In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle examines the nature of happiness, which he defines as a specially good kind of life. He considers the nature of practical reasoning, friendship, and the role and importance of the moral virtues in the best life. This new edition features a revised translation and valuable new introduction and notes.

Contextualism concerning vagueness (hereafter ‘CV’) is a popular response to the puzzle of vagueness.[1] The goal in this paper is to uncover in what ways vagueness may be a particular species of context-sensitivity. The most promising form of CV turns out to be a version of socalled ‘Non-Indexical Contextualism’.[2] In §2, we sketch a generic form of CV (hereafter ‘GCV’). In §3, we distinguish between Truth CV and Content CV. A non-indexical form of CV is a form of Truth CV, (...) while an indexical form of CV is a form of Content CV. In §4, we argue that the theory of vagueness given in Fara (2000) is crucially incomplete but is best seen as a non-indexical form of CV. In §5, we set forth four kinds of error-theory to which CV might be committed. It turns out that Non-Indexical CV is committed to a weaker, and more plausible, error-theory than Indexical CV. In §6, we address a challenge posed by Keefe (2007) to the effect that CV entails that any speech report of what has been said by a particular vague utterance, where the context of utterance and the reporting context are relevantly different, will almost always be inaccurate. While this challenge is prima facie effective against Indexical CV it proves to be less effective against Non-Indexical CV. In §7, we look at two tests for context-sensitivity and assess whether they can be employed against CV. These tests, if cogent, reveal that the only workable form of CV is Non-Indexical CV. (shrink)

Contextualism concerning vagueness (hereafter ‘CV’) is a popular response to the puzzle of vagueness.[1] The goal in this paper is to uncover in what ways vagueness may be a particular species of context-sensitivity. The most promising form of CV turns out to be a version of socalled ‘Non-Indexical Contextualism’.[2] In §2, we sketch a generic form of CV (hereafter ‘GCV’). In §3, we distinguish between Truth CV and Content CV. A non-indexical form of CV is a form of Truth CV, (...) while an indexical form of CV is a form of Content CV. In §4, we argue that the theory of vagueness given in Fara (2000) is crucially incomplete but is best seen as a non-indexical form of CV. In §5, we set forth four kinds of error-theory to which CV might be committed. It turns out that Non-Indexical CV is committed to a weaker, and more plausible, error-theory than Indexical CV. In §6, we address a challenge posed by Keefe (2007) to the effect that CV entails that any speech report of what has been said by a particular vague utterance, where the context of utterance and the reporting context are relevantly different, will almost always be inaccurate. While this challenge is prima facie effective against Indexical CV it proves to be less effective against Non-Indexical CV. In §7, we look at two tests for context-sensitivity and assess whether they can be employed against CV. These tests, if cogent, reveal that the only workable form of CV is Non-Indexical CV. (shrink)

In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body. Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate—especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of (...) health and well-being, suffering, and death. In _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy. A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_ explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Since the idea of a canon seems so closely bound up with the idea of history, there should be something to be learned from the persistent efforts that have been going on for nearly two hundred years to extend the musical repertory back in time. What is involved here is nothing less than a continuous effort to endow music with a history. From the workings of this process in the nineteenth century, we learn that where the ideology is right the (...) past can indeed yield up a canon of works and even a canon of performance. Bach, to take the most weighty example, would appear to have entered the canon—Hoffman’s canon—before entering the repertory. The history of the nineteenth-century Bach revival begins as a triumph of ideology over practice. Only after J. N. Forkel, in his famous biography, canonized Bach as the archetypal German master was The Well-tempered Clavier published for the first time—and if any one work of music deserved to be called canonic, it would have to be The Well-tempered Clavier.14 Gradually other Bach works, works which fitted better into nineteenth-century concert life, did enter various nineteenth-century repertories; Mendelssohn’s revival of the St. Matthew Passion is a famous landmark, and various piano transcriptions and orchestral arrangements, not to speak of Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” followed in due course. Bach was made to sound like a premature Romantic. There was as yet no call for historical “authenticity.” But I do not think it was Bach that Hood was thinking of when he complained of musical traditions of the past whose “real identities are gone.” The skeleton may not have been bodied out with authentic flesh and blood, but it was made into a handsome waxwork which was quite real enough for the nineteenth century. 14. This point is made by Crocker, “Is There Really a ‘Written Tradition’?” Joseph Kerman, professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Opera as Drama, The Beethoven Quartets, The Masses and Motets of William Byrd, and The New Grove Beethoven. He is also coeditor of Beethoven Studies and Nineteenth-Century Music and is presently working on a concise study of modern musical scholarship. “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out,” his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1980 issue. (shrink)

Pursuing equality is an important challenge for any modern democratic society but this challenge faces two sets of difficulties: the theoretical question of what sort of equality to pursue and for whom; and the practical question concerning which legal and political institutions are the most appropriate vehicles for implementing egalitarian social policy and thus realizing egalitarian justice. This book offers original and innovative contributions to the debate about equality of opportunity. The first part of the book sets out a theory (...) of equality of opportunity that presents equal opportunities as a normative device for the regulation of competition for scarce resources. The second part shifts the focus to the consideration of the practical application by courts or legislatures or public policy makers of policies for addressing racial, class or gender injustices. The author examines standardized tests, affirmative action, workfare, universal health-care, comparable worth, and the economic consequences of divorce. (shrink)

Microfinance began with the noble aim of alleviating poverty through the extension of small loans to poor borrowers, and has grown to now serve approximately 200,000,000 people-the majority of whom are female. Yet despite claims to the contrary, the practice has not been proven to have succeeded in either enriching or empowering its borrowers. In a thorough-going ethical assessment of the industry, Can Microfinance Work? examines the central microfinance model and whether or not it is effective, the extent to which (...) the practice creates the conditions for exploitation and coercion to occur, and whether the distribution of the benefits and burdens of microfinance is likely to be an ethical one. Author Lesley Sherratt argues for the establishment of a duty of care in microfinance in recognition of the vulnerability of the client base. She also examines the ethical dilemmas inherent in working in the informal sector, as well as microcredit's macro impact on economies. From there, Sherratt draws some wider lessons microfinance can offer anti-poverty developments in general.Challengingly, the book considers how microfinance might be reformed to ensure it is practiced both more ethically and effectively, and in doing so, argues that only a part of the industry may survive in its current form. The bulk could instead bifurcate in to one of two camps, either scaling down to become predominantly savings rather than credit vehicles, probably subsidized; or scaling up to provide credit to small and medium enterprise lending operations. For the rest, it is argued that establishing a non-exploitative interest rate, ending the practice of group liability, and fully specifying a duty of care -- with, if necessary, regulation developed to enforce these -- are microfinance's urgent ethical priorities. (shrink)

Honeybees show lateral asymmetry in both learning about odours associated with reward and recalling memory of these associations. We have extended this research to show that bees exhibit lateral biases in their initial response to odours: viz., turning towards the source of an odour presented on their right side and turning away from it when presented on their left side. The odours we presented were the main component of the alarm pheromone, iso-amyl acetate (IAA), and four floral scents. The significant (...) bias to turn towards IAA odour on the right and away from it on the left is, we argue, a lateralization of the fight-flight response elicited by this pheromone. It contrasts to an absence of any asymmetry in the turning response to an odour of the flowers on which the bees had been feeding prior to testing: to this odour they turned towards when it was presented on either the left or right side. Lemon and orange odours were responded to differently on the left and right sides (towards on the right, away on the left) but no asymmetry was found in responses to rose odour. Our results show that side biases are present even in the initial, orienting response of bees to certain odours. (shrink)

It may be objected that musical analysts claim to be working with objective methodologies which leave no place for aesthetic criteria, for the consideration of value. If that were the case, the reluctance of so many writers to subsume analysis under criticism might be understandable. But are these claims true? Are they, indeed, even seriously entered?Certainly the original masters of analysis left no doubt that for them analysis was an essential adjunct to a fully articulated aesthetic value system. Heinrich Schenker (...) always insisted on the superiority of the towering products of the German musical genius. Sir Donald Tovey pontificated about "the main stream of music" and on occasion developed this metaphor in considerable detail. It is only in more recent times that analysts have avoided value judgments and adapted their work to a format of strictly corrigible propositions, mathematical equations, set-theory formulations, and the like—all this, apparently, in an effort to achieve the objective status and hence the authority of scientific inquiry. Articles on music composed after 1950, in particular, appear sometimes to mimic scientific papers in the way that South American bugs and flies will mimic the dreaded carpenter wasp. In a somewhat different adaptation, the distinguished analyst Allen Forte wrote an entire small book, The Compositional Matrix, from which all affective or valuational terms are meticulously excluded. The same tendency is evident in much recent periodical literature.Joseph Kerman, professor of music at the University of California at Berkeley, has been the editor of Nineteenth-Century Music. His books include Opera as Drama, The Elizabethan Madrigal, The Beethoven Quartets, Listen , and The Masses and Motets of William Byrd. (shrink)

"Cult of ugliness," Ezra Pound’s phrase, powerfully summarizes the ways in which modernists such as Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme—the self-styled "Men of 1914"—responded to the "horrid or sordid or disgusting" conditions of modernity by radically changing aesthetic theory and literary practice. Only the representation of "ugliness," they protested, would produce the new, truly "beautiful" work of art. They dissociated the beautiful from its traditional embodiment in female beauty, and from its association with Walter Pater (...) and Oscar Wilde. Their cultivation of ugliness displaced misogyny and homophobia. Higgins takes in texts such as John Ruskin’s art criticism, Eliot’s literary journalism, Lewis’s pro-fascism pamphlets, and the poetry of Pound, Conrad Aiken, and Langston Hughes. She demonstrates that even vigorous champions of beauty were committed to aesthetic practices that disempowered female figures in order to articulate new truths of male artistic mastery. (shrink)

This text aims to clearly explain the central ideas and concepts in modern political philosophy as well as the main differences between the dominant modern political ideologies; and to show how these various concepts and ideas fit together into a coherent vision of democratic politics.

Manuscripts and early printed copies of Nicholas of Lyra's influential biblical commentary, the Postilla litteralis et moralis in totam bibliam, were made to include a series of around forty illustrations, mostly in the biblical books of Exodus and Ezekiel, to accompany the sections on the Tabernacle of Moses, Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, and Ezekiel's re-visioning of the Temple. Although they are not present in all copies of the work, it is known that they were planned by Nicholas himself, since he (...) refers to them in the text. This chapter considers possible sources for Nicholas's drawings and diagrams, including Richard of St Victor, and the Jewish commentators, Rashi and Maimonides. It argues that, far from being mere decoration, the illustrations are meant as an integral part of Nicholas's literal exegesis of the scriptural text. (shrink)

This guest column marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Jacques Derrida. The journal in which it appears, Common Knowledge, was not especially receptive to deconstruction during Derrida's lifetime, but Lesley Chamberlain in retrospect sees reasons to reconsider his role in intellectual history now. The delicacy of Derrida's mission, she argues, has been misunderstood. He is best placed in the company not of the “deconstructionists” who thought to follow in his footsteps but, rather, in the company of the (...) moralistic and theologically minded German philosophers and thinkers who inspired him, from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. A personal fear of being pinned down, coupled with his tragic Jewish witness to a philosophical quest for certainty gone astray, led the “Sad Rider,” one of many possible Derridas, to want to “erase” as much as he wanted to write — despite which, he was not spared being turned into an industry. (shrink)

Do Animals have ideas? Do they experience pain like humans? Do they think about objects that they cannot see? About situations that have occurred in the past? Do they consciously make plans for the future or do they simply react unthinkingly to objects as they appear and situations as they arise? All of these questions have bearing on whether or not animals have consciousness. The advent of computers that ”think” has lead us to consider “intelligence” in a way we never (...) thought possible a decade ago. But when and how does information processing in the brain become automatic?In Minds of Their Own, Lesley J. Rogers examines the issue of animal thought both sympathetically and critically by looking at the different behavior characteristics of a variety of animals, the evolution of the brain and when consciousness might have evolved. To most people, to be conscious means to be aware of oneself as well as to be aware of others. But does this hold true for animals? The answer may have implications which transcend mere scientific inquiry: if animals are cognizant creatures, what, if any, moral responsibility do humans have to assure their rights? This timely book examines this issue and others by emphasizing comparisons between humans and animals: how we evolved; how we remember; how we learn. (shrink)

Who were the true forerunners of the seventeenth-century theorists of innate ideas? Credit should go, not to Plato, despite the common label Platonist, but to the Stoics—or so this challenging new study claims. Plato’s celebrated doctrine of knowledge as recollection differed from these others’ theories not merely in its extravagant postulate of a prenatal knowing state but in many hitherto unrecognized ways, Scott argues. Among those who shared the belief that all men are endowed at birth with considerable epistemological resources, (...) Plato alone is a pessimist both about how few of us make any use of these—only those who make philosophical progress—and about the difficulty of unearthing these resources. Contrary to a prevalent view, Scott holds that Plato invokes recollection to explain not “ordinary learning,” the acquisition or application of everyday concepts such as equality or beauty, but “higher learning”—the province of the philosopher. (shrink)

Lesley Wright; The Concept of Development and its Legitimacy in the Philosophy of Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 1, 30 May 2006.

Introduces key Russian thinkers prior to the 1917 revolution, offering insight into regional philosophical belief systems about happiness, society, and morality that challenges popular conceptions.

The aim of this study was to evaluate terminal care among hospitalized children who died of HIV/AIDS. The design was a retrospective.

In this article, we aimed to evaluate the utility of critical posthumanism for nurses interested in planetary health—a growing area of study that requires a decentering of the human, and environmental justice considerations. We used Chinn and colleagues' method to describe and critically reflect on critical posthumanism, extending the theory analysis method to include a wide range of academic and video sources. We found that critical posthumanism is like a double‐edged sword: It provides a lens through which to transcend human‐centric (...) approaches to healthcare but is marred by its lack of clarity and inaccessibility. We argue critical posthumanism can be adapted to enhance its potential at the intersection of nursing and planetary health. An analysis of critical posthumanism is followed by a discussion framed by five ways of knowing in nursing, highlighting real‐world examples of how critical posthumanism can aid nurses in dealing with planetary health concerns. By exploring the intersections of critical posthumanism with nursing knowledge, we demonstrate how critical posthumanism can enable nurses to comprehend and tackle environmental issues intricately linked to human health. (shrink)

A complexity cosmography is introduced as construing a world that is self-organizing, dynamic, and emergent, and that comprises organic entities that too are self-organizing, dynamic, and emergent. Following critical reflection into the nature of utilising complexity in social inquiry, specific images, vocabularies and complexity-based methods and techniques as developed by the authors are introduced.

Women's preference for symmetrical men need not have evolved as part of a good gene sexual selection (GGSS) reproductive strategy employed during recent human evolutionary history. It may be a remnant of the reproductive strategy of a perhaps promiscuous species which existed prior to the divergence of the human line from that of the bonobo and chimp.

Although the backlash is not an organized movement, that doesn't make it any less destructive. In fact, the lack of orchestration, the absence of a single string-puller, only makes it harder to see—and perhaps more effective... In the last decade, the backlash has moved through the culture's secret chambers, traveling through passageways of flattery and fear. Along the way, it has adopted disguises: a mask of mild derision or the painted face of deep 'concern'.1.

Biomechanical engineering is marked by highly experimental efforts to craft mechanical devices that might one day alleviate the scarcity of transplantable organs in the USA. A pronounced desire among bioengineers involves melding humans with machines, bearing the promise of perfecting the natural yet messy flaws of the ‘natal’ body. Not all bodies are considered equal within this field, however. Visual renderings of heart devices — as an unusual sort of body prosthesis — foreground a specialized aesthetic, where the well-toned male (...) form defines an idealized generic of beauty and perfection. This analysis considers the moral underpinnings of the embodied aesthetic in specific reference to engineers’ efforts to fabricate implantable ‘artificial’ hearts. Of central concern are the sociomoral consequences of a standardized male beauty, set alongside the striking absence — or invisibility — of the female form within this rarified field of science. (shrink)

Lesley Wright; Physical Education and Moral Development, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 93–102, https://doi.org/10.1.

In this book Lesley Jacobs challenges the view, now prevalent in North America and Western Europe, that the primary function of a nation's social policy should be to provide support only for the poorest people instead of social services accessible to all its citizens. In an interesting and distinctive argument he develops and defends the idea that access to basic rights such as education, health care, adequate housing, and income support can provide a solid moral foundation for redistributive state (...) welfare programmes, maintaining that any nation which purports to take rights to basic liberties seriously must also be fully committed to the principles of the welfare state. Dr Jacob's thesis addresses a pressing political and philosophical problem at the heart of the policies and structure of the modern state. His justification of the redistribution of resources will be of particular interest to political philosophers, lawyers, and social policy analysts. (shrink)

Lesley Wright; The Distinction Between Play and Intrinsically Worthwhile Activities, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages.