A recently published fragment of the fourth-century speechwriter Hyperides contains a speech for the prosecution of Timandrus, accused of mistreating four orphans in his care. This article draws out from the fragment three important contributions to our understanding of Athenian conceptions of family relationships, particularly the relationships of marginalized groups: girls and enslaved people. First, the fragment constitutes a rare portrayal of a relationship between two sisters. Second, the fragment clearly articulates the idea that affective family relationships are not a (...) biological inevitability but arise from socialization, a departure from other fourth-century thinking. Third, the speaker applies this statement to enslaved people, claiming that the separation of children from close family members is so cruel that even slave-traders avoid it in their sale of human beings. Though this claim seems to have been untrue except in a very limited sense, its place in the argumentation of the speech assumes broad recognition of the existence and value of family relationships between enslaved people, vivid evidence of the paradox that slave societies recognized the humanity of people they simultaneously insisted were subhuman. (shrink)

This interview with N. Katherine Hayles, one of the foremost theorists of the posthuman, explores the concerns that led to her seminal book How We Became Posthuman, the key arguments expounded in that book, and the changes in technology and culture in the ten years since its publication. The discussion ranges across the relationships between literature and science; the trans-disciplinary project of developing a methodology appropriate to their intersection; the history of cybernetics in its cultural and political context ; (...) the changed role for psychoanalysis in the technoscientific age; and the altering forms of mediated ‘embodiment’ in the posthuman context. (shrink)

This is a book about philosophy, physics, and mechanics in the 18th century, and the struggle for a theory of bodies. Bodies are everywhere, or so it seems: from pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, they populate the world, acting and interacting with one another. And they are the subject- matter of Newton's laws of motion. At the beginning of the 18th century, physics was that branch of philosophy tasked with (...) the study of body in general. With such an account in hand, the special areas of philosophy (whether natural, moral, or political) that presuppose special kinds of bodies (such as plants, animals, and human beings) could proceed assured of the viability of their objects and the unity of their shared enquiries. For all had "bodies" in common. So: What is a body? And how can we know? This is the Problem of Bodies, and the quest for a solution animated natural philosophy throughout the Age of Reason. (shrink)

Katherine Hawley explores and compares three theories of persistence -- endurance, perdurance, and stage theories - investigating the ways in which they attempt to account for the world around us. Having provided valuable clarification of its two main rivals, she concludes by advocating stage theory.

Introduction to Kristeva -- Horror/basic concepts: the abject and its varieties -- Horror/specifying the circumstances -- Strangers/basic concepts: strangers without and within -- Strangers/expansions: the stranger's story -- Love/basic concepts -- Love/basic concepts the text of society and history -- Love/ Expansions: Old and new discourses -- The text of society and history -- Women and social change.

In Focus: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy reproduces almost fifty of the artist's photographs, with commentaries on each by katherine Ware, an Assistant Curator in the Musuem's Department of Photographs. Included as well is an edited transcript of a colloquim on Moholy-Nagy's work, with comments by Thomas Barrow, Jeannine Fiedler, Charles Hagen, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Weston Naef, Leland Rice, and Katherine Ware. A chronology of significant events in the artist's life is also provided.

Katherine Hawley investigates what trustworthiness means in our lives. We become untrustworthy when we break promises, miss deadlines, or give unreliable information. But we can't be sure about what we can commit to. Hawley examines the social obstacles to trustworthiness, and explores how we can steer between overcommitment and undercommitment.

Being and Time begins by asking, “Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ‘being’ [seiend]?” (SZ1). Heidegger’s project is thus often understood as an attempt to answer this question of being. But Heidegger immediately goes on to say that the problem is not that we lack an answer to this question so much as that we do not even have a sense of the question: “But are we nowadays (...) even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression ‘Being’ [Sein]? Not at all” (SZ1). Instead of, or at least before, giving us an answer to the question of being, Heidegger wishes to gift us the openness of that question. I argue that the question of being asks after the meaningful presencing of entities, where this means it asks what it is to hold entities up to, or grasp them in light of, ontological standards. I show that the metaphors of holding, grasping, and light mask a deep perplexity about this phenomenon, and I suggest that the ontological-epistemological problem of being that Heidegger wants to bequeath to us has general philosophical significance beyond the scope of his own philosophising. (shrink)

Feminist analyses of gender concepts must avoid the inclusion problem, the fault of marginalizing or excluding some prima facie women. Sally Haslanger’s ‘ameliorative’ analysis of gender concepts seeks to do so by defining woman by reference to subordination. I argue that Haslanger’s analysis problematically marginalizes trans women, thereby failing to avoid the inclusion problem. I propose an improved ameliorative analysis that ensures the inclusion of trans women. This analysis yields ‘twin’ target concepts of woman, one concerning gender as class and (...) the other concerning gender as identity, both of which I hold to be equally necessary for feminist aims. (shrink)

What is Heidegger talking about when he says that being conceals itself? This is the first study to systematically address that question. Katherine Withy analyses texts from across Heidegger's philosophical career and sorts the various phenomena of concealing and concealment that Heideggerdiscusses into a highly-structured taxonomy. The taxonomy clarifies the relationships and differences between such phenomena as lethe, the nothing, earth, excess, the backgrounding of the world, and un-truth, as well as speaking falsely, talking idly, secrets, mysteries, seeming, andinauthentic (...) discovering. But in relating and differentiating these phenomena, the taxonomy shows that none of them is the self-concealing of being.Having established what the self-concealing of being is not, Withy establishes what it is. She argues that being conceals itself in that it shows up to us as lacking the sorts of contrast cases that render entities determinate and intelligible. This novel and powerful interpretation of theself-concealing of being explains why the secondary literature to date has discussed it in vague and metaphorical terms, as well as why Heidegger tends to collapse being's self-concealing into the concealment of lethe. Withy's interpretation is both a clarification of and a corrective to Heidegger'snotoriously difficult and sometimes misleading discussions of being as self-concealing. (shrink)

Much of what we learn from talking and listening does not qualify as testimonial knowledge: we can learn a great deal from other people without simply accepting what they say as being true. In this article, I examine the ways in which we acquire skills or knowledge how from our interactions with other people, and I discuss whether there is a useful notion of testimonial knowledge how.Keywords: Knowledge how; Practical knowledge; Tacit knowledge; Testimony; Skills; Assertion.

Simon Saunders argues that, although distinct objects must be discernible, they need only be weakly discernible (Saunders 2003, 2006a). I will argue that this combination of views is unmotivated: if there can be objects which differ only weakly, there can be objects which don’t differ at all.

Sometimes it is epistemically beneficial to form a belief on authority. When you do, what happens to other reasons you have for that belief? Linda Zagzebski’s total-preemption view says that these reasons are “preempted”: you still have them, but you do not use them to support your belief. I argue that this situation is problematic, because having reasons for a belief while not using them forfeits you doxastic justification. I present an alternative account of belief on authority, the proper-basing view, (...) which enables the agent to base her belief on as many reasons as she has. A salient result is that the notion of a preemptive reason, useful though it may be in accounting for acting on authority, does not have any place in an account of believing on authority or in epistemology more generally. (shrink)

The poetry and journalistic essays of Katherine Tillman often appeared in publications sponsored by the American Methodist church. Collected together for the first time, her works speak to the struggles and triumphs of African-American women.

The roles of linguistic, cognitive, and social-pragmatic processes in word learning are well established. If statistical mechanisms also contribute to word learning, they must interact with these processes; however, there exists little evidence for such mechanistic synergy. Adults use co-occurrence statistics to encode speech–object pairings with detailed sensitivity in stochastic learning environments (Vouloumanos, 2008). Here, we replicate this statistical work with nonspeech sounds and compare the results with the previous speech studies to examine whether exclusion constraints contribute equally to the (...) statistical learning of speech–object and nonspeech–object associations. In environments in which performance could benefit from exclusion, we find a learning advantage for speech over nonspeech, revealing an interaction between statistical and exclusion processes in associative word learning. (shrink)

Can human beings be free and responsible if there is an all-powerful God? Anselm of Canterbury offers viable answers to questions which have plagued religious people for at least two thousand years. Katherin Rogers examines Anselm's reconciliation of human free will and divine omnipotence in the context of current philosophical debates.

One reason that fake news and other objectionable views gain traction is that they often come to us in the form of testimony from those in our immediate social circles – from those we trust. A language around this phenomenon has developed which describes social epistemic structures in terms of ‘epistemic bubbles’ and ‘epistemic echo chambers’. These concepts involve the exclusion of external evidence in various ways. While these concepts help us see the ways that evidence is socially filtered, it (...) doesn’t help us understand the social functions that these structures play, which limits our ability to intervene on them. In this paper, I introduce a new concept – that of the epistemic bunker. This concept helps us better account for a central feature of the phenomenon, which is that exclusionary social epistemic structures are often constructed to offer their members safety, either actual or perceived. Recognising this allows us to develop better strategies to mitigate their negative effects. (shrink)

Social groups, including racial and gender groups and teams and committees, seem to play an important role in our world. This article examines key metaphysical questions regarding groups. I examine answers to the question ‘Do groups exist?’ I argue that worries about puzzles of composition, motivations to accept methodological individualism, and a rejection of Racialism support a negative answer to the question. An affirmative answer is supported by arguments that groups are efficacious, indispensible to our best theories, and accepted given (...) common sense. Then, I turn to an examination of the features of social groups. I argue that social groups can be divided into two sorts. Groups of Type 1 are organized social groups like courts and clubs. Groups of Type 2 are groups like Blacks, women, and lesbians. While groups of both sorts have some features in common, they also have marked differences in features. Finally, I turn to views of the nature of social groups. I argue that the difference in features provides evidence that social groups do not have a uniform nature. Teams and committees are structured wholes, while race and gender groups are social kinds. (shrink)

There are moments when things suddenly seem strange - objects in the world lose their meaning, we feel like strangers to ourselves, or human existence itself strikes us as bizarre and unintelligible. Through a detailed philosophical investigation of Heidegger's concept of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit), Katherine Withy explores what such experiences reveal about us. She argues that while others (such as Freud, in his seminal psychoanalytic essay, 'The Uncanny') take uncanniness to be an affective quality of strangeness or eeriness, Heidegger uses (...) the concept to go beyond feeling uncanny to reach the ground of this feeling in our being uncanny. -/- "Heidegger on Being Uncanny" answers those who wonder whether human existence is fundamentally strange to itself by showing that we can be what we are only if we do not fully understand what it is to be us. This fundamental finitude in our self-understanding is our uncanniness. In this first dedicated interpretation of Heidegger's uncanniness, Withy tracks this concept from his early analyses of angst through his later interpretations of the choral ode from Sophocles's Antigone. Her interpretation uncovers a novel and robust continuity in Heidegger's thought and in his vision of the human being as uncanny, and it points the way toward what it is to live well as an uncanny human being. (shrink)

Responsibility means we do what we are supposed to do, such as cleaning up after ourselves. Readers discover how to be a good helper alongside their friends from Sesame Street.

Katherine Hawley explores the key ideas about trust in this Very Short Introduction. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, psychology, and evolutionary biology, she emphasizes the nature and importance of trusting and being trusted, from our intimate bonds with significant others to our relationship with the state.

Stereotypes sometimes lead us to make poor judgements of other people, but they also have the potential to facilitate quick, efficient, and accurate judgements. How can we discern whether any individual act of stereotyping will have the positive or negative effect? How Stereotypes Deceive Us addresses this question. It identifies various factors that determine whether or not the application of a stereotype to an individual in a specific context will facilitate or impede correct judgements and perceptions of the individual. It (...) challenges the thought that stereotyping only and always impedes correct judgement when the stereotypes that are applied are inaccurate, failing to reflect social realities. It argues instead that stereotypes that reflect social realities can lead to misperceptions and misjudgements, and that inaccurate but egalitarian social attitudes can therefore facilitate correct judgements and accurate perceptions. The arguments presented in this book have important implications for those who might engage in stereotyping and those who are at risk of being stereotyped. They have implications for those who work in healthcare and those who have mental health conditions. How Stereotypes Deceive Us provides a new conceptual framework-evaluative dispositionalism-that captures the epistemic faults of stereotypes and stereotyping, providing conceptual resources that can be used to improve our own thinking by avoiding the pitfalls of stereotyping, and to challenge other people's stereotyping where it is likely to lead to misperception and misjudgement. (shrink)

Richard Waller, Fellow and Secretary of the Royal Society, is probably best remembered for editing Robert Hooke’s posthumously published works. Yet, Waller also created numerous drawings, paintings, and engravings for his own work and the Society’s publications. From precisely observed grasses to allegorical frontispieces, Waller’s images not only contained a diverse range of content, they are some of the most beautiful, colorful, and striking from the Society’s early years. This article argues that Waller played a distinctly important role in shaping (...) the visual program of the Royal Society by virtue of his multiple functions as reliable administrator and translator, competent natural philosopher, and skilled image-maker. It analyzes Waller’s visual works in the context of his graphic training—in part influenced by his mother Mary More—and situates them within the context of English image-making traditions and Waller’s own natural philosophical interests. Examined as a functional whole, Waller’s career as a Fellow of the Royal Society emerges as an important case study in the fusion of visual and scientific practices in early-modern England. (shrink)

Social groups—like teams, committees, gender groups, and racial groups—play a central role in our lives and in philosophical inquiry. Here I develop and motivate a structuralist ontology of social groups centered on social structures (i.e., networks of relations that are constitutively dependent on social factors). The view delivers a picture that encompasses a diverse range of social groups, while maintaining important metaphysical and normative distinctions between groups of different kinds. It also meets the constraint that not every arbitrary collection of (...) people is a social group. In addition, the framework provides resources for developing a broader structuralist view in social ontology. (shrink)

Fear generalisation is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when fear that is elicited in response to a frightening stimulus spreads to similar or related stimuli. The practical harms of pathological fear generalisation related to trauma are well-documented, but little or no attention has been given so far to its epistemic harms. This paper fills this gap in the literature. It shows how the psychological phenomenon, when it becomes pathological, substantially curbs the epistemic agency of those who experience the fear that (...) generalizes, limiting their ability to respond to evidence, and substantially limiting their epistemic horizons. It is argued that when these epistemic harms are caused by wrongful actions and decisions of individuals or institutions, because the fear is elicited in response to a traumatic experience inflicted by them, the harms should be considered epistemic wrongs. The epistemic wrongs are closely akin to agential epistemic injustice, a variety of distributive epistemic injustice, and sometimes also involve epistemic exclusion. The paper thereby identifies a previously underexplored psychological mechanism that can be a vehicle through which both individuals and institutions can epistemically wrong others. The argument has implications for how both epistemic wrongs and epistemic injustice should be conceived, suggesting that both can occur without being caused by primarily epistemic flaws or errors, or a bad epistemic character. Finally, it highlights the advantage of taking a victim-centred approach to understanding epistemic harm. (shrink)

Highlighting main issues and controversies, this book brings together current philosophical discussions of symmetry in physics to provide an introduction to the subject for physicists and philosophers. The contributors cover all the fundamental symmetries of modern physics, such as CPT and permutation symmetry, as well as discussing symmetry-breaking and general interpretational issues. Classic texts are followed by new review articles and shorter commentaries for each topic. Suitable for courses on the foundations of physics, philosophy of physics and philosophy of science, (...) the volume is a valuable reference for students and researchers. (shrink)

I outline a number of parallels between trust and distrust, emphasising the significance of situations in which both trust and distrust would be an imposition upon the (dis)trustee. I develop an account of both trust and distrust in terms of commitment, and argue that this enables us to understand the nature of trustworthiness. Note that this article is available open access on the journal website.

When used clinically, psychedelics may appear unusual or even unique when compared to more familiar or long-standing medical interventions, prompting some to suggest that the ethical issues raised may likewise be exceptional. If that is correct, then perhaps psychedelics should be treated differently from other medical substances: for example, by being subjected to different ethical or evidentiary standards. Alternatively, it may be that psychedelics have more in common with various existing medical interventions than first meets the eye. We argue in (...) favor of the latter position, drawing on parallels from earlier debates around genetic exceptionalism in bioethics. We suggest there are risks to adopting a stance of “psychedelic ethical exceptionalism,” and propose that consistent ethical rules and evidentiary standards should be applied across all relevant areas of clinical medicine. Importantly, this does not preclude the possibility that changes to existing standards should be made; but if so, this should not be justified by appealing to the alleged uniqueness of psychedelics. (shrink)