Metamorphoses of the Zoo marshals a unique compendium of critical interventions that envision novel modes of authentic encounter that cultivate humanity's biophilic tendencies without abusing or degrading other animals. These take the form of radical restructurings of what were formerly zoos or map out entirely new, post-zoo sites or experiences. The result is a volume that contributes to moral progress on the inter-species front and eco-psychological health for a humankind whose habitats are now mostly citified or urbanizing.

Philosophers of language have long recognized that in opaque contexts, such as those involving propositional attitude reports, substitution of co-referring names may not preserve truth value. For example, the name ‘Clark Kent’ cannot be substituted for ‘Superman’ in a context like:1. Lois believes that Superman can flywithout a change in truth value. In an earlier paper, Jennifer Saul demonstrated that substitution failure could also occur in ‘simple sentences’ where none of the ordinary opacity-producing conditions existed, such as:2. Superman leaps (...) more tall buildings than Clark Kent does.Accounts focusing on opacity were unable to explain our ‘anti-substitution intuitions’ in such cases.In Simple Sentences, Substitution, and Intuitions, Saul extends her earlier work. She provides a comprehensive presentation and criticism of recent accounts of simple sentence substitution failure, and proposes a new approach drawing on psychological evidence about cognitive processing. Saul's purpose is not merely to solve the substitution puzzle cases, but to make …. (shrink)

Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. We rely on the reports of those around us for everything from the ingredients in our food and medicine to the identity of our family members. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the epistemology of testimony. Despite the multitude of views offered, a single thesis is nearly universally accepted: testimonial knowledge is acquired through the process of transmission from speaker to hearer. In this book, Jennifer Lackey shows that this (...) thesis is false and, hence, that the literature on testimony has been shaped at its core by a view that is fundamentally misguided. She then defends a detailed alternative to this conception of testimony: whereas the views currently dominant focus on the epistemic status of what speakers believe, Lackey advances a theory that instead centers on what speakers say. The upshot is that, strictly speaking, we do not learn from one another's beliefs - we learn from one another's words. Once this shift in focus is in place, Lackey goes on to argue that, though positive reasons are necessary for testimonial knowledge, testimony itself is an irreducible epistemic source. This leads to the development of a theory that gives proper credence to testimony's epistemologically dual nature: both the speaker and the hearer must make a positive epistemic contribution to testimonial knowledge. The resulting view not only reveals that testimony has the capacity to generate knowledge, but it also gives appropriate weight to our nature as both socially indebted and individually rational creatures. The approach found in this book will, then, represent a radical departure from the views currently dominating the epistemology of testimony, and thus is intended to reshape our understanding of the deep and ubiquitous reliance we have on the testimony of those around us. (shrink)

Jennifer Johnston’s fiction presents the conditions of Irish culture and society by exploring the separations between interior and exterior realms and past and present temporalities persisting within the insulating privacy of the familial home space. In _The Christmas Tree_ (1981), the home is both haven and prison for Johnston’s heroine. In this paper, I argue that the home—which assumes the form of the individual body and the familial home—is paradoxical. The protagonist leaves 1950s Ireland because of the country’s rigid (...) gender roles in order to pursue an autonomous life as a writer in England, but she is unable to publish her writing within the confines of the patriarchal publishing world. The home of her body becomes paradoxical when she becomes a single mother as an avenue for creativity but is then diagnosed with terminal cancer. She returns to her father’s home to die, which she re-orders and reclaims through the disorder of the uncanny—represented by her non-conformity and illness brought into the patriarchal home. By writing her life story and creating a brief, alternative maternal relationship with her young caretaker, the protagonist confronts her own ambivalence toward her parents, who also represent aspects of oppressive heteronormative gender expectations. (shrink)

Background: Not all patients are considered equal. For patients who are considered to be “very important persons,” care can be different from that of other patients with advantages of greater access to resources, special attention from staff, and options for luxurious hospital amenities. While very important person care is common and widely accepted by healthcare administration, it has negative implications for both very important person and non-very important person patients, supports care disparities and inequities, and can create serious ethical dilemmas (...) for healthcare professionals. Very important person care can also result in negative care outcomes for its recipients. Objective: This article sought to explore the implications and ethical considerations of very important person care within the context of United States healthcare system, and integrate bioethical principles and American Nurses Association Code of Ethics for Nurses to influence recommendations for managing ethical dilemmas associated with very important person care. Method: A synthesis of the literature on very important person care was undertaken for this article. Ethical considerations: Ethical conduct was considered and respected when performing the literature review, referencing sources, and establishing authorship. Findings: According to the published literature, very important person care bares both positive and negative implications for patients, and negative implications for nurses. Nurses are the most affected by the demands from their administrators to provide special care and attention to patients in the “very important person” category and their families. Very important person care can be disruptive, disorienting, challenging, and stressful to nurses. Conclusion: While physicians and other healthcare professionals have commented on very important person care, limited work has been done in nursing. There have not been any empirical studies on very important person care. Therefore, in order to minimize the negative implications of very important person care, studies of this phenomenon are warranted. Exposing very important person care is important in the development of an ethical healthcare system. Moreover, understanding the ethical principles surrounding the concept of very important person care will empower nurses to effectively manage conflicts and ethical dilemmas that arise with very important person care. (shrink)

This book addresses these and a cluster of other questions about changes in the self through time and about the moral attitudes we adopt in the face of these...

Jennifer Lackey presents a ground-breaking exploration of the epistemology of groups, and its implications for group agency and responsibility. She argues that group belief and knowledge depend on what individual group members do or are capable of doing, while being subject to group-level normative requirements.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface In this issue, one cluster of articles presents scholarly and creative work focused on Latin American queer politics. Each article reveals queer challenges—theoretical, aesthetic, political, ideological, libidinal, corporeal—to prevailing logics of heteronormativity and neoliberalism, and to asymmetrical processes of knowledge production and circulation. Rafael de la Dehesa examines how political responses to AIDS in Brazil enabled surprising alliances between NGOs, activists, and the state, which produced radical social (...) change and, at times, engendered exclusion and vulnerability. Christine Keating and Amy Lind’s essay explores indigenous and transfeminist efforts to transform the Ecuadorian constitution, producing new conceptions of both state and family. Constanza Tabbush and Melina Gaona trace the rise and fall of a neighborhood organization in Argentina called Tupac Amaru, which provided a space of encounter for lesbian, non-gender normative, and marginalized women. In a review of recent work on Latin American sexualities, Juan Camilo Galeano Sánchez finds LGBT people across Latin America and the diaspora deploying “queer revolutionary gestures” as a form of resistance to social, political, and economic marginalization. María Amelia Viteri’s commentary examines the intellectual trajectories of a network of queer scholars from across the Americas. The art essay by Tara Daly engages Iquitos artist Christian Bendayán’s visual efforts to queer prevailing conceptions of the Amazon, and tatiana de la tierra’s* poems offer a deep celebration of female eroticism. * We have spelled tatiana de la tierra’s name in lower case in accordance with the wishes of her literary executors. 256Preface Another cluster of essays highlights reproductive rights and race in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez and Lynn M. Morgan study the tactics that right-wing, US-based organizations deploy against sexual and reproductive rights in Mexico and Central America. Jennifer L. Shoaff examines the Dominican cultural construction of the Haitian mother as “beggar-mother,” which shores up ideas of pathological black maternity. Ana-Maurine Lara’s article considers the gendered and sexual logics of anti-blackness, and anti-Haitianism, in the Dominican Republic. The provocation for our cluster on representations of queer identities and politics in Latin America came, broadly, from developments in Latin America in recent decades: the wave of LGBT organizing around issues from same-sex marriage to transgender rights, alongside the continued, if not escalated, violence against trans, travestis, and other queer people in countries throughout the region. More immediately, it came from a symposium on Latin American/Latin@ queer and sexuality studies, cosponsored by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS) and the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), Amherst, in March 2013. Several of the papers published here were initially presented at that event and have been complemented and extended by other analytical essays and creative material on similar questions. Based on their familiarity with the debates, Sonia Alvarez, UMass CLACLS Director and professor of political science, and Amy Lind, head of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, offered invaluable input for this issue, and we thank them for their intellectual generosity and collaborative spirit. Three of the articles in the cluster take us inside the complex relations between queer movements and neoliberal institutions, illustrating the distinctive ways these dynamics play out in different national contexts and political configurations. In “NGOs, Governmentality, and the Brazilian Response to AIDS: A Multistranded Genealogy of the Current Crisis,” Rafael de la Dehesa argues that the AIDS crisis served as a “doorway to the state” for marginalized actors, such as sex workers and LGBT activists. These groups pushed for and won a national AIDS program that dramatically reduced rates of mortality and new infections in Brazil in the 1990s through universal access to treatment and a nonstigmatizing approach to prevention. Its success was based, in part, on World Bank Preface 257 loans and, in part, on a participatory model of public-private partnerships characteristic of neoliberal government. De la Dehesa argues that, “Far from encapsulating activism in a seamless web of biopolitical management... nodes of articulation between officials and activists became sites of conflict and productive tension.” However, while the alliances between NGOs... (shrink)

Testimony is a crucial source of knowledge: we are to a large extent reliant upon what others tell us. It has been the subject of much recent interest in epistemology, and this volume collects twelve original essays on the topic by some of the world's leading philosophers. It will be the starting point for future research in this fertile field. Contributors include Robert Audi, C. A. J. Coady, Elizabeth Fricker, Richard Fumerton, Sanford C. Goldberg, Peter Graham, Jennifer Lackey, Keith (...) Lehrer, Richard Moran, Frederick F. Schmitt, Ernest Sosa, and James Van Cleve. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 491 Jennifer Anne Moses The Teacher It didn’t start percolating out until years—decades—later, and by that time even the youngest of what we’d soon be calling “the victims ” were in their early fifties, with husbands and children and grandchildren of their own, or not, with houses, careers, garages stuffed to the gills with lifetimes’ worth of (...) patio furniture and forgotten Halloween costumes and broken lamps and tools. Someone saw someone who knew someone, who’d remembered someone, and again the stories were abroad, the whisperings, only this time it was with heavy sighs of regret and anxious handwringing: How could we not have known better? How could our parents not have known? And if they, the parents, had known—and surely some of them had—they were too busy themselves, and perhaps too ashamed, too abashed to see it for what it was, and after all, busy and perplexed with their own lives, their own divorces or philandering husbands or careers that felt like prison, with alcoholism and dying parents, with inheritances and bright futures withered to nothing. All those bright promises of their bright and perfect childhoods curling like so many brown November leaves. His name was Mr. Bryce—Evan Bryce, as we later came to call him—and he was among the most popular, perhaps the most popular, of the upper-school teachers, with a yearly following of students lucky enough not only to have been enrolled in one of his classes, but allowed, as if by virtue of their own charmed stars, their own charming uniqueness, to lean against his desk during free time, or joke around with him as he walked, his battered book bag in hand, toward the lunchroom. He 492 Jennifer Anne Moses taught history and geography; his classroom was the first on the left as you rounded the corner from the art room to the open-air corridor that the upper school classrooms abutted. Beyond that strip of covered poured white concrete was a kind of rough lawn, made patchy by years of boys tackling each other there or throwing a Frisbee around, and beyond that, on the other side of a narrow gravel road used only, as far as we could tell, by the school’s groundskeepers whose names, despite their ubiquitous presence, we didn’t know, was the first of the playing fields, used for hockey and soccer. Beyond the playing field was a covered sports arena with a huge swooping roof like the wings of a swan, and beyond that, hills covered with mowed green grass—perfect for tumbling down on bright spring days—and others still wooded, watered with streams and crisscrossed with trails. We knew the trails of course— some of our natural science classes took place in the woods—and we knew each of the hills and fields as well, each tree, each row of boxwoods or pines, until finally, out there, beyond the school grounds, was where the residents of the town lived in red-brick development houses of two and sometimes one-and-a-half floors, in modified colonials and California-style split-levels, each on its own small patch of lawn, and a garage. We felt sorry for the people who lived in those developments (we always called them developments, never neighborhoods, which is where we lived), but we rarely wondered what their lives might be like, or where their children, if they had them, might go to school. Our houses weren’t like that, of course. Susie Bluestone’s house was old, tall and thin, in a neighborhood of other old, tall, thin houses, with Oriental carpets running up the stairways, and a laundry shoot that the children were forbidden to play in and played in anyway. My best friend Nan Jones lived in a farmhouse on the top of a hill and wasn’t allowed to use the guestroom bathroom, even though her room was right next to it; her mother kept horses and her father had once been some kind of fencing champion. There were black-and-white pictures of him, in black frames, on the walls... (shrink)

It is widely accepted that political discourse in recent years has become more openly racist and more filled with wildly implausible conspiracy theories. Dogwhistles and Figleaves explores certain ways in which such changes—both of which defied previously settled norms of political speech—have been brought about. Jennifer Saul shows that two linguistic devices, dogwhistles and figleaves, have played a crucial role. Some dogwhistles (such as “88,” used by Nazis online to mean “Heil Hitler”) serve to disguise messages that would otherwise (...) be rejected as unacceptable, allowing them to be transmitted surreptitiously. Other dogwhistles (like the 1988 “Willie Horton” ad) work by influencing people in ways that they are not aware of, and which they would likely reject were they aware. Figleaves (such as “just asking questions”) take messages that could easily be recognized as unacceptable, and provide just enough cover that people become more willing to accept them. Importantly, these work against the background of a divided public. They are particularly effective in influencing people who are conflicted yet malleable—those who don’t want to be racist, for example, but are willing to be convinced that something which seems racist really isn’t. Saul shows how these dogwhistles and figleaves have both exploited and widened existing divisions in society, and normalized racist and conspiracist speech. (shrink)

This article extends earlier research concerning the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance, with particular emphasis on methodological inconsistencies. Research in this area is extended in three critical areas. First, it focuses on a particular industry, the chemical industry. Second, it uses multiple sources of data-two that are perceptual based (KLD Index and Fortune reputation survey), and two that are performance based (TRI database and corporate philanthropy) in order to triangulate toward assessing corporate social performance. Third, it (...) uses the five most commonly applied accounting measures in the corporate social performance and corporate financial performance (CSP/CFP) literature to assess corporate financial performance. The results indicate that the a priori use of measures may actually predetermine the CSP/CFP relationship outcome. Surprisingly, Fortune and KLD indices very closely track one another, whereas TRI and corporate philanthropy differentiate between high and low social performers and do not correlate to the firm's financial performance. (shrink)

This article analyzes narratives about encounters between police officers and domestic violence victim/survivors in the context of domestic violence calls. Narratives are sites in which individuals create relationships between themselves and others, oriented around a set of unfolding events. Narrative is a motivated, engaged retelling of prior or anticipated events produced in interaction with others, in a particular context stocked with constraints and affordances. In the process of telling stories, identities emerge. In order to understand the relationship between narrative and (...) identity, I analyze stories told about police interactions with domestic violence victim/survivors from the perspectives of both the police and the victim/survivors. Working empirically with a data set of 48 interviews, I use critical discourse analysis and discourse analysis to analyze the ways both groups narrate domestic violence and confrontations with police officers, the ways they create story worlds stocked with characters, the ways story characters are formed and deployed, and the ways those characters are positioned against/with/by the storyteller, allowing the storyteller’s identity to emerge. This article is an analysis of the relationship between the storyteller and the story world and the storyteller’s process of constructing an/other in order to position in relation to that other. Ultimately, I argue that identity emerges for the storyteller in the way she or he constructs characters in a story and then positions in relation to those characters. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 2, Page 44-46, February 2012.

Introductory article in a collection entitled Philosophical Works of Lady Mary Shepherd. Published in 2 volumes. Thoemmes Press, 2000.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 8, August 2022.

In the philosophical literature on mental states, the paradigmatic examples of mental states are beliefs, desires, intentions, and phenomenal states such as being in pain. The corresponding list in the psychological literature on mental state attribution includes one further member: the state of knowledge. This article examines the reasons why developmental, comparative and social psychologists have classified knowledge as a mental state, while most recent philosophers--with the notable exception of Timothy Williamson-- have not. The disagreement is traced back to a (...) difference in how each side understands the relationship between the concepts of knowledge and belief, concepts which are understood in both disciplines to be closely linked. Psychologists and philosophers other than Williamson have generally have disagreed about which of the pair is prior and which is derivative. The rival claims of priority are examined both in the light of philosophical arguments by Williamson and others, and in the light of empirical work on mental state attribution. (shrink)

When Jennifer Wallace travelled round Greece as a student, hiking through olive groves to hunt out the stones of old temples and lost cities, she became fascinated by archaeology. It was magical. It was absurd. Give an archaeologist a few rocks and, like a master storyteller, he could bring another world to life. Give him a vague hunch about the past, and he was prepared to spend hours raking through the soil in search of proof. From the plain of (...) Troy to the Titanic, and from Britain's Stonehenge to Ground Zero in New York, Digging the Dirt explores the excavation sites that have exerted the strongest pull on the public imagination. Some sites, in which bones are indistinguishable from dust, have driven archaeologists to despair. Other sites haunt poets with memories of loss and romance. All reveal the relevance of archaeology to our deepest cultural anxieties. Passionate and intelligent, Digging the Dirt engages with the work of philosophers and writers who have been stirred by the life below the ground, while never losing sight of the pressing demands of archaeologists today. In a world of postmodern spin, Wallace calls for a renewed sense of the poetics of depth and shows how ex. (shrink)

Many epistemologists use intuitive responses to particular cases as evidence for their theories. Recently, experimental philosophers have challenged the evidential value of intuitions, suggesting that our responses to particular cases are unstable, inconsistent with the responses of the untrained, and swayed by factors such as ethnicity and gender. This paper presents evidence that neither gender nor ethnicity influence epistemic intuitions, and that the standard responses to Gettier cases and the like are widely shared. It argues that epistemic intuitions are produced (...) by the natural ‘mindreading’ capacity that underpins ordinary attributions of belief and knowledge in everyday social interaction. Although this capacity is fallible, its weaknesses are similar to the weaknesses of natural capacities such as sensory perception. Experimentalists who do not wish to be skeptical about ordinary empirical methods have no good reason to be skeptical about epistemic intuitions. (shrink)

Beyond the obvious technical difficulties, human attempts to communicate with hypothetical Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences also present a number of philosophical puzzles. After all, an alien intelligence is likely the closest thing to a Wittgensteinian lion humanity could ever encounter. In this paper I advance a new challenge for the feasibility of communication with extra-terrestrials. The problem I raise is a practical problem that falls out of the history and philosophy of mathematics and the implementation of METI projects—specifically, the semiprime self-decryption schema (...) of the Drake Pictures message strategy. The Drake Pictures strategy presumes that aliens share the concept ‘prime number’ with us, as understanding that concept is necessary to decrypt our message. However, if the concept ‘prime number’ exhibited open texture at any point in its history, it could have developed in a different direction than it did in our history. If that is so, an alien could have the concept ‘prime number’ and still not be capable of decrypting our messages. I argue that this new problem is more trenchant than previous arguments in both the philosophy and SETI literature, such as applications of the aforementioned Lion argument and other concerns about the possibility of long-range communication without the assumption of shared concepts. (shrink)

Do epistemic intuitions tell us anything about knowledge? Stich has argued that we respond to cases according to our contingent cultural programming, and not in a manner that tends to reveal anything significant about knowledge itself. I’ve argued that a cross-culturally universal capacity for mindreading produces the intuitive sense that the subject of a case has or lacks knowledge. This paper responds to Stich’s charge that mindreading is cross-culturally varied in a way that will strip epistemic intuitions of their evidential (...) value. I argue that existing work on cross-cultural variation in mindreading favors my position over Stich’s. (shrink)

Semantic externalism holds that the content of at least some of our thoughts is partly constituted by external factors. Accordingly, it leads to the unintuitive consequence that we must then often be mistaken in what we are thinking, and any kind of claim of privileged access must be given up. Those who deny that semantic externalists can retain any account of self-knowledge are ‘incompatibilists’, while those who defend the compatibility of self-knowledge with semantic externalism are ‘compatibilists’. This paper examines the (...) claim of compatibilism, focusing on Burge’s “Slow Switching Argument” and Boghossian’s “Objection of Relevant Alternatives”. I argue that compatibilism is false, and that semantic externalism is incompatible with self-knowledge. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas argues that baptism is necessary for salvation. However, he entertains a scenario described by Ambrose of Milan, such that Emperor Valentinian II converted to Christianity and was intending to be baptized but died before the sacrament could be performed. Aquinas argues that the Emperor could have achieved salvation without being baptized with water because he desired baptism and that desire was the result of his faith in God. In this paper, I offer a short treatment of Aquinas’s view (...) of baptism, his handling of the Valentinian II case, and his arguments concerning the efficacy of the baptism of desire. I conclude with a brief discussion of Aquinas’s treatment of the case of Cornelius the centurion, which illustrates how Aquinas’s view of baptism of desire and implicit faith can apply to those individuals who have no access to or connection with the Church. (shrink)

This title merges Jennifer Scoggin's straight-talking blogger persona, Mrs Mimi, with her years of research and teaching to combine relatable classroom stories with research on best literacy practices, in an effort to help teachers rediscover or redefine who you are and the type of literacy teacher you want to become. At the heart of this book is teacher happiness and empowerment - reconnecting with your inner fabulous to give the best possible literacy instruction to your students.

Book Reviews Jennifer K. Dobe, Kantian Review, FirstView Article.

This article aims to rethink the trauma of the 1947 Partition of British India through the figure of the border. It is at the border that we can see how the present is as much constituted by the concentration of new realities that call for shifting frameworks of understanding as it is by past events that continue to haunt memory. It undertakes this task through a close reading of the trope of borders in Saadat Hasan Manto’s 1953 short story, ‘Toba (...) Tek Singh’. Partition fiction serves as a fruitful ground for developing new approaches to that history because, in part, literature is uniquely situated between representation and theory, between what a text represents and how it represents. In Manto’s story, the border is embodied in its central protagonist, Bishan Singh, who experiences an ontological struggle between being and belonging that exceeds the particular historical, geographical, and national context of the Partition. I suggest that the division of British India signaled a unique rupture within the subcontinent in which the creation of borders became the defining traumatic event of that history. This article thus moves away from the familiar nationalist rhetoric that has otherwise dominated conversations about the 1947 Partition of British India. It focuses instead on the geographical border as a conceptual figure that is at once spatially and corporeally oriented to a collective identity that exceeds nationalist frameworks of reference. (shrink)

Saul_Jennifer, Scepticism and Implicit Bias.

Sexual and gender minorities in contemporary India are formed in the interstices between the neoliberal, Hindutva state; transnational discourses of liberal democracy and sexual ‘rights’; as well as cosmopolitan culture and global LGBT movements. As is evident in recent court judgments and legislation, particularly since 2014, postcolonial Hindu nationalism has created cultural conditions where forms of queer gender are permissible while queer sexuality is generally unacceptable. In recent years, significant developments have focused on transgender communities, complicating activism surrounding sexual and (...) gender identities. By positing some identities as state-sanctioned acceptable citizens and others as not, certain ‘transgender’ individuals are conceptualised as bearers of rights while finding other facets of their identities discriminated against and maintained as illegal. The 2014 Supreme Court NALSA v. Union of India judgment and The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016 passed by the Lok Sabha, alongside further judgments and legislation affecting wider LGBT communities, have kept discourses fixed on sexual and gender identities and their relationship to Indian citizenship at the forefront of discussions of gender justices and injustices in India today. Focusing on recent judicial and legislative developments, this paper examines how transgender rights are being granted in the context of the neoliberal, Hindutva state and considers which forms of transgender identity are currently being conceptualised as legitimate and authentic in such discourses, which can serve to bolster larger right-wing visions and ideologies of the nation and its citizens. It contemplates the ways in which gender ‘justices’, framed in relation to both transnational LGBT rights discourses and right-wing agendas, are conceptualised and played out on the bodies of sexual and gender minorities. (shrink)

Neurotechnologies that collect and interpret data about brain activity are already in use for medical and nonmedical applications. Refinements of existing noninvasive techniques and the discovery of new ones will likely encourage broader uptake. The increased collection and use of brain data and, in particular, their use to infer the existence of mental states have led to questions about whether mental privacy may be threatened. It may be threatened if the brain data actually support inferences about the mind or if (...) decisions are made about a person in the belief that the inferences are justified. This article considers the chain of inferences lying between data about neural activity and a particular mental state as well as the ethico-legal issues raised by making these inferences, focusing here on what the threshold of reliability should be for using brain data to infer mental states. (shrink)

Physics, once known as “natural philosophy,” is the most basic science, explaining the world we live in, from the largest scale down to the very, very, very smallest, and our understanding of it has changed over many centuries. In Black Bodies and Quantum Cats , science writer Jennifer Ouellette traces key developments in the field, setting descriptions of the fundamentals of physics in their historical context as well as against a broad cultural backdrop. Newton’s laws are illustrated via the (...) film Addams Family Values , while Back to the Future demonstrates the finer points of special relativity. Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” serves to illuminate the mysterious nature of neutrinos, and Jeanette Winterson’s novel Gut Symmetries provides an elegant metaphorical framework for string theory. An enchanting and edifying read, Black Bodies and Quantum Cats shows that physics is not an arcane field of study but a profoundly human endeavor—and a fundamental part of our everyday world. (shrink)

Long viewed as an example of effective multilateralism, UN peace operations are facing mounting challenges. Transformations in the landscape of conflict are outpacing their ability to respond. Rising expectations of peacekeeping have led to disenchantment with what they can deliver, while dis- and misinformation tactics undermine the efforts of the UN to make and build peace. As UN peace operations risk becoming another casualty of intensifying international tensions, great power rivalry, and the erosion of the rules and norms that govern (...) international cooperation, we consider the future of UN peace operations. In the debate between a “pragmatic” and an “adaptive” approach to peacekeeping, we argue that a fundamental question is the ability of both alternatives to address three recurring issues that have shaped the effectiveness and legitimacy of peace operations: the mismatch between ambitious mandates and limited resources; the gap between the protection of civilians objective and its implementation in practice; and growing difficulties in honoring the principles of impartiality. We argue that policymakers and researchers should not lose sight of the fact that peacekeeping's legitimacy depends on its adherence to some version of host-state consent and some kind of restriction on when and how force is used. The expectation of civilian populations that the UN stands for protection also means that the UN must continue to safeguard some key norms associated with peacekeeping. (shrink)

The last thirty years have seen a resurgence of interest in virtue among philosophers, psychologists, and educators. This co-authored book brings an interdisciplinary response to the study of virtue: it not only provides a framework for quantifying virtues, but also explores how we can understand virtue in a philosophically-informed way that is compatible with the best current thinking in personality psychology. The volume presents a major contribution to theemerging science of virtue and character measurement.

A comprehensive proposal for a conceptual framework for describing conscious experience in dreams, integrating philosophy of mind, sleep and dream research, and interdisciplinary consciousness studies. Dreams, conceived as conscious experience or phenomenal states during sleep, offer an important contrast condition for theories of consciousness and the self. Yet, although there is a wealth of empirical research on sleep and dreaming, its potential contribution to consciousness research and philosophy of mind is largely overlooked. This might be due, in part, to a (...) lack of conceptual clarity and an underlying disagreement about the nature of the phenomenon of dreaming itself. In Dreaming, Jennifer Windt lays the groundwork for solving this problem. She develops a conceptual framework describing not only what it means to say that dreams are conscious experiences but also how to locate dreams relative to such concepts as perception, hallucination, and imagination, as well as thinking, knowledge, belief, deception, and self-consciousness. Arguing that a conceptual framework must be not only conceptually sound but also phenomenologically plausible and carefully informed by neuroscientific research, Windt integrates her review of philosophical work on dreaming, both historical and contemporary, with a survey of the most important empirical findings. This allows her to work toward a systematic and comprehensive new theoretical understanding of dreaming informed by a critical reading of contemporary research findings. Windt's account demonstrates that a philosophical analysis of the concept of dreaming can provide an important enrichment and extension to the conceptual repertoire of discussions of consciousness and the self and raises new questions for future research. (shrink)