If the work carried out to gain a detailed understanding of the process of photosynthesis, and probably other types of bioenergetic conversions as well, fulfills the criteria of a molecular biology, and if the groups funding this research and those who worked in the laboratory regarded it as such, why has it been necessary for me to argue here that bioenergetics should always have been counted as part of - indeed, may have been in the forefront in establishing — the (...) molecular biology tradition? Why have the investigators themselves not insisted on correcting the historical record that has emerged thus far? I would like to offer two reasons: one institutional, the other scientific. (shrink)

In the absence of comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level, many American states and localities are undertaking their own legal reforms. The new state and local laws have been challenged by immigrant-rights organizations and individuals on the grounds that the federal government has already pre-empted the field. The lawsuits bring a new narrative voice—that of judges—into the boiling U.S. immigration debate. Judges engage the controversy over local enforcement of immigration enforcement, as they have other contentious disputes, both as pragmatic (...) decision-makers and as spokespersons for justice. The tensions this dual role entails are explored here in the context of a single, controversial case. Close-up analysis of the judge’s narrative strategy reveals a range of specific techniques to create moral distance from a decision, combined, ironically, with the enlistment of moral themes to justify the ruling. The inter-twining of rule-of-law and justice rhetoric mirrors and also shapes a broader politics of justice in the United States. (shrink)

Yoga is a unique form of expert movement that promotes an increasingly subtle interpenetration of thought and movement. The mindful nature of its practice, even at expert levels, challenges the idea that thought and mind are inevitably disruptive to absorbed coping. Building on parallel phenomenological and ethnographic studies of skilful performance and embodied apprenticeship, we argue for the importance in yoga of mental access to embodied movement during skill execution by way of a case study of instruction and practice in (...) two related traditions, Iyengar and Anusara. Sharing a pose repertoire, they are based on distinctive philosophical systems with different teaching styles and metaphoric structures. To address relations between pedagogy and practice in embodied expertise, and to investigate the reciprocal influences of embodiment and thought, we explore in detail the linguistically mediated learning context where practitioners work with yoga teachers. Here, the mind/body problem comes to practical life. We demonstrate the effects of words on bodies, as knowledge is literally incorporated. We show why interpersonal influence on our movement capacities is sometimes needed to enhance expertise. We theorize and identify ?signature patterns of tension? among practitioners. These patterns have four sources: ghost gestures, innate differences in bodily form, functional fusing, and signature patterns of affective experience, modulation and expression. These patterns of tension produce ?silent zones?, cognitively impenetrable actions, functional fusing of a skilful, compensatory form, and signature patterns of pain and damage. We show how instruction can disrupt these silent zones, enhancing mental and physical flexibility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bibliography of Resources by and about André E. Hellegers*Compiled by Doris Mueller Goldstein (bio)This bibliography is derived from the holdings of the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature and the BIOETHICSLINE© database (both of which are at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and supported by the National Library of Medicine); the archives of Lauinger Library, Georgetown University; the Medline databases of the National Library of Medicine; the WorldCat (...) database of OCLC, Dublin, Ohio, and selected Internet sites.Primarily comprised of writings by Dr. Hellegers, the list also includes interviews and media programs in which he participated, as well as writings about him that were written following his death. The arrangement within each section is by date. The 231 authored pieces reflect the transition from Dr. Hellegers’s early career as a researcher in fetal physiology at Johns Hopkins Medical School, where he published his first research report at the age of 29, to the early years of the Kennedy Institute, where he produced so many provocative columns on bioethical issues that influenced the growth of the field.Due to the diversity of sources and the 40-year time span covered, there are some variations in bibliographic style. Time and availability constraints precluded verifying all of the citations with the original documents. Any additions or corrections should be submitted to the compiler.Works Authored by André E. HellegersNo Date Ethical Issues in Sterilization of the Retarded. Unpublished paper.1956Vitamin B12 Serum Level and Pregnancy. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 4: 440+, 1956. [With Bacon F. Chow and Kunio Okuda] [End Page 89]1957Vitamin B12 Absorption in Pregnancy and in the Newborn. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 5: 327+, 1957. [With Bacon F. Chow, Robert E. L. Nesbitt, Kunio Okuda, and David W. Smith]1958The Effects of Acute Hypoxia on the Osmotic Pressure of the Plasma. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Physiology 43: 197+, 1958. [With Donald H. Barron, Frederick C. Battaglia, and Giacomo Meschia]Studies on the Absorption of Vitamin B12 in Human Pregnancy with Especial Reference to the Effect of D-Sorbitol. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 76: 91+, 1958. [With Bacon F. Chow, Harry Prystowsky, and Vernon Wong]1959The Alveolar PCO2 and PO2 in Pregnant and Nonpregnant Women at Altitude. Proceedings of the Society for Clinical Investigation 38: 1010+, 1959. [With Donald Barron, William Huckabee, Giacomo Meschia, James Metcalfe, and Harry Prystowsky]A Comparison of the Oxygen Dissociation Curves of the Bloods of Maternal and Fetal Goats at Various pHs. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Physiology 44: 215–21, July 1959. [With Donald Barron, Giacomo Meschia, Harry Prystowsky, and A. Stark Wolkoff]Fetal Blood Studies. XII. On the Relationship Between the Position of the Oxygen Dissociation Curve of Human Fetal Blood and Adult Fetal Hemoglobin. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 77: 585+, 1959. [With Paul D. Bruns, Julian Cotter, and Harry Prystowsky]Fetal Blood Studies. XIV. A Comparative Study of the Oxygen Dissociation Curve of Nonpregnant, Pregnant and Fetal Human Blood. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 78: 489–93, September 1959. [With Paul D. Bruns and Harry Prystowsky]Fetal Blood Studies. XVI. On the Changes in Total Osmotic Pressure and Sodium and Potassium Concentration of Amniotic Fluid During the Course of Human Gestation. Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics 109: 509–12, October 1959. [With Frederick Battaglia, Paul D. Bruns, Harry Prystowsky, and Clayton Smisson]Further Observations on the Metabolism of Vitamin B12 in Human Pregnancy. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 77: 1+, 1959. [With Bacon F. Chow, Harry Prystowsky, Bruno Ranke, and Elma Ranke]The Oxygen Dissociation Curves of the Bloods of Adult and Fetal Llamas. Federation Proceedings 18, 1959. [With Donald Barron, William Huckabee, Giacomo Meschia, James Metcalfe, and Harry Prystowsky] [End Page 90]Transfer of Oxygen Across the Sheep Placenta at High Altitude. Federation Proceedings 18, 1959. [With Donald Barron, William Huckabee, Giacomo Meschia, and Harry Prystowsky]Uterine Blood Flow and Metabolism in Pregnant Sheep at High Altitude. Federation Proceedings 18, 1959. [With Donald Barron, William Huckabee, Giacomo Meschia, James Metcalfe, and Harry Prystowsky]Uterine Blood Flow and Metabolism in Unanesthetized Pregnant Sheep. Federation Proceedings 18, 1959. [With Donald Barron, William Huckabee, Giacomo... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 84-115 [Access article in PDF] Be-longing and Bi-lingual States Doris Sommer "How sad that people don't keep commitments any more. Even marriages last only about five years.""Yes, but long-distance marriages can stretch those five years out over weekends and vacations to make relationships last a lifetime."Benedict Anderson's provocative new book, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World, raises questions about political relationships (...) over time and over space. Like precarious modern marriages and their corollary "political" kinships (in-laws in Spanish are one's familia política), national sentiment today strains with the movements of transnational communities from home to distant enclaves. Over time, ties can unravel as modern subjects choose, or not, to identify with adopted political relatives. Is one's country the bastion of a people reluctant to receive more immigrants? Is it the sender of surplus people who will, in turn, send money home? (Heads of state in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico typically object to US restrictions on immigration.) Or is it the harbor for many peoples? Does belonging even to a recently invented country anchor an existential need, a be-longing, because being a "man"--as Hannah Arendt still called the subject of politics--means striving for recognition among equals? Or, do many citizens today feel like resident aliens (to themselves or to others), belonging rather to ethnic minorities and perhaps--long-distance--to other nations of origin or of choice? Anderson is right to worry about precarious belongings and optional obligations.In the end though, he finds solace from the threats of egotism and despair, and from the social decomposition of too much movement (what Arjun Appadurai calls "modernity at large") in the resilient promise of the "goodness of nations." Confidence in the extrapersonal goals and pride in national belonging appears, almost miraculously, in the last of seventeen chapters. Each of these brilliant and erudite essays will reconfirm our admiration for Anderson. My own personal debt includes his extraordinary generosity and the good counsel that encourages me to follow him, sometimes with a swerve, as will be evident when my appreciation for be-longing plays bi-lingual games.The opening pages of The Spectre of Comparisons theorize a paradox in the postcolonial condition: the inescapable folly of comparing one's nation to another, or to a mother country. Concepts like nation or culture, after all, take on meaning in their particular contexts and by contrast with others. The core chapters chronicle aborted beginnings and abusive conflations of the nation and the state. But hope has the last word, thanks to three guarantees of national imaginings: the promising and innocent unborn generations; the nation's dead (war heroes); and the living who are ever willing to give the nation another chance, and yet another. Feelings of pride and shame come together in the end, because citizens invest, often against the evidence, in "the goodness [End Page 84] of nations" [364]. This resilience shows up right after the trouble in chapter 16, where shame was the connection between nation and narrator in Mario Vargas Llosa's 1987 novel about Peru. Unfounded but unrelenting, Anderson's hope follows on shame rather abruptly and suggests that shame itself is a sign of our care for our countries. 1 The narrator of El hablador had tried to escape from his ill-fated country, his "malhadado país," only to be haunted by it.My question is whether Anderson's coda to this Peruvian novel is inspired by the same indomitable demon of comparisons that he has been exposing throughout the essays. José Rizal had named the meddling devil to blame it for distracting the Filipino from the lovely garden he saw in Manila, assailing him with memories of a European original or model [2]. This double vision raises a specter of possible inauthenticity; it undermines meaning as models slip from centers to peripheries. Local concepts lose their particularities in global vocabularies. Anderson calls the movement a "logic of seriality." I prefer to call it trans-latio, literally a carrying from one place to another... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Making the Best of Things: Character Skepticism and Cross-Cultural PhilosophyJohn M. Doris (bio)With your spirit settled, accumulate practice day by day, and hour by hour.—Miyamoto MusashiLike many of my colleagues in moral psychology, I’ve focused almost exclusively on Western philosophy, so I was pleasantly surprised when practitioners of cross-cultural and comparative philosophy responded to character skepticism with resources drawn from Eastern traditions.1 [End Page 571]As a reminder: the (...) character skeptic asserts a descriptive claim, to the effect that traditional conceptions of character are empirically inadequate, accompanied by a prescriptive claim to the effect that, as a result of this inadequacy, traditional notions of character should receive considerably diminished emphasis in ethical thought (e.g., Doris 2022, p. 2).2 The antiskeptic rejects both claims: a suitably nuanced conception of character has nothing to fear from empirical moral psychology and may safely retain its focal role in ethical thought.Near as I can see, cross-cultural philosophers commenting on the issues have generally been anti-skeptical. This anti-skepticism might be either contrastive or complementary in tenor. In a contrastive approach, Eastern conceptions of character, while bearing some affinities to Western conceptions (if there are no affinities, we’d have a change of subject), are supposed to be substantially different than Western notions, so defending the West by way of the East marks a departure from the Western characterological tradition. In a complementary approach, the Eastern and Western conceptions are substantially similar, so defending the West by way of the East is fundamentally a continuation of the Western characterological tradition. (Though continuation can’t be quite the right word, since the referenced Eastern traditions are often older than the Western.)While this dichotomy, like most dichotomies, oversimplifies, my sense is that cross-cultural philosophy’s contributions have tended to be complementary: consideration of Eastern traditions, often times Confucian, is said to illuminate what’s valuable in Western, frequently Aristotelian, traditions.3 This circumstance is both surprising to, and convenient for, me. Surprising, for my reading of the one Eastern text I have studied closely,4 over my thirty-five-year avocation as a martial artist, the legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings (Musashi/Harris 1974), suggests a contrastive reading: courage seems nearly invisible in Musashi’s treatment of success in combat, while martial valor is central to Aristotle’s understanding of courage. In any case, that those with vastly more scholarly credibility than I have favored complementary projects is a welcome convenience for me, since it allows me to enter discussion of cross-cultural philosophy and character along my usual pathways in contemporary Western moral psychology.Paul Condon, Seth Robertson, and Matthew Spencer, the gracious and insightful commentators for this symposium on my essay collection, Character Trouble (2022), seem generally to favor a complementary approach: while careful to note the existence of differences, they find in Eastern traditions resources to blunt the force of character skepticism as applied to its usual target, virtue ethics in a broadly Aristotelian tradition.5 Quite expectedly, in my responses, I’ll beg to differ. The essays in question span over twenty years, and on the main points of character skepticism, I’ve failed to change my mind in the face of (sometimes strident) criticism, so it’s [End Page 572] unlikely I would do so now, despite my commentators’ astute recommendations. In fact, I’m now more convinced of character skepticism than when I started, or at least have better arguments for it (more on this below). Nevertheless, my commentators have done much to enrich the issues; in this unavoidably and regrettably incomplete response, I’ll attempt to enrich things a bit more.Framing the Rhetorical SpaceI take it my commentators and I are united in thinking that the kind of empirical moral psychology embodied in character skepticism and celebrated in Character Trouble (CT) has important implications for how philosophers and psychologists should think about character and virtue.6 This makes refreshing contrast with early responses to character skepticism from the 2000s, which often insisted that things could go on pretty much as they had before interdisciplinary moral psychologists set to work... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nursing Ethics:A Selected Bibliography, 1987 to PresentDoris Mueller Goldstein (bio)The ethics of nursing is emerging as a discipline distinct from bioethics or medical ethics. Although these areas have many concerns in common, nurses are demonstrating that their perspective can make a unique contribution to ethical debate.An especially dynamic area of discussion within nursing ethics is the philosophy of caring. The work on moral development by Harvard educator Carol Gilligan (...) in her book, In a Different Voice, is pivotal in this discussion (IV B, Cooper 1989). Jean Watson, a nurse at the University of Colorado Center for Human Caring, also has written extensively on the philosophy of caring. She states that "an ethic of caring has a distinct moral position: caring is attending and relating to a person in such a way that the person is protected from being reduced to the moral status of objects...." (I, Watson 1988).Even as the philosophy of caring becomes more predominant, however, nurses today are often drawn away from the caring role by forces prevalent in the modern hospital. First, modern technology can divert the nurse's attention away from the patient and toward the operation of complex equipment, and second, large hospitals are often managed as bureaucracies (I, Fitzpatrick 1988).A recent study examined the frequency and seriousness of ethical issues encountered in nursing practice (IV A, Berger 1991). A survey instrument that included 32 potential ethical issues was developed by the authors. Respondents were asked to identify what kinds of issues concerned them and with what frequency, and to indicate what resources were used to cope with these dilemmas. The study found that nurses were frequently faced with inadequate staffing, heroic measures for prolonging life, inappropriate resource allocation, situations where patients are being discussed inappropriately, and coping with irresponsible activity of colleagues.The variety of ethical dilemmas encountered on a daily basis by nurses and their expressed interest in developing a moral grounding for the profession of [End Page 177] nursing, along with increased attention to ethical issues in nursing education have led to an explosion in the literature on these topics. In the preparation of this bibliography over 1,000 citations were retrieved in computer searches of various databases: BIOETHICSLINE, MEDLINE and CATLINE (National Library of Medicine), CINAHL (Current Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature), BOOKS IN PRINT PLUS, and ETHX (the online public access catalog for articles at the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature). What is offered here is a small sampling of that literature. Books and special issues of periodicals are briefly annotated, but citations to articles are simply arranged by broad subject, and within that, alphabetically by author. The subcategories reflect the topics receiving the most discussion in current literature.This bibliography updates "The Ethics of Nursing: A Selected Bibliography," by Doris Mueller Goldstein, which covered the earlier literature and was published as an appendix to Ethical Decision Making in Nursing Administration (I, Silva 1990).I. BooksAustralian Nursing Federation. Ethics: Nursing Perspectives, vol. 2. North Fitzroy, Victoria: The Federation, 1989. 102 p. (Publisher's address: 373-375 St. Georges Road, postal code 3068.) The National Professional Development Committee of Australia fostered the publication of a second volume of papers on nursing ethics. Articles cover patients' rights, ethical theory in decisionmaking behaviors, the nurse and the DNR order, and whistleblowing. Several appendices represent difficult-to-obtain documents, such as the RANF (Royal Australian Nursing Federation) position statements on terminal care, AIDS and occupational health, professional practice problems, and conscientious objection.Bandman, Elsie L., and Bandman, Bertram. Nursing Ethics Through the Life Span. 2nd ed. Norwalk, CT: Appleton & Lange, 1990. 288 p. Following an extensive review of the moral foundations of decision making in nursing, the authors take the reader through a chronology of nursing ethics issues as they occur in the human life span, beginning with the procreative family period and concluding with the end of life. Each chapter contains discussion questions—an aid to educators using this as a textbook.Benjamin, Martin, and Curtis, Joy. Ethics in Nursing. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 206 p. An overview of the nature of ethical inquiry and theory is followed by... (shrink)

In the dialogue between Timothy F. Murphy and Cristina Richie about queer bioethics and queer reproduction in this journal, significant points of the emergent and extremely important discussions on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer bioethics are raised. Richie specifies correctly that queer bioethics can either complement or contradict LGBT bioethics and the queer standpoint against heteroconformity and heterofuturity is decisive here. As the field of queer bioethics is such a recent and essential part of consideration for bioethics and as (...) it is still evolving, the objective of this intervention is to provide both an overview of important milestones of queer bioethics and to highlight that queer bioethics is not mono-logic and monolithic. To exemplify queer bioethic's ‘many-headed monsters’, queer reproduction is revisited and complemented by a European viewpoint. It is central to my argument and here I disagree with Richie that to be against heterofuturity does not necessarily mean to be against queer reproduction. However, I also argue that there are other reasons why queer reproduction should not be pursued at all costs. Finally, I discuss the most recent debates on race, class and citizenship, for example, queer necropolitics. These points still need to be addressed in queer bioethical agendas. (shrink)

In this chapter, we recount some of the most pressing objections to character scepticism, pointing out their limitations and, when appropriate, incorporating their suggestions. From here, we consider what empirically informed moral improvement might look like by turning to the skill analogy. While the skill analogy provides a realistic rubric for becoming a better person, many of the questions concerning the details of how moral improvement might take place remain unanswered. When developing expertise in domains like chess and morality, a (...) wide range of factors will likely be important and it is unlikely than any one individual factor will be especially important. Given this, for any account of moral improvement, our optimism should be bounded: the effect of any particular intervention is likely to be limited, in both magnitude and domain. Lastly, we consider how character scepticism has reshaped the way we think about moral responsibility, whether this is cashed out in reasons-responsiveness or self-expression accounts. While both views face challenges, by distinguishing the possession of the responsibility-making feature from failures to manifest that property in behaviour, we gain a certain degree of wiggle room that allows us to accommodate empirical findings while holding on to notions of responsibility. This chapter highlights that the ‘person-situationism debate’ has expanded far beyond its beginnings, giving way to new accounts of moral improvement and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Questions about knowledge in expert sport are not only of applied significance: they also take us to the heart of foundational and heavily-disputed issues in the cognitive sciences. To a first (rough and far from uncontroversial) approximation, we can think of expert ‘knowledge’ as whatever it is that grounds or is applied in (more or less) effective decision-making, especially when in a competitive situation a performer follows one course of action out of a range of possibilities. In these research areas, (...) studies of motor expertise have for many years actively contributed to broader debates in philosophy and psychology (Abernethy, Burgess-Limerick, & Parks, 1994; Williams, Davids, & Williams, 1999). When we navigate the world flexibly and more or less successfully, how much is this due to a capacity to represent it? In considering alternative options, or planning future actions, we seem to transcend our present environment in some way: what is the balance or relation here between highly-tuned bodily dispositions and background knowledge of the world and its patterns? What changes in these regards as we gain experience and adapt to more complex and challenging environments? Is know-how fundamentally different in kind from ordinary factual knowledge of the world, or knowledge-that? And if expertise in a domain does involve or depend on a knowledge base that is somehow more organized or deeper than that of novices, how is this knowledge selectively and appropriately deployed, often under severe time constraints? (shrink)

This article explores the properties of formulations in a corpus of Hebrew radio phone-ins by juxtaposing two theoretical frameworks: conversation analysis and dialogic syntax. This combination of frameworks is applied towards explaining an anomalous interaction in the collection – a caller’s marked, unexpected rejection of a formulation of gist produced by the radio phone-in’s host. Our analysis shows that whereas previous CA studies of formulations account for many instances throughout the corpus, understanding this particular formulation in CA terms does not (...) explain its drastic rejection by the caller. We therefore turn to an in-depth examination of strategies for lexical and syntactic resonance as a stance-taking device throughout the interaction. In so doing, we not only shed light on the anomalous interaction, but also offer an answer to a provocative question previously put forward by Haddington concerning which of the two – stances or actions – have more meaningful consequences for the description of the organization of interaction. In the particular interaction analyzed here, stances play the more significant role. We propose that the intersubjective stance-taking of participants may be viewed as a meta-action employed among participants as they move across actions, sequences, and activities in talk. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to Creative Writing ContributionsAlexis Pauline Gumbs, Akasha Gloria Hull, Cheryl Clarke, doris diosa davenport, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Asha French, Sharon Bridgforth, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Alexis De Veaux, and Sokari Ekinewhen i first began to dream of creative writing contributions for this special issue of Feminist Studies celebrating the fortieth anniversaries of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and All the Women (...) Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, I imagined a wealth of examples of the world and the work made possible by these two groundbreaking anthologies. I wondered what their editors and contributors were writing now. I wondered about the work of their students and people like me: those of us who understand everything we write as indebted to the path-making, silence-clearing, generative, and bodacious work of the participants in the miracles that are This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave.But today as I reread the contributions that actually emerged from this process, I realize that my dream was too small. I imagined writing that would provide evidence of the ongoing impact made by these two anthologies. Instead, the creative writing in this special issue offers something more crucial and beautiful than I had imagined. These works are not mere evidence of a transformed world; these works are continuing to transform the world in urgent and visionary ways. As repeated again and again by participants in the 2022 celebration for the fortieth anniversary celebration of This Bridge Called My Back, the work that inspired these anthologies is not over. The writings featured in this issue not only show [End Page 198] how this work continues, but they feed, nurture, and provoke us as we honor our responsibility to transform this world.For example, when Akasha Gloria Hull, coeditor of But Some of Us Are Brave, shares her daily early morning meditative writing in "Writing and Rebirth: A Set of Journal Poems," we remember not only her fundamental work excavating the daily lives of Black women writers from the nineteenth century—most notably in Give Us Each Day, her edited book based on the diaries of poet Alice Dunbar Nelson—but also our own imperative. Hull's reflections on health challenges, interpersonal conflict, resurrection, collaboration, and writing itself remind us that our feminist praxis is impactful because of its dailyness. Those of us who wake up tomorrow will need to ask the same critical questions the editors of But Some of Us Are Brave asked of the fields of Black studies and women's studies. We will find surprises and repetitions in the days we meet, and then we will have to do it again.When we read two new prose poems by Cheryl Clarke, an original contributor to This Bridge Called My Back, we have an opportunity to time travel. In "Living as a Lesbian in the Archive of Style," we venture into a critical engagement with the term "hardcore lesbian," displacing the desires of the person who needs to classify others using that term with those of someone who has been hailed by it. Clarke's poem is a reminder that as we work in literary traditions and fields of study made possible by the revolutionary identity politics of an earlier era, we are still responsible for centering the experiences of those most impacted by our fluent and fluid naming practices. In "History," Clarke offers us a timely Black lesbian feminist lens on many iterations of responding to police violence, centering the perspective of a lesbian, her lover, and her lover's husband.The poem "On Being an hbcu Graduate, Teacher, Professor-Scholar at Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, AL, in May 2015" by doris diosa davenport—an original contributor to But Some of Us Are Brave—highlights the intimacy, hilarity, and poignancy of the daily work of intergenerational critical and creative praxis. In particular, she considers the context of institutions and regions that are sometimes excluded from the imaginary of how and where feminist work happens. davenport transmits the lessons and energy gained through her practice of thinking and gathering otherwise... (shrink)

Through the years there have been subtle changes in the evaluations of the work of Tycho Brahe. As one examines the tracts dealing with novae and comets in which reference is made to the nova of 1572 or the comet of 1577, it becomes quite evident that in different parts of Europe and in the Near East and at different periods of time and among men of different religious convictions different values were placed on his work. The extent of his (...) influence should be distinguished from the measure of his achievements. Moreover, his importance cannot be completely separated from that of Kepler and the horde of other writers who furnished more than a mere background for the display of Tycho's brilliance. Here, as always, there is the danger of assigning to one man innovations that were, so to speak, in the air. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Does Meditation Solve the Situationist Crisis in Modern Ethics? A Contemplative Response to John M. DorisMatthew Spencer (bio)There is a good chance you believe in character, in the notions of good character and bad character.1 You may believe in the virtues, too. The virtues are classically said to lead us toward the good, toward the noble, the fine, the honorable (to kalón, to kalon).2 But John M. Doris (...) wants you [End Page 555] to forget about, or move on from, all this talk of virtue and character. There are two suggestions, then: (1) forgetting, (2) thinking about moving on. The two stories are different, and Doris has supported both, sometimes pushing back against his own earlier statements.3 Both stories are powerful, and if we do not assess how they overlap, we will not be in good ethical shape for the future.Why does Doris criticize virtues and character? Virtues, according to the ancient sources, encourage and facilitate our having good ethical dispositions (Anscombe 1958; Keown 1992). If this is right, we ought to have the right kind of (what psychologists today call) traits and, moreover, we can have them.4 Notice, however, that while the virtues may contain or include the having of dispositions, they also extend beyond mere dispositions.According to Aristotle, cultivating courage is to be seen primarily, even exhaustively, as a matter of developing and maintaining the disposition (trait) of courage (Nic. Eth. 1115a6 ff.). However, as others have recognized,5 isolated acts of bravery still count when it comes to calling someone courageous. If you haul a stricken victim from train tracks, you merit the appellation “courageous” even if (especially if) you usually show opposite traits like non-courageousness or cowardice.Furthermore, according to modern virtue ethicists (Russell 2013, pp. 1–28), we must not only have good dispositions but also relate the virtues to the long tradition of what moral philosophy has noticed about the interplay of virtues and character with the moral life in general. Reducing this “moral life” to dispositional virtues is, as the train example indicates, not as attractive as recent writing on virtue ethics suggests.6Because virtues include even if they are not limited to the right kind of traits, they keep us stably disposed to do the right thing whatever the situation. At least, that is the classical picture. The virtues under classical description impact a range of ethically relevant traits, although do note that what “ethical relevance” amounts to is a deep if underexamined question in philosophical ethics; the meanings of “ethical” and “moral” have evolved over time and have not operated in all cultures.Not all cultures, then, have the notions of “moral” and “ethical” that we have, more or less intelligibly, in our own day.7 Arguably, these notions were foreign to Aristotle, as several philosophers from Elizabeth Anscombe to Alasdair MacIntyre have claimed. It may, moreover, be the case that they remained foreign through the early stages of the Western philosophical tradition, much as they also appear foreign to traditions such as Buddhism (MacIntyre 2013, p. 46). The notion that there is some distinguishable realm of “moral matters” as opposed to “nonmoral” matters or to some equally distinguishable realm of “the ethical” is, then, hard to find in the Nicomachean Ethics—despite the name that posterity has given it, with some irony.8 I do not believe the notion can be found, nor that it is named, in the earliest Buddhist texts.9 [End Page 556]The virtues, in any case, are classically designed (arguably in both Aristotle’s works and Buddhism) to give us good ethical dispositions. It is not much use just having a disposition; we need to put it into practice. Defeasible dispositions, in the jargon, do not count for very much—or they do not always count when it matters. The notion, then, that we can have a disposition but not always act upon it because it gets defeated, is controversial.10 How we avoid this fate is a central theme in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Then it matters that, for some years now, Doris has criticized the virtues in ancient and modern authors, deprecating... (shrink)

through examining the case of Doris Lessing’s varying accounts of her mother, I discuss here the fundamental fact/value entanglement involved in describing people, human situations, and human relations. A serious consideration of the ethical and epistemic challenges involved in biographical narration will provide strong reasons for jettisoning the fact/value dichotomy when thinking about human life.1 Yet, I do not propose such considerations as providing an overall model for rejecting the fact/value dichotomy, but rather suggest that there may be no (...) formal unity to the various considerations that speak against upholding a fact/value dichotomy in different philosophical discussions. Furthermore, seeking such unity .. (shrink)

In my quest for Aurai in Greek art, I have been surprised by the haste of commentators to label each and every running woman as a Nereid. Surely it should depend on the evidence. I begin with two Attic pyxides in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The first GR 1. 1933 was given and published by Miss Lamb in CVA Cambridge ii pl. 26. In Beazley, ARV 297, this vase was said to be in the Manner of Douris. In ARV 451 (...) this vase has lost its own reference and acquired that of GR 10. 1934.‘Nereids’ is an inadequate description of either vase; for both include different sexes.The pyxis 1. 1933 is not in good condition. The central figure is surely not the male, as Miss Lamb says, but a running woman taking up twice as much room as anyone else. She holds one dolphin and has lost another, so she must be the heroine Thetis. On one side of her stands a man with a dark beard, but he holds an old man's crooked stick, so he must be Nereus in spite of his dark beard: and a frightened Nereid rushes by him to the left: on a third side a stationary woman has just frightened a woman with a sceptre off her chair; the sceptre holder must be Doris. Here then we have a Peleus and Thetis scene, but there is no room for Peleus. (shrink)

In this chapter I consider the work of four leading naturalistic moral psychologists – Joshua Greene, Shaun Nichols, Jesse Prinz, and John Doris. Each of them draws a different meta-ethical conclusion, and they would likely disagree amongst themselves on a number of points. But here my goal is to consider, as much as space allows, whether the moral realist should feel threatened by the empirical work which they cite and the arguments which they base upon it.

An examination of contemporary art's recent emphasis on “research” and “knowledge production,” and its claims to provide a novel access to “knowledge.” Questioning the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect, Knowledge Beside Itself delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on such notions as “research” and “knowledge production.” Contemporary art is viewed here as a strategic bet on the social distinctions and value extractions made (...) possible by claiming a different, novel access to “knowledge.” Contemporary art's various liaisons with the humanities and the social and natural sciences, as well as its practitioners' frequent embeddedness within transdisciplinary research environments and educational settings, have created a sense of epistemo-aesthetic departure, which concurs with the growing relevance of art as conduit or catalyst of knowledge. Discussing the practice of artists such as Christine Borland, Bureau d'études, Tony Chakar, Lina Dokuzović, Fernando García-Dory, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Adelita Husni-Bey, Jakob Jakobsen, Claire Pentecost, and Pilvi Takala, writer and curator Tom Holert submits the gambit of conceptualizing contemporary art as an agent of epistemic politics to a genealogical analysis of its political-economic underpinnings—in times of cognitive capitalism, machine learning, and a renewed urgency of epistemological disobedience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Changes in CharacterSeth Robertson (bio)I expect that many readers and most reviewers of John M. Doris’ Character Trouble will find tempting some quip about how the book counterexamples itself. After all, it puts on display a remarkable consistency of character, spanning over 20 years, from Doris. Virtue ethics and virtue theory have undergone substantial evolution, psychology is (according to some) undergoing a revolution, and, through it all, (...) Doris’ skepticism about moral character has remained steadfast. I hope that, should this temptation arise, it would be followed quickly by the thought that such quips evince a misunderstanding of Doris’ view. After all, entrenched skepticism about moral character (or moral character theorized a certain way) would be exactly the kind of narrow trait that has not overly worried Doris.In fact, one of the most helpful aspects of the book is that it makes it more difficult to misunderstand or dismiss Doris’ views. I’ll have more to say about this shortly, but first I should mention that my main goal here is not to write a general or detailed review of Character Trouble, but instead to write [End Page 541] a review aimed primarily at an audience of those interested in the intersection of moral psychology, moral character, and comparative or cross-cultural moral philosophy. Moral character has received much attention in cross-cultural philosophy both broadly (for example, Gyeke 1995; Bewaji 2004; Singh 2021; Hanner 2021; Cokelet 2016; Kim 2016; Sim 2015; Van Norden 2003, 2002; Sarkissian 2010; Wong 2015), and specifically regarding the situationist critique of virtue ethics (Hutton 2006; Slingerland 2011; Mower 2013; Robertson 2018), and these topics continue to attract interest.1 And they do so with good reason: accounts of, and ideas about, moral psychology and moral character from outside the Western philosophical canon are both fascinating in and of themselves and also immensely philosophically valuable for refining our understanding of what human morality and ethics could and should be.For scholars interested in these cross-cultural projects, Character Trouble is incredibly helpful. Doris has long maintained that certain non-Western ways of thinking about human moral psychology may be less susceptible to some of the concerns he raises (Doris 2022, p. 40). Even if one disagrees (or disagrees heartily) with some of the conclusions Doris draws, his questions are consistently excellent ones, especially for those trying to develop interpretations of historical works without inadvertently or unknowingly importing contentious assumptions about human moral psychology. Doris’ “Lotta-Little Principle,” which underlies a great deal of his argumentation throughout the anthology, is especially valuable for those working in cross-cultural philosophy. It states, “typically, many factors are implicated in complex psychological outcomes, and relatively seldom are individual factors implicated especially strongly” (p. 172; see pp. 172–173). Beyond simply being true, the principle is an incredibly helpful guide for doing good, rich, non-overly reductive moral philosophy. Saliently for this discussion, adherence to the Lotta-Little Principle also should incentivize doing (or supporting) more cross-cultural moral philosophy because (a) oftentimes, moral philosophy outside the Western canon adheres or adheres relatively more to the Lotta-Little Principle, and (b) if our aim is to better notice and appreciate moral psychological complexity, one of the obvious places to start, should we wish to do so well, is cross-cultural moral philosophy (to better ensure that our assumptions and intuitions about moral psychology aren’t simply parochial).Character Trouble contains 11 essays and an appendix, including the classic “Persons, Situations, and Character” (1998), and two new essays, “Making Good” and “The Future of Character.” The appendix (“An Open Letter to Our Students,” co-written with Edouard Machery) contains a great deal of helpful advice that any graduate student interested in ethics would benefit from reading. Around half of the essays focus on issues at the intersection of moral psychology and moral responsibility and agency, topics that, despite receiving serious attention in cross-cultural philosophy (e.g., [End Page 542] Seok 2017; Finnigan 2022; Sommers 2012), deserve much more: mainstream discussions of agency and responsibility stand to benefit a great deal from a richer understanding of how intuitions, attitudes, and ways of theorizing about culpability, blameworthiness, praiseworthiness, and related... (shrink)

Following the lead of Hannah Arendt and others, I want to argue that the imperial mystique seen in the British Empire found its way into Germany’s expansionist ambitions. I am concerned with the emotional costs of oppression, or what I call soul death. I focus on three key writers of the 20th century: Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee, placing their writings in the context of war trauma and the barbarities associated with 20th century totalitarianism. My argument (...) seeks to elucidate the relationship between postcoloniality and the wars that shaped that century. These narratives of distress will be juxtaposed with novels by Imre Kertész and Arnošt Lustig whose writings of the Holocaust and the war atmosphere on the Eastern Front illuminate scenes of trauma and personal anguish. Here my study draws on the work of recent psychologists whose term soul murder is made much of. These writers’ works can be more fully understood to reveal patterns of personal destruction that are part of living under imperialism. They bring to the forefront behaviours that expose the debasement and hardening witnessed in the early decades of the century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:604 Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Alix Genter Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Butch-Femme Fashion and Queer Legibility in New York City, 1945–1969 The 1956 image of Sunny and Doris (figure 1) is a typical one when conjuring images of butch-femme lesbianism in the post-World War II era: a femme looking glamorous in a dress, makeup, and heels, and a dapper butch sporting (...) a man’s suit and tie and a slick D.A. haircut with a pompadour and one casual curl in front.1 The butch’s masculine appearance and the sharp gendered contrast between the two make their queerness highly legible, a standard feature in images of postwar butch-femme lesbians in both the public and scholarly imagination.2 Indeed, lesbian visibility at midcentury was almost entirely dependent on gender transgressions in the form of “mannishness,” demarcating butches as the public face of lesbianism—a role that scholars such as Joan Nestle, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline Davis, and Donna Penn argue had powerful political implications. Butches not only challenged normative conceptions of gender and claimed lesbian social space, they also defiantly announced their queerness through their looks, thereby expressing women’s sexual autonomy and acting as vehicles for introducing others to gay life. Alongside them, femmes, while generally undetectable by 1. D.A. refers to “duck’s ass,” a popular hairstyle from the 1950s. The hair was slicked back into a point at the nape of the neck that resembled a duck’s tail. 2. In addition to dress and appearance, postwar butch-femme lesbianism was defined by gendered behaviors and mannerisms, and by roles in courtship, relationships, and sex. Alix Genter 605 themselves, proclaimed their own lesbianism and contributed to these modes of visual resistance.3 In these analyses, femmes are incorporated into lesbian rebellion by association with butches—their willingness to stand beside butches and be read as queer and to provide love and support for their partners who bore the brunt of homophobic abuse because of their overt gender expression. Butch visibility remains the foundation of butch-femme resistance, and legible butch masculinity remains an idealized icon of subversive lesbian power. But what if butches in postwar America were not as visible as commonly believed? Consider Miriam Wolfson and May Brown, for example (figure 2), both butches in New York City in the 1950s. Wolfson sees herself as a shy-but-aggressive butch who has always felt masculine, and she sees her friend May Brown as “the butch of the century.”4 Yet, the image shows two women in skirts with feminine hairdos and hints of lipstick. Photographs such as this one demonstrate the visual disconnect between what one might expect butchness to look like and what it did look like for some women during this era. While New York City’s butches certainly employed the classic suit-and-tie and jeans-and-T-shirt looks, they also conveyed their identities through alternate means that included clandestine codes and plays on women’s fashions. In doing so, they offered a range of ways of interpreting butchness in their everyday lives that did not necessarily rely on the men’s clothing and styling that made lesbians visible in larger US culture. This article interrogates the relationship between masculine style and lesbian self-presentation during the postwar period. Queer legibility could enable entrance into lesbian communities and attract one’s next lover as well as provoke hostility, violence, and arrest. In this context, appearance carried tremendous significance, and butches and femmes employed diverse strategies to both convey and conceal their queerness, 3. See Joan Nestle, “Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s,” in her A Restricted Country, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003), 92–102; Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); Donna Penn, “The Meanings of Lesbianism in Postwar America,” in Gender and American History since 1890, ed. Barbara Melosh (New York: Routledge, 1993), 106–24. 4. Miriam Wolfson, interview with author, New York, NY, July 1, 2010. 606 Alix Genter knowing that the consequences varied by time, place, and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Basic Resources in Bioethics*Mary Carrington Coutts (bio)OrganizationsKennedy Institute of Ethics Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057 National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature 800-MED-ETHX or 202-687-3885The Hastings Center 255 Elm Road Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510 914-762-8500Society for Health and Human Values 6728 Old McLean Village Drive McLean, VA 22101 703-556-9222NOTE: There are numerous organizations in the United States and abroad that deal with bioethical issues. For a more comprehensive listing of (...) those organizations, see:American Hospital Association. Directory of Biomedical Ethics Organizations. Chicago: American Hospital Association, 1989.National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature. International Directory of Bioethics Organizations edited by Robert Iosco. Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 1986.Encyclopedia and DictionaryDictionary of Medical Ethics. Edited by A.S. Duncan, G.R. Dunstan, and R.B. Welborn. New rev. ed. New York: Crossroad, 1981. [End Page 75]Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Edited by Warren T. Reich. 4 vols. New York: Macmillan-Free Press, 1978; or 1982 reprint in 2 volumes available to members of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics through the membership office, 202-687-8099.Online DatabaseBioethicsline. Produced by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics for the National Library of Medicine. Searchable through the MEDLARS system. Focuses on questions of ethics and public policy in the fields of health care and biomedical research. Searches available upon request to the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature. For information on securing a personal access code from the National Library of Medicine, call 800-638-8480.BibliographiesBibliography of Bioethics. Edited by LeRoy Walters and Tamar Joy Kahn. Washington, DC: Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. Issued annually since 1975. Corresponds to the BIOETHICSLINE database. Provides references to resources on ethical and public policy issues in medicine and biomedical research. Includes abstracts; arranged by broad subject categories.Ethics in Nursing. Edited by Terry Pence. 2nd ed. New York: National League for Nursing, 1986. An annotated bibliography of nursing ethics. Includes author and subject indexes.Goldstein, Doris M. Bioethics: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982. A selected, annotated bibliography to the literature of bioethics.The Hastings Center's Bibliography of Ethics, Biomedicine and Professional Responsibility. Compiled by the staff of the Hastings Center. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984.Medical Ethics: An Annotated Bibliography. Edited by Mark Siegler, Peter A. Singer and David L. Schiedermayer. Philadelphia: American College of Physicians, 1988.Current Awareness ServicesNOTE: Several journals have sections where they highlight new publications. See, for example, the "In The Literature" section of the Hastings Center Report, or the "Medicolegal Reference Shelf" section of Law, Medicine and Health Care. Other services include:BioLaw. Edited by James F. Childress and Ruth D. Gaare. Frederick, MD: [End Page 76] University Publications of America, 1983 to present. Annual with bimonthly updates. (Previous title: Bioethics Reporter.) A compendium of articles and legal documents on ethical and legal issues in medicine, health care administration and human experimentation. Includes the text of important legal decisions in the Resources section.New Titles in Bioethics. Edited by Luanda Fitch Huttlinger. Washington, DC: National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. Published monthly 1975-1989; quarterly 1990—present. List of acquisitions by the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature. Organized by subject categories. Includes ordering information for difficult-to-find items. Annual cumulation available.Scope Notes Series. Washington, DC: National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. A series of issue briefs including annotated bibliographies on the following popular bioethical topics:No 1. Dangerousness, September 1982, 5 p.No 2. Living Wills and Durable Powers of Attorney: Advance Directive Legislation and Issues, Revised February 1990, 15 p.No 3. Ethics Committees in Hospitals, Revised June 1989, 12 p.No 4. Diagnosis Related Groups and the Prospective Payment System, June 1984, 11 p.No 5. Baby Fae, January 1985, 19 p.No 6. Surrogate Mothers, Revised January 1988, 12 p.No 7. Withholding or Withdrawing Nutrition or Hydration, Revised September 1988, 12 p.No 8. AIDS: Law, Ethics and Public Policy, April 1988, 12 p.No 9. Bioethics Audiovisuals 1982 to Present, September 1988, 12 p.No 10. Ethical Issues in... (shrink)

In many areas of philosophy, it is becoming more and more mainstream to appeal or at least refer to social science research. For example, in moral psychology, the empirically informed approach is well established in the literature on moral judgment, moral emotions, and moral responsibility (Greene, 2013; Nichols, 2004; Prinz, 2007; Kelly, 2011; Doris, 2016; Roskies, 2006; Vargas, 2013). Does work in the social sciences have any bearing on philosophical questions about practical reason or reasoning? While there has been (...) some excellent work that explores this question (e.g., Stein, 1996 ; Bishop and Trout, 2004 ), the growing empirical wave is less noticeable here. But this may not be because empirical research is irrelevant to the philosophical questions in the area. In this chapter, we will consider three questions about practical reason or reasoning that might be illuminated by attention to research in the social sciences. First, we’ll consider whether research on the role of sentiments on moral judgment is relevant to the philosophical debate between moral rationalism and moral sentimentalism. Second, we’ll consider whether research on the unconscious causes of action undermines philosophical views about the relationship between reasons and actions. Third, we’ll consider whether research on implicit bias is relevant to the normative question of how we can reason better. Along the way, we’ll see that when philosophical arguments and theories about practical reason make empirical assumptions – which they often do – empirical research can help to test these assumptions. We’ll also see that philosophical theories don’t always make the assumptions they are accused of making by their critics. Finally, we’ll see that we can make better prescriptions for how to reason better if we have a better sense of what we’re doing wrong. (shrink)

Virtue ethics prescribes cultivating global and behaviorally efficacious character traits, but John Doris and others argue that situationist social psychology shows this to be infeasible. Here, I show how certain versions of virtue ethics that ‘go mental’ can withstand this challenge as well as Doris’ further objections. The defense turns on an account of which psychological materials constitute character traits and which the situationist research shows to be problematically variable. Many situationist results may be driven by impulsive akrasia (...) produced by low-level , emotionally induced ignorance about one’s situation, and some may be driven by a further subtype: modal akrasia. Many subjects in the infamous Milgram experiments, e.g., seem to have recognized what the virtuous thing to do was and that they should do it, and only failed to do it because their emotions prevented them from seeing that they could. If the primary constituents of character traits are higher-level mental dispositions involved in deliberation, though, then the results don’t show that these psychological materials are problematically variable. (shrink)

In this radical critique of contemporary social theory, Eugene Halton argues that both modernism and postmodernism are damaged philosophies whose acceptance of the myths of the mind/body dichotomy make them incapable of solving our social dilemmas. Claiming that human beings should be understood as far more than simply a form of knowledge, social construction, or contingent difference, Halton argues that contemporary thought has lost touch with the spontaneous passions—or enchantment—of life. Exploring neglected works in twentieth century social thought and philosophy—particularly (...) the writings of Lewis Mumford and Charles Peirce—as well as the work of contemporary writers such as Vaclav Havel, Maya Angelou, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, and Victor Turner, Halton argues that reason is dependent upon nonrational forces—including sentiment, instinct, conjecture, imagination, and experience. We must, he argues, frame our questions in a way which encompasses both enchantment and critical reason, and he offers an outline here for doing so. A passionate plea for a fundamental reexamination of the entrenched assumptions of the modern era, this book deals with issues of vital concern to modern societies and should be read by scholars across disciplines. Robert Bellah: "This is an original, incisive, and badly needed book. In prose as vigorous as his argument, Halton addresses issues urgent in many disciplines, as well as in our common culture." "Halton takes the 'ghost in the machine' as a dominant defining metaphor for modern thought and life, and criticizes it with gusto, wit, wide reading, and philosophical acumen."—Robert J. Mulvaney, _Review of Metaphysics_. (shrink)

In this book I show that science suffers from a damaging but rarely noticed methodological disease, which I call rationalistic neurosis. It is not just the natural sciences which suffer from this condition. The contagion has spread to the social sciences, to philosophy, to the humanities more generally, and to education. The whole academic enterprise, indeed, suffers from versions of the disease. It has extraordinarily damaging long-term consequences. For it has the effect of preventing us from developing traditions and institutions (...) of learning rationally devoted to helping us learn how to make progress towards a wiser, more civilized world. On our fragile earth, overcrowded, fraught with injustice, inequality and conflict, menaced by unprecedented and terrifying technological and industrial means for change and destruction, we urgently need to acquire a little more wisdom and civilization if we are to avoid repeating horrors of the kind suffered by so many during the 20th century (and already suffered by many in the first few years of the 21st century). We can ill afford to have in our hands instruments of learning botched and bungled from the standpoint of helping us learn how to live more wisely. It may seem scarcely credible that something as important as our institutions of learning can suffer from wholesale, structural defects. Why has this not been noticed before? Why have not armies of scientists and scholars appreciated the point and, long ago, put the matter right? The answer will emerge as my argument unfolds. I will show that one of the most damaging features of rationalistic neurosis is that it has built-in methodological and institutional mechanisms which effectively conceal that anything is wrong. But there is also an immediately obvious reason: specialization, and the resulting fragmentation of academia, has resulted in a situation in which hardly anyone takes responsibility for the overall ideals, the overall aims and methods, of academic inquiry. Academics, these days, are specialists, furiously trying to keep abreast of developments in their own specialist fields. They have no time, and no inducement, to lift their eyes from their particular disciplines, and look at the whole endeavour. Science has long been under attack, at least since the Romantic movement. Blake objected to “Single vision & Newton’s sleep” and declared that “Art is the Tree of Life... Science is the Tree of Death”. Keats lamented that science will “clip an Angel’s wings” and “unweave a rainbow”. Whereas the Enlightenment had valued science and reason as tools for the liberation of humanity, Romanticism found science and reason oppressive and destructive, and instead valued art, imagination, inspiration, individual genius, emotional and motivational honesty rather than careful attention to objective fact. Much subsequent opposition to science stems from, or echoes, the Romantic opposition of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and many others. There is the movement Isaiah Berlin has described as the “Counter-Enlightenment” (Berlin, 1979, ch. 1). There is existentialism, with its denunciation of the tyranny of reason, its passionate affirmation of the value and centrality of irrationality in human life, from Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Sartre (see, for example, Barrett, 1962). There is the attack on Enlightenment ideals concerning science and reason undertaken by the Frankfurt school, by postmodernists and others, from Horkheimer and Adorno to Lyotard, Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, MacIntyre and Rorty (see Gascardi, 1999). The soul-destroying consequences of valuing science and reason too highly is a persistent theme in literature: it is to be found in the works of writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Max Frisch, Y. Zamyatin. There is persistent opposition to modern science and technology, and to scientific rationality, often associated with the Romantic wing of the green movement, and given expression in such popular books as Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends, Berman’s The Reenchantment of the World and Appleyard’s Understanding the Present. There is the feminist critique of science and conceptions of science: see, for example, Fox Keller (1984) and Harding (1986). And there are the corrosive implications of the so-called “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge, and of the work of social constructivist historians of science, which depict scientific knowledge as a belief system alongside many other such conflicting systems, having no more right to claim to constitute knowledge of the truth than these rivals, the scientific view of the world being no more than an elaborate myth, a social construct (see Barnes and Bloor, 1981; Bloor, 1991; Barnes, Bloor and Henry, 1996; Shapin and Schaffer, 1985; Shapin, 1994; Pickering, 1984; Latour, 1987). This latter literature has provoked a counter-attack by scientists, historians and philosophers of science seeking to defend science and traditional conceptions of scientific rationality: see Gross and Levitt (1994), Gross, Levitt and Lewis (1996), and Koertge (1998). This debate between critics and defenders of science came abruptly to public attention with the publication of Alan Sokal’s brilliant hoax article ‘Transgressing the boundaries’ in a special issue of the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996 entitled Science Wars: see Sokal and Bricmont (1998). What does this book have to contribute, given the above avalanche of criticism of science? The criticisms of science developed in this book are diametrically opposed to the above, in so far as the above criticisms oppose scientific rationality, seek to diminish or restrict its influence, or hold that it is unattainable. My central point is that we suffer, not from too much scientific rationality, but from not enough. What is generally taken to constitute scientific rationality is actually nothing of the kind. It is rationalistic neurosis, a characteristic, influential and damaging kind of irrationality masquerading as rationality. Science is damaged by being trapped within a widely upheld but severely defective philosophy of science; free science from this defective philosophy, provide it with a more intellectually rigorous philosophy, and it will flourish in both intellectual and humanitarian terms. And more generally, as we shall see, academic inquiry as a whole is damaged by being trapped within an intellectually defective philosophy of inquiry; free it from this defective philosophy, from its rationalistic neurosis, and it will flourish in intellectual and human terms. It is not reason that is damaging, but defective pretensions to reason — rationalistic neurosis —masquerading as reason. Thus what I seek to do here is the exact opposite of what all those who oppose science and scientific rationality do. I shall argue that Reason, the authentic article, arrived at by generalizing the progress-achieving methods of science, can have profoundly liberating and enriching consequences for all worthwhile, problematic aspects of life, and thus deserves to enter into every aspect of life. The bare bones of the argument of this book can be stated quite simply like this. Science cannot proceed without making the substantial metaphysical assumption that the universe is physically comprehensible (to some extent at least). But this conflicts with the orthodox view that in science everything is assessed impartially with respect to evidence, nothing being permanently assumed independently of evidence. So the metaphysical assumption of comprehensibility is repressed. Science pretends that no such assumption is made. But this damages science. For the assumption is substantial, influential and highly problematic. It needs to be made explicit within science so that it can be critically scrutinized, so that alternatives can be developed and considered. Pretending the assumption is not being made undermines the intellectual rigour of science, its intellectual value and success. And it does not stop there. For science also makes value assumptions. Quite properly, science is concerned to discover that which is of value. New factual knowledge devoid of all value (whether intellectual or practical) does not contribute to science. But the orthodox view of science holds that values have no place within science. As in the case of metaphysics, here too, science pretends that values have no role to play within the intellectual domain of science. And this damages science. For values are, if anything, even more influential and problematic than metaphysics (in influencing the direction of research). Here too, values need to be made explicit within science so that they can be scrutinized, so that alternatives can be developed and assessed. Pretending that values play no role within the intellectual domain damages science; both the intellectual and the practical aspects of science are adversely affected. Science fails to pursue those avenues of research that lie in the best interests of humanity. And it goes further. Science is pursued in a social, cultural, economic and political context. It is a part of various social, economic and political projects which seek to achieve diverse human objectives. But the idea that science is an integral part of humanitarian or political enterprises with political ends clashes, once again, with the official view of science that the aim of science is to improve factual knowledge. The political objectives of science are repressed. And, once again, this damages science. For, of course, the political objectives of science, like all our political objectives, are profoundly problematic. These need to be made explicit so that they can be scrutinized, so that alternatives can be developed and considered. The pretence that science does not have this political dimension once again undermines the intellectual rigour of science, and its human value. It lays science open to becoming a part of economic, corporate and political enterprises that are not in the best interests of humanity. The upshot of the line of argument just indicated is that we need to bring about a revolution in the aims and methods of science, and of academic inquiry more generally. Natural science needs to change; its relationship with the rest of academic inquiry, with social inquiry and the humanities, needs to change; and most importantly and dramatically, academic inquiry as a whole needs to change. The basic task of the academic enterprise needs to become to help humanity learn how to tackle its problems of living in more cooperatively rational ways than at present. We need to put the intellectual tasks of articulating our problems of living, and proposing and critically assessing possible solutions, possible and actual actions, at the heart of academic inquiry. The basic task needs to be to help humanity learn a bit more wisdom – wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. Natural science, despite its flaws, has massively increased our knowledge and technological know-how. This in turn has led to a massive and sometimes terrifying increase in our power to act. Often this unprecedented power to act is used for human good, as in medicine or agriculture. But it is also used to cause harm, whether unintentionally (initially at least) as when industrialization and modern agriculture lead to global warming, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, or intentionally, as when the technology of war is used by governments and terrorists to maim and kill. Before the advent of modern science, when we lacked the means to do too much damage to ourselves and the planet, lack of wisdom did not matter too much. Now, with our unprecedented powers to act, bequeathed to us by science, lack of wisdom has become a menace. This is the crisis behind all the other current global crises: science without wisdom. In these circumstances, to continue to pursue knowledge and technological know-how dissociated from a more fundamental quest for wisdom can only deepen the crisis. As a matter of urgency, we need to free science and academia of their neuroses; we need to bring about a revolution in the academic enterprise so that the basic aim becomes to promote wisdom by intellectual and educational means. At present science and the humanities betray both reason and humanity. The argument of this book, which I have just summarized, begins with a discussion of the philosophical and methodological problems that beset theoretical physics. At once, many of those who are concerned about moral, political and environmental issues that plague our world today, will feel impatient. What have the methodological problems of theoretical physics to do with third world poverty, war and the threat of war, pollution, extinction of species, the menace of conventional, chemical, biological and nuclear armaments? I can only plead with such a reader: patience. The root cause of the sickness of our times does indeed lie, I claim, with a methodological sickness of natural science or, even more specifically, of physical science. What makes the modern world so utterly different from all previous ages is our possession of modern science and technology. This is the instrument that has changed the conditions of human life almost beyond all recognition, and put unprecedented, and sometimes terrifying, powers into our hands. One should not dismiss out of hand the suggestion that a part of our problem may lie with this instrument, this engine, of rapid change. We see, here, too, the way in which intellectual specialization, referred to above, has effectively concealed from view the nature and extent of the problem that confronts us. The argument that I shall develop in what follows begins with physics, with problems concerning the aims and methods of physics. But it then leaps to social science, to philosophy, to the humanities, to education, to psychotherapy, and to politics: in the end there is scarcely an aspect of modern life that is not touched and, potentially, affected by the argument. How many academic experts are prepared to follow, to take seriously, an argument that ranges so recklessly across such a wide range of academic disciplines? How many non-academic non-experts? But just this is what the argument and message of this book requires. I hope that the reader will endure with patience the somewhat esoteric discussion concerning the aims and methods of physics pursued in chapter one. This may not seem to have anything much to do with the urgent problems of our times, but it does. This is in part how the intellectual disaster I seek to expose in this book conceals itself from view: it buries itself in the obscure, recondite field of the philosophy of physics. Those who devote their lives to the philosophy of physics are, by and large, too myopic to see how their specialized field of study has anything to do with the great and dreadful humanitarian problems and disasters of our age; and those who are above all concerned with these humanitarian disasters have no time at all for abstruse issues concerning the aims and methods of physics. And so the connection is never made. As it happens, the methodological neurosis of physics, with which we begin in chapter one, is actually a quite simple matter to grasp. It does not require any real knowledge of physics to understand. Indeed, physicists and philosophers of physics are much more likely to find the argument difficult to follow than are non-experts. We non-scientists can stand back and see the whole wood; scientists, trained to think in terms of the current orthodox conception of science, trapped in the thickets of research, will find this much harder to do. In an attempt to take this peculiar circumstance into account, I have arranged the exposition as follows. In chapter one I give a simple exposition of the case for declaring natural science to suffer from what I call "rationalistic neurosis"; this avoids all technicalities, and goes straight to the heart of the matter. In the appendix I tackle a host of more technical objections that may be made to the elementary argument of chapter one. So, those experts in the fields of the philosophy of physics and philosophy of science who find the argument of chapter one naïve and unconvincing, should consult the appendix before tossing the book away in disgust. I write in the hope that there will be a few who will not dismiss out of hand the suggestion that the question of how we are to go about learning how to live in wiser and more civilized ways might have something to learn from scientific learning, and will take the trouble to pursue the line of argument traced out in this book. I write in the hope that these few will grasp just how desperate our situation is, how urgent the need to change the status quo, and will do everything in their power to alert others to the need to heal the methodological sickness from which our institutions and traditions of learning at present suffer. To begin with, we need a campaigning organization, modelled perhaps on "Friends of the Earth", which might be called something like "Friends of Wisdom". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Post-Traumatic Hermeneutics: Melancholia in the Wake of TraumaAngelika Rauch (bio)1Classical Analysis: Problems for Trauma TherapyAccording to the Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, American ego psychology has taken a leading role in debunking what it considers antiquated Freudian approaches to the study of trauma. As neutral observers and students of the facts, ego psychologists have purportedly reclaimed the study of trauma as the search for an objectifiable traumatic event (...) in the past, one that can be accessed as recovered memory, as a specimen of pathogenic development, or as cognitive and behavioral effects that point to an inaccessible implied memory buried in the psyche. Central to this revision of psychoanalytical trauma therapy is the dismissal of Nachträglichkeit as an antiquated and irrelevant concept. Harold P. Blum, for instance, writes in a recent article of JAPA that “‘deferred action’ is an ambiguous concept, a dubious, antiquated, theoretical legacy.” According to Blum, “deferred action overlooks the immediate and potentially powerful effects of preoedipal trauma and is dissociated from considerations of cumulative trauma and developmental disturbance.” [1155]. With respect to Freud’s case of the Wolf-Man, Blum states that “[d]eferred action emphasized traumatic events and memory rather than cumulative developmental effects of shock and strain trauma, and pathogenic object relationships.” Key to Blum’s view, then, is the assertion that “the concept of deferred action deterred consideration of real infantile experience and the complex overdetermination of pathogenesis through development” [1156]. Blum apparently takes the side of those who like to argue that trauma is more real than imagined. Whereas oedipal trauma is an imaginary or illusory trauma, preoedipal trauma is comprehensible as real shock and, as such, is empirically true. This is an idea that is very compatible with “recovered memory” therapy, a subject that has become controversial in recent debates about child abuse and recovered memory syndrome.In contrast, Arnold H. Modell in Other Times, Other Realities points out that “[t]he concept of Nachträglichkeit is virtually unknown among American psychoanalysts. This may be due in part to Strachey’s faulty translation; but this idea is also inconsistent with the belief in an orderly hierarchical psychic development such as that envisioned by ego psychologists.” [3]. In other words, Freudian Nachträglichkeit violates the principles of space and time assumed by empirical scientists whose conceptions are founded on the causality of such principles as stimulus/response. It is here, of course, that ego psychology’s treatment of trauma would come into conflict not only with Freudian analysis, including its French Freudian variants, but with the kind of trauma studies being conducted by the contributors to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory. They include Bessel [End Page 111] van der Kolk, Onno van der Hart, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Robert Lifton, and, of course, Cathy Caruth herself.Emphasis on the reality of traumatic shock (as abuse, stress, accident, and so on), however important it may be, loses sight of a hermeneutical dimension of psychoanalytic therapy that Caruth and her contributors emphasize: the question of how meanings are associated or bound to the understanding of life’s events. My own clinical approach to psychoanalysis favors the introduction of an even stronger hermeneutical perspective that is sensitive to the kinds of issues raised by philosophers like Dilthey, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Gadamer, for whom the question of experience is not reducible to restricted understandings of stimulus/response, nor—as in the case of Caruth (for example, in Unclaimed Experience)—to the privileging of language as a formal (that is, literary) construct. Rather, I am interested in emphasizing a hermeneutics of the therapeutic encounter within which questions of language, culture, history, and behavior are situated. With respect to trauma therapy, I will introduce a number of well-known analytical contributions even as I take the following statement of Arnold Modell’s as my point of departure:The analyst or therapist becomes an unwitting collaborator in the recreation of the past, while still retaining a proximity to present time. The therapist becomes the person with whom one can reexperience trauma within a new context or experience for the first time what has been absent in the past. Affects belonging to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bilingual Aesthetics:A New Sentimental EducationJane DuranBilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education, by Doris Sommer. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004, 254 pp.Doris Sommer's new work Bilingual Aesthetics is the sort of book that takes one by surprise—and for good reason. Filled with punning twists, and itself a valorizer of word games and magic, this work has not a lot to do with bilingualism (in the standard (...) sense), not a lot to do with aesthetics (again, in the standard academic sense), but a great deal to do with both. Whether the title is read (and Sommer's point is to forward the notion of alternate readings) as the aesthetics of bilingualism or as an account of what a bilingual might make of aesthetics, there is a startling amount of content in the work.Briefly, Sommer essays to make the case that our multicultural society is distinctly better off for being multicultural and multilingual (or at least, in some threatening sense, emergently bilingual) because the literal bilingual has a distinct advantage over her or his monolingual counterpart. The bilingual can play language games, and those games shock, amuse, or jolt—whatever it is that they do, they rouse us out of any state of intellectual torpor into which we might have fallen and they serve to make us all individuals who, in Du Bois' memorable phrase, have "double consciousness."Thus Sommer does in fact mean for her title to be read in at least two ways: Her work attempts to valorize and vindicate a sort of unofficial bilingualism (one of the blurbs on the back of the paperback edition begins by saying "Knowing a second language entails some unease... "), while she also attempts to let us in on the notion that there is an aesthetic that develops from the use of more than one code. Sommer plays remarkably on all these concepts: She is familiar with the standard, overt scholarship on bilingualism—she can cite work by sociolinguists and others. At the same time, as an author known for previous work on literature, especially with regard to Latin America, she is also familiar with much of the standard historical work in aesthetics, including Kant. Citing thinkers such as Kenji Hakuta, William J. Bennett, Wittgenstein, and Elena Poniatowska, Sommer leaves the reader somewhat bedazzled and breathless but better off for having read her work.Her overall thesis, if one may attempt to employ such a phrase, is that bilingualism and code-switching create for us the same sort of uneasiness and inevitable access to the unconscious that works of art and literature produce—and that the edginess that is a concomitant of code-switching is beneficial. Her first chapter "Choose and Lose" reminds Americans that the United States has always been a multilingual place and focuses on how much can be gained from attempting to forward the notion. If there is any difficulty to Sommer's work, it is that she practices what she preaches. Every page demands much of the reader, since every page itself engages in the [End Page 121] sort of rapid-fire twisting and switching that Sommer is trying to support as the ground for a new aesthetic consciousness.Early on, Sommer gives us the following:Complaints about the danger to national coherence [of multi- or bilingualism] can be downright funny.... [One irate journalist wrote:] "How can immigrants identify with America if they can't read Lincoln's words in the language in which they were spoken?(out of many, one) to a multicultural boarding house,...?" No need to be upset at this harangue. It's obviously a joke, even if the author missed it (a common asymmetry in bilingual humor). Notice that the translation from Latin assumes that English-only citizens don't understand the very slogan they hold dear.(p. 26)But of course the joke is to some extent on Sommer and on all of us, as she no doubt intends. It is highly unlikely that the journalist did get the humor, and the only funny part of the entire tirade is that we—assuming we have enough formal education—may be able to make something out of it... (shrink)

What kind of turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Ethics is back in literary studies, philosophy, and political theory. Where critiques of universal man and the autonomous human subject had, in recent years, produced a resistance to ethics in many fields of scholarship, today these critiques have generated a crossover among disciplines and led to theories and practices that see and do ethics otherwise. The decentering of the subject, the (...) contributors to this volume suggest, has brought about a recentering of the ethical. The philosophers, political theorists, literary critics and physician whose essays are collected here bring the particularities of their disciplines and training to a vital complex of questions. Many of these authors express concerns that the turn to ethics is a turn away from politics towards moralism. All ultimately conclude, however, that such concerns, rather than leading away from ethics, have helped to reinvigorate the intellectual field in the present moment. Contributors: Judith Butler, Homi K. Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Nancy Fraser, John Guillory, Beatrice Hanssen, Barbara Johnson, Perri Klass, Chantal Mouffe, Doris Sommer, Rebecca Walkowitz. (shrink)

One tradition of solving the surprise exam paradox, started by Robert Binkley and continued by Doris Olin, Roy Sorensen and Jelle Gerbrandy, construes surpriseepistemically and relies upon the oddity of propositions akin to G. E. Moore’s paradoxical ‘p and I don’t believe that p.’ Here I argue for an analysis that evolves from Olin’s. My analysis is different from hers or indeed any of those in the tradition because it explicitly recognizes that there are two distinct reductios at work (...) in the student’s paradoxical argument against the teacher. The weak reductio is easy to fault. Its invalidity determines the structure of the strong reductio, so-calledbecause it is more difficult to refute, but ultimately unsound because of reasons associated with Moore-paradoxicality. Previous commentators have not always appreciated this difference, with the result that the strong reductio is not addressed, or the response to the weak reductio is superfl uous. This is one reason why other analyses in the tradition are vulnerable to objections to which mine is not. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Social Psychology and Contemplative Science Perspective on Character and VirtuePaul Condon (bio)Character Trouble: Undisciplined Essays on Moral Agency and Personality. By John M. Doris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.The early years of experimental social psychology showed the power of situations to discourage people from helping others. The murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, allegedly witnessed by 38 nonresponsive bystanders, sparked interest in the situational forces that shape (...) social behavior.1 Experimental research later confirmed that the presence of nonresponsive bystanders led to a reduction in helping behavior, called “the bystander effect” (Latane and Darley 1968; Fischer et al. 2011). Surprisingly, situations also reduce helping behavior among those who have dedicated their lives to virtues such as compassion. In a highly cited study, seminary students who were on their way to deliver a lecture on generosity, under time pressure, were less likely to help an actor portraying a homeless man compared with those students not under time pressure (Darley and Batson 1973). Stanley Milgram’s (1963) research on obedience demonstrated the overwhelming tendency of people to obey authorities who encouraged ostensible harm toward others, thereby sacrificing an impulse for compassionate intervention. Social psychology has repeatedly shown that situations override people’s virtuous inclinations.For over 20 years, John M. Doris and other self-identified character skeptics—also sometimes called situationists—have drawn on empirical results from social psychology to challenge the concept of moral character and virtue. In their view, empirical data from social psychology convincingly show that situational forces can override the values and motivations that stem from individual personality traits and moral character. Doris’ latest iteration, Character Trouble, chronicles the evolution of his thought over his career, applying social psychology to examine and question the project of virtue ethics, moral character, and agency. The book begins with chapters from Doris’ initial work, responses, and applications over time, then concludes with two original chapters and a methodological primer for those who wish to engage scientific psychology to develop philosophical theory. [End Page 527]Throughout the book, Doris reviews an impressive range of experimental literature across social and cognitive psychology that will be of interest to philosophers and psychologists. The coverage includes classic studies and important revised accounts in light of new historical research and replication efforts, for example, concerning Milgram’s obedience studies and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Doris cites various examples in which subtle situations surprisingly override character traits (e.g., the presence of noise pollution from a lawnmower reduced helping behavior; discovering a dime in a phone booth increased helping behavior). Indeed, findings that subtle situational cues can decrease or increase prosocial behavior have been a hallmark throughout the history of social psychology. Doris also describes various phenomena that pose challenges to the normative ideals of reflection and deliberation, including self-delusion, the correspondence bias (in which people are biased to attribute others’ behaviors to traits and ignore situational influence), the limits of self-report, and positive illusions about one’s own capacities.Doris shows that philosophers and psychologists need not fear interdisciplinary work, and that we can venture beyond the bounds of our disciplinary training through intentional, thoughtful conversation with colleagues across disciplines. The appendix offers practical suggestions for scholars who wish to incorporate lessons and material from beyond their home discipline to achieve a generative, undisciplined body of work. Doris also gives the reader a valuable tutorial on methodological and statistical considerations. As an experimental social psychologist who studies compassion training—a program that one might call a normative project of moral and emotional training—I read Doris and his interlocutors with great interest. Other reviewers of Character Trouble are more qualified to speak to the philosophical contours of this debate (i.e., Robertson and Spencer in this issue; Fileva 2022). Here, I focus my review on three themes concerning social psychological research and their implications for normative projects related to virtue and character. In the end, inspired by Doris, I offer some original thoughts on the potential to reconcile situationism with normative ideals through dialogue with Eastern contemplative traditions.The Person-Situation DebateThe crux of Character Trouble’s position on virtue ethics and character skepticism is the parallel debate... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Accurate Self-Assessment, Autonomous Ignorance, and the Appreciation of DisabilityJoel Anderson (bio) and Warren Lux (bio)In their thoughtful commentaries on our essay, "Knowing your own strength: Accurate self-assessment as a requirement for personal autonomy," George Agich, Ruth Chadwick, and Dominic Murphy (2004) provide both criticisms and insights that give us a context in which to clarify further our claim that one's autonomy is impaired when one is unable to appreciate (...) whether one has the capacities required for tasks one is undertaking. We focus on two issues: the extent to which our account of autonomy suggests a problematically "externalist" or "objective" approach and the issue of whether our talk of accurate self-assessment entails an overdemanding requirement that one know numerous facts about oneself to count as autonomous.The External Point of ViewFor many, the idea that specific regions of the brain might be relevant to a person's autonomy evokes nightmarish, startlingly reductionist visions of a world in which informed consent is decided on the basis of neuroimaging. In arguing that a capacity for self-assessment is essential for autonomy and also presupposes executive function that is often impaired by prefrontal damage, we do not wish to engage in such reductionism by suggesting that there is any straightforward, one-to-one mapping comparable to that presupposed by the nightmare scenarios. Given what we know about the brain's plasticity, the prospects (although limited at present) for neurorehabilitation, the multiplicity of the instantiation of autonomy-related capacities, and, especially, the constitutively moral/normative dimensions of these capacity concepts, such mappings are clearly problematic. This is true even in the easy cases, which, as Murphy points out, include our case of "John." This is all the more true with regard to the more complicated psychiatric cases, including disorders such as depression where the normative dimensions and the greater interpretive leeway in diagnosis preclude reductionist solutions (See Anderson 2004). For these reasons and for independent philosophical reasons, we are uncomfortable with the label "externalist," [End Page 309] although we acknowledge and confirm our view that externally applied neuroscientific notions—and evidence—can inform these matters. Nonetheless, we do not wish to argue for a fully externalist point of view, especially when paired with the idea that we are advocating a "smooth naturalistic picture of the cognitive basis of autonomy" (Murphy 2004, 303). Murphy puts us in some terrific company with the likes of John Doris, Shaun Nichols, and—we would add—himself, and this is welcome and flattering. But, to avoid any misunderstanding of an issue that we do not actually take up in our essay, we should caution that we do not endorse a program of naturalizing the normativity on which many of central autonomy-related concepts are based. The notion, for example, of what it is to assess competently one's chances of success cannot be replaced with a set of nomological regularities or a self-applying list of necessary and sufficient conditions.Appreciating Disability and Knowing the FactsOne of the central challenges we face in presenting our approach is to distinguish our requirement of "accurate self-assessment" from an implausible requirement that one have no false beliefs about one's capacities. In different ways, all three commentaries make it clear that our argument would benefit from further clarification of this distinction.In her commentary, Chadwick suggests that our approach may commit us to requiring too much self-knowledge, specifically, that it seems to require accurate knowledge of things like our genetic makeup as a requirement for autonomy. To begin with, it is worth underscoring again that the requirement we have introduced is explicitly task specific: we are focused here on whether an agent has an understanding of things that are relevant for undertaking an intended task, and declarative knowledge of facts, genetic or otherwise, about oneself is relevant only insofar as they bear on that understanding.But Chadwick's point clearly goes deeper. In that regard, it is particularly important to underscore that ours is actually a requirement that has less to do with knowing facts—even task-specific ones—about oneself and much more to do with having the ability to incorporate available... (shrink)

This Festschrift in Professor Kristeller’s honor consists of contributions by scholars who have had some connection with Columbia University, his "intellectual home in the United States for three decades." It also includes a Tabula Gratulatoria listing many other friends from the United States and Europe. The editor’s opening essay provides an interesting and informative account of this scholar’s academic career, and should be read together with the complete annotated bibliography of his publications through 1974. The latter lists 149 "major publications" (...) and 220 "minor publications." Kristeller’s contributions to the history of Renaissance philosophy are well known to historians of philosophy, and deservedly so. Here reference should be made to his groundbreaking studies on Marsilio Ficino and Pomponazzi, and on others such as Pico della Mirandola and Petrarch, as well as on Renaissance Platonism, Aristotelianism in the Renaissance, Thomism in the Renaissance, Paduan Averroism, and Alexandrism. But he has also contributed greatly to the fields of medieval and Renaissance history, and especially to our understanding of Renaissance humanism, Renaissance music, and Renaissance art. He is universally recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on manuscript research, as is witnessed, for example, by the cooperative project, Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, which he founded, and by his Iter ltalicum. In all of these enterprises he has set an enviable example for other scholars by the exacting standards and the breadth of his expertise. It is only fitting, then, that the many essays in this Festschrift should reflect the breadth and depth of the scholarship so evident in the man to whom they are dedicated. Limitations of space will only permit us to list them here, with a few remarks reserved for those of more special interest to philosophers and historians of philosophy: Eugene F. Rice, Jr., "The De magia naturali of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples" ; Donald R. Kelley, "Louis Le Caron Philosophe", on Le Caron’s effort to bring together jurisprudence and classical, especially Platonic, philosophy; Richard H. Popkin, "The Pre-Adamite Theory in the Renaissance", with fascinating material about theories concerning men before Adam in La Peyrère and widely scattered earlier sources; Richard Lemay, "The Fly against the Elephant: Flandinus against Pomponazzi on Fate", on an unedited attack by an Augustinian Bishop against Pomponazzi’s espousal of the Stoic doctrine of fate; Martin Pine, "Pietro Pomponazzi and the Medieval Tradition of God’s Foreknowledge", on Pomponazzi’s solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom inlight of his familiarity with earlier discussions by Boethius, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham; F. Edward Cranz, "Editions of the Latin Aristotle Accompanied by the Commentaries of Averroes", helpful to all who wish to consult late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century versions of the Latin Aristotle and especially the Latin Averroes; Josef Soudek, "A Fifteenth-Century Humanistic Bestseller: The Manuscript Diffusion of Leonardo Bruni’s Annotated Latin Version of the Aristotelian Economics" ; Edward P. Mahoney, "Nicoletto Vernia on the Soul and Immortality", which details a radical shift on Vernia’s part from an earlier Averroistic reading of Aristotle; Joan Kelly-Gadol, "Tommaso Campanella: The Agony of Political Theory in the Counter-Reformation", which attempts to account for some of the shifts and inconsistencies in Campanella’s political writings by placing them within the troubled personal and political circumstances of his life; Charles Trinkaus, "Protagoras in the Renaissance: An Exploration" ; Maristella de Panizza Lorch, "Voluptas, molle quoddam et non invidiosum nomen: Lorenzo Valla’s Defense of voluptas in the Preface to his De voluptate" ; Neal W. Gilbert, "Richard de Bury and the ‘Quires of Yesterday’s Sophisms"’, with much interesting material on the medieval tradition of sophismata, especially at Oxford; Malcolm Brown, "A Pre-Aristotelian Mathematician on Deductive Order" ; John H. Randall, Jr., "Paduan Aristotelianism Reconsidered", on evidence for influence of the Italian Aristotelian tradition on Galileo; William F. Edwards, "Niccoló Leoniceno and the Origins of Humanist Discussion of Method" ; C. Doris Hellman, "A Poem on the Occasion of the Nova of 1572" ; Edward Rosen, "Kepler’s Mastery of Greek" ; W. T. H. Jackson, "The Politics of a Poet: The Archipoeta as Revealed by his Imagery" ; John Charles Nelson, "Love and Sex in the Decameron" ; George B. Parks, "Pico della Mirandola in Tudor Translation" ; Richard Harrier, "Invention in Tudor Literature: Historical Perspectives" ; Helene Wieruszowski, "Jacob Burckhardt and Vespasiano da Bisticci " ; Morimichi Watanabe, "Gregor Heimburg and Early Humanism in Germany" ; Raymond de Roover, "Cardinal Cajetan on ‘Cambium’ or Exchange Dealings" ; and a series of text editions with introductions including Julius Kirshner, "Conscience and Public Finance: A Questio disputata of John of Legnano on the Public Debt of Genoa" ; John Mundy, "The Origins of the College of Saint-Raymond at the University of Toulouse" ; Charles B. Schmitt, "Girolamo Borro’s Multae sunt nostrarum ignorantionum causae " ; Guido Kisch, "An Unpublished Consiliumof Johannes Sichardus" ; Patricia H. Labalme, "The Last Will of a Venetian Patrician " ; Felix Gilbert, "The Last Will of a Venetian Grand Chancellor" ; Herbert S. Matsen, "Giovanni Garzoni to Alessandro Achillini : An Unpublished Letter and Defense" ; Theodore E. James, "A Fragment of An Exposition of the First Letter of Seneca to Lucilius Attributed to Peter of Mantua". The editor, his collaborators, and the contributors are all to be commended for the high quality of this volume.—J.F.W. (shrink)

This book is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character that date back to Aristotle. John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. More often than not it is the situation not the nature of the personality that really counts. The author elaborates the philosophical consequences of this research for (...) a whole array of ethical theories and shows that, once rid of the misleading conception of motivation, moral psychology can support more robust ethical theories and more humane ethical practices. (shrink)

Do we know what we're doing, and why? Psychological research seems to suggest not: reflection and self-awareness are surprisingly uncommon and inaccurate. John M. Doris presents a new account of agency and responsibility, which reconciles our understanding of ourselves as moral agents with empirical work on the unconscious mind.

Paradoxes are more than just intellectual puzzles - they raise substantive philosophical issues and offer the promise of increased philosophical knowledge. In this introduction to paradox and paradoxes, Doris Olin shows how seductive paradoxes can be, why they confuse and confound, and why they continue to fascinate. Olin examines the nature of paradox, outlining a rigorous definition and providing a clear and incisive statement of what does and does not count as a resolution of a paradox. The view that (...) a statement can be both true and false, that contradictions can be true, is seen to provide a challenge to the account of paradox resolution, and is explored. With this framework in place, the book then turns to an in-depth treatment of the Prediction Paradox, versions of the Preface/Fallibility Paradox, the Lottery Paradox, Newcomb's Problem, the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Sorites Paradox. Each of these paradoxes is shown to have considerable philosophical punch. Olin unpacks the central arguments in a clear and systematic fashion, offers original analyses and solutions, and exposes further unsettling implications for some of our most deep-seated principles and convictions. (shrink)

In this essay, Doris Santoro examines the discourse of “fidelity of instruction” to show how it is doublespeak for teacher compliance that is incompatible with democracy and education. Analyzing the distorted use of the term “fidelity” by market-based reformers, Santoro illustrates how it can be used as a weapon against teacher intelligence and moral response. She argues that John Dewey's philosophy provides conceptual resources to reframe some teacher infidelity as intelligent response, the moral agency required for pedagogical responsibility.

__Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay_ offers a timely analysis of professional dissatisfaction that challenges the common explanation of burnout. _Featuring the voices of educators, the book offers concrete lessons for practitioners, school leaders, and policy makers on how to think more strategically to retain experienced teachers and make a difference in the lives of students. Based on ten years of research and interviews with practitioners across the United States, the book theorizes the (...) existence of a “moral center” that can be pivotal in guiding teacher actions and expectations on the job. Education philosopher Doris Santoro argues that demoralization offers a more precise diagnosis that is born out of ongoing value conflicts with pedagogical policies, reform mandates, and school practices. _Demoralized_ reveals that this condition is reversible when educators are able to tap into authentic professional communities and shows that individuals can help themselves. Detailed stories from veteran educators are included to illustrate the variety of contexts in which demoralization can occur. Based on these insights, Santoro offers an array of recommendations and promising strategies for how school leaders, union leaders, teacher groups, and individual practitioners can enact and support “re-moralization” by working to change the conditions leading to demoralization. (shrink)

This article considers how we should frame the ethical issues raised by current proposals for large-scale genebanks with on-going links to medical and lifestyle data, such as the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council's 'UK Biobank'. As recent scandals such as Alder Hey have emphasised, there are complex issues concerning the informed consent of donors that need to be carefully considered. However, we believe that a preoccupation with informed consent obscures important questions about the purposes to which such collections are (...) put, not least that they may be only haphazardly used for research —an end that would not fairly reflect the original altruistic motivation of donors, and the trust they must invest. We therefore argue that custodians of such databases take on a weighty pro-active duty, to encourage public debate about the ends of such collections and to sponsor research that reflects publicly agreed priorities and provides public benefits. (shrink)

The Médecins Sans Frontières ethics review board has been solicited in an unprecedented way to provide advice and review research protocols in an ‘emergency’ mode during the recent Ebola epidemic. Twenty-seven Ebola-related study protocols were reviewed between March 2014 and August 2015, ranging from epidemiological research, to behavioural research, infectivity studies and clinical trials with investigational products at early development stages. This article examines the MSF ERB’s experience addressing issues related to both the process of review and substantive ethical issues (...) in this context. These topics include lack of policies regarding blood sample collection and use, and engaging communities regarding their storage and future use; exclusion of pregnant women from clinical and vaccine trials; and the difficulty of implementing timely and high-quality qualitative/anthropological research to consider potential upfront harms. Having noticed different standards across ethics committees, we propose that when multiple ethics reviews of clinical and vaccine trials are carried out during a public health emergency they should be accompanied by transparent communication between the ECs involved. The MSF ERB experience should trigger a broader discussion on the ‘optimal’ ethics review in an emergency outbreak and what enduring structural changes are needed to improve the ethics review process. (shrink)

Most research on aggression and delinquency concentrates on risk factors. There has been less attention for protective factors and mechanisms, in particular with regard to biosocial influences. Based on theories of autonomous arousal and stress reactance the present study addresses the influence of adrenocortical activity as a risk and/or protective factor in the development of antisocial behavior in children. We also investigated relations to anxiousness and family stressors. In a prospective longitudinal study of 150 German boys, the first measurement took (...) place at preschool age and contained an assessment of cortisol after waking up and 30 min later. Aggressiveness and anxiousness of the children were assessed by the kindergarten teachers with the Social Behavior Questionnaire. After 6 years, the children's behavior was rated by the teachers in middle school. Variable-oriented data analyses revealed a significant correlation between the total amount of cortisol after waking up and 30 min later and anxiousness both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, but not with aggressiveness. A family stress index correlated positively with aggressiveness but neither with cortisol nor with anxiousness. There were significant correlations between aggressiveness and anxiousness at kindergarten age and the respective behavior problems 6 years later. In a linear regression analysis on aggression only family stress had a significant effect but anxiousness not. Moderator analyses on aggressiveness with anxiousness and AUCG or on AUCG with anxiousness and aggressiveness did not show any significant interactions. Longitudinally, only aggression significantly predicted aggression 6 years later in a linear regression. In addition to variable-oriented analyses, we also applied a person-oriented approach to investigate specific patterns of behavior. Children who were high in both aggressiveness and anxiousness had the highest cortisol level and those with low anxiousness and high aggressiveness the lowest. The groups with different patterns of externalizing and internalizing problems at preschool age showed significant differences in aggression 6 years later. Our results underline the need for complex pattern analyses on cortisol, aggression, and anxiousness in children and for a differentiated consideration of emotional reactive aggression and unemotional instrumental aggression. (shrink)

Previous studies of Hebrew nu investigate this discourse marker in casual conversation. The current study explores nu on Israeli political phone-in radio programs and broadens our knowledge both about the functions and grammaticization processes of discourse markers and about some particularities of Israeli political talk radio. The comparison to casual talk reveals both qualitative and quantitative differences. In casual talk, the main function of nu is a sequential one – urging further development of an ongoing topic. In the radiophonic data, (...) the most common role of nu is as a keying token, functioning in the affective realm. Furthermore, the talk-radio data show a wider variety of keys constructed by nu – which range from joking to sheer contempt – clustering closer towards the latter, in contrast to the case of casual talk, manifesting mostly the joking key. Structurally, whereas sequential functions are generally accomplished by stand-alone nu, affective tokens are accompanied by same-speaker talk. The analysis sheds new light on how a sequential token might come to function in the affective realm. (shrink)

O texto analisa a presença do rádio no romance Incidente em Antares, de Erico Verissimo, com o objetivo de verificar o papel do veículo na ficção produzida pelo autor e a sua relação com o imaginário do período. Conclui-se que o rádio, no romance, traça um grande painel da sociedade e da política gaúcha (e brasileira). Ao mesmo tempo, mexe com a necessidade de circulação entre o imaginário e o real da comunidade e auxilia na construção de novos imaginários. The (...) text analyzes the presence of radio in the novel Incidente em Antares, by Erico Verissimo, in order to verify the role of the vehicle produced by the writer in the fiction and its relationship with the imaginary of the period. We conclude that the radio, in the novel, draws a large panel of society and politics in the State. At the same time, move with the need to travel between the imaginary and the real community and assists in building new imaginary. (shrink)