It is an ancient view, to be found even in Aristotle’s analysis of friendship, that the other is an alter ego, another myself. More recently, this conception has provoked spirited debate within and without the phenomenological tradition. It can be found in a wide variety of texts, from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations to Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” The basic position can be summarized as follows. Intentional experiences are subjective, first-person experiences, not objective, third-person experiences.

ACCORDING TO HUSSERL, THE REVOLUTION brought about by the new mathematical science of the seventeenth century was primarily an ontological one: a shift in the conception of the real. That Husserl opposes the new Galilean-Cartesian ontology is clear. This much is evident from the potent rhetoric of the Crisis declaiming Galileo as an "entdeckender und verdeckender Genius", forgetful of the lifeworld, failing to grasp what the mathematical-empirical method he brought to such a degree of perfection actually achieves. Indeed, even without (...) the ringing Crisis passages, one could already expect that Husserl, the phenomenologist, would oppose the Platonizing scientific realism of a Galileo or a Descartes. However, Husserl's critique of Galileo poses many puzzling questions, questions which are not directly addressed in the Crisis, and which can be answered only in terms of the broader position outlined by Husserl elsewhere. To whit: what is the more precise content of Husserl's objections against Galileo, and how are these justified? Further, if scientific realism is to be rejected on phenomenological grounds, does this imply that a phenomenological approach is necessarily instrumentalist? Finally, what solution does Husserl's thought offer to the realism/instrumentalism debate? (shrink)

IN SCIENCE, PERCEPTION, AND REALITY, Sellars marvels at the power of fashion in philosophy, which all too often offers us the spectacle of a stampede rather than a careful sifting of gold from dross. Sellars was worried that the flight from phenomenalism would lead to the familiar pendulum effect and so thwart his effort to “usher analytic philosophy out of its Humean and into its Kantian stage,” as Rorty has put it. Accordingly, Sellars’s critique of the Myth of the Given (...) aimed to show that what was really wrong with phenomenalism was nothing particular to the sense-data of the positivists but the framework of givenness itself. (shrink)

IN SCIENCE, PERCEPTION, AND REALITY, Sellars marvels at the power of fashion in philosophy, which all too often offers us the spectacle of a stampede rather than a careful sifting of gold from dross. Sellars was worried that the flight from phenomenalism would lead to the familiar pendulum effect and so thwart his effort to “usher analytic philosophy out of its Humean and into its Kantian stage,” as Rorty has put it. Accordingly, Sellars’s critique of the Myth of the Given (...) aimed to show that what was really wrong with phenomenalism was nothing particular to the sense-data of the positivists but the framework of givenness itself. (shrink)

Philosophy and the Disdain for History: Reflections on Husserl's Ergiinzungsband to the Crisis GAIL SOFFER HUSSERL'S RECENTLY PUBLISHED Erganzungsband to the Cr/s/s' is a highly inti- mate statement, almost a confession, of hope and despair at the end of a philosophical life, a compendium of urgent, world-historical tasks not yet laid to rest. Above all, it abounds in reflections on history. In these, two things are poignantly clear: the late Husserl is completely convinced that history is of the (...) utmost importance to philosophy; he is not certain why. On a superfi- cial interpretation, the reason may seem obvious: Husserl's philosophical proj- ect is founded on the ideal of presuppositionless rational insight, and hence is Cartesian and ahistorical in its essence. The turn to history is to something external, and an implicit admission of the limitations of phenomenology itself, its inability to address the most pressing and meaningful problems of human existence: the crisis in European society and values, the ultimate significance of a man's life, work, and death. For those who would seek external motives for Husserl's turn to history, material is not lacking in this volume. There are moving philosophical discussions -- set in the atemporal phenomenological present tense -- of nationalism, of territoriality and the search for Lebensraum, of racism and xenophobia, of the forced emigration of families to a "no man's land. '' There is an attack on.. (shrink)

Philosophy and the Disdain for History: Reflections on Husserl's Ergiinzungsband to the Crisis GAIL SOFFER HUSSERL'S RECENTLY PUBLISHED Erganzungsband to the Cr/s/s' is a highly inti- mate statement, almost a confession, of hope and despair at the end of a philosophical life, a compendium of urgent, world-historical tasks not yet laid to rest. Above all, it abounds in reflections on history. In these, two things are poignantly clear: the late Husserl is completely convinced that history is of the (...) utmost importance to philosophy; he is not certain why. On a superfi- cial interpretation, the reason may seem obvious: Husserl's philosophical proj- ect is founded on the ideal of presuppositionless rational insight, and hence is Cartesian and ahistorical in its essence. The turn to history is to something external, and an implicit admission of the limitations of phenomenology itself, its inability to address the most pressing and meaningful problems of human existence: the crisis in European society and values, the ultimate significance of a man's life, work, and death. For those who would seek external motives for Husserl's turn to history, material is not lacking in this volume. There are moving philosophical discussions -- set in the atemporal phenomenological present tense -- of nationalism, of territoriality and the search for Lebensraum, of racism and xenophobia, of the forced emigration of families to a "no man's land. '' There is an attack on... (shrink)

Heidegger's attacks against humanism have come under renewed scrutiny, especially in France, as the latest wave of polemics over his political engagement has metamorphosed into a debate over the nature of humanism itself. Yet these recent discussions give rise to a number of perplexities. Firstly, for all their differences, it is remarkable how Heidegger's critics and defenders alike distort his position. On the one side, his French defenders hold that humanism is the attribution of a fixed essence to man, according (...) to which definition "even Nazism is a humanism." The fact that the early Heidegger was still enmeshed in the snares of humanism is then invoked to explain his political views in the thirties. (shrink)

As a contribution towards clearing the ground for a new phenomenological evaluation of the essence of science, in this paper I present a critique of Heidegger''s argument in Being and Time for the priority of Zuhandenheit to Vorhandenheit. I argue that Heidegger''s notion of presence-at-hand is incoherent, conflating Husserl and Descartes, and that this general analysis has serious phenomenological flaws. Contrary to Heidegger, I maintain that there is a form of exploratory, theoretical activity including causal inquiry which is prior to (...) the type of practical activity entailed by readiness-to-hand. Consideration of this exploratory activity points us in the direction of an alternate conception of the genesis and essence of theory. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive historical and thematic overview of phenomenological philosophy. The first half, written by Elisabeth Ströker, is devoted to Husserlian phenomenology; the second, by Paul Janssen, addresses the central German and French heirs of the phenomenological tradition: Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas. The main stages in the phenomenological itinerary of each thinker are carefully reconstructed and analyzed, their aporiae considered, and--in the case of the post-Husserlian phenomenologists--their relation to Husserl's own phenomenology laid out in detail. The (...) Ströker portion of the book also contains a useful exposition of the historical and philosophical context in which Husserl's thought emerged, and some discussion of the development of Husserlian phenomenology in America, especially in the work of Gurwitsch and Schütz. (shrink)

This volume is an introduction to both newer and more established ideas in the growing field of critical phenomenology from a number of disciplinary perspectives.

The literature on epistemic injustice has been helpful for highlighting some of the epistemic harms that have long troubled those working in area studies that concern oppressed populations. Nonetheless, a good deal of this literature is oriented toward those in a position to perpetrate injustices, rather than those who historically have been harmed by them. This orientation, I argue, is ill-suited to the work of epistemic decolonization. In this essay, I call and hold attention to the epistemic interests of those (...) who are epistemically marginalized on account of relations of dominance and oppression. To do so, I draw on Kristie Dotson’s work, which uses a systems approach focused on epistemic agency. I develop Dotson’s insights further to argue that epistemic inclusions may be just as pernicious as epistemic exclusions Specifically, I highlight some of the ways in which epistemic agents can be included in epistemic systems in a manner that is epistemically exploitative—extracting epistemic labor coercively or in ways that are distinctly non-reciprocal. I then turn to María Lugones’ distinction between horizontal and vertical practices to discuss avenues of resisting both exclusions and inclusions that thwart the epistemic agency of marginalized knowers. (shrink)

Meno's Paradox from Socrates to Sextus Gail Fine. sense that they consider the issues it raises; and they argue, against its conclusion, that inquiry is possible. Like Plato and Aristotle, they also explain what makes inquiry possible; and they do ...

Sleep-related experiences [Watson, D. . Dissociations of the night: Individual differences in sleep-related experiences and their relation to dissociation and schizotypy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 110, 526–535] refer to a host of nocturnal altered-consciousness phenomena, including narcoleptic tendencies, nightmares, problem-solving dreams, waking dreams, and lucid dreams. In an attempt to clarify the meaning of this construct, we examined cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of sleep-related experiences , altered-consciousness tendencies , psychological distress, childhood maltreatment , and life stress in young adults. Both (...) types of SREs were found to be distinguishable from altered-consciousness tendencies. Transliminality emerged as a longitudinal predictor of both general SREs and lucid dreams. Psychological distress and an increase in life stress predicted an increase in general SREs over a 3-month interval. We conclude that transliminality is a general altered-consciousness trait that accounts for some of the individual differences in sleep-related experiences, and that general sleep experiences are an outcome of psychological distress and life stress. (shrink)

Ubuntu, or humanness, has been theorized as a uniquely African contribution to the world. At the same time, others insist that it is a universal ethical principle. This paper particularly wants to look at a sub-theme of ubuntu studies, regarding how some of the authors and researchers have wanted to apply it to business, even suggesting that ubuntu can provide a model for ethical management principles that can also result in better outcomes for businesses. To approach business with an ethical (...) emphasis is clearly better than casting ethics aside in pursuit of profit without concern for human flourishing. But, can ubuntu management principles be used in a global capitalist framework, to soften the hard edges of cutthroat capitalism? Or does the ubuntu management approach without capitalist critique fall short of reaching the goal and practice of humanness? Additionally, perhaps the fault of current practices is not only due to the capitalist global economy, but also, an historical and a current global anti-black racism as well as sexism, which continues to skew the numbers of managers to greatly over-represent white males. This is due to historical privileging of men and the white race. We need to put forth our best efforts to ensure fair treatment of workers, who are valued as persons, and paid a good wage, with profits to go to them so that they can nourish and support their extended families. An ubuntu ethic could indeed be helpful as a guide for deciding which kinds of changes to the larger economic and political structures we should advocate and fight for (Publisher's website includes free full text). (shrink)

Selections seeks to provide an accurate and readable translation that will allow the reader to follow Aristotle's use of crucial technical terms and to grasp the details of his argument. Unlike anthologies that combine translations by many hands, this volume includes a fully integrated set of translations by a two-person team. The glossary--the most detailed in any edition--explains Aristotle's vocabulary and indicates the correspondences between Greek and English words. Brief notes supply alternative translations and elucidate difficult passages.

A broad exploration of Irigaray’s philosophy of life and living. Featuring a highly accessible essay from Irigaray herself, this volume explores her philosophy of life and living. Life-thinking, an important contemporary trend in philosophy and in women’s and gender studies, stands in contrast to philosophy’s traditional grounding in death, exemplified in the work of philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Schopenhauer. The contributors to Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray consider Irigaray’s criticisms of the traditional Western philosophy of death, including its (...) either-or dualisms and binary logic, as well as some of Irigaray’s “solutions” for cultivating life. The book is comprehensive in its analyses of Irigaray’s relationship to classical and contemporary philosophers, writers, and artists, and produces extremely fruitful intersections between Irigaray and figures as diverse as Homer and Plato; Alexis Wright, the First-Nations novelist of Australia; and twentieth-century French philosophers like Sartre, Badiou, Deleuze, and Guattari. It also develops Irigaray’s relationship to the arts, with essays on theater, poetry, architecture, sculpture, and film. “This is a very timely text; it places Irigaray scholarship in conversation with the lively field of feminist philosophies of life, and this is a really wonderful, fruitful match. The collection itself contains many marvelous pieces. Luce Irigaray’s essay is strong and pithy—she reiterates a number of her important ideas, in accessible language, and places them in the context of pertinent questions in feminism.” — Sabrina L. Hom, coeditor of Thinking with Irigaray. (shrink)

This paper is a counter to the view that names are always predicates with the same extension as a metalinguistic predicate with the form “is a thing called “N”” (the Predicate View). The Predicate View is in opposition to the Referential View of names. In this paper, I undermine one argument for the Predicate View. The Predicate View’s adherents take examples of uses of names that have the surface appearance of a predicate and generalise from these to treat uses of (...) names that do not have the surface appearance of a predicate. They show that the Predicate View can provide a unified account of these two uses and assume that the Referential account cannot. I propose an alternative view of names, the Polysemy View. This view allows one to resist the pressure to generalise from the cases with the surface appearance of predicates to all uses of names while nevertheless providing connections between the uses. On the Polysemy View names are not, in their core use, metalinguistic predicates. Names are predominantly referring expressions but they also freelance as metalinguistic predicates on occasion. They have a double life. This double life is possible because of the pragmatic and conventional connections between the two aspects of that life. My main aim in this paper is to show that the Predicate View is not the only view that can give a good account of apparently predicative uses of names. In addition, I offer some inconclusive reasons to prefer the Polysemy View over the Predicate View. My paper assumes a background framework that the Predicate and Referentialist Views share and I do not attempt to justify that framework. I ignore many other views of names (notably descriptivist views and relevance theoretic views) in order to focus on the debate between these two opponents. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt misrepresented Africans at the same time that she criticized the actions of those who harmed them. Arendt's 1951 work, The Origins of Totalitarianism aimed to show how Hitler's (and Stalin's) practices of totalitarian rule in Europe could be understood in the context of its predecessors, anti-Semitism and imperialism. As a middle stage in her argument, she focussed on the case of the Cape Colony in South Africa. Arendt's study includes: the distinctions she made between colonization and imperialism; her (...) comments on race-thinking and racism; and her evaluation of labor practices, or the lack of labor, among the indigenous Africans, the trekboers, and the gold diggers. While making some valuable points regarding each of these topics, she nevertheless on occasion repeats some of the popular misconceptions regarding Africa. In addition, she advocates a position regarding labor that calls indigenous African practices into question as much as the adventures of the colonizers. (shrink)

Attempts to reclaim mindfulness from the commercial and corporate juggernaut it has become and to demonstrate its usefulness in spiritual (including Christian) life.

This outstanding reference source to epistemic injustice is the first collection of its kind. Over thirty chapters address topics such as testimonial and hermeneutic injustice and virtue epistemology, objectivity and objectification, implicit bias, gender and race.

In Telling Flesh, Vicki Kirby addresses a major theoretical issue at the intersection of the social sciences and feminist theory -- the separation of nature from culture. Kirby focuses particularly on postmodern approaches to corporeality, and explores how these approaches confine the body within questions about meaning and interpretation. Kirby explores the implications of this containment in the work of Jane Gallop, Judith Butler, and Drucilla Cornell, as well as in recent cyber-criticism. By analysing the inadvertent repetition of the nature/culture (...) division in this work, Kirby offers a powerful reassessment of dualism itself. (shrink)

Existing metasemantic projects presuppose that word- (or sentence-) types are part of the non-semantic base. We propose a new strategy: an endogenous account of word types, that is, one where word types are fixed as part of the metasemantics. On this view, it is the conventions of truthfulness and trust that ground not only the meaning of the words (meaning by convention) but also what the word type is of each particular token utterance (words by convention). The same treatment extends (...) to identifying the populations through which the conventions prevail. We consider whether this proposal leads to new underdetermination challenges for metasemantics, and make a case that it does not. (shrink)

This book opens the door to the effects of intellectual, educational, and economic colonization of young children throughout the world. Using a postcolonial lens on current educational practices, the authors hope to lift those practices out of reproducing traditional power structures and push our thinking beyond the adult/child dichotomy into new possibilities for the lives that are created with children.

The field of bioethics has evolved over the past half-century, incorporating new domains of inquiry that signal developments in health research, clinical practice, public health in its broadest sense and more recently sensitivity to the interdependence of global health and the environment. These extensions of the reach of bioethics are a welcome response to the growth of global health as a field of vital interest and activity. This paper provides a critical interpretive review of how the term “global health ethics” (...) has been used and defined in the literature to date to identify ethical issues that arise and need to be addressed when deliberating on and working to improve the discourse on ethical issues in health globally. Selected publications were analyzed by year of publication and geographical distribution, journal and field, level of engagement, and ethical framework. Of the literature selected, 151 articles were written by authors in high-income countries, as defined by the World Bank country classifications, 8 articles were written by authors in low- or middle-income countries, and 13 articles were collaborations between authors in HIC and LMIC. All of the articles selected except one from 1977 were published after 1998. Literature on global health ethics spiked considerably from the early 2000s, with the highest number in 2011. One hundred twenty-seven articles identified were published in academic journals, 1 document was an official training document, and 44 were chapters in published books. The dominant journals were the American Journal of Bioethics, Developing World Bioethics, and Bioethics. We coded the articles by level of engagement within the ethical domain at different levels: interpersonal, institutional, international, and structural. The ethical frameworks at use corresponded to four functional categories: those examining practical or narrowly applied ethical questions; those concerned with normative ethics; those examining an issue through a single philosophical tradition; and those comparing and contrasting insights from multiple ethical frameworks. This critical interpretive review is intended to delineate the current contours and revitalize the conversation around the future charge of global health ethics scholarship. (shrink)

The field of bioethics has evolved over the past half-century, incorporating new domains of inquiry that signal developments in health research, clinical practice, public health in its broadest sense and more recently sensitivity to the interdependence of global health and the environment. These extensions of the reach of bioethics are a welcome response to the growth of global health as a field of vital interest and activity. This paper provides a critical interpretive review of how the term “global health ethics” (...) has been used and defined in the literature to date to identify ethical issues that arise and need to be addressed when deliberating on and working to improve the discourse on ethical issues in health globally. Selected publications were analyzed by year of publication and geographical distribution, journal and field, level of engagement, and ethical framework. Of the literature selected, 151 articles were written by authors in high-income countries, as defined by the World Bank country classifications, 8 articles were written by authors in low- or middle-income countries, and 13 articles were collaborations between authors in HIC and LMIC. All of the articles selected except one from 1977 were published after 1998. Literature on global health ethics spiked considerably from the early 2000s, with the highest number in 2011. One hundred twenty-seven articles identified were published in academic journals, 1 document was an official training document, and 44 were chapters in published books. The dominant journals were the American Journal of Bioethics, Developing World Bioethics, and Bioethics. We coded the articles by level of engagement within the ethical domain at different levels: interpersonal, institutional, international, and structural. The ethical frameworks at use corresponded to four functional categories: those examining practical or narrowly applied ethical questions; those concerned with normative ethics; those examining an issue through a single philosophical tradition; and those comparing and contrasting insights from multiple ethical frameworks. This critical interpretive review is intended to delineate the current contours and revitalize the conversation around the future charge of global health ethics scholarship. (shrink)

This editorial critically engages with the understanding of openness by attending to how notions of presence and absence come bundled together as part of efforts to make open. This is particularly evident in contemporary discourse around data production, dissemination, and use. We highlight how the preoccupations with making data present can be usefully analyzed and understood by tracing the related concerns around what is missing, unavailable, or invisible, which unvaryingly but often implicitly accompany debates about data and openness.

Lecturer in social foundations of education and women's studies, Victoria College, Australia.

This article explores the development of a novel biomedical research organism, and its potential to remake the species and spaces of translational medicine. The humanized mouse is a complex experimental object in which mice, rendered immunodeficient through genetic alteration, are engrafted with human stem cells in the hope of reconstituting a human immune system for biomedical research and drug testing. These chimeric organisms have yet to garner the same commentary from social scientists as other human–animal hybrid forms. Yet, they are (...) rapidly being positioned as central to translational medicine in immunological research and pharmaceutical development. This article explores the complex relations between species and spaces they seek to enact. Humanizing mice simultaneously moves these animal forms towards the intimate geographies of corporeal equivalence with humans and the expansive geographies of translational research. These multiple trajectories are achieved by the way humanized mice function as both uncertain ‘epistemic things’ and as expansive ‘collaborative things’, articulating mouse genetics with other research, notably stem cell science. In the context of post-genomics, their indeterminacy is critical to their collaborative value; their expansive potential follows as much from their biological openness as from specific expectations. Yet, these new research organisms have both accumulative and disruptive capacities, for there are patterns of interference between these trajectories, remaking boundaries between experimental practices and clinical contexts. (shrink)