lenguaje como historia de la filosofía.--El lenguaje filosófico griego: hacía una revisión de la terminología.--Lenguaje e historia de la filosofía.--Lenguaje e interpretación filosófica.--"Lógico" y "terminológico" en filosofía (una nota introductoría al enguaje de Heidegger).--Un modelo de semántica filosófica.--Semántica cartesiana (una lectura del Discours de la méthode).

Gomez, Cristina Lledo This article explores the idea that motherhood is an invitation to engage with the paschal mystery and can thus be a salvific experience in the lives of women. This is of even greater significance for a Christian mother who can explicitly name the experience as her own sharing in the paschal event of Jesus. This article will focus on crisis moments of motherhood in a contemporary Western context, exploring particularly the issues raised in first becoming a (...) mother, and on the initial years of motherhood. (shrink)

Aristotle claims that narrative can depict virtue and vice in particular cases, and that literature's moral meanings are not subject to philosophical paraphrase. He distrusts generalization in ethics, asserting that valid judgments rest on the perception of particulars. But this position is itself an unprovable generalization. If philosophy cannot prove the superiority of narrative over moral theory, perhaps literature can show it. In "Lolita", Nabokov reveals the moral hazards of theory while depicting one man's profound evil. Thus "Lolita" (...) is an illuminating example of pure Aristotelian fiction that serves a moral function without recourse to theory. (shrink)

For some, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is the definitive example of the aesthete's outlook with its combination of the narrator's sordid actions and his iridescent wordplay—not to mention Nabokov's own endorsement of the novel as a locus for "aesthetic bliss."1 In recent years, criticism of Lolita has challenged the aesthete's amoral perspective by suggesting that the work's aesthetic qualities are inextricably coupled with moral questions.2 Leona Toker, Colin McGinn, and Richard Rorty are three notable critics who suggest, in different (...) ways, that Lolita is a normative text that can educate its readers; that it can teach virtue.In many ways, this is a boldly contrarian position, defying satirical elements in the text .. (shrink)

From the mediator, a veritable artificial sun, descends a mysterious ray which makes the object shine with a false brilliance. There would be no illusion if Don Quixote were not imitating Amadis. Emma Bovary would not have taken Rudolph for a Prince Charming had she not been imitating romantic heroines.And Humbert Humbert would not have chosen Lolita for a lover had he not been imitating romantic heroes. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, probably due to its controversial subject, is regularly (...) analyzed as a piece of “technical virtuosity and hilarity.”2 In this essay, I will attempt to show how the novel unfolds with René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. This approach will highlight how the plot, style, and hero of... (shrink)

In attempting to answer whether Nabokov’s Lolita can be described as an unethical novel, the author ponders on what basis one could make such a determination. At (1) the author analyzes the merited-response argument offered by Gaut (and previously Hume and Carroll), which provides a conceptual framework for the resolution of the controversy surrounding Lolita. Based on this analysis, (2) the author decides what constitutes the novel’s ethical foundation and what (3) prescriptions and (4) responses can follow from (...) it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eichmann, Empathy, and LolitaLeland de la DurantayeISometime in late 1960 or early 1961 Adolf Eichmann, jailed and awaiting trial in Jerusalem, was given by his guard a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's recently published Lolita, as Hannah Arendt puts it, "for relaxation." After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant: "Quite an unwholesome book"—Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch—he told his guard. 1 Though we are not privy (...) to, and nor does Arendt speculate upon this officer's intentions, it is difficult to imagine that they were limited to procuring Eichmann a little "relaxation." The tale of a homicidal madman writing under observation and awaiting a trial that will consign him either to death or prolonged imprisonment—which fate spares him by felling him with a heart attack—could hardly have been very relaxing for someone at that moment writing his own memoirs and himself awaiting a trial with similar stakes.We might imagine other intentions on the part of Eichmann's guard. Could the gesture have been ironic? Or was it motivated by a dark curiosity—something of the order of an experiment? The sulphurous halo of Nabokov's book was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960. 2 Might Eichmann's guard have seen Lolita as a sort of litmus test for radical evil, and wanted to see whether the real-life villain—he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents—would coldly, even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov's creation?This is all only speculation. In Arendt's account, she congratulates Eichmann for his indignation and moves on to other matters. In any event, given Eichmann's radical conventionality one could hardly imagine him liking—or even very well understanding—much of the book. As [End Page 311] Eichmann himself avowed, during his adult life he had read only two books, one of them being Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State. But whatever the motivations of Eichmann's guard, whatever Eichmann's degree of comprehension, and whatever congratulations Eichmann might have deserved for his disgust, the incident raises a question for the study of Nabokov's finest work which has yet to be answered.IIBefore turning to this question, let us remain with Arendt and her notorious reader for a moment. Arendt notes elsewhere that it appeared to her that Eichmann was nearly "aphasic." She comments that, "when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché," and that, "his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else." Arendt offers here nothing less than a definition of thought itself. "To think" is glossed ("... namely") by Arendt as, "to think from the standpoint of someone else." Though as a definition of thought, it is hardly impressive, it nevertheless expresses something essential about Arendt's conception of thought and thinking. (3) In her view, thought is to be placed under the sign of intellectual empathy, under the sign of living in the strangeness and wonder of another's world. (Though Arendt does not mention the connection, both the language she wrote Eichmann in—English—and her native one—German—make special provision for such a sense, as he or she who is "thoughtless" is not her or she who is incapable of some form of cognition or calculation, as "thoughtless" people can indeed be very clever and very clever people have been capable of great "thoughtlessness.")Thought is thus a communal, not individualistic, thing. 4 This point is important as, though Adolf Eichmann was unlikely to have seen much of himself in the irreverent and urbane genius of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, nor in the latter's strange eloquence, Eichmann the man and Humbert the character of the first part of the novel (to leave the repenting Humbert of the book's last pages out for the moment), share an essential trait. What Eichmann the man shares with Nabokov's literary creation is the inability or unwillingness "to think from the standpoint of somebody else." The evil they share is the... (shrink)

THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY, "READING MORE THAN LOLITA IN TEHRAN," IS meant to invoke Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, a memoir documenting how Western literary classics have the ability to change and improve the lives of people living under theocratic rule. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran, Nafisi invited seven of her best women students to attend a weekly study of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, (...) and other authors she believed would provide the women with examples of how to successfully assert their autonomy despite great odds. (shrink)