A metaphysical investigation of money and monetary value, exploring money as a social phenomenon, the metaphysics of financial value, materialism and measurement.

The aim of this paper is to show that response-dependence is not a metaphysically significant notion unless applied directly to properties. Therefore, a distinction between response-dependent concepts and response-dependent properties must be kept clear. While a notion of response-dependent concepts can in some cases be useful, it is quite different from a metaphysically notion of response-dependent properties. Some common accounts of response-dependence are described, and then it is shown how response-dependence can be applied to concepts without implications for properties. Two (...) arguments for the claim that response-dependence for concepts implies response-dependence for properties are then considered and rejected. (shrink)

This paper argues that philosophical practice in the Western world, in particular analytic philosophy, suffers from problems that contribute to its lack of diversity in two senses: the exclusion of women and minorities, and a narrow choice of subjects and methods. This is not fruitful for philosophical exchange and the flourishing of philosophical thought. Three contributing factors are covered: a flawed execution when instilling intellectual humility; the gaslighting of women in philosophy; and an overemphasis on a narrow conception of intelligence. (...) The conclusion calls for a more humane and socially aware practice of philosophy. (shrink)

The institution of marriage has long been used as a tool for securing and transferring property and wealth. The role of women in this system has traditionally been secondary yet essential. In the modern era, several female philosophers questioned women’s role in this system. The English enlightenment philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was critical of women’s role in a system in which people were either owners of property or owned as property. Wollstonecraft emphasized the ability of women to be financially independent, (...) both in her writings and in her own life. The French philosopher Gabrielle Suchon (1632-1703) recommended secular celibacy as a way for women to retain their independence, financial and otherwise. Sarah Scott (1720-1795) promoted separatist female communities. In this chapter, I consider the criticism of marriage put forth by these thinkers and others in the modern era, with a special emphasis on the promotion of financial independence for women and the critique of marriage as an essential factor in the ruling financial system. I argue that already in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, some female thinkers were putting forth a social analysis and critique that we tend to associate with later times. (shrink)

This thesis explores the prospects of a distinction between subjective and objective properties in terms of how they are instantiated. While there are many ways in which the subjective can be separated from the objective, the one that interests me here is the difference between properties instantiated subjectively and properties instantiated objectively. The idea is that in some cases what makes it so that object o has the property p is what a thinking subject thinks of it or how she (...) reacts to it, while in other cases what makes it so that o has p has nothing to do with what the subject thinks or does. In the first kind of case, the instantiation of the property is mind-dependent, or subjective, and in the second kind of case the instantiation is mind-independent, or objective. I examine ways to draw a distinction between subjective and objective properties in this sense and defend the possibility of such a distinction against conceivable threats. I then go on to arguing that instead of sorting properties into two groups, subjective and objective, it is more fruitful to think of them as on a continuum ranging from entirely subjective to entirely objective. While there may be cases of properties that are entirely objective, i.e. instantiated only objectively, finding entirely subjective properties if more difficult. Candidates for subjective properties do not seem to be exclusively subjective; i.e. they are instantiated objectively to some extent. I use color as a paradigm case to argue for my account of properties whose instantiation is partly objective and partly subjective. I then go on to arguing that all sensory properties should be treated as color in this respect. (shrink)

According to a common intuition, a property is subjective or mind-dependent if it is a matter of taste whether an object possesses it or not and such matters are open to so-called faultless disagreement. For instance, assuming that funniness is subjective, two people may disagree about whether something is funny, yet both be right. If this intuition is correct, the possibility of subjective properties seems to depend on the possibility of faultless disagreement, which again seems to depend on some type (...) of relativism about truth or facts. Given that relativism is a contested view, this reliance is not a fortunate one for subjective properties. Those rejecting the possibility of faultless disagreement include indexical relativists. In this paper, I argue that the mind-dependence of properties does not require faultless disagreement and that indexical relativism, or contextualism, has the resources needed for a coherent notion of a subjective property. While contextualism may have its flaws, failure to account for subjective properties is not one of them. (shrink)

I argue that there are good reasons for thinking of colors as both subjective and objective. I propose a spectrum ranging from the entirely subjective to the entirely objective, with colors belonging somewhere between the two ends. I then argue that these findings about colors can be applied to other sensory properties as well because the reasons for placing colors where they belong on the spectrum hold for all sensory properties.

The #MeToo movement successfully united women to break the long silence surrounding the culture of sexual violence. In that light, it is no surprise that the movement has also been met with resistance since any movement that fights against the existing systems will invariably be found suspect in many ways and be subjected to all kinds of scrutiny. This chapter considers some of the attempts made to resist the successes of the #MeToo movement that have mainly taken place via misrepresentation (...) of the movement’s message, purpose, and actions, and puts this in the context of so-called benevolent sexism and the tendency for women resisting it to be vilified. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Barbie pays homage to a tradition of feminist utopias in literature and theory by offering a stage for a simple but interesting thought experiment about power imbalances and alternative gender systems. In addition to the “Real World,” the film depicts two different fictional worlds, Barbieland and Kendom, each with different gendered power dynamics and values. Barbieland could be described as an artificial matriarchy where the Barbies hold all the positions of influence, responsibility, and power. In Kendom, (...) the rules of patriarchy from the Real World have been simplified and reproduced, and the Barbies are objectified and treated as inferior. The authors suggest that the film’s version of a feminist utopia risks reiterating postfeminist and neoliberal ideas about female agency, empowerment, and desires, that go against the vision of a more authentic feminist utopia. They also claim that Barbie’s version of “girlpower” could even render women more vulnerable to various forms of oppression. Finally, they analyze the film’s contrasts and heavily gendered power dynamics in the context of relationships and sexual violence in the Real World, and ask how differently balanced gender systems can affect the laws of romance, desire, and relationships. (shrink)

Now that pornography is on the Internet, its political and social functions have changed. So contends Margret Grebowicz in this imperative philosophical analysis of Internet porn. The production and consumption of Internet porn, in her account, are a symptom of the obsession with self-exposure in today's social networking media, which is, in turn, a symptom of the modern democratic construction of the governable subject as both transparent and communicative. In this first feminist critique to privilege the effects of pornography's Internet (...) distribution rather than what it depicts, Grebowicz examines porn-sharing communities and the politics of putting women's sexual pleasure on display as part of the larger democratic project. Arguing against this project, she shows that sexual pleasure is not a human right. Unlikely convergences between thinkers like Catherine MacKinnon, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, and Jean-François Lyotard allow her to formulate a theory of the relationships between sex, speech, and power that stands as an alternative to such cyber-libertarian mottos as "freedom of speech" and "sexual freedom.". (shrink)

Feminist theorist and philosopher Donna Haraway has substantially impacted thought on science, cyberculture, the environment, animals, and social relations. This long-overdue volume explores her influence on feminist theory and philosophy, paying particular attention to her more recent work on companion species, rather than her "Manifesto for Cyborgs." Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick argue that the ongoing fascination with, and re-production of, the cyborg has overshadowed Haraway's extensive body of work in ways that run counter to her own transdisciplinary practices. Sparked (...) by their own personal "adventures" with Haraway's work, the authors offer readings of her texts framed by a series of theoretical and political perspectives: feminist materialism, standpoint epistemology, radical democratic theory, queer theory, and even science fiction. They situate Haraway's critical storytelling and "risky reading" practices as forms of feminist methodology and recognize her passionate engagement with "naturecultures" as the theoretical core driving her work. Chapters situate Haraway as critic, theorist, biologist, feminist, historian, and humorist, exploring the full range of her identities and reflecting her commitment to embodying all of these modes simultaneously. (shrink)

Synthetic biology" is the label of a new technoscientific field with many different facets and agendas. One common aim is to "create life", primarily by using engineering principles to design and modify biological systems for human use. In a wider context, the topic has become one of the big cases in the legitimization processes associated with the political agenda to solve global problems with the aid of (bio-)technological innovation. Conceptual-level and meta-level analyses are needed: we should sort out conceptual ambiguities (...) to agree on what we talk about, and we need to spell out agendas to see the disagreements clearly. The book is based on the interdisciplinary summer school "Analyzing the societal dimensions of synthetic biology", which took place in Berlin in September 2014. The contributions address controversial discussions around the philosophical examination, public perception, moral evaluation and governance of synthetic biology. (shrink)

At the end of his attack on my use of the psychoanalytic model for the interpretation of literature, Heller raises the question concerning what the task of the literary critic is or ought to be. His own "sketch of the Kleistean theme's historical ancestry and its later development," he says, seeks to deepen and enrich the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents, the conclusiveness of his examples." By implication he suggests (...) that my method does not have this end—that is, appreciation—for its goal. In this he is partially right. "Appreciation" in Heller's sense is not as directly a goal for me. But does Heller's method of intellectual history and literary relation meet his own criteria of deepening and enriching the reader's appreciation of Kleist? In his capsule treatment of Great Thinkers of the Western World from Plato to Marx, we learn that many writers besides Kleist treated Kleist's theme of man's fall from unconscious grace. What exactly does this tell us about Kleist's treatment of it? How does it deepen the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents? It doesn't. It isn't even about Kleist. Although Heller tells us that it is the "thought" and "imagery" which "make for the great distinction of the essay" , his evidence for this consists, in the case of the former, in his tracing the history of the essay's thought and, in the case of the latter, in his statements that Kleist's use of the puppet as the exemplar of the unselfconscious graceful being is "unusual" and "novel" and that his bear story, though it may lack "in immediate plausibility," "gains in making Kleist's point" and is "a memorable exemplar" of the "art of grotesque inventions that are capable of floating for quite a while above and between the comic and the serious before landing with scintillating effect in one domain or the other" . Margret Schaefer is a lecturer in the department of psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School. She responds here to Erich Heller's "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" , in which he discussed her article, "Kleist's 'About the Puppet Theater,". (shrink)

If feminists argue for the irreducibility of the social dimensions of science, then they ought to embrace the idea that feminist and non-feminist scientists are not in collaboration, but in fact defend different interests. Instead, however, contemporary feminist science studies literature argues that feminist research improves particular, existing scientific enterprises, both epistemically (truer claims) and politically (more democratic methodologies and applications). I argue that the concepts of empirical success and democracy at work in this literature from Longino (1994) and Harding (...) (1996), to Longino (2002), Gilbert and Rader (2001), and Keller (2001) are not sufficiently critical, and fail to do justice to the truly revolutionary work done by feminist scientists. I offer the beginnings of an epistemology of dissensus (as opposed to consensus), using the work of Haraway (1978), Lyotard (1984), and Ziarek (2001). How would such an epistemology relate to feminist discussions of the possibility of democratic, responsible knowledge? (shrink)

Synthetic biology is a dynamic, young, ambitious, attractive, and heterogeneous scientific discipline. It is constantly developing and changing, which makes societal evaluation of this emerging new science a challenging task, prone to misunderstandings. Synthetic biology is difficult to capture, and confusion arises not only regarding which part of synthetic biology the discussion is about, but also with respect to the underlying concepts in use. This book offers a useful toolbox to approach this complex and fragmented field. It provides a biological (...) access to the discussion using a 'layer' model that describes the connectivity of synthetic or semisynthetic organisms and cells to the realm of natural organisms derived by evolution. Instead of directly reviewing the field as a whole, firstly our book addresses the characteristic features of synthetic biology that are relevant to the societal discussion. Some of these features apply only to parts of synthetic biology, whereas others are relevant to synthetic biology as a whole. In the next step, these new features are evaluated with respect to the different areas of synthetic biology. Do we have the right words and categories to talk about these new features? In the third step, traditional concepts like "life" and "artificiality" are scrutinized with regard to their discriminatory power. This approach may help to differentiate the discussion on synthetic biology. Lastly our refined view is utilized for societal evaluation. We have investigated the public views and attitudes to synthetic biology. It also includes the analysis of ethical, risk and legal questions, posed by present and future practices of synthetic biology. This book contains the results of an interdisciplinary research project and presents the authors' main findings and recommendations. They are addressed to science, industry, politics and the general public interested in this upcoming field of biotechnology. (shrink)

Natural human behavior is segmented into action units, functionally related groups of movements with durations of a few seconds. This phenomenon can also be found in nonhuman primates and other mammals. In humans, a similar segmentation can be found in planning, preparatory behavior, perception, and speech. Temporal segmentation may be related to the functioning of short-term memory. Segmentation may thus be a central feature of neuronal integration. Segment length was hitherto thought to be determined by either capacity constraints or temporal (...) factors. Instead we show that segment length depends on the interplay between capacity and temporal factors. (shrink)

_The National Park to Come_ examines the sense of "the national" that our national parks construct and the kind of citizen they produce in the process. Who is the visitor in these spaces? Who is the national and who the foreigner? To whose children is the ostensibly unpeopled wilderness of the future owed? At what cost, and to whom? Grebowicz explores how such politicized modes of being-in-nature are maintained on the emotional level, shaping our basic sense of coherence, futurity, collectivity, (...) and having a life. Wilderness-as-spectacle, she argues, functions as a form of social relation even as we imagine the true experience of nature to be solitary and apolitical. The book's most pressing concern is the relationship between the foreigner and the future in the democratization of wilderness. For the questions explored here, contends Grebowicz, are precisely those that will shape the future of our entire park system. (shrink)

Examines Lyotard’s writings in light of contemporary feminist theory.

Why “do” philosophy, if not to contribute to social consciousness , to develop ideas for change, to articulate the desperations of the present and the possibilities of futures which will help people, however loosely we define “people”? This is one of the most popular objections to philosophy: that it is not practical, and therefore not really politically useful. And in today’s philosophical arena, this argument is directed specifically against postmodern philosophies. However, there is another sense of the word “postmodern,” which (...) we often forget when talking about postmodernism. Lyotard wants us to think about that which resists institutionalization, homogenization, academic taxonomies, economies, and genealogies. The postmodern is the moment of ideological instability and confusion, of radical undermining of foundations and transgressing of boundaries. It is just another name for thought. In this essay, I attempt to describe a sort of postmodern praxis in terms of the Lyotardian notion of thought, discussing the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Hardt and Negri, and June Jordan. (shrink)

Both Husserl and Popper share the sentiment that philosophy should model itself after something called "science," despite their differing attitudes toward the Galilean tradition. I begin by describing their respective approaches to the problem of objectivity by examining their accounts of the origins of science in Husserl's Vienna Lecture and Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. Each of them explicitly takes up the problem of objectivity in The Origin of Geometry and Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject, respectively, and it is here that (...) they develop their notions of the role played by subjectivity in science. I argue that Popper suffers from a commitment to subjectivism even in the course of renouncing the subject as irrelevant for science. Husserl, on the other hand, sees in the possibility of crisis the need to reinstate subjectivist concerns in order for any discourse to be capable of saying something about the world. Husserl thus proposes a scientism which takes account of the fact that the world is, first and foremost, experienced by subjects. I contend that Popper can ultimately be held to the same position, and thus be forced to qualify his strong dismissal of subjectivity. (shrink)

: Grebowicz argues from the perspective of Jean-François Lyotard's critique of deliberative democracy that the project of democratizing knowledge may bring us closer to terror than to justice. The successful formulation of a critical standpoint requires that we figure the political as itself a contested site, and incorporate this into our theorizing about the role of dissent in the production of knowledges. This essay contrasts Lyotard's notion of the differend with Chantal Mouffe's agonistic model.

_The National Park to Come_ examines the sense of "the national" that our national parks construct and the kind of citizen they produce in the process. Who is the visitor in these spaces? Who is the national and who the foreigner? To whose children is the ostensibly unpeopled wilderness of the future owed? At what cost, and to whom? Grebowicz explores how such politicized modes of being-in-nature are maintained on the emotional level, shaping our basic sense of coherence, futurity, collectivity, (...) and having a life. Wilderness-as-spectacle, she argues, functions as a form of social relation even as we imagine the true experience of nature to be solitary and apolitical. The book's most pressing concern is the relationship between the foreigner and the future in the democratization of wilderness. For the questions explored here, contends Grebowicz, are precisely those that will shape the future of our entire park system. (shrink)

The Kennedy Institute of Ethics is grateful for the vision, guidance, and dedication on behalf of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal by Robert M. Veatch, PhD, its senior editor and senior research scholar at the KIE. For over twenty years, Bob has steered the journal along its path of success, and its partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Press, to arrive at the place it holds today—truly a "scholarly forum for diverse views on major issues in bioethics." Bob has (...) retired from the editorship effective January 2011 (though thankfully not from the KIE!).We also wish to express our appreciation to Carol M. Spicer, PhD, the journal's editor and hands-on manager of KIEJ. Carol received her doctorate in .. (shrink)

This article investigates the intersections of secrecy/interiority, the state, and speech/ expression, and their implications for the rights of women. I propose a critique of commercial pornography that reanimates MacKinnon's claim that pornography and American democracy are in a relationship of mutual reinforcement, and incorporates poststructuralist (Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Butler) commitments to secrecy and unintelligibility, as well as their role in the production of pleasure.

This fresh portrait of Varenius presents a young German scholar, whose books on Japan, the first one from a European perspective, and on General Geography were written and published in Amsterdam and led to establishing geography as a science.

Sexual violence of various forms, be it sexual harassment or sexual abuse, perpetrated by male professors against their female students has gained societal visibility through media broadcasts. This article tells the tale of the 2013 recruitment to the University of Iceland of a former political party leader, minister and ambassador. He was publicly called out in 2012 for his alleged sexual offences, perpetrated some years earlier. The story is told from two different viewpoints: from that of the media and from (...) the article author’s own standpoint as assistant professor in gender studies with co-responsibility for his de-recruitment. In the media story, opinion leaders from the political, judicial and media spheres take centre stage. The author thus utilizes the concepts patriarchal homosociality and influencers. Based on the findings from the media analyses, the author lays out her defence and justification, using embodiment as the core of her argument. She draws on black feminist knowledge validation processes, more specifically, the ethic of caring and personal accountability. Furthermore, she explores affective feminist pedagogy, i.e. connecting mind and body through self-actualization. By contrasting the two accounts, that of the media and her own feminist standpoint, the author sheds light on the role that influencers play in preserving patriarchal power and the status quo against ‘fire-raising feminists’ in academia and society at large. (shrink)

In this paper we explore how some of the largest US-newspapers linguistically frame immigrants to the USA in articles about Mexican and Central American immigrants. Specifically, it is a corpus-assisted discourse study which examines the frequency of different semantic predicate-types with migrant subjects and migrant by-agents in the quest for underlying positive or negative biases. We wish to ascertain what activities migrants are presented as taking part in, principally as agents. The analysis shows that more than half of the migrant/predicate-pairings (...) reflect the dictionary definitions of migrant. However, immigrants are described as illegal 66% of the times that their location is mentioned with an immigrant/predicate-pairing. The non-definition-confirming pairings also show evidence of a negative framing of immigrants, but not of migrants. Furthermore, immigrants are more often than migrants cast as agents of activities that do not simply reiterate their status as migrants. Finally, we found evidence of the Negation Bias in the immigrant/predicate-pairings. (shrink)

This book, based on the Round Table on Bioethics and Women held at UNESCO during the Fourth Session of the International Bioethics Committee (IBC), presents the ...

Das Buch präsentiert zwei sehr unterschiedliche Textformate: eine Forschungsarbeit von 1974 zur «Patriotischen Gesellschaft in Bern», die jetzt erstmalig gedruckt vorliegt, und eine vorläufige Dokumentation zum Anteil des Basler Ratsherrn Isaak Iselin (1728-1782) an der europäischen Geschichtsphilosophie. Iselin war Gründungsmitglied der Berner Gesellschaft und Autor der ersten deutschsprachigen Geschichtsphilosophie. Die gegenseitige Bezugnahme der beiden Studien zum «Ursprung» des geschichtsphilosophischen Denkens und dem simultanen Beginn der Patriotischen Gesellschaften am Beispiel der Berner zeigt vor allem eins: Sie macht den Anspruch jener Aufklärer (...) plausibel, die theoretische Entwürfe mit der sozioökonomischen Praxis im Bestreben um politische Reformen verbunden wissen wollten. (shrink)