_Messiahs and Machiavellians_ is an innovative exploration of “modern evil” in works of early- and late-modern theatre, raising issues about ethics, politics, religion, and aesthetics that speak to our present condition. Paul Corey examines how theatre—which expressed a key political dynamic both in the Renaissance and the twentieth century—lays open the impulses that instigated modernity and, ultimately, unparalleled levels of violence and destruction. Starting with Albert Camus’ _Caligula_ and Samuel Beckett’s _Waiting for Godot_, then turning to Machiavelli’s _Mandragola_ and Shakespeare’s (...) _Measure for Measure_, Corey traces the emergence of two dominant, intertwining features of modern evil: an unrestrained pursuit of power and the utopian desire for perfection. Corey’s imaginative and convincing readings of these plays, based on detailed textual analysis, move beyond the accounts usually offered by literary critics. Drawing on political, theological, and philosophical sources—a combination as fertile as it is unusual—Corey’s methodology allows him to make keen and subtle arguments about the eschatological nature of modern politics. “Corey’s lucid, compelling treatise argues for a radical reconsideration of the role of tragedy in dealing with the shifting metaphysical and metatheatrical sands of the contemporary era. While the study begins with an examination of mid-20th Century French existentialism—and the dramatic work of Beckett and Camus in particular—the book soon takes the reader on a fascinating voyage back into the ‘problem’ comedies of the Italian and English Renaissance theatre, and beyond that, into Greek tragedy to understand the evolving concept of ‘evil’ in the Western philosophical, theological, and dramatic tradition. Ending with a reflection on the new ‘theatre’ of terrorism entering the 21st Century, Corey poses the intriguing suggestion, that far from being irrelevant to the post-modern era, a ‘new tragic sensibility’ may become key to our gaining a ‘lucid awareness of our current situation […] the limits of politics, the indelible nature of violence, our inescapable mortality, and a need for prudence’ ” —_Moira Day, University of Saskatchewan_ “A sensitive examination of the problem of evil in Renaissance and 20th century drama. Corey provides fascinating analyses of individual plays, and makes a compelling argument for restoring a tragic vision of good and evil in the face of modern expediency and utopianism.” —_Mary P. Nichols, Baylor University_ _ _ “In _Messiahs and Machiavellians_, Paul Corey delivers insights both numerous and profound. His work is a serious and important contribution to contemporary political science while also offering analyses of interest to scholars in literature, religious studies, theology, and ethics.” —_Barry Cooper, University of Calgary_. (shrink)

Kelly Aguirre, Phil Henderson, Cressida J. Heyes, Alana Lentin, and Corey Snelgrove engage with different aspects of Robert Nichols’ Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory. Henderson focuses on possible spaces for maneuver, agency, contradiction, or failure in subject formation available to individuals and communities interpellated through diremptive processes. Heyes homes in on the ritual of antiwill called “consent” that systematically conceals the operation of power. Aguirre foregrounds tensions in projects of critical theory scholarship that aim for dialogue and solidarity (...) with Indigenous decolonial struggles. Lentin draws attention to the role of race in undergirding the logic of Anglo-settler colonial domination that operates through dispossession, while Snelgrove emphasizes the link between alienation, capital, and colonialism. In his reply to his interlocutors, Nichols clarifies aspects of his “recursive logics” of dispossession, a dispossession or theft through which the right to property is generated. (shrink)

Moira Gatens investigates the ways in which differently sexed bodies can occupy the same social or political space. Representations of sexual difference have unacknowledged philosophical roots which cannot be dismissed as a superficial bias on the part of the philosopher, nor removed without destroying the coherence of the philosophical system concerned. The deep structural bias against women extends beyond metaphysics and its effects are felt in epistemology, moral, social and political theory. The idea of sexual difference is contextualised in (...) _Imaginary Bodies_ and traced through the history of philosophy. Using her work on Spinoza, Gatens develops alternative conceptions of power, new ways of conceiving women's embodiment and their legal, political and ethical status. (shrink)

It has typically been assumed that affective and social components of disagreement, such as trust and fair treatment, can be handled separately from substantive components, such as beliefs and logical principles. This has freed us to count as “deep” disagreements only those which persist even between people who have no animosity towards each other, feel equal to one another, and are willing to argue indefinitely in search of truth. A reliance on such ideal participants diverts us from the question of (...) whether we have swept away the opportunity for some real arguers to have their voices heard, and for those voices to determine the real substance of the disagreement. If affective and social issues need to be assessed side by side with belief differences and reasoning paradigms, investigating trust may assist us to understand and make progress on the affective and social components that are involved in disagreement. (shrink)

Debates about female genital mutilation/cutting have polarized opinion between those who see it as an abuse of women’s health and human rights, to be ‘eradicated’, and those who may or may not oppose the practice, but see a double standard on the part of western campaigners who fail to challenge other unnecessary surgical interventions — such as male circumcision or cosmetic surgery — in their own communities and cultures. This article interrogates these debates about FGM/c in the context of measures (...) to reduce it in the UK over recent decades. It does not suggest that FGM/c is a legitimate practice, seeing it, rather, as an abuse of women’s and children’s rights that should be combated using a combination of measures. However, it argues that reduction strategies are undermined by inconsistencies in the law and the failure to back up the law with research and education. (shrink)

Rational Rules argues that moral learning can be understood in terms of general-purpose rational learning procedures. Nichols provides statistical learning accounts of some fundamental aspects of moral development, combining aspects of traditional empiricist and rationalist approaches.

Williams (1970) argues that our intuitions about personal identity vary depending on how a given thought experiment is framed. Some frames lead us to think that persistence of self requires persistence of one's psychological characteristics; other frames lead us to think that the self persists even after the loss of one's distinctive psychological characteristics. The current paper takes an empirical approach to these issues. We find that framing does affect whether or not people judge that persistence of psychological characteristics is (...) required for persistence of self. Open-ended, abstract questions about what is required for survival tend to elicit responses that appeal to the importance of psychological characteristics. This emphasis on psychological characteristics is largely preserved even when participants are exposed to a concrete case that yields conflicting intuitions over whether memory must be preserved in order for a person to persist. Insofar as our philosophical theory of personal identity should be based on our intuitions, the results provide some support for the view that psychological characteristics really are critical for persistence of self. (shrink)

Why would the work of the 17th century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza concern us today? How can Spinoza shed any light on contemporary thought? In this intriguing book, Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd show us that in spite of or rather because of Spinoza's apparent strangeness, his philosophy can be a rich resource for cultural self-understanding in the present. _Collective Imaginings_ draws on recent re-assessments of the philosophy of Spinoza to develop new ways of conceptualising issues of freedom and (...) difference. This ground-breaking study will be invaluable reading to anyone wishing to gain a fresh perspective on Spinoza's thought. (shrink)

It describes and explains the patient-centered model examining and evaluating qualitative and quantitative research. It comprehensively covers the evolution and the six interactive components of the patient-centered clinical method, taking the reader through the relationships between the patient and doctor and the patient and clinician. All the editors are professors in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chanter’s Democratizing PhilosophyMoira FradingerDeinvesting Fetishism, Embracing Radical DemocracyA radical democrat: This is how I have come to see Tina Chanter in our intellectual exchanges. She ceaselessly alerts us to the conditions of production of our privileges; the exclusions on which our social, political, sexual, racial identities are constructed; the blood of those others who “have crafted our eyes,” to recall Donna Haraway’s famous manifesto (Haraway 1988, 585);1 the suffering (...) that allows for our happiness; the “danger” that defines our “purity,” to pay homage to Mary Douglas’s early anthropological exploration of boundary-formations (Douglas 1966). Chanter’s questioning of all the exclusions that give meaning to our identities and social orders is not oriented to “include” that which is excluded, as if she aimed at an “adding approach.” Rather, Chanter aims at thinking about how inclusions can change what Jacques Rancière refers to as the “cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible” (Rancière 2009, 72). At stake is how to make inclusion speak of difference instead of sameness.Chanter has questioned major feminist thinkers (Irigaray, Kristeva) as to their failure to avoid reinstating exclusions, that is, to avoid the fetishistic logic, thoroughly studied by Chanter, whereby excluded elements are assigned a fixed meaning. Recently she has engaged Rancière’s thought on the radical premise of equality as a starting point for politics and critical thought. But long before this new development, and within the ranks of her discipline, Chanter was a practicing democrat of sorts in the Rancièrian sense, bringing to bear those concepts “with no part” (to use Rancière’s phrase) in philosophy, concepts coming from other disciplines, in order to denaturalize reified “partitions of the sensible” (again Rancière 2010, 36) as they appear in the discipline of philosophy.2 In other words, she was engaged in making philosophy hear the [End Page 144] “difference” of other regimes of thought without reducing them to philosophical categories, with the premise that they are neither “truer” nor “lesser” than philosophical thought (in contrast to certain philosophical traditions of understanding “art,” as Chanter has argued).3 Thus, Chanter’s engagement with such “impurities” (from the point of view of philosophy) as literature, performance, reception studies, or psychoanalysis redraws the boundaries of her home discipline.Rachel Jones calls this practice “Chanter’s ethics of restlessness,” an alertness to the ways in which we, as feminist critics, may reproduce the exclusions that we denounce as constitutive of the systems of representation we inhabit. Double alertness at that, or perhaps an ethical dimension proper to the democratic questioning of boundaries: Chanter alerts us also to the fact that our questioning is never enough. We need a scene of interlocution that can keep our questioning open when we are tempted to close it. We unravel processes of exclusion but we always remain “blind” to the exclusions effected by our own critiques. It is perhaps her engaging of psychoanalysis—for all her critique of its conceptualization of sexual difference—which shows here: a commitment, if I may say so, to the subject of the unconscious, to being subjected to representational systems modeling our perceptions beyond our consciousness. This is to redeem, for philosophical thinking, the strange failure of consciousness that we call “the unconscious,” to paraphrase Lacan’s musings on this concept in Seminar XI (Lacan 1998, 17–64). In other words, Chanter’s conscious attention to exclusions is also an attention to the experience of that which our language makes or leaves silent. It is an experience of an excess or a void—always an experience of precariousness with respect to our symbols, a fragility of our means of expression. A structural failure; a failure of “language as such” that is always already a failure of our language.The inclusion of the subject—individual or collective—is crucial here, and this is where I see the crux of Chanter’s “restlessness”: For it is not a question of philosophizing about “the” essential nature of language as always failing but rather of pointing to the radical singularity through which the failure becomes manifest in any given system of... (shrink)

This extremely accessible textbook provides a wide-ranging analysis of the relations between philosophy and feminist thought. Examining not only feminist critiques of philosophical ideas, Gatens also looks at the ways in which feminist theory can be informed by philosophical analysis and debates. Gatens adopts an historical approach, beginning with an analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of Rousseau. She then examines attempts by Harriet Taylor and J. S. Mill to extend liberal principles to women's situation. Other chapters discuss the work of (...) more recent philosophers, including Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Mary Daly and Dale Spender. Gatens concludes with a discussion of current debates in the politics of sexual difference. (shrink)

Laudato si’, with its articulation of a familial ecology reflecting Francis’s Latin American context, expands the subject of solidarity in Catholic social teaching and thought. Yet, this ecological vision of family fails to attend to the problem of gender subordination latent in Catholic social teaching, including in its approaches to ecology. A vision of solidarity that eradicates gender and ecological subordination must elaborate a familial ecology characterized by both mercy and equality.

Sentimental Rules is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary work, which proposes and defends a new theory about the nature and evolution of moral judgment. In it, philosopher Shaun Nichols develops the theory that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgment. Nichols argues that our norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms, and that such 'sentimental rules' enjoy an advantage in cultural evolution, (...) which partly explains the success of certain moral norms. This has sweeping and exciting implications for philosophical ethics. Nichols builds on an explosion of recent intriguing experimental work in psychology on our capacity for moral judgment and shows how this empirical work has broad import for enduring philosophical problems. The result is an account that illuminates fundamental questions about the character of moral emotions and the role of sentiment and reason in how we make our moral judgments. This work should appeal widely across philosophy and the other disciplines that comprise cognitive science. (shrink)

According to recent accounts of the imagination, mental mechanisms that can take input from both imagining and from believing will process imagination‐based inputs (pretense representations) and isomorphic beliefs in much the same way. That is, such a mechanism should produce similar outputs whether its input is the belief that p or the pretense representation that p. Unfortunately, there seem to be clear counterexamples to this hypothesis, for in many cases, imagining that p and believing that p have quite different psychological (...) consequences. This paper sets out some central problem cases and argues that the cases might be accommodated by adverting to the role of desires concerning real and imaginary situations. (shrink)

This paper treats a recalcitrant problem in Spinoza scholarship, namely, how to reconcile the conception of 'power' in his political writings with that found in his Ethics. Some have doubted the capacity of Spinoza's political philosophy to yield an adequate normative theory. If he is unable to provide a normative ground for political philosophy then perhaps this exposes a problem in Spinoza's philosophy taken as a whole. I argue that the considerable normative resources of his ethical and political philosophy, as (...) well their continuing relevance today, are best appreciated through attending to his notion of the exemplar. (shrink)

: Kühberger et al. show that producing the Langer effect is considerably more difficult than has been assumed. Although their results clearly demonstrate a need for further exploration of the Langer effect, none of their arguments undermines the evidence against simulation theory that we presented in Nichols et al. . In our study the actor subjects did show an effect, but the prediction subjects did not predict it, despite the fact that they were provided with all the details of the (...) actor's situation. Further, we report additional evidence that corroborates our empirical case against simulation theory. (shrink)

Solar radiation management is a form of geoengineering that involves the intentional manipulation of solar radiation with the aim of reducing global average temperature. This paper explores what precaution implies about the status of solar radiation management. It is argued that any form of solar radiation management that poses threats of catastrophe cannot constitute an appropriate precautionary measure against another threat of catastrophe, namely climate change. Research of solar radiation management is appropriate on a precautionary view only insofar as such (...) research aims to identify whether any forms of solar radiation management could be implemented without creating new or exacerbating existing threats of catastrophe. (shrink)

Recent work by Joshua Knobe indicates that people’s intuition about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this effect is that there are stable individual differences in how ‘intentional’ is interpreted. That is, in Knobe’s cases, different people interpret the term in different ways. This interpretive diversity of ‘intentional’ opens up a new avenue to help explain Knobe’s results. Furthermore, the paper argues that the (...) use of intuitions in philosophy is complicated by fact that there are robust individual differences in intuitions about matters of philosophical concern. (shrink)

Precaution is usually associated with the intuition that it is better to be safe than sorry, and/or that it is sometimes necessary to act in advance of scientific certainty to prevent harmful outcomes. At this point, we cannot entirely prevent climate change, but we can affect how harmful such change is. Adaptation may therefore be understood as a precautionary measure against the damage due to climate change. 'The' precautionary principle alone is too vague to shape adaptation policy, but a limited (...) catastrophic precautionary principle may productively guide adaptation policy makers. I argue in this paper that an explicit commitment to a precautionary approach based on the catastrophic precautionary principle could and should be made to strengthen the adaptation policies introduced at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (shrink)

An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way.

Investigating instances where lexical selection fails can lead to deeper insights into the cognitive machinery and architecture supporting successful word retrieval and speech production. In this paper, we used a multiplex lexical network approach that combines semantic and phonological similarities among words to model the structure of the mental lexicon. Network measures at different levels of analysis (degree, network distance, and closeness centrality) were used to investigate the influence of network structure on picture naming accuracy and errors by people with (...) Anomic, Broca's, Conduction, and Wernicke's aphasia. Our results reveal that word retrieval is influenced by the multiplex lexical network structure in at least two ways—(a) the accuracy of production and error type on incorrect productions were influenced by the degree and closeness centrality of the target word, and (b) error type also varied in terms of network distance between the target word and produced error word. Taken together, the analyses demonstrate that network science techniques, particularly the use of the multiplex lexical network to simultaneously represent semantic and phonological relationships among words, reveal how the structure of the mental lexicon influences language processes beyond traditionally examined psycholinguistic variables. We propose a framework for how the multiplex lexical network approach allows for understanding the influence of mental lexicon structure on word retrieval processes, with an eye toward a better understanding of the nature of clinical impairments, like aphasia. (shrink)

For individuals pursuing medically assisted gender transition, gender-affirming surgical treatments, such as oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries) and orchiectomy (removal of the testicles), cause sterility, and gender-affirming hormone treatment with medications (i.e., testosterone and estrogen) may negatively impact infertility. The major United States (US) medical associations already endorse fertility preservation (FP) through cryopreservation (i.e., “freezing” egg and sperm) for transgender individuals. Despite these endorsements from the relevant medical societies, medical insurance coverage for FP remains very limited in the US. Given (...) the high out-of-pocket costs for FP services, fertility preservation remains financially out of reach for many transgender individuals who may desire it. We present an ethical justification for universal FP coverage for all transgender and gender diverse (TGD) individuals who request this option during medically assisted gender transition. First, we argue that gender-affirming medical care is analogous to other medical interventions and treatment regimens that compromise fertility, such as cancer care, and that both types of interventions need to be afforded the same medical benefits and assistance in pursuing fertility goals. Second, we argue that the lack of FP for transgender individuals contributes to the ongoing and profound transphobia and anti-trans bias that has been exacerbated in the past several years across the healthcare landscape in the United States. We argue that the provision of FP coverage for transgender individuals is necessary for clinicians and third-party payers to state their unequivocal support for TGD patients and their healthcare needs. (shrink)

Some critics have claimed that Spinoza's philosophy has nothing to offer aesthetics. I argue that within his conception of an ars vivendi one can discern a nascent theory of art. I bring the figure of the prophet in relation to that of the artist and, alongside a consideration of Spinoza's views on goodness and beauty, show that the special talent of the artist should be understood in terms of the entirely natural expression of the conatus.

Reid's unusual primary/secondary quality distinction is drawn along epistemic lines. Reid takes an epistemic turn because of Locke's failure to draw a metaphysical distinction. Secondary qualities differ from primary qualities in virtue of the fact that we acquire notions of secondary qualities via the mediation of sensations. Primary qualities require no such mediation. In one respect, the analysis I set out renders qualities relative to agents. I address whether Reid advocates a dispositional theory of secondary qualities, whether the phenomenology of (...) color underlying Reid's theory is tenable, and whether Reid's distinction coheres well with his theory of perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

Refugee crises are one of the grand challenges of the 21st century. Despite the theoretical importance attached to value created for beneficiaries in the partnership literature, research tends to focus on internal processes and value created for partners and partnerships, leading to widespread calls to further specify the value created by partnerships for beneficiaries. Applying an analytical framework from the value creation and social impact literatures, we report on a study of multiple social partnerships of a nongovernmental organization in the (...) refugee issue field. Our results demonstrate that frames of refugees held by partners and in partnerships’ implementation contexts shape the value creation activities undertaken for beneficiaries, and determine whether value is created and what types of value. The dual contribution of this article comprises a rare empirical study of value creation activities for beneficiaries (here, refugees) and theorization of how and when implementation context affects value creation by partnerships. (shrink)

This book takes a fresh look at Socrates as he appeared to three ancient writers: Aristophanes, who attacked him for his theoretical studies; Plato, who immortalized him in his dialogues; and Aristotle, who criticized his political views. It addresses the questions of the interrelation of politics and philosophy by looking at Aristophanes' Clouds, Plato's Republic, and Book II of Aristotle's Politics--three sides of a debate on the value of Socrates' philosophic life. Mary Nichols first discusses the relation between Aristophanes and (...) Plato, showing that the city as Socrates' place of activity in the Republic resembles the philosophic thinktank mocked in Aristophanes' Clouds. By representing the extremes of the Republic's city, Plato shows that the dangers attributed by Aristophanes to the city are actually inherent in political life itself. They were to be moderated by Socratic political philosophy rather than Aristophanean comedy. Nichols concludes by showing how Aristotle addressed the question at issue between Plato and Aristophanes when he founded his political science. Judging Plato's and Aristophanes' positions as partial, Nichols argues that Aristotle based his political science on the necessity to philosophy of political involvement and the necessity to politics of philosophical thought. (shrink)

With rapidly expanding technological capacity, research has outpaced the existing infrastructure of ethical and regulatory guidance. In the area of incidental findings, this is particularly true.The regulations under which most Institutional Review Boards operate were established over 25 years ago and have not been substantially altered in the intervening years. The technology available today that creates the opportunity for IFs was not conceived of, or considered, in the crafting of those regulations. Therefore, little guidance can be derived directly from these (...) regulations. Rather, aspects of existing ethical guidance and regulations can be adapted to assist IRBs and researchers in dealing with issues surrounding IFs. (shrink)

Parental burnout is a specific syndrome resulting from enduring exposure to chronic parenting stress. But why do some parents burn out while others, facing the same stressors, do not? The main aim of this paper was to propose a theory of parental burnout capable of predicting who is at risk of burnout, explaining why a particular parent burned out and why at that specific point in time, and providing directions for intervention. The secondary goal was to operationalize this theory in (...) a tool that would be easy to use for both researchers and clinicians. The results of this two-wave longitudinal study conducted on 923 parents suggest that the Balance between Risks and Resources (BR 2 ) theory proposed here is a relevant framework to predict and explain parental burnout. More specifically, the results show that (1) the BR 2 instrument reliably measures parents' balance between risks (parental stress-enhancing factors) and resources (parental stress-alleviating factors), (2) there is a strong linear relationship between BR 2 score and parental burnout, (3) parental burnout results from a chronic imbalance of risks over resources, (4) BR 2 predicts parental burnout better than job burnout and (5) among the risk and resource factors measured in BR 2, risks and resources non-specific to parenting (e.g., low stress-management abilities, perfectionism) equally predict parental and job burnout, while risks and resources specific to parenting (e.g., childrearing practices, coparenting) uniquely predict parental burnout. (shrink)

Moira Howes and Catherine Hundleby ABSTRACT: While anger can derail argumentation, it can also help arguers and audiences to reason together in argumentation. Anger can provide information about premises, biases, goals, discussants, and depth of disagreement that people might otherwise fail to recognize or prematurely dismiss. Anger can also enhance the salience of certain premises...

Sets out Catholic teaching on hotly debated issues such as stem cell research, reproductive technologies, euthanasia and much more.

Different sectors have expressed the need to address the different notions of pluralism that characterize modern society, as well as their difficulties. The article provides a critical reading of three significantly different approaches to the issue: Chantal Mouffe's On the Political, John Rawls' Political Liberalism, and William E. Connolly's Pluralism. It discusses their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the possibilities they provide to understand pluralism and take their theoretical contributions to the field of practice.

The paper applies the theoretical frameworks of epistemic injustice and narrativist philosophy of history to read the process of re-signification of an event that took place in a prison in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1978, called “Massacre in the Seventh Ward” or “Mutiny of the Mattresses”. By looking into this case, we explore the exercise of epistemic resistance through category expansion, drawing on the most recent developments on hermeneutical injustice as a deficiency in the application (and not (...) only in the content) of the available concepts. This allows us to identify the selected case as an example of hermeneutical injustice, and to highlight some characteristics of such injustice that remain under-analysed in the specialised literature, linked to agency, temporality, and the concrete forms adopted by resistance. Among the latter, we highlight the role that can be played by the exercise of what in philosophy of history has been called the “practical past”: an intervention in the dispute of meanings about the past, born out of an explicit commitment to the present. Finally, the conclusions present some caveats to be considered in the study of epistemic injustice in the context of institutions such as prisons. (shrink)

This book may be taken as a plea for a return to a teleological moral philosophy. Mrs Roberts examines responsibility and freedom in terms of human interests and purposes and seeks to establish the autonomy of the personal decision. F. H. Bradley's criteria for moral responsibility serves as a starting point, but Mrs Roberts finds these theoretical and remote. She builds up an account of the social context in which we learn to use words like 'responsibility', 'freedom' and 'action'. Ambiguities (...) in the use of 'action' and 'perception' are dealt with at length. (shrink)