In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reclaiming the Works of Early Modern Women Authorship, Gender, and Interpretation in the Nouveau recueil de lettres des dames de ce temps (1635)1Aurora Wolfgang (bio) and Sharon Diane Nell (bio)Reclaiming the forgotten texts of women writers has been a major feminist undertaking of the last half-century. Indeed, believing in the importance of this sort of work, we have each spent much of our careers studying the (...) women writers absent from our own graduate-school education. What follows, however, is a cautionary tale about discovery and reclamation: first, our discovery of what we thought was a hitherto-neglected text by eminent seventeenth-century writer Madeleine de Scudéry—her Lettres amoureuses de divers auteurs de ce temps (1641); second, our discovery that the text was not (even as indexed in Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History microfilm collection) authored by Scudéry but was written instead by a Franciscan priest, Jacques Du Bosc. Clearly, our second discovery pointed out both our own rush to judgment as well as that of other literary scholars interested in the tenuous project of historical reclamation. In this essay, we seek to explore the implications of attribution and authorship for our cautionary tale. Does the fact that a work is not Scudéry’s Lettres amoureuses but instead Du Bosc’s Nouveau recueil de lettres des dames de ce temps (1635) diminish its importance to the history of women’s letters?The First DiscoveryWe became interested in Scudéry’s Lettres amoureuses because of a brief description of the text in Joan DeJean’s Tender Geographies, a pioneering study of women novelists of the seventeenth century. DeJean describes a one-volume work that constituted the first publication of one of the most important writers of the seventeenth century, Madeleine de Scudéry. This work was a reversal of and “forceful response to” the so-called Ovidian model of epistolary fiction in which a “seduced and abandoned” woman complains in letter form about the infidelity of her male lover. In Scudéry’s text, however, men wrote long letters complaining about the women who did not reciprocate their love (DeJean, Tender Geographies 79).We obtained a copy of the Lettres amoureuses from the Women’s History microfilm collection, which was created in the 1970s (published 1983) in order to make available [End Page 1] an extensive array of texts and documents relating to women’s lives. We were surprised to see that all of the letters in the Lettres amoureuses were written by women—not men. Moreover, most of the letters were written by women to other women. No letters by men were included at all. Our copy of Lettres amoureuses contained letters and responses written between women, meant to show the excellence of women’s writing skill. The letters discussed and debated a wide variety of topics of interest to seventeenth-century French women; more strikingly, however, they reflected a close-knit homosocial world of women who openly expressed love, devotion, desire, and longing for each other’s company.Given the differences between our copy of Lettres amoureuses and the text described by DeJean, we wondered if we were looking at the same book. Was our collection the one to which DeJean referred? Yes and no. In another DeJean article about the Lettres amoureuses, we discovered that DeJean had used a particular copy of the text, one found in the holdings of Harvard’s Houghton Library. Upon first obtaining a microfilm copy of the Houghton volume, and later examining the physical book itself in Houghton’s rare books room, we saw that it (unlike our own copy) did indeed contain only letters by men who complain about their female beloveds. At this point, we thought we had discovered a second volume to Scudéry’s work: it seemed clear to us that the Lettres amoureuses had been halved at some point in the last several centuries and that we had a chance to reunite the volumes. After all, the preface in the Houghton volume tells the reader, “Si vous receuez fauorablement ce volume, ie vous en prepare un second” [“If you receive this volume favorably, I will prepare a second one... (shrink)

How much responsibility ought a professional engineer to have with regard to supporting basic principles of sustainable development? While within the United States, professional engineering societies, as reflected in their codes of ethics, differ in their responses to this question, none of these professional societies has yet to put the engineer’s responsibility toward sustainability on a par with commitments to public safety, health, and welfare. In this paper, we aim to suggest that sustainability should be included in the paramountcy clause (...) because it is a necessary condition to ensure the safety, health, and welfare of the public. Part of our justification rests on the fact that to engineer sustainably means among many things to consider social justice, understood as the fair and equitable distribution of social goods, as a design constraint similar to technical, economic, and environmental constraints. This element of social justice is not explicit in the current paramountcy clause. Our argument rests on demonstrating that social justice in terms of both inter- and intra-generational equity is an important dimension of sustainability (and engineering). We also propose that embracing sustainability in the codes while recognizing the role that social justice plays may elevate the status of the engineer as public intellectual and agent of social good. This shift will then need to be incorporated in how we teach undergraduate engineering students about engineering ethics. (shrink)

This book returns the reader to an agenda for addressing equity in schools, emphasizing the need to reexamine past reform efforts and the work ahead for educational leaders in reshaping schools and schooling.

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that Tait’s axiomatic conception of mathematics implies that it is in principle impossible to be justified in believing a mathematical statement without being justified in believing that statement to be provable. I will then show that there are possible courses of experience which would justify acceptance of a mathematical statement without justifying belief that this statement is provable.

In many ways set theory lies at the heart of modern mathematics, and it does powerful work both philosophical and mathematical – as a foundation for the subject. However, certain philosophical problems raise serious doubts about our acceptance of the axioms of set theory. In a detailed and original reassessment of these axioms, Sharon Berry uses a potentialist approach to develop a unified determinate conception of set-theoretic truth that vindicates many of our intuitive expectations regarding set theory. Berry further (...) defends her approach against a number of possible objections, and she shows how a notion of logical possibility that is useful in formulating Potentialist set theory connects in important ways with philosophy of language, metametaphysics and philosophy of science. Her book will appeal to readers with interests in the philosophy of set theory, modal logic, and the role of mathematics in the sciences. (shrink)

There are individual and cultural differences in how memories of our emotions are cognitively represented. This article examines the cognitive representation of emotions in different cultures, as a result of emotional (in)consistency in different cultures. Using a continuous semantic priming task, we showed in two studies that individuals who were less emotionally consistent across relationships have stronger associations of their emotions within those relationships. Further, we found (in Study 2) that in a culture characterised by higher levels of emotional inconsistency (...) across relationships (Singapore), stronger associations between emotions within relationships were found than in a culture characterised by emotional consistency (USA). This cultural difference in cognitive representation was fully mediated by individual differences in cross-situational consistency levels. (shrink)

A. NATURAL. HISTORY. OF. THE. SENSES. “This is one of the best books of the year—by any measure you want to apply. It is interesting, informative, very well written. This book can be opened on any page and read with relish.... thoroughly  ...

In the 70 years since Alan Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ appeared in Mind, there have been two widely-accepted interpretations of the Turing test: the canonical behaviourist interpretation and the rival inductive or epistemic interpretation. These readings are based on Turing’s Mind paper; few seem aware that Turing described two other versions of the imitation game. I have argued that both readings are inconsistent with Turing’s 1948 and 1952 statements about intelligence, and fail to explain the design of his game. (...) I argue instead for a response-dependence interpretation. This interpretation has implications for Turing’s view of free will: I argue that Turing’s writings suggest a new form of free will compatibilism, which I call response-dependence compatibilism. The philosophical implications of rethinking Turing’s test go yet further. It is assumed by numerous theorists that Turing anticipated the computational theory of mind. On the contrary, I argue, his remarks on intelligence and free will lead to a new objection to computationalism. (shrink)

In this fast-paced, enlightening guide, Sharon M. Kaye takes us on a whistle-stop tour of medieval philosophy, revealing its astounding legacy to the discipline today.

Unlike most texts in critical thinking, _Reason in the Balance_ focuses broadly on the practice of critical inquiry, the process of carefully examining an issue in order to come to a reasoned judgment. Although analysis and critique of individual arguments have an important role to play, this text goes beyond that dimension to emphasize the various aspects that go into the practice of inquiry, including identifying issues and relevant contexts, understanding competing cases, and making a comparative judgment._ Distinctive Features of (...) the Text:_ Emphasis on applying critical thinking to complex issues with competing arguments Inclusion of chapters on inquiry in specific contexts Attention to the dialogical aspects of inquiry, including sample dialogues Emphasis on the spirit of inquiry _The Second Edition Features:_ Updated examples and items of current interest New dialogues on vaccination, prostitution, and climate change New material on biases in reasoning, including emotional, psychological, social, and cognitive _The _Reason in the Balance_ Website includes:_ An Appendix on Logic Exercises Quizzes. (shrink)

Contemporary realist theories of value claim to be compatible with natural science. In this paper, I call this claim into question by arguing that Darwinian considerations pose a dilemma for these theories. The main thrust of my argument is this. Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes. The challenge for realist theories of value is to explain the relation between these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the (...) independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other. Realism, I argue, can give no satisfactory account of this relation. On the one hand, the realist may claim that there is no relation between evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes and independent evaluative truths. But this claim leads to the implausible skeptical result that most of our evaluative judgements are off track due to the distorting pressure of Darwinian forces. The realist’s other option is to claim that there is a relation between evolutionary influences and independent evaluative truths, namely that natural selection favored ancestors who were able to grasp those truths. But this account, I argue, is unacceptable on scientific grounds. Either way, then, realist theories of value prove unable to accommodate the fact that Darwinian forces have deeply influenced the content of human values. After responding to three objections, the third of which leads me to argue against a realist understanding of the disvalue of pain, I conclude by sketching how antirealism is able to sidestep the dilemma I have presented. Antirealist theories of value are able to offer an alternative account of the relation between evolutionary forces and evaluative facts —
an account that allows us to reconcile our understanding of evaluative truth with our understanding of the many non-rational causes that have played a role in shaping our evaluative judgements. (shrink)

From domestic goddess to desperate housewife, this book explores the importance and centrality of postfeminism in contemporary popular culture.

Introduction : but is it ethics? -- Alterity : the problem of transcendence -- Singularity : the unrepresentable face -- Responsibility : the infinity of the demand -- Ethics : normativity and norms -- Scarce resources? : Levinas, animals, and the environment -- Failures of recognition and the recognition of failure : Levinas and identity politics.

In this article, I discuss a trivialization worry for Hartry Field’s official formulation of the access problem for mathematical realists, which was pointed out by Øystein Linnebo. I argue that various attempted reformulations of the Benacerraf problem fail to block trivialization, but that access worriers can better defend themselves by sticking closer to Hartry Field’s initial informal characterization of the access problem in terms of general epistemic norms of coincidence avoidance.

In this paper, I will attempt to develop and defend a common form of intuitive resistance to the companions in guilt argument. I will argue that one can reasonably believe there are promising solutions to the access problem for mathematical realism that don’t translate to moral realism. In particular, I will suggest that the structuralist project of accounting for mathematical knowledge in terms of some form of logical knowledge offers significant hope of success while no analogous approach offers such hope (...) for moral realism. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss a trivialization worry for Hartry Field’s official formulation of the access problem for mathematical realists, which was pointed out by Øystein Linnebo (and has recently been made much of by Justin Clarke-Doane). I argue that various attempted reformulations of the Benacerraf problem fail to block trivialization, but that access worriers can better defend themselves by sticking closer to Hartry Field’s initial informal characterization of the access problem in terms of (something like) general epistemic norms of (...) coincidence avoidance. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Nature of Critical Thinking Critical Thinking: Skills/Abilities and Dispositions Critical Thinking and the Problem of Generalizability The Relationship Between Critical Thinking and Creative Thinking “Critical Thinking” and Other Terms Referring to Thinking Critical Thinking and Education Critiques of Critical Thinking Conclusion.

Building on the breakthrough text Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda, this book offers 30 chapters covering conceptual and substantive developments in the philosophy of engineering, along with a series of critical reflections by engineering practitioners. The volume demonstrates how reflective engineering can contribute to a better understanding of engineering identity and explores how integrating engineering and philosophy could lead to innovation in engineering methods, design and education. The volume is divided into reflections on practice, principles and process, each of (...) which challenges prevalent assumptions and commitments within engineering and philosophy. The volume explores the ontological and epistemological dimensions of engineering and exposes the falsity of the commonly held belief that the field is simply the application of science knowledge to problem solving. Above all, the perspectives collected here demonstrate the value of a constructive dialogue between engineering and philosophy and show how collaboration between the disciplines casts light on longstanding problems from both sides. The chapters in this volume are from a diverse and international body of authors, including philosophers and engineers, and represent a highly select group of papers originally presented in three different conferences. These are the 2008 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering held at the Royal Academy of Engineering; the 2009 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands; and the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology, held in Golden, Colorado at the Colorado School of Mines. (shrink)

Economics is probably the most subtle, precise and powerful of the social sciences and its theories have deep philosophical import. Yet the dominant alliance between economics and philosophy has long been cheerfully simple. This is the textbook alliance of neo-Classicism and Positivism, so crucial to the defence of orthodox economics against by now familiar objections. This is an unusual book and a deliberately controversial one. The authors cast doubt on assumptions which neo-Classicists often find too obvious to defend or, indeed, (...) to mention. They set out to disturb an influential concensus and to champion an unpopular cause. Although they go deeper into both philosophy and economics than is usual in interdisciplinary works, they start from first principles and the text is provokingly clear. This will be a stimulating book for all economic theorists and philosophers interested in the philosophy of science and social science. (shrink)

A newly revised edition of the International Best-Seller, Making the Brain/Body Connection hit the book stores in June. This book has people raving about its user friendly approach and its solid research based information. Explore and experience how your brain, body and senses interrelate. Sharon Promislow's approach makes the brain research almost fun. Learn about your body's defence mechanism for stress and how you can adapt them to defuse stress instead of allowing it to accumulate into a full blown (...) stress attack. In her lively and entertaining book, Sharon blends cutting edge stress and brain research with practical exercises and techniques that have you moving beyond your current limitations and into a life you only imagined you could have. Her Quick Six stress buster techniques can be used on the street, in the board room, wherever you are when stress hits.Follow along with this step-by-step guide as she leads you through a model for change that unlocks hidden "stress circuits." Clear away mental, emotional and physical blocks to success with simple movements from the 10 Step Change Process, that make change fun. Illustrated with humorus new cartoon characters by Cathrine Levan. (shrink)

In Science as Social Knowledge, Helen Longino offers a contextual analysis of evidential relevance. She claims that this "contextual empiricism" reconciles the objectivity of science with the claim that science is socially constructed. I argue that while her account does offer key insights into the role that values play in science, her claim that science is nonetheless objective is problematic.

Plato's account of an important dialogue on the nature of love between Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates and Alcibiades. English translation with notes and introduction.

Most agree that when it comes to so-called 'first-order' normative ethics and political philosophy, constructivist views are a powerful family of positions. When it comes to metaethics, however, there is serious disagreement about what, if anything, constructivism has to contribute. In this paper I argue that constructivist views in ethics include not just a family of substantive normative positions, but also a distinct and highly attractive metaethical view. I argue that the widely accepted 'proceduralist characterization' of constructivism in ethics is (...) inadequate, and I propose what I call the 'practical standpoint characterization' in its place. I then offer a general taxonomy of constructivist positions in ethics. Since constructivism's standing as a family of substantive normative positions is relatively uncontested, I devote the remainder of the paper to addressing skeptics' worries about the distinctiveness of constructivism understood as a metaethical view. I compare and contrast constructivism with three other standard metaethical positions with which it is often confused or mistakenly thought to be compatible: realism; naturalist reductions in terms of an ideal response; and expressivism. In discussing the contrast with expressivism, I explain the sense in which, according to the constructivist, the distinction between substantive normative ethics and metaethics breaks down. I conclude by distinguishing between two importantly different debates about the mind-dependence of value. I argue that a failure to make this distinction is part of what explains why the possibility of constructivism as a metaethical view is often overlooked. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy of science appears to present problems for the ideal of value-free science. These difficulties also challenge a traditional understanding of the objectivity of science. However, feminist philosophers of science have good reasons for desiring to retain some concept of objectivity. The present essay considers several recent and influential feminist approaches to the role of social and political values in science, with particular focus on feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory. The similarities and difference, as well as the strengths (...) and weaknesses of these approaches are explored. The essay concludes with suggestions for future research in the area of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Since Benacerraf’s ‘What Numbers Could Not Be, ’ there has been a growing interest in mathematical structuralism. An influential form of mathematical structuralism, modal structuralism, uses logical possibility and second order logic to provide paraphrases of mathematical statements which don’t quantify over mathematical objects. These modal structuralist paraphrases are a useful tool for nominalists and realists alike. But their use of second order logic and quantification into the logical possibility operator raises concerns. In this paper, I show that the work (...) of both these elements can be done by a single natural generalization of the logical possibility operator. (shrink)

Turing used the expression “emotional” in three distinct ways: to state his philosophical theory of the concept of intelligence, to classify arguments for and against the possibility of machine intelligence, and to describe the education of a “child machine”. The remarks on emotion include several of the most important philosophical claims. This paper analyses these remarks and their significance for current research in Artificial Intelligence.

Showing that a radical feminist analysis cuts across class, race, sexuality, region, and religion, the varied contributors in this collection reveal the global reach of radical feminism and analyze the causes and solutions to patriarchal oppression.

This article tracks Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as an emergent organizational process that places the employee at its center. Predominantly, research on CSR tends to focus on external pressures and outcomes leading to a neglect of CSR as a dynamic and developing process that relies on the involvement of the employee as a major stakeholder in its co-creation and implementation. Utilizing case study data drawn from a study of a large multinational energy company, we explore how management relies on employees' (...) interaction with CSR as the process of initiation → implementation → maturation develops. Employee involvement grows from a minor element in the CSR initiation stage to a vital contributory factor in CSR's success in the later stages of the process. The article offers new insights into a processual and interactional approach to CSR that accounts for the actions of different actors involved at each stage. Most unusually, it also recognizes the dual impact this has on broader issues concerning the management and involvement of employees through CSR actions, and gaining legitimacy in the eyes of not only external stakeholders but internal too. (shrink)

In this paper the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic bases for a pattern of conventionalization of two types of iconic handshapes are described. Work on sign languages has shown that handling handshapes and object handshapes express an agentive/non-agentive semantic distinction in many sign languages. H-HSs are used in agentive event descriptions and O-HSs are used in non-agentive event descriptions. In this work, American Sign Language and Italian Sign Language productions are compared as well as the corresponding groups of gesturers in each (...) country using “silent gesture.” While the gesture groups, in general, did not employ an H-HS/O-HS distinction, all participants used iconic handshapes more often in agentive than in no-agent event descriptions; moreover, none of the subjects produced an opposite pattern than the expected one . These effects are argued to be grounded in cognition. In addition, some individual gesturers were observed to produce the H-HS/O-HS opposition for agentive and non-agentive event descriptions—that is, more Italian than American adult gesturers. This effect is argued to be grounded in culture. Finally, the agentive/non-agentive handshape opposition is confirmed for signers of ASL and LIS, but previously unreported cross-linguistic differences were also found across both adult and child sign groups. It is, therefore, concluded that cognitive, cultural, and linguistic factors contribute to the conventionalization of this distinction of handshape type. (shrink)