Iconic signs are overrepresented in the vocabularies of young deaf children, but it is unclear why. It is possible that iconic signs are easier for children to learn, but it is also possible that adults use iconic signs in child-directed signing in ways that make them more learnable, either by using them more often than less iconic signs or by lengthening them. We analyzed videos of naturalistic play sessions between parents and deaf children aged 9–60 months. To determine whether iconic (...) signs are overrepresented during child-directed signing, we compared the iconicity of actual parent productions to the iconicity of simulated vocabularies designed to estimate chance levels of iconicity. For almost all dyads, parent sign types and tokens were not more iconic than the simulated vocabularies, suggesting that parents do not select more iconic signs during child-directed signing. To determine whether iconic signs are more likely to be lengthened, we ran a linear regression predicting sign duration, and found an interaction between age and iconicity: while parents of younger children produced non-iconic and iconic signs with similar durations, parents of older children produced non-iconic signs with shorter durations than iconic signs. Thus, parents sign more quickly with older children than younger children, and iconic signs appear to resist that reduction in sign length. It is possible that iconic signs are perceptually available longer, and their availability is a candidate hypothesis as to why iconic signs are overrepresented in children’s vocabularies. (shrink)

Dans ce livre richement illustré et documenté, Marie-Jo Bonnet s'interroge sur la symbolique du couple de femmes dans l'art, en privilégiant l'exemple français, et ressuscite des figures d'artistes oubliées, comme Louise Janin, ou méconnues, telles Louise Abbéma ou Claude Cahun. Tribades, précieuses, amazones et garçonnes sont conviées à livrer leurs secrets : Marie-Jo Bonnet s'intéresse à la mise en scène du désir, longtemps orchestrée en fonction des attentes du spectateur masculin,...

Plusieurs hommes et femmes britanniques, inscrits dans des mouvements pour la réforme parlementaire en Grande-Bretagne, s’installèrent à Paris après la chute de la Bastille en juillet 1789 afin d’observer de plus près les événements de la Révolution française et d’y participer. Pour certains, c’est la chute de la monarchie le 10 août 1792 qui devient le moteur de leur engagement politique sur le sol français. Cet article a pour but de replacer les écrits des membres de la communauté britannique (...) à Paris sur la Révolution dans leur contexte diplomatique et politique. Il se penche tout d’abord sur la réception de la Révolution française en Grande-Bretagne, avant de s’intéresser à la naissance du club politique qui rassembla les Britanniques et Irlandais partisans de la Révolution française et domiciliés à Paris et qui sera connu sous le nom de la « Société des amis des droits de l’homme ». Il s’attache ensuite à faire l’état des lieux des contributions des Britanniques au débat sur la rédaction d’une nouvelle constitution républicaine entre octobre 1792 et février 1793, en portant une attention particulière à la façon dont ces derniers appréhendèrent l’idée d’un gouvernement fondé sur la souveraineté populaire. Enfin, il jette un éclairage sur la façon dont ces auteurs – témoins oculaires des événements – appréhendèrent la Révolution et dont ils tentèrent, en insistant sur la véracité de leurs témoignages, d’infléchir l’opinion nationale dans leur pays natal. (shrink)

Tous ceux qui s’intéressent à la vie et à l’œuvre de Descartes connaissent l’épisode rapporté par Adrien Baillet dans sa Vie de monsieur Descartes et évoqué par Descartes lui-même dans une lettre à son ami Villebressieu en 1631 : vers la fin des années 1620, le jeune Descartes participa à Paris chez le nonce apostolique, le cardinal Guidi di Bagno, à une « assemblée de personnes savantes et curieuses », parmi lesquelles le cardinal de Berulle et Mersenne. L’orateur était..

« Nous pensons qu’un recueil de lettres écrites par ces amies de notre Fédération constituerait une précieuse contribution à l’histoire de la guerre de 1939-1945 » écrit dans son rapport d’activité à l’AFDU (Association Française des Femmes Diplômées) Marie-Louise Puech en 1946. Rémy Cazals, professeur d’histoire contemporaine à l’Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, avec ce livre, met en oeuvre ce programme et nous livre ainsi un des multiples trésors qu’il a dénichés dans les archives publique...

Drawing on my experiences at a teaching-focused university, I show how locating the health humanities in first-year or introductory composition courses improves learning and offers an economical, flexible, and far-reaching approach to bringing a health humanities education to all baccalaureate-level learners, regardless of whether they aspire to careers in the health professions. In terms of improving learning, health humanities composition courses support the disciplinary aims of both fields. Accessible, relevant issues in the health humanities, such as interventions in health debates (...) or representations of illness and healthcare settings, nourish the cognitive and social conditions needed to develop college-level writing skills. The health humanities’ emphases on interdisciplinarity and suspending judgment also inform students’ writing abilities. Composition trains students to write rhetorically by considering purpose, context, genre, mode, and other factors when addressing an audience. This approach to writing helps pre-health humanists communicate intentionally and compassionately about health topics as well as the larger issues they call into question. Because students enroll in health humanities composition courses at an early, formative moment in their studies, they are poised to carry or “transfer” their knowledge to other courses, including those that might prepare them for the workforce. (shrink)

En avril 1775, alors que le ministère Turgot rencontre les plus vives oppositions et attaques et va devoir affronter les émeutes liées au prix du blé, les amis de Turgot, D'Alembert et Condorcet, sont à des postes clés de la cité savante : le premier comme secrétaire perpétuel de l'Académie française, le second comme adjoint du secrétaire perpétuel de l'académie royale des sciences de Paris, Grandjean de Fouchy, dont le retrait est attendu. Dans une lettre à Joseph-Louis de Lagrange, (...) alors directeur de la classe de mathématiques à l'académie de Berlin, D'Alembert se plaint que Condorcet et lui essuient des « tracasseries » à l'Académie des sciences. Au même moment, Mme Grandjean de Fouchy, demande à D'Alembert six mille francs pour éviter l'expulsion de leur logement. Comment ces différents événements interfèrent-ils ? (shrink)

Liz Jackson is Professor of Education and Head of Department of International Education at the Education University of Hong Kong. Liz served as the President of the Philosophy of Education Society...

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a host of ethical challenges, but key among these has been the possibility that health care systems might need to ration scarce critical care resources. Rationing p...

Introduction : the politics of our selves -- Foucault, subjectivity, and the enlightenment : a critical reappraisal -- The impurity of practical reason : power and autonomy in Foucault -- Dependency, subordination, and recognition : Butler on subjection -- Empowering the lifeworld? autonomy and power in Habermas -- Contextualizing critical theory -- Engendering critical theory.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 2022.

Feminist theory needs both explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian moments in order to be truly critical and truly feminist. However, the explanatory-diagnostic task of analyzing the workings of gendered power relations in all of their depth and complexity seems to undercut the very possibility of emancipation on which the anticipatory-utopian task relies. In this paper, I take this looming paradox as an invitation to rethink our understanding of emancipation and its relation to the anticipatory-utopian dimensions of critique, asking what conception of emancipation (...) is compatible with a complex explanatory-diagnostic analysis of contemporary gender domination as it is intertwined and entangled with race, class, sexuality, and empire. I explore this question through an analysis of two specific debates in which the paradoxical relationship between power and emancipation emerges in particularly salient and seemingly intractable forms: debates over subjection and modernity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that a negativistic conception of emancipation offers the best way for feminist critical theory to transform the paradox of power and emancipation into a productive tension that can fuel critique. (shrink)

Our exemplar of a Native American relational ethic is depicted through the Seven Grandfather Teachings, an ancient sacred story of Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples. These teachings state that human beings are responsible to act with wisdom, respect, love, honesty, humility, bravery, and truth toward each other and all creation. We illustrate the possible uses of this ethic through exercises wherein students reflect on the values and learn lessons related to ethics, leadership, teamwork, and relationships, or create stories using Native American (...) story form. (shrink)

This essay develops a concept of curiotization, through which people are reduced to a curio for the fascination of others. I argue that trans people as they have appeared in media, philosophy, and narratives of history are curiotized as forever fascinating, new, titillating, and controversial. In contrast to the narrative of momentous trans progress in the mid-2010s, I point out that frameworks such as the "Transgender Tipping Point" worked to position its "trans moment" as unprecedented and always on the threshold (...) of arrival. To work through a specific example, I point to decades of renewed fascination over trans women being capable of breastfeeding and the long history of trans fascination in popular music. I conclude by emphasizing the obscured world-historical presence of transsexuality as it coincides with the history of pharmaceuticals, hormone technologies, and birth control. In contrast to a "goldfish memory optics" through which trans people become eternally new, fascinating, and debatable, I stress the importance of restoring the complexity of "trans" and its histories back into an understanding of the present. (shrink)

This essay meditates on the short film American Reflexxx and the violent laughter directed at a non-trans woman in public space when she was assumed to be trans. Drawing from work on the ideological and institutional dimensions of transphobia by Talia Bettcher and Viviane Namaste, alongside Sara Ahmed's writing on the cultural politics of disgust, I reverse engineer this specific instance of laughter into a meditation on the social meaning of transphobic laughter in public space. I then look at racialized (...) transphobic laughter directed against Tyra Hunter and Miriam Rivera to emphasize transmisogynist laughter as a denial of contact, intimacy, and care. Building on Kate Manne's work on misogyny, I conclude that a key aspect of transmisogyny is the use of transfeminine people as a source of dehumanized, disavowed, and disposable care and intimacy. Laughter and accompanying violence against trans women serves to reinforce this dynamic. (shrink)

This paper is a sequel to an earlier result of the authors that in making inferences from certain probabilistic knowledge bases the maximum entropy inference process, ME, is the only inference process respecting “common sense.” This result was criticized on the grounds that the probabilistic knowledge bases considered are unnatural and that ignorance of dependence should not be identified with statistical independence. We argue against these criticisms and also against the more general criticism that ME is representation dependent. In a (...) final section, however, we provide a criticism of our own of ME, and of inference processes in general, namely that they fail to satisfy compactness. (shrink)

The tension between reason and power has a long and illustrious history in political theory. In his magnum opus of legal and political theory, "Between Facts and Norms," Jürgen Habermas presents his most complex, sophisticated, and ambitious attempt to confront this tension. My thesis in this article is that though Habermas’s political theory thematizes the tension between reason and power in a way that is initially quite promising, he ultimately forecloses that tension in the direction of a rationality that has (...) been conceptually and methodologically purified of the strategic power relations that pervade social reality. His attempt to insulate his Arendtian notion of communicative power (which he conceptualizes in BFN as a force of legitimation) from strategic power is not only unattainable in practice, I argue, but conceptually incoherent. This should compel him not to abandon his normative theoretical and political agenda, I suggest, but to defend it in a more contextualist way than he has been willing to do up until now. (shrink)

In “The Standing to Blame: A Critique” (2013), Macalester Bell challenges theories that claim that ‘standing’ plays a central role in blaming practices. These standard accounts posit that it is not enough for the target of blame to be blameworthy; the blamer also must have the proper standing to blame the wrongdoer. Bell identifies and criticizes four different standing conditions, (1) the Business Condition, (2) the Contemporary Condition, (3) the Nonhypocricy Condition, and (4) the Noncomplicity Condition. According to standard accounts, (...) these conditions must be met in order for a would-be blamer to properly blame a wrongdoer. In this paper, I defend the Business Condition against Bell’s critique. My argument, then, is that some version of the standard account survives and ‘standing’ should be part of our theory of properly-wielded blame. I conclude by raising two additional concerns regarding the agency of blamers and the possibility that, without proper standing, a blamer could make things worse. (shrink)

Morally supererogatory actions are traditionally conceived of as actions that are nonobligatory but distinctively morally worthy. Here I challenge the assumption that supererogatory actions are distinctively praiseworthy and offer an alternative definition of moral supererogation. This alternative definition complements, and is complemented by, a novel account of moral praiseworthiness, which I call the Two-Step view. My Two-Step view of moral worth, which I develop in some detail, accounts for currently underappreciated features of moral praiseworthiness.

Applying the graded response model within the item response theory framework, the present study analyzes the psychometric properties of Karwowski’s creative self-efficacy scale. With an ethnically diverse sample of US college students, the results suggested that the six items of the CSE scale were well fitted to a latent unidimensional structure. The scale also had adequate measurement precision or reliability, high levels of item discrimination, and an appropriate range of item difficulty. Gender-based differential item functioning analyses confirmed that there were (...) no differences in the measurement results of the scale concerning gender. Additionally, openness to experience was found to be positively related to the CSE scale scores, providing some support for the scale’s convergent validity. Collectively, these results confirmed the psychometric soundness of the CSE scale for measuring CSE and also identified avenues for future research. (shrink)

This paper re-examines the relationship between power, reason and history in Horkheimer and Adorno’s "Dialectic of Enlightenment." Contesting Habermas’ highly influential reading of the text, I argue that "Dialectic of Enlightenment," far from being a dead-end for critical theory, opens up important lines of thought in the philosophy of history that contemporary critical theorists would do well to recover. My focus is on the relationship that Horkheimer and Adorno trace between enlightenment rationality and the domination of inner and outer nature.

Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Jürgen Habermas - one of the most important European philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - has produced a prodigious and influential body of work. In this Lexicon, authored by an international team of scholars, over 200 entries define and explain the key concepts, categories, philosophemes, themes, debates, and names associated with the entire constellation of Habermas's thought. The entries explore the historical, philosophical and social-theoretic roots of these terms and concepts, as (...) well as their intellectual and disciplinary contexts, to build a broad but detailed picture of the development and trajectory of Habermas as a thinker. The volume will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Habermas, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, political science, sociology, international relations, cultural studies, and law. (shrink)

In some sense, bioethics was built on conflicts. Abortion, physician‐assisted suicide, patients’ demand for autonomy all are staple and contentious issues. And the controversies continue to proliferate. What forum best serves such debates? A look at political theories of democracy can help answer that question. The most promising for bioethics debates are theories that ask citizens and officials to justify any demands for collective action by giving reasons that can be accepted by those who are bound by the action. This (...) conception has come to be known as deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Purpose: This study explores social networkers' interest in and attitudes toward personal genome testing (PGT), focusing on expectations related to the clinical integration of PGT results. Methods: An online survey of 1,087 social networking users was conducted to assess 1) use and interest in PGT; 2) attitudes toward PGT companies and test results; and 3) expectations for the clinical integration of PGT. Descriptive statistics were calculated to summarize respondents' characteristics and responses. Results: Six percent of respondents have used PGT, 64% (...) would consider using PGT, and 30% would not use PGT. Of those who would consider using PGT, 74% report they would use it to gain knowledge about disease in their family. 34% of all respondents consider the information obtained from PGT to be a medical diagnosis. 78% of those who would consider PGT would ask their physician for help interpreting test results, and 61% of all respondents believe physicians have a professional obligation to help individuals interpret PGT results. Conclusion: Respondents express interest in using PGT services, primarily for purposes related to their medical care and expect physicians to help interpret PGT results. Physicians should therefore be prepared for patient demands for information and counsel on the basis of PGT results. (shrink)

In his account of critical theory as diagnosing social pathologies of reason, Axel Honneth has rehabilitated the analogy between critical theory and psychoanalysis – according to which the critical theorist stands in relation to the pathological social order as the analyst stands in relation to the analysand, and the aim of critical theory is to effect the diagnosis and, ultimately, the cure of social disorders or pathologies. In this article, I show that Honneth, like Habermas before him, has an overly (...) rationalistic understanding of how psychoanalysis works and crucially downplays the role of affect in the therapeutic process of working through. Looking to Freud’s papers on analytic technique, I show that psychoanalysis works first and foremost not through rational insight, but rather through the dynamic reworking of affect. I then discuss some of the implications of this for Habermas and Honneth’s conceptualization of critical theory. (shrink)

If, as Axel Honneth has recently argued, critical theory needs psychoanalysis for meta-normative and explanatory reasons, this does not settle the question of which version of psychoanalysis critical theorists should embrace. In this paper, I argue against Honneth's favoured version – an intersubjectivist interpretation of Winnicott's object-relations theory – and in favour of an alternative based on the drive-theoretical work of Melanie Klein. Klein's work, I argue, provides critical theorists with a more realistic conception of the person and a richer (...) explanatory account of human aggression and destructiveness than does Honneth's intersubjectivist view. As such, it better serves the ends for which Honneth claims that critical theory should turn to psychoanalysis in the first place. (shrink)

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

In this article, I take up one strand – arguably the central one – of the Foucault/Habermas debate: their respective accounts of subjectivation. Against those who hold that Foucault and Habermas occupy such drastically different theoretical perspectives as to preclude the integration of their views into a common framework, I begin to lay the groundwork for an account of subjectivation that draws on the conceptual insights to be found on each side of the debate. While both Foucault and Habermas offer (...) a one-sided analysis of subjectivation – Foucault emphasizes its power-ladenness, and Habermas its communicative, rational, intersubjective aspects – I argue that subjectivation necessarily entails both communicative rationality and power relationships. I then consider the implications of my comparative argument for both Foucault and Habermas’s broader philosophical projects. (shrink)

This paper argues that feminists have yet to develop a satisfactory account of power. Existing feminist accounts of power tend to have a one-sided emphasis either on power as domination or on power as empowerment. This conceptual one-sided-ness must be overcome if feminists are to develop an account complex enough to illuminate women's diverse experiences with power. Such an account is sketched here.

A collection of essays on the work of Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel, focusing on his ethics of liberation.

In this paper, we explore the perspectives of expert stakeholders about who owns data in a medical information commons and what rights and interests ought to be recognized when developing a governance structure for an MIC. We then examine the legitimacy of these claims based on legal and ethical analysis and explore an alternative framework for thinking about participants' rights and interests in an MIC.

Neural substrates of fatigue in traumatic brain injury are not well understood despite the considerable burden of fatigue on return to productivity. Fatigue is associated with diminishing performance under conditions of high cognitive demand, sense of effort, or need for motivation, all of which are associated with cognitive control brain network integrity. We hypothesize that the pathophysiology of TBI results in damage to diffuse cognitive control networks, disrupting coordination of moment-to-moment monitoring, prediction, and regulation of behavior. We investigate the cingulo-opercular (...) and frontoparietal networks, which are engaged to sustain attention for task and maintain performance. A total of 61 individuals with mild TBI and 42 orthopedic control subjects participated in functional MRI during performance of a constant effort task requiring altering the amount of effort utilized to manually squeeze a pneumostatic bulb across six 30-s trials. Network-based statistics assessed within-network organization and fluctuation with task manipulations by group. Results demonstrate small group differences in network organization, but considerable group differences in the evolution of task-related modulation of connectivity. The mild TBI group demonstrated elevated CO connectivity throughout the task with little variation in effort level or time on task, while CO connectivity diminished over time in controls. Several interregional CO connections were predictive of fatigue in the TBI group. In contrast, FP connectivity fluctuated with task manipulations and predicted fatigue in the controls, but connectivity fluctuations were delayed in the mild traumatic brain injury group and did not relate to fatigue. Thus, the mTBI group’s hyper-connectivity of the CO irrespective of task demands, along with hypo-connectivity and delayed peak connectivity of the FP, may allow for attainment of task goals, but also contributes to fatigue. Findings are discussed in relation to performance monitoring of prediction error that relies on internal cues from sensorimotor feedback during task performance. Delay or inability to detect and respond to prediction errors in TBI, particularly evident in bilateral insula-temporal CO connectivity, corresponds to day-to-day fatigue and fatigue during task performance. (shrink)

Although Judith Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender has been highly influential in feminist theory, queer theory, cultural studies, and some areas of philosophy, it has yet to receive its due from critical social theorists. This oversight is especially problematic given the crucial insights into the study of power – a central concept for critical social theory – that can be gleaned from Butler’s work. Her analysis is somewhat unique among discussions of power in its attempt to theorize simultaneously (...) both the features of cultural domination in contemporary societies and the possibilities of resistance to and subversion of such domination. Although I will maintain here that this attempt is not entirely successful, I nevertheless argue that Butler’s account makes crucial contributions to a feminist critical theory of power; as a result, it merits much more serious attention from critical theorists. (shrink)