Lamb, Judith Australian Catholic women religious have played a significant role in the spread of the Gospel and in the provision of services, especially in education and health care, from the middle of the nineteenth century. One such group is the Congregation of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. From their base in Sydney in 1885, missionaries were sent to remote communities in Australia, Papua New Guinea and beyond. In 2011, as part of the celebration (...) of the centenary of the promulgation of the Australian Province, the Provincial Council invited sisters to tell their stories in a series of interviews. These interviews have been used to provide personal perspectives on the challenges and rewards of missionary life. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a (...) reiterated social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a (...) reiterated social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

'...a challenging and useful book, both because it provokes a careful scrutiny of one's own basic ideas regarding evolutionary theory, and because it cuts across so many biological disciplines.' -The Quarterly Review of Biology 'In my view, this work exemplifies Theoretical Biology at its best...here is rampant speculation that is consistently based on cautious reasoning from the available data. Even more refreshing is the absence of sloganeering, grandstanding, and 'isms'.' -Biology and Philosophy 'Epigenetics is fundamental to understanding both development and (...) gene expression, and not surprisingly, evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated with its proper place in evolutionary theory...Enter Jablonka and Lamb, who provide a thoughtful review of the recent molecular literature and suggest a number of potential consequences.' -EvolutionSince first publication of this controversial book, much of the initial opposition to the ideas it contained has been replaced by a general, although often grudging, acceptance of them. Advances in knowledge, especially at the molecular level, have enhanced general awareness and interest in epigenetics and the evolution of systems that store and transmit information and put any of the authors' speculations on a more solid basis. This paperback edition contains a new Preface that sets out the major changes in the scientific world and in the authors' own thinking that have occurred since the book was published. A new Appendix provides a selected bibliography of the many books and articles about epigenetic inheritance and its role in evolution that have appeared since first publication. (shrink)

This study compares corporate social performance in terms of charitable contributions of minority-owned and nonminority-owned small businesses. In this sample, minority-owned small businesses are younger, have less full-time employees, and lower annual sales. Minority-owned small businesses donate more funds to religious organizations than nonminority-owned small businesses. When annual sales are accounted for, minority-owned businesses contribute more total dollars to all charitable organizations than nonminority-owned firms. Suggestions for future research in this area are delineated.

In the past decade a line of thought has developed that, in addition to the "fetishized sublime object" Judith Plotz describes in The Romantic Vocation of Childhood,1 there are other versions of "the child" at play in William Wordsworth's work.2 As Alan Richardson puts it, "If Wordsworth's 'Mighty Prophet' and Lamb's 'child angel' have lost their valence, other tendencies within the Romantic representation of childhood remain . . . vital, perhaps even indispensable."3 This essay focuses primarily on Wordsworth's (...) more down-to-earth accounts of childhood, accounts which, fully emerging in the 1799 Prelude, have affinity with work done by past and present evolutionary scientists. The biological concept of human .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 22-40 [Access article in PDF] Giving an Account of Oneself Judith Butler In recent years, the critique of poststructuralism, itself loquacious, has held that the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding undermines the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself. Critics have argued that the various critical reconsiderations of the subject, including those that do away with the (...) theory of the subject altogether, cannot provide the basis for an account of responsibility, that if we are, as it were, divided, ungrounded, or incoherent from the start, it will be impossible to ground a notion of personal or social responsibility on the basis of such a view. I would like to try to rebut this view in what follows, and to show how a theory of subject-formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can work in the service of a conception of ethics and, indeed, of responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, it is not therefore licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its relations to others. Indeed, if it is precisely by virtue of its relations to others that it is opaque to itself, and if those relations to others are precisely the venue for its ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject's opacity to itself that it sustains some of its most important ethical bonds.In all the talk about the social construction of the subject, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other—in its singularity, as Levinas would have it, though surely that—but also on the possibility that the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening. This opening calls into question the limits of established regimes of truth, where a certain risking of the self becomes, as Levinas claims, the sign of virtue [see Foucault]. Whether or not the Other is singular, the Other is recognized and confers recognition through a set of norms that govern recognizability. So whereas the Other may be singular, if not radically personal, the norms are to some extent impersonal and indifferent, and they introduce a disorientation of perspective for the subject in the midst of recognition as an encounter. For if I understand myself to be conferring recognition on you, for instance, then I take seriously that the recognition comes from me. But in the moment that I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone, that I did not singlehandedly make them, then I am, as it were, dispossessed by the language that I offer. In a sense, I submit to a norm of recognition when I offer recognition to you, so that I am both subjected to that norm and the agency of its use.As Hegel would have it, recognition cannot be unilaterally given. In the moment that I give it, I am potentially given it, and the form by which I offer it is one that potentially is given to me. In this sense, one might say, I can never offer it, in the Hegelian sense, as a pure offering, since I am receiving it, at least potentially and structurally, in the moment, in the act, of giving. We might ask, as Levinas surely has, what kind of gift this is that returns to me so quickly, that never really leaves my hands. Is it the case that recognition consists, as it does for Hegel, in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that [End Page 22] the Other is structured in the same way that I am, and I recognize that the Other also makes, or can make, this very recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps an encounter with alterity here that is not reducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity? On the one hand, the Hegelian Other is always found outside, or at least... (shrink)

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, (...) resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power. -/- Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Basak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis. (shrink)

Religious faith may manifest itself, among other things, as a mode of seeing the ordinary world, which invests that world imaginatively (or inspiredly) with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance. While such seeing may well be truthful, it is also unavoidably constructive, involving the imagination in its philosophical sense of the capacity to organize underdetermined or ambiguous sense date into a whole or gestalt. One of the characteristic ways in which biblical narratives inspire and teach is by (...) renewing their characters’ and readers’ imagination. The texts do so not inexorably but in a similar way as (other) works of art. This paper therefore investigates the ways in which works of art engage and develop the imagination, and thereby enable renewed perceptual and cognitive engagement with the world. The paper introduces predictive processing as a helpful psychological theory for analyzing this dynamic, and outlines questions for further research. (shrink)

BackgroundPalliative sedation and analgesia are employed in patients with refractory and intractable symptoms at the end of life to reduce their suffering by lowering their level of consciousness. The doctrine of double effect, a philosophical principle that justifies doing a “good action” with a potentially “bad effect,” is frequently employed to provide an ethical justification for this practice. Main textWe argue that palliative sedation and analgesia do not fulfill the conditions required to apply the doctrine of double effect, and therefore (...) its use in this domain is inappropriate. Furthermore, we argue that the frequent application of the doctrine of double effect to palliative sedation and analgesia reflects physicians’ discomfort with the complex moral, intentional, and causal aspects of end-of-life care. ConclusionsWe are concerned that this misapplication of the doctrine of double effect can consequently impair physicians’ ethical reasoning and relationships with patients at the end of life. (shrink)

This paper examines the conception of disinterested love, pur amour, advocated by the Archbishop of Cambrai, Francois Fenelon, and its role in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau andWilliam Godwin.We argue that for Fenelon, Rousseau, and Godwin, virtue is, or follows directly from, a form of love stripped of self-interest. Hence, virtuous activity is performed without either hope of reward or fear of punishment and sometimes with no reference to the self at all. At the same time, this disinterested love re-identifies (...) the self with something beyond, whether this is friends, God, the common weal, or utility. We demonstrate that Rousseau and Godwin adopted a specifically Fenelonian conception of disinterested love by considering the particular use they make of Fenelon's works, and, indeed, their references to him as a person. Interestingly, the logic of disinterestedness propels quite disparate thoughts about political life: for Fenelon the virtue is preeminently religious, and lawgivers and monarchs should exemplify and perpetuate pur amour; Rousseau's version is reconceptualised psychologically and reoriented such that it demands democratic politics, while for Godwin disinterestedness becomes a personal moral issue, actually requiring the dissolution of politics and government. (shrink)

In this volume a group of distinguished legal and political theorists and experts on journalism discuss how to reconcile our values concerning freedom of the press with the enormous power of the media - especially television - to shape opinions and values. The policy issues treated concern primarily the extent of justifiable government regulation of the media and the justification for regulating television differently from newspapers. The volume contains some highly original and groundbreaking analyses of philosophical issues surrounding the First (...) Amendment of the US Bill of Rights. This is a book for anyone seriously interested in the rights to free speech and expression in technologically advanced societies. (shrink)

State Violence, Coalitions, Subjects After a consideration of the reception of her work in France , Judith Butler assesses the political contribution of queer movements and minority struggles. She addresses the need for the left to reappropriate the forthright critique of the State and its violence and to examine the way minorities are produced. To do so, her analysis starts from the question of immigrant persons. She highlights the issues and the difficulties which are involved, if there is to (...) be a productive critique of the State, the aim of which is to contest it. As part of a dynamic political perspective, she proposes the creation of coalitions. She outlines the main lines of such a coalition, its dynamics and singularities, its articulation with the subject, but also its limits. In conclusion, she examines the issue of revolution and her relation to Marxist thought, indicating the outlines of her current thinking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Wide Open to Life”:Thomas Merton’s Dialogue of Contemplative PracticeJudith Simmer-BrownThrough my decades of Tibetan Buddhist practice and interreligious dialogue experience, I have often contemplated an encounter that took place in a bar in the Central Hotel in Calcutta, October 19, 1968. It is the encounter between Thomas Merton in the last year of his life with my Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, early in his teaching career in (...) the West. This encounter has deeply influenced my life of dialogue, for they initiated what I came to understand as a new kind of interreligious dialogue—the dialogue of contemplative practice. It is the kind of dialogue Trungpa introduced to Naropa University in the late 1970s in Merton’s honor, and it has influenced our university ever since.Thomas Merton, Father Louis, was fifty-three years old when stepped off the plane in India for his much-anticipated Asian journey. Excited and jet-lagged, he met the twenty-eight-year-old Tibetan monk Chogyam Trungpa, who had returned to India and Bhutan for a retreat after five years of study at Oxford University and a new venture of teaching dharma to Westerners. Trungpa’s English would have been accented but comprehensible, and his curiosity about Christian monasticism was at its peak. Merton was “coming home” to a place he had never been, visiting Asia to look for true spiritual masters about whom he had read for so many decades. He was later to admit to a special attraction to the Tibetans.On Merton’s first day in India, he and Trungpa found each other over many gin and tonics at the Central Hotel in Calcutta, talking about the contemplative life and its challenges in the twentieth century. It was the first of a number of conversations over the next few months. In his journals Merton commented:the important thing is that we are people who have been waiting to meet for a long time. Chogyam Trungpa is a completely marvelous person. Young, natural, without front or artifice, deep, awake, wise. I am sure we will be seeing a lot more of each other, whether around northern India and Sikkim or in Scotland, where I am now determined to go to see his Tibetan monastery if I can … The newsletter he puts out is good. His own meditations and talks, from what I have seen, are extraordinary.1 [End Page 193]Trungpa had a similar rapport with Merton. In the 1971 edition of his autobiography, he wrote, “Father Merton himself was an open, unguarded, and deep person. During these few days, we spent much time together and grew to like one another immensely. He proposed that we should collaborate on a book bringing together sacred writings of the Catholic and Vajrayana Buddhist traditions.”2 In another reflection, Trungpa commented, “Meeting Thomas Merton was wonderful; he was like a child, and at the same time, he was full of energy and life.”3 Still later, Trungpa was to conclude, “I had the feeling that I was meeting an old friend, a genuine friend … [Father Merton] was the first genuine person I met from the West.”4Later, Trungpa was deeply saddened by Merton’s premature death, feeling he had lost a heart friend, a genuine dialogue partner. Thirteen years later, Trungpa launched a series of seven landmark dialogue conferences at the fledgling university that he had founded, Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. From the beginning, Trungpa dedicated these gatherings to “Fr. Merton” and said that he sought to cultivate the kind of conversations between genuine contemplatives that he had discovered with Merton. Sister Pascaline Coff, from the Benedictine community of Osage Monastery in Oklahoma, wrote that the inaugural conference was “a major breakthrough in the Christian-Buddhist dialogues.”5 This breakthrough gave impetus to the development of the international Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (DIM in Europe) and other contemporary dialogue developments.6 What kind of dialogue is this, and how did Merton stimulate this movement?I’ve written elsewhere about Merton’s encounter with the Tibetans and their view of him.7 I’ve also described Merton as a Dzogchen yogi, especially in relationship with his contact with Tibetan... (shrink)

This article draws on the results of an inductive qualitative study on the microdynamics of framing corporate community involvement. Insight is provided into these dynamics by using the metaphor of a social movement and drawing on that literature’s framing perspective. Based on accounts of diverse organizational members, we identify several double edges in framing CCI as a strategic issue, and we develop a model that helps to understand why and how strategizing CCI may be controversial.

The commentaries on Evolution in Four Dimensions reflect views ranging from total adherence to gene-centered neo-Darwinism, to the acceptance of non-genetic and Lamarckian processes in evolution. We maintain that genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and cultural variations have all been significant, and that the developmental aspects of heredity and evolution are an important bridge that can unite seemingly conflicting research programs and different disciplines.

The most cited sustainability definition, by the World Commission on the Environment and Development, contains a moral imperative, as pointed out by several scholars. While ethical implications have been examined by philosophers and social scientists, concepts such as agricultural sustainability have been challenged less. The present work should contribute to the debate on the implicit moral values of agricultural sustainability and help uncover conflicting moral perspectives regarding agricultural sustainability. Choosing the social dimension of agricultural sustainability as starting point, the idea (...) of conflict interrupting the functionality or longevity of any social system, such as a farm is introduced. Based on the idea of agricultural value chains, different stakeholders’ interests for seven moral conflict scenarios in agriculture and the moral arguments behind them are identified. These are sorted according to ethical theories and argumentation patterns are detected. The three central moral premises, as well as their importance to the sustainability context, are discussed. Finally, working hypotheses are proposed which can help create more comprehensive ideas about the social dimension of agricultural sustainability, furthering the consideration of normative aspects in the context of agricultural sustainability. (shrink)

‘We Are Also Here.’ Whose Revolution Will Democracy Be? Steven Winter’s argument is premised on a sharp contrast of individualist and social revolutions. I elaborate my doubts about his argument on three accounts, involving feminist perspectives at various points. First, I take issue with Winter’s portrayal of liberal theory, redirecting the focus of his concern to economic libertarianism rather than liberalism, and arguing a more hospitable attitude to the Kantian pith in the theory of democracy. Secondly, I discuss his conceptualization (...) of democracy, adding the conceptual distinction of civil society and public sphere. Thirdly, I question his normative notion of socially situated selves as having an intrinsic relation to social freedom. I moreover consult cultural history on the gendered symbolics of market and democracy to further problematize Winter’s take on either’s meaning for social freedom. (shrink)

The sea god Poseidon is taken for granted as such in Classical Greek literature and iconography. Yet one does not have to look far in the literary or iconographical sources to find material that conveys a somewhat different impression. This has been noticed, and in the past there have been some interesting attempts to surmise Poseidon's origins and significance from the evidence at hand. This paper is not an attempt to reconstruct a putative Mycenaean deity, but will examine certain episodes (...) of the Homeric Iliad to suggest possible reasons for the inconsistencies and anomalies that appear. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt began her scholarly career with an exploration of Saint Augustine's concept of _caritas_, or neighborly love, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the influence of Martin Heidegger. After her German academic life came to a halt in 1933, Arendt carried her dissertation into exile in France, and years later took the same battered and stained copy to New York. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, as she was completing or reworking her most influential studies of (...) political life, Arendt was simultaneously annotating and revising her dissertation on Augustine, amplifying its argument with terms and concepts she was using in her political works of the same period. The disseration became a bridge over which Arendt traveled back and forth between 1929 Heidelberg and 1960s New York, carrying with her Augustine's question about the possibility of social life in an age of rapid political and moral change. In _Love and Saint Augustine_, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark make this important early work accessible for the first time. Here is a completely corrected and revised English translation that incorporates Arendt's own substantial revisions and provides additional notes based on letters, contracts, and other documents as well as the recollections of Arendt's friends and colleagues during her later years. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

The human body is both religious subject and scientific object, the manifest locus of both religious gnosis and secular cognition. Embodiment provides the basis for a rich cross–fertilization between cognitive science and comparative religion, but cognitive studies must return to their empiricist scientific roots by reembodying subjectivity, thus spanning the natural bridge between the two fields. Referencing the ritual centrality and cognitive content of the body, I suggest a materialist but nonreductionist construct of the self as a substantial cognitive embodiment (...) that embraces not just perception and cognition, mind and spirit, but the forceful physicality of the moving body. Proprioception of the body's moving mass constitutes a mode of knowing that resonates strongly with the experience of self, not only across religious traditions but also within the physical sciences. By way of illustration, two directions are suggested in which a construct of the self as a substantial cognitive embodiment might lead us: first, a body–based interpretation of the Islamic myth of Adam and Iblis that reveals an internal substantiality as constitutive of the divinely imaged Self, and second, a new, religious direction for human evolutionary theory based on the implications of an embodied intentionality. (shrink)