This essay looks at Norplant qua technology and uses analytic frameworks from the social construction of technology to explain the trajectory of its brief history. The author contend that there were multiple uses of Norplant, in terms of rhetorical strategies, symbolic representations, and contraceptive intentions, constructed by reproductive scientists, population control advocates, pharmaceutical manufacturers, doctors, birth control clinic staffers, government regulators, legislators, judges, women’s health activists, potential users, and actual users. However, while relevant social groups shaped the discourse surrounding Norplant (...) in the 1990s, its ultimate fate was determined by choices made by potential users. At the ‘‘consumption junction’’ of the late twentieth-century contraceptive marketplace, American women ignored the meanings constructed for Norplant by developers, producers, providers, and policy makers and made their decisions based on what Norplant meant to them. Individuals’ decisions to choose other methods of preventing pregnancy coalesced into a collective rejection of this contraceptive technology. (shrink)

Stress presents an interesting case for the application of medicalization theory. From the 1950s to the 1980s, stress became an established, if not fully deciphered, component of the matrix within which illness developed, as understood by physicians and patients, scientists, and laypeople alike. While the various iterations of the medicalization thesis are useful for analyzing the information flows between the multiplicity of actors engaged in the production and interpretation of the stress concept, they cannot account for all aspects of the (...) evolution of the incorporation of stress into both the medical lexicon and the popular vernacular. To account for the significance of physical explanations for the physiological and pathological effects of stress on the body, this essay expands the model of medicalization to include biologization. This modified model is further deployed as an analytical framework to develop the central argument of this essay: that the medicalization of stress allowed for an expansion of therapeutic options available to practitioners and recipients of mainstream medicine by opening up space for the legitimation of alternative healing practices. Biologization looks to the system of ideas on which medical approaches are based to explain how the reductionist project to find molecular mechanisms of disease causality brought stress and other social and psychological phenomena into the domain of medicine. This expanded model of medicalization can usefully characterize late twentieth and early twenty-first century attitudes toward a wide variety of human disorders whose causes have been found to be molecular in origin. By folding biology into the medicalization thesis, social scientists can train a fresh analytical lens on the role of medicine in recent and contemporary American life. (shrink)

Stress presents an interesting case for the application of medicalization theory. From the 1950s to the 1980s, stress became an established, if not fully deciphered, component of the matrix within which illness developed, as understood by physicians and patients, scientists, and laypeople alike. While the various iterations of the medicalization thesis are useful for analyzing the information flows between the multiplicity of actors engaged in the production and interpretation of the stress concept, they cannot account for all aspects of the (...) evolution of the incorporation of stress into both the medical lexicon and the popular vernacular. To account for the significance of physical explanations for the physiological and pathological effects of stress on the body, this essay expands the model of medicalization to include biologization. This modified model is further deployed as an analytical framework to develop the central argument of this essay: that the medicalization of stress allowed for an expansion of therapeutic options available to practitioners and recipients of mainstream medicine by opening up space for the legitimation of alternative healing practices. Biologization looks to the system of ideas on which medical approaches are based to explain how the reductionist project to find molecular mechanisms of disease causality brought stress and other social and psychological phenomena into the domain of medicine. This expanded model of medicalization can usefully characterize late twentieth and early twenty-first century attitudes toward a wide variety of human disorders whose causes have been found to be molecular in origin. By folding biology into the medicalization thesis, social scientists can train a fresh analytical lens on the role of medicine in recent and contemporary American life. (shrink)

The Estrogen Elixir: A History of Hormone Replacement Therapy in America by Elizabeth Siegel Watkins is a thoroughly documented cautionary tale of the information and advice offered to women in the perimenopausal period of their life, and the consequences of exposure to sexual hormones on their health and wellbeing.

The Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings (GCC) aims to stop the export of unethical research practices from higher to lower income settings. Launched in 2018, the GCC was immediately adopted by European Commission funding streams for application in research that is situated in lower and lower-middle income countries. Other institutions soon followed suit. This article reports on the application of the GCC in two of the first UK-funded projects to implement this new code, one situated in (...) India and one in Pakistan. Through systematic ethics evaluation of both projects, the practical application of the GCC in real-world environments was tested. The findings of this ethics evaluation suggest that while there are challenges for implementation, application of the GCC can promote equity in international research collaborations. (shrink)

One of Chicago's great cultural achievements, the Institute of Design was among the most important schools of photography in twentieth-century America. It began as an outpost of experimental Bauhaus education and was home to an astonishing group of influential teachers and students, including Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind. To date, however, the ID's enormous contributions to the art and practice of photography have gone largely unexplored. Taken by Design is the first publication to examine thoroughly this remarkable institution (...) and its lasting impact. With nearly 300 illustrations, including many never-before published photographs, Taken by Design examines the changing nature of photography over this critical period in America's midcentury. It starts by documenting the experimental nature of Moholy's Bauhaus approach and photography's new and enhanced role in training the "complete designer." Next it traces the formal and abstract camera experiments under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, which aimed at achieving a new kind of photographic subjectivity. Finally, it highlights the ID's focus on conscious references to the processes of the photographic medium itself. In addition to photographs by Moholy, Callahan, and Siskind, the book showcases works by Barbara Crane, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Joseph Jachna, Kenneth Josephson, Gyorgy Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Ray K. Metzker, Richard Nickel, Arthur Siegel, Art Sinsabaugh, and many others. Major essays from experts in the field, biographies, a chronology, and reprints of critical essays are also included, making Taken by Design an essential work for anyone interested in the history of American photography. Contributors include: Keith Davis, Lloyd Engelbrecht, John Grimes, Nathan Lyons, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Elizabeth Siegel, David Travis, Larry Viskochil, James N. Wood. (shrink)

The essays in this special issue of Centaurus examine overlooked agents and sites of knowledge production beyond the academy and venues of industry- and government-sponsored research. By using gender as a category of analysis, they uncover scientific practices taking place in locations such as the kitchen, the nursery, and the storefront. Because of historical gendered patterns of exclusion and culturally derived sensibilities, the authors in this volume find that significant contributions to science were made in unexpected places and that these (...) were often made by women. The shift in focus to these different sites and different actors broadens the spectrum of what counts as science and where science happens. That is, in moving beyond the parameters of formal academic structures, this special issue seeks to recast the ways in which the production of science itself is defined and to engage readers in the redesign of the boundaries of our discipline. (shrink)

Where was your soul before you were born? If your soul is immortal, did it have a "life" prior to birth? Did you choose your life and parents? Is reincarnation real? Elizabeth and Neil Carman, the authors of Cosmic Cradle, address these questions through interviews with adults and children who report pre-birth experiences (PBEs) not based on regression, hypnosis, or drugs. Instead, interviewees recall their pre-birth existence completely sober and awake. In contrast to near-death experiences (NDEs), which have been (...) well documented to show us what the soul experiences after death, PBEs throw light upon our lives before birth. People with NDEs sense that they "return home" when their spirits cross to the other side. What is the nature of this place we "return" to? PBEs suggest that we come from the same place we return to: we come from the Light and return to the Light. The same eternal "you" progresses through life before life, human life, and life after death. This new edition of Cosmic Cradle explores your soul's journey into your mother's womb--where your soul comes from, the origin and purpose of your life, and the process by which you entered an earthly body. In pre-birth communications, parents meet a soul seeking to cross over from the heavenly realm to human birth. Persons with pre-birth memories recall existence in a luminous world before birth, in which they preview the upcoming life with a Divine Planner, and recall how they journeyed to their mothers' wombs. Contents Foreword by Bernie Siegel, MD Introduction: Amnesia of Our Spiritual Origins Part One: Pre-Birth Memory 1. Children as Messengers 2. Memories of the Cosmic Cradle 3. “I Was in Your Tummy Twice” 4. Scanning Soul Plans: Contemporary Pre-Birth Memories 5. Welcome to Planet Earth 6. Shirley Temple and the Blue Bird 7. Our Soul as a Tiny Spaceship 8. I Saw All My Costumes Part Two: Pre-Birth Communications 9. Souls Waiting in the Wings for Birth 10. Soul as a Sphere of Light 11. Cosmic Conception 12. Miscarriages and Stillbirths in the Light of Pre-Birth Plans 13. Conversations with Unborn Children Part Three: Pre-Birth Wisdom down through History 14. Spirit-Children Down Under 15. Lodge of the Great Manitou 16. The Cosmic Designer 17. Travelers from the Light 18. Journey from Forgetting to Remembering. (shrink)

This essay builds on Jacques Rancière's exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and politics to analyse queer sexuality in Don Siegel's prison film Escape from Alcatraz. The film both illustrates and embodies what Rancière refers to as a redistribution of the sensible, an opening up of a new way of making sense of the world. In Escape from Alcatraz this sense-making is bound up with same-sex desire. Rancière is usually concerned with aesthetic practices linked to class struggle. This essay, (...) however, examines how Rancière's ideas are also illuminating in relation to subjugated sexual experiences. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe tangos with Hume in the middle of her march toward the three theses of "Modern Moral Philosophy" that we should abandon moral philosophy "until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology"; that the concepts of moral obligation and moral duty, of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of 'ought' "ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible;" and that "the differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to (...) the present day are of little importance." But the tango could have been a waltz: Hume could embrace at least the first two theses with pleasure. Indeed, Hume pursues the kind of philosophy of psychology that Anscombe recommends and offers resources for developing her reflections on the relationship between happiness, human need, and our particular desires. (shrink)

We are pleased to say that Hume Studies has awarded its second annual Essay Prize, with an announcement featured in this issue. The winning paper will be published in November 2023 (Hume Studies 48:2). We thank the members of the 2022–23 Prize Committee, who are acknowledged in the announcement. Please see the Call for Papers for the Third Annual Essay Prize on page 189 of this issue.Along with five original articles and three book reviews, our current issue features a symposium (...) on Margaret Watkins’s book, The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s “Essays” (Cambridge University Press, 2019). The symposium is a development from an Author-Meets-Critics panel that was held at the 47th Hume Society Conference, sponsored by... Read More. (shrink)

The Estrogen Elixir: A History of Hormone Replacement Therapy in America by Elizabeth Siegel Watkins is a thoroughly documented cautionary tale of the information and advice offered to women in the perimenopausal period of their life, and the consequences of exposure to sexual hormones on their health and wellbeing.

If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

For those open to the possibility that philosophical thought can improve life, David Hume's Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary have something to say. In the first comprehensive study of the Essays, Margaret Watkins engages closely with these neglected texts and shows how they provide important insights into Hume's perspective on the breadth and depth of human life, arguing that the Essays reveal his continued commitment to philosophy as a discipline that can promote both social and individual progress. Addressing topics (...) such as politics, war, slavery, the priesthood, the development of industry, aesthetics, emotional disorders, egoism, friendship, sexuality, gender relations, and the nature of philosophy itself, the volume examines Hume's purposes and aims against the backdrop of the eighteenth century society in which he lived. It will be of interest to scholars of modern thought in philosophy, politics, history, and economics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt by Tim MilnesMargaret WatkinsTim Milnes. The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 278. Hardback. ISBN: 9780198812739. $91.00.In his brief autobiography, “My Own Life,” Hume reports that “almost all [his] life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations” (E-MOL: xxxi). This is one (...) of at least ten places in this brief work in which he associates himself with “letters” or “literature”—as compared to at most four associations with philosophy. The moral to be inferred is not that Hume considered himself not to be a philosopher. Rather, he conceived of philosophy as a kind of literature. The Treatise was itself a “literary attempt.” Indeed, opposition between the “literary” and “philosophical” aspects of a text would have been foreign to Hume and his contemporaries—a notion for a later age, despite his occasional loose distinction between the relevant genres, as in his list of writings “historical, philosophical, or literary” in “My Own Life” (E-MOL: xxxvi).Yet despite Hume’s own understanding of the continuity between philosophy and literature, broadly conceived, it is still common for contemporary philosophers to ignore literary questions in their examination of Hume’s work, or to presume that one can easily distinguish the “philosophical” parts from the “literary” ones. Tim Milnes’s The Testimony of Sense is therefore a welcome addition to the Hume literature (pun intended). With a particular focus on the essay—a genre of great importance to Hume—Milnes contributes to the small set of engagements with Hume from the disciplinary perspective of English literature. With training in both philosophy and literature, as well as established expertise on Romanticism and its own essays, Milnes is well-qualified for the task. The Testimony of Sense includes sustained engagement with Hume’s contemporaries and successors, but for the purposes of this review, I engage the book primarily as a Hume scholar for Hume scholars.Milnes’s story plays out in three acts. The first establishes the need for public trust created by a skeptical crisis, itself a product of Hume’s criticism of the epistemic program of thinkers in the Cartesian and Lockean traditions. The second explains how the essays of the long eighteenth century constitute a response to that need in various ways. The third reveals in detail how the Romantic essayists, particularly William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, both respond to and deviate from the “neoclassical” essayists, typified by Hume and Samuel Johnson.The first chapter, “Self and Intersubjectivity,” lays the groundwork by articulating how Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart identify the need for what we now call intersubjectivity. Milnes describes the common thread as a kind of “natural transcendentalism.” In what sense are these thinkers properly understood as [End Page 175] transcendentalists? The central idea seems to be that all posit things other than reason as “conditions of meaningful thought” (72). For Hume, it is the social, linguistic experience of a community of virtuous judges. The intricate relations between self and other essential to such a community get “internalized within the specular drama of the impartial spectator” (72) in Smith’s writing, which itself takes part in the drama through his “halting, qualified syntax” that mimics “everyday speech” (44). Reid posits a “prescience” of trust, which grounds our reliance on both human testimony and the uniformity of nature, itself undergirded by the design of a benevolent God. Stewart, who posits axiomatic truths that help constitute the “stamina of intellect,” goes furthest, actually calling these truths transcendental (55). This chapter also puts these eighteenth-century thinkers in conversation with twentieth-century theorists, including Habermas, Davidson, and Rorty.Chapter 2, “The Subject of Trust,” deepens the analysis by situating these “natural transcendentalisms” in the broader enlightenment context. In contrast to Descartes, Bacon, and Locke, who were suspicious of our reliance on the opinions of others, the eighteenth-century thinkers understand trust as prior to reason in various ways—though not prior to solidarity. The particulars in each case depend on their responses to skepticism and their accounts of the relation between... (shrink)

Focuses on the encounters of feminist and queer theories, on the ways in which basic terms such as - sex, gender, and sexuality change meaning as they move from one body of theory to another. This book includes essays by Judith Butler, Evelynn Hammonds, Biddy Martin, Kim Michasiw, Carole-Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth Weed.

Current psychiatric classification adopts a disorder-focused diagnostic approach, as exemplified within ICD-11 and DSM-V. Although this approach has improved reliability of categorization, its validity and utility has been questioned (Harvey, Watkins, Mansell, & Shafran, 2004; Insel et al., 2009; Sanislow et al., 2010). Limitations include high comorbidity between supposedly distinct disorders; heterogeneity within diagnoses; limited treatment efficacy; and similarities across disorders in aetiology, latent symptom structure, and underlying biology. There is also evidence of transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioural processes (Harvey et al., (...) 2004). An alternative approach is therefore to focus on fundamental underlying mechanisms of psychopathology rather than observed symptom clusters. This article considers the possible benefits, hurdles, and steps towards implementation of this transdiagnostic mechanistic approach, using the example of repetitive negative thought. (shrink)

Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death of God in ways that take the debate beyond the narrow confines of atheism into the much broader domain of post-theological thinking. Christopher Watkin argues that Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux each elaborate a distinctive approach to the post-theological, but that each approach still struggles to do justice to the death of God.

This article argues that Hume's brief essay, "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion," offers resources for three claims: (1) Delicate taste correlates with self-sufficiency and thus with a particularly Humean form of Magnanimity -- greatness of mind; (2) Delicate taste improves the capacity for profound friendships, characterized by mutual admiration and true compassion; and (3) magnanimity and compassion are thus not necessarily in tension with one another and may even proceed from and support harmony of character. These claims, in (...) turn, provide reasons to take seriously Hume's view that moral character depends, in part, on aesthetic character. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that certain type of first-personal causal property, efficacy, is represented in perceptual experience.

A summary of The Rationality of Perception, and my replies to symposium papers on it by Andy Clark and Christopher Peacocke.

This paper attempts to shed light on Kant’s notion of autonomy in his moral philosophy by considering the extent to which he presents a similar doctrine in his theoretical philosophy, where he strikingly claims (e.g., in the Prolegomena) that the understanding prescribes laws to nature. It argues that even though there are important points of difference between the cases of theoretical legislation of the laws of nature and autonomy in moral philosophy, their extensive parallels make a strong, even if not (...) definitive case in favor of the Prolegomena forming at least an important part of the explanation of the emergence of autonomy in the Groundwork. In addition, the comparison proves instructive insofar as it reveals deep structural parallels between Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy regarding his conception of laws. (shrink)

I show that the common reading of Thomson, that she argues by analogy for the conclusion that abortion is permissible, is mistaken. The correct reading of Thomson is that she argues by counterexample, showing that arguments against abortion are unsound. The remainder of the paper highlights the lessons learned from Thomson once we read her aright.

According to the “adequacy-for-purpose” view of data evaluation, data should be evaluated as better or worse relative to a given research purpose and corresponding research context. In this paper, I apply the adequacy-for-purpose view to a novel case study—concerning the use of paleoecological data to make predictions about coral reef response to contemporary climate change—and then use the case study to suggest two extensions to the adequacy-for-purpose view. First, I argue that we can evaluate research purposes according to their productivity (...) (how well these research purposes serve other, more ultimate purposes). Second, I argue that we can also evaluate research purposes according to their plausibility (including whether we have access to data that are adequate for these research purposes). The relationship between data evaluation and purpose setting should be seen as an iterative one, in which both data and purposes are refined in concert over time. (shrink)

Introduction: human rights in healthcare -- A right to treatment? the allocation of resouces in the National Health Service -- Ensuring quality healthcare: an issue of rights or duties? -- Autonomy and consent in medical treatment -- Treating incompetent patients: beneficence, welfare and rights -- Medical confidentiality and the right to privacy -- Property right in the body -- Medically assisted conception and a right to reproduce? -- Termination of pregnancy: a conflict of rights -- Pregnancy and freedom of choice (...) -- The right to life at the end of life -- The law and ethics of assisted dying: is there a right to die? (shrink)

This research examined choice behaviour and probability judgement in a counterintuitive reasoning problem called the Monty Hall problem (MHP). In Experiments 1 and 2 we examined whether learning from a simulated card game similar to the MHP affected how people solved the MHP. Results indicated that the experience with the card game affected participants' choice behaviour, in that participants selected to switch in the MHP. However, it did not affect their understanding of the objective probabilities. This suggests that there is (...) dissociation between implicit knowledge gained from the task and the explicit understanding as to why switching was the best strategy. In Experiment 3, the number of prizes and doors were manipulated to examine how participants construed the problem space of the MHP. Results revealed that participants partition the probability judgement to reflect the number of prizes over the number of unopened doors. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the repeated rhetorical moves through which the third wave autobiographical subject seeks to be real and to speak as part of a collective voice from the next feminist generation. Given that postmodernist, postructuralist, and multiculturalist critiques have shaped the form and the content of third wave expressions of the personal, the study is ultimately concerned with the possibilities and limitations of such theoretical analysis for a third wave of feminist praxis.

Radical moral encroachment is the view that belief itself is morally evaluable, and that some moral properties of belief itself make a difference to epistemic rationality. To date, almost all proponents of radical moral encroachment hold to an asymmetry thesis: the moral encroaches on rational belief, but not on rational credence. In this paper, we argue against the asymmetry thesis; we show that, insofar as one accepts the most prominent arguments for radical moral encroachment on belief, one should likewise accept (...) radical moral encroachment on credence. We outline and reject potential attempts to establish a basis for asymmetry between the attitude types. Then, we explore the merits and demerits of the two available responses to our symmetry claim: (i) embracing moral encroachment on credence and (ii) denying moral encroachment on belief. (shrink)

Kierkegaard the Christian thinker is introduced, beginning with his cultural background, his basic assumptions about the structure of the Christian universe, and the development of his vocation as religious writer. The author shows why he is different from others in his treatment of Christianity, then follows his presentations of Christian ideality and the tension and opposition in his authorship between Christianity as godly enjoyment of the world and Christianity as renunciation and total self-denial. Distributed in the US by Books International. (...) Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)