Philosophy's traditional "man of reason"—independent, neutral, unemotional—is an illusion. That's because the "man of reason" ignores one very important thing—the woman. Representing Reason: Feminist Theory and Formal Logic collects new and old essays that shed light on the underexplored intersection of logic and feminism.

Actor‐Network Theory is a research lens that has gained popularity in the nursing and health sciences domains. The perspective allows a researcher to describe the interaction of actors (both human and non‐human) within networked sociomaterial contexts, including complex practice environments where nurses and health technology operate. This study will describe Actor‐Network Theory and provide methodological considerations for researchers who are interested in using this sociotechnical lens within nursing and informatics‐related research. Considerations related to technology conceptualization, levels of analysis, and sampling (...) procedures in Actor‐Network Theory based research are addressed. Finally, implications for future nursing research within complex environments are highlighted. (shrink)

InDemocracy in America, Tocqueville described the ideal wife of a democratic citizen as a capable domestic helpmeet who enables the citizen‐husband to endure the daily trials of political activity. Tocqueville's biographers have presented Tocqueville's own wife Mary Mottley as having approximated this ideal. Mottley's importance, it is claimed, lay in providing the domestic calm and psychological support that Tocqueville needed to think, act, and write as he did. My aim in this article is to challenge this interpretation by offering an (...) overdue reassessment of Mottley's life and work, uncovering the hidden labors she performed in Tocqueville's circle and giving scope, where possible, to her own political views and activities. Mottley, I argue, refused to confine herself to the domestic‐management and emotional‐support roles typical of a Tocquevillian citizen‐wife. Instead, she carved out a role for herself as Tocqueville's political and intellectual interlocutor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Noël Carroll THE PARADOX OFJUNK FICTION Perhaps on your way to some academic conference, if you had no papers to grade, you stopped in die airport gift shop for something to read on the plane. You saw racks of novels authored by die likes of Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky, Tom Clancy, and so (...) on. These are the kinds of novels that, when you lend them to friends, you don't care, unless you live in Bowling Green, Ohio, whether you ever get them back. They are mass, popular fictions. In another era, they would have been called pulp fictions. Following Thomas Roberts,1 I will call diem junk fictions, under which rubric I will also include things like Harlequin romances; sci-fi, horror, and mystery magazines; comic books; and broadcast narratives on either the radio or TV, as well as commercial movies. There are a number of interesting philosophical questions diat we may ask aboutjunk fiction. We could, for example, attempt to characterize its essential features. However, for the present, I will assume that the preceding examples are enough to provide you with a rough-andready notion of what I am calling junk fiction, and I will attempt to explore anotiier feature of the phenomenon, viz., what I call the paradox ofjunk fiction. Thejunk fictions that I have in mind are all narratives. Indeed, dieir story dimension is die most important thing about diem. Stephen King, for instance, makes diis point by saying that he is primarily a story teller rather than a writer. Junk fictions aspire to be page-turners—the blurb on the cover of Stillwatch by Mary Higgins Clark says that it is "designed to be read at breatiitaking speed"—and what motivates turning die page so quickly is our interest in what happens next. We do not dawdle Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 225-241 226Philosophy and Literature over Clark's diction as we might over Updike's nor do we savor die complexity of her sentence structure, as we do widi Virginia Woolfs. Radier, we read for story. Moreover, junk fictions are die sort of narratives that commentators are wont to call formulaic. That is, junk fictions generally belong to well-entrenched genres, which diemselves are typified by tiieir possession of an extremely limited repertoire of story-types. For example, as John Cawelti has pointed out, one such recurring Western narrative is diat of the recendy pacifist gunfighter, like Shane, who is forced by circumstances to take up his pistols again, widi altogedier devastating effect.2 Junk fictions tell diese generic stories again and again with minor variations. Sometimes diese variations may be quite clever and unexpected. Agatiia Christie was the master of this; she was able to use the conventions of the mystery genre in order to "hide" her murderers. In TheMurderofRogerAckroyd, she "secrets" the murderer in the personage of the narrator; in Ten Little Indians, die murderer is a "dead man"; while in Murder on the Orient Express, all the suspects did it. In each of these cases, Christie's brilliance hinges upon her playing (and preying) upon conventional expectations. Neverdieless, even diese surprising variations require a well-established background of narrative forms. That is, in order to appreciate diese variations, die reader must in some sense know die standard story already. And with junk fiction, it is generally fair to say that in some sense, the reader—or, at least, the reader who has read around in die genre before—knows in rough oudine how die story is likely to go. Readers and/or viewers of Jurassic Park surmised, once die dinosaur enclosures were described, diat in fairly short order die dinosaurs would trample them down and go on the rampage—after all we had already seen or read The Lost World, King Kong, and their progeny. So, junk fictions are formulaic. They rehearse certain narrative formats again and again. And, furthermore, in some very general sense, the audience already knows die story in question. But this knowledge on die part of die audience provokes a question, specifically, why if the reader, viewer or listener already... (shrink)

In her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft accused Edmund Burke of having contempt for his political opponents. Yet she herself expressed contempt for Burke and did so unapologetically. Readers have long regarded Wollstonecraft’s decision to match Burke’s contempt with one of her own as either a tactical blunder or evidence that she sought merely to ridicule Burke rather than argue with him. I offer an interpretation and defence of Wollstonecraft's rhetorical choices by situating the Vindication within eighteenth-century (...) debates about the dangers of elite contempt and the best methods for stifling it. Rather than countering Burke’s contempt with more of the same, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication marks a distinction between two forms of contempt. The first expresses the false sense of superiority experienced by elites who owe their social elevation to arbitrary differences of wealth or family. As such, it represents both an abuse of privilege and an anxious recognition among elites that their... (shrink)

An award-wining biologist takes us on the dramatic expeditions that unearthed the history of life on our planet. Just 150 years ago,most of our world was an unexplored wilderness.Our sense of how old it was? Vague and vastly off the mark. And our sense of our own species’ history? A set of fantastic myths and fairy tales. Fossils had been known for millennia, but they were seen as the bones of dragons and other imagined creatures. In the tradition of The (...) Microbe Hunters and Gods, Graves, and Scholars, Sean Carroll’s Remarkable Creatures celebrates the pioneers who replaced our fancies with the even more amazing true story of how our world evolved. Carroll recounts the most important discoveries in two centuries of national history — from Darwin’s trip around the world to CharlesWalcott’s discovery of pre-Cambrian life in the Grand Canyon; from Louis and Mary Leakey’s investigation of our deepest past in East Africa to the trailblazers in modern laboratories who have located a time clock in our DNA. Join him in a rousing voyage of discovery, from the epic journeys of pioneering naturalists to the breakthroughs making headlines today. (shrink)

In this chapter, we treat Larry David’s television series, Curb Your Enthusiasm as, in large measure, a philosophical exercise. We argue that it presents a critique of our norms, practices, and conventions of social behavior, notably those that pertain primarily to civility rather than to morality. This critique identifies certain essential features of such behavior including: the typical unspoken-ness of its governing norms, and their non-necessity, despite appearances to the contrary, due to our intense emotional investment in them. In Curb (...) Your Enthusiasm, the ostensible justification that “This is just how we do things” comes in for merciless, satirical interrogation, most often by Larry David but sometimes by others, at Larry David’s expense. This chapter relies heavily on Mary Douglas’s discussion of jokes, but parts company with it in crucial respects. The chapter will also situate Larry David’s brand of humor in the context of the philosophy of comic amusement in terms of the notion of incongruity. Special emphasis will be played on the importance Larry David assigns to emotions in the maintenance of the relevant social norms. (shrink)

Dans son ouvrage Décadence, Michel Onfray s'en prend avec virulence au christianisme antique et à son héritage. Selon le philosophe, la personne de Jésus n'est qu'un mythe sans consistance historique et la religion chrétienne se trouve à l'origine des violences et de l'intolérance qui obscurcissent, jusqu'à nos jours, le devenir de l'Occident, à travers son lien étroit au pouvoir politique. Il revient ici à Jean-Marie Salamito de répondre point par point à ces affirmations aussi définitives que contestables : non, (...) le christianisme n'est pas un obscurantisme bon à jeter aux poubelles de l'histoire. L'existence et le message de Jésus sont bel et bien attestés. Saint Paul n'est pas l'inventeur d'une religion obscurantiste qui manie le glaive. Et l'on ne peut réduire la relation Eglise/politique au seul épisode de Constantin. Et si le christianisme décrit par Michel Onfray n'était, au fond, qu'un mythe, une vision réinventée et caricaturée, sans plus de réalité que les personnages fantasques de Lewis Carroll? (shrink)

In recent years there has been an expansion of scientific work on consciousness. However, there is an increasing necessity to integrate evolutionary and interdisciplinary perspectives and to bring affective feelings more centrally into the overall discussion. Pursuant especially to the theorizing of Endel Tulving , Panksepp and Vandekerckhove we will look at the phenomena starting with primary-process consciousness, namely the rudimentary state of autonomic awareness or unknowing consciousness, with a fundamental form of first-person ‘self-experience’ which relies on affective experiential states (...) and raw sensory and perceptual mental existences, to higher forms of knowing and self-aware consciousness. Since current scientific approaches are most concerned with the understanding of higher declarative states of consciousness, we will focus on these vastly underestimated primary forms of consciousness which may be foundational for all forms of higher ‘knowing consciousness’. (shrink)

The concept of community of persons, which focuses on both persons and the whole, helps understand solidarity. The latter is based on the social nature of persons. Community of persons and solidarity seems to be able to move away from the individualist perspective or the individualism-collectivism dichotomy. Using autopraxeography in a pragmatic constructivism epistemological paradigm, this article aims to explore how organizations can develop solidarity in a workplace. The experience presented takes place in a bank. It shows that communities of (...) persons with employees and customers are both ethical and financially efficient. These communities build a dialogue between persons and organizations. Nevertheless, it is impossible to force solidarity because it could generate derision that is contrary to the wished goal. Finally, while this model is based on solidarity, it focuses solely on internal solidarity. (shrink)

A paradigm for peace discovered in the cosmopolitan neighborhoods of poor urban immigrants.

L'évolution récente des réflexions sur la portée démocratique des différents modes de participation à la vie politique est marquée par la diffusion d'un modèle de « démocratie délibérative », dérivé de la philosophie de J. Habermas. Nous souhaitons interroger la validité d'un tel modèle quand il sert de référence normative à l'évaluation d'un ensemble hétérogène de situations de débat. L'hypothèse formulée ici pose que les différentes situations de confrontation ne sont conceptuellement pas assimilables. Ainsi, le parti pris consistant à transposer (...) les normes délibératives à tout type d'échange doit être d'autant plus questionné que les théories délibératives se restreignent elles-mêmes à des espaces spécifiques.The recent reflections on the scope of democratic modes of participation in political life is marked by the diffusion model of "deliberative democracy", derived from the philosophy of J. Habermas. We wish to question the validity of such a model when it is used as a normative reference to the evaluation of a heterogeneous set of situations of debate. The assumption here posits that the different situations of confrontation are not conceptually equivalent. Thus, the bias of transposing deliberative standards for all types of exchange must be questioned even more is that deliberative theories restrict themselves to specific areas. (shrink)

This paper aims to confront two notions that have acquired a particular importance in contemporary reflections on the law: the notion of “un-law” (“Unrecht” or “non-droit”), that was constructed after the second WW in order to think about the specific nature of “Nazi law”; and the notion of “state of exception” (“Ausnahmezustand” or “état d’exception”), which is now commonly tied up with the idea of juridical anomie. This confrontation extends the analysis that is especially exposed by the very concept of (...) “un-law”, in order to think about the possibility of a “monstrous law” in a functional way, and not in a substantial one. In return, this new light will help to think of the discontinuities between a “state of exception” and a “state of un-law”. (shrink)

Looking at representations of the Irish landscape in contemporary literature and the arts,this volume discusses the economic, political and environmental issues associated with it, questioning the myths behind Ireland's landscape, from the first Greek descriptions to present day post Celtic-Tiger architecture.

1. Signification de la métaphysique.--2. Significations de l'être.

This study examined the recall of car and food advertisements within either a car or food television program to investigate the relationship between recall, program content, and viewer involvement. The participants, 92 sixth-form students, aged between 16–17 years, were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. As predicted, advertisements placed within a program of dissimilar content were recalled significantly better than if placed within a program of similar content. A gender bias in recall was found with females recalling female-orientated products (...) significantly better than males. Viewer-involvement ratings factored onto three factor clusters: enjoyable, cheerful, and humorous. Negative correlations were shown between cheerfulness and recall in the car program, and positive correlations were shown between cheerfulness and recall in the food program. Finally, implications of the results were considered. (shrink)

Cet article se propose d’étudier comment Platon, Aristote et Thucydide participent à la remise en question du rôle prépondérant accordé au courage dans le domaine militaire avant la guerre du Péloponnèse. Le courage n’est rien sans le savoir ni l’expérience. Telle est la thèse que ces trois auteurs déclinent chacun à leur manière, qu’il s’agisse pour Platon d’interroger la dimension intellectuelle du courage, pour Thucydide d’établir la complémentarité du courage et de l’expérience, ou, pour Aristote, de faire de la connaissance (...) des particuliers qu’est l’expérience le premier critère dans la désignation des stratèges. (shrink)

The interactional quality of Pina Bausch’s staged dance performance challenges the perception and the expectations of social interaction that follow it. Through repetition and combinations of words and movements new expectations and new social roles are created. This shows not only how fragile interaction processes can be disturbed but also how we are prone to make sense out of interactions through observation.

Current controversies about the ordination of women have shown the need for a re‐examination of what the Christian Church means by priesthood. This article looks at the Epistle to the Hebrews’ contribution to our understanding. To that end it focuses on the institution of priesthood in its first‐century Jewish context and shows the use made of it by the author of Hebrews in his presentation of Christian faith.Section 1 emphasizes some all‐important differences between the NT’s use of the language of (...) priesthood and ours. Not least, it nowhere uses “priest” to designate Christian ministers. All the more striking, therefore, is Hebrews’ depiction of Jesus as “high priest”.Section 2 discusses Judaism’ Day of Atonement ceremonies – Hebrews’ dominant cultic model. In the comparison drawn between Christ’s death and exaltation with these rites, he becomes not only the high priest but also the expiatory victim.As far as Judaism’ cultic institutions are concerned, however, Jesus was not and never could be a priest, since he was of the tribe of Judah rather than Levi. Hence Hebrews appeals to Melchizedek. How this non‐Israelite model is used by Hebrews to subvert the whole notion of priesthood as caste is discussed in section 3.Finally, in section 4 Isaacs concludes that for Hebrews there is no longer a role for an ongoing priesthood, since Jesus has definitively achieved access to God, which was its raison d’être. Melchizedekian high priesthood is unique to Christ; neither inherited nor transmitted. Hence, unlike other NT authors, for Hebrews even the church as a corporate body is not a priesthood. As its closing chapters show, in this Epistle the cultic model gives way to the more inclusive one of pilgrimage. (shrink)

Patient self-disclosure is essential to the work of health professionals, and this is even more critical in mental health where speech is a reflection of the content of thought. Self-disclosure is then about invisible symptoms that are associated with health problems where discrimination and stigmatization are still very prevalent. This article explores the ethical issues of this phenomenon which has received very little study. Disclosure as a decision-making, interpersonal, dynamic and complex process will be defined and deepened with the help (...) of examples from research. Subsequently, the vulnerability of the person who discloses will be addressed, followed by issues of quality of care and related to the standards of professional practice associated with patient disclosure and their associated responsibility. These elements highlight many ethical issues and ultimately lead us to a proposal to situate the professionals involved. (shrink)