In the mid-19 th century, increases in global migration and mobility produced a discernable rise in the number of ambiguous absences. This shift, combined with a novel expectation, linked to improved communications technology, that such absences might be resolved engendered the emergence of missing persons as a social category. A demand on the part of families of the missing that the state aid in their location would produce a Bourdieusian classification struggle over how to define and categorize this new mass (...) of absences. At issue would be whether an ambiguously absent individual was merely absent, as a routine component of social life, or whether the individual merited legitimation by the state as a new form of deviant: a "missing" person. Scholars have described the emerging administrative state’s enhanced powers of surveillance and classification and its persistent inclination to render their populations, in James Scott’s phrase, “legible.” Brought to the attention of the state, missing persons represented a body of people who had conspicuously fallen out of official sight. Yet, instead of attempting to fix this omission by gathering additional information on the lost — to, in effect, see the missing — as theories of the state would lead us to expect, the state chose to look away. In the United States, the state, in the form of municipal police departments, resisted classifying absences as cases of missingness and pushed back against families’ requests for aid. Leveraging the inherently ambiguous characteristics of the missing, the state promoted a definition of missing persons that conveniently freed it from the burden of managing an unmanageable population. In this article, drawing from archival data, I challenge prevailing theories of the modern state that emphasize its avidly classificatory nature by offering a case in which legibility was strategically withheld and a population was, in service of state interests, intentionally obscured. Only after the state lost its symbolic monopoly and the category was raced and gendered, becoming, in public discourse, associated with a socially valuable demographic – namely, young, white women – would the state, facing a threat to its legitimacy, deem the missing as worthy of being seen. (shrink)

Book Review. Jos de Mul. The Tragedy of Finitude . Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life . New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2004.

[Book Review] Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, eds. Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Works vol. III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Book Review. Jesús Conill-Sancho. Ética hermenéutica. Crítica desde la facticidad. [Hermeneutic Ethics. The Critique of Facticity]. Madrid: Tecnos, 2006.

Augustine famously claims every word is a name. Some readers take Augustine to thereby maintain a purely referentialist semantic account according to which every word is a referential expression whose meaning is its extension. Other readers think that Augustine is no referentialist and is merely claiming that every word has some meaning. In this paper, I clarify Augustine’s arguments to the effect that every word is a name and argue that ‘every word is a name’ amounts to (...) the claim that for any word, there exist tokens of that word which are autonymous nouns. Augustine takes this to be the result of universal lexical ambiguity or equivocity and I clarify how Augustine’s account of metalinguistic discourse, which is one of the most detailed to have survived from antiquity, differs from some ancient and modern theories. (shrink)

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Volume 26 Number 1 March 2012 ARTICLES An Inferential Model of Scientific Understanding Mark Newman 1 Evidence and the Assessment of Causal Rela...

Preface -- Introduction -- How to value democracy -- Paper stones, the ethics of participation -- Philosophers-citizens -- Superdeliberators -- What is it like to be a citizen? -- Democracy's ethics of belief -- The division of democratic labor -- Representing principles -- Democratic complicity -- Not in my name, macrodemocratic design.

This article is a report on ongoing field research and the exponential growth of the environment in which sex workers, prostitutes, call girls, and escorts operate. We look at the complexity of the conditions of such work and consider the socio-psychological and media vectors that make up the context from which its actors and stereotypes emerge. With the explosion of websites offering virtual or real sex, there is also a continuation of oppressive and violent male practices in this sector, restricting (...) the freedom of choice for women who work professionally in this field. These practices reproduce the power relations and the exclusion that has always been present in society, and are also now more diffuse as virtual reality has come to play an important role in social practice. (shrink)

"The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia University, in New York."-Preface, pg. 3.

In recent decades, Western philosophy, including personalism, has had to face the question of how to respect the otherness of the personal Other, a challenge issued most famously by Emmanuel Levinas. In his Totality and Infinity, Levinas's conclusions about alterity are stark. The Other is beyond all conceptualization and precedes my activity as a subject. It is the Other who founds my own independent subjectivity as an "I."1 These are indeed radical conclusions, but they raise the question, Does the very (...) term Other itself fully capture the alterity Levinas wishes to do justice to? The term Other (autrui) has a certain unavoidable generality and abstractness to it. Any person who is not myself, the world's population minus one, can be referred to by this term. Yet the Other is always richly distinguished in each case, for each Other is unique. I will argue that the personalist philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand reveals that the alterity of the Other rests on the more fundamental uniqueness of the content of our personhood. This content, which is a value, is disclosed in love, and it is indicated in the personal name. It is the name that, better than the term Other, captures the alterity of the personal Other. (shrink)

There are many actions that we attribute, at least colloquially, to states. Given their size and influence, states are able to inflict harm far beyond the reach of a single individual. But there is a great deal of unclarity about exactly who is implicated in that kind of harm, and how we should think about responsibility for it. It is a commonplace assumption that democratic publics both authorize and have control over what their states do; that their states act in (...) their name and on their behalf. In Not In Their Name, Holly Lawford-Smith approaches these questions from the perspective of social ontology, asking whether the state is a collective agent, and whether ordinary citizens are members of that agent. If it is, and they are, there’s a clear case for democratic collective culpability. She explores alternative conceptions of the state and of membership in the state; alternative conceptions of collective agency applied to the state; the normative implications of membership in the state; and both culpability (from the inside) and responsibility (from the outside) for what the state does. Ultimately, Lawford-Smith argues for the exculpation of ordinary citizens and the inculpation of those working in public services. (shrink)

One current challenge for neuropsychologists is to design assessment methods capable of detecting cognitive deficits in the early or preclinical phases of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The objective of this paper is to review the studies that have explored the use of the Face-Name Associative Memory Exam (FNAME) as a test for early diagnosis of AD. Studies looking at correlations between performance on the FNAME test and biomarkers in healthy people and studies comparing healthy controls and people with mild cognitive (...) impairment are reviewed. These studies are based on the evidence that AD’s pathological process begins years before the most visible clinical manifestations. We conclude that the FNAME test may be a valuable tool for early diagnosis but that some important questions remain to be resolved in future research. (shrink)

For years now, unionization has been under vigorous attack. Membership has been steadily declining, and with it union bargaining power. As a result, unions may soon lose their ability to protect workers from economic and personal abuse, as well as their significance as a political force. In the Name of Liberty responds to this worrying state of affairs by presenting a new argument for unionization, one that derives an argument for universal unionization in both the private and public sector (...) from concepts of liberty that we already accept. In short, In the Name of Liberty reclaims the argument for liberty from the political right, and shows how liberty not only requires the unionization of every workplace as a matter of background justice, but also supports a wide variety of other progressive policies. (shrink)

This paper presents Michael Heller’s notion of “philosophy in science” and re-introduces Michael Heller’s classical text that first presented this concept of philosophy entitled How is “philosophy in science” possible?. The paper discusses the historical context of Heller’s idea as it emerged from the discussions and works of the Krakow philosophical scene and discusses the basic tenants of this philosophy, its analytic character, the role of intellectual tradition in the development of this philosophy, and the critical role played by an (...) interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophy, science, and theology. Despite the idea of philosophy in science having emerged about 40 years ago, this concept still inspires and fuels innovative research. The notion of “philosophy in science” lies at the foundations of the philosophy published in two journals: Philosophical Problems in Science and Philosophy in Science. (shrink)

We present a version of Herbelin’s image-calculus in the call-by-name setting to study the precise correspondence between normalization and cut-elimination in classical logic. Our translation of λμ-terms into a set of terms in the calculus does not involve any administrative redexes, in particular η-expansion on μ-abstraction. The isomorphism preserves β,μ-reduction, which is simulated by a local-step cut-elimination procedure in the typed case, where the reduction system strictly follows the “ cut=redex” paradigm. We show that the underlying untyped calculus is (...) confluent and enjoys the PSN property for the isomorphic image of λμ-calculus, which in turn yields a confluent and strongly normalizing local-step cut-elimination procedure for classical logic. (shrink)

Our purpose in this paper is to argue how the idea of affirmation of life embodies the practice of the art of life. The yes-saying attitude towards life can provide an enormous support for the self-formation practices. Our attempt, then, consists of demonstrating the subjective character of the aesthetic marked by pleasure, and especially a new approach to the relationship between “I” and the other. We comprehend that this sort of life is individually relative or subjective. Meanwhile, there is a (...) political reconfiguration of “I” and the other which ends in freedom. Politics becomes possible in a simultaneous caring for I and the other through the practices of self-constitution. In order to clarify our discussion further, this challenge is accompanied by a presentation of three real lives that are exemplary for us in the art of life; a way of being that stands for a political affirmation of life. (shrink)