Understanding how transcription factor (TF) binding is related to gene regulation is a moving target. We recently uncovered genome‐wide evidence for a “Hit‐and‐Run” model of transcription. In this model, a master TF “hits” a target promoter to initiate a rapid response to a signal. As the “hit” is transient, the model invokes recruitment of partner TFs to sustain transcription over time. Following the “run”, the master TF “hits” other targets to propagate the response genome‐wide. As such, a TF may act (...) as a “catalyst” to mount a broad and acute response in cells that first sense the signal, while the recruited TF partners promote long‐term adaptive behavior in the whole organism. This “Hit‐and‐Run” model likely has broad relevance, as TF perturbation studies across eukaryotes show small overlaps between TF‐regulated and TF‐bound genes, implicating transient TF‐target binding. Here, we explore this “Hit‐and‐Run” model to suggest molecular mechanisms and its biological relevance. (shrink)

This paper is about an avian influenza outbreak in South Africa’s commercial ostrich industry. The outbreak was managed according to international best practice and led to the destruction of 30,000 ostriches in two of South Africa’s provinces. However, the industry has a long history of managing low pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks in a different way. We use the 2004 outbreak and earlier approaches to managing disease to shed light on recent debates on how we might live differently with livestock diseases. (...) The paper is based on in-depth interviews with farmers, veterinarians, scientists and agriculture officials. (shrink)

This article is the lead piece in a special report that presents the results of a bioethical investigation into chimeric research, which involves the insertion of human cells into nonhuman animals and nonhuman animal embryos, including into their brains. Rapid scientific developments in this field may advance knowledge and could lead to new therapies for humans. They also reveal the conceptual, ethical, and procedural limitations of existing ethics guidance for human‐nonhuman chimeric research. Led by bioethics researchers working closely with an (...) interdisciplinary work group, the investigation focused on generating conceptual clarity and identifying improvements to governance approaches, with the goal of helping scholars, funders, scientists, institutional leaders, and oversight bodies (embryonic stem cell research oversight [ESCRO] committees and institutional animal care and use committees [IACUCs]) deliver principled and trustworthy oversight of this area of science. The article, which focuses on human‐nonhuman animal chimeric research that is stem cell based, identifies key ethical issues in and offers ten recommendations regarding the ethics and oversight of this research. Turning from bioethics’ previous focus on human‐centered questions about the ethics of “humanization” and this research's potential impact on concepts like human dignity, this article emphasizes the importance of nonhuman animal welfare concerns in chimeric research and argues for less‐siloed governance and oversight and more‐comprehensive public communication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman ComedyAmy RichlinC. W. Marshall. The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiv + 320 pp. 2 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $90.C. W. Marshall's new book forms part of the productive trend towards treating ancient theater as performance. In 1991 David Wiles began The Masks of Menander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xi) by commenting on the institutional (...) divide between classics and drama studies. Marshall, as a writer, occupies the unusual position of being able to speak both as a classicist and a professional actor, with substantial credits in both improv and Shakespeare. His work is influenced by writers in theater studies, particularly Susan Bennett on audiences, Keith Johnstone on improv, and Jacques Lecoq on masking and physical movement. Among writers on ancient comedy, he shares with David Wiles a commitment to the serious study of masking, and with Timothy Moore a focus on the interaction between actors and audience. As a performer and director, he has often worked with Mark Damen and Mary-Kay Gamel towards an understanding of ancient drama through hands-on production. Above all, this book is based in Marshall's experience as an actor; having had the privilege of working with him on a production of Persa, I can attest that the physicality of his acting pops his sense of what happened on the stage of Plautus into vivid 3-D.Marshall throughout prefers complex to simple models: the audience was not monolithic (no "Romans" here), venues differed in nature, the actors did not share a single status, literary influences on the plays were multiple (no tyranny of the "Greek original"). The introduction begins with a satisfyingly spiderwebby chart (2) laying out a stemma of influences on Plautus and, separately, Terence. As Marshall observes, audience members bring along their own performance codes, and "For Rome such codes are unlikely even to include knowledge of the play which the playwright claims as his source for the present entertainment" (109). (That is, to get a laugh out of Strange Brew, it is not necessary to know much [End Page 131] about Hamlet.) Venues for production would have been "found spaces" (47), often (following Sander Goldberg) a flat space in front of a temple, with the audience sitting on the steps, but generally any public space capable of holding a simple stage, backdrop, and seats. Marshall envisions the troupe as a mix of free and slave actors, some of whom owned others, opening up "convoluted situations" in the assignment of roles (87–88). Masks, as he demonstrates, could not have followed any rigid typology, especially (151) when they had to put a face on slaves who turned out to be free men (Captivi), whores who turned out to be virgins, and, I would add, Calydonians who turned out to be Carthaginians (Poenulus). The content of plays was determined by a simple bottom line: "the troupe sells an audience to the magistrates for a price" (83). Audiences were "heterogeneous" (186), and, while performance works to create a "consolidated audience," the "economic and social diversity of the audience itself exists in tension with this" (185); if the magistrates wanted to emphasize "Roman social stratigraphy," the plays worked to question divisions (77).The theme throughout is "flexibility," in keeping with what for me is the book's most important hypothesis: the plays of Plautus were collaborative creations (186–87): they "contain lines that did not originate with the playwright" but from "the collective of the theatrical troupe" (268–69). Here, Marshall persuasively draws on his own experience with improv groups, invoking the lazzi of commedia dell'arte and the shtick of vaudeville (165, n. 10) to suggest how Plautus's plays were put together by what he felicitously dubs "shtickomythia" (193). Speaking here as a translator of Plautus, I would vigorously agree: the register often slips into jokes that are corny (e.g., Poenulus 279), and what is corn but a shtick-on plaster? Even the inventiveness of slave-torture insults feels a lot like "yo mama" jokes, the kind of call-and-response humor that young men in agonistic cultures perfect in verbal dueling. Most... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Current State of Vico ScholarshipDavid L. MarshallGiambattista Vico is one of those chameleon figures in the history of ideas who is so intellectually rich that he can be constantly reinvented. It is indicative of the rich ambiguity of his thought that two of the most prominent intellectual historians working today should have come to opposite conclusions about his relationship to the master-category of eighteenth-century intellectual history: for Mark (...) Lilla, Vico was a Counter-Enlightenment thinker; for Jonathan Israel, he was a figure in the Radical Enlightenment.1 Vico’s fungibility gives reason for pause. Someone who can be folded into all manner of intellectual projects may be suspect. But Vico is more colonizing than colonized and, thus, the diversity of his receptions is evidence of creativity, and not merely malleability. The only way to deal with Vico is to dive into the multiplicity of plausible interpretations and find in them the makings of a new line of inquiry. Vico’s moment of flourishing in the Anglophone world came initially in the 1960s and 1970s, but if the diversity and quality of receptions in the last five years is anything to go by then we can say that Vico remains—especially in Italian, French, and German— an intellectual historical provocateur.This review essay surveys such literature and makes a single recurring observation: the various specifications of Vico’s place in intellectual history come into alignment as dimensions of what one might term Vico’s reinvention of rhetoric. As a professor of rhetoric in a culture that possessed—for [End Page 141] the most part—very weak oratorical institutions, Vico found himself in a particularly paradoxical situation. Recent research on Vico suggests that this paradox worked itself out in Vico’s thought in a number of highly interesting ways. First, Vico constitutes an opportunity for intellectual historians of the scientific revolution by offering a simultaneously rhetorical and pragmatic gloss of the early modern logic of experiment. Second, for intellectual historians of religion, Vico constitutes a study in how early moderns could examine the rhetorical functioning of theological vocabularies without necessarily committing themselves to the independent existence of the referents of those vocabularies. Third, for intellectual historians of Enlightenment, Vico confirms that encyclopedism was not a merely French practice in the eighteenth century and that the kind of omnicompetence implicit in encyclopedic multidisciplinarity had roots in rhetorical criticism. Fourth, intellectual historians of Counter-Enlightenment cannot easily fold Vico into their narratives, in part because his legal works (which have been read as a call for cultural retrenchment in response to early modern skepticism) are in fact an account of how Greek rhetoric found its analogue in Roman jurisprudence. Fifth, for historians of the idea of language, Vico demonstrates that there were powerful alternatives in early modernity to the dominant contractualist account of the origin of language (offered by Hobbes, Locke, and others) that were rhetorical and yet did not emphasize the priority of speech over writing.When it appeared in 1961, Nicola Badaloni’s Introduzione a G.B. Vico was the most sophisticated attempt to locate Vico in the Neapolitan philosophical tradition. In many ways, it remains the best attempt at contextualizing a thinker who is notoriously difficult to situate among his contemporaries. John Robertson’s recent Case for the Enlightenment has many virtues (not least its revealing supposition that Vico ought to be read alongside Hume), but as an attempt at contextualization Robertson’s work is not as rich as Badaloni’s.2 In particular, Badaloni did a great deal to reconstruct the history of natural philosophical inquiry at Naples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Badaloni’s description, Naples was a place in which a strong culture of natural philosophical investigation set the foundation for concepts such as experimentalism and pantheism. Furthermore, Badaloni argued that, although such concepts originated in natural philosophy, they cross-pollinated with ideas prominent in the Neapolitan schools of jurisprudence—particularly probabilism. In the [End Page 142] broadest terms, Badaloni argued that Vico’s intellectual project was an examination of the pantheistic principle that Jovis omnia plena (“all things are made of Jove”) in the domains of law, poetry, and history... (shrink)

In June 1993, conjoined twins Amy and Angela Lakeberg became the focus of national attention. They shared a complex six‐chambered heart and one liver; only one could survive separation surgery, and even her chances were slim. The medical challenge was great and the ethical challenges were even greater.

This is a study involving three HIV clinics in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Manitoba. We sought to identify ethical issues involving health care providers and clinic clients in these settings, and to gain an understanding of how different ethical issues are managed by these groups. We used an institutional ethnographic method to investigate ethical issues in HIV clinics. Our researcher conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews, compiled participant observation notes, and studied health records in order to document ethical (...) issues in the clinics, and to understand how health care providers and clinic clients manage and resolve these issues. We found that health care providers and clinic clients have developed work processes for managing ethical issues of various types: conflicts between client-autonomy and public health priorities, difficulties associated with the criminalization of nondisclosure of HIV positive status, challenges with non-adherence to HIV treatment, the protection of confidentiality, barriers to treatment access, and negative social determinants of health and well-being. Some ethical issues resulted from structural disadvantages experienced by clinic clients. The most striking findings in our study were the negative social determinants of health and well-being experienced by some clinic clients – such as experiences of violence and trauma, poverty, racism, colonization, homelessness, and other factors affecting well-being such as problematic substance use. These negative determinants were at the root of other ethical issues, and are themselves of ethical concern. (shrink)

Val Plumwood argued for a reworking of our concept of wilderness in ways that would both recognize indigenous influence and expand the official "fake" history to include perspective from the Others'side. Borrowing from Plumwood's logic of colonization, I explore how the official history of wilderness in the United States of America is similar to Tasmania's "fake" history. I offer a philosophical analysis of Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in the case of Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823) where the "wilderness" finds (...) its first legal articulation. I argue that although multiple erasures of the Other as found in Marshall's concept of wilderness are serious problems, they do not support wilderness scepticism. Rather, in order to reshape the concept of wilderness in a new non-colonizing way, its antecedents must be clearly understood. Only then can we escape the precedents of control and find an ethical basis to repair the nature/culture split ending the war on the Other. (shrink)

Scholars see Israel as a settler state, comparable with North American, South African and Oceanian cases. But how was Jewish settlement-colonization in pre-Israel Palestine even possible? In the North American, Oceanian and South African cases, European settlers did not encounter diseases like malaria that scholars argue impede settlement. Palestine, however, had high malaria morbidity rates. The disease incapacitated and killed settlers and was one of the most serious threats to Jewish settlement and political economic development. I argue that the exigencies (...) caused by malaria are exactly what fostered Jewish settlement-colonization in Palestine because they prompted the formation of socio-technical arrangements in order to combat the disease. These arrangements included, among other things, people, organizations, scientific knowledge, procedures and larvicides as well as considering the agency of mosquitos and other elements in the environment in disrupting settlement. These arrangements were marshalled by medical-national and political institutions that developed to combat malaria. Only then were Jewish settlers able to effectively colonize Palestine, make their colonies economically viable and make Palestine habitable for future Jewish immigrants. I demonstrate this argument by drawing on archival and library materials that describe the work of an important Zionist Malaria Research Unit (MRU) as well as malaria control efforts in Hefer Valley in the 1930s–1940s, after the unit’s disbandment. Then, I discuss the theoretical implications of this paper to settler-colonial and state-building literatures that, for the most part, neglected the socio-technical nature of state-building and settlement. (shrink)

Marshall Edelson identifies the core theory of psychoanalysis and shows how free association and the case study method can provide rational grounds for believing its clinical inferences about the causal role of unconscious sexual fantasies. "Dr. Edelson has committed himself with gusto, persistence and intelligence [to] a spirited defense of psychoanalysis as science—not necessarily as it is, but as it can be in the best of hands as it should be.... It is a defense that I hope can resonate (...) strongly in psychoanalytic ranks. It is also a message that I hope would receive a warm reception in that wider intellectual world where ideas matter and where enlightened social policy and cultural cachet are fostered."—Robert Wallerstein, New York Times Book Review. (shrink)

Recent debate on the nature of probabilities in evolutionary biology has focused largely on the propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF), which defines fitness in terms of a conception of probability known as “propensity”. However, proponents of this conception of fitness have misconceived the role of probability in the constitution of fitness. First, discussions of probability and fitness have almost always focused on organism effect probability, the probability that an organism and its environment cause effects. I argue that much of the (...) probability relevant to fitness must be organism circumstance probability, the probability that an organism encounters particular, detailed circumstances within an environment, circumstances which are not the organism’s effects. Second, I argue in favor of the view that organism effect propensities either don’t exist or are not part of the basis of fitness, because they usually have values close to 0 or 1. More generally, I try to show that it is possible to develop a clearer conception of the role of probability in biological processes than earlier discussions have allowed. (shrink)

How are we to understand the phenomenology of imagining? Attempts to answer this question often invoke descriptors concerning the “vivacity” or “vividness” of our imaginative states. Not only are particular imaginings often phenomenologically compared and contrasted with other imaginings on grounds of how vivid they are, but such imaginings are also often compared and contrasted with perceptions and memories on similar grounds. Yet however natural it may be to use “vividness” and cognate terms in discussions of imagination, it does not (...) take much reflection to see that these terms are ill understood. In this paper, I review both some relevant empirical literature as well as the philosophical literature attempt to get a handle on what it could mean, in an imaginative context, to talk of vividness. As I suggest, this notion ultimately proves to be so problematic as to be philosophically untenable. (shrink)

This paper seeks to advance our thinking about values and justice by studying the relationship between these constructs at the organizational level. We hypothesize that collective perceptions of moral values in organizational settings will influence collective perceptions of justice. Survey results from 619 individuals in 108 departments strongly support our hypothesis that collective values influence perceptions of both procedural and overall justice climate. We discuss these results, and their implications for thinking about relationships between moral values and justice at even (...) higher levels of analysis such as society overall. (shrink)

Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Jürgen Habermas - one of the most important European philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - has produced a prodigious and influential body of work. In this Lexicon, authored by an international team of scholars, over 200 entries define and explain the key concepts, categories, philosophemes, themes, debates, and names associated with the entire constellation of Habermas's thought. The entries explore the historical, philosophical and social-theoretic roots of these terms and concepts, as (...) well as their intellectual and disciplinary contexts, to build a broad but detailed picture of the development and trajectory of Habermas as a thinker. The volume will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Habermas, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, political science, sociology, international relations, cultural studies, and law. (shrink)

Notice --- Hobbes and Adams as Thucydideans --- Ancient Greece --- Alternative Concepts of the Human Condition --- Medieval Monarchy --- Renaissance Republics --- Founding Fathers --- The Moral Recuperation of Self-Interest --- Other Human Worlds --- Now is the Whimper of Our Self-Contempt --- Culture is the Human Nature.

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

This paper examines the relationship between gender and ethical decision models employed by managers. Subjects completed a survey that measured the extent to which they focused on actions or the outcomes of those actions in determining whether a behavior was ethical or not. The study also examined subjects' reactions to other managers' responses to ethical dilemmas. Results suggest that men and women do not differ in their underlying ethical models, that they do differ in the way in which they evaluate (...) others in ethical situations, and that ethical predispositions play an important role in those evaluations. (shrink)

Through readings of works by Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley, David Marshall provides a new interpretation of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with theatricality and sympathy. Sympathy is seen not as an instance of sensibility or natural benevolence but rather as an aesthetic and epistemological problem that must be understood in relation to the problem of theatricality. Placing novels in the context of eighteenth-century writing about theater, fiction, and painting, Marshall argues that an unusual variety of authors and texts (...) were concerned with the possibility of entering into someone else's thoughts and feelings. He shows how key eighteenth-century works reflect on the problem of how to move, touch, and secure the sympathy of readers and beholders in the realm of both "art" and "life." Marshall discusses the demands placed upon novels to achieve certain effects, the ambivalence of writers and readers about those effects, and the ways in which these texts can be read as philosophical meditations on the differences and analogies between the experiences of reading a novel, watching a play, beholding a painting, and witnessing the spectacle of someone suffering. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy traces the interaction of sympathy and theater and the artistic and philosophical problems that these terms represent in dialogues about aesthetics, moral philosophy, epistemology, psychology, autobiography, the novel, and society. (shrink)

This paper explores the influence of group context on the ethical predispositions of group members. Results indicate that groups exert a powerful influence on individuals' ethical frameworks, and that the patterns of these influences differ depending on the type of ethical framework involved. Individuals' ethical utilitarianism was affected by both leadership style and group cohesiveness. Ethical formalism was most affected by the leadership style in the group.

This paper examines the relationship between individuals' gender and their ethical decision models. The study seeks to identify asymmetries in men's and women's approaches to ethical decision making and differences in their perceptions of how same-sex and other-sex managers would likely act in business and nonbusiness situations that present an ethical dilemma. Results indicate that the models employed by men and women differ in both business and nonbusiness settings, that both sexes report changing models when leaving business settings, and that (...) women were better predictors of both sex's likely ethical models. (shrink)

1. Introduction: 1.1 Difficulties of Approach; 1.2 Philosophical Background. 2. The Context of Early Modern Theories of the Passions: 2.1 Changing Vocabulary; 2.2 Taxonomies; 2.3 Philosophical Issues in Theories of the Emotions. SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENTS: Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Theories of the Emotions; Descartes; Hobbes; Malebranche; Spinoza; Shaftsbury; Hutcheson; Hume.

This first-time translation makes available to English-speaking readers a seminal essay in Latin American thought by one of Latin America's leading intellectuals. Originally published in Mexico in 1957, The Role of the Americas in History explores the meaning of the history of the Americas in relation to universal history. Amy A. Oliver's introduction provides an excellent overview of such major themes in Zea's thought as marginality, humanism, Catholicism and Protestantism, philosophy of history, and liberation.

and was correct to conclude that the way a biological population is described should affect conclusions about whether natural selection occurs, but wrong to conclude that natural selection is therefore not a cause. After providing a new argument that ignored crucial biological details, I give a biological illustration that motivates a fairly extreme dependence on description. I argue that contrary to an implication of , biologists allow much flexibility in describing populations, as contemporary research on recent human evolution shows. Properly (...) understood, such description-dependence is consistent with descriptions capturing different causal relations involving the same population. I thus show that Walsh’s arguments fail for reasons that have not previously been understood; I argue that Walsh’s more recent “Sure Thing” argument fails for similar reasons. The resulting view provides a new perspective on causation in evolutionary processes. (shrink)

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)

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Denying the Body? Memory and the Dilemmas of History in DescartesTimothy J. ReissIn an essay first published in The New York Review of Books in January 1983, touching her apprenticeship as writer, the Barbadian /American novelist Paule Marshall described the long afternoon conversations with which her mother and friends used to relax in the family kitchen. She recalled how they saw things as composed of opposites; not torn, (...) but completed and made whole by them.Theirs was not a Manichean brand of dualism that sees matter, flesh, the body, as inherently evil, because they constantly addressed each other as “soully-gal”—soul: spirit; gal: the body, flesh, the visible self. And it was clear from their tone that they gave one as much weight and importance as the other. They had never heard of the mind/body split. 1This closing claim is surely less than self-evident. Whether or not the companions had heard of the mind/body split depends on the meaning given to the verb “hear.” Certainly it was embedded in their language, however much the phrase “soully-gal” might recombine its parts.Did the split come from Descartes and early European debates, linguistically colonizing all those who came within its sphere—Africans, Barbadians, Brooklynites? Did it come from a Christian heritage, with its haggling over bodily mortality and immortality of soul? Who knows? A first point is that it is still an everyday experience, deeply buried in language and so in the ideas, feelings, and meanings expressed in language. A second point is that the post-Cartesian debates—to simplify for a moment with an overly heavy [End Page 587] hand—were and are themselves but a variant within a much longer received wisdom. Nonetheless, such wisdom is now bound to that variant, which, willy-nilly, does give one set of parameters to a common experience—at least, to that of those of us who dwell under Western hegemonies. It gives them also, no doubt, to many who live within them at once less clearly and more contentiously.I would like to offer a further powerful instance here, simply to emphasize what and how much is at stake in the questions to be addressed. It occurs in a writing by the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, his Palace of the Peacock. First in a tetralogy, this novel recounts something like a journey away from a life of colonial and postcolonial violence and oppression towards a hoped-for rebirth in “fulfilment and understanding.” 2 Early on, the harsh protagonist, Donne, mocks the narrator, his mysterious “double” and “brother,” Dreamer, who has remarked their distance from “the folk.” “Is it a mystery of language and address?” asks Donne. Slightly bewildered, Dreamer struggles to suggest that the obstacle is less of language than of a deeper disjunction:“it’s an inapprehension of substance,” I blurted out, “an actual fear of the substance of life, fear of the substance of the folk, a cannibal blind fear in oneself. Put it how you like,” I cried, “it’s a fear of acknowledging the true substance of life. Yes, fear I tell you, the fear that breeds bitterness in our mouth, the haunting sense of fear that poisons us and hangs us and murders us. And somebody,” I declared, “must demonstrate the unity of being, and show...” I had grown violent and emphatic... “that fear is nothing but a dream and an appearance....” 3Recovery of unity might become a way to defeat political and historical violences. In the next novel in the sequence, one of two self-indulgently whining characters, accused of pining for a woman who has run away to seek education, explodes: “I don’t believe you can begin to see how some body like they born seeking for mind.” 4 For peoples of the colonized Americas, imbued with “the great civilization of the American Indian,” this urge, Harris then wrote in a critical essay, was simply the personal form of a social and political necessity to recover still-living elements of a culture for which “matter truly bore the imprint of genius,” refusing “the taboo of spirituality removed from sensuous direction.” 5 Recently, Harris has worried this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 399-424 [Access article in PDF] Representation and the Body of Power in French Academic Painting Amy M. Schmitter [Figures] Reputation of power, is Power... Hobbes, Leviathan, Bk. I, ch. x Introduction It seems natural, even obvious, to distinguish between representations and what they are representations of. A picture of a dog is no more a dog than the word "dog" is (...) a furry, tail-wagging mammal. Nor are properties belonging to the object of a representation necessarily properties of the representation: a picture of a big dog need not be big, a picture of a dog that resembles Fido need not resemble Fido; even a picture of brown Fido need not be brown. And no number of pictures of Fido will sympathetically induce changes in Fido or any other dog. But however clear-cut this distinction may be when what is in question are pictorial references to ordinary, middle-sized material particulars such as dogs, it is much less clear in other cases. It is no violation of common-sense to consider "representations" of such things as gender norms or national identities or selves as non-neutral in the face of what they represent. The representations of gender norms, for example, can extend and enforce them, can change or undermine them, and may well lend a hand in constituting them in the first place.My theme here is a form of pictorial representation, one found in the theory and practice of that strain of French Academic painting under Louis XIV associated with Charles LeBrun. LeBrun held the titles of First Painter to the King and Director of the French Royal Academy of Painting, and the works I will examine were devoted to the royal power. That one effect of royal power is the ability to command resources and to cause the proliferation of representations, especially flattering representations, is no surprise. But I intend to suggest something stronger: not only did these Academic representations present an expenditure [End Page 399] of royal power, they were meant to embody and therefore extend royal power—even to constitute royal power. The view under examination does not simply collapse the common-sense distinction between signifying properties and what is signified; indeed those relations play an important role in one concept of representation modeled on language and written texts. But to this the academicians added another, more robust concept, one that does not distinguish clearly between the representation and its object.Implausible as this view may seem at first blush, I think it can prove genuinely explanatory: explanatory for thinking about pictorial representation, about how it can operate (on both its object and its viewer), and about its relation to power. But to see its explanatory value demands considering the nature and needs of state power. For unlike middle-sized material particulars, state power requires recognition to exist. Although that recognition need not be explicit, conscious, or voluntary, it must be widespread, and pictorial representations can be a powerful device for eliciting such recognition. Yet state power in general— or at least the particular form in question here—may demand that the constitutive role of recognition be disguised. Indeed many of the views and concepts of pictorial representation developed by the Academy reverse the dependence of power on recognition; they function in an ideology of representation. Nonetheless, I think that certain "formal," or structural, features of LeBrun's works can be explained in terms of how they elicit recognition and constitute this particular form of royal power. I make no claim that LeBrun's works must be explained so: for one, the royal power represented by LeBrun's works is long gone, and his representations do not now have any miraculous power to raise the dead. For any representations actually to operate as I suggest requires the support of a whole complex of institutions and activities committed to the care and feeding of state power. It is only because such a complex did exist that LeBrun's representations could have a recognizable object, i... (shrink)

Providing an overview of the intellectual roots of the worldwide environmental movement - from ancient religions and philosophies to modern science and ethics - this book synthesises them into a new philosophy of nature in which to ground ...

ABSTRACT A patient whose case notes had been used, without her permission, during a disciplinary inquiry on the conduct of Wendy Savage (her obstetrician) complained that this was a breach of confidentiality. Her complaint cannot be understood as based on a concern about the possible adverse consequences of this use of the notes: rather, her concern was just with the fact that medical information about her had been made known to others. My concern is with the meaning and status of (...) the right to privacy, to which the Savage patient appealed. Such a right cannot be reduced to a property right, since this cannot capture what concerned the Savage patient. A proper understanding of what lies behind her complaint requires us to recognise the way in which facts about oneself—in this case facts about one's body—are intimately bound up with one's self, with one's identity, and thus with one's autonomy. What kinds of fact, and thus what conception of the self, are involved in such a conception of privacy need not everywhere be the same; the crucial point is that privacy and the self are concepts which, whatever their particular content, are internally related [1]. (shrink)