Berger and Miller argue that contemporary medical education directed toward “cultural competency” fails to address the structural inequities and systemic racism underpinning health dispariti...

_The essential companion to Simone de Beauvoir's celebrated novel._.

Denton and Hockx present thirteen essays treating a variety of literary organizations from China's Republican era . Interdisciplinary in approach, the essays are primarily concerned with describing and analyzing the social and cultural complexity of literary groupings and the role of these social formations in literary production of the period.

IN THIS ESSAY I ASSERT THAT AFFLUENT CONSUMER CULTURES INCULCATE in their residents certain forms of desiring. One of those forms tends to silence the complicity that the affluent enjoy through appropriating the material benefits that come to them through the labor and poor living conditions of people in domestic and global poverty. A prime example is the cheap food that political policy and economic structures promote. The affluent are themselves spiritually stunted through the dynamics of complicity. The essay suggests (...) that contrition is a gift of grace in the face of complicity. Consumerism blocks contrition; that is the operative dynamic here. The failure to be contrite blocks the work of grace in people's lives. However, contrition can slingshot those who experience the Christian vision of desire into a budding transformation which reeducates their desires. Some of those consequences involve a redirection of our sensory experience and an increase in community and compassion. (shrink)

Reprint, in paper covers, of the Columbia U. Press edition of 1990. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Tommaso Campanella’s dignitas hominis acquires its own autonomous and innovative historiographical value in recognizing the connection between mens and religion as a distinctive element of human beings. The Mens is infused in men directly by God and the discovery of the religion of mind has revealed the rationality of Christianity. Only through Christianity the “Primalitary” structure of being is fully expressed and, at the same time, human freedom reaches its fulfillment.

A contemporary of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, Tommaso Campanella was a controversial philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet who was persecuted during the Inquisition and spent much of his adult life imprisoned because of his heterodox views. He is best known today for two works: _The City of the Sun_, a dialogue inspired by Plato’s _Republic_, in which he prophesies a vision of a unified, peaceful world governed by a theocratic monarchy; and his well-meaning _Defense of Galileo_, which may have (...) done Galileo more harm than good because of Campanella’s previous conviction for heresy. But Campanella’s philosophical poems are where his most forceful and undiluted ideas reside. His poetry is where his faith in observable and experimental sciences, his astrological and occult wisdom, his ideas about deism, his anti-Aristotelianism, and his calls for religious and secular reform most put him at odds with both civil and church authorities. For this volume, Sherry Roush has selected Campanella’s best and most idiosyncratic poems, which are masterpieces of sixteenth-century Italian lyrics, displaying a questing mind of great, if unorthodox, brilliance, and showing Campanella’s passionate belief in the intrinsic harmony between the sacred and secular. (shrink)

In complexity theory, both the brain and consciousness are understood as trophic systems—they consume metabolic energy when they function. Complex systems are dynamic and nonlinear and comprise diverse entities that are interdependent and interconnected in such a way that information is shared and that entities adapt to one another. Some natural complex systems are complex adaptive systems (CAS), which are sensitive to change in relation to their environments and are often chaotic. Consciousness and the neural systems mediating consciousness may be (...) modeled as CAS and, more specifically, as intelligent complex adaptive systems (ICAS), where intelligence means that a nervous system can solve problems successfully by intervening between sensory input and behavioral output. Evolution of any ICAS will result in emergent properties, particularly advanced brains. Two processes are involved in integrating experience and knowledge: the effort after meaning and the effort after truth. These efforts are mediated by the predominance given to direct experience presented to the brain's sensorium and modeling processes mediated by higher cognitive functions. Understanding consciousness as an ICAS has profound repercussions in how anthropology conceives of culture. (shrink)

Recent theorizing about the nature of the cognitive impairment in autism suggests that autistic individuals display abnormally weak central coherence, the capacity to integrate information in order to make sense of one’s environment. Our article shows the relevance of computational models of coherence to the understanding of weak central coherence. Using a theory of coherence as constraint satisfaction, we show how weak coherence can be simulated ina a connectionist network that has unusually high inhibition compared to excitation. This connectionist model (...) simulates autistic behaviour on both the false belief task and the homograph task. (shrink)

Our species of hominin, Homo sapiens, is an extremely social animal. We are born with social brains. The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is a methodological approach to social consciousness that offers significant advantages in terms of uncovering and describing the essential structures of our social perceptions and actions. This is especially true in this period of post-neuro-turn social science, because the structures described by Husserlian “pure” phenomenology with its emphasis upon “returning to the things,” performing reductions, and developing the skills (...) available to the phenomenological attitude are in synch with neuroscientific research on the neural correlates of consciousness. For the anthropology of consciousness, the Husserlian methodology allows us to explore consciousness in cross-cultural settings in greater detail and depth of understanding. This is especially the case with respect to the experience of intersubjectivity, the roots of which are found to be part of the inherent life-world that all normal humans depend upon to true their experiences of the environing world, regardless of cultural background. The Husserlian approach to intersubjectivity challenges the discipline of anthropology to move past its knee-jerk distinction between nature and nurture, and its erroneous assumption that human experience is somehow “culture all the way down.”. (shrink)

New technologies from artificial intelligence to drones, and biomedical enhancement make the future of the human family increasingly hard to predict and protect. This book explores how the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics can help us to cultivate the moral wisdom we need to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.

Best known for his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau is often considered a recluse who emerged from solitude only occasionally to take a stand on the issues of his day. In _Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal_, Shannon L. Mariotti explores Thoreau’s nature writings to offer a new way of understanding the unique politics of the so-called hermit of Walden Pond. Drawing imaginatively from the twentieth-century German social theorist Theodor W. Adorno, she shows how withdrawal from the (...) public sphere can paradoxically be a valuable part of democratic politics. Separated by time, space, and context, Thoreau and Adorno share a common belief that critical inquiry is essential to democracy but threatened by modern society. While walking, huckleberrying, and picking wild apples, Thoreau tries to recover the capacities for independent perception and thought that are blunted by “Main Street,” conventional society, and the rapidly industrializing world that surrounded him. Adorno’s thoughts on particularity and the microscopic gaze he employs to work against the alienated experience of modernity help us better understand the value of Thoreau’s excursions into nature. Reading Thoreau with Adorno, we see how periodic withdrawals from public spaces are not necessarily apolitical or apathetic but can revitalize our capacity for the critical thought that truly defines democracy. In graceful, readable prose, Mariotti reintroduces us to a celebrated American thinker, offers new insights on Adorno, and highlights the striking common ground they share. Their provocative and challenging ideas, she shows, still hold lessons on how we can be responsible citizens in a society that often discourages original, critical analysis of public issues. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of mindreading and those that challenge the alleged ubiquity of mindreading. Together, these two kinds of arguments, if successful, would present a serious challenge to the standard account of human social understanding. In this paper, I examine the strongest of these embodied cognition arguments (...) and argue that mindreading approaches can withstand the best of these arguments from embodied cognition. (shrink)

Most recent studies of dual use research have focused on the life sciences, although some researchers have suggested that dual use research occurs across many disciplines. This research is an initial investigation into the prevalence of dual use research in other scientific disciplines by surveying senior editors of scientific journals, drawn from Journal Citation Reports. The survey was emailed to 7,500 journal editors with a response rate of 10.1 %. Approximately 4.8 % of life science editors reported they had to (...) consider whether to publish dual use research and 38.9 % said they decided to not publish the research in question. In disciplines other than the life sciences, 7.2 % of editors from other science disciplines reported that they had to consider whether to publish dual use research, and 48.4 % declined to publish it. The survey investigated relationships between dual use and the journal’s source of funding and place of publication, but no relationships were found. Further research is needed to better understand the occurrence of dual use research in other science disciplines. (shrink)

This paper expands on the notion of "moral conversion" (advanced by Bernard Lonergan but underdeveloped in his work) by developing a typology that uses two "cross-hatching" criteria. First, it distinguishes between moral conversions that have to do with a person's relation to moral obligation, good and evil, and between moral conversions that have to do with how a person regards the question of happiness and the meaning of life. Secondly, it distinguishes between conversions regarding the _content_ (what is good/evil or (...) the meaning of life?), regarding _attitude_ (becoming committed to doing good or to the meaning-seeking process), and regarding _coherence_ (conforming one's actual life to what is understood to be right/wrong or meaning-giving). Combining both criteria leaves us with six types of moral conversion. Each type is then illustrated and supported with concrete real-life narratives. I conclude with an attempt at a definition of moral conversion that includes all types. The article is a summary of Chapter 5 of my dissertation (2008) "Narratives of Hope: A Philosophical Study of Moral Conversion.". (shrink)

Both Ralph Waldo Emerson's and W. E. B. Du Bois' firstborn sons tragically died at very young ages. Drawing from the essays where they write about their grief, I explore Du Bois' "subversion" and "revision" of Emerson's thought by contrasting their visual metaphors: Emerson's "focal distancing" and Du Bois' practice of "second sight" and seeing through "the Veil." I show how the disruptive particular event of the deaths of their sons causes both to challenge the idealist elements of their respective (...) gazes. I draw upon Theodor Adorno to explore the larger lessons of these reconsiderations. In recognizing the seductive dangers of the idealist gaze and the value of the disruptive particular, Adorno explicitly theorizes what Emerson and Du Bois also come to appreciate, in a less overt way, in their moments of loss. (shrink)

Many stored beliefs, like beliefs in one’s personal data or beliefs in one’s area of expertise, intuitively amount to knowledge, and so are justified. This uncontroversial datum arguably tells against evidentialism, the position according to which a belief is justified if it fits the available evidence: stored beliefs are normally not sustained by one’s available evidence. Conee and Feldman have tried to meet this potential objection by relaxing the notion of available evidence. According to their proposal, stored beliefs are dispositionally (...) justified, because they are justified by the evidence one has the disposition to retrieve; such evidence, as a consequence, is to be characterize as available, though in a derivative sense. Goldman has criticized this proposal, by offering a counterexample to the claim that a disposition to generate a piece of evidence may qualify as a justifier. In this paper I critically examine two possible replies to Goldman’s example stemming from Conee and Feldman, and finally propose my own, based on a distinction, inspired by Audi, between dispositional evidence and the disposition to have evidence. Though this proposal differs from Conee and Feldman’s one, I will conclude that it fits pretty well their intuitions. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that we need a better understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the current debates in international law surrounding hate speech and inchoate crimes. I construct a theoretical basis for speech acts as incitement to genocide, distinguishing these speech acts from speech as genocide and speech denying genocide by integrating international law with concepts drawn from speech act theory and moral philosophy. I use the case drawn on by many commentators in this area of international criminal (...) law, the trial of media executives for the roles they played in the Rwandan genocide through public speech acts by media entities insulting an ethnic group or advocating violence against an ethnic group. Each of these men were institutional leaders and were charged with using their positions within Rwandan society to distribute what I call genocidal hate speech, genocidal incitement speech, and genocidal participation speech. I argue for a distinction between these three types of speech, and a difference in individual criminal liability for the dissemination of each type of speech. I also argue that there should be a difference in individual criminal liability for speech acts within the context of an ongoing or recent genocide, and speech acts that can be separated from a site of mass violence. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 5-62, Spring 2020.

In our everyday social interactions, we try to make sense of what people are thinking, why they act as they do, and what they are likely to do next. This process is called mindreading. Mindreading, Shannon Spaulding argues in this book, is central to our ability to understand and interact with others. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have converged on the idea that mindreading involves theorizing about and simulating others’ mental states. She argues that this view of mindreading is limiting (...) and outdated. Most contemporary views of mindreading vastly underrepresent the diversity and complexity of mindreading. She articulates a new theory of mindreading that takes into account cutting edge philosophical and empirical research on in-group/out-group dynamics, social biases, and how our goals and the situational context influence how we interpret others’ behavior. -/- Spaulding's resulting theory of mindreading provides a more accurate, comprehensive, and perhaps pessimistic view of our abilities to understand others, with important epistemological and ethical implications. Deciding who is trustworthy, knowledgeable, and competent are epistemically and ethically fraught judgments: her new theory of mindreading sheds light on how these judgments are made and the conditions under which they are unreliable. -/- This book will be of great interest to students of philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, applied epistemology, cognitive science and moral psychology, as well as those interested in conceptual issues in psychology. (shrink)

Cognitive niche theories consist in a theoretical framework that is proving extremely profitable in bridging evolutionary biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and anthropology by offering an inter-disciplinary ground, laden with novel approaches and debates. At the same time, cognitive niche theories are multiple, and differently related to niche theories in theoretical and evolutionary biology. The aim of this paper is to clarify the theoretical and epistemological relationships between cognitive and ecological niche theories. Also, by adopting a constructionist approach we will try (...) to explain the shift from ecological to cognitive niches and their actual and theoretical overlaps. In order to do so, we will take two concepts expressing loose forms of causation in the interaction between organisms and their environment: the biological notion of “enablement” and the psycho-cognitive one of “affordance”. (shrink)

This essay explores Adorno's neglected writings on democracy in the United States, composed in English and directed toward an American audience, to illuminate a democratic theory and practice oriented around the concepts of “democratic leadership,” “democratic pedagogy,” and “democratic enlightenment.” Bridging disciplinary divides, this essay brings the lens of artistic modernism to bear on Adorno's writings on democracy in America to illuminate the distinctive contributions of a political theory that might only appear partial and preliminary when analyzed through the lens (...) of conventional politics. Adorno's understanding of “democratic enlightenment” resonates with the modernist concept of epiphany and represents a translation of artistic modernism to the political realm. Reworking traditional readings of Adorno's politics and his relationship with the United States, this essay reads him as a democratic modernist whose lessons on the meaningful practice of democracy still speak powerfully and practically to Americans today. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 61 Heft: 3 Seiten: 333-353.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Historicity of the Archive:A Counter-Memory for Lynne Huffer's Mad for FoucaultShannon WinnubstLynne Huffer likes to laugh. I haven't known her very long and I don't even know her very well, but this much I am certain of: the woman likes to laugh. Whether at amusing intellectual witticisms or truly boisterous, gut-splitting observations of life's absurdities, Professor Huffer enjoys laughing. It comes as little surprise, then, that it (...) is the ludic aspect, which is intimately connected to the erotic aspect, of Foucault's work that she aims to rehabilitate in this remarkable, provocative, beautifully written, meticulously researched, and often funny book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory.This book is an unusual one. Replete with the intellectual rigor of archival research, subtle, nuanced challenges to accepted translations, critical historical contextualizations, and complex theorizing at the most abstract levels, it is—despite its own anxieties—an intensely academic undertaking. But at the same time, in one of many of its own doublings (the Deleuzian trope through which Huffer initiates her discussion of Foucault), it is also an intensely personal undertaking, shaped by several interludes of appropriately ironic confessions: of Huffer's own coup de foudre in the Foucault archives of a twelfth-century premonasterian abbey in Normandy; of her politico-intellectual biography from high theory French departments to feminist love/hate relations with Foucault; and of her own struggles with various forms of so-called "madness." Giving voice to a transformative experience of encountering "a different Foucault" in that twelfth-century monastery, Huffer clearly gives an account of what Ladelle McWhorter, in her Bodies and Pleasures (McWhorter 1999), calls "undergoing" [End Page 215] Foucault. Huffer herself described it to me as "a work of passion"—and this is clear on every page.Consequently, the challenges that it brings to us as readers, thinkers, and cultural theorists are likewise intense and doubled—both academic and personal, both intellectual and politico-ethical, both theoretical and erotic, both historical and present, and both philosophical and not. She invites us, from the outset, to work through these doublings and the folding back upon themselves that become our intricate enactments and reflections upon our subjectivities. Again, her own beginning with the Deleuzian concepts of doublings, foldings, and coextensivity sets the framework for the kinds of intricate unravelings, especially of dialectical thinking, Huffer undertakes. The text consequently unfolds on multiple levels and requires a reading that is also multiply attentive and attuned. I take the heart of her project—namely, to begin the labor of articulating a desubjectivating, queer, feminist ethics of eros that will enact a more promising, less "caged" freedom in its resistance to the normalizing forces of biopolitics—to be a critical endeavor shared by many cultural theorists working in our contemporary milieu. Huffer's rejuvenation of the language of ethics in this project is most welcome and my comments today are meant to engage her in this shared labor of articulating a queer feminist ethics.The most explicit and innovative narrative of Mad for Foucault is Huffer's doubling of Foucault's 1961 History of Madness and his 1976 History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Much more than a mere tracing of Sexuality One's roots in an earlier, lesser known work, Huffer returns to Madness as a site of erotic ethical possibilities that are utterly absent in the ridiculously popular and popularized Sexuality One. Her return to Madness thereby constitutes a critical intervention in not only Foucault scholarship, but also in queer theory. As Huffer puts it, "Not only is Madness an earlier consideration of sexuality, but, historically, analytically, and stylistically, it gives a thicker, experiential texture to its subject than Sexuality One" (Huffer 2010, xiv). In skeletal terms, Huffer argues that Madness gives us the story of the great split between reason and unreason that occurred in the seventeenth century: due to bourgeois moral exclusion and the ascendancy of rationalism, this Age of Reason produces abnormality, which includes sexuality within its wide arc. Reading Foucault's writing of Madness in the late 1950s alongside his first love affair with Jean Barraqué (Huffer 2010, 13-16) and his struggles with... (shrink)