Recently, the concept of "gender identity" has enjoyed a great deal of attention in gender metaphysics. This seems to be motivated by the goal of creating trans-inclusive theory, by explaining trans people's genders. In this paper, we aim to unmotivate this project. Notions of "gender identity" serve important pragmatic purposes for trans people, such as satisfying the curiosity of non-trans people, and, relatedly, securing our access to important goods like legal rights and medical care. However, we argue that this does (...) not mean that "gender identity" is a metaphysically substantial thing that deserves extensive theoretical attention. There are reasons to be skeptical of such a concept. We trace the history of "gender identity," primarily to identify its roots in trans-antagonistic medical theory and its connections to the problematic "wrong-body" model--a legacy that has pathologized and flattened trans experience. Moreover, we argue that trans people primarily use "gender identity" to explain ourselves to non-trans people, rather than to discuss ourselves among ourselves. Thus, we urge theorists to resist the urge to substantiate gender identity. Instead, we encourage the development of new and better concepts, ones that attend to the lived realities of trans community and the flourishing gender terms and practices that are constructed there. If these lived realities are taken seriously, there is no need to “explain” trans people’s genders; we can simply see them as they are. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "From Axiom to Dialogue".

In this article, I examine the moral dimensions of gender affirmation. I argue that the moral value of gender affirmation is rooted in what Iris Murdoch called loving attention. Loving attention is central to the moral value of gender affirmation because such affirmation is otherwise too fragile or insincere to have such value. Moral reasons to engage in acts that gender affirm derive from the commitment to give and express loving attention to trans people as a way of challenging their (...) marginalization. In the latter part of the paper, I will discuss how my arguments bear on recent arguments by Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak (2018) on the use of gender-neutral language. They argue that we have a duty not to use gender-specific pronouns for anyone. Their conclusion turns, in part, on a rejection of gender affirmation as a moral duty. The value of gender affirmation, rooted in our moral perception of trans people, should make us skeptical of this conclusion, in favor of a more nuanced and pluralistic approach to the ethics of gendering. (shrink)

With increased visibility of trans people comes increased philosophical interest in gendered language. This chapter aims to look at the research on gendered language in analytic philosophy of language so far, which has focused on two concerns: (1) determining how to define gender terms like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ such that they are trans inclusive and (2) if, or to what extent, we should use gendered language at all. We argue that the literature has focused too heavily on how gendered language (...) can harm trans people, and has not considered how trans people use gendered language to create meaning and joy for ourselves. Pulling from the literature in sociolinguistics, we look at examples of how trans people use language to make their lives better by gaining recognition, playing with gendered language, finding joy in gendered language, and taking control of definitional power, concluding that debates about gendered language need to consider not only how such language harms trans people but also how trans people use it for our own liberation. (shrink)

This paper has two aims: to explore the affective dimensions of moral shock and the way it relates to normative marginalization of those furthest from dominant society and also, more specifically, to articulate the trans experience of constantly being under moral attack because the dominant ‘world’ normatively defines trans individuals out of existence. Toward these ends, I build on Katie Stockdale's recent work on moral shock, arguing that moral shock needs to be contextualized to ‘worlds’ of sense to understand how (...) marginalized people affectively experience shocking events. My focus is the trans experience of moral shock due to the way trans people are positioned outside of dominant society, which creates the conditions to experience cyclical, chronic shock. These affective conditions point to a collective responsibility to ease the affective stress that the most marginalized experience. (shrink)

We say that A≤LRB if every B-random set is A-random with respect to Martin–Löf randomness. We study this relation and its interactions with Turing reducibility, classes, hyperimmunity and other recursion theoretic notions.

Romanian born E.M. Cioran, who lived in Paris until his death in 1995, writes of politics, of history, and of the utopian dream. "Cioran has a claim to be regarded as among the handful of original minds... writing today".--NEW YORK TIMES.

Trans existence has recently been plagued by two different explanations: a natural, “born this way,” necessity and a social, often-thought perverted, choice. These contrasting explanations of necessity and choice create an explanatory false dichotomy and political double-bind. This talk constructs an alternative explanation for why people transition, one that centralizes the role of desire while recognizing the necessity of choice that arises from that desire. Toward this end, I present a moral psychology of desire. An explanation that recognizes the role (...) desire plays, not just in our actions, but in our perception. This desire is made apparent when one perceives the option to transition as a salient possibility. Once this desire is recognized, it functions as what Bernard Williams calls a categorical desire, a desire that partly constitutes one’s ethical identity and thus makes following through on that desire a matter of practical necessity that adds meaning to our lives. I argue that this explanation eschews the explanatory false dichotomy and evades the political double-bind. (shrink)

_Zettel, _ an en face bilingual edition, collects fragments from Wittgenstein's work between 1929 and 1948 on issues of the mind, mathematics, and language.

This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

In 2005 St Andrews Studies published a volume of essays by Anscombe entitled Human Life, Action and Ethics, followed in 2008 by a second with the title Faith in a Hard Ground. Both books were highly praised. This third volume brings essays on the thought of historical philosophers in which Anscombe engages directly with their ideas and arguments. Many are published here for the first time and the collection provides further testimony to Anscombe's insight and intellectual imagination.

Dubbed “Nietzsche without his hammer” by literary critic James Wood, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran is known as much for his profound pessimism and fatalistic approach as for the lyrical, raging prose with which he communicates them. Unlike many of his other works, such as On the Heights of Despair and Tears and Saints, The New Gods eschews his usual aphoristic approach in favor of more extensive and analytic essays. Returning to many of Cioran’s favorite themes, The New Gods (...) explores humanity’s attachment to gods, death, fear, and infirmity, in essays that vary widely in form and approach. In “Paleontology” Cioran describes a visit to a museum, finding the relatively pedestrian destination rife with decay, death, and human weakness. In another chapter, Cioran explores suicide in shorter, impressionistic bursts, while “The Demiurge” is a shambolic exploration of man’s relationship with good, evil, and God. All the while, The New Gods reaffirms Cioran’s belief in “lucid despair,” and his own signature mixture of pessimism and skepticism in language that never fails to be a pleasure. Perhaps his prose itself is an argument against Cioran’s near-nihilism: there is beauty in his books. (shrink)

Rob Withagen has rendered the distinction between affordances and invitations more radical in two aspects: (i) affordances do not explain behavior anymore, invitations do; (ii) invitations do not boil down to affectively charged affordances, they also encompass affectively charged misperceptions. I argue that Withagen went too far. If we understand affordances as a relation between the abilities of an individual organism and its environment, then we already have sufficient resources to incorporate affectivity in the ecological approach. Affective states constitute perceptual (...) abilities and modulate their exercise, in that every perception of affordance is affectively charged. Affective states are crucial for guiding our attention to the possibilities of action relevant to the activities in which we are engaged and for providing a sense of the quality of our relationship with the environment. (shrink)

This collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. E.M. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers. "An intellectual bombshell that blasts away at all kinds of cant, sham and conventionality... ". --Jonah Raskin, L.A. WEEKLY.

Comparatively speaking, philosophy has not been especially long-winded in attempting to answer questions about what is funny and why we should think so. There is the standard debate of many centuries’ standing between superiority and incongruity accounts of humor, which for the most part attempt to identify the intentional objects of our amusement.1 There is the more recent debate about humor and morality, about whether jokes themselves may be regarded as immoral or about whether it can in certain circumstances be (...) wrong to laugh.2 There is even apparently some disagreement about whether amusement is an emotion proper or a different kind of psychological attitude altogether. While I have almost despite myself taken .. (shrink)

Two experiments examine the effects of unreportable hints on anagram solving performance and on solvers' subjective experience of insight. In Experiment 1, after seeing a hint presented too briefly to identify, participants solved anagrams preceded by the solution fastest and solved anagrams preceded by unrelated hints slowest. Participants' “warmth” ratings for solution hints were more insight-like than those for unrelated hints. In Experiment 2 a hint, or no hint, was presented at one of three different exposure durations . Participants benefited (...) from solution-relevant hints that were either unreportable or reportable, but showed a cost only for unrelated hints that were reportable. Participants' ratings of their insight experiences showed that unreportable solution and semantically related hints produced more insight-like experiences than did unrelated hints. The results suggest that unreportable processing of solution-related information is important for the insight experience. (shrink)

Born of a terrible insomnia--"a dizzying lucidity which would turn even paradise into hell"--this book presents the youthful Cioran, a self- described "Nietzsche still complete with his Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown's tricks, a whole circus of the heights." On the Heights of Despair shows Cioran's first grappling with themes he would return to in his mature works: despair and decay, absurdity and alienation, futility and the irrationality of existence. It also presents Cioran as a connoisseur of apocalypse, a (...) theoretician of despair, for whom writing and philosophy both share the "lyrical virtues" that alone lead to a metaphysical revelation. "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."--Bill Marx, Boston Phoenix "The dark, existential despair of Romanian philosopher Cioran's short meditations is paradoxically bracing and life-affirming. . . . Puts him in the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."-- Publishers Weekly, starred review "This is self-pity as epigram, the sort of dyspeptic pronouncement that gets most people kicked out of bed but that has kept Mr. Cioran going for the rest of his life."--Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review Emil M. Cioran (1911-1995) is the author of numerous works, including The Fall into Time, A Short History of Decay, and Tears and Saints. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889, son of parents of Jewish extraction but not Jewish religion. Asked how his family came by the name ‘Wittgenstein’ Ludwig said they had been court Jews to the princely family and so had taken the name when Jews were required by law to have European-style names. The father, Karl, was a Protestant, the mother a Catholic. The Jewish blood was sufficient to bring the family later on into danger under Hitler's Nuremberg Laws. They did (...) not think of themselves as Jews or belong to the Jewish community in Vienna. The children were brought up sort-of Catholic though so far as I know only the eldest, Hermine, towards the end of her life, took this seriously and made a profession of faith before friends and household. At 9 years of age Ludwig and Paul, a year or two older than Ludwig, talked together and decided that their religion was all nonsense. Paul became a pianist of some fame, but soon after his debut in Vienna he became a wounded prisoner on the Russian front and his arm was lopped off by a surgeon who did not know he was a pianist. (shrink)

There are two aims of this paper: (1) to explore the affective dimensions of moral shock and how it relates to normative marginalization of those furthest from dominant society, but also, more specifically; (2) to articulate the trans experience of constantly being under moral attack because the dominant “world” normatively defines you out of existence. Toward these ends, I build on Katie Stockdale’s recent work on moral shock, arguing that moral shock needs to be contextualized to “worlds” of sense to (...) understand how marginalized people affectively experience shocking events. My focus is the trans experience of moral shock due to the way trans people are positioned outside of dominant society, creating the conditions to experience cyclical, chronic shock. These affective conditions point to a collective responsibility to ease the affective stress that the most marginalized experience. (shrink)

The author presents and defends three theses: (1) "the first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology." (2) "the second is that the concepts of obligation, And duty... And of what is morally right and wrong, And of the moral sense of 'ought', Ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible...." (3) "the third thesis is that (...) the differences between the well-Known english writers on moral philosophy from sidgwick to the present day are of little importance." (staff). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DOES GOD HAVE A QUIDDITY ACCORDING TO AVICENNA* IN THE NEW critical edition of Avicenna's MemphyS'ics by S. Van Riet at Louvain (I, 1977; II, 1980; III, 1983), Gerard Verbeke states that according to Avicenna, "L'Etre necessaire n'a pas une essence qui est distincte de son existence" (II, p. * 42, at note 159), i.e. that the Necessary Being does not have an essence that is distinct from its (...) existence. One looks in vain for a precise reference to an Avicennian text. On the other hand, in a three-part study, Albert G. Judy, O.P., "Avicenna's Me1taphy8'ics in the Summa contra Gentiles," published in Angelicum, part I: 52 (1975) 340-384; part II: 541-586; part Ill: 53 (1976) 183-226, states quite clearly that the "First" does not have a quiddity but only an "anity" (anitas)... (546), and that Avicenna... finds that the absolutely necessary being cannot have what every other reality has, namely, a quiddity, a "whatness " distinct from its" whether-ness" or anitas (547-548). Moreover, the first appendix of Judy's article contains a redaction of the 1495 and the 1508 Venice editions of ltletaphyiscs 8.4, which differs chiefly in punctuation from the excellent Van Riet text based on five Latin MSS. A slightly more nuanced position is. found in Etienne Gilson's Elements of Christian Philosoph;y (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1960), p. 127: "... such exactly had been the con- * Delivered before the Society for the Study of Islamic Philosophy and Science meeting in conjunction with The American Catholic Philosophical Association in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on April 12, 1985. 79 80 E. M. MACIEROWSKI clusion of Avicenna: the first has no quiddity (quidditatem non habet)," a claim that cites (305, note 28) secondary literature which one can trace as far back as Father M.-D. RolandGosselin 's edition of the De ente et essentia. What is at stake in this dispute? What if God does not have a quiddity? It would seem that He should be utterly unknowable, if quiddity or essence is a principle of knowledge as well as of being. Such would be plausible consequences of Gilson's and Judy's position. What, on the other hand, if God does have a quiddity? One possible inference, if we happened to have access or insight into the divine quiddity, is that we could have a sort of mystical union with God, perhaps even in this life; or again, one might draw pantheistic conclusions. Verbeke does not follow such paths. His inference points toward a rawrochement between Avicenna's doctrine and that of St. Thomas Aquinas, who maintained not only that God is His own essence (and therefore that it is reasonable to speak of a divine essence) but also that God's essence is no other than His esse, His being or existence. Accordingly, for scholars to have such opposed views about so important a topic even at the hermeneutical level of Avicenna's position points to a serious difficulty. Since Judy does offer texts in support of his interpretation, let us consider the evidence, using his section numbers and Van Riet's pages and lines: Judy, section 4=Van Riet 398.83-399.84 goes thus in Latin: Redibo igitur et dicam quod primum non habet quidditatem, nisi anitatem, quae sit discreta ab ipsa. This text he renders, "The first does not have a quiddity, except an 'anity,' which is distinct from it" (549). The other text in Latin (Judy, section 13=Van Riet 401.31-32) goes thus: Igitur necesse esse non habet quidditatem nisi quod est necesse esse, et haec est anitas, which he renders, "Therefore necessary being does not have a quiddity, but only the fact of its necessary being, and this is DOES GOD HAVE A QUIDDITY ACCORDING TO AVICENNA 81 'anity'" (559). We wonder, however, why nisi should be translated "except" in section 4 and "hut only" in section 13. One would have expected a sed solum or a sed tantum to justify the rendering "but only." Accordingly, the translation should be corrected to read, " Therefore the necessary being has no quiddity except that it is necessary being, and this... (shrink)

Recombinant DNA technology will soon allow physicians an opportunity to carry out both somatic cell- and Germ-Line gene therapy. While somatic cell gene therapy raises no new ethical problems, gene therapy of gametes, fertilized eggs or early embryos does raise several novel concerns. The first issue discussed here relates to making a distinction between negative and positive eugenics; the second issue deals with the evolutionary consequences of lost genetic diversity. In distinguishing between positive and negative eugenics, the concept of malady (...) is applied as a definitional criterion for identifying genetic disorders that could qualify for Germ-Line therapy. Because gene replacement techniques are currently unavailable for humans, and because even if they were possible the number of people involved would be quite small, the loss of diversity concern seems moot. Finally, we dissuss the issue of iatrogenic disorders associated with gene therapy and discuss several ‘real world considerations.’. (shrink)