Amy Marga studies Karl Barth's early encounter with Roman Catholic theology during the 1920s, especially seen in his seminal set of dogmatic lectures given in..

Imagination has been assigned an important explanatory role in a multitude of philosophical contexts. This paper examines four such contexts: mindreading, pretense, our engagement with fiction, and modal epistemology. Close attention to each of these contexts suggests that the mental activity of imagining is considerably more heterogeneous than previously realized. In short, no single mental activity can do all the explanatory work that has been assigned to imagining.

In this paper, I examine Iris Marion Young's conception of power, arguing that it is incomplete in at least two ways. First, Young tends to equate the term power with the narrower notions of ‘oppression’ and ‘domination.’ Thus, Young lacks a satisfactory analysis of individual and collective empowerment. Second, as Young herself admits, it is not obvious that her analysis of power can be useful in the context of thinking about transnational justice. I conclude by considering one way in which (...) Young's analysis of power needs to be extended or perhaps modified in order to do justice to questions of transnational justice. (shrink)

Imagination is celebrated as our vehicle for escape from the mundane here and now. It transports us to distant lands of magic and make-believe, and provides us with diversions during boring meetings or long bus rides. Yet the focus on imagination as a means of escape from the real world minimizes the fact that imagination seems also to furnish us with knowledge about it. Imagination seems an essential component in our endeavor to learn about the world in which we live--whether (...) we're planning for the future, aiming to understand other people, or figuring out whether two puzzle pieces fit together. But how can the same mental power that allows us to escape the world as it currently is also inform us about the world as it currently is? Ten original essays grapple with this neglected question; in doing so, they present a diverse array of positions ranging from cautious optimism to deep-seated pessimism. Blending perspectives from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, Knowledge Through Imagination sheds new light on the epistemic role of imagination. (shrink)

The puzzle of imaginative desire arises from the difficulty of accounting for the surprising behaviour of desire in imaginative activities such as our engagement with fiction and our games of pretend. Several philosophers have recently attempted to solve this puzzle by introducing a class of novel mental states—what they call desire-like imaginings or i-desires. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the i-desire solution to the puzzle of imaginative desire. The introduction of i-desires is both ontologically profligate and (...) unnecessary, and, most importantly, fails to make sense of what we are doing in the imaginative contexts in question. (shrink)

Does critical theory still need psychoanalysis? In Critique on the Couch, Amy Allen offers a cogent and convincing defense of its ongoing relevance. Countering the overly rationalist and progressivist interpretations of psychoanalysis put forward by contemporary critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, Allen argues that the work of Melanie Klein offers an underutilized resource. She draws on Freud, Klein, and Lacan to develop a more realistic strand of psychoanalytic thinking that centers on notions of loss, negativity, ambivalence, (...) and mourning. Far from leading to despair, such an understanding of human subjectivity functions as a foundation of creativity, productive self-transformation, and progressive social change. At a time when critical theorists are increasingly returning to psychoanalytic thought to diagnose the dysfunctions of our politics, this book opens up new ways of understanding the political implications of psychoanalysis while preserving the progressive, emancipatory aims of critique. (shrink)

According to representationalism, the phenomenal character of a mental state reduces to its intentional content. Although representationalism seems plausible with respect to ordinary perceptual states, it seems considerably less plausible for states like moods. Here the problem for representationalism arises largely because moods seem to lack intentional content altogether. In this paper, I explore several possible options for identifying the intentional content of moods and suggest that none of them is wholly satisfactory. Importantly, however, I go on to argue that (...) the plausibility of representationalism should not be seen to rest on the question of whether moods have intentional content but rather on the question of whether the intentional content of moods, were there any, would be sufficient to determine their phenomenal character. As I argue, even if we concede to the representationalist that moods have intentional content, their phenomenal character outstrips their intentional content; thus, the representationalist reduction cannot succeed. Ultimately, then, I conclude that moods do indeed pose a serious objection to the representationalist theory. (shrink)

Who should have the authority to shape the education of citizens in a democracy? This is the central question posed by Amy Gutmann in the first book-length study of the democratic theory of education. The author tackles a wide range of issues, from the democratic case against book banning to the role of teachers' unions in education, as well as the vexed questions of public support for private schools and affirmative action in college admissions.

A longstanding problem with the study of empathy is the lack of a clear and agreed upon definition. A trend in the recent literature is to respond to this problem by advancing a broad and all-encompassing view of empathy that applies to myriad processes ranging from mimicry and imitation to high-level perspective taking. I argue that this response takes us in the wrong direction and that what we need in order to better understand empathy is a narrower conceptualization, not a (...) broader one. I propose that empathy be conceptualized as a complex, imaginative process through which an observer simulates another person's situated psychological states while maintaining clear self–other differentiation. I defend my view through an examination of three processes: emotional contagion, a process of self-oriented perspective taking that I call “pseudo-empathy,” and empathy proper. Drawing on recent findings in social neuroscience, I highlight the differences among these processes and discuss conceptual, empirical, and normative reasons for keeping them theoretically and conceptually distinct. (shrink)

Exploring the apparent tension between Foucault’s analyses of technologies of domination – the ways in which the subject is constituted by power–knowledge relations – and of technologies of the self – the ways in which individuals constitute themselves through practices of freedom – this article endeavors to makes two points: first, the interpretive claim that Foucault’s own attempts to analyse both aspects of the politics of our selves are neither contradictory nor incoherent; and, second, the constructive claim that Foucault’s analysis (...) of the politics of our selves, though not entirely satisfactory as it stands, provides important resources for the project of critical social theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to the critiques of my book, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, made by Nikolas Kompridis, Paul Patton, Allison Weir and Moira Gatens. My response is organized around three overlapping themes that are raised in these four astute papers: a defence of my account of normativity, of my reading of Foucault’s conception of power, and of my analysis of gender subordination/identity.

Purpose: This study explores social networkers' interest in and attitudes toward personal genome testing (PGT), focusing on expectations related to the clinical integration of PGT results. Methods: An online survey of 1,087 social networking users was conducted to assess 1) use and interest in PGT; 2) attitudes toward PGT companies and test results; and 3) expectations for the clinical integration of PGT. Descriptive statistics were calculated to summarize respondents' characteristics and responses. Results: Six percent of respondents have used PGT, 64% (...) would consider using PGT, and 30% would not use PGT. Of those who would consider using PGT, 74% report they would use it to gain knowledge about disease in their family. 34% of all respondents consider the information obtained from PGT to be a medical diagnosis. 78% of those who would consider PGT would ask their physician for help interpreting test results, and 61% of all respondents believe physicians have a professional obligation to help individuals interpret PGT results. Conclusion: Respondents express interest in using PGT services, primarily for purposes related to their medical care and expect physicians to help interpret PGT results. Physicians should therefore be prepared for patient demands for information and counsel on the basis of PGT results. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, as philosophers of mind have begun to rethink the sharp divide that was traditionally drawn between the phenomenal character of an experience (what it’s like to have that experience) and its intentional content (what it represents), representationalist theories of consciousness have become increasingly popular. On this view, phenomenal character is reduced to intentional content. This article explores a key motivation for this theory, namely, considerations of experiential transparency. Experience is said to be transparent in that (...) we ‘look right through it’ to the objects of that experience, and this is supposed to support the representationalist claim that there are no intrinsic aspects of our experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer some critical comments on Fabian Freyenhagen's book, Adorno's Practical Philosophy. Although I am largely in agreement with many of his arguments about the value of Adorno's negativism for contemporary critical theory, I raise a few critical questions that are grouped around the following three headings: immanent critique, objectivism, and skepticism. My primary aim in pursuing these questions is not to haggle over fine points of Adorno interpretation but rather to consider how these three issues bear (...) systematically on the vision for critical theory that Freyenhagen has put forward. (shrink)

Introduction -- Karl Marx's concept of alienation -- Objectification, alienation, and estrangement -- Other origins of alienation and objectification -- Marx's account of alienation : from early to late -- The alienated object of production : commodity fetishism -- The alienated means of production : machine fetishism -- Machines and the transformation of work -- Marx's energeticist turn -- The first law of thermodynamics -- From arbeit to arbeitskraft -- The second law of thermodynamics -- Machines in the communist future (...) -- Technology and the boundaries of nature -- Material wealth and value : the Grundrisse's fragment on machines -- The strife between technology and capital : the fall in the rate of profit -- Enjoyment not value : challenging the logic of exhaustion -- Man himself as fixed capital -- Class kinship and the redistribution of the means of production -- Machines in the capitalist reality -- Between thermodynamics and humanism : approaching capital -- Machinery as an historical category of production -- Machines, trains, and other capitalist monsters -- Rough, foul-mouthed boys : women's monstrous laboring bodies -- Wage labor and race -- Wage labor and sexuality -- Machinery and revolution -- Alienation beyond Marx -- Science and technology in Marx's excerpt notebooks -- Karl Marx and Charles Babbage -- Machines and temporality : the treadmill effect and free time -- Technophobia and technophilia -- Technophobia and twentieth-century theory. (shrink)

This paper argues that feminists have yet to develop a satisfactory account of power. Existing feminist accounts of power tend to have a one-sided emphasis either on power as domination or on power as empowerment. This conceptual one-sided-ness must be overcome if feminists are to develop an account complex enough to illuminate women's diverse experiences with power. Such an account is sketched here.

The topic of my remarks is progress, but I should note at the outset that I have structured this article as something like a theme with variations, rather than a tightly interconnected, progressive argument. I am interested in problematizing how the concept of progress is deployed across a range of discussions. I start with the role of progress in my own field of critical social theory, and then move on to consider the idea of philosophical progress, and finally connect this (...) idea to different visions of philosophical pluralism. So, in other words, I will be starting with the otherwise and then moving on to the philosophical.First-generation critical theorists of the Frankfurt school, especially Walter Benjamin and.. (shrink)

The Analects appears to offer two bodies of testimony regarding the felt, experiential qualities of leading a life of virtue. In its ostensible record of Confucius’ more abstract and reflective claims, the text appears to suggest that virtue has considerable power to afford joy and insulate from sorrow. In the text’s inclusion of Confucius’ less studied and apparently more spontaneous remarks, however, he appears sometimes to complain of the life he leads, to feel its sorrows, and to possess some despair. (...) Where we attend to both of these elements of the text, a tension emerges. In this essay, I consider how Confucius’ complaints appear to complicate any clean conclusion that Confucius wins a good life, particularly where we attend to important pre-theoretical sensibilities regarding what a “good life” ought to include and how it ought to feel for the one who leads it. (shrink)

In his "Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere," Habermas is notoriously and selectively blind to gender subordination – most centrally, the ways in which the bourgeois public sphere was founded upon the exclusion of women. Nancy Fraser articulated four specific assumptions involving the bourgeois public sphere that need to be recast in order to make the concept of the public sphere serviceable for feminist critical theory. However, subsequent historical, political and theoretical developments – specifically relating to globalization – have raised (...) new questions about the constitutive exclusions and ideological distortions that inform the normative underpinnings of even this reformulated version of public sphere theory. Even if the concept of the public sphere is ideological, though, is it merely ideology? (shrink)

A collection of essays introducing and assessing the work of political theorist Wendy Brown. Includes an original essay by Brown and a reply to her critics.

The global COVID‐19 pandemic challenged the world—how it functions, how people move in the social worlds and how government/government services and people interact. Health services, operating under the principles of new public management, have undertaken rapid changes to service delivery and models of care. What has become apparent is the mechanisms within which contemporary health services operate and how services are not prioritising the person at the centre of care. Person‐centred care (PCC) is the philosophical premise upon which models of (...) health care are developed and implemented. Given the strain that COVID‐19 has placed on the health services and the people who deliver the care, it is essential to explore the tensions that exist in this space. This article suggests that before the pandemic, PCC was largely rhetoric, and rendered invisible during the pandemic. The paper presents an investigation into the role of PCC in these challenging times, adopting a Foucauldian lens, specifically governmentality and biopolitics, to examine the policies, priorities and practical implications as health services pivoted and adapted to changing and acute demands. Specifically, this paper draws on the Australian experience, including shifting nursing workforce priorities and additional challenges resulting from public health directives such as lockdowns and limitations. The findings from this exploration open a space for discussion around the rhetoric of PCC, the status of nurses and that which has been lost to the pandemic. (shrink)

Surveillance serves as the eyes of public health. It has provided the foundation for planning, intervention, and disease prevention and has been critical for epidemiology research into patterns of morbidity and mortality for a wide variety of disease and conditions. Registries have been essential for tracking individuals and their conditions over time. Surveillance has also served to trigger the imposition of public health control measures, such as contact tracing, mandatory treatment, and quarantine. The threat of such intervention and long-term monitoring (...) has provoked alarm and rendered surveillance suspect for those concerned about the unwarranted exercise of state authority in the name of public health. Thus the history of surveillance has been bounded by promise of disease control and a specter of intrusion. In this article we address the tension between the public's need for knowledge as a foundation for rational policy-making and the centrality of norms of privacy for democratic societies. (shrink)

One of the central pedagogical strategies employed in the "Analects" consists in the suggestion of models worthy of emulation. The text's most robust models, the dramatic personae of the text, emerge as colorful figures with distinctive personal styles of action and behavior. This is especially so in the case of Confucius himself. In this essay, two particularly notable features of Confucius' style are considered. The first, what is termed "everyday" style, consists in Confucius' unusual command of conventional norms in ordinary (...) circumstances; the second, termed "deviant" style, consists in Confucius' occasional and sometimes puzzling departures from conventional norms. The combind effect of these two aspects of Confucius' personal style is shown to yield a productive pedagogical tension for the moral learner who would emulate, but cannot imitate, Confucius. (shrink)

To what extent are countability distinctions subject to systematic semantic variation? Could there be a language with no countability distinctions—in particular, one where all nouns are count? I argue that the answer is no: even in a language where all NPs have the core morphosyntactic properties of English count NPs, such as combining with numerals directly and showing singular/plural contrasts, countability distinctions still emerge on close inspection. I divide these distinctions into those related to sums and those related to parts. (...) In the Sahaptian language Nez Perce, evidence can be found for both types of distinction, in spite of the absence of anything like a traditional mass–count division in noun morphosyntax. I propose an extension of the Nez Perce analysis to Yudja, analyzed by Lima as lacking any countability distinctions. More generally, I suggest that at least one countability distinction may be universal and that languages without any countability distinctions may be unlearnable. (shrink)

In modern pluralist societies, political disagreement often reflects moral disagreement, as citizens with conflicting perspectives on fundamental values debate the laws that govern their public life. Any satisfactory theory of democracy must provide a way of dealing with this moral disagreement. A fundamental problem confronting all democratic theorists is to find a morally justifiable way of making binding collective decisions in the face of continuing moral conflict.

This article explores some of the philosophical implications of the Bayesian modeling paradigm. In particular, it focuses on the ramifications of the fact that Bayesian models pre‐specify an inbuilt hypothesis space. To what extent does this pre‐specification correspond to simply ‘‘building the solution in''? I argue that any learner must have a built‐in hypothesis space in precisely the same sense that Bayesian models have one. This has implications for the nature of learning, Fodor's puzzle of concept acquisition, and the role (...) of modeling in cognitive science. (shrink)

An early example is von Neumann's and Charney's Princeton Meteorological Project in the period 1946–53 which ended with daily numerical prediction in less than 2 hours. After this stage, the questions of long-range forecasting and general circulation of the atmosphere became of greater importance. The late 1950s saw the emergence of an alternative: were atmospheric models used mainly for prediction or understanding? This controversial debate in particular occurred during an important colloquium in Tokyo in 1960 which gathered together J. Charney, (...) E. Lorenz, A. Eliassen, and B. Saltzman, among others, and witnessed discussions on statistical methods for predictions and/or maximum simplification of dynamic equations. This phase ended in 1963 with Lorenzs seminal paper on “Deterministic non periodic flows.”. (shrink)

This book answers both the 'what' and the 'why' question raised by indexical shift in crosslinguistic perspective. What are the possible profiles of an indexical shifting language, and why do we find these profiles and not various equally conceivable others? Drawing both from the literature (published and unpublished) and from original fieldwork on the language Nez Perce, Amy Rose Deal puts forward several major generalizations about indexical shift crosslinguistically and present a theory that attempts to explain them. This account has (...) consequences for the way we think about the semantics of attitude verbs, the nature of contexts, the typology of first person, and the relationship between indexicals and logophors, of course along with numerous consequences for the analysis of particular languages (e.g. Nez Perce, Uyghur, Korean, English, Zazaki, Amharic, Mishar Tatar). The book contains numerous glossed examples from a range of languages (including a detailed description of Nez Perce indexical shift, based on original fieldwork, as described above); a bibliography; and an appendix providing grammatical background about Nez Perce. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hannah Arendt's political theory offers key insights into the power that binds together the feminist movement - the power of solidarity. Second-wave feminist notions of solidarity were grounded in notions of shared identity; in recent years, as such conceptions of shared identity have come under attack for being exclusionary and repressive, feminists have been urged to give up the idea of solidarity altogether. However, the choice between (repressive) identity and (fragmented) non-identity is a false opposition, and (...) the Arendtian account of solidarity developed here allows us to move beyond this opposition. Thus, Arendt provides us with a model of solidarity that can stand a post-identity politics feminist theory in good stead. (shrink)

Exemplars clearly play a significant role in the ethical vision of the Analects. However, while they are often treated as illustrations of the text’s more abstract ethical commitments, I argue that they are better understood to source those commitments. Such is to say that the conceptual schemata of the Analects – its account of human flourishing, the specific virtues it recommends, and its suggested path for self cultivation – originate in the people the text so vividly describes, in the unmediated (...) experiences of admiration and appreciation that these figures inspire. Theory is here an attempt to take our responses to exemplars and query just why we admire them, lifting from the examples they provide more general observations about virtue. Drawing on Linda Zagzebski’s’s recent work, I argue that there are both sound textual reasons and important prudential reasons to treat the Analects as exemplarist virtue ethic. (shrink)

This article examines 17 substance-abusing women's perceptions of their mothering practices in the context of a residential substance-abuse treatment program for women with children and pregnant women. Using in-depth semistructured interviews and observations of treatment groups, the participants' cultural knowledge about mothering is explored. Although the women in this study described how their substance-abusing lifestyle had a negative impact on their children, they also detailed practices that illustrated that they felt capable as parents. The women were silent about how race, (...) gender, or class arrangements affected their lives; their stories, however, showed active avoidance and manipulation of the contemporary ideology of mothering. (shrink)

Biological samples are routinely collected and used in biomedical research. As Weir and Olick (2004) point out in their book The Stored Tissue Issue, there are four ways in which samples can be sto...

As bioethics gains more prominence in public policy debates, it is time to more fully reflect on the following: what is its role in the public square, and what limitations relate to and barriers impede its fulfilment of this role? I contend we should consider the how of bioethics (as a policy influencer) rather than simply focus on the who or what of bioethical enquiry. This is not to suggest considerations of latter categories are not important, only that too little (...) attention has been paid to parallel or resulting policy involvement—involvement that will require specialised skills and knowledge that we can develop with a proactive (vs reactive) stance. Moreover, and equally critically, this how of public policy involvement will require more transparency regarding influences (eg, philosophical, ideological, cultural, socio-political) on what bioethicists bring to the table and what constituency base each represents—a humility as to the scope of one's role. In this vision, bioethics is not one single person or belief system for a policymaker to call to guide or give support to a position; rather, it offers tools—formed and utilised by a diverse disciplinary range of individuals—to help guide ethical analysis of biomedical endeavours, with the goal of infusion and diffusion of ethical enquiry and prioritisation in health policymaking, and greater humility among bioethicists who inform this discussion. (shrink)