Psychoanalysis has long cited poetry as the expressive vehicle for unconscious production. This article addresses the sexual politics of psychoanalysis's conjoining of poetry and the "feminine." The argument of this text is that the coupling of the "feminine" and the poetic in Lacanian discourse is a metaphorical double cross which most often leaves "woman" at a loss for words.

Generally speaking, naturalism is the view that the methods of empirical science are our best, perhaps only, methods for obtaining knowledge. Merrick reshapes this debate by introducing a new question: Is naturalism compatible with fostering appreciative love for the created order? She argues the naturalism's operating paradigm for evaluating explanations is well-tailored to achieve the goal of scientific inquiry championed by Francis Bacon in the 17th century. But it systematically weeds out explanations more likely to induce appreciative love for the (...) phenomena. Merrick concludes by looking at C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves and Henri Nouwen's Life of the Beloved for attitudes and practices that inquirers should adopt. (shrink)

Critical thought on immersive theatres is gathering in pace with many arguments centred on explorations of audience/performer interaction and the unique relationship these theatres create. Within this paper I look beyond these debates in order to consider the implications of immersive theatres within contemporary culture, with the aim of furthering the ways in which immersive theatres are presently being framed and discussed. Theatre and science fiction have shared a somewhat limited relationship compared to their burgeoning usage within other forms of (...) entertainment. This paper focuses on how the conceits of science fiction are being staged within this theatrical setting. Primary focus is given to Punchdrunk’s… and darkness descended and The Crash of the Elysium. This is considered alongside The Republic of the Imagination’s Cerebellium, an original narrative created for the performance which has been subsequently developed over a three-year period to date. This discussion is presented and framed through my personal experience as both a performer in Cerebellium and as audience member. The particular use of dystopian narratives and alternate worlds is given consideration, with reflection on the way these works destabilize and call into question the audience’s sense of self either through their ability to survive or understand their sense of self. By making evident the spectrum of practice, I endeavour to delve further into identifying and de-mystifying immersive theatres and their differences to conventional theatre. (shrink)

The 2005 International Consensus Conference on Intersex resulted in a substantive revision of the lexicon and guidelines for treating intersex conditions. The speed with which the new treatment protocol has been adopted by healthcare practitioners and providers is considered unprecedented. However, a number of intersex people and advocacy groups have complained that the recommended revisions are inadequately informed by the testimony of intersex people. In this paper, I argue that such complaints are valid and that, despite the conference conveners stated (...) intention, the revisions perpetuate the epistemic injustice long endured by intersex people. By analyzing the Consensus Conference and its results as a failed attempt to redress the epistemic marginalization of intersex patients and advocacy groups, I am able to identify lingering institutional hurdles to cultivating the virtue of epistemic justice in biomedical practice. (shrink)

Here I criticise Audi's account of self-evidece. I deny that understanding of a proposition can justify belief in it and offfer an account of intuition that can take the place of understanding in an account of self-evidence.

The 2005 International Consensus Conference on Intersex resulted in a substantive revision of the lexicon and guidelines for treating intersex conditions. The speed with which the new treatment protocol has been adopted by healthcare practitioners and providers is considered unprecedented. However, a number of intersex people and advocacy groups have complained that the recommended revisions are inadequately informed by the testimony of intersex people. In this paper, I argue that such complaints are valid and that, despite the conference conveners stated (...) intention, the revisions perpetuate the epistemic injustice long endured by intersex people. By analyzing the Consensus Conference and its results as a failed attempt to redress the epistemic marginalization of intersex patients and advocacy groups, I am able to identify lingering institutional hurdles to cultivating the virtue of epistemic justice in biomedical practice. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the best form of deontology is one understood in terms of prima facie duties. I outline how these duties are to be understood and show how they offer a plausible and elegant connection between the reason why we ought to do certain acts, the normative reasons we have to do these acts, the reason why moral agents will do them, and the reasons certain people have to resent someone who does not do them. I (...) then argue that this form of deontology makes it harder to unify a pluralistic ethics under a single consequentialist principle in a plausible way, and illustrate this with reference to Rob Shaver's consequentialist arguments. (shrink)

This paper argues that Frege's notoriously long commitment to Kant's thesis that Euclidean geometry is synthetic _a priori_ is best explained by realizing that Frege uses ‘intuition’ in two senses. Frege sometimes adopts the usage presented in Hermann Helmholtz's sign theory of perception. However, when using ‘intuition’ to denote the source of geometric knowledge, he is appealing to Hermann Cohen's use of Kantian terminology. We will see that Cohen reinterpreted Kantian notions, stripping them of any psychological connotation. Cohen's defense of (...) his modified Kantian thesis on the unique status of the Euclidean axioms presents Frege's own views in a much more favorable light. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWomen television journalists have long faced criticism and harassment regarding their appearance. The normalization of social media engagement in newsrooms, where journalists are expected t...

Here I argue that the best form of deontology is an ethic of prima facie duties, and that this form of deontology is especially resistant to any form of reduction to a single principle.

Shortly following the Second World War, and under the medical direction of ex-army psychiatrist T. F. Main, the Cassel Hospital for Functional Nervous Disorders emerged as a pioneering democratic ‘therapeutic community’ in the treatment of mental illness. This definitive movement away from conventional ‘custodial’ assumptions about the function of the psychiatric hospital initially grew out of a commitment to sharing therapeutic responsibility between patients and staff and to preserving patients’ pre-admission responsibilities and social identities. However, by the mid-1950s, hospital practices (...) had come to focus pre-eminently on patients’ relationships with family members, and staff had developed a social model of mental health that focused on the family as the irreducible unit of mental treatment. By the late 1950s, this culminated in the in-patient admission of entire families for mental treatment, even when only one family member was exhibiting symptoms. At the heart of this growing post-war social-psychiatric preoccupation with the family was a new emphasis on the close relationship between mental health and individuals’ successful development toward mature responsible adulthood. The family came to be conceived as the quintessential space where both were forged. This article examines the process through which the Cassel’s social-psychiatric commitment to ‘therapeutic community’ became focused on the family as a key therapeutic site. While the family had become a central point of focus in social, political and psychological discussions of the foundation for stable democratic culture and political peace in post-war Britain, the Cassel Hospital actively experimented with these connections in therapeutic practice. This article thus illuminates the important, but frequently overlooked, role of psychiatric practices in the development of a post-war psychopolitics that established important links between the nuclear family, mental health and democratic social life. (shrink)

(2006). Taking Our Obligations to Research Participants Seriously: Disclosing Individual Results of Genetic Research. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 6, No. 6, pp. 32-34.

Scholars have posited both a positive and a negative relationship between political openness and transnational activism, arguing that while closed opportunity structures positively affect activism by creating strong incentives for activists to “go transnational,” they also negatively affect activism by inhibiting local groups from participating. The author argues that these contrary arguments are largely the result of an insufficiently developed comparative approach to the study of transnational activism. By examining countries at different levels of openness and multiple types of activism, (...) she shows that different types of activism are affected in distinct ways by the level of political openness. (shrink)

In this study, we explain differences in support for interreligious lawful and violent protests against the religious outgroup. Combining religiosity and social identity approaches, we take three dimensions of religiosity into consideration related to support for interreligious conflict, next to relevant control characteristics. The analysis is based on survey data collected among a random sample of Muslims and Christians across the Indonesian archipelago. Our findings show that members of the Muslim community are, on average, more inclined to support interreligious conflict, (...) both lawful and violent protests. Participation in rites of passage is a crucial aspect of religious practices found to be positively related to both kinds of protest. Religious beliefs show great importance but vary in their influence: particularistic views and intratextual fundamentalism are related to support for lawful protest, whereas religiocentrism is related to support both for lawful and violent protests. In contrast, salience reduces support for violent protest. As such, the findings offer a differentiated way to understand present-day interreligious conflicts among the general population in Indonesia. (shrink)

Divine determinism, though affirmed by many Calvinists, implicates God in the decisions people make that ultimately damn them to the terrible destiny of hell. In this paper, the authors argue that this scenario is a problem for divine determinism. The article contends that determinism is inconsistent with God’s love and the Scriptures that explicitly state that God does not ‘desire’ anyone to go to hell. Even human love for others strongly suggests that God, who is ‘love’, will not determine anyone (...) to hell. On the other extreme, those who argue for universalism, though appealing to Scripture, often do so with questionable exegesis. (shrink)

According to ethical intuitionists, basic moral propositions are self-evident. Robert Audi has made significant progress articulating and defending this view, claiming that an adequate understanding of a self-evident proposition justifies rather than compels belief. It is argued here that understanding a proposition cannot justify belief in it, and that intuition, suitably understood, provides the right sort of justification. An alternative account is offered of self-evidence based on intuition rather than understanding, and it is concluded that once we have an adequate (...) understanding of a self-evident proposition, we can see that it does no distinctive epistemic work. It merely reports that intuition is doing some significant epistemic work. Since the very idea of self-evident moral propositions is so controversial, and self-evidence does no significant epistemic work, ethical intuitionists should drop this notion from their moral epistemology. All they need are intuitive propositions and our intuition of these. (shrink)

_Kant, Duty and Moral Worth _is a fascinating and original examination of Kant's account of moral worth. The complex debate at the heart of Kant's philosophy is over whether Kant said moral actions have worth only if they are carried out from duty, or whether actions carried out from mixed motives can be good. Philip Stratton-Lake offers a unique account of acting from duty, which utilizes the distinction between primary and secondary motives. He maintains that the moral law should (...) not be understood as a normative moral reason but as playing a transcendental role. Thus a Kantian account of moral worth is one where the virtuous agent may be responsive to concrete particular considerations, whilst preserving an essential role for universal moral principles. _Kant, Duty and Moral Worth _is a lucid examination of Kant's moral thought that will appeal to Kant scholars and anyone interested in moral theory. (shrink)

Ethical Intuitionism was the dominant moral theory in Britain for much of the 18th, 19th and the first third of the twentieth century. However, during the middle decades of the twentieth century ethical intuitionism came to be regarded as utterly untenable. It was thought to be either empty, or metaphysically and epistemologically extravagant, or both. This hostility led to a neglect of the central intuitionist texts, and encouraged the growth of a caricature of intuitionism that could easily be rejected before (...) moving on to 'more serious' philosophical theories. More recently, however, this hostility towards ethical intuitionism has subsided. A wide range of moral philosophers, from Aristotelians, to rule-consequentialists, to expressivists, Kantians and deontologists, are beginning to look to the ethical intuitionists's work as a positive resource. It is, therefore, a good time to get clear on what it was that intuitionists said, and re-evaluate their contribution to our understanding of morality. This volume is the first serious engagement with ethical intuitionism in the light of contemporary developments in ethical theory. It contains essays by eminent moral philosophers working in very different traditions whose aim is to clarify and assess ethical intuitionism. Issues addressed include whether the plurality of basic principles intuitionists adhere to can be grounded in some more fundamental principle; the autonomy of ethics and self-evidence; moral realism and internalism; and the open question argument and naturalism. (shrink)

Molinism is founded on two ‘pillars’, namely, the view that human beings possess libertarian free will and the view that God has middle knowledge. Both these pillars stand in contrast to naturalistic determinism and divine determinism. In this article, however, the authors offer philosophical and theological grounds in favor of libertarian free will and middle knowledge.