In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:14 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Melissa Oliver-Powell Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Unechante,l’autrepas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France In the spring of 1971, three years after the revolutionary fervor of May 1968 in France, 343 women put their names to a courageous manifesto announcing that they were criminals of a particularly gendered nature. The (...) authors of Manifeste des 343 (Manifesto of the 343) comprised a large group of culturally eminent French women and activists declaring that they had all illegally undergone abortions, which at this point, despite growing decriminalization throughout much of Western Europe, were still outlawed within their republic. Though many of the revolutionary fires had now eased to embers, French feminists demonstrated that reproductive rights were still a vital and unresolved topic of social justice. Including names as weighty as Simone de Beauvoir, Jeanne Moreau, and Catherine Deneuve, the manifesto brought together exceptional women from the fields of academia, law, theater, film and literature, alongside grassroots activists. Their action was a bold challenge to the French authorities, daring them to arrest some of the country’s brightest thinkers and cultural innovators under a law the signatories felt was deeply unjust, sexist, and antithetical to the values of individual liberty and citizenship. It was a case of those with the broadest shoulders weaponizing their privilege to present a robust front line in the wider struggle for women’s rights. One of the signatories was filmmaker Agnès Varda. Her name, like those of several others on the list, demonstrates the symbiosis between Melissa Oliver-Powell 15 cultural production and gender politics that has often characterized French feminist thought. From the multidisciplinary writings of Beauvoir, to the novels of the écriture féminine movement, to the lyrical academic prose of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and others, French and Francophone feminist writers have tended to connect art and politics with a great deal of fluidity. As a committed activist and a filmmaker, Agnès Varda falls very much within this tradition, often adopting and developing feminist practices within her cinema. This article examines how Varda’s 1977 film, L’Une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, The Other Doesn’t) interacts with and participates in the feminist political project of reproductive rights as well as the ongoing intellectual and moral debates over abortion taking place in France throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. I look particularly at the adversarial construction of abortion narratives within these debates and the location of victimhood therein. Within mainstream cultural representations in and beyond France, abortion is typically constructed as either a traumatic or a transgressive moment. The same is often true on either side of political and social debates on abortion, which have tended either to characterize the women who get abortions as irresponsible and amoral or as sympathetic victims in need of protection. Though the transgressive element persists, it is the interaction with representations of trauma that interests me here. In approaching discussions of gendered injustice, it is common for feminist writers and activists to leverage pathos as a rhetorical strategy. While suffering can be a highly effective and galvanizing expression of oppression, such discourses also run the risk of producing excessive depictions of victimhood, which can displace the capacity for action from the subject of hardship onto the privileged oppressor. This risk is particularly at stake within the cultural form of film, as its visuality and identificatory mechanics have the potential to spectacularize the female victim and make her relatable only through suffering. This was often the case in earlier French films that featured abortion such as Les Mauvaises rencontres (1955), Des gens sans importance (1956), Journal d’une femme en blanc (1965), and Une femme en blanc se révolte (1966), all of which made their subjects sympathetic by entwining them in long narratives of victimization ending in death or disgrace. This article looks at how Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas disengages from the spectacle of suffering that so often characterizes representations of women’s experiences 16 Melissa Oliver-Powell and rejects the idea that abortion narratives must... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface At a time when access to safe abortions is being curtailed in the United States under the pretext of a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this Feminist Studies issue focuses on abortion and women’s embodiment. The essays by Melissa Oliver-Powell, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, and Jennifer L. Holland each contribute new approaches to the stillvexed topic of abortion, positioning movements for abortion access in relation (...) to historical and ecological change. Two collaboratively written essays, by South American authors María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra and Tania Pérez-Bustos, and by North American and European authors Laura Bisaillon with six colleagues, both center the body within feminist labor, exploring how the embodied experience of work can also be a site of knowledge-making. Other authors push us to move beyond humanistic understandings of affect and the body in feminist work, as Nathan Snaza shows in a review essay of four recent books engaging “Biopolitics without Bodies.” Poems by Rosetta Marantz Cohen, Darlene Taylor, and Abby Minor also feature experiences of bodily violence and bodily pleasure, while Ellyn Weiss discusses the distinctive representations of bodies in the visual art of Swedish-American artist Anna U. Davis. To close the issue, two News and Views pieces by Pang Laikwan and Sealing Cheng on the recent protest movement in Hong Kong provide two complementary perspectives on living through tumultuous political times. Our next issue will include content directly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first essay, Melissa Oliver-Powell’s “Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France” addresses the complexities of anti-​ abortion 8 rhetoric in France. Placing Varda’s 1977 film in the historical context of French nationalistic anxiety about low birthrates in the twentieth century, Oliver-Powell argues that the film deconstructs polarized narratives about abortion. While dominant cultural representations of abortion typically depicted it as the result of female irresponsibility or traumatic victimization, Varda’s film rejects the binary concepts of villain and victim and questions the presumption that women always suffer when exercising their reproductive choice. Oliver-Powell situates Varda alongside the 343 eminent French female cultural leaders who composed a famous 1971 Manifesto publicly declaring themselves criminals for having had illegal abortions and presents simultaneous histories of French feminism and French cinema. Varda’s film constructs a feminist representation of abortion that avoids foregrounding women ’s suffering and instead emphasizes empowerment and solidarity. Its narrative features two women friends, both treated unjustly by France’s abortion laws, who participate in the movement for reform over a fourteen -year span. Varda represents the interplay of motherhood with women ’s lives as a continuum, not a disruptive episode, and she blends documentary -style devices with imaginative musical interludes: she shows actual women seeking abortions in Holland and includes songs about abortion, pregnancy, and motherhood. Oliver-Powell claims that Varda dramatizes unprecedented representations “of female friendship without pathology, of abortion without guilt, death or persecution, of motherhood without objectification....” A second essay, Rachel Hurst’s “Abortion as a Feminist Pedagogy of Grief in Marianne Apostolides’s Deep Salt Water,” proposes that the championing of women’s reproductive rights could better account for the context of difficult emotions and an imperfect world. Hurst uses reproductive justice approaches to critique simplistic rights-based arguments for abortion, premised on liberal concepts of choice and autonomy, which fail to understand the material conditions of poor women and especially women of color. Such analyses emphasize the necessity of rights discourses that include the right to bear and parent one’s own children free from violence and economic hardship, and they advocate the transformative possibilities of acknowledging rather than suppressing women’s ambivalence about their own abortions as well as others’ choices. Hurst describes a collaboration between two contemporary Canadian feminists, writer Marianne Apostolides and visual artist  9 Catherine Mellinger, in their mixed-media text, Deep Salt Water, which is organized according to the weeks of a pregnancy and the aftermath of its termination. Rather than falling back into familiar polarizations for and against “choice,” they use the story of Apostolides’s abortion seventeen years earlier... (shrink)

The debate between moral realism and antirealism plays an important role in contemporary metaethics as well as in the interpretation of Kant's moral philosophy. This volume aims to clarify whether, and in what sense, Kant is a moral realist, an antirealist, or something in-between. Based on an explication of the key metaethical terms, internationally recognized Kant scholars discuss the question of how Kant's moral philosophy should be understood in this regard. All camps in the metaethical field have their inhabitants: Some (...) contributors read Kant's philosophy in terms of a more or less robust moral realism, objectivism, or idealism, and some of them take it to be a version of constructivism, constitutionism, or brute antirealism. In any case, all authors introduce and defend their terminology in a clear manner and argue thoughtfully and refreshingly for their positions. With contributions of Stefano Bacin, Jochen Bojanowski, Christoph Horn, Patrick Kain, Lara Ostaric, Fred Rauscher, Oliver Sensen, Elke Schmidt, Dieter Schönecker, and Melissa Zinkin. (shrink)

There can be no doubt that Kant thought we should be reflective: we ought to care to make up our own minds about how things are and what is worth doing. Philosophical objections to the Kantian reflective ideal have centred on concerns about the excessive control that the reflective person is supposed to exert over her own mental life, and Kantians who feel the force of these objections have recently drawn attention to Kant’s conception of moral virtue as it is (...) developed in his later work, chiefly the Metaphysics of Morals. Melissa Merritt’s book is a distinctive contribution to this recent turn to virtue in Kant scholarship. Merritt argues that we need a clearer, and textually more comprehensive, account of what reflection is, in order not only to understand Kant’s account of virtue, but also to appreciate how it effectively rebuts long-standing objections to the Kantian reflective ideal. (shrink)

Many philosophers invoke the "wisdom of nature" in arguing for varying degrees of caution in the development and use of genetic enhancement technologies. Because they view natural selection as akin to a master engineer that creates functionally and morally optimal design, these authors tend to regard genetic intervention with suspicion. In Part II, we examine and ultimately reject the evolutionary assumptions that underlie the master engineer analogy (MEA). By highlighting the constraints on ordinary unassisted evolution, we show how intentional genetic (...) modification can overcome many of the natural impediments to the human good. Our contention is that genetic engineering offers a solution that is more eff icient, reliable, versatile, and morally palatable than the lumbering juggernaut of Darwinian evolution. In Part III, we evaluate a recent attempt to ground precautionary enhancement heuristics in adaptive etiology. Our problem with this approach is two-fold: first, it is based on the same "strong adaptationist" interpretation of evolution that motivates the flawed MEA, and second, the etiological concept of function on which it relies provides indirect and potentially misleading information about the likely consequences of genetic intervention. We offer instead enhancement criteria based on causal relationships in ontogeny. We conclude that rather than grounding a presumption against deliberate genetic modification, the causal structure of the living world gives us good moral reason to pursue it. (shrink)

The precautionary principle (“the Principle”) has been widely embraced as the new paradigm for contending with biological and environmental risk in the context of emerging technologies. Increasingly, it is being incorporated into domestic, supranational, and international legal regimes as part of a general overhaul of health and environmental regulation.1 Codifications of the Principle typically are vague, with their content intentionally left for scholars to debate, decision makers to interpret, and the courts to flesh out through case law. Generally speaking, the (...) Principle holds that scientific uncertainty will not be a bar to preventive regulatory action, and that decision makers should err on the side of .. (shrink)

Many people believe that Somalia’s economy has been in chaos since the collapse of its national government in 1991. We take a comparative institutional approach to examine Somalia’s performance relative to other African countries both when Somalia had a government and during its extended period of anarchy. We find that although Somalia is poor, its relative economic performance has improved during its period of statelessness. We also describe how Somalia has provided basic law and order and a currency, which have (...) enabled the country to achieve the coordination that has led to improvements in its standard of living. (shrink)

Understanding how scientific activities use naming stories to achieve disciplinary status is important not only for insight into the past, but for evaluating current claims that new disciplines are emerging. In order to gain a historical understanding of how new disciplines develop in relation to these baptismal narratives, we compare two recently formed disciplines, systems biology and genomics, with two earlier related life sciences, genetics and molecular biology. These four disciplines span the twentieth century, a period in which the processes (...) of disciplinary demarcation fundamentally changed from those characteristic of the nineteenth century. We outline how the establishment of each discipline relies upon an interplay of factors that include paradigmatic achievements, technological innovation, and social formations. Our focus, however, is the baptism stories that give the new discipline a founding narrative and articulate core problems, general approaches and constitutive methods. The highly plastic process of achieving disciplinary identity is further marked by the openness of disciplinary definition, tension between technological possibilities and the ways in which scientific issues are conceived and approached, synthesis of reductive and integrative strategies, and complex social interactions. The importance – albeit highly variable – of naming stories in these four cases indicates the scope for future studies that focus on failed disciplines or competing names. Further attention to disciplinary histories could, we suggest, give us richer insight into scientific development. (shrink)

On a version of consent theory that tempts many, predatory sexual relations involving significant power imbalances (e.g. between professors and students, adults and teenagers, or employers and employees) are wrong because they violate consent-centric norms. In particular, the wronged party is said to have been incapable of consenting to the predation, and the sexual wrong is located in the encounter’s nonconsensuality. Although we agree that these are sexual wrongs, we resist the idea that they are always nonconsensual. We argue instead (...) that it is possible for students, teenagers, employees, etc. to fully consent to sexually predatory encounters; denying as much renders survivors of predation vulnerable to compounding harms. Survivors face a dilemma: give up either their understanding of their experience as wrong, or their self-conception as an agent capable of consenting. We call the latter phenomenon agential demotion. (shrink)

Normativity is widely regarded as the ability to make evaluative judgments based on a shared system of social norms. When normativity is viewed through the cognitively demanding lens of human morality, however, the prospect of finding social norms innonhuman animals rapidly dwindles and common causal structures are overlooked. In this paper, I develop a biofunctionalist account of social normativity and examine its implications for how we ought to conceptualize, explain, and study social norms in the wild. I propose that we (...) think of social normative systems as behavior-regulatory power structures that resolve conflicts between nested levels of selection in favor of the higher level. I argue that the best case for social norms outside of humans is not in the animals one might expect, such as primates or other large-brained vertebrates, but rather in social insects. Finally, I engage with a number of potential objections to this unorthodox proposal. (shrink)

The application of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in healthcare have immense potential to improve the care of patients. While there are some emerging practices surro...

New York City hospitals expanded resources to an unprecedented extent in response to the COVID pandemic. Thousands of beds, ICU beds, staff members, and ventilators were rapidly incorporated into h...

This is the second of the four essays in Part II of the book on liberalism and traditionalist education; all four are by authors who would like to find ways for the liberal state to honour the self-definitions of traditional cultures and to find ways of avoiding a confrontation with differences. Melissa Williams examines citizenship as identity in relation to the project of nation-building, the shifting boundaries of citizenship in relation to globalization, citizenship as shared fate, and the role (...) of multicultural education within the view of citizenship-as-shared-fate. She argues the other side of the same coin to that presented by Shelley Burtt in the previous chapter: according to Williams, the liberal state often demands too much in the way of loyalty from traditional groups, and when it does, it runs a strong risk of becoming oppressive and illiberal. Moreover, she holds that there is no need for a single shared identity among citizens of the liberal state. Her conception of people tied together by a shared fate is to this extent compatible with Burtt’s attempt to make liberalism’s commitment to autonomy more hospitable to groups of individuals encumbered by unchosen attachments, but her notion of citizenship as shared fate also goes further than that, and possibly stands in some tension with, Burtt’s view, since it allows and even encourages people to develop primary affiliation to all kind of groups – traditional as well as global. (shrink)

The Institute of Medicine’s 2005 publication, Dietary Supplements: A Framework for Evaluating Safety, is authoritative and thorough, and thus representative of other reports by the Institute of Medicine. What makes this report particularly interesting, however, is the rich political subtext that exists in the interstices of the report, popping up here and there in brief comments and barely suppressed yelps of exasperation. To understand this context, it is useful to reflect for a moment on the special nature of the IOM (...) and its relationship to government.IOM is part of the National Academy of Sciences, and is a private, non-governmental organization that does not receive direct federal funding for its work. Rather, IOM studies are often funded by contract with governmental entities that request reports on particular topics. As a case in point, the dietary supplement study was requested and paid for by the FDA. (shrink)

Researchers are studying how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to better detect, prognosticate and subgroup diseases. The idea that AI might advance medicine’s understanding of biological categories of psychiatric disorders, as well as provide better treatments, is appealing given the historical challenges with prediction, diagnosis and treatment in psychiatry. Given the power of AI to analyse vast amounts of information, some clinicians may feel obligated to align their clinical judgements with the outputs of the AI system. However, a potential (...) epistemic privileging of AI in clinical judgements may lead to unintended consequences that could negatively affect patient treatment, well-being and rights. The implications are also relevant to precision medicine, digital twin technologies and predictive analytics generally. We propose that a commitment to epistemic humility can help promote judicious clinical decision-making at the interface of big data and AI in psychiatry. (shrink)

Training in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) is required for many research trainees nationwide, but little is known about its effectiveness. For a preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of a short-term course in RCR, medical students participating in an NIH-funded summer research program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) were surveyed using an instrument developed through focus group discussions. In the summer of 2003, surveys were administered before and after a short-term RCR course, as well as to (...) alumni of the courses given in the summers of 2002 and 2001. Survey responses were analyzed in the areas of knowledge, ethical decision-making skills, attitudes about responsible conduct of research, and frequency of discussions about RCR outside of class. The only statistically significant improvement associated with the course was an increase in knowledge, while there was a non-significant tendency toward improvements in ethical decision-making skills and attitudes about the importance of RCR training. The nominal impact of a short-term training course should not be surprising, but it does raise the possibility that other options for delivering information only, such as an Internet-based tutorial, might be considered as comparable alternatives when longer courses are not possible. (shrink)

Introduction: The role of animals in philosophies of man -- Part I: What's wrong with animal rights? -- The right to remain silent -- Part II: Animal pedagogy -- You are what you eat : Rousseau's cat -- Say the human responded : Herder's sheep -- Part III: Difference worthy of its name -- Hair of the dog : Derrida's and Rousseau's good taste -- Sexual difference, animal difference : Derrida's sexy silkworm -- Part IV: It's our fault -- The (...) beaver's struggle with species-being : De Beauvoir and the praying mantis -- Answering the call of nature : Lacan walking the dog -- Part V: Estranged kinship -- The abyss between humans and animals : Heidegger puts the bee in being -- Strange kinship : Merleau-Ponty's sensuous stickleback -- Stopping the anthropological machine : Agamben's tick-tocking tick -- Psychoanalysis and the science of kinship -- Psychoanalysis as animal by-product : Freud's zoophilia -- Animal abjects, maternal abjects : Kristeva's strays -- Conclusion: Sustainable ethics. (shrink)

We propose a Bayesian framework for the attribution of knowledge, and apply this framework to generate novel predictions about knowledge attribution for different types of “Gettier cases”, in which an agent is led to a justified true belief yet has made erroneous assumptions. We tested these predictions using a paradigm based on semantic integration. We coded the frequencies with which participants falsely recalled the word “thought” as “knew” (or a near synonym), yielding an implicit measure of conceptual activation. Our experiments (...) confirmed the predictions of our Bayesian account of knowledge attribution across three experiments. We found that Gettier cases due to counterfeit objects were not treated as knowledge (Experiment 1), but those due to intentionally-replaced evidence were (Experiment 2). Our findings are not well explained by an alternative account focused only on luck, because accidentally-replaced evidence activated the knowledge concept more strongly than did similar false belief cases (Experiment 3). We observed a consistent pattern of results across a number of different vignettes that varied the quality and type of evidence available to agents, the relative stakes involved, and surface details of content. Accordingly, the present findings establish basic phenomena surrounding people’s knowledge attributions in Gettier cases, and provide explanations of these phenomena within a Bayesian framework. (shrink)

Journal of Business Ethicsrecently published a critique of ethical practices in quantitative research by Zyphur and Pierides (J Bus Ethics 143:1–16, 2017). The authors argued that quantitative research prevents researchers from addressing urgent problems facing humanity today, such as poverty, racial inequality, and climate change. I offer comments and observations on the authors’ critique. I agree with the authors in many areas of philosophy, ethics, and social research, while making suggestions for clarification and development. Interpreting the paper through the pragmatism (...) of William James, I suggest that the authors’ arguments are unlikely to change attitudes in traditional quantitative research, though they may point the way to a new worldview, or Jamesian “sub-world,” in social research. (shrink)

Programs, policies, and technologies — particularly those concerned with health equity — are often designed with justice envisioned as the end goal. These policies or interventions, however, frequently fail to recognize how the beneficiaries have historically embodied the cumulative effects of marginalization, which undermines the effectiveness of the intended justice. These well-meaning attempts at justice are bounded by greater socio-historical constraints. Bounded justice suggests that it is impossible to attend to fairness, entitlement, and equity when the basic social and physical (...) infrastructures underlying them have been eroded by racism and other historically entrenched isms. Using the case of Brazil’s National Health Policy for the Black Population, this paper proposes that bounded justice can contribute to justice discourses by serving as a concept, a proffering to a multi-disciplinary conceptual framework, and a potential analytic for those interested in the design of policy, technology, and programmatic interventions towards health equity. (shrink)

Stephen Jay Gould argued that the shape of animal life as we know it is a radically contingent accident of history determined more by fortune than comparative functional merit. Acknowledging the formative role of contingency in macroevolution is crucial, Gould believed, to vanquishing the lingering vestiges of progressivism that continue to buttress anthropocentric views of life. Gould’s contingency thesis has come under fire in recent years by proponents of convergent evolution who argue that not only is replication ubiquitous in evolution, (...) but also that it indicates an evolutionary process charging inexorably toward ever more complex and human-like outcomes. We argue here that although convergentist approaches are widely seen as inimical to the Gouldian view of life, in fact the two are indispensable allies in the anti-progressivist crusade, particularly in relation to the evolution of mind. We illustrate this by examining the progressivist foundations of comparative cognition science and the ongoing resistance to attributions of convergent minds. (shrink)

From Descartes to Hume, philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed a dialectic of radically conflicting claims about the nature of the self. In the Paralogisms of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant comes to terms with this dialectic, and with the character of theexperiencing self. Powell seeks to elucidate these difficult texts, in part by applying to the Paralogisms insights drawn from Kant's Transcendental Deduction. His reading shows that the structure of the Paralogisms provides an essential key (...) to understanding both Kant's critique of "rationalpsychology" and his theory of self-consciousness. As Kant realized, the ways in which we must represent ourselves to ourselves have import not only for epistemology, but for our view of persons and of our own immortality, and for moral philosophy as well. Kant's theory of self-consciousness is alsoshown to have implications for contemporary discussions of the problem of other minds, functionalism, and the problem of indexical self-reference. (shrink)

The standard economic and ethical case in defense of sweatshops employs the standard of the “welfare of their workers and potential workers” to argue that sweatshop regulations harm the very people they intend to help. Scholars have recently contended that once the benefits and costs are balanced, regulations do, in fact, raise worker welfare. This paper describes the short and long-run tradeoffs associated with sweatshop regulation and then examines how reasonable constructions of measures of “worker welfare” would evaluate these tradeoffs (...) finding that the standard economic and ethical case against sweatshop regulations is well supported. (shrink)

A new reading of Plato’s political thought Plato famously defends the rule of knowledge. Knowledge, for him, is of the good. But what is rule? In this study, Melissa Lane reveals how political office and rule were woven together in Greek vocabulary and practices that both connected and distinguished between rule in general and office as a constitutionally limited kind of rule in particular. In doing so, Lane shows Plato to have been deeply concerned with the roles and relationships (...) between rulers and ruled. Adopting a longstanding Greek expectation that a ruler should serve the good of the ruled, Plato’s major political dialogues—the Republic, the Statesman, and Laws—explore how different kinds of rule might best serve that good. With this book, Lane offers the first account of the clearly marked vocabulary of offices at the heart of all three of these dialogues, explaining how such offices fit within the broader organization and theorizing of rule. Lane argues that taking Plato’s interest in rule and office seriously reveals tyranny as ultimately a kind of anarchy, lacking the order as well as the purpose of rule. When we think of tyranny in this way, we see how Plato invokes rule and office as underpinning freedom and friendship as political values, and how Greek slavery shaped Plato’s account of freedom. Reading Plato both in the Greek context and in dialogue with contemporary thinkers, Lane argues that rule and office belong at the center of Platonic, Greek, and contemporary political thought. (shrink)

Socrates wrote nothing; Plato's accounts of Socrates helped to establish western politics, ethics, and metaphysics. Both have played crucial and dramatically changing roles in western culture. In the last two centuries, the triumph of democracy has led many to side with the Athenians against a Socrates whom they were right to kill. Meanwhile the Cold War gave us polar images of Plato as both a dangerous totalitarian and an escapist intellectual. And visions of Plato have proliferated at the heart of (...) postmodern critiques of the very idea of metaphysics and politics. Plato's Progeny begins with an account of modern responses to the trial of Socrates and the controversial question of Socrates' relation to Plato. At its centre are two chapters exploring the idea of Platonic origins in and for philosophy, and of Platonic foundations for philosophical politics. Exploring unfamiliar as well as familiar invocations of Plato, Melissa Lane argues that twentieth-century ideological battles have obscured the importance of Socratic individualism, the nature of Platonic ethics, and the value of Platonic politics. Succinct and clearly written, this is an ideal guide for everyone interested in the way philosophers are still writing footnotes to Plato. (shrink)

I have vigorously absorbed the negative element of the age in which I live, an age that is, of course, very close to me, which I have no right ever to fight against, but as it were a right to represent. The slight amount of the positive, and also of the extreme negative, which capsizes into the positive, are something in which I have had no hereditary share. I have not been guided into life by the hand of Christianity – (...) admittedly now slack and failing – as Kierkegaard was, and have not caught the hem of the Jewish prayer shawl – now flying away from us – as the Zionists have. I am an end or a beginning.1. (shrink)

In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Thomas Reid offers a barrage of objections to the view, held by David Hume, that conceivability implies possibility. In this paper, I present Reid's first two objections to the ‘maxim of conceivability’ and defend Hume from them. The first objection concerns our ability to understand impossible claims, while the second concerns thoughts about impossible claims (such as, for instance, the thought that they are impossible). Reid's objections have special force against Hume (...) because of his commitment to analyse all operations of the understanding in terms of conception. I argue that these objections fail, on the grounds that they presuppose substantive views about language which we are not warranted in attributing to Hume. Ultimately, Reid's objections help us draw out a set of intertwined issues about the language-mind relationship in Hume. (shrink)

The Free Choice effect—whereby \\) seems to entail both \ and \—has traditionally been characterized as a phenomenon affecting the deontic modal ‘may’. This paper presents an extension of the semantic account of free choice defended by Fusco to the agentive modal ‘can’, the ‘can’ which, intuitively, describes an agent’s powers. On this account, free choice is a nonspecific de re phenomenon that—unlike typical cases—affects disjunction. I begin by sketching a model of inexact ability, which grounds a modal approach to (...) agency in a Williamson -style margin of error. A classical propositional semantics combined with this framework can reflect the intuitions highlighted by Kenny ’s dartboard cases, as well as the counterexamples to simple conditional views recently discussed by Mandelkern et al.. In Section 3, I turn to an independently motivated actual-world-sensitive account of disjunction, and show how it extends free choice inferences into an object language for propositional modal logic. (shrink)

In the Doctrine of Virtue Kant stipulates that ‘Love is a matter of feeling, not of willing . . . so a duty to love is an absurdity.’ Nonetheless, in the same work Kant claims that we have duties of love to other human beings. According to Kant, the kind of love which is commanded by duty is practical love. This paper defends the view that the duty of practical love articulated in the Doctrine of Virtue is distinct from the (...) duty of beneficence and best understood as a duty of self-transformation, which agents observe by cultivating a benevolent disposition and practical beneficent desires. (shrink)

The chapter examines Kant’s thesis about the ‘radical evil in human nature’ developed in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. According to this thesis, the human moral condition is corrupt by default and yet by own deed; and this corruption is the origin (root, radix) of human badness in all its variety, banality, and ubiquity. While Kant clearly takes radical evil to be endemic in human nature, controversy reigns about how to understand this. Some assume this can only (...) be a synthetic a priori claim about the necessity of radical evil (and thus one requiring a transcendental deduction). However, Kant indicates that while radical evil is inevitable it is not, for that, strictly necessary. The best way to understand this is through a teleological approach that explains how we inevitably bring this corruption upon ourselves in the course of our development. The chapter thereby joins other teleological accounts, but distinctively argues that Kant draws on Stoic natural teleology (specifically the doctrine of oikeiōsis), which he knows through Seneca and Cicero. This background allows us to make sense of the structure of Kant’s argument in ways that shed fresh light on the philosophical content of the thesis about radical evil. It also allows us to see that another hotly debated issue — namely, whether radical evil should be understood in ‘psychological’ or ‘social’ terms — is spurious: we see that these are flip sides of one coin, and are better placed to register the broader ethical significance of this result. (shrink)

Farm to school programs have been positioned as interventions that can support goals of the global food sovereignty movement, including strengthening local food production systems, improving food access and food justice for urban populations, and reducing distancing between producers and consumers. However, there has been little assessment of how and to what extent farm to school programs can actually function as a mechanism leading to the achievement of food sovereignty. As implemented in North America, farm to school programs encompass activities (...) not only related to school food procurement, but also to the development of student knowledge and skills under the framework of food literacy. Research on farm to school initiatives has largely been conducted in countries with government-supported national school feeding programs; this study examines farm to school organizing in Canada, where there is no national student nutrition program. Using qualitative fieldwork and document analysis, we investigate the farm to school movement in British Columbia, in a context where civil society concerns related to education and health have been the main vectors of farm to school mobilization. Our analysis suggests that, despite limited institutional infrastructure for school meals, the British Columbia farm to school movement has contributed toward realizing goals of food sovereignty through two main mechanisms: advocacy for institutional procurement of local and sustainable foods and mobilizing food literacy for increased public engagement with issues of social justice and equity in food systems. (shrink)

In the Doctrine of Virtue Kant divides duties of love into three categories: beneficent activity , gratitude and Teilnehmung – commonly referred to as the duty of sympathy . In this paper I will argue that the content and scope of the third duty of love has been underestimated by both critics and defenders of Kant's ethical theory. The account which pervades the secondary literature maintains that the third duty of love includes only two components: an obligation to make use (...) of our natural receptivity to sympathetic feelings as a means to fulfilling other duties of love, and an indirect duty to cultivate these feelings. As a result, Kant's duty of sympathy has been widely regarded as a duty whose value is derived from the way in which it serves other duties, in particular, the duty of beneficent activity, which obliges agents ‘to promote according to one's means the happiness of others in need’ . Teilnehmung has thus assumed something of a second-class status among the duties to others. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate that the prevailing account of Kant's third duty of love is incomplete. (shrink)

Political scientist Melissa Orlie asks what it means to live freely and responsibly when advantages are distributed disproportionately according to race, gender ...

The dominant view in the cognitive science of religion (the ‘Standard Model’) is that religious belief and behaviour are not adaptive traits but rather incidental byproducts of the cognitive architecture of mind. Because evidence for the Standard Model is inconclusive, the case for it depends crucially on its alleged methodological superiority to selectionist alternatives. However, we show that the Standard Model has both methodological and evidential disadvantages when compared with selectionist alternatives. We also consider a pluralistic approach, which holds that (...) religion or various aspects of religion originated as byproducts of evolved cognitive structures but were subsequently co-opted for adaptive purposes. We argue that when properly formulated, the pluralistic approach also has certain advantages over the Standard Model. (shrink)