Modern and Postmodern Cutting Edge Films closely examines a wide variety of major filmic texts that have established permanent, iconic shifts in modern and postmodern US culture and filmic practices. These films and their often visionary, trend-setting auteurs each introduced new manners of seeing that were imitated by later directors and ultimately, absorbed by popular culture itself. The primary rationale for writing this collection was quite simple: it is new and different. No anthology exists that examines the concept of the (...) cutting edge film across such a remarkably wide variety of genres and with such a diversity of theoretical approaches and subject matter. Equally important, all the contributors bring a unique voice and multi-disciplinary perspective to their respective chapters. This anthology will be of great interest to scholars from a variety of disciplines, including film studies, historical studies, and gender and genre studies. As far as possible, contributors have minimized a great deal of typical theoretical terminology so that lay readers who possess some familiarity with basic film analysis and theory can understand the text. It can be used as a classroom text in both graduate and upper-level undergraduate film classes. Modern and Postmodern Cutting Edge Films is an anthology that instructors of film theory and history can use for many years to come. Indeed, we feel that this remarkable collection of essays will itself become an indispensable, cutting edge text of film scholarship. (shrink)

Fricker shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be forcefully discussed.

I develop a broadly reliabilist theory of non-ideal epistemic rationality and argue that if it is correct we should reject the recently popular idea that the standards of non-ideal epistemic rationality are mere social conventions.

When we hope to explain and perhaps vindicate a practice that is internally diverse, philosophy faces a methodological challenge. Such subject matters are likely to have explanatorily basic features that are not necessary conditions. This prompts a move away from analysis to some other kind of philosophical explanation. This paper proposes a paradigm based explanation of one such subject matter: blame. First, a paradigm form of blame is identified—‘Communicative Blame’—where this is understood as a candidate for an explanatorily basic form (...) of blame. Second, its point and purpose in our lives is investigated and found to reside in its power to increase the alignment of the blamer and the wrongdoer's moral understandings. Third, the hypothesis that Communicative Blame is an explanatorily basic form of blame is tested out by seeing how far other kinds of blame can reasonably be understood as derivative, especially in respect of blame's point and purpose. Finally, a new and quasi-political worry about blame is raised. (shrink)

"'There is only one thing that is certain, namely that we can have nothing certain; and therefore it is not certain that we can have nothing certain,' Samuel Butler once said, expressing in that mindbloggler all the elements required to form a classical paradox. Throughout the ages wise men and jesters alike have been intrigued by such mental twists and riddles which defy common sense and yet appear to be true." -- Dust jacket.

In this paper I respond to three commentaries on Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. In response to Alcoff, I primarily defend my conception of how an individual hearer might develop virtues of epistemic justice. I do this partly by drawing on empirical social psychological evidence supporting the possibility of reflective self-regulation for prejudice in our judgements. I also emphasize the fact that individual virtue is only part of the solution – structural mechanisms also have an essential role (...) in combating epistemic injustice. My response to Goldberg principally concerns my perceptual account of the epistemology of testimony, which I defend as being both well-motivated and best categorized as a species of non-inferentialism. I also explain its relation to the reductionism/non-reductionism contrast, and defend my resistance to casting it as any kind of default view. In response to Hookway, I contrast discriminatory with distributive forms of epistemic injustice, and defend the basic taxonomy I present in the book, which casts testimonial and hermeneutical injustice as the two fundamental discriminatory forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

There are two kinds of forgiveness that appear as radically different from one another: one presents forgiveness as essentially earned through remorseful apology; the other presents it as fundamentally non-earned—a gift. The first, which I label Moral Justice Forgiveness, adopts a stance of moral demand and conditionality; the second, which I label Gifted Forgiveness, adopts a stance of non-demand and un-conditionality. Each is real; yet how can two such different responses to wrongdoing be of one and the same kind? This (...) paper explains how, by showing that the basic role each plays in moral-social life is the same; and that one is conceptually and therefore historically prior to the other. The result is pluralism, with each kind of forgiveness represented as distinctive in both its psychology and its normativity; and yet an ordered pluralism—with Moral Justice Forgiveness revealed as the root kind, and Gifted Forgiveness a culturally contingent iteration. (shrink)

Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism—the ‘relativism of distance’. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical. I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our (...) lights are a matter of their living according to the moral thinking of their day, judgements of blame are out of order. Finally, I will propose a form of moral judgement we may sometimes quite properly direct towards historically distant agents when blame is inappropriate—moral-epistemic disappointment. Together these two proposals may help release us from the grip of the idea that moral appraisal always involves the potential applicability of blame, and so from a key source of the relativist idea that moral appraisal is inappropriate over distance. (shrink)

It has been proposed that the policies and practices of food sovereignty, unlike those of today's hegemonic food/agricultural system, provide the means for satisfying and safeguarding the right to food security for everyone everywhere. My principal objective in this article, which gains its significance in the light of an explanatory critique of the current system, is to explore how scientific research — using what kinds of methodologies, and building on experiences of what and of whom? — can constructively inform these (...) practices and policies, and contribute towards appraising this proposal. (shrink)

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political (...) significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom. (shrink)

R.I.G Hughes offers the first detailed and accessible analysis of the Hilbert-space models used in quantum theory and explains why they are so successful.

This book reconstructs Heidegger’s philosophy of time by reading his work with and against a series of key interlocutors that he nominates as being central to his own critical history of time. In doing so, it explains what makes time of such significance for Heidegger and argues that Heidegger can contribute to contemporary debates in the philosophy of time. Time is a central concern for Heidegger, yet his thinking on the subject is fragmented, making it difficult to grasp its depth, (...) complexity, and promise. Heidegger traces out a history that focuses on the conceptualisations of time put forward by Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Husserl—an “alternative history of time” that challenges how time has been defined and studied within both philosophy and the sciences. This book explores what happens when we take seriously Heidegger’s claim that these seven figures are essential to any understanding of time, setting out what this can tell us about existence, possibility, and philosophy as a historical discipline. Heidegger’s Alternative History of Time will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on Heidegger, phenomenology, the philosophy of time, and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Interpreting Bernard Williams’s ethical philosophy is not easy. His style is deceptively conversational; apparently direct, yet argumentatively inexplicit and allusive. He is moreover committed to evading ready-made philosophical “-isms.” All this reinforces the already distinct impression that the structure of his philosophy is a web of interrelated commitments where none has unique priority. Against this impression, however, I will venture that the contours of his philosophy become clearest if one considers that there is a single, unchanging root conviction from which (...) his ethical philosophy grows. Despite the perpetual motion of his philosophical thought—its erudition, originality, range, and unceasing forward momentum—still, I contend, there is something unchanging at the heart of it. I will show this by reference to three signature theses: internal reasons, the relativism of distance, and the porous borders of philosophy and history. I will argue that the root conviction of which these are the fruits is the conviction that the constraints of universal rationality seriously underdetermine how one should live. This, I believe, is the vision of the human ethical condition that constitutes the largely inexplicit yet utterly fundamental presupposition beneath Williams’s ethical philosophy taken as a whole. I label the object of this root conviction ethical freedom, and thus portray Williams as a philosopher of ethical freedom. (shrink)

Since its publication in 1918, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West has been the object of academic controversy and opprobrium. In their efforts to dispose of it, scholars have resorted to a variety of tactics: bitter invective, icy scorn, urbane mockery, or simply pretending that the book is not there. Yet generations of readers have refused to be warned off, finding in Spengler a prophetic voice and a source of profound intellectual excitement. H. Stuart Hughes's Oswald Spengler offers (...) a judicious and objective reading of Spengler's works that admirably fills the gap between hypercritical invective and naive enthusiasm. This pioneering volume makes clear why Spengler's pessimistic reading of the fate of European civilization continues to resonate with contemporary anxieties. Despite the author's self-imposed intellectual and social isolation, Spengler's work was as Hughes demonstrates, a part of the enormous effort of intellectual reevaluation that has characterized the early twentieth century. Viewing Spengler in the broadest possible perspective, the author places his thought in its cultural relationship to that of such predecessors as Giambattista Vico, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nikolai Danilevsky and contemporaries including Benedetto Croce, Henri Bergson, and Vilfredo Pareto. A chapter of Hughes's book is devoted to Spengler's influence on later cyclical thinkers such as Arnold Toynbee and Pitirim Sorokin. Another chapter clarifies the essentially antagonistic relationship between his thought and Nazi ideology. Throughout, Hughes is carefully attuned to the complex and often bewildering shifts of Spengler's ideas and manner, providing a unified picture of the sober historian; the lofty seer; the cool, detached observer; and the impassioned participant. In his introduction to this new edition, Hughes comments on the timeliness of Spengler's message with respect to technology and environmental issues and draws some unexpected and fascinating parallels between Spengler's thought and that of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Oswald Spengler offers an illuminating view of the achievements and limitations of one of the most influential and representative figures of the twentieth century. It will be of concern to intellectual historians, philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists. (shrink)

We gain information from collective, often institutional bodies all the time—from the publications of committees, news teams, or research groups, from web sites such as Wikipedia, and so on—but do these bodies ever function as genuine group testifiers as opposed to mere group sources of information? In putting the question this way I invoke a distinction made, if briefly, by Edward Craig, which I believe to be of deep significance in thinking about the distinctiveness of the speech act of testimony. (...) The distinction is that between somebody’s functioning as a ‘good informant’ and their functioning merely as a ‘source of information’. The difference between these has, as he remarks, a crucial ethical aspect: What I have in mind is the special flavour of situations in which human beings treat each other as subjects with a common purpose, rather than as objects from which services, in this case true belief, can be extracted. In this paper I shall try to bring out the distinctive nature of the role of good informant in a way that helps to clarify what is at stake in asking whether there can be group testimony in the sense of genuinely collective testimony—that is to say, where the group testifier is a collective and not merely a sum of individuals testifying in one or another form of aggregated chorus. (shrink)

The dual aim of this article is to reveal and explain a certain phenomenon of epistemic injustice as manifested in testimonial practice, and to arrive at a characterisation of the anti–prejudicial intellectual virtue that is such as to counteract it. This sort of injustice occurs when prejudice on the part of the hearer leads to the speaker receiving less credibility than he or she deserves. It is suggested that where this phenomenon is systematic it constitutes an important form of oppression. (...) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between rational authority and social power, proceeding by way of a philosophical genealogy derived from Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature. The position advocated avoids the errors both of the 'traditionalist' (who regards the socio-political as irrelevant to epistemology) and of the 'reductivist' (who regards reason as just another form of social power). The argument is that a norm of credibility governs epistemic practice in the state of nature, which, when socially manifested, is (...) likely to imitate the structures of social power. A phenomenon of epistemic injustice is explained, and the politicizing implication for epistemology educed. (shrink)

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from (...) the self, torn from the social fabric, and thrust into commercial transactions -- as organs, secretions, reproductive capacities, and tissues -- responding to the dictates of an incipiently global marketplace. Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as 'text', the chapters in this book examine not only images of the body-turned-merchandise but actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities, semi-magical tokens, symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topics covered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses, the biopolitics of cells, sperm banks and eugenics, to the international trafficking of kidneys, the development of 'transplant tourism', to the idioms of corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshly commodity. This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropology, law, medicine, and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete ways in which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turn remakes social relations and cultural meanings. (shrink)

[T]he dominated live in a world structured by others for their purposes — purposes that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees inimical to our development and even existence.We are perhaps used to the idea that there are various species of oppression: political, economic, or sexual, for instance. But where there is the phenomenon that Nancy Hartsock picks out in saying that the world is “structured” by the powerful to the detriment of the (...) powerless, there is another species of oppression at work, one that has not been registered in mainstream epistemology: epistemic oppression. The word ‘structured’ may be read materially, so as to imply that social institutions and practices favour the powerful, or ontologically, so as to imply that the powerful somehow constitute the world. But for present purposes I am interested only in an epistemological reading, which implies that the powerful have some sort of unfair advantage in “structuring” our understandings of the social world. I will try to present an account of what this initially vague idea involves. I hope thereby to explain an exact sense in which the powerful can have a kind of epistemic advantage that means the powerless are epistemically oppressed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:uippraisals from the 'Past THE CLEAREST INTELLECT OF OUR AGEl H UGH MACLENNAN 19°7-199° R cently I have been rereading Bertrand Russell, and in so doing I suddenly realized that lowe to this man a good deal of such happiness as I enjoy. Over the years I had forgotten how great my debt was, but when I reread one of his books which I first read as a student, (...) I understood the extent to which he had liberated me from the psychological sadism of Calvin and Knox, to whom I had been unduly exposed when young. It is probably impossible for anyone entirely to escape once these two have got their hands around his throat, but Russell enabled me to escape a litde. 1 [This essay was recently discovered during the cataloguing for BRACERS of an obscure class of correspondence. Mr. Joseph w. Devine had sent Russell a clipping of the essay's appearance in' the Philadelphia Sunday But/etin, of 15 July 1962. I had long thought, from reading Elspeth Cameron's Hugh MacLennan: a Writers Life (1981), that he showed signs not only of having been influenced by Russell but of being the sOrt of person who is attracted to Russell's way of thinking. A promising tide in the same scholar's bibliography ofMacLennan turned out to be a fuller version of the clipping. "The Clearest Intellect of Our Age" is reprinted from The Montreal Star, 14 July 1962, "Entertainments" sec., p. 5. Russell did influence MacLennan. Neither the Russell Archives nor the inventory of the Maclennan papers at the Universiry of Calgary reveals personal contact berween the rwo. I wish I had asked MacLennan about contacts and influence seventeen years ago, when I sent him an early issue of Russell He commented: ''1 found your journal fascinating and never before had read that beautiful thing Russell wrote in his early days with Whitehead:" He is referring to the essay on the status of women in No.6, now in Papers 12.-Ed.] russell: the Journal ofthe Benrand Russell Archives McMaster Unive..ity Libraty Press noS. 11 (summer 1991): 83-5 ISSN 00,6-01631 84 HUGH MACLENNAN I suppose he really is the greatest man alive, in the sense that his teaching grows and his teaching is good, but it is pointless to argue the point between him and Churchill. It is wonderful, however, that many think he is our greatest man and that he has become an international hero to millions of the thoughtful youth. He must be the first pure logician who ever was that. Until he took his stand against nuclear war, he never appealed to the passions. He lacked the aggressions which youth admires. He never said: "Come live with me and I will be your master"; or, "Follow me and I will purge you of your sins." He had no use for self-sacrifice as such. He simply said, in effect: "Happiness is good. If you desire it, you must be reasonable." As he was intelligent enough to know that anyone who teaches that happiness is good, and teaches how to achieve it, is sute to be considered subversive to a Christian-commercial society, he bore no personal resentment when society persecuted him. The young know, of course, that Russell is now assumed by the experts to be the most important philosopher since Hume, but that is not why they love him. They love him for the sublime civilization of his courage, for his refusal to let an intensely kind nature blunt his respect for truth. They love him because he loves life even in the twentieth century; and they love him most of all because he is engage. And of course they also love the wit which refuses to be made tongue-tied by those who insist that whenever one speaks of sex or religion one must be solemn. Russell's wit is worth the study of any writer. It is based on mathematics, and Russell would agree, I think, with the remark Camillien Houde once made to me when I asked the famous mayor of Montreal how he was always able to make people laugh. Houde replied... (shrink)

The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are written by philosophers at the forefront of feminist scholarship, and are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide to a philosophical literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. Ranging from history of philosophy through metaphysics to philosophy of science, they encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses, offering both an overview of and a contribution to the relevant debates. Together they testify (...) to the intellectual value of feminism as a radicalizing energy internal to philosophical inquiry. This volume will be essential reading for any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about the place of feminism in their subject. (shrink)

Various authors, for instance Elizabeth Anderson, Rosemary Tong, Mary Warnock and Margaret Brazier have argued that commercial surrogate motherhood is exploitative and that it should be prohibited. Their arguments are unconvincing. Exploitation is a more complex notion than it is usually presented as being. Unequal bargaining power can be a cause of exploitation but the exercise of unequal bargaining power is not inevitably or inherently exploitative. Exploitation concerns unfair and/or unjust strategies - rather than the exercise of power as such. (...) Commercial surrogate motherhood is not necessarily exploitative. Furthermore, not all transactions which are exploitative should be made illegal. (shrink)

I consider Katherine Hawley's commitment account of interpersonal trustworthiness alongside her sceptical challenge regarding the value of philosophically modelling institutional trustworthiness as distinct from reliability. I argue, pace Hawley's challenge, that there would be significant diagnostic and explanatory loss if we were to content ourselves with ideas of institutional (un)reliability alone; and I offer an illustrative case where institutional unreliability is only the half of it, indicating that when it comes to certain kinds of institutional dysfunction, we do need philosophical (...) models of institutional ‘distrustworthiness’ if we are to achieve a proper diagnosis. (shrink)

She was to a degree the tool of her husband. However, despite the fact she was under his influence to a degree she cannot escape if the Bank took all reasonable steps to ensure that she had appreciated and understood what she was signing. It may be that Mrs Wright-Bailey did not have an adequate comprehension of the nature of the charge... [E]ven if she did not, the Bank did take all reasonable steps.

Our understanding of social experiences is central to our social understanding more generally. But this sphere of epistemic practice can be structurally prejudiced by unequal relations of power, so that some groups suffer a distinctive kind of epistemic injustice—hermeneutical injustice. I aim to achieve a clear conception of this epistemicethical phenomenon, so that we have a workable definition and a proper understanding of the wrong that it inflicts.

My overarching purpose is to illustrate the philosophical fruitfulness of expanding epistemology not only laterally across the social space of other epistemic subjects, but at the same time vertically in the temporal dimension. I set about this by first presenting central strands of Michael Williams' diagnostic engagement with scepticism, in which he crucially employs a Default and Challenge model of justification. I then develop three key aspects of Edward Craig's ‘practical explication' of the concept of knowledge so that they may (...) be seen to resonate positively with Williams's epistemological picture: the admixture of internalist and externalist features; the proto-contextualism; and, finally, the distinctively genealogical antisceptical impetus. In this way I aim to support and augment the socialized anti-sceptical case mounted by Williams, and so to show that expanding epistemology in the temporal dimension can be a productive move in central debates in epistemology. Philosophical Papers Vol. 37 (1) 2008: pp. 27-50. (shrink)

The notion of recognition is an ethically potent resource for understanding human relational needs; and its negative counterpart, misrecognition, an equally potent resource for critique. Axel Honneth’s rich account focuses our attention on recognition’s role in securing basic self-confidence, moral self-respect, and self-esteem. With these loci of recognition in place, we are enabled to raise the intriguing question whether each of these may be extended to apply specifically to the epistemic dimension of our agency and selfhood. Might we talk intelligibly—while (...) staying in tune with Honneth’s concepts and their Hegelian key—of a generic idea of epistemic recognition? Such an idea might itself be seen to apply at the same three levels to indicate: first, basic epistemic self-confidence; second, our status as epistemically responsible; and third, a certain epistemic self-esteem that reflects the epistemic esteem we receive from others. The papers in this volume surely sound a chord in the affirmative, and together they steer us towards a multifaceted conception of how epistemic injustice is related to epistemic misrecognition, and indeed how we might construe a positive relation of epistemic recognition. (shrink)

This article draws on a five-year, multi-sited transnational research project on the global traffic in human organs, tissues, and body parts from the living as well as from the dead as a misrecognized form of human sacrifice. Capitalist expansion and the spread of advanced medical and surgical techniques and developments in biotechnology have incited new tastes and traffic in the skin, bones, blood, organs, tissues, marrow and reproductive and genetic marginalized other. Examples drawn from recent ethnographic research in Israel, the (...) Palestinian Authority and Turkey serve to cast light on the dark side of organs harvesting and transplantation. The article focuses on the dangers of the `fetishized kidney' for both sellers and buyers, for whom this new commodity has become an organ of opportunity and an organ of last resort. The bodily sacrifice is disguised as a donation, rendered invisible by its anonymity, and hidden under the medical rhetoric of `life saving' and `gift giving'. It suggests that the ultimate fetish as recognized long ago by Ivan Illich is the idea of `life' as object of manipulation. (shrink)

Darwin hypothesized that some animals, when selecting sexual partners, possess a genuine “sense of beauty” that cannot be accounted for by the logic of natural selection. This hypothesis has been notoriously controversial. In this chapter I propose that the concept of agency can be useful to operationalize the “sense of beauty”, and can help identify the conditions under which one can infer that animals are acting as (aesthetic) agents. Focusing on a case study of the behavior of the Pavo cristatus, (...) I identify the types of evidence that would allow for the inference of agency through aesthetic choice. (shrink)

Basic concepts in Habermas's theory of communicative action -- Habermas's "reconstruction" of modern law -- Discourse theory and the theory and practice of adjudication -- System, lifeworld, and Habermas's "communication theory of society" -- After between facts and norms : religion in the public square, multiculturalism, and the "postnational constellation".

Our ideas about forgiveness seem to oscillate between idealization and scepticism. How should we make sense of this apparent conflict? This paper argues that we should learn something from each, seeing these views as representing opposing moments in a perennial and well-grounded moral ambivalence towards forgiveness. Once we are correctly positioned, we shall see an aspect of forgiveness that recommends precisely this ambivalence. For what will come into view will be certain key psychological mechanisms of moral-epistemic influence – other-addressed and (...) self-addressed mechanisms of moral social construction – that enable forgiveness to function well when it is well-functioning, but which are also intrinsically prone to deterioration into one or another form of bad faith. Thus forgiveness is revealed as necessarily containing seeds of its own corruption, showing ambivalence to be a generically appropriate attitude. Moreover, it is emphasized that where forgiver and forgiven are relating to one another in the context of asymmetries of social power, the practice of forgiveness is likely to be further compromised, notably increasing the risk of negative influence on the moral-epistemic states of either the forgiver or the forgiven, or both. (shrink)

In both social science and medicine, research on reproduction generally focuses on women. In this article, we examine how men’s reproductive contributions are understood. We develop an analytic framework that brings together Cynthia Daniels’ conceptualization of reproductive masculinity with a staged view of reproduction, where the stages include the period before conception, conception, gestation, and birth. Drawing on data from two medical sites that are oriented to the period before pregnancy, we examine how gendered knowledge about reproduction produces different reproductive (...) equations in different stages of the reproductive process. We conclude with a new research agenda that emerges from rethinking the role of men and masculinity in reproduction. (shrink)

Hugh H. Benson explores Plato's answer to Clitophon's challenge, the question of how one can acquire the knowledge Socrates argues is essential to human flourishing-knowledge we all seem to lack. Plato suggests two methods by which this knowledge may be gained: the first is learning from those who already have the knowledge one seeks, and the second is discovering the knowledge one seeks on one's own. The book begins with a brief look at some of the Socratic dialogues where Plato (...) appears to recommend the former approach while simultaneously indicating various difficulties in pursuing it. The remainder of the book focuses on Plato's recommendation in some of his most important and central dialogues-the Meno, Phaedo, and Republic-for carrying out the second approach: de novo inquiry. The book turns first to the famous paradox concerning the possibility of such an inquiry and explores Plato's apparent solution. Having defended the possibility of de novo inquiry as a response to Clitophon's challenge, Plato explains the method or procedure by which such inquiry is to be carried out. The book defends the controversial thesis that the method of hypothesis, as described and practiced in the Meno, Phaedo, and Republic, is, when practiced correctly, Plato's recommended method of acquiring on one's own the essential knowledge we lack. The method of hypothesis when practiced correctly is, then, Platonic dialectic, and this is Plato's response to Clitophon's challenge. (shrink)

Taking on topics from pornography and prostitution to female genital mutilation, from womens magazines and marriage to sexual violence, contributors in this collection argue that the kind of liberal feminism currently rising to prominence does little to challenge the status quo.

While the early Platonic dialogues have often been explored and appreciated for their ethical content, this is the first book devoted solely to the epistemology of Plato's early dialogues. Author Hugh H. Benson argues that the characteristic features of these dialogues- -Socrates' method of questions and answers, his fascination with definition, his professions of ignorance, and his thesis that virtue is knowledge- -are decidedly epistemological. In this thoughtful study, Benson uncovers the model of knowledge that underlies these distinctively Socratic views. (...) What emerges is unfamiliar, yet closer to a contemporary conception of scientific understanding than ordinary knowledge. (shrink)