This chapter contains sections titled: A Riff on Infant Feeding Ethical Questions about Infant Feeding Closing Thoughts on Classification and Responsibility Notes.

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the (...) École normale supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Interpersonal and Emotional Beginnings of Understanding: A Review of Peter Hobson’sThe Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of ThinkingShaun Gallagher (bio)Hobson's book (2002) is extremely accessible, interestingly interdisciplinary, and knowledgeable in all the right ways. He pulls together work in psychiatry, experimental psychology, and psychoanalysis in a framework that is relevant to issues in the philosophy of mind. We are told much of this in the preface, and (...) it is true. I think it is an excellent book for students and for theorists who have an interest in, but who are not working in the specific areas of, cognitive development. I recommend it highly for those audiences. For those who are already working in these areas, and for those who are already familiar with Hobson's work, there are no surprises. As someone who has learned a good deal from Hobson and who is in substantial agreement with many of his conclusions, I read the first six chapters of the book looking for something new and exciting, but did not find it. The reader will nonetheless find clear and careful discussions of contributions from evolutionary theory, developmental psychology, and psychopathology to our understanding of the mind.Hobson does tackle the difficult question of why we should include psychoanalysis as part of the investigation. He views psychoanalysis as a kind of experimental procedure. Like the experimentalist, the psychoanalyst "sets up an unusual situation that allows him to observe things that would otherwise remain hidden" (p. 19). What the psychoanalyst looks for in these arrangements are patterns of relationship that shape all of the patient's behavior and thought, relations with others and with herself. The analyst has to engage in something like a second-person phenomenology, examining not only the subjective [End Page 253] patterns of the patient, but also the effects (specifically the emotional effects) those patterns have on the analyst himself. The outcome of analysis, for purposes of the research project that Hobson is engaged in, is twofold. First, the psychoanalytic procedure reaches certain dimensions of thought and social relationships that seem unavailable to experimental approaches. "We find that the mind works in ways that are more complex than common sense or even experimental psychology would suggest. In particular, there are ways of thinking and relating to people that appear to be more primitive and less rational than we might suppose" (pp. 21-2). Second, psychoanalysis shows that what happens within an individual's mind is essentially related to what happens in her social relationships. The latter point, as Hobson notes, is a central theme of his book.This is all well and good, the experimental psychologist might say, but it seems overly subjective. After all, if the data include the emotional effects that a patient might have on the investigator, how precisely can we make that scientifically objective? I think that the right answer to that question is embodied in Hobson's approach, and perhaps in who Hobson is. Hobson is himself an experimental psychologist, as well as a practicing psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. He balances the claims that he bases on psychoanalysis with results from studies (including many of his own studies) in experimental psychology and psychiatry. To put it precisely, the task is not to turn the subjective or intersubjective data from psychoanalysis into objective data, but to explore subjectivity (which is certainly part of what we want to explain) by means of a method that gets at things from a different perspective, but that is also consistent with and balanced by the more objective results of experimental science. My own doubts about psychoanalysis are somewhat mitigated by the balance that Hobson maintains throughout this book.Chapters 2 through 6 summarize a large number of studies that ultimately make the case for the importance of intersubjectivity in the development of mental abilities. Chapter 2 explores the necessary prerequisites for the emergence of thought in infancy. Evidence found in experiments on and observations of the interaction between infants and caregivers, early imitation, and emotional relatedness supports the picture of a mix of innate and acquired aspects that move the child toward thought. Significant emphasis is devoted to the role of perception and... (shrink)

In debates about genetic testing of children, as well as about disclosing unsolicited findings (UFs) of pediatric exome sequencing, respect for future autonomy should be regarded as a prima facie consideration for not taking steps that would entail denying the future adult the opportunity to decide for herself about what to know about her own genome. While the argument can be overridden when other, morally more weighty considerations are at stake, whether this is the case can only be determined in (...) concrete cases. Importantly, when children grow into adolescents, respect for future autonomy will have to give way to respecting their emerging autonomy. When pediatric exome sequencing is done for complex conditions not involving developmental delay, respect for the child’s future or emerging autonomy should be a primary consideration for those charged with deciding on behalf of the child. Building on what Emanuel and Emanuel have termed the ‘deliberative model’ of shared decision making, we argue that if parents fail to give these considerations their due, professionals should actively invite them to do so. Taking a directive stance may be needed in order to make sure that the future or emerging autonomy of the child are duly considered in the decision-making process, but also to help the parents and themselves to shape their respective roles as responsible care-givers. (shrink)

This study aims to look at the role of the practice of excellence strategies in education in achieving sustainable competitive advantage for the Higher educational institutions of the faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, a model, and the study considered the competitive advantage of educational institutions stems from the impact on the level of each student, employee, and the institution. The study was based on the premise that the development of strategies for excellence in education, (...) and its implementation is a vital important prerequisite to achieve sustainable competitive advantage in higher educational institutions. The study followed a systematic exploratory descriptive methodology through review of the theoretical literature, and the adoption of the experience of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza as a model for its unique experience in the field of excellence in education. The study results showed that the most important are: There is a strong correlation between the level of exercising excellence strategies in education and the achievement of higher educational institutions to the sustainable competitive advantage. The results include a general required number of important sub results on the subject of the model - Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza as follows: - The student considered the academic focus of the operation in the development process of the workers’ skills, particularly academics at the university helps to distinguish students and increase the employment rate after graduation. - The existence of consistency in development efforts and quality improvement for all three levels (student, employee, and the university), and this contributes to the Faculty excellence. - The Faculty has been able to achieve competitive advantages by offering excellent services without harming the efficiency, and this alone is a great success because improving service properties requires great investments, which negatively affect the continued institutional development. The study also reached a set of recommendations as follows: - The need to exercise excellence strategies in education, excellence reward at the national level, and those higher educational institutions follow the criteria for measuring the competitive advantages of its institutions always. - There is a need to increase efforts to implement programs of excellence, the allocation of adequate time, reward outstanding efforts as well. There is a necessity for each faculty to achieve competitive advantage and sustainability, using the general philosophies of competitive advantage, but with a different strategically content from what is in the private commercial sector, it reflects the Faculties mission and objectives, depending on making improvements and excellence in processes that ensure the safety of its outputs. As well as the need to find a balance between the work of teaching and research work of the faculty members, this has important implications regarding the criteria used in the process of excellence evaluation. The study recommended the adoption of strategies for excellence in education on a national public policy level mainly in the processes of change in higher education institutions. The need to support the existence of a common understanding of the efforts of excellence to create a general culture that appreciates excellence in faculties and universities. This underlines the need for transparent, fair rewards systems, to encourage innovation in education. The need to conduct a comprehensive surveys on the graduates of faculties and universities including the areas of employment and skills, because that will give accurate indications of the graduates and will help to establish a link to a more precise about the relationship of excellence strategies with the competitive advantages. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Proceedings of the 1998 International Buddhist-Christian Theological EncounterBarbara Fields Bernstein and Brian MuldoonThe 1998 International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter, the continuation of the Cobb-Abe group, met in Indianapolis, Indiana, from May 1 to 3, 1998. Following the reading of a statement from Prof. Masao Abe in which he stated his regret at not being able to attend this important gathering and his hope that the encounter would begin to address (...) the global crises facing humankind today, John Cobb provided a brief history of the encounter for the new participants.First Paper: “Buddhism and Ecological Ethics,” by Chatsumarn KabilsinghProf. Kabilsingh began the morning discussion by focusing on the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination, which reveals the interconnectedness of all life, as the starting place for fashioning a response to the environmental crisis. Suggesting that the inner and outer worlds are necessarily related (“As the king is, so are the sun and the moon”), she recommended adopting certain monastic practices to create a more harmonious relationship with nature. This provoked a discussion about the need for concrete action in addressing the behaviors not so much of individuals as of institutions. Institutions are uniquely human, embodying human imperfection even as they shape who we are. Noting that both traditions tended to focus on individual awakening or redemption, the question was asked how the principles of individual enlightenment or salvation could be applied to a community or institution. Further, there needs to be some practical balance between the two traditions’ extreme views of civilization, one of which places it in the heart of the forest (the East) and the other that finds it in the marbled city (the West). This balance, which must restore the tree of life to the heart of the city, will require a new model of institutions as living organisms rather than lifeless monoliths or random encounters. The balance of the morning’s discussion addressed the relationship between community and institutions and the “eschatological hope” of both Christianity and Buddhism. Chatsumarn concluded the session by highlighting the principle of interrelationship as the common ground between Christianity and Buddhism. [End Page 193]Second Paper: “Self and Nature in Christianity (and Buddhism),” by Sallie McfagueMcFague’s paper generated a spirited discussion about a series of paired concepts: Self-other, individual-community, sacramental-prophetic, absolute-relative, commonality-distinctiveness, vertical-horizontal, thinking-feeling, and scientific-aesthetic. The observation that ethics must be based on empirical data led to an exploration of the relationship of the relative (concrete reality that can be described) and the absolute (that which cannot be described, but may or may not be expressed through that which is particular) levels of truth. Interdependence, in the Buddhist model, includes an appreciation of the particularity of each thing while also recognizing the sameness of all. Speakers agreed that we must think both relatively and absolutely (although a new way of applying language to these concepts is needed). Meaningful environmental ethics must be grounded in the sacramental, in scientific particularity as perceived through the heart of the aesthete in intimate relationship with the natural world. But how could we move from these theoretical reflections into a closer encounter with that world? Stephanie Kaza would provide the needed vehicle in her comprehensive overview of the environmental crisis in the next session.Third Paper: “Overcoming the Grip of Consumerism,” by Stephanie KazaIt is fair to say that Kaza’s paper catalyzed provocative directions for thought during the three-day encounter, both because it provided the factual data from which an ethical discussion might proceed and because it focused the conversation on the role of consumerism in the environmental crisis. Prof. Kaza provided a telling comparison of consumerism and liberation practice as paths to self-realization and fulfillment, showing how the twelve links of dependent origination are integral to both paths. Breaking the grip of consumerism requires breaking any one of these links, like an addiction. This generated a spirited discussion about the relationship between enlightenment—whether “sudden” or otherwise—and consumerism and the relationship between consumerism and the more fundamental human tendency toward the acceptance of suffering over practices that promote liberation. While education was obviously critical for a... (shrink)

Starting from two paintings by Salvador Dalì (The Enigma of William Tell and Autumnal Cannibalism), the article explores Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung’s idea of erotic cannibalism. The fear of being eaten is an archetype of the collective unconscious, as fairy tales clearly reveal. Following Jacques Derrida’s reflections, the author suggests that the fear of being eaten is not limited to anthropophagic cultures, because there is a sort of symbolic cannibalism which has to do with the capacity for annihilation. (...) The petrifying gaze of Medusa, described by Jean Paul Sartre, is a good example of this symbolic cannibalism. On the opposite side of the spectrum, compared to the petrifying gaze, we find the recognizing look of a mother toward her child. For the child, the mother embodies the good subject, which is reassuring and nonthreatening (the fairy who stands in contrast to the devouring ogre in fairy tales). Sara Ruddick explicitly refers to this motherhood model in her book Maternal Thinking, where she lays out the methodology for the ethics of care. The maternal, or recognizing gaze, as the opposite of Medusa’s gaze portrayed by Sartre, is well described in a compelling text by the Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello. At the same time, it plays an important role in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Finally, the article returns to Salvador Dalì, showing how in his life, the artist experienced the Other’s gaze in both forms: the objectifying one, represented by the artist’s father (portrayed in The Enigma of William Tell), and the recognizing one, embodied by his partner Gala (portrayed in Autumnal Cannibalism). (shrink)

Clinical ethics records offer bioethics researchers a rich source of cases that clinicians have identified as ethically complex. In this paper, we suggest that clinical ethics records can be used to point to types of cases that lack attention in the current bioethics literature, identifying new areas in need of more detailed bioethical work. We conducted an analysis of the clinical ethics records of one paediatric hospital in Australia, focusing specifically on conflicts between parents and health professionals about a (...) child’s medical treatment. We identified, analysed, and compared cases of this type from the clinical ethics records with cases of this type discussed in bioethics journals. While the cases from journals tended to describe situations involving imminent risk to the child’s life, a significant proportion of the clinical ethics records cases involved different stakes for the child involved. These included distress, poorer functional outcome, poorer psychosocial outcome, or increased risk of surgical complications. Our analysis suggests that one type of case that warrants more detailed ethics research is parental refusal of recommended treatment, where the refusal does not endanger the child’s life but rather some other aspect of the child’s well-being. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Radical Female Imaginary: Temporality and Embodiment in Irigaray’s EthicsEwa Plonowska Ziarek* (bio)An important intervention of Irigaray’s work on sexual difference into the postmodern debates on ethics is the mediation between two different lines of ethical inquiry: one represented by the work of Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault, and, to a certain degree, Castoriadis, and the other by the work of Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard. Although the two trajectories (...) both depart from the notion of morality as a universal system of law and judgment, they represent different approaches to freedom and obligation. For Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard, the ethical significance of alterity disrupts social systems of signification and, in this sense, marks transcendence as a break in discourse, whereas for Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault, otherness is expressed within the endless variations of becoming. To elucidate this difference, it might be useful to recall John Caputo’s distinction between two kinds of postmodern ethics—the Nietzschean heteromorphism and the Levinasian heteronomy. In its emphasis on becoming and change, heteromorphism, Caputo claims, puts forward the claim of liberation but cannot accommodate an obligation to the other: “In heteromorphism, the aim is freedom from inhibition and blockage, freedom from... the weight of values... from everything that weighs the will down....” By contrast, the Levinasian ethics of alterity gives priority to the obligation to the other, which calls the freedom of the subject into question: “freedom is suspect, suspended, held in question, because it is aggressive, self-accumulative, and eventually, finally murderous. Heteronomism wants the other to be free while one is oneself held hostage” [Caputo 60].In my discussion of the radical female imaginary I would like to show that Irigaray’s work refuses to align itself with either side of this divide. Originating in the very gap between liberation and responsibility, self and other, immanence and transcendence, freedom and obligation, the feminist ethics of sexual difference cannot disregard any of these claims. For Irigaray, the ethics of sexual difference has to enable different trajectories of gendered becomings without forgetting the obligation to the other. In fact, Irigaray argues that the responsibility to the other who differs sexually is the very source of such becomings. Irigaray’s ethics maintains neither the rigid separation between freedom and obligation, as is the case in Levinas’s work, nor their symmetrical reversibility, as is the case in Kant’s ethics. By contesting the oppositions between carnal passions and ethical obligations, between the respect for the other and the becoming of the self, Irigaray allows us to think through the disjunction between the two main ethical trajectories of postmodernism and to find the means to negotiate between them. In this essay I would like [End Page 60] to focus on two moments of such negotiation: the becoming of sexed bodies and the temporality of the female imaginary.One of Irigaray’s famous claims is the charge of the forgetting of sexed bodies in the discourses of philosophy, science, linguistics, and politics. Although this claim is certainly not new in feminist theory, what is original in Irigaray’s work is the diagnosis of the numerous symptoms of such forgetting, for instance, the relation she makes between the erasure of the sexed body and the nihilism of Western culture. For Irigaray, the forgetting of sexual difference manifests itself not only in the disregard for the specificity of feminine embodiment, desires, and genealogies but also in the disembodied character of linguistic analyses, in the erasure of the drama of enunciation evident in the privilege given to predication, in the separation of the subject of knowledge from carnality and desire, in the infatuation with formalism and with its obverse side, the crippling nostalgia for the maternal body, and, finally, in the rigid separation between the immanence of flesh and the transcendence of the spirit. 1 Even more striking is the originality of Irigaray’s intervention, which links the question of sexual difference with the temporality of the body.An important element of Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference is the recovery of “that repressed entity, the female imaginary” [TS 28]. Despite numerous excellent discussions of the imaginary in Irigaray’s work, the complexity of her negotiations around this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration by Amy LevadLloyd SteffenRedeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration Amy Levad minneapolis: fortress press, 2014. 233 pp. $39.00.Amy Levad (University of St. Thomas) has added a theological voice to the national conversation that Michelle Alexander opened with her devastating critique of the American criminal justice system in The New Jim (...) Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander showed how policies grounded in the war on drugs have disproportionately distressed racial and ethnic minorities—African Americans and Latinos—and the poor, destroying lives and communities. Incarceration in the United States is today a system that perpetuates what Alexander called a “caste” system from which escape is, especially among black males, virtually impossible. In this informed and well-presented study, Levad takes up Alexander’s social justice analysis, extending it in new directions, offering a creative theological contribution to the mass incarceration crisis in the world’s first “genuine prison society.”Levad observes that a limitation in the Christian response to mass incarceration is the “lack of Catholic voices” (47), which her book makes an effort to correct. She draws on core insights of Catholic tradition to address conditions that foster crime while also responding “to the ways in which the criminal justice crisis both reflects and sustains social injustices” (48). Her book offers a wonderfully clear analysis of mass incarceration and related issues such as recidivism strategies and policing policies. She advocates “pulling levers,” policing policies that aim at avoiding prison, versus harsh “window-breaking” policies that for deterrence reasons criminalize even minor offences. Levad addresses theories of punishment, proposes ideas for prison reform, and, while acknowledging a limited need for prisons, sets forth constructive suggestions for how best to decarcerate society through restorative justice and rehabilitation practices that reintegrate offenders into society.The study is a provocative interdisciplinary conversation between criminology and theology. Levad’s focus is on liturgy and sacrament, the central resources of Roman Catholic theology, finding in the Eucharist the theological [End Page 204] model for inviting the marginalized and dispossessed into the common fellowship of human dignity. She then argues that penance and reconciliation yield attitudes and behaviors that parallel secular restorative justice efforts. Advocating alternatives to prison while denying the effectiveness of punitive retribution, Levad critiques the approaches of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and other Catholics. She highlights Kathryn Soltis as a Catholic scholar who uses theological resources to affirm the dignity of prisoners, attend to the common good, and seek ways to repair relationships between victims and offenders.Some of Levad’s ideas could be developed further. Pluralism, for instance, is mentioned as a contextual issue for her theological work but never thoroughly developed. Utilitarianism is denied a constructive ethics role, but Levad’s discussion of recidivism appeals to it as a marker of the common good (122). And Levad’s attention to the internal failures of the Church in confronting social justice issues leads one to wonder whether the decarcerated vision of society she desires is practicable.Levad speaks to the heart of the incarceration crisis in America, challenging the willingness of Americans to “throw people away” (198) through imprisonment—especially the young, the poor, and minorities. With her underlying question of “what kind of people we want to be and what we want our communities to be like” (43), Levad presents readers with a distinctive “vision of justice in God’s reign conveyed by liturgy and sacraments” (197). With that, she has accomplished what she set out to do: confront the social injustice of mass incarceration with the best insights of modern criminology but also with a theological perspective that embodies the struggle to realize an engaged Catholic praxis of justice.Lloyd SteffenLehigh UniversityCopyright © 2016 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Proposal Information: In this paper it is argued that although Spinoza, unlike other great philosophers of the Enlightenment era, never actually wrote a philosophy of education as such, he did – in his Ethics – write a philosophy of self-improvement that is deeply educational at heart. When looked at against the background of his overall metaphysical system, the educational account that emerges is one that is highly curious and may even, to some extent at least, come across as counter-intuitive in (...) a contemporary setting. This is so because it grounds the greater social and political endeavors of humanity in the individual’s striving for an ever-increasing power of acting. Hence, education, for Spinoza, is a decidedly individualistic affair, but then again, so is the making of society. Since, for Spinoza, every instance of knowledge bears the unique mark of the individual body that expresses it, one might conclude that at the foundation of every social structure is an encounter between concrete bodies; each expressing a particular perspective from where to grasp the world. I would argue, based on this, that one of Spinoza’s main contributions to educational theory is his grounding of larger social endeavors in the striving of the individual. Hinged on the striving to be more rational, as dictated by the doctrine of the conatus, education appears to offer a way of grounding the structure of the human social world in the same principles as those guiding the individual. Spinoza’s doctrine of the imitation of affects thereby offers a way of linking the egoistic striving for power on behalf of the individual with the educational goal of building a sustainable society. It does so as it conditions self-improvement by the human characteristic to imitate what others desire. By being surrounded with people who desire to be more rational, one can utilize this desire for the good and become strengthened in one’s own striving for increasing one’s degree of existence. Consequently, the teaching situation is geared for guiding students towards a more rational life, at the same time as it is geared for the self-improvement of the teacher. This aspect of self-improvement is, ultimately, what will motivate the teacher in striving to enhance the lives of his or her students in the first place. Being unable to self-improve in isolation, the doctrine of the imitation of affects dictates that the rational person will be moved toward a life of generosity, not primarily for altruistic reasons, but out of a desire to become more rational and thus to gain in his or her own power of acting. The question that follows from this, of course, is how does one go about when inculcating a desire to be more rational in one’s students?Education, from a Spinozistic point of view, is ultimately about the cultivation of the potential that lies dormant in each individual, so that a person may live a happier life as a result of understanding, more adequately, their place in the natural world. The challenge, then, becomes one of overcoming the many obstacles that prevent a person from developing their potential. Pedagogy, from this point of view, may be understood in terms of the art of offering the right amount of resistance. This notion is based on the assumption that if a student encounters no resistance – or too much resistance – his or her potential remains just that – a potential. In order to develop this potential the student needs to overcome certain barriers. With regards to this, the role of the teacher may be conceived in terms of the one balancing the amount of resistance so that the student is properly challenged but at the same time not overwhelmed. Methodology or Methods/ Research Instruments or Sources Used: The paper makes for an attempt to outline a Spinozistic philosophy of education based on readings of Spinoza’s texts – primarily the Ethics – and some of the relevant secondary literature such as Della Rocca’s influential reading of Spinoza. As such it is a philosophical inquiry seeking to interconnect some key aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy with some of the major issues of education. Methodologically, this paper argues, in line with Melamed, that rather than turning to the history of philosophy in order to identify ‘precursors to [our] own views’, so as to validate what we already believe we know, it is more fruitful to turn to past philosophers in order to ‘challenge our most basic beliefs and intuitions by studying texts that are both well-argued and strongly opposed to our commonsense’. Accordingly, turning to Spinoza marks an attempt to revisit and reconceptualize some key aspects of educational thought. Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings: A conclusion of this paper is that a Spinozistic philosophy of education would need to focus on resolving the tension between Spinoza’s egoism and education as a social project. To this end it identifies Spinoza’s doctrine of the imitation of affects as a possible link between the individual’s striving for power and the collective agenda of improving human well-being at large. It is also suggested that, in aspiring to inculcate a desire to be more rational in his or her students, the challenge for the Spinozistic teacher is to prompt the students to aspire to reach beyond the temporary satisfactions of the passions so as to acquire a more enduring sense of satisfaction and so that their well-being is more fully under their own command rather than under the command of various external influences. This, in turn, is connected with the notion of resistance in the sense that in experiencing the volatility of fortune – and thereby understanding the instability of relying on one’s passions – a person would appear to be more inclined to strive for a more enduring sense of happiness, even if this would mean giving up on some of the temporary pleasures that one has grown accustomed to. The resistance, then, may be conceived in terms of the overcoming of temporary pleasures that stand in the way of the developing of one’s potential. In this scenario the role of the teacher may be understood in terms of someone offering a well-balanced amount of resistance. This means that to accommodate one’s students – in the sense that one approaches them in terms of prospective customers, aspiring to satisfy their demands – is inimical to education insofar as the wants and desires of students are, generally speaking, caused by passive affects rather than their rational wills. References: Aloni, N.. Spinoza as Educator: From Eudaimonistic Ethics to an Empowering and Liberating Pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory 40, pp. 531–544.Della Rocca, M.. Spinoza. New York: Routledge.Della Rocca, M.. Rationalism, Idealism, Monism, and Beyond. In: E. Förster & Y. Y. Melamed Spinoza and German Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 7–26.Derry, J.. The Unity of Intellect and Will: Vygotsky and Spinoza. Educational Review, 56, pp. 113–120.Lloyd, G.. Spinoza and Educating the Imagination. In: A. O. Rorty Philosophers on Education: Historical Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 157–172.Melamed, Y. Y.. Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Nadler, S.. Eternity and Immortality in Spinoza’s Ethics. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26, pp. 224–244.Poulimatka, T.. Spinoza’s Theory of Teaching and Indoctrination. Educational Philosophy and Theory 33, pp. 397–410.Spinoza, B.. The Ethics. In: E. Curley A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Princeton: Princeton Unive. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:New Insights on Young PopperJohn R. WetterstenSeven essays that Popper wrote from 1925 to 1932–33 show Popper's transition from a fresh student of pedagogy into a serious philosopher of science ten years later. His first essay was published in 1925, and in 1934–35 he presented a revolutionary philosophy. These essays led first to Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (written between 1930 and 1933 but first published in 1979) (...) and culminated in Logik der Forschung.1. Students as IndividualsIn his first published essay Popper argued that each student should be treated as an individual as much as possible.1 It is evident that Popper held this attitude throughout his life, but this essay plays no interesting role in his intellectual development.2. HeimatIn his second essay Popper developed an idea that was important not only for his pedagogy, but also for his psychology and his theory of the open society: because humans tend quite naturally to be dogmatic, they have to learn to overcome dogmatism in order to be rational.2 Following a perspective [End Page 603] heavily indebted to Eduard Burger,3 Karl Bühler,4 and Charlotte Bühler,5 Popper proposed that all aspects of learning begin with the beliefs and attitudes that one learns at "home." Teachers, Popper says, should not ignore the cultural background of their students. This background derives from their home, from their parents or village, and so forth. Teachers should accept the students' dogmatic acceptance of the views and attitudes of home as a necessary, even useful stage in any child's development. The teacher's central task is to help children move away from this dogmatic stage to broader perspectives. How to do this well, he says, poses a, if not the, central pedagogical problem. He discusses the movement from home to aesthetics, to art, to ethics, to law, to the theory of knowledge and science, and to culture. In each case he finds something in the heritage of home that each child possesses, which may be used as a starting point to expand the child's horizons.The problem of how teachers can sympathetically help children move away from the views of their home to broader perspectives is severe, Popper thought, due to the innate need of children to think dogmatically. When children learn the culture of their home they are given certainties that they cling to. As individuals mature, dogmatic thinking has to be overcome: a crucial task for teachers is to help children to set aside their innate dogmatic attitude to engage in critical thinking.At this time Popper was groping for a good philosophical approach. He said that the concept of "Heimat" had to be analyzed because, even though it was at the center of pedagogical concerns, it was a confused concept. This analytical method was quickly abandoned. It is only a historical curiosity that shows how far he had to go in order to develop a new philosophical method. Yet his use of it did bring him to adopt, or he used it to defend, views that he held throughout his life.3. Gewohnheit und Gesetzerlebnis in der ErziehungIn the same year (1927), in Gewohnheit und Gesetzerlebnis in der Erziehung, Popper turned to the task of providing a psychological explanation of the child's need for dogmatism. This third essay was submitted to the Pedagogic Institute, but only became available after Popper's death. Popper was ambivalent about it. When I visited him at his home in Penn in 1973 or 1974, I asked him for a copy. It was then listed in his bibliography, but there were no copies at the University of Vienna. His wife began to say she knew where it was, but he interrupted her before her sentence was completed. But he did not throw it away. The reason for his reluctance to show scholars his essay is [End Page 604] now clear: the essay endorses a philosophy of science—Hans Vaihinger's—with a strong inductivist component, even though its methodology is deductivist. He tried to apply this method in his own psychological investigation of dogmatism in children.Dogmatism was, he thought, a psychological... (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s philosophy involves a general anti-platonism about properties or standards of similarity. On his view, what it is for one thing to have the same property as another is not dictated by reality itself; it depends on our classificatory practices and the standards of similarity they embody. Wittgenstein’s anti-platonism plays an important role in the private language sections and in his discussion of the conceptual problem of other minds. In sharp contrast to Wittgenstein’s views stands the contemporary doctrine of natural (...) properties, which holds that there is an objective hierarchy of naturalness amongst properties, a hierarchy that is completely independent of our concepts or practices. Some authors have appealed to the natural properties view to offer an explicitly anti-Wittgensteinian account of sensation concepts. The paper discusses these competing views of properties and sensation concepts. It is argued that, if our account of concepts of conscious states starts from a commitment to natural properties, we are bound to recognize that our actual classificatory practices also play a crucial role in determining which properties our concepts pick out. On the other hand, if we start from the anti-platonist position, we are bound to recognize that we also need a notion of sameness of property that extends beyond our limited capacity to recognize similarity or sameness of property. The correct view, it is concluded, must occupy a middle position between an extreme anti-realism about properties and an extreme version of the natural properties view. It is suggested that Wittgenstein’s own view does just that. (shrink)

Amitai Etzioni argues that societies must find a way to balance individual rights and the common good. This point of balance may change as new technologies develop, the natural and international environments change, and new social forces arise. Some believe the United States may be unduly shortchanging individual rights that need to be better protected. Specifically, should the press be granted more protection? Or should its ability to publish state secrets be limited? Should surveillance of Americans and others (...) be curtailed? Should American terrorists be treated differently from others? How one answers these questions, Etzioni shows, invites a larger fundamental question: Where is the proper point of balance between rights and security? Etzioni implements the social philosophy, "liberal communitarianism." Its key assumptions are that neither individual rights nor the common good should be privileged, that both are core values, and that a balance is necessary between them. Etzioni argues that we need to find a new balance between our desire for more goods, services, and affluence, particularly because economic growth may continue to be slow and jobs anemic. The key question is what makes a good life, especially for those whose basic needs are sated. (shrink)

Carpendale & Lewis's (C&L's) theory falls in with an existing set of theories that children's understanding of mind is collaboratively constructed in linguistically mediated social interaction. This social constructivist view needs to be clear about the complementary contributions of the child and of the social environment. I distinguish between the child's individual linguistic ability and the dyad's social communication, proposing that each makes a contribution to theory-of-mind development, differently balanced in different individuals.

What are the processes, from conception to adulthood, that enable a single cell to grow into a sentient adult? The processes that occur along the way are so complex that any attempt to understand development necessitates a multi-disciplinary approach, integrating data from cognitive studies, computational work, and neuroimaging - an approach till now seldom taken in the study of child development. Neuroconstructivism is a major new 2 volume publication that seeks to redress this balance, presenting an integrative new framework (...) for considering development. In the first volume, the authors review up-to-to date findings from neurobiology, brain imaging, child development, computer and robotic modelling to consider why children's thinking develops the way it does. They propose a new synthesis of development that is based on 5 key principles found to operate at many levels of descriptions. They use these principles to explain what causes a number of key developmental phenomena, including infants' interacting with objects, early social cognitive interactions, and the causes of dyslexia. The "neuroconstructivist" framework also shows how developmental disorders do not arise from selective damage to normal cognitive systems, but instead arise from developmental processes that operate under atypical constraints. How these principles work is illustrated in several case studies ranging from perceptual to social and reading development. Finally, the authors use neuroimaging, behavioural analyses, computational simulations and robotic models to provide a way of understanding the mechanisms and processes that cause development to occur. Computer and robotic models provide concrete tools for investigating the processes and mechanisms involved in learning and development. Volume 2 illustrates the principles of 'Neuroconstructivist' development, with contributions from 9 different labs across the world. Each of the contributions illustrates how models play a central role in understanding development. The models presented include standard connectionist neural network models as well as multi-agent models. Also included are robotic models emphasizing the need to take embodiment and brain-system interactions seriously. A model of Autism and one of Specific Language Impairment also illustrate how atypical development can be understood in terms of the typical processes of development but operating under restricted conditions. This volume complements Volume 1 by providing concrete examples of how the 'Neuroconstructivist' principles can be grounded within a diverse range of domains, thereby shaping the research agenda in those domains. (shrink)

Purpose. The research is aimed at substantiation of the process of formation of various human images in the postmodernism era in the context of biophilosophy, taking into account the need to find an adequate response to historical challenges and the production of new value orientations reflecting succession of civilization development. Theoretical basis. The author in his theoretical constructs proceeds from the need of taking into account the biophilosophical aspect of postmodern man, as the one who, remaining a representative of the (...) species Homo sapiens, began to dynamically change, losing its own natural and functional qualities, acquiring to a large extent the socio-technology-related qualities. The thesis that in the postmodern society the moral and legal foundations of existence of human being, as the subject of actions and responsibility for these actions, practically coincide with the biological foundations is taken as initial argument. New biological knowledge, as well as the related technologies, orient the public consciousness towards production of fundamentally new or modernization of the existing bio-philosophical ideas. The author's vision of the anthropological collision of the Post-Modernism era is caused by the fact that the issues of a postmodern man acquire a special urgency at the end of the ХХ – early XXI century. A progressive disproportion between a human being, whose abilities as a representative of the species Homo sapiens are biologically limited, and the human community, which sees no limits in its information and technological expansion, is of current interest. Originality. The author reveals the key features of the Post-Modernism era, in which a fundamentally different civilizational space originates, and where a new type of person emerges in its internal culture, which is called the postmodern man. The postmodern man was considered through the prism of bio-philosophy. Its interest in man is caused by his or her place in nature, the prospects of development at the individual, population and species levels. Conclusions. In the process of development of bio-philosophy, its research field will be naturally expanded with the use of philosophical means of perception of life as such and filling the bio-philosophy with philosophical and biological issues. In contemporary conditions, the study of the boundaries of biological reality and its previously unknown properties, definition of new horizons of theoretical knowledge in the science of life, the critical rethinking of the concepts of biocentrism and anthropocentrism in the space of modern scientific knowledge, the definition of perspective trends in the study of man, his or her place and role in the planetary being is of great importance. (shrink)

ntroduction Since China’s gradualist reform started in the early 1980s, its governance record has been relatively successful. Despite a large number of severe challenges, the government in Beijing has managed outstanding economic performance and large-scale social transformation (Naughton 2007). Overall, the regime seems to enjoy relatively high levels of public support (Gilley 2006; Wang 2009), and a reform and state-building process controlled by the ruling Chinese Communist Party looks set to continue for the next ten to 20 years. One key (...) element of the Chinese political or governing system is management of its Party and government officials, or “cadres” in its own terminology. We argue that the Party-state’s personnel management features a meritocratic system that has so far largely evaded scholarly attention. This system retains strong influences from the Confucian scholar-official tradition of China’s imperial past, as well as the Leninist “vanguard party” tradition that was established in the revolutionary and Maoist eras. In recent years, however, this system has paid increasing attention to nurturing managerial competence for the purpose of administering a modern economy and a modern society. How the Party attempts to strike a balance between political loyalty and professional competence is the focus of this study. We will examine several aspects of the Chinese cadre management system. These include the formal rules, institutions, and actual practices regarding (1) recruitment, (2) development, and (3) promotion of officials. From this analysis we will understand how political loyalty and professional competence are defined and measured in the Party’s personnel regime, and how a balance is sought between the two. We will also look at the changes that are taking place in the relative importance, or weights, of these two criteria as the Party-state tries to build a modern governance machine. We find that while political reliability and commitment still feature prominently when the Party staffs the state and party bodies, rapid economic development and social changes have amplified the need for capable and competent managers and administrators, in order to deliver successful governance. Whereas in the past political loyalty played a crucial role for officials’ success within the state ranks, today professional competence has become more central. Whether this trend will continue, to a future state in which political loyalty becomes almost irrelevant, will be discussed toward the end of the chapter. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration by Amy LevadLloyd SteffenRedeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration Amy Levad minneapolis: fortress press, 2014. 233 pp. $39.00.Amy Levad (University of St. Thomas) has added a theological voice to the national conversation that Michelle Alexander opened with her devastating critique of the American criminal justice system in The New Jim (...) Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander showed how policies grounded in the war on drugs have disproportionately distressed racial and ethnic minorities—African Americans and Latinos—and the poor, destroying lives and communities. Incarceration in the United States is today a system that perpetuates what Alexander called a “caste” system from which escape is, especially among black males, virtually impossible. In this informed and well-presented study, Levad takes up Alexander’s social justice analysis, extending it in new directions, offering a creative theological contribution to the mass incarceration crisis in the world’s first “genuine prison society.”Levad observes that a limitation in the Christian response to mass incarceration is the “lack of Catholic voices” (47), which her book makes an effort to correct. She draws on core insights of Catholic tradition to address conditions that foster crime while also responding “to the ways in which the criminal justice crisis both reflects and sustains social injustices” (48). Her book offers a wonderfully clear analysis of mass incarceration and related issues such as recidivism strategies and policing policies. She advocates “pulling levers,” policing policies that aim at avoiding prison, versus harsh “window-breaking” policies that for deterrence reasons criminalize even minor offences. Levad addresses theories of punishment, proposes ideas for prison reform, and, while acknowledging a limited need for prisons, sets forth constructive suggestions for how best to decarcerate society through restorative justice and rehabilitation practices that reintegrate offenders into society.The study is a provocative interdisciplinary conversation between criminology and theology. Levad’s focus is on liturgy and sacrament, the central resources of Roman Catholic theology, finding in the Eucharist the theological [End Page 204] model for inviting the marginalized and dispossessed into the common fellowship of human dignity. She then argues that penance and reconciliation yield attitudes and behaviors that parallel secular restorative justice efforts. Advocating alternatives to prison while denying the effectiveness of punitive retribution, Levad critiques the approaches of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and other Catholics. She highlights Kathryn Soltis as a Catholic scholar who uses theological resources to affirm the dignity of prisoners, attend to the common good, and seek ways to repair relationships between victims and offenders.Some of Levad’s ideas could be developed further. Pluralism, for instance, is mentioned as a contextual issue for her theological work but never thoroughly developed. Utilitarianism is denied a constructive ethics role, but Levad’s discussion of recidivism appeals to it as a marker of the common good (122). And Levad’s attention to the internal failures of the Church in confronting social justice issues leads one to wonder whether the decarcerated vision of society she desires is practicable.Levad speaks to the heart of the incarceration crisis in America, challenging the willingness of Americans to “throw people away” (198) through imprisonment—especially the young, the poor, and minorities. With her underlying question of “what kind of people we want to be and what we want our communities to be like” (43), Levad presents readers with a distinctive “vision of justice in God’s reign conveyed by liturgy and sacraments” (197). With that, she has accomplished what she set out to do: confront the social injustice of mass incarceration with the best insights of modern criminology but also with a theological perspective that embodies the struggle to realize an engaged Catholic praxis of justice.Lloyd SteffenLehigh UniversityCopyright © 2016 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This paper aims to suggest a new approach to Plato’s theory of being in Republic V and Sophist based on the notion of difference and the being of a copy. To understand Plato’s ontology in these two dialogues we are going to suggest a theory we call Pollachos Esti; a name we took from Aristotle’s pollachos legetai both to remind the similarities of the two structures and to reach a consistent view of Plato’s ontology. Based on this theory, when Plato (...) says that something both is and is not, he is applying difference on being which is interpreted here as saying, borrowing Aristotle’s terminology, 'is is (esti) in different senses'. I hope this paper can show how Pollachos Esti can bring forth not only a new approach to Plato’s ontology in Sophist and Republic but also a different approach to being in general. -/- Keywords Plato; being; difference; image; pollachos esti; pollachos legetai 1. Being, Not-Being and Difference The three dialogues where the notion of "difference" attaches to the notion of being, namely Parmenides II, Sophist and Timaeus,and specifically the first two we try to discuss here. In these dialogues, Plato is going to achieve a new and revolutionary understanding of being which is not anymore based on the notion of "same" as it was before in Greek ontology. It was his discovery, I think, that the notion of being in the Greek ontology is attached to the notion of the "same" and it is because of this attachment that there have always been many problems understanding being especially after Parmenides. That being has always been relying on the "same" can be found out from the way most of the Presocratics understood it. It was based on such a relationship between being and "same" that a later Ionian, Heraclitus of Ephesus, rejected Being by rejecting its sameness: unable to be the same, being cannot be being anymore but becoming. Heraclitus’ criticism of his predecessors’ understanding of being was due to his discovery that what they call being is not the same but different in every moment. The relation of being and sameness reaches to its highest point in Parmenides. What Plato does in using the "difference" is nothing but the establishment of a creative relation between being and "difference". In this new relation, although he is in agreement with Heraclitus that being is not the same but different, he does not do it by use of becoming. He disagrees, on the other hand, with Parmenides that such a relation between being and difference leads to not being. At Parmenides 142b5-6 it is said that if One is, it is not possible for it to be without partaking (μετέχειν) of being (οὐσίας), which leads to the distinction of being and one: -/- So there would be also the being of the one (ἡ οὐσία του̑ ἑνὸς) which is not the same (ταὐτὸν) as the one. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be its being, nor the one would partake of it. (142b7-c1) -/- The fact that what is (ἔστι) signifies (σημαῖνον) is other (ἀλλο) than what One signifies (c4-5), is being taken as a reason for their distinction. The conclusion is that when we say 'one is', we speak of two different things, one partaking of the other (c5-7). Having repeated these arguments of the otherness of being and one at 143a-b, Parmenides says that the cause of this otherness can be neither Being nor One but "difference": -/- So if being is something different (ἕτερον) and one something different (ἕτερον), it is not by being one that the one is different from being nor by its being being that being is other than one, but they are different from each other (ἕτερα ἀλλήλων) by difference (τῷ ἑτερῳ) and otherness (ἄλλῳ). (143b3-6) -/- The fifth hypothesis, 'one is not' (160b5ff.) is also linked with the notion of difference. When we say about two things, largeness and smallness, that they are not, it is clear that we are talking about not being of different (ἕτερον) things (160c2-4). When it is said that something is not, besides the fact that there must be knowledge of that thing, we can say that it entails also its difference: 'difference in kind pertains to it in addition to knowledge' (160d8). Parmenides explains the reason as such: -/- For someone doesn’t speak of the difference in kind of the others when he says that the one is different from the others, but of that thing’s own difference in kind. (160e1-2) -/- Although the theory of being as "difference" is not fulfilled yet, an exact look at what occurs in Sophist can make us sure that this was the launching step for "difference" to get its deserved role in Plato’s ontology. The notion of the "difference" is not yet well-functioned in Parmenides because we can see that being is still attached to the same: -/- For that which is the same is being (ὄν γὰρ ἐστι τὸ ταὐτόν) (162d2-3). -/- The notion of difference in Sophist is the key element based on which a new understanding of being is presented and the problem of not being is somehow resolved. The friends of Forms, the Stranger says, are those who distinguish between being and becoming (248a7-8) and believe that we deal with the latter with our body and through perception while with the former, the real being (ὄντως οὐσίαν) with our soul and through reasoning (a10-11). Being is then bound with the "same" by adding: -/- You say that being always stays the same and in the same state (ἣν ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ὡσαύτως ἔχειν) but becoming varies from one time to another (δὲ ἄλλοτε ἄλλως). (248a12-13) -/- That the theory of the relation of being and capacity (247d8f., 248c4-5) matches more with becoming than with being (248c7-9) must be rejected because being is also the subject of knowledge which is kind of doing something (248d-e). It does, however, confirm that 'both that which changes and also change have to be admitted as existing things (ὄντα) (249b2-3). I believe that this is what Socrates would incline to do at Theaetetus 180e-181a, that is, putting a fight between two parties of Parmenidean being and Heraclitean becoming and then escaping. The solution is that becoming is itself a kind of being and we ought to accept what changes as being. This is what must be done by a philosopher, namely, to refuse both the claim that 'everything is at rest' and that 'being changes in every way' and beg, like a child, for both and say being (τὸὄν) is both the unchanging and that which changes (249c10-d4). This kind of begging for both is obviously under the attack of contradiction (249e-250b). For both and each of rest and change similarly are (250a11-12) but it cannot be said either that both of them change or both of them rest, being must be considered as a third thing both of the rest and change associate with (250b7-10). The conclusion is that 'being is not both change and rest but different (ἕτερον) from them instead' (c3-4). The notion of difference helps Plato to take being departed from both rest and change because it was their sophisticated relation with being that made the opposition of being and becoming. Plato is now trying to separate being from rest and, thus, from "same" by "difference". Such a crucial change is great enough to need a 'fearless' decision (256d5-6). The possibility of being of not being is resulted (d11-12) comes as the answer to the question 'so it’s clear that change is not being and also is being (ἡ κίνησις ὄντως οὐκ ὄν ἐστι καὶ ὄν) since it partakes in being?' (d8-9). It is then by the notion of difference that becoming is considered as that which both is and is not. This coincidence of being and not being about change is apparently similar to Socrates’ paradoxical statement at Republic 477a about what both is and is not. -/- Introduction The Republic 476-477 has always been a matter of controversy mainly about two interwoven points. The first problem is the meaning of being here; that whether what he has in mind is a veridical, existential or propositional sense of being. The second problem is his distinction between the objects of knowledge and opinion which seems to lead, some believe, to the Two Worlds (TW) theory. The crucial point in Republic is that what is considered between knowledge (ἐπιστήμης) and ignorance (α͗γνοιας), namely opinion, must have a different object that leads Socrates to draw the distinction of knowledge and opinion between their objects. The problem of understanding being in the fifth book of the Republic is that when it is said that the Form of F is F but a particular participating in F, both is and is not F, it sounds too bizarre and unacceptable. It cannot be imaginable how a thing can be existent and non-existent at the same time. At the first sight, the only solution seems to be the degrees of existence which is called by Annas (1981, 197) a 'childish fallacy' and a 'silly argument'. Kirwan (1974, 118) thinks that Republic V does not attribute 'any doctrine about existence' to Plato and Kahn (1966, 250) claims that the most fundamental value of einai when used alone (without predicate) is not "to exist" but "to be so", "to be the case" or "to be true". The problems of understanding being in Republic and Sophist besides the difficulties of the existential reading led scholars to the other senses of being, mostly related to the well-known Aristotelian distinctions between different senses of being. In the predicative reading, Annas, for example, refers this difference to the qualified and unqualified application. Whereas the Form of F is unqualifiedly F, a particular instance of F can be F only qualifiedly (1981, 221). Vlastos’ well-known substitution of 'degrees of reality' for 'degrees of being/existence' must be categorized as a predicative reading. Kahn thinks that the basic sense of being for Plato is 'something like propositional structure, involving both predication and truth claims, together with existence for the subject of predication' (2013, 96). Believing that the complete-incomplete distinction terminology is misleading about Plato, he thinks that semantic functions are only second-order uses of the verb and it is the predicative or incomplete function which is fundamental. Suggesting a veridical reading, Fine (2003, 70 ff) thinks that while both existential and predicative readings separate the objects of knowledge and belief, it is only her reading which does not force such separation of the objects and thus does not imply TW. Stokes (1998, 266) thinks that though Fine is right saying that Plato does not endorse TW in book V, she is wrong in rejecting existential in favor of the veridical reading. The reception of existential reading can be seen more obviously in Calvert who thinks, in agreement with Runciman, that 'it would be safer to say that Plato’s gradational ontology is probably not entirely free from degrees of existence' (1970, 46). At Sophist 254d-e Plato singles out five most important kinds (or Forms!?) in which the same (ταὐτὸν) and difference (θάτερον) are regarded besides being, rest and change. They are, therefore, neither the same nor the difference but share in both (b3). Being (τὸ ὄν) cannot be the same also because if they 'do not signify distinct things' both change and rest will have the same label when we say they are (255b11-c1). We have then four distinct kinds, being, change, rest and same, none of them is the other. The case of difference is more complicated. When the stranger wants to assess the relation of being and difference, he can say simply neither that they are distinct nor that they are not. He has to make an important distinction inside being to get able to draw the relation of being and difference: -/- But I think you'll admit that some of the things that are (τῶν ὄντων) are said (λέγεσθαι) by themselves (αὐτὰ καθ’ αὑτά) but some [are said] always referring to (πρὸς) other things (ἄλλα) (255b12-13) -/- The difference is always said referring to other things (τὸδέγ’ ἕτερον ἀεὶ πρὸς ἕτερον) (255d1). It pervades all kinds because each of them should be different from the others and is so due to the difference and not its own nature (253e3f.) After asserting that change is different from being and therefore both is and is not (256d), the difference is described as what makes all the other kinds not be, by making each different from being. Given that all of them are by being, this association of being and difference is the cause of their being and not-being at the same time, the issue that its version at RepublicV made all those controversies we discussed above: -/- So in the case of change and all the kinds, not being necessarily is (Ἔστιν ἄρα ἐξ ἀναγκης τὸ μὴ ὄν). Τhat’s because as applied to all of them, the nature of the difference (ἡ θατέρον φύσις) makes each of them not be by making it different from being. And we’re going to be right if we say that all of them are not in the same way. And conversely [we’re also going to be right if we say] that they are because they partake in being. (Sophist 256d11-e3) -/- Plato’s new construction of five distinct kinds and the role he gives to thedifference among them is aimed to resolve the old problem of understanding being which has always been annoying from the time of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Both the ontological status of becoming and that of not being were, in Plato’s mind, based on the absolute domination of the notion of the Same over being. Now, not only becoming is understandable as being but also not being which is not the contrary of being anymore but only different (ἕτερον) (257b3-4). Though I agree partly with Frede that the account of not being which is needed for false statements is more complicated than just saying, as Cropsey (1995, 101) says, that Plato is substituting 'X is not Y' with 'X is different from Y', I totally disagree with him that when we say X is not beautiful, Plato could not have thought that it is not a matter of its being different from beautiful because 'it would be different from beauty even if it were beautiful by participation in beauty' (1992, 411). Conversely, as we will discuss, it is exactly the relation of the beautiful thing, X, and the beautiful itself, in which X shares that is to be solved by the notion of not being as difference. Though it is beautiful because of sharing in beauty, X is not beautiful because it is different from beautiful itself. What the difference is to do is to show how something can both be and not be the same thing. The difference is what makes one thing both be and not be a certain other thing. This equips the difference with the ability to explain a certain thing’s not-being when it is. Thanks to the notion of difference, it is now possible to explain not only not being but also the simultaneous being and not being of a thing: 'What we call "not-beautiful" is the thing that ἕτερόν ἐστιν from nothing other than του̑ καλου̑ φύσεως' (257d10-11). The result is that not beautiful happens to be (συμβέβηκεν εἶναι) one single thing among kinds of beings (τι τῶν ὄντων τινὸς ἑνὸς γένους) and at the same time set over against one of the beings (πρός τι τῶν ὄντων αὖ πάλιν ἀντιτεθὲν) (257e2-4) and thus be something that happens to be not beautiful (εἶναί τις συμβαίνει τὸ μὴ καλόν); a being set over against being (ὄντος δὴ πρὸς ὄν ἀντίθεσις) (e6-7). Neither the beautiful is more a being (μα̑λλον ... ἐστι τῶν ὄντων) nor not beautiful less (e9-10) and thus both the contraries similarly are (ὁμοίως εἶναι) (258a1). This conclusion, it is emphasized again (a7-9), owes to θατέρου φύσις now turned out as being. Therefore, each of the many things that are of the nature of the difference and set over each other in being (τῆς τοῦ ὄντος πρὸς ἄλληλα ἀντικειμένων ἀντίθεσις) is being as being itself is being (αὐτοῦ τοῦὄν τοςοὐσία ἐστιν) and not less. They are different from, and not the contrary of, each other (a11-b3). This is exactly τὸμὴὄν, the subject of the inquiry (b6-7). Hence, not being has its own nature (b10) and is one εἶδοςamong the many things that are (b9-c3). Such far departing from Parmenides’ ontological principle is done on the basis of the nature of the difference. It was the discovery of such a notion that made the stranger brave enough to say that not being is each part of the nature of the difference that is set over against being (258d7-e3, cf. 260b7-8). That the relation of being and difference is difference is the key element of the new ontology. The difference is, only because of its sharing in being, but it is not that which it shares in but different from it (259a6-8). Not being is exactly based on this difference: ἕτερον δὲ τοῦ ὄντος ὄν ἔστι σαφέστατα ἐξ ἀνάγκης εἶναι μὴ ὄν (a8-b1). 2. Difference and the Being of a Copy We discussed above that the sense of being of particulars in Republic V made so many debates that whether being is there used in an existential sense or not. Particulars in Republic are regarded as images in the allegories of Line and Cave. The being of an image/copy makes, thus, the same problem. Plato’s analogy of original -copy for the relation of Forms and their particulars in Republic has obviously a different attitude to being. The main question is that what is the ontological status of a copy in respect of its original? Are there two kinds of being, 'real being' versus 'being' as Ketchum says (1980, 140) or only one kind? What is the difference of being in an original and its copy? Is it a matter of degrees of being or reality as some commentators have suggested? Is it a matter of being relational? By reducing the ontological issue to an epistemological one, Vlastos’ suggestion of degrees of reality in an article with the same name does neither, I think, pay attention to the problem nor resolve it. He agrees that Plato never speaks of "degrees" or "grades" of reality (1998, 219). What allows him to entitle it as such are some of Plato’s words in Republic as well as Plato’s words in some other dialogues (1998, 219). When Plato states that the Forms only can completely, purely or perfectly be real he means, Vlastos says, they are cognitively reliable (1998, 229); an obvious reduction of the issue to an epistemological one. He thinks that when in Republic we are being said that a particular’s being F is less pure than its Form, it is because it is not exclusively F, but it is and is not F and this being adulterated by contrary characters is the reason of our confused and uncertain understanding of it (1998, 222). Ketchum rightly criticizes Vlastos’ doctrine in its disparting from ontology thinking that 'to understand Plato’s talk of being as talk of reality is to obscure the close relation that exists between "being" and the verb "to be"' (1980, 213). He thinks, therefore, that οὐσία must be understοοd as being rather than reality, τὸὄν as "that which is" and not "that which is real" and … (ibid). His conclusion is that degrees of reality cannot interpret Plato correctly and we must accept degrees of being. Allen believes that a 'purely epistemic' reading of the passage in Republic is patently at odds with Plato’s text (1961, 325). He thinks that not only degrees of reality but also degrees of reality must be maintained (1998, 67). What Cooper suggests gets close to this paper’s solution: -/- Plato does not I think wish to suggest that existence is a matter of degree in the way in which being pleasant or painful is a matter of degree. Rather there are different grades of ontological status. (1986, 241) -/- A more ontological solution for the problem of understanding the being of a copy and its relation with the being of its original is suggested by the theory of copy as a relational entity. Based on this interpretation, 'the very being of a reflection is relational, wholly dependent upon what is other than itself: the original…' (Allen, 1998, 62). As relational entities, particulars have no independent ontological status; they are purely relational entities which derive their whole character and existence from Forms (ibid, 67). Although these relational entities are and have a kind of existence, we must also say that 'they do not have existence in the way that Forms, things which are fully real, do' (ibid). Allen (1961, 331) extends his theory to Phaedo where it is said that particulars are deficient (74d5-7, 75a2-3, 75b4-8), 'wish' to be like (74d10) or desire to be of its nature (75a2); an extension that, like F.C. white (1977, 200), I cannot admit. He correctly states that Plato did not start out with a doctrine of particulars as images and semblances but come to such a view after Phaedo, or perhaps after Republic V (1977, 202). Though we may not agree with him about Republic V, if we have to consider its last pages also, we must agree with him that not only the ontology of Phaedo but also that of Republic II-V (except the last pages of the latter book) are somehow different from (but at the same time appealing to) the ontology of original-copy which should exclusively assign to Sophist, Timaeus and RepublicVI-VII besides the last pages of book V. The answer to the problem of Plato’s sense of being in RepublicV can be reached only if we read Republic V based on and as following Sophist. We can find out his meaning of that which both is and is not only by the ontological status he assigns to a copy in Sophist. The kind of being of a copy in Sophist reveals as Plato’s key for the lock of the problem of not being. Let’s see how the ontological status of a copy is the critical point of Plato’s ontology. In the earlier pages of Sophist, we are still in the same situation about not being. To think that that which is not is is called a rash assumption (237a3-4) and Parmenides’ principle of the impossibility of being of not being is still at work (a8-9). At 237c1-4, the problem of "not being" is noticed in a new way which shows some kinds of a more realistic position to the problem of not being. Nevertheless, not being is still unthinkable, unsayable, unutterable and unformulable in speech (238c10). Soon after mentioning that it is difficult even to refuse not being (238d), the solution to the problem appears: the being of a copy (εἴδωλον) (239d). A copy is, says Theaetetus, something that is made referring to a true thing (πρὸς τἀληθινὸν) but still is 'another such thing (ἕτεροντοιου̑τον)' (240a8). Nevertheless, this 'another such thing' cannot be another such real or true thing. In answer to the question of the Stranger that if this 'another such thing' is the true thing (240a9), Theaetetus answers: οὐδαμῶς ἀληθινόν γε, ἀλλ’ ἐοικὸςμὲν (240b2). A copy’s being 'another such thing' does not mean another true thing but only a resemblance of it. Not only is not a copy another true thing besides the original, but it is the opposite of the true thing (b5) because only its original is the thing genuinely and being a copy is being the thing only untruly. The word ἐοικὸς is opposed to ὄντως ὄν in the next line (240b7): 'So you are saying that that which is like (ἐοικὸς) is not really that which is (οὐκ ὄντως [οὐκ] ὄν)'. But still a copy 'is in a way (ἔστι γε μήν πως)' (b9). While it is not really what it is its resemblance, it has its own being and reality because it really is a likeness (εἰκων ὄντως) (b11). The Stranger asks: -/- So it is not really what is (οὐκ ὄν ἄρα [οὐκ] ὄντως ἐστὶν) but it really is what we call a likeness (ὄντως ἣν λέγομεν εἰκόνα)? (b12-13) -/- This is Plato’s innovative ontological solution to the problem of not being. Theaetetus’ answer confirms this: 'Maybe that which is not is woven together with that which is' (c1-2). Therefore, a copy neither is what really is nor is not-being but only is what in a way is. Thanks to the ontological status of a copy, the third status intermediate between being and not being is brought forth. The essence of an image, in Kohnke’s words, does not consist 'solely in the negation of what is genuine and has real being' because otherwise 'it would be an ὄντως οὐκ ὄν,essentially and really a not being' (1957, 37). The characteristics of a copy can be summed up as folows: i) A copy is a copy by referring to a true thing (πρὸς τἀληθινὸν). ii) A copy is different from that of which it is a copy (ἕτερον). iii) A copy is not itself a true thing (ἀληθινόν) as that of which it is a copy but only that which is like it (ἐοικὸς). iv) It is not really that which really is (ὄντως ὄν) but only really a likeness (εἰκων ὄντως). The conclusion is that: v) A copy in a way (πως) is that means it both is and in not, the product of interweaving being with not being. This leads to the refutation of father Parmenides’ principle, accepting that 'that which is not somehow is (τό τε μὴ ὄν ὡς ἔστι)' and 'that which is, somehow is not (τό ὄν ὡς οὐκ ἔστι) (241d5-7). Besides copies and likenesses (εἰκόνων), we have also imitations (μιμημάτων) and appearances (φαντασμάτων) as the subjects of this new kind of being and thus false belief (241e3). In Timaeus, the world of becoming which cannot correctly be called and thus we have to call it "what is such" (τὸ τοιου̑τον) (49e5) or "what is altogether such" (τὸ διἀ παντὸς τοιου̑τον) (e6-7), consists solely of imitations (μιμημάτα) (50c5) which are identifiable only by the things that they are their imitations. The word τοιου̑τον which had been used to determine the situation of a copy in respect of its original, now becomes the definition of the world of becoming in which everything is an image of another thing, a Being, that stays always the same and is different and separated from its image. Cherniss, in my view rightly, draws attention to the very important point about the ontological status of an image that can at the same time be considered a criticism of the relational theory. What we are being said in Timaeus, he thinks,cannot be explained by saying that an image is not self-related and making its being relational. What is crucial about an image is that it 'stands for something, refers to something, means something and this meaning the image has not independently as its own but only in reference to something else apart from it' (1998, 296). This function finds its best explanation in the theory we are to suggest in the following. 3. πολλαχῶς ἔστι The best way to understand the ontological status of an image in Plato is to see first how his most clever pupil, Aristotle, resolved the same problem that Plato brought his theory of image for its sake. Aristotle’s theory of pollachos legetai is a brilliant and, at the same time, deviated version of Plato’s theory that is able, however, to help us read Plato in a better way. We discuss Aristotle’s theory to reach to a full understanding of Plato’s theory because it is, firstly, constructed in Aristotle in a more clear way and, secondly, it can also be taken as an evidence that our reading of Plato is legitimate. The phrase τὸ ὄν πολλαχῶς λέγεται, a so much repeated phrase in Aristotle’s works, is his resolution for some of the ontological problems of his predecessors all treating being as if it has only one sense. Aristotle is right in his criticism of the philosophical tradition specially Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato since all did presuppose only one sense for being and his theory is, thus, a creative and revolutionary solution for many problems that all the past philosophers were stuck in. But it is at the same time somehow a borrowed theory. As we will discuss, both the structure of the doctrine and the problems it tries to resolve are the same as Plato’s doctrine (and even is comparable in its phraseology) though it is in Aristotle, as can be expected, a more clear and better structured doctrine. 1) Associated with the theory of pros hen and the theory of substance, the theory of several senses of being provides a structure which, I insist, is the best guide to understand Plato’s theory of Being in Sophist, Timeaus and Republic. a) Although the theory of pollachos legetai is not necessarily based on the theory of pros hen, they become tightly interdependent about being: -/- Being is said in many ways/senses (τὸ δὲ ὄν λέγεται μὲν πολλαχῶς) but by reference to one (πρὸς ἕν) [way/sense] and one kind of nature (μίαν τινὰ φύσιν). (Metaphysics 1003a33-34) -/- The doctrine of pros hen which is Aristotle’s initiative third alternative besides the homonymous and synonymous application of words, is primarily a linguistic theory that tries to provide a new theory to explain the different implementations of the same word. The pros hen implementation of being is to provide an alternative for the theory of the synonymous (in Plato: homonymous) implementation of being which says being is said in one sense (kath hen) (1060b 32-33). That both the pros hen and the kath hen implementation of a word has one thing (hen) as what is common, makes them in opposition to the homonymous implementation which does not consider anything in common. Whereas both pros hen and kath hen assume a common nature, with which all the implementations of the word have some kind of relation, their difference is that while kath hen takes all the implementations of the word as the same with the common nature, pros hen makes them different. Substance is called πρῶτον ὄν because it is said to be primarily: -/- For as is (τὸ ἔστιν) is predicated of all things, not however in the same way (οὐχ ὁμοίως) but of one sort of thing primarily and of others in a secondary way. So too τὸτί ἐστιν belongs simply (ἁπλῶς) to substance but in a limited sense (πῶς) to the others [other categories] (1030a21-23). -/- The word ἁπλῶς standing against κατὰ συμβεβηκός tries to make substance different from the accidents. When we are being said that τὸ ὄν πολλαχῶς λέγεται, it means that only the substance that is simply (ἁπλῶς) the ἕν, the common nature, τὸὄν. When we use the word 'being' about a substance, the being is said differently from when we use 'being' about an accident. The distinction between the substance and the other categories is a distinction between what simply is said to be and what only with reference to (pros) the substance is said to be. The doctrine of pros hen, changing kath hen to pros hen in respect of to on, makes a distinction that wants to show that while there is a kind of implementing the word being that is simply being, there is another kind which is called being only by reference to that which is simply being. In the doctrine of pros hen it is not so that all the things that are said to be are only by reference to a common one thing, but that while one thing is called being because it is that thing itself, the other things are called so without being that thing itself but only by referring to it. At the very beginning of book Γ, it is said that: -/- Being is said in many senses but all refer to one arche. Some things are said to be because they are substances, others because they are affections of substances, others because they are a process towards substances or destructions or privations or qualities of substances … (1003b5-9, cf. 1028a18-20) -/- Substance is what really is said to be and all other things that are said to be are said only in favor of it. This difference of substance from all other senses of being is what is, I believe, primarily aimed in Aristotle’s interrelated theories of pollachos legetai,pros hen and the theory of substance. b) The difference of the implementation of being in the case of substance and the accidents goes so deep that while substance is considered as the real being, the accidents are almost not being. An accident is a mere name (Metaphysics 1026b13-14) and is obviously akin to not being (b21). Aristotle adds that Plato was 'in a sense not wrong' saying that sophists deal with not being (τὸ μὴ ὄν) because the arguments of sophists are, above all, about the accidental (1026b13-16). At the beginning of book , he says about quality and quantity (which look to be more of a being than other accidents) that they are not existent (οὐδ̕ ὄντα ὡς εἰπεῖν) in an unqualified sense (ἁπλῶς) (1069a21-22). The two above-mentioned points, Aristotle’s (a) interwoven theories of pollachos legetai, pros hen and the theory of substance and (b) taking accidents almost as not being, comparedwith substance, brings forth a structure that I shall call Pollachos Legetai (with capital first letters). What is of the highest importance in this structure for me is the difference of substance from accidents and the kind of relation which is settled between them. There is a substance that without any qualification is said to be and the accidents that are said to be only by reference (pros) to it. Adding Aristotle’s point about accidents that they are nearly not being to this relation and difference, we can obviously see how much this structure is close to Plato’s original-copy ontology. We spoke of the relation of being and difference in Plato’s model and the way Plato construes the being of a copy. A copy is a copy only by referring to (pros) a model; it is different from (ἕτερον) that of which it is a copy; it is not itself a true thing as its model and not really that which is (ὄντως ὄν) but only is in a way (πῶς). If we behold the difference of substance and accident in the context of the theory of pollachos legetai and pros hen, we can observe its fundamental similarity with Plato’s original-copy theory in its structure. Allen draws attention to the fact that the relation between Forms and particulars in Plato’s original-copy model is 'something intermediate between univocity and full equivocity' (1998, 70, n. 24) and the same as what Aristotle calls it pros hen (ibid). What made us compare the two structures was not, of course, the complete similarity of two structures (we have to agree with many possible differences of the two theories) but exactly the specific relation between an original and its copy on the one hand, and a substance and its accident on the other hand. As substance and accident do not share a common character and the substance -accident model hints that they stand in a certain relation, there is no common character between the original and copy in Plato’s model as well. Furthermore, their similarity is not confined to their structure only; they are also aimed to solve the same problem. The central point of the theory is that all the predecessors took being in one sense and this was their weakness point. Besides the mentioned above passages about the relation of pollachos legetai and presocratics’, as well as Plato’s, ontology, the relation of the theory with the problem of not being is clear in several passages. In Metaphysics, it is said: 'Being is then said in many senses… It is for this reason that we say even of not being that it is not being' (1003b5-10). Discussing the accidental sense of being, Aristotle points that it is in the accidental way that we say, for example, that not-white is because that of which it is an accident is (1017a18-19, cf. 1069a22-24). We mentioned that he thought Plato was right saying that sophistic deals with not being because sophistic deals with accidental, which is somehow not being (1026b14-16). Plato turned sophistic not-being to what both is and is not and Aristotle to what accidentally is said to be. What helps Aristotle to resolve the problem of not being is his distinction between ἁπλῶς and κατὰ σθμβεβηκός. Aristotle’s "qua" (ᾕ) which is directly linked with his distinction between καθ’ αὑτο λέγεται and κατὰ συμβεβηκός λέγεται, is used to resolve the old problem of coming to be out of not being (Physics 191b4-10). He strictly asserts that his predecessors could not solve the problem because they failed to observe the distinction of "qua itself" from "qua another thing" (b10-13). He then continues: -/- We ourselves are in agreement with them in holding that nothing can be said simply (ἁπλως) to come from not being (μὴὄντος). But nevertheless we maintain that a thing may come to be from not being in an accidental way (κατὰ συμβεβηκός). For from privation which ὅ ἐστι καθ’ αὑτο μὴ ὄν, nothing can become. (Phy. 191b13-16, cf. b19-25) . (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of (...) the themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experience, Embodiment, and History: Remarks on Waldow’s Experience EmbodiedDario Perinetti (bio)Anik Waldow’s Experience Embodied delves into what she calls the “early modern debate on the concept of experience.”1 In her rich and wide-ranging account, she shows how a group of key early modern philosophers dealt with a puzzle regarding the connection between the subjective and objective aspects of experience. The puzzle stems from the fact that experience (...) reveals as much about the experiencing subject as it does about the experienced world. Waldow believes that a one-sided focus on the role of “the way of ideas” in shaping the subjective aspect of experience has distorted our understanding of early modern views on experience.According to the traditional reading, the puzzle presents an intractable challenge to early modern philosophers. For if we experience the world through ideas, and ideas are internal mental states, it becomes difficult to reconcile the explanations required for the psychology of our mental states with those needed for the natural sciences dealing with objective states of affairs. But, so Waldow claims, the challenge can be successfully faced once we understand experience as embodied: “We have to think of experience as embodied to do justice to both explanatory requirements, because it is the body that connects the experiencing mind and its subjectivity with the factual realm of the world.”2Waldow disputes the commonly held view that early modern philosophers saw experience as an interaction between mind and world. She contends, instead, that most early modern philosophers understood experience as embodied. The thesis is presented through a series of “case studies” or “snapshots.” These snapshots focus on the way Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder, and Kant accounted for the [End Page 319] embodied dimension of experience. The case studies are noteworthy because they succeed in revealing the significance of embodied experience for the authors in question. Waldow manages to expose the significance of embodied experience by focusing on the connection between the authors’ central philosophical views and their views on topics like education, the psychology of emotions, and history, which are often considered of lesser interest by contemporary philosophers.For example, in chapter 1, Waldow argues that connecting Descartes’s mind-body dualism with his understanding of reason as a tool for human self-determination and agency, makes it possible to see how, contrary to commonly held assumptions, Descartes’s dualism aligns well with an understanding of experience as embodied. This weakens the view that Descartes defended a conception of reason as disembodied, and instead, allows for a reading of Cartesian philosophy as aligned with a more naturalistic picture of human nature. In her chapters on Hume and Herder, Waldow sheds light on the way these philosophers perceived reason and experience as deeply rooted in bodily sensibility, as well as in historically shaped moral attitudes and social norms. This focus on embodied experience is central for highlighting how, in different ways, these philosophers endorsed the naturalistic project of understanding the human place in nature. Building on these results, Waldow approaches the problem of the relationship between naturalism and the methodology proper to philosophy from a different and original angle. Her final chapters on Herder and Kant present two ways of understanding the connection between philosophy and the empirical sciences. In her view, Herder advocates for a naturalistic methodology as a way to provide answers to deep metaphysical questions, as well as to empirical questions related to human nature and its connection to culture, society, and history. Unlike Herder, Kant appears as promoting a form of methodological dualism that distinguishes conceptual questions regarding the structure of experience from empirical questions regarding the experience of concrete, embodied human beings. Waldow succeeds in highlighting this contrast between two methodological approaches, thanks to a journey that takes us through the canonical texts of these two thinkers, as well as through less frequented texts such as Herder’s work on the origins of language and Kant’s writings on anthropology, geography, natural history, and history. As can be seen, Waldow’s book not only provides a valuable insight into the significance of embodied experience in early modern philosophy, but also offers refreshing and unexpected readings of the... (shrink)

Rhythm and meter are central elements of music. From the very beginning, children are responsive to rhythms and acquire increasingly complex rhythmic skills over the course of development. Previous research has shown that the processing of musical rhythm is not only related to children’s music-specific responses but also to their cognitive abilities outside the domain of music. However, despite a lot of research on that topic, the connections and underlying mechanisms involved in such relation are still unclear in some respects. (...) In this article, we aim at analyzing the relation between rhythmic and cognitive-motor abilities during childhood and at providing a new hypothesis about this relation. We consider whether predictive processing may be involved in the relation between rhythmic and various cognitive abilities and hypothesize that prediction as a cross-domain process is a central mechanism building a bridge between rhythm processing and cognitive-motor abilities. Further empirical studies focusing on rhythm processing and cognitive-motor abilities are needed to precisely investigate the links between rhythmic, predictive, and cognitive processes. (shrink)

In February 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 appeared and spread rapidly in Italy. With the health emergency and social isolation, parents started spending more time with their children, and they might have experienced greater distress. Attachment style is considered as an effective emotion regulation strategy in the parent–child relationship. However, few empirical studies have addressed this issue. Based on attachment theory, this study aimed to find parental attachment style as a candidate to moderate the relation between parents’ negative emotions (...) and their perceptions of their children’s negative emotions related to COVID-19. Parents of 838 Italian children and adolescents aged 3 to 18 years participated in an online survey. Results showed that parents with a fearful attachment style had significantly higher negative emotions when facing COVID-19 than those with other attachment styles. Moreover, parents with a dismissing attachment style perceived fewer negative emotions in their children than parents with fearful and preoccupied styles. At last, higher parents’ negative emotions were associated with greater perception of children’s negative emotions only in parents classified as secure and fearful. These findings suggest that parents with dismissing and fearful attachment styles and their children may be at higher risk during the COVID-19 pandemic and they should be given long-term attention. (shrink)

This article examines the notorious mid-nineteenth-century American trial of Amelia Norman, who was acquitted - very much against the weight of the evidence - of attempting to kill the man who seduced her. In particular, we explore the role in the trial and its aftermath of the affective energies and cultural expectations set in motion by best-selling American sentimental novels like Hannah Foster's "The Coquette" and Susanna Rowson's "Charlotte Temple." In Norman's case, once newspapers, defense lawyers, and reformers such as (...) Lydia Maria Child recast the defendant as a sentimental heroine, the trial became about seduction, not attempted murder. The sentimental emplotment of Norman's life marshaled a powerful set of emotional responses and moral judgments on her behalf. For example, Norman claimed insanity. And since sentimental heroines are supposed to go mad when they are seduced and abandoned, the jury was prepared to interpret her symptoms according to her lawyers' very strategy for establishing her innocence. Ultimately, however, Norman embodied the plight of the sentimental heroine at the same time that she contested her fictional counterpart's fate. In this way, her trial spectacularized the disparity which the sentimental novel conjures up and displaces but never resolves. Going further, the common law theory of coverture, which severely limited the legal personhood of married women, has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Cases like Norman's remind us that unmarried women were also subject to draconian constraints on their legal personhood. The tort of seduction is a key example. Legal historians trace the development of the seduction tort from its common-law origins, when men's property interest in women's bodies formed the basis of the cause of action, to 1851, when Field Code authors (including Norman's lawyer, David Graham) persuaded several states to grant seduced women standing to bring their own cause of action. Consequently, courts were forced to reckon with the seduced woman as a moral agent capable of consenting to sex. As trials like Norman's demonstrate, sentimental novels helped lay the groundwork for this shift in the law by elucidating a subjectivity for the seduced woman. Yet the doctrinal implications of Norman's precedent-setting trial had a second, more ambiguous strain. Other women facing similar charges used the same legal strategy to gain acquittals in a substantial number of cases. Indeed, Norman's sentimental strategy proved so powerful that men on trial for killing their wives' seducers appropriated it to bring their own stories before juries and to reinforce male sexual norms through the so-called honor defense. In the end, then, Norman's trial fostered legal reform, but it also suggested - as Lydia Maria Child's fictionalization of the case in "Rosenglory" recognized - that only sustained and multifaceted efforts to change cultural as well as legal norms could improve the sexual status of women. In addition to its legal, literary, and historical insights that it provides, we also intend this article to contribute to debates on the nature of scholarship in law and literature. Scholars such as Wai Chee Dimock have argued for a focus on the historical and historically shifting relations between law and literature - a view we endorse. Where we differ from Dimock is in our diversion of attention away from abstract ideas of law laid out by treatise writers and philosophers in favor of law experienced and manipulated by individuals. So, too, we are interested less in representations of concepts such as justice in legal and literary texts than we are in the ways in which literature (broadly conceived) can create provisional and fragile opportunities for concrete instantiations of justice and even generate legal change (for good or ill). We would argue that to the extent legal change motivates rather than simply mirrors cultural change, it needs literature to be effective. This project, then, responds to Gregg Crane's call for attention to the complex and slippery historical interactions of law and literature that shape and are shaped by an ever changing cultural idiom of justice. The extended story of Amelia Norman, in short, not only constitutes a case study in the inescapable interaction between the overlapping and interdependent discourses of law and literature, but also reveals the literary and legal consequences of that interaction. (shrink)

It is reported that medical students both in the U.S. and Poland have experience of interacting with pharmaceutical company representatives (pharma reps) during their school years. Studies have warned that the interaction typically initiated by the pharma reps’ general gift-giving eventually leads to the quid pro quo relationship between the pharma company and the future doctors, the result of which is that the doctors will prescribe their patients drugs in favor of the pharma company. Built upon the existing (...) class='Hi'>finding, this research engages in analysis with three foci. The first is to compare attitudinal differences of the American and Polish medical students as they interact with pharma reps. Second, it investigates the role of the different economic and cultural elements (respectively in the U.S. and Poland) in the students’ attitudinal differences. Last, it suggests that the medical schools in both countries should have strict policies and effective education curriculum to help their students better prepare to interact ethically with pharma reps. Since there has been no direct comparative cultural analysis of this kind which is known in a published literature or report, the authors believe that the paper will serve as a catalyst for further research in the area. (shrink)

What Kyselo calls the “body-social problem” concerns whether to individuate the human self in terms of its bodily aspects or social aspects. In her view, either approach risks privileging one dimension while reducing the other to a mere contextual element. However, she proposes that principles from enactivism can help us to find a middle ground and solve the body-social problem. Here Kyselo looks to the notions of “needful freedom” and "individuation through and from a world" and extends them from the (...) realm of biological individuation to an individuation in terms of social interactions. However, I will argue that because Kyselo’s solution to the body-social problem downplays the role of the living body, it actually is in tension with the enactivist framework. First, while enactivism places the living body at the center of selfhood and subjectivity, Kyselo’s account treats the living body as mere means and mediator. Second, her claim that the self is socially enacted and individuated is in tension with the enactivist conception of autonomous agency, which centers on the autonomous organization of the living body. However, suppose we grant Kyselo’s claim that we are necessarily social beings, but claim that the mind of a minded human animal constitutively extends to the limits of its living organismic body, but no further. My proposed “life shaping” thesis says that the self is not just essentially embodied, but also partially causally determined or shaped by social interactions, and thoroughly influenced by social norms and values. The life shaping thesis can explain how the self is individuated biologically, in terms of the autonomous organization of the living body, but nonetheless deeply embedded in the social world. (shrink)

Volume 26/27 begins with publication of _The Annual's_ first prize essay, Samuel Abrams's "How Child and Adult Analysis Inform and Misinform One Another." This is followed by a series of papers originally prepared for a symposium honoring John E. Gedo. These papers span the clinical topics of obsessiveness, sublimation, dreams and self-analysis, and analyzability, and also delve into applied psychoanalysis and art history, with two studies of Vincent van Gogh and another of Alberto Giacometti. These papers not only convey the (...) impressive range of Gedo's own interests, but embody the high scholarly and clinical standards that Gedo has long held, both for himself and for the field in general. Section III offers original contributions to clinical analysis in the form of the consideration of the role of affective engagement in the analyst's "usability"; thoughtful assessment of the perils of parental projection in child analytic work; and comparison of a failed and successful supervision in the same psychoanalytic case. Section IV examines psychoanalysis and the arts, with two further studies of van Gogh, an analytic reading of Nabokov's _Lolita_, and more general examinations of psychoanalysis in relation to dramatic art and film analysis. The volume closes with two provocative scholarly essays bearing on the roots of psychoanalysis: the correspondence between Mabel Dodge and her analysts Smith Ely Jelliffe and A. A. Brill as a vehicle for reviewing the issue of extra- and postanalytic contact between analyst and patient; and an examination of Freud, Lacan, and the uneasy relationships among literature, psychoanalysis, and the female subject. Volume 26/27 offers readers a rich harvest of contemporary insights about psychoanalysis, including its history and evolution, its continuing clinical refinement, and its scholarly applications outside the consulting room. (shrink)

The study ascertained (1) whether an observer's scope of justice with reference to either the moral agent or the target person of a moral act, would affect his/her judgements of the ethicality of the act, and (2) whether observer judgements of ethicality parallel the moral agent's decision processes in systematically evaluating the intensity of the moral issue. A scenario approach was used. Results affirmed both research questions. Discussions covered the implications of the findings for the underlying cognitive processes of moral (...) judgements, for the link between judgements of fairness and ethicality, as well as for the debate of ethical absolutism versus relativism. (shrink)

In an ordinary interaction, communicants have various, mostly unconscious goals which reflect their interactional, social and personal needs. In these interactions, people’s minds try to find a balance between reaching these goals and consuming cognitive energy. If a speaker puts too little effort into speech production, she risks not achieving her communicative goals. This is especially typical when the atmosphere is relaxed, a good example of which is family discourse. An analysis of recorded conversations shows that there (...) are certain regular manifestations of risk-taking in family discourse, such as expressing immature thoughts, raising a large variety of topics and overguessing. A substantial amount of risk-taking in family discourse is in one way or another connected with false confidence in the interlocutors’ common ground. Family members know each other well, which results in an overestimation of the similarity of their understanding of words and objects. This attitude leads them to use cryptic, hard-to-comprehend speech. Quick, everyday interactions are mostly automated, and the speakers do not recognise that their speech is full of implicitness and underdeterminacy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Infertility Treadmill: Feminist Ethics, Personal Choice, and the Use of Reproductive Technologies by Karey HarwoodKathryn Lilla CoxThe Infertility Treadmill: Feminist Ethics, Personal Choice, and the Use of Reproductive Technologies Karey Harwood Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 221pp. $22.00Karey Harwood’s The Infertility Treadmill, published in the University of North Carolina’s Studies in Social Medicine series, fills a lacuna in the infertility literature. Harwood takes (...) an interdisciplinary approach examining “assisted reproductive technologies” (ART) using current scientific, philosophical, theological, and—most importantly—her own ethnographic research. By way of a thick description of women’s experiences of infertility, she draws the reader into a rich ethical conversation regarding ARTs.Harwood “seeks first and foremost to offer an interpretation of the ethical significance of the increasing use of ART by bringing a particular set of normative or evaluative lenses to bear on a particular set of descriptive data” (8). She engaged in this study because of her desire to explore the connections between decisions to use ART and such factors as paid employment, delayed childbirth, and the ongoing balancing of work and family life. Harwood gathered her descriptive data by spending a year with the Atlanta chapter of RESOLVE (The National Infertility Association): attending monthly meetings and listening to speakers and participants as well as appraising RESOLVE’s national and local literature. She also conducted nine interviews with eight women and one man. Focusing on work and family conflicts in light of questions related to gender justice and the interplay between social and communal norms theories, on the one hand, and private and individual choice, on the other, Harwood teases out the ethical complexity surrounding ARTs.After surveying philosophical and theological literature relevant to her topic, Harwood names and examines existential concerns that emerged from her observations, conversations, and interviews with RESOLVE members. Clustered thematically, these concerns include the painful isolation of infertility, the stigma attached to using ARTs, people’s moralizing, how much treatment to pursue, what is the value in trying one more thing, socioeconomic status, and emotional awareness (62–97). Throughout her discussion of these concerns, [End Page 209] Harwood reminds ethicists of the importance of personal narratives for any treatment of an ethical issue like this.Moreover, her research leads Harwood to deduce that RESOLVE helps people with meaning-making, questions of purpose, language clarification, and various options surrounding infertility and ARTs. She asserts that the infertility experience can be a transformative one for the infertile. The decision-making process regarding the use of ARTs functioned as a type of ritual—albeit “a consumeristic ritual”—that aided people in working through the grief of infertility (157). Religious institutions have not always helped the infertile in these areas. Nonetheless, Harwood’s study leads her to conclude that RESOLVE members and leaders tend to be deficient in their capacities for challenging and critically examining how individual decisions intertwine with larger social contexts.Harwood acknowledges that her methodological decision to focus on one RESOLVE chapter limited her demographics (63–64). Moreover, although for the most part balanced, Harwood’s assessment of her findings is at times partial, even bordering on advocacy. For example, she clearly seeks to make the case that ethical analyses of infertility need to be more nuanced—incorporating more personal narrative—and that RESOLVE needs to be more open to critical self-reflection, especially the critical questioning of the “treadmill of infertility” (133). In her analysis of her findings, Harwood demonstrates how personal narratives help nuance ethical analysis. Less clear is whether RESOLVE can be or wants to be more self-critical and more questioning of its own core premises. Nonetheless, these limitations do not detract from Harwood’s important insights regarding “the infertility treadmill” and the host of issues related to ARTs—including consumerism, the role of rituals, meaning-making, suffering and grief, and gender justice, among others.Those struggling with infertility or considering ARTs will find Harwood to be an empathetic dialogue partner. Others will gain a deeper understanding of infertility’s toll by reading this book. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students will benefit from Harwood’s analysis of how personal decisions have wide-ranging... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Place for Healing:A Hospital Art Class, Writing, and a Researcher's TaskJulia Kellman (bio)Introduction[O]bjects transform the top of our chest into a site of memory. I think of private landscapes like this one as querencias, places that hold the heart. The word has been translated as homing instinct and affection. Expatriate Alastair Reid introduced me to it in 1965, writing about the Spanish bullfight in The New Yorker. After (...) the first wound the bull chooses his querencia, the place in the ring where he returns for a moment to rest before the fight goes on, and where he finally dies. Querencia comes from the common Spanish verb querer; among its many meanings are to love, to want, to hold, and to command. Reid spoke of hometowns and native countries as querencias; exiles cling to their memories of them.1Place, "space that has the capacity to be remembered and to evoke what is most precious,"2 by its nature orients us to a particular perspective, to a way of looking at the world. Each place has its own local accent, its own constellation of habits, its own rhythm of language and thought. We are grounded in landscape in the same manner that we are situated in our social world, imprinted like other creatures on a typography, pattern of weather, cycle of seasons, scents, and colors.3Our hearts, too, are embedded in such places; and in this article, through this "act of personal witness," this "inscription of a self and a description of an object" as the anthropologist and writer Ruth Benhar4 describes it, we will see how the members of an art class for people with HIV/AIDS at a local hospital have similarly become grounded in their art space and in the tiny art community that has grown up around it. Additionally, we will discover the importance of a more descriptive style of writing as means for examining the role of art in the lives of people who are ill, for their various difficult [End Page 106] situations call for particular clarity and empathy that both honors and relates the stories of their lives. It will become clear as this article proceeds that the personal engagement of a researcher/writer in such a situation is critical as well. For not only must she be open—vulnerable, as Behar suggests—to the people with whom she works as a means of spanning the chasm between a life of illness and a life of health, but she must also be sensitive to the reader's needs, for she is the reader's guide and surrogate.5 This role as guide and alter-ego demands that the researcher tell the story of other lives in a manner that enables the reader to empathetically and eagerly undertake a journey with the researcher into a world unlike her own.6Personal Engagement: The Researcher/WriterHoward Brody, doctor and medical ethicist, explains the necessity for stories of illness to be descriptive.7 He asserts that the stories in which we are most interested are not merely factual recitations; they are about what the illness means to the individual—they include how that person understands events. "It is far too simple-minded" he writes, to assume that "the writer of literature presents to us a world of fantasy that never existed whereas the author of a nonfictional pathography has some special insight into the world as it really exists, even if the relevant world is nothing but his own subjective experiences."8 He concludes "in stories of that sort (stories of the meaning of things) the line between so-called truth and fiction becomes more blurred and ceases to affect the uses we make of the stories for the deeper understanding of the human response to illness."9 Further, Brody continues, one must understand stories of sickness in order to truly develop a philosophical understanding of what it means to be ill. Such an understanding, Brody suggests, not only provides ethical guidance for health care workers and others but also will lead to improved care for patients and better education of health professionals.10 This view of... (shrink)

This article reviews pertinent literature and presents findings from recent research to illustrate how CAFCASS (Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service) private law practitioners understand, experience and manage the tension between empowerment and protection in welfare report enquiries. The traditional approach in the United Kingdom has been for children to be protected, especially when their divorced or separated parents are in conflict, but the balance is changing, as calls for the active participation of children in decisions (...) that affect them continue to grow louder. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to use the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin to reveal new insights into the role and impact of social media in health-care settings. Design/methodology/approach With the help of Bakhtin’s constructs of dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia and carnival, the power and influences of the social media phenomenon in health-care settings, are explored. Findings It is apparent from the in-depth analysis conducted that there is a delicate balance between the need to increase dialogue and the need to safeguard (...) public health, in the use of social media for health-related communication. Bakhtin‘s constructs elucidate this delicate balance and highlight the need for health-care providers that use social media to find the right balance between these competing communicational priorities. Originality/value This paper advances a nascent theoretical approach to social media research. By applying Bakhtinian ideas to consumer health informatics, this paper has the potential to open a new approach to theorizing the role of social software in health-care settings. Stakeholders in digital health will find this paper useful, as it opens up dialogue to further discuss the role of social media in health care. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.1 (2001) 41-44 [Access article in PDF] A Response to Mitchell, Hinshelwood, and Adshead Sarah Richmond Iam grateful to Juliet Mitchell for contributing, in her response to my paper, some interesting further ideas about anorexia. Before commenting on these, I would like to reply to her suggestion that a distinction between symptom and phantasy will provide a necessary corrective to my approach. I think (...) that, in relation to my usage of terms, this suggestion is mistaken.If I have understood her correctly, Mitchell maintains that we need to focus on symptoms rather than on phantasy because the former always indicate the influence of something truly unconscious, a meaning that the subject cannot recognize. On the other hand, phantasy, Mitchell says, involves a "slippage between unconscious and preconscious," between the notions of a meaning that remains disguised and inaccessible to consciousness and one that may be recognized by the subject.I meant, in my paper, to use the term phantasy in the Kleinian sense, that is, to denote mental content that is unconscious. On the Kleinian view, symptoms whose cause is psychological are expressions of (and clues to) an unconscious phantasy that underlies them: To understand symptomatic behavior, the analyst needs to understand its basis in unconscious object-relational phantasy. (Many such cases can be found in Klein's writings. In her seminal paper of 1935, for example, she cites a patient suffering from "hypochondriacal complaints" and carefully "nursing these parts of his body"; in her view, "the different organs he was trying to cure were identified with his internalized brothers and sisters, about whom he felt guilty and whom he had to be perpetually keeping alive" (Klein 275). There is not, therefore, any important distinction, as far as the line of thought pursued in my paper goes, between phantasy and symptom.In introducing the distinction, Mitchell seems to want to emphasize the distinctive, conflict-indicating nature of unconscious material and its heterogeneity with respect to conscious thought. On this, I am in agreement; indeed, my complaint against feminist "literalist" accounts of anorexia is precisely that they overlook the opacity of the unconscious, attributing such "reasonable" and straightforward conflicts to women as to render most of the explanatory resources of psychoanalytical theory redundant.In connection with this issue, it is helpful to be reminded by Mitchell of the "delusion" that often accompanies anorexia, that is, the manifestly false belief, on the sufferer's part, that she is fat. This feature of the subject's outlook must be one of the reasons that anorexia is popularly thought of as [End Page 41] a "slimmer's disease"; equally, it may have helped to encourage the view that anorexia is a response to constructions of female beauty in the media.The "delusional" aspect of the belief, however, discredits this view: Anorexic women do not stop "dieting" when they approximate to a conventional ideal of female slimness. (What about the recent use of anorexically thin fashion models? I don't think this provides a real objection to my claim; so far at least, this practice is quite rare, and I think intended more to shock than to provide an aesthetic ideal.)Anorexic women's continued abstinence from food leads them to acquire an appearance that most people find unattractively thin. Often, they become sufficiently malnourished to endanger their health and sometimes to result in their death. This behavior, surely, cannot be attributed to a desire to conform to fashion, even if that is what the woman says she is trying to do. I agree with Mitchell that the anomaly manifested in some anorexic behavior, the mismatch between what is said and done, suggests the need for explanation in terms of unconscious conflict.Nonetheless, it is plausible that the "media message" and the slimming industry play some role. As I suggested in my article, we might see this role as provocative; the message sounds a note that resonates with or encourages an adolescent's distaste for her body. Further, it may also provide her with a convenient rationalization of her behavior: "I need to diet; I look... (shrink)

This dissertation responds to a long-standing debate among scholars regarding the nature of Platonic Eros and its relation to lack. The more prominent account of Platonic Eros presents the lack of Eros as a deficiency or need experienced by the lover with respect to the object needed, lacked, or desired, so that the nature of Eros is construed as self-interested or acquisitive, subsisting only so long as the lover lacks the beloved object. This dissertation argues that such an interpretation neglects (...) the different senses of lack present in the Symposium and presents an alternative interpretation of Eros based on the Symposium's presentation of Eros as the child of Poverty and Resource. Chapter one examines the origin and development of the position that Platonic Eros is acquisitive or egocentric and the influence this has had on subsequent interpretations of Plato's thought. Chapter two argues that Diotima's theogony of Eros that presents him as a child of Poverty and Resource is central to understanding the account of Eros propounded in her discourse. Chapter three examines the development and refinement of the concepts of lack and poverty that are offered alongside those of Eros throughout Socrates' account of Eros in the Symposium. Chapters four and five discuss the relationship of these concepts of lack to the depiction of Eros as an intermediary and the ethical consequences of this relationship. Chapter six shows how the disposition of poverty serves as the source of the erotic ascent toward the vision of the beautiful itself. Chapter seven, drawing upon the analysis of previous chapters, argues that the reexamination of the role of poverty in the Symposium reveals that the account of Eros offered there describes a katharsis of the affective element in human beings, parallel to the katharsis of the rational element described in Plato's Phaedo. This katharsis involves the embrace of poverty as a way of living, loving, and knowing. Thus, the poverty of Eros does not indicate a lack that is egocentric or acquisitive, but describes a kind of asceticism or spiritual discipline that is requisite for the philosophical and moral life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deaconesses and Ritual ImpurityCatherine Brown TkaczCultural diversity underlies the differences between deaconesses of the East and of the West.1 In the West, women were recognized by their faith as able to catechize others and to assist women at baptism; in some parts of the East, only a deaconess could take these roles. Again, only in some areas of the East, women at certain times were not permitted to (...) enter the church building, but deaconesses could take the Eucharist to these housebound women. In religious life, corresponding differences existed. In the West, nuns were fitted by their vows to take various roles in the Liturgy of the Hours; in the East, in some areas, only a diaconal abbess could take these roles. In remote monasteries which might lack a priest for some time, the diaconal abbess could distribute pre-consecrated communion to the community. Long has cosmic dualism been recognized as a trait of the Eastern groups that had deaconesses. Now another trait can be identified: [End Page 187] apparently the groups which retained the Levitical laws of ritual impurity were the ones that needed the gender-specific ministry of deaconesses. Examining the theological and cultural context in which that office arose helps explain this varied history. Next, the Western deaconess is most clearly limned by comparing the pertinent Latin ceremonies. This also sheds unexpected light on how the Roman Catholic Church protected the property rights of consecrated women.The Context in Which Deaconesses AroseJesus taught a new doctrine: the call to sanctification: "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matt 5:48). Again, he commanded them to imitate him, to take up their cross daily and follow him (Luke 9:23). The post-Gospels New Testament continued to suggest ways for the believer to imitate Christ (for example, Heb 13:10–15). These teachings ground the doctrine that every human person is called to be holy and like Christ. To ensure that his followers knew that this vocation to holiness concerns women equally with men, Jesus demonstrated and emphasized the spiritual equality of the sexes throughout his time on earth.2 In an unprecedented way, he provided balanced examples of male and female in his interactions with men and women, in his healings, resurrection miracles, parables, and prophecies.3 In contrast, in the Old Testament and in the Jewish Haggadah, [End Page 188] paired male and female examples are "quite rare."4 While Tannaite Jews "exempted" women from reciting Shema and other acts of ritual worship and required only domestic devotions, Jesus elicited a public profession of faith from a woman as well as from a man—Peter (John 6:69) and Martha of Bethany (John 11:27)—and hers proves to be fuller.5 This dynamically demonstrated the spiritual equality of the sexes, and Eustathios of Antioch, Chrysostom, Augustine, and others praised Martha for teaching the faith.6From the start, both men and women were instructed in the faith, baptized, and received communion.7 Women also participated with men in evangelizing others. This began at Jesus's presentation in the Temple, his first public appearance, when the prophetess Anna announced the coming of the Messiah (Luke 2:36–38). The Samaritan woman evangelized her community: as soon as she learned of Jesus through conversation with him, she actively instructed others, so that many believed in him "because of the woman's testimony" (John 4:28–30, 39–42). The evangelical work of Priscilla was reported, with the account of her teaching a man (Acts 18:2, 26). That is, Christians interacted without a strict segregation of the sexes. When the apostles learned of neglect of the Greek widows, they obviously did not think that only other women could respond to this social need, for the apostles appointed men to do so (Acts 6:1–6).8Contrast this to the Jewish understanding of the roles of men and women. In the Temple, only Jewish men were allowed inside; women were relegated to the women's court. This segregation continued in medieval synagogues.9 [End Page 189] Likewise, as noted above, the Tannaite Jews "exempted" women from public worship. In Christian churches, however... (shrink)

When a mother kills her child, we call her a bad mother, but, as this book shows, even mothers who intend to do their children harm are not easily categorized as "mad" or "bad." Maternal love is a complex emotion rich with contradictory impulses and desires, and motherhood is a conflicted state in which women constantly renegotiate the needs mother and child, the self and the other. Applying care ethics philosophy and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and (...) Simone de Beauvoir to real-world experiences of motherhood, Sarah LaChance Adams throws the inherent tensions of motherhood into sharp relief, drawing a more nuanced portrait of the mother and child relationship than previously conceived. The maternal example is particularly instructive for ethical theory, highlighting the dynamics of human interdependence while also affirming separate interests. LaChance Adams particularly focuses on maternal ambivalence and its morally productive role in reinforcing the divergence between oneself and others, helping to recognize the particularities of situation, and negotiating the difference between one's own needs and the desires of others. She ultimately argues maternal filicide is a social problem requiring a collective solution that ethical philosophy and philosophies of care can inform. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dialogue with Ongoing Judaism by Matthew LeveringJustin Schembri O.P.Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dialogue with Ongoing Judaism by Matthew Levering (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2021), 547 pp.Engaging the Doctrine of Israel not only presents an interesting take on an old and complex problem but also is intriguing in its basic thesis and overall development. In this (...) book, Levering attempts, and succeeds, to marry a scripturally grounded dialogue with ongoing Judaism with the necessary presuppositions of Christian dogmatics. He does so in order to understand the central realities of God's biblical people Israel and to shine a light on how these realities must inform Christian thought (3).Such a volume fills a gap in research, since Christian dogmatic studies [End Page 1437] often suffer a lack of appreciating just how important understanding "Israel's covenantal life" is for Christian doctrine (3). Thus, while Levering tells us that this book is "the dogmatic sequel" to his Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage (1), the content of the book cannot be divorced from its scriptural foundation, nor from a contemporary dialogue with Israel.After an ample introduction (1–47), Levering begins his treatment of the matter by explaining the necessary hermeneutical framework in which such an engagement can take place (48–109). This foundational chapter not only provides the grounding for the chapters that follow but also examines the pitfalls to avoid in dialoging with ongoing Israel. In particular, Levering finds a balance in the need for both Christians and Jews to retain core beliefs and a recognition that both sides have suffered from unnecessary and painful biases that have hurt dialogue in the past (52–53).Since Levering is writing from the point of view of a Christian, he is right to point out that a healthy and fruitful dialogue with Judaism in the present moment requires both a solid foundation in Christian doctrine and an acknowledgement of how the New Testament has been misused to reject and subject the Jewish people to injustice over the centuries. Thus, in agreement with the author, I too think that Christian–Jewish dialogue plays a vital role not only in healing such biases but also in bridging needless gaps between the two groups (108–109).This crucial chapter is followed by an examination of six different areas (110–443) in which Levering engages with Israel's doctrine through a Christian lens. In each case, a similar format is found in the sense that Levering first introduces the topic and then engages with different Jewish and Christian scholars in order to elicit a more robust space for dialogue to happen. Each topic of study, then, is brought to a conclusion wherein Levering explicates both the pitfalls to be avoided and what truth can Christians glean.The first area to be discussed is creation (110–46). In this chapter, Levering examines why is it important for both Jews and Christians alike to affirm that omnipotent God created creation ex nihilo. The author is right to point out that if God did not create creation out of nothing, then God is not omnipotent but rather merely a "powerful finite being" (111).While I would have like to see a more robust exegetical analysis on Gen 1:1–2 (especially with regards to bǝrē'šît, since it is not so certain that this prepositional phrase should be interpreted temporally), the author is right to move beyond the metaphysical question of creation ex nihilo, to point out that creation is "also rooted in God's speaking, and thus his Word," since creation must be understood as the way in which God establishes "a dialogic communion" (124) with creation. After all, it is the Word which is [End Page 1438] fundamental; God speaks and practically invites creation to take its place amongst the grooves that God has made.What is more is that this Word, as Levering acknowledges, is both divine and human, since it is the Word of God written in human language. Thus, in Scripture, we cannot escape the "divine–human collaboration" (145) that is willed by... (shrink)

Substantial gender disparities in career advancement are still apparent, for instance in the gender pay gap, the overrepresentation of women in parttime work, and the underrepresentation of women in managerial positions. Regarding the developmental origins of these gender disparities, the current study examined whether children’s views about future career and family involvement were associated with children’s own gender schemas and parents’ career- and family-related gender roles. Participants were 142 Dutch families with a child between the ages of 6 and (...) 12 years old. The families had different compositions. Children completed a computer task assessing gender stereotypes about toys and questionnaires on gender identity and their views about future career and family involvement. Parents reported their occupation, work hours, and task division in the home, which were combined in a composite variable reflecting gender-typicality of career and family involvement. Generalized estimation equations were used to take into account dependency between family members. Results revealed that parents’, and especially mothers’, gender-typical career and family involvement was associated with children’s gender-typical views about future career and family involvement. In addition, children’s felt similarity to the same gender was associated with children’s gender-typical expectations about career and family involvement. These findings suggest that parents’ career, work hours, and task division in the home, together play an important role in how their children envision their future work and family roles. Children themselves also play an active role in developing this vision for the future by their own gender identity, specifically by how similar they feel to individuals of the same gender. To reduce gender disparities in the occupational and domestic domain, programs need to be designed that focus on parental role modeling in the family as well as children’s gender identity development. (shrink)

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right responds to two dichotomies. One is between the freedom of rational thought in its practical application and the givenness of natural impulses and desires. Against Kant Hegel argues that pure reason alone cannot determine the content of any maxim or principle of action. Thus Hegel must find a way in which the content of natural needs and impulses – the only source of content for maxims of action – can be transfigured into contents of (...) rationally self-given principles and maxims. Hegel also responds to the dichotomy between the individual agent and the social whole within which agents act. Hegel argues that this dichotomy is specious because human beings are fundamentally social practitioners and because neither social practices nor individual agents have priority over the other. There are no social practices without social practitioners and there are no social practitioners without social practices. Hegel’s response to this second dichotomy allows him to respond to the first one as well. The elaboration and specialization of natural needs and desires through exchange relations and the social division of labor transfigures the contents of those needs and desires into collectively self-given ends. The social practices producing this transfiguration and meeting these ends form the contents of implicit principles of right. These implicit principles are collectively self-given because they result from the social practices collectively developed to meet these needs. Only acts that are executed and accepted by an agent are free acts. This strong condition requires that an agent’s intentions correspond to the actual nature and consequences of his or her act. Since the aims, the principles, and the means of action are fundamentally social, these strong constraints entail that free action is possible only within a community which makes known its structure and the role of its members within it and their contribution to it, so that its members can act on the basis of that knowledge. Hegel’s theory of the state is a theory of a communal structure that makes such explicit, free action possible. In briefest compass, Hegel holds that laws are legitimate only insofar as they codify those practices that have been developed in order to achieve human freedom, and laws are obligatory only insofar as they are necessary for achieving human freedom. Hegel’s government is designed to codify and promulgate such laws. Hegel’s legislature is designed to make known to the citizens at large, through their corporate representatives, that laws have such a basis and how individual roles and actions fit within the community as a whole. (shrink)

This paper asks: What is philosophy and what are some current challenges and future prospects for pursuing and teaching it? What role can and should students’ imagination, interests, and circumstances play in addressing these challenges and prospects? It argues, first, that there are at least six senses of the term “philosophy”: the personal, social, branch of inquiry, theory, school of thought, and wise sayings senses; second, that a variety of stimuli contribute to motivate philosophy in all of its senses. Third, (...) it argues that teaching philosophy involves not just teaching one or more philosophies historically held, nor just partially or totally defending one or another of these philosophies; but also engaging in the third sense of “philosophy” above listed: philosophy as a branch of inquiry. Finally, the paper argues that by relying on the interests of philosophy learners that match the stimuli motivating philosophy, philosophy teaching sensitizes philosophy learners to the grounds that make this investigation viable and promising, and motivates them to engage in it. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

Mind, it is increasingly fashionable to assert, is an intrinsically embodied and environmentally embedded phenomenon. But there is a potential tension between two strands of thought prominent in this recent literature. One of those strands depicts the body as special, and the fine details of a creature’s embodiment as a major constraint on the nature of its mind: a kind of new-wave body-centrism. The other depicts the body as just one element in a kind of equal-partners dance (...) class='Hi'>between brain, body and world, with the nature of the mind fixed by the overall balance thus achieved: a kind of extended functionalism (now with an even broader canvas for multiple realizability than ever before). The present paper displays the tension, scouts the space of possible responses, and ends by attempting to specify what the body actually needs to be, given its complex role in these recent debates. (shrink)

The perception of the relationship between humans and nature is important for promoting not only pro-environmental behaviors but also psychological well-being. The present research explored how people’s self-construal would moderate the relationship between the need to belong, the desire for social acceptance and connectedness and perceived nature relatedness. Two studies using community samples with diverse demographic characteristics in two different cultures obtained consistent findings. The results showed that independent self-construal, which emphasizes separateness from others in the social contexts, (...) moderated the relationship between the need to belong and nature relatedness. Specifically, the need to belong was negatively associated with nature relatedness among people with a stronger independent self-construal, while this pattern was not significant among those with a weaker independent self-construal. No evidence for the moderating role of interdependent self-construal was found in the two studies. These findings highlighted the importance of non-nature experience in understanding people’s perception of human–nature relationships. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:is There a White Gift?: A Pragmatist Response to the Problem of Whiteness Terrance A. MacMullan Introduction Lucius Outlaw and Shannon SuUivan are prominent contemporary philosophers of race who follow in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois as they search for a theoretical understanding of race and a political solution to the problem of racism. They agree that the solution to racism is not found in the elimination of (...) the idea of race from our discourses as suggested by Naomi Zack and Anthony Appiah, but in a critical conservation of race that is nonhierarchical and committed to addressing the suffering of non-white racial groups.1 This moral and critical conservation of race makes Sullivan and Outlaw standard bearers for Du Bois's idea of the racial gift, which John Shuford writes is rooted in the conviction that, "'race' and race-consciousness are not the causes of racism and racial injustice, [and] that 'race' may be employed toward collective and mutual liberation."2 However, despite their inteUectual kinship regarding their broad approach to race, Outlaw and SuUivan come to a significant and iUuminating disagreement over the issue of whiteness. In Du Boisian terms, they disagree about whether white people, qua white, have a racial gift worth conserving. Outlaw recognizes the illegitimacy of the hierarchical racial taxonomies established during the Enlightenment era but accepts race as a real and meaningful feature of our social landscape. Revealing a strong affinity for Du Bois' approach to race, Outlaw imagines his work as, an inquiry into raciality and ethnicity via a treacherous "third path" between racism and invidious ethnocentrism, on the one side, and anti-racism and antiinvidious ethnocentrism, on the other. What I propose can help us to recognize and nurture races and ethnies as we reconsider raciation and ethnicization as processes by which we humans produce TRANSACTIONS OFTHE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY Vol. 41, No. 4 ©2005 Hi and reproduce ourselves as crucial aspects of our "social construction of ET1 realities."3 H tr* Q η He further argues for "the need to conserve 'race' and 'ethnie' (and 'ethnic- ¡» ity') as vital components of a philosophical anthropology."4 Outlaw there- 5j fore contends that the challenge facing liberatory race theorists is not the «' elimination of race, but instead, "the challenge is to find ways to conserve a Ç) sense of raciality that is both socially useful and consistent with democratic justice." Outlaw clearly wants to avoid invidious ethnocentrism, but what is more significant is that he also rejects the idea that we should purge racial ^j ideas and practices as a means to achieve democratic justice. He, like Du τ> Bois, is fully aware of the evils of racism, but is nonetheless committed to > the belief that human existence is inevitably colored by race as a salient fea- g ture of our social reality. Outlaw's commitment to the conservation of race ;> is so deep that he would preserve race-based communities of meaning, "even ^ if, in the very next instant, racism and perverted, invidious ethnocentrism in every form or > manifestation would disappearforever'. '6 ^ The key to this balancing act is to look at race and ethnicity through the r lens of "philosophical anthropology" instead of through the materialism of > biology. Outlaw argues that when we look at race this way we glean, an understanding and appreciation of senses of belonging and of shared destiny by which individuals are intimately connected to other individuals in ways that make for the constitution of particular kinds of social collectivities, what I term social-natural kinds. Races and ethnies are such "kinds."8 Outlaw thus uses an idea of race that is fully transactional, to use a term coined by Dewey and rewardingly reclaimed by Sullivan. Race is created in the confluence of culture and biology, to the extent that certain biologicaUy determined traits, primarily morphological features, are the tags that play important symbolic roles in terms of how social groups are formed. The goal, therefore, is not to eliminate race, because people long have and likely always will use appearance as one of the many determinants of how they form groups. The goal is, instead, to form groups in ways that encourage human flourishing "consistent... (shrink)

Photo ID 279661800 © Sidewaypics|Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT Decolonization is complex, vast, and the subject of an ongoing academic debate. While the many efforts to decolonize or dismantle the vestiges of colonialism that remain are laudable, they can also reinforce what they seek to end. For decolonization to be impactful, it must be done with epistemic and cultural humility, requiring decolonial scholars, project leaders, and well-meaning people to be more sensitive to those impacted by colonization and not regularly included in the discourse. (...) INTRODUCTION Decolonization is complex. To successfully achieve decolonization, projects should incorporate the voices of those subjugated or silenced. Including such voices requires sincerely exploring who has been affected by colonialism or neocolonialism and how, as well as cultural sensitivity. In its basic use, decolonization refers to countries under colonial rule gaining independence or freedom from forms of subjugation. Additionally, scholars use the term to refer to efforts to dismantle neocolonialism and vestiges of colonialism. The process includes de-silencing subjugated voices.[1] I use decolonization in the latter way to refer to countries with technical independence. While arguably colonization ended formally with independence from colonizing powers, neocolonialism is the indirect, informal, and sometimes subtle control of the people, their economy, and political life despite formal independence from colonizing authorities. I conceptualize neocolonialism as a system that involves direct and involuntary control of another’s political, economic, or social life, impacting their worldview and ways of encountering the world. Decolonization may target actions, places, or systems like health care or AI to overcome the ills of colonialism and neocolonialism. It also may target knowledge and require rethinking how people develop their knowledge base. For example, if people grew up seeing an outside colonizer as superior, they would need to change their knowledge of superiority. Decolonization may target power, for example, changing who owns and distributes COVID-19 vaccines and who distributors exclude in the distribution of vaccines. Decolonization could require looking at those disempowered in the distribution process. Additionally, decolonization may target autonomy of persons by freeing people, ensuring human and individual rights, and respecting cultural traditions. Decolonization projects that try to de-silence by including the voices of those affected by colonialism and neocolonialism must examine inclusiveness in the context of the culture of the subrogated individuals. Examples of decolonization projects include making datasets inclusive of diverse peoples and places, returning to traditional food and eating practices, making sure hospitals in developing countries are led by locals and respectful of cultural traditions, returning unethically obtained artefacts or objects. Another project would be laying the groundwork for equality in formerly colonized countries to ensure that business ownership, education, and financial success will flow fairly to those previously victimized by colonization. Summarily, there are many strategies for decolonizing. However, it is worth asking whether the strategies have risks that undermine the goal of decolonization. I. Understanding Decolonization Discourses Many fields, from AI to politics, economics, health care, aviation, and academia, discuss decolonization. The content of the discourse on decolonization depends on the region and field discussing it. Rather than just reporting on decolonization, the discussions may be calls to action. For example, decolonization discourses reflect activism for cognitive justice, such as equal consideration of Indian or African knowledge systems in global health discourses.[2] In politics and political science, some scholars frame decolonization as an anti-western, anti-colonial movement by Africans to emancipate Africa/ns from subjugation or shift the continent to postcolonialism and post-neo-colonialism. This framing walls off non-African participants and may undermine their capacity to benefit the conversation.[3] There are other political scientists who actively support decolonization and see it as a field of activism in support of anyone and countries where colonization harmed people and development.[4] The point is that two ways of conceptualizing decolonization in politics and political science are discernible. One conceptualization is less inclusive since it alienates scholars and professionals from Western, high-income, or developed countries. The other is more inclusive. In humanitarian studies, including philosophy, some decolonization articles and conversations are efforts to end the destructive force of colonization. They focus on either the form, such as ecocide, genocide, and many others, or the geographic location, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.[5] Finally, the feelings one brings into this conversation can adversely impact how one engages in them and who they listen to or are willing to hear from. For example, anger, rage, bitterness, and hatred are emotions that are not uncommon in spaces of decolonization conversations. Decolonization conversations that originate from a place of negativity risk deepening the psychological state of victimhood and prevent people from disrupting constructively or critically engaging in the conversation.[6] II. Understanding Decolonization Strategies Decolonization strategies mainly aim to de-silence victims of domination or subjugation. People have proposed many strategies for decolonizing. These strategies may be informed by what the target is for decolonization. Decolonization can target power relations in global health. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health organizations noted the power imbalance in vaccine distribution. Decolonization could involve de-silencing those affected by neocolonialism to bring about a more balanced distribution of power and a more fair distribution of the vaccine. By analyzing who was adversely impacted by the distribution and who ought to wield power, those engaged in decolonizing advocated for positive change and equitable power relations. Equally, when being is the target of decolonization, the language of unlearning or relearning and mental decolonization take centre stage in the decolonization discourse. For example, the quest to decolonize colonized minds aims to demythologize African inferiority and Western superiority. Demythologizing African inferiority enables those engaged in the decolonization discourse to cultivate and foster African agency.[7] Finally, when knowledge production is the target of decolonization, scholars use inclusion and cognitive justice. For example, they try to alter the knowledge that underlies global health ethics.[8] “[D]decolonizing researchers aim to respectfully understand and integrate theory from Other(ed) perspectives, while also critically examining the underlying assumptions that inform their Western research framework.”[9] One common strategy that scholars use in decolonization is inclusion. It is worth asking, does including people who have been subrogated foster decolonization? Whether that is effective depends on whether included people are more heard or whether the strategies to include them create new forms of silencing. III. Inclusion and the Quest to Decolonize Evaluating how effective inclusion is in the quest to de-silence subjugated voices is important. First, inclusive strategies are not neutral. They are epistemically situated. This situatedness constrains meaning-making in different ways: how and what questions are asked, how social roles are constructed, organized or assigned, and who is admitted to the room where these conversations occur.[10] Inclusion strategies may reinforce (unchallenged) assumptions. For example, to address prejudices and stereotypes in global health images, Arsenii Alenichev and his colleagues[11] successfully inverted “one stereotypical global health image” by prompting a generative AI to produce “an image of a traditional Indian or African healer healing a White Child.” Although there were some problems with the image of the White child, this innovation is a significant, useful effort to de-embed or strip global health images of problematic pictures that mythologize White superiority and Black inferiority. Yet it is possible that using categories like traditional Indian or African reinforces unchallenged assumptions, raising key questions regarding how language and words create new stereotypes. It is common to define traditional as non-conventional, unorthodox, and informal. Yet studies continue to reveal that non-scientifically appraised healing approaches in India or Africa are not only effective but also real, meaningful, fundamental, and primary care-seeking behaviours in many communities in these regions.[12] Suppose inclusive strategies are not un-situated. These conversations may be had within the structures, language, and spaces built by or connected to colonialism. The spaces, language, places, and structures in which these conversations occur can limit who can participate and how they participate. Importantly, some conditions are not conducive to participation as equals. The allocated time for the discussion could also constrain how individuals express themselves. It is unclear who is ultimately heard. Furthermore, epistemic situatedness of inclusion can impact decolonization conversations when participants are beneficiaries of, products of, and trained by structures and systems they seek to dismantle. To enhance the decolonization project and its goals, a pressing task is to unveil and question how the circumstances may inhibit activism. If the vestiges of colonialism continue to structure the decolonization discourse invisibly, the vestiges may undermine decolonization. For example, a public health discussion that includes white Western doctors and Western pharmaceutical executives in Africa may have many local Africans at the table but could still effectively devalue their input based on built-in assumptions and biases that are vestiges of colonialism. Second, exclusion and inclusion are also not binary. Individuals may experience exclusion, even while included (the phenomenon called internal exclusion). In other words, inclusion can fail to be substantial or become a means of enhancing optics, “a way of (un)consciously weakening the radical claims being pursued.”[13] For example, in South Africa, many institutions have made significant efforts to diversify their faculties due to the promulgation of the Employment Equity Act 55.[14] The act requires South African institutions to implement employment equity that redresses the history of harmful discrimination in the country. The act further requires transforming departments and institutional administrations. Although many recognize and support the need to transform departments in South Africa, the rhetoric of transformation departs sharply from the lived experiences.[15] This misalignment between the plan and practice is evident in the underrepresentation of black people and females in senior management teams, professorships in many universities and health departments, and positions of power in some South African institutions. Those selected in the transformation of the departments have also complained of being overworked. The burden of extra work undermines their ability to develop agency and voice in the space they now occupy or fulfil key requirements that have implications for their career trajectory.[16] This is called the minority tax. Notably, "the minority tax… is the burden of extra responsibilities [placed] on faculty of colour to achieve diversity and inclusion and contributes to attrition and impedes academic promotion."[17] One challenge for decolonializing projects will be for decolonial scholars and those selected for decolonization objectives to have the humility to decline invitations, requests, roles, and platforms for which they are either unqualified or lack the capacity to fulfil. At its heart, decolonization strategies must empower those included rather than weaken them. Finally, inclusion can lead to a phenomenon known as elite capture.[18] Elite capture occurs when socially advantaged individuals in a group monopolize or exploit activism to their own benefit at the expense of the larger, struggling group. Elite capture weakens decolonization efforts from within, revealing that those likely to benefit from global inclusive efforts are those who fulfil globally constructed standards, those “already present in the room.” There is no better strategy to weaken decolonial movements than weakening the project from within by strategically positioning individuals who share physical properties with the victims of exclusion and silencing but intellectually, behaviourally, psychologically, and emotionally share more common ground with the colonizer. Such insiders may be unaware they are furthering neocolonial conditions rather than decolonizing. In relation to decolonization, particularly in global health, elite capture reveals that those whose voices are loudest in the room are not necessarily those more impacted by colonialism. They may benefit more from reinforcing colonialism. Opportunism weakens meaningful activism from within, preventing good initiatives and strategies from having their intended impact or taking substantive root.[19] This paper cannot do justice to elite capture, but it is worth noting its negative impacts. IV. Improving the Impact of Decolonization To end neo-colonialism, it is important to understand how it manifests and what to do at each level. Beyond the academic discourse, many tangible efforts exist to decolonize through de-silencing. Examples of these efforts include the ME2 movement that seeks to centre the concerns and experiences of sexually abused or harassed victims in the public discourse. At the funding level, many grant-awarding agencies like Wellcome Trust have dedicated huge budgets to studies that help them understand how they may have perpetrated colonialism or neocolonialism and what they can do differently going forward.[20] In South Africa, promulgating the Employment Equity Act 55 was a tangible attempt to entrench decolonization concerns in a country's regulatory framework. Yet, these decolonization efforts could fail to be substantive if they do not reflect cultural sensitivity. Two key components of cultural sensitivity are worth highlighting here: epistemic and cultural humility. Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue described as knowing one’s limitations and the limitations of the learning methods employed. At its simplest, it is the ability to admit when one is wrong. Cultural humility includes genuine attempts to learn about and embrace other cultures. Epistemic and cultural humility are signs of academic excellence and strength. Epistemic and cultural humility seriously acknowledge how the state of our knowledge, cognitive limitations, experiences, and backgrounds, while constraining us, also invite us to listen, learn, grow, and change. The limitations-owing account of epistemic and cultural humility suggests that “a person who is aware of her cognitive limitations and owns them is much better positioned to achieve such epistemic goods as true beliefs and understanding than someone who… simply has insight into the epistemic status of her beliefs.”[21] Epistemic and cultural humility may help prevent decolonization projects that unintentionally reinforce what they seek to dismantle. Epistemic humility calls on decolonizers to defer tasks for which they are not qualified to suitably qualified persons. Beyond this, humility supports brave scholarship that imagines and reimagines how featuring the same voices, faces, and perspectives possibly introduces new forms of domination or silencing. Cultural knowledge can lead to a more intentional way of seeking out the right people or a more diverse group than those frequently featured in decolonization conversations. This would give others more opportunities to navigate these spaces and should do so in ways that are familiar to them. One ought to be more sensitive to those who would ordinarily not be included in these conversations. Unless we radically and boldly reimagine these discussions, we risk alienating those most negatively impacted by neocolonialism. CONCLUSION Decolonization conversations are complex and the subject of academic debate. The strategies employed to decolonize can harm or help the victims of neo-colonialism. Inclusion of previously silenced individuals may not be enough to overcome the vestiges of colonialism, leading to a false inclusion, where those included feel excluded or contribute in ways reflecting their own biases and circumstances. Inclusion of an elite or people who do not truly represent the subjugated can lead to elite capture. For decolonization strategies to be impactful, for example, in the context of global health, project leaders and participants must engage in conversations employing epistemic and cultural humility. In many ways, epistemic and cultural humility can help us demythologize our assumptions of any cultural superiority or cognitive authority, allowing for diverse voices, cultures, and perspectives to emerge without domination. - [1] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [2] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [3] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh 2023. Is decolonisation Africanisation? The politics of belonging in the truly African university. Social Dynamics, 1-20. [4] Rianna Oelofsen 2015. Decolonisation of the African mind and intellectual landscape. Phronimon, 16, 130-146. [5] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [6] Pedro Alexis Tabensky 2008. The Postcolonial Heart of African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 27, 285-295. [7] Nicholas M. Creary 2012. African Intellectuals and Decolonization, Ohio, Ohio University Press. [8] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [9] Vivetha Thambinathan & Elizabeth Anne Kinsella 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Creating Spaces for Transformative Praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 16094069211014766. [10] Abimbola Seye 2023. Knowledge from the global South is in the global South. Journal of Medical Ethics, 49, 337. [11] A. Alenichev, P. Kingori & K. P. Grietens 2023. Reflections before the storm: the AI reproduction of biased imagery in global health visuals. Lancet Glob Health. [12] Jonathan K. Burns & Andrew Tomita 2015. Traditional and religious healers in the pathway to care for people with mental disorders in Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 50, 867-877. [13] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh & Cornelius Ewuoso 2023. What type of inclusion does epistemic injustice require? Journal of Medical Ethics, jme-2023-109091. [14] 1998. Employment Equity Act. In: GOVERNMENT, S. A. (ed.) 19370. [15] Dina Zoe Belluigi & Gladman Thondhlana 2019. ‘Why mouth all the pieties?’ Black and women academics’ revelations about discourses of ‘transformation’ at an historically white South African university. Higher Education, 78, 947-963. [16] Juliet Ramohai & Khomotso Marumo 2016. Women in Senior Positions in South African Higher Education: A Reflection on Voice and Agency. 231, 135-157. [17] J. Trejo 2020. The burden of service for faculty of color to achieve diversity and inclusion: the minority tax. Mol Biol Cell, 31, 2752-2754. [18] Olufemi Taiwo 2020. Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference. The Philosopher, 108, 7. [19] Margarita Kurbatova & Elena Kagan 2016. Opportunism of University Lecturers As a Way to Adaptate the External Control Activities Strengthening. Journal of Institutional Studies, 8, 116-136. [20] Jeremy Farrar. 2022. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme [Online]. Available from: https://wellcome.org/news/update-wellcomes-anti-racism-programme [Accessed August 10, 2022 2022]. [21] Katherine Dormandy 2018. Does Epistemic Humility Threaten Religious Beliefs? Journal of Psychology and Theology, 46, 292-304. (shrink)

Volume 19 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_ turns to the ever-intriguing relationship between "Psychoanalysis and Art." This introductory section begins with Donald Kuspit's scholarly reflections on the role of analysis in visual art and art criticism, and then proceeds to a series of topical studies on Freud and art introduced by Harry Trosman. Egyptologist Lorelei Corcoran explores the Egypt of Freud's imagination, thereby illuminating our understanding of the archaeological metaphor. Marion Tolpin offers new insights into Freud's analysis of the (...) American writer Hilda Doolittle by focusing on the meaning of the Goddess Athene - whose statue rested on Freud's desk - to both analyst and analysand. Stephen Toulmin examines Freud's artistic sensibility - and places the historical significance of Freud's art collection in bold relief - by looking at the many contemporary art objects Freud chose _not_ to collect. Danielle Knafo identifies key events in the early life of Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele that were "primary determinants" of the content and form of his self-portraits. And Barbara Almond examines the spontaneous healing process depicted in Margaret Drabble's novel _The Needle's Eye _as an analogue to the kind of growth and development mobilized by the psychoanalytic process. Section II, "Psychoanalysis and Development," begins with Barbara Fajardo's appreciation of the contribution of biology to analyzability; she reviews findings from both infant research and biogenetic research that tend toward an understanding of "constitution" as resilience in development and, subsequently, in treatment. Benjamin Garber adds to the psychoanalytic understanding of childhood learning disabilities by presenting the three-and-a-half-year analysis of a learning-disabled child. In a fascinating two-part contribution, "Bridging the Chasm Between Developmental Theory and Clinical Theory," Joseph Palombo sheds light on some of the knottiest problems in contemporary analysis, including the relationship between childhood events and the reconstruction of those events in treatment. In Section III, "Psychoanalysis and Empathy," Mary Newsome presents case material in support of her claim that the analyst's empathic understanding catalyzes the coalescence of the patient's affect and aim, that is, the patient's capacity to believe in and then realize his ambitions. The acquisition of the capacity, she contends, not only betokens a specific kind of structure formation, but is the bedrock of emerging self-cohesion. Her challenging paper is thoughtfully discussed by David Terman and Jerome Winer. Section IV of _The Annual_ offers Jerome Kavka's appreciation of the work of N. Lionel Blitzsten. Blitzsten, the first Chicago psychoanalyst and one of America's most gifted clinicians and teachers, anticipated modern concepts of narcissism in identifying "narcissistic neuroses" with special treatment requirements. Morris Sklansky furthers our understanding of Blitzsten in his discussion of Kavka's essay. Ranging across the analytic canvas with presentations as edifying as they are provocative, volume 19 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_ challenges readers to wrestle with issues at the cutting edge of the discipline. It takes a well-deserved place in the preeminent continuing series in the field. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Working with Patience:An Insight into Dealing with Difficult EmotionsDavid VilanovaAs the most trusted professionals in the nation, nurses are expected to care for their patients with empathy and freedom from bias. The reality is that nurses are human, and some form of implicit bias is inevitable. In my own experience, this issue has reared its head on several occasions. My nursing background is prominently in cardiac and intensive care. (...) Seeing patients at their most vulnerable has become a regular part of my practice. Among some of the most challenging cases for me have been when I assume care of a patient withdrawing from alcohol. As an adult child with close alcoholic family members, many instances of abuse and pain stick with me today and these are brought to the surface when I care for patients with alcohol use disorder. In most cases, I easily find a healthy balance between remaining an understanding-and-empathetic provider and protecting my emotional and mental health as I navigate ethical and moral issues. However, with this patient population, walking that fine line is especially challenging. How do I navigate and manage intensely personal emotions and biases while providing the high-quality care I vowed to deliver regardless of my patient's life choices, addictions, and illnesses? How do I maintain an appropriate level of neutrality and clarity as this patient's behavior and attitude spark emotional triggers? In other words, how do I take care of someone I don't like?Mrs. H was a middle-aged Hispanic woman, barely coherent, but speaking clearly enough that I could understand her slurred speech. Immediate dread washed over me as I realized my assignment included a patient withdrawing from alcohol. The patient's affect, incoherence, and aggression were all too reminiscent of a traumatic past I still work to heal from. My coworkers couldn't understand her insults and obscenities and were therefore unphased except for noting her unruly and erratic behavior. On the other hand, I could understand much of what she was yelling at me and any other staff who bravely walked into her room. My immediate thoughts were that this woman clearly did not want our help. My every attempt to enter her room, speak with her, and provide care were met with an all too familiar rejection and denial that she even had a problem. Yet here she was in a hospital room, and I was her nurse. She verbalized denial of drinking too much when told that she was being treated for alcohol withdrawal. She stated this denial more to herself than to the health care providers in the room, and it was reminiscent of the denial I have seen in my loved ones. This was ironic, I always thought, as the need for such self-deception in and of itself points to the fact that something may be wrong and worth addressing.But denial or not, today, this patient—Mrs. H, was entrusted into my care. She refused treatments and medications, and this put me in a complex ethical predicament—treating a patient that I do not like for the personal issues she reminds me of, and the treatment of a patient against their refusal, as she was deemed incapable of making her own decisions. The latter of these two issues was easiest to put aside. Legally, this patient needed to be treated through her alcohol withdrawal. Once her mental status cleared up, she could sign out against medical advice or choose to remain until a safe discharge plan was in place. There was a protocol and legal guidelines for this situation. However, no guidelines [End Page 10] truly exist when it comes to the management of a patient that you simply do not like. The result can be a near-instantaneous dread each time you must answer that patient's bed alarm, call light, or most basic needs. A negative bias takes over, and it would be an understatement to say that this affects the quality of care. Patients in situations like this—with providers who judge them as I have been guilty of—can easily become subject to derogatory remarks, health inequities, and biased labeling... (shrink)

Emotional processing and episodic memory are closely related throughout childhood development. With respect to emotional episodic memory, available evidence shows that the consolidation of information is accompanied by an arousal that generates longer duration and persistence of the memory representations. In the case of early stages of development (i.e., first 5 years), it is less clear how these associations emerge and are modulated by individual and environmental factors. In this study, 116 4- to 5-years old Argentinean children from different socio-environmental (...) contexts (i.e., favorable or unfavorable living conditions at home), performed a task of visual emotional memory in which they observed a set of 15 images with variable emotional valences (negative, neutral, and positive). The child’s task was to appraise each image using one of the following three possible valences: (a) drawings of faces with smiles (positive valence), (b) drawings of faces with tears and round mouth with edges down (negative valence), or (c) drawings of faces with horizontal mouth (neutral valence). Five years-old children exhibited greater accuracy appraisal. Individual differences in emotional accuracy appraisal allowed us to observe different performances in free recall of negative visual images. Accuracy appraisal did not vary between children with respect to gender, living conditions at home, or language ability. Seven to ten days after the emotional appraisal children were asked to tell the experimenter all the images they remembered (variables of interest: free recall of negative, positive, or neutral images). Results showed individual (age) differences. Specifically, 5-years-old children evoked more images than 4-years-old children. These findings contribute to the understanding of emotional memory in early developmental stages and raise the need to include emotional appraisal in the assessment of episodic memory. (shrink)