In this essay, I analyze pregnancy loss from a feminist phenomenological perspective. I draw upon relational accounts of personhood wherein a person's status and identity are formed through a lived history and the activity of “calling into personhood” a being a woman may seek to know or become. I draw upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who advances a feminist phenomenology that grounds the status and identity of women within embodied situations. Her important work sheds light on the varied (...) perceptions and processes that inform experiences of pregnancy and pregnancy loss. (shrink)

Natsume S seki's novel Kokoro (1914) offers an indictment of the loneliness and isolation of a modernized Japan, a Japan in which people ‘feel cut off from every other living thing’. In this essay, I argue that Plato and S seki offer analogous critiques of an eradicated honor culture; an eradication that is rooted in the political exchange of honorific autonomy for honorific heteronomy. Moreover, I suggest that the deprecation and subsequent demise of the Japanese samurai and Greek warrior—individuals for (...) whom self-worth, dignity, and status are rooted in reputation and social regard—exemplify the dramatic cultural shift toward heteronomy. My reading aims to shed light on the rich philosophical connections between seemingly disparate cultures and texts through an exposition and exegesis of the master-protagonists Socrates and Sensei. (shrink)

In this paper, we describe Blackboard’s Online Journal program and explain how we use the online journal in a variety of philosophy courses. We outline our pedagogical motivation for using online journals and analyze how online journals help to improve our students’ ability to read, write and think philosophically. We analyze the strengths and weaknesses of online journals in comparison to online discussion boards. Finally, we address several concerns that philosophy teachers may have about using online journals.

Using works written over the course of 1,500 years, considers philosophers’ autobiographies as a genre of philosophical writing.

In this essay, I aim to identify and analyze the influence of Cartesian dualism on Rembrandt's pictorial representations of the self. My thesis is that Descartes and Rembrandt share concerns about philosophy's exploration of human nature, concerns rooted in mind–body dualism. Descartes's corpus bears witness to a growing skepticism about the relation between matter and extension. Likewise, Rembrandt's anatomy lessons lead the viewer to question the value of treating humans as scientific objects. I suggest that by reexamining Rembrandt's work in (...) light of the mind–body problem we generate a fuller understanding of Rembrandt's artistic critique and expression and Descartes's mature scientific thinking and abiding influence. My analysis centers on four Rembrandt paintings: The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (1632); The Descent from the Cross (1632–1633); The Sacrifice of Abraham (1635); and The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Joan Deyman (1656). (shrink)

Wakandan women can play stereotypically male roles because of the political construction of Wakandan identity. Wakandan women emerge, for starters, in a radically different cultural context than women of color in other countries and cultures. Despite their tacit representation of feminist ideals, Wakandan women resist the full‐throated feminism we associate with the modern era: the no‐husband, no‐children feminism championed by the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In 1966 Black Panther, the Marvel comic superhero, made his debut during the height of (...) second‐wave feminism. Back in Wakanda, M'Baku's renouncement of Shuri's non‐domestic activities makes an implicit appeal to the feminine mystique. Recognizing feminist and womanist elements within Wakanda helps explain the masculine and feminine performances of Wakandan women. Demystifying Wakanda requires us to recognize and reckon with The Panther Mystique : uncoerced appropriations of masculine and feminine norms for the sake of collective, communal freedom. (shrink)

The eight essays contained in this book explore the portrayal of women, and various philosophical responses to that portrayal in contemporary post-civil rights society. They bring feminist voices to the conversation about gender and attests to the importance of feminist critique in what is sometimes claimed to be a post-feminist era.

This is a response to Paul Boghossian’s paper: What is inference?. The paper and the abstract originate from a symposium at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA in San Diego in April 2011. John Broome was a co-commentator.

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch the account of virtue that we think most amenable to virtue measurement. Our account integrates Whole Trait Theory from psychology with a broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to virtue. Our account is ‘ecumenical’ in that it has appeal for a wide range of virtue ethicists. According to WTT, a personality trait is composed of a set of situation-specific trait-appropriate responses, which are produced when certain “social-cognitive” mechanisms are triggered by the perception of trait-relevant (...) stimuli in a person’s external and/or internal environment. Moving from this starting point, we discuss our conception of a virtue and respects in which it both aligns with and diverges from Aristotle’s conception. We discuss roles for practical wisdom and motivation in our conception of virtue, and highlight respects in which WTT provides an amenable empirical framework into which key Aristotelian elements can be integrated. We conclude with brief remarks about our conception as an empirically adequate and measurable account. (shrink)

Abstract: Recent experimental research on the 'Knobe effect' suggests, somewhat surprisingly, that there is a bi-directional relation between attributions of intentional action and evaluative considerations. We defend a novel account of this phenomenon that exploits two factors: (i) an intuitive asymmetry in judgments of responsibility (e.g. praise/blame) and (ii) the fact that intentionality commonly connects the evaluative status of actions to the responsibility of actors. We present the results of several new studies that provide empirical evidence in support of this (...) account while disconfirming various currently prominent alternative accounts. We end by discussing some implications of this account for folk psychology. (shrink)

For over a decade, we have watched the state affairs/practitioner constituency within the American Psychological Association move steadily to become the single largest group—clearly a majority—within the membership ranks of the association. Over the same period of time and as the obverse of related demographic phenomena, the research/academic constituency has shrunk to around 30% of the membership. Since power over the affairs of and the destiny of APA has traditionally resided in the hands of the latter, it probably would have (...) been too much to hope that the visionaries in the research/academic community would have made way gracefully for new leadership to be seated in the positions of authority in the association, a leadership more attuned to the needs of APA's majority. So it is not surprising that an orderly transfer of power has not taken place. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Discussion of supported decision making has been dominated by legal scholars, philosophers, and advocates for persons with disabilities. Peterson et al.’s primary contribution is introducing...

Written over the last 18 months of his life and inspired by his interest in G. E. Moore's defence of common sense, this much discussed volume collects Wittgenstein's reflections on knowledge and certainty, on what it is to know a proposition for sure.

The considerations and recommendations set out by Bhatia-Lin and colleagues (2019) for the appropriate use of social media platforms to locate and track research participants are timely and importa...

If you cannot lucidly doubt that you exist as a thinking thing, then nor can there be a lucid doubt about the reality of those psychological states and attributes whose possession is distinctive of thinkers, par excellence their being subject to the various kinds of doxastic and conative states involved in goal-directed thought. Thus, it seems a short step from the Cogito to at least a limited application of the categories of ordinary attitudinal psychology. Yet many leading modern philosophers—for instance, (...) Dennett, Stich, the Churchlands and, above all, Quine—have been united, notwithstanding other differences, in a tendency to skepticism about the reality of attitudinal states. (shrink)

Ethical or ‘socially sustainable’ sourcing mechanisms mandating labour standards among the suppliers and subcontractors that organisations source goods and services from are becoming more common. The issue of how labour activist groups such as trade unions can encourage organisations to adopt and strengthen these mechanisms within domestic production networks is largely unexplored. Using three cases of domestic sustainable sourcing campaigns developed by unions in Britain, the strategies used by labour activists, the characteristics of the organisations targeted and the motivations of (...) lead firms for improving sourcing practices are analysed. The article makes a significant contribution by demonstrating that organisational susceptibility to reputational risk is a key factor influencing the capacity of activist groups to convince and compel their targets to improve sourcing practices. It argues that different types of organisations are susceptible to reputational damage in different ways, that risk events provide opportunities for unions to strengthen their leverage against target organisations, and that the multidimensional nature of corporate reputation needs to be better considered for understanding how campaigns are framed and executed. (shrink)

Patient requests for a healthcare provider of a particular race or sexual orientation create a conflict of obligations. On the one hand, providers have a duty to deliver clinically indicated care consistent with patient preferences. On the other hand, providers have legal, professional, and organizational assurances that they should not suffer workplace discrimination. Protecting healthcare providers from harm while maintaining obligations to patients requires unambiguous messaging to both parties. Providers need to be clear that their organization will not be complicit (...) in discrimination against them, instead supporting their needs and preferences for management of the situation. In a context of patient-centered care, harm principle-based boundaries of respect for autonomy must be defined. A Caregiver preference guideline developed and used at University Health Network, Toronto provides a standardized way for the organization to decide when it will honor patient requests for providers of a particular background. This process stresses dialogue, assessment of clinical feasibility, and empowerment and support for affected care providers. (shrink)

Daan Evers argues that relativists about aesthetic and other types of evaluative language face some distinctive and largely overlooked metaphysical difficulties concerning the nature of the states of affairs that such statements are intended to be about. These difficulties, as Evers notes, all rest on the assumption that evaluative language is representational. Evers takes it that it is only on this assumption that evaluative relativism is distinguished from expressivism. I argue that this is incorrect and that, without falling into some (...) form of expressivism, relativists can and must drop the representational assumption, but that the resulting position is one in which relativism no longer offers any distinctive dialectical or theoretical advantage. (shrink)

Much of our knowledge about the nineteenth-century natural history boom resides with the collectors themselves and their collections. We know much less about the conduct of the global trade that made collecting possible. That such a trade occurred in the face of significant obstacles of distance, variable prices, inadequate information, and diverse agents makes our knowledge deficit the more significant. William John Macleay, based in Sydney, built his significant natural history collection by trading locally as well as across the globe. (...) Our study of Macleay measures his complete set of trading transactions at a time of rapid expansion of his collection. It analyses how he chose between different forms of exchange and agreed fair value in order to complete long-distance specimen trading. (shrink)

The general-case glass ceiling hypothesis states that not only is it more difficult for women than for men to be promoted up levels of authority hierarchies within workplaces but also that the obstacles women face relative to men become greater as they move up the hierarchy. Gender-based discrimination in promotions is not simply present across levels of hierarchy but is more intense at higher levels. Empirically, this implies that the relative rates of women being promoted to higher levels compared to (...) men should decline with the level of the hierarchy. This article explores this hypothesis with data from three countries: the United States, Australia, and Sweden. The basic conclusion is that while there is strong evidence for a general gender gap in authority—the odds of women having authority are less than those of men—there is no evidence for systematic glass ceiling effects in the United States and only weak evidence for such effects in the other two countries. (shrink)

Genetics offers real opportunities for public health actors. Increased understanding of genetics will illuminate some of the factors that affect disease and, in many cases, will lead to more effective treatments. The recognition that phenylketonuria was caused by a metabolic defect that led to the accumulation of toxic levels of phenylalanine, an elevation that could largely be averted by adopting a low-phenylalanine diet, is an early example. Some cases of what was thought to be Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, a diagnosis (...) used when no etiology is known, now appear to have been caused by metabolic defects in fatty acid oxidation and sodium channel defects. One of the tasks that has already been undertaken by the public health sector is to ensure that genomic information is incorporated into clinical care when the robusmess of findings and their clinical utility have been well defined. (shrink)

Pessimists about trust in the normative domain believe that forming normative beliefs on the basis of trusting others is problematic, forming normative beliefs in other ways is not so problematic and forming non-normative beliefs on the basis of trust is not so problematic. Whilst there is substantial disagreement over the best way of accounting for pessimist ideas about trust, it is widely accepted that the intuitively problematic character of forming normative beliefs on the basis of trust cannot be explained in (...) terms of the idea that trust cannot be a source of normative knowledge. This paper argues that the dismissal of scepticism about trust as a source of normative knowledge is unwarranted. It does so by developing a sceptical explanation of pessimist ideas, arguing that the obvious arguments against the sceptical explanation fail and arguing that the sceptical explanation has the resources to resolve the considerations that present problems for existing explanations. (shrink)