Cet article illustre les différences entre les processus d’expertise en France et aux États-Unis par une comparaison des procédés d’évaluation des risques du perchlorate, un contaminant environnemental détecté dans les eaux de consommation et dans l’alimentation. Ce cas atteste d’une opposition entre deux modèles, l’un fondé sur la confrontation et l’ouverture aux parties prenantes, l’autre fondé sur le consensus et la centralisation de l’expertise. Les différences principales concernent la formalisation de l’interaction entre différentes instances évaluatives et les autres parties prenantes, (...) les processus permettant des évaluations externes de la qualité des évaluations des risques et le rôle du chercheur dans leur élaboration. Après avoir décrit les différences, l’article développe les avantages et les désavantages des deux systèmes d’expertise, et conclut sur la possibilité de développement d’une voie intermédiaire pour l’expertise institutionnelle européenne, alliant centralisme, collégialité et pluralité.This article illustrates the differences between expert assessment procedures in France and the United States by comparing their respective procedures for the risks raised by perchlorate, an environmental contaminant detected in drinking water and food. This example highlights the contrast between the two models, one based on confrontation and stakeholder involvement, the other on consensus and the centralisation of experience. The main differences lie in the way interactions between the various bodies responsible for the assessments and the other stakeholders are formalised, in the procedures governing audits of the risk assessments, and in the role of researchers in the production of these assessments. After describing the differences, the article describes the advantages and drawbacks of the two systems and concludes with a proposal for the development of an intermediate method for EU institutional expert appraisals, combining a centralising approach with pluralist and collegial principles. (shrink)

This book offers a new approach to the analysis of the multiple meanings of English modals, conjunctions, conditionals, and perception verbs. Although such ambiguities cannot easily be accounted for by feature-analyses of word meaning, Eve Sweetser's argument shows that they can be analyzed both readily and systematically. Meaning relationships in general cannot be understood independently of human cognitive structure, including the metaphorical and cultural aspects of that structure. Sweetser shows that both lexical polysemy and pragmatic ambiguity are shaped by our (...) metaphorical folk understanding of epistemic processes and of speech interaction. Similar regularities can be shown to structure the contrast among root, epistemic and speech act uses of modal verbs, multiple uses of conjunctions and conditionals, and certain processes of historical change observed in Indo-European languages. Since polysemy is typically the intermediate step in semantic change, the same regularities observable in polysemy can be extended to an analysis of semantic change. (shrink)

This essay focuses on conceptual engineers who aim to improve other people's patterns of inference and attention by shaping their concepts. Such conceptual engineers sometimes engage in a form of epistemic paternalism that I call paternalistic cognitive engineering: instead of explicitly persuading, informing and educating others, the engineers non-consultatively rely on assumptions about the target agents’ cognitive systems to improve their belief forming. The target agents could reasonably regard such benevolent exercises of control as violating their sovereignty over their own (...) belief formation. This is a pro tanto reason against such engineering. In addition to the relevant projects of conceptual engineering, paternalistic cognitive engineering plausibly includes certain kinds of nudging and evidence suppression. I distinguish the sovereignty-based concern from other ethical worries about conceptual engineering and discuss how one might justify the relevant conceptual engineering projects despite the sovereignty-based reason against them. (shrink)

On the day on which Dr Harold Shipman, the Manchester serial killer, was convicted, there was wall-to-wall coverage of it in the media. During the course of one of the many reports, the daughter of one of his victims was interviewed, and asked for her views on why Shipman had acted as he did. What she said was this: she’d tried and tried to understand or explain his deeds, and she could only come to the conclusion that he was a (...) really evil man. In saying this, she clearly meant to convey more than the obvious truth that what Shipman did was very wrong and entirely to be condemned. It seems to me that a secular as well as a religious audience would find the daughter’s appeal to evil as an appropriate explanation perfectly comprehensible. But what exactly was it that was being attributed to Shipman, and how was it thought to explain his actions? (shrink)

"These essays advance a reinterpretation of pivotal categories such as self-knowing, moral agency, and altruism.

In this paper we defend a version of moral internalism and a cognitivist account of motivation against recent criticisms. The internalist thesis we espouse claims that, if an agent believes she has reason to A, then she is motivated to A. Discussion of counter-examples has been clouded by the absence of a clear account of the nature of motivation. While we can only begin to provide such an account in this paper, we do enough to show that our version of (...) internalism can be defended against putative counter-examples. All theories of motivation which take what motivates to be a psychological state run foul of the following plausible constraint: the reason why you ought to do an action and the reason why you do it can be the same. In our view, however, while what motivates is a reason (which is a fact) the state of being motivated is a cognitive stage, viz. the belief that one has reason to act. In cases where the agent's relevant beliefs are false, then she has no reason to act, but nontheless her action can be explained in other ways. (shrink)

Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, an extraordinarily moving and engaging look at loss and death. Eve Joseph is an award-winning poet who worked for twenty years as a palliative care counselor in a hospice. When she was a young girl, she lost a much older brother, and her experience as a grown woman helping others face death, dying, and grief opens the path for her to recollect and understand his loss in a way she could not as (...) a child. In the Slender Margin is an insider's look at an experience that awaits us all, and that is at once deeply fascinating, frightening, and in modern society shunned. The book is an intimate invitation to consider death and our response to it without fear or morbidity, but rather with wonder and a curious mind. Writing with a poet's precise language and in short meditative chapters leavened with insight, warmth, and occasional humor, Joseph cites her hospice experience as well as the writings of others across generations--from the realms of mythology, psychology, science, religion, history, and literature--to illuminate the many facets of dying and death. Offering examples from cultural traditions, practices, and beliefs from around the world, her book is at once an exploration of the unknowable and a very humane journey through the land of grief. (shrink)

In this paper, the principal objections to unconditional forgiveness are canvassed, primarily that it fails to take wrongdoing seriously enough, and that it displays a lack of self-respect. It is argued that these objections stem from a mistaken understanding of what forgiveness actually involves, including the erroneous view that forgiveness involves some degree of condoning of the offence, and is incompatible with blaming the offender or punishing him. Two positive reasons for endorsing unconditional forgiveness are considered: respect for persons and (...) human solidarity; and it is argued that the latter provides more plausible grounds for it than the former. (shrink)

I will clarify when and how a tension arises between epistemic environmentalism (a new focus on assessing and improving the epistemic environment) and respect for epistemic autonomy (allowing, empowering, and requiring people to each govern their own beliefs). Using the example of participatory conceptual engineering (improving the linguistic environment through rational discussion with broad participation), I will also identify an option for avoiding the tension—namely, participatory environmentalism. This means a new focus on how people can each contribute to improving the (...) shared epistemic environment through rational deliberation and thereby govern their own beliefs that are shaped by that environment. (shrink)

I will argue that those thinking about conceptual engineering should think more about ways of believing. When we talk about what someone “believes”, we could be talking about how they are inclined to act, or what they have put forth as their position on a matter, or what gives rise to a feeling of endorsement when they reflect on the matter. If we further recognize that the contents of our beliefs are at least sometimes framed in certain concepts and that (...) projects of conceptual engineering at least sometimes aim to change our beliefs by changing the concepts they are framed in, the question arises: which beliefs does conceptual engineering target? Is it always “belief” in the same sense? I will argue that it is not, using examples from feminist and mainstream metaphysics. Suppose that revisionary ontologists call on us to eliminate the non-joint-carving concept TABLE from our beliefs about the world. They then plausibly have in mind only “belief” in the sense of practically detached reflective assent: they want the concept eliminated from the content of such assent. On the other hand, when feminist metaphysicians of gender call on us to ameliorate the ethically problematic concept WOMAN, they target our “beliefs” in a sense that encompasses both the content of our everyday observations and experiences and what might be called practically engaged reflective assent; but they do not target the practically detached assent. (shrink)

We readily claim that great moral catastrophes such as the Holocaust involve evil in some way, although it' not clear what this amounts to in a secular context. This paper seeks to provide a secular account of what evil is. It examines what is intuitively the most plausible account, namely that the evil act involves the production of great suffering (or other disvalue), and argues that such outcomes are neither necessary nor sufficient for an act to be evil. Only an (...) appeal to distinctive patterns of motivation, so it is argued, will allow us to accommodate our intuitionsabout which acts are evil, and hence will provide an adequate account of the nature of evil. (shrink)

Sustaining hope in patients is an important element of health care, allowing improvement in patient welfare and quality of life. However in the palliative care context, with patients who are terminally ill, it might seem that in order to maintain hope the palliative care practitioner would sometimes have to deceive the patient about the full nature or prospects of their condition by providing a ‘false hope’. This possibility creates an ethical tension in palliative practice, where the beneficent desire to improve (...) patient welfare through sustaining hope appears to be in conflict with an autonomy-based requirement not to deceive patients about their condition. In order to resolve this ethical tension, we provide an analysis of the concept of hope and argue that there is at least one conception – the ‘absolute’ conception of hope – which when properly understood allows practitioners to foster hope in terminally-ill patients while avoiding any need to deceive them about their condition. Practitioners therefore do not need to shy away from using the language of hope in the palliative setting, as on this understanding of hope it can be used in a way that both promotes patient welfare and respects patient autonomy. (shrink)

In "The Nature of Evil"2 I offer an analysis of evil action, in a sense distinct from merely very wrong action, in which I claim that the evil act is one in which the agent silences overwhelming considerations against performing the act. Christopher Hamilton 's interesting commentary raises five objections against my account of evil in terms of silenced reasons I shall argue that all five objections can be met.

Forgiveness usually gets a very good press in our culture: we are deluged with self-help books and television shows all delivering the same message, that forgiveness is good for everyone, and is always the right thing to do. But those who have suffered seriously at the hands of others often and rightly feel that this boosterism about forgiveness is glib and facile. Perhaps forgiveness is not always desirable, especially where the wrongdoing is terrible or the wrongdoer unrepentant. In this book, (...) Garrard and McNaughton suggest that the whole debate suffers from a crippling lack of clarity about what forgiveness really amounts to. They argue that it is more difficult, complex and troubling than many of its advocates suppose. Nevertheless, they conclude, a proper understanding of forgiveness allows us to avoid cheap and shallow forms of it, and enables us to see why it is right and admirable to forgive even unrepentant wrongdoers. (shrink)

This article analyzes the institutionalization of the global organic agriculture field and sheds new light on the conventionalization debate. The institutions that shape the field form a tripartite standards regime of governance that links standard-setting, certification, and accreditation activities, in a layering of markets for services that are additional to the market for certified organic products. At each of the three poles of the TSR, i.e., for standard-setting, certification, and accreditation, we describe how the corresponding markets were constructed over time (...) and the role of the different actors in their evolution. We analyze the politics at stake among the actors at each pole, their competing or cooperative interests and visions, and the tensions between them in the promotion of markets. Through the lens of the TSR heuristic, we show that the institutionalization of the organic field beginning in the 1990s and its de facto inclusion in the broader sustainability field beginning in the 2000s contribute to a progressive distancing between the organic movement and its initial political project of alterity, to which public and private actors both contribute actively. As a set of interlinked market institutions, the TSR orients and narrows the scope of debate, which becomes restricted to “market-compatible” dimensions and objects. We conclude that the TSR is a promising heuristic for analyzing contemporary global regulation. (shrink)

Many things are frightening in the process by which people identify against and resist oppressions. One of the worst is how easy it is for people to be made to feel, by some intervention from another, that their own identity and their standing from which to resist that oppression have been foreclosed or annihilated: their voices delegitimated, the authority of their grounding in an indispensable identity threatened with erasure. Anyone who has worked in feminist groups, for instance, knows the moment (...) when a woman or group of women announce that they have sat silent through a discussion, not because they had nothing to say, but because they felt silenced, felt radically denegated by some act or speech or some perceived dynamic of the group. These announcements make shifty moments in the power relations of a group. They bring to the surface, by rupturing it, how far from impartial or inclusive is the normal, “neutral” decorum of conversational exchange, and how far from detached are the needs and dreads that people have invested in it. The fabric of trust that gives a nominally egalitarian texture to activist interactions is—it is always shocking to have once more to learn—a fragile one that a multitude of unacknowledged presumptions can suddenly leave gaping. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and the forthcoming Epistemology of the Closet. Her most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley, Sterne, and Male Homosocial Desire”. (shrink)

Abstract“Science Is Politics By Other Means” (SIPBOM) was coined in The Pasteurization of France, Latour’s 1984 empirical study of the birth of microbiology. Yet, it encapsulates an outstanding political theory of science that Latour has never formalized and that has remained unnoticed to this day. The theory is comprised of two dimensions. The first one is the ontological labor performed by science, that is, the laboratory production of new nonhumans. The second one is the ability of science to devise and (...) implement novel policies targeted at the new beings it produces. These “other means” are incorporated in political projects and contribute to the shaping of society. Fifteen years later, Latour published Politics of Nature ([1999] 2004), a full-blown political treatise equally devoted to the political character of science. It would be mistaken, however, to assume that it falls in the same SIPBOM paradigm as the Pasteur study. The compositionist theory it offers redefines politics as the institution of the nonhumans that make up external reality, a task that has traditionally been monopolized by Science. In this sense, “science is politics by other means” has become “politics is science by other means,” these “other means” now referring to “cosmopolitics,” that is, the due process advocated by compositionism. The first claim of the present paper is that the respective weight ascribed to politics and ontology is different in The Pasteurization of France and in Politics of Nature. The second claim is that compositionism is not as successful as Latour’s early theory to account for the politicity of science. (shrink)

Does conceptual engineering as a philosophical method deserve all the attention that it has been getting recently? The important philosophical questions, one might say, are about the world, not about what our concepts are or should be like. This paper fleshes out one way in which conceptual engineering can contribute to philosophical progress. The suspicion that conceptual engineering is getting too much attention presupposes that it is important to distribute our philosophical attention well (for example, conceptual engineering should not get (...) more than its fair share). The paper’s defense of conceptual engineering builds on that assumption. Conceptual engineering, it argues, is a way of configuring philosophers’ patterns of attention for the better: it serves attentional progress in philosophy. (shrink)

This paper considers whether we have any reason to forgive the perpetrators of the most terrible atrocities, such as the Holocaust. On the face of it, we do not have reason to forgive in such cases. But on examination, the principal arguments against forgiveness do not turn out to be persuasive. Two considerations in favour of forgiveness are canvassed: the presence of rational agency in the perpetrators, and the common human nature which they share with us. It is argued that (...) the presence of rational agency does not generate a reason to forgive. However, our common human nature may be sufficient to provide such a reason, and evidence for its general reason-giving power can be seen in phenomena such as vicarious shame, and the moral significance which we attach to the notion of crimes against humanity. A reason for forgiveness based on common human nature will not be a strong one, but a weak reason still has some force. (shrink)

Prisoners are legally categorized as a vulnerable group for the purposes of medical research, but their vulnerability is not limited to the research context. Prisoner-patients may experience lower standards of care, fewer options for treatment, violations of privacy, and the use of inappropriate surrogates as a result of their status. This case study highlights some of the ways in which a prisoner-patient’s vulnerable status impacted the care he received. The article argues the following: (1) Prisoner-patients are entitled to the same (...) quality of care as all other patients, and healthcare providers should be vigilant to ensure that the stigma of incarceration does not influence care decisions. (2) Options for treatment should reflect what is most medically appropriate in the hospital or other healthcare setting, even when not all treatments would be available in the correctional setting. (3) The presence of guards at the bedside requires that additional measures be taken to protect the privacy and confidentiality of prisoner-patients. (4) When endof-life decisions must be made for an incapacitated patient, prison physicians are not well placed to act as surrogate decision makers, which heightens the obligations of the healthcare professionals in the hospital to ensure an ethically supportable process and outcome. Therefore, healthcare professionals should provide extra protection for those prisoner-patients who do not have decision-making capacity, by utilizing a robust process for decision making such as those used for incapacitated patients without surrogates, rather than relying solely on prison physicians as surrogates. (shrink)

The author takes a collection of essays on concepts and approaches in evolutionary epistemology as the occasion for a critical discussion of the limits and achievements of evolutionary epistemology as well as of certain philosophical objections to the very project itself. She comes to the conclusion that evolutionary epistemology, even if it cannot explain cognition itself, can nevertheless shed light on the complex phenomenon of cognition by demonstrating the presence of traces of our evolutionary past in cognition. Modern research into (...) the structure and functioning of the brain supports this conclusion. The author argues that the questions which evolutionary epistemology can legitimately pose and answer are such that it is not in competition with traditional epistemology. For this reason she suggests that this research program be renamed "evolutionäre Informationstheorie", in the hope that its aims will become clearer to proponents as well as opponents. In the final section the author discusses the possibility that an evolutionary approach might explain the fact that human beings are less and less capable of dealing with the complexity of the world they have created. (shrink)

Some of the virtues have a very stable place in our understanding of goodness – beneficence and courage are unlikely ever to lose their high standing. But other virtues have something like a life cycle: they move from a marginal status to to a central one, and sometimes they move back again to the margins, or even beyond the domain of virtue altogether. Chastity is one example of this; humility is another. There was a period in which humility wasn’t a (...) virtue at all (see Aristotle on the great-souled man); with the rise of Christianity (blessed are the meek) it became, not a cardinal, but still a central, virtue, though possibly more honoured in the breach than in the observance; now in the post-Christian world it seems, if a virtue at all, a somewhat creepy one. Why is this – what is it about humility that made it so important during the Christian period, and now makes us so ambivalent about it? And is there any way of rescuing it for a secular context, so that we can once again wholeheartedly endorse and admire it as one of the virtues? (shrink)

Aristotle’s writings contain more direct statements about priorities and rankings among the various sciences, degrees of accuracy within them, routes to knowledge from first principles, “first philosophy” and its characteristics, and the relation between sciences and practical concerns than almost any other philosopher we know.Yet taken together, Aristotle’s statements on these matters belie the apparent systematicity of his philosophical temperament. Almost every devotee of Aristotle is compelled to choose certain texts as authoritative and relegate others to some specific topic-context in (...) which they have limited validity. An only slightly shaky consensus among Aristotle’s readers has emerged through this process over time: on that consensus, Aristotelian first philosophy equals what later came to be called metaphysics, and is characterized by its remoteness from particular human discourses and desires, and from the types of knowledge we connect most directly with perception. First principles are also divorced from perception and are known through an incompletely explained intuitive process, but remain indemonstrable. Theoretical wisdom or contemplation soars above the domain of the human struggle, providing a stabilizing but distanced and abstract mode of considering the highest and most divine matters of which we are capable of thinking. (shrink)

The author discusses the question, if sociobiology can be relevant for the conceptual foundations of ethics. She comes to the conclusion that sociobiology cannot reduce the meaning of moral terms to that of sociobiological discourse, but that sociobiology might nevertheless be able to shed light on the complex phenomenon of morality by demonstrating the presence of traces of our evolutionary past in our behavior. Thereby sociobiology might be relevant for elucidating the relation between »can« and »ought«, that is, for the (...) question of practicability of moral norms. (shrink)

Nagel ist es nicht geglückt, die Möglichkeit des Verzichts auf teleologische Formulierungen und Erklärungen plausibel zu begründen. Bei seinem Versuch, die Äquivalenz teleologischer und nichtteleologischer Erklärungen nachzuweisen und den Bedeutungsüberschuß teleologischer Sprache hinwegzuformulieren, ist er immer schon an die Voraussetzung dieses Bedeutungsüberschusses gebunden, dessen er sich nicht, wie seine Beschreibung zielgerichteter Systeme beweist, entledigen kann. Unser Ergebnis dispensiert jedoch nicht von der Frage, ob der Anspruch 'der in teleologischen Wendungen geltend gemacht wird, auch zu Recht besteht. Denn die semantische Unmöglichkeit (...) der Reduktion von Relevanzrelationen auf Bedingungsrelationen verbürgt ja noch nicht, daß die teleologische Sprache den Gegenstandsbereich der Biologie auch adäquat trifft. Eine über unsere Studie hinausgehende Untersuchung müßte daher die hier aufgeworfene Frage in den größeren Zusammenhang der als klassisch geltenden Stellungnahmen einbetten und unter Einbeziehung der Resultate der kybernetischen Wissenschaften dem Problem nachgehen, ob Teleologie nur heuristischer Leitfaden der Reflexion ist, der aus forschungsstrategischen Gründen der Organisation des Gegenstandes an diesen von außen herangetragen wird, oder darüberhinaus eine Struktureigenschaft von Objekten selbst bezeichnet. Ist Teleologie also nur eine "Sache der Formulierung" oder eine "Formulierung der Sache"? (shrink)

The article takes up and challenges the Lockean conception of common sense and common right to property in two ways: first, through a critical investigation of Locke's historical connection to colonialism, and second, by turning to contemporary indigenous conceptions of common sense. Locke's practical experiences in the founding of Carolina, I argue, serve not simply to explain the problematical colonial impulses of the Second Treatise, but indeed to help undo the credibility of that text's ideological claim to acquire and assimilate. (...) Next, I turn from an internal historicized critique of the Second Treatise to a contemporary external challenge, examining current indigenous perspectives de-legitimized by the Second Treatise. I contend that traditionalized conceptions of indigenous knowledge and understanding provide a strategic revitalization of common sense in ways that re-define and re-characterize the word's roots not only in the common but also in the senses themselves. The article concludes by questioning whether these revitalized ‘traditionalisms’ — as much as they challenge exclusionary Lockean conceptions of the ‘common’ and common sense — also carry the risk of denying aspects of indigenous modernity and excluding alternative indigenous conceptions of land and resource use. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Platonic Ethics: Old and NewEve Browning ColeJulia Annas. Platonic Ethics: Old and New. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 196. Cloth, $35.00Readers of Plato's dialogues in our time are almost unanimously affected by what Annas here calls "the developmental thesis." We bring to Plato's texts as a dogma the [End Page 114] view that his doctrines evolved over time, that later dialogues return to problems (...) unsuccessfully addressed in earlier dialogues, and in short that the Platonic corpus as a whole should be arranged as a kind of intellectual "Bildungsroman." The early and inconclusive explorations of Socrates give way to mature and expansive metaphysical doctrines, which in turn are tested and revised in subsequent works.This developmentalist dogma has dominated interpretations of Plato, with few exceptions (notably Paul Shorey), for a century and more. Yet this makes it a rather young dogma after all. Annas argues that it is a product of Victorian scholars, and especially targets the highly influential work of Benjamin Jowett (95 n.56). Jowett placed the Republic at the center of Plato's works and interpreted others backward and forward from it. The influence of this developmental thesis has been sweeping and, Annas argues, unfortunate. Armed with it, we are reluctant to consider the doctrines of the dialogues on their own terms; we make problems for one dialogue with concerns expressed in quite another; we tend to force our readings to fit the progressive picture and distort the works in the process.To achieve some distance from developmentalism and other modern preconceptions and dogma, Annas proposes listening with an open mind to ancient readings of Plato, especially those of the so-called Middle Platonists. Most modern students of ancient philosophy have been accustomed to discount these ancients as either too marginal to deserve a hearing or too biased to be fair readers. (In addition, access to their works in reliable texts and translations has been impossible until quite recently.)But such ancient readers as Albinus, Alcinous, Arius Didymus, Philo, and Numenius have (Annas argues) much to offer.First, they are active participants in an ongoing intellectual conversation about "eudaimonism," or the sufficiency of virtue for happiness. They comfortably engage Plato in this conversation as a proponent of eudaimonism. This is as true for the Plato of Republic and Laws as for the earlier dialogues. These older readers of Platonic ethics demonstrate that it is indeed possible to discern a unified view of the relation between goodness and happiness, without violence to the texts. While Plato may speak with "many voices," as Arius Didymus averred, this does not entail that he held "many doctrines" (9).Another modern shibboleth which the older readers can help us dislodge concerns the proper understanding of the Republic. We have tended to classify it as political theory (and in this are supported by the Library of Congress, as Annas points out). While recognizing the hefty core of more individual ethical thinking which goes into the definition of justice in the soul, we have insisted that the "Fairest City" is a serious utopian project description and should shape and contain the Republic's ethical teachings. Here too the ancients were much less inhibited than we; most of them cheerfully ignore the city-building and attend mainly to the implications for moral life. Annas finds this not only salubrious and unity-supporting but more faithful to the text, whose political content she finds "brief and underdeveloped" (82).Many readers will find the treatment of Republic's political significance (or lack thereof) objectionable. Many readers will also find the idea of relinquishing developmentalism to be unappealing or even frightening. But Annas makes a strong case for [End Page 115] seriously consulting the ancient readers if only for their medicinal value; they can "... wake us from our developmental slumbers" (165). Moreover, she provides a friendly and accessible entree to their world, one which will be of value to many modern readers who have been mystified by them heretofore.All texts quoted are in translation, and the occasional bits of original texts are transliterated. An extremely helpful "cast of characters" (which everyone will be tempted to xerox and... (shrink)

Digital spaces are saturated with metaphor: we have pages, sites, mice, and windows. Yet, in the world of digital textuality, these metaphors no longer function as we might expect. Martin Paul Eve calls attention to the digital-textual metaphors that condition our experience of digital space, and traces their history as they interact with physical cultures. Eve posits that digital-textual metaphors move through three life phases. Initially they are descriptive. Then they encounter a moment of fracture or rupture. Finally, they go (...) on to have a prescriptive life of their own that conditions future possibilities for our text environments - even when the metaphors have become untethered from their original intent. Why is "whitespace" white? Was the digital page always a foregone conclusion? Over a series of theses, Eve addresses these and other questions in order to understand the moments when digital-textual metaphors break and to show us how it is that our textual softwares become locked into paradigms that no longer make sense. Contributing to book history, literary studies, new media studies, and material textual studies, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History provides generative insights into the metaphors that define our digital worlds. (shrink)