Anthropomorphism in Islam: The Challenge of Traditionalism. By Llivnat Holtzman. Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 434. $130, £85 ; $44.95, £29.99.

This is the first comprehensive monograph on the theology of Abū l-Qāsim al-Kaʿbī al-Balkhī, a leading Muʿtazilī who flourished at the end of the Baghdādī school and at the beginning of the scholastic phase of Muʿtazilī history.

'Hands Tied' brings together two very different films about hands: Maria Lassnig's Palmistry (1973) and Ayesha Hameed's A Rough History (of the Destruction of Fingerprints) (2016). These works are contextualised and their scope extended further by a roundtable discussion featuring participants Rachel Aumiller, Sam Dolbear, Nadine El-Enany, Amelia Groom, Clio Nicastro, Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen, and M. Ty., who discuss their relation to fate, work, pleasure, touch, and surveillance.

El poeta andalusí Ibrāhīm ibn Sahl (609/1212-649/1251), que se convirtió del judaísmo al islam, escribió poemas pertenecientes al subgénero de la poesía amorosa conocida como al-ġazal al-ʿuḏrī sobre los amados Moisés, y con menor frecuencia Mahoma. Las investigaciones sobre Ibn Sahl se han centrado, tradicionalmente, en la cuestión acerca de si la conversión histórica al islam fue sincera o si sus poemas sobre Moisés reflejan un anhelo oculto por el judaísmo. Este artículo problematiza esta cuestión, prestando atención a lo que (...) se sabe de las circunstancias históricas en las que vivió Ibn Sahl y por medio de una discusión crítica del fenómeno de la conversión. Luego redirijo la conversación sobre la poesía de Ibn Sahl: en lugar de tratar de comprender la sinceridad de la conversión de Ibn Sahl a través de su poesía este artículo lee sus poemas como textos literarios, con atención a sus juegos de palabras, imágenes e intertextualidad. El análisis de la poesía de Ibn Sahl, que presta mucha atención a esta significativa intertextualidad, ilumina la red de referencias religiosas que hay en ella y las formas en las que funcionan dentro de la poesía. La conclusión, tras la lectura atenta de poemas seleccionados del dīwān de Ibn Sahl, es que el mérito de estos poemas y las características que los han hecho atractivos para el público proceden de las formas en que mantienen la posibilidad de diferentes interpretaciones, por lo que continuamente avivan la curiosidad del público, así como su uso, que induce a los portentos del lenguaje figurativo, la intertextualidad y los juegos de palabras. (shrink)

El artículo propone una concepción no individualista de la justifi cación epistémica de las decisiones judiciales. Sugiere que la epistemología jurídica debe reconsiderar su teoría de la justifi cación epistémica con el fi n de dar cuenta de la posibilidad de que juzgadores racionales carezcan de autonomía intelectual. Sostiene que la dependencia epistémica es una de las propiedades que distinguen el razonamiento jurídico sobre los hechos, y que los juzgadores tienen buenas razones para aceptar una proposición sobre la base de (...) la experiencia cognitiva de otras personas. Después de hacer algunas precisiones terminológicas acerca de los conceptos de “testimonio” y “evidencia”, el trabajo explica la estructura de la dependencia epistémica, aborda los debates normativos actuales acerca de la justifi cación epistémica en casos de testimonio, y propone una posición externalista distinta, el antiindividualismo. Al fi nal, se explora una variación sobre el tema, que consiste en la integración de la noción de dependencia epistémica en una teoría de la autoridad en el derecho. (shrink)

On October 27, 1991, a Jewish woman named Rachel Drouk, a settler in the West Bank, was killed by Palestinian Intifada fighters. Twenty-five women spontaneously gathered at the site of the murder and held a vigil—a vigil that eventually developed into a protest settlement. The women, all of whom were married mothers, presented their initiative in maternal narratives: grounds, motives, and justifications for the act, and targets and anticipations were all related to the practice of care. This article conducts (...) an artificial dialogue between the women's discourse and Ruddick's theory of maternal thinking, enabling deconstruction of the former and a critique of the theory of care. (shrink)

El presente trabajo, perteneciente al campo de la ética normativa, tiene como propósito ofrecer una selección de objeciones relevantes al utilitarismo. Dicha selección viene dada por una serie de autores que guardan relación con la heterogénea ética de la virtud. En primer lugar, trataremos sucintamente el utilitarismo viendo en qué consiste en su sentido más general para pasar, en un segundo momento, a atender a ciertas críticas provenientes de Rachels, MacIntyre, Foot y, en especial, de Williams, donde el problema de (...) la integridad se planteará como el nuclear de la presente exposición. A través de tales críticas veremos cómo se va delineando una posición alternativa al utilitarismo que vendrá dada por la ética de la virtud. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in inadequately prioritized healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries such as Kenya. In this prolonged pandemic, nurses and midwives working at the frontline face multiple ethical problems, including their obligation to care for their patients and the risk for infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Despite the frequency of emergencies in Africa, there is a paucity of literature on ethical issues during epidemics. Furthermore, nursing regulatory bodies in African countries such as Kenya (...) have primarily adopted a Western code of ethics that may not reflect the realities of the healthcare systems and cultural context in which nurses and midwives care for patients. In this article, we discuss the tension between nurses’ and midwives’ duty of care and resource allocation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is an urgent need to clarify nurses’ and midwives’ rights and responsibilities, especially in the current political setting, limited resources, and ambiguous professional codes of ethics that guide their practice. (shrink)

This Element presents a philosophical exploration of the concept of the 'model organism' in contemporary biology. Thinking about model organisms enables us to examine how living organisms have been brought into the laboratory and used to gain a better understanding of biology, and to explore the research practices, commitments, and norms underlying this understanding. We contend that model organisms are key components of a distinctive way of doing research. We focus on what makes model organisms an important type of model, (...) and how the use of these models has shaped biological knowledge, including how model organisms represent, how they are used as tools for intervention, and how the representational commitments linked to their use as models affect the research practices associated with them. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

Classifying Madness (Springer, 2005) concerns philosophical problems with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, more commonly known as the D.S.M. The D.S.M. is published by the American Psychiatric Association and aims to list and describe all mental disorders. The first half of Classifying Madness asks whether the project of constructing a classification of mental disorders that reflects natural distinctions makes sense. Chapters examine the nature of mental illness, and also consider whether mental disorders fall into natural kinds. The (...) second half of the book addresses epistemic worries. Even supposing a natural classification system to be possible in principle, there may be reasons to be suspicious of the categories included in the D.S.M. I examine the extent to which the D.S.M. depends on psychiatric theory, and look at how it has been shaped by social and financial factors. I aim to be critical of the D.S.M. without being antagonistic towards it. Ultimately, however, I am forced to conclude that although the D.S.M. is of immense practical importance, it is unlikely to come to reflect the natural structure of mental disorders. (shrink)

is a term introduced by Ian Hacking to refer to the kinds of people—child abusers, pregnant teenagers, the unemployed—studied by the human sciences. Hacking argues that classifying and describing human kinds results in feedback, which alters the very kinds under study. This feedback results in human kinds having histories totally unlike those of natural kinds (such as gold, electrons and tigers), leading Hacking to conclude that human kinds are radically unlike natural kinds. Here I argue that Hacking's argument fails and (...) that he has not demonstrated that human kinds cannot be natural kinds. Introduction Natural kinds Hacking's feedback mechanisms 3.1 Cultural feedback 3.2 Conceptual feedback. (shrink)

In Talking about, Unnsteinsson defends an intentionalist theory of reference by arguing that confused referential intentions degrade reference. Central to this project is a “belief model” of both identity confusion and unconfused thought. By appealing to a well‐known argument from Campbell, I argue that this belief model falls short, because it fails to explain the inferential behavior it promises to explain. Campbell's argument has been central in the contemporary literature on Frege's puzzle, but Unnsteinsson's account of confusion provides an opportunity (...) for more clarity about how the argument is best interpreted, and what it shows. (shrink)

Our aesthetic judgments are embedded in and shaped by unjust social orders. But can our aesthetic judgments themselves—“this is beautiful; that is not”—be unjust? This article argues that they can. Admitting that this is so does not require us to be unduly revisionary with respect to our concept of justice. Rather, the thought that aesthetic judgments are unjust flows naturally from familiar egalitarian constraints.

In this book, Rachel Zuckert provides the first overarching account of Johann Gottfried Herder's complex aesthetic theory. She guides the reader through Herder's texts, showing how they relate to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy of art, and focusing on two main concepts: aesthetic naturalism, the view that art is natural to and naturally valuable for human beings as organic, embodied beings, and - unusually for Herder's time - aesthetic pluralism, the view that aesthetic value takes many diverse and culturally (...) varying forms. Zuckert argues that Herder's theory plays a pivotal role in the history of philosophical aesthetics, marking the transition from the eighteenth-century focus on aesthetic value as grounded in human nature to the nineteenth-century focus on art as socially significant and historically variable. Her study illuminates Herder's significance as an innovative thinker in aesthetics, and will interest a range of readers in philosophy of art and European thought. (shrink)

The tradition of immanent critique promises a lot. It promises to be critical of the existing social order without appealing to ‘external’ normative standards. I argue that the prospects for immanent criticism are bleak: they must either commit to an implausible social ontology, a flawed meta-normative theory, or both.

We present a novel semantic and conversational framework for a class of gradable-like constructions. These include metalinguistic comparatives, like "Ann is more a linguist than a philosopher", as well as metalinguistic equatives, degree modifications, and conditionals. To the extent previous literature discusses such metalinguistic gradability, the focus has been on comparatives. We extend our account of metalinguistic comparatives (Rudolph & Kocurek 2020) to cover a broader range of metalinguistic gradable constructions. On our semantic expressivist view, these all serve in various (...) ways to express speakers' relative commitments to different linguistic interpretations. (shrink)

A new reading of Plato's account of conventionalism about names in the Cratylus. It argues that Hermogenes' position, according to which a name is whatever anybody 'sets down' as one, does not have the counterintuitive consequences usually claimed. At the same time, Plato's treatment of conventionalism needs to be related to his treatment of formally similar positions in ethics and politics. Plato is committed to standards of objective natural correctness in all such areas, despite the problematic consequences which, as he (...) himself shows, arise in the case of language. (shrink)

: This article seeks to explain how thought experiments work, and also the reasons why they can fail. It is divided into four sections. The first argues that thought experiments in philosophy and science should be treated together. The second examines existing accounts of thought experiments and shows why they are inadequate. The third proposes a better account of thought experiments. According to this account, a thought experimenter manipulates her worldview in accord with the “what if” questions posed by a (...) thought experiment. When all necessary manipulations are carried through, the result is either a consistent model or a contradiction. If a consistent model is achieved, the thought experimenter can conclude that the scenario is possible; if a consistent model cannot be constructed, then the scenario is not possible. The fourth section of the article uses this account to shed light on the circumstances in which thought experiments fail. (shrink)

I present and evaluate Johann Gottfried Herder's criticisms of Kant's account of the sublime and Herder's own theory of the sublime, as presented in his work, Kalligone. Herder's account and criticisms ought to be taken seriously, I argue, as (respectively) a non-reductive, naturalist aesthetics of the sublime, and as illuminating the metaphysical, moral, and political presuppositions underlying Kant's (and Burke's) accounts of the sublime.

Hume's moral philosophy makes sentiment essential to moral judgment. But there is more individual consistency and interpersonal agreement in moral judgment than in private emotional reactions. Hume accounts for this by saying that our moral judgments do not manifest our approval or disapproval of character traits and persons "only as they appear from [our] peculiar point of view..." Rather, "we fix on some steady and general points of view; and always, in our thoughts, place ourselves in them, whatever may be (...) our present situation" (T 581-82), in order to "correct" our situated sentiments. This seems to create two serious difficulties for Hume's theory. First, moral evaluations become inductive, empirical beliefs about what we would feel if we really occupied the imagined common point of view, and hence are the deliverances of causal reason; this contradicts Hume's claim that the making of a moral evaluation is not an activity of reason but of sentiment. Secondly, given Hume's thesis that the passions do not represent anything else, he cannot say that our moral evaluations will better represent the object being judged if they are made from the common point of view. This leaves no clear reason to adopt it, rather than making judgments from our real position. Hume says that left to our particular points of view, we will encounter contradictions and be unable to communicate, but it is hard to see why. My interpretation resolves these two difficulties. I argue that every time we reflect upon someone's character from the common point of view, we feel an actual sentiment of approbation or disapprobation, which may alter and merge with the situated sentiment or may fail to do so, leaving two different feelings about the same character. Furthermore, whenever we make moral evaluations we also simultaneously make objective, causal judgments about the love and hatred, pride and humility that the trait will produce. We routinely take up the common point of view in order to achieve truth and consistency in our causal judgments, to avoid grave practical problems. (shrink)

Hume's position in ethics, which is based on his empiricist theory of the mind, is best known for asserting four theses: (1) Reason alone cannot be a motive to the will, but rather is the slave of the passions (see Section 3) (2) Moral distinctions are not derived from reason (see Section 4). (3) Moral distinctions are derived from the moral sentiments: feelings of approval (esteem, praise) and disapproval (blame) felt by spectators who contemplate a character trait or action (see (...) Section 7). (4) While some virtues and vices are natural (see Section 13), others, including justice, are artificial (see Section 9). There is heated debate about what Hume intends by each of these theses and how he argues for them. He articulates and defends them within the broader context of his metaethics and his ethic of virtue and vice. Hume's main ethical writings are Book 3 of his Treatise of Human Nature, Of Morals (which builds on Book 2, Of the Passions), his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, and some of his Essays. In part the moral Enquiry simply recasts central ideas from the moral part of the Treatise in a more accessible style; but there are important differences. The ethical positions and arguments of the Treatise are set out below, noting where the moral Enquiry agrees; differences between the Enquiry and the Treatise are discussed afterwards. (shrink)

Socrates’ refutations of Thrasymachus in Republic I are unsatisfactory on a number of levels which need to be carefully distinguished. At the same time several of his arguments are more powerful than they initially appear. Of particular interest are those which turn on the idea of a craft, which represents a shared norm of practical rationality here contested by Socrates and Thrasymachus.

Plato’s attitude towards women in his major political works, the Republic and Laws, is complex. On the one hand, Plato argues that in well-run cities, women should hold positions of rule; but on the other, he suggests that women are inferior to men with respect to virtue. To reconcile these conflicting attitudes, some scholars argue that Plato’s progressive proposals are about women as they could be given the right education and environment, while his derogatory comments are about women as they (...) are. Surprisingly, however, commentators who defend this line of thought fail to identify which aspect or aspects of women’s current social position is the problem. I argue that a central problem is women’s role in the private family. More specifically, I argue that Plato thinks the institution of the private family and household is an impediment to virtue; since the private family and household is the primary domain of women, they will be particularly susceptible to its ill effects. In short, individuals’ characters are shaped by the institutions they inhabit; the private family and household is a character-shaping institution that is the primary domain for women, and as a result their characters will be shaped for the worse. (shrink)

This chapter offers phenomenological ethics of intimacy for experiences of isolation, reduced haptic relations, and periods when we must hold each other at a distance. How can we practice an ethics of intimacy from a space of separation and suspended activities involving bodily proximity and touch? By drawing on Luce Irigaray’s identification of a “caress before the caress,” I locate a queer, feminist ethics of intimacy born from the experience of undetermined desire or “erotic suspension.” The reduction and disruption of (...) touching, brought about by a crisis such as a pandemic, magnifies the experience of ethical or epistemological uncertainty surrounding haptic relations. But I argue that the experience of erotic suspension before the caress underlies all forms of being-together. One’s relationship to this moment before the caress is critical because it informs and transforms the way we are together. The disruption of our usual forms of being-together may be an opportunity for transformed ethical relations, the expansion of intimacy, and heightened sensation and pleasure. (shrink)

Drawn from the authors' experiences in the UK, Australia and mainland Europe and with contributions from across the globe, this clear and accessible book includes a wide range of examples. The authors show the reader how to: identify ethical issues which may arise with any research project, gain informed consent, provide information in the right way to participants, and present and disseminate findings in line with ethical guidelines.

In this article, I compare and evaluate R. D. Laing and A. Esterson’s account of schizophrenia as developed in Sanity, Madness and the Family, social models of disability, and accounts of extended mental disorder. These accounts claim that some putative disorders should not be thought of as reflecting biological or psychological dysfunction within the afflicted individual, but instead as external problems. In this article, I consider the grounds on which such claims might be supported. I argue that problems should not (...) be located within an individual putative patient in cases where there is some acceptable test environment in which there is no problem. A number of cases where such an argument can show that there is no internal disorder are discussed. I argue, however, that Laing and Esterson’s argument—that schizophrenia is not within diagnosed patients—does not work. The problem with their argument is that they fail to show that the diagnosed women in their study function adequately in any environment. (shrink)

Paradigmatically, natural kinds are the kinds of thing or stuff that are classified by the natural sciences. The periodic table provides perhaps the best example of the potential importance of natural kinds for science. In the philosophy of psychiatry, debates over whether mental disorders can be natural kinds emerge because kinds of mental disorder are manifestly different from chemical kinds in various ways. While chemical kinds are precise, psychiatric kinds are fuzzy. While chemical kinds are objective, the identification of psychiatric (...) kinds is value-laden. Psychiatric classification involves classifying people, and unlike chemical elements, those people can respond to being classified in various ways. This chapter goes through these differences, one-by-one, and argues that despite them, mental disorders may be natural kinds. (shrink)

Increasingly, Deaf activists claim that it can be good to be Deaf. Still, much of the hearing world remains unconvinced, and continues to think of deafness in negative terms. I examine this debate and argue that to determine whether it can be good to be deaf it is necessary to examine each claimed advantage or disadvantage of being deaf, and then to make an overall judgment regarding the net cost or benefit. On the basis of such a survey I conclude (...) that being deaf may plausibly be a good thing for some deaf people but not for others. (shrink)

The DSM is the main classification of mental disorders used by psychiatrists in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. Although widely used, the DSM has come in for fierce criticism, with many commentators believing it to be conceptually flawed in a variety of ways. This paper assesses some of these philosophical worries. The first half of the paper asks whether the project of constructing a classification of mental disorders that ‘cuts nature at the joints’ makes sense. What is (...) mental disorder? Are types of mental disorder natural kinds (that is, are the distinctions between them objective and of fundamental theoretical importance, as are, say, the distinctions between the chemical elements)? The second half of the paper addresses epistemic worries. Even if types of mental disorder are natural kinds there may be reason to doubt that the DSM will come to reflect their natural structure. In particular, I examine the extent to which the DSM is theory-laden, and look at how it has been shaped by social and financial factors. Ultimately, I conclude that although the DSM is of immense practical importance it is not likely to become the best possible classification of mental disorders. (shrink)

According to traditional versions of the mental file theory, we should posit _mental files_—that is, mental representations with containment structure—to explain both rational relations between the attitudes, and the persistence of the attitudes across time. However, Goodman and Gray ( 2022 ) offer a revisionary interpretation of the file framework, according to which its explanatory commitments are better presented by positing _mental filing_, as a process, but not _mental files_, as mental representations with file structure. Goodman and Gray focus on (...) a certain class of synchronic explanations, but files have also been thought to play an essential diachronic role in the maintenance and update of object-directed thought. This paper has two aims. First, we clarify the aims and commitments of Goodman and Gray ( 2022 ). Second, we extend their mental filing view to show how it can account for continued belief, change of mind and persistence of the attitudes in general. (shrink)

This paper explores an analogy between two approaches to teleology in nature and two theories of authorship. I argue that Spinoza’s attempt (as Kant criticizes it in the Third Critique) to explain all natural unity, and explain away apparent teleological unity, in terms of inhering in the same subject (God) or proceeding causally from God’s essence mirrors the view Proust lays out in the essay “Gustave Moreau” that the features of a work of art are unified in virtue of occurring (...) together in, and proceeding from the laws of, the artist’s inner soul. Meanwhile, the strategy Kant favors for understanding interdependent natural systems like organisms—provisionally considering them as purposively designed—resembles the one Alexander Nehamas recommends in “The Postulated Author” (1981) for interpreting a work of art: imagining the agent who could have intended all its features. I propose that this analogy sheds light on the unity of the two parts of the Third Critique by pointing to the similarity between interpreting beautiful objects and interpreting nature. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a powerful resurgence of settler colonialism as an interpretive framework through which to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Attached to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies, this so-called ‘turn’ to settler colonialism has seen Israel-Palestine increasingly compared alongside New World white settler societies like Australia, Canada and the United States. In seeking to undercut the lens of exceptionalism through which the conflict has conventionally been viewed, the settler colonial paradigm has some important counter-hegemonic implications (...) for reframing Israel-Palestine, not least of which is its prescription for decolonization. However, it is paradoxically in the context of decolonization that the limits of the settler colonial paradigm become most apparent. I argue that these limitations are connected to the dominance of Patrick Wolfe’s structural account of settler colonialism, which leaves very little room for transformation, and to the particular connotations settler colonial studies has acquired from the New World contexts in which it is most often articulated. This is particularly the case in Israel-Palestine, where these connotations preclude engagement with the national aspects of the conflict and leave under-examined the unique resonances of the settler/native distinction, which need reckoning with in any serious account of decolonization. (shrink)

A generally ignored feature of Plato’s celebrated image of the cave in Republic VII is that the ascent from the cave is, in its initial stages, said to be brought about by force. What kind of ‘force’ is this, and why is it necessary? This paper considers three possible interpretations, and argues that each may have a role to play.

In the Republic, Plato argues that the soul has three distinct parts or elements, each an independent source of motivation: reason, spirit, and appetite. In this paper, I argue against a prevalent interpretation of the motivations of the spirited part and offer a new account. Numerous commentators argue that the spirited part motivates the individual to live up to the ideal of being fine and honorable, but they stress that the agent's conception of what is fine and honorable is determined (...) by social norms. I argue that while it is correct to hold that spirit aims to be fine and honorable, it is not the case that the agent’s conception of what it is to be fine and honorable is determined by social norms. Instead, there is a fact of the matter about what it is to be fine and honorable, and it is this fact that shapes the individual’s conception of the fine and honorable. I argue that being fine and honorable involves living up to your rational views about how you should behave, despite appetitive temptations to the contrary. I claim that this condition of the soul is the basis of a variety of interrelated admirable traits, some with moral and others with aesthetic connotations. (shrink)

Friesen et al. (2023) describe barriers to research in patient populations that have been historically labeled as vulnerable and, as a result, are under-represented in research due to the Instituti...