Agricultural modernisation is a longstanding goal of China’s Party-state. Since the early 2000s, it has pursued this goal through policies designed to facilitate land consolidation and support the expansion of large agricultural enterprises – ‘New Agricultural Operators’ (NAOs). In this paper we explore the effect of these policies on the livelihoods of a cohort of smallholder orange growers in the mountainous regions of Hubei province and the local political economy. An analysis of data from a 2019 survey of 266 households (...) and interviews with villagers, agribusiness executives, cooperative leaders, and government officials, we find smallholder farmers are earning good incomes as independent commodity producers, withstanding attempts by local officials at land consolidation, and bypassing NAOs to self-determine their own modes of production and exchange. Our results speak to the ongoing debate about the future of smallholder farming in China, identify the strengths and limitations of recent state-centric analyses of agrarian transition, and re-iterate the pitfalls of the central government’s agricultural modernisation agenda. (shrink)

This is Thomas Reid's greatest work. It covers far more philosophical ground than the earlier, more popular Inquiry. The Intellectual Powers and its companion volume, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, constitute the fullest, most original presentation of the philosophy of Common Sense. In the process, Reid provides acutely critical discussions of an impressive array of thinkers but especially of David Hume. In Reid's eyes, Hume had driven a deep tendency in modern philosophy to its ultimate conclusions by creating (...) a phantom-world of so-called 'ideas' that sprang from objects of observation; the self was a conglomeration of perceived ideas; and the will as the source of action was nothing but the balance of passionate impulses. -/- Reid's Common Sense philosophy answers these problems by suggesting that sceptics, such as Hume, unavoidably affirm what they purport to deny, namely the existence of a stable external world, of other minds, of the continuity of their own minds, and of their own and other people's ability to ascribe and accept responsibility for actions. We can understand all of this by proper empirical observation and philosophical analysis of the activity of the mind. Reid's major positive contribution to philosophy is a detailed account of the various innate powers of the mind. While particularly influential in the first half of the nineteenth century, Reid's work has retained a significant role in philosophy, not least in recent years. At the same time, his role in the Scottish Enlightenment is becoming much better understood. -/- This is the only properly established text. It is accompanied by manuscript lectures on the nature and immortality of the soul, as well as helpful editorial annotation and introduction, making it useful to a wide variety of readers. -/- Key Features: -/- Accurate, reliable and critically established text; The Introduction explains the work's genesis and its place in Reid's system; Annotations provide an understanding of Reid's context; An Appendix contains manuscript material covering an important topic not represented in the hitherto published work. (shrink)

Thomas Reid (1710–96) is increasingly being seen as a highly significant philosopher and a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. This new edition of Reid's classic philosophical text in the philosophy of mind at long last gives scholars a complete, critically edited text of the Inquiry. The critical text is based on the fourth life-time edition (1785). A selection of related documents showing the development of Reid's thought, textual notes, bibliographical details of previous editions and a full introduction by the (...) editor makes this an important contribution to the study of this increasingly respected philosopher. -/- Key Features - Complete, critically edited text of the Inquiry accompanied by a judicious selection of manuscript evidence relating to its composition - Comprehensive Introduction providing an historical and philosophical account of the formation of the Inquiry - Detailed textual notes which include bibliographical details and allusions, translations, references to secondary literature and selected passages from Reid's manuscripts. (shrink)

Many normative political theorists have engaged in the systematic collection and/or analysis of empirical data to inform the development of their arguments over the past several decades. Yet, the approach they employ has typically not been treated as a distinctive mode of theorizing. It has been mostly overlooked in surveys of normative political theory methods and methodologies, as well as by those critics who assert that political theory is too abstracted from actual political contestation. Our aim is to unearth this (...) grounded normative theory (GNT) approach – to identify its definitive practices and highlight its potential significance. We detail four overlapping commitments characteristic of GNT. These include commitments to expanding the comprehensiveness of input for normative arguments through original empirical research and/or analysis, recursivity in the development of normative claims, attentiveness to the systematic inclusion of a range of voices and ways of knowing, and accountability to those engaged by the theorist in empirical contexts. We discuss methodological distinctions within GNT, including between more- and less-solidaristic approaches. We discuss how GNT answers calls for theorists to engage more closely with empirical political dynamics and we consider responses to possible critiques. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, this study investigates how U.S. higher education leaders have centered their crisis management on values and guiding ethical principles. We conducted 55 in-depth interviews with leaders from 30 U.S. higher education institutions, with most leaders participating in two interviews. We found that crisis plans created prior to the COVID-19 pandemic were inadequate due to the long duration and highly uncertain nature of the crisis. Instead, higher education leaders applied guiding principles on the fly (...) to support their decision-making. If colleges and universities infuse shared values into their future crisis plans, they will not have to develop a moral compass on the fly for the next pandemic. This paper suggests the following somewhat universal shared values: engage in accuracy, transparency, and accountability; foster deliberative dialog; prioritize safety; support justice, fairness, and equity; and engage in an ethic of care. To navigate ethics tensions, leaders need to possess crisis-relevant expertise or ensure that such expertise is present among crisis management team members. Standing up formal ethics committees composed of diverse stakeholders also is instrumental in navigating tensions inherent in crises. The next pandemic is already on the horizon according to experts. Through infusing values into future crisis plans, higher education leaders can be confident that their responses will be grounded in their communities’ shared values. (shrink)

Can we respond to injustices in the world in ways that do more than just address their consequences? In this book, Brooke A. Ackerly argues that what to do about injustice is not just an ethical or moral question, but a political question about assuming responsibility for injustice. Ultimately, Just Responsibility offers a theory of global injustice and political responsibility that can guide action.

Some people feel distressed reflecting on human extinction. Some people even claim that our efforts and lives would be empty and pointless if humanity becomes extinct, even if this will not occur for millions of years. In this essay, I will attempt to demonstrate that this claim is false. The desire for long-lastingness or quasi-immortality is often unwittingly adopted as a standard for judging whether our efforts are significant. If we accomplish our goals and then later in life conclude that (...) these accomplishments were of no significance, then this is a sign that the desire for long-lastingness has crept into our standards. By recognizing this, and refraining from adopting an unreasonable standard to judge whether our efforts are significant, it will be to our advantage. Then, when we look back on life from an external perspective that encompasses times after humanity has become extinct, we will not conclude that our efforts amounted to nothing. Rather, we will conclude that many people made significant accomplishments that made their lives and the lives of other people better than they would have been if their goals had never been pursued. (shrink)

This paper presents the relationship between pedagogical content knowledge and political/ideological clarity as a framework for understanding the nuanced interpretations and applications of critical social studies pedagogy and practice. Using a qualitative case study research design, this study explores the decision-making process of two novice social studies teachers as they decide if and how to utilize critical historical inquiry within their classrooms. Findings indicate that teachers’ use of critical historical inquiry is informed by their subject area consciousness and political and (...) ideological clarity which is cultivated through personal, schooling, and communal experiences. However, we also find that a teacher's pedagogy is significantly strengthened when political and ideological clarity are coupled with pedagogical content knowledge to ensure a more developed enactment of critical historical inquiry is reached within the social studies classroom. (shrink)

D. M. Armstrong is an eminent Australian philosopher whose work over many years has dealt with such subjects as: the nature of possibility, concepts of the particular and the general, causes and laws of nature, and the nature of human consciousness. This collection of essays explores the many facets of Armstrong's work, concentrating on his more recent interests. There are four sections to the book: possibility and identity, universals, laws and causality, and philosophy of mind. The contributors comprise an international (...) group of philosophers from the United States, England and Australia. An interesting feature of the volume is that Armstrong himself has written responses to each of the essays. There is also a complete bibliography of Armstrong's writings. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory predicts that humans should avoid incest because of the negative effects incest has on individual reproduction: production of defective offspring. Selection for the avoidance of close-kin mating has apparently resulted in a psychological mechanism that promotes voluntary incest avoidance. Most human societies are thought to have rules regulating incest. If incest is avoided, why are social rules constructed to regulate it? This target article suggests that incest rules do not exist primarily to regulate close-kin mating but to regulate (...) inbreeding between more distant kin and sexual relations between affinal relatives. Three evolutionary hypotheses about cousin marriage and affinal kin mating follow from this suggestion: Rules regulating mating between affinal kin are means of paternity protection. Cousin marriage is regulated because, if it occurs, it can concentrate wealth and power within families to the detriment of the powerful positions of rulers in stratified societies and the relatively equal social statuses of most men in egalitarian societies. Tests using the comparative method on a worldwide sample of 129 societies supported the three hypotheses. Two alternative anthropological hypotheses failed to be supported. (shrink)

From the diverse work and often competing insights of women's human rights activists, Brooke Ackerly has written a feminist and a universal theory of human rights that bridges the relativists' concerns about universalizing from particulars and the activists' commitment to justice. Unlike universal theories that rely on shared commitments to divine authority or to an 'enlightened' way of reasoning, Ackerly's theory relies on rigorous methodological attention to difference and disagreement. She sets out human rights as at once a research (...) ethic, a tool for criticism of injustice and a call to recognize our obligations to promote justice through our actions. This book will be of great interest to political theorists, feminist and gender studies scholars and researchers of social movements. (shrink)

This article explores how anticipations of parenthood differentially affect the career aspirations and choices of women and men who have not had children. Drawing from in-depth interviews conducted separately with 60 coupled young adults, I find that women in my sample were disproportionately likely to think and worry about future parenthood in their imagined work paths. Moreover, women were more likely than men to alter or downshift their present-day career goals in anticipation of the changes in preferences and responsibilities that (...) accompany new parenthood. Because men were unlikely to engage in the mental work of anticipating parenthood, they were also free from its emotional and behavioral consequences. In this way, gendered anticipations of parenthood, which begin relatively early in an individual’s career path, are likely to play a key role in reproducing patterns of labor market inequality even before the real constraints of parenthood have set in. (shrink)

In Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, Brooke Ackerly demonstrates the shortcomings of contemporary deliberative democratic theory, relativism and essentialism for guiding the practice of social criticism in the real, imperfect world. Drawing theoretical implications from the activism of Third World feminists who help bring to public audiences the voices of women silenced by coercion, Brooke Ackerly provides a practicable model of social criticism. She argues that feminist critics have managed to achieve in practice what other theorists do (...) only incompletely in theory. Complemented by Third World feminist social criticism, deliberative democratic theory becomes critical theory - actionable, coherent, and self-reflective. While a complement to democratic theory, Third World feminist social criticism also addresses the problem in feminist theory associated with attempts to deal with identity politics. Third World feminist social criticism thus takes feminist theory beyond the critical impasse of the tension between anti-relativist and anti-essentialist feminist theory. (shrink)

Today data art is a full-fledged and maturing artistic practice. Like painting, artists are creating new visuals and representations with data. Like sculpture, artists are recombining bits to build something new out of the commonplace. Like photography, artists are using data to mirror or reflect contemporary society. In my own practice for the last 15 years I have been using data to make works at the intersection of art, design and activism with a recent focus on environmental topics. It is (...) my belief that through improved representation of, access to and public involvement with data we can increase understanding of important issues and provoke behavioural and systemic change. In this paper, I will examine the evolution of my work using data as my medium as well as outline tactics for data art to promote change. (shrink)

Stem cell research has important implications for medicine. The source of stem cells influences their therapeutic potential, with stem cells derived from early-stage embryos remaining the most versatile. Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), a source of embryonic stem cells, allows for understandings about disease development and, more importantly, the ability to yield embryonic stem cell lines that are genetically matched to the somatic cell donor. However, SCNT requires women to donate eggs, which involves injection of ovulation-inducing hormones and egg retrieval (...) through laparoscopy or transvaginal needle aspiration. Risks from this procedure are fiercely debated, most notably risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS). This review examines risk of OHSS resulting from oocyte donation. We conclude that risk posed by OHSS in egg donation is not significant enough to warrant undue concern, and much of this can be eliminated when proper precautions are taken. This bears relevance to the future of stem cell research policymaking. (shrink)

This comprehensive introductory text with readings offers a historical overview of all major subdivisions of Western Philosophy perspectives--including both the analytic and Continental traditions--as well as Eastern philosophy, postcolonial philosophy, and feminist philosophy. Written in an engaging and captivating style, it makes philosophy accessible without oversimplifying the material, and shows that philosophy's powerful ideas affect the lives of real people.

Margaret Cavendish’s views about the nature of bodies and perception leave her with a potentially problematic implication: that light has no role in visual perception. For her, perception occurs through the self-motion of animate matter, not through a mechanical system that appeals to local motions and collisions of contiguous bodies. This means that motion is not transferred from external objects with light playing a mediating role; the matter of our eyes simply moves itself to copy the sensible qualities of external (...) bodies. However, Cavendish cannot ignore the simple empirical fact that we appear to have visual perceptions in the presence of light but not in the presence of darkness. Light must play some role. I argue that light for Cavendish plays an intermediary role but does not transfer motions as the mechanical model suggests. Rather, light behaves like our eyes by moving itself to form copies of external objects. Our eyes then see these copies. For Cavendish, we are directly acquainted with a “veil of light” rather than the objects themselves. (shrink)

The division of labor has typically been portrayed as a complementary strategy in which men and women work on separate tasks to achieve a common goal of provisioning the family. In this paper, we propose that task specialization between female kin might also play an important role in women’s social and economic strategies. We use historic group composition data from a population of Western Desert Martu Aborigines to show how women maintained access to same-sex kin over the lifespan. Our results (...) show that adult women had more same-sex kin and more closely related kin present than adult men, and they retained these links after marriage. Maternal co-residence was more prevalent for married women than for married men, and there is evidence that mothers may be strategizing to live with daughters at critical intervals—early in their reproductive careers and when they do not have other close female kin in the group. The maintenance of female kin networks across the lifespan allows for the possibility of cooperative breeding as well as an all-female division of labor. (shrink)

Explores the work of Guo Xiang, a Neo-Taoist thinker who developed a radical philosophy of freedom and spontaneity.

Throughout history, many people, including Mother Teresa, have been troubled by God’s silence. In spite of the conflicting interpretations of the Bible, God has remained silent. What are the implications of divine hiddenness/silence for a meaning of life? Is there a good reason that explains God’s silence? If God created humanity to fulfill a purpose, then God would have clarified his purpose and our role by now, as I will argue. To help God carry out his purpose, we would need (...) to have a clear understanding of our role. Thus, by failing to clarify our role, God would be undermining himself in achieving the purpose he conceived, which would not make sense. Because God, if he exists, would not engage in this self-defeating behavior, this suggests that humanity was not created by God to fulfill a purpose. (shrink)

The fact that especially few women survive in a subject that attracts roughly equal numbers of male and female undergraduates suggests that, while bothsexes are equally drawn to philosophy, there is something about the discipline that is discouraging to women.

David Benatar claims that everyone was seriously harmed by coming into existence. To spare future persons from this suffering, we should cease having children, Benatar argues, with the result that humanity would gradually go extinct. Benatar’s claim of universal serious harm is baseless. Each year, an estimated 94% of children born throughout the world do not have a serious birth defect. Furthermore, studies show that most people do not experience chronic pain. Although nearly everyone experiences acute pain and discomforts, such (...) as thirst, these experiences have instrumental value. For example, when a person picks up a hot object, in response to the pain, the person releases the object, thereby preventing serious harm. The standard that Benatar uses to evaluate the quality of our lives is arbitrary, as I will demonstrate. His proposal that we phase humanity out of existence by ceasing to have children is misguided and an overreaction to the problem of human suffering. The ‘threshold conception of harm’, which is a targeted approach for preventing future persons from suffering, is a more sensible approach. (shrink)

Some people feel threatened by the thought that life might have arisen by chance. What is it about “chance” that some people find so threatening? If life originated by chance, this suggests that life was unintended and that it was not inevitable. It is ironic that people care about whether life in general was intended, but may not have ever wondered whether their own existence was intended by their parents. If it does not matter to us whether one's own existence (...) was intended, as will be hypothesized, then why should it matter whether there was some remote intent behind the creation of the first unicellular organism(s) billions of years ago? I will discuss three possible scenarios by which life might have originated. I will then argue that, in regard to whether one’s individual life can be meaningful, it does not matter whether life was intended or arose by chance. If complex life was unintended and is rare in this universe, this is not a reason to disparage life, but a reason to appreciate and value our existence. -/- . (shrink)

More than any other textbook, Moore and Parker's Critical Thinking has defined the structure and content of the critical thinking course at colleges and universities across the country--and has done so with a witty writing style that students enjoy. Now in full-color, the eighth edition brings the concepts of critical thinking to life in vivid detail, with current examples relevant to today's students.

This article identifies a foundation for Confucian democratic political thought in Confucian thought. Each of the three aspects emphasized is controversial, but supported by views held within the historical debates and development of Confucian political thought and practice. This democratic interpretation of Confucian political thought leads to (1) an expectation that all people are capable of ren and therefore potentially virtuous contributors to political life; (2) an expectation that the institutions of political, social, and economic life function so as to (...) develop the virtue of being a perfected human being; and (3) an expectation that there be public spacefor political criticism and for ongoing contestation over the duties and behaviors of individual leaders and citizens and over the functioning of the institutions that am to cultivate their behavior. (shrink)

Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning their grandchildren as well as helping their daughters with household chores and productive labor. Previous studies have investigated these contributions across a broad time period, from infancy through toddlerhood. Here, we extend and refine the grandmothering literature to investigate the perinatal period as a critical window for grandmaternal contributions. We propose that mother-daughter co-residence during this period affords targeted grandmaternal effort during a period of heightened vulnerability (...) and appreciable impact. We conducted two focus groups and 37 semi-structured interviews with Himba women. Interviews focused on experiences from their first and, if applicable, their most recent birth and included information on social support, domains of teaching and learning, and infant feeding practices. Our qualitative findings reveal three domains in which grandmothers contribute: learning to mother, breastfeeding support, and postnatal health and well-being. We show that informational, emotional, and instrumental support provided to new mothers and their neonates during the perinatal period can aid in the establishment of the mother-infant bond, buffer maternal energy balance, and improve nutritional outcomes for infants. These findings demonstrate that the role of grandmother can be crucial, even when alloparenting is common and breastfeeding is frequent and highly visible. Situated within the broader anthropological and clinical literature, these findings substantiate the claim that humans have evolved in an adaptive sociocultural perinatal complex in which grandmothers provide significant contributions to the health and well-being of their reproductive-age daughters and grandchildren. (shrink)

Across a wide variety of cultural settings, kin have been shown to play an important role in promoting women’s reproductive success. Patrilocal postmarital residence is a potential hindrance to maintaining these support networks, raising the question: how do women preserve and foster relationships with their natal kin when propinquity is disrupted? Using census and interview data from the Himba, a group of semi-nomadic African pastoralists, I first show that although women have reduced kin propinquity after marriage, more than half of (...) married women are visiting with their kin at a given time. Mobility recall data further show that married women travel more than unmarried women, and that women consistently return to stay with kin around the time of giving birth. Divorce and death of a spouse also trigger a return to living with kin, leading to a cumulative pattern of kin coresidence across the lifespan. These data suggest that patrilocality may be less of a constraint on female kin support than has been previously assumed. (shrink)

This article identifies a foundation for Confucian democratic political thought in Confucian thought. Each of the three aspects emphasized is controversial, but supported by views held within the historical debates and development of Confucian political thought and practice. This democratic interpretation of Confucian political thought leads to an expectation that all people are capable of ren and therefore potentially virtuous contributors to political life; an expectation that the institutions of political, social, and economic life function so as to develop the (...) virtue of being a perfected human being; and an expectation that there be public space for political criticism and for ongoing contestation over the duties and behaviors of individual leaders and citizens and over the functioning of the institutions that are to cultivate their behavior. (shrink)

The most widespread interpretation amongst contemporary theorists of Kant's theory of punishment is that it is retributivist. On the contrary, I will argue there are very different senses in which Kant discusses punishment. He endorses retribution for moral law transgressions and consequentialist considerations for positive law violations. When these standpoints are taken into consideration, Kant's theory of punishment is more coherent and unified than previously thought. This reading uncovers a new problem in Kant's theory of punishment. By assuming a potential (...) offender's intentional disposition as Kant does without knowing it for certain, we further exacerbate the opportunity for misdiagnosis. (shrink)

Tiantai Buddhism emerged from an idiosyncratic and innovative interpretation of the Lotus Sutra to become one of the most complete, systematic, and influential schools of philosophical thought developed in East Asia. Brook A. Ziporyn puts Tiantai into dialogue with modern philosophical concerns to draw out its implications for ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Ziporyn explains Tiantai’s unlikely roots, its positions of extreme affirmation and rejection, its religious skepticism and embrace of religious myth, and its view of human consciousness. Ziporyn reveals the (...) profound insights of Tiantai Buddhism while stimulating philosophical reflection on its unexpected effects. (shrink)

The mother–adult daughter relationship has been highlighted in both the social sciences and the public health literature as an important facet of social support networks, particularly as they pertain to maternal and child health. Evolutionary anthropologists also have shown positive associations between support from maternal grandmothers and various outcomes related to reproductive success; however, many of these studies rely on proximity as a surrogate measure of support. Here I present data from the Puerto Rican Maternal and Infant Health Survey (PRMIHS) (...) comparing geographic proximity of mother and daughter with a self-reported measure of mother-to-daughter support. These two measures were used to predict infant health outcomes as well as various measures of instrumental and emotional aid provided during pregnancy and after birth. Primary support was shown to have a positive effect across the analyses, whereas geographic proximity was associated with an increased risk of infant mortality and low birth weight as well as reduced odds of receiving support. This paradox was then examined using a combination variable that teased out the interactions of maternal support and proximity. Women who were geographically close to their mothers but who did not consider them a primary source of support had increased odds of infant death and low birth weight, and were less likely to receive either tangible or intangible forms of aid, while women whose mothers were both close and primary showed uniformly positive outcomes. These results place the role of propinquity within the larger context of social support and highlight the need for more detailed studies of social support within evolutionary anthropology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis symposium brings together normative and empirical scholars in dialogue on Brooke Ackerly’s innovative and compelling recent monograph, Just Responsibility. Contributors discuss the book’s distinctive grounded normative theory methodology, its arguments for how individuals can take appropriate responsibility for global structural injustices, and its potential for practical impact.

In Book 9 of Plato's Republic we find three proofs for the claim that the just person is happier than the unjust person. Curiously, Socrates does not seem to consider these arguments to be coequal when he announces the third and final proof as ‘the greatest and most decisive of the overthrows’. This remark raises a couple of related questions for the interpreter. Whatever precise sense we give to μέγιστον and κυριώτατον in this passage, Socrates is clearly appealing to an (...) argumentative standard of some kind, and claiming that his final argument alone meets this standard. But what precise standard is Socrates invoking here? And given that the first two arguments of Book 9 fall short of this standard, why does he not simply leap directly to the third, most decisive proof? (shrink)

This essay builds on various critiques of the relationship between the voice and autonomous individual subjectivity, briefly tracking the specific history through which the voice transformed into an ideal object representing the liberal subject of post-Enlightenment thought. This paper asks: what are we to make of those enfleshed voices that do not conform to the ideal voice of the self-possessed liberal subject? What are we to make of those voices that refuse the imperative of improvement that underpins social and economic (...) contractualism? How might we attend to the sonicity of those voices that refuse to individuate, possess, and accumulate? And what fugitive modes of speech might be transmitted by such un-formed and un-organized voices? Against the idealized voice of liberalism, and the gendered and racialized exclusions that this voice implies, I propose a mode of fugitive listening that allows us to open our ears to the noisy voices and modes of speech that sound outside the locus of politics proper. Indebted to the Black radical tradition, fugitive listening attends to sonic practices that refuse the given grounds of representation. I argue that fugitive listening is a practice that can be situated in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call ‘the undercommons’. The essay concludes by turning to gossip, figuring this noisy modality of speech as central to undercommon spaces shaped by Black performance. (shrink)

_Continues the author’s inquiry into the development of the Chinese philosophical concept Li, concluding in Song and Ming dynasty Neo-Confucianism._.