When considering the impact of stigmatization on society, we tend to think of one aspect of stigmatization while ignoring another. Drawing from historical and fictional cases, I argue that acts of stigmatization can be direct or indirect. Acts of direct stigmatization are acts taken by individuals or groups against an entity, while acts of indirect stigmatization are the specific acts taken by potential targets of stigmatization to prevent themselves from becoming victims of direct stigmatization. If we want a full understanding (...) of the impact that stigmatization has on society, then we need to consider the impact of both direct and indirect acts of stigmatization. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I examine our mental health concepts to see what work they are currently doing as well as what work they could be doing. In 1976, Christopher Boorse stated that the mental health literature is a “web of obscurities” (p. 51). To resolve some of this confusion, I argue that we need to consider the goals we should have for our mental health concepts and then give accounts of those concepts that meet our stated goals. I argue that (...) our goals for our mental health concepts should be twofold: first, we need concepts that will work to alleviate the stigmatization of mental disorder as this stigmatization gets in the way of providing and receiving medical help, and second, we need concepts that will be useful tools for medical practitioners to use in their diagnosis and treatment practices. -/- I begin by arguing that our mental disorder concept is not currently a useful tool for medical practitioners. Moreover, I argue that our mental disorder concept is confused in such a way that it is unlikely that it could ever be a useful tool for medical practitioners. If we cannot give an account of the mental disorder concept that is a useful tool for medical practitioners, then perhaps we can give an account of the mental disorder concept that can be used toward our goal of alleviating the stigmatization of mental disorder. Before we can do that, however, we need an account of the stigmatization concept so that we can understand what our mental disorder concept needs to be alleviating. -/- I argue that stigmatization is a process whereby some entity becomes marked as disgraceful or shameful. This stigmatization process includes (1) an attitude against the entity for reasons found in the social ideology, and (2) acts against the entity. I then argue that acts of stigmatization take two forms: direct stigmatization (where stigmatizors take acts against the stigmatized entity) and indirect stigmatization (where potential victims of stigmatization take acts to avoid becoming victims of stigmatization). With that in mind, we learn that if we are to alleviate the stigmatization of mental disorder, we need to work on alleviating both direct and indirect stigmatization. It is at this point that I argue for a new account of our mental disorder concept that can be utilized to alleviate the direct and indirect stigmatization of mental disorder. With our mental disorder concept redesigned to achieve that goal, I turn to the goal of providing medical help for persons that need that help. I argue that we need to reconceptualize what it means to be a ‘diagnosable condition’ so that we can develop a new framework for diagnosis and treatment that will be more efficacious than our current system. In conclusion, I suggest that we can untangle the current confusion that is the mental health literature by imbuing our mental health concepts with specific purposes and then utilizing them to achieve those purposes as I outline in this dissertation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Political scientist James Fishkin has devised “deliberative polling” as a means to better informed, more autonomous, and more reflective participant opinion. After a deliberative poll, this improved form of public opinion can be disseminated to the general public and to policy makers so as to influence public opinion (as it is normally construed) and public policy. Close examination of the results of deliberative polling, however, suggests no evidence of a normatively desirable gain in informed, autonomous, or considered opinion—as opposed (...) to minor gains in participants' general political knowledge and in ideological constraint, which is likely attributable to the pre-packaged “expert” views set forth in the briefing materials provided to the participants. (shrink)

The contemporary books of Cassius Dio's Roman History are known for their anecdotal quality and lack of interpretive sophistication. This paper aims to recuperate another layer of meaning for Dio's anecdotes by examining episodes in his contemporary books that feature masquerades and impersonation. It suggests that these themes owe their prominence to political conditions in Dio's lifetime, particularly the revival, after a hundred-year lapse, of usurpation and damnatio memoriae, practices that rendered personal identity problematic. The central claim is that narratives (...) in Dio's last books use masquerades and impersonation to explore paradoxes of personal identity and signification, issues made salient by abrupt changes of social status at the highest levels of imperial society. (shrink)

The difference between computers and simple machines is the extent to which computer systems subsume design and development decisions over which users have little or no control. Normally, such decisions are all but forgotten after implementation. Subsumption ethics describes this process.This paper begins with a discussion of subsumption ethics and describes four axioms of subsumption ethics. Four ethical frameworks with roots in philosophical traditions are used as an ethical framework: The golden rule ; the golden mean; niskama karma ; and (...) complexity. A matrix is presented that combines the axioms of subsumption ethics with these ethical frameworks. The paper concludes by applying the matrix to some standard problems in software systems development. (shrink)

As an imperial Greek author of both cultural and stylistic interest, Aretaeus deserves to be more widely read. His most riveting disease descriptions bring before our eyes the spectacle of the human body in extreme states of suffering and dehumanization. These descriptions achieve a degree of visual immediacy and emotional impact unparalleled among ancient medical writers. This essay considers them as examples of ekphrastic rhetoric, designed to create enargeia. To intensify immediacy and impact, Aretaeus deploys a set of techniques that (...) invite the reader’s active engagement with the spectacle he describes. This engagement has the potential to generate a corporeal response that destabilizes the boundary between the body of the reader and the body in the text. The modern concept of “empathy” is perhaps too anodyne to convey the complexity of the response involved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.3 (2000) 497-499 [Access article in PDF] Thomas Schmitz. Bildung und Macht: zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Munich: Beck, 1997. 270 pp. Paper, DM 98. (Zetemata, 97) This book, which originated as a Habilitationsschrift, offers an intelligent and energetic analysis of the Second Sophistic from a sociological perspective informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. This (...) is not Bourdieu the Algerian sociologist of the 1960s, nor even Bourdieu the polemical critic of social anthropology of the 1970s, but the Bourdieu of the 1970s and 1980s who applied his theories of practice and symbolic capital to the analysis of language and education in such works as Homo Academicus (Paris 1984) and Ce que parler veut dire: l'économie des échanges linguistiques (Paris 1982).Schmitz is interested in the way the elites of Greek cities used education to legitimate their ruling position (chapter 2.2, "Bildung als Legitimation zur Herrschaft"). The social domination of an elite, where not based on brute force, may be presented by that elite, both to those they dominate and to themselves, as the "natural" result of certain forms of superiority. The hallmark of elite superiority in the Greek cities of the Empire was paideia. This situation may explain the general prevalence of rhetorical training among elite families, but not why some people from these families would become sophists. Schmitz demonstrates [End Page 497] correctly that performing as a sophist did not in itself procure social advancement (chapter 2.3). Instead he sees the ruling class as delegating the legitimation of its collective power to certain of its members, so that the sophists in effect performed publicly as pars pro toto (64-66). How exactly the invisible hand of class delegation made itself felt in individual life choices would require some psychological speculation, which Schmitz does not attempt here. Possibly sophists evolved from child prodigies whose early success in outperforming their peers instilled a lifelong appetite for victorious competition.Mastery of the arbitrary complexities of atticizing paideia set one apart from the underclass (chapter 3) but could also be used to set oneself apart from one's peers. Schmitz sees striving for distinction as a constant in imperial society (chapter 4) and makes good use of the posthumous vaunts of funerary inscriptions to show that for these aristocrats paideia was the medium of competition par excellence (chapter 5.1). He stresses the parallel between paideia and euergetism (65-66, 95-96, 100ff., 219-20), a form of competitive political communication that validated the ascendancy not only of the individual liturgist but also the class to which he belonged. He describes the cornucopia of opportunities for public competition that characterized imperial society (from children's encomium contests at the Pythian Games to learned symposia) but concludes that because it structured competitive impulses and enhanced participants' sense of belonging, paideia, like euergetistic competition, operated in imperial society as a centripetal as well as centrifugal force (chapter 4.5).Schmitz sees the opsimathes as a sort of bogeyman whose pedantry, laboriously acquired and gauchely displayed, educated aristocrats imagined to contrast with their own paideia, the product of an inborn superiority. Indeed in chapter 5 he uses Bourdieu to pinpoint one of the reasons that participants and educated observers put such stress on extemporaneous performance: "il leur suffit d'être ce qu'ils sont pour être ce qu'il faut être, c'est-à-dire naturellement distingués de ceux qui ne peuvent pas faire l'économie de la recherche de la distinction" (158). As Schmitz himself puts it, in an extemporaneous performance, an aristocratic sophist "zeigte er nicht, was er erlernt hatte und was er wusste, sondern was er war." Improvisation functioned as synecdoche for aristocratic supremacy.What sophists have to say about the size of the crowds they enthralled should be taken with a grain of salt. In chapter 6 Schmitz is perhaps a bit too credulous in this regard, but he rightly stresses the artful way in which... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, a.d. 50–250Maud W. GleasonSimon Swain. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, a.d. 50–250. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xii 1 499 pp. Cloth, $90.How do people who by birth, wealth, and education consider themselves entitled to leadership in their local communities conceive of their relationship to the imperial power that both authorizes and (...) limits their local autonomy? In the case of the Greek-speaking city-states under the Roman empire, language was clearly a crucial component of local and personal identity. This language, educated Greek, and the paideia that it presupposed, also served to distinguish the leading citizens of the various “Greek” cities from the shopkeepers of their streets and the peasants of their hinterlands.One thing that makes the picture confusing is the fact that “the Romans,” against whom “the Greeks” might be expected to define themselves, were likewise propertied aristocrats who professed admiration for Greek culture and in many cases put some serious effort into acquiring it themselves. So one of the things we would like to know is to what extent “Hellenism” was conceived by the ancients to be a matter of ethnicity or education. The answer is not straightforward.To be a Hellene one had to be able to display oneself as elaborately acculturated. For this particular aristocracy, the medium of elaboration was language. The artificiality of this acculturation process was concealed, as it generally is, by nearly invisible scrims designed to make the cultural look natural. Notable among these was the historical fiction that claimed for a Greek-speaking city an origin from a hero of Greek history or myth. Thus Greek aristocrats propagated themselves culturally through arduous acquisition of an elite dialect, but euphemized this process through the myth of genetic contact with the glory days. To be a Hellene was to participate in a strange charade of talking as if the Roman Empire and the Latin language did not exist. Once Roman dominance over the Mediterranean was secure, Greeks (at least in the formal literary productions that survived them) avoided talking about Rome. To say the least, this reluctance makes the Greeks’ attitude towards Rome difficult to assess. Yet this is what Swain has bravely and thoroughly set out to do.Swain’s book is in two parts. The first focuses on the role of language in [End Page 307] forming the identity of elite Greeks in the Second Sophistic (a period of literary renaissance lasting approximately from the mid-first to the mid-third century a.d.); the second examines what the chief Greek writers of that period had to say about Rome. Chapter 1 discusses the language consciousness of the Greek elite, who on formal occasions eschewed the dialect in common use (koine) to speak and write a belletristic Attic modeled on the great stylists of the past. Ironically, the “Asian”/“Attic” antithesis, with its conservative moral and political overtones, originally developed as part of Roman stylistic debate (24). We see it in Cicero, and in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who functioned in effect as an apologist for Roman rule because Roman rule ensured that the right sort of people retained control of local government in the Greek cities. Dionysius in his historical writing went to elaborate lengths to show that Rome was really a Greek city on the Isocratean (nondemocratic) model (26). It is interesting to speculate why subsequent authors did not follow this approach. Perhaps, once their dominance in their cities was firmly secured by Rome’s hegemony, Greek aristocrats preferred to avert their gaze from the system that propped them up, and to elaborate instead the fiction that it was their Greekness that entitled them to effortless success.To explain the “repristinization” of linguistic features in the Atticizing movement Swain offers an interesting survey of the role of katharevousa in modern Greece (35–40). (There is also of course the phenomenon of “Oxford English,” which Fellows of All Souls are perhaps disinclined to pursue.) Chapter 2 discusses how purism worked out in practice (Favorinus, Lucian, Athenaeus, and some lexicographers). A test case: Galen practiced “purism... (shrink)

One of the most intractable contemporary problems in the USSR is the Soviet federal dilemma. The late 1980s witnessed competing claims among the national minority groups of the USSR to rights of voice, representation, and cultural, economic, and even political sovereignty. Since the onset ofperestrojka, the principle of nationalstatehood has acquired a new legitimacy. Nationality is one of the pillars of the federal reform. The drive to create a new Soviet federalism has become an important component ofperestrojka. But, according to (...) Leninist doctrine, the nation is a transitional formation. Unless there is a significant departure from Leninist theory, the new acknowledgement of the rights of nations in the USSR can only be a political — and thus temporary — concession. Can the ideology evolve in such a way as to provide ideologically-based political legitimacy to the notion of national-statehood? Is Gorbachev''s dynamic interpretation of Leninism capable of rejecting one of Lenin''s most fundamental concepts? The thesis of this article is that Soviet federal reform requires a substantial departure from the Leninist tradition. The extent to which Soviet leaders are prepared to do this casts light on one of the perennial concerns of socialist thought, namely whether ideology matters at all. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:...

This paper addresses the knowledge required for individuals to evaluate Information and Communications Technologies decisions that relate to the organization and management of cyberspace, and to hold accountable the parties responsible for those decisions, whether the responsible party is a government actor, market actor or private individual. The authors argue that the Open Systems Interconnection model, with certain modifications, should serve as a primary educational tool in helping individuals to gain the understanding of ICT necessary to protect public interests related (...) to cyberspace. (shrink)

With STEM education garnering an increasing share of educational budgets and press, humanities teachers should consider how to respond to the growing power of math and science. Should humanists rea...