In many facets of Western culture, including archaeology, there remains a legacy of perceiving gender divisions as natural, innate, and biological in origin. This belief follows that men are naturally pre-disposed to public, intellectual pursuits, while women are innately designed to care for the home and take care of children. In the interpretation of material culture, accepted notions of gender roles are often applied to new findings: the dichotomy between the domestic sphere of women and the public sphere of men (...) can color interpretations of new materials. In this innovative volume, the contributors focus explicitly on analyzing the materiality of historic changes in the domestic sphere around the world. Combining a global scope with great temporal depth, chapters in the volume explore how gender ideologies, identities, relationships, power dynamics, and practices were materially changed in the past, thus showing how they could be changed in the future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.2 (2002) 194-196 [Access article in PDF] The Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir by Suzanne Antonetta. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001. Pp. 242. Hardback $26; paper $15.00. ISBN 1-5824-3209-0. Memoirs rely on the power of recollection to reproduce the inward texture of experience. Autobiographies cast their authors as historians of the self, combing through documents and old letters, checking facts. In her first prose work, (...) the accomplished poet Suzanne Antonetta crosses the boundary between memoir and autobiography. Interweaving the rough textures of memory with slick surfaces of corporate data, she gives us a lyric meditation on the struggle to become undeceived. Recounting both the facts of corporate malfeasance and our fantastic capacity to filter our reality, she captures the relation between failures of understanding and failures of responsibility. She shows us how difficult it is to accept an unofficial truth. The Body Toxic is a thoughtful and obsessively readable contribution to environmental ethics.Antonetta tells us of childhood exposure to toxic wastes in a penurious and neglected corner of Barnegat Bay. She writes in retrospect, with painfully acquired knowledge of cancer clusters and disease-ridden families. [End Page 194] Her own body's malformed reproductive organs, riddled with tumors, prove spectacularly and tragically infertile when quadruplets spontaneously abort. Sharp backward glances at childhood pleasures; crabbing, berrying, and running through the sweet-smelling spray of DDT, twist us around. Children of the 1960s trail through pesticide as if the weekly truck brought some poisonous ice cream. The mosquitoes thrived: what happened to the children? We revisit these scenes obliquely. Denzer-Schaefer empties its effluent into the bay, cost-efficient Ciba-Geigy rids their chemical wastes through a pipe running straight into the woods, the local farm has become an illegal toxic dump for an unscrupulous contractor. Fire at a nearby nuclear weapons silo has hapless firemen spraying radioactive water into the air. The government responds: they build a chain link fence around the site. A nuclear power plant of the 'old-school' emanates levels of radioactivity to rival Chernobyl. The plant managers assiduously cover it up. This is not some national catalogue of Superfund sites: all take place within a dozen or so miles of a childhood summer house in New Jersey. These shards of a case study are scattered throughout Antonetta's non-linear narrative, piecing together experience, cause and effect.But this work is more ethically and artistically ambitious than the artificial clarity of case studies. Powerfully, Antonetta shows us the inner tangle of toxic mental life: the depression, listlessness, confusion, and self-medication of barely cognized symptoms. Self-clouding toxicity affects both the body and the mind. She fears that she and other family members are not right in the head. How far can she trust herself, and how far can she trace the causes? Is it heredity? Is it toxicity? Has toxic exposure potentiated some family trait? She reads out strings of hazardous chemicals like a rosary, overdetermining all of her symptoms. The distance between cause and effect shields the guilty. Strong toxicity undermines the ability of its victims to understand and act. The Body Toxic is part case study, part phenomenology of altered consciousness, and all too human. A course in environmental ethics could make imaginative use of its insights into a wide range of anthropocentric concerns. Antonetta considers questions of environmental justice, religious beliefs about the natural order, environmental responsibility and property rights, nuclear risk, and cost-benefit analysis in multi-dimensional form, an entry point for philosophical reflection. The Body Toxic is stimulating, controversial, and beautifully written.Many great works of literature signal their ethical intent by fostering a sense of identification with their subjects or protagonists. Antonetta's deft [End Page 195] blunt portraiture expands our moral sensibility by showing us how to be concerned for people with whom we are not meant to identify. The story begins before the beginning, with Antonetta's immigrant family. They are strangely familiar and not entirely sympathetic people, isolated between first generation immigrant cultures and fantasies of prosperous America, clinging to islands of... (shrink)

This is a major new study of Kant's ethics that will transform the way students and scholars approach the subject in future. Allen Wood argues that Kant's ethical vision is grounded in the idea of the dignity of the rational nature of every human being. Undergoing both natural competitiveness and social antagonism the human species, according to Kant, develops the rational capacity to struggle against its impulses towards a human community in which the ends of all are to harmonize (...) and coincide. The distinctive features of the book are twofold. First, it focuses for the first time on the central role played in Kant's ethical theory by the value of rational nature as an end itself. Second, it shows the importance of Kant's systematic theory of human nature and history, and its implications for the structure, formulation, and application of Kant's moral principles. This comprehensive study will be of critical importance to students of moral philosophy, the history of ideas, political theory, and religious studies. (shrink)

In this book, Allen Wood investigates Kant's conception of ethical theory, using it to develop a viable approach to the rights and moral duties of human beings. By remaining closer to Kant's own view of the aims of ethics, Wood's understanding of Kantian ethics differs from the received 'constructivist' interpretation, especially on such matters as the ground and function of ethical principles, the nature of ethical reasoning and autonomy as the ground of ethics. Wood does not hesitate (...) to criticize and modify Kant's conclusions when they seem inconsistent with his basic principles or fail to make the best use of the resources Kantian principles make available. Of special interest are the book's treatment of such topics as freedom of the will, the state's role in securing economic justice, sexual morality, the justification of punishment, and the prohibition on lying. (shrink)

This important new study offers a powerful exposition of the ethical theory underlying Hegel's philosophy of society, politics, and history. Professor Woodshows how Hegel applies his theory to such topics as human rights, the justification of legal punishment, criteria of moral responsibility, and the authority of individual conscience. The book includes a critical discussion of Hegel's treatment of other moral philosophers, provides an account of the controversial concept of 'ethical life', and shows the relation between the theory and Hegel's critical (...) assessment of modern social institutions. The book is nontechnical and should interest anyone concerned with Hegel's ethical and political thought, including philosophers, political scientists, intellectual historians and students of German culture. (shrink)

This paper confronts Heidegger’s critique of Platonism and defends Plato as a productionist metaphysician. Heidegger misunderstands and abuses Platonic metaphysics. Rather than initiating the reification of being (Sein) in beings (das Seiende) and the subordination of nature to human control, as Heidegger accuses, Plato offers us a non-dogmatic metaphysics of human possibility oriented by and subordinated to being, conceived equally as the good and the beautiful. The relevant production constitutes the ethical counterpart of Platonic metaphysics: it is the responsible bringing (...) of ourselves to “presence” in accordance with the measures given in nature, a process that is erotic, progressive, and always on-the-way. (shrink)

Krueger & Funder (K&F) describe social cognitive research as being flawed by its emphasis on performance errors and biases. They argue that a perspective shift is necessary to give balance to the field. However, such a shift may already be occurring with the emergence of social cognitive neuroscience leading to new theories and research that focus on normal social cognition.

The expression "Thy heavens" included for him that universe whose existence was demonstrated by the "Moon and the stars." Evidently it was a song composed..

This Element surveys the place of the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant's overall philosophical project and describes and analyzes the main arguments of the work. It also surveys the developments in Kant's thought that led to the first critique, and provides an account of the genesis of the book during the 'silent decade' of its composition in the 1770s based on Kant's handwritten notes from the period.

Contemporary Greeks and Arabs are heirs of a common empire which ruled the lives of their ancestors for long centuries before it ended at the beginning of the twentieth century. These heirs imagined, constructed and experienced their post-Ottoman nations in connection with the existential crises of the empire. Their national selves emerged from political and military struggles, and were fashioned by ideas about enlightenment, modernization, selfhood and emancipation. Their journeys to national statehood were shaped by the different positions they held (...) in the empire; they were marked by different givens and different circumstances. Their post-independence eras witnessed numerous challenges and faced dramatic crises. They were often internally disenchanting and externally checked by geo-political pressures. But they were experienced in total isolation from each other’s situations. Today these journeys are critically reflected upon by the intellectuals of these nation-states but almost never in conjunction with the other’s experiences, despite their geographical contiguity, significant common historical past, and many shared social mores. This study looks at how these two estranged neighbors fared after they parted ways on their independence journeys in their definitions of cultural identity and practices of cultural critique, and compares these journeys, by establishing links that were rarely, if ever, made hitherto. It focuses on the respective contemporary debates on enlightenment and emancipation that look at the early ideas of independence and progress and assess their fate in the post-independence era to our present day. The study aims at revealing the commonalities and specificities of the struggles of these nation-states for enlightenment, emancipation, progress and modernization. It helps us raise a number of questions about the meaning of enlightenment in these post-Ottoman contexts. (shrink)

Historiker haben den weitreichenden Einfluß eines schottischen Common-Sense-Realismus auf die amerikanische Theologie häufig festgestellt. Und mit Sicherheit konnte man diesen Einfluß kaum irgendwo eher mit Händen greifen als am Old-Princeton-Seminary: Kontinentale Theologie und Bibelkritik geriet mit Princetons realistischem Ansatz und einer der Tradition verhafteten calvinistischen Theologie in Konflikt. Das trat insbesondere 1893 im Zuge des kirchlichen Untersuchungsverfahrens gegen Charles August Briggs zu Tage: Die Ereignisse und Diskussionen regten in Princeton dazu an, noch hinter die iro-schottischen Wurzeln zurückzugreifen und sich um (...) eine Fundierung einer von konfessionellem Bewußtsein geprägten calvinistischen Theologie zu bemühen. Ein Ergebnis war, daß Geerhardus Vos erster professor biblicus der Fakultät wurde. Vos war von der Neo-Calvinistischen Bewegung Abraham Kuypers in den Niederlanden geprägt, die wiederum selbst wesentliche Elemente dem Romantizismus verdankte. Der vorliegende Beitrag berücksichtigt gerade diese besonderen, auf der niederländischen Prägung beruhenden Charakteristika der Vosschen Methode, insbesondere bezogen auf seine Epistemologie, sein Wissenschaftsverständnis, das Geschichtsbild und seinen Organizismus; sie lassen manche Anfrage an seine Föderaltheologie zu. Freilich kopierte Vos Kuyper nicht einfach, sondern erkannte die besonderen Anforderungen, die die Situation in Amerika an ihn stellte. Darum berücksichtigt der vorliegende Beitrag auch, in welcher Weise Vos die in den Niederlanden gewonnenen Erkenntnisse in seine Lehre in Princeton integrierte. Während Kuyper die Biblische Theologie etwa gleichgültig blieb, eröffnete der Lehrstuhl in Princeton Vos die Möglichkeit, diese sich zunehmend etablierende Disziplin weiterzuentwickeln. So wurde Vos' Position zu einem tertium zwischen den Calvinisten in Princeton einerseits und denen in Amsterdam auf der anderen Seite. (shrink)