Death narratives, nurturance, and transitive crossings within species and between species open pathways into entanglements of life of earth. This paper engages with time in both sequential and synchronous modes, investigating interfaces where time, species, and nourishment become densely knotted up in ethics of gift, motion, death, life, and desire. The further aim is to consider the dynamic ripples generated by anthropogenic mass death in multispecies knots of ethical time, and to gesture toward a practice of writing as witness.

In this essay, Deborah Bird Rose takes up Val Plumwood's challenge that Western thought needs radical revitalization by pursuing the liveliness of the biosphere and human ontologies of connectivity. The first part looks at obstacles to the West's understanding of Earth as a place of lively, interactive connectivities that promote diversity, complexity, and relationality. In this context Rose offers a brief overview of Indigenous animisms. The second part explores the question of liveliness. It is taken as (...) given that the West now seeks ontological legitimacy in science, and so this discussion focuses on what biological scientists have contributed to contemporary ontology wars. The third part examines trauma in the Garden of Eden narrative, highlighting both the disaster of the story and its continuing relevance. Drawing on the work of theologians, in particular, Rose seeks in this section to recuperate a mythic foundation for a Western animism from within that great site of loss. (shrink)

A portrait of Australian flying fox life in the Anthropocene illuminates startlingly familiar stories. These animals are participants in most of the major catastrophic events, as well as contestations about rescue, of contemporary life on Earth: warfare, man-made mass death, famine, urbanisation, emerging diseases, climate change, biosecurity, conservation, and local/international NGO aid. They are endangered, and are involved in all four of the major factors causing extinctions: habitat loss, overexploitation, introduced species, and extinction cascades. My account of flying foxes in (...) Australia rests on the understanding of species articulated both vigorously and eloquently by Donna Haraway : we and others are entangled in knots of species who are co-shaping each other in layers of reciprocating complexity. I seek to engage both the living, warm-blooded beings whose lives are threatened, and the excruciatingly dynamic deathscape that is surrounding them/us. Positioned, like much of life on Earth today, in zones of increasing conflict and terror, the lives and deaths of flying foxes tell us that in the Anthropocene there is no way out of entanglements within multispecies communities. Rather than seeking to erect more impenetrable barriers against others, relational ethics for living and dying in the Anthropocene urge us to assume ever greater mutuality and accountability as intradependent members of the suffering family of life on Earth. (shrink)

Perceptions of dingoes range from kin to pest. Social and ecological justice researcher Deborah Bird Rose explores the ethical dimensions of our relationship with this top predator.

In this essay I examine four modes of thinking about the betrayals involved in the planned mass deaths of animals, specifically the wild donkeys of North Australia. I consider the wild, but in contrast to the positive valence this concept has acquired in environmental literature, I work with a set of negative connotations that I encountered in conversations with Aboriginal people in North Australia. I explore the wild as a form of narcissism, to use Hatley’s terminology, and I engage with (...) animal mass deaths as an outcome of processes of disconnection and catastrophe. My analysis examines how the colonising wild is the tearing apart of the fabric of life and death on earth. (shrink)

In this essay I examine four modes of thinking about the betrayals involved in the planned mass deaths of animals, specifically the wild donkeys of North Australia. I consider the wild, but in contrast to the positive valence this concept has acquired in environmental literature, I work with a set of negative connotations that I encountered in conversations with Aboriginal people in North Australia. I explore the wild as a form of narcissism, to use Hatley’s terminology, and I engage with (...) animal mass deaths as an outcome of processes of disconnection and catastrophe. My analysis examines how the colonising wild is the tearing apart of the fabric of life and death on earth. (shrink)

‘We were driving through Death Valley, an American-Australian and two Aussies, taking the scenic route from Las Vegas to Santa Cruz.’ This multi-voiced account of multispecies encounters along a highway takes up the challenge of playful and humorous writing that is as well deeply serious and theoretically provocative. Our travels brought us into what Donna Haraway calls the contact zone: a region of recognition and response. The contact zone is a place of significant questions: ‘Who are you, and so who (...) are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?’ Events were everything in this ecology of play, in which the movements of all the actors involved the material field in its entirety. We were brought into dances of approach and withdrawal, dances emerging directly, to paraphrase Brian Massumi, from the dynamic relation between a myriad of charged particles. (shrink)

Fern Logan’s collection of photographic portraits documents the emergence of the African American artist into mainstream American art. The Artist Portrait Series captures sixty significant artists from the late twentieth century.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Five Poems DEBORAH WARREN Bugonia hic vero subitum dictu mirabile monstrum aspiciunt, liquefacta boum per viscera toto stridere apes utero et ruptis effervere costis. —Vergil, Georgics IV The covert’s dark, but Aristaeus sees —beyond it, in the oleandered meadow, walking to her wedding with her maids— Eurydice, as sweet as early windfall apples to the gods of the bitter dead. She runs, from shifting shade to sun (...) to shade until, in a shock of sudden sun, she sways, blinded, blundering into an adder’s kiss, and while the bridegroom waits by the bridal bed, she waits to be undressed by worms instead. But Aristaeus pays for the assault. The mead-gods visit on his apiaries wax-moth, mites, foulbrood and chalk-disease until an oracle orders a hekatomb: after nine days the myrtle-nymphs perform a miracle, and out of the carcases crawl fat new sun-furred drones to work the comb, a gift of the mead-gods who, with the poet, praise the teams of bright collaborating bees as little Romans—parvos Quirites. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 And what about Eurydice? The swarm goes humming on, a small Rome in a hive. The story’s not about Eurydice’s second chance, or whether she’ll survive. Eurydice’s a minor character; she’s only one girl, sui generis. Besides, no cattle-trick exists for her. The gods can let the apiaries thrive and armies—even empires—endure; one girl’s more complicated to replace. 44 five poems The Tithonus Club We can begin our visit with the Day Room where, in wheelchairs, some with canes or walkers, members sit: a fraternity so ancient that the confrères mostly ignore each other (club tradition). The dues are paid in decades; no one has an outstanding balance—Sir? Whoa, steady, there! Sit down... yes. Here’s your blanket. The badge of membership—the club regalia? Laminated ceremonial bracelets bear the motto Do Not Resuscitate (legend which, in practice, is seldom honored). Eleven-thirty, gentlemen; lunch is served, and now a little toast while the television mesmerizes the aides: Messieurs, your health! Deborah Warren 45 Aphrodite at the Old-Age Home —for Aphrodite Kalogeris “Honey,” the night nurse said to Aphrodite, “let me fix your bib. Look, Aphrodite! Here’s your juice and crackers, Aphrodite! “She doesn’t speak a blessed word of English,” the night nurse told us, “but she understands as good as if we spoke to her in Greek.” Aphrodite’s ears were as grotesque as the pore-coarse nose that bloomed across her face, but she heard her name: When Aphrodite rose and, beatific, dreamed across the room, traversing a happiness none of us could hear, she spoke a language older than herself but still her own—a dialect of beauty able to translate the fetid air. 46 five poems Climbing Etna We’d see the lava, nights, from the town square, as if the sun—an egg of fire—broke at dusk, threading its incandescent yolk down a mountain hanging in black air. Every night we’d scan the dark horizon looking for those streaks, and every night they took a while to find, however bright: Etna, it seemed, had spent the evening rising off the earth, to hover even higher, as if the mountain meant not to be found. And then, today, we ran the flows to ground, climbing up to the rolling burns of fire— closer, into the shimmering air and hiss that glanced up from the thick and red-flecked river —until our soles were smoking. But the lava sang, inside the mountain: Come, discover the fire’s origin and genesis; more—the heart of the world, in its enceinte of blind white heat. Seeing the lava course wasn’t enough, or watching the rock decant the sun; what brought us up here was the force— the hot loins—of a lightning god as dark as thunder; and, like Eve, like Semele, we wanted to approach. But there’s a spark, a jewel older than geology: stop shy of it—of finding the fire’s source, of closing in on what you shouldn’t see. Deborah Warren 47 Human Sucking strength... (shrink)

The following views were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Seminar “Teaching Ethics in Science and Engineering”, 10–11 February 1993 organized by Stephanie J. Bird , Penny J. Gilmer and Terrell W. Bynum . Opragen Publications thanks the AAAS, seminar organizers and authors for permission to publish extracts from the conference. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions of AAAS or its Board of Directors.

Insight is a cognitive feature that is usually regarded as being generated by the neocortex and being present only in humans and possibly some closely related primates. In this essay we show that especially corvids display behavioral skills within the domains of object permanence, episodic memory, theory of mind, and tool use/causal reasoning that are insightful. These similarities between humans and corvids at the behavioral level are probably the result of a convergent evolution. Similarly, the telencephalic structures involved in higher (...) cognitive functions in both species show a high degree of similarity, although the forebrain of birds has no cortex-like lamination. The neural substrate for insight-related cognitive functions in mammals and birds is thus not necessarily based on a laminated cortical structure but can be generated by differently organized forebrains. Hence, neither is insight restricted to mammals, as predicted from a “scala naturae”, nor is the laminated cortex a prerequisite for the highest cognitive functions. (shrink)

Despite the challenges associated with virtually mediated communication, remote collaboration is a defining characteristic of online multiplayer gaming communities. Inspired by the teamwork exhibited by players in first-person shooter games, this study investigated the verbal and behavioral coordination of four-player teams playing a cooperative online video game. The game, Desert Herding, involved teams consisting of three ground players and one drone operator tasked to locate, corral, and contain evasive robot agents scattered across a large desert environment. Ground players could move (...) throughout the environment, while the drone operator’s role was akin to that of a “spectator” with a bird’s-eye view, with access to veridical information of the locations of teammates and the to-be-corralled agents. Categorical recurrence quantification analysis was used to measure the communication dynamics of teams as they completed the task. Demands on coordination were manipulated by varying the ground players’ ability to observe the environment with the use of game “fog.” Results show that catRQA was sensitive to changes to task visibility, with reductions in task visibility reorganizing how participants conversed during the game to maintain team situation awareness. The results are discussed in the context of future work that can address how team coordination can be augmented with the inclusion of artificial agents, as synthetic teammates. (shrink)

Plants have been—and, for reasons of human sustenance and creative inspiration, will continue to be—centrally important to societies globally. Yet, plants—including herbs, shrubs, and trees—are commonly characterized in Western thought as passive, sessile, and silent automatons lacking a brain, as accessories or backdrops to human affairs. Paradoxically, the qualities considered absent in plants are those employed by biologists to argue for intelligence in animals. Yet an emerging body of research in the sciences and humanities challenges animal-centred biases in determining consciousness, (...) intelligence, volition, and complex communication capacities amongst living beings. In light of recent theoretical developments in our understandings of plants, this article proposes an interdisciplinary framework for researching flora: human-plant studies. Building upon the conceptual formations of the humanities, social sciences, and plant sciences as advanced by Val Plumwood, Deborah Bird Rose, Libby Robin, and most importantly Matthew Hall and Anthony Trewavas, as well as precedents in the emerging areas of human-animal studies, I will sketch the conceptual basis for the further consideration and exploration of this interdisciplinary framework. (shrink)

The Well-Ordered Universe argues that Cavendish's natural philosophy, social and political philosophy, and medical theory share an underlying concern with order. This reveals interesting connections among Cavendish's natural philosophy and her views on gender, animals and the environment, and human health, and explains her commitment to monarchy and social hierarchy.

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

In Mourning Becomes the Law, Gillian Rose takes us beyond the impasse of post-modernism or 'despairing rationalism withour reason'. Arguing that the post-modern search for a 'new ethics' and ironic philosophy are incoherent, she breathes new life into the debates concerning power and domination, transcendence and eternity. Mourning Becomes the Law is the philosophical counterpart to Gillian Rose's highly acclaimed memoir Love's Work. She extends similar clarity and insight to discussions of architecture, cinema, painting and poetry, through which (...) relations between the formation of the individual and the theory of justice are connected. At the heart of this reconnection lies a reflection on the significance of the Holocaust and Judaism. Mourning Becomes the Law reinvents the classical analogy of the soul, the city and the sacred. It returns philosophy, Nietzsche's 'bestowing virtue', to the pulse of our intellectual and political culture. (shrink)

The process of seeking the consent of a patient to a medical procedure is, arguably, one of the most important skills a doctor, or indeed any clinician, should learn. In fact, the very idea that doctors may institute diagnostic or treatment processes of any sort without a patient's consent is utterly counter-intuitive to the modern practice of medicine. It was not always thus, and even now it can be reliably assumed that consent is still not sought and gained appropriately in (...) every clinical encounter. To say that it should be sought and gained in this manner elevates the value of consent to a high level. It can be instructive to ask oneself why such a value might be held to be the case. The answer to this question lies in the philosophical underpinning of clinical consent, which sits within a notion of personal autonomy, and respect for autonomous decision making. (shrink)

A standard view in contemporary philosophy is that belief is involuntary, either as a matter of conceptual necessity or as a contingent fact of human psychology. We present seven experiments on patterns in ordinary folk-psychological judgments about belief. The results provide strong evidence that voluntary belief is conceptually possible and, granted minimal charitable assumptions about folk-psychological competence, provide some evidence that voluntary belief is psychologically possible. We also consider two hypotheses in an attempt to understand why many philosophers have been (...) tempted to view belief as involuntary: that belief is a prototype concept and that belief is a dual character concept. Altogether, our findings contribute to longstanding philosophical debates about the relationship between the will and the intellect, while also advancing scientific understanding of important social judgments. (shrink)

Laspro et al. (2024) present an insightful survey of ethical issues emerging in first-in-human whole eye transplants (WET). Their discussion is applicable to a broad range of first-in-human surgica...

In the social sciences and in everyday speech we often talk about groups as if they behaved in the same way as individuals, thinking and acting as a singular being. We say for example that "Google intends to develop an automated car", "the U.S. Government believes that Syria has used chemical weapons on its people", or that "the NRA wants to protect the rights of gun owners". We also often ascribe legal and moral responsibility to groups. But could groups literally (...) intend things? Is there such a thing as a collective mind? If so, should groups be held morally responsible? Such questions are of vital importance to our understanding of the social world. In this lively, engaging introduction Deborah Tollefsen offers a careful survey of contemporary philosophers? answers to these questions, and argues for the unorthodox view that certain groups should, indeed, be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable. Tollefsen explores the nature of belief, action and intention, and shows the reader how a belief in group agency can be reconciled with our understanding of individual agency and accountability. _Groups as Agents_ will be a vital resource for scholars as well as for students of philosophy and the social sciences encountering the topic for the first time. (shrink)

Bakhtin and the Visual Arts is the first book to assess the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas as they relate to painting and sculpture. First published in the 1960s, Bakhtin's writings introduced the concepts of carnival and dialogue or dialogism, which have had significant impact in such diverse fields as literature and literary theory, philosophy, theology, biology, and psychology. In his four early aesthetic essays, written between 1919 and 1926, and before he began to focus on linguistic and literary categories, (...) Bakhtin worked on a larger philosophy of creativity, which was never completed. Deborah Haynes's in-depth study of his aesthetics, especially his theory of creativity, analyses its applicability to contemporary art theory and criticism. The author argues that Bakhtin, with such categories as answerability, outsideness and unfinalisability, offers a conceptual basis for interpreting the moral dimensions of creative activity. (shrink)

Biological individuality is a notoriously thorny topic for biologists and philosophers of biology. In this paper we argue that biological individuality presents multiple, interconnected questions for biologists and philosophers that together form a problem agenda. Using a case study of an interdisciplinary research group in ecology, behavioral and evolutionary biology, we claim that a debate on biological individuality that seeks to account for diverse practices in the biological sciences should be broadened to include and give prominence to questions about uniqueness (...) and temporality. We show that broadening the problem agenda of biological individuality draws attention to underrecognized philosophical issues and discussions and thereby organizes and enriches the existing debate. (shrink)

O êxodo rural brasileiro compreendeu um processo de grande magnitude desde o seu início, onde, em comparativo, poucos países experimentaram fluxo migratório tão intenso, tendo em vista a quantidade absoluta da população atingida. Uma das características encontradas nos movimentos migratórios brasileiros se estabelece na diferenciação por sexo. Estudos apontam que as mulheres migram mais do que os homens, além do fluxo migratório se caracterizar cada vez mais pela saída de jovens do campo. Nesse sentido, o presente artigo se propõe a (...) analisar a categoria rural, abordando a situação das mulheres migrantes no contexto do Norte de Minas. Para tanto, utilizará do levantamento bibliográfico na construção de uma revisão acerca das práticas migratórias do campo realizadas por jovens, de modo a entender e problematizar a questão do gênero no processo migratório. Como resultado parcial tem-se que as mulheres continuam migrando, sendo tal deslocamento realizado com propósitos variados e, muitas vezes, devido à ausência de políticas públicas regionais, que resultam em pouca perspectiva de valorização do campo/gênero. Sendo assim, o processo migratório, principalmente no que diz respeito à questão de gênero, não se encerra nas discussões apresentadas, sendo necessários estudos que acompanhem as distintas dimensões que o migrar implica. (shrink)

For centuries, westerners have referred to China's numerous traditions of spiritual expression as "religious"--a word born of western thought that cannot completely characterize the passionate writing that fills the pages of this pathbreaking anthology. The first of its kind in well over thirty years, this text offers the student of Chinese ritual and cosmology the broadest range of primary sources from antiquity to the modern era. Readings are arranged chronologically and cover such concepts as Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and even communism. (...) A large number of the selections concern the role of the female in Chinese religion, and are either by or about women. Through invocations, poetry, drama, philosophical texts, religious treatises, and modern fiction, students hear the voices of numerous Chinese masters expounding on the movements and traditions that inspired them: the mysterious Tao-te ching of Lao Tzu, cloaked in the mists of deepest antiquity; the Analects of stately, reverent Confucius; "Nailing a Stick into Empty Space," from The Recorded Conversations of Ch'an Master I-hsuan, and many others, including the work of Mencius, Pan Chao, Han Shan, Chang Tsai, Wang Yang-ming, Lu Hsun, and Mao Tse-tung. Fully one third of the translations are new, and each reading is preceded by an introduction that explains its importance and salient features. Complete with a helpful chronology of dynasties and list of possible video sources, this remarkable volume collects under one cover the most significant and influential works of China's dynamic spiritual tradition, making a fundamental contribution to courses in Chinese religion, literature, and history. (shrink)

Decades before the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, Adorno condemned our destructive and self-destructive relationship to the natural world, warning of the catastrophe that may result if we continue to treat nature as an object that exists exclusively for our own benefit. "Adorno on Nature" presents the first detailed examination of the pivotal role of the idea of natural history in Adorno's work. A comparison of Adorno's concerns with those of key ecological theorists - social ecologist Murray Bookchin, ecofeminist (...) Carolyn Merchant, and deep ecologist Arne Naess - reveals how Adorno speaks directly to many of today's most pressing environmental issues. Ending with a discussion of the philosophical conundrum of unity in diversity, "Adorno on Nature" also explores how social solidarity can be promoted as a necessary means of confronting environmental problems. (shrink)

The seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary invention, discovery and revolutions in scientific, social and political orders. It was a time of expansive automation, biological discovery, rapid advances in medical knowledge, of animal trials and a questioning of the boundaries between species, human and non-human, between social classes, and of the assumed naturalness of political inequality. This book gives a tour through those objects, ordinary and extraordinary, which captivated the philosophical imagination of the single most important French philosopher of (...) this period, Rene Descartes. Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore document Descartes' attempt to make sense of the complex, composite objects of human and divine invention, consistent with the fundamental tenets of his metaphysical system. Their central argument is that, far from reducing all the categories of ordinary experience to the two basic categories of substance, mind and body, Descartes' philosophy recognises irreducible composites that resist reduction, and require their own distinctive modes of explanation. (shrink)

Has the diversity of corporate boards of directors improved? Should it? What role does diversity play in reducing corporate wrongdoing? Will diversity result in a more focused board of directors or more board autonomy? Examining the state of Tennessee as a case study, the authors collected data on the board composition of publicly traded corporations and compared those data to an original study conducted in 1995. Data indicate only a modest improvement in board diversity. This article discusses reasons for the (...) scarcity of women on boards and concludes that, to enhance strategic decisions, board membership should reflect the corporation''s consumer population. Thus, women are a critical but overlooked resource. Areas for future research are also considered. (shrink)

This article investigates whether or not theories of justice from political philosophy, first, support the position that health research should contribute to justice in global health, and second, provide guidance about what is owed by international clinical research (ICR) actors to parties in low- and middle-income countries. Four theories—John Rawls's theory of justice, the rights-based cosmopolitan theories of Thomas Pogge and Henry Shue, and Jennifer Ruger's health capability paradigm—are evaluated. The article shows that three of the four theories require the (...) conduct of health research for justice in global health. The theories help identify the ends of justice to which ICR is to contribute, but they cannot tell us how to organize ICR to promote these ends. Aside from Ruger's health capability paradigm, the theories also lack an allocative principle for assigning specific duties to specific actors. This creates difficulties for establishing obligations for certain types of ICR actors. (shrink)

Descartes is often accused of having fragmented the human being into two independent substances, mind and body, with no clear strategy for explaining the apparent unity of human experience. Deborah Brown argues that, contrary to this view, Descartes did in fact have a conception of a single, integrated human being, and that in his view this conception is crucial to the success of human beings as rational and moral agents and as practitioners of science. The passions are pivotal in (...) this, and in a rich and wide-ranging discussion she examines Descartes' place in the tradition of thought about the passions, the metaphysics of actions and passions, sensory representation, and Descartes' account of self-mastery and virtue. Her study is an important and original reading not only of Descartes' account of mind-body unity but also of his theory of mind. (shrink)

Numerous philosophical theories of joint agency and its intentional structure have been developed in the past few decades. These theories have offered accounts of joint agency that appeal to higher-level states that are?shared? in some way. These accounts have enhanced our understanding of joint agency, yet there are a number of lower-level cognitive phenomena involved in joint action that philosophers rarely acknowledge. In particular, empirical research in cognitive science has revealed that when individuals engage in a joint activity such as (...) conversation or joint problem solving, they become aligned at multiple levels. We argue that this phenomenon of alignment is crucial to understanding joint actions and should be integrated with philosophical approaches. In this paper, we sketch a possible integration, and draw out its implications for understanding of joint agency and collective intentionality. The result is a process-based, dynamic account of joint action that integrates both low-level and high-level states, and seeks to capture the separate processes of how a joint action is initiated and sustained. (shrink)

Autism is one of the most compelling, controversial, and heartbreaking cognitive disorders. It presents unique philosophical challenges as well, raising intriguing questions in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and philosophy of language that need to be explored if the autistic population is to be responsibly served. Starting from the "theory of mind" thesis that a fundamental deficit in autism is the inability to recognize that other persons have minds, Deborah R. Barnbaum considers its implications for the nature of consciousness, (...) our understanding of the consciousness of others, meaning theories in philosophy of language, and the modality of mind. This discussion lays the groundwork for consideration of the value of an autistic life, as well as the moral theories available to persons with autism. The book also explores questions about genetic decision making, research into the nature of autism, and the controversial quest for a cure. This is a timely and wide-ranging book on a disorder that commends itself to serious ethical examination. (shrink)

Argues that the central cognitive component of ethical virtue for Aristotle is awareness of the value of particulars.

How and why, historian of science Lily Kay asks, did the ‘biological problem of DNA-based protein synthesis’ come to be represented ‘as an information code and a writing technology?’ What sort of metaphor was ‘code’ for these bio-geneticists? One whose run-away expansion, Derrida noted in Of Grammatology (1967), urgently required philosophical justification. Yet, 60 years later, there is still fundamental disagreement about its meaning and epistemic status. If the metaphor lacks ontological purchase, what accounts for its effectiveness? If, on the (...) other hand, scriptural metaphors get at the common root of culture and biology, what do we now mean by ‘code’? In this article, I trace several influential accounts of the metaphor’s effectiveness—making explicit the opposing notions of ‘code’ that animate them—and argue that each is too limited. Greater attention to the metaphoricity of ‘code’ yields a more philosophically productive and critical account of the metaphor of code. (shrink)

Idiosyncrasies of Hobbes's composition process, together with a paucity of reliable autobiographical materials and the norms of seventeenth-century manuscript production, render interpretation of his political theory particularly difficult and contentious. These difficulties are surveyed here under three headings: the process of "serial" composition, which was common in the period; the relationship between Hobbes's three political-theory texts-- the "Elements of Law, De Cive ", and "Leviathan", which is basic to defining the textual embodiment of his theory, and controversial; and his method (...) of writing. I argue that Hobbes's composition process undercut his intention to produce a deductive, logical theory of politics and opened the door to inconsistency and muddle in his arguments. (shrink)