Jack Freer, Stephen Wear; Culture Wars in New York State: Ongoing Political Resistance by Religious Groups to the Family Health Care Decisions Act, Christian bi.

Medical school curricula, although traditionally and historically dominated by science, have generally accepted, appreciated, and welcomed the inclusion of literature over the past several decades. Recent concerns about medical professional formation have led to discussions about the specific role and contribution of literature and stories. In this article, we demonstrate how professionalism and the study of literature can be brought into relationship through critical and interrogative interactions based in the literary skill of close reading. Literature in medicine can question the (...) meaning of “professionalism” itself, thereby resisting standardization in favor of diversity method and of outcome. Literature can also actively engage learners with questions about the human condition, providing a larger context within which to consider professional identity formation. Our fundamental contention is that, within a medical education framework, literature is highly suited to assist learners in questioning conventional thinking and assumptions about various dimensions of professionalism. (shrink)

In this article I defend an account of beauty labor as a form of resistance that can enable individuals and communities to combat body oppression. Focusing on the “Fuck Flattering!” movement, a social-media-driven movement in which fat people purposefully wear unflattering clothing to resist antifat fashion and oppressive body standards, I first set three criteria necessary for an act of beauty labor to count as one of resistance. I argue that (1) the agent in question must be (...) situated as a less ideal candidate for attributions of beauty, (2) the agent must have some level of knowledge or awareness of the norms (defined in light of dominant groups) and their harms, and (3) that knowledge or awareness of the harms of said norms must inform the agent's act of beauty labor. Based on this account of beauty labor as resistance, I argue that beauty labor can combat larger systems of oppression and incite meaningful change insofar as it enables individuals to claim and reclaim space (both digital and physical) from which fat people have been historically excluded, while affording an opportunity for education and unpacking of oppression and bias, and expanding the fashion industry. (shrink)

#ThisFlag movement was started by Pastor Evan Mawarire in April 2016 bemoaning the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy at the hands of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government under President Robert Mugabe. Although it started off as accidental, it, however, galvanised disparate groups and enabled them to transform anger against the state from online media to the streets. #ThisFlag movement officially started on the 20th of April 2016, when Pastor Mawarire wearing the Zimbabwean flag posted a video to (...) his Facebook page decrying the state of the economy and what he felt was government’s neglect of its duties to serve the citizens of Zimbabwe. Although one government minister described Mawarire’s actions as a ‘pastor’s fart in the corridors of power’, the reaction by the state security agents points to the contrary. Street protests have been banned. This article interrogates the transformation of #ThisFlag movement from an online struggle to street protests that have turned violent. It also looks at other movements that are complementing #ThisFlag and how the state is responding to these protests both on the social media and on the ground. Evan Mawarire may be considered as an unusual voice from the ever mushrooming new church establishments. As such, it becomes a point of interest to find out what voice there is, which represents what is commonly viewed as mainline churches. Such a voice is identified as coming from Bishop Raymond Mpandasekwa of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Chinhoyi who in one of his sermons delivered an acerbic attack on Mnangagwa’s government as a ‘blood thirsty’ government. The study explored the messages of Mawarire and Mpandasekwa using the socio-theological lenses as guided by Rawls’ theory of civil disobedience. Contribution: This study locates #ThisFlag activism in the context of toxic transformative politics in Zimbabwe. In addition, it contributes to our understanding of the relationship between religion and politics in an unstable political and economic setting. It calls for a re-thinking of the role of the church in Zimbabwean society and discusses the state’s response to those deemed to be not towing the line. It shows that while some religious organisations and groups are too keen to be co-opted by the regime, some have effectively resisted this and have become combative as they fight for people’s rights. Another important contribution is located in how these pastor-cum-activists have harnessed social media to amplify their voices and to reach huge audiences beyond the pulpit. The study is important because it contextualises the role of religion in the country’s contemporary politics, and this fits into the scope of the journal in that it is a multidisciplinary study of both religion and politics. (shrink)

RFID tags, small microchips no bigger than grains of rice, are currently being embedded in product labels, clothing, credit cards, and the environment, among other sites. Activated by the appropriate receiver, they transmit information ranging from product information such as manufacturing date, delivery route, and location where the item was purchased to (in the case of credit cards) the name, address, and credit history of the person holding the card. Active RFIDs have the capacity to transmit data without having to (...) be activated by a receiver; they can be linked with embedded sensors to allow continuous monitoring of environmental conditions, applications that interest both environmental groups and the US military. The amount of information accessible through and generated by RFIDs is so huge that it may well overwhelm all existing data sources and become, from the viewpoint of human time limitations, essentially infinite. What to make of these technologies will be interrogated through two contemporary fictions, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Cloud Atlas focuses on epistemological questions — who knows what about whom, in a futuristic society where all citizens wear embedded RFID tags and are subject to constant surveillance. Resistance takes the form not so much of evasion (tactical moves in a complex political Situation) but rather as a struggle to transmit information to present and future stakeholders in a world on the brink of catastrophe. Ubik, by contrast, focuses on deeper ontological questions about the nature of reality itself. Both texts point to the necessity to reconceptualize information as ethical action embedded in contexts and not merely as a quantitative measure of probabilities. (shrink)

Many predicates are dispositional. Some show this by a suffix like "-ible", -uble", or "-able": sugar is soluble in water, gasoline is flammable. Others have no such suffix and don't wear their dispositionality on their sleeves. Yet part of what it is to be solid is to be disposed to resist deformation, and part of what it is to be red is to appear red to normal human observers in normal lighting conditions. However, there is no agreement as to (...) whether dispositional predicates may be given a realist interpretation. For many authors, propositions containing them are made true by states of affairs (or facts) containing categorical, rather than dispositional properties. Many also claim that the states of affairs that make true attributions of dispositions to macroscopic objects are microscopic states of affairs concerning their parts. For example, what makes a vase fragile is the microscopic structure of its molecular constituents, which is what makes the vase break when it falls. Against these claims, I will argue that what makes a dispositional predicate apply to an object, whether macroscopic or microscopic, whether in common sense or science, is the object's having what I will call a powerful property. If the object is macroscopic, it is another matter whether the property is microreducible. My reasons for supposing that these powerful properties exist are those for postulating theoretical properties generally: they unify existing explanations and suggest new ones. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Take My Breath AwayEric Hayot (bio)In the middle of everything—in the middle of everything—here we are. Breathing. Not breathing. Choking on the fumes of the history we inherit: climate change, white supremacy, global pandemic. Waiting for the great exhale.At the dedication of St. Gaudens' Boston monument to the first Black regiment raised in the North to fight in the Civil War, Robert Lowell said, William James "could almost hear (...) the bronze Negroes breathe." Lowell's poem, written some seven decades after the monument's unveiling, at the height of the Civil Rights era, is a bitter record of the country's failure to fulfill the promise of emancipation, of its reluctance to let Black people breathe: "The monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city's throat."The country's throat. Still! Another five decades later!I do not think it is too much to say that the global rise of white nationalism is the echo of the still unresolved civil, legal, and political history of the Americas, the tension between the ideal of a multi-racial democracy and the difficulty that whites would have accepting it. The broader question is whether the fruits of Europe's long period of technological and military dominance can be shared with those whose exploitation and domination helped make that period possible, whether at home—where the resistance to immigration and refugees is basically a resistance to the distribution of the goods of the welfare state to people who are not white—or abroad—where the consequences of climate change will be felt most strongly, and where the understandable demand to continue developing, to access the cars and air conditioning and other goods that allow Europe its immense comfort, confronts the (equally understandable) demand to reduce the use of fossil fuels, the building of factories, and the like. We've had our development, the West says. But you can't have yours. And you can't have ours, either.But you know all this.One effect of the moment is that the global-historical forms of conflict now seem to penetrate down the very marrow of daily life, so that a billion tiny moments or gestures that might in other times have happily [End Page 127] signified only in the small local contexts of their occurrence now instead immediately connect to, or allegorize, the global-historical patterns to which they indubitably also belong. This has the effect of destroying what we were used to thinking of as the "private" or even "local" sphere of our actions. We might think of this as a "politicizing" of the formerly "personal," but this formulation, which is already a half century old (Carol Hanisch's essay with that title was published in 1970), feels sadly out of date, as though it itself had been swallowed up by one of its newer versions, "the local is the global," which in turn has been swallowed up by something even larger: there is no local, no personal, anymore. It is all global, all political.Perhaps the condition of having a personal or local sphere was itself a function of European privilege. In some respects, of course, it was. A Black person at a police traffic stop is not having a merely local experience, but a politically and deeply historically overdetermined one. A trans person at a medical appointment is not just having a private conversation between patient and doctor, but participating (and knows they are participating) in a national and transnational discussion about bodies, gender, sexuality, and so on. The examples can be multiplied.So perhaps it was only ever the white bourgeoisie that got to live the illusion of a life completely separated from history, from structure. And perhaps the world-historical shifts that make such illusions difficult—you are no longer experiencing local flooding or a heat wave, but the effects of climate change; you are no longer able to trust the people you see at the store who don't wear masks, because they belong to a mass movement that hates you and people like you—are good, insofar as they force some of us to live in the reality that everyone else... (shrink)

This study seeks to understand women's use of makeup in the workplace. The authors analyze 20 in-depth interviews with a diverse group of women who work in a variety of settings to examine the appearance rules that women confront at work and how these rules reproduce assumptions about sexuality and gender. The authors found that appropriate makeup use is strongly associated with assumptions about health, heterosexuality, and credibility in the workplace. They describe how these norms shape women's personal choices to (...) wear makeup. Next, they examine how some women transform the meanings of wearing makeup and, in rare instances, attempt to subvert the institutionalized norms. Although many women find pleasure in wearing makeup, the authors conclude that the institutional constraints imposed by the workplace effectively limit the possibilities for resistance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Stanley Cavell and Criticizing the University from WithinMichael FischerStanley Cavell has spoken often of his "lifelong quarrel with the profession of philosophy" but he has said less about the university as a whole and its pressures on all academic disciplines, philosophy included. 1 In Cavell's work, "academic" or "professional" philosophy takes shape in an institutional context he has not yet fully analyzed. I want here to extrapolate from Cavell's (...) work a critical, yet sympathetic, response to the university that I think is especially needed today, when the rise of the so-called corporate university is intensifying some of the professional pressures that Cavell resists.Cavell's discomfort with academic philosophy stems in part from what he regards as its narrowness, specifically, its marginalization of Ludwig Wittgenstein and other philosophers, not to mention Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the comedies of remarriage, and other work that Cavell cares about. In his view, the professional marginalization of these writers partly results from their exemplifying what can seem to be a vague moral seriousness, even at times a prophetic urgency, that calls for something akin to conversion rather than issuing in specific conclusions or reforms. According to Cavell, academic philosophy, by contrast, subsumes moral concerns under ethics, a separate field in which the "point of conversation is getting the other to agree to, or to do, something." 2Although Cavell does not systematically analyze the institutional pressures on academic philosophy, he does drop some hints. As befitting a subject seeking legitimacy in the university, academic philosophy has aligned itself with teachable subjects such as science, as opposed to more elusive pursuits such as painting and creative writing, which [End Page 471] have been less at home in the university and where the necessity of university instruction may be less clear and the line between success and failure harder to draw. 3 What can be taught in academic philosophy is a method of analysis, mastery of which can be certified in students by professors and in professors by journals, promotion and tenure committees, and administrators. Subdividing philosophy into discrete fields such as ethics makes it even more manageable, or less susceptible to sweeping pronouncements that cannot be tested by experts. Finally, the interest in getting "the other to agree to, or to do, something" associates academic philosophy, or at least ethics, with measurable results and maybe even progress.The rise of the so-called corporate university has exacerbated the emphasis on teachable expertise and definable outcomes that I have been describing. Take the largest private university in the United States—the University of Phoenix—as a model that some state and non-profit private universities may be emulating as they struggle to cut costs, meet external expectations, and work with reduced budgets. At the University of Phoenix, the interest in measurable results gets recast as learning outcomes that teachers enable students to reach as efficiently as possible. Specialization narrows these learning outcomes to sharply defined skills, such as writing business memos, which students can master and build on. Finally, the emphasis on method does not simply depersonalize instruction; it reduces the need for instructors. Each instructor is tasked with teaching as many students as possible, sometimes through distance learning, with class size reaching a limit only when the learning outcomes cannot be delivered. Lacking tenure, these instructors can be replaced, like interchangeable parts, when they wear out or their student customers become too dissatisfied with them. At another rapidly growing for-profit university, DeVry, students unhappy with their instructors are assured, in the words of a campus dean, that "weak links" will be "fixed" in a "total quality management" environment. 4Along similar lines, Lindsay Waters has recently explored how "the corporate makeover of the university" and "the commercialization of higher education" have affected academic publishing. 5 Universities compete in an increasingly cutthroat marketplace and face an escalating insistence on results from state legislatures, federal agencies, accrediting associations, and boards. Capitulating to this "accountability culture" (EP, p. 20), bottom-line driven administrators have stepped up demands for faculty productivity, measured in quantitative terms by numbers of students taught, grants won, and, what most concerns Waters, books and [End... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophocles’s Enemy Sisters: Antigone and IsmeneWm. Blake Tyrrell (bio) and Larry J. BennettAt the core of the Oedipus myth, as Sophocles presents it, is the proposition that all masculine relationships are based on reciprocal acts of violence. Laius, taking his cue from the oracle, violently rejects Oedipus out of fear that his son will seize his throne and invade his conjugal bed. Oedipus, taking his cue from the oracle, (...) does away with Laius, violently rebuffs the sphinx, then takes their places—as king and “scourge of the city,” respectively. Again, Oedipus, taking his cue from the oracle, plots the death of that unknown figure who may be seeking to usurp his own position. Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias, each taking his cue from the oracle, seek one another’s downfall.All these acts of violence gradually wear away the differences that exist not only in the same family but throughout the community.—René Girard, Violence and the SacredRené Girard does not include feminine relationships in his assessment of the Oedipus myth, yet the same redundancy that characterizes the males marks the females.1 Jocasta conjoins in one person multiple and redundant social roles: she is the mother and wife of the same person, for which she [End Page 1] hangs herself, leaving for Oedipus “many pains that a mother’s furies fulfilled” (Homer Odyssey 11.279–80). Her daughters, their father’s sisters, manifest kinship redundancy in two persons. Incest produces circularly, reverting to a sibling of the parent rather than moving forward with a descendant. The absence of linear progression from one generation to the next creates a sameness and equilibrium that thwart separation and individuality. Oedipus’s brothers/sons fail in their adult roles, because neither can overcome the other’s right to the throne of Thebes and the mastery of its royal household. They are enemy brothers locked in reciprocal violence.2 Antigone and Ismene have escaped notice not only as enemy sisters but even as products of the same incest. Audiences for Sophocles’s Antigone have viewed them as “normal” women and cooperated with his characters in emphasizing the differences between them. They have assumed from Antigone’s betrothal to Haemon and resistance to Creon that she is the elder, more mature sister.3 They tend to accept without question that Antigone engages in burial rituals with Polyneices’s corpse (241–58) and returns to it (442–35).4 Bernard M. W. Knox’s critically powerful concept of the “Sophoclean hero” has bolstered this view of Antigone while reducing Ismene to a foil, and abetted the tendency of modern producers of the play to cast an older or more famous actress in the role of Antigone.5 Naturalistic readings like that of C. M. Bowra—“seeing that Ismene is her only close relative in the world, Antigone is remarkably cold to her”6—have masked the source and hence the vehemence of Antigone’s fury.That the reciprocity of the violence between Ismene and Antigone has gone unnoticed is understandable in view of the familiarity of the conflict between their brothers. Males in Greek society pursued difference by striving to excel as aristoi (best) in competition for prestige, wealth, and power.7 Whenever Eteocles and Polyneices came together, each asserted a right to Oedipus’s household and throne that was equally matched, and violence ensued from the equilibrium. On the other hand, Greek women were not supposed to compete with one another for distinction. They wove wool for clothes, maintained the household, and cared for the children, the sick, and the dead, activities that required cooperation away from public view.8 Proximity to other women was the norm and desideratum. Moreover, lawgivers like Solon based their funeral legislation on the premise that every woman wanted to participate in mourning.9 For the sake of public tranquillity, legislators tried to limit the numbers of women participants by imposing restrictions according to degrees of kinship, for instance, to children of fifth cousins. In this context, women were interchangeable, and the places they held during birth, coming of age in wedding ceremonies, and death, [End Page 2] were open to more than one woman. Closeness and... (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, a fictionalised account of experiences of the UK welfare system in conditions of austerity. We consider, firstly, the significant challenge the film poses to dominant figurations of welfare recipients under austerity, through a focus on vulnerability to state processes. We follow with a reading of some of the film’s interventions in relation to reciprocity, drawing on the important trajectories of care, community and resistance that the film (...) renders visible through the collective stories of the major characters. Finally, we conclude with reflections on citizenship, subject narratives and alternative imaginaries of ‘deservingness’. Our article offers an ‘against the grain’ reading (hooks, 1996; Wearing, 2013) of the film, highlighting some of the radical possibilities of the more minor moments, character arcs and subject positionalities within the film’s central narrative of Daniel’s experiences in the shadow of the steadily crumbling welfare state. (shrink)

The most noticeable difference between the Digambara and Śvetāmbara sects of Jainism is expressed by the very names of these ancient traditions. Śvetāmbara means 'white-clad' and refers to the fact that the ascetics of this tradition wear white garments. Digambara means 'sky-' or 'space-clad' and refers to the fact that the ascetics of this tradition go naked, that is, they wear nothing but the sky. This is considered by both sects to be a critical difference and one that (...) justifies the split between the two. There are other differences between them, including the resistance of the Digambara sect to the idea that women can achieve moksha.1 Moreover, the Digambara reject many of the scriptures of the Śvetāmbara as .. (shrink)

During the last two decades, many thinkers on Iranian cinema have had many things to say about censorship, especially the issue of the veil imposed on women’s gender by the authorities in Iran. In this paper, I will describe Hamid Dabashi’s narrative as related to the concept of “truth” to show further that the veil issue has reached a new phase in Iran. Although much of what Dabashi defines as the absented body of women in his article “Body less faces: (...) Mutilating modernity and abstracting women in an ‘Islamic cinema’” may still hold, I believe his over-arching narrative doesn’t contribute enough to our understanding of the new relations among the authorities and actresses’ Fashion styles on red carpets. This paper’s method is connected with cultural and visual studies through Roland Barthes’ semiotics. I first focus on Hamid Dabashi’s conception of “truth” and how he believes “truth” is related to Islamic ideology and embodied in Iranian post-revolutionary cinema to further (through analysing photos of Iranian actresses’ clothing who attend festivals) conclude that Iranian women try to adopt new resistances in choosing their costumes compared to the early two decades of post-revolutionary Iran. The presence of Iranian women in festivals especially regarding what they wear has established a new interwoven relationship with authorities which has somewhat not been surveyed properly. By surveying the photos of their fashion and style I conclude that they are in constant negotiation with authorities through what they rebelliously wear. (shrink)

The standard philosophical view is that compulsive behaviors are caused by “irresistible” desires. Gary Watson famously argued that this view conflates compulsion with weakness of the will, and proposed differentiating weakness and compulsion by appealing to the normal strength-of-will of members of the community. This extrinsic distinction leaves no room for phenomenological differences between weakness and compulsion. Evidence from clinical psychology shows, however, that compulsion is associated with certain phenomenological features that are absent in cases of weakness. I therefore reject (...) the irresistible desire account. Instead, I propose that psychological compulsions “wear down” an individual’s normal faculty of self-control, i.e., the will. The recurrent inhibition of the behavior by the will overexerts this faculty, causing the psychological stress noted by psychologists. This stress raises the cost of resistance until it is unbearable. The subject abandons resistance and therefore performs the behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pairing breaths:Rabah Ameur-Zaïmech's Terminal Sud (2019)Marion Froger (bio)Translated by David F. BellAsphyxiaNever had I felt such a sense of suffocation watching a film by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche.1 The poisoned atmosphere of Terminal Sud (2019) recalls the atmosphere of the Algerian War (1955-1962) and that of the decade of darkness (1991-2002) in that country. The filmmaker chose not to make a historical film, however, but rather a dystopia that fuses together (...) periods and places. The story appears to be contemporary, in a country bathed in the colors of southern France, apparently in the grip of all the violence that French and Algerian memories are nowhere near forgetting.2 Bandits wearing combat uniforms, policemen wearing outfits sporting an acronym that strangely resembles one used by Islamist Algerian groups,3 and generals evoking the French putschists of 1961 all fight against each other—ransoming, threatening, kidnapping, killing, and torturing the local population. Meanwhile, out in the countryside, guerrillas (maquisards4) try to care for their dying leader, like North African freedom fighters (fellagas) were doing before them, and this in turn evokes French Resistance fighters in the 1940s. The film's work on confused memories, which, according to Thierry Kuntzel, is related to the condensation, overdetermination, and displacement of dreamwork, transforms being out of breath into a symptom that hounds the doctor, played by Ramzy Bédia ("Inhale…Exhale…Inhale again…Hold your breath…Exhale"), a state of the world in the form of a trap that threatens to suffocate him—and launches the quest for a filmic poetics of calm through the pairing of breaths.Peeling façades with tightly closed doors, lowered metal shop shutters, narrow and tense streets: the doctor, his wife Hazia, and their family slip outside in fear of kidnapping and gunfire, climb up stairs breathing heavily, anxiously await by the window, their bodies obscured in starkly contrasting shadows cast by glaring light, hug each other with endless sighs. As they share their grief, they have barely enough breath left to sing to the memory of someone who has disappeared,5 as if after an argument, [End Page 244] when everything has been said and all that remains is a strangled sob serving as last farewell.The film opens with an attack on a minivan used for public transportation: bandits, who could be soldiers, steal everything from the passengers and driver. The doctor sees his patients in a rundown hospital, treats a woman whose breathing is raucous, her voice taut with anxiety, and who speaks about the disappearance of her husband. Back home, he finds anonymous letters containing death threats and, to calm down, he searches for his breath by taking a deep drag from a cigarette and a swig of whiskey. "I can't take it any longer, I can't even stand up, I can't do anything, I'm at the end of my rope, I'm tired […] Is that what our country has become?" he confides to a friend several hours before losing, in the emergency room, his wife's brother, a journalist assassinated in front of his house. "Stay with me," he says as he runs beside the stretcher calling for help, "Breathe, breathe."The spasmodic breathing of Ramzy Bédia, provoked by the fear, effort, and pain that define his character, intensifies as the film progresses. He barely breathes in the car taking him to treat the rebel leader; he is running out of breath beside the leader's bed as we hear the death rattle and as Bédia shouts to the leader's comrades, "Give him some air, everyone get out!" Later, one of the policemen standing guard at the entrance to the hospital will be mortally wounded by a kamikaze attack and will die on the operating table despite the doctor's exhausting reparatory manipulations. Asphyxia will ultimately directly threaten the doctor after his arrest. Tied to an old bedspring, he will be tortured by electroshock,6 will attempt one last time to justify himself to a soldier who wants to know everything about the rebel leader the doctor has treated, and will nearly suffocate in his... (shrink)

In 2009, a law was passed in the Danish parliament, according to which judges cannot wear religious symbols in courts of law. First, I trace the development of this legislation from resistance to Muslim religious practices on the nationalist right to ideas in mainstream Danish politics about secularism and state neutrality – a process I refer to as ‘liberalization’. Second, I consider the plausibility of such liberal justifications for restrictions on religious symbols in the public sphere and, in (...) particular, for the ban on the wearing of religious symbols by judges. I argue that such justifications are flawed and so are not plausible corollaries of anti-Islamic justifications originating on the nationalist right. (shrink)

A lively history of American libertarianism and its decay into dangerous fantasy. In 2010 in South Fulton, Tennessee, each household paid the local fire department a yearly fee of $75.00. That year, Gene Cranick's house accidentally caught fire. But the fire department refused to come because Cranick had forgotten to pay his yearly fee, leaving his home in ashes. Observers across the political spectrum agreed-some with horror and some with enthusiasm-that this revealed the true face of libertarianism. But libertarianism did (...) not always require callous indifference to the misfortunes of others. Modern libertarianism began with Friedrich Hayek's admirable corrective to the Depression-era vogue for central economic planning. It resisted oppressive state power. It showed how capitalism could improve life for everyone. Yet today, it's a toxic blend of anarchism, disdain for the weak, and rationalization for environmental catastrophe. Libertarians today accept new, radical arguments-which crumble under scrutiny-that justify dishonest business practices and Covid deniers who refuse to wear masks in the name of "freedom." Andrew Koppelman's book traces libertarianism's evolution from Hayek's moderate pro-market ideas to the romantic fabulism of Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand, and Charles Koch's promotion of climate change denial. Burning Down the House is the definitive history of an ideological movement that has reshaped American politics. (shrink)

At the center of_ In Dark Again in Wonder_ are readings of René Char and George Oppen. Both of these poets achieved recognition at a young age, Char among the French surrealists in the 1930s, Oppen among the American objectivists in the same decade. Both were independent individuals who, having found their way to communities of inventive writers, stepped back and shaped their own idiosyncratic paths. Both responded decisively to the social upheavals of the 1930s and ‘40s. Oppen committed himself (...) to radical politics in the ‘30s, a decision that, as it turned out, led to his not writing poetry for nearly twenty-five years. Char fought in the Resistance in the '40s. Both, in their mature work, developed a kind of poetry that is at once a love poetry, a meditative poetry, and a poetry of encounter. The concluding chapter of the book places the questions raised by Char’s and Oppen’s work in a larger context, tracing the cultural history that shapes our modern experience of inhabiting a tension between an historical and a metaphysical horizon of experience, or, as this appears in a different but related light, a tension between a sociological and an existential understanding of our lives. Char and Oppen are both poets concerned with the old philosophical questions that are still with us—the nature of spiritual freedom, the gathering of the self in relation to death, the meditation on the whole, the turn to Nature as the open space of the whole under the conditions of modernity, the clarification of the ground of vision in eros and love, and the search for the good life—while at the same time they fully engage the social predicaments and promises of their world. "A brilliant, philosophical, and aesthetic approach to twentieth-century poetry that casts important light on the great poetic works of René Char and George Oppen. Revealing the ongoing role of wonder in the post-Romantic tradition, it points to two remarkable poets whose work embodies imagination in the knowledge of inevitable loss, renewal in the awareness of despair. This is a book worth reading for its insight into two poets and the larger literary and philosophical currents in which they lived and worked." _—Sandra L. Bermann, Princeton University_ "This is a brilliant, erudite, beautifully written, and compelling book, one that makes an important contribution to our understanding not only of the two poets on whom it focuses but of the period they inhabit and that we, as their inheritors, continue to inhabit. Robert Baker wears his considerable learning lightly, but he has deep knowledge both of the history of European and American poetry and of the history of philosophy. He has thought deeply and passionately about poetry, philosophy, history, and the ways in which they intertwine." —_Henry Weinfield, University of Notre Dame_ "Robert Baker has written a fine and unusual book: a study of two remarkable poets, one French and the other American, and a concluding reflection of considerable literary and intellectual reach on the gap between history and metaphysics in which both poets found themselves and in which we still subsist. Bake'rs style is synthetic, magisterial, drawing on a capacious knowledge of literature and the history of ideas." —_Kevin Hart, University of Virginia_. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE EDUCATOR IN THE FACE OF REFORM Enrique Gómez León It might be claimed that all the reforms ofthe educational systems of the wealthy nations of the West aim to accomplish the motto of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The principle goal of school today is the formation ofcitizens. Laws enshrine this sacred purpose, and politicians repeat it in every conceivable declaration oftheir programs. Public schools are ofcourse (...) part and parcel ofthe State. It is the ideals ofthe State that govern the educational process, and this in a double sense: schools should train pupils in these values, and at the same time reproduce these values in their functional processes. A quick glance at the characteristics of any high school allows us to recognize the values in question: a)Freedom of expression for teachers and pupils; freedom ofprograms, or rather the multiplication of subjects to be taught, since schools should represent every facet of our complex reality; freedom also from etiquette, from formal rules of behavior regarding what to wear, the way to speak up, how to address teachers; freedom, finally, from parents, who abandon to schools the role of primary and fundamental educator. b)Equality, a benefit ofdemocratization, which bears with it the obligation ofschooling for all; boys and girls study the same contents, and there is no exclusion for economic or religious reasons, nor for intellectual ones. c)Fraternity nowadays cashes out as tolerance, a true fetish word in the contemporary world. It is a tolerance which implies an absolute laicity so as to allow the expression ofevery kind ofbelief, or its lack, and which implies the right to speak far beyond what science allows, and yet to fall far short of what it demands, since emotion and sentiment demand their place alongside, or above, truth. The indubitable goodness of these objectives, these ideals—which no one would dare to criticize in public—does not manage to hide a spreading sense ofmalaise: teachers complain that pupils learn less and less, discipline problems increase; adolescents complain that school doesn't frighten them Enrique Gómez León97 any more, it'sjust boring; parents complain that there are no longer any good manners, their children are wasting their time; the newspapers deplore the increase of violence in the schools. Often the motives behind these complaints are quite banal: teachers focus on their own convenience and resist change; comparisons with the past are no longer valuable, since now everybody has become a product of schooling; most adolescents, above all, are extraordinarily entertained by school, where they meet up with their friends; parents forget that they had already scandalized their own parents with their astounding new mores; newspapers are slaves to the moment, obliged every day to forget what happened yesterday. We should not overlook the bad reasons for complaining about the malaise, but we should equally give it its due attention. I would like to bring out some arguments underlying it, as described from the position ofa teacher ofadolescents who loves and enjoys his profession. This malaise does not spring from resistance to the ideals of our era—liberty, equality, fraternity—but from the experience of a surprising fact: the more one exalts that slogan, the more the intellectual task of the school recedes into the background. As a consequence, freedom is reduced to lack of direction, equality to simple indifference, and fraternity to a paralyzing absence ofany meaningful boundaries. School, then—we are still talking about the state education system—may tend to produce what it is trying to avoid: a society both less free and more unequal. It is the apprehension of this future that provokes some disquieting questions among teachers: What use is this? What am I doing? What might I be able to do? In other words: What power do I have? So as to bring out some elements for discussion, and with the goal also of justifying the preceding hypothesis, I am going to approach the problem by first drawing away from it. In this way I hope to gather the necessary "élan" to underline two points—among many others—which, in my opinion, deserve more thought. Mircea Eliade repeats on several occasion this... (shrink)

The topic of developing professionalism dominated the content of many academic medicine publications and conference agendas during the past decade. Calls to address the development of professionalism among medical students and residents have come from professional societies, accrediting agencies, and a host of educators in the biomedical sciences. The language of the professionalism movement is now a given among those in academic medicine. We raise serious concerns about the professionalism discourse and how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has (...) defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label of "professionalism." In particular, we argue that the professionalism discourse needs to pay more attention to the academic environment in which students are educated, that it should articulate specific positive behaviors, that the theory of professionalism must be constructed from a dialogue with those we are educating, and that this theoretical and practical discourse must aim at a deeper understanding of social justice and the role of medicine within a just society. (shrink)

The topic of professionalism has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. The message of this current wave of professionalism is that medical educators need to be more attentive to the moral sensibilities of trainees, to their interpersonal and affective dimensions, and to their social conscience, all to the end of skilled, humanistic physicians. Urgent calls to address professionalism from such groups as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American (...) Board of Internal Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, among others. In fact, at the 2004 annual meeting of the AAMC six separate presentations addressed professionalism with such titles as "Evaluating Humanism and Professionalism," Professionalism: Expectation, Education, Evaluation," or "Toward Assessing Professional Behaviors of Medical Students through Peer Observations". Professionalism, then, has become part of the current academic medicine parlance, used by administrators, clinical faculty, residency programs, and professional organizations with an expectation of shared meanings and goals. All of these stakeholders focus on what has become a consistent list of attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism, which usually include variations on altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect. In fact, most of the scholarly work to date has been listing, describing, decrying, and measuring/evaluating it. In this collection of essays, we don’t argue with these attributes. Instead, we ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession’s beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, we will scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment. (shrink)

Substantial efforts have recently been made to reform the physician-patient relationship, particularly toward replacing the `silent world of doctor and patient' with informed patient participation in medical decision-making. This 'new ethos of patient autonomy' has especially insisted on the routine provision of informed consent for all medical interventions. Stronly supported by most bioethicists and the law, as well as more popular writings and expectations, it still seems clear that informed consent has, at best, been received in a lukewarm fashion by (...) most clinicians, many simply rejecting what they commonly refer to as the `myth of informed consent'. The purpose of this book is to defuse this seemingly intractable controversy by offering an efficient and effective operational model of informed consent. This goal is pursued first by reviewing and evaluating, in detail, the agendas, arguments, and supporting materials of its proponents and detractors. A comprehensive review of empirical studies of informed consent is provided, as well as a detailed reflection on the common clinician experience with attempts at informed consent and the exercise of autonomy by patients. In the end, informed consent is recast as a management tool for pursuing clinically and ethically important goods and values that any clinician should see as meriting pursuit. Concurrently, the model incorporates a flexible, anticipatory approach that recognizes that no static, generic ritual can legitimately pursue the quite variable goods and values that may be at stake with different patients in different situations. Finally, efficiency of provision is addressed by not pursuing the unattainable and ancillary. Throughout, the traditional principle of beneficence is appealed to toward articulating an operational model of informed consent as an intervention that is likely to change outcomes at the bedside for the better. (shrink)

Relevance Theory is a cognitively oriented theory of pragmatics, i.e., a theory of language use. It builds on the seminal work of H.P. Grice1 to develop a pragmatic theory which is at once philosophically sensitive and empirically plausible (in both psychological and evolutionary terms). This entry reviews the central commitments and chief contributions of Relevance Theory, including its Gricean commitment to the centrality of intention-reading and inference in communication; the cognitively grounded notion of relevance which provides the mechanism for explaining (...) pragmatic interpretation as an intention-driven, inferential process; and several key applications of the theory (lexical pragmatics, metaphor and irony, procedural meaning). Relevance Theory is an important contribution to our understanding of the pragmatics of communication. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for an account of metaphorical content as what is said when a speaker utters a metaphor. First, I show that two other possibilities—the Gricean account of metaphor as implicature and the strictly semantic account developed by Josef Stern—face several serious problems. In their place, I propose an account that takes metaphorical content to cross-cut the semantic-pragmatic distinction. This requires re-thinking the notion of metaphorical content, as well as the relation between the metaphorical and the literal.

This volume brings together original research that throws new light on how standards of behavior for medical practitioners are articulated in different religious, social, and political contexts.

The removal of life-sustaining treatment often brings physicians into conflict with patients. Because of their moral beliefs physicians often respond slowly to the request of patients or their families. People in bioethics have been quick to recommend that in cases of conflict the physician should simply sign off the case and “step aside”. This is not easily done psychologically or morally. Such a resolution also masks a number of more subtle, quite trouble some problems that conflict with the commitment to (...) toleration and moral diversity that it is intended to support. These conflicts are detailed and evaluated. (shrink)

Many teachers of bioethics often express concern, in their writings and otherwise, about the theoretical basis (or lack of it) of bioethics and the allied issue of relativism. The companion articles by Tong and Momeyer are in this vein and rightly address such issues within the context of a liberal arts education. This article addresses such issues in a different venue, i.e., bioethics teaching in the clinical sphere of health care institutions. It presumes to suggest that many of these theoretical (...) concerns, as well as the threat of relativism, seldom arise in this sphere. Rather, a broad based, well accepted body of moral truth has been fashioned over the last quarter century and it is this that clinical bioethics regularly keys to and to which most moral dilemmas are referred for resolution. The various forms of this pedagogy, e.g., case consultations or institutional policy statements, are charted out in this regard, as well as the often tactical character of much of this teaching, i.e., not "what should we do?", but "how might we best do it?". The article then goes on to conclude with a reflection on the use and abuse of power in clinical bioethics teaching and consultation. (shrink)

Do continuing education (CE) mandates increase participation in ethics programs and enhance their perceived outcomes? In a study of 5,198 North American psychologists, significant differences were found between mandated and nonmandated psychologists in relation to their participation in ethics programs but not in the perceived outcomes associated with those trainings. Although 64.3% of those psychologists operating under ethics mandates reported completing at least one ethics training within the previous year, only 40.7% of those without such mandates reported doing likewise. Overall, (...) both groups tended to view their ethics training quite favorably in relation to its perceived outcomes, though they differed in relation to their endorsement of CE mandates. Results are discussed in relation to the ongoing development of evidence-based CE and its role in developing critical professional competencies. (shrink)

This paper concerns itself with the concept of diminished competence with particular regard to the problems and options that mentally compromised patients raise for medical management. It proceeds through three general stages: (1) a restatement of the sense and grounds of the new patients' rights ethos which the existence of such patients calls into question; (2) a consideration of what expanded responsibilities and tactics physicians should embrace to protect and enhance such patients' autonomy; and (3) the standards, criteria, and mechanisms (...) by which paternalistic interventions might be justified in cases when the diminishment remains too substantial to merit acceptance of the patients' directives. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Cultural State of the Coffeehouse A Personal Encounter A Few Steps Back Aesthetics and Liberalism The Power of the Consumer Three Capitalisms Complex and Lasting Beauty.

Although long touted as an ethical and legal requirement, some clinicians still seem to offer less than fully adequate informed consent processes; similarly the counseling of patients and families, particularly about post-intervention scenarios, is often perfunctory at best. Keyed to a narrative of a patient's experience with surgery for a deviated septum, this article reflects on why such less than adequate clinician behaviors tend to occur and what might be done about them. Certain legal misconceptions about informed consent are highlighted (...) in this reflection, as well as why certain clinicians seem to take such a narrow view of their responsibilities to patients. Further reference in this regard is also made to a recently constructed module on informed consent for medical residents. In it, though legal requirements for informed consent are reviewed, the basic perspective taken regards informed consent as a clinical intervention that pursues certain basic goods and values, only one of which lies in determining when legal closure for such processes has occurred. (shrink)

Imaginative and creative capacities seem to be at the heart of both games of make-believe and figurative uses of language. But how exactly might cases of metaphor or idiom involve make-believe? In this paper, I argue against the pretense-based accounts of Walton (1990, 1993), Hills (1997), and Egan (this journal, 2008) that pretense plays no role in the interpretation of metaphor or idiom; instead, more general capacities for manipulating concepts (which are also called on within the use of pretense) do (...) the real explanatory work. This result has consequences for both our understanding of metaphor and idiom as well as for the use of figurative language by fictionalists in ontology. (shrink)

Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice. In _Health Humanities Reader_, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians (...) to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field—and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection’s contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences. With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, _Health Humanities Reader_ truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness. (shrink)

The pattern of impairments exhibited by some individuals on the autism spectrum appears to challenge the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor ( Carston, 1996, 2002 ; Sperber and Wilson, 2002 ; Sperber and Wilson, 2008 ). A subset of people on the autism spectrum have near-normal syntactic, phonological, and semantic abilities while having severe difficulties with the interpretation of metaphor, irony, conversational implicature, and other pragmatic phenomena. However, Relevance Theory treats metaphor as importantly unlike phenomena such as conversational implicature or irony (...) and like instances of ordinary literal speech. In this paper, I show how Relevance Theory can account for the prima facie incongruity between its treatment of metaphor and the case of individuals with autism. (shrink)

This paper examines instructional issues such as how, when, and where the medical humanities are taught in medical school settings. The author interviewed seven humanities scholars teaching in medical schools using openended questions which elicited data illustrating 1) informants' teaching styles; 2) where/how their teaching currently fits in the medical curriculum; 3) their suggestions on ideal curricular integration of the medical humanities; and 4) informants' teaching successes.