In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic ImaginationNancy WormanMark Payne. The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. ix + 164 pp. Cloth, $35.Mark Payne’s elegant and unusual book addresses an elusive topic: human perceptions of animal consciousness. Focusing largely on literary artists’ senses of other animals, Payne initially approaches the conundrum of how these (...) artists devise ways to bridge this gap from a broad but distinctly personal perspective. He takes the reader with him out into a natural setting, complete with details such as the beers he drank in the evening and the driftwood on which he hung his clothes to swim, and puzzles over how we as humans make meaning from and with animals. Payne’s personally imbedded starting point grounds his insistence from the outset that we share certain aspects of our behaviors with animals and that we may even through particular experience countenance something of what might be called the animal perspective. To put it this way, however, somehow reduces the attentive grace with which Payne navigates such profound topics; while his concerns are essentially existential he is also after the delicate distinctions among phenomena that open out onto animal being, the diversities of which certain types of literary expression seek to capture.The book is divided into two sections of two chapters each, running from tropes and inhabitations of the “beast in pain” to articulations of human-animal experiences (embraced as “becoming something else”). Payne begins his exploration of how poets take account of animal lives by addressing their use of bestial otherness to capture abject and aggressive outsider experiences. As Payne demonstrates, the archaic poet Archilochus flashes his brilliant and disturbing poetic control of animal subjectivity as a means of antagonistic warning to his enemies and other iambic targets. Hipponax in contrast appears to offer up more fully inhabited images of the dog when he is down—that is, the scapegoat, the quintessential figure of abjection, the human reduced to animal status and rejected by the community of men. Hipponax is also the inventor of the iambic meter that famously “limped,” a deformity of rhythm that interested the modern American poet William Carlos Williams. In a wonderfully rich and responsive discussion, Payne shows how in his long (and last) poem, Patterson, Williams shapes his subjectivity as a “dog poet” by means of a similar inhabitation of the deformed or lowly animal, whose perspective is then celebrated as more attuned to the songs close to the ground: the sounds of the river’s run, the very local details attended [End Page 696] to by bug or snail. Here Payne claims that Williams’ “biopoetics” “keeps an ear open for the lameness of Hipponax’s choliamb in its efforts to communicate the experience of physical impediment by formal means” (48). He reveals the details of this formal engagement by tracking Williams’ use of triadic structures to capture human-animal incapacities and the vulnerabilities of imaginative work.The second discussion in this section takes on violent rejections of the continuities of human-animal experiences, which Payne likens to the myth of Satan because of the narcissistic hatred of other life forms that is central to its dynamics. This “destructivism” (a term Payne borrows from the American poet Susan Howe) originates in a sense of homelessness in the world and results in a groundless need to kill other animals, as well as in the fetishization of the artificial and inorganic. Payne’s poetic sources run from Milton to Flaubert, in whose descriptions of these lost killers he locates metonymies of this turn to artificiality. While there is something mildly disturbing in the apparently uncritical ways in which Payne represents this murderous perspective—so that, for instance, Symbolist aesthetics become consonant with its “biocide”—he captures effectively the dark fascination of this rejection of so much that is living. Against the human tendency to mass decimation of other life forms Payne sets the imagination’s attention to the “thisness” of individual things and beings. Gerard Manley Hopkins and, perhaps more surprisingly, Ezra Pound provide for Payne examples of modern poets who unfold... (shrink)

Studys the philosophy of Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, Locke, and Hegel and examines their underlying assumptions about women.

In evaluating science, philosophers tends to focus on general laws and on their truth. I urge a shift in focus to the reliability of the panoply of outputs science produces and in tandem, from the general to the particular. Here I give five arguments to support this, including many, many scientific outputs, which must be supposed reliable if we are to warrant our general principles, aren’t truth-apt; and reliability invites the crucial question, ‘Reliable for what?’ Getting clear the particular purpose (...) is essential for effective action and just evaluation. (shrink)

Rosenblum argues that we should judge associations not only by what they do for civic virtue, but also by what they do for individual members.

What does it mean to develop psychiatric method in a colonial context? Specifically, if the aims of psychiatry have traditionally been couched in the language of ‘psychic integration’ and ‘healing’, then what does it mean to practice psychiatry within structures that organize and reinforce the exclusions of colonialism? With these questions, this article examines Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric practices in light of his radical political commitments. I argue that Fanon’s innovations with the institutional form of the psychiatric hospital serve to intervene (...) differently in psychic conflict. Notably, these changes offer different ways to diagnose and respond to patients, along with different strategies for managing psychic disintegration in colonial contexts. The result is a rethinking of the relation between material and imagined worlds, and so the emergence of the hospital as a waystation between a colonial context and a political freedom yet to come. (shrink)

Abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq confront us with the question of how seemingly ordinary soldiers could have perpetrated harms against prisoners. In this essay I argue that a Stoic approach to the virtues can provide a bulwark against the social and personal forces that can lead to abusive behavior. In part one, I discuss Abu Ghraib. In two, I examine social psychological explanations of how ordinary, apparently decent people are able to commit atrocities. In three, I address a (...) series of questions: why should we turn to ethics for help with these problems, and why, in particular, to Stoicism instead of other ethical theories, such as utilitarianism or Kantianism? Given the power of situations in influencing behavior, is a turn to character ethics a viable response to problems such as those at Abu Ghraib? I argue in part four that character formation drawing on Stoic values can provide soldiers with the inner resilience to resist the situational factors that press them to unwarranted aggression. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have been remaking the landscape in political theory, and in this important book some of the most important feminist political theorists provide reconstructions of those concepts most central to the tradition of political philosophy. The goal is nothing less than the construction of a blueprint for a positive feminist theory.Many of these papers are completely new; others are extensions of important earlier work; two are reprints of classic papers. The result is a progress report on the continuing feminist (...) project to re-envision traditional political theory. As such, it constitutes essential reading not only for feminist thinkers but also for traditional philosophers and political theorists, who will need to come to terms with these contemporary critiques and re-readings. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 7, Page 802-808, September 2022.

If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. In this collection of writings on images and visual art, the author explores this through an extraordinary range of references.

Economics differs from physics, we are told, in that the laws economics studies hold only ceteris paribus whereas those of physics are supposed to obtain universally and without condition. Does this point to a metaphysical difference between the laws the two disciplines study or does it reflect merely a deficiency in the level of accomplishment of economics as compared to physics?

Previous discussions on the value of sport in remote locations have concentrated on 1) environmental and process concerns, with the rejection of competition and goal-directed or use oriented activity, or 2) the value of risk and dangerous sport for self-affirmation. It is argued that the value of risk in remote sport is in self-knowledge rather than self-affirmation and that risk in remote sport, while enhancing certain kinds of experience, is not necessary. The value of remote sport is in offering the (...) opportunity for experience that enhances the participants’ knowledge both of self and of the environment with which they interact. (shrink)

Academic research is increasingly centering on interdisciplinary work. Strong interdisciplinary research (SIR), involving researchers from very different fields, such as scientists and humanists, is often encouraged, if not required, by funding agencies. I argue that two intellectual virtues, open-mindedness and intellectual humility, are crucial for overcoming obstacles to SIR and achieving success. In part I, I provide a primer on intellectual virtue and the two virtues in question. In part II, I distinguish SIR from weak interdisciplinary research (WIR), which involves (...) research teams from neighboring fields, such as physics and chemistry, and from disciplinary research (DR), which involves researchers from the same discipline. I also outline what counts as success in SIR, and explain why it’s more challenging to attain than in WIR and DR. In part III, I explain how both intellectual virtues are essential for achieving success in SIR and for overcoming obstacles that can arise in its pursuit. (shrink)

This paper refers to a project that we as an art school carried out together with the Flemish organisation VVOB in Zambia. The main goal of the project was to equip primary school teachers with the necessary knowledge and infrastructure to deliver basic ‘education for all.’ The paper challenges the implicit instrumentalization of the arts in that approach, but also brings back to the forefront the notion of art as a practice that ‘makes sense together.’ Through cabinet of curiosity practices (...) such as observing, noting, collecting, mapping, exposing and gathering, we explored how sharing emergent relational structures could be a starting point and even the essence of a pedagogical practice that thinks with and before the world, and approaches education for all as a study praxis rather than an end goal. The argument is built in company with authors such as Gert Biesta, Jean Luc Nancy and Tim Ingold. (shrink)

The needless proliferation of virtues is a possible pitfall of the explosion of work in virtue ethics. I discuss two positions on proliferation and offer my own. Russell takes the first approach, arguing that virtue ethical right action is impossible unless we adopt a finite and specifiable list of the virtues. I argue against this. Hursthouse offers a second perspective, looking first to standard Aristotelian virtues, and adding virtues only when the standard list fails to capture something of moral importance. (...) Like Hursthouse, I believe that questions arising from applied ethics present the real challenge to the adequacy of traditional lists of virtues. These challenges are becoming increasingly urgent. Technologies are not only shaping our conceptions of ourselves, the human good, and virtues, but also, through germline gene editing, have the potential to change human nature. My position takes its cue from Hursthouse but goes beyond her by arguing for an “anthropological turn” in virtue ethics. The anthropological turn examines forms of life, especially those influenced by technology and science, and how they affect articulations of the human good and the virtues needed to attain it. Any new virtues, I argue, should be identified through study of how dispositions conducive to human good arise organically within forms of life. In this way, virtues remain grounded in what is good for humans, yet the anthropological turn recognizes that what counts as human good is now in flux because of science and technology. (shrink)

From the earliest photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races to depictions of disease in new tropical medicines, Picturing Tropical Nature offers ...