In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I Listen Like Nausicaa to NPR KATIE HARTSOCK “Kwame wants to show me the Pru River... Young girls and women wash clothes along the banks.” —“River Blindness Robbed Him of His Sight But Not His Independence,” Morning Edition As if we stood with no one between us, not your translator or my handmaidens. Why should a young thing like me want a man oceans older, trailing a (...) goddess who gussies him up to take the years off. I’ll go online to read the radio story, posted with pictures of your cloudy face. “The trick,” you say, “to gardening blind is planting in straight lines.” Your hands in dirt, knowing by feel the cardinal directions, work alone. I’m rinsing the silks of my soaped-up trousseau for an abstract husband, in the river you reel your fish from, waters that breed the black fly whose parasitic bite pricked you, quick as a paper cut from a book of murder ballads, before you reached the age to marry. I could have brought cloths, those last days you could see, when you saw worms swim across your eyes, to swathe your itching, long ago, beyond all laws, before a state-mandated pill ended the disease. “I sleep and wake on my own.” But that is just what a king would say, washed up naked at my feet arion 26.3 winter 2019 and hiding histories of desire with a leaf. Our separate selves stay separate. No one suspects a thing as we walk, at a distance I decide, away from the river that rose to our thighs with its necessities, like laundry or longing, and its cataracts of other lives, disrobing. 34 i listen like nausicaa to npr... (shrink)

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.

For over twenty years Nancy Hartsock has been a powerful voice in the effort to forge a feminism sophisticated and strong enough to make a difference in the real world of powerful political and economic forces. This volume collects her most important writings, offering her current thinking about this period in the development of feminist political economy and presenting an important new paper, “The Feminist Standpoint Revisited.”Central themes recur throughout the volume: in particular, the relationships between theory and activism, (...) between feminism and Marxism, and between postmodernism and politics. Readers will appreciate Hartsock’s account of how so much of her theoretical work grew directly out of the demands of the activist life. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited is an important record and a timely reevaluation of the development of feminist thought, as well as a contribution to current work. It will be a valuable resource for feminist theorists in a wide variety of disciplines. (shrink)

This essay provides an overview of the field of environmental ethics. I sketch the major debates in the field from its inception in the 1970s to today, explaining both the central tenets of the schools of thought within the field and the arguments that have been given for and against them. I describe the main trends within the field as a whole and review some of the criticisms that have been offered of prevailing views.

: Gail Mason's Spectacle of Violence undertakes an important project in confronting a number of serious questions about definitions of violence and power, and about the nature of experience, subjectivity, and mind/body dualisms. Hartsock's comments on the book focus on issues of experience, embodiment, and standpoint theories.

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...

A few years ago, it was common for philosophers to begin inquiry into hope by noting that the subject has received little attention in the philosophical literature. But our ability to make this claim is quickly coming to an end; hope has been earning increasing recognition in the discipline, with philosophers exploring important questions related to the nature of hope, what makes hope rational, and how hope is connected to human wellbeing and agency. Despite this recent interest, however, there remains (...) very little discussion of the social and political dimensions of hope. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the importance of a feminist perspective in bringing these dimensions into fuller view. I argue that feminist insights into the relational nature of the self, which call attention to where selves are socially situated in relation to others, enable a richer understanding of the nature and value of hope. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that exposure to nature may reduce delay discounting and thereby facilitate healthier dietary intake. This pre-registered study examined the impact of online exposure to images of natural scenes on delay discounting and food preferences. It was predicted that exposure to images of natural scenes would be associated with: lower delay discounting; higher desirability for fruits and vegetables ; and delay discounting would mediate the effect of nature-image exposure on food desirability. Adult participants were recruited to an online (...) between-subjects experiment in which they viewed a timed sequence of six images either showing natural landscape scenes or urban scenes. They then completed measures of mood, delay discounting and rated their momentary desire to eat four fruits and vegetables, and four energy-dense foods. There was no statistically significant effect of experimental condition on delay discounting or food desirability. Bayes factors supported the null hypothesis for discounting, and energy-dense food desirability, but provided no strong evidence for either hypothesis for F&V desirability. These findings indicate that brief online exposure to images of nature does not affect momentary impulsivity or energy-dense food preference, whereas for preference for less-energy dense foods, the evidence was inconclusive. (shrink)

Extant accounts of exploitation typically focus on either an exchange or interaction between persons, or on exploitative systems (i.e., global capitalism). We propose a new account of exploitation that focuses instead on the benefits an exploiter enjoys which are had at the expense of another, the exploited party. This account is developed by considering the benefits enjoyed by consumers (e.g., inexpensive sweatshop-made goods) and the manner in which those benefits are produced (e.g., the loss of dignity suffered by sweatshop workers). (...) On our account, an exploitative relationship need not involve any interaction or exchange between exploiter and exploited. Neither is exploitation a property of systems or institutions. Instead, we argue that a consumer who buys a shirt produced under near slave-like conditions engages in a moral wrong by exploiting the worker who made it even though the two may be far-removed in space and time. (shrink)

It’s common in this world, for diagnoses to be confused. This grey, oblique world is the “World of Brain Tumors” from which these narratives are written, a world I entered when a tangerine–sized tumor was found on my temporal lobe. Each narrative illustrates this world in which everything is covered in a thick film rendering things once obvious, now unknown. Parents are asked to choose treatment plans for their children, plans that will inevitably alter their child’s quality of life but (...) in ways they cannot determine or even imagine. Parents are asked to play God. Most of the parents who share their stories in this collection, parents of PBT (pediatric brain tumor) patients have to walk the line of trying to not disrupt their relationships with their physicians, wanting the best for their child, and facing the decision to follow their gut or go with advised treatment plans. (shrink)

The purpose of this qualitative study is to answer calls to examine social media, ethical engagement, and marginalized publics. Findings suggest that strategic communication and public relations pr...

In this paper we describe an approach to practical reasoning, reasoning about what it is best for a particular agent to do in a given situation, based on presumptive justifications of action through the instantiation of an argument scheme, which is then subject to examination through a series of critical questions. We identify three particular aspects of practical reasoning which distinguish it from theoretical reasoning. We next provide an argument scheme and an associated set of critical questions which is able (...) to capture these features. In order that both the argument scheme and the critical questions can be given precise interpretations we use the semantic structure of an Action-Based Alternating Transition System as the basis for their definition. We then work through a detailed example to show how this approach to practical reasoning can be applied to a problem solving situation, and briefly describe some other previous applications of the general approach. In a second example we relate our account to the social laws paradigm for co-ordinating multi-agent systems. The contribution of the paper is to provide firm foundations for an approach to practical reasoning based on presumptive argument in terms of a well-known model for representing the effects of actions of a group of agents. (shrink)

_The Business of Being Made_ is the first book to critically analyze assisted reproductive technologies from a transdisciplinary perspective integrating psychoanalytic and cultural theories. It is a ground-breaking collection exploring ARTs through diverse methods including interview research, clinical case studies, psychoanalytic based ethnography, and memoir. Gathering clinicians and researchers who specialize in this area, this book engages current research in psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and debates in feminist, queer and cultural theory about affect, temporality, and bodies. With psychoanalysis as its (...) fulcrum, _The Business of Being Made_ explores the social constructions and personal experiences of ARTs. Katie Gentile frames the cultural context, exploring the ways ARTs have become a complex form of playing with time, attempting to manufacture a hopeful future in the midst of growing global uncertainty. The contributors then present a range of varied experiences related to ARTs, including: Interviews with women and men undergoing ARTs; A psychoanalytic memoir of male infertility; Clinical research and work with transgender, gay and lesbian patients creating new Oedipal constellations, the experiences of LBGTQ people within the medical system and the variety of families that emerge; Research on the experiences of egg donors and a corresponding clinical case study of successful egg donation; The experiences of ongoing failure which is the often unacknowledged for ART procedures; How and when people choose to stop using ARTs; A psychoanalytic ethnography of a neonatal intensive care unit populated in part with the babies created through these technologies and their parents, haggard and in shock after years of failed attempts. Full of original material, _The Business of Being Made_ conveys the ambivalence of these technologies without simplifying their complicated consequences for the bodies of individuals, the family, cultures, and our planet. This book will be relevant to clinicians, medical and psychological personnel working in assisted reproductive technologies and infertility, as well as academics working in the fields of sociology, literature, queer and feminist theories and at the intersections of cultural, critical and psychoanalytic theories. (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 Bayesian maxim for rational learning could be described as conservative change from one probabilistic belief or credence function to another in response to newinformation. Roughly: ‘Hold fixed any credences that are not directly affected by the learning experience.’ This is precisely articulated for the case when we learn that some proposition that we had previously entertained is indeed true (the rule of conditionalisation). But can this conservative-change maxim be extended to revising one’s credences in response to entertaining propositions or (...) concepts of which one was previously unaware? The economists Karni and Vierø (2013, 2015) make a proposal in this spirit. Philosophers have adopted effectively the same rule: revision in response to growing awareness should not affect the relative probabilities of propositions in one’s ‘old’ epistemic state. The rule is compelling, but only under the assumptions that its advocates introduce. It is not a general requirement of rationality, or so we argue. We provide informal counterexamples. And we show that, when awareness grows, the boundary between one’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ epistemic commitments is blurred. Accordingly, there is no general notion of conservative change in this setting. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotional events tend to be remembered better than neutral events, but emotional states and stimuli may also interfere with cognitive processes that underlie memory performance. The current study investigated the effects of emotional content on working memory capacity, which involves both short term storage and executive attention control. We tested competing hypotheses in a preregistered experiment. The emotional enhancement hypothesis predicts that emotional stimuli attract attention and additional processing resources relative to neutral stimuli, thereby making it easier to encode and (...) store emotional information in WMC. The emotional impairment hypothesis, by contrast, predicts that emotional stimuli interfere with attention control and the active maintenance of information in working memory. Participants completed a common measure of WMC (the operation span task; Turner, M. L., & Engle, R. W. [1989]. Is working memory capacity task dependent? Journal of Memory and Language, 28,... (shrink)

Recent critics (Andrew Light, Bryan Norton, Anthony Weston, and Bruce Morito, among others) have argued that we should give up talk of intrinsic value in general and that of nature in particular. While earlier theorists might have overestimated the importance of intrinsic value, these recent critics underestimate its importance. Claims about a thing’s intrinsic value are claims about the distinctive way in which we have reason to care about that thing. If we understand intrinsic value in this manner, we can (...) capture the core claims that environmentalists want to make about nature while avoiding the worries raised by contemporary critics. Since the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value plays a critical role in our understanding of the different ways that we do and should care about things, moral psychology, ethical theory in general, and environmental ethics in particular shouldn’t give up on the concept of intrinsic value. (shrink)

There are at least two plausible generalisations of subjective expected utility (SEU) theory: cumulative prospect theory (which relaxes the independence axiom) and Levi’s decision theory (which relaxes at least ordering). These theories call for a re-assessment of the minimal requirements of rational choice. Here, I consider how an analysis of sequential decision making contributes to this assessment. I criticise Hammond’s (Economica 44(176):337–350, 1977; Econ Philos 4:292–297, 1988a; Risk, decision and rationality, 1988b; Theory Decis 25:25–78, 1988c) ‘consequentialist’ argument for the SEU (...) preference axioms, but go on to formulate a related diachronic-Dutch-book-style’ argument that better achieves Hammond’s aims. Some deny the importance of Dutch-book sure losses, however, in which case, Seidenfeld’s (Econ Philos 4:267–290, 1988a) argument that distinguishes between theories that relax independence and those that relax ordering is relevant. I unravel Seidenfeld’s argument in light of the various criticisms of it and show that the crux of the argument is somewhat different and much more persuasive than what others have taken it to be; the critical issue is the modelling of future choices between ‘indifferent’ decision-tree branches in the sequential setting. Finally, I consider how Seidenfeld’s conclusions might nonetheless be resisted. (shrink)

Renting is a common property relation, and it is becoming more common. In spite of this, there is little treatment of renting in political philosophy. In this paper, I remedy this neglect by offering a defence of renting personal goods such as housing, clothing, and means of transport. I argue that we should want each person to rent a much greater proportion of their personal goods than at present they typically do. I offer two arguments for this claim: “The Community (...) Argument” and “The Mitigation Argument.”. (shrink)

The niche has been central to ecology for most of the discipline’s history, yet there have been few attempts by philosophers to work out the ontology of the niche. A challenge is that there is a plurality of seemingly inconsistent definitions of the niche in ecology. This paper characterizes the population-level ecological niche by distinguishing among niche concepts, niche models, and the niche as a phenomenon. I argue that 'niche concepts' should be interpreted as theoretical frameworks or modelling strategies. I (...) also argue that there is a unified niche phenomenon underlying the seemingly heterogeneous models and definitions. The plurality of niche concepts in ecology should be seen as an expected consequence of the nature of modelling complex systems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett BourbonKatie PelkeyEveryday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett Bourbon; 200 pp. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.In Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics, Brett Bourbon probes the nature of poetry and its centrality in our everyday lives, working from the ordinary-language philosophical framework associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, W. V. O. Quine, and Stanley Cavell. Bourbon's ideas contribute new (...) dimensions to the elusive concept of poetry and pivots the reader's attention inward: how can we recognize poetry in our day-to-day and why should we? At sentence level, his claims are clear and compelling to readers across disciplines with varying knowledge of philosophy and poetry. This book is thus addressed to "poets, literary scholars, philosophers, and students of religion, and anyone who cares about the ethics of everyday life, about the surprises that punctuate and give our lives form" (p. ix).Poems themselves are such "events of form," Bourbon emphasizes, which live among us and need not be constituted by words. Wordless poems can be uncovered and embraced through the development of a "poetic vulnerability" to ordinary experiences that are not necessarily wedded to one's aesthetic reaction. Bourbon designates the alphabet as one such example of what he calls a "primal everyday poem"; the alphabet is wordless and consists of a patterned order whose mere form does not encompass its meaning. The ordinary expression "I love you" also falls under this classification; the phrase is a performative poem whose intricate connotation is simplified by common language, yet is not the equivalent of its mere words. Bourbon asserts that, like the phrase "I love you," poems of the everyday cannot be reduced to mere language, conditions, or creative modes.Of the ineffable nature of poetry, Bourbon claims, "Poetry, like death, is that which we can only know by analogy—by examples—but it has a scope beyond all our examples" (p. 108). In terms of examples, he draws from poignant personal experiences to reinforce his arguments and provide insight into his keen sensibility. In chapter 1 ("Poems of the Everyday"), Bourbon recounts his own dismissal as a young boy of poetry's worthiness until one day while watching an old film, he in fact was struck by the phrase "I love you." This ordinary phrase allowed him to reconsider the parameters of what constitutes poetry and acknowledge the dichotomy of the phrase's formal power constituted by trivial symbols.Chapter 4 ("Epithalamion") is also rooted in personal experience. Bourbon opens with the flat assertion, "I have never liked weddings" (p. 43), but he notes a difference between a "marriage of forms" and "marriage of intimacy and stability": his distaste is for the former. He believes that a successful marriage can become a poem of the everyday—an event of power and "linguistic surrogacy"—where the event itself fosters more meaning than the words alone [End Page 475] can carry. Marriage can be a poem of discovery that arises from the action of learning what it means to love. But in the objects of the wedding and all its trite, heart-shaped symbols, Bourbon remarks, no poems are to be found.Bourbon dedicates chapter 5 ("Is a Poem the Same as Its Words?") to his claim that what a poem is cannot be bound by its words entirely or by meaning alone. If one finds each line of a poem intelligible, that does not indicate that the poem's meaning is consequentially understood. Conversely, a reader may not know a poem's meaning with complete certainty; what is said may not illuminate what is meant. In Bourbon's explanation of the sentence as a model for how particular words construct a poem, he says that one must determine how such a sentence-poem would be meaningful through our own reading. He claims that a poem is more than its words and cannot be simplified into sets of sentences or phrases. "A poem, if it is a sentence, is always more than that sentence; otherwise, a poem would not be a poem but a sentence" (p. 67).Bourbon's latest publication challenges traditional, long... (shrink)

The neuroscience revolution has revived interpretations of religious experiences as wholly dependent on biological conditions. William James cautioned against allowing such neurological reductionism to overwhelm other useful perspectives. Contemporary psychologists of religion have raised similar cautions, but have failed to engage James as a full conversation partner. In this article, we present a contemporary, applied version of James's perspective. We clarify the problem by reviewing specific James-like contemporary concerns about reductionism in the neuropsychological study of religion. Then, most centrally, we (...) employ three of James's conceptual tools—pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism—to moderate contemporary reductionism. Finally, we point to a constructive approach through which neuroscientists might collaborate with scholars in the humanities and psychosocial sciences, which is consistent with our conclusion that it is often no longer fruitful to separate neurobiological studies from studies that are psychosocial or sociocultural. (shrink)

In Western Kenya, smallholder dairy production is becoming incrementally commercialized through the commodification and sale of milk through formal market channels. While commercialization is often construed as a way to boost rural livelihoods through increased income from milk, emerging evidence suggests that married women are not directly benefiting from formal milk market participation. This critical issue of gender power imbalance has been framed by development interventions in economic efficiency and social justice perspectives, but thus far interventions in the sector have (...) not addressed how underlying social-market mechanisms embedded in gendered ideology influence smallholder engagement in dairy commercialization. Drawing on feminist theories of power and social embeddedness, this study investigates how gendered power relationships materialize and influence formal milk marketing engagement and practices in Western Kenya. Facilitated discussion groups with smallholder farmers revealed the gendered ideologies and norms that ascribe masculinized meaning to cattle, milk, and commercial enterprise. Key informant interviews with commercial dairy management and farmers were used to identify current practices for increasing women’s formal market participation—namely, direct payments to women for milk deliveries. Findings from this study indicate that cattle and formal dairy market participation are imbued with gendered meaning that create legitimacy around men’s privilege over dairy proceeds. Interventions in the sector aimed at addressing gender power imbalances must acknowledge this dynamic, and accept the social trade-offs and gendered costs of dairy commercialization. (shrink)

In these lines Ovid introduces Althaea's debate whether or not to kill her son Meleager by burning the brand which was his life, because he had killed her two brothers during the Calydonian boar hunt. A. S. Hollis says of line 476 that it contains ‘a forced and almost pointless word-play’. If sanguis is taken in its primary meaning, ‘blood’, this condemnation is quite justified. However, if one takes into account a secondary sense, the word-play acquires more strength. This sense (...) is that of ‘offspring’ or ‘descendant’. Examples of this usage include Virgil, Aeneid 6.835 ‘sanguis meus’ , Horace, Carmen Saeculare 50 ‘clarus Anchisae Venerisque sanguis’ , Odes 3.27.65 ‘regius sanguis’ , and, in the Metamorphoses itself ‘pro…meo veni supplex tibi, Iuppiter, …sanguine’. It may well be that Ovid was intending implications of both meanings in his choice of the word. (shrink)

This article takes Catherine Malabou’s provocative insistence on an alliance between plasticity and feminism to initiate an exploration of gestation and its representation in the context of the postgenomic age. I argue that Malabou’s attention to epigenetic schemas of life and becoming can inform and, in turn, be enriched by feminist film-philosophy which locates the maternal as an alternative schema of embodied subjectivity – simultaneously displacing essentialising over-reliance on gender/sex binaries without entirely metaphorising or abstracting the material processes which subtend (...) bodies and their openness to difference. Drawing on recent feminist scholarship, including Ann Carruthers’s Fertile Visions and Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now, I turn to Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution (2015) in order to approach gestational bodies as a central site for both the violent subjugation of embodied life and a feminist ethics and aesthetics of affective relationality. Part science-fiction, fairy-tale and body horror, Hadžihalilović’s film responds to contemporary bio-genetic innovations: Malabou’s elaboration of the “phylogenetic remains” and “cellular potentials” that epigenetic plasticity reactivates guides my reading of its seething maternal waters, multiply directed gestational bodies and various forms of plastic co-becoming. As well as being exemplary of new epigenetic imaginaries, Hadžihalilović’s complex foetal/fertile visions illuminate how feminist-philosophical-artistic practices may elaborate an epigenet(h)ics of life – informed by past forms, present configurations, and open to future bio-possibilities. (shrink)

Eduard Pernkopf’s Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy is a four-volume anatomical atlas published between 1937 and 1963, and it is generally believed to be the most comprehensive, detailed, and accurate anatomy textbook ever created. However, a 1997 investigation into “Pernkopf’s Atlas,” raised troubling questions regarding the author’s connection to the Nazi regime and the still unresolved issue of whether its illustrations relied on Jewish or other political prisoners, including those executed in Nazi concentration camps. Following this investigation, the (...) book was removed from both anatomy classrooms and library bookshelves. A debate has ensued over the book’s continued use, and justification for its use has focused on two issues: there is no definitive proof the book includes illustrations of concentration camp prisoners or Jewish individuals in particular, and there is no contemporary equivalent to this text. However, both points fail to address the central importance of the book, not simply as part of anatomy instruction, but also as a comprehensive historical narrative with important ethical implications. Having encountered a first edition copy, these authors were given a unique opportunity to engage with the text through the respective humanities lenses of history, ethics, and narrative. In doing so, an instructive and profound irony has surfaced: Nazis, including Pernkopf, viewed specific groups of people as less than human, giving rise to unthinkable atrocities perpetuated against them. However, these same individuals became the sources for the creation of the Atlas, which served as the model for primary instruction on the human form for more than half of the twentieth century. In this article, we recount the difficult and somewhat opaque provenance of this book, engage the ethical questions surrounding both its creation and its use, and ultimately propose a pedagogical methodology for its continued use in medical education. (shrink)

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

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)