Life-extension was the focus for the 10th annual Congress of the International Association of Biomedical Gerontology, held last September at Cambridge University. This scientific convention included a panel of several bioethicists, including Art Caplan, John Harris, and others. The presentations on the ethics of life-extension are reviewed here.

(2001). Associative democracy and the incorporation of minorities: Critical remarks on Paul Hirst's associative democracy. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 4, Associative Democracy: The Real Third Way, pp. 187-202. doi: 10.1080/13698230108403343.

This volume presents an extended version of the contributions presented at the workshop "Kant's Concept of Law" held at the 26th World Congress of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR) in 2013. It handles issues of applied legal philosophy in Kant's Doctrine of Right such as ownership, the alleged right of necessity, the right of resistance and the right of revolution. With each of these applied issues, the focus lies, on the one hand, (...) on the relationship between the principles a priori of law and of the duties of rights, as well as their normative requirements - for instance, the duty of independence from the coercion by others - and, on the other hand, empirical situations and their pressing demands. Thus, this volume illustrates how Kant concretely conceives of the doctrine of "first metaphysical of the doctrine of right" as supplying "the immutable principles for any giving of positive law". Each essay of this volume not only undertakes a careful and original interpretation of Kant's theses, but also offers a critical assessment. (shrink)

Faring poorly by international standards, out-of-home childcare in Canada is often described as ‘in crisis’. This study addresses how national childcare movement actors, who are overwhelmingly women, have discursively constructed their collective identity during two contrasting political climates. Data comprise publically available media releases produced in 2005 and 2008 by the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada, a national grassroots childcare social movement organization. Guided by Fairclough's overarching framework for critical discourse analysis and Koller's approach to analysing collective (...) identity through CDA, the discursive mechanisms of CCAAC movement actors have employed in relation to their collective identity construction are identified and explored. Finally, whether or not these mechanisms may have been strategic is explored. (shrink)

Prva Međunarodna filozofska olimpijada održana je 1993. godine u Bugarskoj na inicijativu Odjela za filozofiju Sveučilišta u Sofiji. Otad se neprekidno održava svake godine u mjesecu svibnju u jednoj od država sudionica. Olimpijada se održava pod patronatom najveće međunarodne asocijacije filozofskih društava FISP, uz suradnju s UNESCO-ovim Odjelom za humanističke znanosti, filozofiju i etiku znanosti i tehnologije. Osim same popularizacije filozofije, ciljevi IPO-a su poticanje na kritičko, radoznalo i kreativno mišljenje, promicanje filozofskog mišljenja u znanosti, umjetnosti i društvenom životu, promišljanje (...) o etičkim problemima u modernom svijetu te poticanje intelektualne razmjene među mladim ljudima iz različitih zemalja u svrhu promoviranja kulture mira. Odlukom Upravnog odbora Hrvatskoga filozofskog društva i u suradnji s Agencijom za školstvo, Republika Hrvatska na filozofskoj olimpijadi sudjeluje od 2007. godine. Olimpijada je potaknula niz nacionalnih natjecanja iz filozofije diljem svijeta. Ovo međunarodno natjecanje dobar je način za popularizaciju filozofije među srednjoškolskom populacijom.The first International Philosophy Olympiad was held in 1993 in Bulgaria. It was initiated by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. It is held annually in the month of May in one of the participating countries. The Olympiad is endorsed by the International Federation of Philosophical Societies , the largest international association of its kind, in collaboration with UNESCO. In addition to popularising philosophy, the aims of IPO are encouraging critical, inquisitive and creative thinking, promoting philosophical thinking in science, art and social life, reflecting on the ethical problems of today’s world, and encouraging intellectual exchanges amongst the young people of different countries with the purpose of promoting the culture of peace. The Republic of Croatia has been participating in IPO since 2007 . The Olympiad has inspired a whole series of national competitions in philosophy around the world. This international competition is an excellent way to popularise philosophy amongst high school students. (shrink)

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Computer Science Logic, CSL '97, held as the 1997 Annual Conference of the European Association on Computer Science Logic, EACSL, in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 1997. The volume presents 26 revised full papers selected after two rounds of refereeing from initially 92 submissions; also included are four invited papers. The book addresses all current aspects of computer science logics and its applications and thus presents (...) the state of the art in the area. (shrink)

Background The American Association of Medical Colleges has called for incorporation of the health humanities into medical education, and many medical schools now offer formal programs or content in this field. However, there is growing recognition among educators that we must expand beyond empathy and wellness and apply the health humanities to questions of social justice – that is, critical health humanities. In this paper we demonstrate how this burgeoning field offers us tools for integrating social justice into medical (...) education, utilizing the frameworks of critical consciousness and structural competency. Practice of health humanities Critical health humanities can be applied at multiple levels of learners, and in a variety of contexts. We are two physician-writers who have developed several educational programs that demonstrate this. We taught a seminar that introduced first-year and second-year undergraduates to concepts such as social determinants of health, intergenerational trauma, intersectionality, resilience, and cross-cultural care through works of fiction, poetry, film, podcasts, stand-up comedy, and more. Through creative projects and empathic reflection, students engaged with the complexities of structural forces that create and maintain health disparities. Medical students in their clinical years can engage in critical health humanities learning experiences as well. We teach several multidisciplinary electives that address social (in)justice in medicine, as well as mentor fourth-year students engaged in independent electives that foster critical awareness around health equity and ethics. Beyond the classroom, we have actively engaged in critical health humanities practices through story slams, literary journal clubs, conference presentations, and Grand Rounds. Through these activities we have included learners at GME and CME levels. These examples also demonstrate how community engagement and multidisciplinary partnerships can contribute to the practice of critical health humanities. Conclusion In this paper, we explore the growing field of critical health humanities and its potential for teaching health equity through narrative practices. We provide concrete examples of educational activities that incorporate critical consciousness and structural competency – frameworks we have found useful for conceptualizing critical health humanities as a pedagogical practice. We also discuss the strengths and challenges of this work and suggest future directions. (shrink)

The volume starts with the paper of Lynn Maurice Ferguson Arnold, former Premier of South Australia and former Minister of Education of Australia, concerning the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life) that was held from 25 May to 25 November 1937 in Paris, France. The organization of the world exhibition had placed the Nazi German and the Soviet pavilions directly across from each other. Many papers are (...) devoted to the interpretation of this opposition. Arnold’s paper considers the differences in the two totalitarian states’ architectural and design discourse styles. Although each of them communicated a totalitarian language of purposes, permissions, and boundaries, they essentially differed in the styles of discourse represented by the architecture and design of their respective pavilions. They were opposites of each other and the liberal ideals they contested. The internationalist viewpoint reflecting the multi-ethnic mix of the USSR is contrasted to the ein Volk homogeneity represented in the German pavilion. The Soviet pavilion opted for a utopian future to be arrived at by “benign” leadership, whereas the German pavilion anchored itself in the myth of Teutonic history with the nostalgic pride protected by the swastika-bearing eagle. Jean-Yves Béziau is best known as a logician and founder of Universal Logic. However, in this paper, he poses a new philosophical question: why philosophical discourse does not use images? The paper begins with a general analysis of different types of philosophical discourses. Then, he focuses on why images have been and are still rejected in philosophical discourse. He explains various ways to use images in a fruitful way to develop philosophical thinking and discourse and illustrates his view by providing several examples. He concludes with a promising programmatic declaration about founding a new journal entitled World Journal of Pictorial Philosophy to stimulate the usage of images for developing philosophical thinking. Although complaints about the obscurity of many philosophers’ discourse are widespread, Tatiana Denisova, ex-professor of the Surgut University and a research associate of the University of the Aegean undertakes a positive attitude to this problem. She explains that the reasons for the obscurity of philosophical texts, the subsequent complexity in communicating philosophers’ meanings and their eventual incomplete understanding is not a sign of their inferiority. On the contrary, it is a sign of the fruitfulness of philosophical discourse, which can generate new meanings. Thus, the darkness of philosophical discourse is like the life-giving chaos, and the obscurity that it inevitably contains can be the keeper of implicit meanings and even their generator. Katarzyna Gan-Krzywoszyńska and Piotr Leśniewski, authors of a monograph on Polish philosopher Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890 – 1963), make a comparative analysis of his educational style with that of Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921 – 1997). The authors highlight that these scholars have distinctly different backgrounds. The former was an educator, philosopher and a leading advocate of critical pedagogy connected with the dialogical Latin-American tradition. The latter was a philosopher and logician, a notable representative of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic with significant contributions to semantics, model theory and the philosophy of science. Despite their apparent difference, the authors identify some striking similarities regarding their attitudes towards education; notably, their approaches are essentially dialogical. Gilah Yelin Hirsch is a multidisciplinary artist who works as a painter, writer, curator, educator, and filmmaker. In her experiential paper, he explains how and why she uses four channels of communication in her creative expression: writing, painting, filmmaking, and teaching, as dialogic inquiry. She considers that these channels compose a continuum of discourse styles, each reaching a different facet of kaleidoscopic consciousness. She claims that her choice of medium is prompted by a need to communicate her insights profoundly. Thus, for instance, she created painted allegories to express narratives based on dreams and visions emerging from her subconscious. Art and healing is another Tibetan-rooted type of discourse practised by the author. Creating and observing a healing image produces a positive psychophysiological change in both the artist and the viewer. The discourse here is tripartite between creator, image, and viewer. Filmmaking is another type of discourse she practices between the filmmaker/artist as shaman or healer and the viewer as respondent or participant. These films are meant to be experienced frame by frame, physically and emotionally in both the body and mind. Jocelyn Ireson-Paine is a cartoonist and programmer. His paper offers an original attempt to use category theory in cartooning. Category theory is a branch of mathematics that provides concepts and methods to describe general abstract structures in terms of a labelled directed graph called category, whose nodes are called objects, and whose labelled directed edges are called arrows (or morphisms or transformations or mappings). The author explores different ways to define “style” in art using category theory and a relational view of art. Moreover, he examines how “translation” (transformation) between styles could be defined and reveals the difficulties of how it could be implemented in a computer using special software. Jens Lemanski is a philosopher who has revived research in Arthur Schopenhauer’s legacy by exploring his work on mathematical evidence, logic diagrams, and problems of semantics. In this paper, he advances a new approach to eristic as an art of protecting oneself from the one who deliberately violates norms of discourse ethics to win an argument. The author attributes the origins of this view to Schopenhauer, suggesting a new reading of his work. According to the author, eristic is a prohibitive technique that takes effect when the norms of discourse ethics are transgressed and violated. Thus, eristic is viewed as a discipline of Enlightenment philosophy and a correlate of discourse ethics. Roshdi Rashed is an authority on the history of Arabic mathematical sciences. Proceeding from Gilles-Gaston Granger’s definition of mathematical style, he studies the question of whether a mathematical work can be characterized by a single style or by a multitude of styles. This question is explored within the style of a single work, namely Menelaus’s Sphaerica, and through the study of the development of a single problem over time, namely the isoperimetric problem. He indicates Menelaus’s divergence from the Euclidean style of (plane and stereometric) geometry caused by the drop of the Parallel Postulate, which associated it with hyperbolic geometry. Hence, the author concludes that Menelaus’s Sphaerica incorporates the well-known Euclidean style with a variation of the non-Euclidean one. On the other hand, examining the isoperimetric problem reveals another interesting historical picture. A succession of different styles (cosmological, geometric, infinitesimalistic, style of the calculus of variations, of synthetic geometry) can be observed due to the transformation of the research object over time. Boris Shalyutin, a Russian social philosopher, and Ombudsman for Human Rights in the Kurgan Region, explores the origins of discourse in combination with the birth of society and law. He claims that legal discourse marks the historical emergence of discourse in general. Homo Juridicus generated Homo Sapiens, which have created new spheres of discourse, notably moral discourse and further philosophical, political, and scientific discourse. Petros Stefaneas, a logician, computer scientist and novelist, suggests an alternative to the traditional narratology approach for studying (interactive) social media discourse. He claims that style describes how the parts of a narrative are blended into a whole. The author relies upon Goguen’s and Harrel’s concept of style as a choice of blending principles and transfers to the study of the social media narratives elements from the methodology of studying Web-based collaborative search for mathematical proofs like those implemented within the Polymath project. The last paper belongs to Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, a linguist, language revivalist, and proponent of a model of the emergence of Israeli Hebrew, according to which Hebrew and Yiddish were the primary sources of Modern Hebrew. This paper explores the fascinating and multifaceted Yiddish language and its survival in Israeli. Yiddish is characterized by a unique style that embeds psycho-ostensive expressions throughout its discourse. The author highlights the cross-fertilization between Hebrew and Yiddish as it manifests itself in any aspect of the Israeli language. He claims that Yiddish survives beneath Israeli phonetics, phonology, discourse, syntax, semantics, lexis, and even morphology, although traditional and institutional linguists have been most reluctant to admit it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From the Executive EditorDonald R. KelleyTwenty years ago the Journal of the History of Ideas moved from Temple University to the University of Rochester (through the efforts especially of J. Paul Hunter, then dean of the college of arts and sciences, and Lewis White Beck, professor of philosophy), and I replaced Philip Wiener, who had been editor for forty-five years, the first issue under my supervision being that of (...) July 1985. A year later Robin Ladrach joined me as assistant and then as associate editor, and in 1991 we both moved along with the JHI to Rutgers University (through the efforts especially of Richard McCormick, then dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and now president of the university). Now the Journal has moved to the University of Pennsylvania, and I pass on the editorship to a committee composed of Warren Breckman, Martin J. Burke, Anthony Grafton, and Ann E. Moyer, with Robin Ladrach continuing as managing editor.We changed our face in 1990, but otherwise we have maintained a remarkably steady course since the days of Arthur O. Lovejoy, original founder of the JHI in 1940, with articles submitted and articles published continuing in mostly the same quantity and intellectual range and following the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural vision established by Lovejoy in the 1930s (history of philosophy, science, political thought, historiography, religion, literature, art, and music) but also modified by intervening intellectual and cultural changes (and so enhanced by studies in the human sciences, gender, women's history, globalism, animals, etc.). Such change has for the most part not been from conscious editorial policy, except indirectly, but rather "from below," and the role of the editor has been that not of cultural critic but of observer, whose reflections have appeared in "Horizons of Intellectual History," JHI, 48 (1987), 143–69; "What is Happening to the History of Ideas?" JHI, 51 (1990), 3–25; "JHI 2000," JHI, 61 (2000), 153–56; and The History of Ideas: Canon and Variations (Rochester, N.Y., 1990), which contains also the reflections of Lovejoy and other earlier authors. The new regime may well introduce new departures, but I [End Page 475] believe that it will continue to rely and perhaps draw on the old Lovejovian tradition which has made this journal a successful and enduring international enterprise.Donald R. KelleyExecutive Editor Emeritus Rutgers UniversityCopyright © 2005 The Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

To pose the question of evaluating political poetry is, of course, itself already a polemical move, since it insists on distinctions that command neither general critical consent nor methodological specificity. Repudiating the pertinence of such concerns to poetry has been, after all, the principal thrust of some of the most influential texts in modern literary theory. Indeed, considered historically, the struggle to separate aesthetic from both moral and political considerations can be seen as constituting the inaugural, grounding act of poetics (...) as a distinct discipline. In such a view, the words of a poem, by their very nature, are radically divorced from their usage in the quotidian world of shared human activities, so that although a text may contain political themes among its material poetica, insofar as it succeeds as a work of art these must function purely as internal and autonomous elements in the structure of the piece, not as arguments seeking to participate in a wider discourse. Because the language of poetry is unique and self-sufficient, thematic considerations are strictly irrelevant, and the issue of evaluation is identical regardless of the ostensible subject matter of the poem. Political poetry, in other words, is a meaningless term: a work is either a poem or it is not, and any attempt to include political concerns in its creation or evaluation is simply to abandon the domain of art for what Mallarmé dismissed as the debased idiom of “les journaux.”1Yet the very need to keep insisting on so categorical a distinction reveals that contamination is always possible, that the chasm may prove only a threshold habitually traversed by the words of any poem. And in fact, for every instance of a Mallarméan insistence upon the autonomy of the poem, there exists a counterpolemic stressing the link between word and world and, more pertinently still, between the language of verse and a search for values applicable to the communal experiences of both author and readers.2 But as I remarked earlier, the very heterogeneity of these arguments tends to deprive them of any methodological specificity, and all too often discussions of political poetry have done little more than catalog judgments about the ideological stance of a given work according to a critic’s fixed conception of which attitudes merit approval and which deserve censure. There is a crucial distinction between reading political poetry and reading poetry politically. In the latter case, the concern is less with the characteristics, let alone the evaluation, of political poetry per se than which judging how effectively the poem either champions or contests positions whose independent authority is always already guaranteed and which, in principle, are only to be illustrated, not questioned or modified, by literary texts. 1. Mallarmé’s formulation here is both categorical can powerful: “cette donnée exacte, quíl faut, si l’on fait de la literature, parler autrement que les journaux” . Michael André Bernstein, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic and Prima della Rivoluzione , a volume of verse. He is currently completing a book on the Abject Hero and a study, Talent and the Individual Tradition in Modern Poetry. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “When the Carnival Turns Bitter: Preliminary Reflections upon the Abject Hero” and “image, Word, and Sign: The Visual Arts as Evidence in Ezra Pound’s Cantos”. (shrink)

This book's aims are to determine the importance of legal philosophy in legal education and in addition to develop alternative methods for teaching law in general and the philosophy of law in particular. In this context, the individual essays in this volume discuss the alternatives and tendencies in the quest for an adequate model of teaching and learning jurisprudence. Common to all of them is a commitment to the necessary integration of theoretical and practical knowledge, of traditional case and lecture (...) methods with non-traditional models such as cinema, drama, and literature, and of the dominant legal perspective with alternative approaches utilizing information technologies such as computers and the internet. Effective teaching and learning must favor critical and strategic thinking, dialectical and dialogical inquiry or research, problem-solving, role-playing, and skill-developing over mere rote memorization of existing rules and standard answers. (shrink)

Chapter 1: An Introduction: The ‘Semantic Sting’ Argument Describes Dworkin’s theory as concerning the conditions of legal validity. “A legal system is a system of norms. Validity is a logical property of norms in a way akin to that in which truth is a logical property of propositions. A statement about the law is true if and only if the norm it purports to describe is a valid legal norm…It follows that there must be certain conditions which render certain norms, (...) but not others, legally valid. Hence it also follows that there can be two types of disagreement over the truth or falsehood of propositions about the law. People can disagree over the question ‘What are the conditions of legal validity?’, in which case their disagreement is a theoretical one. Or they can agree on the conditions of validity, and disagree as to whether or not those conditions actually obtain in a given case or not.” Argues that the best way to interpret Dworkin’s ‘semantic-sting argument’ is as a general argument against conventionalism in legal positivism. Summarizes the outcome of Dworkin’s argument as follows: “[I]f Dworkin is right about the legal reasoning of lawyers and judges, conventionalism would be self-defeating: if lawyers and judges recognize as legally binding not only those norms which are uncontroversially identifiable under the Rule of Recognition, that is, if what they recognize as binding is not only source-based law, then conventionalism turns out to be false on its own terms. In other words, either law is not what lawyers and judges think that it is, in which case law is not a matter of conventions, or – if it is what lawyers and judges think – conventionalism is false, as they do not see the law as purely a matter of conventions.” Dworkin’s theory, then, is a new conception of jurisprudence aiming to present itself as a rival to conventionalism. The book will be concerned with re-examining positivism in light of the interpretative challenge. Chapter 2: Meaning and Interpretation “[R]oughly, interpretation can be defined as an understanding or explanation of the meaning of an object.” Interpretation in this narrow sense is distinct from a less formal and broader use of interpretation that makes it equivalent to explanation. “Hence also, only those objects which are capable of bearing some meaning qualify as objects of interpretation.” [Why shouldn’t we think of interpretation as object-identification? This seems to be closer to what Dworkin has in mind.] Thus, a consideration of the philosophical work on meaning is appropriate. First, a consideration of Davidson on interpretation. The thesis is that Davidson’s “radical interpretation” can only account for sentence meaning and not for linguistic interpretation in general. Davidson cannot account for the non-rule-governed aspects of communication. “Semantics, as opposed to interpretation, concerns those aspects of communication which are rule or convention governed…but such rules are normally unavailable as reasons or justifications for an interpretation. On the contrary, interpretation is usually required because the issue is not determined by rules or conventions.” Interpretation, rather, is parasitic with understanding the meaning of an expression and not equivalent with it. As Dummett notes, any reflection on the meanings of words assumes prior knowledge of ordinary meanings. “This leads to the conclusion that understanding or explaining the meaning of an expression and interpreting it, are two conceptually separate things. It also indicates that seman ics can only be employed, if at all, to elucidate the concept of interpretation by way of contrast: interpretation concerns those aspects of communication which are under-determined by semantic rules or conventions.” Pragmatics, the study of problems posed by discrepancies between utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning, would seem to be closer to inquiry into interpretation. Both are concerned with understanding how meaning is possible where conventional rules leave off. Contemporary pragmatics, moreover, recognizes the logically indeterminate character of communicative inferences beyond conventional meaning and that the contextual conditions that account for the possibility cannot be realized in the semantic structure of the sentence. However, different criteria of success may be at work in pragmatics than interpretation. Pragmatics is concerned with how communication is achieved and thus the criteria of success would be grasping a speaker’s intentions. Many think, however, that communication is unimportant in certain spheres of communication, e.g. artistic interpretation, and that in these cases the aim of interpretation is not to uncover the actual artist’s intentions. What kind of meaning is interpretation aimed at then? It cannot be the meaning the object has for the interpreter. “Interpretation purports to be a statement about the object interpreted, not about the subject who offers the interpretation…it is crucial to remember that not everything we say about a work of art, or any other text, amounts to an interpretation of it. Only those aspects of a text which can shed light on its meaning form part of the text’s interpretation. What the text means for someone rarely entails anything about what the text means.” [This is puzzling to some extent for it remains somewhat ambiguous what it means to talk of subject-independent meaning.] Interpretive meaning attribution is, rather, counterfactual. “In general, I will suggest that the answer to this question consists in the fact that meaning is assigned by a counterfactual statement. Given that x is the meaning attributed to, for instance a text T, and x is not the literal meaning of T, nor is it the meaning of T intended by its author, then the attribution of meaning x to T can only be understood as the contention that on the basis of certain assumptions a certain fictitious or stipulated speaker would have meant x by expressing T.” Thus, on this account, interpretation, when it does not concern an actual speaker, turns out to be a kind of counterfactual intention attribution. Twofold point: “First, that interpretation is essentially a matter of attributing intentions, that is, in the pragmatics sense of ‘meaning’, namely, meaning that such-and-such by an act or expression. At the same time, interpretations need not be based on the intentions of actual authors; the meaning of an act or expression is understandable in terms of counterfactual intentions.” [Are we really restricted to understanding the coherence and integrity of meaning in such a way? Presumably the author is a kind of device for organizing meaning, much like Dworkin’s integrity, but need it take that format?] The logic of interpretation is typically reducible to intention attribution. [What role does the counterfactual author play in structuring meaning?] The criteria of interpretive success will depend upon the object, whether it is the real author or the counterfactual author. If the former, success will depend upon the retrieval of the author’s actual intentions. “Likewise, if the author is characterized in terms of some ideal representative of a certain genre, for instance, the presumptions which are taken to determine this c aracterization would provide the criteria of success for the particular interpretation offered.” [The criteria of success would seem, then, to be the principles, ideals, etc. that we attribute to the counterfactual author. These attributed qualities would be doing all the work – is the attribution of intention to the hypothetical author, then, really necessary at all?] [Does this account presuppose a weird dichotomy between what an object is and what it means? This dichotomy is different, if present at all, in Dworkin.] Chapter 3: Dworkin’s Theory of Interpretation and the Nature of Jurisprudence Three main insights of Dworkin’s theory of interpretation: “First, that interpretation strives to present its object in its best possible light. Second, that interpretation is essentially genre-dependent. And third, that there are certain constraints that determine the limits of possible interpretations of a given object.” Why the best light? Dworkin doesn’t really address this question in depth but claims that otherwise we are left with no way of justifying and choosing an interpretation or we are left with the author’s intention model, which we should reject. [Marmor doesn’t seem clear on what precisely it means to present something in its best light – seems to conflate it with most appealing light which, I take it, is different than what Dworkin has in mind.] “Dworkin is quite right to maintain that without having some views about the values inherent in the genre to which the text is taken to belong, no interpretation can take off the ground. The values we associate with the genre partly, but crucially, determine what would make sense to say about the text, what are the kinds of meaning we could ascribe to it.” There is no necessity for an interpretation to present an object in its best light with regards to the genre it is taken to be part of. Interpretations “could simply strive to present it in a certain light, perhaps better than some, worse than others, but in a way which highlights an aspect of the meaning of the text which may be worth paying attention to for some reason or another.” [What kind of reasons would count in choosing to present it in one light rather than another?] There is simply zero grounds for Dworkin’s assertion that we have no reason to pay attention to an interpretation that does not present it in its best light. Take a psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet, for example – not the best light, but a legitimate one. [This seems related to the next criticism – clearly Dworkin would have to loosen his insistence on the best, though not to detriment.] Moreover, especially with regards to art, it doesn’t appear possible to make an all things considered judgment about the best interpretation given the incommensurability of different values that are taken to inhere in a given genre. [Dworkin can respond here that we may have different available interpretations that could be justified with respect to the relevant value. Moreover, a lack of common denominator does not prevent any comparison whatsoever.] Constructive interpretation concerns social practices constituted by norms – it imposes a purpose or value rendering intelligible the normative character of the practice. There is a separate aspect of constructive interpretation that maintains that elements of the practice are sensitive to the point of the practice. It is important to note that different social practices will institutionalize themselves in different ways – thus, different practices will establish varying conditions on how the practice can be altered. The position of the positivists is that evaluative judgments concerning what the law should be are insufficient for determining what the law is given the nature of law’s institutionalization.&nb p; [This would seem to reside on a certain conception of law, i.e. an interpretation about where the value of law lies.] “[T]his being one of the main points of dispute between Dworkin and his positivist opponents, Dworkin cannot at this initial state presume law to be sensitive to its value in the manner that other, non-institutional practices might be, without incurring the charge of having assumed the very point at issue.” The upshot for Dworkin is that any explanation of a social practice such as law requires the same kind of reasoning as participation in that practice. This will be called the hermeneutic thesis. We can try to reconstruct a justification for this view based on the necessity of shared background assumptions – but this will not do since Dworkin’s claim is stronger: it contends that participants’ and theorists’ must “adopt one and the same normative point of view.” [The sense of normative here is unclear. It is true, though, that shared background assumptions do not imply viewing the law as valuable in any particular way, or at least it does not imply this in any strong sense.] Dworkin makes two distinct points with the hermeneutic thesis: “First, that the explanation of a social practice, like law or the arts, is essentially interpretative, and as such, necessarily value laden. Second, that the interpretation of such social practices, which Dworkin calls ‘argumentative’, is unique in the sense that the practice itself is an evaluative enterprise, and that therefore the interpreter of such a practice must form an evaluative judgment of her own about those values which are inherent in the practice that she purports to interpret.” [As stated, the first thesis is terribly ambiguous – for Dworkin, it clear implies a commitment to constructive interpretation. For Marmor, who accepts it, it is totally unclear what commitment he intends to make. He seems to mean simply that we have criteria for success concerning what counts as a successful explanation.] Mamor denies the second thesis. “What Dworkin seems to ignore here is that there is a crucial difference between forming a view about the values which are manifest in a social practice, like law, and actually having evaluative judgments about them.” [The problem, however, it that it is a contentious matter what values are part of the law – a theorist’s account of what values are constitutive of a particular legal system must rely on the kind of arguments which participants rely on. Of course, a theorist might simply note a debate about values and attempt to remain agnostic, but this will fail to be a full theoretical account of what law is!] Dworkin’s thesis seems to depend exclusively on his account of constructive interpretation. [This seems exactly right.] Chapter 4: Coherence, Holism, and Interpretation: The Epistemic Foundation of Dworkin’s Legal Theory Begins with discussion of Rawls’ reflective equilibrium. Sums up dual criticism as follows: “[T]he assumption that intuitions are independently true and the converse one, that their truth depends on fitting a coherent scheme, both seem to yield paradoxical results.” Dworkin, in his article “The Original Position”, claims that Rawls cannot commit himself to ethical realism. “[T]he natural model presupposes some form of ethical realism, while the constructive model does not. One important difficulty arising from an attempt to apply the natural model to Rawls is, that under the natural model, any theory which dopes not account for an intuition, at least for one which is held firmly, cannot be wholly satisfactory, just as scientific theory which does not account for certain observational data it is supposed to cover, would not be satisfactory in a familiar way.” Rawls, rather, is committed to a constructivist view of morality. Moreover, the reason we value coherence epistemically in moral theory is that it itself is a value of political morality – fairness requires consistency and publicity in the application of moral standards. Marmor notes the following problem with such a view: “[I]f coherence is justified, as it is here, with reference to certain moral values, that is, a specific conception of fairness, then we face the following problem: the presupposed values of fairness must themselves be based upon intuitive convictions, in which case the question of their truth cannot be ignored. If they are taken to be true…we are driven back to the perplexities of the natural model.” Discusses, helpfully, the Fish/Dworkin debate. The upshot is that Dworkin’s interpretive model is best off if it commits itself to a Quineian holism. However, this undermines his distinction between internal and external skepticism since holism must deny that moral judgments constitute a closed system. [This analysis seems exactly right.] Endorses Simmonds view that Dworkin’s theory does not meet the requirements of complexity he identifies as necessary to avoid vicious circularity in interpretive judgments of fit and identity. Coherence is doing the work through and through and therefore the interpretive theory of law is circular. [Will require further investigation, though it is unclear how coherence is doing any work in the pre-interpretive stage. At this stage, the judgments, if interpretive, seem to be derived from different sources. In any case, using coherence as a value seems to be highly suspect.] Why doesn’t Dworkin just reject Fish’s assumptions: because of his jurisprudence. “If legal texts can have a meaning that is not entirely dependent on a process of interpretation, then it is at least sometimes the case that the law can simply be understood, and applied, without the mediation of interpretation. And if that is the case, then the argument from interpretation against legal positivism collapses. It is no longer the case that every conclusion about what the law is, depends on evaluative considerations about what it ought to be.” Chapter 5: Semantics, Realism, and Natural Law Assessment of Michael Moore’s legal realism and its implications. [The final criticisms of Moore are not decisive.] Chapter 6: Constructive Identification and Razian Authority A consideration of Dworkin’s denial that the communication model of interpretation is appropriate for legal interpretation. Marmor argues that intentions do play a crucial role in the identification of legal norms in a way that is incompatible with Dworkin’s “coherence thesis”. Marmor takes Dworkin to be committed to the constructive identification thesis: that the identification of something as part of the legal, artistic, etc. genre can be done sufficiently by evaluative considerations. “Here, one must maintain that evaluative considerations are sufficient to determine whether something is a legal norm or a work of art”. [Fit, however, constrains possible evaluative considerations – thus evaluative considerations are not sufficient in themselves.] “Now the crucial point here is this: if you maintain the possibility of constructive identification in art, you must assume that works of art can be identified as such on the basis of certain features they happen to possess, features which contain no reference to any particular intention to create a work of art…unless we take intentions into account, how can we discriminate between the concept of an aesthetic artifact and the con ept of a work of art?” [It is unclear, and I think false, that constructive interpretation of anything requires identifying something irrespective of an artificers intentions. Those intentions may be relevant, dependent upon the genre under which we are trying to classify the object. Nothing, seemingly, about constructive interpretation in general excludes this possibility.] Marmor’s point is that it turns out to be impossible to identify art as art without reference to an artist’s intentions – especially given the state of contemporary art. [It is notable that Marmor’s response to counterexample implicitly depends upon a fully developed theory of aesthetics. His cursory comments on the matter of identifying art seem insufficient to say the least.] The rest of the chapter considers the incompatibility of Raz’s account of authority with constructive interpretation. The incompatibilities mentioned do not move beyond what Raz identifies in his article “Authority, Law and Morality”, but a defense of this notion of authority is defended in several [inconclusive] respects. [Raz and Marmor want to separate identification from content. This is not clearly a defensible separation.] Chapter 7: No Easy Cases? Chapter defends notion that there is a distinction between easy and hard cases in the positivist sense. Takes a Hartian approach and ultimately defends the distinction by associating it Wittgenstein’s conception of rule following. The point is that one need to look the purpose of rule in order to understand what the rule requires. Chapter 8: Legislative Intent and the Authority of Law Examines the following doctrine concerning the role of legislative intent in adjudication: “[F]irst, it would hold that laws, at least in certain cases, are enacted with relatively specific intentions, and that this is a matter of fact which is discernible through an ordinary fact-finding procedure. Second, that in certain cases the presence of such a fact, namely, that the law was enacted with a certain intention, provides judges with a reason to decide the legal dispute in accordance with the relevant legislative intent.” [It is important that for Marmor, interpretive strategies are only appropriate in hard cases. However, we should wonder what grounds positivism can offer for deciding a hard case in any manner which is not the morally best manner according to the judgment of the judge. There are no legal grounds, by definition, in hard cases and so what justificatory strategy would endorse any judicial decision except for the morally best one?] We can ascribe intentions to a legislative body, when this is possible at all, by taking the shared intentions of the majority, rather than some group intention, to be the significant intentions. Moreover, we should expect a good deal of consensus about intentions for otherwise it is hard to explain how legislative bodies are able to produce so much legislation. Discussion of kinds of intentions concludes as follows: “I have distinguished between three main types of intention that are potentially relevant from the legal point of view. Apart from the intentions that are manifest in the language of the law itself, legislators typically have further intentions in enacting a given law, and sometimes they would have certain intentions bearing on its proper application. I have also suggested that some of these further intentions may be essentially non-avowable, in which case they are rendered initially irrelevant. Finally, I have pointed out that considerations of consistency require that the legislator’s application intentions be taken into account only if, and to the extent that, they are in accord with his further intentions.” The manner in which intentionalism is to be justif ed relies on the distinction, Marmor maintains, between expert and mere collective action authority. “The point I wanted to make is strictly conditional: if, and only if, a certain law is justified on the basis of the expertise branch of the normal justification thesis, would it make sense to defer to the legislature’s intentions in the interpretation of the law, that is, to the extent that there is, in fact,; such an intention and it can clarify something that needs clarification.” Insofar as a legislature can be considered an expert on the matter requiring adjudication and interpretation should the body’s intention be taken into account. Chapter 9: Constitutional Interpretation Begins by laying out general necessary features of a constitution. Then Marmor moves on to consider general questions of constitutional legitimacy. First, he considers what grounds might be offered for the legitimacy of a constitution at all. He notes that the central question is what permits a single generation to bind future generations. He then examines four arguments to avoid this problem. The first is based on the moral legitimacy of the constitution; Marmor rejects this solution for the [truly dubious] reason that the constitution would make no practical difference because it would not supply reasons in addition to those provided by morality [but, presumably, the point is that these legally valid rules would be institutionally enshrined]. The second is based on the moral authority of the framers and Marmor rightly rejects this on the basis of the idealization of the framers it requires and less rightly on the basis that there cannot be moral authorities. Third is the “argument from interpretation” which claims that “as long as the particular content of the constitution is determined by its interpretation, and the authoritative interpretation at any time correctly instantiates the values which ought to be upheld in the community, the constitution would be morally legitimate”. The fourth is Raz’s which argues that a constitution is valid so long as its constraints are morally permissible because conventions of this type might aid the continuity of the legal system, i.e. it is important to have a convention of this type and the constitution is a kind of this type. Marmor appears to endorse these two approaches and concludes: “The conditions for the legitimacy of a constitution must comprise the following conditions. First, the values and principles enshrined in it must be morally permissible…Second, when certain choices are made in particular cases, they would be legitimate if they are either morally underdetermined, or else, morally correct…It follows from this that both arguments must assume that at least in those areas in which the constitution would make a moral difference, it can be interpreted to make the difference that it should, that is, according to the true moral principles that should apply to the particular case...the moral legitimacy of constitutions very much dependent on the practices of their interpretation. In other words, a great deal of the burden of moral legitimacy is shifted by these arguments to the application of the constitution, thus assuming that the constitution is legitimate only if the courts are likely to apply the constitution in a morally desirable way.” [This implies that the only significant value constitutions have is in providing a conventional practice where some such practice is required.] Moves on to argue that courts typically rely, and rightly so, on moral considerations when deciding constitutional issues because typically, in cases of the kind that reach the supreme or constitutional court, there is no law on the case. Much of this relies on his earlier discussion about the nature of interpretation in the law – that legal interpretation is always a matter of cha ging the law. (shrink)

Recent advances in a variety of scientific disciplines have revealed the limitations of the Newtonian-Cartesian model of the universe. One of the interesting aspects of this development is the increasing convergence of science and the "perennial philosophy." The new research has led to a critical revaluation of ancient spiritual systems long ignored or rejected because of their assumed incompatibility with science. Here are Swami Muktananda on the mind. Swami Prajnananda on Karma. Swami Kripananda on the Kundalini. Ajit Mookerjee on the (...) Kundalini. Joseph Chilton Pearce on spiritual development. Mother Teresa on love and service. Jack Kornfield on Buddhism for Americans. Fritjof Capra on the new paradigms. Rupert Sheldrake on morphic resonance. Karl Pribram on the holographic model. Claudio Naranjo on meditation, and more. The papers in this book were presented at the seventh Conference of the International Transpersonal Association held in Bombay. The ITA is a non-profit organization that brings together individuals of different nationalities, professions, and philosophical or spiritual preferences who share in the view that there is a fundamental unity underlying all of humanity and the material world. The cover photo is from the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in the Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri. (shrink)

In a career extending over almost six decades, Nicholas Rescher has conducted researches in almost every principal area of philosophy, historical and systematic alike. In this extraordinary volume, two dozen scholars join in offering penetrating discussions of various facets of Rescher s investigations. The result is an instructively critical panorama of the many-faceted contributions of this important American philosopher. Born in Germany in 1928, Nicholas Rescher came to the U.S. at the age of nine. He is University Professor of Philosophy (...) at the University of Pittsburgh where he has also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department and as director (and currently chairman) of the Center for Philosophy of Science. In a productive research career extending over six decades, he has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style. His work represents a many-sided approach to fundamental philosophical issues that weaves together threads of thought from continental idealism and American pragmatism. And apart from this larger program Rescher has made various specific contributions to logic (the conception autodescriptive systems of many-sided logic), the history of logic (the medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic), to the theory of knowledge (epistemetrics as a quantitative approach in theoretical epistemology), and to the philosophy of science (the theory of a logarithmic retardation of scientific progress). Rescher has also worked in the area of futuristics, and along with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey is co-inaugurator of the so-called Delphi method of forecasting. Ten books about Rescher s philosophy have been published in four languages. Rescher earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1951 while still at the age of twenty-two a record for Princeton s Department of Philosophy. He has served as a President of the American Philosophical Association, of the American Catholic Philosophy Association, of the American G. W. Leibniz Society, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and of the American Metaphysical Society. He was the founder of the American Philosophical Quarterly. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Royal Society of Canada, the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, he has been awarded fellowships by the Ford, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundations. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated from English into other languages, he is the recipient of eight honorary degrees from universities on three continents. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, and the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007.". (shrink)

The study of literature from the point of view of the search for archetypal images and the study of artistic creativity from the standpoint of structuralism are two important trends. Both of these trends have emerged in the contexts of different scientific paradigms. The origin of archetypal criticism is associated with the figure of Herman Northrop Fry, and the basis of archetypal criticism is psychology, namely the concept of psychoanalysis, founded by Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. While the origin (...) of structuralism is associated with linguistics and the name of Ferdinand de Saussure, who first began to consider language as a system of signs in which each element defines other elements and is itself determined by them. With all the difference in origin, in general, both theories do not contradict each other - on the contrary, they complement each other. Archetypal literary criticism and structuralist theory of art have deep internal theoretical connections in several ways: both theories look for repetitive elements in literature, both consider literature as a space of memory about the past. Archetypal literary criticism and the structuralist theory of art direct the appeal to the psychology of man as the creator of works of art. Both directions are also largely based on the idea of binary oppositions: within the framework of the archetypal criticism of the pair, many archetypes are grouped into pairs, whereas within the framework of structuralism, the idea of structure itself is based on elementary concepts opposed to each other; finally, both methods have been criticized for the same shortcomings, such as the denial of author subjectivity and the denial of human progress. This article attempts to show that the theory of archetypes in literature and the structuralist theory of art complement each other, and how exactly this complementarity is achieved. (shrink)

The article is devoted to social problems of modern science (as it were interpreted Max Weber) considered in the context of the system-communicative approach by N. Luhmann. In contrast to the modern work of art, the modern science, as M. Weber believes, is associated with the fundamental unattainability of “true being”, and, as a result, with the transitory character of any scientific achievement. The specialty of modern science, as Weber noted, is determinated, on the one hand by its self-understanding, due (...) to the “peculiarity of the current moment”, and, on the other, by its transformation into a kind of blind spot of scientific observation. As a result, Weber formulated the main problem of the meaning of modern science: he wondered why any scientist needs a science under (1) external alienation and (2) inaccessibility of a scientific object? Moreover, the category of truth not just acquires its special value, but also sets a special meaning to the purpose of scientific communication, that becomes an object but not a property of scientific search. The main content of the article is the study of the Weberian concepts of the external (science as a profession) and internal (science as vocation) social factors of modern science as they were interpreted by E. von Kahler, G. Rickert, M. Scheller, K. Loewit. The authors discuss their attempts to modernize the fundamental Weberian distinction of truth/value as a principle of inclusion in the scientific community, that was formulated as a response to the “Weber’s challenge”. The authors argue that von Kahler criticized the Weberian concept for the incompatibility of the spatial and temporal discreteness of science within the “organic understanding” of the unity of the world. At the same time Scheler and Rickert payed special attention to the problem of subject specification of science. K. Levit discussed the possibility of Weber’s substitution of objectivity as a key distinction of modern knowledge with some opposite attribute. In the final part, the authors summarize the inconsistency of predictions about the further internal differentiation of scientific disciplines and the rejection of research motive for “genuine being”. (shrink)

Since its founding in 1943, Medievalia et Humanistica has won worldwide recognition as the first scholarly publication in America to devote itself entirely to medieval and Renaissance studies. Since 1970, a new series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America and edited by an international board of distinguished scholars and critics, has published interdisciplinary articles. In yearly hardbound volumes, the new series publishes significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews treating all facets of medieval and Renaissance culture: history, (...) art, literature, music, science, law, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Since its founding in 1943, Medievalia et Humanistica has won worldwide recognition as the first scholarly publication in America to devote itself entirely to medieval and Renaissance studies. Since 1970, a new series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America and edited by an international board of distinguished scholars and critics, has published interdisciplinary articles. In yearly hardbound volumes, the new series publishes significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews treating all facets of medieval and Renaissance culture: history, (...) art, literature, music, science, law, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

This paper opens a critical conversation about the ethics of international bioethics conferencing and proposes principles that commit to being anti-discriminatory, global, and inclusive. We launch this conversation in the Section, Case Study, with a case example involving the International Association of Bioethics’ (IAB’s) selection of Qatar to host the 2024 World Congress of Bioethics. IAB’s choice of Qatar sparked controversy. We believe it also may reveal deeper issues of Islamophobia in bioethics. The Section, Principles for (...) class='Hi'>International Bioethics Conferencing, sets forth and defends proposed principles for international bioethics conferencing. The Section, Applying Principles to Site Selection applies the proposed principles to the case example. The Section, Applying Principles Beyond Site Selection addresses other applications of the proposed principles. The Section, Objections responds to objections. We close (in the Section, Conclusion) by calling for a wider discussion of our proposed principles.One-Sentence Capsule Summary: How should bioethicists navigate the ethics of global bioethics conferencing? (shrink)

Calls to decolonise the curriculum gain traction across the academe. To a great extent, the movement echoes demands of the decolonisation era itself, a period from which academics draw both impetus and legitimacy. In this article, we examine the movement’s purchase when applied to the teaching of international law. We argue that the movement reinvigorates debates about the origins of international law, centring its violent foundations as well as its Eurocentric episteme. Yet, like many critical approaches toward (...) class='Hi'>international law, the movement is smitten with itself and with the regime. As a consequence, the outcome of its activism and critique is predetermined: both must redeem the Eurocentrism of international law and its associated pedagogy. Calls to decolonise the curriculum ultimately validate the epistemological limitations inherent to a stratified, international order, failing to offer a genuine alternative framework or epistemology. (shrink)

Throughout the world, Eastern European critical theory is enjoying a moderate, yet exciting, resurgence. From its oppositional roots in praxis philosophy and critical sociology, this diffuse and dynamic tradition has expanded its field of concern to encompass, among other problems, the aporias of democracy, the Holocaust and legacies of totalitarianism, the vicissitudes of modern culture and the ethical imperatives of living after the grand narrative. In the process, Eastern European thought has come to figure as a vital alternative to the (...) dominant tendencies emanating from Frankfurt and Paris. This essay surveys and introduces a collection of papers delivered at The International Conference of Marxist Critical Theory in Eastern Europe held in Chengdu, P.R.C., in November 2018. It both highlights the thematic range of contemporary scholarship on Eastern European critical theory and signals potential directions in future research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the SelfBrian KarafinMeeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self. By Anne Carolyn Klein. Boston: Beacon, 1995. 307 pp.“When the iron bird flies and carriages run on wheels, the dharma will come to the land of the red man”: this saying attributed to the semilegendary founder of Buddhism in Tibet, Padmasambhava, stands as (...) an oft-cited marker for the sense that the meeting between Tibetan Buddhism and North American culture was somehow a [End Page 227] fated one, a confluence emergent from some karmic relationship or mythical dependent-arising. Karmic connection or historical product of the near-simultaneous exile of Tibetans from their homeland in 1959 and the burgeoning of Western interest in Eastern religions and philosophies, the encounter of these two mutually and exotically other traditions is, nearing the second Christian millennium, proceeding apace. Especially since the 1989 awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetans—and now international pop icon—the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, the Western fascination for things Tibetan has exponentially increased, transforming what had been the preserve of scholars and eccentric spiritual seekers into a media sensation.The reception of Tibetan Buddhism in the West has proceeded in stages and phases that overlap and mutually affect each other, from pop phantasms of Tibet as a mythical Shangri-La (as in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon) and theosophical hopes in Tibet as the domain of the Wise Mahatmas overseeing the spiritual evolution of humanity to the relatively recent development of Tibetan studies as an academic discipline centered on the translation of texts, as well as the growing population of westerners practicing Tibetan Buddhist religion under the guidance of exiled lamas. With these latter two groups—scholars and practitioners who often overlap memberships—the phenomenon of Tibetan Buddhism in the West has reached a point where critical self-reflection is now possible. Donald Lopez’ recent Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West is the first full-length critical examination of the cultural confluence I’ve been noticing thus far. Lopez represents a movement in the field of Tibetan studies from philological scholarship of texts, in which the scholarly effort consists largely of translation along with commentary that closely follows the commentarial literature of the Tibetan tradition being translated, to cultural criticism of the underlying dynamics in the encounter itself.This critical self-consciousness in the field of Tibetan studies is likewise the motivating impetus behind Anne Klein’s recent work as represented by the book under review here. Klein, like Lopez, was a student of the dean of American Tibetan studies, Jeffrey Hopkins, at the University of Virginia. As such, her early work followed Hopkins in pursuing an essentially philological approach to Tibetan tradition with a focus on the philosophical scholasticism of the Gelukpa lineage. Klein’s three philological-philosophical books—Knowledge and Liberation; Knowing, Naming, and Negation; and Path to the Middle—are excellent examples of the genre of translation/commentary above mentioned, treating the Sautrantika and Madhyamika tenet systems in which the Gelukpa tradition systematized Indian Buddhist philosophy for the purposes of monastic study and debate. Meeting the Great Bliss Queen is something else entirely; in this work Klein blazes a trail out from recondite translation work toward cultural critique and psychosocial self-reflection in which the previously submerged subtext of the encounter between the Tibetan tradition and the Western psyche and society is allowed to surface and its issues probed and reflected upon.Klein frames her work in terms of a dialogue between Buddhism (by which she mainly means meditation practices and some associated philosophy) and feminism (by which she means both academic feminist theory and her own autobiographical [End Page 228] experience as a Western woman personally experiencing the confluence of Western and Tibetan exigencies). Klein is a salient example of a scholar-practitioner, someone who occupies positions both in the academic field of Tibetan studies and in the population of students of Tibetan lamas in exile. As such, she is exactly situated to embark on such a project of cultural and psychological reflection. She knows... (shrink)

I have been working on meta-philosophy for quite some time and was pleasantly surprised to encounter, mid-May 2017, someone who shares this commitment (apart from his many other interests and specializations) for very similar reasons as my own. He is Dr Desh Ray Sirswal from India and one of his numerous websites, blogs, journals, etc is - http://drsirswal.webs.com/ I let him speak for himself. “My objective is to achieve an intellectual detachment from all philosophical systems, and not to solve specific (...) philosophical problems but to become sensitively aware of what it is when we philosophize.” Copyright© Desh Raj Sirswal . I commence by dealing with the teaching of philosophy, because the contents of what is being taught at under-graduate level is for most people who are slightly informed about the subject what philosophy is about. This usually consists of the history of Ideas of Western Philosophy. Although an increasing number of faculties now broaden the scope to the ‘philosophies’ of Asia, the Far East and the Middle East. This international broadening of what is being included in curricula of or as philosophy is another index that Western Philosophy is in need of subject-matter as its traditional subject-matter have all but died out. Apart from the History of Philosophical ideas, the subject often is presented in terms of so-called branches, for example metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic, and so on. A number of authors suggest that both ways of teaching the discipline is very selective because of the departments adherence to some form of either ‘analytical’ or ‘continental’ philosophy. Apart from the traditional lecture-style the teaching of philosophy is dealt with by means of some variation on the Oxbridge ‘tutorial’-style. Tutorials are often acclaimed as being an amazing, to be highly regarded innovation. Some studies and research of it however revealed that is not at all very comprehensive but is restricted to a number of items concerning reasoning, argumentation and critical re-viewing and thinking. This approach forms part of the attempt by contemporary research universities to teach aspects of ‘research’. This brings us to my next section on methods of doing philosophy. I suggest that the doing of philosophy resembles certain aspects and contexts of some of the steps and stages of doing theorizing. This is the rationale for including the next section on theorizing, its steps, stages and other aspects such as the use of metaphors, imaginary experiments, heuristic devices, etc. The next section deals with the changing nature of traditional philosophy as it lost most of its subject-matter to other disciplines that have been socio-culturally differentiated. And the search for new philosophical subject-matter such as Experimental Philosophy or XPhi, the involvement of philosophers in inter-disciplinary studies, especially the latest fad of cognitive studies or sciences and of course the fabrication of philosophies of all areas of human behaviour and kinds of socio-cultural activities for example sport, the arts, sciences, cognition, sex, violence, gender, race, religion, etc etc. I then turn to the question about how, where and why one could perhaps do philosophy against the background of the above. In this investigation I make explicit some of the self-imposed limits of the discourse. Some of these restrictions have been created because of the absolute institutionalization of the discipline as just another subject of universities. This institutionalization of course requires that those involved in the discipline of institutionalized philosophy must be professionals. This absolute requirement lays down the condition that to be a philosopher one must be a professional and an academic. The conditions of institutionalization and professionalization have far reaching consequences for the philosophical discourse, its subject-matter, methods, principles, values, aims, purposes and norms. One of these is the need to publish and to publish often especially in peer-reviewed journals and in their required, institutionalized format. Because of these institutionalized restrictions of what philosophy is, what it must be like, what it may be like and what it may not be like I explore the lack of self-cognition of academically institutionalized philosophy and the associated absence of critical, meta-cognition and self-awareness of professional philosophers. I question the values of doing that type of philosophy, philosophy-on-demand and because of demand and suggest that it is preferable to engage with the more original, creative-thinking philosophers’ work. All of the above are of course intersubjectively determined and this is why I finally explore the nature and operation of different forms of intersubjectivity, for example of common sense, everyday existence, that of the different sciences, the arts, etc and the roles or functions of these things in the creation or constitution of alternative discourses, their realities, life-worlds or perspectives on ‘the world, reality, and existence’. This is the phantom, the ghost of the deceased discourse of philosophy that I chased, encountered and describe. -/- . (shrink)

In his essay “Painting Memories” , Michael Fried identifies memory as the privileged thematic that structures Charles Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846. But he then limits his investigation of this topic by focusing on the representation of “past” art, to the exclusion of the recollection of “past” experience. Fried thus isolates the theme of memory from the dialectic of life and art that characterizes its performance for Baudelaire. Such selective analysis not only reverses Baudelaire’s priorities but deflects his pointed comments on (...) modernity and naiveté, which in turn inform the example of Edouard Manet, Fried’s exemplary modernist painter. One wonders whether too much of Baudelaire and Manet is lost to this view. Perhaps the predilections of contemporary criticism have sanctioned Fried’s approach. For today we hesitate to ground art in experience, preferring to conceive of representations as signs fully engendered by and engendering other signs. Baudelaire was of a different mind; he lived through the dawning of our own age, but also in the fading light of another. He was heir to a tradition that regarded the forms of art as powerfully motivated by the experience of internalized ideas and sensations; for him, a master artist’s “signs” would appear more symbolic than allegorical, more immediate than mediated or distanced. As we deny artistic signs motivation in extralinguistic “experience,” we aggravate that perennial problem of origins which Fried himself invokes. It might be reformulated in this manner: all painting depends on a lineage of antecedent painting; yet, to succeed, a new work must transcend its filial bondage, as it compounds the effect of the “original” in its own originality. Vexation follows from this issue of the artistic source. Since memories of past art make possible the very creation of art, the creative event cannot assume priority over memory. And the matter of primordial memory, like the matter of an absolutely original art, is aporia. Fried does not pursue this matter ; but the question necessarily implies that both representations and memories, in constituting the “past,” must always be distanced. Distanced not from the present, which they enter and likewise constitute, but from those “original” experiential moments they purport to present. Richard Schiff is associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art and is currently working on a study of modernism in relation to classicism and a related study of photographic realism. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Seeing Cézanne” , “Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship” , and, with Carl Pletsch, “History and Innovation”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Quest for the Historical Abstract ExpressionismDaniel A. SiedellAbstract Expressionism:The International Context, by Joan Marter and David Anfam. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007, 320 pp. $26.95, paper.Abstract Expressionism, by Debra Bricker Balken. London: Tate, 2005, 80 pp. $9.60, paper.Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, by Ellen Landau. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, 768 pp. $45.00, paper.What makes any definition of a movement in art dubious (...) is that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement—certainly not as well as, if successful, it does the others.—Harold Rosenberg, 1952From the moment of its inception in the 1940s, "Abstract Expressionism" has been the subject of reframings, redefinitions, and revisions. This is because it is more than the sum total of artworks and artists traditionally recognized as part of the movement. It is a constitutive part of postwar American cultural life, and it has shaped how we understand art and the role of the artist. It has also shaped the practice of art criticism and defined the role of the art critic. Because it is part of the United States' creation myth of a distinctive postwar "American identity," it also possesses significant symbolic value. And this symbolic value is why it has been such a popular subject for art museum exhibitions for nearly half a century. The fact that in the last ten to fifteen years, major art museums have mounted major exhibitions of the work of key figures in the movement, like Jackson Pollock (including a feature film starring Ed Harris), Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman, and that auction prices for these artists reach tens of millions of dollars, suggest that, no matter how contested and complicated the concept of "Abstract Expressionism" is, the artists associated with the movement remain relevant.1Abstract Expressionism is not merely big business for museums, collectors, and auction houses. It has also been big business for scholars. The symbolic power of Abstract Expressionism and its influence on shaping and [End Page 107] forming contemporary artistic and critical practice has made the movement an important subject for historical and critical scrutiny. The publication of Irving Sandler's The Triumph of American Painting in 1970 was the first book-length study on Abstract Expressionism, and it marked the gradual beginning of the movement's transformation from a living entity to a more reified subject palatable for academic inquiry. Blending Alfred H. Barr's formalism with an historian's interest in subject matter and iconography and a critic's access to the artists, The Triumph of American Painting provided a taxonomy of sources and influences. Sandler's book, in part, provoked the publication of Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art in 1983 (written in 1978 as a doctoral dissertation), which initiated nearly fifteen years of serious and provocative scholarship on Abstract Expressionism. Guilbaut's radical revisionist approach to the subject—which sought to reinterpret the entire development of Abstract Expressionism as an aesthetic weapon of the Cold War—provoked a slew of responses from art historians eager to either jump on the careening bandwagon of Marxist social histories of modern art or hunker down in the trenches to protect hard-won scholarly turf. The latter was the response of a loose federation of art historians eager to forge a scholarly orthodoxy. This emergent paradigm is revealed in a 1988 special issue of Art Journal called "Abstract Expressionism: New and Improved," coedited by Stephen Polcari and Ann Gibson. This issue included essays by those art historians who understood themselves as part of a "new generation" of scholars characterized by their collective desire to transcend the polemics and limitations of those critics and curators whose distorted picture of the movement would be restored to clarity through scholarly distance, a distance that a "new synthesis" of Abstract Expressionist "art, culture, history, and society together, not separately" would produce.2 Sandler and Guilbaut were swiftly dismissed by these art historians of the "new and improved," the former because of his formalism and close proximity to the artists—many of whom he knew personally—the latter because of his Marxism... (shrink)

BackgroundCORE (Clarity and Openness in Reporting: E3-based) Reference (released May 2016 by the European Medical Writers Association [EMWA] and the American Medical Writers Association [AMWA]) is a complete and authoritative open-access user’s guide to support the authoring of clinical study reports (CSRs) for current industry-standard-design interventional studies. CORE Reference is a content guidance resource and is not a CSR Template.TransCelerate Biopharma Inc., an alliance of biopharmaceutical companies, released a CSR Template in November 2018 and recognised CORE Reference as (...) one of two principal sources used in its development.MethodsThe regulatory medical writing and statistical professionals who developed CORE Reference conducted a critical review of the TransCelerate CSR Template. We summarise our major findings and recommendations in this communication. We also re-examined and edited the Version 1 CORE Reference Terminology Table that we first published in 2016, and we present this as Version 2 in this communication.ResultsOur major critical review findings indicate that opportunities remain to refine the CSR Template structure and instructional text, enhance content clarity, add web links to referenced guidance documents, improve transparency to support the broad readership of CSRs, and develop supporting resources.The CORE Reference ‘Terminology Table’ Version 2 includes estimand as a defined term and an adaptation of the original ‘worked study example’ to incorporate the recently evolved concept of ‘estimands’.ConclusionsAs TransCelerate’s CSR Template represents an important milestone in authoring CSRs, we offer CSR authors advice and recommendations on its use, similarities, and differences with CORE Reference and advise them to consider shared interpretations between the two.RegistrationCORE Reference is registered with the EQUATOR Network. The TransCelerate CSR Template is not registered with any external organisation to the knowledge of the authors of this paper. (shrink)

This dissertation explains Audre Lorde's theoretical work as a pedagogical model, and particularly as foundational for an exploration of photomontage or image/text. Lorde's poetry enacts her theory; she uses her fascination with difference formally, structurally, and rhetorically. My conjecture is that Lorde's practice posits an epistemology based on her thoroughgoing investigation of difference on many levels. She is fascinated by difference, contradiction, dialectic. Her method significantly involves constant comparison and juxtaposition or repositioning of images; processes which tend to be associated (...) with allegorical procedures and montage practice. ;Lorde's work helps illuminate the following questions central to the pedagogy, of image/text or photomontage, toward which I speculate. How can we find forms that move us from our emotions and or something that is internal, powerfully and meaningfully out among others and back and how can we use forms or representation to intervene in our communities and society toward more complex understandings and just practices? ;How can we move students from production to analysis; from developing their own idea, even as a collective, to broader analysis. How do we ask the questions that move us forward and that keep us productive and critical, as part of a dialogue or dialectical practice allowing us to see differently? How do we resist "closure" without committing to aimless relativism? How do we open improvisational space where things can happen, but where we also make meaning of and judgments about what happens or what doesn't; and about where we need to move and why? ;The work here is toward a pedagogy which holds images in conversation, realizing that images and conversations move so we need to make a practice of scrutiny. The pedagogy toward which I speculate examines how our culture/society works in us through images, too often unexamined. My conjecture is that there are methods of dialogue which produce questions out of difference, comparison, and contradiction; and by way of production of imagery, and forms. Specifically, production of visual imagery can be used powerfully in this process. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this Journal Hugo David discussed the possible sources for the comparison that Abhinavagupta draws between ritual and literary discourse at the beginning of his “critical reconstruction” of the theory of rasa in the sixth chapter of his New Dramatic Art. The question of Abhinavagupta’s sources raises more general questions about Abhinavagupta’s use of the concepts and analytical procedures of Mīmāṃsā in his literary-theoretical works. What, if anything, does Mīmāṃsā really have to do with the analysis (...) of literary texts? How, if at all, can we construct parallels between ritual and literary texts such that the hermeneutics of one can illuminate the hermeneutics of the other? And more specifically, what are the examples that might convince us that there are such parallels? With these questions I attempt, modestly, to reach a somewhat better understanding of the beginning of Abhinavagupta’s “critical reconstruction,” which has already received a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention. I also hope, however, that this passage might serve as an example for how to think of the “borrowing” of concepts typically associated with Mīmāṃsā into the realm of literary theory. (shrink)

The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy is the definitive single-source reference work on the subject, with state-of-the-art and in-depth scholarly reflection on key issues from leading international experts. It is available both online and in print. A state-of-the-art and in-depth scholarly reflection on the key issues raised by communication, covering the history, systematics, and practical potential of communication theory Articles by leading experts offer an unprecedented level of accuracy and balance Provides comprehensive, clear entries which are (...) both cross-national and cross-disciplinary in nature The Encyclopedia presents a truly international perspective with authors and positions representing not just Europe and North America, but also Latin America and Asia Published both online and in print Part of The Wiley Blackwell-ICA International Encyclopedias of Communication series, published in conjunction with the International Communication Association. (shrink)

MARINA PAOLA BANCHETTI-ROBINO is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and zoosemiotics. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Synthese, Husserl Studies, Idealistic Studies, Philosophy East and West, and The Review of Metaphysics. She has also contributed essays to The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy (1997), Feminist Phenomenology (2000), and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial (...) Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm (2006). She co-edited Philosophies of the Environment and Technology (1999) and is currently working on a book-length project entitled The Birth of Science Out of the Spirit of Myth: A Historico-Phenomenological Re-Examination of the Crisis of the European Sciences. BERNARD BOXILL was born in Saint Lucia, West Indies where he received his primary and secondary education. He studied philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada and at the University of California, Los Angeles where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1971. He has published numerous articles, a book, Blacks and Social Justice (1992), and is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ED BRANDON was born and educated in England, studying philosophy and linguistics at The University of York, England, and later philosophy at The University of Oxford with the late John Mackie. After teaching in Sierra Leone and briefly in England, he went to teach philosophy of education at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1978. From 1992 he has been attached to a policy unit of the Vice-Chancellery, based at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados, where he has been assisting since 2000 with a new major in philosophy. His academic work can be accessed from http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/epb/personalpage.html CAROLYN CUSICK is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is a founding member of the Phenomenology Roundtable. Her research focuses on feminist epistemology, Africana philosophy, and phenomenology. LEWIS GORDON is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is Laura H. Carnell Professor, the most distinguished chair, at Temple University, where he holds appointments in philosophy, religion, and Judaic studies and directs the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is also Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Paradigm, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell, 2006) and Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm, 2005). CLEVIS HEADLEY is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program, as well as director of the Master's in Liberal Studies. Professionally, he serves as the Vice-President and Treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Headley has published widely in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Africana philosophy. He has also published in Analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Gottlob Frege. PAGET HENRY is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, and the co-editor of C. L. R. James' Caribbean. Professor Henry also serves as the editor of the C. L. R. James Journal, and has published numerous articles on the political economy of the Caribbean as well as on African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. ESIABA IROBI is Associate Professor of International Theatre/Performance Studies at Ohio University, Athens. His groundbreaking book: A Theatre for Cannibals: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1441 will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, in 2007. He has been invited to be an External Resident Fellow at the prestigious Dartmouth College Humanities Institute for the 2007-2008 academic year. CHIKE JEFFERS is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University. His interests are in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. He is originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. CATHERINE JOHN is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was co-published by Duke University Press and UWI Press in 2003. She has published several articles on Caribbean literature and culture and her current book project is entitled The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She spends her summer working in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica helping with a summer school for children and participating in the community's emancipation celebration. KENNETH KNIES is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His areas of focus are phenomenology and ancient philosophy. He is also a contributing editor for Political Affairs magazine. EDIZON LEN is a photographer and coordinator of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. In 2006, he was curator of the photo exhibit "The Color of the Diaspora" presented at the Cultural Center of the Catholic University of Ecuador and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is currently completing his doctorate at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar with a focus on Maroon thought. REKHA MENON is Associate Professor of Art History at State University of New York, Buffalo State. She is the author of Seductive Aesthetics of Post Colonialism (forthcoming). Her area of research focuses on current philosophical investigations in colonial and neocolonial aspects of Indian art, artistic/cultural practices and philosophies and their relationship to Western arts and philosophies. Her manuscripts under review are: Ashamed of Our Nakedness, Is There Ever a Naked Body? Ambivalence in Contemporary Indian Expressive Aesthetics and Insatiable Desire. MICHAEL R. MICHAU is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, and during the 2006-2007 school year, a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies and Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He is the co-founder and co-secretary of the North American Levinas Society. CHARLES W. MILLS is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, and is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). MABOGO P. MORE is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He has published articles on African philosophy and social and political philosophy in a number of academic journals, such as South African Journal of Philosophy, Dialogue and Universalism, Alternation, Theoria, and African Journal of Political Science. MARILYN NISSIM-SABAT, Ph.D., M.S.W. is Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Lewis University. Dr. Nissim-Sabat is also a psychotherapist in private practice. She is the author of numerous book chapters and papers in the fields of philosophy (Husserlian phenomenology), psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical race theory. Citations of her works can be found on her website: marilynnissim-sabat.com. FREDERICK OCHIENG'-ODHIAMBO is a Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Coordinator of the discipline at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. His major research areas are African philosophy and social philosophy. He has published several articles on philosophic sagacity. IVAN PETRELLA is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is author of The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto (SCM Press, 2006) and editor of Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (Orbis Books, 2005) as well as co-editor of the series Reclaiming Liberation Theology (SCM Press) RICHARD PITHOUSE is a research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Africa World Press, 2006). SATHYA RAO is Assistant Professor in French translation at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research fields include: theory of translation, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, discourses on Africa, and Francophone cinema and literature. He has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals and written chapters in several collective books such as: De l'Ecrit Africain a l'Oral le Phenomene Graphique Africain, Simon Battestini (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006) and Thèorie-rèbellion. Un Ultimatum, Gilles Grelet (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005). He has a co-edited a book on Francophone African cinema L'Afrique fait son cinema (Montreal: Memoires d'encrier, forthcoming). Sathya Rao is vice-president of the International Non-Philosophical Organisation (INPhO), member of the Canadian Association of Translatology (CATS), coordinator of the research team Poexil, and Secretary of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is co-founder of an online journal Alternative Francophone. CATHERINE WALSH is Professor and Director of the doctoral program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, interculturality and concerns related to the Afro-Andean Diaspora and the production of decolonial thought. Among her recent publications are Pensamiento crìtico y matriz colonial (Quito: Abya Yala, 2005), "Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power. An 'Other' Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference," in Coloniality of Power, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, R. Grosfoguel, J.D. Saldivar, and N. Maldonado-Torres (Eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) and "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Others' in the Andes," Cultural Studies (forthcoming). KRISTIN WATERS has published widely in the areas of race and gender. Her anthology Enlightened Conversations: Women and Men Political Theorists (Blackwell, 2000) challenges political theorists to be more inclusive of race and gender in their research and teaching. Her book Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, co-edited with Carol Conaway (University of Vermont Press, forthcoming), addresses the varied intellectual traditions of black women's thought that spans more than two hundred years in North America. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State College and Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University. (shrink)

Across the globe, radical conservative political forces and ideas are influencing and even transforming the landscape of international politics. Yet IR is remarkably ill-equipped to understand and engage these new challenges. Unlike political theory or domestic political analyses, conservatism has no distinctive place in the fields’ defining alternatives of realism, liberalism, Marxism, and constructivism. This paper seeks to provide a point of entry for such engagement by bringing together what may seem the most unlikely of partners: critical theory and (...) the New Right. Important parts of today’s New Right represent self-conscious appropriations of Critical themes and thinkers—turning them to self-declared “reactionary” ends. Developing outside the confines of the academy, these forms of thought have woven insights from across Critical theory into new and mobilizing forms of conservative ideology, seeking to link that ideology to social forces that play increasingly active roles in global politics. Our intention here is not to somehow blame Critical perspectives for the ideas of the New Right, either directly or by association. Rather, we seek to show how an engagement with Critical theory helps us understand the New Right, while also demonstrating some of the direct challenges the New Right poses for critical perspectives. (shrink)

There is a standard skeptical concern within philosophy of art that causal explanations in psychology and neuroscience apply equally to our engagement with art that is done well and art that is done poorly and so do not contribute to our understanding of the normative dimension of artistic appreciation. This skeptical concern is often used to challenge the relevance of psychology and neuroscience to our understanding of art. I sketch a crossmodal model for perception which demonstrates that those affective processes (...) responsible for encoding the biological and instrumental value of a stimulus play a critical productive role in perceptual processing. I argue that the ensuing model for affective perception dissolves these skeptical philosophical concerns. (shrink)

In a commentary published in Bioethics I defended Qatar as the location of the 2024 World Congress of Bioethics (Schuklenk 2023). I have since, reluctantly, changed my views on this.This brief resp...

Studyholism is a new potential obsessive-compulsive -related disorder recently introduced in the literature. According to its theorization, there are two types of Studyholic: Engaged and Disengaged Studyholics, which are characterized, respectively, by high and low levels of Study Engagement. This study aims to shed light on the role of internalizing and externalizing features as antecedents and outcomes of Studyholism and Study Engagement. Moreover, it aims to analyze the differences in psychopathology and sensation seeking between students demonstrating Disengaged and Engaged Studyholism. (...) We performed four path analyses, MANOVAs, and Mann–Whitney tests on 1,223 Italian college students. Among the main findings, Studyholism is associated with psychological and academic impairment, while Study Engagement predicts better mental health and academic functioning; though, the β values are lower for Study Engagement. Moreover, Studyholism is positively predicted by internalizing symptoms and negatively predicted by externalizing variables. Finally, students showing Engaged Studyholism have lower levels of obsessive-compulsive symptoms than those demonstrating Disengaged Studyholism. In conclusion, this study shows the critical importance of implementing preventive interventions aimed at reducing Studyholism levels in college students. Moreover, it provides support to the conceptualization of problematic overstudying as a new potential OCD-related disorder and to the value of distinguishing between Engaged and Disengaged Studyholics for tailored clinical interventions. Finally, it highlights the need to use two different theorizations and operationalizations for problematic overworking and overstudying. However, the literature on problematic overstudying is too scant to reach any firm conclusion. Hence, future studies should deepen the analysis of problematic overstudying, possibly using longitudinal designs, to unveil its internalizing and/or externalizing nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 3-6MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Whispers of the Flesh Essays in Memory of Pierre KlossowskiIan JamesRussell Ford Pierre Klossowski—novelist, essayist, painter, and translator—was one of the most startling, original, and influential figures in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. The older brother of the well-known painter Balthus and a close associate of Georges Bataille, Klossowski's diverse oeuvre includes novels, philosophical essays, and translations, as well as paintings and films. (...) Confined thus far to an undeserved but somehow fitting shadow existence in the margins and notes of theorists who have become mainstays of Anglo-American criticism, Klossowski's own work has increasingly become a focus of critical interest for its decisive contribution to the development of thought and aesthetics in France from the 1950s onward. Born in 1905, the eldest son of Polish émigrés, Klossowski spent his first ten years in Paris in an artistic milieu, heavily influenced by the neoimpressionism of figures such as Bonnard and Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski de Rola, was a painter and art historian, the author of an important monograph on Daumier. His mother, Baladine, was also a painter and trained under Bonnard. While still a teenager Klossowski was introduced to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he became close and who in turn introduced him to the novelist André Gide. At eighteen he became Gide's secretary and assisted him with the drafts of his famous novel Les faux-monnayeurs.Not until 1930, however, did Klossowski's own career properly begin, when he translated with Jean-Pierre Jouve a collection of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. Throughout his life Klossowski was a prolific and influential translator from both German and Latin into French, translating amongst others Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein from the German, and Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine, and Tertullian from the Latin. While working for the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst René Laforgue, Klossowski published his first philosophical essay on the Marquis de Sade in 1933 in the Revue française de la psychanalyse. Scandalized by Klossowski's Nietzschean-inflected psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade's writing, Laforgue dismissed Klossowski immediately. Throughout the 1930s Klossowski made a number of key friendships and acquaintances, most importantly with Georges Bataille, but also many others, including Walter Benjamin, André Masson, Jean Wahl, and Maurice Heine. During this period he published several articles and collaborated with Bataille on the review Acéphale and in the avant-garde experiment of the Collège de Sociologie (where, it is said, he would attend meetings dressed in a soutane). During the war years Klossowski trained in a number of Catholic seminaries, a vocation which ultimately failed and led to the writing of his first novel, La vocation suspendue. In the postwar period he married [End Page 3] a war widow, Denise Morin Sinclair, who had been interned in Ravensbrück for her activities in the Resistance and who became the model for Roberte, a key figure in much of Klossowski's fiction and painting. After the war Klossowski began to publish the influential works for which he will chiefly be remembered: literary-philosophical essays on Sade and Nietzsche (among others), as well as six important novels written between 1950 and 1965, La vocation suspendue (1950), the three works, originally published separately, which went on to form the Lois de l'hospitalité trilogy—Roberte ce soir (1954), La révocation de l'Édit de Nantes (1959) and Le souffleur ou le théâtre de société (1960)‚—and, finally, Le Baphomet (1965).Klossowski's seminal 1947 work, Sade mon prochain, was one of the first full-length literary and philosophical studies of Sade's work to be published in France and marked a decisive break from earlier accounts. Whereas earlier treatments of Sade had focused either on biographical detail or on the medical and psychosexual import of his life and writing, Klossowski's reading was concerned with the intertwined figures of law and transgression in Sade's work. After Sade mon prochain French intellectuals and writers... (shrink)

The nexus between religion and violence has been widely debated in the public sphere at the turn of the twenty-first century. Much of these discourses have centered on direct violence, and on terrorism in particular. Yet, structural violence also remains endemic within many religious traditions, including Buddhism. Buddhist women, and men, continue to challenge these gender inequalities in various ways, notably Sakyadita, the International Association of Buddhist Women founded in 1987, is committed to improving conditions for Buddhist women (...) worldwide. This article investigates how Sakyadhita is promoting gender equity in global Buddhism. It explores Sakyadhita’s origin, and focuses on the 13th Sakyadhita Conference, to examine the role of religious social movements in advancing gender parity. It also proposes an innovative ultramodern Buddhism framework for understanding contemporary global Buddhism, building on existing Buddhist studies, critical feminist and sociological theories. While focused on a Buddhist women’s social movement, this article provides new knowledge that may assist diverse religious communities in addressing gender disparities both locally and internationally. (shrink)

What does ‘care’ mean in contemporary society? How are caring relationships practised in different contexts? What resources do individuals and collectives draw upon in order to care for, care with and care about themselves and others? How do such relationships and practices relate to broader social processes? Care shapes people’s everyday lives and relationships and caring relations and practices influence the economies of different societies. This interdisciplinary book takes a nuanced and context-sensitive approach to exploring caring relationships, identities and practices (...) within and across a variety of cultural, familial, geographical and institutional arenas. Grounded in rich empirical research and discussing key theoretical, policy and practice debates, it provides important, yet often neglected, international and cross-cultural perspectives. It is divided into four sections covering: caring within educational institutions; caring amongst communities and networks; caring and families; and caring across the life-course. Contributing to broader theoretical, philosophical and moral debates associated with the ethics of care, citizenship, justice, relationality and entanglements of power, _Critical Approaches to Care_ is an important work for students and academics studying caring and care work in the fields of health and social care, sociology, social policy, anthropology, education, human geography and politics. (shrink)

Much of the methodological discussion around experiments in economics and other social sciences is framed in terms of the notions of internal and external validity. The standard view is that internal validity and external validity stand in a relationship best described as a _trade-off_. However, it is also commonly held that internal validity is a _prerequisite_ to external validity. This article addresses the problem of the compatibility of these two ideas and analyzes critically the standard arguments about the conditions under (...) which a trade-off between internal and external validity arises. Our argument stands against common associations of internal validity and external validity with the distinction between field and laboratory experiments and assesses critically the arguments that link the artificiality of experimental settings done in the laboratory with the purported trade-off between internal and external validity. We conclude that the idea of a trade-off or tension between internal and external validity seems, upon analysis, far less cogent than its intuitive attractiveness may lead us to think at first sight. (shrink)

Drawing on philosophy, history, and critical theory, Unconditional Life introduces a new perspective on the significance of post-war international law developments. The book examines the public discourse regarding technological risk in World War II texts of unconditional surrender, in the World Trade Organisation's EC-Biotech dispute, and in the International Court of Justices' Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion. The volume describes international law in terms of its management of, and relation to, the risks associated with technological innovation in war (...) and in trade. It proposes that international law, too, is itself a kind of technology: one intended to manage the material and existential risks inherent in the creation of a new international, postcolonial, political community emerging out of the Second World War. Members of this community are imagined to possess a universal quality: humanness, which itself is underscored by a power of invention. Yoriko Otomo demonstrates how international lawyers' inability to adjudicate questions of large-scale technological risk is due to the competing and intractable claims of international law.Offering a feminist analysis of the political economy that has created this crisis of governance, the book provides a way of understanding the structural inequities that will need to be addressed if international law is to remain a relevant forum for the adjudication of war and trade into the 21st century. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the multiple layers of representation which occur in the South Africa Pavilion at the Art Biennale in Venice in order to understand how they constitute and affect the state’s political imaginary. By analysing three artworks (David Koloane’s The Journey, Sue Williamson’s For thirty years next to his heart, and Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases) which were exhibited in the 2013 Pavilion, two key arguments emerge: 1) in this context artistic representation can be (...) understood as a form of political representation; and, 2) these artists are simultaneously state and citizenry representatives. A tension emerges between the political imaginary desired by the South African state and the political imaginary enacted by its representatives. The article draws on seven months of participant observation fieldwork at the Biennale, which involved 76 interviews with people associated with the South Africa Pavilion, including government representatives, exhibition organisers, artists, and visitors. Part I explores the concept of representation in order to establish the two philosophical trajectories (political and artistic) with which this article engages – with particular reference to Michael Saward’s framework of the representative claim. Part II explores the multiple representative claims which the three artists and their artworks enact.Abbreviations: Biennale: Venice Art Biennale; DAC: Department of Arts and Culture; For thirty years: For thirty years next to his heart, by Sue Williamson; TRC: Truth and Reconciliation Commission; US: United States of America. (shrink)

The topic of professionalism has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. The message of this current wave of professionalism is that medical educators need to be more attentive to the moral sensibilities of trainees, to their interpersonal and affective dimensions, and to their social conscience, all to the end of skilled, humanistic physicians. Urgent calls to address professionalism from such groups as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the (...) American Board of Internal Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, among others. In fact, at the 2004 annual meeting of the AAMC six separate presentations addressed professionalism with such titles as "Evaluating Humanism and Professionalism," Professionalism: Expectation, Education, Evaluation," or "Toward Assessing Professional Behaviors of Medical Students through Peer Observations". Professionalism, then, has become part of the current academic medicine parlance, used by administrators, clinical faculty, residency programs, and professional organizations with an expectation of shared meanings and goals. All of these stakeholders focus on what has become a consistent list of attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism, which usually include variations on altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect. In fact, most of the scholarly work to date has been listing, describing, decrying, and measuring/evaluating it. In this collection of essays, we don’t argue with these attributes. Instead, we ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession’s beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, we will scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment. (shrink)

In October 2022, the International Association of Bioethics announced that the 17th World Congress of Bioethics (WCB) 2024 would be held in Doha, Qatar. The International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB) traditionally holds its World Congress jointly with the WCB. As part of the ongoing debate about the ethics of bioethics conferencing, the FAB provided a detailed statement discussing concerns about choosing Qatar as the site for a feminist bioethics conference. In order to explore possible (...) approaches towards the FABs decision, the German Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics and Bioethics working group (FME) dedicated one of its meetings to the topic. In this commentary, we present two aspects that we consider particularly important for this current debate: (1) the participation of LGBTQIA+ people in the conference and (2) the possibility of racist and anti-Muslim bias in the evaluation of Qatar as the site for the WCB 2024. As members of the FME, we aim to contribute to an exchange of various perspectives within the international feminist bioethics community. (shrink)