The first European Congress on Agriculturaland Food Ethics was held at Wageningen University andResearch Center (WUR), Wageningen, The Netherlands, March 4–6, 1999. This was the inaugural conference forthe newly forming European Society for Agricultural andFood Ethics – EUR-SAFE – and around two hundredpeople from across Europe (and a handful of NorthAmericans) participated. Following theCongress/conference, a small (16 people), two-dayworkshop funded in part by the US National ScienceFoundation focused on similarities and differencesbetween the US and the EU regarding publicdiscourse/debate on food (...) biotechnology. A briefoverview of the Congress and the follow-up workshopsuggests what lessons AFHVS and ASFS might learn fromEuropean experience of agricultural and food ethics. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that queer women – especially cis and trans lesbians – have more in common than contemporary fissures either allow for or acknowledge. Lesbians who recognised their queer sexuality in the 1970s have in common with trans women the shared condition of being, in the words of the 1970s radical feminist Marilyn Frye, ‘spat summarily out of reality’. We also share the experience of refusing to accept this condition. I make this argument by manoeuvring away from (...) questions of gender identity and focusing instead on gender’s ontoformativity: the astonishing, welcome and transformative fact that new social realities are brought into being by new social practices. I turn to experimental writing to explore this matter. Through this medium, the cis lesbian poet Nicole Brossard and the trans lesbian poet Trace Peterson wrote themselves into worlds, languages and social orders that refused to acknowledge their existence. Brossard was writing in 1970s Montreal, Peterson in early twenty-first-century New York, but what they have in common, indeed what radical lesbian theory from the 1970s shares with contemporary theorising by trans women, is the insight that identifying with men is expected. It is in identifying with women that we are most at risk. (shrink)

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values, and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions. Volume 28 features lectures given by Bill Viola, Judy Illes, Brian Skyrms, Susan Wolf, David Miller, Annabel Patterson, and Howard Gardner.

Patriarchal institutions govern all aspects of women's lives: their minds, their bodies, and their souls. Additionally, they govern the ways in which women are perceived by others and the ways in which women perceive themselves. (Re) Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women's Experience, is a collection of essays on language, religion, war, sex trafficking, and medicine-the patriarchal structures that form the basis of western society and, thus, are in many ways inherently unjust. The essays illustrate the multitude of ways (...) that women have found to work within and without these structures to create justice. Traditional theories of justice cast it as a cardinal virtue, unbiased and impartial. The essays in this book, however, remove justice from the abstract and return it to the specific: most of the essays use personal narratives to highlight the connections all people share. The women discussed here are challenging the authority of existing patriarchal narratives by telling their versions, and, thus, calling attention to and challenging their own political and social realities. Reflecting a focus on global connectedness and interdisciplinarity, the writers of these essays aim not only to raise questions, but also to show ways in which women are creating new pathways for themselves. Only by exploring solutions will women reclaim justice. From L.A. to Zimbwabe, women have stories to tell about their experiences of justice in the inherently patriarchal institutions of Language, Religion, War, Sex Trafficking, and Medicine. This relevant and thought-provoking collection captures the trials that women across the world face and the hope they create through their courageous actions. Through both personal narrative and factual overview, these essays emphasize that as people committed to justice, women must not simply raise the questions, but they must also explore solutions in order to reclaim justice for themselves, their daughters, their sisters, and their mothers. Contributors: Yifat Bitton, Stephany Ryan Cate, Jo Scott-Coe, Susan Dewey, Carmela Epright, Carmen Faymonville, Adam Gaynor, Pauline Greenhill, Denise Handlarski, Alison Jobe, Marc J.W. de Jong, Jodie M. Lawston, Jody Lisberger, Kristy Maher, Susan Maloney, Mickias Musiyiwa, Ruben Murillo, Annemarie Profanter, Natalie Wilson, and J. Carter Wood. (shrink)

Some exceptional and surprising mistakes of scholarship made in the writings of a number of feminist academics (Ruth Bleier, Ruth Hubbard, Susan Bordo, Sandra Harding, and Rae Langton) are examined in detail. This essay offers the psychological hypothesis that these mistakes were the result of political passion and concludes with some remarks about the ability of the social sciences to study the effect of the politics of the researcher on the quality of his or her research.

(This is for the series Elements of Decision Theory published by Cambridge University Press and edited by Martin Peterson) -/- Our beliefs come in degrees. I believe some things more strongly than I believe others. I believe very strongly that global temperatures will continue to rise during the coming century; I believe slightly less strongly that the European Union will still exist in 2029; and I believe much less strongly that Cardiff is east of Edinburgh. My credence in something (...) is a measure of the strength of my belief in it; it represents my level of confidence in it. These are the states of mind we report when we say things like ‘I’m 20% confident I switch off the gas before I left' or ‘I’m 99.9% confident that it is raining outside'. -/- There are laws that govern these credences. For instance, I shouldn't be more confident that sea levels will rise by over 2 metres in the next 100 years than I am that they'll rise by over 1 metre, since the latter is true if the former is. This book is about a particular way we might try to establish these laws of credence: the Dutch Book arguments (For briefer overviews of these arguments, see Alan Hájek’s entry in the Oxford Handbook of Rational and Social Choice and Susan Vineberg’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopaedia.) -/- We begin, in Chapter 2, with the standard formulation of the various Dutch Book arguments that we'll consider: arguments for Probabilism, Countable Additivity, Regularity, and the Principal Principle. In Chapter 3, we subject this standard formulation to rigorous stress-testing, and make some small adjustments so that it can withstand various objections. What we are left with is still recognisably the orthodox Dutch Book argument. In Chapter 4, we set out the Dutch Strategy argument for Conditionalization. In Chapters 5 and 6, we consider two objections to Dutch Book arguments that cannot be addressed by making small adjustments. Instead, we must completely redesign those arguments, replacing them with ones that share a general approach but few specific details. In Chapter 7, we consider a further objection to which I do not have a response. In Chapter 8, we'll ask what happens to the Dutch Book arguments if we change certain features of the basic framework in which we've been working: first, we ask how Dutch Book arguments fare when we consider credences in self-locating propositions, such as It is Monday; second, we lift the assumption that the background logic is classical and explore Dutch Book arguments for non-classical logics; third, we lift the assumption that an agent's credal state can be represented by a single assignment of numerical values to the propositions she considers. In Chapter 9, we present the mathematical results that underpin these arguments. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This paper addresses weighting and partitioning in complex reinforcement learning tasks, with the aim of facilitating learning. The paper presents some ideas regarding weighting of multiple agents and extends them into partitioning an input/state space into multiple regions with di erential weighting in these regions, to exploit di erential characteristics of regions and di erential characteristics of agents to reduce the learning complexity of agents (and their function approximators) and thus to facilitate the learning overall. It analyzes, in reinforcement learning (...) tasks, di erent ways of partitioning a task and using agents selectively based on partitioning. Based on the analysis, some heuristic methods are described and experimentally tested. We nd that some o -line heuristic methods performed the best, signi cantly better than single-agent models. (shrink)

The many meanings of integrity are distinguished. This paper focuses specifically on how the concept of integrity in the sense of firm adherence to values applies to science qua institution. The most relevant values - the epistemological values of evidence-sharing and respect for evidence - are articulated, and shown to be rooted in the character of the scientific enterprise. This paves the way for an exploration of the circumstances that presently threaten to erode commitment to these core values: an exploration (...) illustrated by the disturbing saga of the arthritis drugs Vioxx and Celebrex. The paper concludes with an articulation of why the erosion of scientific integrity should concern us. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker?s research carefully negotiates the fields of ethics and epistemology, and the places and points where they overlap and intersect. Her 2007 text Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing is particularly noteworthy in this regard. It seamlessly integrates these research areas and, in so doing, turns a critical eye on the common assumption that feminist epistemology, characterized by its focus on the role of gender oppression within knowledge practices, is a marginal field of social epistemology. Fricker challenges (...) her readers to consider the thesis that social and feminist epistemologies are more thoroughly interconnected than is traditionally assumed. (shrink)

Charles Peirce, Mikhail Bakhtin and Thomas Sebeok all develop original research itineraries around the sign and, despite terminological differences, canbe related with reference to the concept of dialogism and modelling. Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiosic “functional cycle”, a model for semiosic processes, is alsoimplied in the relation between dialogue and communication.Biological models which describe communication as a self-referential, autopoietic and semiotically closed system (e.g., the models proposed by Maturana,Varela, and Thure von Uexküll) contrast with both the linear (Shannon and Weaver) and (...) the circular (Saussure) paradigms. The theory of autopoietic systems is only incompatible with dialogism if reference is to a linear causal model which describes communication as developing from source to destination, or to the conversation model governed by the turning around together rule. Dialogism understood in biosemiotic terms overlaps with the concepts of interconnectivity,interrelation, intercorporeity and presupposes the otherness relation.As Uexküll says, the relation with the umwelt in nonhuman living beings is stable and concerns the species; on the contrary, in human beings it is, changeableand concerns the single individual, which is at once an advantage and a disadvantage. Thanks to “syntactics”, human beings can construct, deconstruct and reconstruct an infinite number of worlds from a finite number of elements. This distinguishes human beings from other animals and determines their capacity for posing problems and asking questions. The human being not only produces his or her own world, but can also endanger it, and even destroy it to the point of causing the extinction of all other life forms on Earth. The unique capacity for reflection on signs makes human beings responsible for life across the planet, both human and nonhuman. Such reflections shift semiotic research in the direction of semioethics. (shrink)

In responding to the challenge that we cannot know that animals feel pain, Peter Singer says: We can never directly experience the pain of another being, whether that being is human or not. When I see my daughter fall and scrape her knee, I know that she feels pain because of the way she behaves—she cries, she tells me her knee hurts, she rubs the sore spot, and so on. I know that I myself behave in a somewhat similar—if more (...) inhibited—way when I feel pain, and so I accept that my daughter feels something like what I feel when I scrape my knee. The basis of my belief that animals can feel pain is similar...1 . Singer here suggests that the epistemological problem facing animal ethics is really the more general problem of other minds: the Cartesian problem of how to escape solipsism, how to cross the bridge from my own thoughts and feelings to the thoughts and feelings of any other being. The suggestion is that no-one can seriously be in the thrall of this sceptical problem. The method for building the bridge to other minds is familiar to us all: we use it every day in our ascriptions of thoughts and feelings to people near and dear, and to those far away. And we use it every day in our ascriptions of thoughts and feelings to animals. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel puzzle about desire consisting of three independently plausible but jointly inconsistent propositions: all desires are dispositional states, we have privileged access to some of our desires, and we do not have privileged access to any dispositional state. Proponents of the view that all desires are dispositional states might think the most promising way out of this puzzle is to deny. I argue, however, that such attempts fail because the most plausible accounts of self-knowledge of desires (...) do not explain how we possess privileged access to dispositional desires. I conclude by offering what I take to be a more promising solution to the puzzle, one that involves the rejection of on the grounds that some desires possess phenomenology. (shrink)

Late Tokugawa society and the crisis of community -- Before the Kojikiden : the divine age narrative in Tokugawa Japan -- Motoori Norinaga : discovering Japan -- Ueda Akinari : history and community -- Fujitani Mitsue : the poetics off community -- Tachibana Moribe : cosmology and community -- National literature, intellectual history, and the new Kokugaku -- Conclusion : imagined Japan(s).

This volume presents an exploration of the intersection between the work of Michel Foucault and feminist theory, focusing on Foucault's theories of sex/body, identity/subject, and power/politics. Like the other books in this series, this volume seeks to bring a feminist perspective to bear on the interpretation of a major figure in the philosophical canon. In the case of Michel Foucault, however, this aim is somewhat ironic because Foucault sees his work as disrupting that very canon. Since feminists see their work (...) as similarly disruptive, Foucault and feminism would seem to find much common ground, but, as the contributors to this collection reveal, the matter is not so simple. Foucault, like many feminists, is centrally concerned with questions related to sexuality and the body. This concern has led both Foucault and feminists to challenge the founding concept of the modernist philosophical canon: the disembodied transcendental subject. For both Foucault and feminists, this subject must be deconstructed and a new concept of identity articulated. The exciting possibilities of a Foucaultian approach to issues of the subject and identity, especially as they relate to sex and the body, are detailed in several of the essays collected here. Despite these possibilities, however, Foucault's approach has raised serious questions about an equally crucial area of feminist thought-politics. Some feminist critics of Foucault have argued that his deconstruction of the concept "woman" also deconstructs the possibility of a feminist politics. Several essays explore the implications of this deconstruction for feminist politics and suggest that a Foucaultian feminist politics is not viable. Overall, this collection illustrates the range of interest Foucault's thought has generated among feminist thinkers and both the advantages and liabilities of his approach for the development of feminist theory and politics. Contributors are Nancy Fraser, Nancy Hartsock, Judith Butler, Ellen L. McCallum, Linda Alcoff, Honi Haber, Jana Sawicki, Jon Simons, Monique Deveaux, Moya Lloyd, Amy Allen, and Terry Aladjem. (shrink)

There are kinds of dialogue that support social justice and others that do the reverse. The kinds of dialogue that support social justice require that anger be bracketed and that hiding in safe spaces be eschewed. All illegitimate ad hominem/ad feminem attacks are ruled out from the get-go. No dialogical contribution can be down-graded on account of the communicator’s gender, race, or religion. As well, this communicative approach unapologetically privileges reason in full view of theories and strategies that might seek (...) to undermine reasoning as just another illegitimate form of power. On the more positive side, it is argued in this paper that social justice dialogue will be enhanced by a kind of “communicative upgrading,” which amplifies “person perception,” foregrounds the impersonal forces within our common social spaces rather than the “baddies” within, and orients the dialogical trajectory toward the future rather than the past. Finally, it is argued in this paper that educators have a pressing responsibility to guide their students through social justice dialogue so that their speech contributes to the amelioration of injustice, rather than rendering the terrain more treacherous. (shrink)