New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects (...) that comprise the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie. (shrink)

In _Biocultural Creatures_, Samantha Frost brings feminist and political theory together with findings in the life sciences to recuperate the category of the human for politics. Challenging the idea of human exceptionalism as well as other theories of subjectivity that rest on a distinction between biology and culture, Frost proposes that humans are biocultural creatures who quite literally are cultured within the material, social, and symbolic worlds they inhabit. Through discussions about carbon, the functions of cell membranes, (...) the activity of genes and proteins, the work of oxygen, and the passage of time, Frost recasts questions about the nature of matter, identity, and embodiment. In doing so, she elucidates the imbrication of the biological and cultural within the corporeal self. In remapping the relation of humans to their habitats and arriving at the idea that humans are biocultural creatures, Frost provides new theoretical resources for responding to political and environmental crises and for thinking about how to transform the ways we live. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes is an iconic figure who serves as an easy reference for pundits commenting on the brutality of war as well as for critics of a distinctly modern individualism in which calculating and rapacious self-interest is the cause of the violence, destruction, and exploitation endemic to the contemporary world. Frost's reading of Hobbes's philosophy shows us that underlying such visions of self and politics is another iconic figure: that of the Cartesian subject. What gives the iconic Hobbes his (...) hardcore individualism and its corollary accounts of instrumentalism, conflict, and absolutism is a Cartesian rendering of the self as split into mind and body. Carefully elaborating Hobbes's materialist ontology, _Lessons from a Materialist Thinker_ challenges both our implicit Cartesian assumptions about the self and the commonplace Hobbes that so readily figures violence in our political imagination. Through his materialism, Hobbes presents an alternative modern account of self-consciousness, reason, agency, power, freedom, and responsibility. In doing so, he shows that our fundamental intersubjectivity and interdependence require that we pursue peace above all else. (shrink)

Drawing on research in posthumanism, science and technology studies and biosemiotics, this essay analyses the challenges epigenetic processes pose for our understanding of embodied subjectivity. It uses the work of Charles Sanders Peirce to argue that epigenetic processes are indexical in their patterned logic, that they are meaning-making processes and that, consequently, they can be conceived as a form of attention. To conceive of bodies as paying attention through epigenetic processes is to rupture the distinction between matter and meaning that (...) governs many philosophical categories. This in turn invites us to recalibrate our conception of the relationship between self, body and world. (shrink)

This article argues that feminist theorists should conceive of the life sciences not only as a factual resource but also as a figural resource. It proposes that in shifting our conceptual orientation to biological science from fact to figure, feminists will be able to give theoretical life to scientific findings about the ways in which social environments and material habitats are processes integral to our development, growth, and social and political well-being. The figuration of ourselves as specifically biocultural creatures will (...) enable feminists to gain a stronger theoretical and analytic purchase on the ongoing mutual shaping of the biological and social dimensions of existence. This, in turn, will enable feminists to creatively re-imagine the fields and fora of feminist politics. (shrink)

Observing that René Descartes's dualistic philosophy haunts our conceptualization of matter, this essay argues that Thomas Hobbes develops a non-Cartesian materialism, which is to say that he articulates a materialism in which matter is not construed as essentially unthinking. Tracing his accounts of sense, perception, and thinking, this essay reconstructs Hobbes's account of self-consciousness and proposes that in a subject conceived as wholly embodied, self-knowledge or self-awareness takes the form of memory. The essay elaborates how Hobbes 's account of self-consciousness (...) as memory transforms our understanding both of the form taken by the subject's self-mastery and of the relationship between the individual and the collective. It concludes by speculating about the implications of this account for our understanding of Hobbes's theories of ethics and politics. (shrink)

Este ensayo aborda el tratamiento que Hobbes da a la complejidad de la causalidad en conjunción con su análisis materialista del modo en que el miedo orienta al sujeto en el tiempo con el fin de defender que para Hobbes el miedo es tanto una respuesta como una negación de la imposibilidad de la auto-soberanía. El ensayo argumenta que los movimientos de la memoria y la anticipación que Hobbes describe como centrales en la pasión del miedo transforman el campo causal (...) del sujeto de tal manera que le da un sentido de posible dominio tanto sobre sí como sobre el mundo que la rodea. Al sugerir que el miedo fomenta la ilusión de autonomía en la agencia de los individuos, Hobbes señala la posibilidad de que el inmenso y temible poder atribuido al soberano no sea simplemente una respuesta a la necesidad de sofocar el desenfreno y el desorden, sino también una condición para el sentido de cada individuo de su propia soberanía. (shrink)

The interview is a follow-up from Samantha Frost’s article, ‘The Attentive Body’, in Body & Society 26. Tomoko Tamari invites Frost to explore her interest in ‘biocultural creatures’, with its focus on ‘bodies’ responsive self-transformation’ in epigenetic processes, and unfolds Peirce’s account of the index for understanding meaning-making in biological processes. Tamari also introduces Katherine Hayles’s notion of ‘cognitive nonconscious’ to raise the question of the possible theoretical and mechanical similarities/discrepancies between epigenetic processes in organisms and the (...) meaning-making process in computational systems. Drawing on Jacob von Uexkull’s notion of ‘umwelt’ and introducing Yoshimi Kawade’s remarks on a living being’s subjective orientation in environments, a further question about ‘intention’ and ‘subjectivity’ enables Frost to further unpack her notion of ‘the attentive self’ and discuss its relation to ‘intentionality’ and ‘referentiality’ in epigenetic processes. Finally, Samantha Frost mentions her current projects on the connection between ‘attention-as-responsive-self-transformation’ and ‘mode-of-living-as-form-of-life’. (shrink)

Review Essay: New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics , eds. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

The other contributions address philosophical problems arising in specific domains of international law, such as human rights law, international economic law, ...

Alfred Tarski was a nominalist. But he published almost nothing on his nominalist views, and until recently the only sources scholars had for studying Tarski’s nominalism were conversational reports from his friends and colleagues. However, a recently-discovered archival resource provides the most detailed information yet about Tarski’s nominalism. Tarski spent the academic year 1940-41 at Harvard, along with many of the leading lights of scientific philosophy: Carnap, Quine, Hempel, Goodman, and (for the fall semester) Russell. This group met frequently to (...) discuss logical and philosophical topics of shared interest. At these meetings, Carnap took dictation notes, which are now stored in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy. Interestingly, and somewhat surprisingly, the plurality of notes covers a proposal Tarski presents for a nominalist language of unified science. This chapter addresses the following questions about this project. What, precisely, is Tarski’s nominalist position? What rationales are given for Tarski’s nominalist stance—and are these rationales defensible? Finally, how is Tarskian nominalism of 1941 related to current nominalist projects? (shrink)

The “local food” movement has been growing since at least the mid- twentieth century with the founding of the Rodale Institute. Since then, local food has increasingly become a goal of food systems. Today, books and articles on local food have become commonplace, with popular authors such as Barbara Kingsolver1 and Michael Pollan2 espousing the virtues of eating locally. Additionally, local food initiatives, such as the “farm- tofork,” “Buying Local,” and “Slow Food” have gained a strong international following with clearly (...) visible impacts on the food industry and policy. The numbers of local farmers’ markets, community- supported agriculture projects, and community gardens have been on the rise steadily since 1994. (shrink)

This book provides a unique presentation of Simone Weilʹs life, work, and her contributions to feminist thought. Long before postmodern or deconstructionist ideas became current, Weil was concerned with recognizing the absence of consistency and the continual presence of reversals and contradictions in life. The struggle to clarify her "reading" of reality and her perceptions of meaning was an ongoing one and she challenged contemporary views on complex issues such as human nature, good and evil, divinity, and truth. In this (...) introduction to Simone Weilʹs ideas, and the political and intellectual circumstances of her work, the authors make Weilʹs complex and at times elusive ideas accessible to readers. They offer their own interpretation of her work and delineate how Weilʹs ideas evolved, while providing compelling excerpts from Weilʹs writings to let her speak for herself. Her work offers a voice for those segments of society that are generally underrepresented, misrepresented, or totally silent in conventional historical and philosophical writings. -- Back cover. (shrink)

Biases and misunderstanding stemming from pre-training in Generative Pre-Trained Transformers are more likely for users of underrepresented English varieties, since the training dataset favors dominant Englishes (e.g., American English). We investigate (potential) bias in GPT-4 when it interacts with Trinidadian English Creole (TEC), a non-hegemonic English variety that partially overlaps with standardized English (SE) but still contains distinctive characteristics. (1) Comparable responses: we asked GPT-4 18 questions in TEC and SE and compared the content and detail of the responses. (2) (...) Accurate translation: we assessed how accurate and authentic 29 TEC and 34 SE translations were. (3) Language knowledge and attitudes: we asked what language the prompts were written in and categorized the responses and examined any language attitudes that were exhibited. Content and detail in prompts were comparable. The model was proficient at translating TEC pronouns and many grammatical categories. It was weaker at processing spelling and vocabulary items. In addition, it produced several inauthentic features. Only 39% of TEC-generated sentences were fully grammatical. While GPT-4 was perfect at identifying SE, it was 21% accurate at identifying TEC, which it sometimes classified as English with “errors” and “corrected”. GPT-4’s scope of use is limited for non-hegemonic English users. It is problematic that some of its analyses perpetuate bias against underrepresented Englishes. Increased research on lesser-documented Englishes is necessary and we anticipate that this problem affects dialects of other languages. We intend to partner with Trinidadian stakeholders to train GPT-4 in the future. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between the law and pervasive and persistent reasonable disagreement about justice. It reveals the central moral function and creative force of reasonable disagreement in and about the law and shows why and how lawyers and legal philosophers should take reasonable conflict more seriously. Even though the law should be regarded as the primary mode of settlement of our moral conflicts,it can, and should, also be the object and the forum of further moral conflicts. There is (...) more to the rule of law than convergence and determinacy and it is important therefore to question the importance of agreement in law and politics. By addressing in detail issues pertaining to the nature and sources of disagreement, its extent and significance, as well as the procedural, institutional and substantive responses to disagreement in the law and their legitimacy, this book suggests the value of a comprehensive approach to thinking about conflict, which until recently has been analysed in a compartmentalized way. It aims to provide a fully-fledged political morality of conflict by drawing on the analysis of topical jurisprudential questions in the new light of disagreement. Developing such a global theory of disagreement in the law should be read in the context of the broader effort of reconstructing a complete account of democratic law-making in pluralistic societies. The book will be of value not only to legal philosophers and constitutional theorists, but also to political and democratic theorists, as well as to all those interested in public decision-making in conditions of conflict. (shrink)

_A compelling set of lectures on political obligation that contributes to ongoing debates in political theory and intellectual history_ This stimulating collection of lectures by the late Judith Shklar on political obligation is paired with a scholarly introduction that offers an overview of her life, illuminates the connections among her teaching, research, and publications, and explains why her lectures still resonate with us and contribute to current debates in political theory and intellectual history.

The essays in this book clarify the technical, legal, ethical, and social aspects of the interaction between eHealth technologies and surveillance practices. The book starts out by presenting a theoretical framework on eHealth and surveillance, followed by an introduction to the various ideas on eHealth and surveillance explored in the subsequent chapters. Issues addressed in the chapters include privacy and data protection, social acceptance of eHealth, cost-effective and innovative healthcare, as well as the privacy aspects of employee wellness programs using (...) eHealth, the use of mobile health app data by insurance companies, advertising industry and law enforcement, and the ethics of Big Data use in healthcare. A closing chapter draws on the previous content to explore the notion that people are 'under observation', bringing together two hitherto unrelated streams of scholarship interested in observation: eHealth and surveillance studies. In short, the book represents a first essential step towards cross-fertilization and offers new insights into the legal, ethical and social significance of being 'under observation'. (shrink)

Interest in republicanism as a political theory has burgeoned in recent years, but its implications for the understanding of law have remained largely unexplored. Legal Republicanism is the first book to offer a comprehensive, critical survey of the potential for creating republican accounts of fundamental issues in law and legal theory.

This article surveys recent feminist contributions to moral philosophy with an emphasis on those works which engage with debates within mainstream ethics. The article begins by examining a tension said to arise from the two criteria a theory must meet if it is to count as feminist moral theory: the women's experience requirement and the feminist conclusion requirement. Subsequent sections deal with feminist relational theories of rights, feminist work on responsibility and feminist contractarian approaches to ethics. A final section looks (...) at the application of some feminist moral theories to the problem of abortion. (shrink)

Introduction: an 'untimely' political thought for serious times -- The twentieth-century politics of contempt -- 'Undisguised influences' -- Tragic beginnings mystic 'communion' with nature -- An artist's point of view -- Rethinking participation beyond 'romanticism' -- A stranger to the world of ressentiment -- Commencement of freedom -- Sisyphus or happiness in hell -- Nothing is possible, everything is permitted -- The absurd and power -- Combat with nihilism -- Between Sade and the Dandy -- Conclusion.

Background The review of human participant research by Research Ethics Committees or Institutional Review Boards is a complex multi-faceted process that cannot be reduced to an algorithm. However, this does not give RECs/ IRBs permission to be inconsistent in their specific requirements to researchers or in their final opinions. In England the Health Research Authority coordinates 67 committees, and has adopted a consistency improvement plan including a process called “Shared Ethical Debate” where multiple committees review the same project. Committee reviews (...) are compared for consistency by analysing the resulting minutes. Methods We present a description of the ShED process. We report an analysis of minutes created by research ethics committees participating in two ShED exercises, and compare them to minutes produced in a published “mystery shopper” exercise. We propose a consistency score by defining top themes for each exercise, and calculating the ratio between top themes and total themes identified by each committee for each ShED exercise. Results Our analysis highlights qualitative differences between the ShED 19, ShED 20 and “mystery shopper” exercises. The quantitative measure of consistency showed only one committee across the three exercises with more than half its total themes as top themes. The average consistency scores for the three exercises were 0.23, 0.35 and 0.32. There is a statistically significant difference between the ShED 19 exercise, and the ShED 20 and mystery shopper exercises. Conclusions ShED exercises are effective in identifying inconsistency between ethics committees and we describe a scoring method that could be used to quantify this. However, whilst a level of inconsistency is probably inevitable in research ethics committee reviews, studies must move beyond the ShED methodology to understand why inconsistency occurs, and what an acceptable level of inconsistency might be. (shrink)

The review of human participant research by Research Ethics Committees or Institutional Review Boards is a complex multi-faceted process that cannot be reduced to an algorithm. However, this does not give RECs/ IRBs permission to be inconsistent in their specific requirements to researchers or in their final opinions. In England the Health Research Authority coordinates 67 committees, and has adopted a consistency improvement plan including a process called “Shared Ethical Debate” where multiple committees review the same project. Committee reviews are (...) compared for consistency by analysing the resulting minutes. We present a description of the ShED process. We report an analysis of minutes created by research ethics committees participating in two ShED exercises, and compare them to minutes produced in a published “mystery shopper” exercise. We propose a consistency score by defining top themes for each exercise, and calculating the ratio between top themes and total themes identified by each committee for each ShED exercise. Our analysis highlights qualitative differences between the ShED 19, ShED 20 and “mystery shopper” exercises. The quantitative measure of consistency showed only one committee across the three exercises with more than half its total themes as top themes. The average consistency scores for the three exercises were 0.23, 0.35 and 0.32. There is a statistically significant difference between the ShED 19 exercise, and the ShED 20 and mystery shopper exercises. ShED exercises are effective in identifying inconsistency between ethics committees and we describe a scoring method that could be used to quantify this. However, whilst a level of inconsistency is probably inevitable in research ethics committee reviews, studies must move beyond the ShED methodology to understand why inconsistency occurs, and what an acceptable level of inconsistency might be. (shrink)

Foucault contra Habermas is an incisive examination of, and a comprehensive introduction to, the debate between Foucault and Habermas over the meaning of enlightenment and modernity. It reprises the key issues in the argument between critical theory and genealogy and is organised around three complementary themes: defining the context of the debate; examining the theoretical and conceptual tools used; and discussing the implications for politics and criticism. In a detailed reply to Habermas' Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, this volume explains the (...) difference between Habermas' philosophical practice and Foucault's between the analytics of truth and the politics of truth. Many of the most difficult arguments in the exchange are subject to a detailed critical analysis. This examination also includes discussion of the ethics of dialogue; the practice of criticism; the politics of recognition, and the function of civil society and democracy. (shrink)

Habermas does not rule out the possibility of violence in language. In fact his account explicitly licenses a broad conception of violence as ‘systematically distorted communication’. Yet he does rule out the possibility that language simultaneously imposes as it discloses. That is, his argument precludes the possibility of recognizing that there is an antinomy at the heart of language and philosophical reason. This occlusion of the simultaneously world-disclosing and world-imposing character of language feeds and sustains Habermas’s legal and political arguments, (...) where he states that in order to achieve consensus rational deliberation must eliminate force. In this paper, I claim that this argument operates through a manoeuvre that leaves Habermas’s position curiously blind to its own predicament. To explain why, I turn to Kant’s treatment of the problem of evil in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Here, as in the Western philosophical tradition more generally, evil has no separate existence: it is folded back into Kant’s philosophical scheme. Arendt notes that as soon as Kant identifies the problem of evil he rationalizes it into comprehensible motives. I will show how, through a move that is structurally similar to Kant’s rationalization of evil, Habermas rationalizes and attempts to eliminate violence from his consideration of law and language. In Habermas’s work, law and language appear as ciphers for reason. The case to be made here is that Habermas’s inability to recognize the paradoxical character of language and reason makes his work blind to the violence in which it is unavoidably implicated. (shrink)

The concept of medical necessity is often used to explain or justify certain decisions—for example, which treatments should be allowed under certain conditions—as though it had an obvious, agreed-upon meaning as well as an inherent normative force. In introducing this special issue of Clinical Ethics on medical necessity, we argue that the term, as used in various discourses, generally lacks a definition that is clear, non-circular, conceptually plausible, and fit for purpose. We propose that future work on this concept should (...) address three main questions: what medical necessity is (i.e., what makes something medically necessary, as opposed to something else); what the concept does (what ‘work’ is it doing when invoked in different settings); and what should follow, normatively, from the fact that something is indeed medically necessary (on some plausible conception). (shrink)

This essay explores the development of Simone Weil's conception of obedience across religious, political, and ethical contexts. By bringing together these strands of Weil's thought, it aims to illuminate some important connections in her treatment of obedience throughout these diverse topics. The author argues that Weil's political treatment of obedience is deeply influenced by ideas in Christian thought, and that this account is situated within an understanding of obedience in the natural world which is itself ethically loaded. Hence it is (...) suggested that Weil's account of obedience has something to offer philosophy today: namely, a conception of obedience which recognises the practical and ethical need for obeying others, but which is distinct from the mere submission to power. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) calls for medical practitioners to “integrate” our best available evidence into clinical practice. A significant amount of the literature on EBM takes this integration to be unproblematic, focusing on questions like how to interpret evidence and engage with patient values, rather than critically looking at how these features of EBM can be implemented together. Other authors have also commented on this gap in the literature, for example, identifying the lack of clarity about how patient preferences and evidence (...) from trials is supposed to be integrated in practice. In this paper, I look at this issue from an epistemological perspective, (looking at how different types of knowledge in EBM can be used to make sounds judgements). In particular, I introduce an epistemological issue for this integration problem, which I call the epistemic integration problem. This is essentially the problem of how we can use information that is both general (eg, about a population sample) and descriptive (eg, about what expected outcomes are) to reach clinical judgements that are individualized (applying to a particular patient) and normative (about what is best for their health). (shrink)

We speculate with Hegel about language, critiquing interpretations of Hegel’s views on language given by Jim Vernon, John McCumber, Stephen Houlgate, and Michael N. Forster, as well as defending Sophisticated Radical Whorfianism from the objections of Maria Francisca Reines and Jesse Prinz. Prior to discussing Forster, we explicate Hegel’s views on mechanical memory. We conclude by discussing why, although thought grows up, it does not move out.

Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and novelist who wrote extensively on the themes of love, goodness, religion, and morality. In this article, we explore her notion of ‘moral vision’; the idea that morality is not just about how we act and make choices, but how we see the world in a much broader sense.

In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller draws a striking connection between aesthetic value and individual and political freedom, claiming that, ‘it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom’. However, contemporary ways of thinking about freedom and aesthetic value make it difficult to see what the connection could be. Through a careful reconstruction of the Letters, we argue that Schiller’s theory of aesthetic value serves as the key to understanding not only his (...) view of aesthetic engagement, but also his distinctive account of individual and political freedom. In Part I, we develop a reconstruction of Schiller's view that aesthetic value is the only path to individual freedom and in Part II we analyze how Schiller connects aesthetic value to political freedom. In the end, we show that Schiller defends a non-hedonic, action-oriented, communitarian theory of aesthetic value and a theory of freedom that makes the aesthetic not just supererogatory but fundamental for any fully autonomous life. Although we have lost touch with this way of thinking about aesthetic value and freedom, we submit that it is illuminating for contemporary thinking about both. (shrink)