Queer objects are crucial to the narrative strategies of Dennis Cooper’s George Miles cycle where they support his exhaustive inventory of what it means to have a sexual type. In Frisk, Cooper transforms some objects into media to blur the boundaries between the writing subject and the objects he desires. The snuff photos, seen at too young an age, form the point of reference for Dennis the narrator’s erotic life but they acquire their force in a looping narrative (...) structure that calls into question their status as representation as well as their capacity to communicate. The novel thus elicits a new theorization of the relation between objects and media that discloses the stakes for fiction in a queer subjectivity that takes the self as another object at the same time as it probes the limits of realism. I situate Cooper in a genealogy of autofiction that extends back to Marcel Proust and Jean Genet and forward to J.T. LeRoy, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Sheila Heti. The essay concludes by contrasting Cooper’s narrative achievements to the collapse of the writing subject into the autobiographical self in the more recent examples. (shrink)

In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter the erosion of humanistic education.

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) is designed to measure the tendency to override a prepotent response alternative that is incorrect and to engage in further reflection that leads to the correct response. It is a prime measure of the miserly information processing posited by most dual process theories. The original three-item test may be becoming known to potential participants, however. We examined a four-item version that could serve as a substitute for the original. Our data show that it (...) displays a.58 correlation with the original version and that it has very similar relationships with cognitive ability, various thinking dispositions, and with several other rational thinking tasks. Combining the two versions into a seven-item test resulted in a measure of miserly processing with substantial reliability (.72). The seven-item version was a strong independent predictor of performance on rational thinking tasks after the variance accounted for by cognitive ability and thinking dispositions had been partialled out. (shrink)

O artigo discute algumas considerações a respeito dos conceitos de vulnerabilidade e proteção, quando relacionados à prática e à pesquisa em psicologia. Estabelece ligações entre conceitos clássicos, principalmente na área da filosofia e demais ciências humanas, como ética, moral e educação e as circunstâncias cotidianas e contemporâneas, como o acesso facilitado às informações, o incentivo à formação de recursos humanos na área da pesquisa e o desenvolvimento tecnológico das últimas décadas. Ao fim, sinalizam-se alternativas práticas e possíveis para operacionalizar a (...) manutenção da pesquisa no contexto da vulnerabilidade e, ao mesmo tempo, para garantir o cumprimento das recomendações éticas vigentes. (shrink)

Polls and election results show Americans sharply divided on same-sex marriage, and the controversy is unlikely to subside anytime soon. Debating Same-Sex Marriage provides an indispensable roadmap to the ongoing debate.

According to Frantz Fanon, the psychological and social-political are deeply intertwined in the colonial context. Psychologically, the colonizers perceive the colonized as inferior and the colonized internalize this in an inferiority complex. This psychological reality is co-constitutive of and by material relations of power—the imaginary of inferiority both creates and is created by colonial relations of power. It is also in this context that violence takes on significant political import: violence deployed by the colonized to rebel against these colonial relations (...) and enact a different world will also be violent in its fundamental disruption of this imaginary. The ethics of care, on the other hand, does not seem to sit well with violence, and thus Fanon’s political theory more generally. Care ethics is concerned with everything we do to maintain and repair our worlds as well as reasonably possible. Violence, which ruptures our psycho-affective, material, and social-political realities, seems antithetical to this task. This article seeks to reconsider this apparent antinomy between violence and care via a dialogue between Fanon and the ethics of care. In so doing, this article mobilizes a relational conceptualization of violence that allows for the possibility that certain violences may, in fact, be justifiable from a care ethics perspective. At the same time, I contend that violence in any form will also eventually demand a caring response. Ultimately, this productive reading of Fanon’s political theory and the ethics of care encourages both postcolonial philosophers and care ethicists alike to examine critically the relation between violence and care, and the ways in which we cannot a priori draw lines between the two. (shrink)

A perennial debate in the field of global ethics revolves around the possibility of a universalist ethics as well as arguments over the nature, and significance, of difference for moral deliberation. Decolonial literature, in particular, increasingly signifies a pluriverse – one with radical ontological and epistemological differences. This book examines the concept of the pluriverse alongside global ethics and the ethics of care in order to contemplate new ethical horizons for engaging across difference. Offering a challenge to the current state (...) of the field, this book argues for a rethinking of global ethics as it has been conceived thus far. (shrink)

Ben Segal, our fiction curator, presents interviews with Maggie Nelson and Evan Lavender-Smith as well as "outtakes" from their books Bluets and From Old Notebooks. The authors discuss working with fragments, taxonomy, and narratology.

The purpose of this paper is to point out that some mathematical doctrines attributed by Aristotle to Plato find their origin in a threefold order of problems: first, in some allusions contained in the dialogues, which might create ambiguities within the so-called standard model of ideas; second, in the Aristotelian interpretation of ideal entities as universals or predicates, an interpretation in turn partly authorized by Plato himself; third, in the tendency not to emphasize the possibility of understanding participation and the (...) whole-part relationship from a non-quantitative point of view. In this paper I will disregard the complex debate about whether or not to attribute the unwritten doctrines of the Aristotelian account to Plato, but I will appraise in what sense some Aristotelian objections to participation may arise from the fact of conceiving of numbers and magnitudes as ideas. (shrink)

In academic and political spaces, as well as in the dominant culture in the United States, sex workers are granted little authority, and their lived experiences are not privileged as a form of valuable knowledge. As feminist scholars, we seek to counter this pattern by highlighting the situated knowledges and agency of sex workers in the United States. To do so, we share the words of sex workers through I-poems. I-poems are a form of poetic inquiry and a method for (...) qualitative research analysis. As a form of found poetry, these poems are constructed using only the words of the participants. Unlike prior scholars, we use focus groups that capture conversation about people involved in street-based sex work rather than individual interviews. By centering the participants’ own words, we hope to moderate our influence as researchers on the presentation of data. (shrink)

Many low-income college students are barred from food assistance for no reason other than the fact that they are pursuing a college education. Based on 22 interviews that capture the experiences of food insecure college students as they attempt to navigate SNAP, this study shows how low enrollment in the program and food insecurity are the predictable outcomes of policy decisions intended to restrict access to both free public higher education and public assistance in the 1980’s and 1990’s and were (...) shaped by the racialized politics of deservingness. By documenting the barriers students encounter attempting to access food assistance, this study shows how these policies play out in the lives of students at the City University of New York today. Ultimately, the politics of deservingness create significant direct and indirect barriers to SNAP enrollment for students and limit policy makers’ and advocates’ attempts to expand SNAP and address food insecurity on college campuses. (shrink)

Basic research is often weird, and it's often boring. It's the years spent mapping the neurons of zebra fish, so that future scientists can have a more detailed biological model to work with. It's the chemical analysis that has to happen, so that two decades from now somebody else can discover a new cancer-fighting drug. Basic research is about curiosity, and knowledge for knowledge's sake. By it's very nature, basic research relies on public funding. But by it's very nature, it's (...) hard to explain how the public benefits from the basic research we fund. (shrink)

In her 2015 article, Helena Olofsdotter Stensöta notes that ‘the ethics of care is often used as a lens to dissect the current arrangement of care provision (or rather non-care provision) in polici...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Difficult, Difficult, Lemon, DifficultMaggie TaylorI like to joke that my husband is a lemon—he suffers from manufacturing defects that prevent his body from functioning as intended. Illnesses other 40-somethings recover from quickly are things that land him in the hospital for weeks on end. So, it was no surprise last year that an epileptic seizure led to aspiration pneumonia, admission to the lCU, intubation, multisystem organ failure, and a (...) Helivac ride to a regional hospital for a higher level of care. I was told that his odds of survival were about fifty-fifty. At the time, I was training as a clinical ethics fellow, still relatively inexperienced but savvy enough to guess the true likelihood was probably lower. Doctors don’t usually like telling brutal truths to families.But the moral complexities of his treatment did not arise when he was on the verge of death. They came days later when he was getting better. He’d survived a major surgery, come off pressors, recovered from an acute kidney injury, did well on spontaneous breathing trials (SBTs), and tolerated sedation weaning. Ironically, this was the hardest part of the hospitalization for me. Some people tolerate endotracheal tubes. Others don’t. My husband is in the latter group. He’d even self-extubated on a prior hospitalization. This time, he was too weak to lift his arms. Instead of pulling at the tube taped to his face, he stared up at me with wild eyes that said I don’t know what’s happening but I hate it; make it stop.As his discomfort became more apparent, I pressed the intensivist, Dr. Roja1, about extubating. “He’s alert, following commands, and hit the benchmarks on his vent settings.”Dr. Roja responded by saying she didn’t feel my husband was ready. They would continue conducting SBTs and reevaluate the next day.She said the same thing the next day.And the next day. Then she suggested a trach evaluation. I rejected Dr. Roja’s proposed compromise. Forcefully.It wasn’t just that I had trouble seeing my husband in this state of confusion and discomfort, although I did. I also knew continued vent dependence was something he would not accept. Over the course of our relationship, we’ve talked a lot about what interventions my husband would tolerate under various circumstances. This makes sense, given my profession and his health problems. He doesn’t want to live no matter the costs, but only if he can do so without being a burden on those he loves or dependent on machinery long-term—which, for him, means a few weeks.This is what I told Dr. Roja. At least, this is what I think I told her. It’s doubtful I stated my reasoning [End Page 28] half that clearly, given my emotional, physical, and cognitive state. It had been two weeks since my husband was admitted, and I was depleted. I was living in a hotel across from the hospital, wasn’t eating, and had fallen back into the vice of smoking cigarettes. Exhaustion and stress had made me combative: I had to defend my husband against this doctor who refused to do the right thing and take the tube out.In what felt like a last-ditch effort to get me off her back, Dr. Roja suggested an ethics consult. It was embarrassing that the intensivist was the one to suggest ethics involvement. Consumed as I was by my job as my husband’s advocate, I had forgotten my actual job.The team was able to put together a family meeting within hours. Beforehand, the ethicist came to my husband’s room and introduced herself to me and my mother.“I work in ethics too, as a clinical ethics fellow,” I said.She responded: “Oh.”That was all. Not even a word, but a sound. I don’t know what response I wanted, but that wasn’t it. This made me suspicious of the process.My mother and I joined the ethicist, Dr. Roja, and a palliative care physician in the family room. Dr. Roja led with a summary of my husband’s clinical condition... (shrink)

What is intellectual humility? In this essay, we aim to answer this question by assessing several contemporary accounts of intellectual humility, developing our own account, offering two reasons for our account, and meeting two objections and solving one puzzle.

Children are presumptively regarded as incompetent to make their own medical decisions, and the responsibility for making such decisions typically falls to parents. Parental authority is not unlimited, however, and ethical guidelines identifying appropriate bounds on this authority are needed. One proposal currently gaining support is the Harm Threshold (HT), which asserts that the state may only legitimately intervene in parental decision-making when serious and preventable harm to children is likely. This paper considers two questions: in virtue of what underlying (...) principle or property does the HT gain its purported justification?; and does this underlying principle or property ground the HT as its proponents conceive of it? I identify two separate grounds represented in the literature: (i) J.S. Mill’s Harm Principle; and (ii) the liberty interests of parents. I find that the HT is not sufficiently grounded in either of these, revealing a substantial conceptual difficulty for its advocates. (shrink)

Maggie Günsberg explores the intersection between gender portrayal and other social categories of class, age and the family in the Italian theatre from the Renaissance to the present day. She examines the developing relationship between patriarchal strategies and the formal properties of the dramatic genre such as plot, comedy and realism. She also considers conventions specific to drama in performance, including images of both femininity and masculinity. An interdisciplinary approach, drawing on semiotics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, theories of spectatorship and dramatic (...) theory from a feminist perspective, informs Günsberg's critique of landmarks in Italian theatrical history, including work by Machiavelli, Ariosto, Goldoni, D'Annunzio and Pirandello. The book concludes with a chapter on the plays of Franca Rame, assessing the impact of this important figure on contemporary Italian theatre. (shrink)

The Harm Threshold (HT) holds that the state may interfere in medical decisions parents make on their children’s behalf only when those decisions are likely to cause serious harm to the child. Such a high bar for intervention seems incompatible with both parental obligations and the state’s role in protecting children’s well-being. In this paper, I assess the theoretical underpinnings for the HT, focusing on John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle as its most plausible conceptual foundation. I offer (i) a novel, (...) text-based argument showing that Mill’s Harm Principle does not give justificatory force to the HT; and (ii) a positive account of some considerations which, beyond significant harm, would comprise an intervention principle normatively grounded in Mill’s ethical theory. I find that substantive recommendations derived from Mill’s socio-political texts are less _laissez-faire_ than they have been interpreted by HT proponents. Justification for state intervention owes not to the severity of a harm, but to whether that harm arises from the failure to satisfy one’s duty. Thus, a pediatric intervention principle derived from Mill ought not to be oriented around the _degree_ of harm caused by a parent’s healthcare decision, but rather, the _kind_ of harm—specifically, whether the harm arises from violation of parental obligation. These findings challenge the interpretation of Mill adopted by HT proponents, eliminating a critical source of justification for a protected domain of parental liberty and reorienting the debate to focus on parental duties. (shrink)

Memories and notes on the teaching of Cesare Vasoli and on the main lines of his studies of philosophy and history of culture.