Inside the Team: Questions and Answers Facing Teacher Leaders is a book for K-12 teachers and leaders who face dilemmas leading teams of peers. Using Q/A scenarios and building context for leadership in practice, the authors provide answers, useful, practical tools, resources, models and conversation starters that move teams forward.

“When Species Meet is a breathtaking meditation on the intersection between humankind and dog, philosophy and science, and macro and micro cultures.” —Cameron Woo, Publisher of Bark magazine In 2006, about 69 million U.S. households had pets, giving homes to around 73.9 million dogs, 90.5 million cats, and 16.6 million birds, and spending over $38 billion dollars on companion animals. As never before in history, our pets are truly members of the family. But the notion of “companion species”—knotted from human (...) beings, animals and other organisms, landscapes, and technologies—includes much more than “companion animals.” In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway digs into this larger phenomenon to contemplate the interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic. At the heart of the book are her experiences in agility training with her dogs Cayenne and Roland, but Haraway’s vision here also encompasses wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms, and whales wearing video cameras. From designer pets to lab animals to trained therapy dogs, she deftly explores philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal-human encounters. In this deeply personal yet intellectually groundbreaking work, Haraway develops the idea of companion species, those who meet and break bread together but not without some indigestion. “A great deal is at stake in such meetings,” she writes, “and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no assured happy or unhappy ending—socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.” Ultimately, she finds that respect, curiosity, and knowledge spring from animal-human associations and work powerfully against ideas about human exceptionalism. One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness and the now-classic essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” she received the J. D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science. (shrink)

A response to Kavita Shah's article Selecting Barrenness.

Mental time travel is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: acts on the same (...) information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two ; and is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this domain-general simulation system enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of a social desirability response bias as a personality characteristic (self-deception and impression management) and as an item characteristic (perceived desirability of the behavior) on self-reported ethical conduct. Findings from a sample of college students revealed that self-reported ethical conduct is associated with both personality and item characteristics, with perceived desirability of behavior having the greatest influence on self-reported conduct. Implications for research in business ethics are drawn, and suggestions are offered for reducing the effects (...) of a socially desirable response bias. (shrink)

The predominant conception of the status of race is that race is a social construction. But what does it mean to say that a group, racially defined, is a social construct? How we understand the process of constitution and related identities is important beyond the conceptual reality or non-reality that defines the group. To this end, this dissertation explores two models of group constitution employed by Jean-Paul Sartre, the first from Anti-Semite and Jew, which bases group constitution and identity on (...) the gaze of the dominant Other, and the second from his later work, Critique of Dialectic Reason, Vol.1, which places the group as a prominent facilitator of history that produces itself in the domain of the Other. Both models show that the existence of group and group identity are constructed and as a result both reject claims of essentialism that may be ascribed to the group. However, I argue that the more nuanced conception of the social construction of the group, found in the Critique, envisages a more complex and dynamic account of group formation and identification, an account that acknowledges the need for group identities particularly among those who are historically oppressed as members of a group. ;My dissertation attempts to reconcile two fundamental and distinct approaches to race---ontology and experience---through what I hope the reader will appreciate as a series of dialogues between Sartre and various interlocuters. These interlocuters include contemporary authors such as Ian Hacking, K. Anthony Appiah, and Naomi Zack whose works refer to some aspect of Sartrean thought. Additionally, I explore textual dialogues between Sartre and both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, existentialists authors themselves, whose works provide insights into the possibilities and problems that Sartre faced in his attempts to attend to colonialism, racism, race and class consciousness, individual and group freedom. Thus, a secondary goal of this dissertation is to show Sartre's continued relevance to our contemporary discourse of race in particular and contemporary philosophy in general. (shrink)

Purpose Underlying much recent development in data science and artificial intelligence (AI) is a dependence on the labour of precarious crowdworkers via platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. These platforms have been widely critiqued for their exploitative labour relations, and over recent years, there have been various efforts by academic researchers to develop interventions aimed at improving labour conditions. The aim of this paper is to explore US-based crowdworkers’ views on two proposed interventions: a browser plugin that detects automated quality (...) control “Gold Question” (GQ) checks and a proposal for a crowdworker co-operative. Design/methodology/approach The authors interviewed 20 US-based crowdworkers and undertook a thematic analysis of collected data. Findings The findings indicate that US-based crowdworkers tend to have negative and mixed feelings about the GQ detector, but were more enthusiastic about the crowdworker co-operative. Originality/value Drawing on theories of precarious labour, this study suggests an explanation for the findings based on US-based workers’ objective and subjective experiences of precarity. The authors argue that for US-based crowdworkers “constructive” interventions such as a crowdworker co-operative have more potential to improve labour conditions. (shrink)

On the basis of psychological research, a group of philosophers known as 'situationists' argue that the evidence belies the existence of broad and stable (or 'global') character traits. They argue that this condemns as psychologically unrealistic those traditions in moral theory in which global virtues are upheld as ideals. After a survey of the debate to date, this article argues that the thesis of situationism is ill-supported by the available evidence. Situationists overlook the explanatory potential of a large class of (...) global character traits, namely, vices that do not involve other-directed malevolence, such as laziness, cowardice, and selfishness. A detailed discussion of the relevant empirical studies bearing on moral psychology shows that the behavioral patterns observed in these studies are consistent with the widespread possession of such non-malicious vices. This means, contrary to the situationist thesis, that the empirical record is fully compatible with the common existence of global character traits. (shrink)

This article consists of two important parts. The first is a specific defense of some of the central claims made by stanley cavell in "must we mean what we say" against the criticisms of fodor and katz in "the availability of what we say." the major issue concerns the question of whether evidence of some sort is needed to support a claim by a native speaker about what we mean when we say something. Further speculations on this topic occupy the (...) other part of the paper. (shrink)

The study assesses how a social desirability (SD) bias influences the relationship between several independent and dependent variables commonly investigated in ethics research. The effect of a SD bias was observed when a questionnaire was administered under varying conditions of anonymity and with different measurement techniques for the SD construct. Findings reveal that a SD bias is present in the majority of relationships studied, and it most frequently plays a moderating role. While the measure of SD influences the strength and (...) type of relationship, condition of anonymity has relatively little effect on the level of SD. (shrink)

Nurses have moral obligations incurred by membership in the profession to participate knowingly in health policy advocacy. Many barriers have historically hindered nurses from realizing their potential to advance health policy. The contemporary political context sets additional challenges to policy work due to polarization and conflict. Nursing education can help nurses recognize their role in advancing health through political advocacy in a manner that is consistent with disciplinary knowledge and ethical responsibilities. In this paper, the authors describe an exemplar of (...) Elizabeth Barrett's “Power as Knowing Participation in Change” theory as a disciplinary lens within a doctoral nursing health policy course. Barrett (radically) emphasizes “power as freedom” instead of “power as control.” This approach is congruent with nursing disciplinary values and enhances awareness of personal freedom and building collaborative relationships in the policy process. The theory was used in concert with other traditional policy content and frameworks from nursing and other disciplines. We discuss the role of nursing ethics viewed as professional responsibility for policy action, an overview of Barrett's theory, and the design of the course. Four student reflections on how the course influenced their thinking about policy advocacy are included. While not specific to policymaking, Barrett's theory provides a disciplinary grounding to increase students' awareness of freedom and choices in political advocacy participation. Our experience suggests that Barrett's work can be fruitful for enhancing nurses' awareness of choices to participate in change across settings. (shrink)

In the present commentary, I argue that Foster has attacked an uncharitable reconstruction of Etchemendy's argument against Tarski's account of the logical properties. I provide an alternative, more charitable reconstruction of that argument that withstands Foster's objections.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.4 (2000) 635-655 [Access article in PDF] The Mystery of Truth: Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin's Enlightened Mysticism David Bates "... what truth! and what error!" --Goethe on Saint-Martin 1It is hardly surprising that Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803), the philosophe inconnu of late Enlightenment Europe, remains almost completely unknown outside of the marginalized and exotic disciplines of esoterism, theosophy, and mysticism. Although influential in (...) certain circles, Saint-Martin failed to penetrate the mainstream of Enlightenment thought, and what influence he did have in philosophy was largely felt outside of this period altogether, revealing itself in figures such as Maistre, 2 Lamartine, 3 and German Romantics like Franz von Baader. 4 In his own lifetime Saint-Martin was met with incredulity by the forces of rationalism. Voltaire was given a copy of Saint-Martin's 1775 text Des erreurs et de la vérité by a friend of d'Alembert. Voltaire later commented to the mathematician, "I don't believe anyone has ever printed anything more absurd, [End Page 635] more obscure, more crazy, and more stupid." 5 In the Tableau de Paris, Mercier described Saint-Martin and his martinist followers as a sect which turned its back on the paths opened up by sound physics, chemistry, and all natural history in order "to run headlong into an invisible world only they perceived." Saint-Martin taught that the objects we see around us are only "fantastic and deceptive images" and that the truth lies precisely where we cannot see it, Mercier explained. "Physical experiences," the cornerstone of the dominant sensationalist doctrine, were for the martinists only "errors," an "eternal source of folly and deception," wrote Mercier. 6 One review of Saint-Martin's works described their effect as analogous to that of a "pyramid covered in hieroglyphs, erected by an unknown man in a public square," in other words, completely mystifying. 7 The revolutionary Barnave would link martinism with all the other "metaphysical follies," which were, he believed, the result of an overly speculative tendency in eighteenth-century thought. 8For his part Saint-Martin rejected what he considered to be the anti-spiritual tendency of Enlightenment thought. Responding (as a mature student) to the professor Garat, one of the idéologue followers of Condillac, at the École normale in 1795, Saint-Martin wrote: I always admire how you protect youself from materialism by endorsing... the teachings of Condillac. Although I read little, I have just gone through (very quickly, it is true) his Essai sur les origines des connaissances humaines and his Traité des sensations. Whether I have poorly grasped it, or I haven't your secret, I have come across almost no passages which do not repel me; and, I can say, have not encountered one which attracts me. His statue, for example... seems to be a mockery of nature... For me, each of the author's ideas appears to be an attack against man, a veritable homicide. 9Mystic thought, it seems, must oppose Enlightenment. At best, mysticism during the period of Enlightenment will be seen as its "underside" 10 or as the [End Page 636] preparation for coming anti-Enlightenment Romantic doctrines. 11 Indeed, the end of the Enlightenment in France saw a marked interest in esoteric thought and a mystic sensibility. 12 However, the attempt to link mysticism and Enlightenment has almost always been a critical attempt to discover the "superstitious" core of eighteenth-century rationalist thought. In this perspective the study of mystic thought in its own terms can only have antiquarian value, for the mystic approach to truth is, it is claimed, always in the form of a secret, revealed knowledge that can never withstand disciplined analysis. Saint-Martin finds his way into history as either a footnote in large books on Romantic thinking, or as the protaganist in largely incomprehensible ones examining esoteric thought. 13Here, I do not want to claim that Saint-Martin should be "included" in the Enlightenment, but a sympathetic reading of this complex... (shrink)

The nature–nurture controversy has been with us since it was first outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Nobody likes it anymore. All reasonable scholars today agree that genes and environment interact to determine complex cognitive outcomes. So why does the controversy persist? First, it persists because it has practical implications that cannot be postponed (i.e., what can we do to avoid bad outcomes and insure better ones?), a state of emergency that sometimes tempts scholars to stake out claims they cannot defend. (...) Second, the controversy persists because we lack a precise, testable theory of the process by which genes and the environment interact. In the absence of a better theory, innateness is often confused with (1) domain specificity (outcome X is so peculiar that it must be innate), (2) species specificity (we are the only species who do X, so X must lie in the human genome), (3) localization (outcome X is mediated by a particular part of the brain, so X must be innate), and (4) learnability (we cannot figure out how X could be learned, so X must be innate). We believe that an explicit, plausible theory of interaction is now around the corner, and that many of the classic maneuvers to defend or attack innateness will soon disappear. In the interim, some serious errors can be avoided if we keep these confounded issues apart. That is the major goal of this chapter: not to attack innateness but to clarify what claims about innateness are (and are not) about. (shrink)

"I experience language as an intensely physical process," writes Donna Haraway. "I cannot not think through metaphor... Biochemistry and language just don't feel that different to me." Since the appearance of her monumental Primate Visions and the now classic essay "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," feminist historian of science Donna Haraway has created a way of thinking about culture, science, and the production of knowledge that has made her one of the most highly regarded theorists in America. She is (...) admired for her passion and rigor, her wicked ironies, and her deep commitment to issues of gender and race, as well as species. The author of four seminal works on science and culture, Donna Haraway here speaks for the first time in a direct and non-academic voice. Thyrza Nichols Goodeve leads her subject through conversation about Haraway's intellectual development, theories and influences, the role of Catholicism in her thinking, and how her ethical stands have mirrored issues in her personal life. For readers who have admired and struggled with the rich and complex performances of her earlier works, How Like a Leaf will be a welcome inside view of the author's thought. At the same time, this work makes Haraway's contribution to modern thought available to a much wider audience who cares about the issues she addresses. This is a highly personal introduction to a major thinker's body of work. (shrink)

Donna Haraway's work has transformed the fields of cyberculture, feminist studies, and the history of science and technology. Her subjects range from animal dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History to research in transgenic mice, from gender in the laboratory to the nature of the cyborg. Trained as an historian of science, she has produced a series of books and essays that have become essential reading in cultural studies, gender studies, and the history of science. The Haraway Reader (...) brings together a generous selection of Donna Haraway's work. Included is her "Manifesto for Cyborgs," in which she famously wrote that she "would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." Other selections are taken from her three major works, Primate Visions, Modest Witness , and Simians, Cyborgs and Women , as well as some of her more recent writing on animals. For readers in cultural studies, feminist theory, science studies, and cyberculture, Donna Haraway is one of our keenest observers of nature, science, and the social world. This volume is the best introduction to her thought. (shrink)

Education, Religion and Society celebrates the career of Professor John Hull of the University of Birmingham, UK, the internationally renowned religious educationist who has also achieved worldwide fame for his brilliant writings on his experience, mid-career, of total blindness. In his outstanding career he has been a leading figure in the transformation of religious education in English and Welsh state schools from Christian instruction to multi-faith religious education and was the co-founder of the International Seminar on Religious Education and values. (...) John Hull has also made major contributions to the theology of disability and the theological critique of the "money culture." This volume brings together leading international scholars to honour John Hull's contribution, with a focus on furthering scholarship in the areas where he has been active as a thinker. The book offers a critical appreciation of his contribution to religious education and practical theology, and goes on to explore the continuing debate about the role of religious education in promoting international understanding, intercultural education and human rights education. A possible basis for integrating Islamic education into Western education is suggested and the contribution of the philosophy of religion to pluralistic religious education is outlined. The contributors also deal with issues relating to indoctrination, racism and relationship in Christian religious aspects, and examines aspects of the the theology of social exclusion and disability. (shrink)

Once we grasp Bergson’s new conception of an intuitive metaphysics premised on a distance from action, it seems unlikely that a connection could be found between this metaphysics and an activist philosophy of war. In this essay I shall revisit Bergson’s metaphysics to see how they could have been understood to provide support for war. I discuss how Bergson’s metaphysics by way of its number theoretical understanding of oneness was thought to mirror or express the limit experience of war that (...) attracted many intellectuals hungry for a shattering of conventional limits on what held up as reality. Finally I suggest that Bergson subtly changed his understanding of the élan vital in the course of the Great War, compromising in the process its initially non-teleological character in order to ensure that his doctrines would only be implicated in international peace, not jingoistic war propaganda. (shrink)

The fundamental importance of theology in the work of Carl Schmitt has been the subject of much recent literature on this controversial figure. However, there has been little consensus on the precise nature of Schmitt's own political theologydecisionisminstitutional thinking,” in order to reveal the theological basis for his understanding of the new regime. I will then argue that Schmitt's institutional approach had in fact always been central to his earlier, better-known writings on law and the state. Schmitt's concept of the (...) institution, which had roots in French legal theory, grounded a political theology that was in the end less a metaphysical approach to the state than one that drew on the concrete example of the legal institutional order of the Catholic Church. (shrink)

Background: Nurses are confronted daily with ethical issues while providing patient care. Hospital ethical climates can affect nurses’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, retention, and physician collaboration. Purpose: At a metropolitan academic medical center, we examined nurses’ perceptions of the ethical climate and relationships among ethical climate factors and nurse characteristics. Design/participants: We used a descriptive correlational design and nurses ( N = 475) completed Olson’s Hospital Ethical Climate Survey. Data were analyzed using STATA. Ethical considerations: Approvals by the Nursing Research (...) Council and Institutional Review Board were obtained; participants’ rights were protected. Results: Nurses reported an ethical climate total mean score of 3.22 ± 0.65 that varied across factors; significant differences were found for ethical climate scores by nurses’ age, race, and specialty area. Conclusion: These findings contribute to what is known about ethical climate and nurses’ characteristics and provides the foundation to develop strategies to improve the ethical climate in work settings. (shrink)

Despite a predominantly digital, 21st century music production landscape, analogue hardware professional audio technologies persist. In the discoursal throes of the leading online audio technology message forum Gearslutz, such technologies are routinely objectified, sexualized, fetishized and socialized into gear. Situated in a contemporary critical, interdisciplinary framework of fetish, masculinity and sexuality studies, this research interrogates how audio technologies manufactured and intended for music production contexts become sexy. Applying a mixed-mode methodology, including an intensive discourse, image and material-semiotic analysis of an (...) ‘epic’ sexy gear thread, we collated extensive data about technological fetishization. Sexy gear discourse articulates themes of voyeurism, acquisition, control and animation – linking the fetish value of technological objects and their connoisseurship with the erotic potential of sexualized objects. Such discourses ultimately serve to maintain social order, and become sites for performing the maintenance work of hegemonic masculine formations. This research provides new insights into how hegemonic masculinities depend upon the organization of online and offline sociability around fetishized material objects. Furthermore, our findings align with those of current scholarship focused on representational politics of technoculture. (shrink)

There is an urgent need for reconstructing models of property to make them more women-friendly. However, we need not start from scratch: both ‘canonical’ and feminist authors can sometimes provide concepts which we can refine and apply towards women’s propertylessness. This paper looks in particular at women’s alienation from their reproductive labour, building on Marx and Delphy. Developing an economic and political rather than a psychological reading of alienation, it then considers how the refined and revised concept can be applied (...) to concrete examples in global justice for women: in particular, the commercialisation of embryonic and fetal tissue in the new stem cell technologies. (shrink)

Electrifying, provocative, and controversial when first published thirty years ago, Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" is even more relevant today, when the divisions that she so eloquently challenges--of human and machine but also of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and location--are increasingly complex. The subsequent "Companion Species Manifesto," which further questions the human-nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound polarization.Manifestly Haraway brings together these momentous manifestos to expose the continuity and ramifying force (...) of Haraway's thought, whose significance emerges with engaging immediacy in a sustained conversation between the author and her long-term friend and colleague Cary Wolfe. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, Haraway and Wolfe join in a wide-ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human-nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.The conversation ends by revealing the early stages of Haraway's "Chthulucene Manifesto," in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene. Deeply dedicated to a diverse and robust earthly flourishing, Manifestly Haraway promises to reignite needed discussion in and out of the academy about biologies, technologies, histories, and still possible futures. (shrink)

This article reports a study of how leading U.S. business schools incorporate one important dimension of corporate citizenship—corporate involvement in community economic development (CI/CED)—in their curricula and programs. Corporate citizenship, or social responsibility, is shown to have several important and unexpected locations in business education. In addition, the authors develop a rationale forwhy and howspecific topics such as CI/CED as well as the general topic of corporate citizenship are appropriate for business school attention.

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth- century technoscience. The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse. (...) Haraway sees the world of contemporary technoscience as a drama. Information sciences and life sciences are at the center of the dramatic action. Scenes are set in landscapes where maps of human genetic differences are stored in databases, racialized bodies are reconfigured by morphing for photographs in popular magazines, and transgenic mice important to breast cancer research are patented intellectual property. The actors are many, and not all are human. Beginning with the Modest Witness, the key figure in the Science Revolution, Haraway shows us the trouble lurking in race and gender- marked practices for attesting to matters of fact. In later scenes, Haraway explores the kinship relations among the many cyborg creatures produced in the late twentieth-century--in nuclear research, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, computer-mediated representational practices, and mutations in biological approaches to "race.". (shrink)

Workplace ethics perceptions drive ethical behaviors, but our understanding of how context shapes the nature of this relationship is limited. Consequently, this article uses contingency theory to explore how perceptions of ethical priorities in the workplace—ethical work climate (EWC)—are differentially associated with ethical behavior based on the broader context. Specifically, we meta-analytically test theoretically relevant cultural values (i.e., collectivism, power distance) and work context factors (i.e., consequence of errors, job autonomy) as moderators of the connection between EWC perceptions and ethical (...) behavior. Our findings reveal that while higher power-distance societal contexts strengthen the connection between EWC perceptions and ethical behavior, work contexts with higher autonomy _weaken_ the connection. We found mixed support for collectivism as a contextual moderator, with results supporting theoretical expectations with one cultural conceptualization but not another. Contrary to expectations, the consequences of errors in work contexts did not moderate the association between EWC perceptions and ethical behavior. Taken together, this meta-analytic investigation highlights the meaningful role of the broader organizational context as a potential boundary condition for the influence of EWC perceptions on ethical behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.4 (2000) 577-593 [Access article in PDF] Machina Ex Deo: William Harvey and the Meaning of Instrument Don Bates Introduction Since our clocks do consistently disclose each hour of the day and night--do they not seem to partake of another body (beyond the elements), and that more divine? But if, under the dominion and management of [our human] Art, such splendid things (...) are daily achieved beyond the powers of the objects themselves,... And if, in serving men they carry out such things as are to be marvelled at, what I ask, may we expect from them when they be instruments in the hand of God? These words come near the end of William Harvey's De generatione animalium. 1 As he does often in this work, he is arguing that it is possible for a material object to behave supra vires elementorum, i.e., in a manner that exceeds what can be explained merely from the qualities of the elements from which it is made. In fact, just before this, he argues that human craftsmanship enables the elements of air and water to make ships sail in opposite directions, fire to do one sort of thing in the kitchen, another in the shops of metal-workers, including the production of iron, which in its turn peacefully tills the soil or besieges the town in war. So if even human Art is capable of making something as wonderful as a clock out of the elements, how much more might God be able to do with them? [End Page 577]Not only is it entirely conceivable that the (divinely) artful manipulation of these same elements can account for the wonders of God's nature--such as the generation of a chick out of an egg--there is also no need to infer the existence of additional entities such as faculties, qualities, agents, and the like. All that is needed is the concept of "instrument." Today such things as his appeal to a clock, his reference to "art," and the word "instrument" itself, are liable to arouse in our minds a fairly mechanical sort of image. Therefore, we need to put this idea in its intellectual context, by looking at where Harvey's notion of instrument is coming from.First, our much more mechanical world view was just coming into being as Harvey (1578-1657) wrote these words. Although the philosophy of his younger contemporary, René Descartes (1596-1650) was not yet in full bloom (he died a year before Harvey's book appeared), Cartesianism was certainly on the explanatory horizon, 2 as was the work of another contemporary and contributor to the "new philosophy," Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655). 3 And, of course, Harvey had certainly known Francis Bacon (1561-1626). 4 Nevertheless, Harvey was a devout Aristotelian who was adamantly opposed to the efforts of these contemporaries to replace Aristotle. 5 Moreover, it was from the Aristotelian tradition, not from the new mechanics, that Harvey had derived the concept of instrument.If, broadly speaking, the "new philosophy" was about a universe that was built like a clock, then the "old" natural philosophies, whether dominated by Platonism, Aristotelianism, Christian theology, or some combination, were about a universe that was socially constructed. 6 Not only was man at the center, to a large extent the workings of the universe were envisioned in terms of social experience. The regularity, predictability, harmony, and wonder of natural phenomena seemed best explained in the language of reason, moral values, motives, responsibilities, hierarchies, laws (in the social sense), and the like, explanatory resources that, in the late ancient and medieval intellectual cultures of Europe, far outweighed either those that appealed to the passively material and the mechanical, or to the random and the chance.But very central to that social model of nature was the concept of instrument, which gave to it something of a mechanical twist. To see how this was so, we need to go back temporarily to the works of Aristotle, the influence of... (shrink)

Interview by Klasien Horstman on gender and genetics. 'Unlike many gender theorists, I do not view the body as socially constructed; nor do I share postmodern and deconstructionist disquiet at the notion of a unified subject. Frankly, I think these constructions get in the way of political action and are bad for women’s rights.' -/- .

Barzykowski and Moulin's view on involuntary autobiographical memory focuses on automatic activation of representations and inhibitory control mechanisms. We discuss how and when a known neural mechanism – pattern completion – may result in involuntary autobiographical memories, the types of cues that may elicit this phenomenon and consider interactions with future-oriented cognition.

Psychoanalysis engages with the difficult subjects in life, but it has been slow to address climate change. Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics draws on the latest scientific evidence to set out the likely effects of climate change on politics, economics and society more generally, including impacts on psychoanalysts. Despite a tendency to avoid the warnings, times of crisis summon clinicians to emerge from comfortable consulting rooms. Daily engaged with human suffering, they now face the inextricably bound together crises of (...) global warming and massive social injustices. After considering historical and emotional causes of climate unconsciousness and of compulsive consumerism, this book argues that only a radical ethics of responsibility to be "my other s keeper" will truly wake us up to climate change and bring psychoanalysts to actively take on responsibilities, such as demanding change from governments, living more simply, flying less, and caring for the earth and its inhabitants everywhere. Linking climate justice to radical ethics by way of psychoanalysis, Donna Orange explores many relevant aspects of psychoanalytic expertise, referring to work on trauma, mourning, and the transformation of trouble into purpose. Orange makes practical suggestions for action in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic communities: reducing air travel, consolidating organizations and conferences, better use of internet communication and education. This book includes both philosophical considerations of egoism as problematic, together with work on shame and envy as motivating compulsive and conspicuous consumption. The interweaving of climate emergency and massive social injustice presents psychoanalysts and organized psychoanalysis with a radical ethical demand and an extraordinary opportunity for leadership. Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics will provide accessible and thought-provoking reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as philosophers, environmental studies scholars and students studying across these fields. ". (shrink)