Like any science, archaeology relies on trust between actors involved in the production of knowledge. In the early history of archaeology, this epistemic trust was complicated by histories of Orientalism in the Middle East and colonialism more broadly. The racial and power dynamics underpinning 19th- and early 20th-century archaeology precluded the possibility of interpersonal moral trust between foreign archaeologists and locally hired labourers. In light of this, archaeologists created systems of reward, punishment, and surveillance to ensure the honest behaviour of (...) site workers. They thus invented a set of structural conditions that produced sufficient epistemic trust for archaeological research to proceed—a system that continues to shape archaeology to the present day. (shrink)

How do ethics show up in the everyday behaviors and conversations of researchers in a scientific laboratory? How does the microcosmic culture of the laboratory shape researchers’ understandings of scientific ethics? We, an interdisciplinary team representing anthropology, computer science, and rhetorical studies, investigated these questions in two university STEM labs. Similar to previous work mapping out the epistemic cultures, we sought to understand the ethical cultures of these research groups. We observed their lab meetings for several months and conducted interviews (...) with members of the research laboratories. Ultimately, we recognized two distinct ethical cultures within the two laboratories: one focused on the relationship between science and social justice, and the other focused on clean data and accuracy as an ethical issue. These two distinct ethical cultures were discernable through ethnography, close reading of laboratory members’ language, as well as broad-scale topic modeling. Our project complements previous studies of ethics in science that have focused on codes of ethics or student curricula as ways in which scientists develop an understanding of scientific ethics. Our project demonstrates that everyday interactions between the members of scientific research labs additionally shape, at a decidedly local level, how scientists understand and ultimately approach ethical decision-making in the scientific research process. (shrink)

Christians, Allison, Benoît-Guay, Nicolas.

So considered, Hume is viewed as a naturalist, whose project in the first three parts of the first book of the Treatise is to provide an account of the ...

In his new book the eminent Kant scholar Henry Allison provides an innovative and comprehensive interpretation of Kant's concept of freedom. The author analyzes the concept and discusses the role it plays in Kant's moral philosophy and psychology. He also considers in full detail the critical literature on the subject from Kant's own time to the present day. In the first part Professor Allison argues that at the centre of the Critique of Pure Reason there is the foundation (...) for a coherent general theory of rational agency. The second part employs this account of rational agency as a key to understanding Kant's concept of moral agency and associated moral psychology. The third part focuses on Kant's attempt to ground both moral law and freedom in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. This is a major contribution to the interpretation of Kant which will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students of Kant's moral theory. (shrink)

This volume presents seventeen essays by one of the world's leading scholars on Kant. Henry E. Allison explores the nature of transcendental idealism, freedom of the will, and the concept of the purposiveness of nature. He places Kant's views in their historical context and explores their contemporary relevance to present day philosophers.

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the (...) normativity of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

The fifteen essays, written by such eminent scholars as Derrida, Heidegger, Deleuze, Klossowski, and Blanchot, focus on the Nietzschean concepts of the Will to ...

This brief, but tightly argued, work advances a dual thesis: Kant’s compatibilist solution to the free will problem is best understood in terms of Davidson’s anomalous monism; so understood, it constitutes a viable position, defensible in contemporary terms. The text consists of a short introduction followed by four substantive chapters dealing, respectively, with: Kant’s theory of compatibilism ; Kant and contemporary metaphysics ; Kant’s theory of causal determinism ; and Kant’s theory of free will. Because of the range of topics (...) covered and the thoroughness of its argumentation, this book should be of interest not only to Kantians, but to philosophers concerned with the more general issues regarding compatibilism. (shrink)

Henry E. Allison presents an analytical and historical commentary on Kant`s transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. He argues that, rather than providing a new solution to an old problem, it addresses a new problem, and he traces the line of thought that led Kant to the recognition of the significance of this problem in his 'pre-critical' period. In addition to the developmental nature of the account of Kant`s views presented (...) here, two distinctive features of Allison's reading of the deduction are a defense of Kant`s oft criticized claim that the conformity of appearances to the categories must be unconditionally rather than merely conditionally necessary and an insistence that the argument cannot be separated from Kant`s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature.

Recently, bioethicists and the UNCRPD have advocated for supported medical decision-making on behalf of patients with intellectual disabilities. But what does supported decision-making really entail? One compelling framework is Anita Silvers and Leslie Francis’ mental prosthesis account, which envisions supported decision-making as a process in which trustees act as mere appendages for the patient’s will; the trustee provides the cognitive tools the patient requires to realize her conception of her own good. We argue that supported decision-making would be better understood (...) as a collaborative process, giving patients with intellectual disabilities the opportunity to make decisions in a respectful relationship with trusted others. We offer an alternative account of supported decision-making where the primary constraint is to protect the patient from domination by the trustee. This is advantageous in its preservation of the prospects for genuine collaboration, for the mental prosthesis approach ultimately reinforces a problematic ideal of isolated patient self-determination. (shrink)

Henry Allison is one of the foremost interpreters of the philosophy of Kant. This new volume collects all his recent essays on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. All the essays postdate Allison's two major books on Kant, and together they constitute an attempt to respond to critics and to clarify, develop and apply some of the central theses of those books. Two are published here for the first time. Special features of the collection are: a detailed defence of (...) the author's interpretation of transcendental idealism; a consideration of the Transcendental Deduction and some other recent interpretations thereof; further elaborations of the tensions between various aspects of Kant's conception of freedom and of the complex role of this conception within Kant's moral philosophy. (shrink)

Although only one aspect of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's diverse oeuvre, his religious thought had a significant influence on thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and present-day liberal Protestant theologians. His thought is particularly difficult to assess, however, because it is found largely in a series of essays, reviews, critical studies, polemical writings, and commentary on theological texts. Beyond these, his correspondence, and a few fragmentary essays unpublished during his lifetime, we have his famous drama of religious toleration, Nathan the Wise, (...) and his philosophical-historical sketch, The Education of the Human Race. In these scattered texts, Lessing challenged the full range of theological views in the Enlightenment, from Protestant orthodoxy, with its belief in Biblical inerrancy, to a radical naturalism, which rejected both the concept of a divine revelation and the historically based claims of Christianity to be one, as well as virtually everything in between. Since he refused to identify himself with any of these parties, Lessing was an enigmatic figure, and a central question from his time to today is where he stood on the issue of the truth of the Christian religion. Now back in print, and with the addition of two supplementary essays, Henry E. Allison's book argues that, despite appearances, Lessing was not merely an eclectic thinker or intellectual provocateur, but a serious philosopher of religion, who combined a basically Spinozistic conception of God with a sophisticated pluralistic conception of religious truth inspired by Leibniz. (shrink)

This essay argues that the key to understanding Kant's transcendental idealism is to understand the transcendental realism with which he contrasts it. It maintains that the latter is not to be identified with a particular metaphysical thesis, but with the assumption that the proper objects of human cognitions are “objects in general” or “as such,” that is, objects considered simply qua objects of some understanding. Since this appears to conflict with Kant's own characterization of transcendental realism as the view that (...) (mistakenly) regards appearances as if they were things in themselves, the essay explicates the connection between the concepts of an object (or thing) considered as such and a thing considered as it is in itself. In light of this, it maintains that Kant's transcendental idealism is compatible with a robust empirical realism and that many of its critics are tacitly committed to a misguided transcendental realism. (shrink)

Allison Trowbridge harnesses the power of story in a series of letters to an imagined young woman wrestling with the questions that arise as she stands on the precipice of adulthood.

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the Third Analogy, a greatly expanded discussion of Kant’s _Paralogisms, _and entirely new chapters dealing with Kant’s theory of reason, his treatment of theology, and the important Appendix to the Dialectic. _Praise for the earlier edition: _ “Probably the most comprehensive and substantial study of the Critique of Pure Reason written by (...) any American philosopher.... This is a splendid book.”—Lewis White Beck “This masterful study... will most certainly join the canon of required reading for future interpreters of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Superbly organized and lucidly written.”—Garrett Green, _Journal of Religion_. (shrink)

According to a dominant view of stigma, a person is stigmatized within a community if sufficiently many people within that community hold a bad view of her. I call this the 'Bad View Model'. In this paper, I argue against the Bad View Model on the grounds that such beliefs are neither necessary nor sufficient for stigma, and that the account cannot explain the distinctive phenomenology of stigma, including certain vulnerabilities to shame. I then develop an alternative that explains these (...) features of stigma, which I call the 'Shaming Model'. On this view, a person is stigmatized within a community if she is shamed by members of that community, and this is explained by their belief that she has deviated from some social norm and/or standard. (shrink)

Using ethnographic data gathered at a mandated, community-based drug treatment program for women offenders, this article analyzes how gendered notions of the self and of autonomy shape penal governance. This study examines how psychological models of women's deviance, racialized visions of motherhood, and therapeutic techniques of the self come into tension with expectations of responsible, autonomous citizenship. The program prioritized therapeutic ways of governing its clients over those that emphasized economic self-reliance, rational decision making, and normalizing gender. This is because (...) staff attributed criminal and addictive behaviors to women's inadequate self-understanding and lack of emotional autonomy in personal relations. Staff discouraged women's motherhood and paid labor because they saw these external obligations as a threat to women's autonomous selfhood. This research complicates claims that contemporary forms of penal treatment manage offenders through rational incentives and personal responsibility by pointing to the ways that subject formation is a gendered process. (shrink)

This paper defends a hylomorphic version of animalism according to which human persons survive as immaterial, bodiless animals after death. According to the hylomorphism under consideration, human persons have souls that survive death, and according to the animalism under consideration, human persons are necessarily animals. One might think this implies that human persons don't survive their deaths since if they were to survive their deaths, they would be immaterial animals after death, but necessarily animals are material. This paper shows that (...) the hylomorphic animalist can overcome this problem in a way that respects the intuition that animals are material. In addition, the paper defends the hylomorphic animalist survivalist from the objection that her view introduces an insoluble mereological puzzle. (shrink)

Despite the fact that the requirement to obtain informed consent for medical procedures is deeply enshrined in both U.S. moral and legal doctrine, empirical studies and anecdotal accounts show that women's rights to informed consent and refusal of treatment are routinely undermined and ignored during childbirth. For example, citing the most recent Listening to Mothers survey, Marianne Nieuwenhuijze and Lisa Kane Low state that "a significant number of women said they felt pressure from a caregiver to agree to having an (...) intervention that they did not want during birth". Specifically, Nieuwenhuijze and Low cite that "19% of women who did not have epidural analgesia felt... (shrink)

Rawlsian liberals face the challenge of providing reasons to oppose stigma that do not appeal to a rejection of controversial stigmatic attitudes, but rather to political values that are undermined by stigma. One prominent strategy (the Self-Respect Strategy) appeals to the threat stigma poses to self-respect. Another strategy (the Hierarchy Strategy) appeals to the dependence of stigmas on social hierarchies, which are taken to be intrinsically problematic. I argue that the Self-Respect Strategy needs further resources in order to answer important (...) questions about which stigmas are most morally and politically urgent. The Hierarchy Strategy confronts the obstacle, for the purposes of political justification, of sustaining a highly contentious interpretation of the value of equality. In my view, Rawlsian liberals should jettison this underlying normative concern with hierarchy when making the case for opposing stigmas, and instead use considerations of hierarchy to identify some of the most pronounced threats that stigma poses to self-respect. In this way, considerations of hierarchy can help supply the explanatory resources that the Self-Respect Strategy needs. (shrink)

The firearms data infrastructure in the United States is severely limited in scope and fragmented in nature. Improved data systems are needed in order to address gun violence and promote productive conversation about gun policy. In the absence of federal leadership in firearms data systems improvement, motivated states may take proactive steps to stitch gaps in data systems. We propose that states evaluate the gaps in their systems, expand data collection, and improve data presentation and availability.

It is often claimed that classification, on Locke’s view, proceeds by attending to similarities between things, and it is widely argued that nothing about the sensible similarities between things determines how we are to sort them, in which case sorting substances at the phenomenal level must be arbitrary. However, acquaintance with the “internal” or hidden qualities of substances might yet reveal objective boundaries. Citing what I refer to as the Watch passage in Locke’s Essay (henceforth Watches), many commentators claim that (...) classification at the microphysical level must also be arbitrary. They conclude that sorting is arbitrary at any level of description. I refer to this as the standard reading of Locke on classification. In this paper I argue that Locke does not claim that sorting is arbitrary, either at the phenomenal level, or at the microphysical level. First, Locke does not claim in Watches that sorting is arbitrary at the microphysical level. The existence or nonexistence of objective boundaries at the microphysical level is not Watches’ topic and the passage is in fact silent on that question. Here, the standard reading mistakes a claim about the nature of the task of locating “specific differences” for a claim about the nature of the task of classification. This diagnosis proves instructive, for I argue that a similar conflation underwrites the standard reading’s claim that sorting at the phenomenal level must be arbitrary. Far from arbitrarily choosing how to sort things in terms of their phenomenal similarities, Locke thought that the mind simply follows nature’s lead. This characterization of the mind’s activity, I go on to argue, accords well with Locke’s claim that species are the workmanship of the understanding. (shrink)

In section 24 of The Antichrist, Nietzsche notes a problem namely “the origin of Christianity.” He offers two propositions toward its solution: the first is that “Christianity can only be understood on the soil where it grew:” and the second is that “the psychological type of the Galilean is still recognizable, but it had to assume a completely degenerate form (simultaneously mutilated and full of alien features) before it came to be used as a redeemer of humanity” (A 24). Significantly (...) this passage suggests that the origins of Christianity rest on a reinterpretation of the type of the redeemer. This paper seeks to clarify the nature of such a modification and to identify some of its key ramifications. After clarifying the type, the paper argues that the type, thus understood, serves as a link between the texts On the Genealogy of Morality and The Antichrist and, as such, reveals the connection between Nietzsche's genealogical methods and the wider project of reevaluation. Though this reading is not the standard interpretive strategy, the paper argues that it is the strategy that Nietzsche himself recommends. (shrink)

Allison, Lyn; Cannold, Leslie It is great to see such a good turnout for this important occasion and I congratulate the Humanist Society again on this award. It really makes a difference to people's lives: when they get the award, when they know about it, when there is publicity for the person concerned. It is an all-round good thing to do and I congratulate you for it.

Contemporary feminist theory is at an impasse: the project of reformulating concepts of self and social identity is thwarted by an association between identity and oppression and victimhood. In Sacrificial Logics, Allison Weir proposes a way out of this impasse through a concept of identity which depends on accepting difference. Weir argues that the equation of identity with repression and domination links "relational" feminists like Nancy Chodorow, who equate self-identity with the repression of connection to others, and poststructuralist feminists (...) like Judith Butler, who view any identity as a repression of nonidentity and difference. Through readings of Chodorow, Butler, Jessica Benjamin, Luce Irigaray, Jacqueline Rose and Julia Kristeva, Weir analyzes the relation of theories of self-identity to theories of women's identity, social identity, the identity of meaning in language and feminist solidarity. Drawing particularly on the work of Julia Kristeva, she argues for a reformulation of self-identity as a capacity to participate in a social world, and sketches a model of a self-identity which depends on a capacity to accept nonidentity, difference and connections to others. (shrink)

Using testimonies from immigrants and examples of immigrant policies, this book proposes an interdisciplinary, feminist approach to immigration justice.

In a well-known passage of the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche makes audible a “new demand”: namely, that “we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must be called into question—and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they changed and evolved”.1 Here Nietzsche is relatively clear. We need an understanding of the historical conditions under which our moral values have changed (...) in order to call into question the value of our moral values and to subject such valuations to critique. Less obvious, however, is what Nietzsche’s methodology contributes to such a critique of morality and how... (shrink)

This paper contains a critical analysis of the interpretation of Kant's second edition version of the Transcendental Deduction offered by Béatrice Longuenesse in her recent book: Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Though agreeing with much of Longuenesse's analysis of the logical function of judgment, I question the way in which she tends to assign them the objectifying role traditionally given to the categories. More particularly, by way of defending my own interpretation of the Deduction against some of her criticisms, (...) I argue that Longuenesse fails to show how either part of the two-part proof may be plausibly thought to have established the necessity of the categories (as opposed to the logical functions). Finally, I question certain aspects of her 'radical' interpretation of the famous footnote at B160-1, where Kant distinguishes between 'form of intuition' and 'formal intuition'. (shrink)

Dr. Mike Allison thoughtfully examines biblical admonitions, legalism, Christian liberty, personal conviction by the Holy Spirit, three types of Old Testament laws, modesty and the blessings found in obedience. With a compassionate heart, he courageously opens the truth of God's Word to demonstrate clearly that standards are not to be rejected, but rather, embraced. Standards protect us from traps of Satan and help us to apply other biblical principles. Herein the preacher will find help for declaring "all the counsel (...) of God" boldly, without apology, without compromise. - Back cover. (shrink)