Over the years, Katie Cannon's students referred to her work in progress as "Katie's canon." Not only does this book represent the canon of Cannon's best work; the book itself directly addresses the issues of canon formation and canon reformation. Cannon canonizes a literary tradition and directly addresses both oppression and liberation of African American women. Now in an expanded 25th-anniversary edition, Katie's Canon still packs firepower.

In this paper, we develop a novel response to counterfactual scepticism, the thesis that most ordinary counterfactual claims are false. In the process we aim to shed light on the relationship between debates in the philosophy of science and debates concerning the semantics and pragmatics of counterfactuals. We argue that science is concerned with many domains of inquiry, each with its own characteristic entities and regularities; moreover, statements of scientific law often include an implicit ceteris paribus clause that restricts the (...) scope of the associated regularity to circumstances that are ‘fitting’ to the domain in question. This observation reveals a way of responding to scepticism while, at the same time, doing justice both to the role of counterfactuals in science and to the complexities inherent in ordinary counterfactual discourse and reasoning. (shrink)

The search for the statistical mechanical underpinning of thermodynamic irreversibility has so far focussed on the spontaneous approach to equilibrium. But this is the search for the underpinning of what Brown and Uffink have dubbed the ‘minus first law’ of thermodynamics. In contrast, the second law tells us that certain interventions on equilibrium states render the initial state ‘irrecoverable’. In this article, I discuss the unusual nature of processes in thermodynamics, and the type of irreversibility that the second law embodies. (...) I then search for the microscopic underpinning or statistical mechanical ‘reductive basis’ of the second law of thermodynamics by taking a functionalist strategy. First, I outline the functional role of the thermodynamic entropy: for a thermally isolated system, the thermodynamic entropy is constant in quasi-static processes, but increasing in non-quasi-static processes. I then search for the statistical mechanical quantity that plays this role—rather than the role of the traditional ‘holy grail’ as described by Callender. I argue that in statistical mechanics, the Gibbs entropy plays this role. (shrink)

Background: Exploring the concept of ethical competence in the context of healthcare is essential as it pertains to better quality of care. The concept still lacks a comprehensive definition covering the aspects of ethical expertise, ethical knowledge and action of a health professional. Objective: This article aims to report an analysis of the concept of ethical competence. Method: A modified strategy suggested by Walker and Avant was used to analyse the concept. Results: As a result, the concept of ethical competence (...) can be defined in terms of character strength, ethical awareness, moral judgement skills and willingness to do good. Virtuous professional, experience of a professional, human communication, ethical knowledge and supporting surroundings in the organisation can be seen as prerequisites for ethical competence. Ethical competence results in the best possible solutions for the patient, reduced moral distress at work and development and democratisation of society. Conclusion: The results of the analysis establish a basis for an instrument to evaluate health professionals’ ethical competence. It will guide educators, as well as managers in healthcare, to support the development of ethical conduct in healthcare. (shrink)

This article examines the role of vision in the construction of Nature. It is suggested that how nature is 'seen' is inextricably tied to how such a space is named, traversed, and experienced at particular moments. A key contention is that the lens of modernity has for too long adversely impacted what it is possible to see, say, do, and feel with respect to Nature. The force of this statement is borne out with reference to orthodox envisionings of forest conflict (...) in Australia. The article concludes by calling for an environmental ethic(s) which puts into critical relief the discursive, trajective, and affective dimensions of vision. (shrink)

This is the first-ever critical history of sociology in Britain, written by one of the world's leading scholars in the field. A. H. Halsey presents a vivid and authoritative picture of the neglect, expansion, fragmentation, and explosion of the discipline during the past century. The book examines the literary and scientific contributions to the origin of the discipline, and the challenges faced by the discipline at the dawn of a new century.

"Did you know that common sense helps you make good choices? Common sense tells you how to act. Discover these and toher interesting facts in Common Sense." --.

Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole: the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 4.

Review of Peter Mulholland's Love's Betrayal: The Decline of Catholicism and Rise of New Religions in Ireland.

Aim: Participation in classroom physical activity breaks may improve children’s cognition, but few studies have involved adolescents. The primary aim of this study was to examine the effects of classroom-based resistance training with and without cognitive training on adolescents’ cognitive function.Methods: Participants were 97 secondary school students. Four-year 10 classes from one school were included in this four-arm cluster randomized controlled trial. Classes were randomly assigned to the following groups: sedentary control with no cognitive training, sedentary with cognitive training, resistance (...) training without cognitive training, and resistance training with cognitive training. Sessions varied in levels of both cognitive demand and resistance training and were administered three times per week for 4 weeks. Inhibition, cognitive flexibility, episodic memory, on-task behavior, and muscular fitness were assessed at baseline and post-test. Linear mixed models were used to examine changes within and between groups.Results: In comparison with the control group, episodic memory improved significantly in the resistance training without cognitive training group. There were no group-by-time effects for inhibition or cognitive flexibility. Classroom activity breaks both with and without cognitive demand improved participants’ on-task behavior in comparison with the control and sedentary group. The resistance training programs did not lead to improvements in muscular fitness.Conclusion: Participation in body weight resistance training without cognitive training led to selective improvements in episodic memory. No training effects were found for inhibition or cognitive flexibility. A longer study period may be necessary to induce improvements in muscular fitness and associated changes in inhibition and cognitive flexibility.Clinical Trial Registration:https://www.anzctr.org.au/ACTRN12621001341819.aspx, Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry—ACTRN12621001341819. (shrink)

This book explores the nature, value, and role of hope in human life under conditions of oppression. Oppression is often a threat and damage to hope, yet many members of oppressed groups, including prominent activists pursuing a more just world, find hope valuable and even essential to their personal and political lives. This book offers a unique evaluative framework for hope that captures the intrinsic value of hope for many of us, the rationality and morality of hope, and ultimately how (...) we can hope well in the non-ideal world we share. It develops an account of the relationship between hope and anger about oppression and argues that anger tends to be accompanied by hopes for repair. When people’s hopes for repair are not realized, as is often the case for those who are oppressed, anger can evolve into bitterness: a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that injustice will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. But even when all hope might seem lost or out of reach, faith can enable resilience in the face of oppression. Spiritual faith, faith in humanity, and moral faith are part of what motivates people to join in solidarity against injustice, through which hope can be recovered collectively. Joining with others who share one’s experiences or commitments for a better world, and uniting with them in collective action, can restore and strengthen hope for the future when hope might otherwise be lost. (shrink)

The majority of U.S. abortion patients are poor women, and Black and Hispanic women. Therefore, this article encourages bioethicists and equity advocates to consider whether the need for abortion c...

In celebrating the epistemological reform and empowerment of non-white peoples in the academy, we propose a manifesto that seeks to dislodge the complacencies within Sikh Studies and within Sikh communities, and invite non-Sikhs to engage with radical Sikhi social justice. By dwelling at feminist intersections of postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, and decolonization studies, we are inspired to share the radical possibilities of Sikh Studies, and we also urge Sikh Studies and Sikh people to inhabit an explicit political orientation of insurrection (...) and subversion. Importantly, such a feminist decolonial orientation may well hold promise for other fields of study on the margins as well. In particular, we foreground eight points of action: gendering Sikh Studies; de-policing intimate desire and the diversity of relationships; disrupting Eurocentric knowledge production; de-territorializing diasporas; challenging caste politics; disrupting Islamophobia; undoing our roles in contemporary colonialisms; and fostering care and responsibility for the nonhuman world. In this manifesto we hope to develop interdisciplinary connections, critical interventions, and broader alliances to cultivate debates and action that both challenge tradition and participate within broader political campaigns for social justice. (shrink)

When once-successful physical theories are abandoned, common wisdom has it that their characteristic theoretical entities are abandoned with them: examples include phlogiston, light rays, Newtonian forces, Euclidean space. But sometimes a theory sees ongoing use, despite being superseded. What should scientific realists say about the characteristic entities of the theories in such cases? The standard answer is that these ‘theoretical relicts’ are merely useful fictions. In this paper we offer a different answer. We start by distinguishing horizontal reduction (in which (...) a superseded theory approximates the successor theory) from vertical reduction (in which a higher-level theory abstracts away from the lower-level theory, but nonetheless can be constructed from it); these are usually regarded as having different ontological consequences. We describe a ‘verticalization’ procedure which transforms horizontal reductions into vertical reductions. The resulting verticalized theories are abstractions rather than approximations, with restricted domains. We identify a sense in which the higher-level theory describes distinct subject matters from the lower-level theory, enabling in certain cases the higher-level theory to retain distinctive explanatory power even in the presence of reduction. We suggest that theoretical entities from superseded theories should be retained in a scientific realist worldview just when, reinterpreted as higher-level abstractions, those theories and their characteristic entities continue to perform distinctive explanatory work in providing the best explanation for less-fundamental phenomena of interest. In slogan form: a good relict is an emergent relict. (shrink)

We argue that concerns about double-counting—using the same evidence both to calibrate or tune climate models and also to confirm or verify that the models are adequate—deserve more careful scrutiny in climate modelling circles. It is widely held that double-counting is bad and that separate data must be used for calibration and confirmation. We show that this is far from obviously true, and that climate scientists may be confusing their targets. Our analysis turns on a Bayesian/relative-likelihood approach to incremental confirmation. (...) According to this approach, double-counting is entirely proper. We go on to discuss plausible difficulties with calibrating climate models, and we distinguish more and less ambitious notions of confirmation. Strong claims of confirmation may not, in many cases, be warranted, but it would be a mistake to regard double-counting as the culprit. 1 Introduction2 Remarks about Models and Adequacy-for-Purpose3 Evidence for Calibration Can Also Yield Comparative Confirmation3.1 Double-counting I3.2 Double-counting II4 Climate Science Examples: Comparative Confirmation in Practice4.1 Confirmation due to better and worse best fits4.2 Confirmation due to more and less plausible forcings values5 Old Evidence6 Doubts about the Relevance of Past Data7 Non-comparative Confirmation and Catch-Alls8 Climate Science Example: Non-comparative Confirmation and Catch-Alls in Practice9 Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

In this article, I use a Marxist feminist methodology to map the organisation of migrant sex workers’ socially reproductive paid and unpaid labour in one city and country of arrival, London, UK. I argue that unfree and ‘free’ labour exists on a continuum of capitalist relations of production, which are gendered, racialised, and legal. It is within these relations that various actors implement, and migrant sex workers contest, unfree labour practices not limited to the most extreme forms. My analysis reveals (...) that many migrant sex workers have very limited ‘freedom’. This is in stark contrast to the classical liberal claim of sex worker rights activists and academics that the vast majority of migrant sex workers are free, and therefore not coerced, exploited or trafficked. I then consider whether the emerging labour approach to trafficking could help achieve ‘freedom’ for migrant sex workers. Advocates argue that anti-trafficking efforts must, and can, be refocused on extending minimum labour and social protections to all vulnerable workers. I argue that this approach is disconnected from material interests and history. Rather, migrant sex workers, sex worker rights activists, and all migrant and citizen workers and activists globally must collectively organise against ‘labour unfreedom’ and hence for meaningful control over their labour and lives. (shrink)

In this paper we apply a general account of practical reasoning to arguing about legal cases. In particular, we provide a reconstruction of the reasoning of the majority and dissenting opinions for a particular well-known case from property law. This is done through the use of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents to replicate the contrasting views involved in the actual decision. This reconstruction suggests that the reasoning involved can be separated into three distinct levels: factual and normative levels and a level connecting (...) the two, with conclusions at one level forming premises at the next. We begin by summarising our general approach, which uses instantiations of an argumentation scheme to provide presumptive justifications for actions, and critical questions to identify arguments which attack these justifications. These arguments and attacks are organised into argumentation frameworks to identify the status of individual arguments. We then discuss the levels of reasoning that occur in this reconstruction and the properties and significance of each of these levels. We illustrate the different levels with short examples and also include a discussion of the role of precedents within these levels of reasoning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A Mother's Love"Katie L. GholsonWho is going to teach my daughter about becoming a woman?" S said to me. S was 38 and diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She and her husband were high school sweethearts, and she had a young son and a daughter. She had been told that there was no cure for her cancer, and at the point of meeting her, very little was able to (...) be done to manage her symptoms.As a mother of a young daughter, I was humbled by the question she asked me. Her daughter was 12 and was just beginning to learn about becoming a woman. The anticipatory grief of not having the opportunities to care for one's own children in the crucial moments of their development was devastating to S. Her ability to name what she grieves the most was profoundly sad to me and the other team members who witnessed it.As a palliative care chaplain, I am used to sad and tragic cases, but this one felt different. S and I had [End Page 80] a lot in common. I am also 38, married to my high school sweetheart, and I have a son and a daughter. Of course, it was not just these reasons that I felt a connection to S. It was also the tangible despair I felt when I was with her. As a chaplain, I am trained to meet people where they are and not to hurry them from a place of despair and anguish. I visited with S nine different times and watched the progression of her existential distress. Her distress was not always linear. Some days, it took a backseat and other days, it was front and center, but I was there to be a witness to whatever she was thinking and feeling, and a lot of times, it was inexpressible grief.S did not want to meet with "palliative care" initially. She was terrified of her diagnosis and believed that there were treatments that would give her back the life she desired. She was fierce and determined. S was also religious and believed that there was a miraculous cure for her that would allow her the time she desired to spend with her children and her husband. S was a softball mom and loved to watch her daughter play. While in the hospital, she missed many games, and this weighed on her.Along with being an athlete, S's daughter was very artistic and made S a bouquet of paper flowers. Each flower contained an encouraging phrase. S opened one while I was in her room. She had lost her hair, much of her body weight, and was wearing a hospital gown, but when she opened the flower, her daughter had written, "You are beautiful, Mom." In that moment, two 38-year-old women understood that beauty transcends outward appearances. S was beautiful: her story, her life, and her courage.S loved to walk around the hallway of her unit. I think she felt if she could keep moving, she could stay alive. She was able to take a walk outside a few times while she was inpatient and getting fresh air was very positive to her. These walks not only gave her the ability to widen her environmental space, but they also gave her space to think and consider the difficult situation she was faced with. I accompanied her on one of her walks. It was while we walked next to each other that she was able to finally share with me that she was afraid. She told me that the fear of not getting home, and the fear of death was overwhelming. I find that sometimes people can be vulnerable when they are not feeling interrogated by a medical team staring at them as they lay in a hospital bed. The "normal" activity of taking a walk and being side-by-side humanized the experience and I think S felt that at that moment, she could talk to me human-to-human—like friend-to-friend.When S finally decided to go home on hospice, I collected some legacy project supplies. I went to the hospital... (shrink)

Evangelical Christianity is often thought of as oppressive to women. The #MeToo era, when many women hit a breaking point with rampant sexism, has also reached evangelical communities. Yet more than thirty million women in the United States still identify as evangelical. Why do so many women remain in male-dominated churches that marginalize them, and why do others leave? In each case, what does this cost them? The Struggle to Stay is an intimate and insightful portrait of single women's experiences (...) in evangelical churches. Drawing on unprecedented access to churches in the United States and the United Kingdom, Katie Gaddini relates the struggles of four women, interwoven with her own story of leaving behind a devout faith. She connects these personal narratives with rigorous analysis of Christianity and politics in both countries, and contextualizes them through interviews with more than fifty other evangelical women. Gaddini grapples with the complexities of obedience and resistance for women within a patriarchal religion against the backdrop of a culture war. Her exploration of how women choose to leave or remain in environments that constrain them is nuanced and personal, telling powerful stories of faith, community, isolation, and loss. Bringing together meticulous research and deep empathy, The Struggle to Stay provides a revelatory account of the private burdens that evangelical women bear. (shrink)

The issue of intrinsic values is often a point of disagreement and sometimes confusion between ethicists and economists. Ethicists often criticise economic modes of valuation for failing to take account of intrinsic values. In response, economists have proposed a number of different types of value meant to account for intrinsic values within an economic framework. However, many ethicists have criticised these notions as inadequate substitutes for ethical understandings of intrinsic value. One reason for confusion about this issue is that there (...) are many different meanings of ‘intrinsic value’ within ethics. This chapter identifies those meanings and the differences among them, and considers how well the types of value proposed within economics can capture them. (shrink)

Philosophers tend to focus on the metaphysics of functions: establishing unifying theories employing general criteria for being a function, avoiding spooky backward causation, distinguishing functions from accidents, and correctly representing the functional structure of the world. We show that there is a need for localized, practice-sensitive accounts of the epistemology of functions—accounts that explain the identification, justification, and explanatory applications of function attributions in particular scientific contexts—and that this need is best met alongside a plurality of unifying metaphysical theories of (...) functions. Our argument begins with the observation that unifying theories assume that (i) functions are discovered or justified by criteria for being a function and (ii) criteria identified in a theory are generally applicable across target systems. We then draw on examples from cognitive science and ecology to show that function ascriptions are sometimes presupposed or assigned based on highly contextual epistemic factors not described in unifying metaphysical theories. (shrink)

While the fundamental laws of physics are time-reversal invariant, most macroscopic processes are irreversible. Given that the fundamental laws are taken to underpin all other processes, how can the fundamental time-symmetry be reconciled with the asymmetry manifest elsewhere? In statistical mechanics, progress can be made with this question. What I dub the ‘Zwanzig–Zeh–Wallace framework’ can be used to construct the irreversible equations of SM from the underlying microdynamics. Yet this framework uses coarse-graining, a procedure that has faced much criticism. I (...) focus on two objections in the literature: claims that coarse-graining makes time-asymmetry ‘illusory’ and ‘anthropocentric’. I argue that these objections arise from an unsatisfactory justification of coarse-graining prevalent in the literature, rather than from coarse-graining itself. This justification relies on the idea of measurement imprecision. By considering the role that abstraction and autonomy play, I provide an alternative justification and offer replies to the illusory and anthropocentric objections. Finally, I consider the broader consequences of this alternative justification: the connection to debates about inter-theoretic reduction and the implication that the time-asymmetry in SM is weakly emergent. 1Introduction 1.1Prospectus2The Zwanzig–Zeh–Wallace Framework3Why Does This Method Work? 3.1The special conditions account3.2When is a density forwards-compatible?4Anthropocentrism and Illusion: Two Objections 4.1The two objections in more detail4.2Against the justification by measurement imprecision5An Alternative Justification 5.1Abstraction and autonomy5.2An illustration: the Game of Life6Reply to Illusory7Reply to Anthropocentric8The Wider Landscape: Concluding Remarks 8.1Inter-theoretic relations8.2The nature of irreversibility. (shrink)

Azul y no tan rosa was the first Venezuelan film to win the Goya for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film. It was also the first Venezuelan film to feature a kiss between two men, as well as an openly transgender character. At the heart of the film is a scene which cross-cuts between transsexual Delirio performing the 1980s Venezuelan pop hit ‘No soy una señora’ and a vicious homophobic attack. This scene exemplifies the film’s preoccupation with the performance of gender, (...) its denunciation of machista violence, and its call for acceptance of difference. (shrink)

Let's learn about the things all around us, with this fun, bright book of first concepts.

This study identified and described ethical problems encountered by physiotherapists in their practice and physiotherapists’ moral sensitivity in ethical situations. A questionnaire-based survey was constructed to identify ethical problems, and the Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire Revised version was used to measure moral sensitivity. Physiotherapists (n = 116) working in public health services responded to the questionnaire. Based on the results, most of the physiotherapists encounter ethical problems weekly. They concern mainly financial considerations, equality and justice, professionalism, unethical conduct of physiotherapists or (...) other professions and patients’ self-determination. The dimension of moral strength was emphasised in physiotherapists’ self-evaluations of their moral sensitivity. As a conclusion, ethical problems do occur not only at individual level but also at organisational and society level. Physiotherapists seem to have moral strength for speaking on behalf of the patient. Scarce resources make them feel insufficient but much could still be done to provide quality care in co-operation with other health-care professionals. (shrink)