Foucault and Religion seeks to unearth a new dimension of Foucault scholarship. Renowned Foucault scholar Jeremy Carrette reveals not simply how Foucault's work can be applied to religion but how a religious question at the heart of Foucault's own work offers a radical challenge to religious ideas. Carrette argues that Foucault offers a twofold critique of Christianity by bringing the body and sexuality into religious practice and exploring a political spirituality of the self. This first major commentary on Foucault (...) and religion opens up the diverse religious questions the philosopher raises in his work, and sheds new light on how Foucault challenges religious thinking and transforms religious understanding. (shrink)

William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience was an intellectual landmark, paving the way for modern study of parapsychology and religious experience. In this indispensable new companion to the Varietie s, key international experts in the fields of religious studies, psychology and mysticism offer contemporary responses to James's book, exploring its historical importance and modern relevance. As the only critical work dedicated to the cross-disciplinary influence of The Varieties of Religious Experience , it stands as a testament to James's genius (...) and ongoing legacy. (shrink)

This book offers a radical new reading of William James’s work on the idea of ‘religion.’ Moving beyond previous psychological and philosophical interpretations, it uncovers a dynamic, imaginative, and critical use of the category of religion. This work argues that we can only fully understand James’s work on religion by returning to the ground of his metaphysics of relations and by incorporating literary and historical themes. Author Jeremy Carette develops original perspectives on the influence of James’s father and Calvinism, (...) on the place of the body and sex in James, on the significance of George Eliot’s novels, and Herbert Spencer’s ‘unknown,’ revealing a social and political discourse of civil religion and republicanism and a poetic imagination at the heart of James understanding of religion. These diverse themes are brought together through a post-structural sensitivity and a recovery of the importance of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier to James’s work. This study pushes new boundaries in Jamesian scholarship by reading James with pluralism and from the French tradition. It will be a benchmark text in the reshaping of James and the nineteenth-century foundations of the modern study of ‘religion.’. (shrink)

Introduction: The politics of religious experience -- The ethics of knowledge in the human sciences -- The ethical veil of the knowledge economy -- Binary knowledge and the protected category -- Economic formations of psychology and religion -- Religion, politics, and psychoanalysis -- Maslow's economy of religious experience -- Cognitive capital and the codification of religion -- Conclusion: Critique and the ethics of not-knowing.

Michel Foucault and Theology brings together a selection of essays by leading Foucault scholars on a variety of themes within the history, thought and practice of theology. Revealing the diverse ways that the work of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) has been.

In this essay, the author shows how Foucault's discussions of pastoral power relate to a wider “analytics” of religious power set down in 1975 and 1976 before he deploys the language of the “pastoral”. In shifting the discussion of pastoral power to a wider trajectory, the author considers the question of whether pastoral power persists after the historical shift to governmentality. The chapter maps the specific features of Foucault's idea of pastoral power in the 1977–78 College de France course and, (...) aided by the “dry and schematic character” of the lectures. It examines one of the most neglected aspects of pastoral power, the theological relation of pastoral power, something brought to light in the 1977–78 course. The priority Foucault gave to pastoral power is significant not only for its “decisive” historical importance, but also in showing something of how “religion is a political force”. (shrink)

This review locates the 1980 lectures within the context of the wider discussions of Foucault and religion; highlighting the influence of George Dumézil on the comparative and structural analysis. Assessing the problem of the historical accuracy of Christian history in Foucault’s work and the nature of the archaeological approach, the review explores what would be fair to ask of Foucault’s 1980 lectures on Christianity. The review focuses on the internal consistency, selections and theoretical tensions. While acknowledging that Foucault picks up (...) the important shift towards external ritual performance of early Christian life, the review questions Foucault’s lack of appreciation of the notion of “sacramentum,” which informs the central interpretative framework of “truth acts.” The review suggests that Foucault’s thinking is shaped by an “expressionist theology” and operates on a false binary distinction between faith and practice. It shows the problematic reading of Tertullian and the indivisibility between acts and faith in his work and reveals the counter-conduct and freedom practices in Tertullian’s later Montanist commitment—which rejected church authority for inner commitment to God—and also suggests a gendered dimension to expressionist acts. The review reveals Foucault’s own inability to split the faith-practice dichotomy—on which his expressionistic argument depends—and highlights the tensions that persist in maintaining a “truth-act” model from early Christian life. It concludes by suggesting that the philosophy-theology relation in Foucault opens more questions than it resolves. (shrink)

Using Foucault’s conceptual frame from The Archaeology of Knowledge to read Foucault’s late deployment of “spirituality,” this article argues that Foucault’s enigmatic gesture in using this concept reveals a refusal of “rupture” from the Christian pre-modern discourse of “spirit.” Despite attempts to alter the “field of use,” Foucault’s genealogical commitment ensures a Christian continuity in modern discourses of transformation. In a detailed examination of the 1982 Collège de France lectures, the article returns Foucault’s use of “spirituality” to the Alexandrian joining (...) of philosophy and theology and the specificity of Christian practice and belief. (shrink)

In this book Grace Jantzen constructs a Quaker spirituality of beauty as a theological-philosophical response to a world preoccupied with death and violence. Having mapped the foundations of western cultural violence in the Greco-Roman period and the Judea-Christian tradition in _Foundations of Violence_ and _Violence to Eternity_, she now offers her alternative vision. This vision is an original and creative feminist reading of the Quaker tradition, considering George Fox and the writings of Quaker women, exploring the themes of inner light (...) and beauty as alternatives to violence and the obstacles to building such an alternative world. After showing how seventeenth-century Quakers offered a different option for modernity, she maps the philosophical and ethical implications of engaging with the world through beauty and its transforming power. Written for everyone interested in contemporary spirtuality, it explains how Quaker ideas can provide a way to transform our violent world into one that celebrates life rather than death, peace rather than violence. This work is the second of two posthumous publications to complete Grace M. Jantzen’s _Death and the Displacement of Beauty_ collection, which began with Foundations _of Violence_. (shrink)

In this volume _Grace M. Jantzen_ continues her groundbreaking analysis of death and beauty in western thought by examining the religious roots of death and violence in the Jewish and Christian tradition, which underlie contemporary values. She shows how man’s fear of the female is often implicated in religious violence and in her critique of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament she examines a range of themes that show the western preoccupation with necrophilia. She examines the relation of (...) death to the Jewish covenant, the nature of monotheism, Holy War and the Christian covenant and kingdom. However, Jantzen recognises that submerged beneath these themes in Judaism and Christianity are traces of an alternative world of beauty and life. Jantzen’s internationally recognised feminist philosophy of religion puts forward a powerful analysis of patriarchy and violence and reveals the hidden power of natality. Her work is a searching challenge for our times and one that gives hope in a violent world. This work is the first of two posthumous publications to complete her impressive genealogy death and beauty of western thought. (shrink)

This paper provides a method for characterizing space events using the framework of conceptual spaces. We focus specifically on estimating and ranking the likelihood of collisions between space objects. The objective is to design an approach for anticipatory decision support for space operators who can take preventive actions on the basis of assessments of relative risk. To make this possible our approach draws on the fusion of both hard and soft data within a single decision support framework. Contextual data is (...) also taken into account, for example data about space weather effects, by drawing on the Space Domain Ontologies, a large system of ontologies designed to support all aspects of space situational awareness. The framework is coupled with a mathematical programming scheme that frames a mathematically optimal approach for decision support, providing a quantitative basis for ranking potential for collision across multiple satellite pairs. The goal is to provide the broadest possible information foundation for critical assessments of collision likelihood. (shrink)

A balanced, accessible discussion of whether and on what grounds animal research can be ethically justified.

Many bioethicists view the primary task of bioethics as ‘value clarification’. In this article, I argue that the field must embrace two more ambitious agendas that go beyond mere clarification. The first agenda, critique, involves unmasking, interrogating, and challenging the presuppositions that underlie bioethical discourse. These largely unarticulated premises establish the boundaries within which problems can be conceptualized and solutions can be imagined. The function of critique, then, is not merely to clarify these premises but to challenge them and the (...) boundaries they define. The second agenda, integration, involves honoring and unifying what is right in competing values. Integration is the morally ideal response to value conflict, offering the potential for transcending win/lose outcomes. The function of integration, then, is to envision actions or policies that not only resolve conflicts, but that do so by jointly realizing many genuine values in deep and compelling ways. My argument proceeds in stages. After critically examining the role and dominant status of value clarification in bioethical discourse, I describe the nature and value of the two agendas, identify concrete examples of where each has been and could be successful, and explain why a critical integrative bioethics – one that appreciates the joint necessity and symbiotic potential of the two agendas – is crucial to the future of the field. The ultimate goal of all of this is to offer a more compelling vision for how bioethics might conduct itself within the larger intellectual and social world it seeks to understand and serve. (shrink)

Niche construction theory (NCT) can be applied to examine the influence of culturally constructed learning environments on the acquisition and retention of beliefs, values, role expectations, and skills. Thus, NCT provides a quantitative framework to account for cultural-historical contingency affecting development and cultural evolution. Learning in a culturally constructed environment is of central concern to many sociologists, cognitive scientists, and sociocultural anthropologists, albeit often from different perspectives. This article summarizes four pertinent theories from these fields—situated learning, activity theory, practice theory, (...) and distributed cognition. As a basis for interdisciplinary investigation, the article considers how these theories may be addressed using a cultural niche-construction framework, including the utility of an embedded model that explicitly accounts for effects of the constructed learning environment on within-individual learning dynamics in an evolutionary framework. (shrink)

In 1970, President Richard Nixon expressed his unambiguous support for interracial marriage; as for same-sex marriage, he exclaimed, "I can't go that far—that's the year 2000" . Nixon's prescient remark, made shortly after the Supreme Court's 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia to overturn anti-miscegenation laws, expresses at once hesitancy for, yet resigned acceptance of, the inevitable expansion of civil marriage to include more and more kinds of loving partnerships. Nearly forty years later, Nixon's uncanny prediction appears close to being (...) realized. At the very least, many have gone where he claimed to be unable to go, adding their voices to a growing movement seeking state recognition of same-sex unions as a matter of equality, rights, and justice. And, indeed, a strong case might be made on such grounds, were the state justified in sponsoring an institution of civil marriage in the first place. (shrink)

People tend to perceive ongoing continuous activity as series of discrete events. This partitioning of continuous activity may occur, in part, because events correspond to dynamic patterns that have recurred across different contexts. Recurring patterns may lead to reliable sequential dependencies in observers' experiences, which then can be used to guide perception. The current set of simulations investigated whether this statistical structure within events can be used 1) to develop stable internal representations that facilitate perception and 2) to learn when (...) to update such representations in a self-organizing manner. These simulations demonstrate that experience with recurring patterns enables a system to accurately predict upcoming stimuli within an event, to identify boundaries between such events based on transient increases in prediction error, and to use such boundaries to improve prediction about subsequent activities. (shrink)

The overall goal of the approach developed in this paper is to estimate the likelihood of a given kinetic kill scenario between hostile spacebased adversaries using the mathematical framework of Complex Conceptual Spaces Single Observation. Conceptual spaces are a cognitive model that provide a method for systematically and automatically mimicking human decision making. For accurate decisions to be made, the fusion of both hard and soft data into a single decision framework is required. This presents several challenges to this data (...) fusion framework. The first is the challenge involved in handling multiple complex terminologies, which is addressed by drawing on a set of Space Domain Ontologies. Another challenge is the complex combinatorics involved when considering all possible feature combinations. This can be mitigated by using integer linear programming optimization that is outlined by the Complex Conceptual Spaces Single Observation mathematical model framework. A third challenge is the complicated physics that is involved in a spacecraft collision that must be addressed to obtain a better understanding of threat assessment. Overcoming these various challenges allows for a quantitative ranking for the potential of a kinetic kill collision across multiple spacecraft pairs. In addition to overcoming these challenges this paper will break down threat assessment into four domains and identify a ranking of threat both for each individual domain and for the four domains combined. Simulation results are shown to verify the developed concepts. (shrink)

Previous work has shown that the Complex Conceptual Spaces − Single Observation Mathematical framework is a useful tool for event characterization. This mathematical framework is developed on the basis of Conceptual Spaces and uses integer linear programming to find the needed similarity values. The work of this paper is focused primarily on space event characterization. In particular, the focus is on the ranking of threats for malicious space events such as a kinetic kill. To make the Conceptual Spaces framework work, (...) the similarity values between the contents of observations on the one hand and the properties of the entities observed on the other needs to be found. This paper shows how to exploit Dempster-Shafer theory to implement a statistical approach for finding these similarities values. This approach will allow a user to identify the uncertainty involved in similarity value data, which can later be propagated through the developed mathematical model in order for the user to know the overall uncertainty in the observation-to-concept mappings needed for space event characterization. (shrink)

Bioethicists invoke a duty to rescue in a wide range of cases. Indeed, arguably, there exists an entire medical paradigm whereby vast numbers of medical encounters are treated as rescue cases. The intuitive power of the rescue paradigm is considerable, but much of this power stems from the problematic way that rescue cases are conceptualized—namely, as random, unanticipated, unavoidable, interpersonal events for which context is irrelevant and beneficence is the paramount value. In this article, I critique the basic assumptions of (...) the rescue paradigm, reframe the ethical landscape in which rescue obligations are understood, and defend the necessity and value of a wider social and institutional view. Along the way, I move back and forth between ethical theory and a concrete case where the duty to rescue has been problematically applied: the purported duty to regularly return incidental findings and individual research results in genomic and genetic research. (shrink)

The question of whether a liberal state ought to recognize same-sex marriage must be situated within a broader inquiry into the proper relationship between political liberalism and marriage simpliciter. This general inquiry invites a diverse set of responses to the narrower question.A first widely held view—call it thick marital egalitarianism—sees a straightforward link from central liberal values, such as neutrality, equality, and nondiscrimination, to the full and equal inclusion of all willing partnerships into the thickly constituted, state-defined institution of marriage. (...) A second very different account—call it thin marital egalitarianism—sees the liberal commitment to neutrality as requiring a minimal legal framework of support for caring relationships sans additional antecedent restrictions, such as those thickly defining their nature or their purpose . Finally, a third important view—call it liberal marital contractualism—holds that this kind of "minimal marriage" is not minimal enough; a liberal state ought to treat marriage as a primarily "private affair worked out between or among partners, with [its] involvement limited to the enforcement of general laws and particular contracts that are individually designed within a defensible system of contract law". (shrink)

In this issue of the Report, Daniel Groll suggests new ways to understand old tensions between autonomy and paternalism. He categorizes disagreements between doctors and patients in four ways. Some are about the ends or goals of medical treatment. For these, he claims, patient choices are based upon patient values, and physicians should neither challenge nor assess them. More common are disagreements about the appropriate means to achieve an agreed-upon goal. These subdivide into two distinct categories—those in which the relative (...) efficacy of possible means is “medically assessable” and those in which it is not. When disagreements are medically assessable, Groll argues, doctors can legitimately challenge patient .. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page W1-W5.

abstract It is generally assumed that the link between utilitarianism and vegetarianism is relatively straightforward. However, a familiar objection to utility‐based vegetarianism maintains that, given the massive scale of animal agribusiness, any given person is causally impotent in reducing the overall number of animals raised for food and, thus, in reducing the unfathomably high quantity of disutility engendered thereby. Utilitarians have frequently responded to this objection in two ways: first, by appealing to expected utility and economic thresholds, and, secondly, by (...) appealing to publicity effects. In this paper, I will offer some reasons for thinking that, however far these responses go in the direction of ethical vegetarianism, both leave an important normative gap between the dietary prescription they are capable of underwriting and a ‘minimally‐genuine’ vegetarian obligation. What is needed to close this gap is a utility‐based reason that (1) generates an ethical prescription for minimally‐genuine vegetarianism and (2) circumvents the causal impotence objection. As I see it, there is a straightforward and auspicious reason that can perform both of the required tasks — namely, an appeal to the well‐documented welfare‐reducing effects of eating animal products upon human health. For, if causal impotence is to work as a global objection to utility‐based vegetarianism (rather than as a more local objection to certain reasons supporting that position), then it must operate as a general thesis about the incapacity for any given individual to bring about more utility solely through her own abstention from consuming animal products. However, for almost any given individual, the decision to maintain a vegetarian diet is causally potent in at least diminishing the expected disutility for herself of poorer health and a shorter life span associated with the consumption of animal products. Thus, it follows that (1) there are plausible, if not conclusive, utilitarian grounds for minimally‐genuine vegetarianism and (2) the causal impotence objection fails as a general criticism of utility‐based vegetarianism. (shrink)

Decision-making capacity (DMC) is, in many ways, a central organizing concept of modern health care ethics. Patients with DMC have the moral—if not always the legal—authority to make all manner of...

Prospective parents have long been interested in knowing as much information about their children as early as possible. This interest is not—and never has been—strictly limited to significant “medi...

COVID-19 presents many challenges, both clinical and philosophical. In this paper we discuss a major lacuna that COVID-19 revealed in our philosophy and understanding of medicine. Whereas we have some understanding of how physician-scientists interrogate the world to learn more about medicine, we do not understand the epistemological costs and benefits of the various ways clinicians acquire new knowledge in their fields. We will also identify reasons this topic is important both when the world is facing a pandemic and when (...) it is not. (shrink)

The ontology of medicine—the question of whether disease entities are real or not—is an underdeveloped area of philosophical inquiry. This essay explains the primary question at issue in medical ontology, discusses why answering this question is important from both a philosophical and a practical perspective, and argues that the problem of medical ontology is unique, i.e., distinct, from the ontological problems raised by other sciences and therefore requires its own analysis.

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 92-94.

The pandemic creates unprecedented challenges to society and to health care systems around the world. Like all crises, these provide a unique opportunity to rethink the fundamental limiting assumptions and institutional inertia of our established systems. These inertial assumptions have obscured deeply rooted problems in health care and deflected attempts to address them. As hospitals begin to welcome all patients back, they should resist the temptation to go back to business as usual. Instead, they should retain the more deliberative, explicit, (...) and transparent ways of thinking that have informed the development of crisis standards of care. The key lesson to be learned from those exercises in rational deliberation is that justice must be the ethical foundation of all standards of care. Justice demands that hospitals take a safety‐net approach to providing services that prioritizes the most vulnerable segments of society, continue to expand telemedicine in ways that improve access without exacerbating disparities, invest in community‐based care, and fully staff hospitals and clinics on nights and weekends. (shrink)

Rationale One's understanding of medical progress – what it is, how it is pursued and how it is assessed – may be deeply dependent on one's understanding of the metaphysics of medicine, and of diseases in particular. -/- Aims and Objectives In this paper I present a new account of the nature of diseases, neither realist nor constructivist, and describe what progress in medicine looks like if we understand diseases in this way. -/- Conclusions This new account, Constructive Realism, may (...) provide a better account of medicine than either realism or constructivism. (shrink)