The Stoics claim that only a body can be a substance (οὐσία). They also claim that the cosmos taken as a whole is one continuous body, finite in extent, comprising within itself all the bodies that there are. Given these claims, one might expect that when confronted with the question of what lies outside the cosmos, the Stoics would take the Aristotelian line: namely, that there is nothing whatsoever outside the cosmos. But this is not what the Stoics say. They (...) say, rather, that outside the cosmos lies an infinite expanse of void, conceived of as a three-dimensional extension empty of body.1Of course, the Stoics do not consider this void outside the cosmos to be a substance, since it is not a body. They class it .. (shrink)

There is a striking resemblance between the physical theory of Plato'sTimaeus and that of the Stoics; striking enough, indeed, to warrant the supposition that the latter was substantially influenced by the former. In attempting to trace the main lines of this influence, scholars have tended to focus attention almost exclusively on the Stoics' choice and characterization of the world's ultimate constituents: a rational principle that pervades and controls a material principle. In this paper, I offer some suggestions about how the (...) early Stoics may have reacted as readers to Plato's literary presentation of the dialogue's cosmogonic myth. On this basis I consider the proposal that the crucial philosophical appeal of the Timaeus for the Stoics – and perhaps the reason it attracted their interest in the first place – lay not in its claims about the Receptacle and World Soul, but rather in its portrayal of the Demiurge who designed the cosmos. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that Plotinus denies deliberative forethought about the physical cosmos to the demiurge on the basis of certain basic and widely shared Platonic and Aristotelian assumptions about the character of divine thought. We then discuss how Plotinus can nonetheless maintain that the cosmos is «providentially» ordered.

In this paper, we argue that Plotinus denies deliberative forethought about the physical cosmos to the demiurge on the basis of certain basic and widely shared Platonic and Aristotelian assumptions about the character of divine thought. We then discuss how Plotinus can nonetheless maintain that the cosmos is «providentially» ordered. -/- [Note: This paper is a French translation (prepared by Mathilde Brémond) of a paper that appears in A. Marmodoro and B. Prince (eds.), Causation and Creation in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, (...) 2015).]. (shrink)

Shadow Philosophy: Plato’s Cave and Cinema is an accessible and exciting new contribution to film-philosophy, which shows that to take film seriously is also to engage with the fundamental questions of philosophy. Nathan Andersen brings Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange into philosophical conversation with Plato’s Republic , comparing their contributions to themes such as the nature of experience and meaning, the character of justice, the contrast between appearance and reality, the importance of art, and the impact of images. (...) At the heart of the book is a novel account of the analogy between Plato’s allegory of the cave and cinema, developed in conjunction with a provocative interpretation of the most powerful image from A Clockwork Orange , in which the lead character is strapped to a chair and forced to watch violent films. Key features of the book include: a comprehensive bibliography of suggested readings on Plato, on film, on philosophy, and on the philosophy of film a list of suggested films that can be explored following the approach in this book, including brief descriptions of each film, and suggestions regarding its philosophical implications a summary of Plato’s Republic , book by book, highlighting both dramatic context and subject matter. Offering a close reading of the controversial classic film A Clockwork Orange , and an introductory account of the central themes of the philosophical classic The Republic , this book will be of interest to both scholars and students of philosophy and film, as well as to readers of Plato and fans of Stanley Kubrick. (shrink)

According to cultural evolutionary theory in the tradition of Boyd and Richerson, cultural evolution is driven by individuals' learning biases, natural selection, and random forces. Learning biases lead people to preferentially acquire cultural variants with certain contents or in certain contexts. Natural selection favors individuals or groups with fitness-promoting variants. Durham (1991) argued that Boyd and Richerson's approach is based on a "radical individualism" that fails to recognize that cultural variants are often "imposed" on people regardless of their individual decisions. (...) Fracchia and Lewontin (2005) raised a similar challenge, suggesting that the success of a variant is often determined by the degree of power backing it. With power, a ruler can impose beliefs or practices on a whole population by diktat, rendering all of the forces represented in cultural evolutionary models irrelevant. It is argued here, based on work by Boehm (1999, 2012), that, from at least the time of the early Middle Paleolithic, human bands were controlled by powerful coalitions of the majority that deliberately guided the development of moral norms to promote the common good. Cultural evolutionary models of the evolution of morality have been based on false premises. However, Durham (1991) and Fracchia and Lewontin's (2005) challenge does not undermine cultural evolutionary modeling in nonmoral domains. (shrink)

BACKGROUND Patients with chronic pain face significant barriers in finding clinicians to manage long-term opioid therapy (LTOT). For patients on LTOT, it is increasingly common to have them sign opioid treatment agreements (OTAs). OTAs enumerate the risks of opioids, as informed consent documents would, but also the requirements that patients must meet to receive LTOT. While there has been an ongoing scholarly discussion about the practical and ethical implications of OTA use in the abstract, little is known about how clinicians (...) use them and if OTAs themselves modify clinician prescribing practices. OBJECTIVE To determine how clinicians use OTAs and the potential impacts of OTAs on opioid prescribing. DESIGN We conducted qualitative analysis of four focus groups of clinicians from a large Midwestern academic medical center. Groups were organized according to self-identified prescribing patterns: two groups for clinicians who identified as prescribers of LTOT, and two who did not. PARTICIPANTS 17 clinicians from General Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, and Palliative Care were recruited using purposive, convenience sampling. APPROACH Discussions were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for themes using reflexive thematic analysis by a multidisciplinary team. KEY RESULTS Our analysis identified three main themes: (1) OTAs did not influence clinicians’ decisions whether to use LTOT generally but did shape clinical decision-making for individual patients; (2) clinicians feel OTAs intensify the power they have over patients, though this was not uniformly judged as harmful; (3) there is a potential misalignment between the intended purposes of OTAs and their implementation. CONCLUSION This study reveals a complicated relationship between OTAs and access to pain management. While OTAs seem not to impact the clinicians’ decisions about whether to use LTOT generally, they do sometimes influence prescribing decisions for individual patients. Clinicians shared complex views about OTAs’ purposes, which shows the need for more clarity about how OTAs could be used to promote shared decision-making, joint accountability, informed consent, and patient education. (shrink)

Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to overcoming this antinomy is a re-engagement with the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing priorities of those orientations, any speculative critique of Kant will have to re-open and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to extend and yet (...) delimit each other has always been at the core of philosophy and science. Coordinating their discrepant powers, Brown argues, is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux. He also shows how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics. (shrink)

Examines transcendentalism as a distinct rhetorical genre concerned primarily and self-consciously with questions of power.

This is the 1991 (2nd) edition of the 1986 book (MIT Press), considered to be the classic defense of Millianism. The nature of the information content of declarative sentences is a central topic in the philosophy of language. The natural view that a sentence like "John loves Mary" contains information in which two individuals occur as constituents is termed the naive theory, and is one that has been abandoned by most contemporary scholars. This theory was refuted originally by philosopher Gottlob (...) Frege. His argument that the naive theory did not work is termed Frege's puzzle, and his rival account of information content is termed the orthodox theory. In this detailed study, Nathan Salmon defends a version of the naive theory and presents a proposal for its extension that provides a better picture of information content than the orthodox theory gives. He argues that a great deal of what has generally been taken for granted in the philosophy of language over the past few decades is either mistaken or unsupported, and consequently, much current research is focused on the wrong set of questions. Salmon dissolves Frege's puzzle as it is usually formulated and demonstrates how it can be reconstructed and strengthened to yield a more powerful objection to the naive theory. He then defends the naive theory against the new Frege puzzle by presenting an idea that yields both a surprisingly rich and powerful extension of the naive theory and a better picture of information content than that of the original orthodox theory. Nathan Salmon is Professor of Philosophy, University of California at Santa Barbara. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that the challenge of justifying punishment can be met by a theory that emphasizes the expressive character of punishment. A particular type of theories of this sort - call it Expressive Retributivism [ER] - combines retributivist and expressivist considerations. These theories are retributivist since they justify punishment as an intrinsically appropriate response to wrongdoing, as something wrongdoers deserve, but the expressivist element in these theories seeks to correct for the traditional obscurity of retributivism. Retributivists often rely on (...) appeals to controversial intuitions involving obscure concepts. While retributive intuitions can be compelling, some worry that the justificatory challenge cannot be met merely by appealing to them. ER tries to enhance the clarity and justificatory power of these intuitions and the concepts they invoke by appealing to an expressive conception of punishment. I argue that these theories fail to justify punishment and that there is reason to think that they cannot, in principle, justify punishment. (shrink)

The nursing community in the United States polarized in September 2020 between Dawn Wooten's whistleblowing about forced hysterectomies at an immigration center in Georgia and the American Nurses Association's refusal to endorse a presidential candidate despite the Trump administration's mounting failures to address the public health crisis posed by the COVID‐19 pandemic. This reveals a need for more attention to political aspects of health outcome inequities. As advocates for health equity, nurses can join in recent scholarship and activism concerning the (...) political determinants of health. In this paper, we examine recent work on the political determinants of health with an aim to add two things. First, we seek to build further on the notion of “political” determinants of health by distinguishing policy and governance structures from dynamics of politicization through appeal to critical disabilities studies. Second, we seek to apply this further nuanced approach to challenge rhetorical uses of “vulnerable populations,” where this phrase serves to misrecognize systemic institutionalized forces that actively exploit and marginalize people and groups. By refocusing attention to political systems organized around and perpetuating inequitable health outcomes, nurses and other health care professionals—as well as those whom they serve—can concentrate their effort and power to act on political determinants of health in bringing about more equitable health outcomes. (shrink)

The nursing community in the United States polarized in September 2020 between Dawn Wooten's whistleblowing about forced hysterectomies at an immigration center in Georgia and the American Nurses Association's refusal to endorse a presidential candidate despite the Trump administration's mounting failures to address the public health crisis posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This reveals a need for more attention to political aspects of health outcome inequities. As advocates for health equity, nurses can join in recent scholarship and activism concerning the (...) political determinants of health. In this paper, we examine recent work on the political determinants of health with an aim to add two things. First, we seek to build further on the notion of “political” determinants of health by distinguishing policy and governance structures from dynamics of politicization through appeal to critical disabilities studies. Second, we seek to apply this further nuanced approach to challenge rhetorical uses of “vulnerable populations,” where this phrase serves to misrecognize systemic institutionalized forces that actively exploit and marginalize people and groups. By refocusing attention to political systems organized around and perpetuating inequitable health outcomes, nurses and other health care professionals—as well as those whom they serve—can concentrate their effort and power to act on political determinants of health in bringing about more equitable health outcomes. (shrink)

There is a large body of literature that examines different dimensions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Africa, with many focusing on the false promises of these corporate initiatives. Contrary to simplistic claims of CSR being merely window-dressing, however, this paper reveals that although several rhetorical proclamations underpin the idea, such statements are often given instrumental meaning through diverse mechanisms (e.g., interpretation of cues toward the proactive (re)construction of identity, (inter)subjective discourses on social legitimacy, and acts of “issue selling”) that (...) help to enact particular characteristics of the corporation. The paper specifically employs the organizational concepts of sensemaking and sensegiving to explain how, through CSR activities, hydrocarbon companies in Ghana construct and (re)affirm a particular reality for its stakeholders. The findings suggest that by having significant leverage over the (re)construction of its identity and claims around social legitimacy and performance, the corporation gives sense to and further sustains its authority over societal norms and expectations around what social responsibility entails. The evidence presented contributes to scholarship that considers the corporation as a complex nexus of multiple relations, contested narratives, and practices. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume will be essential reading for students and scholars working on Greco-Roman philosophy, Roman rhetoric, and the history and literary culture of the Roman Republic. It showcases innovative methodological approaches to Cicero the philosopher and defines new directions for the immediate future of the field.

“A boundary [peras] is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.” Martin Heidegger -/- Place, as Aristotle defines it, is to be sharply distinguished from merely geometrical space. Places, unlike geometrical spaces, are not indifferent to that which they contain. Indeed, they seem to have a kind of power. For unless something interferes, things gravitate naturally toward places that suit them. This power that Aristotle attributes to (...) place is obvious not only in the case of elemental bodies, but much more so in the case of animals, whose very existence depends upon their inhabitation of a suitable place. A fish out of water soon ceases to be a fish, and, in general, living substances can only preserve and maintain themselves given the stable existence of several characteristic environmental conditions. That is why it is surprising that standard readings of Aristotle on the concept of place have focused almost exclusively on its explicit treatment in the Physics, and have largely failed to address his usage of the concept of place in other writings. -/- My aim in this essay was to elucidate the conception of place at work in Aristotle's biological treatises. A consideration of the role played by place in Aristotle’s biological treatises assists in retrieving a richer and more complex conception of place than is indicated by a tradition of commentators who have looked primarily or exclusively to his explicit comments on the subject in the Physics. It reveals that the Aristotelian approach is not merely of antiquarian interest but can be a valuable resource for recent thinkers – in the context of environmental philosophy, phenomenology, feminist theory and the social sciences – who are working on issues centered around the philosophy of place. (shrink)

Place, as Aristotle defines it, is to be sharply distinguished from merely geometrical space. Places, unlike geometrical spaces, are not indifferent to that which they contain. Indeed, they seem to have a kind of power. For unless something interferes, things gravitate naturally toward places that suit them. This power that Aristotle attributes to place is obvious not only in the case of elemental bodies, but much more so in the case of animals, whose very existence depends upon their inhabitation of (...) a suitable place. A fish out of water soon ceases to be a fish, and, in general, living substances can only preserve and maintain themselves given the stable existence of several characteristic environmental conditions. That is why it is surprising that standard readings of Aristotle on the concept of place have focused almost exclusively on its explicit treatment in the Physics, and have largely failed to address his usage of the concept of place in other writings. -/- The aim of this essay is to elucidate the conception of place at work in Aristotle's biological treatises. A consideration of the role played by place in Aristotle’s biological treatises assists in retrieving a richer and more complex conception of place than is indicated by a tradition of commentators who have looked primarily or exclusively to his explicit comments on the subject in the Physics. It reveals that the Aristotelian approach is not merely of antiquarian interest but can be a valuable resource for recent thinkers – in the context of environmental philosophy, phenomenology, feminist theory and the social sciences – who are working on issues centered around the philosophy of place. (shrink)

Hume is famous for the view that "reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions." His claim that "we are no sooner acquainted with the impossibility of satisfying any desire, than the desire itself vanishes" is less well known. Each seems, in opposite ways, shocking to common sense. This paper explores the latter claim, looking for its source in Hume's account of the passions and exploring its compatibility with his associationist psychology. We are led to the (...) conclusion that this view—that desires vanish when fulfilment is deemed impossible—endows reason with a power over the passions that is at odds with its role as slave, and ultimately incompatible with a proper understanding of emotions such as grief. Such emotions involve continuing to want what one believes to be impossible. The human (and Humean) imagination can sustain desires without the belief that fulfilment is possible. (shrink)

Autonomous weapons systems (AWS), sometimes referred to as “killer robots”, are receiving evermore attention, both in public discourse as well as by scholars and policymakers. Much of this interest is connected with emerging ethical and legal problems linked to increasing autonomy in weapons systems, but there is a general underappreciation for the ways in which existing law might impact on these new technologies. In this paper, we argue that as AWS become more sophisticated and increasingly more capable than flesh-and-blood soldiers, (...) it will increasingly be the case that such soldiers are “in the power” of those AWS which fight against them. This implies that such soldiers ought to be considered hors de combat, and not targeted. In arguing for this point, we draw out a broader conclusion regarding hors de combat status, namely that it must be viewed contextually, with close reference to the capabilities of combatants on both sides of any discreet engagement. Given this point, and the fact that AWS may come in many shapes and sizes, and can be made for many different missions, we argue that each particular AWS will likely need its own standard for when enemy soldiers are deemed hors de combat. We conclude by examining how these nuanced views of hors de combat status might impact on meaningful human control of AWS. (shrink)

This article takes issue with interpretations of Foucault’s thought that understand power and resistance as forces working in opposition to one another to fix and dissolve or construct and deconstruct social identities. Starting from the theme of dispersion presented in The Archaeology of Knowledge, it maintains that, for Foucault, power works only in a dispersive manner and that identities are not so much substantialities produced by power as simulacra that appear on the surface of a very different dynamic. Resistance, in (...) turn, is not a force opposed to power but rather a consequence of the disjunctive nature of power relations themselves. Using this reconceived dynamic of power and resistance, the article revisits Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary society and the micropolitics of the care of the self, and argues that, although Foucault has been deployed in political theory to show that identities are both necessary and problematic, his work in fact points to a politics and ethics that strives to dispense with this necessity altogether. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religion, the Globalization of War, and Restorative JusticeNathan TierneyAs the pace of globalization increases, the world's religions find themselves in a perilous dilemma that they have yet to resolve in either practical or conceptual terms. On the one hand, the globalization of markets exerts a powerful pressure toward consumerist and materialist values, which undermine and undercut religious perspectives and sensibilities. On the other hand, the globalization of war heightens (...) the intensity of these religious perspectives and sensibilities, and distorts them in the direction of violence and religious extremism. This dilemma plays itself out in different ways in the developed and developing world, but, as the term "globalization" indicates, it is a problem for all of us. Governments, in developing countries especially, often find themselves forced to choose between one horn of the dilemma or the other, with often disastrous results as they take one or the other side in a "West versus the rest" scenario. In the long run, the only viable solution is one that addresses both horns of the dilemma at the same time, and this is possible only if, in turn, religions themselves become truly global. This will require a large-scale and focused cooperative effort in which the religions of the world actively and jointly engage with both problems, working with governments, NGOs, religious communities, and interfaith groups to harmonize religious life with economics and to promote a culture of peace and justice.Because "globalization" is a familiar term in relation to markets, I'll begin by clarifying what I mean by the globalization of war. There are two main aspects to this phenomenon. First, the term refers to a specific transformation in the nature, purposes, and conditions of warfare brought about by the forces of globalization. By globalization I mean the growing trend of the world's cultural, economic, and political forces to bypass national borders and operate on a world scale. This process creates new possibilities for both integration and conflict. When that conflict passes beyond the possibility of diplomatic negotiation, we have the conditions for globalized war. Globalized war is not necessarily world war. It can be relatively local in its sphere of combat; for example, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a collective response to a worldwide threat of terrorism. What makes it a globalized war, as distinct from international war, is the global nature of the forces that produced it and [End Page 79] are affected by it. Globalized war in this sense has come only lately onto the scene, but its scale and impact is likely to grow in the coming century.The second aspect of the globalization of war is the tendency of conflict to mutate beyond the interests and concerns of nation-states and be taken up by broader civilizational units, even if they were not originally a response to global pressures. The most likely trajectory for this mutation has been well described by Samuel P. Huntington in his influential article "The Clash of Civilizations" (1993) and his book-length treatment of the same subject (1997). Huntington argues that the fault lines of conflict will not be primarily ideological or economic but cultural, where "cultural" is to be understood at its broadest level—the level of civilizations. He divides the world into seven or eight competing civilizations: Western, Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African. Societies sharing cultural affinities will cooperate with one another, and the attempt by the West to universalize its dominant version of consumer capitalism and liberal democracy will be resisted in an increasingly determined way—eventually to the point of outright war: "the next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations."1In Huntington's analysis, then, the globalization of war refers to a coming clash of civilizations. He believes that religion will play a central role in this clash as the focal point of civilizations: "Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture tradition and, most important, religion."2 While Western civilization has experienced several decades of decline and decay, in both its cultural unity and its sense of identity, other civilizations have grown both in economic terms and... (shrink)

Recent philosophical debates have moved beyond proclamations of the “death of philosophy” and the “death of the subject” to consider more positively how philosophy can be practiced and the human self can be conceptualized today. Inspired by the writings of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze, rapid changes related to globalization, and advances in evolutionary biology and neuroscience, these debates have generated a renewed focus on time as an active force of change and novelty. Rejecting simple linear models of time, these strands (...) of thought have provided creative alternatives to a traditional reliance on fixed boundaries and stable identities that has proven unable to grapple with the intense speeds and complexities of contemporary life. In this book, Nathan Widder contributes to these debates, but also goes significantly beyond them. Holding that current writings remain too focused on time’s movement, he examines more fundamentally time’s structure and its structural ungrounding, releasing time completely from its traditional subordination to movement and space. Doing this enables him to reformulate entirely the terms through which time and change are understood, leading to a radical alteration of our understandings of power, resistance, language, and the unconscious, and taking post-identity political philosophy and ethics in a new direction. Eighteen independent but interlinked reflections engage with ancient philosophy, mathematical theory, dialectics, psychoanalysis, archaeology, and genealogy. The book’s broad coverage and novel rereadings of key figures—including Aristotle, Bergson, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze—make this a unique rethinking of the nature of pluralism, multiplicity, and politics. (shrink)

Emerging New Voices in Critical Animal Studies: Vegan Studies for Total Liberation, co-edited by Nathan Poirier, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Annie Bernatchez of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, is a brilliant radical engaging intersectional book promoting total liberation from new fresh critical animal studies voices throughout the world. This captivating critical animal studies collection, influenced by historical and ongoing radical movements such as green anarchism, Black liberation, prison abolition, feminism, Queer liberation, disability rights, and decolonization, is one (...) of the most powerful texts in the last decade within the animal liberation movement. We must begin to listen to new and young scholars for social justice to evolve in order to end speciesism and all forms of oppression. Read, share, reflect and act on this interdisciplinary collection of scholar-activists from sociology, anthropology, criminology, economics, philosophy, cultural studies, eco-theology, environmental studies, and education that will transform the global movement for radical social justice and propel total liberation forward. (shrink)

Buddhas, gods, prophets and oracles are often depicted as asking questions. But what are we to understand when Jesus asks “Who do you say that I am?”, or Mazu, the Classical Zen master asks, “Why do you seek outside?" Is their questioning a power or weakness? Is it something human beings are only capable of due to our finitude? Is there any kind of question that is a power? -/- Focusing on three case studies of questions in divine discourse on (...) the level of story - the god depicted in the Jewish Bible, the master Mazu in his recorded sayings literature, and Jesus as he is depicted in canonized Christian Gospels - Nathan Eric Dickman meditates on human responses to divine questions. He considers the purpose of interreligious dialogue and the provocative kind of questions that seem to purposefully decenter us, drawing on methods from confessionally-oriented hermeneutics and skills from critical thinking. -/- He allows us to see alternative ways of interpreting religious texts through approaches that look beyond reading a text for the improvement of our own religion or for access to some metaphysically transcendent reality. This is the first step in a phenomenology of religions that is inclusive, diverse, relevant and grounded in the world we live in. (shrink)

This paper critically examines efforts to “professionalize” the field of healthcare management and its corresponding costs. Drawing upon the scholarly critiques of professionalization in medicine and the broader field of management, this paper seeks to explore the symbolic role professionalization might play in the psyche of its constituents, and specifically its function as a defense against uncertainty and anxiety. This psychodynamic heuristic is then deployed to put forth the hypothesis that an ongoing crisis of professional identity continues to both propel (...) and impede professionalization efforts in healthcare management, giving rise to a litany of standardization pressures that ultimately limit the field’s potential. To mitigate these pressures, the call is made for rekindling healthcare management’s moral, political, and existential aspects. Specifically, this entails engaging with the deeper themes that flow through the field: the experience of illness and what it means to suffer, the experience of life and what it means to have hope, and the experience of death and dying. It also entails squarely confronting questions of power, poverty and disease, and the pursuit of justice. (shrink)

Michel Foucault, one of the most cited scholars in the social sciences, devoted his last three lectures to a study of leader development. Going back to pagan sources, Foucault found a persistent theme in Hellenistic antiquity that, in order to qualify for leadership, a person must undergo processes of subjectivation, which is simply the way that a person becomes a Subject. From this perspective, an aspiring leader first becomes a Subject who happens to lead. These processes depend on a condition (...) of _parresia_, which is truth-telling at great risk that is for the edification of the other person. A leader requires a mentor and advisors in order to lead successfully, while also developing the capacity in one’s own mind to heed the truth. In other words, a leader must learn how to guide oneself. A valuable contribution to the field of leadership studies, this book summarizes these last lectures as they pertain to the study and practice of leadership, emphasizing the role of ethics and truth-telling as a check on power. It then presents several other contexts where these same lessons can be seen in practice, including in the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose career as a writer epitomized speaking truth to power, and somewhat surprisingly in the United States military, in response to its twenty-first century mission of counterinsurgency. (shrink)

Contemporary proponents of republican political theory often focus on the concept of freedom as non-domination, and how best to promote it within a state. However, there is little attention paid to what the republican conception of freedom demands in the international realm. In this essay I examine what is required for an agent to enjoy freedom as non-domination, and argue that this might only be achieved for individuals if one of two possibilities is pursued internationally: either (1) all nations are (...) made equally powerful, such that none may arbitrarily impose its will on another without penalty, or (2) all nations are joined under a global sovereign which guarantees that the weaker states are not subject to the whims of the stronger. I further argue that the first condition cannot suffice for achieving true non-domination, and as a result, republicanism must prescribe working toward the establishment of a global state. This paper provides an important contribution to the literature by addressing the international implications of the republican conception of freedom. (shrink)

In this paper I will defend the view that, according to Locke, secondary qualities are dispositions to produce sensations in us. Although this view is widely attributed to Locke, this interpretation needs defending for two reasons. First, commentators often assume that secondary qualities are dispositional properties because Locke calls them “powers” to produce sensations. However, primary qualities are also powers, so the powers locution is insufficient grounds for justifying the dispositionalist interpretation. Second, if secondary qualities are dispositional (...) properties then objects would retain secondary qualities while not being observed, but Locke says that colors “vanish” in the dark. Some commentators use this as evidence that Locke rejects the dispositionalist view of secondary qualities, and even those that are sympathetic to the traditional interpretation find these comments to be problematic. By contrast, I argue that even in these supposedly damning passages Locke shows an unwavering commitment to the view that the powers to produce sensations in us, i.e., the secondary qualities, remain in objects even when they are not being perceived. Thus the arguments against the traditional interpretation are unpersuasive, and we should conclude that Locke does indeed hold that secondary qualities are dispositions to cause sensations in us. (shrink)

Anarchism and Political Modernity looks at the place of 'classical anarchism' in the postmodern political discourse, claiming that anarchism presents a vision of political postmodernity. The book seeks to foster a better understanding of why and how anarchism is growing in the present. To do so, it first looks at its origins and history, offering a different view from the two traditions that characterize modern political theory: socialism and liberalism. Such an examination leads to a better understanding of how anarchism (...) connects with newer political trends and why it is a powerful force in contemporary social and political movements. This new volume in the Contemporary Anarchist Studies series offers a novel philosophical engagement with anarchism and contests a number of positions established in postanarchist theory. Its new approach makes a valuable contribution to an established debate about anarchism and political theory. It offers a new perspective on the emerging area of anarchist studies that will be of interest to students and theorists in political theory and anarchist studies. (shrink)

Judging a place as wasteland or homeland is a matter of perspective: presupposed values, knowledge through acquaintance, and comportment. Therefore, contra Martin Drenthen, the value of wilderness is a judgement call, not a conceptual necessity. I show this by first distinguishing wilderness from “wildness,” then culture from civilization, and finally, by situating Nietzsche’s teachings of the will to power in the context of a devalued world-view.Nevertheless, I agree with Drenthen that some understandings of wilderness are more appropriate than others. When (...) wild nature is understood to be “good” in an axiologically transcendent sense, morality and humanness per se are not undermined, and the transcendence of wildness is still sufficiently immanent to avoid the drive to devalue it. Even though such conceptualization can be attained by civilized urbanites, it seems to be optimally actualized in life by non-civilized cultures. This leads to implications that are not easy for us to accept, but deserve our serious consideration nonetheless. (shrink)

A compelling look at animal welfare and factory farming in the United States from Mercy For Animals, the leading international force in preventing cruelty to farmed animals and promoting compassionate food choices and policies. Nathan Runkle would have been a fifth-generation farmer in his small midwestern town. Instead, he founded our nation’s leading nonprofit organization for protecting factory farmed animals. In Mercy For Animals, Nathan brings us into the trenches of his organization’s work; from MFA’s early days in (...) grassroots activism, to dangerous and dramatic experiences doing undercover investigations, to the organization’s current large-scale efforts at making sweeping legislative change to protect factory farmed animals and encourage compassionate food choices. But this isn’t just Nathan’s story. Mercy For Animals examines how our country moved from a network of small, local farms with more than 50 percent of Americans involved in agriculture to a massive coast-to-coast industrial complex controlled by a mere 1 percent of our population—and the consequences of this drastic change on animals as well as our global and local environments. We also learn how MFA strives to protect farmed animals in behind-the-scenes negotiations with companies like Nestlé and other brand names—conglomerates whose policy changes can save countless lives and strengthen our planet. Alongside this unflinching snapshot of our current food system, readers are also offered hope and solutions—big and small—for ending mistreatment of factory farmed animals. From simple diet modifications to a clear explanation of how to contact corporations and legislators efficiently, Mercy For Animals proves that you don’t have to be a hardcore vegan or an animal-rights activist to make a powerful difference in the lives of animals. (shrink)

This essay argues that the motifs of divine vengeance present in the Histories reflect a conscious, considered theory of divine action. This theory is defined by Herodotus’ empirical methodology and his lack of poetic revelation or other claimed insight into the nature and motivations of divinity. For Herodotus, divinity possesses a basically regulatory role in the cosmos, ensuring that history follows certain consistent patterns. One such pattern is vengeance, by which a large-scale balance of reciprocity is maintained in human events (...) through human and divine acts of repayment. This theory underlies Herodotus’ historical project, reinforcing his general skepticism about human knowledge and power and making possible his universalizing approach to historical narrative. (shrink)

This paper argues that Nietzsche presents an ontology of excess that, by problematizing the logic of identity, can positively contribute to democratic theory and practice. This ontology is missed by a wide range of interpreters who try to depoliticize Nietzsche's thought, align it with the agonisms of contemporary mass democracy, or re-align it with an aristocratic politics of fixed hierarchy. While Nietzsche himself may not extend this ontology onto the political domain, the writings of Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate (...) how it can provide greater appreciation of the subtleties and complexities of power relations that operate at a micropolitical level. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Normativity seems characteristically, perhaps essentially, explained by claims about the competition between normative reasons. John Broome’s ‘quick objection’ aims to show that rationality cannot be explained by claims about normative reasons and, thus, that it is not normative. Broome’s objection turns on the idea that rationality is mind-dependent in a way that facts about reasons are not. However, this objection is shaped by a popular, powerful, and restrictive assumption about the substance of normative reasons called factualism, which holds that (...) the substances that are reasons are facts, either in the sense of true propositions or of the truth-makers of such propositions. I suggest that support for factualism is weaker than its popularity suggests. In particular, I suggest that arguments for factualism from (1) the nature of normative explanation, (2) expressions attributing reasons, (3) the relationship between normativity and actuality, and (4) common sense are weaker than they appear. Rejecting factualism allows us to tie some class of reasons—subjective reasons, we might call them—more closely to the mind and to thereby ground the normativity of rationality. Thus, Broome’s ‘quick objection’ is too quick for it must account for the possibility of non-factualist reasons. (shrink)

Economists have long treated technological phenomena as events transpiring inside a black box and, on the whole, have adhered rather strictly to a self-imposed ordinance not to inquire too seriously into what transpires inside that box. The purpose of Professor Rosenberg's work is to break open and examine the contents of the black box. In so doing, a number of important economic problems be powerfully illuminated. The author clearly shows how specific features of individual technologies have shaped a number of (...) variables of great concern to economists: the rate of productivity improvement, the nature of learning processes underlying technological change itself, the speed of technology transfer, and the effectiveness of government policies that are intended to influence technologies in particular ways. The separate chapters of this book reflect a primary concern with some of the distinctive aspects of industrial technologies in the twentieth century, such as the increasing reliance upon science, but also the considerable subtlety and complexity of the dialectic between science and technology. Other concerns include the rapid growth in the development of costs associated with new technologies as well as the difficulty of predicting the eventual performance characteristics of newly emerging technologies. (shrink)

Worsening energy crises and the growing effects of climate change have spurred, among other things, concerted efforts to tackle global problems through what the United Nations calls Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These are in turn argued to be best achieved via the adoption of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) as the vehicle for guiding our efforts. However, though these things are often presented as the solution to global issues, they are increasingly being used as a means to centralize power (...) and exacerbate growing authoritarian trends. This article aims to demonstrate how the narratives surrounding ESG mask this reality, taking as a solution one of the foundational causes of global wealth and power disparity. (shrink)

Although DNA profiling has been an important forensic research technique since the late 1980s, for a long time, it had not captured much attention from either academics or the public so far.In recent years, this neglect seems to have ended. Not only has wide-spread media coverage of events such as 9/11 and the 2004 tsunami brought about widespread knowledge of the usefulness of forensic DNA identification, the development of large databases containing DNA profiles of both suspected and convicted criminals has (...) in the last few years also triggered a discussion on the intrusiveness of these measures into a number of civil rights.Indeed, although the increasing use of DNA based techniques in the criminal justice system promises to offer some great benefits for a society that is permeated with risk-aversion, at the same time it also gives rise to some worrying ethical and social consequences.In this article, we confine ourselves to an analysis of the practice of DNA sample retention by government agencies that use these samples to derive digital storable DNA profiles. While this practice seems unnecessary for the purpose of criminal investigation, it carries some severe risks for genetic privacy rights which have hardly been explored so far. (shrink)

What potential can be found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari for critical legal scholarship? The authors argue that their work can be deployed to re-think ‘critique’ by directly addressing the place and role of the ‘critic’. It is argued that the continued commitment to a stance of ‘resistance’ in CLS is underpinned by never-ending dualisms which, if not confronted and replaced, can only make CLS ever more redundant. The authors ask: ‘what is critique beyond the dualism of power (...) and resistance, of state and nomad?’ This question arises from a belief that critique is still capable of being effective, but only if there is the courage to experiment, and to think creatively. In this sense, the ‘exhaustion’ of critique is framed as an opportunity to re-think and re-engage with the politics of law. The paper diagrams, through image and film, a critical thought: the potential of the artisan. Film is utilised not as representation, nor as illustration, but as a thinking mind in its own right, through which questions relating to the state, political action, and creative thinking can be framed. Such a re-framing is essential, it is argued, for an engagement with the emergence of societies of control. (shrink)

The contemporary moment in rhetoric studies is complex, marked by a number of powerful currents pulling scholarship in new directions. One of those currents is the deepening engagement with science and technology studies through rhetorical investigations of medicine, environmental policy, and science. Another is the increasing experimentation with qualitative methodologies, often called “rhetorical ethnography.” A third is the rapidly developing encounter with interwoven philosophies of speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism. If you are interested in any of these, you (...) should absolutely read Scott Graham’s The Politics of Pain Medicine. The title is overly... (shrink)

To many, it seems like the debate of "when life begins" is irresolvable. This is unfortunate since this failure to make progress is largely a result of people not asking what the question means, or clarifying what is being asked, and listening carefully to try to understand the range of answers. -/- As a philosophy professor who teaches logic and critical thinking, I suggest that asking the simple, but powerful, question, "What do you mean?" and seeking to understand different answers (...) could help us move past this debate to more important, and challenging, ethical and legal questions about abortion. (shrink)