This paper argues that moral judgment is suffering at the hands of instrumental rationality and identity thinking, concepts from the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory that help explain degradations in human relations. These concepts are not new, but they are realized in novel ways, and the implications continue to be significant, contributing to human suffering and prominent anti-intellectual sentiment. Working through the shared intellectual ground of Adorno, Edmundson, Stivers, and Ellul, the paper takes a critical look at (...) our culture through the objectification of genuine human relations that comes with techno-rational prioritization. The endpoint of such a culture is the compromise of human subjectivity in the service of efficiency, objectivity, and measurability. Extending the analysis to educational practice, Joas’s notion of situational creativity and Dewey’s aesthetics are proposed as possible points of resistance, highlighting positive actions to be taken to remediate these narrow and dehumanizing phenomena. (shrink)

The sense of agency is the perception of willfully causing something to happen. Wegner and Wheatley proposed three prerequisites for SA: temporal contiguity between an action and its effect, congruence between predicted and observed effects, and exclusivity . We investigated how temporal contiguity, congruence, and the order of two human agents’ actions influenced SA on a task where participants rated feelings of self-agency for producing a tone. SA decreased when tone onsets were delayed, supporting contiguity as important, but the order (...) of the agents’ actions also mattered. Relative contiguity was the main determinant of SA, as delayed tones were usually attributed to the most recent action. This was unaffected by contingencies between the two actors’ actions , showing that contiguity has a powerful influence on SA, even during joint action in the presence of other cues. (shrink)

According to ‘orthodox’ representationalism, perceptual states possess constitutive veridicality (truth, accuracy, or satisfaction) conditions. Typically, philosophers who deny orthodox representationalism endorse some variety of anti-representationalism. But we argue that these haven’t always been, and needn’t continue to be, the only options. Philosophers including Descartes, Malebranche and Helmholtz appear to have rejected orthodox representationalism while nonetheless endorsing perceptual representations of a fundamentally practical kind not captured by orthodox representationalism. Moreover, we argue that the perceptual science called on by contemporary philosophers to (...) defend orthodox representationalism instead motivates a return to this older view, and we suggest that contemporary philosophers may conceptualize fundamentally practical perceptual representations as _‘de agendo’_ representations, a species of representation that has constitutive appropriateness rather than veridicality conditions. (shrink)

Self-initiated action effects are often perceived as less intense than identical but externally generated stimuli. It is thought that forward models within the sensorimotor system pre-activate cortical representations of predicted action effects, reducing perceptual sensitivity and attenuating neural responses. As self-agency and predictability are seldom manipulated simultaneously in behavioral experiments, it is unclear if self-other differences depend on predictable action effect contingencies, or if both self- and externally generated stimuli are modulated similarly by predictability. We factorially combined variation in predictability (...) of action effects, spatial congruence, and performance by the self or computer to dissociate these influences on a visual discrimination task. Participants performed 2AFC speed judgments. Self-initiated motion was judged to be slower than computer-initiated motion when action effect contingencies were predictable, while spatial congruence influenced speed judgments only when action effect contingencies were unpredictable. Results are discussed in relation to current theories of sensory attenuation. (shrink)

The phenomenology of controlled action depends on comparisons between predicted and actually perceived sensory feedback called action-effects. We investigated if intervening task-irrelevant but semantically related information influences monitoring processes that give rise to a sense of control. Participants judged whether a moving box “obeyed” or “disobeyed” their own arrow keystrokes or visual cues representing the computer’s choices . During 1 s delays between keystrokes/cues and box movements, participants vocalized directions cued by letters inside the box. Congruency of cued vocalizations was (...) manipulated relative to previously selected keystrokes and upcoming box movements. In Experiment 1, reported obey moves and feelings of control reflected the true frequency of obey moves, but were also modulated by vocalizations. Incongruent vocalizations reduced reported obey moves, whereas congruent vocalizations increased them. In Experiment 2, vocalizations had stronger effects when their congruence with primary-task box movement was consistent for several consecutive moves before congruence changed. In Experiment 3, analogous impacts of vocalizations occurred when the computer selected the directions and participants judged whether the computer had control of the box. We conclude that predicted and perceived action-effects associated with semantically related but separate and ostensibly irrelevant actions can be conflated with one another. This interference is not restricted to actions performed with the same effector or within the same modality, or even by the same actor. Thus in estimating degrees of control, the mind integrates across ongoing action systems, whether or not they are logically task-relevant. (shrink)

Prima facie, accounts of scientific representation should illuminate how models support justified surrogative reasoning while remaining neutral on the nature of inductive inference. We argue that doing both at once is harder than it first appears. Accounts like “DEKI,” which distinguish justified and unjustified surrogative inferences by appealing to a distinction between derivational and factual correctness, cannot accommodate non-formal, non-rule-based accounts of inference such as John Norton’s material theory of induction. In contrast, a recent expressivist-inferentialist account appears compatible with material (...) inference, but at the cost of abandoning inductive neutrality. (shrink)

Nowadays, philosophers and scientists tend to agree that, even though human and artificial intelligence work quite differently, they can still illuminate aspects of each other, and knowledge in one domain can inspire progress in the other. For instance, the notion of “artificial” or “synthetic” phenomenology has been gaining some traction in recent AI research. In this paper, we ask the question: what (if anything) is the use of thinking about phenomenology in the context of AI, and in particular machine learning? (...) We will isolate one sense of “phenomenology”, namely the sense in which it is commonly understood within analytic philosophy of perception. Then, we will give examples of projects within sensory substitution and restoration science that rely heavily on machine learning and to which, according to us, phenomenology in the sense specified makes a relevant contribution. Finally, we will shed some light on what this contribution looks like and why it is important. (shrink)

I argue that understanding why p involves a kind of intellectual know how and differsfrom both knowledge that p and knowledge why p (as they are standardly understood).I argue that understanding, in this sense, is valuable.

Testimony is an important source of our knowledge about the world. But to some, there seems something odd, perhaps even wrong, about trusting testimony about specifically moral matters. In this paper, I discuss several different explanations of what might be wrong with trusting moral testimony. These include the possibility that there is no moral knowledge; that moral knowledge cannot be transmitted by moral testimony; that there are reasons not to trust moral testimony either because you should try to gain and (...) use “moral understanding” to make your moral judgements instead or because doing so is damaging to your moral character in various ways. Finally, I discuss some “debunking explanations” according to which it is right and rational to trust moral testimony from a trustworthy source. © 2013 The Author. Philosophy Compass © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (shrink)

This article explores critical theory's relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adorno's thought relates to Hegel's. Adorno's apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative . Adorno's allegiance to Hegel's dialectic emerges when he traces the dialectical process whereby enlightenment reverts (...) to myth and human domination over nature reverts into our domination by nature. However, Adorno criticizes Hegel's dialectic as the ultimate form of ‘identity thinking’, subsuming unique, material objects under universal concepts by using dialectical reason to expand those concepts to cover objects utterly. These two responses cohere because Adorno shares Hegel's view that dialectical contradict.. (shrink)

Social justice demands that we attend carefully to the epistemic terrains we inhabit as well as to the epistemic resources we summon to make our lived experiences tangible to one another. Not all epistemic terrains are hospitable—colonial projects landscaped a good portion of our epistemic terrain long before present generations moved across it. There is no shared epistemicterra firma,no level epistemic common ground where knowers share credibility and where a diversity of hermeneutical resources play together happily. Knowers engage one another (...) on a politically saturated,unlevel knowing fieldwhere members of dominant groups work to forcibly maintain their epistemic home-terrain advantage. I use the metaphor of the unlevel knowing field to capture these oppressive epistemic structures. The unlevel knowing field is a hungry place where all knowledge that fails to nurture and sustain dominant ways knowing risks being dragged onto the dominator's epistemic home turf to be mined, coopted, consumed, or destroyed. Knowledge and willful ignorance circulate with equal vigor in this hungry world. From the standpoint of oppressed/resisting peoples, the unlevel knowing field is a minefield, an epistemic twilight zone, which must be traversed with considerable care and endless attention. The harms epistemic injustice produces are not disembodied harms. Repeated acts of injustice weather our bodies, dull our minds, weaken our hearts, and traumatize the spirit of our communities. They create public-health precarities and invite mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual illness into our being. Epistemic oppression is a cruel thief. It is disorienting, exhausting, and deadly. It triggers anger, anxiety, depression, and resistance. It steals our time, energy, and attention away from more beautiful things. (shrink)

In a morally diverse society, moral agents inevitably run up against intractable disagreements. Civility functions as a valuable constraint on the sort of behaviors which moral agents might deploy in defense of their deeply held moral convictions and generally requires tolerance of other views and political liberalism, as does pluralism. However, most visions of civility are exceptionless: they require civil behavior regardless of how strong the disagreement is between two members of the same society. This seems an excellent idea when (...) those required to do the tolerating might otherwise smash us. However, the demands of civility are universal and fall upon everyone, including ourselves. They may seem to require us to tolerate the intolerable, leading us not into pluralism but rather into functional relativism, and also require the powerless to moderate their demands for redress. They also place moral agents in a very difficult position with respect to realizing our deeply held moral values. Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism, by contrast, allows us to violate tolerance when we come up against values which, put into practice, are incompatible with a form of life we can tolerate. Despite the many fronts on which civility and pluralism align, they are also pitted against each other. Only a qualified (not exceptionless) civility based in respect for persons can cohere with pluralism and thus resolve the double bind in which the moral agent seemed to be placed by exceptionless civility. I develop a rule for Accepted Exceptions that helps to explain how moral agents can be civil, value pluralism, demand redress, and maintain their own deeply held moral commitments. (shrink)

Epistemology should take seriously the possibility of rationally evaluable changes in conceptual resources. Epistemic decision theory compares belief states in terms of epistemic value. But it's standardly restricted to belief states that don't differ in their conceptual resources. I argue that epistemic decision theory should be generalized to make belief states with differing concepts comparable. I characterize some possible constraints on epistemic utility functions. Traditionally, the epistemic utility of a total belief state has been understood as a function of the (...) epistemic utility of individual (partial) beliefs. The most natural ways of generalizing this account generate a kind of repugnant conclusion. I characterize some possible alternatives, reflecting different epistemic norms. (shrink)

Western moral and political theorists have devoted much attention to the victimization of women by non-western cultures. But, conceiving injustice to poor women in poor countries as a matter of their oppression by illiberal cultures yields an imcomplete understanding of their situation.

North American archaeologists have long defined their ethical responsibilities in terms of a commitment to scientific goals and an opposition to looting, vandalism, the commercial trade in antiquities, and other activities that threaten archaeological resources. In recent years, the clarity of these commitments has been eroded from two directions: professional archaeologists find commercial entanglements increasingly unavoidable, and a number of nonarchaeological interest groups object that they are not served by scientific exploitation of the record. I offer an analysis of issues (...) having to do with the identity of archaeology that underlie this debate and outline one strategy of response now emerging. (shrink)

This short article argues that an adequate response to the implications for governance raised by ‘Big Data’ requires much more attention to agency and reflexivity than theories of ‘algorithmic power’ have so far allowed. It develops this through two contrasting examples: the sociological study of social actors used of analytics to meet their own social ends and the study of actors’ attempts to build an economy of information more open to civic intervention than the existing one. The article concludes with (...) a consideration of the broader norms that might contextualise these empirical studies, and proposes that they can be understood in terms of the notion of voice, although the practical implementation of voice as a norm means that voice must sometimes be considered via the notion of transparency. (shrink)

My engagement with Dotson’s essay begins with an overview of first- and second-order epistemic exclusions. I develop the concept of an "unlevel knowing field." I use examples from the epistemic injustice literature, and some of my own, to highlight the important distinction she makes between reducible and irreducible forms of epistemic oppression. Next, I turn my attention to her account of third-order epistemic exclusions. I offer a brief explanation of why her sketch of at this level makes an important contribution (...) to the literature on epistemic injustice. In closing I suggest that Dotson’s account of third-order epistemic exclusions has a cognitive bend that limits the resources she might use for bringing about change, and suggest opening up the conversation to include affective, aesthetic or mystical resources. (shrink)

This paper argues that the anxieties being expressed in the UK and elsewhere about the lack of impact that philosophy now has on education are nothing other than the inevitable manifestation of a fundamental intellectual disorder deeply rooted in our contemporary understanding of the philosophy of education. In trying to substantiate this claim, the paper offers an historically informed philosophical analysis of how philosophy is related to education and education to philosophy that concludes by clarifying how any debates about the (...) current problems and future development of the philosophy of education ought to proceed. (shrink)

Food behaviors, both private and public, are deeply affected by gender norms concerning both masculinity and femininity. In some ways, food-centered activities constitute gender relations and identities across cultures. This entry provides a non-exhaustive overview of how gender norms bear on food behaviors broadly construed, focusing on three categories: food production, food preparation, and food consumption.

The “social licence to operate” has been invoked in science policy discussions including the 2007 Universal Ethical Code for scientists issued by the UK Government Office for Science. Drawing from sociological research on social licence and STS interventions in science policy, the authors explore the relevance of expectations of a social licence for scientific research and scientific contributions to public decision-making, and what might be involved in seeking to create one. The process of seeking a social licence is not the (...) same as trying to create public or community acceptance for a project whose boundaries and aims have already been fully defined prior to engagement. Such attempts to “capture” the public might be successful from time to time but their legitimacy is open to question especially where their engagement with alternative research futures is “thin”. Contrasting a national dialogue on stem cells with the early history of research into bioenergy, we argue that social licence activities need t.. (shrink)

Some initial reflections on the theoretical status of philosophy of education suggest that it seems appropriate to regard education and teaching as practices in some sense. Following a distinction between teaching as an institutional and professional role and teaching as a more basic form of moral association, however, some key aspects of this distinction are explored via a contrast between MacIntyrean notions of moral and social practice and more mainstream Aristotelian virtue-ethics concepts of moral character and agency. The paper proceeds (...) to argue that, notwithstanding any and all pressure to regard teaching in institutional and professional contexts as a form of technical or managerial expertise directed to specific social ends, neither teaching nor the moral ends which it more widely serves seem reducible to practices in any such socially defined sense. (shrink)

Narrative and the real world are not mutually exclusive. Life is not a structureless sequence of events; it consists of complex structures of temporal configurations that interlock and receive their meaning from within action itself. It is also not true that life lacks a point of view which transforms events into a story by telling them. Our focus of attention is not the past but the future, because we grasp configurations extending into the future. Action involves the adoption of an (...) anticipated future-retrospective point of view on the present. The actions of life can be viewed as the process of telling ourselves stories. The retrospective view of the narrator is an extension and refinement of a viewpoint inherent in action itself. Because storytelling is a social activity, the story of one's life is told as much to others as to oneself. Social human time, like individual human time, is constructed into configured sequences. The practical first-order narrative process that constitutes a person or a community can become a second-order narrative whose subject is unchanged but whose interest is primarily cognitive or aesthetic. (shrink)

In this paper I look at narrative as a mode of explanation and at various ways in which the explanatory value of narrative has been criticized. I begin with the roots of narrative explanation in everyday action, experience, and discourse, illustrating it with the help of a simple example. I try to show how narrative explanation is transformed and complicated by circumstances that take us beyond the everyday into such realms as jurisprudence, journalism, and history. I give an account of (...) why narrative explanation normally satisfies us, and how or in what sense it actually explains. Then I consider how narrative is challenged and rejected as a mode of explanation in many scientific and other contexts and why attempts are made to replace it with something else. I try to evaluate the nature and sources of these challenges, and I describe this controversy over narrative against the historical background of its emergence. My paper ends with a pragmatic defense of narrative explanation against these challenges. (shrink)

When intense public controversy erupted around agricultural biotechnology in the late 1990s, critics found opportunities to challenge risk assessment criteria and test methods for genetically modified products. In relation to GM food, they criticized the concept of substantial equivalence, which European Union and United States regulators had adopted as the basis for a harmonized, science-based approach to risk assessment. Competing policy agendas framed scientific uncertainty in different ways. Substantial equivalence was contested and eventually recast to accommodate some criticisms. To explain (...) how the concept changed, this article links two analytical perspectives. Regulatory-science perspectives illuminate how the scientification of politics and politicization of science led to shifts in the boundary between science and policy. Governance perspectives illuminate how the collective problem for policy was redefined to provide a new common ground for some stakeholders. Overall, substantial equivalence was recast to govern the social conflict and address legitimacy problems of regulatory procedures. (shrink)

Aristotelian virtue ethics invests emotions and feelings with much moral significance. However, the moral and other conflicts that inevitably beset human life often give rise to states of emotional division and ambivalence with problematic implications for any understanding of virtue as complete psychic unity of character and conduct. For one thing, any admission that the virtuous are prey to conflicting passions and desires may seem to threaten the crucial virtue ethical distinction between the virtuous and the continent. One recent attempt (...) to sustain this distinction -- considered in this paper -- maintains that the contrary-to-virtue emotions and desires of the virtuous (by contrast with those of the continent) must relinquish their motive power as reasons for action. Following some attention to the psychological status of feelings and emotions -- in particular their complex relations with cognition and reason -- this paper rejects this solution in favour of a more constructive view of emotional conflict. (shrink)

It’s been argued that there are no diachronic norms of epistemic rationality. These arguments come partly in response to certain kinds of counterexamples to Conditionalization, but are mainly motivated by a form of internalism that appears to be in tension with any sort of diachronic coherence requirements. I argue that there are, in fact, fundamentally diachronic norms of rationality. And this is to reject at least a strong version of internalism. But I suggest a replacement for Conditionalization that salvages internalist (...) intuitions, and carves a middle ground between conservatism and evidentialism. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue the cooking is a fraught issue for women, and especially women who self-identify as feminist, because it is so deeply gendered.

Seeking to reinstate the importance of knowledge, truth and curriculum in contemporary intellectual debate, this book fills a major gap in the literature and greatly advances an exciting area of research.

The classical tragedies relate conflicts, choices and dilemmas that have meaningful parallels in our own experience. Many of the normative dimensions of tragedy, however, rely critically on the causal and motivational efficacy of divine forces. In particular, these narratives present supernatural interventions invading their characters’ practical deliberations and undermining their claims to autonomous agency. Does this dynamic find any analogy in a contemporary, secular conception of moral agency? It does, but it is an analogy that challenges certain standard philosophical accounts (...) of agentive self-governance. (shrink)

It is central to virtue ethics both that morally sound action follows from virtuous character, and that virtuous character is itself the product of habitual right judgement and choice: that, in short, we choose our moral characters. However, any such view may appear to encounter difficulty in those cases of moral conflict where an agent cannot simultaneously act (say) both honestly and sympathetically, and in which the choices of agents seem to favour the construction of different moral characters. This paper (...) argues, against possible counter-arguments, for a view of virtue ethics which embraces the diversity of moral character. (shrink)

Dream lucidity, or being aware that one is dreaming while dreaming, is not an all-or-none phenomenon. Often, subjects report being some variant of “a little lucid” as opposed to completely or not at all. As recent neuroimaging work begins to elucidate the neural underpinnings of lucid experience, understanding subtle phenomenological variation within lucid dreams is essential. Here, we focus on the variability of lucid experience by asking participants to report their awareness of the dream on a 5-point Likert scale. Participants (...) implemented a combination of mnemonic training lucid dream induction methods at home for one week and provided detailed reports about their dream experiences each morning. Consistent with previous research, cognitive induction methods led to about half of participants reporting at least one lucid dream and about half of all dreams including some level of lucidity. However, we also show that induction success rate varies significantly depending on the minimum criteria for lucidity. Participants also reported how much they adhered to specific components of each induction method, and the amount of mnemonic rehearsal during a brief early awake period was predictive of lucidity level. Furthermore, lucidity levels were positively correlated with dream control, dream bizarreness, and next-morning positive affect. Lastly, we asked participants open-ended questions about why they chose particular levels of lucidity. We focus a qualitative discussion on responses to those “semi-lucid” dreams to explore why participants rate their dreams as having intermediate levels of awareness. Together, the present study explores the frequency of semi-lucid dreams, what they are, why they might arise, their correlates, and how they impact methodological concerns in lucid dreaming research. (shrink)

As is the case with most pre‐modern philosophers of India, very little historical information is available about Bhartṛ‐hari. There are many interesting legends, some turned into extensive plays and poems, current about him. However, it is impossible to determine on their basis even whether there was only one philosopher called Bhartṛ‐hari. The appellation “philosopher” could unquestionably be applied to the author or authors of at least two Sanskrit works that are commonly ascribed to Bhartṛ‐hari.

Can we extend accuracy-based epistemic utility theory to imprecise credences? There's no obvious way of proceeding: some stipulations will be necessary for either (i) the notion of accuracy or (ii) the epistemic decision rule. With some prima facie plausible stipulations, imprecise credences are always required. With others, they’re always impermissible. Care is needed to reach the familiar evidential view of imprecise credence: that whether precise or imprecise credences are required depends on the character of one's evidence. I propose an epistemic (...) utility theoretic defense of a common view about how evidence places demands on imprecise credence: that your spread of credence should cover the range of chance hypotheses left open by your evidence. I argue that objections to the form of epistemic utility theoretic argument that I use will extend to the standard motivation for epistemically mandatory imprecise credences. (shrink)

The altruistic emotions of pity and compassion are discussed in the context of Aristotle's treatment of the former in the Rhetoric, and Nussbaum's reconstruction of that treatment in a recent account of the latter. Aristotle's account of pity does not represent it as a virtue, the context of the Rhetoric rather rendering his account one of a peculiarly self-centred emotion. Nussbaum's reconstruction builds on the cognitive ingredients of Aristotle's account, and attempts to place the emotion of compassion more squarely in (...) the moral sphere. It is argued that Nussbaum's reconstruction nevertheless falls short of capturing the altruism which is central to the virtue of compassion, and which therefore explains its role as a ‘basic social emotion’. (shrink)

While notions of spirituality, spiritual experience and spiritual development seem much neglected in the literature of modern analytical philosophy, such terminology continues to be current in both common usage and religious contexts. This author has previously taken issue with some recent attempts to develop conceptions of spirituality and spiritual experience as substantially independent of religious attachment. Notwithstanding this, the present paper considers whether such a ‘religiously-untethered’ notion of spirituality, spiritual experience or sensibility might yet be sustainable in terms of two (...) key criteria: as a capacity for non-instrumental perspectives on, or interpretations of, the world of ordinary experience; and as a corresponding capacity to identify goals and values that transcend or are not reducible to the meeting of immediate natural or material—either individual or social—needs. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion of the topic of intentional agency has often focused on questions about the nature of the events which are intentional actions. This event-oriented approach cannot yield an adequate account of human agency because it cannot accommodate negative acts, or acts of omission. Agents may act intentionally by omitting to act, but many such acts of omission cannot be identified with any event consisting of a bodily movement. This dissertation is an attempt to develop an account of agency which (...) can accommodate acts of omission. In the course of this, generally accepted views about the causal powers of agents, the ontology of action, the relation between an intention and the act which realizes it and the abilities exercised in acting are challenged. In Chapter One it is argued that causation by acts of omission cannot be explicated in terms of event causation and that the abilities which an agent exercises in intentionally omitting must be analyzed as second order abilities. Views according to which acts of omission are in some way constituted by positive actions are surveyed and criticized in Chapter Two. It is claimed that an agent omits to act by forming a negative intention, but this mental act is not identical to the act of omission. Acts of omission are states of affairs which obtain or facts and are not events. In Chapter Three it is shown that certain positive non-basic acts like killings also cannot be identified with any event because no event could have the requisite temporal and causal properties. Two important differences between positive and negative acts are identified in Chapter Four. The relation between a positive intention and behavior which realizes it is a causal one, but negative intentions do not cause the behavior which realizes them. A person may perform a positive action and may be responsible for this even though he lacks the ability to refrain from doing so, but to omit to perform some action and to be responsible for this, a person must have the ability to perform it. (shrink)

This paper takes seriously the claim that postmodernism has seriously undermined our‘modern’ understanding of what the role of education in a democratic society should be. It therefore seeks to reinterpret this role in a way that confronts the challenge that postmodernism has posed. In order to do this the paper clarifies how postmodernism has now discredited the‘modern’ assumptions on which our view of the relationship between education and democracy has been erected. Drawing on the philosophy of John Dewey, it then (...) reconstructs the relationship between education and democracy so as effectively to resist the challenge that postmodernism has posed. (shrink)

Written by leading scholars in feminist theory, Feminist Frameworks was one of the first anthologies in its field and, in the third edition, remains on the cutting edge. Comprehensive, the book covers current issues, problems, theory, and historical texts regarding the oppression of women. With the third edition comes a new section, "Why Theory?" in Part II, explaining the value of feminist theory. Also, the emerging areas of multicultural feminism and global feminism are covered in Part IV. Introductions to each (...) major theme expose students to the readings in a meaningful context. (shrink)

A famous section of 1 Corinthians and some influential passages in the work of Iris Murdoch seem to suppose a significant connection between the higher human love of agape and moral knowledge: that, perhaps, the former may provide access to the latter. Following some sceptical attention to this possibility, this paper turns to a more modest suggestion of Plato's Symposium that the ‘lower’ human love of eros might be a transitional stage to higher moral love or knowledge of the good. (...) Still, while conceding that this may be so, the present paper argues that any moral transformations of such loves would need to be informed by moral wisdom or knowledge rather than vice versa. However, the paper concludes that there are ultimately deep and perhaps irreconcilable tensions between the epistemic and agapeic dimensions of moral life. (shrink)

In the current philosophical literature on trustworthiness, two claims are very widely accepted, first that trustworthiness is a kind of reliability and secondly, that trustworthiness is not a virtue. Both claims are made, for instance, in Hawley's recent highly influential account of trustworthiness. I argue that both are mistaken. I develop and defend a new account of trustworthiness as responsibility, contrasting it with reliability and obligation accounts of trustworthiness. I argue that trustworthiness as responsibility is very plausibly a kind of (...) moral virtue. (shrink)

Fluorescence imaging has become an indispensable tool in cell and molecular biology. GFP‐like fluorescent proteins have revolutionized fluorescence microscopy, giving experimenters exquisite control over the localization and specificity of tagged constructs. However, these systems present certain drawbacks and as such, alternative systems based on a fluorogenic interaction between a chromophore and a protein have been developed. While these systems are initially designed as fluorescent labels, they also present new opportunities for the development of novel labeling and detection strategies. This review (...) focuses on new labeling protocols, actuation methods, and biosensors based on fluorogenic protein systems. (shrink)

After using descriptive experience sampling to study randomly selected moments of inner experience, we make observations about feelings, including blended and multiple feelings. We observe that inner experience usually does not contain feelings. Sometimes, however, feelings are directly present. When feelings are present, most commonly they are unitary. Sometimes people experience separate emotions as a single experience, which we call a blended feeling. Occasionally people have multiple distinct feelings present simultaneously. These distinct multiple feelings can be of opposite valence, with (...) one pleasant and the other unpleasant. We provide examples that inform theories of emotions and discuss the important role observational methodology plays in the effort to understand inner experience including feelings. (shrink)