What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable. We live one life. Why is Earth supposedly a mother? Cuomo suggested a historic association with the connection of woman and Earth as “providers of life, sustenance, and creativity.” Norgaard wrote that there is a “connection between women’s fertility and the fertility of the land.” Women are oriented toward relationships and interdependence whereas men approach problems with principles, reasoning, and judgments. Are these generalizations? Undoubtedly, yes. Yet it is sometimes (...) helpful to start with the general and then fuse new meanings and perspectives from such traditional beliefs. I believe the way forward.. (shrink)

Noticing that, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir deftly describes patriarchy as a male sensorium encompassing vision, smell, touch, taste, and sound, this article focuses on the way feminist directors utilize sound in film and television. Three examples—Chantal Akerman’s 1968 Blow Up My Town, Emerald Fennell’s 2020 Promising Young Woman, and Michaela Coel’s 2020 I May Destroy You—show how feminist media showcases the white noise of patriarchy to reorient the ears of its audience to hear the way feminists do.

This article compares Hannah Arendt's famous essay on Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel in 1961 to Simone de Beauvoir's little studied piece, "An Eye for an Eye," on the trial of Robert Brasillach in France in 1945. Arendt and Beauvoir each determine the complicity of individuals acting within a political order that seeks to eliminate certain forms of otherness and difference, but come to differing conclusions about the significance of the crimes. I explain Beauvoir's account of ambiguity, on which she (...) draws in her judgment of Brasillach and elaborates in her 1948 Ethics of Ambiguity, ana measure it against Arendt's account of Eichmann's thoughtlessness and its effects on the destruction of conditions of worldly plurality. Linking the failure of ethical judgment on the part of individuals to prior systemic political conditions, Beauvoir helps us recognize struggles over the meaning of bodies and conditions of inequality as central to politics. (shrink)

<I>Cosmopolitanism and the Arab Spring: Foundations for the Decline of Terrorism analyzes the role of social media in the Arab Spring within a specific philosophical framework. Kantian cosmopolitanism, enhanced by social media and Internet communications technologies, offers a solid explanation of the political evolution of the Arab Spring. These technologies have given rise to a new cosmopolitanism that rejects alternating dichotomies in favor of an evolving consciousness of our status as citizens of a global commonwealth with a tiered set of (...) duties to everyone within our sphere of influence. Cosmopolitanism as extended through social media has the potential to break down barriers to aid those who suffer under unjust governmental systems and to yield real and sustainable progress toward the amelioration of both tyranny and terrorism. <I>Cosmopolitanism and the Arab Spring is recommended for political philosophy courses as well as interdisciplinary capstone courses exploring problems in the modern world. (shrink)

Beauvoir's writings index the politics of ontological, structural, instrumental, and affective instances of violence. In all cases, she sees violence as a result of political practices. Rather than simply deploring or condemning violence, however, Beauvoir demonstrates that we have to understand that it delineates and is manifest in all our relationships and representations. Nevertheless, we need not accept violence, and indeed, we must struggle against it. Oppressive human relationships situate us as systematically and unequally exposed to violent injury and premature (...) death, and as unequally able to nourish a creative and flourishing life. These conditions are never justified. Beauvoir insists that we must affirm ambiguity and freedom against structural conditions of oppression, and act politically to minimize violence and its tragic effects. (shrink)

Aristotle's theory of moral character focuses on developing virtues, the deep internal dispositional traits from which external actions naturally flow. Aristotle describes moral virtue as a human excellence that can be developed through practice. The morally worst person is the vicious person who does the wrong thing, desires the wrong thing, and doesn't even know the right thing to do—perhaps even mistaking the wrong thing to do for the right thing. This was the sort of person Eleanor was when she (...) entered The Good Place. One objection to the possibility of moral development is called situationism: the claim that people don't really live according to moral character but are overwhelmingly shaped by the situations around them. As Eleanor learns in The Good Place, the road to being a better person starts with caring about those close to us. (shrink)

Monkeys and apes, inhabiting variable environments and subjected to K-selection, exhibit cultural behavior transmitted horizontally and vertically, like cetaceans. Behaviors enhancing better health and nutrition, predator avoidance, or mate selection, can affect differential reproduction.Furthermore, dominance hierarchies and social status not only affect the transmission and acceptance of new behaviors but they may also affect genetic inheritance.

Starting with Richard Wright’s controversial address to the Paris Congress of Black Writers and Authors of 1956, this article explores Wright’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s focus on existential freedom as key to an emancipatory political subjectivity. Both Wright and Beauvoir reject the content of identity formed via oppression, seeking to move beyond categories of culture, religion, femininity and blackness. They argue that solidarity can be better forged across identity groups by nurturing a political subjectivity that recognizes the historical and political (...) impact of embodied identities but is driven by ontological freedom expressed in collective action and dissociation with normative categories. Putting Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices in conversation with Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, we can more fully appreciate Wright’s political writing after he left the United States. Here we see the potential for solidarity across borders, and with women and other oppressed peoples. Most important, we witness these two thinkers imagining political invocations that do not reinforce political meanings given to bodies, thus allowing new forms of solidarity and collective action to emerge. (shrink)

An investigation is presented in which a computer simulation model (DIAGNOSER) is used to develop and test predictions for behavior of subjects in a task of medical diagnosis. The first experiment employed a process‐tracing methodology in order to compare hypothesis generation and evaluation behavior of DIAGNOSER with individuals at different levels of expertise (students, trainees, experts). A second experiment performed with only DIAGNOSER identified conditions under which errors in reasoning in the first experiment could be related to interpretation of specific (...) data items. Predictions derived from DIAGNOSER's performance were tested in a third experiment with a new sample of subjects. Data from the three experiments indicated that (1) form of diagnostic reasoning was similar for all subjects trained in medicine and for the simulation model, (2) substance of diagnostic reasoning employed by the simulation model was parable with that of the more expert subjects, and (3) errors in subjects' reasoning were attributable to deficiencies in disease knowledge and the interpretation of specific patient data cues predicted by the simulation model. (shrink)

Adults and infants display a robust ability to perceive the unity of a center-occluded object when the visible ends of the object undergo common motion (e.g. Kellman, P.J., Spelke, E.S., 1983. Perception of partly occluded objects in infancy. Cognitive Psychology 15, 483±524). Ecologically oriented accounts of this ability focus on the primacy of motion in the perception of segregated objects, but Gestalt theory suggests a broader possibility: observers may perceive object unity by detecting patterns of synchronous change, of which common (...) motion is a special case. We investigated this possibility with observations of adults and 4-month-old infants. Participants viewed a center-occluded object whose visible surfaces were either misaligned or aligned, stationary or moving, and unchanging or synchronously changing in color or bright- ness in various temporal patterns (e.g. ¯ashing). Both alignment and common motion con- tributed to adults' perception of object unity, but synchronous color changes did not. For infants, motion was an important determinant of object unity, but other synchronous changes and edge alignment were not. When a stationary object with aligned edges underwent syn- chronous changes in color or brightness, infants showed high levels of attention to the object, but their perception of its unity appeared to be indeterminate. An inherent preference for fast over slow ¯ash rates, and a novelty preference elicited by a change in rate, both indicated that infants detected the synchronous changes, although they failed to use them as information for object unity. These ®ndings favor ecologically oriented accounts of object perception in which surface motion plays a privileged role. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Using a multidisciplinary framework, this article examines the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s (ORR) policy decision to prohibit teens in federal immigration custody from obtaining abortions. As we argue, this appropriation of decisional authority over their reproductive bodies discursively cast them as doubly subversive for first breaching the southern border of the United States and then insisting upon the right to ‘abortion on demand’. Mapping these twinned agendas onto their bodies, these teens were configured as a threat to the racialised national (...) order during the Trump era. Centring our analysis on the much publicised constitutional challenge to ORR’s abortion ban in Garza v. Hargan, we interrogate this policy as a powerful expression of legal duplicity, the spatial and bodily containment of those deemed other, and the privileging of the citizen-foetus over their undocumented mothers. (shrink)

Reanimated for the contemporary literature in the writings of Quine, [16]) and Kuhn [7], the conventionalism of Duhem [2] and Poincaré [12] has emerged in the last few years as one of the genuinely interesting topics in the philosophy of science. The theory in question—let us follow Grünbaum [3] in calling it the D-thesis, after its founder, Pierre Duhem—claims three things: a single scientific hypothesis H is never disconfirmable in isolation from its fellow; every single hypothesis H of science presupposes, (...) explicitly or implicitly, the support of a conjunction A = A, • A2 • … • Am of auxiliary assumptions or hypotheses; the failure of an observational consequence of H in face of contradictory evidence disconfirms only the conjunction of H and A, not H alone—i.e. establishes only ∼. The logical picture is as follows. (shrink)

Having remarked that "competing and mutually contradictory philosophies may be formulated in different languages," Landesman concludes that "the generalization that the speaking of a given language by a given philosopher is either a necessary or sufficient condition for the formulation of his explicit philosophy would seem to be false." I do not believe that the conclusion follows. Elsewhere, I have tried to show that what I call the "strong interpretation" of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can be assimilated to the notion of (...) "untranslatability" in such a way that it becomes equivalent to the denial of the position held by Roman Jakobson that "All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language." To deny Jakobson's thesis is equivalent to the assertion that there is at least one language for which there is at least one other language such that the first cannot translate the second. Letting "Txy" stand for "x translates y," and "Lx" for "x is a language," Jakobson's thesis goes over in symbols as. (shrink)

A diverse set of expert voices from the Global North and South - philosophers, economists, policy and development scholars and practitioners - explore two themes central to development ethics: agency and democracy. Established luminaries in development ethics engage with the book's themes alongside fresh voices on the way to becoming familiar figures in the field. Their essays work within diverse areas of development studies, including human security and human rights, democratic governance in theory and practice, the capability approach, gender and (...) development, and applied and theoretical critiques of the philosophical underpinnings of various accounts of development. The result is a varied and comprehensive discussion of current work in development ethics that significantly advances our understanding of theoretical and practical work of development. This book will interest students, scholars, and practitioners of global justice, human rights, international development and political philosophy. (shrink)

Gliomas are diffuse and invasive brain tumors with the nefarious ability to evade even seemingly draconian treatment measures. Here we introduce a simple mathematical model for drug delivery of chemotherapeutic agents to treat such a tumor. The model predicts that heterogeneity in drug delivery related to variability in vascular density throughout the brain results in an apparent tumor reduction based on imaging studies despite continual spread beyond the resolution of the imaging modality. We discuss a clinical example for which the (...) model-predicted scenario is relevant. The analysis and results suggest an explanation for the clinical problem of the long-standing confounding observation of shrinkage of the lesion in certain areas of the brain with continued growth in other areas. (shrink)

Deeply rooted structures of racism, ableism, misogyny, ageism, and transphobia hurt great numbers of people, exposing them to intolerance, economic exclusion, and physical harm around the globe. Billions of land animals suffer and die annually in concentrated feeding operations and slaughterhouses. Our planet and all who live here are in perilous straights as the climate changes. In the face of such grievous problems, people who want to find positive ways to respond often grapple with difficult questions about how to make (...) a difference. Effective Altruism has arisen as an attempt to help answer these questions, encouraging people to give as much money as they can in the most effective ways to address human and animal suffering. But the Effective Altruists’ answers support some of the very social structures that cause suffering, undermining its efforts to “do the most good.” The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does is the first book-length critique of Effective Altruism. It brings together a diverse group of activists and scholars to explore Effective Altruism’s failure to meaningfully address forms of human and animal suffering. (shrink)