Volume 24, Issue 12, December 2024, Page 71-73.

Malm and colleagues (2008) consider (and reject) five arguments putatively justifying the idea that healthcare workers (HCWs) have a duty to treat (DTT) during a pandemic. We do not have sufficient...

We concur with Baum and colleagues (2009) on the importance of pandemic planners taking explicit steps to employ public engagement methodologies. Thus far, as Baum and colleagues note, there have b...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Veterans Affairs National Center for Clinical EthicsJames L. Bernat (bio)The veterans health administration is the largest health care system in the United States and, indeed, is larger that the health care system of many foreign countries. In February 1991 the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.) in Washington, D.C. awarded a contract to the clinical ethics group at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, (...) Vermont to establish the V.A. National Center for Clinical Ethics. In this article I describe the organizational context, mission, operation, and future direction of the Center, which William A. Nelson, Ph.D., and I co-direct.The Veterans Health AdministrationThe Department of Veterans Affairs operates 171 hospitals providing services ranging from primary, secondary, and tertiary medical care to psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and nursing homes. The V.A. also provides outpatient services at all hospitals and at dozens of free-standing outpatent clinics. V.A. medical centers employ over 14,000 physicians and serve approximately 4.5 million veteran patients (Hollingsworth and Bondy 1990; Mirvis 1990).The V.A. serves an important educational function, providing training sites for medical students, postgraduate physicians, and trainees in other health-related fields. Approximately 78 percent of V.A. medical centers are affiliated with medical schools. Over one-third of all American medical students and over 40 percent of interns and residents spend a portion of their training in V.A. medical centers. More than 100,000 students in all health-related fields train in V.A. facilities annually (Hollingsworth and Bondy 1990).Research is another mission of the V.A. Many academic physicians and scientists derive their research and salary funding from V.A contracts and awards. The V.A. Research Career Development Program provides the means for many medical school faculty members to achieve successful careers as scientists and clinical investigators. Although research accounts for only slightly more than 1 percent of the V.A. medical budget, two V.A. researchers have been awarded the Nobel Prize (Hollingsworth and Bondy 1990). [End Page 385]In comparison to other medical care settings, the average V.A. patient is likely to be older, poorer, male, less well-educated, more chronically ill, and more expensive to care for. Many patients first patronize the V.A. system after they have been bankrupted by the costs of a major illness. Unlike young, healthy patients ideally favored by health maintenance organizations, these patients immediately require large expenditures for hospitalizations, medications, and other treatments. Additional burdens have been placed on V.A. facilities by a record of chronic federal underfunding over the past decade, despite expanded patient censuses at every facility.Bioethical issues arise in V.A. facilities with great frequency for several reasons. Older and poorer patients are often sicker, have fewer home-support resources, and have completed fewer advance directives for health care. Chronic operational underfunding requires explicit health care rationing systemwide. Academic physicians within the V.A. system have multiple professional duties that have the potential for conflict. Although their primary duty is to their patients, they also must serve the federal government and their medical school academic supervisors. The practice of medical care rationing pits the physician's professional duty to his patient against his duty to the system (Mirvis 1990).The V.A. has responded to these bioethical demands with several initiatives. Hospital ethics advisory committees have been developed in nearly every V.A. medical center. The V.A. National Bioethics Committee has been empaneled to encourage uniform policies across the V.A. system concerning bioethical issues. Most recently, funds were provided for the V.A. National Center for Clinical Ethics.Functions of the National Center for Clinical Ethics (NCCE)The NCCE has a fourfold mission: 1) to enhance the quality of clinical ethics programs at all 171 V.A. medical centers nationwide; 2) to staff the V.A. National Bioethics Committee; 3) to assist administrators and planners in the V.A. Central Office on policy development concerning bioethical issues; and 4) to study, organize, and coordinate clinical, educational, and research bioethics programs throughout the system.Enhancing the quality of clinical ethics programs at V.A. medical centers is largely an... (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 12, December 2024, Page 87-88.

For much of the twentieth century, plant physiologists considered themselves in an ideal position to study and explain the functions and processes of plants. Much of that authority stemmed from plant physiologists’ long-standing commitment to experimental control and the integration of the physical sciences into biological practice. This article places plant physiology back in the center of the story of the recent life sciences. It shows the development of parallel experimental research programs into environmental as well as genetic (...) effects on growth and development in plant physiology and genetics, and notes that the pursuit of an experimental environment was celebrated as much as (and occasionally more than) a molecular vision of life throughout most of the twentieth century by much of the plant science community. Thus, this article concludes that the history of the recent life sciences needs new complementary narratives of plant physiology with genetics, new concepts with technological tools, and plant-sized scales with the molecular. The history of the ‘Age of Biology,’ as the plant scientists saw it, helps confront the issue first posed by Evelyn Fox Keller, namely that the history of genetics has overshadowed a larger history of experimental life science. My answer here is through a larger narrative of the rise of the complementary experimental sciences of genes and environments in the life sciences. (shrink)

The text- and argument-focused histories of philosophy that we have are mainly interested in teasing out the details of the positions taken on philosophical issues by individual philosophers. But this is a long way from having a historical explanation of the larger-scale trajectory of philosophical development. An empirical history of philosophy, however, examines the institutionalized places and venues for philosophical work that provide a rich, shared structure for the promotion of particular sorts of work. Mid-twentieth-century philosophers of science such (...) as Herbert Feigl and Philipp Frank knew what they were doing—they were creating the space to promote certain sorts of work in venues such as the Institute for the Unity of Science and the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science and, ultimately, in publication venues such as Daedalus and the Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science. Here the engine of progress is the institution-building activity of committed philosophers making a space within the institutional structures of philosophy for their own projects and other projects aligned with them and transmitting these as live philosophical projects to the next generation. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 101-103.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America by Michael John WitgenGeronimo Barrera de la TorreSeeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America BY MICHAEL JOHN WITGEN Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill, N.C.: Omohundro Institute for the Study of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, (...) 2022The colonial projects of nation-states in the Americas have defined the relationship between states and Indigenous peoples by means of [End Page 138] dispossession, as Anishinaabeg thinker Leanne Betasamosake Simpson asserts.1 Seeing Red delves into the processes through which dispossession of Indigenous land became the ideology and systematic practice behind US expansion as Indigenous communities struggled to reshape their place in the new context. The book carefully details the settler- colonial ideology and logic of elimination that permeated US territorial expansion over the Northwest Territories at the end of the eighteen and the first decades of the nineteenth centuries. Seeing Red thoroughly examines the complex context of dispossession by the US colonial power, centering on Anishinaabeg communities, the “mix- race” population, and the different Indigenous people inhabiting this region. However, the book focuses on what the author names “unthinkable history,” following Michel- Rolph Trouillot’s argument that this region, and the whole continent, was conceived as an unsettled territory instead of belonging to many Indigenous peoples. Thus, the text explores Indigenous and mixed- raced communities’ political imaginaries and imagined futures to retain autonomy and territory.Author Michael John Witgen is a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe and a professor in the Department of History and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. His research centers on the complex relations between Indigenous people and settler colonizers in the Great Lakes and the Northwest Territories. Seeing Red expands his previous analysis of race, ethnicity, and citizenship intersections, bringing to the fore Indigenous people’s history to rethink the statemaking process in the United States.This book’s pages show that theft lies at the foundation of wealth transfer from Indigenous territories to the United States government and white citizens. The white settler ideology, based on a “doctrine of discovery,” established a stark division between the civilized and uncivilized to rationalize, among other things, the theft of Indigenous people. This is a central argument of the book that signals how the civili zation project underpinning the territorial expansion of the United States was based on the transformation of commons into private property. Indigenous land became critical in the “political economy of plunder” advanced by the state and the meaning of “native” as a racial categorization of exclusion. Chapter 1 explores this economy of plunder by detailing the advancement of the settler frontier through different [End Page 139] mechanisms, such as the treaty policy— subsequently violated by the state— and territory surveying to make land legible for the state and cheap for settlers. It is worth mentioning that the book contains historical and thematic maps that visually represent the ideology of wilderness behind the colonization project and evidence of the territorial extent of dispossession suffered by Indigenous communities. However, this crusade to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their territory also rested on the national mythology that strengthened the trope of Indigenous vanishing. The author shows how during the years of the study, the Indigenous population was not vanishing but immersed in an intricate social world and transregional trade networks. Chapter 2 explores such context, following the story of an Ojibwe man to evidence the context in which settlers and federal officials relied on Indigenous customs to profit from the fur trade while using ties with communities to further land cessions.Mix- race families played a crucial role in expanding the settler frontier through treaty negotiations but remained marginalized as they identified themselves as both Natives and US citizens. Chapter 3 examines the significance of mixed- raced families, particularly women, in establishing and expanding missions’ schools that relied on their domestic and linguistic labor. Moreover, it shows the intricate landscape of the civilization mission that depended on the complex networks that had created... (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 2, February 2025, Page 1-2.

Volume 24, Issue 7, July 2024, Page 104-106.

In 1934 Alonzo Church, Kurt Gödei, S. C. Kleene, and J. B. Rosser were all to be found in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1936 Church founded The Journal of Symbolic Logic. Shortly thereafter Alan Turing arrived for a two year visit. The United States had become a world center for cutting-edge research in mathematical logic. In this brief survey1 we shall examine some of the writings of American logicians during the 1920s, a period of important beginnings and remarkable (...) insights as well as of confused gropings.The publication of Whitehead and Russell's monumental Principia Mathematica [18] during the years 1910-1913 provided the basis for much of the research that was to follow. It also provided the basis for confusion that remained a factor during the period we are discussing. In 1908, Henri Poincaré, a famous skeptic where mathematical logic was concerned, wrote pointedly :It is difficult to admit that the word if acquires, when written ⊃, a virtue it did not possess when written if.Principia provided no very convincing answer to Poincaré. Indeed the fact that the authors of Principia saw fit to place their first two “primitive propositions”*1.1: Anything implied by a true proposition is true.*1.2: ⊢ p ⋁ p ⊃ punder one and the same heading suggest that they had thought of what they were doing as just such a translation as Poincare had derided. (shrink)

With the rise of place-based models of education, credence needs to be given to epistemological traditions that curate individual understandings of and relations to the social world (i.e., places). The epistemological traditions that have been shared across generations of North American settler colonialists are at the center of this article. The dominant epistemology of settler society provides racialized, anthropocentric, and capitalistic understandings of places. Relations to place are cultivated through particular conceptions of nature, private property, and (...) personhood, which remain at the epistemic foundation of Western society. These conceptions are concomitant to modes of domination like white supremacy and settler colonialism, and ultimately constitute an ideal white male settler actor. This article suggests that place-based education carries the potential to offer epistemic resistance to domination, but first needs to engage in a more comprehensive understanding of settler traditions of place. (shrink)

This well crafted volume provides unflinching assessments of the philosophical values that are beginning to unite - and that continue to divide - the cultures of America and Europe. Its contributors offer arguments that are once timely, provocative, and accessible. - Larry A. Hickman, The Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale IL American and European Values is a far richer book than a misreading of its title might suggest: it is truly a both (American)-and (...) (European), not an either-or. The perspectives of its contributors range over time and place, from the anarchic California of Gold Rush days to modern Poland, Russia, and Turkey. Eclectic in the best sense of that word, it combines philosophy, literature, history, and even religion without ever straying far from its central theme. And, somewhat incidentally, it also demonstrates just how multifaceted and complex is the idea of pragmatism. - William McBride, Ph.D. is Arthur G. Hansen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, Indiana. (shrink)

Before the Department of Homeland Security instituted the Migrant Protection Protocols in January 2019, as many as 1,000 Central American refugees passed each day through Catholic Charities’ Humanitarian Respite Center, where they received food, clothing, a shower, toiletries, and sandwiches for the road. Sister Norma Pimentel founded the Humanitarian Respite Center in 2014 to “restore human dignity” to refugees who had been degraded and vilified during their dangerous journeys north, not least by way of their processing by (...) the US government. Sister Norma has inspired countless people, including me, to engage with the community as a form of place-based philosophical activism, that is, of situated and engaged teaching, scholarship, and service. In this essay I read Sister Norma as a feminist pragmatist in the historical and philosophical lineage of Jane Addams, and I aim to provide an example of how a feminist-pragmatist approach can support and encourage philosophical activism in our communities. Feminist scholars can learn from feminist pragmatism the importance of “being-with,” “sympathetic understanding,” and “a larger social impulse.” Feminist pragmatism encourages academics to become place-based philosophical activists who use their teaching, research, and service in order to press for social justice. (shrink)

"Sovereignty or submission: Restoring national identity in the spirit of liberty," a symposium organized by The New Criterion and the Center for American Greatness, took place on October 16, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Participants were Michael Anton, David Azerrad, Chris Buskirk, Tucker Carlson, Angelo M. Codevilla, John Fonte, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Daniel McCarthy, Balázs Orbán, John O'Sullivan, James Piereson, and Kiron Skinner. Discussion revolved around earlier versions of the essays presented in this book.

In some views, philosophy’s glory days in bioethics are over. While philosophers were especially important in the early days of the field, so the argument goes, the majority of the work in bioethics today involves the “simple” application of existing philosophical principles or concepts, as well as empirical work in bioethics. Here, we address this view head on and ask: What is the role of philosophy in bioethics today? This paper has three specific aims: (1) to respond to skeptics and (...) make the case that philosophy and philosophers still have a very important and meaningful role to play in contemporary bioethics, (2) to discuss some of the current challenges to the meaningful integration of philosophy and bioethics, and (3) to make suggestions for what needs to happen in order for the two fields to stay richly connected. We outline how bioethics center directors, funders, and philosopher bioethicists can help. (shrink)

Judaism is one of the oldest surviving religious traditions in the world. The Jews, who base their history on Abraham and his son Isaac, began to be called religion with Moses. The Jews, who lived their golden age in and around Jerusalem during the David and Solomon periods, also built the Temple, which was at the center of their religious life. The Jews, who rebuilt the Temple during the Babylonian exile and subsequently Ezra's reign, lived in these lands until (...) the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 AD. The statelessness that started after the destruction of the temple had an important place in the Jewish identity. The exile life, which continued for two thousand years, caused the Jews to go to different parts of the world and live there. In this period, which is expressed as the period of exile, Jews lived in many regions such as Africa, Anatolia, Europe and America. The arrival of the Jews in the Americas dates back to the Columbus era. Jews were present in South America and subsequently in the British colonies. Currently, most of the Jews in the world live in the USA. Among the Jews who went to the Americas, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews constitute the majority. However, in the Americas, Jews have formed different groups over time. These include groups such as Conservative, Orthodox, Reformist, and Reconstructionist. Jewish groups formed by African-Americans also have a special place among these formations. These African-American Jews in the USA, are discussed within the framework of this article. In the article, firstly, a piece of brief information about Judaism in America was given, and then the relations between Blacks and Jews were discussed. Afterward, the main features of these formations, which are of African origin and consider themselves the descendants of the Israelites, are emphasized. Finally, the Jewish groups established by Black Jews were contacted and if they had different practices and beliefs from the others, they were included. The research was carried out based on the literature review and information was given about the prominent black Jewish groups. (shrink)

The focus of my article is a unique place, the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, which connects Yiddish culture with the American one, the experience of the Holocaust with the descendants of the survivors, and a modern idea of Jewishness with the context of American postmodernity. Created in the 1980s, in the mind of a young and enthusiastic student Aaron Lansky, the Yiddish Book Center throughout the years has become a unique place on the (...) class='Hi'>American cultural map. Traversing the continents and crossing borders, Lansky and his co-workers for over thirty years have been saving Yiddish language books from extinction. The Center, however, has long stopped to be merely a storage house for the collection, but instead has grown into a vibrant hub of Yiddishkeit in the United States. Its employees do not only collect, distribute, digitalize and post online the forgotten volumes, but also engage in diverse activities, scholarly and cultural, that promote the survival of the tradition connected with Yiddish culture. They educate, offering internships and fellowships to students interested in learning Yiddish from across the world, translate, publish, and exhibit Yiddish language materials, in this way finding new users for the language whose speakers were virtually annihilated by the Holocaust. To honour their legacy, a separate project is aimed at conducting video interviews that record life testimonies of the speakers of Yiddish. Aaron Lansky’s 2004 memoir, Outwitting History, provides an interesting insight into the complexities of his arduous life mission. Today, the Center lives its own unique life, serving the world of academia and Yiddishkeit enthusiasts alike. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation by Jason DemersKenneth SurinDemers, Jason. The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation. University of Toronto Press, 2019. 218pp.This most welcome book gets off on the right foot by eschewing such problematic terms as “post-structuralism” or “French theory” in studying the work of French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and (...) Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. These terms are of a strictly Anglo-Atlantic provenance, a convenient but misleading encapsulation that facilitated their journey or translation into the Anglo-Atlantic world. Instead, Demers prefers to view this transmission as an ensemble of relays between “people, groups, places, ideas, and moments in time” (3), as well as codes; metalanguages; markets for symbolic capital, a notion derived from Pierre Bourdieu; and “networks of feeling” (5n), a term the author borrowed from Raymond Williams. Demers observes, for example, that there was a relay or “mutual implication” (5) between Paris and Columbia University, which occurred in the aftermath of the events of May ’68, that recalled a somewhat earlier circuit, also leading to Paris, which involved the mid-1960s Berkeley free speech movement. To approach the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and Foucault by resorting to terms such as “post-structuralism” or “French theory” severs them from the crucial relays and circuits constituting the complex and highly mobile transpositions of their work to an American intellectual and political milieu, and vice versa, and it is clear that Demers views, quite rightly, that the political and the intellectual are inextricably bound up with each other.Demers acknowledges his debt here to the versions of assemblage theory formulated in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory and A New Philosophy of Society, and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Buttressing these texts for Demers is the work of catalytic significance undertaken by Deleuze and Guattari on assemblages/ensembles. The supervening context for these processes of transmission between France and the Anglo-American world is the global May ’68.Demers’s first chapter deals with Derrida and the notions of translation and margins in order to delineate and analyze the “contiguous [End Page 127] relationship between campus and community” (12). The difficulty Demers grasps here is that Derrida’s work on the place of philosophy, already premised on the defining notion that there is no “we” in the philosophical domain, is rooted in the French educational system, and so is deracinated, inevitably, by its movement out of France into the Anglo-Atlantic world. After seeking to account for the implications of this uprooting, Demers shows convincingly how the later Derrida moved (somewhat) away from the political evasiveness of his earlier writings. Taking Derrida’s “The Ends of Man” as his focus, Demers understands the essay as an attempt to translate the intellectual and practical work being done on the academic and political margins of the university into a properly philosophical position (“deconstruction”) with regard to the logic of margins and centers extending beyond the university. At this point Demers makes two criticisms of Derrida. First, while Derrida’s philosophy pivots on an ever-expanding democracy-to-come, the richness and intricacies of the margins – the very resources created there to disrupt the established centers – have little place in his reflections. Derrida caters to iconic figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela, who serve as powerful cryptograms for his thinking, but hardly more than that. This stems from a second problem associated with Derrida’s deconstructive positions, namely, that apart from making theoretical moves acclamatory of those positioned on the margins, albeit in relation to a deconstructed and displaced center held in an endless abeyance, it also leaves the Derridean Other in a situation of debilitating indeterminacy – the infinite deferral of Derrida’s différance and the à venir purports to be redemptive, but is ultimately incapacitating. Derrida’s eschatology always trumps his politics. In fact, in his theoretical and practical “spaces,” Derrida’s cat seems to have the same discursive status as Mandela. Demers, and I suspect he may agree with... (shrink)

"The extensive attention devoted to abortion has led Christians for too long to overlook much of the exploding bioethics agenda. Moreover, to focus only on 'issues' is to fail to address the profound changes taking place in the very nature of the medical profession. This book signals the commitment of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity to help expand the church's bioethical vision and to foster a more substantial Christian contribution to the public debate."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided (...) by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Ernst Mayr''s contributions to 20th century biology extend far beyond his defense of certain elements in evolutionary theory. At the center of mid-century efforts in American evolutionary studies to build large research communities, Mayr spearheaded campaigns to create a Society for the Study of Evolution and a dedicated journal,Evolution, in 1946. Begun to offset the prominence ofDrosophila biology and evolutionary genetics, these campaigns changed course repeatedly, as impediments appeared, tactics shifted, and compromises built a growing coalition of support. (...) Preserved, however, were designs to balance the community and journal with careful equation of status and explicit partitioning of responsibilities within the working coalition. Choice terms such as cooperation and unity carried a strong political message. Mayr''s editorship ofEvolution provides a superb example of these balancing efforts. The mid-century infrastructural activities described herein also represented aggressive attempts to leverage control across several layers of community. Leaders of these campaigns sought: (1) to promote evolutionary studies as a modernized research discipline and place it at the center of American biology, (2) to promote evolutionary studies within existing disciplines — e.g. systematics, genetics, and paleontology, (3) to foster certain research styles within evolutionary studies, and (4) to emphasize certain solutions to prominent research questions. Throughout, Mayr interjected his priorities, tactics and energy. (shrink)

Recent histories of American jurisprudence tend to ignore the fact that ideas that appeared in the United States often appeared simultaneously in Europe. Even those works that do not ignore the European context are content with tracing the influence or reception of European thought in America. This article suggests that another possible approach is to compare jurisprudential developments in the United States, Europe, and other places in order to reach more general, sociology-of-knowledge-like insights into the reasons why certain (...) ideas appear at certain times and places. One concrete example is discussed: the rise of an interest in the distinction between formal and "living" law in American and European jurisprudence in the first decade of the twentieth century. This distinction was central to the work of Roscoe Pound in the United States and the work of the Austro-Hungarian legal thinker Eugen Ehrlich. Pound and Ehrlich shared similar personal backgrounds. When they began advocating the study of informal law, both Pound and Ehrlich were teaching law in provincial towns situated on the frontiers of empires. Both towns were marginal places where different cultures clashed and where the legal culture of the center of the empire had only a tenuous hold. Scholars working in such an environment, it is argued, would tend to be more aware of the gap between formal state law and the actual norms governing the daily lives of people than scholars working at the center of an empire. The article offers additional support for this argument by looking at the scholarship of Guido Tedeschi, an Italian-Israeli legal scholar who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1940s. The article concludes by calling for the study of the history of American jurisprudence from a comparative perspective, taking into account such issues as the interaction between center and periphery and between empire and provinces in more than one national context. (shrink)

This article shows that William E. Connolly’s work holds resources for projects of racial justice but must be revised to fully meet the challenge of racial inequality. There are two interrelated problems in Connolly’s theory: first, the drive to destabilize identity, for which he argues, rejects the need for collective identity, which is necessary in democratic politics. Furthermore, because domination renders identity unstable, the call to destabilize identity places too great a burden on already marginalized groups. The problem of (...) destabilizing identity is underwritten by a second problem: the white working class and its grievances occupy too important a position in Connolly’s analysis. This article uses insights provided by James Baldwin to amend Connolly’s contributions. The article argues that there is a need to destabilize the ‘we’ of American politics that allows white, male identity to occupy the ‘heart’ of liberal democracy. Baldwin’s insights help solve the problem of the ‘black hole’ at the center of liberal democracy which, Connolly argues, sustains fundamentalism and racial injustice. This article’s contribution is to amend Connolly’s work to meet the challenge of racial injustice, offer a novel reading of the place of political imagination in Baldwin’s work, and show how political imagination adds depth to conversations about democracy, racial justice, and pluralism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:129 Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race BY GENEVIEVE CARPIO Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019 REVIEWED BY JARED FRIESEN In Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race, Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies Genevieve Carpio systematically uncovers several of the insidious forms that power takes in order to construct racial inequality. Settlement, mobility, and immobility have served to draw distinctions (...) between Latino/a, Indigenous, Asian, African Americans and white populations in the inland Southern California region. Carpio produced abundant evidence to bolster these statements through interdisciplinary methodological practices, such as “reinterpreting and recovering history” through archival research, analysis of oral history projects, and the examination of both photographic records and the built environment (14). Collisions at the Crossroads begins with a recent example of how mobility and the social construction of place, or “place making” were used to exclude Latino/a residents from participating in the celebration of the Route 66 heritage of the area. In an effort to protect the authenticity of the event, organizers of the Rendezvous festival implemented a ban on lowriders, thus sanitizing the event of Mexican cruising culture that has been a part of the complex multiracial history of the region. This moment is only one of the latest in the history of inland Southern California reaching back to the arrival of white migrants in the form of the Riverside colony to a region composed of Indigenous and Mexican Book Reviews ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 13 / ISSUE 2 / 2021 130 American communities. The book lays bare how “the concept of mobility particularly applies to the everyday channels of movement in a community, especially for Indigenous people and people of color” (3–­4). Mobility is conceptualized as physical movement, the shared meaning of the physical movement, and the policies that enable or constrict movement.Throughthisanalyticlens,Carpio tracesthe “Anglo Fantasy Past” to illuminate how white populations created history that places them at the center and either erases non-­white populations or reduces themtoperpetualoutsiders.Thishistoryincludeswhitesettlement,the rise of the citrus industry, and the role of religion. For example, Indigenous people were immobilized in off-­ reservation boarding schools for AmericanIndianchildren,andcapitalist-­orientedpolicieswereenacted such as the Geary Act (1892) in order to control the mobility of Chinese immigrants. The latter is an excellent example of how race continually shaped the experiences of nonwhite migrants. Mobility is encouraged when a source of low cost labor is needed, but then controlled or even criminalized in order to maintain a racialized hierarchy. Throughout the book, Carpio reinforces the precarious situation of mobilityforpeopleofcolor.“Workersweresupposedtomoveinparticu­ lar ways, at specific times, in and to predetermined spaces” (66). This was deftly accomplished in a way that expresses the subtle processes through which power is used, indeed in ways that appear normative and even natural. Without globalized labor migration, the rise of industries such as large-­ scale citrus agriculture would not have been possible. Alternatively, deterring regional labor migration and desegregated housing were critical to maintaining the white supremacist status quo. Collisions at the Crossroads connects readers to the current turmoil and fear around immigration and racism by looking back at the exploita­ tive incentivizing and coercion of Mexican migrant workers. Mexican immigrants are attracted to work in agricultural communities, then their mobility is pathologized to limit movement through public policy. Ultimately, Mexican immigrants are constructed as “birds of passage” who prefer not to be rooted to a place. Geographer Doreen Massey refers to these processes as “differentiated mobility”: “some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-­end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.”1 Book Reviews 131 This racialization of labor created a low-­ cost workforce that was immobilized by the threat of arrest but later seen as preferable to Puerto Rican or Filipino migrants who had rights to permanent settlement. The claim was that because Mexicans preferred to migrate to worksites, they should therefore return to Mexico in the ebbs of citrus production in the inland Southern California region. Mexican migrants were considered a natural option for filling the workforce needs of the local citrus industry while... (shrink)

Apparently, the wall was something of an engineering miracle even prior to the events that exposed it to the light of day. People used to go down to the basement where part of it was visible, and marvel at its ability to resist 3500 pounds per square inch of pressure over 3300 feet. When it was called upon to bear even more it rose to the challenge, anthropomorphically speaking. Now it is being compared to the Liberty Bell,1 a physical object (...) that symbolizes a signature and defining event. This wall, built to hold back the Hudson River from flooding the basement of the World Trade Center, was once the foundation and physical site of a place, but has now itself become a place. It has transformed from site to situation. It is being written retrospectively as a humble and unglamorous object that rose to be a noble, even heroic place, one which because of the “ miracle ” of superior engineering stood when everything else fell. This object which newly defines a place has become the classic American story of triumph over insurmountable odds. It has become personified, narrativized, and valorized - it “held” against the onslaught like a defender protecting a city, saving the lives of people who were rushing out of the building. It is a place of memory, although precisely what is being remembered depends on who faces the wall. It is the Wailing Wall. It is being incorporated into the new design for the site by the architects and the memorial planners, an unlikely remembrance to and representation of horrific events. It is the hypostatization of a narrative of siege, another quintessentially American story about the triumph of the inside over the outside. It is the Alamo, it is Independence Day, it is homeland security. Less literally but no less viscerally than Maya Ying Lin’s Vietnam. (shrink)

In Tyranny of the Gene: Personalized Medicine and Its Threat to Public Health (Knopf, 2023), James Tabery traces the ascendance of personalized or precision medicine in America, arguing that America's emphasis on genetics offers more hype than transformational power. In his examination of the power struggles, social relationships, and technological advances that centered the gene in American health policy, Tabery demonstrates how an intensive focus on genetics draws attention away from both the fundamental causes of health disparities and more‐effective (...) changes that could be made to developmental, physical, and social environments. American policy‐makers, health care institutions, funders, and bioethicists should not let the technological shine and attractive politics of personalized medicine continue to replace the hard but necessary work of addressing sociopolitical causes of disease and illness. (shrink)

In the wake of a war against the United States and the displacement of his people from their lands at the confluence of the Rock and Mississippi Rivers, the Sauk leader, Black Hawk, prepared an autobiography published in 1833. At the center of his work was an attempt to offer his readers a strategy that would make it possible for the Sauk and other Native peoples to coexist with the Americans of European descent who had come to the Mississippi (...) valley. The autobiography, from this perspective, represents more than another statement of a Native American ''worldview.'' Instead, it offers an assessment and a response to a crisis of survival. At issue for Black Hawk are neither property rights nor the troubles of communication between cultures, but rather ways of seeing and understanding the place that sustained the life of his people. Here, the land is not merely something valued, but rather the ground that organizes the meaning of things and events. It is the breakdown of this logic of place, both within the Native community and outside it, that precipitated the disastrous war and it is the recovery of this logic through the narrative of Black Hawk's autobiography that he raises the possibility of cultural survival. This paper reexamines Black Hawk's project and provides resources for reading it both as philosophy and as an instance of a conception of place that can contribute to ongoing efforts to promote the coexistence of cultural differences in the land of Black Hawk's people. (shrink)

“Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” has long been recognized for the special place that it occupies in the history of American philosophy. In it, American pragmatism enters into a wider, popular consciousness for the first time, acquiring both its name and its lineage. In the course of a brief hour with George Holmes Howison’s Philosophical Union at Berkeley in August of 1898, in a gymnasium before an audience of eight hundred people, pragmatism also acquires its living voice as (...) William James introduces a new uniquely American philosophy based upon the innovative ideas of the then obscure Charles Peirce. After describing a new strategy for arriving at the meaning of an idea, he goes on to illustrate.. (shrink)

This is the first book in which contemporary scientists and mystics share with us-in their own words-their views on space, time, matter, energy, life, consciousness, creation and on our place in the scheme of things. The book is also the story of an American philosopher who-with these dialogues-ventures into ground-breaking territory, and of her search in America, Europe, India and Nepal for people whose work is at the center of our understanding of reality.

Aureli advances a fresh, spirited and combative account of the idea of ‘autonomy’, connecting Italian architectural debates from the 1960s with the politics of class-autonomy that was being developed and advanced by workerist theorists such as Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti and Toni Negri. Aureli’s account focuses on Aldo Rossi’s architectural ideas and the project of the No-Stop City proposed by the young avant-garde group Archizoom. The Project of Autonomy is not simply envisaged as an historical exploration of the 1960s; primarily, (...) it is conceived as an intervention in current architectural theory, drawing on the author’s interest in Tronti’s politics to challenge the contemporary popularity of a broadly post-Negrian ‘autonomism’. This review questions aspects of Aureli’s reading of Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri. Furthermore, although Aureli’s discussion of Red Vienna opens up onto vital questions of strategies for social change, which remain pertinent to contemporary arguments over ‘enclaves’ or ‘zones’ of resistance, his antagonism towards Tafuri prevents his argument from either exploring or advancing the debate which he has initiated. (shrink)

Several studies have lately revealed that social media conceal at least three dangerous pitfalls. Firstly, social media can negatively impact sociopolitical processes in advanced liberal democracies by becoming vehicles for the spread of false information that augments political polarization (Lee et al. 2017; Ostillio 2018). Secondly, as a result of the first point, social mediacan rapidly become a source of incorrect beliefs for those subjects with low digital literacy (Guess et al. 2019). Thirdly, because of the first and second points, (...) intentionally deceitful manipulations of social media content are potent generators of information cascades that increase group polarizations across groups of vulnerable social media users (Jang and Kim2018, Wang et al. 2018, Colliander 2019). These findings support the claim that the circulation of biased content on social media potentially threatens sociopolitical stability in liberal Western democracies (Duffy 2018; Sunstein 2018). Although this claim is far from being speculative, as shown by the FacebookFile investigations (Wall Street Journal 2019) and the center for humane technology’s recen tresearch, it introduces a thorny dilemma regarding the founding principles of liberal Western democracies. Namely, should Western legislators limit free speech by introducing severe penalties for those who spread fake news and the likes on social media? Or should they let the free market autonomously produce efficient technology allowing people to identify biased social media content?In other words, is a libertarian solution to the plight of online fake news and the like preferable to adequate legislation that punishes those who spread such content? Though appealing, it is unrealistic to believe that the free market can resolve this problem. On the other hand, it is realistic to suppose that Western governments should engage in a merciless battle against biased social media content. For instance, following the publication of the Report of the independent High level Group on fake news and online disinformation in 2018, the European Union introduced new directives to limit the spread of fake news online in 2021, when the Covid19 pandemic started fading. Although initiatives as such might look like limitations of free speech, there is solid philosophical ground to defend such initiatives. To prove this contention, we resort to Hobbes’s (1651, Part II, §18 and §29) argument that humans can avoid falling back into the Hobbesian state of war only if they stipulate a covenant. Specifically, we appeal to Hobbes’s (1651) argument in favor of bestowing the sovereign the right to ban those seditious doctrines that might undermine peace and sociopolitical stability in the Hobbesian Commonwealth. In this regard, we show that the Hobbesian covenant resolves conflict among humans in the same way a correlated equilibrium limits noncooperation in game theory. Namely, like game theory players, citizens enjoy greater welfare whenever they observe rules that mitigate conflict (Slomp 2010). Accordingly, we argue that citizens would be better off only if Western governments introduced severe penalties for those who intentionally spread fake news. Notably, we argue that effective regulation would create disincentives for spreading biased content and incentives for spreading truthful content. Furthermore, we argue that effective regulation against online fake news would assuage the polarizing effects of online availability cascades on social networks. Importantly, we provide empirical evidence supporting these claims by showing that the lack of effective regulation led the American government to miserably fail to contain the devasting effects of the online infodemic (i.e., the epidemic of false online information)that took place during the first two waves of the Covid19 pandemic (Evanega et al. 2020, Milosh et al. 2020). (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this wide-ranging interview Professor Douglas V. Porpora discusses a number of issues. First, how he became a Critical Realist through his early work on the concept of structure. Second, drawing on his Reconstructing Sociology, his take on the current state of American sociology. This leads to discussion of the broader range of his work as part of Margaret Archer’s various Centre for Social Ontology projects, and on moral-macro reasoning and the concept of truth in political discourse.

This volume provides a comprehensive account of Wilhelm Röpke as a liberal political economist and social philosopher. Wilhelm Röpke was a key protagonist of transatlantic neoliberalism, a prominent public intellectual and a gifted international networker. As an original thinker, he always positioned himself at the interface between political economy and social philosophy, as well as between liberalism and conservatism. Röpke’s endeavors to combine these elements into a coherent whole, as well as his embeddedness in European and American intellectual networks (...) of liberal and conservative thinkers, are a central theme throughout the book. The volume includes papers by international experts from a conference in Geneva on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Röpke’s passing. The first part focuses on new biographical insights into his exile years in Istanbul and Geneva, while the second part discusses his business cycle theory in the context of the Great Depression, and the third part elaborates on his multifaceted social philosophy. Wilhelm Röpke was among the most important thinkers within the classical liberal revival post-WWII, with intriguing tensions between liberalism and conservatism. A highly recommended volume. –– Peter J. Boettke, 2016-2018 President of the Mont Pèlerin Society and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, George Mason University This important collection of papers provides an in-depth assessment of Wilhelm Röpke’s contributions, placing him in the context of his time. A fine contribution. –– Bruce J. Caldwell, Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy and Research Professor of Economics, Duke University. (shrink)

In the 1960s, the growing strategic importance of ocean exploration led the French government to develop greater capacity in marine scientific research, aiming to promote cooperative and diplomatic relations with the leading states in ocean exploration. Devised during Charles de Gaulle's government (1958–1969), the restructuring of French oceanography culminated, in 1967, in the establishment of the state‐led Centre National pour l'Exploitation des Océans (CNEXO). Beyond being intended to control the orientation of marine research at a national level, the CNEXO's mission (...) was to use scientific diplomacy to balance a desire for enhancing international cooperative relations in oceanography with French ambitions to equal the USA's leading capacity to explore the oceans. Its director, the naval officer Yves la Prairie, played a crucial role in articulating scientific, national, and diplomatic interests for France in the oceans. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors' IntroductionThomas Cattoi and Kristin Johnston LargenIn 2018, Buddhist-Christian Studies published the proceedings of an international conference on Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733) that had been held in Pistoia in October 2017. Marking the two-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Tuscan Jesuit in Lhasa, the event explored from a variety of disciplinary perspectives the extraordinary contribution of a figure who effectively inaugurated the theological conversation between Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity. (...) Desideri, however, was neither the only nor the first Catholic missionary to reach Tibet—a number of other Jesuits and a few members of other religious orders had visited the Land of Snows or even settled there before his arrival. In this issue of the journal, we are therefore glad to open this issue with the translation of another report by a missionary—this time, the author is the Capuchin Domenico da Fano, who authored his memories of his time in Tibet in 1713. The translation is by Michael J. Sweet and Leonard Zwilling—names many of our readers will recognize as the translator and the editor of Desideri's Relazione. As Luciano Petech's collection Il Nuovo Ramusio contains quite a few more reports by Italian Catholic missionaries to Asia, this may not even be the last such translation that the journal is going to publish.Continuing our long-established tradition, the first part of the issue contains a number of papers that were initially presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. For the second year in a row, because of the global health emergency, the meeting was held remotely, but the energy and the enthusiasm of both speakers and audience ensured that the sessions were both compelling and inspiring. A first set of essays touches on the relationship between Buddhist-Christian dialogue and the environmental crisis, exploring perspectives as diverse as process thought, hybridity, the interface between environmental activism and spiritual practice, and the need to listen to the environmental wisdom of the marginalized voices from the Global South. The second section explores different facets of the exchange between Japanese Buddhism and Christianity. Two contributions map the contribution of the Jesuit scholar and practitioner William Johnston, SJ (1925–2010), who played an important role in laying the foundations of dialogue between Japanese Zen and Catholic Christianity; another piece—also presented at the SBCS meeting in November 2021—addresses the fraught question of different responses to US nationalism during the Japanese-American conflict in World War II, while a final essay introduces us to the way women practitioners respond to [End Page vii] challenging aspects of Shin Buddhist teachings. The third and the last section of the first part includes four essays that sketch the contours of a number of interreligious encounters; one explores monastic obedience in Franciscan spirituality and Theravada Buddhism, one touches on the spirituality of victim souls and the Tibetan practice of gcod, and a final one brings into conversation Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, and Lonergan.In 2016, members of the Research Center for World Buddhist Cultures at Ryukoku University started an interreligious project under the title "Conversations in Comparative Theology: Shin Buddhism, Christianity, Islam." The goal was to organize a series of events where a few scholars from these three traditions would present papers on shared themes and discuss points of shared concerns. This initiative led to a series of four meetings that concluded in 2019. Thanks to Dennis Hirota and Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Buddhist-Christian Studies is glad to publish a series of eight essays that emerged from these conversations. Readers will notice that some of these essays are of an interreligious nature, but do not actually discuss the intersection of Buddhism and Christianity. In line with the policy adopted with the publication of the proceedings from the 2019 Lotus Sutra seminar organized in Tokyo by Risshō-Kōsei-Kai, the editors decided to publish all the contributions from these events, so as to make sure that the proceedings of these important interreligious exchanges would all be available in the same place.On January 22, 2022, the Vietnamese Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hahn reached the end of his life. Thich Nhat Hahn had devoted his... (shrink)

: As the twentieth century closes, marked by triumphal strides in medical advances, the American society has yet to ensure that each person has access to affordable health care. To correct this injustice, this article calls on the nation's political and corporate leaders, providers, and faith-based groups to join all Americans in a new national conversation on systemic health care reform. The Catholic faith tradition is one that compels both a proclamation to ministry values and a commitment to speak (...) out against the challenges or threats to what are essential to the well-being of individuals and society. The Catholic health ministry must therefore be both a voice for the voiceless and an agent of transformation. The nation's goal should be to "reposition" health care from its status as an important, but ultimately optional building block to one that is essential. (shrink)

This essay provides a literary history of the restitution narrative in colonial New England; using Cotton Mather's The Angel of Bethesda, I argue that Puritan medical texts employ theological and medical epistemologies to enable patient agency. In these texts, individuals must be involved in reforming the sinful behaviors that they believed caused their conditions, and must also engage in a form of public health by sharing their stories so that others may avoid future sins—and therefore illnesses. Ultimately, recognizing how restitution (...) has been historically defined allows for alternate understandings of recovery that place patients at the center. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CALL FOR PROPOSALS TRAUMA AND HEALING 12TH EAST-WEST PHILOSOPHER’S CONFERENCE MAY 24-31, 2024 The 12th East-West Philosopher’s Conference will explore the many dimensions of trauma and healing. While trauma can be physical, it can also be psychological, social, political, economic, and cultural—encompassing the immediate effects of global pandemics, the ongoing impacts of ethnic and gender bias, the intergenerational legacies of colonization and geopolitical strife, and the planetary ramifications of (...) anthropogenic climate disruption. Ours is an era in which differences of histories, cultures, and identities are engaged as sources of insight, but also one of retrenchment—a period of relational appreciation, but also one of schism. The global scientific community’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a stunning example of human potential for empathetic collaboration in the face of global personal and public health trauma. Yet, the economic trauma of the pandemic has resulted in crumbling international alliances, deepening trade wars, and an unfortunate collective reinvestment in zero-sum endgame framings of geopolitics against which there is no vaccination and through which the terms of healing have become delinked from the restoration of global wholeness. These traumas do not stop shaping our lives when the immediate danger comes to an end. Traumatic pain remains stored in the memories of peoples and individuals, it populates their imagination and shapes horizons of possibility. Thus a philosophical exploration of trauma and healing is not only diagnostic of current problems but also a form of genealogy. We invite participants to reflect upon the relational complexity of both trauma and healing, critically and historically engaging concrete occurrences of trauma while also drawing out theoretical insights regarding healing that strengthens and empowers and resists the forms of personal and social amnesia that make the repetition of trauma so tragically common. Of special interest are panels and papers that explore the trauma and healing at all scales from the interpersonal, to the relational traumas experienced by nations at war and cultures in conflict, thus addressing the interplay of the private and public spheres, of ethics and economics, of the human and the natural sciences, and among disciplines, classes, genders, and generations. Panel and paper proposals are encouraged that explore trauma and healing during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the trauma of refugees, displaced and colonized peoples, trauma and healing in personal relationships, climate change as a form of trauma to the planet and its people, trauma and healing related to issues of gender and sexuality, and how philosophers of all traditions, ancient and modern, cross-culturally deal with trauma and healing. KEYNOTE PRESENTERS: Jin Y. Park, Chair of Philosophy and Religion at American University, Washington DC, “Translating Violence.” Ato Quayson, Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford University, CA, “The Ethnography of the Private Sphere: Trauma, Domesticity, and Healing in the Work of Toni Morrison.” We invite proposals for individual papers and panels. Please submit a 250-300 word abstract to the Conference organizers via: [email protected]. Submission Timeline: November 1, 2023 Notifications of acceptance for abstracts and panel proposals received by November 1 will be sent out by December 15, 2023. We have established an early submission timeline to facilitate faculty applying to their own institutions for travel funding. Abstracts received after November 1, 2023, will be vetted as received, taking into consideration the late submission. The absolute deadline for abstract submissions is March 15, 2024. After this, we will not be able to accommodate additional proposals. Final Papers Due: April 15, 2024 CONFERENCE REGISTRATION AND LOGISTICS: Hosted in keeping with the Hawaiian Islands’ spirit of aloha, breakfast and lunch will be provided for all registered presenters, as well as an opening reception and final dinner. The Conference does not provide lodging or travel support, but economical lodgings of various kinds are readily available in Honolulu. ABOUT THE EAST-WEST PHILOSOPHER’S CONFERENCE: The East-West Philosophers’ Conference series is the premier forum for convening philosophers from across the academy who are committed to cross-cultural inquiry. The Conference is the oldest continuous international gathering in Hawai‘i and has been a model of productive collaboration between the University of Hawai‘i at... (shrink)

The aim of this article is to take the Center for Inquiry’s ((CFI) a highly influential organization in the west), mission statement to task with respect to their critique of supposed extraordinary claims through the application of Carl Sagan’s quote: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Specifically, those which are defensible through rational argumentation (God’s existence) i.e., in order to question whether or not they are actually promoting rigorous critical thought through the utilization of science and reason. A look will (...) be also taken into whether they are actually fostering freedom of inquiry or if they are becoming masterful at insulating themselves from any criticisms against their own respective position. This will be carried forth through the examination of the following: i) emotions and non-belief, ii) the epistemology of Carl Sagan’s quote, iii) philosophy, science and the question of God, iv) the presumption of atheism and its relation to Sagan’s quote, v) proper basicality and Sagan’s quote and vi) Jesus’ resurrection as a test case. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 21-40 [Access article in PDF] Unifying the Curriculum with an Art Exhibition:In the American Grain Terry Barrett This is an account of a whole-school faculty designing and teaching a five-month whole-school curriculum based on an exhibit of modern American art, In the American Grain, in a public school in the Pacific Northwest, grades 6-12. This account is a case-study (...) of a successful attempt of teachers, students, and administrators at one school, in one time and place, unifying the whole curriculum by having an art exhibit at the center of learning. The account is given through many voices, especially those of the students in the school who participated in the curriculum, and the teachers who invented it. I served the school as a faculty advisor and thus the telling is in the voice of a participant-observer but I rely heavily on the experiences of the participants and their ways of telling. The students and teachers are unabashedly enthused about what they were able to accomplish in teaching and learning, and are eager to share their experiences with other learningcommunities. This account begins with a short history of the recently founded school and an overview of its curricular mission. It proceeds with students telling about projects they did and their experiences of the curriculum, which evolved around In the American Grain; teachers talking about their experiences with the curriculum; and the founding principal's responses to the curriculum. It ends with my observations and conclusions. I hope that this account might encourage other educators to initiate their own attempts at school reform by placing the arts at the center of the curriculum. The School Vancouver School of Arts and Academics opened in September of 1996 with 525 middle and high school students (grades 6-11 with 12th grade added the following year) in a renovated building originally constructed as a high school in 1928. 2 The school has a new theater, recording studio, rehearsal rooms, and art studios. The school is dedicated to "the dual mission [End Page 21] of academic rigor and artistic excellence," with an evolving curriculum in which all areas of study (math, science, language arts, and social studies) and a full spectrum of arts disciplines (music, theater, dance, moving imagery, literature, and visual arts) are focused around artistic themes taught through interdisciplinary approaches. 3All students attend the school full-time. The mornings are devoted to "academics," subjects that are team-taught to "core groups" of students of combined grades (6-7-8, 9-10, 11-12) and the afternoons consist of three hours of arts instruction in elected classes of mixed-age students. There are four teachers for each core of about 100 students. Teaching and learning is project-based, interdisciplinary, on an art-centered school theme pre-selected for the year by the faculty. In selecting its theme for a year, the faculty follows the state of Washington's pattern for social studies concentrating one year on world history, the next on United States history, and the next on state history. The faculty also privileges an art form for the year: year one is visual arts; year two, music; year three drama; and so forth. Theme-related projects are conducted by students working individually or in small groups of two to three, and are usually teacher-suggested at the junior high level and student-initiated at the senior high level.Students enroll from all areas of the Vancouver school district and neighboring districts. 4 Students and their parents are interviewed and students are selected for the school on the basis of a demonstrated interest in the arts, not on portfolios or auditions, nor on the basis of special designations such as "gifted and talented." Most of the students are from working-class families, and most students graduating from the school go on to college.All faculty members applied to teach at the school, and all have personal interest and expertise in one or more art forms. For example, Mr... (shrink)

This study examines the changing role of art and artist during the turn-of-the-century period, offering a consideration of the multiple dichotomies of art and life, aesthetics and economics, production and consumption, and centre and periphery.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Individual in Relation to the Sangha in American Buddhism:An Examination of "Privatized Religion"Kenneth K. TanakaIn his celebrated book Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam noted the increased level in the phenomenon of "privatized religion" within the previous thirty-five years. Many of the Baby Boomer generation left churches in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Some sought out new religious movements and religious therapies, but most simply "dropped out" (...) of organized religion altogether. He cites Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, specialists in American religion, who describe the outcome of this trend in American religious behavior: "[The consequence was a] tendency toward highly individualized religious psychology without the benefits of strong supportive attachments to believing communities. A major impetus in this direction in the post-1960s was the thrust toward greater personal fulfillment and quest for the ideal self.... In this climate of expressive individualism, religion tends to become "privatized," or anchored in the personal realms."1 Putnam observes that although privatized religion may be "morally compelling and psychologically fulfilling," it involves less social capital than environments in which individuals are connected to other individuals in shared faith commitment.Interestingly, American Buddhism may be one of the beneficiaries of this trend, for the recent growth of Buddhism in the United States is partly attributable to the climate of "privatized" religion. Nowhere is this symbolized more than by the so-called Nightstand Buddhists.2The Nightstand Buddhists derive their name from their practice of placing a Buddhist meditation book on the nightstand after reading it before they go to sleep. They get up the next morning and practice to the best of their ability the meditation they had read about the night before. Further, they may frequently attend lectures at the local university and visit a Buddhist center's web-page or participate in an online Buddhist discussion group. And if we were to visit them, we might find their homes decorated with Buddhist artifacts.But these Nightstand Buddhists do not show up in any statistics on the [End Page 115] American Buddhist population because they would not identify themselves as Buddhists. According to Thomas Tweed, who coined the term Nightstand Buddhists, "Sympathizers (= Nightstand Buddhists) are those who have some sympathy for Buddhism but do not embrace it exclusively or fully. When asked, they would not identify themselves as Buddhists. They would say they are Methodists, or Jewish, or unaffiliated."3 However, they have been an important part of the story of Buddhism in America from its beginning and continue to be so today.Among the three million Buddhists currently estimated to be in the United States, I believe there are Buddhists who exhibit many of the same characteristics as the Nightstand Buddhists. And this number is significant, particularly among those converts to Buddhism whose main practice is meditation. This group of convert Buddhists is one segment of the larger Buddhist community in the United States, which I have categorized into four groups.41. New Asian American Buddhists (those who have mostly arrived in the United States since the 1960s: Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Cambodian, Myanmar, Laotian, and Sri Lankan).2. Old-line Asian American Buddhists (those who were established before World War II: Chinese and Japanese).3. Convert Buddhists whose main practice is meditation (predominately Euro-Americans practicing in the Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan traditions).4. Convert Buddhists whose main practice is chanting (Sōkagakkai International–USA, a sizable percentage of whom are African and Hispanic Americans).In this paper, I wish to focus on a Jōdo Shinshū temple from the second group (old-line Asian American Buddhists) and on several centers collectively that belong to the Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan traditions from the third group (convert Buddhists whose main practice is meditation), looking at the manner in which individuals relate to their respective institutions and traditions, with special attention given to the phenomenon of "privatized religion."For purposes of this paper, my definition of "privatized religion" is based on the observation of Roof and McKinney, cited above, as "a tendency for individuals (1) to emphasize practicing at home over religious centers, and (2) to value the subjective and the inward." The homebound orientation is connected... (shrink)

For ten years, between 1903 and 1913, Gertrude Stein saw human relationships as painful mathematical puzzles in need of solutions. Again and again, she converted the predicaments of her personal life into literary material, the better to solve and to exorcise them. The revelation that relationships had a structural quality came to her during the composition of Q.E.D. , when she grasped the almost mathematical nature of her characters' emotional impasse. Stein's persona in the novel comments on their triangular affair, (...) "Why it's like a piece of mathematics. Suddenly it does itself and you begin to see."1 The theory encouraged her to examine such situations as if they were case histories: she continued to study the same piece of mathematics from different angles in Fernhurst , Three Lives , and The Making of Americans . But whatever the sexual arrangements in these triangles, the powerful generally managed to impose their wills upon the less powerful, and the triangles resolved themselves into oppositional structures, pitting two against one. Gradually, when the couple began to replace the triangle as her structural model, Stein composed numerous verbal portraits of couples and their relationships. In two of these, "Ada" and "Two Women," Stein applied her general theory of relationships to the particular puzzle of female friendships because, I think, she felt that women's characters were most intensely molded in same-sex involvements. Although she attempted to "prove" these theories in distanced, deliberately depersonalized prose, we as readers must examine "the complex interplay of self-discovery and writing" from which her portraits emerged.2Stein's portraits of women entangled in familial and erotic bonds seem to invite us into "the process whereby the self creates itself in the experience of creating art"; to read them, we must "join the narrator in reconstructing the other woman by whom we know ourselves."3 This task of reconstruction implies that we must also rethink the place of biography—generally dismissed by New Criticism and its subsequent post-structuralist permutations as "mere" biography—in feminist critical projects. If it is true that "in reading as in writing, it is ourselves that we remake," then feminist critics have a special stake in understanding the biographical, and autobiographical, impulses at work in these activities.4 Stein's portraits, which hover between fiction and biography, raise important questions about the ways in which biographical information can justify our suspicion that female writers may be "closer to their fictional creations than male writers are."5 Recently, feminist critics have adapted psychoanalytic theory to examine the particular closeness of female characters in women's writing or to suggest a related closeness between the female author and her characters. We find it useful to speak of the pre-Oedipal structures and permeable ego boundaries that seem to shape women's relationships. Although Stein used very different psychological paradigms, she approached these same issues in her own studies of female friendships. Realizing that she preferred to write about women, she observed, "It is clearer…I know it better, a little, not very much better."6 In spite of her qualifications, she knew that she could see the structuring principles of relationships with greater clarity when writing from her own perspective.1. Stein, "Fernhurst," "Q.E.D.," and Other Early Writings, ed. Leon Katz , p. 67.2. Elizabeth Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," Signs 6 : 444. For a very useful critical discussion of this complex issue, see Abel, "Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women," and Judith Kegan Gardiner, "The es of dentity: a Response to Abel on 'Merging Identities,'" in the same issue of Signs .3. Gardiner, "The es of dentity," p. 442.4. Jonathan Morse, "Memory, Desire, and the Need for Biography: The Case of Emily Dickinson," The Georgia Review 35 : 271. See also J. Gerald Kennedy's suggestive remarks on the "tension between personal confession and implacable theory" in Barthes' later work .5. Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," p. 444.6. Stein, The Making of Americans, cited in Richard Bridgeman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces , p. 78.Carolyn Burke, an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Research on Women, Stanford University, has published articles on French feminist writing and on Mina Loy, whose biography she is now completing. The theoretical implications of this essay will be explored in her related study in progress on feminist biography. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is now in its seventh year. The goals of this National Center for Biomedical Computing are to: create and maintain a repository of biomedical ontologies and terminologies; build tools and web services to enable the use of ontologies and terminologies in clinical and translational research; educate their trainees and the scientific community broadly about biomedical ontology and ontology-based technology and best practices; and collaborate with a variety of groups who develop and use (...) ontologies and terminologies in biomedicine. The centerpiece of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a web-based resource known as BioPortal. BioPortal makes available for research in computationally useful forms more than 270 of the world's biomedical ontologies and terminologies, and supports a wide range of web services that enable investigators to use the ontologies to annotate and retrieve data, to generate value sets and special-purpose lexicons, and to perform advanced analytics on a wide range of biomedical data. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on mental health interact with preexisting health risks and disparities to impact varying populations differently. This study explored the relationship between demographic variables, distress and mental health, and vulnerability factors for COVID-19. An online cross-sectional study was conducted from 18 June to 17 July 2020, reflecting the impact of early phase COVID-19 pandemic and related shelter-in-place measures in the United States. Participants were adults residing in the United States, with substantial subsamples of American Indian, Asian (...) American, African-American, and Hispanic and/or Latinx participants, as well as people with disabilities and sexual minorities. Outcomes measured were depression, hopelessness, somatic complaints, anxiety-related disorders, locus of control, and a novel measure of pandemic-related distress. Data were analyzed using analyses of covariance, chi-square test, and correlation coefficients. Generally, younger individuals, and those with less financial power—across all identities—suffered more distress. When controlling for age, lower financial power was associated with higher scores on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale-Revised, Beck Hopelessness Scale, Patient Health Questionnaire-15, Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders for Adults Panic Disorder, SCARED-A generalized anxiety disorder, SCARED-A obsessive–compulsive disorder, and the COVID-19 Pandemic Distress restriction/disconnection scale. In addition, disparities were found, in general, for marginalized identities by gender, sexual orientation, and disability status. Importantly, each ethnicity subsample showed a unique pattern of relationships between COVID-19 risk variables and mental health symptoms. The results support the hypothesis that any pandemic may amplify preexisting social and financial disparities. Overall, interventions at the clinical, governmental, or health equity level should take into consideration the needs of vulnerable groups. (shrink)

Contemporary bioethics has evolved over the past 40 years predominantly as a “Western” construct drawing fundamental inspiration for its conceptual and methodological frameworks from secular, Anglo-American philosophical traditions. American bioethicists can be credited with playing a defining role in the globalization of this new discipline to the developing countries of the world, but in this process, in the words of LaFleur, “Bioethics has become international without becoming internationalized.” Among the criticisms leveled against the dominant American model of (...) bioethics is that in its focus on universalism it ignores local cultural and religious influences that are vital to the comprehension of the moral life in many societies. Medical sociologist Renée C. Fox and historian Judith P. Swazey have termed this as a form of “cultural myopia.”. (shrink)

This book provides a concise overview, with excellent historical and systematic coverage, of the problems of the philosophy of language in the analytic tradition. Howard Callaway explains and explores the relation of language to the philosophy of mind and culture, to the theory of knowledge, and to ontology. He places the question of linguistic meaning at the center of his investigations. The teachings of authors who have become classics in the field, including Frege, Russell, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, and (...) Putnam are critically analyzed. I share completely his conviction that contemporary Anglo-American philosophy follows the spirit of the enlightenment in insisting on intellectual sincerity, clarity, and the willingness to meet scientific doubts or objections openly. --Professor Henri Lauener, Editor of Dialectica. (shrink)