The Promethean background As the scientific rationality of Western civilization began to bear its full fruit, it became increasingly conscious of its ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PORTIA'S SUITORS by Richard Kuhns and Barbara Tovey I am always inclined to believe that Shakespeare has more allusions to particular facts and persons than his readers commonly suppose. —Samuel Johnson, "Merchant of Venice," Notes on Shakespeare's Plays. 66f\ver-name them," Portia says to Nerissa, "and as thou namest V^/them, I will describe them, and according to my description level at my affection." This passage in TL· Merchant of (...) Venice (Act I, Scene ii), where Portia describes her suitors, presents certain problems.1 To our knowledge interpreters have not addressed them. In the first place, the lengthy description ofthe discarded suitors serves no apparent function. The suitors play no role whatsoever in the subsequent development of the drama, and the protracted account of their failings retards rather than advances the action of the play. To be sure, Shakespeare wanted die audience to be aware that Portia had many suitors of high rank and from many different countries, but it was scarcely necessary for him to go to such lengths to make the point. In the second place, the denigration of the previous suitors in this scene does not accord with the account ofthem given by Bassanio when talking to Antonio in the first act: Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth, For the four winds blow in from every coast Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks 325 326Philosophy and Literature Hang on her temples like a golden fleece, Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strond, And many Jasons come in quest of her. (Li. 167-72) The suitors as described by Portia hardly deserve to be called "renowned," or to be referred to as "Jasons." The belittling of his competitors in this scene also has the undesirable effect of trivializing Bassanio 's achievement in Act III. Thirdly, there is something decidedly odd about the sort of failings attributed to the suitors by Portia. Had he so wished, Shakespeare could have utilized this passage to present a sort of catalogue of human frailties. One suitor might have been a representative of pride, another of avarice, another of envy, etc. But Shakespeare does nothing of the sort. With the exception of the German, who is a drunkard, the defects of the suitors can hardly be considered major vices. The Neapolitan Prince talks too much about his horse, the County Palatine frowns excessively, the French lord is an imitator of the others, the English baron is "oddly suited," and so on. Yet Shakespeare dwells at considerable length upon these more or less trivial failings. Now it may be suggested that Shakespeare, who is certainly deeply interested in national differences of character and behavior, may have inserted this discussion of the suitors into the play in order to provide himself with an opportunity for analysis of idiosyncratic national traits. The answer to this objection is simple. The characteristics ascribed to the suitors do not represent genuine or interesting national differences any more than they stand for major human vices. Is it true, as under this hypothesis Shakespeare would seem to be suggesting, that Neapolitans are fonder of horses than most other folk? Or that Frenchmen are particularly prone to imitating others? Or that Germans are uniquely predisposed to alcoholism? If not, we must admit that the discussion of the discarded suitors represents a puzzling and as yet unexplained digression. Commenting upon this scene, Samuel Johnson made a suggestion that we think merits serious consideration. Might it be the case that the suitors represent actual persons, whose descriptions give clues to their real identities? It is our suggestion that the six suitors make up a company of the most gifted, influential, and to Shakespeare—we suspect—the most interesting writers of the tradition in which he worked. These are the writers from whom he derived inspiration and plots. The question may Richard Kuhns and Barbara Tovey327 well be raised, as to why, if this is so, the suitors are depicted in such derogatory terms. We suggest that one very potent way in which to express the deepest gratitude and admiration is by means of a loving insult. This technique ofexpressing affection and indebtedness to one's literary mentors... (shrink)

This book places the contribution of psychoanalysis to the understanding of art within a philosophical framework and seeks to show by argument and example the potential and unrealized power of psychoanalytic theory for a philosophy of art and culture.

In this creative and engaging reading, Richard Kuhns explores the ways in which _Decameron's_sexual themes lead into philosophical inquiry, moral argument, and aesthetic and literary criticism. As he reveals the stories' many philosophical insights and literary pleasures, Kuhns also examines _Decameron_in the context of the nature of storytelling, its relationship to other classic works of literature, and the culture of trecento Italy. Stories and storytelling are to be interpreted in terms of a wider cultural context that includes masks, (...) metamorphosis, mythic themes, and character analysis, all of which Boccaccio explores with wit and subtlety. As a storyteller, Boccaccio represents himself as literary pimp, conceiving the relationship between storyteller and audience in sexual terms within a tradition that goes back as far as Socrates' conversations with the young Athenians. As a whole, Boccaccio's great collection of stories creates a trenchant criticism of the ideas that dominated his social and cultural world. Addressed as it is to women who were denied opportunities for education, the author's stories create a university of wise and culturally observant texts. He teaches that comic, religious, sexual, and artistic themes can be seen to function as metaphors for hidden and often dangerous unorthodox thoughts. Kuhns suggests that _Decameron_is one of the first self-conscious creations of what we today call "a total work of art." Throughout the stories, Boccaccio creates a detailed picture of the Florentine trecento cultural world. Giotto, Buffalmacco, and other great painters of Boccaccio's time appear in the stories. Their works and the paintings that surround the characters as they prepare to leave the plague-ridden city, with their representations of Dante, Aquinas, and other thinkers, are essential to understanding the ways the stories work with other works of art and illuminate and enlarge interpretations of Boccaccio's book. (shrink)

Like every other venerable speculation, philosophy has its myths and its great myth-makers. One of the greatest—maker of myths for all contemporary thought—was Kant. Should some future Lévi-Strauss classify this tradition, he will find that philosophical myths, like tribal lore of primitive peoples, suffer thematic variation and evolution, for myths relate our true business in this world, and therefore are essential for all thought about ourselves.

Bringing together important writings not easily available elsewhere, this volume provides a convenient and stimulating overview of recent work in the philosophy of science. The contributors include Paul Feyerabend, Ian Hacking, T.S. Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Laurens Laudan, Karl Popper, Hilary Putnam, and Dudley Shapere. In addition, Hacking provides an introductory essay and a selective bibliography.

This anthology is remarkable not only for the selections themselves, among which the Schelling and the Heidegger essays were translated especially for this volume, but also for the editors' general introduction and the introductory essays for each selection, which make this volume an invaluable aid to the study of the powerful, recurrent ideas concerning art, beauty, critical method, and the nature of representation. Because this collection makes clear the ways in which the philosophy of art relates to and is part (...) of general philosophical positions, it will be an essential sourcebook to students of philosophy, art history, and literary criticism. (shrink)

Predatory grooming is a form of abuse most familiar from high-profile cases of sexual misconduct, for example, the Nassar case at Michigan State. Predatory groomers target individuals in a systematic effort to lead them into relationships in which they are vulnerable to exploitation. This is an example of a broader form of epistemic misconduct that Leydon-Hardy describes as epistemic infringement, where this involves the contravention of social and epistemic norms in a way that undermines our epistemic agency. In this chapter, (...) Leydon-Hardy looks at the distinctive epistemic harm caused by epistemic infringement. She argues that this harm cannot be understood simply as the victim’s having a false belief, or even as her being alienated from her belief-forming mechanisms. A deeper understanding of the harm caused by infringement shows that it stems from damage to one’s epistemic agency, and indeed, to one’s personhood. (shrink)

How do technically-skilled women negotiate the male-dominated environments of technology firms? This article draws upon interviews with female programmers, technical writers, and engineers of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual orientations employed in the San Francisco tech industry. Using intersectional analysis, this study finds that racially dominant women, who identified as LGBTQ and presented as gender-fluid, reported a greater sense of belonging in their workplace. They are perceived as more competent by male colleagues and avoided microaggressions that were routine among conventionally (...) feminine, heterosexual women. We argue that a spectrum of belonging operates in these occupational spaces dominated by men. Although white and Asian women successfully navigated workplace hostilities by distancing themselves from conventional heterosexual femininity, this strategy reinforces inequality regimes that privilege male workers. These findings provide significant theoretical insights about how race, sexuality, and gender interact to reproduce structural inequalities in the new economy. (shrink)

This essay provides an analysis of the role of affectivity in Martin Heidegger's writings from the mid to late 1920s. We begin by situating his account of mood within the context of his project of fundamental ontology in Being and Time. We then discuss the role of Befindlichkeit and Stimmung in his account of human existence, explicate the relationship between the former and the latter, and consider the ways in which the former discloses the world. To give a more vivid (...) and comprehensive picture of Heidegger's account of mood, we focus on the experience of anxiety by articulating both its function within fundamental ontology and, relatedly, its revelatory nature. We conclude by considering the place of emotions in Heidegger's thinking from this period. In a companion essay, ‘Affectivity in Heidegger II: Temporality, Boredom, and Beyond’, we complement our present analysis by revisiting the issue of affectivity in terms of Heidegger's discussion of temporality in Division II of Being and Time. We also expand our present discussion by considering the fundamental mood of boredom and other specific moods that Heidegger considers within his later thinking. (shrink)

This paper reviews the ethical literature on conflicts between health professionals and parents about medical decision-making for children. We present the results of a systematic review which addressed the question ‘when health professionals and parents disagree about the appropriate course of medical treatment for a child, under what circumstances is the health professional ethically justified in overriding the parents’ wishes?’ We identified nine different ethical frameworks that were put forward by their authors as applicable across various ages and clinical scenarios. (...) Each of these frameworks centred on a different key moral concept including harm, constrained parental autonomy, best interests, medically reasonable alternatives, responsible thinking and rationality. (shrink)

Case-based instruction has been regarded by many as a viable alternative to traditional lecture-based education and training. However, little is known about how case-based training techniques impact training effectiveness. This study examined the effects of two such techniques: (a) presentation of alternative outcome scenarios to a case, and (b) conducting a structured outcome evaluation. Consistent with the hypotheses, results indicate that presentation of alternative outcome scenarios reduced knowledge acquisition, reduced sensemaking and ethical decision-making strategy use, and reduced decision ethicality. Conducting (...) a structured outcome evaluation had no impact on these outcomes. Results indicate that those who use case-based instruction should take care to use clear, less complex cases with only a singular outcome if they are seeking these types of outcomes. (shrink)

In “On Avoiding Deep Dementia,” Norman Cantor astutely notes that, for some individuals, the concept of “protracted maintenance during progressive cognitive dysfunction and helplessness is an intolerably degrading prospect.” This cannot be argued with. Cantor's solution, however—that in the wake of a dementia diagnosis, patients should have the option to direct, in advance, instructions for voluntary stopping of eating and drinking should they develop a state of deep dementia—is more ethically challenging than it may first appear.Respect for autonomy is one (...) of the most fundamental principles of bioethics, and it requires that we allow patients with capacity to refuse life‐sustaining treatment, even when that treatment is something as seemingly innocuous as nutrition and hydration. If a capacitated person uses an advance directive to prospectively refuse artificial nutrition or hydration, then that treatment must be withheld if the person develops dementia and loses the ability or willingness to eat. Cantor is incorrect, however, in suggesting that an advance directive can require that nutrition and hydration be withheld from a patient with dementia who actively requests to eat or drink. Regardless of the language in an advance directive, caregivers cannot be compelled to abandon their duty to attend to the person's human dignity, nor can physicians be compelled to sedate a person with moderate or severe dementia because that person continues to be receptive to eating and drinking. (shrink)

The concept of scale is useful in analyzing both the strengths and limitations of community food security programs that attempt to link issues of ecological sustainability with social justice. One scalar issue that is particularly important but under-theorized is the scale of social reproduction, which is often neglected in production-focused studies of globalization. FoodShare Toronto's good food box (GFB) program, engages people in the politics of their everyday lives, empowering them to make connections between consumption patterns and broader political-economic, cultural, (...) and political-ecological issues. Community food security (CFS) projects such as the GFB are currently limited in their scope and reach and have been criticized for their inability to deliver food to a larger segment of marginalized, hungry people. A central dilemma for CFS projects is how to engage the majority of urban consumers who still eat “inside the box” of the industrial food system. We argue that the concept of scale helps clarify how CFS projects must “scale out” to other localities, as well as “scale up” to address structural concerns like state capacity, industrial agriculture, and unequal distribution of wealth. This requires the state and the third sector to recognize the importance of multi-scaled food politics as well as a long-term pedagogical project promoting ecological sustainability, social responsibility, and the pleasures of eating locally. (shrink)

Peter Geach’s distinction between logically predicative and logically attributive adjectives has gained a certain currency in philosophy. For all that, no satisfactory explanation of what an attributive adjective is has yet been provided. We argue that Geach’s discussion suggests two different ways of understanding the notion. According to one, an adjective is attributive just in case predications of it in combination with a noun fail to behave in inferences like a logical conjunction of two separate predications. According to the other, (...) an adjective is attributive just in case it cannot be applied in a truth-value-yielding fashion unless combined with a noun. The latter way of understanding the notion has been largely neglected by Geach’s critics, but we argue that taking account of it shows the misguided nature of some of their objections, and also yields a more satisfactory explanation of attributivity than does the other. (shrink)

Charles Taber and Milton Lodge provide compelling evidence that people's minds may be closed to information that is inconsistent with their prior beliefs. This type of inconsistency has often been termed ?irrational.? However, recent research suggests that being open or closed minded is not an unchanging variable but depends on one's goals, including one's need for closure, which vary from person to person and situation to situation. In this vein, as Taber and Lodge suggest, those who have more political information (...) may, after having been open minded enough to acquire the information, become closed minded by virtue of having acquired it. At the same time, being more open minded to inaccurate information might lead one in the wrong direction; hence, open mindedness does not necessarily enhance the accuracy of one's judgments or the quality of one's decisions. We may need to rethink the concept of an enlightened, well-informed electorate, to the extent that it assumes the unqualified benefits of open mindedness. (shrink)

The precautionary principle states, roughly, that it is better to take precautionary measures now than to deal with serious harms to the environment or human health later on. This paper builds on the work of Neil A. Manson in order to show that the precautionary principle, in all of its forms, is fraught with vagueness and ambiguity. We examine the version of the precautionary principle that was formulated at the Wingspread Conference sponsored by the Science and Environmental Health Network in (...) 1998. That version fails to indicate who must bear the cost of precaution; what constitutes a threat of harm; how much precaution is too much; and what should be done when environmental concerns and concern for human health pull in different directions. Whether this vagueness is a strength or weakness of the principle depends on what purpose(s) the precautionary principle is supposed to serve. (shrink)

A number of anthropologists have argued that religious concepts are minimally counterintuitive and that this gives them mnemic advantages. This paper addresses the question of why people have the memory architecture that results in such concepts being more memorable than other types of concepts by pointing out the benefits of a memory structure that leads to better recall for minimally counterintuitive concepts and by showing how such benefits emerge in the real‐time processing of comprehending narratives such as folk tales. This (...) model suggests that memorability is not an inherent property of a concept; rather it is a property of the concept, the context in which the concept is presented, and the background knowledge that the comprehendor possesses about the concept. The model predicts how memorability of a concept should change if the context containing the concept were changed. The paper also presents the results of experiments carried out to test these predictions. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is often credited as having offered one of the most thorough phenomenological investigations of the nature of boredom. In his 1929–1930 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, he goes to great lengths to distinguish between three different types of boredom and to explicate their respective characters. Within the context of his discussion of one of these types of boredom, profound boredom [tiefe Langweile], Heidegger opposes much of the philosophical and literary tradition on boredom insofar (...) as he articulates how the experience of boredom can be existentially beneficial to us. In this chapter, we undertake a study of the nature of profound boredom with the aim of investigating its place within contemporary psychological and philosophical research on boredom. Although boredom used to be a neglected emotional experience, it is no more. Boredom’s causal antecedents, effects, experiential profile, and neurophysiological correlates have become topics of active study; as a consequence, a proliferation of claims and findings about boredom has ensued. Such a situation provides an opportunity to scrutinize Heidegger’s claims and to try to understand them both on their own terms and in light of our contemporary understanding of boredom. (shrink)

This article describes the development of a computerized version of a measure of ethical sensitivity to racial and gender intolerance, the Racial Ethical Sensitivity Test. The REST was based on James Rest's 4-component model of moral development and the professional codes of ethics from school-based professions. The new version, Racial and Ethical Sensitivity Test-Compact Disk, consists of 5 videotaped scenarios followed by an interactive "interview" presented on compact discs. Data from a study with 58 students provides initial validation of the (...) REST-CD. Ethical sensitivity to racial and gender intolerance in schools, as measured by the REST-CD, was moderately related to attitudes toward racial and gender equity issues in society as measured by the Quick Discrimination Index. The results provide evidence for both interrater and internal reliability of the REST-CD scores. This study also tests the hypothesized relationship between REST-CD scores and previous multicultural and ethics course work. Students with multicultural and ethics course experience have scored significantly higher on the REST-CD than students without course work. The paper-and-pencil tests are not significantly related to previous ethics/multicultural course work. In this article, we discuss the implications of the results and directions for future research. (shrink)

The project we highlight in this article stems from our philosophical work on moral disagreements that appear to be—and sometimes are—intractable. Deliberative democratic theorists tout the merits of dialogue as an effective way to bridge differences of values and opinion, ideally resulting in agreement, or perhaps more often resulting in greater mutual understanding. Could dialogue mitigate disagreements about a controversial education policy such as affirmative action? Could it foster greater understanding? We conceived of a project that would simultaneously fulfill two (...) goals that we had as philosophers, education researchers, and aspiring public intellectuals. First, it would allow us to use philosophy in research, grounding our mixed methods research in a philosophically informed framework. The tools and analytic techniques that are particular to philosophers felt uniquely suited for an empirical study concerning political theory. Second, we aimed to use philosophy in the community. We were able to put our own expertise in philosophy and race-conscious education policy to good use by purposefully creating opportunities for diverse community members in our larger metropolitan area to engage in dialogue and deliberation with each other over the issue of affirmative action. (shrink)

The Survey of Organizational Research Climate (SORC) is a validated tool to facilitate promotion of research integrity and research best practices. This work uses the SORC to assess shared and individual perceptions of the research climate in universities and academic departments and relate these perceptions to desirable and undesirable research practices. An anonymous web- and mail-based survey was administered to randomly selected biomedical and social science faculty and postdoctoral fellows in the United States. Respondents reported their perceptions of the research (...) climates at their universities and primary departments, and the frequency with which they engaged in desirable and undesirable research practices. More positive individual perceptions of the research climate in one’s university or department were associated with higher likelihoods of desirable, and lower likelihoods of undesirable, research practices. Shared perceptions of the research climate tended to be similarly predictive of both desirable and undesirable research practices as individuals’ deviations from these shared perceptions. Study results supported the central prediction that more positive SORC-measured perceptions of the research climate were associated with more positive reports of research practices. There were differences with respect to whether shared or individual climate perceptions were related to desirable or undesirable practices but the general pattern of results provide empirical evidence that the SORC is predictive of self-reported research behavior. (shrink)

Business and society researchers, as well as practitioners, have been critiqued for ignoring those with less voice and power often referred to as “fringe stakeholders.” Existing methods used in B&S research often fail to address issues of meaningful participation, voice and power, especially in developing countries. In this article, we stress the utility of visual participatory research methods in B&S research to fill this gap. Through a case study on engaging Ghanaian cocoa farmers on gender inequality issues, we explore how (...) VPR methods may be used by researchers to achieve more inclusive, and thus more credible, stakeholder research that can improve decision making within businesses. Furthermore, we argue that ingrained social and environmental problems tackled by B&S research and the unique context in which they occur may open up new opportunities to develop participatory visual methods for social change. (shrink)