It is easy to overlook the fact that the kind of personalist criticism Brower, Wimsatt, and other New Critics were reacting against was a method of interpretation bequeathed by the nineteenth century which most of us would now regard as naïve, simplistic, and sometimes absurd. With the exception of a few poems such as Browning's dramatic monologues, which provided the speaker with an explicit identity as unmistakable as that of a character in a play—"I am poor brother Lippo, by your (...) leave! / You need not clap your torches to my face"—lyric and didactic poems of the first person were invariably treated as personal statements. The voice, emotions, attitudes, and state of mind of the speaker were those of the poet, and even the most symbolic details were often read as literal aspects of the poet's self or environment. Many critical studies and anthologies remain today on library shelves testifying to the persistence of these critical habits of the late 1940s and 1950s. On the assumption that Rochester's love poems describe his actual sexual experiences, Vivian de Sola Pinto was able to write a much longer biography of the poet than would have been possible if personalist criticism had not been in vogue.1 David Nichol Smith could assert that Dryden's Religio Laici "was wholly spontaneous"—the familiar Romantic criterion - and show the poet arguing out "his problems for the peace of his own mind."2 If it became unfashionable to speak in that manner of these and numerous other poems, it was because the New Critics, along with the Chicago critics, had shown convincingly that a lyric poem can be dramatic, the imitation of a fictitious speaker responding to an imagined situation, and that a didactic poem can deal with public issues instead of private agonies. · 1. See Vivian de Sola Pinto, Rochester: Portrait of a Restoration Poet .· 2. David Nichol Smith, John Dryden , p. 61. Phillip Harth is Merritt Y. Hughes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is the author of Swift and Anglican Rationalism and Contexts of Dryden's Thought. (shrink)

Normal propositional modal systems This first chapter has two main aims. One is to give a general account of the propositional modal systems that we shall ...

Star Trek scripts have often grappled with dilemmas of medical ethics. The most explicitly medical-ethics-oriented Star Trek episode is named, aptly enough, “Ethics.” The script was written by Sara Charno and Stuart Charno, authors of two other Star Trek episodes. “Ethics” first aired on 2 March 1992. In the fall of 1992, we began to use this “Ethics” episode to motivate discussions in our first-year medical students’ course on medical ethics and the doctor-patient relationship. We asked students to write essays (...) addressing one of the many ethical dilemmas posed by the episode. Over the years, the episode has become a tradition. Both students and instructors find the formulation of dilemmas in the context of a science-fiction story to be both liberating and stimulating. In this essay, we will discuss this particular episode in some detail and then provide a brief synopsis of other episodes that might be used in ethics courses in a similar way. (shrink)

A recent focus of the debate on conscientious objection in healthcare is the question of whether practitioners should have to justify their refusal to perform certain functions. A recent article by Cowley addresses a practical aspect of this controversy, namely the question of whether doctors claiming conscientious objector status in relation to abortion should be required, like their counterparts claiming exemption from military conscription, to defend their claim before a tribunal. Cowley argues against the use of tribunals in the medical (...) case, on the grounds that there are likely to be fewer unjustified claims to conscientious objection in this context than in the military, and that in any case tribunals will not be an effective way of distinguishing genuine and false cases. I reject these arguments and propose a different conception of the role of a medical conscientious objection tribunal. (shrink)

Disturbances to one's sense of self, the feeling that one has ‘lost a part of oneself’ or that one ‘no longer feels like oneself,’ are frequently recounted throughout the bereavement literature. Engaging Allan Køster's important contribution to this issue, this article reinforces his suggestion that, by rupturing the existential texture of self-familiarity, bereavement can result in experiences of estrangement that can be meaningfully understood according to the concept of self-alienation. Nevertheless, I suggest that whilst Køster's relational interpretation of alienation as (...) the withdrawal of heteronomy can be applied to the experience of world-collapse in bereavement, what sets bereavement apart from other limit situations is the fact that it involves an intersubjective relation between the living and the dead. In contrast to Køster, therefore, I suggest that the experience of self-alienation that is distinctive to bereavement results from the fact that the bereaved is exposed to, and co-opted by, the absolute alterity of death itself. (shrink)

Through accessible text and dynamic photos, readers will learn about the concepts of tight and loose using such topics as knots, rings, and clothing. A “Words to Know” section at the beginning of the book helps students learn new vocabulary they will encounter in the text, while suggestions for other titles and websites encourage students to learn more.

Transhumanism and Unitarian Universalism are both the result of filtering ancient religious aspirations through the sieve of Enlightenment rationalism, humanism and individualism. The transhumanists aspire to transcendence through individual adoption of human enhancing technologies, while the UUs encourage transcendence through the critical, selective construction of personal spiritualities. Today, most religious reject the promises of human enhancement and transhumanism. But Unitarian Universalists are in the unusual position to be interlocutors between faith and science, between spirituality and techno-transcendence, between liberal religion and (...) transhumanism. One area in which both UUs and transhumanists could especially benefit from dialogue is in reimagining virtue, which both have left behind as illiberal, moralistic anachronisms. Our ability to technologically enhance moral sentiments and behavior has made defining a liberal, and yet bounded, concept of the good life urgent for both UUs and the human enhancement movement. (shrink)

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from (...) the self, torn from the social fabric, and thrust into commercial transactions -- as organs, secretions, reproductive capacities, and tissues -- responding to the dictates of an incipiently global marketplace. Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as 'text', the chapters in this book examine not only images of the body-turned-merchandise but actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities, semi-magical tokens, symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topics covered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses, the biopolitics of cells, sperm banks and eugenics, to the international trafficking of kidneys, the development of 'transplant tourism', to the idioms of corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshly commodity. This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropology, law, medicine, and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete ways in which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turn remakes social relations and cultural meanings. (shrink)

In this paper I examine and reply to a deflationary challenge brought against virtue ethics. The challenge comes from critics who are impressed by recent psychological evidence suggesting that much of what we take to be virtuous conduct is in fact elicited by narrowly specific social settings, as opposed to being the manifestation of robust individual character. In answer to the challenge, I suggest a conception of virtue that openly acknowledges the likelihood of its deep, ongoing dependence upon particular social (...) relationships and settings. I argue that holding this conception will indeed cause problems for some important strands of thought in virtue ethics, most notably in the tradition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. But an approach to virtue ethics modeled on David Hume's treatment of virtue and character in A Treatise of Human Nature promises to escape these problems. (shrink)

In two studies, we predicted and found that inferences about motive and character influence intentionality attributions about foreseeable consequences of action (i.e., side effects). First, we show that inferences about intentionality are greater for good side effects than bad side effects when a target person's character is described positively. In Study 2, we manipulated information about a target person and found that inferences about intentionality were greater when side effects were consistent with a target person's character and motives. Overall, our (...) data cast doubt on the generality of the side-effect effect. We discuss our findings and their implications for future research on intentionality and social perception. (shrink)

I consider a number of reasons one might think we should only accept epistemic dilemmas in our normative epistemology as a last resort and argue that none of them is compelling.

Dementia affects millions of people throughout the world. Thinking through Dementia offers a critique of the main models used to understand dementia-the biomedical, neuropsychological, and social constructionist. It discusses clinical issues and cases, together with philosophical work that might help us to better understand and treat this illness.

This article draws on a five-year, multi-sited transnational research project on the global traffic in human organs, tissues, and body parts from the living as well as from the dead as a misrecognized form of human sacrifice. Capitalist expansion and the spread of advanced medical and surgical techniques and developments in biotechnology have incited new tastes and traffic in the skin, bones, blood, organs, tissues, marrow and reproductive and genetic marginalized other. Examples drawn from recent ethnographic research in Israel, the (...) Palestinian Authority and Turkey serve to cast light on the dark side of organs harvesting and transplantation. The article focuses on the dangers of the `fetishized kidney' for both sellers and buyers, for whom this new commodity has become an organ of opportunity and an organ of last resort. The bodily sacrifice is disguised as a donation, rendered invisible by its anonymity, and hidden under the medical rhetoric of `life saving' and `gift giving'. It suggests that the ultimate fetish as recognized long ago by Ivan Illich is the idea of `life' as object of manipulation. (shrink)

I argue that some important elements of the current cosmological model are 'conventionalist’ in the sense defined by Karl Popper. These elements include dark matter and dark energy; both are auxiliary hypotheses that were invoked in response to observations that falsified the standard model as it existed at the time.

In this paper I critically discuss what has come to be known as the consensus or standard view of interpersonal forgiveness noting some of the paradoxes it appears to generate, how its conceptual resources seem unable to help illuminate several other varieties of forgiveness that are either themselves instances of interpersonal forgiving or at least types of forgiveness that a theory of interpersonal forgiveness should be able to shed some light upon. In the final section I offer some remarks on (...) the nature of revenge, which has recently come to be seen by some philosophers as a morally acceptable alternative to forgiving wrongdoers, note some of the puzzles to which it gives rise, and conclude that while both types of responses to wrongdoers remain morally complex, there is good reason to think that forgiveness is the morally more appropriate response to having been wronged. (shrink)

Terminological debates are often circular and unproductive, so it is a pleasure to investigate the terminology of LeRon Shults, who argues with clarity, defines his terms, and offers reasons for preferring one term over another. I would not, however, waste the readers' time if my aim were merely to challenge some of Shults's nomenclature. When one sets out, as does Shults, to intervene in the process of theogonic reproduction, terminological and metaphorical choices matter a great deal insofar as the semiotic (...) tools one deploys carry emotional and affective baggage that can deeply influence the efficacy of the hoped-for intervention. As I argue below, there is much to commend... (shrink)

Boredom is an affective experience that can involve pervasive feelings of meaninglessness, emptiness, restlessness, frustration, weariness and indifference, as well as the slowing down of time. An increasing focus of research in many disciplines, interest in boredom has been intensified by the recent Covid-19 pandemic, where social distancing measures have induced both a widespread loss of meaning and a significant disturbance of temporal experience. This article explores the philosophical significance of this aversive experience of ‘pandemic boredom.’ Using Heidegger’s work as (...) a unique vantage point, this article draws on survey data collected by researchers in an ongoing project titled ‘Experiences of Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic’ to give an original phenomenological interpretation of the meaninglessness and monotony of pandemic boredom. On a Heideggerian interpretation, pandemic boredom involves either a situative confrontation with relative meaninglessness that upholds our absorption in the everyday world, or an existential confrontation with absolute meaninglessness that forces us to take up the question of our existence. Arguing that boredom during the pandemic makes this distinction difficult to sustain, I consider some of the ways in which pandemic boredom might be seen to expose and then exceed the distinctive methodological limitations of Heidegger’s philosophical interpretation of boredom. (shrink)

Let be the class of frames satisfying the condition.

"'There is only one thing that is certain, namely that we can have nothing certain; and therefore it is not certain that we can have nothing certain,' Samuel Butler once said, expressing in that mindbloggler all the elements required to form a classical paradox. Throughout the ages wise men and jesters alike have been intrigued by such mental twists and riddles which defy common sense and yet appear to be true." -- Dust jacket.

It is widely agreed that foreign sponsors of research in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are morally required to ensure that their research benefits the broader host community. There is no agreement, however, about how much benefit or what type of benefit research sponsors must provide, nor is there agreement about what group of people is entitled to benefit. To settle these questions, it is necessary to examine why research sponsors have an obligation to benefit the broader host community, not (...) only their subjects. Justifying this claim is not straightforward. There are three justifications for an obligation to benefit host communities that each apply to some research, but not to all. Each requires a different amount of benefit, and each requires benefit to be directed toward a different group. If research involves significant net risk to LMIC subjects, research must provide adequate benefit to people in LMICs to avoid an unjustified appeal to subjects’ altruism. If research places significant burdens on public resources, research must provide fair compensation to the community whose public resources are burdened. If research is for profit, research sponsors must contribute adequately to the upkeep of public goods from which they benefit in order to avoid the wrong of free-riding, even if their use of these public goods is not burdensome. (shrink)

Dementia is an illness that raises important questions about our own attitudes to illness and aging. It also raises very important issues beyond the bounds of dementia to do with how we think of ourselves as people - fundamental questions about personal identity. Is the person with dementia the same person he or she was before? Is the individual with dementia a person at all? In a striking way, dementia seems to threaten the very existence of the self. This book (...) brings together philosophers and practitioners to explore the conceptual issues that arise in connection with this increasingly common illness. Drawing on a variety of philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, Hume, Wittgenstein, the authors explore the nature of personal identity in dementia. They also show how the lives and selfhood of people with dementia can be enhanced by attention to their psychosocial and spiritual environment. Throughout, the book conveys a strong ethical message, arguing in favour of treating people with dementia with all the dignity they deserve as human beings. The book covers a range of topics, stretching from talk of basic biology to talk of a spiritual understanding of people with dementia. Accessibly written by leading figures in psychiatry and philosophy, the book presents a unique and long overdue examination of an illness that features in so many of our lives. (shrink)

Modern and Postmodern Cutting Edge Films closely examines a wide variety of major filmic texts that have established permanent, iconic shifts in modern and postmodern US culture and filmic practices. These films and their often visionary, trend-setting auteurs each introduced new manners of seeing that were imitated by later directors and ultimately, absorbed by popular culture itself. The primary rationale for writing this collection was quite simple: it is new and different. No anthology exists that examines the concept of the (...) cutting edge film across such a remarkably wide variety of genres and with such a diversity of theoretical approaches and subject matter. Equally important, all the contributors bring a unique voice and multi-disciplinary perspective to their respective chapters. This anthology will be of great interest to scholars from a variety of disciplines, including film studies, historical studies, and gender and genre studies. As far as possible, contributors have minimized a great deal of typical theoretical terminology so that lay readers who possess some familiarity with basic film analysis and theory can understand the text. It can be used as a classroom text in both graduate and upper-level undergraduate film classes. Modern and Postmodern Cutting Edge Films is an anthology that instructors of film theory and history can use for many years to come. Indeed, we feel that this remarkable collection of essays will itself become an indispensable, cutting edge text of film scholarship. (shrink)

I reconsider the relation between love and respect in Kantian ethics, taking as my guide Iris Murdoch's view of love as the fundamental moral attitude and a kind of attention to individuals. It is widely supposed that Kantian ethics disregards individuals, since we don't respect individuals but the universal quality of personhood they instantiate. We need not draw this conclusion if we recognise that Kant and Murdoch share a view about the centrality of love to virtue. We can then see (...) that respect in the virtuous person cannot be blind to the individual, as critics of Kantian ethics contend. My approach contrasts recent efforts to assimilate Kantian respect to Murdochian love, which overlook Murdoch's distinctive claims about the singularity of moral activity. This idea is not as un-Kantian as it seems, and it should inform any Kantian ethics that aims to address the charge about individuals. (shrink)