Within the ethics and science literature surrounding uterus transplantation (UTx), emphasis is often placed on the extent to which UTx might improve upon, or offer additional benefits when compared to, existing ‘treatment options’ for women with absolute uterine factor infertility, such as adoption and gestational surrogacy. Within this literature UTx is often positioned as superior to surrogacy because it can deliver things that surrogacy cannot (such as the experience of gestation). Yet, in addition to claims that UTx is superior in (...) the aforementioned sense it is also often assumed (either implicitly or explicitly) that UTx is less fraught with ethical difficulties and thus should be considered a less morally problematic option. This article seeks to examine this assumption. Given that much UTx research has been performed in Sweden, a country where surrogacy is effectively although not currently explicitly forbidden, we do this through an analysis of the arguments underpinning a 2016 Swedish white paper which considered amending existing policy such that altruistic surrogacy arrangements would be permitted. By applying the white paper’s arguments for a restrictive position on altruistic surrogacy to the case of UTx using living altruistic donors we find that such arguments, if they hold in the case of surrogacy, apply similarly to UTx. We thus suggest that, for reasons of consistency, a similar stance should be taken towards the moral and legal permissibility of these two practices. (shrink)

Personalisation is the new mantra in social care; this article focuses on how personalisation can be achieved in practice, by presenting an analysis of data from people with learning disabilities and their personal assistants, where traditional care relationships have often been shown to be disempowering. The focus here is on the ways in which both parties use references to shared knowledge, joint experiences or personal-life information. These strategies can be used for various social goals, and instances are given where shared (...) references are used during non task-related talk. Both parties are seen on occasion to attempt to refer to shared information, and dense layers of inference can result, which move the interaction onto an ordinary, more symmetrical and friendly footing. The article concludes that shared knowledge referencing creates a way to shift between the personal and the professional, to blur the boundaries, and to create a new and more personalised relationship. (shrink)

This functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging study investigated high and low suggestible people responding to two visual hallucination suggestions with and without a hypnotic induction. Participants in the study were asked to see color while looking at a grey image, and to see shades of grey while looking at a color image. High suggestible participants reported successful alterations in color perception in both tasks, both in and out of hypnosis, and showed a small benefit if hypnosis was induced. Low suggestible people (...) could not perform the tasks successfully with or without the hypnotic induction. The fMRI results supported the self report data, and changes in brain activity were found in a number of visual areas. The results indicate that a hypnotic induction, although having the potential to enhance the ability of high suggestible people, is not necessary for the effective alteration of color perception by suggestion. (shrink)

Intellectual contribution in the form of authorship is a fundamental component of the academic career. While research has addressed questionable and harmful authorship practices, there has largely been no discussion of how U.S. academic institutions interpret and potentially mitigate such practices through the use of institution-level authorship policies. To gain a better understanding of the role of U.S. academic institutions in authorship practices, we conducted a systematic review of publicly available authorship policies for U.S. doctoral institutions, focusing on components such (...) as specification of authorship criteria, recommendations for discussing authorship, dispute resolution processes, and guidance for faculty-student collaborations. We found that only 24% of the 266 Carnegie R1 and R2 Universities had publicly available authorship policies. Within these policies, the majority specified criteria for authorship, but provided less guidance about actual processes for applying such criteria, handling authorship disputes, and managing faculty-student author teams. Further, we found that any discussion of dispute resolution practices typically lacked specificity. Recommendations grounded in these findings are offered for institutions to leverage their ability to guide the authorship process by adopting an authorship policy that acknowledges disciplinary diversity while still offering substantive guidance. (shrink)

Tracy, Shariff, and Cheng (2010) present a timely and eloquent review of the current research on the emotion pride in terms of a naturalist framework. The present commentary not only echoes arguments relating to pride’s adaptive function, but also highlights some points of theoretical clarification. Specifically, we question the necessity of the naturalist approach and the emphasis on two facets of pride.

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 50, Issue 1, Page 7-19, March 2022.

Between the years 1643 and 1649, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes exchanged fifty-eight letters—thirty-two from Descartes and twenty-six from Elisabeth. Their correspondence contains the only known extant philosophical writings by Elisabeth, revealing her mastery of metaphysics, analytic geometry, and moral philosophy, as well as her keen interest in natural philosophy. The letters are essential reading for anyone interested in Descartes’s philosophy, in particular his account of the human being as a union of mind and body, as well as (...) his ethics. They also provide a unique insight into the character of their authors and the way ideas develop through intellectual collaboration. Philosophers have long been familiar with Descartes’s side of the correspondence. Now Elisabeth’s letters—never before available in translation in their entirety—emerge this volume, adding much-needed context and depth both to Descartes’s ideas and the legacy of the princess. Lisa Shapiro’s annotated edition—which also includes Elisabeth’s correspondence with the Quakers William Penn and Robert Barclay—will be heralded by students of philosophy, feminist theorists, and historians of the early modern period. (shrink)

Syntactic complexity effects have been investigated extensively with respect to comprehension . According to one prominent class of accounts , certain structures cause comprehension difficulty due to their scarcity in the language. But why are some structures less frequent than others? In two elicited-production experiments we investigated syntactic complexity effects in relative clauses and wh-questions varying in whether or not they contained non-local dependencies. In both experiments, we found reliable durational differences between subject-extracted structures and object-extracted structures : Participants took (...) longer to begin and produce object-extractions. Furthermore, participants were more likely to be disfluent in the object-extracted constructions. These results suggest that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering the more syntactically complex, object-extracted structures, and that this cost manifests in the form of longer durations and disfluencies. Although the precise nature of this cost remains to be determined, these effects provide one plausible explanation for the relative rarity of object-extractions: They are more costly to produce. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

Altruism is a well-established reason underlying research participation. Less is known about altruism in adolescent-parent decision-making about clinical trials enrolling healthy adolescents. This qualitative investigation focused on identifying spontaneous statements of altruism within adolescent-parent discussions of participation in a hypothetical phase I clinical trial related to adolescent sexual health. Content analysis revealed several response patterns to each other’s altruistic reasoning. Across 70 adolescent-parent dyads in which adolescents were 14 to 17 years of age and 91% of their parents were mothers, (...) a majority of dyadic discussions included a statement reflecting altruism. Parents responded to adolescents’ statements of altruism more frequently than adolescents responded to parents’ statements. Responses included: expresses concern, reiterates altruistic reasoning, agrees with altruistic reasoning, and adds to/expands altruistic reasoning. Since an altruistic perspective was often balanced with concerns about risk or study procedures, researchers cannot assume that altruism will directly lead to study participation. Optimizing the informed consent process for early phase clinical trials involving healthy adolescents may include supporting parents to have conversations with their adolescents which will enhance their capacity to consider all aspects of trial participation. (shrink)

The effect of oxytocin on cognitive bias was investigated in rats in a modified conditioned place preference (CPP) paradigm. Fifteen male rats were trained to discriminate between two different cue combinations, one paired with palatable foods (reward training), and the other paired with unpalatable food (aversive training). Next, their reactions to two ambiguous cue combinations were evaluated and their latency to contact the goal pot recorded. Rats were injected with either oxytocin (OT) or saline with the prediction that rats administered (...) oxytocin would display a shorter average latency to approach on ambiguous trials. There was no significant difference between latencies to approach on ambiguous trials compared to reward trials, but the rats were significantly slower on the aversive compared to the ambiguous conditions. Oxytocin did not affect approach time; however, it was unclear, after follow-up testing, whether the OT doses tested were sufficient to produce the desired effects on cognitive bias. Future research should consider this possibility. (shrink)

Population-level biomedical research offers new opportunities to improve population health, but also raises new challenges to traditional systems of research governance and ethical oversight. Partly in response to these challenges, various models of public involvement in research are being introduced. Yet, the ways in which public involvement should meet governance challenges are not well understood. We conducted a qualitative study with 36 experts and stakeholders using the World Café method to identify key governance challenges and explore how public involvement can (...) meet these challenges. This brief report discusses four cross-cutting themes from the study: the need to move beyond individual consent; issues in benefit and data sharing; the challenge of delineating and understanding publics; and the goal of clarifying justifications for public involvement. The report aims to provide a starting point for making sense of the relationship between public involvement and the governance of population-level biomedical research, showing connections, potential solutions and issues arising at their intersection. We suggest that, in population-level biomedical research, there is a pressing need for a shift away from conventional governance frameworks focused on the individual and towards a focus on collectives, as well as to foreground ethical issues around social justice and develop ways to address cultural diversity, value pluralism and competing stakeholder interests. There are many unresolved questions around how this shift could be realised, but these unresolved questions should form the basis for developing justificatory accounts and frameworks for suitable collective models of public involvement in population-level biomedical research governance. (shrink)

Health care providers (HCPs) are routinely placed into morally challenging situations that have the potential to cause moral distress. This is especially true for HCPs working in the military, whether they are on deployment outside their typical contexts of practice such as in disaster relief (e.g., Haiti and the Ebola missions in West Africa), or in more typically military settings such as peace keeping or armed conflicts (e.g., Afghanistan, Syria). Moral distress refers to “painful feelings and/or psychological disequilibrium” (Nilsson, Sjöberg, (...) Kallenberg, & Larsson, 2011, p. 50) that occur when an individual is aware of a morally appropriate action in a moral dilemma but obstruction prevents them from carrying it out, or when in a situation where they must choose between upholding equally treasured but conflicting moral values. Similarly, moral distress can occur when faced with a ‘tragic choice’ where all available courses of action require something of moral significance to be given up, such as surgical triage in a mass casualty event (Hunt, Sinding, & Schwartz, 2012). In the literature, moral distress has been connected to negative psychological effects and even stress related mental health issues including compassion fatigue, burnout, and post-traumatic stress disorder (Owen & Wanzer, 2014; Gustafsson, Eriksson, Strandberg, & Norberg, 2010; Litz, et al., 2009). (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

Western philosophy’s relationship with prisons stretches from Plato’s own incarceration to the modern era of mass incarceration. Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration draws together a broad range of philosophical thinkers, from both inside and outside prison walls, in the United States and beyond, who draw on a variety of critical perspectives (including phenomenology, deconstruction, and feminist theory) and historical and contemporary figures in philosophy (including Kant, Hegel, Foucault, and Angela Davis) to think about (...) prisons in this new historical era. All of these contributors have experiences within prison walls: some are or have been incarcerated, some have taught or are teaching in prisons, and all have been students of both philosophy and the carceral system. The powerful testimonials and theoretical arguments are appropriate reading not only for philosophers and prison theorists generally, but also for prison reformers and abolitionists. (shrink)

When a person gives up an end of crucial importance to her in order to promote a moral aim, we regard her as having made a moral sacrifice. The paper analyzes these sacrifices in light of some of Bernard Williams’ objections to Kantian and Utilitarian accounts of them. Williams argues that an implausible consequence of these theories is that that we are expected to sacrifice projects that make our lives worth living and contribute to our integrity. Williams’ (...) arguments about integrity and meaning are shown to be unconvincing when the content of projects is left open. However, a look at his later arguments suggests a reason to be concerned about defensible ethical projects as understood through what he refers to as “the morality system”. The problem for theories of this type turns out to be not merely conflicts between ethical projects and moral demands but making sense of some of the ethically relevant features of these projects. Accommodations to moral theories that leave room for ethical projects may be insufficient to explain such features, for example in cases where agents demand more of themselves than the theories require. Making the theories more demanding is also problematic. Williams’ view about the role ethics plays in our conception of the life we want to lead provides a better account of these cases. (shrink)

Alienation and Connection addresses social constructs that perpetuate alienation through suffering. The contributors discuss how alienation through suffering in a variety of contexts can be transformed into connection and reconnection: human relationship with the environment, economic and social systems that disconnect and reconnect, cultural constructs that divide or can heal, encountered difference that brings opportunity, and various manifestations of personal pain that can be survived and even overcome.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

De-Signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice throws new light on the terrain between theory and practice in transdisciplinary discourses of design and art. The collection brings together a selection of essays on spatiality, difference, cultural aesthetics, and identity in the expanded field of place-making and being.

Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even mind and matter. Habit thus discloses a paradox. It takes (...) up a unique position in affect modulation, which encompasses both regulation (in the form of discipline) and also extends the body’s potential for engaging the new, change and creativity. In order to understand the basis of the ambivalent duality governing understandings of habit it is argued that a genealogical approach to this question is necessary. This will be located within the recent ‘turn to affect’ and histories of conation within the psychological sciences, particularly taking the writings of William McDougall as a focus. (shrink)

In this paper we address Bernard Williams' argument for the undesirability of immortality. Williams argues that unavoidable and pervasive boredom would characterise the immortal life of an individual with unchanging categorical desires. We resist this conclusion on the basis of the distinction between habitual and situational boredom and a psychologically realistic account of significant factors in the formation of boredom. We conclude that Williams has offered no persuasive argument for the necessity of boredom in the immortal life. (...) 1. (shrink)

Susan Wolf's paper "Meaning and Morality" draws our attention to the fact that Williams's objection to Kantian morality is primarily a concern about a possible conflict between morality and that which gives our lives meaning. I argue that the force of Williams's objection requires a more precise understanding of meaning as dependent on our intention to make our lives themselves worthwhile. It is not meaning simpliciter that makes Williams's objective persuasive but rather meaning as arising out of (...) our positive evaluation of the value of our lives as a whole. This type of meaning has a normative element: it involves a person's deep-seated commitment to make her actions consistent with ends that confer worth on her life itself. The more significant conflict with morality lies in the conflict between the normative force of moral requirements and the normative force of the need to have a life that is itself worthwhile. (shrink)

Lucretia Mott is widely recognized as a moral and spiritual leader in the abolitionist and early women’s rights movements. She has been characterized as a disciple of William Lloyd Garrison, a proliferator of Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas, and a religious promoter of human rights whose efforts were surpassed by the theoretically sophisticated and politically astute Elizabeth Cady Stanton. These portrayals paradoxically elevate Mott’s status while understating the originality of her views. This analysis examines Mott’s speeches and writings in detail and finds (...) that her unique theoretical contributions are shaped by a combination of elements: a radically anti-dogmatic worldview rooted in her progressive religious faith, an unwavering commitment to autonomy for all people, and an egalitarian conception of power. Careful study of Mott’s work reveals a compelling alternative viewpoint in the early women’s rights and abolitionist movements and provides important insight into the philosophical roots of contemporary feminism and pacifism. (shrink)

A constructivist approach to ethics must include some process—such as Rawls’ (1971) reflective equilibrium—for moving from initial evaluative judgments to those that one can affirm. Walker’s (1998; 2003) feminist version of reflective equilibrium incorporates what she calls “transparency testing” to weed out pernicious, ideologically shaped intuitions. However, in light of empirical work on the plurality of values and on the cognitive processes through which people arrive at moral judgments (i.e. an automatic, intuitive process and/or a controlled reasoning process), I raise (...) one concern: some moral requirements can only be grasped intuitively and should not have to be affirmed from the perspective of other confidently held values. The “requirements of love” (Frankfurt 2004) are one such example; failing to fulfill these requirements is, for someone who loves, unthinkable (Frankfurt 1988); one transgresses the associated values merely by considering sacrificing them. I suggest—citing empirical work on “sacred values” (Tetlock 2000; 2003)—that to subject these requirements to transparency testing would be to transgress them by having “one thought too many” (Williams 1981). One’s confidence in these values, and the authority of these values, depend on an automatic process. I consider the risks, and the necessity, of embracing both intuitive and reasoning processes for affirming the authority of a plurality of moral values. (shrink)

Legal minds have utilized the principle of double effect as proposed by St. Thomas Aquinas for centuries to shape legal authority in cases where moral judgment and legal reasoning meet. The U.S. Supreme Court had uti­lized double-effect reasoning in the realm of self-defense cases. This article discusses more recent use of double-effect reasoning in the landmark Supreme Court case Vacco v. Quill and its companion case, Washington v. Glucksberg. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the Court in Vacco, introduced double-effect (...) reasoning to identify the distinctions between palliative care and assisted suicide in an effort to uphold the constitutionality of the ban on assisted suicide in New York. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.1 (Spring 2011): 41–48. (shrink)

Contrary to quietistic readings, Stephen Bush argues in William James on Democratic Individuality that the role of individualism in James’s view of religion is very much political—and not just generally political, but specifically so. Jamesian individualism is a democratic individualism; “No one doubts that James is committed to individualism,” Bush writes at the outset, “but the key thing is to figure out what his individualism involves”. To this end, this book asks the perennial question of philosophical entailment.From the introduction, we (...) learn that James’s philosophy, theology, politics, and ethics are not externally related elements for Bush. The integrality of each of these elements challenges the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 343-346 [Access article in PDF] The Paradox Topos Lisa Gorton As William Egginton points out, 1 when Dante and Beatrice step outside the cosmos, they step into another set of concentric spheres. 2 These surround our (supposedly) geocentric cosmos, and yet they center upon God. The image affronts our logic of space. If these concentric spheres encompass us, how can (...) they center upon something somewhere else? The notion seems to turn space inside-out. But Dante's spatial paradox is not in truth a paradox of space. Instead, it is a spiritual paradox, set in terms of space. When Dante and Beatrice step outside the cosmos, they step outside space into an old philosophical topos, a spatial image of God. For that reason, Dante's image is not really akin to the spatial paradoxes of modern astrophysics, although Egginton's comparison of the two does provoke some fascinating comments upon medieval concepts of space. Egginton assesses Dante's paradox in light of medieval debates about space, place, and God. However, he overlooks the most important source for Dante's paradox--the symbolic geometry of Neoplatonic philosophy. 3Neoplatonic philosophers use spatial forms to imagine spiritual relationships. They develop a symbolic geometry, a spatial language of thought, which borrows nothing from physical space but its shapes: the center, the circle, and concentric spheres. Neoplatonists use this symbolic geometry because it offers a spatial way to imagine the relationship between a cause and its effect, without importing time differences into that relationship. In this way they seek to avoid the problems of time and causality, which the creation-myth in Timaeus introduced into Plato's philosophy: how and when could a timeless being make time? 4 [End Page 343]Plotinus, the first Neoplatonist, uses symbolic geometry to design an "Intellectual Cosmos," which he treats as quite distinct from our physical cosmos. 5 He imagines the source of life as a center: The Highest cannot be divided and allotted... thus a centre is an independent unity; everything within the circle has its own term in the centre, and to the centre the radii each bring their own. (Enneads, V. 1. 11). The "Highest" exists as the center of this "Intellectual Cosmos." Plotinus treats a center's geometric qualities as metaphysical attributes. Like an undimensioned central point, the "Highest" does not exist in space or time, and yet space and time radiate from it as a circumference radiates from its center.The bare symbolic space of Plotinus's "Intellectual Cosmos" has emotional connotations. Plotinus holds that "the center of a circle is distinctively a point of rest" (Enneads II. 2. 1). Lesser beings must turn sequentially through all the angles their center holds altogether at once: There is, we may put it, something that is centre; about it, a circle of light shed from it; round centre and first circle alike, another circle, light from light; outside that again, not another circle of light but one which, lacking light of its own, must borrow. (Enneads, IV. 3. 17) In Plotinus's "Intellectual Cosmos" life emanates from the center in concentric spheres. 6Dante and Beatrice step into such an "Intellectual Cosmos" when they step outside the physical world. They step into a spatial image that stands outside time and space, at the spiritual center of the poem, when they step into spheres that center upon a light too bright to look upon. Dante wonders where that center could be, and Beatrice responds to his silent question: "The nature of the universe, which holds the center still and moves all else around it, begins here as if from its turning point" (XXVII, 106-9). Egginton comments, "Dante's description of this absolute center as the origin of all movement and force in the universe" is "an 'eerie' likeness of what he [the modern astrophysicist, Robert Osserman] terms the retro-verse." More relevantly, it also refers to the "Intellectual Cosmos" of Neoplatonic philosophy, where the "Highest" is a center of rest, the starting point of light, movement, and life. [End Page 344]Plotinus... (shrink)

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

Suppose you take a tour of the Louvre, that great museum in Paris housing one of the finest art collections in the world. As you walk through the museum, you come across a painting by someone named Leonardo da Vinci -- the Mona Lisa. Suppose this is your first exposure to da Vinci -- you hadn't heard of him or seen the Mona Lisa before. What could you conclude? Certainly you could conclude that da Vinci was a consummate (...) painter. Nevertheless, just from the Mona Lisa you couldn't conclude that da Vinci was also a consummate engineer, musician, scientist, and inventor, whose ideas were centuries ahead of their time. (shrink)

Expanded edition with new chapters and updates to the translation and bibliography. Borges cites innumerable authors in the pages making up his life’s work, and innumerable authors have cited and continue to cite him. More than a figure, then, the quotation is an integral part of the fabric of his writing, a fabric made anew by each reading and each re-citation it undergoes, in the never-ending throes of a work-in-progress. Block de Behar makes of this reading a plea for the (...) very art of communication; a practice that takes community not in the totalized and totalizable soil of pre-established definitions or essences, but on the ineluctable repetitions that constitute language as such, and that guarantee the expansiveness—through etymological coincidences of meaning, through historical contagions, through translinguistic sharings of particular experiences—of a certain index of universality. This edition includes a new introduction by the author and three entirely new chapters, as well as updated images and corrections to the original translation. Lisa Block de Behar is Professor of Communications at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay and is a renowned Jorge Luis Borges scholar. William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several books, including In Defense of Religious Moderation. Christopher RayAlexander is a graduate student and language instructor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. (shrink)