Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, hyperbolized autonomy, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated. It proposes a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practices. Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson’s scientific projects, the book draws, constructively and critically, on ecological theory (...) and practice, on (post-Quinean) naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theory. Analyzing extended examples from developmental psychology, from medicine and law, and from circumstances where vulnerability, credibility, and public trust are at issue, the argument addresses the constitutive part played by an instituted social imaginary in shaping and regulating human lives. The practices and examples discussed invoke the responsibility requirements central to this text’s larger purpose of imagining, crafting, articulating a creative, innovative, instituting social imaginary, committed to interrogating entrenched hierarchical social structures, en route to enacting principles of ideal cohabitation. (shrink)

This revised edition of The Idea of Private Law makes one of the major works of modern legal theory accessible to a new generation of lawyers and students. It includes a new introduction by the author, looking back at the work, its origins, and its aspirations.

Private law governs our most pervasive relationships with other people: the wrongs we do to one another, the property we own and exclude from others' use, the contracts we make and break, and the benefits realized at another's expense that we cannot justly retain. The major rules of private law are well known, but how they are organized, explained, and justified is a matter of fierce debate by lawyers, economists, and philosophers.

This paper explores how the widely acknowledged conception of tort law as corrective justice is to be applied to the law of negligence. Corrective justice is an ordering of transactions between two parties which restores them to an antecedent equality. It is thus incompatible with the comprehensive aggregation of utilitarianism, and it stands in easy harmony with Kantian moral notions. This conception of negligence law excludes both maximizing theories, such as Holmes' and Posner's, and Fried's risk pool, which combines Kantianism (...) with distributive rather than corrective justice.Central to the Kantian approach is the impermissibility of self-preference. The two types of self-preference, self-preference in conception and self-preference in action can respectively account for the objective standard and the Learned Hand test, which are the two most characteristic features of negligence and which are generally (and wrongly) considered to be inescapably aggregative. This corrective justice conception of the negligence standard can then be compared to Epstein's corrective justice conception of strict liability, and arguments can be offered in favour of the superiority of the former. (shrink)

For corrective justice, liability is the consequence of the parties' being correlatively situated as the doer and sufferer of an injustice, and the remedy is seen as undoing that injustice to the extent possible. Combining consideration of legal doctrine and private law theory, this article applies the framework of corrective justice to gain-based damages for torts. Within this framework, restitutionary damages ought to be available only insofar as they correspond to a constituent element in the injustice that the defendant has (...) done to the plaintiff. The radical proposal that allows restitutionary damages for any wrongful gain is unsatisfactory because it fails to link the damages that the plaintiff receives to the normative quality of the defendant's wrong. In contrast, dealings in another's property give rise to such damages because the idea of property includes within the owner's entitlement the potential gainsfrom the property's use or alienation. Restitutionary damages should not be seen as serving a deterrent or punitive function; such a function cannot account for why the plaintiff, of all people, is entitled to the defendant's gain. Properly understood, even situations where the plaintiff's wilfulness or calculation increases the damage award fit within the framework of corrective justice. The corrective justice approach thus repudiates the notion that restitutionary damages are occasions for the promotion of social purposes extrinsic to the juridical relationship between the parties. (shrink)

Kant's political philosophy draws a distinction between 'passive' citizens who are merely protected by the law and 'active' citizens who may also contribute to it. Although the distinction between passive and active citizens is often dismissed by scholars as an 'illiberal and undemocratic' relic of eighteenth century prejudice, the distinction is found in every democracy that distinguishes between mere inhabitants -- such as tourists and guestworkers -- and enfranchised citizens. The purpose of this essay is both interpretive and suggestive. First, (...) I will argue that Kant's mature distinction between active and passive citizens follows from an institutional deficiency in the the developing state rather than the natural deficiency of passive citizens, as Kant's critics have alleged. Second, I will draw on systematic features of Kant's political thought in order to claim that the state has a duty to create the institutional conditions of universal active citizenship. (shrink)

For Tamsin Lorraine, the works of Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze open up new ways of thinking about subjectivity. Focusing on the affinities between the theorists' views—while addressing weaknesses of each—she offers both a cogent analysis of their often challenging writings on this topic and an accessible introduction to their philosophical projects. Through her readings she articulates an approach to subjectivity as an embodied, dynamic process, one that speaks to beliefs about personal identity as well as to the practical (...) problems people face in their relations with one another.Lorraine begins by distinguishing between "conceptual" and "corporeal" considerations of subjectivity and by reviewing recent interdisciplinary efforts to theorize the body. She then turns to Irigaray and Deleuze, finding in the former's notion of the "feminine other" and in the latter's, unique conceptions of nomadic thinking inspiration for a model designed to overcome mind/body dualisms. Her analysis of Irigaray and Deleuze suggests a conception of humanity which amounts to a visceral philosophy—a way of thinking that is receptive to the fluxes of dynamic life forces. (shrink)

In this lively and accessible book Lorraine Code addresses one of the most controversial questions in contemporary theory of knowledge, a question of fundamental concern for feminist theory as well: Is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant? Responding in the affirmative, Code offers a radical alterantive to mainstream philosophy's terms for what counts as knowledge and how it is to be evaluated. Code first reviews the literature of established epistemologies and unmasks the prevailing assumption in Anglo-American philosophy that (...) "the knower" is a value-free and ideologically neutral abstraction. Approaching knowledge as a social construct produced and validated through critical dialogue, she defines the knower in light of a conception of subjectivity based on a personal relational model. Code maps out the relevance of the particular people involved in knowing: their historical specificity, the kinds of relationships they have, the effects of social position and power on those relationships, and the ways in which knowledge can change both knower and known. In an exploration of the politics of knowledge that mainstream epistemologies sustain, she examines such issues as the function of knowledge in shaping institutions and the unequal distribution of cognitive resources. What Can She Know? will raise the level of debate concerning epistemological issues among philosophers, political and social scientists, and anyone interested in feminist theory. (shrink)

Why does an object or phenomenon become the subject of scientific inquiry? Why do some of these objects remain provocative, while others fade from center stage? And why do objects sometimes return as the focus of research long after they were once abandoned? Addressing such questions, _Biographies of Scientific Objects_ is about how whole domains of phenomena—dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, society, mortality, centers of gravity, value, cytoplasmic particles, the self, tuberculosis—come into being and sometimes pass away as objects of scientific (...) study. With examples drawn from both the natural and social sciences, and ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, this book explores the ways in which scientific objects are both real and historical. Whether discovered or invented, these objects of inquiry broaden and deepen in meaning—growing more "real"—as they become entangled in webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations. Thus their biographies will matter to anyone concerned with the formation of scientific knowledge. Contributors are Jed Z. Buchwald, Lorraine Daston, Rivka Feldhay, Jan Goldstein, Gerard Jorland, Doris Kauffman, Bruno Latour, Theodore M. Porter, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Marshall Sahlins, and Peter Wagner. (shrink)

Fifteen essays examine the work of German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer to provide feminist interpretations of his views on science, language, history, ...

In an age of constitutional revolutions and reforms, theory and practice are moving in opposite directions. As a matter of constitutional practice, human dignity has emerged in jurisdictions around the world as the organizing idea of a groundbreaking paradigm. By reconfiguring constitutional norms, institutional structures and legal doctrines, this paradigm transforms human dignity from a mere moral claim into a legal norm that persons have standing to vindicate. As a matter of constitutional theory, however, human dignity remains an enigmatic idea. (...) Some explicate its meaning in abstraction from constitutional practice, while others confine themselves to less exalted ideas. The result is a chasm that separates constitutional practice from a theory capable of justifying its innovations and guiding its operation. By expounding the connection between human dignity and the constitutional practices that justify themselves in its light, Jacob Weinrib brings the theory and practice of constitutional law back together. (shrink)

In legal orders around the world, commitments to democracy, liberalism and constitutionalism are increasingly eroding. Although political and constitutional theorists often lament this trend, they invariably adopt frameworks that are indifferent to these commitments. My aims in this article are both critical and constructive. As a critical matter, I will expose the indifference of the leading political and constitutional theories to the emergence, maintenance and refinement of liberal democratic constitutional orders. As a constructive matter, I will draw on Immanuel Kant’s (...) constitutional theory to explain why realizing such a form of governance is a public duty and why receding from it is a public wrong. (shrink)

This paper will examine the concepts of integrity and moral residue as they relate to nursing practice in the current health care environment. I will begin with my definition and conception of ethical practice, and, based on that, will go on to argue for the importance of recognizing that nurses often find themselves in the position of compromising their moral integrity in order to maintain their self‐survival in the hospital or health care environment. I will argue that moral integrity is (...) necessary to a moral life, and is relational in nature. When integrity is threatened, the result is moral distress, moral residue, and in some cases, abandonment of the profession. The solution will require more than teaching bioethics to nursing students and nurses. It will require changes in the health care environment, organizational culture and the education of nurses, with an emphasis on building a moral community as an environment in which to practise ethically. (shrink)

In his ‘On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy’ Kant makes the astonishing claim that one is not entitled to lie even to save a friend from a murderer. This claim has been an embarrassment for Kant's defenders and an indication of Kant's excessive rigour for his detractors. Responses to SRL fall into three main groups. The first of these groups, that of Kant's critics, claim that SRL demonstrates that Kant's ethical views are so rigorous that they become abhorrent (...) in practice. The second group, Kant's defenders, argues that Kant's conclusions in SRL do not follow from his own ethical principles. The third group, made up of scholars who are generally sympathetic to Kant's position, attempts to explain why a liar is responsible for all the bad consequences that follow from his act by providing an account of Kant's theory of imputation. (shrink)

In this book, Baggini explores Hume’s life and philosophy in an effort to decipher what contemporary, non-academic, audiences might take away from it about what it means to be human and to live well. This is a daunting project for a couple of reasons. First, in comparison with other major figures in the history of philosophy such as Aristotle, Hume does not himself give much direct guidance on these topics. His writings purport to present analyses of human nature, the influences (...) on it, and the ways in which people tend to respond to each other. The degree to which Hume intended these analyses to inform normative proposals is a question of debate amongst Hume scholars, yet most would agree that Hume’s mission falls... (shrink)

(2005). Here and There: Reading Christopher Preston's Grounding Knowledge . Ethics, Place & Environment: Vol. 8, Place-based and Environmental Education, pp. 349-360. doi: 10.1080/13668790500348364.

Over the last few decades, corrective justice has established itself as central to serious academic discussion of the normative dimension of tort liability. This article describes the consensus about corrective justice that is presently emerging, as is evident from work of the author and from recent work of other tort theorists. The framework for discussing this emerging consensus is what the article calls "the juridical conception of corrective justice." The juridical conception seeks to explicate the most general ideas implicit in (...) liability as a normative practice in which the plaintiff makes a claim against the defendant. Under the juridical conception, corrective justice is the synthesis of two complementary abstractions: correlativity and personality. Correlativity articulates at the most general level the relationship between the interacting parties as doer and sufferer of the same injustice. Personality, i.e., the idea of purposiveness regardless of one's particular purposes, similarly articulates at the most general level the conception of the interacting parties that is presupposed in a regime of rights and their correlative duties. The leitmotif of the emerging consensus is the idea of correlativity, which is now effectively accepted by all of the theorists mentioned, even by those who initially rejected it. Personality, on the other hand, has gained less support, because of the apprehension that it implies that rational agency, as elaborated by Kant or Hegel, is a philosophical truth from which tort theory can be derived. This reason for dismissing personality is insufficient. Corrective justice comes into view not by being derived from a notion of rational agency but by reflection on the most general ideas implicit in liability as a normative practice. Personality is merely the abstraction that represents the parties as the bearers of rights and their correlative duties. Like correlativity, it owes its status within corrective justice to its being implicit in the law's doctrines and institutions. Consequently, whether the Kantian or Hegelian notion of rational agency is plausible is a philosophical question that lies beyond tort theory and that does not affect the place of personality within a corrective justice approach to liability. Moreover, if correlativity and personality are indeed complementary, acceptance of the former should lead to acceptance of the latter. Such acceptance would provide the theorists who now reject it with a concept that would be serviceable for their own formulations. In any case, the consensus about the highly structured notion of correlativity indicates that the main lines of the corrective justice approach to tort law are now firmly established. Although refinements inevitably remain to be made, radical revisions are unlikely to result from further reworking the standard material of corrective justice tort theory. Scholarly attention should instead turn to the examination of the place of corrective justice within the legal order as a whole and to the expansion of the corrective justice analysis from tort law to other bases of liability. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Transfer of Value The Transfer Elements of Liability Unjustness Correctively Unjust Enrichment References.

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences--and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy to crystallography--are those featured (...) in scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity-- and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 and the editor of Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, and other books, and coeditor of The Architecture of Science. (shrink)

This paper introduces the notion of a “psychologically rich life”: a life characterized by complexity, in which people experience a variety of interesting things, and feel and appreciate a variety of deep emotions via firsthand experiences or vicarious experiences. A psychologically rich life can be contrasted with a boring and monotonous life, in which one feels a singular emotion or feels that their lives are defined by routines that just aren’t that interesting. Our discussion considers how it is that the (...) psychologically rich life compares to other leading theories of the good life discussed within both philosophy and psychology, and it argues that a psychologically rich life ought to be recognized as a distinct and compelling form of the good life. (shrink)

This book makes a compelling case for the significance of the long, surprising, and epistemologically significant history of scientific observation, a history ...

The arguments in this book are informed at once by the moral-political implications of how knowledge is produced and circulated and by issues of gendered subjectivity. In their critical dimension, these lucid essays engage with the incapacity of the philosophical mainstream's dominant epistemologies to offer regulative principles that guide people in the epistemic projects that figure centrally in their lives. In its constructive dimension, ____Rhetorical__ ____Spaces__ focuses on developing productive, case-by-case analyses of knowing other people in situations where social-political inequalities (...) create asymmetrical patterns of epistemic power and privilege. (shrink)

Because reading was and remains a central aspect of doing science, reading practices may provide insights into cognitive practices—such as observation, economies of attention, arts of memory, and the solidification and erosion of belief—in the context of science. Reading has since ancient times been the model for all forms of understanding and possibly also the template upon which other ways of making the world intelligible were formed. Reading practices may also provide keys to the formation of the specifically scientific self, (...) as they have more generally for that of the learned habitus. Finally, collectivities of readers served as the prototype of all such virtual communities of savants, including the scientific community. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Project of Formalism The Nature of Justification The Structures of Justification The Ground of Justification The Immanent Intelligibility of Law Conclusion References.

This study focuses on the prediction of the engagement of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in environmental management practices, based on a random sample of 689 SMEs. The study finds that several endogenous factors, including tangibility of sector, firm size, innovative orientation, family influence and perceived financial benefits from energy conservation, predict an SME’s level of engagement in selected environmental management practices. For family influence, this effect is found only in interaction with the number of owners. In addition to empirical (...) research on SMEs’ environmental behavior, this article draws on the ecological modernization literature as well as the theory of planned behavior. (shrink)

This paper is a defense of what I call The Simple View, according to which propositions are simple, fine-grained, abstract entities that have truth-conditions essentially and fundamentally. The Simple View has two controversial implications: (i) propositions do not (literally) have constituents or parts, and (ii) propositions’ having truth-conditions is a brute fact about them. I criticize the Simple View’s two competitors, the Possible Worlds View and the Structured View, for failing to provide a plausible ontology of propositions and failing to (...) explain the propositional features they set out to explain. I then consider three versions of the Simple View, developed by George Bealer, Trenton Merricks, and Peter van Inwagen, and argue that Bealer’s view is the most promising. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive account of the major philosophical works on friendship and its relationship to self-love. The book gives central place to Aristotle's searching examination of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. Lorraine Pangle argues that the difficulties surrounding this discussion are soon dispelled once one understands the purpose of the Ethics as both a source of practical guidance for life and a profound, theoretical investigation into human nature. The book also provides fresh interpretations of works on friendship (...) by Plato, Cicero, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne and Bacon. The author shows how each of these thinkers sheds light on central questions of moral philosophy: is human sociability rooted in neediness or strength? is the best life chiefly solitary, or dedicated to a community with others? Clearly structured and engagingly written, this book will appeal to a broad swathe of readers across philosophy, classics and political science. (shrink)

There’s been a recent surge of interest among analytic philosophers of religion in divine ineffability. However, divine ineffability is part of a traditional conception of God that has been widely rejected among analytic philosophers of religion for the past few decades. One of the main reasons that the traditional conception of God has been rejected is because it allegedly makes God too remote, unknowable, and impersonal. In this paper, I present an account of divine ineffability that directly addresses this concern (...) by arguing that the deepest knowledge of God’s nature that we can attain is personal, rather than propositional. On this view, it is precisely because knowledge of God’s nature is personal that it cannot be linguistically expressed and communicated. (shrink)

Explains how the work of Deleuze and Guattari speaks to feminism and other progressive movements.

If Kant’s theory of justice is known for one thing, it is for offering a vision of a perfectly just society that is utterly disconnected from the imperfect societies that we occupy. The purity of Kant’s account has attracted criticism from those who claim that if a theory of justice is to be practical, it must offer more than a vision of a perfectly just society. It must also explain how existing societies mired in injustice are to be brought into (...) ever-closer conformity with the ideal that justice prescribes. In this essay, I will argue that this is exactly what Kant’s mature legal and political theory offers. To discern this feature of Kant’s theory, a neglected component must be integrated into his broader framework. This component is what Kant refers to in Toward Perpetual Peace as a permissive law of public right. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize Structured Propositionalism, the most widely held theory of the nature of propositions according to which they are structured entities with constituents. I argue that the proponents of Structured Propositionalism have paid insufficient attention to the metaphysical presuppositions of the view – most egregiously, to the notion of propositional constituency. This is somewhat ironic, since the friends of structured propositions tend to argue as if the appeal to constituency gives their view a dialectical advantage. I criticize (...) four different approaches to providing a metaphysics of propositional constituency: set-theoretic, mereological, hylomorphic, and structure-making. Finally, I consider the option of taking constituency in a deflationary, metaphysically ‘lightweight’ sense. I argue that, though invoking constituency in a lightweight sense may be useful for avoiding the ontological problems that plague the ‘heavyweight’ conception, it no longer proffers a dialectical advantage to Structured Propositionalism. (shrink)

Having adequate knowledge of the world is not just a matter of survival but also one of obligation. This obligation to "know well" is what philosophers have termed "epistemic responsibility." In this innovative and eclectic study, Lorraine Code explores the possibilities inherent in this concept as a basis for understanding human attempts to know and understand the world and for discerning the nature of intellectual virtue. By focusing on the idea that knowing is a creative process guided by imperatives (...) of epistemic responsibility, Code provides a fresh perspective on the theory of knowledge. From this new perspective, Code poses questions about knowledge that have a different focus from those traditionally raised in the two leading epistemological theories, foundationalism and coherentism. While not rejecting these approaches, this new position moves away from a primary concentration on determinate products and towards an examination of ever-changing processes. Arguing that knowledge never exists as an ungrounded abstraction but rather emerges through dialogue between variously authoritative "knowers" situated within particular social and historical contexts, she draws extensively on examples from lived social experience to illustrate the ways in which human beings have long tried to recognize and meet their epistemic responsibilities. This edition of Epistemic Responsibility includes a new preface from Lorraine Code"--Provided by the publisher. (shrink)

Here I discuss some epistemological questions posed by projects of attempting to think globally, in light of the impossibility of affirming universal sameness. I illustrate one strategy for embarking on such a project, ecologically, in a reading of an essay by Chandra Talpade Mohanty. And I conclude by suggesting that the North/South border between Canada and the U.S.A. generates underacknowledged issues of cultural alterity.

Facing a recent surge in anti-natalist arguments saying that human procreation is immoral, some defend human procreation by saying that procreative parenting adds meaning to parents’ life. This article examines one such defence, and argues that it does not suffice to rescue human procreation from the challenges to procreation.

In Dimensions of Private Law, Professor Stephen Waddams describes the obstacles that an adequate classification of private law must overcome. The purpose of this essay is to offer a theoretical account of legal classification that explains how these obstacles can be overcome and what the resulting classification of private law might look like. I begin with the catalogue of obstacles that Waddams presents and argue that, because they are rooted in misconceptions about the classificatory project, they pose no threat to (...) an adequate conception of legal classification. In search of such a conception, I consider how three great legal theorists – Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel – answer three fundamental classificatory questions about private law. First, what is the unitythat underlies the seemingly chaotic array of legal instances? Second, what is the principle of differentiationthat applies to this unity? Third, how are legalinstancessubsumed under this differentiated unity? The focus of this essay is the enduring significance of Kant’s conception of legal classification, which provides an alternative to Waddams’ conception and offers a set of coherent answers to the fundamental classificatory questions. In contrast, both Aristotle and Hegel respond to the fundamental classificatory questions by providing a conception of the unity of private law that fails to cohere with their ensuing accounts of its differentiation. (shrink)

“There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other.” Thus, in Father and Son, Edmund Gosse characterizes his father’s intellectual crisis of 1857: a crisis which arose out of the elder Gosse’s struggles to reconcile his Christian fundamentalism with the insights he stood to gain, as a marine zoologist, from the work in evolutionary theory of Darwin, Lyell, and others. From this conflict, religion emerged victorious. Philip (...) Gosse, F.R.S., chose to discount the findings of the new biology, at least in so far as they were incompatible with belief in the literal truth of creation set forth in the book of Genesis. In this paper it is my intention to reflect upon the epistemic responsibility of his decision. (shrink)