The introduction first goes back on Jeremy Bentham’s historical scheme to highlight lesser-known traits and show how it was not limited to carceral applications, a versatility which has been reflected in literature. It then moves on to Foucault’s chapter on panopticism in _ Discipline and Punish, _ foregrounding its most influential aspects as well as others which are often overlooked. The third part focuses on the reception of Foucault’s panopticism in literary criticism, from the seminal studies of D.A. Miller and (...) John Bender to contemporary times. The fourth part deals with the influence of panopticism within the field of surveillance studies, as well as the input offered by literature for these discussions. The introduction then presents the structure of the issue and offers a summary of each of the five articles and of the final interview. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of texts which were written in 1802-3 and published in 1812 under the title Panopticon versus New South Wales, namely Jeremy Bentham’s first two letters to Lord Pelham and A Plea for the Constitution, arguing that, in his attempt to show the superiority of his Panopticon plan over the transportation scheme, the reformer depicted New South Wales as a Gothic dystopia. ‘Gothic’ is here understood as a literary genre, an ideological term and a critical tool. (...) Bentham upset the conventional cartography of his time by showing that the ‘archaic’ or ‘barbarian’ practices that Gothic novels located in Catholic Europe were actually present in British penal policies. In addition to drawing on the rhetoric and the dichotomies which underlay the Gothic novels published during his lifetime, Bentham anticipated scenarios – such as reverse colonization and contamination – which would be explored in Victorian fiction. By extrapolating in dystopian fashion from trends which were present in the British body politic, Bentham’s Australian writings show how a historical period may be haunted by its future potentialities. (shrink)

IntroductionJamais construit, jamais occupé, le Panoptique de Bentham demeure une architecture virtuelle qu’il est possible d’interpréter, de rêver ou de « cauchemarder » avec peut-être plus de liberté que si elle s’était incarnée dans la pierre. Si d’un côté, des recherches récentes ont permis de préciser l’évolution historique de ce projet dans la pensée de Bentham, dans d’autres domaines, le Panoptique est un paradigme utilisé pour lire la littérature anglo-saxonne de la fin du XVIIIe sièc..

Introduction Grady Hendrix is an American author and journalist who is also one of the founders of the New York Asian Film Festival. Horrostör: A Novel was published in 2014 by Quirk Books, a publisher based in Philadelphia and distributed by Penguin Random House. According to its website, Quirk Books was founded in 2002 and publishes ‘a highly curated list of entertaining, enlightening, and strikingly unconventional books for adults and children in a number of genres and categories,’ which i...

Dans les grandes études d’histoire carcérale qui ont fait date dans les années 1980-1990, le projet panoptique de Jeremy Bentham occupe une place centrale, marquant le passage de la prison de l’ancien temps (lieu de passage, de brassage, de...

As the author himself notes in the prologue, the book – An Advanced Introduction to Law and Literature – seeks to “advance” the discussion. Written by Peter Goodrich, one of the leading and most prolific scholars on the topic, the work may not be suitable for first-comers to the Law and Literature movement looking for a systematic overview of the field. The latter may be found in the numerous already-existing handbooks, research guides or critical introductions. While the prologue mentions la...

Le propos est précédé par une illustration, la seule de l’ouvrage, extraite d’une Histoire de l’industrie du coton en Grande-Bretagne parue en 1835. Il s’agit de la reproduction d’un dessin représentant le processus d’impression de motifs sur du calicot. On y voit deux hommes travailler, de façon semble-t-il minutieuse, sur deux grandes machines installées dans un atelier spacieux. L’illustration est égayée par les motifs imprimés sur les pans de tissu, qui occupent une grande partie de l’esp..

L’ouvrage de Claire Wrobel s’appuie sur une citation de Michel Foucault qui sert d’épigraphe à l’introduction, selon laquelle « les espaces imaginaires » que sont « les paysages d’Ann Radcliffe […] sont comme la ‘contre-figure’ des transparences et des visibilités qu’on essaie d’établir ». Le « on » de cette citation est celui de Jeremy Bentham, que Claire Wrobel propose ici, suivant l’hypothèse foucaldienne, de lire conjointement avec l’œuvre de Radcliffe, parue pour l’essentiel dans les années (...) 1790, afin d’explorer le rapport que le Panoptique entretient avec le roman gothique (p. 14). Les bornes chronologiques de ce livre, 1764 et 1842, correspondent d’une part à la publication de ce qui est considéré comme le premier roman gothique, _The Castle of Otranto_ (Horace Walpole, 1764), et d’autre part à l’ouverture du pénitencier de Pentonville, inspiré des travaux de Bentham et inauguré 10 ans après sa mort. Le propos est mené avec rigueur, précision et conviction tout au long des 492... (shrink)

Acteur majeur de la philosophie morale anglo-saxonne du second vingtième siècle, Richard Mervyn Hare n’avait encore jamais été traduit en français. C’est désormais chose faite grâce au travail de Malik Bozzo-Rey, Jean-Pierre Cléro et Claire Wrobel. Leur choix s’est judicieusement porté sur Moral Thinking : Its Levels, Method, and Point, ouvrage paru en 1981 et qui constitue sans doute la meilleure porte d’entrée à l’ambitieuse philosophie morale de Hare. Il s’agit en effet du pre...

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing (...) to fight-and die for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or by showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses. (shrink)

Research exploring the needs of families of childhood cancer survivors is critical to improving the experiences of future families faced by this disease. However, there are numerous challenges in conducting research with this unique population, including a relatively high mortality rate. In recognition that research with cancer survivors is a relational activity, this article presents a series of cases of parents bereaved by childhood cancer who unintentionally received invitations to participate in survivorship research. We explore six ethical considerations, and compare (...) our experiences with that described previously. Our considerations include the sharing of confidential information with external parties to confirm past patients’ vital status and appropriate researcher responses to bereaved parents. The management of researchers’ emotional safety when working with illness populations and the fact that study invitations can elicit grief responses in non-bereaved families are discussed. To conclude, we argue for the benefits of inviting bereaved parents whose children died after treatment completion in survivorship research. Such parents’ early survivorship experiences will otherwise be systemically neglected. We argue that discussing complex cases can assist researchers to protect participants’ and researchers’ emotional well-being. We hope to contribute to the dearth of discussion about research operating procedures to address these issues. (shrink)

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) open up the possibility of new forms of relationship and engagement, which form part of the sociality of modern society, leading some to characterize this as a transition to an "information society", a "network society", or a "third industrial revolution". This has implications for Social Quality, especially in terms of social cohesion, social inclusion and social empowerment. Drawing upon recent research we find that ICTs have added new dimensions to social life in ways that go (...) beyond the original formulations of the digital divide. Conversely, Social Quality can also add important insights into our understanding of the relationship between society and technology. The article argues that discussions of Social Quality should take these dimensions into account. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFacial mimicry has long been considered a main mechanism underlying emotional contagion. A closer look at the empirical evidence, however, rev...

Our purpose in this article is to identify and suggest resolution for two core problematics of grounded theory. First, while grounded theory provides transparency to one part of the conceptualization process, where codes emerge directly from the data, it provides no such systematic or transparent way for gaining insight into the conceptual relationships between discovered codes. Producing a grounded theory depends not only on the definition of conceptual pieces, but the delineation of a relationship between at least two of those (...) pieces. Second, the conceptualization process of grounded theory is done in hierarchical fashion, where individual codes emerge from the data but then are used to generate insight into more general concepts and thematic statements. But various works on grounded theory have failed to provide any systematic way of using data specific levels of scale (the codes) to gain insight into more macro levels of scale (concepts and themes). We offer fractal concept analysis as a means of resolving both of these issues. By using a logic structure generator, fractal concept analysis delineates self-similar conceptual frameworks at various levels of abstraction, yielding a method for linking concepts together within and between levels of scale encountered in the grounded theory coding and categorization process. We conclude that this fractal analytic technique can bolster the aims of grounded theory as a formalized and systematic process for generating theory from empirical data. (shrink)

This article is about recent attempts by scholars, database practitioners, and curators to experiment in theoretically interesting ways with the conceptual design and the building of databases, archives, and other information systems. This article uses the term ‘‘archive’’ as an overarching category to include a diversity of technologies used to inventory objects and knowledge, to commit them to memory and for future use. The category of ‘‘archive’’ might include forms as diverse as the simple spreadsheet, the species inventory, the computerized (...) database, and the museum. Using this protean concept, this study suggests that we are currently witnessing a time where close convergences are occurring between social theory and archive construction. It identifies a ‘‘move’’ toward exposure of the guts of our archives and databases, toward exposing the contingencies, the framing, the reflexivity, and the politics embedded within them. Within this move, the study examines ways in which theories of performance and emergence have begun to influence the way that archives of different kinds are conceived and reflects on the role of Science and Technology Studies scholars in their construction. (shrink)

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ Platonis Timaeus: Interprete Chalcidio Cum Eiusdem Commentario Ad Fidem Librorum Manu Scriptorum Calcidius, Johann Wrobel, Plato aedibus B.G. Teubneri, 1876 Philosophy; History & Surveys; Ancient & Classical; Philosophy / History & Surveys / Ancient & Classical. (shrink)

This edited collection had its origins in a two-day conference held at the Tate Britain, organised collaboratively by research staff and students at Middlesex University and the London Consortium in order to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the publication of Edmund Burke's famous book on the sublime. The conference was funded by Middlesex University, the London Consortium and the Tate Britain's AHRC-funded "Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language" research project. The conference set out to critically examine the legacy of the (...) sublime in contemporary art, culture and society and to assess the value and the dangers of this concept as it is articulated in current thought and practice. The book selected from and expanded on the papers delivered at the conference in order to pursue this goal further. It was broken into themed sections (each of which had an introduction), each exploring an different issue around contemporary uses of the sublime. The sections were: 1. Nature, Ecology and the Sublime; 2. The Sublime After Kant; 3. Capitalism, Terror, Art and the Sublime; 4. Baroque and Beyond: Art, Sex and the Sublime; 5. The Cinematic Sublime. The volume reflects the interdisiplinarity of the concept of the sublime today, and includes essays whose appraoches come from aesthetics and ethics, ecological and political thought, psychoanalysis, feminism, film studies, literary studies, art history and popular culture. It includes papers by internationally renowned authors from the UK, America and Europe alongside the new voices of younger academics. The contributors were: Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), Mark Bould (University of the West of England), Eu Jin Chua (London Consortium), Gudrun Filipska (Middlesex University), Cornelia Klinger (Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna / University of Tübingen, Germany), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck), William McDonald (Middlesex Univeristy), Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck), Claire Pajaczkowska (Royal College of Art), Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds), Gene Ray (Geneva University of Art and Design), Bettina Reiber (Central St. Martins), Jan Rosiek (University of Copenhagen), Sherryl Vint (Brock University, Canada), and Luke White (Middlesex University). (shrink)

Artykuł ukazuje w ujęciu problemowym stan badań nad postacią Mikołaja Zebrzydowskiego (1553–1620) oraz jego rodziny do roku 2022. Zwrócono uwagę na najważniejsze publikacje dotyczące jego biografii, fundacji oraz działalności politycznej. Zauważono, że dotychczasowa historiografia zajmowała się Zebrzydowskim głównie w kontekście rokoszu sandomierskiego, fundacji klasztoru, kalwarii oraz fundacji w rodowych Zebrzydowicach. Natomiast genealogią rodziny Zebrzydowskich, ich majątkiem oraz powiązaniami z innymi rodami zajmowano się sporadycznie. Nieco szerzej analizowano działalność Floriana Zebrzydowskiego, ojca Mikołaja, jednak głównie jako teoretyka wojskowości. Autorzy podkreślają szczególnie znaczenie (...) rocznicy 400-lecia śmierci wojewody krakowskiego, która przypadła na rok 2020. Przyczyniła się ona do intensyfikacji badań nad biografią Mikołaja Zebrzydowskiego i jego rodziną, co zaowocowało m.in. wydaniem dwóch monografii: szkicu biograficznego oraz pracy zbiorowej. W podsumowaniu artykułu nakreślono perspektywy badawcze dotyczące biografii wojewody krakowskiego i jego rodziny, zauważając m.in. konieczność rozszerzenia kwerend w archiwach krajowych i zagranicznych. (shrink)

Unifiability of terms (and formulas) and structural completeness in the variety of relation algebras RA and in the products of modal logic S5 is investigated. Nonunifiable terms (formulas) which are satisfiable in varieties (in logics) are exhibited. Consequently, RA and products of S5 as well as representable diagonal-free n-dimensional cylindric algebras, RDfn, are almost structurally complete but not structurally complete. In case of S5n a basis for admissible rules and the form of all passive rules are provided.

Two experiments examined similarities and differences in the effects of consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards on the active maintenance of goal-relevant information. Participants could gain high and low monetary rewards for performance on a word span task. The reward value was presented supraliminally or subliminally at different stages during the task. In Experiment 1, rewards were presented before participants processed the target words. Enhanced performance was found in response to higher rewards, regardless whether they were presented supraliminally or subliminally. In (...) Experiment 2, rewards were presented after participants processed the target words, i.e., during maintenance. Performance increased in response to relatively high rewards when they were presented subliminally, but decreased when they were presented supraliminally. We conclude that both consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards boost resources supporting the maintenance of task-relevant information. Conscious processing of rewards can, however, heavily interfere with an ongoing maintenance process and impair performance. (shrink)

This paper describes a method for analyzing a corpus of descriptions collected through micro-phenomenological interviews. This analysis aims at identifying the structure of the singular experiences which have been described, and in particular their diachronic structure, while unfolding generic experiential structures through an iterative approach. After summarizing the principles of the micro-phenomenological interview, and then describing the process of preparation of the verbatim, the article presents on the one hand, the principles and conceptual devices of the analysis method and on (...) the other hand several dimensions of the analysis process: the modes of structural unfolding of generic structures, the mutual guidance of the processes of structural and experiential unfolding, the tracking of analysis processes, and finally the assessment of analysis results. (shrink)

This article analyses research that has explored the potential of a focus on indeterminate bodies for decision making, policy and politics. Drawing on different ways of conceptualising indeterminacy in scientific and policy domains it describes the Loweswater Care Project, a participatory ‘knowledge collective’ that attempted to avoid converting the complexities of vital cyanobacterial bodies into a purely social or managerial set of questions around water quality. Through a commitment to opening out the nature of ‘things’, participants in this collective honed (...) new questions and avenues of inquiry around cyanobacteria and its relations. The Loweswater Care Project was a kind of ‘open’ in Haraway’s sense, where questions and demands are put to bodies, and to the apparatus that allows us to sense them, in ways that do not shy away from the probabilistic character of entities and their relations. The implications of generating indeterminacies in this setting are explored for environmental decision making, policy and politics. (shrink)

Over the last decade, legal recognition of same-sex relationships in Canada has accelerated. By and large, same-sex cohabitants are now recognised in the same manner as opposite-sex cohabitants, and same-sex marriage was legalised in 2005. Without diminishing the struggle that lesbians and gay men have endured to secure this somewhat revolutionary legal recognition, this article troubles its narrative of progress. In particular, we investigate the terms on which recent legal struggles have advanced, as well as the ways in which resistance (...) to the legal recognition has been expressed and dealt with. We argue that to the extent that feminist critiques of marriage, familial ideology, and the privatisation of economic responsibility are marginalised, conservative and heteronormative discourses on marriage and family are reinforced. Our case studies include two pivotal moments in the quest for legislative recognition of same-sex relationships: the Hearings of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Bill C-23, The Modernization of Benefits and Obligations Act, in 2000 and the hearings on Same-Sex Marriage in 2003. We find that the debates operated within a narrow paradigm that bolstered many existing hierarchies and exacerbated conditions for those who are economically disadvantaged. (shrink)

Most areas of philosopher Edmund Husserl’s thought have been explored, but his views on logic, mathematics, and semantics have been largely ignored. These essays offer an alternative to discussions of the philosophy of contemporary mathematics. The book covers areas of disagreement between Husserl and Gottlob Frege, the father of analytical philosophy, and explores new perspectives seen in their work.

Oddajemy czytelnikom kolejny numer „Rocznika Filozoficznego Ignatianum”. Prawie w całości poświęcony został on Mikołajowi Zebrzydowskiemu. Stan badań na jego temat zarysowany został w pierwszym tekście autorstwa Elżbiety E. Wróbel i Tomasza Graffa. Drugi z wymienionych autorów w osobnym artykule przedstawił także problematykę związaną z rozwojem majątku Floriana Zebrzydowskiego w miarę wzrostu jego znaczenia politycznego na dworze króla Zygmunta Augusta. Szczególny nacisk położono na studium przypadku (_case study_). Autor analizuje bowiem nabycie przez Zebrzydowskiego dóbr w Radoczy koło Wadowic, ukazując perspektywę konieczności (...) podjęcia dalszych badań nad powiększeniem majątku Floriana Zebrzydowskiego i jego rodziny. Artykuł wieńczy aneks, wraz z edycją w języku łacińskim i polskim tłumaczeniu dokumentu, w którym „Zygmunt August nadaje Florianowi Zebrzydowskiemu prawo zbudowania tamy na rzece Skawie i poprowadzenia stamtąd wody fosą przez ziemie dóbr Wadowice dla zbudowania stawów rybnych w dobrach Radocza”_._. (shrink)

Automated Influence is the use of Artificial Intelligence to collect, integrate, and analyse people’s data in order to deliver targeted interventions that shape their behaviour. We consider three central objections against Automated Influence, focusing on privacy, exploitation, and manipulation, showing in each case how a structural version of that objection has more purchase than its interactional counterpart. By rejecting the interactional focus of “AI Ethics” in favour of a more structural, political philosophy of AI, we show that the real problem (...) with Automated Influence is the crisis of legitimacy that it precipitates. (shrink)

Visual artists and scientists frequently employ the labour of assistants and technicians, however these workers generally receive little recognition for their contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work. They are effectively “invisible”. This invisible status however, comes at the cost of a better understanding of artistic and scientific work, and improvements in artistic and scientific practice. To enhance understanding of artistic and scientific work, and these practices more broadly, it is vital to discern the nature of an assistant (...) or technician’s contribution to the production of a work, which is difficult as it is uncommon to discuss these workers. To address this, I investigate how different kinds of parallel working arrangements in collective artistic and scientific practices affect the creative potential of individuals involved. Different working arrangements permit different degrees of autonomy for individuals involved in these practices. Significantly, a lack of autonomy precludes the opportunity to act spontaneously and so exercise, what I term, “creative agency”. Evaluating the contribution of an assistant or technician based on the degree of autonomy that they are granted in the production of a work is an approach that I show can be used to precisely determine the nature of their contribution to the production of a work and accordingly, what kind of recognition an agent should receive for this. Importantly, this approach has the advantage of explaining the artistic and epistemic significance of different kinds of contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work. (shrink)

The Enkratic Principle enjoys something of a protected status as a requirement of rationality. I argue that this status is undeserved, at least in the epistemic domain. Compliance with the principle should not be thought of as a requirement of epistemic rationality, but rather as defeasible indication of epistemic blamelessness. To show this, I present the Puzzle of Inconsistent Requirements, and argue that the best way to solve it is to distinguish two kinds of epistemic evaluation – requirement evaluations and (...) appraisal evaluations. This allows us to solve the puzzle while accommodating traditional motivations for thinking of the Enkratic Principle as a requirement of rationality. (shrink)

Can we make mistakes about what rationality requires? A natural answer is that we can, since it is a platitude that rational belief does not require truth; it is possible for a belief to be rational and mistaken, and this holds for any subject matter at all. However, the platitude causes trouble when applied to rationality itself. The possibility of rational mistakes about what rationality requires generates a puzzle. When combined with two further plausible claims – the enkratic principle, and (...) the claim that rational requirements apply universally – we get the result that rationality generates inconsistent requirements. One popular and attractive solution to the puzzle denies that it is possible to make rational mistakes about what rationality requires. I show why (contra Titelbaum (2015b), and Littlejohn (2015)) this solution is doomed to fail. (shrink)

This article explores interpersonal functions of emotional mimicry under the absence versus the presence of visual contact between the interacting partners. We review relevant literature and stress that previous studies on the role of emotional mimicry were focused on imitative responses to facial displays. We also show that the rules explaining why people mimic facial expressions may be inapplicable when visual signals are unavailable (e.g., people attending an online meeting have their cameras off). Overall, our review suggests that emotional mimicry (...) functionally adapts to whether the perceiver and the expresser can see each other. We, therefore, argue that blocking visual contact between them may provide insight into emotional mimicry's social functions, thereby clarifying its role in fostering affiliation and emotional understanding. (shrink)

Objectives The study uses a qualitative empirical method to define Health Research for Development. This project explores the perspectives of stakeholders in an international health research partnership operating in Ghana and Tanzania. Methods We conducted 52 key informant interviews with major stakeholders in an international multicenter partnership between GlaxoSmithKline and the global health nonprofit organisation PATH and its Malaria Vaccine Initiative program,. The respondents included teams from four clinical research centres and various collaborating partners. This paper analyses responses to the (...) question: What is Health Research for Development? Results Based on the stakeholders’ experience the respondents offered many ways of defining Health Research for Development. The responses fell into four broad themes: i) Equitable Partnerships; ii) System Sustainability; iii) Addressing Local Health Targets, and iv) Regional Commitment to Benefit Sharing. Conclusion Through defining Health Research for Development six key learning points were generated from the four result themes: 1) Ensure there is local research leadership working with the collaborative partnership, and local healthcare system, to align the project agenda and activities with local research and health priorities; 2) Know the country-specific context - map the social, health, legislative and political setting; 3) Define an explicit development component and plan of action in a research project; 4) Address the barriers and opportunities to sustain system capacity. 5) Support decentralised health system decision-making to facilitate the translation pathway; 6) Govern, monitor and evaluate the development components of health research partnerships. Overall, equity and unity between partners are required to deliver health research for development. (shrink)

We are offering you a new issue of _The Ignatianum Philosophical Yearbook_. It is almost entirely devoted to Mikołaj Zebrzydowski. The state of research on him is outlined in the first article by Elżbieta E. Wróbel and Tomasz Graff. In a separate article, the latter author also presents issues related to the development of Florian Zebrzydowski’s estate as his political importance grew at the court of King Sigismund Augustus. Special emphasis was placed on the case study method here. The author (...) analyzes Zebrzydowski’s acquisition of property in Radocza near Wadowice, showing the prospect of the need for further research into the growth of the estate of Florian Zebrzydowski and his family. The article concludes with an appendix, including an edition in Latin and a Polish translation of the document, in which “Sigismund Augustus grants Florian Zebrzydowski the right to build a dam on the Skawa River and to run water from there through a moat across the area of the Wadowice estate to build fish ponds in the Radocza estate.”. (shrink)

A familiar part of debates about supererogatory actions concerns the role that cost should play. Two camps have emerged: one claiming that extreme cost is a necessary condition for when an action is supererogatory, while the other denies that it should be part of our definition of supererogation. In this paper, I propose an alternative position. I argue that it is comparative cost that is central to the supererogatory and that it is needed to explain a feature that all accounts (...) agree is central to the very notion of supererogation: optionality. Perhaps because of this agreement on its importance, few attempts have been made to clarify and explain the notion of optionality. I argue that giving an account of the optionality of supererogatory requires drawing a line between doing the bare minimum permissible and going beyond the bare minimum and that this line ought to be drawn based on comparative cost of alternative permissible acts. Having outlined my account and motivated it, I discuss and reject two concerns that might be raised: firstly, that it is extreme cost, not comparative cost, that matters and, secondly, that in fact no cost is needed for an act to be supererogatory. (shrink)

This article examines the artistic potential of forms of image-making that involve registering the features of real objects using mind-independent processes. According to skeptics, these processes limit an agent’s intentional control over the features of the resultant “automatic images,” which in turn limits the artistic potential of the work, and the form as a whole. I argue that this is true only if intentional control is understood to mean that an agent produces the features of the work by their own (...) bodily movements alone. Not only is this an unrealistic standard to uphold, but I show that a definition of intentional control based on the skeptic’s position does not prohibit an agent from realizing the features of an image by means beyond their own actions. An agent can exercise intentional control over the features of an image if they successfully anticipate the effect that the remote consequences of their actions will have on these. This, I argue, entails that to exert intentional control over the features of an image is to exercise “creative agency,” which is a species of executive agency. Consequently, I defend the idea that the origin of automatic images in creative agency grounds their artistic significance. (shrink)

A recent article argued for the immorality of abortion regardless of personhood status by comparing the impairment caused by fetal alcohol syndrome to the impairment caused by abortion. I argue that two of the premises in this argument fail and that, as such, one cannot reasonably attribute moral harms to abortion on the basis of the moral harms caused by fetal alcohol syndrome. The impairment argument relies on an inconsistent instantiation, which undermines the claim that personhood is irrelevant, and it (...) does not fulfill its own ceteris paribus clause, which demands that no additional benefit be gained from abortion that would not be gained from causing fetal alcohol syndrome. (shrink)

Challenging previous interpretations of Levinas that gloss over his use of the feminine or show how he overlooks questions raised by feminists, Claire Elise Katz explores the powerful and productive links between the feminine and religion in Levinas’s work. Rather than viewing the feminine as a metaphor with no significance for women or as a means to reinforce traditional stereotypes, Katz goes beyond questions of sexual difference to reach a more profound understanding of the role of the feminine in (...) Levinas’s conception of ethical responsibility. She combines feminist interpretations of Levinas with interpretations that focus on his Jewish writings to reveal that the feminine provides an important bridge between his philosophy and his Judaism. Katz’s reading of Levinas’s conception of the feminine against the backdrop of discussions of women of the Hebrew bible points to important shifts in contemporary philosophy toward the creation of life and care for the other. (shrink)