In the late 1970s, the U.S. Congress was debating a number of different proposals to provide monetary compensation to residents of Utah and Nevada who had been exposed to radioactive fallout from government nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s. Yet scientists and government officials expressed concern that such a program would end up compensating many people for cancers that were not caused by the fallout. Thus, after much debate, Congress directed the National Institutes of Health to produce a set of (...) statistical tables—the radioepidemiologic tables—to target compensation awards to “deserving” individuals. Advocates of the tables, notably Senator Orrin Hatch, argued that reliance on scientific data would provide compensation decisions with predictability and evenhandedness. Yet in the end, the effort to employ the tables failed. The substantial scientific uncertainties in the tables and in their application to individual claims failed to deliver the authority they promised. Additionally, the goal of fairness and objectivity could not be convincingly met because of persistent controversy and mistrust surrounding the government’s role in the study of health effects of low‐level radiation. (shrink)

On November 18, 1994, academic, activist, and philosopher Cornel West addressed the National Alliance of Black School Educators at a conference in the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Dr. West’s speech, captured in this video recording, focuses on the experience of African Americans in America, a culture that, according to West, is steeped in the “pernicious and vicious” influence of white supremacy. West argues that 1994 is one of the “more frightening and terrifying moments” in the history of (...) the United States, and he laments the election of Newt Gingrich as well as the leadership positions of such figures as Strom Thurmond and Orrin Hatch. He urges the audience to adopt an approach to democratizing American politics by not only resisting white supremacy but also male supremacy, heterosexual supremacy, and any other attitude that dehumanizes other people. West also deplores the decline of “non-market values” such as kindness, community, and love, contending that “market culture” leads to “market morality,” in which every part of human life is commodified. (shrink)

The Trump Administration's governance of COVID-19 racial health disparities data has become a key front in the viral war against the pandemic and racial health injustice. In this paper, I analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic joins an already ongoing racial spectacle and system of structural gaslighting organized around “racial health disparities” in the United States and globally. The field of racial health disparities has yet to question the domain assumptions that uphold its field of investigation; as a result, the entire (...) reform program called for by racial health disparities science is already featured on the menu of the white supremacist power structure. The societal infrastructure that produces scientific knowledge about patterns of health and disease in the human population needs to confront its structural position as part of the racial spectacle organized around racial health disparities in the United States. This paper offers an interpretation of racial antimatter to explain why the data will not save us in the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on articulations of racial spectacle and structural gaslighting within critical race theory and Afropessimist thought. By positioning events in the COVID-19 pandemic together within the same racially speculative frame, I show how the collection of racial health disparities data came up against white supremacists’ political ambitions in a time-space where the demand for human life to matter and the iterative regeneration of racial antimatter collided. This paper highlights the need for ongoing analysis of the unfolding and future spectacles organized around racial health disparities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 15-37 [Access article in PDF] Kant's Strange LightRomanticism, Periodicity, and the Catachresis of Genius Orrin N. C. Wang We might say that in deconstruction history is always posed as a question, at once urgent, ubiquitous, and insoluble, whereas ideological demystification conceives of its relation to history as an answer, a solution, to its critical hermeneutic. Certainly, this critical truism has special force in Romantic studies, (...) a field very much shaped by the complex relation between deconstruction and ideological critique over the last twenty-five years. But it could just as well be said that the full implications of this relation are especially clarified by the field of Romantic studies, not least because its object of study replays the tensions between these two modes of inquiry. Studying Romanticism means knowing it as a historical period but also knowing it as a figure that stands for something else: an aesthetic practice, a form of consciousness, a political aspiration, an ideology, the possibility of historicity itself. That as a figure Romanticism can be either transhistorical or tied to its historical identity makes its situation all the more complicated and compelling. Romanticism especially dramatizes the interlocking relation between period identity and trope, and the investment of literary studies in that dynamic. Romanticism is the period metaphor that both stabilizes and disrupts the very concept of period metaphors.1 The deconstruction and demystification of Romanticism is very much about the deconstruction and demystification of history, its existence as either question or calculation, trope or immanent being.But even as Romanticism asserts its special relation to history it must also confront an opposite trajectory, how its meaning is best understood through a constellation of other, larger historical identities, such as the Enlightenment and modernity itself. At present the potential disciplinary reorganization of Romanticism into the long eighteenth century is the most vivid academic expression of the question, where does the historical specificity of Romanticism reside, within itself or something larger, or both?Sorting this issue out is certainly a historical proposition, but as Romanticism's special relation to history reminds us, it is also, in Paul de Man's sense, rhetorical. Which is to say, Romanticism's relation to history is, paradoxically, not special-or, more precisely, it is a trope for something pervasive among all the period fields of literary studies, insofar as they remain particular and distinct from one another. This includes those historical entities that might subsume or entangle with Romanticism itself, that would enact historicity by absorbing a field so intent on both the enabling and worrying of historical thought. Approached tropologically, the relation of Romanticism to these larger historical periods is not simply about events and formations that constitute [End Page 15] the boundaries of historical identities. It is also about best identifying and clarifying the workings of figure that create the intelligence of such periodicity.Such labor, what de Man designated innocently enough by the term "reading," calls for its own crossing of a particular set of boundaries. A philosophical text, generated by the entanglement between Romanticism and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, might contain sections exemplary in their recording of the interstice between trope and historical periodization. Immanuel Kant's short meditation on genius in the third Critique is, like the rest of his book, about the limits and possibilities of the judging subject; his words on genius are also specifically about the artistically creative subject. In resolving the contradictions between aesthetic judgment and creation, Kant transforms the solar light of human genius into the historical genius of the Enlightenment, which is very much the linguistic genius of Romanticism. This all occurs in a register not of consciousness or of historical truth, but of something else before either's constative realization.Kant's text is especially telling in its reflexive expression of this situation, so much so that it helps illuminate the sharp distinction between deconstruction and ideological demystification. For if deconstruction always poses history as the pressure of an insoluble, omnipresent question, it does so through figure, before truth. In contrast, ideological demystification, with... (shrink)

Robert A. Hatch - Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 395-397 Book Review Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century Peter N. Miller. Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 234. Cloth, $40.00. N.-C. Fabri de Peiresc was no philosopher—not by modern lights—nor does he bear much resemblance to (...) his contemporaries, Bacon, Hobbes, or Descartes. Not least, Peiresc should not be confused with his singular friend and biographer, Pierre Gassendi. Compared to these philosophers, Peiresc's thought was unsystematic, his interests undisciplined. As Peter N. Miller argues—sometimes brilliantly—Peiresc was an antiquarian. And indeed, more than any contemporary, the "Prince of Erudition" has come to epitomize the Renaissance ideal of Humanist, Scholar, and Patron. But if Peiresc was no philosopher, neither was he content to write about the "Life of Letters." Peiresc lived it—perhaps to excess—perhaps too literally. Peiresc was no philosopher because his curiosity was unbound, not least, Peiresc published nothing, nary a.. (shrink)

This essay explores how Schelling’s Philosophy of Art promotes a theory of the imagination (Einbildungskraft) correlative to that reason informing his Philosophy of Identity. Against the background of Kant’s and Fichte’s transcendental-philosophical notion of the imagination, it shows how Schelling conceives the absolute identity of the ideal and the real in terms of its expression in and asthe imagination. As a name for the self-constitution of absolute identity, the term “Einbildungskraft” denotes for Schelling not merely the formative activity of picturing, (...) but instead the generative dynamic of imprinting, and this as the singular operation of unification in the sense of genuinely making the disparate—the finite and the infinite—into one. How this theory involves a view of artistic symbols as instantiating pure unity is discussed with reference to Schelling’s theory of tragedy as well as Hegel’s criticism of this conception. (shrink)

This volume offers essays on the nature of God and the fundamental tasks of philosophy and theology written by internationally recognized thinkers in the ...

Back in print are Hatch's classic Hibbert Lectures in which he calls into question the influence that Greek ideas had on the historical development of Christian theology. The earliest forms of Christianity were not only outside the sphere of Greek philosophy, but they also appealed, on the one hand, mainly to the classes which philosophy did not reach, and, on the other hand, to a standard which philosophy did not recognize. Edwin Hatch.

Walter Benn Michaels's The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History makes the ostensive cul-de-sac of identity politics the dominant symptom of postmodernism per se. The Shape connects its argument to the controversy over intention and interpretation created by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels's twenty-year-old essay "Against Theory." This very connection, however, highlights the not-quite-acknowledged presence of a certain type of romanticism in both works that each also wants to attack. Misunderstanding Paul de Man's notion of (...) materiality, Michaels becomes the latest thinker hoping to free us from the inchoateness of romantic sensation, both as the indulgence of sensory experience and the cognitive sloppiness of nonmeaning as the sense of meaning. Far from a Fukuyama-inspired postmodern condition, Michaels's scenario actually adumbrates a basic problem between romanticism and modernism-as-modernity. (shrink)

Recent studies have reported gender differences in older workers' orientations toward retirement, with women expressing less favorable views. This study of 557 women and 245 men in their 60s, not currently married, showed that previously married women, who often face a poor financial situation in retirement, were less likely than previously married men to agree that older workers should retire and also were less likely to define themselves as retirees. Never-married women and men did not differ on these measures of (...) retirement orientation, but they did differ on a more general measure of well-being, with the women holding a more positive attitude toward life in retirement. This article concludes that differences in women's and men's occupational and economic circumstances are responsible in part for gender differences reported in the retirement literature, but in addition, marital circumstances also exert an important influence. Thus retirement policies based solely on gender seem unwarranted. (shrink)

Interpretations of Rousseau’s general will have tended to privilege one of two aspects of the general will over the other. Procedural accounts identify the general will with the result of a majority vote of all the citizens. Common good accounts identify the general will with the common good (often as publicly understood by the citizens). In this paper, I argue that identifying the general will with either of these aspects makes the Rousseau’s insistence on other aspect mysterious. I propose a (...) shared capacity account which unites both aspects. Like an individual’s will, the general will is a capacity for self-determination in accordance with a conception of the good. To be a will, it must have both a procedure for self-determination and a constitutive end. To be general, both procedure and end must be shared by all the citizens. I defend my interpretation on the grounds that it accords with Rousseau’s insistence on both procedure and end and that it yields a compelling account of the freedom that Rousseau thinks we enjoy under the general will. (shrink)

In this revision of his doctoral dissertation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Menahem Rosen aims to furnish the conception of dialectic which underlies Hegel’s logical-scientific thought with the contemporary intelligibility which he considers it to lack. Six topics define the chapters of this ambitious reconstruction of dialectic as “basically a logic of ambiguity and paradox” : identity, difference, and contradiction; the beginning of philosophy; its end; matter and nature; language; and dialectical explanation. Specifically, Rosen aims “to prune” the Wissenschaft (...) der Logik and so win “Hegel the dialectician” for the analysis of “human reality qua social, cultural and historical reality,” in distinction from “natural reality qua physical, chemical or biological reality,” by exhibiting the incompatibility of “Hegel the ‘spiritual monist’” with the dualism which actually informs his own method and prevents its totalization. Speculative logic may provide the guidelines of a revised theory of subjectivity, but it does not deliver a metaphysics of the absolute, either as the final unity of thinking and being or even as that of thinking itself. If it is initially unclear exactly what is meant by the declaration that as Hegel’s successors “we are in a privileged position to add to his work, without showing thereby any genuine wisdom”, the issue becomes somewhat more certain through the assurance that “in the face of principles, reality is always right, even at the price of a certain lack of coherence”. The justification of objective reality before the principles of thought is supposed to follow from the inevitable disruption of conceptual order by its ineradicable empirical element. (shrink)

Einstein’s equivalence principle has a number of problems, and it is often applied incorrectly. Clocks on the earth do not seem to be affected by the sun’s gravitational potential. The most commonly accepted reason given is a faulty application of the equivalence principle. While no valid reason is available within either the special or general theories of relativity, ether theories can provide a valid explanation. A clock bias of the correct magnitude and position dependence can convert the Selleri transformation of (...) ether theories into an apparent Lorentz transformation, which gives rise to an apparent equivalence of inertial frames. The results indicate that the special theory is invalid and that only an apparent relativity exists. (shrink)

To assert that a 'clash of civilizations' follows inexorably from the different religious convictions at the foundations of Western Judeo-Christian and Arabic-Islamic cultures means to deny that a common political rationality can articulate genuinely universal, albeit culturally situated values. The eleven contributions to the present volume take up this controversy by challenging its premise that the heritage of classical Greek thought is exclusively part of Western political identity. By exploring the tradition of Platonism informing both Arabic-Islamic and Western political thought (...) and intellectual history in key stations in their history, the contributors show how Platonic political theory can still bear fruit in the present day, especially in the context of dialogue between cultures. (shrink)