This research aimed to examine the agreement between body mass index -based nutritional status and perceived nutritional status overall and by socio-demographic factors and to state the association between the accuracy of weight perception and weight control practices in the Chilean adult population. A population-based cross-sectional study was carried out with 5,192 Chilean adult participants from the Chilean National Health Survey 2016–2017. Agreement between BMI-based weight status and body weight perception for the total sample and across subgroups was determined using (...) the weighted kappa coefficient. The agreement between BMI-based and perceived nutritional status of the total sample was fair. A higher rate of weight perception accuracy was identified in women, younger respondents, and participants with higher education, a higher income, and from urban areas than their counterparts. Respondents with overweight or obesity tended to underestimate their nutritional status. Actions to lose weight were higher in those who had the right perception of their overweight/obesity condition and those who overestimated their body weight, regardless of their nutritional status. In all groups, weight loss behaviors were more related to the perceived than the BMI-based nutritional status. The consequences of accurate perception of the nutritional status are discussed including its effects on body weight and mental health. (shrink)

Examines the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of French feminists Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. This book is the first to examine the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Because of their association with reproduction, embodiment, and the survival of the species, women have been confined to the cyclical time of nature—a temporal model that is said to merely repeat itself. Men, on the other hand, have been (...) seen as bearers of linear time and as capable of change and progress. Fanny Söderbäck argues that both these temporal models make change impossible because they either repeat or repress the past. The model of time developed here—revolutionary time—aims at returning to and revitalizing the past so as to make possible a dynamic-embodied present and a future pregnant with change. Söderbäck stages an unprecedented conversation between Kristeva and Irigaray on issues of both time and difference, and engages thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, and Plato along the way. “Revolutionary Time makes a distinctive contribution to contemporary feminist and continental philosophical thought. By engaging Kristeva and Irigaray in depth alongside one another, and making time the guiding thread for reading their work, the author generates insights that are not to be found elsewhere in the existing literature. Through its development of the concept of revolutionary time, the book offers rich resources for thinking about temporalization in its existential, ontological, and political dimensions, in ways that are particularly valuable for feminist projects of change and political transformation.” — Rachel Jones, author of Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. (shrink)

Desde la mirada de los estudios de la cultura y la hegemonía del poder esta investigación explora desde la perspectiva de sus habitantes, el sentir popular y la apropiación de la celebración religiosa de San Pedro y San Pablo en la parroquia Picoazá (Portoviejo – Ecuador). Para el fin se acude a la metodología cualitativa, utilizando la entrevista como herramienta de corte etnográfico. Los resultados plantean un colectivo apegado a la religión con connotaciones significativas en la organización social y cultural (...) del entorno, dando paso a la reproducción de tradiciones heredadas de generación en generación. Las mismas que a la par, fetichizan y esencializan la actividad, e invisibilizan otros aspectos inherentes a las prácticas culturales. (shrink)

In this paper, I accomplish a conceptual task and a historical task. The conceptual task is to argue that (1) Einstein’s Principle of Separability (henceforth “separability”) is not a supervenience principle and that (2) separability and entanglement are compatible. I support (1) by showing that the conclusion of Einstein’s incompleteness argument would still follow even if one assumes that the state of a composite system does not supervene on the states of the subsystems, and by showing that what Einstein says (...) in “Quantum Mechanics and Reality” (1948) strongly suggests that separability is not a principle about how subsystem states relate to the state of composite systems. I support (2) by showing that if separability was incompatible with entanglement, then Einstein’s argument would be incoherent in a trivial way. Thus, by arguing for (1) and (2) I directly challenge what has been, and still is, a very common reading of separability. The historical task is to offer the first detailed review of the different ways in which separability has been defined by physicists and philosophers in the last 60 years. Among other things, such a review distinguishes three different definitions of the principle, and shows that since the 1990s and up until the present date, it became standard to take separability (as presented by Einstein) to be a supervenience principle. (shrink)

Religious ethics was founded on a commitment to inclusion, welcoming projects from and about different religious and philosophical traditions. This paper argues that the increasing welcome of feminist ethics in the JRE also reveals a tension in the field between inclusion and critique: where feminist ethics is included as another tradition of ethical inquiry, its critical claims can be escaped by appeal to difference from the traditions it seeks to engage. The response to feminist critique should not be to applaud (...) its inclusion without responding to its claims. Where this occurs, religious ethicists must renegotiate the terms of inclusion and the borders of difference. Feminist critique thus requires a return to founding questions of this journal, and the field, about the terms on which different traditions can be discussed and engaged in a common, critical conversation of religious ethics. (shrink)

It is often said in physics that if two models of a theory are related by a symmetry, then the two models provide (or could provide) two different representations of the very same situation, alike the case of two maps of different color for the very same city. It is also said that the situations represented by two models of a theory are indiscernible in some ways when the models in question are related by a symmetry of the theory, just (...) like the situation in the interior of the cabin of a train when the train is at rest in the station is empirically indiscernible from the situation in the interior when the train is moving uniformly (in classical mechanics, these two situations are represented by two models related by a boost). In recent years, philosophers of physics have focused a lot of attention in developing various principles that aim to elucidate these and similar remarks on symmetries, models, physical equivalence, and representation that are widespread in physics practice. The goal of the current article is to provide a critical review of these principles, and suggest a new framework for thinking about these kinds of questions. One important upshot of the paper is that questions of indiscernibility, and questions of the representational capacity of models, must be distinguished from one another. (shrink)

Imagine that we are on a train playing with some mechanical systems. Why can’t we detect any differences in their behavior when the train is parked versus when it is moving uniformly? The standard answer is that boosts are symmetries of Newtonian systems. In this paper, I use the case of a spring to argue that this answer is problematic because symmetries are neither sufficient nor necessary for preserving its behavior. I also develop a new answer according to which boosts (...) preserve the relational properties on which the behavior of a system depends, even when they are not symmetries. (shrink)

This essay offers a critical analysis of Hannah Arendt's notion of natality through the lens of Adriana Cavarero's feminist philosophy of birth. First, I argue that the strength of Arendtian natality is its rootedness in an ontology of uniqueness, and a commitment to human plurality and relationality. Next, I trace with Cavarero three critical concerns regarding Arendtian natality, namely that it is curiously abstract; problematically disembodied and sexually neutral; and dependent on a model of vulnerability that assumes equality rather than (...) asymmetry. This last issue is further developed in the final section of the essay, where I examine the idea that birth, for Cavarero, becomes the very concept by which we can distinguish and normatively differentiate acts of care and love from acts of wounding and violence. Upholding the normative distinction here depends on a conceptual distinction between vulnerability and helplessness. To maintain the ethical potential of the scene of birth, I argue that we have to insist on the very characteristics Cavarero attributes to it—ones, as this essay aims to show, that are ultimately missing in the Arendtian account thereof. (shrink)

L’immense parc des infrastructures en ruine, obsolescentes ou en passe de le devenir, représente un enjeu de transformation sans précédent. À la fois marqueurs idéologiques d’une modernité prométhéenne et symboles d’un service public en déliquescence, la crise écologique, technique et politique des grandes infrastructures notamment énergétique, interrogent notre capacité à transformer nos modèles sociétaux.

Metamorphosis in frogs is a critical developmental process through which a tadpole changes into an adult froglet. Metamorphic changes include external morphological transformations as well as important changes in the wiring of sensory organs and central nervous system. This review aims to provide an overview on the events that occur in the visual system of metamorphosing amphibians and to discuss recent studies that provide new insight into the molecular mechanisms that control changes in the retinal growth pattern as well as (...) the formation of new axonal pathways in the central nervous system. BioEssays 23:319–326, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Consensus in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that conserved quantity theories of causation such as that of Dowe [2000]—according to which causation is to be analysed in terms of the exchange of conserved quantities (e.g., energy)—face damning problems when confronted with contemporary physics, where the notion of conservation becomes delicate. In particular, in general relativity it is often claimed that there simply are no conservation laws for (say) total-stress energy. If this claim is correct, it is difficult to see (...) how conserved quantity theories of causation could survive. In this article, we resist the above consensus and defend conserved quantity theories from this conclusion, at least when focusing on the apparent problems posed by general relativity. We argue that this approach to causation can continue to be defended in general relativity, once one appreciates (a) the availability of approximate symmetries in generic general relativistic spacetimes, and (b) the role of modelling and idealisation in that theory. Given these points, conserved quantity theories of causation must stand or fall on other grounds. (shrink)

Often celebrated as a model of development in Africa, Botswana nonetheless endured a severe HIV epidemic. This article describes the singularity of the Botswana experience in facing AIDS and creating the widest possible access to antiretroviral medications for its citizens. Through exploration of different sets of actors and the construction of their ethics of treatment, it is possible to examine how free and universal access was created within the national antiretroviral program. This article underscores the importance of the site and (...) the local dynamics in the advent of an ethics of access to treatment for Botswana citizens. At the intersection of national citizenship, pharmaceutical philanthropy, and biomedical collaborations, Botswana is an exemplary case (one of the first and unique in its kind) of global health programs for access to drugs in which patients' rights are tied to science and pharmaceutical development. As such it also bears some limitations and concerns over its sustainability. (shrink)

L’auteure, anthropologue de la consommation, suggère que l’étude de nos pratiques alimentaires offre une fenêtre fascinante sur les structures de domination et la reproduction des élites dans une époque de permacrise. En mettant un éclairage sur les « mangeurs hors pair », elle révèle la manière dont les systèmes de pouvoir sont reproduits et contestés par les choix alimentaires. Par l’intermédiaire de la « magie alimentaire » et des « festins empoisonnés », l’autrice démontre que même nos actes alimentaires les (...) plus quotidiens sont imprégnés de significations sociales, économiques et environnementales profondes. Elle conclut en anticipant une transition vers une alimentation plus simplifiée et collective, qui pourrait contester les structures de pouvoir existantes et offrir une alternative aux régimes alimentaires particuliers qui prévalent actuellement. (shrink)

Recently, scholars across disciplines raised ethical, legal and social concerns about the notion of human intervention, control, and oversight over Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. This observation becomes particularly important in the age of ubiquitous computing and the increasing adoption of AI in everyday communication infrastructures. We apply Nicholas Garnham's conceptual perspective on mediation to users who are challenged both individually and societally when interacting with AI-enabled systems. One way to increase user agency are mechanisms to contest faulty or flawed AI (...) systems and their decisions, as well as to request redress. Currently, however, users structurally lack such mechanisms, which increases risks for vulnerable communities, for instance patients interacting with AI healthcare chatbots. To empower users in AI-mediated communication processes, this article introduces the concept of active human agency. We link our concept to contestability and redress mechanism examples and explain why these are necessary to strengthen active human agency. We argue that AI policy should introduce rights for users to swiftly contest or rectify an AI-enabled decision. This right would empower individual autonomy and strengthen fundamental rights in the digital age. We conclude by identifying routes for future theoretical and empirical research on active human agency in times of ubiquitous AI. (shrink)

Ethical decisions are contextualized in the dialectic of a multidimensional system, including situation, setting, culture, and generation. There may be further gaps between the ethical considerations of professionals and folk values. The experience of promoting equal opportunities in Hong Kong illustrates some of these challenges. Whereas the rule of law under a Western legal system advocates human rights, the traditional emphasis on harmony and preference for balancing in conflict resolution underlie the gaps in the interpretation of these ideals. The case (...) of the Hong Kong secondary school places allocation system highlights the conflicting perspectives of law, gender stereotypes, psychological knowledge, as well as ethical principles of justice and fairness in promoting equal opportunities in educational assessment and placement. The cultural perspective highlighted in this case illustrates the complex contexts of ethical decisions. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous présentons une étude de faisabilité sur l’annotation des passages entre guillemets, phénomènes linguistiques polyphoniques qui résistent souvent à une lecture univoque et à un schéma d’annotation simplificateur. La faisabilité de l’annotation a été testée à travers une étude inter-annotateurs qui a montré, avec un accord pour 80% des annotations effectuées, que des valeurs stables (dénomination, citation, autonymie, commentaires modalisants) pouvaient être postulées. Les cas de désaccord, en partie inévitables face à la complexité du phénomène, peuvent être (...) en partie réduits par un repérage systématique des marques formelles (marques typo-dispositionnelles, éléments du lexique et formules syntaxiques) et un inventaire détaillé des contextes d’emploi pour chaque valeur. Certaines valeurs demeurant ambiguës, il convient toutefois de prévoir dans l’annotation des cas de cumul de valeurs (le passage entre guillemets cumule plusieurs valeurs compatibles) ou d’ambiguïtés (plusieurs interprétations différentes sont possibles) en cas de désaccord des annotateurs. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous présentons une étude de faisabilité sur l’annotation des passages entre guillemets, phénomènes linguistiques polyphoniques qui résistent souvent à une lecture univoque et à un schéma d’annotation simplificateur. La faisabilité de l’annotation a été testée à travers une étude inter-annotateurs qui a montré, avec un accord pour 80% des annotations effectuées, que des valeurs stables (dénomination, citation, autonymie, commentaires modalisants) pouvaient être postulées. Les cas de désaccord, en partie inévitables face à la complexité du phénomène, peuvent être (...) en partie réduits par un repérage systématique des marques formelles (marques typo-dispositionnelles, éléments du lexique et formules syntaxiques) et un inventaire détaillé des contextes d’emploi pour chaque valeur. Certaines valeurs demeurant ambiguës, il convient toutefois de prévoir dans l’annotation des cas de cumul de valeurs (le passage entre guillemets cumule plusieurs valeurs compatibles) ou d’ambiguïtés (plusieurs interprétations différentes sont possibles) en cas de désaccord des annotateurs. (shrink)

La pratique du copier-coller chez les étudiant.e.s est assimilée à du plagiat et la réponse apportée par l’institution se résume à « surveiller et punir ». Cette pratique mérite cependant d’être interrogée dans le cadre des littératies universitaires par rapport à la nécessaire prise en compte des littératies numériques. Le fait qu’elle soit conçue comme une « méconduite » d’un point de vue déontologique est à comprendre par rapport à un cadre normatif qui en appelle à l’honnêteté académique et institue (...) l’auteur et les sources comme des composantes essentielles des écrits de savoirs, sans guère en expliciter les enjeux. Comment penser le copier-coller et qu’en faire? En quoi peut-on passer de l’inacceptable au didactisable, et que prendre en compte? Dans la perspective d’une réflexivité critique dans le champ des littératies universitaires, nous proposons des éléments de contextualisation qui permettent de problématiser le copier-coller, en tant que geste d’écriture, en tant qu’objet de débats, et de manière à mieux outiller les étudiant.e.s face aux attentes universitaires et en termes de compétences littéraciques en général. Nous nous intéressons à la réception du copier-coller, à l’énonciation par copier-coller et aux confusions qui entourent les attentes à l’égard des écrits des étudiant.e.s. Le contexte est compris comme un cadre interprétatif qui sert à construire un objet didactique en tant que tel. (shrink)

In this text, I consider two examples in the history of emancipation and manumission of enslaved, Black populations in the Caribbean and South America in order to theorize a colonial mode of conceiving of freedom at play in the first half of the nineteenth century. This mode is marked by the figure of the promise, enacting a notion of freedom as a constantly deferred, external compensation. Indeed, instead of an immediate decision deeming the practice of enslavement and trade of human (...) beings unacceptable, and an effective liberation of the enslaved Black populations in these different emancipation proclamations, the various histories of manumission in Latin America and the Caribbean show a long series of political and legal attempts to reduce and limit the extent of the slave trade that deferred the process of liberation for decades. Moreover, in many of these territories the practice did not end with the official proclamation of emancipation but was continued by illegal practices and mutations into legal forms of exploitation and oppression that are still operative today. After outlining this first trajectory, reconstructing the promise of manumission in the historical examples of Martinique (as read by Édouard Glissant) and La Gran Colombia and the Republic of Nueva Granada (contemporary Panamá, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador), I analyze a second mode of investigation in examples of individual and collective strategies of liberation coming from the enslaved themselves, as reconstructed by contemporary feminist scholars in South America. These strategies appropriate liberation not as a promise, but as a negotiation and calculation that begins with the enslaved’s resistance to their oppressive conditions and that ultimately depends on the external concession by juridical authorities. In the third section of the chapter, I read these practices not as marronage, as they are sometimes approached, but as a different mode of turning back to these glimpses of freedom that more effectively challenge the narrative of emancipation and, with it, the promise of manumission in our present. -/- . (shrink)

Errors and their consequences are typically studied by investigating changes in decision speed and accuracy in trials that follow an error, commonly referred to as “post-error adjustments”. Many studies have reported that subjects slow down following an error, a phenomenon called “post-error slowing” (PES). However, the functional significance of PES is still a matter of debate as it is not always adaptive. That is, it is not always associated with a gain in performance and can even occur with a decline (...) in accuracy. Here, we hypothesized that the nature of PES is influenced by one’s speed-accuracy tradeoff policy, which determines the overall level of choice accuracy in the task at hand. To test this hypothesis, we had subjects performing a task in two distinct contexts (separate days), which either promoted speed (hasty context) or cautiousness (cautious context), allowing us to consider post-error adjustments according to whether subjects performed choices with a low or high accuracy level, respectively. Accordingly, our data indicate that post-error adjustments varied according to the context in which subjects performed the task, with PES being solely significant in the hasty context (low accuracy). In addition, we only observed a gain in performance after errors in a specific trial type, suggesting that post-error adjustments depend on a complex combination of processes that affect the speed of ensuing actions as well as the degree to which such PES comes with a gain in performance. (shrink)

The recent debate about whether gauge symmetries can be empirically significant has focused on the possibility of 'Galileo's ship' types of scenarios, where the symmetries effect relational differences between a subsystem and the environment. However, it has gone largely unremarked that apart from such Galileo's ship scenarios, Greaves and Wallace (2014) proposed that gauge transformations can also be empirically significant in a 'non-relational' manner that is analogous to a Faraday-cage scenario, where the subsystem symmetry is related to a change in (...) a charged boundary state. In this paper, we investigate the question of whether such non-relational scenarios are possible for gauge theories. Remarkably, the answer to this question turns out to be closely related to a foundational puzzle that has driven a host of recent developments at the frontiers of theoretical physics. By drawing on these recent developments, we show that a very natural way of elaborating on Greaves and Wallace's claim of non-relational empirical significance for gauge symmetry is incoherent. However, we also argue that much of what they suggest is correct in spirit: one can indeed construct non-relational models of the kind they sketch, albeit ones where the empirical significance is not witnessed by a gauge symmetry but instead by a superficially similar boundary symmetry. Furthermore, the latter casts doubt on whether one really abandons Galileo's ship in such scenarios. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid TimesPedro Mora-Ramírez, María Amo-Hernández, and Paula García-RodríguezAnswering the Knock at the Door, Welcoming Utopian Futures, The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid Times, May 21–24, 2023, University of Huelva, Spain, and University of Calgary, CanadaThe COVID-19 pandemic has fostered new adversities and vulnerabilities, prompting reflection on the economic, social, and political paradigms that endanger human and nonhuman (...) lives. For many, it was anxiety and uncertainty that “knock[ed] at the door”; for others, however, those same feelings of unease prompted one of hopefulness: reflecting on the possibilities for resilience and regeneration in the process of changing our vision of the world.1 The Knock at the Door conference brought contemporary utopianism to the forefront of thinking about how to respond to global crises while remaining attentive to other adversities of daily life. Scholars and artists answered the knock in an attempt to examine paths toward utopia, and to take advantage of the regenerative and resilient potential of the present.The conference was the culmination of author/activist Larissa Lai’s fellowship period at the University of Huelva. The 2022–23 María Zambrano Fellowship for the academic year2 allowed Lai to complete the project “Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid Times,” carried out in collaboration with the Huelva research group led by Professor Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, who hosted a number of online and in-person seminars on speculative fiction with Lai. The Knock at the Door conference, marking the end of Lai’s fellowship, created yet another space for scholars, artists, and critics to discuss the potential of utopian narratives. Lai asks: “What does our cultural moment require, and how can we get where we need to go from where we are? How can literature, especially speculative fiction literature, help us get from here to there?”3 [End Page 641] The intention of the conference was to encourage others to continue Lai’s work on how to imagine futures where human and posthuman beings need to remain vigilant to adversities. Utopian scholars, among others, might find the complications of “getting there from here” closely related to Lai’s conception of “insurgent utopias,” or “emergent insurgency.” They could find Lai’s concept of “insurgent utopianism” interesting as it lays the foundations of futurity in terms of crisis responses.The aim of the conference was to explore the imagination of better futures through utopian thinking and practice. In addition, it focused on “the knock at the door,” which is “a moment of contingent arrival... open to cooptation, destruction, bastardization, incorporation, death, or defusal.” Yet, it presents “the powerful possibility of critique—narratively or discursively, in its very materiality.”4 One way of doing this might be to look back at the past century of utopianism and ask who or what has been missing. The conference took up Lai’s idea of insurgent utopianism as a method of paving a path toward a multitude of dreams and actions, all shaped by the unique circumstances of one’s positionality.After the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for utopian thinking has become more pressing than ever. New horizons of hope must be created in the face of emerging anxieties. In a world where anthropocentrism is showing signs of its deadly potential, conference participants reflected on the relevance of the utopian imagination to political resistance and resilience building.Utopian Visions: Contesting Better Worlds in Neoliberal and Feminist UtopiasThe first two panels of the conference addressed the critique of two dominant theoretical (and interrelated) frameworks: capitalism and neoliberalism. Speakers reflected on both in light of theoretical interventions by theorists Rosi Braidotti and Francesca Ferrando. Panelists Benjamin Ghan and Marc Lynch reflected on how creative writers envision ideal worlds and temporalities. In Ghan’s view, utopian narratives create a symphony of voices historically excluded from the category of “the human”: women; LGBTQ+ people; Indigenous peoples. In a similar vein, Lynch described his own novel, A Wasp’s Waist, as highlighting the impossibility of imagining utopias within the capitalist paradigm—and thus the necessity of imagining futures beyond capitalism, and beyond... (shrink)

In this article, the authors bring two personal journeys together: one author’s liberationist journey, sparked by a search for justice and liberation in the slums of Guatemala City, and the other’s lifelong commitment to practical theology and spatial justice in South Africa. A practical theology of liberation is the result of life experiences in countries of the Global South amidst the search for justice and liberation. The worlds that come together in this article are René Girard’s mimetic theory, liberation theology (...) and practical theology. This article raises the question of the cross-contextuality of practical theology and the theological application of mimetic theory to develop innovative theological methodologies that respond to the collective woundedness of the urban context in the Global South.Contribution: The main contribution of this article is the use of three seemingly different theological approaches in conjunction. This article opens the door to inform practical theology with René Girard’s mimetic theory and liberation theology. (shrink)

Boston Medical Center/Boston University Medical Campus recently reduced certain requirements for human subjects research where this could be done without adversely affecting the rights and welfare of participants, in anticipation of changes in the Final Common Rule. Modifications affected exempt and expedited categories, approval periods, ceding review, Quality Improvement/Quality Assessment activities, and some requirements for pregnant women, prisoners, and children. This case study may assist other institutions in responding to the Final Common Rule.

The article is an attempt to uncover the metaphysical assumptions implicit in the otherwise highly scientific contemporary identity theories. 1) the identity statement, Being a philosophical interpretation of dualistic psychophysical correspondence, Requires for its support a justificatory ontological or linguistic premise. 2) the conception of the mental as the hidden, Unobservable, Subjective and private is a metaphysical distortion with historical roots in an empiricist and positivist interpretation of the cartesian dichotomy of thinking and extended thing. 3) acceptance of an artificial (...) dichotomy and reliance on a narrow conceptual framework lead identity theorists to misrepresent the nature of the mental-Physical relation and to see ontological reductionism as the only solution. 4) alternative explanations are possible which bypass the shortcomings mentioned and propose the irreducibility of mind to body without postulating a dualistic ontology; merleau-Ponty's and wittgenstein's theories are good examples of an ontological monism which allows for the reality and meaningfulness of the mental within the scope of the physical. (edited). (shrink)

Introduction The digital age has revolutionized the way we think, communicate, work, and enjoy life. Technology has increased the pace of life at an ...

This essay examines Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero's ontology of uniqueness through a reading of Alex Haley's novel Roots, and the recent television adaptation of that book. If Cavarero has insisted throughout her work that we need to challenge the philosophical privileging of abstract universality and focus instead on the irreducibility of embodied singularity, and if such a move in her work has always relied on a feminist analysis of the role women play in such a drama, I argue that attention (...) to issues of race and the institution of slavery both supports and complicates her analysis in meaningful ways. (shrink)