Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Women face extraordinary difficulty in seeking sterilization as physicians routinely deny them the procedure. Physicians defend such denials by citing the possibility of future regret, a well‐studied phenomenon in women’s sterilization literature. Regret is, however, a problematic emotion upon which to deny reproductive freedom as regret is neither satisfactorily defined and measured, nor is it centered in analogous cases regarding men’s decision to undergo sterilization or the decision of women to undergo fertility treatment. Why then is regret such a concern (...) in the voluntary sterilization of women? I argue that regret is centered in women’s voluntary sterilization due to pronatalism or expectations that womanhood means motherhood. Women seeking voluntary sterilization are regarded as a deviant identity that rejects what is taken to be their essential role of motherhood and they are thus seen as vulnerable to regret. (shrink)

This conversation between two scholars of international law focuses on the contemporary realities of feminist analysis of international law and on current and future spaces of resistance. It notes that feminism has moved from the margin towards the centre, but that this has also come at a cost. As the language of women’s rights and gender equality has travelled into the international policy worlds of crisis management and peace and security, feminist scholars need to become more careful in their analysis (...) and find new ways of resistance. While noting that we live in dangerous times, this is also a hopeful discussion. (shrink)

Here, the authors focus on leaders who dare to lead their schools, districts, universities, and educational organizations to new possibilities. The leadership practices of the individuals featured contribute significantly to craft knowledge and to the discourse on contemporary issues of educational leadership. This book is a report of the results of a collective qualitative inquiry into the leadership of eighteen impressive women educational leaders from Illinois, representing a diversity of roles, community sizes, institutional types, and racial perspectives.

This essay uses the phenomenal advent of women's climbing as a paradigm case for integrating feminism and phenomenology, and for analyzing how women experience and evolve free movement and existence. In contrast to the paradigm set by Iris Marion Young's “Throwing like a Girl,” it stresses the category of the lived body over the category of gender, and it reveals how women, by employing and cultivating the body's motility and spatiality, engage and transcend the limits of crux situations.

: This essay uses the phenomenal advent of women's climbing as a paradigm case for integrating feminism and phenomenology, and for analyzing how women experience and evolve free movement and existence. In contrast to the paradigm set by Iris Marion Young's "Throwing like a Girl," it stresses the category of the lived body over the category of gender, and it reveals how women, by employing and cultivating the body's motility and spatiality, engage and transcend the (gender) limits of crux situations.

The figure of Donna Haraway’s cyborg continues to loom large over contemporary feminist engagements with questions of technology. Across a range of analytical projects ranging from cosmetic surgery to employment practices it has come to be one of the defining figurations through which the social and discursive construction of bodies in a technological age are theorized. Indeed, it has become a widely accepted and largely unquestioned orthodoxy of postmodern feminist thinking. Not only has the cyborg offered a theoretical framework for (...) exploring the feminist possibilities of technologies, it has provided a focus for situating questions of technology and bodies into broader feminist theoretical considerations of the structures of knowledge, particularly those of binary oppositions and the logic of identity. While a productive and influential intervention into feminist theorizing, the cyborg is not without limitations. One of these is pointed out by Kirby (1997) as a failure to break convincingly with the logic ofidentity in the way Haraway theorizes the intersection of bodies and technologies in the fabrication of the cyborg. This article examines that criticism and then explores the possibilities which Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblageoffers as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies beyond binary oppositions. (shrink)

This paper (i) offers an interpretation of some central aspects of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of language, (ii) challenges the received view of its relation to analytic philosophy, and (iii) seeks to show that this investigation into the prehistory of analytic philosophy sheds light on its history proper. It has been often maintained, most notably by Quine, that Bentham anticipated Frege’s context principle and the use of contextual definition. On these bases, Bentham has been presented as one of the initiators of (...) a tradition that shares a common commitment to the “semantic priority of sentences” and that includes authors as otherwise diverse as Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. In opposition to this narrative, I argue that Bentham did indeed anticipate the use of contextual definition, but was not a forerunner of Frege’s context principle. The two issues should be sharply distinguished. I show that Bentham’s philosophy of language is informed by a set of empiricist assumptions that Frege’s contextualism was centrally meant to oppose. I conclude that with respect to the question of the relation between propositional and sub-propositional meaning, we should distinguish two opposed strands in the history of analytic philosophy: an empiricist strand anticipated by Bentham, represented most notably by Russell, and an anti-empiricist strand, represented most notably by Frege and Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Respondeat superior is a legal doctrine conferring liability from one party onto another because the latter stands in some relationship of authority over the former. Though originally a doctrine of tort law, for the past century it has been used within the criminal law, especially to the end of securing criminal liability for corporations. Here, I argue that on at least one prominent conception of criminal responsibility, we are not justified in using this doctrine in this way. Firms are not (...) answerable for the crimes committed by their employees, because firms cannot answer as to why the crime was committed; they lack the authority to offer the employee’s reasons for action. Though this rules out respondeat superior as a general principle, I show contexts in which vicarious liability is still appropriate in the criminal law, and I respond to a number of other concerns raised by this picture. (shrink)

Over 5 million college students in the United States – nearly one-in-three students currently enrolled – are of immigrant origin, meaning they are either the children of immigrant parents or guardians and/or immigrants themselves. These students accounted for almost 60% of the growth in higher education enrolment in the 21st century. Nevertheless, there is very little research dedicated to this student population's specific experiences of postsecondary education, with similar absences discernible within the realms of higher education policy and practice. Although (...) college campuses are making important progress in building more inclusive spaces, conversations about climate and student care rarely account for the journeys of students of immigrant origin. Featuring 20 chapters written by more than 50 contributors, this book addresses this glaring omission. The authors examine how students of immigrant origin experience the road to, through, and beyond higher education, while, simultaneously, speaking to evidence-based implications for policy, research, and practice. (shrink)

BackgroundWith the enactment of Bill C-7 in Canada in March 2021, people who are eligible for medical assistance in dying (MAiD), whose death is reasonably foreseeable and are at risk of losing decision-making capacity, may enter into a written agreement with their healthcare provider to waive the final consent requirement at the time of provision. This study explored healthcare providers’ perspectives on honouring eligible patients’ request for MAiD in the absence of a contemporaneous consent following their loss of decision-making capacity. (...) MethodA critical qualitative methodology, using a feminist ethics theoretical lens with its focus on power and relationality, was used to examine how socio-political and environmental contexts influenced healthcare providers' moral agency and perspectives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 healthcare providers (13 physicians, six nurse practitioners, nine nurses and two social workers) from across Canada who provide MAiD-related care.ResultsThemes identified include; (1) balancing personal values and professional responsibilities, (2) anticipating strengths and limitations of the proposed waiver of final consent amendment, (3) experiencing ethical influences on decisions to enter into written agreements with eligible patients, (4) recognizing barriers to the enactment of MAiD in the absence of a contemporaneous consent and (5) navigating the potential for increased risks and burden.DiscussionTo our knowledge, this is the first study in Canada to explore healthcare providers’ perspectives on waiving the final consent for MAiD using a written agreement. Most participants supported expanding eligible people’s access to MAiD following loss of capacity, as they believed it would improve the patients’ comfort and minimize suffering. However, the lack of patients’ input at the time of provision and related ethical and legal challenges may impact healthcare providers’ moral agency and reduce some patients’ access to MAiD. Providers indicated they would enter into written agreements to waive final consent for MAiD on a case-by-case basis. This study highlights the importance of organizational, legal and professional support, adequate resources, clear policies and guidelines for the safety and wellbeing of healthcare providers and to ensure equitable access to MAiD. (shrink)

The male muse in the psychic territory Adrienne Rich called in 1971 ‘The Man’ represents sexualized death and phallic mourning, a concept of masculinity marked by the legacy of the 20th century’s two world wars. In the context of representations of ‘The Man’ in North American white women writers coming of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sylvia Plath’s journal account of the Saint Botolph’s Review party, where she met her husband, and its fictional transformation in her 1957 (...) short story, ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’, demonstrate Plath’s examination of the Bostonian Puritan heritage and the psychic aftermath of the Second World War. Plath’s constructions of heterosexual romance as participating in the history of Fascism and her concept of writing as sexy violence coincide culturally with Lacan’s theory of phallic signification. (shrink)

Recent arbitration and human rights boards of inquiry cases involving discrimination against pregnant employees are reviewed. A comparison is made between remedies available under each procedure. It is suggested that the human resource managers review their policies and procedures relevant to this issue to ensure that they do not have the effect or intent of discriminating against pregnant employees.

It is almost universally accepted that the Frege–Geach Point is necessary for explaining the inferential relations and compositional structure of truth-functionally complex propositions. I argue that this claim rests on a disputable view of propositional structure, which models truth-functionally complex propositions on atomic propositions. I propose an alternative view of propositional structure, based on a certain notion of simulation, which accounts for the relevant phenomena without accepting the Frege–Geach Point. The main contention is that truth-functionally complex propositions do not include (...) as their parts truth-evaluable propositions, but their simulations, which are neither forceful nor truth-evaluable. The view makes room for the idea that there is no such thing as the forceless expression of propositional contents and is attractive because it provides the resources for avoiding a fundamental problem generated by the Frege–Geach Point concerning the relation between forceless and forceful expressions of propositional contents. I further argue that the acceptance of the Frege–Geach Point mars Peter Hanks’ and François Recanati’s recent attempts to resist the widespread idea that assertoric force is extrinsic to the expression of propositional contents. Rejecting this idea, I maintain, requires a deeper break with the tradition than Hanks and Recanati have allowed for. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the worth of a materialist/posthumanist approach to ethics, specifically affirmative ethics, within the field of education. I work empirical material that ‘does’ this ethics in classrooms and draw on Deleuze’s ethically guided materialism as taken up by Braidotti, to gain purchase on it. Defined as a relational matter of human and non-human powers of acting in pursuit of affirmative values, affirmative ethics focuses up relations, forces and affects. It poses considerable challenges to (...) a normalised construction of ethics as located solely within a constituted human subject with moral intentionality as its core. Affirmative ethics presents empirically as an emergent property of relational assemblages of human and more than human elements that bring ethical subjectivity into effect. Pedagogy and curriculum perform a constitutive role in these assemblages, as does pedagogic affect, showing how this ethics can be activated. A materialist affirmative ethics makes for a multi-faceted and generative practice of ethics. Oriented to collectivity and with relationality ‘built-in’, it has the potential to play a significant role in the reconstitution of individualised subjectivity which neoliberal modes of governance continue to advance in education. (shrink)

Sixteen Canadian men and women, part of eight intact couples who had experienced severe and recurrent wife assault, were interviewed individually regarding their worst experience of violence. The self-reports of both spouses of one of these couples is presented and analyzed with a view towards isolating the emerging constituents of their narratives. Additionally, preliminary findings resulting from the analysis of all of the couple's self-reports are presented in the second part of the paper. A gendered reconstruction of their narratives emerges (...) that mirrors the different positions men and women hold in experiences of wife assault. Finally, the main constituents derived from all the participant's selfreports are analyzed and discussed. (shrink)

What does peace mean in today’s world of endless wars? Why has the project of ‘universal peace’, so ardently hoped for by the drafters of the UN Charter in 1945, failed so profoundly? I reflect on these questions through three stories of peace. The first is told by a series of four stained-glass windows in the Peace Palace in The Hague; the second is of the world’s demilitarised zones; and the third of a peace community in Colombia. These stories provide (...) a springboard to reflect on how we might rethink peace in the context of today’s world, drawing on feminist, queer and postcolonial analyses. My discussion exposes the limits of the UN Charter’s approach to peace, and the impossibility of its methods ever achieving ‘universal peace’. The Charter’s reliance on militarism and collective enforcement, as well as its commitment to peace as an evolutionary process, maintain rather than dismantle global hierarchies of domination. I also question the dualism of war and peace, which obscures much of the violence of what we call peace. The task of rethinking peace is urgent. To do so we need to go beyond the worlds we know, beyond the confines of law and the inevitability of quotidian hierarchies of gender, sexuality and race, to invent new methods of peace-making, outside the ‘frames of war’. (shrink)

This paper argues that Wittgenstein opposed theories of meaning, and did so for good reasons. Theories of meaning, in the sense discussed here, are attempts to explain what makes it the case that certain sounds, shapes, or movements are meaningful linguistic expressions. It is widely believed that Wittgenstein made fundamental contributions to this explanatory project. I argue, by contrast, that in both his early and later works, Wittgenstein endorsed a disjunctivist conception of language which rejects the assumption underlying the question (...) that such theories seek to answer—namely, the assumption that the notion of a meaningful linguistic expression admits of non-circular analysis. Moreover, I give two arguments in favor of the view I ascribe to Wittgenstein: one based on later Wittgenstein's discussion of meaning skepticism and one based on considerations concerning the identity of linguistic expressions. (shrink)

It is generally recognised that public health problems in the developing world are dire and that the rest of the world has a moral commitment to provide assistance. Yet many of the world’s poor are unable to access essential pharmaceuticals simply because products that are under patent are too expensive and cheaper generics are not available. One of the proposed solutions to this problem is to allow domestic manufacture of generic products in response to public health crises. However, this solution (...) will provide no assistance in countries that lack the capacity to manufacture pharmaceuticals. This article discusses the extensive international negotiations occurring during the last couple of years that seek to provide an appropriate balance between access rights and patent rights. (shrink)

Until very recently, the lack of health insurance has been viewed primarily as a problem of financial risk for uninsured individuals. This article documents far broader adverse effects, drawn from the work of the Institute of Medicine Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance. It also synthesizes the Committee’s key findings, conclusions, and recommendations.In early 2004, following 3½ years of study, the IOM Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance recommended that “...the President and Congress develop a strategy to achieve universal insurance (...) coverage and establish a firm and explicit schedule to reach this goal by 2010.” The Committee presented 5 principles to be used to assess various proposals for extending coverage or to guide the design of a new strategy, specifying that health care coverage should be universal, continuous, affordable to individuals and families, and affordable and sustainable for society. (shrink)

Until very recently, the lack of health insurance has been viewed primarily as a problem of financial risk for uninsured individuals. This article documents far broader adverse effects, drawn from the work of the Institute of Medicine Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance. It also synthesizes the Committee’s key findings, conclusions, and recommendations.In early 2004, following 3½ years of study, the IOM Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance recommended that “...the President and Congress develop a strategy to achieve universal insurance (...) coverage and establish a firm and explicit schedule to reach this goal by 2010.” The Committee presented 5 principles to be used to assess various proposals for extending coverage or to guide the design of a new strategy, specifying that health care coverage should be universal, continuous, affordable to individuals and families, and affordable and sustainable for society. (shrink)

Friederike Moltmann has recently proposed an account of truth-bearers that draws on Kazimierz Twardowski’s action/product distinction. Her account is meant to provide a third way between the dominant view of primary truth-bearers as mind-independent entities and the recently revived construal of them as mental or linguistic acts. This paper argues that there is no room for Twardowskian accounts because they are based on a notion of “nonenduring product” that defies comprehension, and no need for them because the linguistic data that (...) Twardowskians take to refute the act-theoretic approach can, in fact, be handled by that approach. (shrink)

Individual research protections provided by bioethical principles can be extended to group protections, particularly for place-based communities and cultural groups who may share a common harm or burden. In this article, an argument is made for the need to consider the group conditions of individual research subjects in the ethics of individual report-backs of human biomonitoring results. Human biomonitoring, the measuring of concentration of chemicals or their metabolites in blood, urine, breast milk, hair, and other biological samples, can provide an (...) assessment of an individual's exposure to a chemical and can integrate exposures from multiple pathways and sources. Biomonitoring studies have been increasing in the past decade for such purposes as measuring the levels of chemicals that are ingested by members of the general population and at what concentrations, to determine if exposure levels are higher in some groups vs. others, to track temporal trends to establish reference ranges for chemical exposures, and to investigate an association with health. (shrink)

Self-protection can have psychological and behavioral implications. We contrast them with the implications of a self-enhancement strategy. Both self-enhancement and self-protection have costs and benefits as survival strategies, and we identify some of the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral tradeoffs associated with the differential preferences for each strategy. New analyses on a large existing data set confirm the target article's hypothesis that women are more attuned than men to potential negative consequences of innovations.

As both the promise and the influence of feminism have grown, women with disabilities have, with increasing intensity, pronounced themselves to be disregarded within the women's movement to an extent little different from how patriarchal society devalues them.

Frege appears to hold both that thoughts are internally articulated, in a way that mirrors the semantic articulation of the sentences that express them, and that the same thought can be analyzed in different ways, none of which has to be more fundamental than the others. Commentators have often taken these theses to be mutually incompatible and have tended to polarize into two camps, each of which attributes to Frege one of the theses, but maintains that he is only apparently (...) committed to the other. This paper argues that there are good exegetical and philosophical reasons for reconciling the two theses; that this reconciliation can be achieved by rejecting an assumption shared by the two opposite camps of the exegetical debate, i.e., the assumption that essential articulatedness implies unique articulation; and finally, that this crucial assumption can be resisted by appreciating Frege’s anti-atomistic and ‘organic’ conception of the internal complexity of thoughts. (shrink)

A collaborative team of environmental sociologists, community psychologists, religious studies scholars, environmental studies/science researchers and engineers has been working together to design and implement new training in research ethics, culture and community-based approaches for place-based communities and cultural groups. The training is designed for short and semester-long graduate courses at several universities in the northeastern US. The team received a 3 year grant from the US National Science Foundation’s Ethics Education in Science and Engineering in 2010. This manuscript details the (...) curriculum topics developed that incorporate ethical principles, particularly for group protections/benefits within the field practices of environmental/engineering researchers. (shrink)

Gun violence in American and Canadian schools is an ongoing tragedy that goes substantially beyond its roots in the interlocking emotional and behavioral issues of mental health and bullying. In light of the need for effective policy development, Dianne T. Gereluk, J. Kent Donlevy, and Merlin B. Thompson examine gun violence in schools from several relevant perspectives in this article. The authors consider the principle of standard of care as it relates to parents, teachers, and community members in a (...) particular school's context. They posit that normative principles may provide a procedural mechanism appropriate for policymakers and practitioners when contemplating and implementing heightened security measures. Finally, they propose Rawlsian reasonableness as an effective and deliberative democratic process that reduces emotional, reactive responses to school shootings. Through these overlapping concepts, the authors advocate for purposeful discussions regarding gun violence in schools based on the unique pragmatic, educational, social, political, and contextual circumstances of individual schools and their surrounding communities. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Clearing Some Definitional Ground: Standards as Epistemic Objects What Counts as a Standard?: Orthodoxies and other Stories Travelling with Actor‐Network Theory: ‘It's Practice All theWay Down’6 The Project in Question: Data and Method Assemblage7 Teaching and Standards of Teaching: Performative Tales from the Field Assembling the Accomplished Teacher: Whose Assemblage Counts? The Critical Contribution of Actor‐Network Theory: Performative Politics Notes References.

Paul Horwich has advocated, and attributed to the later Wittgenstein, a “use-theory of meaning” that aims to demystify meaning by reducing it to pure regularities of use. This chapter challenges Horwich’s appropriation of Wittgenstein and seeks to make room for a different conception of the demystification of meaning. It argues that Wittgenstein does indeed aim to demystify meaning, but does not think that this involves any attempt to reduce meaning to something else.

The distinction between sense and nonsense is central to Wittgenstein's philosophy. It is at the basis of his conception of philosophy as a struggle against illusions of sense generated by misunderstandings of the logic of our language. Moreover, it informs the notions of “grammar” and “logical syntax”, whose investigation serves to clear up those misunderstandings. This Element contrasts two exegetical approaches: one grounding charges of nonsensicality in a theory of sense specifying criteria that are external to the linguistic performance under (...) indictment; and one rejecting any such theory. The former pursues the idea of a nonsensicality test; the latter holds that illusions of sense can only be overcome from within, through the very capacity of which they constitute defective exercises. The Element connects the two approaches to opposite understandings of Wittgenstein's conception of language, and defends a version of the second approach. (shrink)

In this study of Giorgio Agamben's pre-Homo Sacer work, I assess his idea of the ethical subject. Over the course of these early writings, he adopts a Walter Benjamin-inspired redemptive aim as he endeavours to uncover the circumstances of alienated subjectivity and possibility of authentic experience. However, while Agamben borrows from Benjamin to elaborate on the ethical potential of the nihilist pose, a more Kantian conception of idealist autonomy becomes increasingly pronounced. This Kantianism is at odds with the Benjaminian nihilism (...) that guides his redemptive prescription, leaving Agamben's ethical subject mired in a realm of meaningless authenticity. (shrink)

Questions concerning the moral status of embryos, the validity of new technologies for human reproduction, ownership of one's own genes, gene patenting, privacy and discrimination have all been raised and debated. Although debate is healthy, it is only useful if all participants understand the fundamental biological principles underlying human life, human genes and human parenthood. Many people believe that science can play no role in determining when human life begins. I argue that this false assumption is based on a failure (...) to separate different contradictory meanings of the term ‘human life’. In actuality, science has provided great insight into when and how human life and human beings come into existence. I argue as well that, contrary to our intuitive feelings, there is no physical connection between any father and his son; shared genes represent shared information and nothing more. Nevertheless, the feeling of a physical connection between parent and child is very real and instinctive, no matter how false it may be. These new understandings have profound ramifications for the way we treat issues surrounding human reproduction, including both abortion and assisted reproductive technologies. (shrink)

Reading Shakespeare’s plays alongside Plato’s Republic, this book shows the intersections between literary, philosophical, and political moments in the texts and demonstrates that philosophical interventions are crucial to decision making and managing uncertainty, error and risk.