In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 71-79 [Access article in PDF] "Explosion" Greta Gaard I. In the beginning there was only water, and you were a part of it. Never mind what else you have heard. This was your first relationship, your connection to water. And the quality of this relationship, the character of your beliefs about water, shapes all relationships in your life. The way you (...) do one thing is the way you do everything. You cannot separate one relationship from another, treat this water with reverence, this water with waste. Because water returns. Water knows there are no separations. You too should know this, for water has been teaching you, from the beginning.Imagine a creek flowing through the length of your life, from your birth to your death. Yes, your death. Water precedes you, water survives you. Consider the silence of blue-ice glaciers, ancient in their solitude, melting. Each winter the snowfall thick and wet, fluffy, or crisp and dry. Each spring the snows melting, glaciers growing and melting. Water flows down pine needles and cedar bark, flows down rocks and fallen logs, flows through moss and soil and sand.The lake gathers rainfall, gathers snowmelt and the plenitude of creeks. The lake overflows, spills, falls, exuberance of fullness, joy in motion, streaming downhill now, swelling the creek bed where it has made this journey so many times before.You have never seen this creek, the hidden water that flows through your days and nights, from one season to the next. Without it you would not live. You rely on this unseen water to flow forever. It has flowed here [End Page 71] before you were born, before you stepped into its flow, and you imagine it will outlast you, outlast whatever you might do to this water. You believe it is limitless, unending. You know its persistent force has carved rocks because you can see them, see the way water flows through stone, leaving its imprint in kettles, in the basins of water where rocks circulate, in the interlaced fingers of water and stone embracing at the falls.Water becomes you. But Narcissus-like, you look at water and see only your self. You believe you are alone. You are afraid. You need to con-trol this fear, this aloneness, this terrifying separation. You see the power of water and you want power. Power will give you control. You build dams and concrete channels and ditches, believing that by doing this you will control the power of water, the fertility of water, the fear of your separation. But water is patient. There are laws that govern the way of water, the ways of energy and power, the ways of land. There are consequences. Water bears no grudge, extracts no retribution. Your own actions, skillful or unskillful, determine the outcome. Your own relationship to water will poison you or save you. You decide.You believe blocking the flow of water gives you power.You believe blocking the flow of feeling gives you power.You believe harnessing the animals, fencing off the land gives you power. And for awhile, these strategies work.But there are consequences. That which is diverted, divided, suppressed, always returns with greater force, and when it returns, no one can control it. No one. II. Imagine a family. Picture the elders first. How many do you see? Where are the children? The sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, cousins and nephews and grandchildren? How many people are needed to form a family? Can you be a family of one?Look at it another way: is there a limit to the relations of family? Is there a certain number of people allowed in a family until a limit is reached? Do you say, "Families may only have ten people"? "The eleventh person will not be included." Or do you point to the basis of inclusion, the things that bind you, one to another, and say, "Yes, this person too"?How do you recognize a family?Do family members have to pulse with the same blood, or will love create a family where the blood... (shrink)

Antiracist white feminists and ecofeminists have the tools but lack the strategies for responding to issues of social and environmental justice cross-culturally, particularly in matters as complex as the Makah whale hunt. Distinguishing between ethical contexts and contents, I draw on feminist critiques of cultural essentialism, ecofeminist critiques of hunting and food consumption, and socialist feminist analyses of colonialism to develop antiracist feminist and ecofeminist strategies for cross-cultural communication and cross-cultural feminist ethics.

Although many ecofeminists acknowledge heterosexism as a problem, a systematic exploration of the potential intersections of ecofeminist and queer theories has yet to be made. By interrogating social constructions of the "natural," the various uses of Christianity as a logic of domination, and the rhetoric of colonialism, this essay finds those theoretical intersections and argues for the importance of developing a queer ecofeminism.

Drawing on a range of queer and ecological theories rather a single orthodox perspective, the thirteen essays in Queer Ecologies develop a strong argument for queering environmentalisms and greening queer theory, in three steps: challenging the heteronormativity of investigations into the 'sexuality' of nature, exploring the intersections between queer and ecological inflections of bio/politics (including spatial politics), and ultimately queering environmental affect, ethics, and desire. Clearly, notions of sexuality have shaped social constructions of nature, as seen in the familiar concepts (...) and creation of wilderness, national and urban parks, and car camping. As the first book-length volume to establish the intersections of queer theory and environmentalisms at such depth, Queer Ecologies covers a broad range of topics—gay cruising in the parks, lesbian rural retreats, transgressive sexual behaviors among diverse species, literary and cultural narratives of queer/nature. It also establishes topics for future development, i.e., exploring the intersection of speciesism and heterosexism in queer ecologies, and developing a focus on the constitution of the non-white queer subject. (shrink)

This essay develops an ecofeminist, environmental justice perspective on the shortcomings of “choice” rhetoric in the politics of women’s reproductive self-determination, specifically around fertility-enhancing technologies. These new reproductive technologies (NRTs) medicalize and thus depoliticize the contemporary phenomenon of decreased fertility in first-world industrialized societies, personalizing and privatizing both the problem and the solution when the root of this phenomenon may be more usefully addressed as a problem of PCBs, POPs, and other toxic by-products of industrialized culture that are degrading our (...) personal and environmental health. The NRTs’ rhetoric of choice is implicitly antifeminist: it blames the victim by attributing rising infertility rates to middle-class women who delay childbearing while struggling to launch careers; it conceals information about adverse health effects and solicits egg donation and gestation services from women disadvantaged by economic status, nation, and age; and it offers no choice at all for the millions of female animals—chicks, cows, turkeys, pigs, and others—whose fertility is regularly manipulated and whose offspring are commodified as products for industrialized animal food production. An intersectional analysis shifts the discourse away from reproductive choice to a framework of ecological, feminist, and reproductive justice. (shrink)

Greta Gaard, Tucson, AZ, The University of Arizona Press, 2007, ix +211 pp., paper, $17.95, ISBN: 978-0-8165-2576-8 Roger Paden, Lanham, MD, Lexington Books, 2007, xiii +209 pp., paper, $26.95, ISB...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:'I am cringe, but I am free':A Reparative Reading of Assuming the Ecosexual PositionVanesa Raditz (bio) and Jess Martinez (bio)Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, Jennie Klein, and Linda Montano. Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. University of Minnesota Press, 2021. ISBN 9781452965796.INTRODUCTIONEcosexual: Eco from the ancient Greek oikos; sexual from Latin, sexuales 1. a person who finds nature romantic, sensual, erotic, or sexy, which can include humans or (...) not. 2. A new sexual identity (self-identified). 3. A person who takes the Earth as their lover. 4. A term used in dating advertisements. 5. An environmental activist strategy. 6. A grassroots movement. 7. A person who has a more expanded concept of what sex and orgasm are beyond mainstream definitions. 8. A person who imagines sex as an ecology that extends beyond the physical body.Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth As Lover (Sprinkle and Stephens 2021, 2)What does it mean to take the Earth as a lover? How does it change our experiences of pleasure in our bodies to give attention to the eroticism of air in our lungs, mud on our skin, or water in our throats? How would it shape our ethical commitments to these elements that we depend upon for life if we were to reconnect with them as pleasurable extensions of our own bodies? These questions are at the heart of the decades-long research-creation performance-art collaboration between Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens that has built an international "ecosexual" identity and movement, a tale that they document in their new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. Part travelog, part relationship memoir, part how-to guide, Assuming the Ecosexual Position chronicles [End Page 105] the emergence and evolution of their ecosex concept and community through a playful recounting of over a decade of productions: performative weddings to the earth, moon, lakes, rocks and beyond; theatrical two-women sexecology performances that culminate in explicit sex in piles of earth; ecosex walking tours; workshops; public sex clinics; documentary films; and so much more.Woven throughout are philosophical reflections on the entanglements between bodies, land, sex, eroticism, and love, many of which emerge from ecofeminist thought, pollinated with the post-porn, sex-positive, queer feminism of the 80s and 90s. In introducing their philosophical inspirations, they name Greta Gaard's classic piece on queering ecofeminism (18) which stimulated a body of work describing the ways that patriarchal systems of power simultaneously oppress women, the erotic, and nature (1997). Drawing upon Sprinkle's background in porn and post-porn modernist theater, Stephens' background as a queer artist with a doctorate in Performance Studies, their mutual interest in sex education, and their love for the redwoods of Santa Cruz, the pair crafted ecosexuality as a particular lens for expanding queer ecofeminist inquiry into the power of sexual liberation for ecological liberation, which they do through the creative methodologies of performance. The performance art practice that they develop has significant inspiration from the Fluxus art movement, which resisted the authority of museums to define the meaning or value of art, and encouraged the active practice and production of art throughout life.Among the inspirations they list in the introduction to Assuming the Ecosexual Position, Donna Haraway and Kim TallBear stand out. Donna Haraway's presence is felt throughout the book—as a colleague of Stephens at UC Santa Cruz, as a friend at their Wedding to the Earth, as a collaborator in the documentary Water Makes Us Wet, and ultimately, as a posthuman philosopher (Haraway 2000) who has inspired Stephens and Sprinkle to "see ecosex as a conceptual art practice and a way of thinking beyond individual identity, and even beyond human beings, to envision a larger system—an ecology of relationships" (8). The authors also express the influence of their evolving relationship with Kim TallBear, with whom Beth studied while pursuing her PhD, and who has encouraged the pair to leverage this posthuman and new materialist consciousness towards decolonial politics (TallBear 2015). They cite one of TallBear's blog posts on ecosexuality, where she encourages ecosexuals to use a critical eye towards "New Age" appropriation of Native American ceremonies... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflecting Back, Looking Forward:Ethics and the Environment at 25Lori Gruen (bio)Twenty-five years ago, when Ethics and the Environment launched, I remember having engaging conversations with the late founding editor, Victoria Davion, about just how important feminist thinking was to ethical explorations of our vexed relationships with the more than human world. She promised to promote feminist philosophical scholarship in this journal and she kept that promise. Although I'm quite (...) skeptical of "metrics" I did a search on the term "feminism" in the three prominent journals that publish on ethics and the environment and was not surprised to find that this journal contains 147 results where there are 51 in Environmental Values and just 33 in Environmental Ethics, a journal that has been publishing longer than Ethics and the Environment.Before the journal launched, Vicky, Chris Cuomo, and I spoke regularly about the value that feminist philosophical insights brought to environmental ethics. While we disagreed on a variety of issues (should the climate be central? Should we center our relationships with other animals?) and names (should we think of ourselves as "ecofeminists" or "ecological feminists"?) and had lively debates with other ecofeminists, including Carol Adams, Greta Gaard, Marti Kheel, Deborah Slicer, Val Plumwood, and Karen Warren, among others, we all shared a commitment to feminist methodology as well as recognizing the crucial need to incorporate ecofeminism into environmental ethics and praxis.Part of the reason it is important to incorporate ecofeminist insights into environmentalism is that ecofeminism builds on work in feminist philosophy that uncovers various biases that distort our knowledge and our relationships. For example, feminist epistemologies help us to see how testimony from those outside the center are undervalued or ignored. This has become painfully clear in environmental justice struggles; communities of [End Page 3] color are disproportionately impacted by exposure to toxins and are then burdened with finding "experts" who can "objectively" assess their claims. Ecofeminists have helped identify the inequity of looking to so-called objective expertise when communities are suffering. This sort of epistemic injustice is getting worse in the face of extreme weather events, in at least two ways. Many people who are impacted by hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, are often not well positioned to navigate institutions that may be able to help, if those institutions even exist. And as sea ice melts and oceans rise, indigenous people's multi-generational wisdom is often overlooked, while their communities are simultaneously imperiled.Another reason that feminist and ecofeminist analyses are crucial for environmental philosophy is that ecofeminists can correct certain problematic frameworks that often hinder our abilities to reshape our relationships with the more than human world. Ecofeminists have long been critical of the abstract individualism that has permeated environmental ethics, including animal ethics (Adams and Gruen, 2014). This focus on abstract individualism leads to faulty analyses of our place in the natural world, as many holistic environmental philosophers have argued. Ecofeminists have also provided important challenges to holism in environmental philosophy, as the categorical "wholes" tend to occlude important differences within and between them. (Kheel, 2007). Ecofeminists have sought to contextualize ecological sensibilities to illuminate how systems of power differentially structure our relationships with each other and our environments.Vicky's commitment to incorporating feminist and ecofeminist perspectives as a central part of this journal's vision has also provided newer scholars with a venue for further development of ecofeminist thinking, as can be seen in A.E. Kings' "Intersectionality and the Changing Face of Ecofeminism" (2017) and Chaone Mallory's "What's in a Name? In Defense of Ecofeminism (Not Ecological Feminisms, Feminist Ecology, or Gender and the Environment)" (2018) published in the special tribute issue to Vicky. New thinking is always important, but in the face of global climate collapse, it is more important than ever.This journal has also been one of the go-to venues for animal ethics. In the early days of environmental ethics, there was a complex debate about what role, if any, animal ethics should play in environmental ethics. Over 35 years ago, two of the early pioneers, J. Baird Callicott (1980) and the late Marti Kheel (1985), argued in the pages of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 431 Cynthia Belmont and Angela Stroud Bugging Out: Apocalyptic Masculinity and Disaster Consumerism in Offgrid Magazine Popular conceptions of survivalism in the United States typically feature the eccentric, backwoods, working-class figures found in television shows such as Doomsday Preppers and Prepper Hillbillies. Offgrid magazine, which first hit the stands in the summer of 2013, however, sells a compellingly (...) bourgeois personal connection to disaster in the vein of men’s self-improvement literature, wherein successful masculinity requires courage, preparedness for calamity, and the resources to shop. Each issue of Offgrid focuses on a “real-life” survivalist or a singular catastrophic event that is dramatically represented on the cover by a self-sufficient man decked out in gear that will allow him to survive a crash landing, escape a city devastated by an earthquake, navigate the hazards of a hacker-created blackout, or evade the destruction of an erupting volcano.1 Filled with articles offering tips on how to prepare, self-defense strategies, profiles of survivalists, disaster scenarios, gear reviews, and advertisements, Offgrid mainstreams prepper culture by retooling the The authors contributed equally to this article; the order listed is alphabetical and should not be construed as implying differing contributions. 1. The terms “survivalist” and “prepper” apply to anyone committed to honing the skills and acquiring the resources required to survive in any context, including disasters, and are used interchangeably in Offgrid. 432 Cynthia Belmont and Angela Stroud face of apocalyptic survival as a regular-guy protagonist whose low-profile normalcy disguises the smoldering heroic potential that will ignite within him when disaster strikes. In this article, drawing upon insights from the sociology of masculinity, environmental feminism, and ecocriticism, we examine the representation of gender, nature, and disaster in issues of Offgrid, spanning nearly three years, from June 2015 through February 2018. While vivid depictions of cataclysm might seem provocative enough to captivate the Offgrid reader, we argue that its principal appeal is that it gives its ninety -one-percent male audience the opportunity to engage directly in what Casey Kelly terms “apocalyptic manhood,” an emergent version of American masculinity that “confirm[s] the necessity of masculine skills as society meets its demise.”2 Thus, Offgrid provides an occasion for readers to salvage a masculinity that feels perpetually threatened within contemporary American culture—a highly effective strategy in promoting the expansion of what we term disaster consumerism. We concur with ecofeminist Greta Gaard’s contention that “masculine gender identity has been constructed as so very antiecological, and thus its interrogation and transformation seem especially crucial” at this time of environmental crisis; this concern resonates particularly poignantly with regard to the apocalyptic imaginary.3 Marketing Disaster, Selling Masculinity Scholars have long argued that commercial media play an important role in circulating gender ideals that are “rooted in consumer capitalism wherein profit can be produced by generating insecurity about one’s body and one’s consumer choices.”4 Of course, despite their influence, advertisers do not create insecurities out of whole cloth; rather, they operate within the context of shifting gender discourses and cultural anxieties. Whereas the authors of a 2005 study found that alcohol ads portrayed men as affable losers who, rejected by strong women, 2. “2018 Recoil Offgrid Media Kit,” Recoil Offgrid; Casey Ryan Kelly, “The Man-pocalypse: Doomsday Preppers and the Rituals of Apocalyptic Manhood,” Text and Performance Quarterly 36, no. 2–3 (2016): 96. 3. Greta Gaard, Critical Ecofeminism (New York: Lexington Books, 2017), 167 (italics in original). 4. Susan M. Alexander, “Stylish Hard Bodies: Branded Masculinity in Men’s Health Magazine,” Sociological Perspectives 46, no. 4 (2003): 551. Cynthia Belmont and Angela Stroud 433 were driven to drink with their buddies, an analysis of Super Bowl commercials just five years later demonstrated that the tone had become “a simpler, angrier one [that was] crafted to galvanize men to buy.”5 The authors of the latter study suggest that the masculine aggression in the ads they analyzed reflects men’s economic insecurities, which advertisers exploit by encouraging men to feel nostalgic for and frustrated about their diminished power. Ads telling men to “wear the pants” and take a stand... (shrink)

Utilizing examples from recent art, we critique Greta Gaard's argument that an inclusive ecofeminism must account for the role played by erotophobia in oppression. We suggest that while Gaard offers valuable insight into how fear of the erotic contributes to maintaining heteropatriarchal institutions, it fails to account for forms of oppression specific to lesbians. Moreover, Gaard's analysis unwittingly reinforces the conceptual, hence political, economic, and social invisibility of lesbians that, following Marilyn Frye, we argue is not (...) merely consequent to compulsory heterosexuality, but constitutive of it. Lastly, we sketch a lesbian erotic whose potential for generating conceptual dissonance within heteropatriarchal value dualism contains the seeds of a creative "sensibility" out of which a genuinely queer ecofeminism might emerge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Considering AnimalsKheel's Nature Ethics and Animal Debates in EcofeminismNoël Sturgeon (bio)How we treat the use of animals by humans for sport, experimentation or food has been controversial within ecofeminism. While it is fair to say that all ecofeminists agree that factory farming and cruel treatment of animals is morally wrong, universal arguments for vegetarianism or veganism have been, if one forgives the metaphor, a bone of contention. Attached to (...) these disagreements are important philosophical and political debates about ecological holism, individualistic frameworks, cultural difference, social privilege and ethics of care, which are consequential above and beyond evaluating our treatment of animals. Thus, ecofeminist discussions of animal issues have been formative for environmental ethics and politics, while remaining a delicate matter when disagreement occurs among a relatively small group of thinkers, activists and scholars who tend towards solidarity.Val Plumwood, the important Australian philosopher whose work and life are celebrated in this volume, was especially cognizant of all of this. In April 1998, Plumwood presented an early version of what became two articles on animal/human relationships (Plumwood 1999, 2000) at the Ecofeminist Perspectives Conference at the University of Montana. [End Page 153] The presentation, which occurred early in the conference, was, typical of Plumwood, straightforwardly contentious, a bold challenge to the position of some ecofeminists at the time that veganism was the only morally acceptable diet. In it, she suggested that what she called "ontological veganism" was a position that was both culturally ethnocentric and dualistic, two accusations guaranteed to deeply disturb this particular audience. The conference, organized by Deborah Slicer (whose 1996 article, "Your Daughter or Your Dog?" argued against animal experimentation), was also attended by Marti Kheel (who, along with Carol Adams, was an early proponent of "ontological veganism"). Present also were thinkers with more nuanced positions on the issue, such as Lori Gruen, Greta Gaard, and Karen Warren. Thus, Plumwood's provocation felt personal, and produced lively debate at the conference, and an even livelier argument on email afterwards.1 Stung by being portrayed as racist, several ecofeminists reacted with anger at Plumwood, with the result that she publicly rejected the label "ecofeminist," and from then until her untimely death, preferred the category "critical feminist eco-socialism" to describe her framework.Despite the hurt feelings, this debate (and Plumwood's subsequent articles and sections in her 2002 book, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason), moved ecofeminist treatment of the issues of animals and morally sound eating practices considerably forward. Plumwood argued that to avoid the dualism of human/nature, humans should recognize themselves as prey as well as predator, an approach she brilliantly portrayed in her article on the experience of surviving a crocodile attack. (Plumwood 1995) In her view, any position that eliminated the possibility of using some animals as food necessarily relied upon a rights-based, individualistic approach that retained the status of some living beings as excluded from moral consideration. Yet, Plumwood argued, from a contextualized moral position, which respected both continuity and difference between different groups of living beings, one could make ethical claims about the moral problems of eating animals. She was particularly interested, both philosophically and from a politically strategic perspective, in arguing against the practice of factory farming. Karen Warren, in her book Ecofeminist Philosophy (2000), also followed and expanded Plumwood's discussion by emphasizing the advantages of a contextualized ethic of care in the treatment of animals as food, arguing (and as such agreeing with Plumwood's conference presentation), that it was ethnocentric [End Page 154] to insist on universal standards in evaluating whether some cultural groups, such as the Inuit, could morally refrain from eating animals. Greta Gaard's thoughtful article on the indigenous Makah whale hunt (2001) took on the charge of ethnocentrism directly, as in some ways an answer to Plumwood's provocation.Given this background, it is interesting to read Marti Kheel's important new book and see how her promotion of veganism as a moral position is articulated. A longtime feminist, vegan, and animal advocate, Kheel is a co-founder of the activist group Feminists for Animal Rights, and the author of an important early critique of deep... (shrink)

Permissivism is the thesis that, for some body of evidence and a proposition p, there is more than one rational doxastic attitude any agent with that evidence can take toward p. Proponents of uniqueness deny permissivism, maintaining that every body of evidence always determines a single rational doxastic attitude. In this paper, we explore the debate between permissivism and uniqueness about evidence, outlining some of the major arguments on each side. We then consider how permissivism can be understood as an (...) underdetermination thesis, and show how this moves the debate forward in fruitful ways: in distinguishing between different types of permissivism, in dispelling classic objections to permissivism, and in shedding light on the relationship between permissivism and evidentialism. (shrink)

Le discours international actuel sur l’écologie s’est mué en un mouvement qui s’identifie avec le discours de la vérité scientifique. L’exemple de Greta Thunberg et de ses appels à l’action illustre dans quelle mesure l’identité actuelle du mouvement enveloppe un paradoxe qui lui est inhérent. D’une part, elle s’appuie sur la nature auto-explicative et claire des idées vraies. D’autre part, pour propager ces idées, elle fait résider son pouvoir rhétorique dans l’impact émotionnel. L’approche par Spinoza de la relation (...) entre raison et foi, telle qu’elle apparaît quand on juxtapose les passages pertinents de l’ Éthique et ceux du Traité théologico-politique qui décrivent la prophétie, constitue un cadre théorique susceptible de rendre compte de ce paradoxe inhérent à l’écologie moderne. (shrink)

Cinema, thought and time -- Deleuze's cinema books -- Technology -- Essences -- Space and time -- Bergson, time, and life -- The movement-image -- The history of time and space and the history of cinema -- The movement-image and semiotics -- Styles of sign -- The whole of movement -- Image and life -- Becoming-inhuman, becoming imperceptible -- The deduction of the movement-image -- Art and time -- Destruction of the sensory motor apparatus and the spiritual automaton -- Time (...) and money -- Art and history -- Monument -- Framing, territorialization, and the plane of composition -- Politics and the origin of meaning -- Transcending life and the genesis of sense -- Beyond symbolic and imaginary -- Shit and money -- Exchange, gift, and theft -- The fiction of mind -- Collective investment and group fantasy -- The time of man -- The intense germinal influx. (shrink)

Le discours international actuel sur l’écologie s’est mué en un mouvement qui s’identifie avec le discours de la vérité scientifique. L’exemple de Greta Thunberg et de ses appels à l’action illustre dans quelle mesure l’identité actuelle du mouvement enveloppe un paradoxe qui lui est inhérent. D’une part, elle s’appuie sur la nature auto-explicative et claire des idées vraies. D’autre part, pour propager ces idées, elle fait résider son pouvoir rhétorique dans l’impact émotionnel. L’approche par Spinoza de la relation (...) entre raison et foi, telle qu’elle apparaît quand on juxtapose les passages pertinents de l’ Éthique et ceux du Traité théologico-politique qui décrivent la prophétie, constitue un cadre théorique susceptible de rendre compte de ce paradoxe inhérent à l’écologie moderne. (shrink)

Suicide has long been the subject of philosophical, literary, theological and cultural–historical inquiry. But despite the diversity of disciplinary and methodological approaches that have been brought to bear in the study of suicide, we argue that the formal study of suicide, that is, suicidology, is characterized by intellectual, organizational and professional values that distinguish it from other ways of thinking and knowing. Further, we suggest that considering suicidology as a “social practice” offers ways to usefully conceptualize its epistemological, philosophical and (...) practical norms. This study develops the idea of suicidology as a social practice and considers the implications for research, practice and public discourse. (shrink)

This article examines the artistic potential of forms of image-making that involve registering the features of real objects using mind-independent processes. According to skeptics, these processes limit an agent’s intentional control over the features of the resultant “automatic images,” which in turn limits the artistic potential of the work, and the form as a whole. I argue that this is true only if intentional control is understood to mean that an agent produces the features of the work by their own (...) bodily movements alone. Not only is this an unrealistic standard to uphold, but I show that a definition of intentional control based on the skeptic’s position does not prohibit an agent from realizing the features of an image by means beyond their own actions. An agent can exercise intentional control over the features of an image if they successfully anticipate the effect that the remote consequences of their actions will have on these. This, I argue, entails that to exert intentional control over the features of an image is to exercise “creative agency,” which is a species of executive agency. Consequently, I defend the idea that the origin of automatic images in creative agency grounds their artistic significance. (shrink)

The debate on the value of Boyer's minimally counter-intuitive theory continues to generate considerable theoretical and empirical attention. Although the theory offers an explanation as to why certain cultural texts and narratives are particularly well conveyed and transmitted, amidst society and over time, conflicting evidence remains for any mnemonic advantage of minimally counter-intuitive concepts. In an effort to reconcile these conflicting results, Barrett has made a comprehensive attempt in presenting a formal system for quantifying counter – intuitiveness including a distinction (...) between counter-intuitive and counter-schematic concepts. The present article uses this system to generate sentences containing different levels of counter-intuitiveness, and tests whether minimally counter-intuitive items show a mnemonic advantage over concepts which are more counter-intuitive or counter-schematic. Results indicate that MCI concepts hold a mnemonic advantage over counter-schematic and maximally counter-intuitive concepts but only for one-week delayed recall. Interference effects may have masked immediate recall effects. Yes-no recognition after one week delay showed almost 100% accuracy suggesting that availability of retrieval cues is the factor which determines the mnemonic advantage of MCI concepts. (shrink)

This special issue commemorates the tenth anniversary of the publication of The View from Within , where Francisco Varela in collaboration with Jonathan Shear designed the foundations of a research program on lived experienced.

It is well-documented that the alteration of portrait photographs can have a negative impact on a viewer’s self-esteem. One might think that providing written disclaimers warning of alteration might help to mitigate this effect, yet empirical studies have shown that viewers continue to feel like what they are seeing is real, and thus attainable, despite knowing it is not. I propose that this cognitive dissonance occurs because disclaimers fail to show viewers how to look at the contents of a photographic (...) image differently. Consequently, viewers have the same perceptual experience, where the picture appears to faithfully resemble a direct visual experience of the subject, which conflicts with their changing sense of warrant. However, I argue that the degree of perceived similarity, and so contact, may be subject to change depending on what a viewer is attentive to during their viewing of an image, including subtle but unrealistic signs of alteration. (shrink)

Increasingly, artists describe the feeling of creating images with generative AI systems as like working with a “collaborator”—a term that is also common in the scholarly literature on AI image-generation. If it is appropriate to describe these dynamics in terms of collaboration, as I demonstrate, it is important to determine the form and nature of these joint efforts, given the appreciative relevance of different types of contribution to the production of an artwork. Accordingly, I examine three kinds of collaboration that (...) can be found in the philosophical literature on artistic authorship—collective authorship, co-creatorship, and co-production—to determine whether human-AI interactions comprise joint efforts as per such kinds. As I find, collaboration is a concept that invokes rich psychological terms and so one to used be with care in relation to generative AI, which does not yet meet the conditions to count as an artistic collaborator in the senses derived from the literature. To progress discussions on ethical and legal issues that are raised by image-making practices involving generative AI, and further research into the distinctive qualities afforded by interactions with these systems, I argue that we ought to frame their contributions to the production of visual artworks in terms of a “generative” contribution and describe the interactions between humans and generative AI systems as “AI-assisted production”. (shrink)

Block proposes that phenomenal experience overflows conscious access. In contrast, we propose that conscious access overflows overt report. We argue that a theory of phenomenal experience cannot discard subjective report and that Block's examples of phenomenal relate to two different types of perception. We propose that conscious access is more than simply readout of a pre-existing phenomenal experience.

The necessity of reconsidering and rethinking the aesthetics of a literary genre is not a novelty. Now that the traditional distinction between argumentative theory patterns and narrative styles of thinking has blurred, the relationship between philosophy and literature raises a principal question: the definition of philosophy itself and of philosophical activity. Modern literature, and in particular the novel of the last century, embodies a polyphonic, complex cognitive enterprise which includes both original uses of language and sophisticated patterns of moral reflection. (...) Modern literature thus represents a new model of paradigmatic thinking for philosophical activity, and both philosophy and literature can be.. (shrink)

By drawing attention to these facts and to the relationship between Cantor’s and Husserl's ideas, I have tried to contribute to putting Frege's attack on Husserl "in the proper light" by providing some insight into some of the issues underling criticisms which Frege himself suggested were not purely aimed at Husserl's book. I have tried to undermine the popular idea that Frege's review of the Philosophy of Arithmetic is a straightforward, objective assessment of Husserl’s book, and to give some specific (...) reasons for thinking that the uncritical reading of Frege's review has unfairly distorted philosophers' perception of a work they do not know very well. (shrink)

Reading Nietzsche’s many remarks on freedom and free will, we face a dilemma. On the one hand, Nietzsche levels vehement attacks against the idea of the freedom of the will in several places throughout his writing. On the other hand, he frequently describes the sorts of people he admires as ‘free’ in various respects, as ‘free spirits’, or as in possession of a ‘free will’. So does Nietzsche think that we are or perhaps could be free, or not? I argue (...) that we ought to read these seemingly conflicting claims as part of one unified project, which is to try to understand what true freedom would look like. Nietzsche’s attacks on ‘free will’, I suggest, are not intended to establish that we are not free, but rather to show that a certain tempting picture of freedom is confused and totally inadequate for purpose. The positive half of Nietzsche’s project, then, should be read as his attempt to do a better job – to provide an account of freedom that better articulates what we were trying, via the confused picture, to get at. (shrink)

Gestational surrogacy relies on a legal agreement between the surrogate and the intended parents to define the roles and responsibilities of the parties, including explicit consent by the surrogate to allow the physician to release all pregnancy-related medical information to the intended parents. In the event of surrogate misconduct, however, physicians may feel conflicted if the surrogate asks the physician to withhold information about potentially dangerous behaviour in pregnancy from the intended parents. While the American Society for Reproductive Medicine guidelines (...) may support disclosure over the objections of the surrogate, the authors argue that such disclosure is a violation of the surrogate’s rights and the physician’s ethical and professional duties. A surrogate’s confidentiality must be maintained as it is an essential element of the physician–patient relationship. (shrink)

Irigaray demonstrates that metaphysics depends upon the specific negation and exclusion of the female body. Readings of Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman tend to highlight the status of this excluded materiality: is there an essential female body which precedes negation or is the feminine only an effect of exclusion? I approach Irigaray's work by way of another question: is it possible to move beyond a feminist critique of metaphysics and towards a feminist philosophy?

This essay explores three deconstructive concepts – archive, anthropocene, and auto-affection – across two registers. The first is the register of what counts as readability in general, beyond reading in its narrow and actualized sense.. The second register applies to Derrida today, and what it means to read the corpus of a philosopher and how that corpus is governed by proper names. I want to suggest that the way we approach proper names in philosophy and theory is part of a (...) broader problem of our relation to what it is to read, and how readability intertwines with the human. (shrink)

One of the ways in which one might chart the force of various forms of posthuman thought is to mark a reversal in the ways we think about relationality. Rather than distinct Cartesian subje...

Base pair mismatches in DNA arise from errors in DNA replication, recombination, and biochemical modification of bases. Mismatches are inherently transient. They are resolved passively by DNA replication, or actively by enzymatic removal and resynthesis of one of the bases. The first step in removal is recognition of strand discontinuity by one of the MutS proteins. Mismatches arising from errors in DNA replication are repaired in favor of the base on the template strand, but other mismatches trigger base excision or (...) nucleotide excision repair (NER), or non‐repair pathways such as hypermutation, cell cycle arrest, or apoptosis. We argue that MutL homologues play a key role in determining biologic outcome by recruiting and/or activating effector proteins in response to lesion recognition by MutS. We suggest that the process is regulated by conformational changes in MutL caused by cycles of ATP binding and hydrolysis, and by physiologic changes which influence effector availability. (shrink)

Nous nous proposons d’effectuer une lecture psychanalytique des transformations sociales et familiales contemporaines et de leurs effets sur la manière dont est pensée l’enfance aujourd’hui. Nous avons choisi de présenter deux figures de l’enfance, sous-tendues par différents discours organisateurs du lien social et familial contemporain. Il s’agira de la figure de l’enfant raisonnable, figure notamment portée par la Convention internationale des droits de l’enfant ( CIDE ) et de celle de l’enfant déchaîné, que l’on retrouve dans le modèle de l’enfant (...) hyperactif des neurosciences comportementales développé dans les classifications internationales (comme le DSM IV). (shrink)