Rahner presents an example of an ambivalent stance towards human materiality. the essay provides a discussion of rahner's use of the concept of materiality in his metaphysics of human knowledge and shows that rahner's anthropology contains two arguments which define the limitations of human materiality in different ways. one of these arguments affirms that human materiality is essential and good, whereas the other stand seems to deny the goodness and the permanence of human materiality.

Reframing Authority provides new perspectives by focusing on the role of materiality and media for questions of authority, as well as on the changing roles of authority historically and cross-culturally.

This paper argues that Aquinas's conception of the human soul and intellect offers a consistent alternative to the dilemma of materialism and post-Cartesian dualism. It also argues that in their own theoretical context, Aquinas' arguments for the materiality of the human soul and immateriality of the intellect provide a strong justification of his position. However, that theoretical context is rather "alien" to ours in contemporary philosophy. The conclusion of the paper will point in the direction of what can be (...) done to render Aquinas's position more palatable to contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

This article analyses the discussion about the ‘new materialism’ or ‘material feminisms’ as an interplay between transdisciplinarity – moving beyond canons and disciplines – and affective interdisciplinary encounters. The previous discussion is taken in a slightly different direction, by arguing that a politics of materiality is at work in the debate, which is implied in affective interdisciplinary encounters. It is argued that despite the transdisciplinarity, the relations of natural science engagements to both social science and humanities feminisms are pivotal. (...) Two specific cases are analysed: the politics of definition, where ‘materiality’ tends to be equated with ‘natural science matters’, and the matter and politics of race. In the latter, race ‘sticks’ to the materiality of materialist feminism, which tends to be left out of the sphere of the presumably new and exciting material feminisms. (shrink)

The popular iconography of insight casts a thinker as he or she uncoils from a Rodin pose and a bulb that lights a world hitherto hidden. By and large, these features of folk mythology capture and guide how psychologists conduct research on insight: Mental processes — some of which may be unconscious — transform an inceptive abstract representation of the world until it prescribes a fruitful solution to a problem. Yet thinking and problem solving outside the laboratory involve interacting with (...) external resources, and through this interactivity with a material world, solutions are distilled. Still, laboratory work on problem solving pays scant and largely indifferent attention to interactivity: Sometimes problems are presented as riddles or static graphical or diagrammatic images, or sometimes they are accompanied by artefacts that can be manipulated. The research methodology — and indifference to the central role of interactivity in thinking — follows from a deep-seated commitment to mentalism and methodological individualism. However, a thinker is an embodied creature embedded in a physical world: The materiality of external resources and artefacts through which problems manifest themselves inevitably determines a set of action affordances. From a systemic perspective, thinking is traceable along a contingent spatio-temporal itinerary wrought by interactivity and evidenced by changes in the world. (shrink)

The notion of natural kinds has been widely criticized in philosophy of science but also appears indispensable for philosophical engagement with classificatory practices. Rather than addressing this tension through a new definition of “natural kind”, this article suggests materiality as a substitute for naturalness in philosophical debates about scientific classification. It is argued that a theory of material kinds provides an alternative and more inclusive entry point for analyzing classificatory practices, which is specified through an account of “restricted malleability” (...) of materiality and further analyzed as (1) gradual, (2) multi-dimensional, (3) scalable, (4) interactive, and (5) purpose sensitive. (shrink)

The notion of natural kinds has been widely criticized in philosophy of science but also appears indispensable for philosophical engagement with classificatory practices. Rather than addressing this tension through a new definition of “natural kind”, this article suggests materiality as a substitute for naturalness in philosophical debates about scientific classification. It is argued that a theory of material kinds provides an alternative and more inclusive entry point for analyzing classificatory practices, which is specified through an account of “restricted malleability” (...) of materiality and further analyzed as (1) gradual, (2)multi-dimensional, (3) scalable, (4) interactive, and (5) purpose sensitive. Such 1. (shrink)

This paper examines fraudulent financial reporting within the context of Jones' (1991) ethical decision making model. It was hypothesized that quantitative materiality would influence judgments of the ethical acceptability of fraud, and that both materiality and financial risk would affect the likelihood of committing fraud. The results, based on a study of CPAs employed as senior executives, provide partial support for the hypotheses. Contrary to expectations, quantitative materiality did not influence ethical judgments. ANCOVA results based on participants' (...) estimates of the likelihood that a "typical CPA" would manipulate reported results indicated that both materiality and risk significantly influenced the likelihood of fraud, but that the perceived morality of the action did not. In contrast, results based on participants' self-reported behavior indicated that materiality and the perceived morality of the action would influence the likelihood of fraud, but that financial risk would not. Regardless of the measure used for the likelihood of fraud, the results indicate that financial executives continue to be influenced by quantitative materiality when misstatements are clearly material on qualitative grounds. (shrink)

A new road map for design is emerging out of interdisciplinary research across biology and design. Whilst in the second part of the twentieth century, the emergence of the digital realm altered and radically challenged conventional design and manufacturing processes, the beginning of the twenty-first century marks a strong shift towards the amalgamation of the binary code with biological systems. With advances in synthetic biology, we can now ‘biofabricate’ like Nature does. By tinkering and altering the DNA code or the (...) environment of growth of living organisms, we can effectively ‘design’ and grow new biomaterials. The role of design is shifting from working with inanimate matter such as plastic and metals to making with animate living entities such as mycelium, yeast and bacteria. This paradigm shift promises to open up new possibilities for biofabricating future intelligent materials as well as for engaging with new sustainable processes. This paper examines strategies and tools for designing with living systems and proposes a framework for design to engage with our future bio-materiality. From biofabrication experiments to synthetic biology propositions, the paper will investigate a series of design artifacts that explores strategies such as co-designing with natural organisms or actuating a new synthetic nature and develop a critique of how biodesign can help shifting towards the crafting of a future sustainable intelligent bio-materiality. (shrink)

The nature of farming is – still – an essentially biological, and thus volatile, system, which poses substantial challenges to its integration into financialized capitalism. Financial investors often seek stability and predictability of returns that are hardly compatible with agriculture – but which are increasingly seen as achievable through data and digital farming technologies. This paper investigates how farmland investment brokers engage with, perceive, and produce farming data for their investors within a co-constructive process. Tackling land’s ‘stubborn materiality’ for (...) investment, I argue, has material and immaterial components: it includes the re-imagination of farming as a financial asset that delivers reliable income streams for investors; and the re-engineering of farmland’s concrete materialities with digital farming technologies. Farmland investment brokers develop investor-suitable farmland imaginaries, underpinned by storytelling as well as the calculative ‘evidence’ of (digital) data. At the same time, digital technologies have become a key tool for transforming farms into ‘investment grade assets’ endowed with the rich data on farm performance and financial returns requested by investors. I conclude that the assetization and digitization of farmland need to be seen as closely intertwined and mutually reinforcing processes and identify key areas for future research on this intersection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward the Materiality of Aesthetic ExperiencePeter de Bolla (bio)Over the last twenty years or so it has become a commonplace in discussions of "aesthetics" or of "art" in the most general sense to note that the term "aesthetics" was only very recently invented by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, where it appears in his Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus [see Menke 40; Dickie; Eagleton]. But the force (...) of this observation in regard to the relative youth of the concept is rarely, if ever, commented upon. As many philosophers and critics have pointed out, Baumgarten's use of the term was not primarily angled at what today might be unproblematically called "artworks"—say, paintings in the European grand master tradition—since his new kind of investigation was to be a "science of sensual recognition," that is, a general inquiry into how we come to know the world from the evidence of our senses. But, as is also frequently remarked, early on in the tradition of speculation now associated with "aesthetics as the study of art" the mutual attraction (to put it in the most anodyne terms) of "art" and "aesthetics" seems to have been extremely strong. As Jonathan Ree remarks, "the real begetter of the philosophical doctrine connecting the arts with the empirical senses—what we might call the aesthetic theory of the arts—was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing" [58]. From this point on (for heuristic purposes it may be identified with the date of publication of Lessing's Laokoon in 1766), artworks, which heretofore had not required a specific branch of inquiry in order for them to make sense or be conceptually grounded as art, are almost universally assumed to require "aesthetic" contemplation or appreciation.1 It is curious, then, that before 1766 such a mode of experiencing artworks had not been felt to be lacking.One might understand this observation both historically and philosophically, and both approaches, it seems to me, are needed. In the case of the first, a number of material effects conspired across mid-eighteenth-century Europe to produce what was in essence the modern art market. These include the legal establishment of copyright, first in England in 1709 but only by the end of the century in France and Germany; the foundation of various institutions whose primary purpose was the promotion and establishment of the fine arts: academies of painting, sculpture, or letters either with or without royal patronage; the public exhibition of paintings (from 1737 in France and 1761 in England); the opening of royal collections to public view (during the second half of the century in London, Paris, Munich, Vienna and Rome); the development of public concerts of secular music (in small scale from the 1670s in England but only becoming fully integrated in fashionable social life by mid-century); the construction of purpose-built concert venues (the Gewandthaus in Leipzig, a former cloth merchant's hall, was remodeled in 1781 in order to accommodate a resident orchestra, in effect becoming the first dedicated concert hall in Europe); the foundation of literary periodicals and review media; the emergence of social spaces and rituals encompassing polite discussion of [End Page 19] literature (coffeehouses, the construction of dedicated library rooms in domestic settings); and the promotion of architecture to a fine art through various societies, competitions, and the public display of architectural drawings in exhibition contexts (the Royal Academy yearly show included both drawings and models). These and other material conditions helped define the fine arts and construct a market in and for them.2 By the 1770s the category of the "fine arts" was well established in Britain, Germany, and France: Charles Batteux's Les beaux arts reduit a un meme principe, first published in France in 1746, was quickly translated into English as The Polite Arts; or, a Dissertation on Poetry,Painting, Musick, Architecture, and Eloquence in 1749 and into German in 1751. By 1771 a four-volume General Theory of the Fine Arts had been published for the German public by J. G. Sulzer.All of this points to the fact that the concept of the "artwork" is subject to both historical and material pressures. Prior to the mid-eighteenth... (shrink)

What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, (...) examining how they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture. (shrink)

This paper examines the topic of Yogācāra idealism through a little studied Buddhist meditation manual, the so-called ‘Yogalehrbuch’ or ‘Qizil Yoga Manual’, a primarily Buddhist Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma text with Mahāyāna Yogācāra strands. What does this unique Central Asian text say about Buddhist meditation practices called yogācāra or yoga? It centres on methods of vivid visualization that are somewhat specific to the Central Asian region of Kucha on the Silk Road. To understand the Manual’s practice and definition of yogic meditation, this (...) paper considers how some of the hyper-real visualizations in the dhātuprayoga section relate the mind to reality and whether Yogācāra meditation can be said to propose idealism as a metaphysical theory about the nature of reality. The paper also asks whether neurocognitive research insights can be useful in understanding what some regard as a ‘hallucination-like’ quality of some visualizations, which destabilise distinctions between appearances and reality. Furthermore, it argues that analyzing the materiality of meditation, particularly the environment of the cave, helps us to better understand the text’s techniques of yogic visualization. The paper concludes that the ‘Qizil Yoga Manual’ facilitates soteriological idealism and suggests that factoring in the material contexts of meditation is useful, both in deciphering the text’s meditation methods and in discussing the metaphysical theory of idealism. (shrink)

A number of recent discussions comparing computer simulation and traditional experimentation have focused on the significance of “materiality.” I challenge several claims emerging from this work and suggest that computer simulation studies are material experiments in a straightforward sense. After discussing some of the implications of this material status for the epistemology of computer simulation, I consider the extent to which materiality (in a particular sense) is important when it comes to making justified inferences about target systems on (...) the basis of experimental results. (shrink)

The issue of how the studio arts can contribute to a liberal arts education is not something that John Dewey addressed in his long career. This is surprising since he had an enormous impact on educational theory in his early and middle years and an equal influence on aesthetics, particularly with respect to the visual arts, in his later years. Moreover, on a practical level, Dewey and his writings had a notable impact on the role of the studio arts in (...) liberal arts education through his effect on various colleges and universities with which he was associated. Notable in this regard was his impact on those at Black Mountain College who were reshaping our notion of the liberal arts as something that would strongly... (shrink)

Online creative idea generation is often considered an extension of traditional creative idea activities on the Internet platform, in which digital technology plays an important role. Consistent with the studies on traditional creative idea activities, the studies on online creative idea generation take the creativity of mass psychology as the core, and believe that digital technology can stimulate people’s creative output. This study challenges the past research paradigm from the perspective of media materiality, redefines the processes and activities of (...) online creative idea generation, and further suggests that it may affect people’s psychology by reducing their creativity without real awareness. The study is innovative in both theory and practice. We also discuss the limitations and future directions of the study. (shrink)

Cicero’s treatise On Divination is among the most intense ancient discussions of divinatory practices, arguing as much against the background of a long and rich tradition in Greek philosophy as contemporary and recent Roman practices. Focusing on book 2, my contribution will reconstruct Cicero’s “ludic view” of divinatory ritual and extispicy in particular (2.26–41). I will argue that the reference to playing is an important part of Cicero’s argument. I will then use this ancient observation as a hermeneutic lens onto (...) divinatory practices and the materiality involved here. I will conclude on an enquiry into the question of how central this very materiality is for the construction of the divine and the establishment of a bidirectional relationship with it. (shrink)

In the contemporary world, voices are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. In The Voice as Something More, Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin tackle these paradoxes with a bold and rigorous collection of essays that look at voice as both object of desire and material object. Using Mladen Dolar’s influential A Voice and Nothing More as a reference point, The Voice as Something More reorients (...) Dolar’s psychoanalytic analysis around the material dimensions of voices—their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that offers reflections on these vocal aesthetics and paradoxes, this authoritative, multidisciplinary collection, ranging from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from classics and music to film and literature, will serve as an essential entry point for scholars and students who are thinking toward materiality. (shrink)

While the presence of monsters in popular culture is ever-increasing, their use as an explicit or implicit category to frame, stigmatise, and demonise the other is seemingly on the rise. At the same time, academic interest for monsters is ever-growing. Usually, monstrosity is understood as a category that emerges to signal a transgression to a given order; this approach has led to the demystification of the insidious characterisations of the (racial, sexual, physical) other as monstrous. While this effort has been (...) necessary, its collateral effects have reduced the monstrous to a mere (socio-cultural) construction of the other: a dialectical framing that de facto deprives monstrosity from any reality. 'Monstrous Ontologies: Politics, Ethics, Materiality' proffers the necessity of challenging these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, whilst also asserting that the monstrous is not simply an epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality. There is a profound difference between monsters and monstrosity. While the former is an often sterile political and social simplification, the end-product of rhetorical and biopolitical apparatuses; the latter may be understood as a dimension that nurtures the un-definable, that is, that shows the limits of these apparatuses by embodying their material excess: not a 'cultural frame', but the limit to the very mechanism of 'framing'. The monstrous expresses the combining, hybridising, becoming, and creative potential of socio-natural life, albeit colouring this powerful vitalism with the dark hue of a fearful, disgusting, and ultimately indigestible reality that cannot simply be embraced with multicultural naivety. As such, it forces us towards radically changing not the categories, but the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge; here lies its profoundly political potential, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and rather requires to engage with its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, PostDocs, and academics alike in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, humanities, sociology and social theory, criminology, human geography, and critical legal theory. (shrink)

While there are numerous differences between the approaches taken by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James J. Gibson, the basic motivation of the two thinkers, as well as the internal logic of their respective views, is extraordinarily close. Both were guided throughout their lives by an attempt to overcome the dualism of subject and object, and both devoted considerable attention to their "Gestaltist" predecessors. There can be no doubt but that it is largely because of this common cause that the subsequent development (...) of their ideas is so similar. It is not my objective in what follows merely to demonstrate a similarity between two lines of thought. Instead, I will try to show that each approach gains considerably from attention to the other. There are numerous ways to begin such a project, each about as arbitrary as the next. For present purposes, I shall take as of central importance the question of the character of the perceived world, both in relation to the traditionally opposed mental and material "substances", and in relation to its identification and individuation of things vis a vis one another and vis a vis ourselves. This will implicate especially Gibson's "affordances" and Merleau-Ponty's thesis concerning the "materiality of meaning.". (shrink)

Appealing to theorists such as Judith Butler, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, and Bibi Bakare-Yusef, the aim of the following is to show that, despite ongoing critique, Cartesian dualism continues to haunt our analyses of the relationship of the subject to embodiment, particularly with respect to the experience of pain. Taking Bakare-Yusef's critique of Elaine Scarry's account of institutionalized violence (slavery) as an example, I will argue, first, that the dualistic impulse which Bakare-Yusef identifies in Scarry's view has deep (...) historical roots in, for instance, Aristotle's hylomorphic concept of the subject. Second, I will consider the specific relevance of poststructuralist analyses of subjectification to our conceptions of violence. Lastly, I will explore some contemporary examples of pain in light of the question: can violence 'deconstruct the body' without desubjectifying the subject? I think that the answer is a qualified 'yes'. (shrink)

This book demonstrates the variety of ways in which the materiality of islands is intertwined in a symbiotic relationship with the capacity of the imagination to make islands the site and embodiment of a host of recurrent human desires, anxieties, and hopes.

Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres' work in the context of late 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres' philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres' unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he argues, organizes great parts of Serres' work into a promising philosophy (...) of science as well as a challenge to the narrower field of French epistemology, to which it has often been limited. Simons highlights how the concept encompasses Serres' commitment to positive relations between science and culture and his rejection of pleas to purify the scientific self from imaginative and cultural elements. It helps to situate Serres between the distinct traditions of Bachelard and Latour as well as progressing the innovative aspects of Serres' philosophy for current debates in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. Showing how Serres' philosophy can serve as a normative approach to science and technology, Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science takes in themes of materiality, religiosity, modernity and ecology to advance a timely alternative to philosophy of science for contemporary life. (shrink)

Documents, in particular identity cards, mediate relationships between individuals and institutions. Their materiality matters and actively impacts how states govern populations and their movements. In this paper, I examine one such object, the Romanian identity card. Focusing on its temporality and agency, I explore how objects and technological procedures enact race. In Romania, people without an address or proof of residence—many of them members of segregated Roma communities living in deep poverty—can only receive a temporary identity card, the Carte (...) de Idenititate Provizorie (CIP). CIP holders do not enjoy full citizenship and are deprived of various rights, such as the right to travel without a passport within the European Union. They are also exposed to heightened surveillance as they must apply annually for a new CIP. Starting from the material object of the CIP, I explore how race comes into being as a relation at the intersection of various temporalities that are folded into the rules and bureaucratic practice entailed in its issue. I offer the concept of “permanent temporality” to analyze how racialization occurs in practices of governing people and their movement in Europe. (shrink)

An increase in the number of older people with dementia is currently a trend around the world. In low and middle countries, effective public health services are not yet well‐developed, and family care‐givers may be overwhelmed by the requirements of care. This paper has two purposes: to share findings from an ethnographic study about family dementia care practices in Brazil and to draw attention to the significance of the materiality of care practices in the family context. The study was (...) conducted in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. We describe the care trajectory of one family and, analysing data using the insights of Actor Network Theory, show the significance of objects in a networked relation of care. In particular, we show how incontinence products such as adult diapers assume different positions in the network, acting as either mediator or intermediary of care in relation to other elements of the network composed of family members and their living situation, the person with dementia herself, the doctor, and Brazilian health policies. Although the diaper is often seen as an ordinary object for care providers, its participation in a care network shapes relations, activating conflict, financial constraint, and disciplining the body of the person with dementia. (shrink)

This article develops a framework for analysing how digital software and models become mediums for creative imagination in architectural design. To understand the hermeneutics of these relationships, we develop key concepts from Material Engagement Theory (MET) and Postphenomenology (PP). To push these frameworks into the realm of digital design, we develop the concept of Digital Materiality. Digital Materiality describes the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate enactive perception, and the possibilities of creative material (...) engagement actualised in work with software. Just as molecular materials come to transform action with material objects, so digital materiality comes to enable and transform creative practices with computers. Digital architectural design form a new space for ongoing enactive discovery and creativity through manipulation of digital models and their underlying software environments. By shifting relationships within their digital models, architects can direct their attention, intention, and imagination towards widely different aspects of the model. Here, creative imagination becomes a fundamentally situated activity where mind emerges through dynamic interaction between a variety of embodied, material, and cultural domains. (shrink)

The issue of political violence is mostly absent from current debates about power. Many conceptions of power treat violence as wholly distinct from or even antithetical to power, or see it as a mere instrument whose effects are obvious and not in need of political analysis. In this paper, I explore what kind of ontology of power is necessary to properly take account of the various roles that violence can play in creating and maintaining power structures. I pursue this question (...) by contrasting the views of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. For Arendt, power is generated and maintained by communicative practices. She argues that power and violence are ‘opposites’ because violence can only destroy but not create these practices. In contrast, Foucault’s conception explicitly allows violence to play a constitutive role in generating power. I argue that while Arendt is right to insist that power and violence are not identical, it does not follow that violence cannot play any role in constituting power. Guided by Foucault’s approach, I formulate a non-dualist account of the relationship between power and violence that takes seriously the role that bodies, material things, and built infrastructures play in making social relations ‘more durable’ and constituting power. (shrink)

This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of (...) children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge. (shrink)

We believe we know our bodies intimately—that their material reality is certain and that this certainty leads to an epistemological truth about sex, gender, and identity. By exploring and giving equal weight to transgendered subjectivities, however, Gayle Salamon upends these certainties. Considering questions of transgendered embodiment via phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud and Paul Ferdinand Schilder), and queer theory, Salamon advances an alternative theory of normative and non-normative gender, proving the value and vitality of trans experience for thinking about (...) embodiment. Salamon suggests that the difference between transgendered and normatively gendered bodies is not, in the end, material. Rather, she argues that the production of gender itself relies on a disjunction between the "felt sense" of the body and an understanding of the body's corporeal contours, and that this process need not be viewed as pathological in nature. Examining the relationship between material and phantasmatic accounts of bodily being, Salamon emphasizes the productive tensions that make the body both present and absent in our consciousness and work to confirm and unsettle gendered certainties. She questions traditional theories that explain how the body comes to be—and comes to be made one's own—and she offers a new framework for thinking about what "counts" as a body. The result is a groundbreaking investigation into the phenomenological life of gender. (shrink)

Material information is a core aspect of a firm's governance and reporting activities. If corporate information is material, then the firm has a responsibility to disclose it. Currently, firms must judge information as material largely based on a confusing set of standard setters’ definitions. I analyze the particular conditions laid out by each standard setter and explain the ethical implications that result from materiality judgments made by firms using these varied standards. Importantly, this analysis underscores that regulators, firms, and (...) researchers alike must consider the impact of these implications on the fiduciary duty and promise‐keeping that firms make as well as the potential for unfairness and financial harm to others’ welfare that could result. (shrink)