Kaum ein Buch hat so viele und so kontroverse Reaktionen verursacht wie Simone de Beauvoirs "Das Andere Geschlecht". Der Sammelband gibt einen Einblick in die aktuelle internationale Beauvoir-Debatte und die Art und Weise wie das fünfzigjährige Jubiläum des "Anderen Geschlechts" gefeiert wurde. Die Autorinnen versuchen die verschiedenen Grundthemen von Beauvoirs Werk, wie Geschlecht und Körper (D. Lamoureux, M. Couillard, M. L. Femenías), Gleichheit und Differenz (S. Kruks, Y. Raynova, S. Bainbrigge), Ausschluss und Anerkennung (D. Bergoffen, S. Moser), Verantwortung und (...) Engagement (F. Rétif, N. Bauer, K. Arp, Dauphin, C. Gater), aus der Perspektive der Gegenwart neu zu beleuchten. Darüber hinaus enthält der Band biographische (K. Vintges, B. Weisshaupt) und bibliographische Beiträge, die ihn zu einem Nachschlagewerk und zu einer Dokumentation der gegenwärtigen Beauvoirforschung werden lassen. Aus dem Inhalt: Françoise Rétif: Zur Aktualität von Simone de Beauvoir oder die Dialektik des Engagements - Nancy Bauer: First Philosophy, "The Second Sex", and the Third Wave - Debra Bergoffen: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: Woman, Man and the Desire to be God - Elaine Stavro-Pearce: Transgressing Sartre: embodied situated subjects in "The Second Sex" - Susanne Moser: Subjekt und Anerkennung: Zum Problem des Ausschlusses von Frauen und Weiblichkeit im" Anderen Geschlecht" - Diane Lamoureux: Der Paradox des Körpers bei Simone de Beauvoir - Marie Couillard: Die Lesbierin bei Simone de Beauvoir und Nicole Brossard - María Luisa Femenías: Beauvoir revisited: Butler and the "gender" question - Sonia Kruks: Panopticism and Shame: Reading Foucault through Beauvoir - Yvanka B. Raynova: Für eine postmoderne Ethik der Gerechtigkeit: Simone de Beauvoir und Jean-François Lyotard - Kristana Arp: Moral obligation in Simone de Beauvoir's "The Ethics of Ambiguity" - Susan Bainbrigge: The Impact of Simone de Beauvoir's "universel singularisé" on the Politics of Representation and the Representation of Politics - Sandrine Dauphin: From Socialism to radical Feminism: Militant foundations in Simone de Beauvoir's Writings - Claudia Gather: Simone de Beauvoir, eine Klassikerin der feministischen Soziologie? - Karen Vintges: Beauvoir's autobiography: "autofiction" or selftechnique? - Brigitte Weisshaupt: Simone de Beauvoir und Jean-Paul Sartre. Eine Anmerkung - Susanne Moser/Yvanka B. Raynova: "50 Jahre 'Das andere Geschlecht'": Zur internationalen Konferenz in Paris (19.-23.01.1999). (shrink)

What distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs? Is hatred a necessarily evil? Are some evils unforgivable? Are there evils we should tolerate? What can make evils hard to recognize? Are evils inevitable? How can we best respond to and live with evils? Claudia Card offers a secular theory of evil that responds to these questions and more. Evils, according to her theory, have two fundamental components. One component is reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm -- harm that makes a life indecent and (...) impossible or that makes a death indecent. The other component is culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities, such as genocides, slavery, war rape, torture, and severe child abuse, are Card's paradigms because in them these key elements are writ large. Atrocities deserve more attention than secular philosophers have so far paid them. They are distinguished from ordinary wrongs not by the psychological states of evildoers but by the seriousness of the harm that is done. Evildoers need not be sadistic:they may simply be negligent or unscrupulous in pursuing their goals. Card's theory represents a compromise between classic utilitarian and stoic alternatives (including Kant's theory of radical evil). Utilitarians tend to reduce evils to their harms; Stoics tend to reduce evils to the wickedness of perpetrators: Card accepts neither reduction. She also responds to Nietzsche's challenges about the worth of the concept of evil, and she uses her theory to argue that evils are more important than merely unjust inequalities. She applies the theory in explorations of war rape and violence against intimates. She also takes up what Primo Levi called "the gray zone", where victims become complicit in perpetrating on others evils that threaten to engulf themselves. While most past accounts of evil have focused on perpetrators, Card begins instead from the position of the victims, but then considers more generally how to respond to -- and live with -- evils, as victims, as perpetrators, and as those who have become both. (shrink)

Although the character of the “lady detective”is a staple of the cozy mystery genre, we contend that there are no great lady detectives to rival Holmes or Poirot. This is not because there are no clever or interesting lady detective characters, but ratherbecause the concept of greatness is sociallyconstructed and, like coolness, depends on public acclaim and perception. We explore the mechanics of genre formation, arguing that the very structure of cozy mysteries precludes female greatness. To create a “great”character,theauthor cannot (...) just endowher with certain attributes; she must actively work to overcome her audience’s tendency to import structures of oppression into the story, and she must wrestle against the conventions of the genre. In doing so, however, authors risk setting their stories in a wholly different genre. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology contains 19 previously unpublished chapters by today's leading figures in the field. These chapters function not only as a survey of key areas, but as original scholarship on a range of vital topics. Written accessibly for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and professional philosophers, the Handbook explains the main ideas and problems of contemporary epistemology while avoiding overly technical detail.

One way to silence the powerless, Langton has taught us, is to pre-emptively disable their ability to do things with words. In this paper I argue that speakers can be silenced in a different way. You can let them speak, and obscure the meaning of their words afterwards. My aim is to investigate this form of silencing, that I call retroactive distortion. In a retroactive distortion, the meaning of the words of a speaker is distorted by the effect of a (...) subsequent speech act by a different speaker. After introducing this notion, I explore some reasons why retroactive distortions can be difficult to challenge and argue that, besides constituting a communicative injustice, they can eliminate topics from public consideration and therefore erode public debate. (shrink)

The article introduces the problematics of the classical two-valued logic on which Western thought is generally based, outlining that under the conditions of its logical assumptions the subject I is situated in a world that it cannot address. In this context, the article outlines a short history of cybernetics and the shift from first- to second-order cybernetics. The basic principles of Gordon Pask’s 1976 Conversation Theory are introduced. It is argued that this second-order theory grants agency to others through a (...) re-conception of living beings as You logically transcending the I. The key principles of Conversation Theory are set in relation to the poetic forms of discourse that played a key role in art as well as philosophical thinking in China in the past. Second-order thinking, the article argues, is essentially poetic. It foregoes prediction in favour of the potentiality of encountering tomorrow’s delights. (shrink)

The editorial introduces issue 21.1 of Technoetic Arts via a critical reflection on the artificial intelligence hype (AI hype) that emerged in 2022. Tracing the history of the critique of Large Language Models, the editorial underscores that there are substantial ethical challenges related to bias in the training data, copyright issues, as well as ecological challeges which the technology industry has consistently downplayed over the years. -/- The editorial highlights the distinction between the current AI technology’s reliance on extensive pre-existing (...) human-generated data for pattern recognition and the performative process inherent in art practice. Patterns of creative output can be replicated without a thorough understanding of underlying concepts. In contrast, the performative process of art practice, as explored through the conceptual frameworks of creativity by Noam Chomsky, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Roger T. Ames and with reference to an earlier publication of the editorial’s author, creates concepts and continually ‘strives to extend itself towards the unknown.’ -/- Following this introductory section, the editorial provides an overview of the ten articles featured in this issue of Technoetic Arts. The first four texts engage with emerging technologies from various perspectives in art and design. The subsequent six articles, part of a special section titled 'Perspectives from Chandigarh,' reflect a quest for meaningful existence within colonial, patriarchal, and biopolitical structures that frame everyday practices of exclusion and oppression. (shrink)

Since the beginning of philosophy, philosophers have sought objective knowledge: knowledge of things whose existence does not depend on one's conceiving of them. This book uses lessons from debates over objective knowledge to characterize the kinds of reasons pertinent to philosophical and other theoretical views. It argues that we cannot meet skeptics' typical demands for nonquestion-begging support for claims to objective truth, and that therefore we should not regard our supporting reasons as resistant to skeptical challenges. One key lesson is (...) that a constructive, explanatory approach to philosophy must change the subject from skeptic-resistant reasons to perspectival reasons arising from variable semantic commitments and instrumental, purpose-relative considerations. The book lays foundations for such a reorientation of philosophy, treating fundamental methodological issues in ontology, epistemology, the theory of meaning, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of practical rationality. It explains how certain perennial debates in philosophy rest not on genuine disagreement, but on conceptual diversity: talk about different matters. The book shows how acknowledgment of conceptual diversity can resolve a range of traditional disputes in philosophy. It also explains why philosophers need not anchor their discipline in the physicalism of the natural sciences. (shrink)

Sibylle Moser untersucht am Beispiel des Handlungsbegriffs die argumentative Komplexität der Empirischen Theorie der Literatur (ETL) und stellt den Entwurf einer konstruktivistischen Methodologie vor.

Statements such as “X is beautiful but I don’t like how it looks” or “I like how X looks but it is not beautiful” sound contradictory. How contradictory they sound might however depend on the object X and on the aesthetic adjective being used (“beautiful”, “elegant”, “dynamic”, etc.). In our study, the first sentence was estimated to be more contradictory than the latter: If we describe something as beautiful, we often intend to evaluate its appearance, whereas it is less counterintuitive (...) to appreciate an appearance without finding it beautiful. Furthermore, statements including “beautiful” appeared more contradictory than those including “elegant” and “dynamic”, pointing to its greater evaluative component. When related to artworks, sentences could appear less contradictory due to readers’ consideration of the divergence between conventional beauty and art-related sensory pleasures that can even include negative valence. Such ambivalence might be more frequent in art-objects than in other artefacts. Indeed, in our study, sentences referring to artworks were estimated to be less contradictory compared to sentences referring to other artefacts. Meanwhile, an additional small group of graphic design students showed a less clear difference between art-related and non-art-related sentences. We discuss the potential influence of art experience and interest as well as theoretical and methodological challenges like the conceptualization of beauty. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, this is a book about truth and the criteria thereof. Thus it is, in a sense, a book about justification and rationality. But it does not purport to be about the notion of justification or the notion of rationality. For the assumption that there is just one notion of justification, or just one notion of rationality, is, as the book explains, very misleading. Justification and rationality come in various kinds. And to that extent, at least, we should recognize (...) a variety of notions of justification and rationality. This, at any rate, is one of the morals of Chapter VI. This book, in Chapters I-V, is mainly concerned with the kind of justification and rationality characteristic of a truth-seeker, specifically a seeker of truth about the world impinging upon the senses: the so-called empirical world. Hence the book's title. But since the prominent contemporary approaches to empirical justification are many and varied, so also are the epistemological issues taken up in the following chapters. For instance, there will be questions about so-called coherence and its role, if any, in empirical justification. And there will be questions about social consensus (whatever it is) and its significance, or the lack thereof, to empirical justification. Furthermore, the perennial question of whether, and if so how, empirical knowledge has so-called founda­ tions will be given special attention. (shrink)

In this book, Paul K. Moser offers a new approach to religious experience and the kind of evidence it provides. Here, he explains the nature of theistic and non-theistic experience in relation to the meaning of human life and its underlying evidence, with special attention given to the perspectives of Tolstoy, Buddha, Confucius, Krishna, Moses, the apostle Paul, and Muhammad. Among the many topics explored in this timely volume are: religious experience characterized in a unifying conception; religious experience naturalized (...) relative to science; religious experience psychologized in merely psychological phenomena; and religious experience cognized relative to potential defeaters from evil, divine hiddenness, and religious diversity. Understanding Religious Experience will benefit those interested in the nature of religion and can be used in relevant courses in religious studies, philosophy, theology, Biblical studies, and the history of religion. (shrink)

Addressing studying as a distinct educational concept and phenomenon in its own right, the essays in this volume consider study and studying from a range of perspectives. Countering dominant educational discourses, which place a heavy emphasis on learning and instruction, the contributors explore questions such as: What does it mean to study something? How is studying something different from being taught about it, or learning something about it? What does the difficulty demanded by study mean for the one who studies (...) and for the teacher? What mode of existence does study induce? The book highlights the significance of study not only, or even primarily, for its educational outcome, but as a human activity. (shrink)

Subjekt, Objekt und Intersubjektivitat bilden drei der wohl zentralsten Elemente im menschlichen Erkenntnisprozess. Anhand einer kritischen Rekonstruktion der Erkenntnistheorien Hegels und Adornos beleuchtet die vorliegende Arbeit die Dialektik zwischen Subjekt und Objekt der Erkenntnis aus zwei verschiedenen Perspektiven. Durch den grundsatzlichen Paradigmenwechsel Habermas' von der Bewusstseinsphilosophie zu einem kommunikationstheoretischen Paradigma wird es moglich, <I>kommunikative Intersubjektivitat als unverzichtbares Element der Erkenntnis angemessen zu thematisieren.<BR> Der Gang von Hegel uber Adorno zu Habermas wird in der vorliegenden Monographie nicht als ein stetiger Fortschritt (...) verstanden, an dessen Zielpunkt die Habermas'sche Theorie als der Weisheit letzter Schluss stehen wurde. Vielmehr erweist sich der Dreischritt selbst als ein dialektischer, der am Ende, angereichert durch Erfahrungen, wieder in seinen Ausgangspunkt mundet. So endet die Untersuchung letztlich mit dem kommunikationstheoretisch angereicherten Desiderat einer modernen Subjekttheorie.". (shrink)

This book is an accessible introduction to contemporary epistemology, the theory of knowledge. It introduces traditional topics in epistemology within the context of contemporary debates about the definition, sources, and limits of human knowledge. Rich in examples and written in an engaging style, it explains the field while avoiding technical detail. It relates epistemology to work in cognitive science and defends a plausible version of explanationism regarding epistemological method.

Many philosophers are again examining the traditional topic of a priori knowledge, or knowledge that does not depend on sensory experience. This volume collects the most important recent essays on the subject by well-known thinkers such as A.J. Ayer, W.V. Quine, Barry Stroud, C.I. Lewis, Hilary Putnam, Roderick M. Chisholm, Saul A. Kripke, Albert Casullo, R.G. Swinburne, and Philip Kitcher. Including an introduction by the editor and an extensive bibliography, this book provides philosophers and students with an in-depth look at (...) contemporary investigations into the nature of a priori knowledge. (shrink)

In recent times, phenomena of conversational asymmetry have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers—under various labels: illocutionary disablement and silencing, discursive injustice :440–457, 2014; Lance and Kukla in Ethics 123:456–478, 2013), illocutionary distortion. The common idea is that members of underprivileged groups sometimes have trouble performing particular speech acts that they are entitled to perform: in certain contexts, their performative potential is somehow undermined, and their capacity to do things with words is (...) distorted or even annulled. In this paper I will assess this idea, focusing on Rebecca Kukla’s and Rae Langton’s accounts; in particular, I will criticize the role the notion of uptake plays in their accounts, and claim that it may ultimately undermine the very idea of discursive injustice. While, according to Kukla and Langton, members of disadvantaged groups are victims of a kind of uptake failure, leading to illocutionary disablement and even silencing, in the account I present they are victims of a kind of communicative disablement. My overall aim is to develop a notion of discursive injustice that is more plausible and more effective for our broader purposes of criticising the structures of power and oppression. (shrink)

Clinical Ethics Consultation (CEC) has grown significantly in the last decade, and efforts are being made to professionalize the practice. The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) has been instrumental in this process, having published the _Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibilities for Healthcare Ethics Consultants_ and founded and endorsed the creation of the _Healthcare Ethics Consultant Certified (HCEC) Certification Commission._ The ASBH also published “core competencies” for healthcare ethics consultants and has delineated a clear identity and role of (...) such consultants distinct from that other healthcare professionals. In addition, more enter the field armed with advanced degrees (MA and PhD) or certification in clinical ethics consultation. While some have questioned the trend toward professionalization, the momentum is clearly in its favor. This paper explores three questions: Does the professionalization of healthcare ethics consultation expose those engaged in the field to the types of liability claims faced by professionals in other fields? What specific liabilities could affect a healthcare ethics consultant? And finally, what should healthcare ethics consultants do to protect themselves against liability claims? We conclude that while the risk of liability remains low, those engaged in the field should accept that risk just as part of their status as professionals and, like those in allied professions, seek appropriate protection in the form of liability insurance. (shrink)

This transdisciplinary project represents the most comprehensive study of imagination to date. The eclectic group of international scholars who comprise _Imagination and Art_ propose bold and innovative theoretical frameworks for conceptualizing imagination in all of its divergent forms.

This article contains criticisms of various interpretations of Mill's argument for Utilitarianism. An attempt is made to explain how Mill conceived the rationality of his proof, and how his justification of the Principle of Utility differs from a justification of fundamental moral principles on the basis of the logic of ethical discourse.

Health-care goods are goods with peculiar properties, and where they are scarce, societies face potentially explosive distributional conflicts. Animated public and academic debates on the necessity and possible justice of limit-setting in health care have taken place in the last decades and have recently taken a turn toward procedural rather than substantial criteria for justice. This article argues that the most influential account of procedural justice in health-care rationing, presented by Daniels and Sabin, is indeterminate where concrete properties of rationing (...) institutions are concerned. Such properties inscribe substantial norms into institutions. These norms can derive validity only from democratic majority decisions, which must be seen as an instance of pure procedural justice. We therefore have to move the discussion to a meta-level and ask how concrete properties of institutions are being chosen. I suggest four criteria for sufficiently democratic institutional design choice and conclude that as institutional properties are likely to have effects on the resulting distribution of health care, design choices should be empirically informed and taken both democratically and deliberately. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory terms targeting individuals and groups of individuals on the basis of race, nationality, religion, gender or sexual orientation. The aim of my paper is to propose an account of appropriated uses of slurs – i.e. uses by targeted groups of their own slurs for non-derogatory purposes, as in the appropriation of ‘nigger’ by the African-American community, or the appropriation of ‘queer’ by the homosexual community. In my proposal appropriated uses are conceived as echoic, in Relevance Theory terms: (...) in-groups echo derogatory uses in ways and contexts that make manifest the dissociation from the offensive contents. I will show that the echoic strategy has interesting advantages over alternative theories, and especially over Anderson and Lepore’s deflationary strategy. (shrink)

Das ethische Prinzip des Respekts vor der Autonomie des Patienten/Probanden hat in der modernen Medizin mittlerweile weltweit Bedeutung erlangt. Die Betonung der Autonomie des Patienten und Probanden in allen in der letzten Zeit verabschiedeten internationalen Deklarationen gibt dieser Tendenz unmissverständlich Ausdruck. Doch wenngleich diese Entwicklung unstrittig positiv ist, wirft sie dennoch eine Reihe von Fragen auf, die mit der Kodifizierung, Interpretation, Reichweite und Anwendung dieses universalen Prinzips verbunden sind. Die Antworten auf diese Fragen entscheiden darüber, ob Autonomie als hilfreiches, emanzipatorisches (...) oder als überforderndes, gar hegemoniales Prinzip begriffen wird. Diese normativen Probleme werden anhand von Beispielen aus der globalen Medizinethik verdeutlicht. Was in modernen Gesellschaften als Autonomie bezeichnet und für die Praxis fruchtbar gemacht wird, ist als ein soziales Konstrukt zu verstehen, nicht im Sinne einer Schimäre, sondern im Sinne einer soziokulturellen Leistung, die auf komplexen, historisch gewachsenen und kulturell geprägten Interaktionen von Gesellschaften, Institutionen und Individuen beruht. (shrink)

Following the traces of Margaret Mead’s statement that emphasized that the first photographic images of the Earth from space presented notions of fragility, the article contextualizes the recent critique of the dominant representation of the Earth as a globe that emerged in conjunction with the discourse on the Anthropocene. It analyses the globe as an image and the sentiments that accompanied it since the first photographs of our planet from space were published in 1968. The article outlines how the cultural (...) meaning of the whole Earth representation changed in parallel with the appropriation of the image by the large technological enterprises that emerged from America’s counterculture. It returns to the possibility of a coexistence of ‘views from within’ and ‘views from without’ following a detour with Gregory Bateson via Bali and proposes a Cybernetics of Grace as a practice of resistance against pure exteriority. The article concludes by linking the Cybernetics of Grace with the second-order conversations of Gordon Pask. (shrink)

The opportunities to become a good person are not the same for everyone. Modern European ethical theory, especially Kantian ethics, assumes the same virtues are accessible to all who are capable of rational choice. Character development, however, is affected by circumstances, such as those of wealth and socially constructed categories of gender, race, and sexual orientation, which introduce factors beyond the control of individuals. Implications of these influences for morality have, since the work of Williams and Nagel in the seventies, (...) raised questions in philosophy about the concept of moral luck. In The Unnatural Lottery, Claudia Card examines how luck enters into moral character and considers how some of those who are oppressed can develop responsibility. Luck is often best appreciated by those who have known relatively bad luck and have been unable to escape steady comparison of their lot with those of others. The author takes as her paradigms the luck of middle and lower classes of women who face violence and exploitation, of lesbians who face continuing pressure to hide or self-destruct, of culturally Christian whites who have ethnic privilege, and of adult survivors of child abuse. How have such people been affected by luck in who they are and can become, the good lives available to them, the evils they may be liable to embody? Other philosophers have explored the luck of those who begin from privileged positions and then suffer reversals of fortune. Claudia Card focuses on the more common cases of those who begin from socially disadvantaged positions, and she considers some who find their good luck troubling when its source is the unnatural lottery of social injustice. (shrink)

Das ethische Prinzip des Respekts vor der Autonomie des Patienten/Probanden hat in der modernen Medizin mittlerweile weltweit Bedeutung erlangt. Die Betonung der Autonomie des Patienten und Probanden in allen in der letzten Zeit verabschiedeten internationalen Deklarationen gibt dieser Tendenz unmissverständlich Ausdruck. Doch wenngleich diese Entwicklung unstrittig positiv ist, wirft sie dennoch eine Reihe von Fragen auf, die mit der Kodifizierung, Interpretation, Reichweite und Anwendung dieses universalen Prinzips verbunden sind. Die Antworten auf diese Fragen entscheiden darüber, ob Autonomie als hilfreiches, emanzipatorisches (...) oder als überforderndes, gar hegemoniales Prinzip begriffen wird. Diese normativen Probleme werden anhand von Beispielen aus der globalen Medizinethik verdeutlicht. Was in modernen Gesellschaften als Autonomie bezeichnet und für die Praxis fruchtbar gemacht wird, ist als ein soziales Konstrukt zu verstehen, nicht im Sinne einer Schimäre, sondern im Sinne einer soziokulturellen Leistung, die auf komplexen, historisch gewachsenen und kulturell geprägten Interaktionen von Gesellschaften, Institutionen und Individuen beruht. (shrink)