It is widely believed that people are sometimes directly aware of their own psychological states and consequently better placed than others to know what the contents of those states are. This (‘commonsense’) view has been challenged by Alison Gopnik. She claims that experimental evidence from the behaviour of 3– and 4–year–old children both supports the theory theory and shows that the belief in direct and privileged knowledge of one’s own intentional states is an illusion. I argue (1) that the (...) experimental evidence is not inconsistent with the commonsense view and that Gopnik’s central thesis assumes a particularly crude perceptual account of self–knowledge to which that view is not committed, and (2) that the commonsense view is neutral as between the theory theory and other theories of mind. (shrink)

This is the first book to offer a systematic account of feminist philosophy as a distinctive field of philosophy. The book introduces key issues and debates in feminist philosophy including: the nature of sex, gender, and the body; the relation between gender, sexuality, and sexual difference; whether there is anything that all women have in common; and the nature of birth and its centrality to human existence. An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy shows how feminist thinking on these and related topics (...) has developed since the 1960s. The book also explains how feminist philosophy relates to the many forms of feminist politics. The book provides clear, succinct and readable accounts of key feminist thinkers including de Beauvoir, Butler, Gilligan, Irigaray, and MacKinnon. The book also introduces other thinkers who have influenced feminist philosophy including Arendt, Foucault, Freud, and Lacan. Accessible in approach, this book is ideal for students and researchers interested in feminist philosophy, feminist theory, womens studies, and political theory. It will also appeal to the general reader. (shrink)

At the intersection of metaphysics and social theory, this book presents and examines Adorno's unusual concept of possibility and aims to answer how we are to articulate the possibility of a redeemed life without lapsing into a vague and naïve utopianism.

_Varieties of Things: Foundations of Contemporary Metaphysics_ is about some of the most fundamental kinds of things that there are; the things that we encounter in everyday experience. A book about the things that we encounter in everyday experience. Contains a thorough and accessible discussion of the nature and aims of metaphysics. Examines a wide range of ontological categories, including both particulars and universals. Mounts a forceful and persuasive case for anti-reductionism.

_Varieties of Things: Foundations of Contemporary Metaphysics_ is about some of the most fundamental kinds of things that there are; the things that we encounter in everyday experience. A book about the things that we encounter in everyday experience. Contains a thorough and accessible discussion of the nature and aims of metaphysics. Examines a wide range of ontological categories, including both particulars and universals. Mounts a forceful and persuasive case for anti-reductionism.

This volume is a comprehensive survey of contemporary thought on a wide range of issues and provides students with the basic background to current debates in metaphysics.

The rise of applied biology was one of the most striking features of the biological sciences in the early 20th century. Strongly oriented toward agriculture, this was closely associated with the growth of a number of disciplines, notably, entomology and mycology. This period also saw a marked expansion of the English University system, and biology departments in the newly inaugurated civic universities took an early and leading role in the development of applied biology through their support of Economic Biology. This (...) sought explicitly to promote the application of biological knowledge to economically important problems and especially to agriculture. The impact of Economic Biology was felt most strongly within Zoology, where it became synonymous with entomology. The transience of Economic Biology belies its significance, for example, in providing a means for the expansion of biology at the civic universities. More broadly, it opened up new research and employment opportunities within the life sciences. In late Edwardian Britain, newly available state funds for agriculturally relevant biological disciplines transformed the life sciences. This paper examines the impact of these funds -- mobilized either under the 1909 Development Act, or under the auspices of colonial interests -- on Economic Biology and the institutionalization of applied biology. The rise and fall of Economic Biology casts new light on the way in which institutional and political alignments profoundly shaped the development of British biology. (shrink)

Graham Macdonald; XI*—Modified Methodological Individualism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 86, Issue 1, 1 June 1986, Pages 199–212, https://do.

In this paper I reconstruct Schlegel's idea that romantic poetry can re-enchant nature in a way that is uniquely compatible with modernity's epistemic and political values of criticism, self-criticism, and freedom. I trace several stages in Schlegel's early thinking concerning nature. First, he criticises modern culture for its analytic, reflective form of rationality which encourages a disenchanting view of nature. Second, he re-evaluates this modern form of rationality as making possible an ironic, romantic, poetry, which portrays natural phenomena as mysterious (...) indications of an underlying reality that transcends knowledge. Yet Schlegel relies here on a contrast between human freedom and natural necessity that reinstates a disenchanting view of nature as fully intelligible and predictable. Third, therefore, he reconceives nature as inherently creative and poetic, rethinking human creativity as consisting in participation in natural creative processes. He replaces his earlier "idealist" view that reality is in itself unknowable with the "idealist realist" view that reality is knowable as creative nature, yet, in its spontaneous creativity, still eludes full comprehension. I argue that Schlegel's third approach to the re-enchantment of nature is his most consistent and satisfactory, and is important for contemporary environmental philosophy in showing how re-enchantment is compatible with modernity. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore briefly the "secular priesthood" metaphor often applied to bioethicists. I next ask: if, despite our discomfort with the metaphor, we were to embrace the best aspects of the priesthood(s) ? which I identify as the missionaries' willingness to work among sinners and lepers, at their own peril ? would we be able to live up to that standard of bravery? I then draw a parallel with the fears of contagion currently be voiced (by Carl Elliott (...) and others), with regard to bioethicists working in or near corporate settings. I argue that such fears may themselves have a number of deleterious effects, and I suggest several possible positive steps in response to that fear. (shrink)

abstract: Religion for many of Canada's earliest Chinese community was not about faith or belief in God, the Buddha, or the Goddess of Compassion (Guanyin). While the majority of Chinese migrants did not convert to Christianity or Buddhism before 1947, a very large number of them joined and became converted to Chinese nationalism (Zhongguo guomindang, aka KMT). This paper reflects on the findings of sixteen years of ethnographic and archival research to understand how sixty-two years of institutionalized racism in Canada, (...) along with bioregionalism and the built environment, determined Chinese migrant religious identities and behaviors in Canada up to 1947. Different Canadian provinces not only had different race-based laws that restricted individual rights and freedoms, they also had varying bioregional characteristics that influenced experiences and interactions with the built environments of churches, temples, and clubhouses. Chinese migrants adapted to legislation that limited their personal rights and freedoms by being efficacious or ling by professing Christian identities in public settings. They might have made offerings to Buddhist deities and frequented Buddhist temples in their home village before migration. But in Canada, being Buddhist was associated with being Japanese, and it was efficacious to be a practicing Buddhist in private. For Canada's Chinese migrants, it was conversion to Chinese nationalism and the veneration of Sun Yat-sen that was the epitome of ling. Being a devoted member met important practical as well as spiritual needs. (shrink)

Many scholars have historicized biopolitics with reference to the emergence of sovereign nations and their colonial extensions over the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. This article begins to conceptualize and trace the history of biopolitics beyond the nation, arguing that the history of world health - the great 20th-century reach of 19th-century health and hygiene - should be understood as a vital politics of population on a newly large field of play. This substantive history of world health and world population (...) is analysed as sites for thinking about global bio-politics; and the article looks seriously at the interwar period as a point at which ‘the world’ (or Hardt and Negri’s ‘Empire’) was already challenging the idea of ‘inter/national’. (shrink)

This article provides an interpretation of the ecophenomenological dimension of Luce Irigaray's work. It shows that Irigaray builds upon Heidegger's recovery of the ancient sense of nature as physis, self-emergence into presence. But, against Heidegger, Irigaray insists that self-emergence is a material process undergone by fluid elements, such as air and water, of which the world is basically composed. This article shows that this “elemental materialist” position need not conflict with modern science. However, the article criticises Irigaray's claim that men (...) and women inhabit radically different sexuate worlds. Although this claim has some phenomenological basis, ultimately it is undercut by Irigaray's own elemental materialism, which implies that sexuate difference colours our perception but does not cleave it down a radical difference in kind. We can therefore accept and develop Irigaray's contribution to ecophenomenology without her insistence on radical sexuate duality. (shrink)

Amid intensifying calls for an international convention on the rights of older persons, it is timely and important to examine the different narratives of aging that are informing and shaping debates on the human rights of older persons and to explore their implications. The article examines the dominant and competing narratives of aging emerging from public policy and gerontological studies, most notably, aging as a crisis or burden; aging as pathology; conceptions of successful, productive or active aging; and finally, aging (...) and vulnerability. The implications of each of these narratives are analysed. The article then explores the extent to which these different narratives are taken up or challenged in advocacy for an international convention on the rights of older persons. The aim of the discussion is to make explicit and interrogate the narratives of aging which advocacy for a new convention on the rights of older persons may be perpetuating or challenging. (shrink)

The question of how the ‘border’ is conceived in international law, and how it shapes identity and peoples’ lives, remains largely unexplored in the international legal literature. This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the meaning of the border in international law, and in the contemporary context, by drawing on the work of the philosopher and political theorist, Étienne Balibar, and by reflecting, in the light of his work, on the recent decision of the House of Lords in (...) R v Immigration Officer at Prague Airport. It is shown that international law's focus on the territorial border may render invisible other borders which are significant for subaltern groups, and thereby fail to address the manner in which borders affect lives and determine outcomes. Borders are not stable and ‘univocal’, but instead, ‘multiple’, shifting in meaning and function from group to group. They are also being ‘exported’ such that a person may experience a foreign border while still within the territory of their own country. In highlighting the multiplicity of borders, the article seeks to prompt further reflection on the articulation and application of norms of international law in a way that addresses the realities of the contemporary context. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Nature Divided A Non‐Reductive Naturalism Norms and Function Functions, Reason, and History Only an Analogy? Concluding Thoughts.

This article begins by wondering how the writer’s transformation into motherhood affects her practice of reading, writing and research: how maternities are made academic. Specifically, this article is interested in thinking through lactating breasts, as a particularly complex and potentially subversive ‘performance’ of maternity. In addition, this article reframes ‘maternal thinking’ through 1990s theories of embodiment and corporeality, and asks how embodied practices like breastfeeding might be theorized, as well as how ‘embodied theory’ might be practised. In looking at various (...) cultural texts about breasts and breastfeeding, the article is scripted into a series of connective and reflexive scenes around performance, space, language and knowledge, coming to rest in the imaginative project of an epistemology of breasts. It sets reflexive accounts of lived experience alongside theoretical reflections to create a dynamic and thoughtful reading of breasts, entwining personal and public discourses, maternal and academic writing, theorizing and cultural practices. (shrink)

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head‐noun in semantically non‐reversible ORCs (“The book that the boy is reading”). In two eye‐tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g., “Where is the tractor that the cow is chasing”). In Experiment 1, 48 children (aged 4;5–6;4) (...) and 32 adults listened to sentences that varied in the lexical animacy of the NP1 head‐noun (Animate/Inanimate) and relative clause (RC) type (SRC/ORC) with an animate NP2 while viewing two images depicting opposite actions. As expected, inanimate head‐nouns facilitated the correct interpretation of ORCs in children; however, online data revealed children were more likely to anticipate an SRC as the RC unfolded when an inanimate head‐noun was used, suggesting processing was sensitive to perceptual animacy. In Experiment 2, we repeated our design with inanimate (rather than animate) NP2s (e.g., “where is the tractor that the car is following”) to investigate whether our online findings were due to increased visual surprisal at an inanimate as agent, or to similarity‐based interference. We again found greater anticipation for an SRC in the inanimate condition, supporting our surprisal hypothesis. Across the experiments, offline measures show that lexical animacy influenced children's interpretation of ORCs, whereas online measures reveal that as RCs unfolded, children were sensitive to the perceptual animacy of lexically inanimate NPs, which was not reflected in the offline data. Overall measures of syntactic comprehension, inhibitory control, and verbal short‐term memory and working memory were not predictive of children's accuracy in RC interpretation, with the exception of a positive correlation with a standardized measure of syntactic comprehension in Experiment 1. (shrink)

In This Incredible Need to Believe, philosopher Julia Kristeva identifies the present as a time of crisis identified with ‘ideality’; historically significant cultural idealizations are failing us, leading to social and cultural breakdown, which Kristeva believes is not being addressed in ‘secular’ western societies. Remarkably, she defends the universal significance of what she defines as ‘belief’, revisiting earlier work on language, literature and the unconscious, against the background of a recent revival of interest in ‘religion’. In an introductory way, this (...) article outlines ways in which Kristeva’s analysis can help feminist readers to take bearings at this time. (shrink)

Michèle Roberts: Female Genius and the Theology of an English Novelist Since Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, feminist analysis has tended to assume that the conditions of male normativity—reducing woman to the merely excluded "Other" of man—holds true in the experience of all women, not the least, women in the context of Christian praxis and theology. Beauvoir's powerful analysis—showing us how problematic it is to establish a position outside patriarchy's dominance of our conceptual fields—has helped to (...) explain the resilience of sexism and forms of male violence that continue to diminish and destroy women's lives because they cannot be seen as questionable. It has also, I would argue, had the unintended consequence of intensifying the sense of limitation, so that it becomes problematic to account for the work and lives of effective, innovative and responsible women in these contexts. In order to address this problematic issue, I use the life and work of novelist Michèle Roberts, as a case study in female genius within an interdisciplinary field, in order to acknowledge the conditions that have limited a singular woman's literary and theological aspirations but also to claim that she is able to give voice to something creative of her own.The key concept of female genius within this project draws on Julia Kristeva's notion of being a subject without implicitly excluding embodiment and female desire as in normative male theology, or in notions of genius derived from Romanticism. Roberts' work as a writer qualifies her as female genius in so far as it challenges aspects of traditional Christianity, bringing to birth new relationships between theological themes and scriptural narratives without excluding her singular female desires and pleasures as a writer. This paper—as part of a more inclusive, historical survey of the work of women writers crossing the disciplinary boundaries between literature and Christian theology over the last several centuries also asks whether, in order to do proper justice to the real and proven limitations imposed on countless women in these fields across global and historical contexts, we need, at the same time, to reduce the Christian tradition to something that is always antithetical or for which women can take absolutely no credit or bear no responsibility. (shrink)

A consideration of some of the embedded themes with which Pamela Sue Anderson was concerned during her career will bear out the suggestion that her approach to enhancing life was richly engaging and distinctive. However, it is perhaps the idea of vulnerability, most of all, that crystallizes this distinctiveness and addresses the aims of the Enhancing Life Project with which she was associated at the time of her death in March 2017, but also brings her philosophy as well as her (...) person most powerfully to mind. In particular I am interested in the way in which, through this focus, she allows us seriously to attend to death (including her own), invoking the positive and life-enhancing implications of our unavoidable vulnerability, for practices of rational affection, without losing sight of the violence and pain of loss and mourning. (shrink)

This article addresses what appears to be a retrenchment into narrower forms of identification and an increased suspicion of difference in the context of educational policy in the UK – especially in relation to ‘Religious Education’. The adoption of standardized management protocols – ‘managerialism’ – across most if not all policy contexts including public educational spaces reduces spaces for encountering or addressing genuine difference and for discovering something new and creative. A theory of the ‘feminization of religion’ associated historically with (...) Barbara Welter, provides some useful insights as to why this might be, suggesting that those in British society who would prefer to see greater separation from ‘religion’ in ‘secular’ schools may well also be caught up in forms of gender stereotyping. (shrink)

Feminism is still often dismissed as an outmoded or discredited concept, out of touch with the feelings and desires of real women and men or antithetical to any proper vision of Christianity. So for the feminist theologian it is as important as ever to find ways of discriminating between truth and falsity and of discerning a future path. In this piece I try to articulate one possible feminist approach using insights from the work of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari—particularly on assemblages—and (...) from the work of poet and theorist, Adrienne Rich, on revisioning. It is my sense that these tools may be able to help provide feminist theologians with the support we undoubtedly need if we are genuinely to be able to acknowledge the weight of our pasts and the risk of our futures without becoming overwhelmed or immobilized in a context which remains decidedly challenging. (shrink)

The theorist and philosopher Julia Kristeva is invited to curate an exhibition at the Louvre in Paris as part of a series-Parti Pris - and to turn this into a book, The Severed Head: Capital Visions. The organiser, Régis Michel, wants something partisan, that will challenge people to think, and Kristeva delivers in response a collection of severed heads neatly summarising her critique of the whole of western culture! Three figures dominate, providing a key to making sense of the exhibition: (...) Freud, Bataille, and the maternal body. Using these figures, familiar from across the breadth of her work over the last half a century, she produces a witty analysis of western culture’s persistent privileging of disembodied masculine rationality; the head, ironically phallic, ironically and yet necessarily severed; the maternal body continually arousing a “jubilant anxiety”, expressed through violence. Points of critique are raised in relation to Kristeva’s normative tendencies-could we not tell a different story about women, for example? The cultural context of the exhibition is also addressed: who are the intended viewers/readers and whose interests are being served here? Ultimately, however, this is a celebration of Kristeva’s tribute to psychic survivors. (shrink)

It is a complex and sometimes frustrating business to effect change that is in accordance with recognizably feminist principles in the world as it is and we inevitably risk confrontation, misunderstanding and compromise. In this paper I consider some of the complexities and obstacles to effecting feminist-friendly changes in educational spaces with specific reference to the field of teaching most familiar to a majority of us – Religion/religious Studies or Theology and Religious Studies. I suggest an approach to change based (...) on the mobilization of spirituality – characterized as becoming – as one metaphor that has been grasped to effect in the past by pioneers such as Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow to bring about changes in the western theological academy. This imaginative work has itself generated resistance and critique from scholars of religion and some feminists, but remains, I believe, one fruitful starting point for thinking through what needs to change in educational spaces identified as ‘religious’, and for avoiding the gendered traps that are laid for us in the process. Primarily these are traps that frustrate our abilities to explore the widest possibilities of difference/s and lead us back into the constrictions of sameness – here, that state of being tied either to a historical view of Christianity that privileges a disembodied, masculine, monotheistic God or to a post enlightenment view that privileges a disembodied, so-called ‘secular’ masculine rationality that just as fearfully excludes the Otherness of the feminine and all she represents. (shrink)

Greek had held an important place in Roman society and culture since the Late Republican period, and educated Romans were expected to be bilingual and well versed in both Greek and Latin literature. The Roman school ‘curriculum’ was based on Hellenistic educational culture, and in the De grammaticis et rhetoribus Suetonius says that the earliest teachers in Rome, Livius and Ennius, were ‘poets and half Greeks’, who taught both Latin and Greek ‘publicly and privately’ and ‘merely clarified the meaning of (...) Greek authors or gave exemplary readings from their own Latin compositions’. Cicero, the Latin neoteric poets and Horace are obvious examples of bilingual educated Roman aristocrats, but also throughout the Imperial period a properly educated Roman would be learned in utraque lingua. The place of Greek in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria reveals the importance and prevalence of Greek in Roman education and literature in the late first century a.d. Quintilian argues that children should learn both Greek and Latin but that it is best to begin with Greek. Famously, in the second century a.d. the Roman author Apuleius gave speeches in Greek to audiences in Carthage, and in his Apologia mocked his accusers for their ignorance of Greek. (shrink)

(2011). ‘What Is, Is More than It Is’: Adorno and Heidegger on the Priority of Possibility. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 31-57. doi: 10.1080/09672559.2011.539357.