Over a 20-year period, the United States has developed a consensus of legal opinion concerning living wills and other advance directives. At the heart of this consensus are two interconnected principles. First, the state should minimally interfere with the wishes of patients and surrogates and the decisions of physicians about foregoing life-sustaining treatments. Second, state interference is permissible for the sake of protecting a compelling state interest. The overwhelming majority of states with advance directive laws have attained this balance of (...) minimal interference and compelling state interest in developing their laws. (shrink)

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Theoretical Remarks on Combined Creative and Scholarly PhD Degrees in the Visual ArtsJames Elkins (bio)The PhD in visual arts is inescapable: it is on the horizon. In just a few years, there will be a number of such programs in the United States, and if the trend mirrors the expansion of MFAs after the mid-1960s, then in a few decades the PhD will be the consensus "terminal" degree for (...) artists. Given that, it is pressing to consider how the degree might be theorized. In Australia and the United Kingdom, where the degrees already exist, their growth has been dictated in large measure by the existing educational structures and by the inevitable quest for funding. (In the United Kingdom, university departments get a disproportionate increase in their funding if they offer doctorate programs, and the same pattern occurs in state schools in America.) As a result, existing programs simply grow by exonomic necessity or opportunity, and so far they have not been well theorized apart from models already in use elsewhere in the university. Private universities and art schools in the United States are therefore well positioned to rethink the conceptual foundations of combined studio and scholarly PhDs, because they are largely freed of the temptation of increased funding and the obligation to fit the new programs into existing structures. In this essay, I propose eight configurations that such degrees might take. I close with three general observations about the future of such programs.Three pieces of background are necessary as introduction. First, the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, where I teach, is currently running an four-year undergraduate major in visual studies. Soon we will be expanding it into an MA and, in a few years, a PhD. At the BA level our program already has a large studio component. For that reason we have been looking at programs that offer comparable combinations of creative and scholarly work at the PhD level. Our own program, we hope, will be a place [End Page 22] where the possibilities of other programs can be kept open and continuously questioned.Second, this essay was originally a reader's report for a creative-arts PhD thesis called "Beyond the Surface: The Contemporary Experience of the Italian Renaissance," written by Jo-Anne Duggan for the University of Technology, Sydney. In fall 2003 Duggan was a candidate for the "DCA," Doctorate of Creative Arts." She is a photographer, and her special interest is photographing inside museums; her thesis explores the history and theory of that practice. The report I wrote for her was the basis of this essay, because I found that her thesis is a mixture of what I think are the eight principal possibilities for combining PhD-level scholarship and creative work.Third, this essay is the outgrowth of several colloquia that have been held at the College Art Association and at the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design/National Association of Schools of Art and Design (AICAD/NASAD) conferences (organizations of art school administrators). These ad hoc forums have been, so far, the only places where the new programs have been debated. I hope this essay can contribute to a more detailed discussion.Here are the eight configurations. The first five are (or will be) common, and the last two are rare but preferable.1. The thesis is art history, intended to inform the art practice. The most obvious relation between scholarship and creative work is that the former informs the latter. The artist positions her scholarship so that it supports her art practice. Within this possibility, perhaps the most common option would be to write an art historical thesis, covering the history of practices that lead up to the writer's own practice. Among the advantages would be that, in theory, the candidate would be able to go on to teach in a department of art history. In terms of her practice, the idea would be that historical knowledge strengthens art practice: a debatable point, if only because so many artists have done so well by ignoring or distorting the relevant history. In Canberra in summer 2003, I met a recent PhD whose thesis was on... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Peculiarly Favored Condition of GeneticsJames J. Lee, PhD (bio) and Damien Morris, MSc (bio)Turkheimer and Greer (2024) (henceforth “T&G”) make some fair points about problems in the scientific profession, including the regrettable tendency to promise practical applications of research that then never materialize. However, T&G’s sustained critique of a body of work associated with one particular researcher to make these general points struck us as uncharitable. More pressingly, (...) we feel that the far-reaching conclusions that T&G attempt to draw from the results they review from the Spit for Science (S4S) cohort are unjustified and risk misleading readers that psychiatric and behavioral genetics is in a parlous state.T&G state that S4S “produced a clear answer to the question it was designed to address,” namely, that its results “unambiguously contradict the hypothesis that alcohol-related behaviors have a meaningful genetic basis.” But S4S cannot possibly have provided affirmative evidence for the null hypothesis, because as a single cohort it lacked the statistical power to do so. Elsewhere T&G acknowledge that the sample size of S4S does not suffice for many purposes; they cannot have it both ways. When GCTA has been applied to samples of greater size, it has unambiguously supported the hypothesis that alcohol-related behaviors have a meaningful genetic basis. The UK Biobank yielded estimates exceeding 0.10 for the contribution of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with minor allele frequency of greater than 0.05 to the heritability of drinks per week, estimates more than ten times their standard errors (Liu et al., 2019).This heritability contributed by common variants is sometimes called “SNP heritability,” and T&G disparage it for the alleged “disadvantage of being substantially smaller” than “twin and family heritabilities.” Nowhere do T&G consider what the precise numbers actually mean—an approach that can be hazardous to your scientific health, as the late John Loehlin might have said. Let us, then, consider these numbers. Under a model of pure neutrality, SNP and pedigree narrow-sense heritabilities should be fairly close, essentially as a result of factors p(1 − p) canceling in the multiplication of the numbers of SNPs to be found at a given allele frequency by the average heritability contributed per SNP (Hill, 2010). If SNP and pedigree heritabilities are not close, then natural selection must have been acting on [End Page 441] the trait, preventing new mutations of large effect from becoming common and thereby concentrating heritability at allele frequencies lower than those typically studied in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). This deduction has been abundantly confirmed: the tendency of GWAS SNPs to reside in evolutionarily conserved regions (Finucane et al., 2015; Kim et al., 2019), the younger age of GWAS SNPs when compared to control SNPs of comparable frequencies (Gazal et al., 2017), the discovery of several rare variants with larger effects than those observed in typical GWAS (Barton et al., 2021; Chen et al., 2023; Marouli et al., 2017), the directly measured deleterious fitness effects of mutations in evolutionarily constrained genes (Gardner et al., 2022), and the substantial additional genetic variance accumulated when rare variants are included in GCTA-type studies, sometimes enough to close the gap between SNP and pedigree heritabilities (Evans et al., 2018; Jang et al., 2022; Pathan et al., 2024; Wainschtein et al., 2022).The genetic architecture of a typical quantitative trait consists of many sites across the genome that can mutate to affect it, numbering potentially in the millions (Agarwala et al., 2013; Zeng et al., 2021), of which those that are common SNPs have very small effects as a result of selection. This is the message, but T&G seem to find fault with the messenger, painting “tiny” effect sizes as an embarrassment to the field of behavioral genetics as a whole. We prefer to view the finding of high polygenicity as a revelation about nature, rather than as a debating point. What is this finding telling us? If one takes the action of stabilizing selection as the initial assumption (Uyeda et al., 2011), then the extreme polygenicity revealed by GWAS becomes part of the answer to the question regarding how traits can... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How We Write Plagues JAMES UDEN One advantage of writing about historical pandemics is that they have already occurred. From where I sit, as I listen to the loudspeaker on the council truck telling me to stay indoors, it is impossible to know what direction the covid-19 crisis will take. Certainly, aspects of the virus’s social impact have mirrored the trajectory of previous pandemics. Back in February, people (...) in France began circulating the phrase Je ne suis pas un virus, protesting acts of violence against Asian communities and resisting the well-documented tendency for societies to target ethnic minorities as scapegoats for epidemic disease. The President’s labeling of covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” aroused similar protest in the United States.1 At an armed rally at the state house in Lansing, MI, armed protesters demanded the reopening of businesses despite public health advice to the contrary, an act that raised familiar questions about the freedom of the individual versus the health of the collective in times of health crisis. Here in Boston, anti-lockdown protesters assembled at the Massachusetts State House on May 4, chanting “no more dictatorship”—language congenial to Boston’s history of colonial rebellion, though not especially fitting to the crisis at hand. Just one day earlier, a banner had flown over the buildings of Manhattan with the words CAPITALISM IS THE PANDEMIC. Whether the virus will redistribute power and become, in Walter Scheidel’s words, a “great leveler,” remains to be seen.2 arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 Hunter H. Gardner, Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 303 pages. $90.00. Brian Walters, The Deaths of the Republic: Imagery of the Body Politic in Ciceronian Rome, 2020. xv + 158 pages. $80.00. 132 how we write plagues Given that we have frequently been reminded that we are facing a pandemic of historic proportions, it is natural that people have turned to history for perspective. Daniel Defoe’s journalistic account of plague in London in 1665, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), has catapulted to an unlikely relevance, promoted on the publisher’s website as the “surprise ‘must-read’ for people facing the covid-19 epidemic.” Thucydides ’ description of Athens’s experience of the plague in 430 bc has made news in The Economist, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Historical accounts of plagues are regularly being called upon to offer advice to the present. Yet not all plagues are alike. Historians have rightly protested about parallels being made between covid-19 and the aids crisis, since the current emergency response contrasts damningly with the Reagan government’s protracted silence and willful ignorance throughout the 1980s.3 One problem is the word “plague” itself, a term too suggestive of sin to represent the devastating impartiality of viral disease. “Plagues,” Susan Sontag wrote in aids and its Metaphors (1988), are “inflicted, not just endured.” She argued that the term imposed additional burdens on patients, who were portrayed as suffering some punishment, and could not simply be ill.4 To speak of “plagues” in the plural also suggests a common experience across time, a regular and shared event. Literary accounts of the plague do indeed share many common tropes. Yet there are important differences in the way communities have responded to outbreaks in different eras, and significant divergences in the meaning of disease. Accounts of plagues understandably arouse interest during a pandemic, but they are apt to mislead us, because the plagues so often look the same. One unshakable constant is the analogy between the body and the state, the “body politic.” As has long been recognized, the symbol surfaces across many, unrelated world cultures.5 In seeking to explain a unity composed of many parts, human beings have tended to look to the most immediate parallel— themselves. Although it has been invoked famously to justify James Uden 133 hierarchies within the state (Livy, Shakespeare, Hobbes), the image seems to resonate most intuitively when it conceptualizes danger, when the “health” of the state is threatened by “infection” or “disease.” In 2009, psychologists asked sixty -nine undergraduates at the University of Arizona to read a popular... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religion, Psychiatry, and “Radical” Epistemic InjusticesRosa Ritunnano, MD (bio) and Ian James Kidd, PhD (bio)Hermeneutical injustice as a concept has evolved since its original formulation by Miranda Fricker (2007). The concept has been taken up in psychiatry, with its moral, epistemic and clinical premium on the interpretation of extremely complex and difficult experiences (Kidd et al., 2022). There are many varieties of hermeneutical injustice with different forms, sources, (...) degrees, effects, and interpersonal and socio-structural aspects (Medina, 2017). José Eduardo Porcher has proposed the addition of a new form of ‘radical’ hermeneutical injustice, with a case study of psychotic symptoms involving religious content.He offers different characterizations of this injustice:a particularly radical form of injustice, namely, having their own interpretation of their experiences unjustifiably undermined.a form of hermeneutical injustice that occurs when a patient diagnosed with psychosis is denied the opportunity of interpreting their own experiences within their own religious framework.These are different things. Denying someone the opportunity to interpret their experiences in their own, preferred framework is one way of undermining their interpretations. Another is forcing someone to use your own preferred framework and then belittling their own, which seems doubly wrong. Misusing some preferred interpretive framework can be as unjust as not using it. The two definitions could be combined, but then much will depend on what it means to undermine someone’s interpretation of an experience. We think there is a form of radical hermeneutical injustice—different to the one described by Porcher. Some interpretations of kinds of experience with religious content can be undermined if one is committed to a metaphysical naturalism. In these cases, one person cannot regard someone’s interpretive framework as coherent or intelligible (one that involves supernatural entities, for instance).Most discussions of hermeneutical injustice focus on social structures. Fricker notes structural dimensions to hermeneutical injustice. In a standard case, a group has unequal participation in collective practices for making and using interpretive resources (Ritunnano, 2022). In a rich analysis, José Medina describes four ‘axes’ or dimensions for distinguishing forms of hermeneutical injustice [End Page 235] (Medina, 2017). The source of these injustices can be semantic or performative. The dynamics may be structural or interpersonal, or both. Moreover, there are different degrees of breadth and depth, defined here in terms of the ‘reach’ of the injustice across one’s life, and the depth of damage to one’s hermeneutic agency, respectively (Medina, 2017, p. 45). On this model, what might count as ‘radical’ hermeneutical injustices? Deep and broad hermeneutical injustices can be radical when they are very broad in scope and very deeply damaging. This might be what Porcher has in mind. But we think there is a further option, relevant to his case study.Porcher focuses on a case where individuals experience unusual beliefs and perceptions with religious content receive a ‘psychosis’ diagnosis. The alleged injustice is that the possibility of a genuine religious experience is not recognized and validated. The example is Femi, a young man with Christian background, who enters the mental health system following the onset of psychotic ‘symptoms’. After being found “disoriented and depleted in public” – tired and undernourished—Femi is compulsorily admitted to hospital, explaining he undertook fasting and isolation in response to orders from God. During this time, Femi devoted himself to Bible reading and stopped going to work. In hospital, where the authenticity of God’s voice is challenged by clinicians, Femi is treated for acute psychosis with pharmacotherapy. While remission of symptoms follow, there is no functional recovery, and Femi is described as “unmotivated and apathetic”.Femi interpreted his experiences in religious terms, but this interpretation is not accepted or pursued by the clinicians. Is this a hermeneutical injustice? If so, is it a ‘radical’ one? Granted, Femi’s religious interpretation may be psychologically adaptive—enhancing his sense of life as meaningful (Ritunnano & Bortolotti, 2022). But this is consistent with it being a hermeneutical injustice. Plus, a religious framing may be conducive to his functional recovery after being discharged, especially in conjunction with a supportive religious community, able to help him articulate, understand, and respond to those religious experiences (see Cottingham, 2005; Wynn, 2005). However, none of... (shrink)

John J. McDermott was born on 5 January 1932, in Richmond Hill, Queens, New York City, and died on 30 September 2018, in College Station, Texas.McDermott received his undergraduate education at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, graduating cum laude in philosophy in January 1953. His graduate study in philosophy was at Fordham University in the Bronx, from which he received his MA in June 1954 and his PhD "with great distinction" in January 1959. His dissertation—"Experience Is Pedagogical: The Genesis and (...) Essence of the American Nineteenth Century Notion of Experience"—was completed under the guidance of his doctoral advisor Robert Channon Pollock. In 1964–65, McDermott held a postdoctoral fellowship in American... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Minding Brain Injury, Consciousness, and Ethics: Discourse and DeliberationsJoseph J. Fins (bio) and James Giordano (bio)The annual John Collins Harvey Lecture at the Georgetown University’s Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics is a forum for addressing contemporary topics at the intersection of medicine and bioethics. This year, in marking the decadal anniversary of the launch of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnology (BRAIN) Initiative, the Harvey Lecture provided (...) an interactive discussion with renowned clinician, researcher, scholar, and author, Joseph J. Fins, MD—who is the E. William Davis, Jr., MD Professor of Medical Ethics, Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics, and a Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College—conducted by James Giordano, PhD, MPhil—who is a Professor of Neurology and Biochemistry, and Chief of the Pellegrino Center’s Neuroethics Studies Program at the Georgetown University Medical Center. The discourse focused upon the topic of covert consciousness, and the ways in which current and developing brain science technologies, together with revised practices of medicine, in general, may afford new opportunities in patient care, but may also give rise to issues, questions, challenges, and opportunities for neuroethics.Prof. James GIORDANO:Prof. Fins, your most recent book, Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics, and the Struggle for Consciousness (Fins 2015), addresses your ongoing work to employ current and emerging neurological approaches to reveal conscious functions in patients with profound brain injury and disease. To be sure, the destination—if you will—is to talk about covert consciousness. But in commencing this discussion, I’d like to propose a route, which traces your professional journey to this point in your career, and how it led you on your search to reveal consciousness in those patients who lack expressive capability. You went into palliative care first, and that brought you to where you are today. [End Page 227]Prof. Joseph J. FINS:First, let me thank you and the Pellegrino Center for the honor of giving the John Harvey Collins Lecture in such an interactive manner. The forefront of neurological care—and the neuroethical issues and methods focal to such practice—wasn’t what I initially intended to do professionally, but I think that therein is a good lesson for young people’s career aspirations. Simply put, one doesn’t always know where they’ll end up at the beginning of the journey, and as Kierkegaard said, life is lived forward, but is understood backwards (Kierkegaard 1843).In the nineties and the early 2000s, I was trying to help improve the quality of care of people at the end of life, and I wrote a book, entitled The Palliative Ethic of Care: Clinical Wisdom at Life’s End (Fins 2006), in which I addressed notions of phronesis—practical wisdom—in integrating theory and practice toward improving how people die. I became interested in the Quinlan case (Quinlan 1976), and the right to die, and around the same time, I ran into a colleague of mine at Cornell: Dr. Nicholas D. Schiff. Dr. Schiff is a neurologist, who was a protégé of Fred Plum, who was the originator of the concept of the vegetative state with Bryan Jennett, back in 1972. Fred was both of our teachers here at Cornell. Niko (Dr. Schiff) was interested in patients with disorders of consciousness, and was beginning to envision doing work—that ultimately, we did—using deep brain stimulation (DBS) to try to treat patients in the minimally conscious state, a category that was subsequently codified in 2002.I realized that a whole population of people—with these disorders of consciousness—had been somewhat marginalized, and their neglect essentially devolves back to the considerations of the right to die. The right to die was established in the Quinlan case because Judge Hughes—the presiding chief judge of the New Jersey Supreme Court—talked about Ms. Quinlan’s loss of a cognitive, sapient state as being the moral warrant for her right to die, given the fact that it was viewed as a futile situation. I recognized, over the ensuing years—from my background in palliative and end-of-life care—[1] that we had over-generalized notions of futility... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vergil's Aeneid and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary DiscourseJames J. O'HaraYasmin Syed. Vergil's Aeneid and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary Discourse. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005. x + 277 pp. Cloth, $65.This book, which "began as a PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley" (1997), tackles a timely, large, and difficult topic, possibly a topic too difficult to (...) be handled in a satisfactory way in a dissertation and first book. In sum, it makes a decent but flawed contribution on a topic that needs much more work, and in some ways, much more careful work.Two introductory chapters describe the importance of the Aeneid in imperial culture and the role of manipulation of the emotions in ancient theories of rhetoric. In a section called "The Reader's Subject Position," two chapters (both largely on Aeneas and Dido) treat "The Gaze" and "The Spectacle of Emotions." In the next section, on "Gender and Ethnicity," four chapters treat "Gendered Emotions" (before Allecto's visit, Amata is worried, but Turnus is calm; "frenzy, then, is female," 122), "Gendered Ethnicity" (Dido's characterization as Punic "is hard to detect because it is blended with her lover's persona," but it is still significant, 145), "Cleopatra and the Politics of Gendered Ethnicity" ("Augustan representations of Cleopatra form the birth of the Western discourse of orientalism," 177, somewhat overstated, but with interesting ideas about the connection between Cleopatra and Dido), and "Romanitas" (Greek stereotypes, and others, define Romans but are characterized by a "fundamental ambivalence," 203). A brief conclusion ends the book.The interesting argument that Syed makes in the first few chapters is "that the Aeneid used its visuality and its sublime style to appeal to the readers' emotions, and that it created a fictional space for an internal reader within the poem for [End Page 317] 316 whom the poem could articulate an identity by creating various fictional characters as figures of identification" (35). Both these and later chapters offer a mix of the new, the familiar, and, at times, the unconvincing. Two of the book's flaws are actually signaled in the surprising final paragraph, which declares that the book's "most glaring omission has been that of considering more Italian characters and generally of giving more attention to the second half of the poem" (227). Syed says that this "focus" on other aspects of the poem "has been a personal decision on my part," but it is hard to imagine thinking about "subject and nation" in the Aeneid without discussing the relationship between Rome and Italy both in the poem and in Vergil's world; see C. Ando, "Vergil's Italy: ethnography and politics in first-century Rome," pp. 123–42 in D. S. Levene and D. Nelis, eds., Clio and the Poets (Leiden, 2002), whose date is probably too close to Syed's publication date. Presumably there will be a full discussion of Rome and Italy in Alessandro Barchiesi's forthcoming The Geopoetics of Vergil's Aeneid.The lack of attention to Books 7–12 is also a problem, because often the arguments Syed makes about the parts of the Aeneid that she does treat are less convincing when we think about passages in the second half of the poem. The claims that Aeneas has a special ability "to control his emotional responses to the world" (70) and that "in contrast to Aeneas, whose emotions are carefully controlled, many characters in the poem give free rein to their emotions" (87), surely cry out for a consideration of Aeneas' rampage after the death of Pallas in Book 10 and the rage with which he kills Turnus in the poem's final lines. The discussion of Dido's wounds and of Lavinia's association, through allusive simile, with the wound of Menelaus (125–35) is fairly good. But Syed does not mention that Turnus at the start of Aeneid 12 is compared to a wounded deer, or that right before the Lavinia scene Vergil says Turnus "grows sicker with the attempt to heal" (aegrescitque medendo, 45). Lavinia is indeed associated with Menelaus by allusion, but Aeneas... (shrink)

I aim to analyze in this dissertation what a desirable basic institutional structure looks like from the perspective of rationality. While the main topic is thus normative in nature, I start by clarifying in the first part what the notion of rationality exactly entails. I do so by focusing explicitly on the economic conception of rationality, according to which a rational individual is motivated to serve his self-interest on the basis of cost-benefit calculations. Such a Homo Economicus is characterized by (...) his intentional and instrumental actions, his perfectly informed beliefs and his exogenously given and egoistic preferences. In my view, however, this model is inadequate if one aims to understand what it means to be rational. The requirements that actions should be instrumental, beliefs should be based on perfect information and preferences should be exogenously given and egoistic in nature turn out to be overly demanding in this respect. That is why I propose to drop these assumptions in what I label the minimal conception of rationality. Since the latter turns out to be very formal indeed, I propose two further alternatives, which focus not so much on the choice of means to achieve certain goals, as they focus on the choice of these goals themselves. According to the first, broad conception, actions are rational if they are based on good reasons, which are further qualified as well-informed beliefs and autonomous preferences. According to the second, expressive conception, actions, beliefs and preferences are rational if they express the things the individual at hand cares about. The latter requires that individuals can reflect upon and identify with their reasons, which implies a capacity to reflect upon and distance themselves from their own bundle of preferences. In the second part of this dissertation, I try to show the value and limitations of these conceptions by applying them to the context of large-scaled elections. In this respect, it becomes immediately clear that the economic conception fails to explain why quite a lot of people go out and vote. After all, since a single vote has only an infinitesimal impact on the electoral result, it does not enable people to serve their interests or realize their goals. This leads to the so-called voting paradox, according to which no rational individual will decide to vote. The standard solution is to assume that individuals vote because they derive satisfaction from the very act itself. However, this strategy is rather ‘ad hoc’ and does not explain how people vote once they find themselves inside the voting booth. The expressive conception of rationality does better in this respect. It suggests that people vote because they care about democracy in general or about a specific political candidate or ideology. Since they conceive of themselves as being a good citizen, they express this aspect of their identity by going out to vote. In the third part of this dissertation, I analyze more fully the normative implications of the different conceptions of rationality. More specifically, I try to answer the question which basic institutional structure is desirable if one assumes that people are by and large rational. This immediately shows that both the normative issue and the explanatory issue are closely connected. In my view, proposals regarding institutional design and reform should be based on empirically adequate models of individual actions and motivations. This search for a realistic utopia goes against the conventional strategy of most economists. They rely on the Homo Economicus model, even if this fails to explain individual behavior. To explain more fully what the normative implications are of the counterfactual assumption that all people are economically rational, I focus on the work of James Buchanan. In his theory of constitutional choice, he argues in favor of a minimal state whose only task is to make sure that the market functions properly. Buchanan thus favors strict constitutional limitations for governments, which tend to expand beyond legitimate borders as soon as politicians and public servants are allowed to serve their own interests. In my view, however, the abovementioned criticisms of the Homo Economicus model have theoretical as well as normative implications. After all, the empirically supported fact that a majority of individuals does not act in economically rational ways creates more room for legitimate government intervention. Expressively rational citizens will, for example, more easily agree on the necessity and desirability of a collective provision of certain public goods. In addition, expressively rational politicians and public servants can be more easily trusted to serve the public interest rather than their narrowly defined self-interest. As an alternative to Buchanan’s one-sided focus on economic rationality and the market, I focus on the work of Samuel Bowles en Herbert Gintis. More specifically, I explore their work on the phenomenon of strong reciprocity, which refers to the widespread tendency of people to reward prosocial behavior and punish antisocial behavior, even if this is costly for themselves. Since this is clearly economically irrational, Bowles and Gintis propose to complement the Homo Economicus model with the Homo Reciprocans model. This model, which comes close to the expressive conception of rationality, is able to incorporate the insight that social norms surrounding reciprocity, cooperation and fairness are crucial in regulating interactions. At the normative level, Bowles and Gintis stress that such norms often lead to socially desirable outcomes, since they enable people to live in harmony without relying on coercive and costly government interventions. This suggests that the debate between proponents of the market on the one hand and the state on the other hand neglects the importance of communities where people spontaneously interact on the basis of generally prosocial norms. As such, the insights of Bowles and Gintis lead to a defense of a basic institutional structure in which markets, states and communities mutually complement and reinforce each other. They also justify a general optimism as regards to the capacity and motivation of people to try and improve the rules and institutions that govern their everyday lives. (shrink)

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In _Parables for the Virtual_ Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing (...) and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, _Parables for the Virtual _tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. _Parables for the Virtual_ will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general. (shrink)

The goal of this book is to develop a new approach to reading the rule-following sections guided by a simple idea. The simple idea is that Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following are split between two distinct but complementary projects. The projects are marked not only by different guiding questions, but different presuppositions and methodologies. There is of course precedent for reading the rule-following remarks as comprising two parts. For example, there is the reading of (S. Kripke 1982) on which Wittgenstein first (...) presents a skeptical challenge before turning to its skeptical solution. And there are readings like (Minar 2011) and (Goldfarb 2012) that likewise treat the sections as roughly divided into two components or "chapters." But even these commentators do not explicitly associate their components with different questions and associated methodologies, and so fall short of attributing to Wittgenstein's text anything quite like the thoroughgoing bipartite structure I will be proposing here. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic examination of the place of religion within Kant's major writings. Kant is often thought to be highly reductionistic with regard to religion - as though religion simply provides the unsophisticated with colourful representations of moral lessons that reason alone could grasp. James DiCenso's rich and innovative discussion shows how Kant's theory of religion in fact emerges directly from his epistemology, ethics and political theory, and how it serves his larger political and ethical projects of (...) restructuring institutions and modifying political attitudes towards greater autonomy. It also illustrates the continuing relevance of Kant's ideas for addressing issues of religion and politics that remain pressing in the contemporary world, such as just laws, transparency in the public sphere and other ethical and political concerns. The book will be valuable for a wide range of readers who are interested in Kant's thought. (shrink)

Two books bound together, from the religious period of one of the most renowned and representative thinkers. Written for laymen, thus easy to understand, it is penetrating and brilliant as well. Illuminations of age-old religious questions from a pragmatic perspective, written in a luminous style.

David Hume (1711-76) is one of the greatest figures in the history of British philosophy. Of all of Hume's writings, the philosophically most profound is undoubtedly his first, A Treatise on Human Nature. Hume on Morality introduces and assesses: Hume's life and the background of the Treatise ; the ideas and text in the Treatise ; and Hume's continuing importance to philosophy. James Baillie provides us with a map to Books 2 and 3 of the Treatise, focusing on Hume's (...) theory of the passions and morality. This book sets out its principal ideas and arguments of the Treatise in a clear and readable way and is ideal for anyone coming to Hume's work for the first time. (shrink)

Boredom has been characterized as a crisis of meaning, a failure of attention, and a call to action. Yet as a self-regulatory signal writ-large, we are still left with the question of what makes any given boredom episode meaningless, disengaging, or a prompt to act. We propose that boredom is an affective signal that we have deviated from an optimal (‘Goldilocks’) zone of cognitive engagement. Such deviations may be due to a perceived lack of meaning, arise as a consequence of (...) struggles we are experiencing in attending to a task, or be interpreted as a blunt call to find something different to engage with. Thus, the key to understanding boredom lies in its role in keeping us cognitively engaged. -/- . (shrink)

This generous omnium-gatherum brings together all the writings William James published that have not appeared in previous volumes of this definitive edition of ...

It Is My Pleasure To Introduce this discussion of Naoko Saito's American Philosophy in Translation. We have contributions from three experts in American philosophy, all of whom have been in conversation with the author for many years: Jim Garrison, Vincent Colapietro, and Steven Fesmire. Prior to their contributions, I would like to set the scene with some brief remarks to introduce the book and to explain something of its background.Over the past two decades, I have worked closely with Saito on (...) a number of projects, and I have been familiar with her ideas for this book since its inception. In some respects, the book is the product of studies in American philosophy that go back to her time as an undergraduate in Tokyo in the 1980s, ideas that were advanced considerably when she did an MA at Harvard, taking classes with Stanley Cavell and Hilary Putnam, and subsequently when she completed her PhD at Teachers College, with René Arcilla as her advisor and Cavell as a member of her committee. It was against this background that, in 2006, Saito published her first singly authored book, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson. As that title indicates, she was already exploring the relation between Dewey and pragmatism, on the one hand, and American transcendentalism, on the other. Her sense back then of some separation between these traditions of thought, and of the nature of the tensions between them, has been refined and, for the most part, strengthened in the years since that earlier publication. No doubt she has been influenced in this by Cavell, who, in one essay, for example, asks: “What's the use of calling Emerson a pragmatist?” In any case, her account of this relationship is extended and altered significantly in American Philosophy in Translation.Through the course of her research, Saito has been conscious of the fact that she is studying American philosophy from a distance—a distance that is geographical, cultural, and linguistic—and she retains a thoughtful humility in relation to this. But she also sees here a possible opening to the perception and release of untapped aspects of these traditions of thought, in ways that might fertilize and extend the ground in which the inheritance of American philosophy has flourished. This is very much the line that she pursues in this book. In the light of this, and as the book's title indicates, there is a particular focus on language and translation. It is important that the latter term is understood not merely as an attractive metaphor for change and transformation: crucial to her developing argument is the experience of translating between languages and the reality of the experience in the lives of so many today, within the academy and without. In the course of this experience, one is sometimes confronted, quite self-consciously, with a word or phrase that resists translation. But sometimes—more often in the life of the accomplished or habituated speaker of the foreign language in question—the experience persists as an undercurrent, subtly opening a world that is other in some respects from the one that comes to light in the mother tongue.By contrast, to the many (especially Anglophone) monolingually minded, the need for translation can appear as an unwanted barrier, something of a nuisance, a problem to be solved. This is by no means a response confined, however, to the uneducated (or the Anglophone or the monolingual). There is also a sophisticated variant of this narrowness of outlook where faith is placed in an artificial or technical language with the power, the fantasy runs, to overcome the vagaries of natural language. Hilary Putnam recalls how Rudolf Carnap, whose stature as a thinker and as a human being he does not doubt, felt strongly that “for all x, planned x is better than unplanned x” and was drawn to the idea of a common world language: Thus the idea of a socialist world in which everyone spoke Esperanto (except scientists, who, for their technical work, would employ notations from symbolic logic) was one which would have delighted him. And I recently had a conversation with a student who remarked quite casually that it would not be a bad idea if there were only one language and one literature: “We would get used to it, and it might help to prevent war.” (Putnam 185)Putnam does not deign to respond to the latter assertion. What is foregrounded in his discussion is that monolingualism is likely to hide the plurality of goods that is realized in different cultures. The importance of that plurality is surely something that the luminaries of American philosophy bring to light. Indeed, Putnam's key point of reference in making these remarks is William James.The undercurrent of translation in the experience of the more accomplished speaker of a foreign language can act then as a sensitization to cultural difference, to different possibilities of thought and being. But in fact, this shifting of thought can apply within any language itself, not just inter- but intra-lingually, opening an insight that is close to the heart of American philosophy. If one can hear the cry of the rooster, then one may be wakened also by Thoreau's turn of expression in the idea of the “father tongue”: through a maturing experience of the language we are brought up with, we come to “a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak” (Thoreau 69). This renewed investment in language, this continual return to our words, is what opens them to new thought and gives them interest. It is first an inheritance from the culture we are brought up in, but it dies in our speech and thinking if we do not turn it to something new. To build, we must begin by borrowing an axe, but we can return it sharper than when we borrowed it.If translation is operative in our language as a whole, as Saito's argument shows, this points to the many little rebirths within ourselves and in our interactions with one another. In fact, the point becomes political in that democracy depends upon this renewal of our words. This renewal resists not only the allure of ideology but also the now familiar etiolated rhetoric of “political realism.” Moreover, it points beyond the reliance, within the politics of recognition, on the defining of groups and categories toward a politics of acknowledgment.In this vein, Saito's outsider perspective is in tune with what Richard Bernstein has called the “global resurgence of American pragmatism.” The borderline or outsider perspective can have a powerful effect on thought, in relation to which Saito invites the reader to recall that America's past was itself an outsider-past: it was outside Europe, a relation with which it was bound to struggle, but it was also ready, as Emerson and Thoreau demonstrate, to draw from greater cultural distances, where it found congenial aspects in East Asian thought.Saito stresses the anti-foundationalist character of American philosophy as of critical importance for both philosophy and politics, and again her discussion of language is crucial to this. Dewey's emphasis on communication, with his relatively flat style of prose, is contrasted with the stylistic experiment and invention that she finds in Emerson, Thoreau, and Cavell. She sees the style of these writers, in some contrast to that of Dewey, as having a salutary, destabilizing effect. She wants to destabilize Dewey. It is entirely consonant with her position, furthermore, that she raises doubts about the bland acceptance of a politics of inclusion. Not only can this become a surreptitious form of discipline and control: it can engender the conformism that Emerson worked so hard to prevent.The book finishes on a more aesthetic note, taking up lines of thought in Dewey's aesthetics but turning this toward the more extravagant elision, in Thoreau, of the functional and the beautiful. The thematization of the aesthetic in this way is, she tries to show, crucial to our (political) world. (shrink)

Several of the essays, like "The Sentiment of Rationality" and "The Knowing of Things Together," are of particular significance in the development of the views ...

2013 Word Guild Award (Academic) How does worship work? How exactly does liturgical formation shape us? What are the dynamics of such transformation? In the second of James K. A. Smith's three-volume theology of culture, the author expands and deepens the analysis of cultural liturgies and Christian worship he developed in his well-received Desiring the Kingdom. He helps us understand and appreciate the bodily basis of habit formation and how liturgical formation--both "secular" and Christian--affects our fundamental orientation to the (...) world. Worship "works" by leveraging our bodies to transform our imagination, and it does this through stories we understand on a register that is closer to body than mind. This has critical implications for how we think about Christian formation. Professors and students will welcome this work as will pastors, worship leaders, and Christian educators. The book includes analyses of popular films, novels, and other cultural phenomena, such as The King's Speech, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Facebook. (shrink)

A timely and accessible synthesis of the strengths, weaknesses and reality of science through the eyes of a practicing scientist.

I discuss several issues related to "classical" spacetime structure. I review Galilean, Newtonian, and Leibnizian spacetimes, and briefly describe more recent developments. The target audience is undergraduates and early graduate students in philosophy; the presentation avoids mathematical formalism as much as possible.

One of the scholars who have provided important contributions to the field of American studies in Romania is Professor Marius Jucan, PhD. The present paper is an attempt to decode, in only some pages, the type of discourse/writing that his books construct. The texts that make the subject of professor Jucan’s studies invite the reader and the writer to engage in a type of discovery that conditions understanding and induces revelations of diverse facets of ‘truth’– the interplay of text and (...) mind. Since such texts of the past, belonging to Henry James, H. D. Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson, frequently superimpose the aesthetic discourse on the philosophical, sociological, cultural and/or political one, it is understandable why they can be consistently studied only by an erudite specialist. (shrink)

James O. Young seeks to explain why we value music so highly. He draws on the latest psychological research to argue that music is expressive of emotion by resembling human expressive behaviour. The representation of emotion in music gives it the capacity to provide psychological insight--and it is this which explains a good deal of its value.

We construct a notion of teleparallelization for Newton-Cartan theory, and show that the teleparallel equivalent of this theory is Newtonian gravity; furthermore, we show that this result is consistent with teleparallelization in general relativity, and can be obtained by null-reducing the teleparallel equivalent of a five-dimensional gravitational wave solution. This work thus strengthens substantially the connections between four theories: Newton-Cartan theory, Newtonian gravitation theory, general relativity, and teleparallel gravity.

This book offers new answers to this persistent philosophical question by defining the question in specifically Husserlian terms and by means of a careful examination of Husserl’s later texts, including the unpublished Nachlass.

Infamous cases like Enron and Bernie Madoff question whether business is an inherently dubious activity. Honorable Business argues that there is, in fact, such a thing as honorable business, which seeks to generate value not only for itself but for all parties to its transactions-and to society generally.

In all these discussions, the author explains the arguments he is criticizing, for the benefit of the non-specialist reader, so that this work can serve as a ...

From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and (...) warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen. (shrink)

The past several decades have seen a renaissance in Christian philosophy, led by the work of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Alston, Eleonore Stump, and others. In the spirit of Plantinga s famous manifesto, Advice to Christian Philosophers, James K. A. Smith here offers not only advice to Pentecostal philosophers but also some Pentecostal advice to Christian philosophers. In this inaugural Pentecostal Manifestos volume Smith begins from the conviction that implicit in Pentecostal and charismatic spirituality is a tacit worldview (...) or social imaginary. Thinking in Tongues unpacks and articulates the key elements of this Pentecostal worldview and then explores their implications for philosophical reflection on ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, language, science, and philosophy of religion. In each case, Smith demonstrates how the implicit wisdom of Pentecostal spirituality makes unique contributions to current conversations in Christian philosophy. (shrink)

Discussing authorial power, landscape metaphor and the notions of community and sense of place, this explores the ways in which spatial and cultural analysis have found much common ground in making sense of ourselves and the landscape we inhabit.