Objective: Even when critically ill patients are almost certain to die from their illnesses, there is generally an element of prognostic uncertainty. Little is known about how physicians handle this uncertainty in conversations with surrogate decision makers. We sought to evaluate whether and how physicians discuss prognostic uncertainty with surrogate decision makers of patients who are highly likely, but not certain, to die. Design: We audiotaped and transcribed discussions between clinicians and surrogate decision makers at two major California teaching hospitals (...) from 2006 through 2008. Physicians completed a questionnaire addressing their prognostic estimates for patients' survival to hospital discharge. Participants: We included physicians and surrogates of 12 incapacitated, critically ill patients. Measurements: We analyzed transcripts of discussions in which physicians' estimates of patients' chances of hospital survival were 1% to 5%; we coded whether physicians disclosed the prognostic uncertainty and, if so, how they conveyed that death was highly likely but not certain. Results: Physicians' estimates of short-term survival were 1% to 5% for 12 of the 70 patients enrolled in the original study. In 8 of 12 cases, physicians conveyed prognostic uncertainty by using probabilistic language or by an explicit mention of uncertainty. In four cases, physicians made at least one statement that either implied or was ambiguous about whether death was certain. Conclusion: We observed variability in how physicians handle prognostic uncertainty in their discussions with surrogates of patients who are highly likely, but not certain, to die, including some circumstances in which physicians stated or implied that death was certain. (shrink)

Domestic violence is endemic across Latin America. It is legitimated by patriarchal Christian theologies and widespread gender inequality. Drawing on the work of women theologians and activists working in Argentina, Uruguay and elsewhere, this article explores women's networks of resistance against violence. These include public and legal acknowledgement of domestic violence; the transmission of life-affirming values; pastoral support in the denouncement of violence; and the development of open and fluid household structures.

The past decades have seen a rise in religious and secular responses to inequality that seek to offer those who are relatively wealthy an opportunity to personally engage with impoverished people and places. This article examines three cases of elite white South Africans who intentionally immersed themselves in poor urban environments. In dialogue with the anthropology of ethics, I argue that immersion was seen as an experimental tool for transforming the self and cultivating virtues of empathy and responsibility towards (...) others. In this way, immersion acted as a technology of the self, linking care of the self to care of others. Yet such experimentation was not without risk. Though imagined as a tool that could promote care of the self and care of others, immersion carries with it the potential to reinforce power divides and/or solicit negative moral judgment. (shrink)

Regenerative agriculture refers to a suite of principles, practices, or outcomes which seek to improve soil health, biodiversity, climate, ecosystem function, and socioeconomic outcomes. However, recent reviews highlight wide heterogeneity in how it is defined. This impedes our ability to understand what regenerative agriculture is and has left the movement open to strategic repurposing by diverse stakeholders. Furthermore, the conceptual franchising of the regenerative agriculture debate by Western culture has omitted discussions surrounding social justice, relational values, and the contribution of (...) Indigenous and local knowledge that does not align with Western-centric producer-consumer frameworks. This is a continuation of injustice by creating barriers to representation and participation, and its confrontation will ultimately be necessary for regenerative agriculture to achieve its transformative potential. This article demonstrates that the farming techniques associated with the regenerative agriculture movement today have been practiced for centuries, and in some cases millennia, by Indigenous and local communities around the world. We propose that current Western academic attempts to define regenerative agriculture have resulted in long lists of practices, principles, and outcomes which fall short of describing the whole, because they lack the relational values component that is so integral to these Indigenous and local knowledge systems. We take an urgently needed, Indigenous-informed approach to defining regenerative agriculture, which confronts current epistemic injustice and prioritizes sociocultural and relational values. Finally, we propose an anti-colonial definition that draws on diverse knowledge systems including Indigenous ecophilosophies and published scientific analyses. (shrink)

Background: Falls in older adults are a major public health problem. White matter hyperintensities are highly prevalent in older adults and are a risk factor for falls. In the absence of a cure for WMHs, identifying potential strategies to counteract the risk of WMHs on falls are of great importance. Physical activity is a promising countermeasure to reduce both WMHs and falls risk. However, no study has yet investigated whether PA attenuates the association of WMHs with falls risk. We (...) hypothesized that PA moderates the association between WMHs and falls risk.Methods: Seventy-six community-dwelling older adults aged 70–80 years old were included in this cross-sectional study. We indexed PA using the Physical Activity Score for the Elderly Questionnaire. Falls risk was assessed using the Physiological Profile Assessment, and WMH volume was determined by an experienced radiologist on T2-weighted and PD-weighted MRI scans. We first examined the independent associations of WMH volume and PASE score with PPA. Subsequently, we examined whether PASE moderated the relationship between WMH volume and PPA. We plotted simple slopes to interpret the interaction effects. Age, sex, and Montreal Cognitive Assessment score were included as covariates in all models.Results: Participants had a mean age of 74 years and 54 were female. Forty-nine participants had a Fazekas score of 1, 19 had a score of 2, and 6 a score of 3. Both PASE and WMH volume were each independently associated with PPA score. The interaction model indicated that PASE score moderated the association between WMH volume and PPA, whereby higher PASE score attenuated the association between WMHs and falls risk.Conclusion: PA is an important moderator of falls risk. Importantly, older adults with WMH can reduce their risk of falls by increasing their PA. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

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)

Determinations of ability/disability are rooted in coloniality, specifically in categorizations of race, gender, and animality as they bear on social formations. I elucidate this rootedness by weaving the “coloniality of ability” into María Lugones’ accounts of the coloniality of gender and the colonial-modern system as founded on the “human-nonhuman” difference. This enables me to reveal an “ability system” based on the “ability-bestiality” difference and delineate with more specificity liminal sites of oppression and resistance across the heterogeneous socialities of coloniality-modernity. From (...) the perspective of the coloniality of ability that I develop, I focus on the liminality of the white woman Victorian invalid and that of the colonized “bestial” body in order to distinguish between two forms of colonial-modern liminality—“light” and “dark.” I also draw from this discussion two forms of colonial-modern oppression—“dehumanizing” and “bestializing”—and two related modalities of anticolonial resistance—“humanizing” and “decolonial.”. (shrink)

Bringing Flowers HomeWe try to put a bandage on the wound,offering a vague apology:Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.Towers turn out to have been built on sand.Regimes collapse. No use in asking whywe ripped the bandage off that bleeding wound.An earthquake followed by a hurricane,fires, floods: they've passed some of us by.Us. And who is we? And what is home?Last week an enormous yellow moonhung low in a corner of the sky.Beauty is no bandage for the wound,hole in (...) the future much too big to mendor even to imagine, though we tryto camouflage it, bringing flowers home.You said, when we were talking of the end,that no one teaches us to say goodbye,or how to ease the bandage from the wound.Forgive me, death. I brought these flowers home.Moving the PianoCompact, gleaming, black and white,this sturdy Yamaha uprightstood staunchly in one room for yearsuntil, maneuvered through several doorstoday by two young slender menand up a ramp into their van,it ventured briefly out into the world again.The change of space, the space of change:the walls look naked, empty, strange.Heavy has given way to light.Habitual soliditytoo familiar to seeyields to possibilitytoo unfamiliar to see.Late and early, early, late,end, beginning—all are swirledinto a mist that veils the world.The black and white of status quoblends to a color I don't know,transition that I cannot name,but I salute it all the same.Goodbye, piano, and hello.So where is the piano going?Where will it find another life,music and memories unpackedin an unfolding second act?North Carolina, near a riverwhose stream, like time, is always flowing.My son lives there with his wife.Beloved, nothing is forever.You can't step twice into this life.Nap at Stony PointMy cousin and my friendon their respective recent deathbedsslid from my mind. I noticedthe scarlet splash of a cardinal perched on a cannonon a bluff above the Hudson.I lay down on a picnic table,sun on my face, five turkey vulturescircling overhead, and closed my eyes.And when I opened them I felt as pleasedas if I had completed some needful taskinstead of having forgottenhow my friend in January and my cousin in March,both of them alert and wry and tranquil,had faced what each of them clearly saw approaching—more, had recognized and greeted it,instead of ignoring it by looking through it,the way some people, even iftheir office is two doors down the hall,look right through you, pretending not to see you.Or maybe they don't see youany more than one envisions deathon a sunny April afternoon.The Last Lecture HallTheaters that were never ours,classrooms empty and refill.Nor do the trees belong to us.We cross the stage and disappearor venture in among the treesand lose ourselves there.Feverish categories blur.Genre distinctions: what for?The empty theater becomesa lecture hall. A classroom morphsinto a forest murmuringwith voices. Words pelt down like rainor rise like mist and dissipate.The rustling trees swell to a roar.But they were never still.Theater, classroom, maple, fir:feverish categories blur,presences pressing through the veilof the phenomenal;a leopard padding down the aisle.Tiger-masked students fill the seatsof the amphitheater.The old professor, looking outover the upturned faces, said“You are all allegoricalfigures to me. I will not learnyour names.” Did the students laugh?Tragedy, satire, comedy:genres are deciduous.Modes blur, leaves spin and fall.The leaves of memory seemed to makeA mournful rustling in the dark(Longfellow, “The Fire of Driftwood”).Lights go on in the theater.Class is over. We stumble out.The GatesWhen I woke up I had walked through a gate.I looked around the room—trickle or torrent, stepping into time—and bent my head to drink at a black stream.I look around a roomthick with the dust of after and before.Am I meant to drink from this black stream?My lips are dry,thick with the crust of after and before,gate of ivory and gate of horn.My lips are dry, I'm thirsty.Heat, cold, fire, snow, sun.Gate of ivory and gate of horn:to cross a threshold ends one story(firelight; snow squeaking; winter sun)and begins another.To cross a threshold ends one story(ever after? or a transformation?)and begins anotherthere is no law compelling us to enter.Ever after or a transformation.Torrent, trickle: we set foot in time,but there's no law compelling us to enterstory once we've latched the gate of dream.FilamentsYour past is thickening. You can seeits filaments, as carefullyyou begin to part the strands(they're all connected) with both hands,and clear a path. Now warilyenter the web—not all the way,but toward some kind of clarity.We have been rightly taught that wecan't finish, but must do, the work.Partway through the leafy murk,crisscrossing dapple of the trees,so tough and so precarious,you find yourself in the dawn air,the circle's center everywhere.Along the PromenadeReading a book about transitioningin the twenty-first-century meaning of the wordblends with plans for my son's upcoming weddingand scraps of conversation overheardat the Japanese-themed street fair today.Somnambulists along the promenadefloat in the warm currents of Broadway,eat talk look linger in the sun and shade.Then to the park: October leaves still green(climate change or merely Indian summer?).Snatched memories, I catch them on the wing:Samos Septembers, pomegranate tree,lemon tree, okra, a chameleon,the little summer of Saint Dimitri,they called it. All this happened; but to me?Streams of conversation flowing by.The sound artist described his work like this(if work is the right word): “Accidentallyuploading seemingly private messages,”which describes, also, dreams and poetry,the drifting crowd, incessant carousel,city and weather, time and holiday,all lived, palped, tasted, tested, overheard.Somnambulists along the promenadehave set up booths, their dreams... Bookending my dawn dream: symmetricalsoaking sponges dripping... DNA?Destiny, temperament, personality:the cards we're dealt and that we have to play,except we now can change them gradually.Transition: he or she or rather they,constructed, deconstructed, rearranged,the tarot spread of genealogy,inheritance as aleatoric play.We walked west to Eleventh Avenue,drawn by rumors of Ad Reinhardt's blue,which buzzed and throbbed. Stand still: my head was spinning.Allusions to water or to sky,dense, deep, alarming, ending or beginning... I sat awhile and watched the crowd glide by,enchanted promenaders all drawn inon the exhibition's last dayby the silence's cerulean humming.And then they climbed the stairs, and so did we,to lighter textures on an upper floorwhere Ruth Asawa's baskets in midairweightlessly demonstrated gravity,twigs, trees, crowns, bubbles dancing in white space.Next week my class will read “On Being Ill.”“Blogs,” I'll tell them, is the word we nowuse, not “essay,” for the moving mind,that saunterer who takes note and leaves behindand doubles back and ponders and regretsamidst the wash of vision, the flowand tidal pull of what we see and know,what we've dreamed, what we have said and heard,the thrumming colors and the floating crowd,as if the bubbly brew of sunny dayand anxious dreams could somehow all be caughtup in one enormous, one all-encompassing word. (shrink)

This essay argues that we need practices for tending to what has been discarded as "historical debris" in order to generate queer socialities and meanings that refuse the dominant heteronormative, capitalist, and white supremacist privileging of futurity, novelty, and productivity. Artist and city planner Theaster Gates's transformative work takes root in Chicago's South Side, where he has renovated abandoned buildings into dynamic community spaces for celebrating and generating Black history, art, and culture. The essay reads Gates's artistic-activist practice through (...) Elizabeth Freeman's queer feminist framework, in particular her notion of "temporal drag," to challenge conventional assumptions that whatever is "newest" offers the most radical or queer potential. Freeman's and Gates's work demonstrates the latent possibilities within history's "throwaway" objects and spaces, which can act as sites for imagining and living otherwise, generating queer utopias in our present. (shrink)

Throughout the midrash Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer , motifs are recycled to connect primordial time to the eschaton. In this paper, I read passages on the well “created at twilight of the Sixth Day” in light of Bakhtin's notion of “chronotope” . The author of PRE disengages the itinerant well from its traditional association with the desert sojourn and links it, instead, to the foundation stone of the world at the Temple Mount. The midrash reflects the influence of Islamic legends about (...) the “white stone” around which the Dome of the Rock was built . Over the course of the discussion, PRE is understood in terms of the genre “narrative midrash” and compared to classical rabbinic literature in order to illustrate changes in both form and content arising from the author's apocalyptic eschatology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ManifestsRachel Blau Duplessis (bio)O great classic cadences of English poetry We blush to hear thee lie Above thy deep and dreamless.—Denise Riley, Mop Mop GeorgetteThat tall white pasture clump that we call cow parsnip, Queen Anne’s lace magnified, are, in Latin, umbellifers, a flat-topped or rounded flower cluster. But sometimes people call them “umbrella flowers.” This work is closer to umbrella flowers than to umbellifers, down there on (...) the ground with bricolaged theorizing practices, folk etymologies, my poetry, and intransigent details. That was a tribute to the essay as woodsy ramble [Good xii and x].And to the essay as personal—a way of marking and mocking the professional codes and impersonal solemnities of the representation of thought. If saying “I” like a heroine will adequately undermine unsituated false universals, I’ll say “I” yes I will. “I” will report that in 1966 or so I diminished all the way down to a scant handful of one-line poems, and to gnomic statements, barely effective. The kind of development they needed was not rhetorical but historical.I, Lady, you are my true love’s lady. You stand in the middle of the room, Sunlight streaming around you. Sunlight takes hold of the seeds in you And wets them. I want to hold myself to you, But you are myself. Can I?This 1966 fragment issues directly from, and is a preternatural reminder of a passionate problematic—questions of gender, in relation to an engagement with poetry, poetry figured as a set of psychosocial and intellectual institutions imbuing a practice of writing in lines. This fragment knew and represented issues, points of political and cultural contradiction about the construction of authorship and the poetic career before their maker could see them as such. The fragment was a cognitive act, not just in autobiography. It functioned as a probe of a situation then almost invisible and always underacknowledged; to have understood it then, one would have needed the cultural apparatus precipitated (though not elaborated) by a social movement—second wave feminism, something that had not yet occurred.Despite mirroring each other in a dramatic hinged appositive, with Lady as hinge (“I, Lady, you”), the female “I” is separated by the very concept “Lady” from her addressee, one traditional addressee of poems, the female “you.” “Lady” is both hinge and barrier; she belongs to “my true love”—a charming and smug ballad turn, filled with idealizations of class and sexuality. Yet the “I” wants to hold this “you” figure to herself, actualizing in female-to-female attraction the long half-life of a Petrarchan structure of feeling in order to create female authorship. Now that gesture could be interpreted as desire (in a [End Page 31] lesbian, matrifocal, or preoedipal plot), or as self-aggrandizing forms of egoistic desire. Is the desired embrace regressive? immature? narcissistic? self-serving? greedy? masturbatory? (all these having been thought of as bad attitudes with a bad press—one might now wonder). Fueled by an ambisexual or polysexual suggestiveness, the poem makes a wobbly declaration of vocation in its desire to embrace singular, hieratic woman herself, yourself, myself. Yet as pronouns multiply, a serious problem is accosted. “But you are myself. Can I?”The fragment stops, startled, where the cultural problem began. Authorship was compromised and almost aborted; in any event, these issues, which seemed to me, in my (then commonplace) ignorance of female cultural production, to have no analogues, pointed me toward total blockage. The “can I” is not simply a personal questioning of my own powers, but concerns general contingencies of gender and female place in culture, a then invisible social horizon. Am “I” forbidden to poetry by one—but one key—law of poetry—the cult of the idealized female? Should “Lady” be ditched totally? or examined? both? and how to poke at a Petrarchanism that seems utterly belated, never uniformly hegemonic, and not, after all, the whole content of poetry? (As I bear down upon it, it recedes, is evasive.) Yet any number of writers do take “Lady” for granted as one of the institutional assumptions of poetry. Many male writers get to say Lady early and often... (shrink)

The press and scholars alike often bemoan the failure of civil public deliberation. Yet this insistence on civility excludes people who engage in adversarial tactics, limiting the ideas that are heard within deliberation. Drawing on a deliberative dialogue that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the aftermath of the deadly White Supremacist rally of 2017, this article reveals how the capacity of deliberation to be inclusive of diverse voices depends upon deliberators’ orientation to learn from people who do not participate (...) in deliberation. While much scholarship attends to learning for democracy, as in the preparation of young citizens, this article shows the significance of learning in democracy, as in the capacity of adults to learn in the midst of political strife. (shrink)

In the U.S. there has been considerable interest in connecting low-income households to alternative food networks like Community Supported Agriculture. To learn more about this possibility we conducted a statewide survey of CSA members in California. A total of 1149 members from 41 CSAs responded. Here we answer the research question: How do CSA members’ socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds, household conditions potentially interfering with membership, and CSA membership experiences vary between lower-income households and higher-income households? We divided members into LIHHs (...) and HIHHs. We present comparisons of LIHHs’ and HIHHs’ employment, race/ethnicity, household composition and education, use of food support, and enjoyment of food-related activities; conditions interfering with membership and major life events; and sources of information influencing decision to join, reasons for joining, ratings of importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, gaps between importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, valuing of the share and willingness to pay more, and impacts of membership. We find that LIHHs are committed CSA members, often more so than HIHHs, and that CSA members in California are disproportionately white, but that racial disproportionality decreases as incomes increase. We conclude by considering: the economic risks that LIHHs face in CSA membership, the intersection of economic risks with race/ethnicity and cultural coding in CSA; and the possibilities of increasing participation of LIHH in CSA. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Books ReceivedAndrianou, Dimitra. The Furniture and Furnishings of Ancient Greek Houses and Tombs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi + 213 pp. 24 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $80.Andrisano, Angela Maria, and Paolo Fabbri, eds. La favola di Orfeo: Letteratura, immagine, performance. Ferrara: UnifePress, 2009. 255 pp. 41 black-and-white figs. Paper, €15.Bartsch, Shadi, and David Wray, eds. Seneca and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ix + 304 (...) pp. 1 black-and-white ill. Cloth, $99.Bers, Victor. Genos Dikanikon: Amateur and Professional Speech in the Courtrooms of Classical Athens. Hellenic Studies 33. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009. Dist. by Harvard University Press. ix + 159 pp. Paper, $15.95.Bowie, Ewen, and Jaś Elsner, eds. Philostratus. Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xii + 401 pp. 14 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $135.Bowlby, Rachel. Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. viii + 251 pp. Paper, $49.95.Calame, Claude. Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece: Heroic Reference and Ritual Gestures in Time and Space. Hellenic Studies 18. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009. Dist. by Harvard University Press. xii + 267 pp. 9 black-and-white figs. Paper, $19.95Collins, Paul. Assyrian Palace Sculptures. With photographs by Lisa Baylis and Sandra Marshall. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. 144 pp. Numerous color ills. Cloth, $45.Coltman, Viccy. Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain Since 1870. Classical Presences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiv + 315 pp. 85 black-and-white figs., 32 color plates. Cloth, $99.Comoth, Katharina. Gott selbst und die Idee. Beiträge zur Philosophie. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009. 86 pp. 2 black-and-white ills. Paper, €10.Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. xv + 421 pp. Numerous black-and-white figs., 27 color plates, 3 maps. Paper, $35. [End Page 345]Eezzuduemhoi, James. I. A. A Fundamental Greek Course. Ed. Glenn Storey. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2009. xxxv + 547 pp. Paper, $65.Erskine, Andrew, ed. A Companion to Ancient History. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. xxxvii + 693 pp. 27 black-and-white figs., 5 maps. Cloth, $199.95.Flower, Harriet I. Roman Republics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. xv + 204 pp. Cloth, $29.95.Föllinger, Sabine. Aischylos: Meister der griechischen Tragödie. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009. 224 pp. 5 black-and-white ills. Cloth, €24.90.Goldhill, Simon, and Edith Hall, eds. Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi + 336 pp. Cloth, $99.Grethlein, Jonas, and Antonios Rengakos, eds. Narratology and Interpretation. Trends in Classics 4. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. vii + 630 pp. Cloth, €93.41.Haziza, Typhaine. Le Kaléidoscope hérodotéen: Images, imaginaire et représentations de l'Égypte à travers le livre II d'Hérodote. Études anciennes 142. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2009. 393 pp. 7 black-and-white figs. Paper, €45.Jouanna, Jacques, and Franco Montanari, eds. Eschyle: À l'aube du théâtre occidental. Entretiens Hardt 55. Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 2009. Dist. by Vandoeuvres. xi + 510 pp. Cloth: SFr 85.Johnson, Mark J. The Roman Imperial Mausoleum in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xviii + 296 pp. Numerous black-and-white figs., 16 color plates. Cloth, $95.Kronenberg, Leah. Allegories of Farming from Greece and Rome: Philosophical Satire in Xenophon, Varro, and Virgil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xi + 223 pp. Cloth, $99.Loukopoulou, Louisa D., and Selene Psoma, eds. Thrakika Zetemata. Vol. 1. In collaboration with Athéna Iakovidou. Meletemata 58. Athens: Research Centre for Greek and Roman Antiquity of the National Hellenic Research Foundation, 2008. Dist. by Boccard. 175 pp. Numerous black-and-white figs. Paper, price not stated.Lowrie, Michèle, ed. Horace: Odes and Epodes. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. viii + 472 pp. Cloth, $199; paper, $75.Martin, Gunther. Divine Talk: Religious Argumentation in Demosthenes. Oxford Classical Mongraphs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ix + 345 pp. Cloth, $125. [End Page 346]Mendoni, Lina G., and Sophia B... (shrink)

Professional workplaces that embody an “ideal worker” image that is implicitly white and male set-up persistent biases against the competence and suitability for authority of those who are not white men, forcing them to work harder to prove their competence and fit in. The added labor of coping with these burdens is largely invisible to dominant actors in the workplace who do not experience them. To facilitate change by making such burdens visible for all, we present data from (...) a survey of 1,349 architects, including white, Asian, Black, Latinx, and mixed race/other underrepresented men and women, about their specific behavioral experiences of prove-it-again bias, tightrope bias, problems of fit, exclusion, emotion work, and interruptions. Across all measures, white men architects report significantly lower levels of these burdens than do women of any race and almost all non-white men. Consistent with status expectations and stereotype prototypicality theories, we find intersectional patterns in the relative burdens experienced by women and men of different racial groups. Gender differences in bias experiences are greatest among white, less among Asian, and least among Black architects. Women of color report the highest levels of bias overall. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.3 (2004) 107-115 [Access article in PDF] The Search for Narrative Laura Felleman Fattal The most cursory cultural investigator cannot help but notice that the visual arts have become a significant source and impetus for the narrative of contemporary books, theater, and dance. In recent memory, the following theatrical and dance performances "Contact" by Susan Stroman and John Weidman, "Art" by Yasmina Reza, "Sunday (...) in the Park with George" by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine, "Les Miserables" by Claude-Michel Schfonberg/music and others, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" by Steve Martin, and "The Sleep of Reason," by Antonio Buero-Vallego have taken the not-so-dead-life (natura morta) or still life of painting into the vital arena of the performing arts. The quest to seek intra-discipline aesthetics among dance, music, theater, and the visual arts is not the charge, but instead a turn to establish a narrative that has brought about this invasion of interactivity between the arts. Clearly defined boundaries between the arts have beenfading since Fluxus, Happenings, and Performance Art for over half a century. In the early part of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp's chess games and use of the fourth dimension of time in his numerous produced and pondered pieces all speak to the interrelatedness of the arts.Contemporary novels based on historical themes and subjects have created characters based on the lives and works of famous and intriguing artists such as Michelangelo Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, and Jan Vermeer. The silence and pensive qualities of the figures of Jan Vermeer, the seventeenth-century Dutch painter, have been the catalyst for two books, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland and the Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.1 Vreeland combines the mystic of the Vermeer paintings' characters with the impoverished history of the refugee status of its owners. In various parts of Vreeland's book the authenticity of the Vermeer painting becomes a subtext for describing the work. [End Page 107] Just the lament of some Dutch art historians. Where has such a treasure gone, or some such thing? He turned to pour us both a brandy. So why could this not be? It's his same window opening inward at the left that he has used so often, the same splash of pale yellow light. Take a look at the figures in the tapestry on the table. Same as in nine other paintings. Same Spanish chair with lion's head finials that he used in eleven canvases, same brass studs in the leather. Same black and white tiles placed diagonally on the floor.2A few pages later the interest in the authenticity of the painting continues: No, no signature. But that was not unusual. He often failed to sign his work. Besides, he had at least seven styles of signature. For Vermeer, signatures are not definite evidence. Technique is. Look at the direction of the brush's stroke, those tiny grooves of the brush hairs. They have their lighted and their shaded side. Look elsewhere. You'll find overlapping layers of paint no thicker than silk thread that give a minute difference in shade. That's what makes it a Vermeer.3In Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer's slow and meticulous technique, obsessive involvement with his models and his assiduous composition of light over textures of both animate and inanimate surfaces in the painting become the core of the novel. He had come in and was standing in the studio, looking out a window. "Take a seat, please, Greit," he said, his back to me.I sat in the chair by the harpsichord. I did not touch it — I had never touched an instrument except to clean it. As I waited I studied the paintings he had hung on the back wall that would form part of the concert painting. There was a landscape on the left, and on the right a picture of three people — a woman playing a lute, wearing a dress that revealed much of... (shrink)

Rachel Carson begins her revolutionary book Silent Spring with a quote from E.B. White that reads ‘we would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively’. While White's advice can account for an instrumental relationship towards nature, I believe that the more important relationship offered in his recommendation is one of appreciation or gratitude. But how are we to understand gratitude as appreciating Nature non-instrumentally when it has traditionally (...) always been understood as a response to a benefit received? My motivation is to modify our traditional conception of gratitude alongside Simon Hailwood's account of the ‘Otherness of Nature’ to see how we can truly show gratitude for Nature rather than simply reflecting on how Nature serves human interests. (shrink)

Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal's attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one's race in the way it might be to change one's sex. Considerations that (...) support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes. (shrink)

This paper examines what it is for a condition to be a disease. It falls into two sections. In the first I examine the best existing account of disease (as proposed by Christopher Boorse) and argue that it must be rejected. In the second I outline a more acceptable account of disease. According to this account, by disease we mean a condition that it is a bad thing to have, that is such that we consider the afflicted person to have (...) been unlucky, and that can potentially be medically treated. All three criteria must be fulfilled for a condition to be a disease. The criterion that for a condition to be a disease it must be a bad thing is required to distinguish the biologically different from the diseased. The claim that the sufferer must be unlucky is needed to distinguish diseases from conditions that are unpleasant but normal, for example teething. Finally, the claim that for a condition to be a disease it must be potentially medically treatable is needed to distinguish diseases from other types of misfortune, for example economic problems and legal problems. (shrink)

We offer an interpretation of the mental files framework that eliminates the metaphor of files, information being contained in files, etc. The guiding question is whether, once we move beyond the metaphors, there is any theoretical role for files. We claim not. We replace the file-metaphor with two theses: the semantic thesis that there are irreducibly relational representational facts (viz. facts about the coordination of representations); and the metasemantic thesis that processes tied to information-relations ground those facts. In its canonical (...) statement, the ‘file’-theory makes reference to a certain kind of relational representational feature, and a certain kind of mental activity. Mental files need not come into it. In short, we posit mental filing without mental files. Our interpretation avoids awkward problems that arise on the standard interpretation and clarifies the explanatory commitments of the theory. (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)

This book is about the norms of the speech act of assertion. This is a topic of lively contemporary debate primarily carried out in epistemology and philosophy of language. Suppose that you ask me what time an upcoming meeting starts, and I say, “4 p.m.” I’ve just asserted that the meeting starts at 4 p.m. Whenever we make claims like this, we’re asserting. The central question here is whether we need to know what we say, and, relatedly, whether what we (...) assert must be true. If the meeting is really at 3:30 p.m., you’ll be late, and probably rather upset that I told you the wrong time. In some sense, it seems like I’m on the hook for having said something false. This sense that I’ve done something wrong suggests that there are certain standards of evaluating assertions: a way of distinguishing between good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate. We call these standards norms. And so the debate about what, if any, norms govern the linguistic practice of assertion is known as the norms of assertion debate. When one’s assertion satisfies the norm, we say that the assertion is warranted. -/- Various philosophers have typically focused their views of the norms of assertion on articulating the level of epistemic support required for properly asserting. Some argue, for example, that one must know what one asserts. Others argue that one merely needs to justifiably believe what one asserts–an epistemic standing weaker than knowledge. The purpose of this book is to defend what I propose as the central norm governing our practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm. Here’s what it looks like: -/- One may assert that p only if: One has supportive reasons for p, The relevant conventional and pragmatic elements of the context are present, and One asserts that p at least in part because the assertion that p satisfies and. -/- In rough outline, the standards for warrantedly asserting shift with changes in context, although knowledge is never required for warrantedly asserting. In fact, in some special contexts, speakers may warrantedly lie. This latter feature particularly sets apart my view from others in the debate. This also means that truth, knowledge, and even belief aren’t necessary conditions for warrantedly asserting. (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)

On the traditional relationalist conception of singular thought, a thought has singular content when it is based on an ‘information relation’ to its object. Recent work rejects relationalism and suggests singular thoughts are distinguished from descriptive thoughts by their inferential role: only thoughts with singular content can be employed in ‘direct’ inferences, or inferences that ‘trade on identity’. Firstly this view is insufficiently clear, because it conflates two distinct ideas—one about a kind of inference, the other a kind of process (...) that grounds inferences—under the title, ‘trading on identity’. Secondly, this leaves us without a notion that can be used as an alternative to relationalism about singular thought. The first notion is no more applicable to singular than to descriptive thought. The second may help us better understand singular thought, but does so, not by replacing the view that singular thoughts are information-based, but by helping us understand the nature of information-based thought. (shrink)

The so-called ‘mental files theory’ in the philosophy of mind stems from an analogy comparing object-concepts to ‘files’, and the mind to a ‘filing system’. Though this analogy appears in philosophy of mind and language from the 1970s onward, it remains unclear to many how it should be interpreted. The central commitments of the mental files theory therefore also remain unclear. Based on influential uses of the file analogy within philosophy, I elaborate three central explanatory roles for mental files. Next, (...) I outline several common criticisms of the file picture, which have been a source of resistance to the view. Finally, I outline several interpretations of the theory, thus highlighting that the best interpretation of the file-theory's central analogy remains a live issue. (shrink)

This article discusses recent theories of the meaning of generics. The discussion is centred on how the theories differ in their approach to addressing the primary difficulty in providing a theory of generic meaning: The notoriously complex ways in which the truth conditions of generics seem to vary. In addition, the article summarizes considerations for and against each theory.

Through an examination of the actual research strategies and assumptions underlying the Human Genome Project (HGP), it is argued that the epistemic basis of the initial model organism programs is not best understood as reasoning via causal analog models (CAMs). In order to answer a series of questions about what is being modeled and what claims about the models are warranted, a descriptive epistemological method is employed that uses historical techniques to develop detailed accounts which, in turn, help to reveal (...) forms of reasoning that are explicit, or more often implicit, in the practice of a particular field of scientific study. It is suggested that a more valid characterization of the reasoning structure at work here is a form of case-based reasoning. This conceptualization of the role of model organisms can guide our understanding and assessment of these research programs, their knowledge claims and progress, and their limitations, as well as how we educate the public about this type of biomedical research. (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)

This paper attributes to Nietzsche a theory of cultural development according to which pyramid societies—steeply hierarchical societies following a unified morality—systematically alternate with motley societies, which emerge when pyramid societies encounter other cultures or allow their strict mores to relax. Motley societies contain multiple value systems due to individual innovation or intercultural contact, and are less stringent in dictating individuals' roles. Consequently, many people are torn between incompatible values and lack direction, so they are drawn to a morality of mediocrity, (...) which offers the modest goals of comfort and conformity. However, the need to mediate between conflicting values also tends to yield exceptional individuals who create new values, and can reshape the society into a new pyramid society governed by those values. I argue that Nietzsche favors neither type of society at the expense of the other, but believes the alternation itself is valuable: a pyramid society develops a value system to its full potential; then, when it encounters alternative values, the extraordinary individuals in the resulting motley society synthesize the competing systems into a fuller vision of human flourishing. (shrink)

It is widely supposed that the scientists in any field use identical standards for evaluating theories. Without such unity of standards, consensus about scientific theories is supposedly unintelligible. However, the hypothesis of uniform standards can explain neither scientific disagreement nor scientific innovation. This paper seeks to show how the presumption of divergent standards (when linked to a hypothesis of dominance) can explain agreement, disagreement and innovation. By way of illustrating how a rational community with divergent standards can encourage innovation and (...) eventually reach consensus, recent developments in geophysics are discussed at some length. (shrink)

This study offers a ckomprehensive new interpretation of one of Plato's dialogues, the _Cratylus_. Throughout, the book combines analysis of Plato's arguments with attentiveness to his philosophical method.

Given the potential dangers of unethical decisions in the workplace, it has become increasingly important for managers to hire, and promote into leadership positions, those who are morally inclined. Behavioral ethics research has contributed to this effort by examining an array of individual difference variables that play a role in morality. However, past research has focused mostly on direct causal effects and not so much on the processes through which different factors, especially those that are morality based, decrease unethical choices. (...) The purpose of the current research is to examine the process, which includes both subconscious and conscious decision pathways, through which moral attentiveness curbs unethical decision making at the individual level. The findings of a study employing about 200 participants and a cheating task reveal that both accurate ethical prototypes and moral awareness of the situation decreased unethical decisions, and moral attentiveness was found to be positively related to both of these constructs. In addition, having accurate ethical prototypes was found to be a partial mediator between perceptual moral attentiveness and less cheating, while moral awareness was found to be a partial mediator between reflective moral attentiveness and less cheating. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

In theoretical work about the language of personal taste, the canonical example is the simple predicate of personal taste, 'tasty'. We can also express the same positive gustatory evaluation with the complex expression, 'taste good'. But there is a challenge for an analysis of 'taste good': While it can be used equivalently with 'tasty', it need not be (for instance, imagine it used by someone who can identify good wines by taste but doesn't enjoy them). This kind of two-faced behavior (...) systematically arises with complex sensory-evaluative predicates, including those with other appearance verbs, such as 'look splendid' and 'sound nice'. I examine two strategies for capturing these different uses: one that posits an ambiguity in appearance verbs, and one that does not. The former is in line with an approach to 'look'-statements prominent in work in philosophy of perception, and I consider how the motivation given in that tradition carries over to the present context. I then show how the data used to support the verbal ambiguity approach can equally be captured on the second strategy, which appeals only to independently-motivated flexibility in adjective meaning. I close by discussing some considerations that are relevant for choosing between the two options. (shrink)

In ordinary conversation, speakers disagree not only about worldly facts, but also about how to use language to describe the world. For example, disagreement about whether Buffalo is in the American Midwest, whether Pluto is a planet, or whether someone has been canceled, can persist even with agreement about all the relevant facts. The speakers may still engage in “metalinguistic negotiation”—disputing what to mean by “Midwest”, “planet”, or “cancel”. I first motivate an approach to metalinguistic negotiation that generalizes a Stalnakerian (...) theory of communication by including linguistic commitments in the conversational common ground. Then, I turn to cases where the very status of a disagreement as metalinguistic or factual is unclear or contested. For example, after the publication of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, some responses claimed to identify factual errors, while others took those same “errors” to be matters of interpretation. I’ll consider how to extend our theorizing about metalinguistic negotiation to this type of (even more) “meta” disagreement, using the discussion following the 1619 Project as a case study. On my view, in most such cases, there will be a metalinguistic negotiation going on. Still, I explain several ways in which, despite a dispute being metalinguistic, the factualist side can sometimes receive important vindication. I also discuss why it can make sense for speakers to contest the status of a dispute. (shrink)

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as “the big…,” listeners typically make anticipatory eye movements to an item in a contrast set, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. Recent studies have suggested that this rapid, contrastive interpretation of scalar adjectives is malleable and calibrated to the speaker's pragmatic competence. In a series of eye‐tracking experiments, we explore the nature of the evidence necessary for the modulation of pragmatic inferences in (...) language comprehension, focusing on the complementary roles of top–down information ‐ (knowledge about the particular speaker's pragmatic competence) and bottom‐up cues (distributional information about the use of scalar adjectives in the environment). We find that bottom‐up evidence alone (e.g., the speaker says “the big dog” in a context with one dog), in large quantities, can be sufficient to trigger modulation of the listener's contrastive inferences, with or without top‐down cues to support this adaptation. Further, these findings suggest that listeners track and flexibly combine multiple sources of information in service of efficient pragmatic communication. (shrink)

Kant is often considered a key figure in a modern transition from social and political systems based on honour to those based on dignity, where “honour” is understood as a hierarchical measure of social value, and “dignity” is understood as the inherent and equal worth of every individual. The essay provides a richer account of Kant’s contribution to the “politics of equal dignity” by examining his understanding of dignity and honour, and the interaction between these concepts. The essay argues that (...) Kant appeals to multiple varieties of dignity and honour, that he does not reject honour in favour of dignity, and that he sees some versions of honour as conducive to respect for dignity. Furthermore, the complexity of Kant’s views on dignity and honour has implications for the theory and practice of human rights in the current day. (shrink)