The result of a seven-and-a-half-year undertaking to document Iowa's barns and all they represent, Harker's Barns: Visions of an American Icon featured seventy-five stunning black-and-white photographs by Michael Harker. An impressive and well-received collection, the book helped preserve the glory of one of rural America's most elemental icons. Still Standing, a postcard book of thirty of Harker's barn photographs---some from Harker's Barns, some previously unseen---continues that mission of preservation. Printed on heavy card stock and perforated (...) for easy removal, the cards showcase midwestern barns-from square to round, wood to brick, Dutch to Swedish, occupied or abandoned, all symbolizing a passing way of life that was once the lifeblood of Iowa and the Midwest. As barns continue to disappear, these images will endure. “Barns Again! Celebrating an American Icon,” an exhibit of Harker's barn photos sponsored by Humanities Iowa and organized by the Smithsonian Institution's Traveling Exhibition Service and the National Building Museum, with assistance from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is currently touring Iowa. (shrink)

A documentary photographer captures the glory and decay of one of rural America's most elemental icons in this collection of images that encapsulate the dramatic transformations that have overtaken the Iowa countryside. Original.

Justice Stephen J. Field was the champion of a form of liberalism often said to be especially friendly to capitalism, the approach to the Constitution traditionally identified with “Lochnerism,” i.e., a laissez-faire oriented judicial activism. More recently a form of judicial revisionism has arisen, challenging the accepted descriptions of “Lochnerism” and of Field's jurisprudence. This article is an attempt to extend the revisionist approach by arriving at a more satisfactory understanding of the grounding of Field's jurisprudence in the natural rights (...) philosophy. Field, it turns out, orienting around natural rights, was not so unambiguously friendly to capitalism as previous generations of scholars maintained, but his approach is surely friendlier than the constitutional theories that have replaced natural rights since Field's day. (shrink)

In Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, Michael Zuckert proposes a new view of the political philosophy that lay behind the founding of the United States.

Leo Strauss and his alleged political influence regarding the Iraq War have in recent years been the subject of significant media attention, including stories in the _Wall Street Journal _and _New York Times._ _Time_ magazine even called him “one of the most influential men in American politics.” With _The Truth about Leo Strauss_, Michael and Catherine Zuckert challenged the many claims and speculations about this notoriously complex thinker. Now, with _Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy_, they turn (...) their attention to a searching and more comprehensive interpretation of Strauss’s thought as a whole, using the many manifestations of the “problem of political philosophy” as their touchstone. For Strauss, political philosophy presented a “problem” to which there have been a variety of solutions proposed over the course of Western history. Strauss’s work, they show, revolved around recovering—and restoring—political philosophy to its original Socratic form. Since positivism and historicism represented two intellectual currents that undermined the possibility of a Socratic political philosophy, the first part of the book is devoted to Strauss’s critique of these two positions. Then, the authors explore Strauss’s interpretation of the history of philosophy and both ancient and modern canonical political philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Locke. Strauss’s often-unconventional readings of these philosophers, they argue, pointed to solutions to the problem of political philosophy. Finally, the authors examine Strauss’s thought in the context of the twentieth century, when his chief interlocutors were Schmitt, Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. The most penetrating and capacious treatment of the political philosophy of this complex and often misunderstood thinker, from his early years to his last works, _Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy_ reveals Strauss’s writings as an attempt to show that the distinctive characteristics of ancient and modern thought derive from different modes of solving the problem of political philosophy and reveal why he considered the ancient solution both philosophically and politically superior. (shrink)

The practice of recontact in genomic medicine has the power to help rectify long‐standing inequities in genetic testing. However, if not delivered systematically, recontacting practices also have the potential to reinforce these same inequities. Recontact, which occurs when contact between a clinician and patient is reinitiated after a relationship has ended, is often in search of or in response to updated interpretation or results. Currently, recontact is happening in a patient‐driven and ad hoc manner, undermining its potential to benefit all (...) patients. In this paper, the authors position justice as an additional argument in favor of systematic recontact and an argument against the predominantly patient‐initiated model. They argue that patients from equity‐deserving groups should be early beneficiaries of an emerging responsibility to recontact patients. The authors share illustrative clinical vignettes and propose role‐specific and systems‐level solutions to rightfully position recontact as a tool to promote a more equitable clinical genomics future. (shrink)

Despite widespread confusion over its meaning, the notion of a conceptual scheme is pervasive in Anglo-American philosophy, particularly amongst those who call themselves ' conceptual relativists'. In this paper, I identify three different ways to understand conceptual schemes. I argue that the two most common models, deriving from Kant and Quine, are flawed, and, in addition, useless for the relativist. Instead, I urge adoption of a 'neo-Kantian', broadly Wittgensteinian model, which, it is ' argued, is immune from Davidsonian objections to (...) the very idea of a scheme. (shrink)

Jonah N. Schupbach and Jan Sprenger and Vincenzo Crupi and Katya Tentori have recently proposed measures of explanatory power and have shown that they are characterized by certain arguably desirable conditions or axioms. I further examine the properties of these two measures, and a third measure considered by I. J. Good and Timothy McGrew . This third measure also has an axiomatic representation. I consider a simple coin-tossing example in which only the Crupi–Tentori measure does not perform well. The Schupbach–Sprenger (...) and Good–McGrew measures are based on different notions of explanatory power, but both are tenable. 1 Introduction2 Measures of Explanatory Power3 The Schupbach–Sprenger Measure4 The Crupi–Tentori Measure5 The Good–McGrew Measure6 Affirmative versus Comprehensive Explanatory Power7 Coin-Flipping Examples8 Decomposition9 Conclusion. (shrink)

Over and over, philosophers have claimed that environmental holism in general, and Leopold's Land Ethic in particular, ought to be rejected on the basis that it has fascistic implications. I argue that the land Ethic is not tantamount to environmental fascism because Leopold's moral theory accounts for the moral standing of the individual as well as "the land," a holistic ethic better protects and defends the individual in the long-run, and the term "fascism" is misapplied in this case.

The Western world is currently gripped by an obsessive concern for the rights of animals - their uses and abuses. In this book, Leahy argues that this is a movement based upon a series of fundamental misconceptions about the basic nature of animals. This is a radical philosophical questioning of prevailing views on animal rights, which credit animals with a self-consciousness like ours. Leahy's conclusions have implications for issues such as bloodsports, meat eating and fur trading.

This paper contributes to the (re-)conceptualisation of responsible innovation by proposing an evolutionary economic approach that focuses on the role of consumers in the innovation process. After a discussion of the philosophical foundations and ethical implications of this approach, which bears an explanatory potential that has not been adequately considered in previous discussions of responsible innovation, we present a first step towards capturing the important but often neglected role of consumers in innovation processes (including responsible innovation): We propose an agent-based (...) model that incorporates a multidimensional space of characteristics in which new products or services are represented by more than the mere aspect of price and quality. Instead, innovations are denoted by a large set of characteristics, including also negative or harmful ones. The model is used to illustrate that consumers’ heterogeneity and bounded rationality – even if considered in a simple manner – indeed play a crucial role in the creation and diffusion of responsible innovation which can and should be used for further work in this field and for possible extensions of the model. (shrink)

Contemporary expressivists typically deny that all true judgments must represent reality. Many instead adopt truth minimalism, according to which there is no substantive property of judgments in virtue of which they are true. In this article, I suggest that expressivists would be better suited to adopt truth pluralism, or the view that there is more than one substantive property of judgments in virtue of which judgments are true. My point is not that an expressivism that takes this form is true, (...) but that it more readily accommodates the motivations that typically lead expressivists to their view in the first place. (shrink)

This article explores the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the recognition of a ground of unlawful discrimination. It is important not only to have a coherent understanding of the currently enumerated grounds, but also to have a theoretical framework that can assist in enumerating new grounds through the open-ended “other status” aspect of many legal frameworks. To that end, this article argues that personal characteristics that are generally morally irrelevant, and that are socially salient in that they carry with (...) them a prevalence of inequality-laden attitudes, amount to necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for recognizing a ground of unlawful discrimination. Other conditions, such as immutability and the presence of relative group disadvantage, will be assessed and dismissed as contingent but not necessary conditions. (shrink)

Previous reports have demonstrated that the comprehension of sentences describing motion in a particular direction (toward, away, up, or down) is affected by concurrently viewing a stimulus that depicts motion in the same or opposite direction. We report 3 experiments that extend our understanding of the relation between perception and language processing in 2 ways. First, whereas most previous studies of the relation between perception and language processing have focused on visual perception, our data show that sentence processing can be (...) affected by the concurrent processing of auditory stimuli. Second, it is shown that the relation between the processing of auditory stimuli and the processing of sentences depends on whether the sentences are presented in the auditory or visual modality. (shrink)

Michael P. Levine, Tamas Pataki. the case of racism. If one understands racism to be rooted in some underlying psychological structure, then while what is ordinarily called racist behavior may well be indicative of such an underlying structure, ...

Research has suggested a fundamental connection between fairness and well-being at the individual, relational, and societal levels. Mattering is a multidimensional construct consisting of feeling valued by, and adding value to, self and others. Prior studies have attempted to connect mattering to both fairness and a variety of well-being outcomes. Based on these findings, we hypothesize that mattering acts as a mediator between fairness and well-being. This hypothesis was tested through Covariance-Based Structural Equation Modeling using multidimensional measures of fairness, mattering, (...) and well-being. Results from a Latent Path Analysis conducted on a representative sample of 1,051U.S. adults provide support to our hypothesis by revealing a strong direct predictive effect of mattering onto well-being and a strong indirect effect of fairness onto well-being through mattering. Results also show that mattering is likely to fully mediate the relationship between fairness and multiple domains of well-being, except in one case, namely, economic well-being. These findings illustrate the value of a focus on mattering to understand the relationship between fairness and well-being and to provide future directions for theory, research, and practice. Theoretical implications for the experience of citizenship and participation, along with cross-cultural considerations, are also discussed. (shrink)

Emergent forms of political protest and constitution often provide limit cases for their contemporary theoretical models, and transnational protest movements from Occupy to Democracy in Europe 2025...

These essays center around two questions: Does truth have an underlying nature? And if so, what sort of nature does it have?

Know-it-All Society is about how we form and maintain our political convictions, and the ways in which political ideologies, human psychology and technology conspire to make our society more dogmatic, less intellectually humble and ultimately less democratic.

From 1914 on Russell's epistemology was dominated by the attempt to show how we come by our knowledge of the external world. As he gradually became aware of the inadequacies of the "pure empiricist" approach, Russell realized that his program was viable only insofar as certain postulates of inference were allowed. In this paper I trace the development of the structural postulates from Analysis of Matter to Human Knowledge. The basic continuity of Russell's thought is established. Certain confusions implicit in (...) the various formulations of the postulates are brought to light. Finally, it is argued that the viability of Russell's program rests on a larger number of independent postulates than he thought were needed. Some implications of Russell's work for current work in the philosophy of science are briefly sketched. (shrink)

A common strategy amongst realists grants relativism at the level of language or thought but denies it at the level of fact. Their point is that even if our concept of an object is relative to a conceptual scheme, it doesn't follow that objects themselves are relative to conceptual schemes. This is a sensible point. But in this paper I present a simple argument for the conclusion that it is false. According to what I call the T-argument, relativism about content (...) entails a relativism about fact. (shrink)

This essay portrays the “law of the good neighbor” as the principle of the Warburg Library's collections — as the argument for their expansion and coherence, as well as the principle governing the scholarly practice inspired by the Warburg Institute and “Warburg school” of cultural analysis. The essay includes a tribute to Anne Marie Meyer (1919 – 2004), Warburg scholar and long-time affiliate of the Institute, with special emphasis on the question that she uniquely raised: “Exactly what was the relation (...) between [Aby] Warburg's research on paganism in the Renaissance and his meditations and fears about Judaism (and Jews)?”. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine has always required integration of patient values with ‘best’ clinical evidence. It is widely recognized that scientific practices and discoveries, including those of EBM, are value-laden. But to date, the science of EBM has focused primarily on methods for reducing bias in the evidence, while the role of values in the different aspects of the EBM process has been almost completely ignored.

I argue for the consistency of the following views. First, there can be irreconcilable but equally true ways to categorize or "carve up" the world into objects; second, truth is an objective concept. In short, I claim that one can be a metaphysical pluralist, but an absolutist about truth. ;The first part of the work is taken up with explaining metaphysical pluralism. This is said to be the thesis that all propositions and all facts are relative to conceptual schemes. Thus, (...) the pluralist can maintain that, relative to one conceptual scheme, there is only one substance, and that relative to another scheme, there is more than one substance--without these views being inconsistent. Along the way, the notion of a conceptual scheme is clarified, and pluralism is defended from objections that it is incoherent, trivial or simply a form of idealism. ;The next part of the work explicates an objective conception of propositional truth. The view of truth discussed is called minimal objectivism, since it holds that while truth is indeed a property of propositions, the concept of truth is fully captured by this truism: the proposition that p is true if and only if p. Minimal objectivism is contrasted and shown to be inconsistent with other, more subjective or epistemic accounts of truth, and it is shown that the minimalist account of the concept floats free of specific debates about the nature of the property of truth. ;In the final chapter I argue that minimalism and metaphysical pluralism are pragmatically and logically consistent. Further, it is shown that pluralism is even consistent with the more robust correspondence theory of truth. Several important implications are thereby said to follow: first, metaphysical pluralism can no longer be rejected on the grounds that it entails an epistemic or relativist view of truth; second, the consistency of minimal objectivism and pluralism allows us to admit the powerful intuition that while there can be equally true but irreconcilable views on the world, some views are simply false. (shrink)

An investigation into the way in which information technology has shaped how and what we know, from "Google-knowing" to privacy and social media.

Much of the literature on speech acts and semantics assigns a type of theoretical priority to assertions; many philosophers assume, as Robert Brandom has put it, that assertion is the fundamental speech act. Others take a more pluralistic approach, with many categories interwoven as peers, and no one category as fundamental. I suggest there is a way to embrace a pluralistic approach and explain the importance of assertions without making them fundamental. Their role instead becomes one of supporting connections between (...) other categories, and surprisingly, turns on their unusually broad but very thin pragmatic character. (shrink)

In this paper, I make two points about Richard’s truth relativism. First, I argue his truth relativism is at odds with his account of truth-aptness. Second, I argue that his truth relativism commits him to a form of pluralism about truth.