Nancy Fraser has elaborated a framework for analyzing different forms of oppression using the categories of redistribution and recognition. This framework has come under criticism from Iris Marion Young and Judith Butler, despite the fact that all three theorists similarly insist that justice is not reducible solely to economic justice and that struggles against ‘cultural’ forms of oppression are equally important. Drawing on the debate between these theorists, in this article I examine the ways in which their respective theoretical frameworks (...) are potentially problematic or do not go far enough in theorizing the complex interconnections among economics, politics and culture. For example, Fraser’s binary economy/culture and Young’s distinction between culture and structure are overly broad and potentially misleading. Butler and Fraser also appear to adopt undertheorized and economistic conceptualizations of ‘the economy’ and capitalism. In the course of my critique, I propose a somewhat different approach to analyzing the causes of various forms of oppression and the relation between different emancipatory struggles. Among other things, I argue that social relationships need to be disaggregated further, into more than just two categories, and that the economic and the cultural (as well as the political) should be analyzed as always complexly overdetermining each other. (shrink)

Although oppressive social practices like capitalism are often portrayed as static, totalizing social 'structures' with 'logics' and 'imperatives' that must be accommodated politically and economically, such portrayals are problematic both theoretically and politically. They rest on determinist and essentialist conceptions of social practices, and they curtail the scope of politics, government regulation, and human action and creativity. Fortunately, social practices can instead be conceptualized as thoroughly social, historical, and contingent, and thus susceptible to political intervention and reworking, as many feminist, (...) post-structuralist, and anti-economistic Marxian theorists do. Attempting to build on such alternative conceptualizations, I argue that Judith Butler's concept of reiteration provides a particularly useful, in-depth theorization of power, the mechanisms enabling social practices to endure and change, and the role of the individual and collectivities in perpetuating and challenging social practices such as capitalism. In so doing, the concept of reiteration offers a compelling and detailed non-voluntaristic account of human agency. Butler's work is thus helpful in theorizing and empirically investigating both the obstacles to and the possibilities for resisting exploitation and altering unjust social practices. (shrink)

Having a decreased sense of security leads to unnecessary suffering and distress for patients. Establishing trust is critical for nurses to promote a patient's sense of security, consistent with trauma‐informed care. Research regarding nursing action, trust, and sense of security is wide‐ranging but fragmented. We used theory synthesis to organize the disparate existing knowledge into a testable middle‐range theory encompassing these concepts in hospitals. The resulting model illustrates how individuals are admitted to the hospital with some predisposition to trust or (...) mistrust the healthcare system and/or personnel. Patients encounter circumstances increasing their emotional and/or physical vulnerability to harm, leading to experiences of fear and anxiety. Without intervention, fear and anxiety lead to a decreased sense of security, increased distress, and suffering. Nurse action can ameliorate these effects by increasing a hospitalized person's sense of security or by promoting the development of interpersonal trust, also leading to an increased sense of security. Increased sense of security results in diminished anxiety and fear, and increased hopefulness, confidence, calm, sense of value, and sense of control. The consequences of a decreased sense of security are harmful to patients and nurses should know that they can intervene in ways that both increase interpersonal trust and sense of security. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is discussion of a new middle‐range theory of patient safety goal priming via safety culture communication. Bedside nurses are key to safe care, but there is little theory about how organizations can influence nursing behavior through safety culture to improve patient safety outcomes. We theorize patient safety goal priming via safety culture communication may support organizations in this endeavor. According to this theory, hospital safety culture communication activates a previously held patient safety goal and increases (...) the perceived value of actions nurses can take to achieve that goal. Nurses subsequently prioritize and are motivated to perform tasks and risk assessment related to achieving patient safety. These efforts continue until nurses mitigate or ameliorate identified risks and hazards during the patient care encounter. Critically, this process requires nurses to have a previously held safety goal associated with a repertoire of appropriate actions. This theory suggests undergraduate educators should foster an outcomes focus emphasizing the connections between nursing interventions and safety outcomes, hospitals should strategically structure patient safety primes into communicative activities, and organizations should support professional development including new skills and the latest evidence supporting nursing practice for patient safety. (shrink)

The logician's central concern is with the validity of argument. A logical theory ought, therefore, to provide a general criterion of validity. This book sets out to find such a criterion, and to describe the philosophical basis and the formal theory of a logic in which the premises of a valid argument are relevant to its conclusion. The notion of relevance required for this theory is obtained by an analysis of the grounds for asserting a formula in a proof.

'Practices without foundations' is, in genesis and in effect, a discussion of the following quotation , which serves therefore as an epigraph to it: ;Nelson Goodman's discussion of the 'new riddle of induction' ... deserves comparison with Wittgenstein's work. Indeed ... the basic strategy of Goodman's treatment of the 'new riddle' is strikingly close to Wittgenstein's sceptical arguments .... Although our paradigm of Wittgenstein's problem was formulated for a mathematical problem it ... is completely general and can be applied to (...) any rule or word. In particular, if it were formulated for the language of color impressions, as Wittgenstein himself suggests, Goodman's 'grue', or something similar, would play the role of 'quus'. But the problem would not be Goodman's about induction--"Why not predict that grass, which has been grue in the past will be grue in the future?"--but Wittgenstein's about meaning: "Who is to say that in the past I didn't mean grue by 'green', so that now I should call the sky, not the grass, 'green'?" vskip9pt ;This fascinating remark of Kripke's suggests a project, that of charting out both the interpretive and philosophic points of connection and disconnection between Wittgenstein, Goodman and Kripke. That project is this dissertation. ;My work severely tests Kripke's remark. For I argue that Kripke not only misreads Wittgenstein, but also mistakes the extremity of the 'scepticism' of his version of Wittgenstein for the priority of the philosophical puzzle that Goodman has bequeathed to us. ;To reach this conclusion, I show that Kripke's Wittgenstein's 'meaning-scepticism' is unanswerable if statable, but actually unstatable; and that, under certain interpretations, the same is true of putative scepticisms derivable from Goodman's text. The upshot is that the sceptical reading of most twentieth century philosophy must be displaced in favour of 'post-scepticism' and 'philosophical ethnography'. The latter concepts, sketched toward the end of the dissertation, are perhaps its telos. (shrink)

Michael Dummett and Dag Prawitz have argued that a constructivist theory of meaning depends on explicating the meaning of logical constants in terms of the theory of valid inference, imposing a constraint of harmony on acceptable connectives. They argue further that classical logic, in particular, classical negation, breaks these constraints, so that classical negation, if a cogent notion at all, has a meaning going beyond what can be exhibited in its inferential use. I argue that Dummett gives a mistaken elaboration (...) of the notion of harmony, an idea stemming from a remark of Gerhard Gentzen's. The introduction-rules are autonomous if they are taken fully to specify the meaning of the logical constants, and the rules are harmonious if the elimination-rule draws its conclusion from just the grounds stated in the introduction-rule. The key to harmony in classical logic then lies in strengthening the theory of the conditional so that the positive logic contains the full classical theory of the conditional. This is achieved by allowing parametric formulae in the natural deduction proofs, a form of multiple-conclusion logic. (shrink)

Jason Read takes up the relation between the individual and collectivity in Althusser’s work. Read focuses on Althusser’s interest in the “ideological dimension of the individual,” primarily by tracing his interest in the law and in particular the moral supplement to the law within its historical dimensions.

"The Politics of Transindividuality" proposes a new understanding of not just the relation of the individual to the collective, but of politics and economics, one that can not only keep pace with existing transformations of capital but ultimately contest them.

The correspondence theory of truth has experienced something of a revival recently in the form of the Truthmaker Axiom: whatever is true, something makes it true. We consider various postulates which have been proposed to characterize truthmaking, in particular, the Disjunction Thesis (DT), that whatever makes a disjunction true must make one or other disjunct true. In conjunction with certain other assumptions, DT leads to triviality. We show that there are elaborations of truthmaking on which DT holds (which must therefore (...) take steps to avoid the triviality); but that there are more plausible accounts of truthmaking on which DT fails. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1957, is a collection of Herbert Read's essays on various topics. The essays explore many different subjects and themes, including art, literature, religion and philosophy. This title will be of interest to a variety of readers.

Sir Herbert Read'S Introduction To The Understanding Of Art Has Influenced The Taste Of Several Generations. It Provides A Basis For The Appreciation Of Pictures, Sculpture And Art-Objects Of All Periods By Defining The Elements That Went Into Their Making. In Compact And Elegant Form The Book Gives An Illustrated Survey Of The Subject From Cave Paintings To The Canvases Of Jackson Pollock, And Summarizes The Essence Of Schools, Genres And Movements In The History Of Art.

In this engaging, thought-provoking book, Dwight Read explores the fundamental scientific debate about how culture and social organization separate humans from our primate cousins.

In this collection of fourteen essays, first published in 1943, Herbert Read extends and amplifies the points of view expressed in his successful pamphlet To Hell with Culture , which has been reprinted here. The ‘politics of the unpolitical’ are the politics of those who strive for human values and not for national or sectional interests. Herbert Read defines these values and demands their recognition as a solvent of social and cultural crises’, and looks forward to the future (...) with constructive vision. This book will be of interest to students of politics, history, and philosophy. (shrink)

I discuss the debate between dynamical versus geometrical approaches to spacetime theories, in the context of both special and general relativity, arguing that the debate takes a substantially different form in the two cases; different versions of the geometrical approach—only some of which are viable—should be distinguished; in general relativity, there is no difference between the most viable version of the geometrical approach and the dynamical approach. In addition, I demonstrate that what have previously been dubbed two ‘miracles’ of general (...) relativity admit of no resolution from within general relativity, on either the dynamical or ‘qualified’ geometrical approaches, modulo some possible hints that the second ‘miracle’ may be resolved by appeal to recent results regarding the ‘geodesic principle’ in GR. (shrink)

Louis Sass disputes that schizophrenia can be understood successfully according to the hitherto dominant models--for much of what schizophrenics say and do is neither regressive (as psychoanalysis claims) nor just faulty reasoning (as "cognitivists" claim). Sass argues instead that schizophrenics frequently exhibit hyper-rationality, much as philosophers do. He holds that schizophrenic language can after all be interpreted--if we hear it as Wittgenstein hears solipsistic language. I counter first that broadly Winchian considerations undermine both the hermeneutic conception of interpreting other humans (...) in general and Sass's hope of interpreting schizophrenics in particular. I then go on to argue that even if these Winchian considerations are not accepted, Sass in any case doesn't take sufficiently seriously Wittgenstein's use of nonsense as a term of criticism. Solipsism is not something we can understand so as to be able to understand analogically the schizophrenic's "world"--for there is no such thing as understanding it. Solipsism is nonsense, is nothing--there is no "world" there, in solipsists (as I show by reference to Cora Diamond's reading of Wittgenstein). Nor in any actually analogous cases of schizophrenia. Their "alienness" is the alienness of nothingness; roughly, of the fantasy of "logically alien thought". (shrink)

" In 'Vagueness and Alternative Logic' (Realism and Reason, Cambridge 1983, pp. 271-86, especially 285-6), Hilary Putnam puts forward a suggestion for a formal treatment of the logic of vagueness. … Putnam admits that, at the time of writing, he had not thought this idea through. What will already be apparent to the alert reader is that, in order to disclose serious difficulties for the proposal, Putnam would not have had to think far.".

The purpose of this paper is to consider whether or not Kripke’s ‘Wittgensteinian’ invocation of “assertibility conditions” and “the community” is a skeptical solution. In other words, this paper relates Kripke’s famous and major book, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, to the key background text for his work—the corpus that forms the backdrop even to his most unusual reading of Wittgenstein: Hume’s works. Through questions of influence and of Kripke’s use of particular terms, the analysis is largely directed toward (...) answering the following question: In what sense could Kripkenstein’s skeptical solution be a solution to rule- or meaning-skeptical doubts? (shrink)

Hartry Field's revised logic for the theory of truth in his new book, Saving Truth from Paradox , seeking to preserve Tarski's T-scheme, does not admit a full theory of negation. In response, Crispin Wright proposed that the negation of a proposition is the proposition saying that some proposition inconsistent with the first is true. For this to work, we have to show that this proposition is entailed by any proposition incompatible with the first, that is, that it is the (...) weakest proposition incompatible with the proposition whose negation it should be. To show that his proposal gave a full intuitionist theory of negation, Wright appealed to two principles, about incompatibility and entailment, and using them Field formulated a paradox of validity (or more precisely, of inconsistency). The medieval mathematician, theologian and logician, Thomas Bradwardine, writing in the fourteenth century, proposed a solution to the paradoxes of truth which does not require any revision of logic. The key principle behind Bradwardine's solution is a pluralist doctrine of meaning, or signification, that propositions can mean more than they explicitly say. In particular, he proposed that signification is closed under entailment. In light of this, Bradwardine revised the truth-rules, in particular, refining the T-scheme, so that a proposition is true only if everything that it signifies obtains. Thereby, he was able to show that any proposition which signifies that it itself is false, also signifies that it is true, and consequently is false and not true. I show that Bradwardine's solution is also able to deal with Field's paradox and others of a similar nature. Hence Field's logical revisions are unnecessary to save truth from paradox. (shrink)

Re-reads Marx in light of the contemporary critical interrogation of subjectivity.

A key development in Wittgenstein Studies over recent years has been the advancement of a resolutely therapeutic reading of the Tractatus. Rupert Read offers the first extended application of this reading of Wittgenstein, encompassing Wittgenstein's later work too, to examine the implications of Wittgenstein's work as a whole upon the domains especially of literature, psychopathology, and time. Read begins by applying Wittgenstein's remarks on meaning to language, examining the consequences our conception of philosophy has for the ways in (...) which we talk about meaning. He goes on to engage with literary texts as Wittgensteinian, where 'Wittgensteinian' does not mean expressive of a Wittgenstein philosophy, but involves the literature in question remaining enigmatic, and doing philosophical work of its own. He considers Faulkner's work as productive too of a broadly Wittgensteinian philosophy of psychopathology. Read then turns to philosophical accounts of time, finding a link between the division of time into discrete moments and solipsism of the present moment as depicted in philosophy on the one hand and psychopathological states on the other. (shrink)

One of the manuscripts of Buridan’s Summulae contains three figures, each in the form of an octagon. At each node of each octagon there are nine propositions. Buridan uses the figures to illustrate his doctrine of the syllogism, revising Aristotle's theory of the modal syllogism and adding theories of syllogisms with propositions containing oblique terms (such as ‘man’s donkey’) and with ‘propositions of non-normal construction’ (where the predicate precedes the copula). O-propositions of non-normal construction (i.e., ‘Some S (some) P is (...) not’) allow Buridan to extend and systematize the theory of the assertoric (i.e., non-modal) syllogism. Buridan points to a revealing analogy between the three octagons. To understand their importance we need to rehearse the medieval theories of signification, supposition, truth and consequence. (shrink)

No final statement can be made regarding the relations between science and policy-making. Knowledge, values, and techniques are interrelated, cumulative, and constantly changing. They are derived from man's responses to the complicated interactions between physical, biological, and cultural phenomena. Final answers are impossible because the answers themselves are part of the world and therefore are factors in changing it. We see through a glass darkly, whether it be the giant glass of Palomar or the eye-piece of the electron microscope.

Rupert Read and David Burnham on what philosophy can tell us about dealing with uncertainty, systemic risk, and potential catastrophe.

Extending work of Wittgenstein, Lakoff and Johnson I suggest that it is the metaphors we rely on in order to conceptualise time that provide an illusory space for time-travel-talk. For example, in the “Moving Time” spatialisation of time, “objects” move past the agent from the future to the past. The objects all move in the same direction – this is mapped to time always moving in the same direction. But then it is easy to imagine suspending this rule, and asking (...) why the objects should not start moving in the opposite direction. This is one way of generating the idea of time-travel “back” into the past. Time-travel-talk essentially involves the unaware projection of fragments of our time-talk – taken from powerful conceptual metaphors – onto the nature of reality itself. Understanding this dissolves away the charm and attractions of such talk. (shrink)