The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics offers the most authoritative and compelling guide to this diverse and fertile field of philosophy. Twenty-four of the world's most distinguished specialists provide brand-new essays about 'what there is': what kinds of things there are, and what relations hold among entities falling under various categories. They give the latest word on such topics as identity, modality, time, causation, persons and minds, freedom, and vagueness. The Handbook's unrivaled breadth and depth make it the definitive reference work (...) for students and academics across the philosophical spectrum. (shrink)

Debate about cognitive science explanations has been formulated in terms of identifying the proper level(s) of explanation. Views range from reductionist, favoring only neuroscience explanations, to mechanist, favoring the integration of multiple levels, to pluralist, favoring the preservation of even the most general, high-level explanations, such as those provided by embodied or dynamical approaches. In this paper, we challenge this framing. We suggest that these are not different levels of explanation at all but, rather, different styles of explanation that capture (...) different, cross-cutting patterns in cognitive phenomena. Which pattern is explanatory depends on both the cognitive phenomenon under investigation and the research interests occasioning the explanation. This reframing changes how we should answer the basic questions of which cognitive science approaches explain and how these explanations relate to one another. On this view, we should expect different approaches to offer independent explanations in terms of their different focal patterns and the value of those explanations to partly derive from the broad patterns they feature. (shrink)

This work provides a thorough index of terms found in Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty. The index includes not only every philosophical term found in Wittgenstein's text, but also many non-philosophical terms when they are used in highly charged philosophical contexts. In all, there are some 575 main entries. Moreover, a concerted effort is made to indicate in what connections a given term is used by adding subordinate qualifying phrases to the main entries. For crucial terms (e.g., 'know,' 'proposition,' 'doubt,' etc.) (...) the sub-entries indicating context are quite extensive. (shrink)

We present a formal system, E, which provides a faithful model of the proofs in Euclid's Elements, including the use of diagrammatic reasoning.

Despite being fairly powerful, finite non-deterministic matrices are unable to characterize some logics of formal inconsistency, such as those found between mbCcl and Cila. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose here restricted non-deterministic matrices (in short, RNmatrices), which are non-deterministic algebras together with a subset of the set of valuations. This allows us to characterize not only mbCcl and Cila (which is equivalent, up to language, to da Costa's logic C_1) but the whole hierarchy of da Costa's calculi (...) C_n. This produces a novel decision procedure for these logics. Moreover, we show that the RNmatrix semantics proposed here induces naturally a labelled tableau system for each C_n, which constitutes another decision procedure for these logics. This new semantics allows us to conceive da Costa's hierarchy of C-systems as a family of (non deterministically) (n+2)-valued logics, where n is the number of "inconsistently true" truth-values and 2 is the number of "classical" or "consistent" truth-values, for every C_n. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo determine the effects of learning interventions aimed at optimizing the quality of physical education on psychomotor, cognitive, affective and social learning outcomes in children and adolescents.DesignA systematic review and meta-analysis.Data SourcesAfter searching PsycInfo, ERIC, and SportDiscus electronic databases, we identified 135 eligible studies published between January 1, 1995 to May 1, 2021.Eligibility Criteria for Selecting StudiesWe included randomized controlled trials, quasi-experimental studies, and controlled trials that assessed the effect of a PE-based intervention against one of the four identified learning (...) domains in youth at school.ResultsOne hundred and thirty five studies with over 42,500 participants and 193 calculated effect sizes were included in the study. The mean effect across all the learning and development outcomes was small to medium. When adjusted for publication bias using the Duval and Tweedie Trim and Fill Method, this mean effect size increased to d = 0.40. Effect sizes varied significantly based on learning and development outcomes. Interventions that consistently report above or below the mean d = 0.40 effect are identified based on learning outcome. The greatest effects across interventions were witnessed in psychomotor learning outcomes followed by affective, social, and cognitive learning outcomes. A minority of PE interventions captured by this systematic review and meta-analysis reported having a negative effect on student learning and development.ConclusionThe interventions with the greatest effects on student learning and development were dependant on the learning domains. Some PE interventions with a pedagogical focus such as games-based approaches, TARGET/Mastery Teaching, and Sport Education were found to be strong investments across multiple domains. The evidence is limited however by consistency in intervention dosage, study design, and data collection instruments. The study received no internal or external funding and was not prospectively registered. (shrink)

Researchers misunderstand their role in creating ethical problems when they allow dogmas to purportedly divorce scientists and scientific practices from the values that they embody. Cortina, Edwards, and Powell help us clarify and further develop our position by responding to our critique of, and alternatives to, this misleading separation. In this rebuttal, we explore how the desire to achieve the separation of facts and values is unscientific on the very terms endorsed by its advocates—this separation is refuted by empirical observation. (...) We show that positivists like Cortina and Edwards offer no rigorous theoretical or empirical justifications to substantiate their claims, let alone critique ours. Following Powell, we point to how classical pragmatism understands ‘purpose’ in scientific pursuits while also providing an alternative to the dogmas of positivism and related philosophical positions. In place of dogmatic, unscientific cries about an abstract and therefore always-unobservable ‘reality,’ we invite all organizational scholars to join us in shifting the discussion about quantitative research towards empirically grounded scientific inquiry. This makes the ethics of actual people and their practices central to quantitative research, including the thoughts, discourses, and behaviors of researchers who are always in particular places doing particular things. We propose that quantitative researchers can thus start to think about their research practices as a kind of work, rather than having the status of a kind of dogma. We conclude with some implications that this has for future research and education, including the relevance of research and research methods. (shrink)

A sample of 227 business students from the United States and Australia was used to evaluate factors that impact business students' ethical orientation and factors that impact students' perceptions of ethical classroom behaviors. Perceptions of classroom behaviors was considered a surrogate for future perceptions of business behaviors. Independent factors included age, gender, religious orientation, country of origin, personality, and ethical orientation. A number of factors were related to ethical orientation, but only age and religious orientation exhibited much impact upon perceptions (...) of ethical classroom behaviors. (shrink)

Quantitative researchers often discuss research ethics as if specific ethical problems can be reduced to abstract normative logics (e.g., virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology). Such approaches overlook how values are embedded in every aspect of quantitative methods, including ‘observations,’ ‘facts,’ and notions of ‘objectivity.’ We describe how quantitative research practices, concepts, discourses, and their objects/subjects of study have always been value-laden, from the invention of statistics and probability in the 1600s to their subsequent adoption as a logic made to appear as (...) if it exists prior to, and separate from, ethics and values. This logic, which was embraced in the Academy of Management from the 1960s, casts management researchers as ethical agents who ought to know about a reality conceptualized as naturally existing in the image of statistics and probability (replete with ‘constructs’), while overlooking that S&P logic and practices, which researchers made for themselves, have an appreciable role in making the world appear this way. We introduce a different way to conceptualize reality and ethics, wherein the process of scientific inquiry itself requires an examination of its own practices and commitments. Instead of resorting to decontextualized notions of ‘rigor’ and its ‘best practices,’ quantitative researchers can adopt more purposeful ways to reason about the ethics and relevance of their methods and their science. We end by considering implications for addressing ‘post truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ problems as collective concerns, wherein it is actually the pluralistic nature of description that makes defending a collectively valuable version of reality so important and urgent. (shrink)

The spectre of the repugnant conclusion and the search for a population axiology that avoids it has endured as a focus of population ethics. This is in part because the repugnant conclusion is often interpreted as a defining problem for totalism, while the implications of averagism and related views are taken to illustrate the theoretical cost of avoiding the repugnant conclusion. However, we show that this interpretation cannot be sustained unless one focuses only on a special case of the repugnant (...) conclusion: namely, the subset of instances of the repugnant conclusion where there is no portion of the population unaffected by the choice between population outcomes (as in Derek Parfit’s original illustration). To avoid an inappropriate focus on only this proper subset of instances of the repugnant conclusion, we formulate a general characterization of the repugnant conclusion. We then prove formally that all leading welfarist axiologies imply this conclusion, including averagism and Ng’s Theory X0 , including probabilistic and ‘very repugnant’ variants that involve the addition of negative lives. We then prove that the full range of axiologies considered by population ethics each imply an extended version of the repugnant conclusion, including axiologies that are incomplete, intransitive, rank-dependent, person-affecting, and/or pluralist. The upshot is that the repugnant conclusion does not ultimately tell against any approach to axiology, and the methodological requirement to avoid the repugnant conclusion should be dropped from population axiology. (shrink)

Formal arguments have proven that avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion is impossible without rejecting one or more highly plausible population principles. To many, such proofs establish not only a deep challenge for axiology, but also pose an important practical problem of how policymaking can confidently proceed without resolving any of the central questions of population ethics. Here we offer deflationary responses: first to the practical challenge, and then to the more fundamental challenge for axiology. Regarding the practical challenge, we provide an (...) overview of recent literature that explores the implications for public policy of the Repugnant Conclusion and related puzzles within population ethics, and shows that there is more commonality in the implications of different population axiologies than is generally recognized. The upshot is that uncertainty about population ethics presents no important problem for policymaking, and the importance of population ethics to policymaking has been overstated. We then turn to more fundamental issues about axiology, and describe a new series of formal proofs that undermine the idea that any plausible axiology could avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, including those that are assumed to avoid it in the literature. The philosophical upshot is that the Repugnant Conclusion cannot plausibly be avoided, and so it is a mistake to assume as a constraint on a plausible axiology that it must be avoided, as is assumed by most of the literature in population ethics, including by all of the fundamental impossibility theorems. (shrink)

Physical activities are generally accepted as promoting important psychological benefits. However, studies examining martial arts as a form of physical activity and mental health have exhibited many methodological limitations in the past. Additionally, recent philosophical discussion has debated whether martial arts training promotes psychological wellbeing or illness. Self-efficacy has an important relationship with mental health and may be an important mechanism underpinning the potential of martial arts training to promote mental health. This study examined the effect of martial arts training (...) on the psychological construct of self-efficacy. A total of 283 secondary school students with a mean age of 12.76 (SD = 0.68) years were recruited to complete a time-limited (10-session) martial arts intervention, which was examined using a randomised controlled trial. Univariate ANOVAs found that the intervention improved the experimental group’s self-efficacy compared to the control group, which was sustained at follow-up. Regression analysis indicated that socio-educational status moderated this outcome. These findings support the martial arts-based intervention’s potential to improve self-efficacy and promote wellbeing through physical activity. Martial arts training may be an efficacious psychosocial treatment that can be used as a complementary approach to promote mental health. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship borne by the traditional paradoxes of set theory and semantics to formal incompleteness phenomena. A central tool is the application of the Arithmetized Completeness Theorem to systems of second-order arithmetic and set theory in which various “paradoxical notions” for first-order languages can be formalized. I will first discuss the setting in which this result was originally presented by Hilbert & Bernays (1939) and also how it was later adapted by Kreisel (1950) and Wang (1955) in (...) order to obtain formal undecidability results. A generalization of this method will then be presented whereby Russell’s paradox, a variant of Mirimanoff’s paradox, the Liar, and the Grelling–Nelson paradox may be uniformly transformed into incompleteness theorems. Some additional observations are then framed relating these results to the unification of the set theoretic and semantic paradoxes, the intensionality of arithmetization (in the sense of Feferman, 1960), and axiomatic theories of truth. (shrink)

We analyze the pointwise convergence of a sequence of computable elements of L1 in terms of algorithmic randomness. We consider two ways of expressing the dominated convergence theorem and show that, over the base theory RCA0, each is equivalent to the assertion that every Gδ subset of Cantor space with positive measure has an element. This last statement is, in turn, equivalent to weak weak Königʼs lemma relativized to the Turing jump of any set. It is also equivalent to the (...) conjunction of the statement asserting the existence of a 2-random relative to any given set and the principle of Σ2 collection. (shrink)

The focus of this chapter is public policy and consequentialism, especially issues that arise in connection with the environment – i.e. the natural world, including non-human animals. We integrate some of the existing literature on environmental economics, welfare economics, and policy with the literature on environmental values and philosophy. The emphasis on environmental policy is motivated by the fact that it is arguably the most philosophically interesting and challenging application of consequentialism to policy, as it includes all the challenges of (...) valuing the distribution of human wealth and power, and has the further challenge of putting these consequences on the same scale as consequences for human health, non-human animals, and nature. We suggest that standard methods of (economic) policy analysis provide a good approximation of correct welfarist analysis, except that they must be supplemented with methods for valuing animal wellbeing and tradeoffs with human wellbeing. We then provide the needed methods. (shrink)

The tension between external forces for better ethics in organizations, represented by legislation such as the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX), and the call for internal forces represented by increased educational coverage, has never been as apparent. This study examines business school faculty attitudes about recent corporate ethics lapses, including opinions about root causes, potential solutions, and ethics coverage in their courses. In assessing root causes, faculty point to a failure of systems such as legal/professional and management (external) and declining personal values (...) (internal). We also found that faculty recommend external forces as a remedy more often than increased ethics educational coverage; we contextualize this finding with recent ethics education literature. We conclude by proposing that neither legislation nor ethics education alone are complete when addressing widespread unethical corporate acts and offer a multi-faceted approach to ethics educational opportunities. (shrink)

Animals, like humans, experience different levels of well-being depending on decisions made by others. As a result, the well-being of animals must be included in any full accounting of the well-being consequences of decisions. However, this is almost never done in large-scale policy and investment analyses, even though it is common to quantify the consequences for human welfare in these decision analyses. This is partly due to prejudice, but increasingly also because we do not currently have good methods for quantifying (...) animal well-being consequences and putting them on the same scale as quantified human well-being consequences. We might call this ‘the problem of interspecies comparisons.’ This important barrier to including animal well-being in decision-making is the result of an insufficiently developed theory and practice of animal well-being and its relation to human well-being. This chapter explains the problem of interspecies comparisons, explains recent research that develops methods to overcome this problem. (shrink)

In an effort to address healthcare disparities in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer populations, many hospitals and clinics institute diversity training meant to increase providers’ awareness of and sensitivity to this patient population. Despite these efforts, many healthcare spaces remain inhospitable to LGBTQ patients and their loved ones. Even in the absence of overt forms of discrimination, LGBTQ patients report feeling anxious, unwelcome, ashamed, and distrustful in healthcare encounters. We argue that these negative experiences are produced by a variety (...) of subtle, ostensibly insignificant features of healthcare spaces and interpersonal interactions called microaggressions. Healthcare spaces and providers often convey heteronormative microaggressions, which communicate to LGBTQ—and, we suggest, intersex and asexual —people that their identities, experiences, and relationships are abnormal, pathological, unexpected, unwelcome, or shameful. We identify heteronormative microaggressions common to healthcare settings and specify how they negatively impact LGBTQIA patients. We argue that standard diversity training cannot sufficiently address heteronormative microaggressions. Despite these challenges, healthcare institutions and providers must take responsibility for heteronormative microaggressions and take steps to reduce their frequency and mitigate their effects on LGBTQIA care. We conclude by offering strategies for problem-solving at the level of medical education, institutional culture and policy, and individual awareness. (shrink)

Joseph Heath states that our paper “misinterpret[s]” and so misrepresents his account. The present Commentary corrects the record. Our paper (Cohen and Peterson 2019) outlined Heath’s account on his own terms; it explained that Heath distances himself from consequentialism. But then we argued that Heath is mistaken and so offered a repaired version of the market failures approach. Our central concern, in the original paper and in this short Commentary, is showing that the economic argument for markets is at the (...) same time ethical, and then being more precise about the ethical consideration that does the work. (shrink)

Resenha do livro de HELAL, R. & AMARO, F. Esporte e mídia: a contribuição de Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.

publicação do quarto número de Aoristo – International Journal of Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Metaphysics compraz à equipe editorial e ao grupo de pesquisa em Fenomenologia, Hermenêutica e Metafísica3, da UNIOESTE, em que as raízes de nossa revista agora encontram solo cuidado por grupo fixo de colaboradores. Por meio desta nova edição, reafirma-se o propósito de acolher, difundir e colaborar com o incremento da produção filosófica de autores nacionais e internacionais, afiliados a seu campo de especialidade.

I Encontro Paranaense de Estudos sobre Heidegger (Toledo – Unioeste, 2019).

There are complex considerations when planning to disclose an attenuated psychosis syndrome diagnosis. In this review, we evaluate ethical, legal, and clinical perspectives as well as caveats related to full, non- and partial disclosure strategies, discuss societal implications, and provide clinical suggestions. Each of the disclosure strategies is associated with benefits as well as costs/considerations. Full disclosure promotes autonomy, allows for the clearest psychoeducation about additional risk factors, helps to clarify and/or correct previous diagnoses/treatments, facilitates early intervention and bolsters communication (...) between providers but there are important considerations involving heritability, comorbidity, culture, and stigma. Non-disclosure advances nonmaleficence by limiting stigma and stress, and confusion in a sensitive developmental period but is complicated by varying patient preferences and the possibility that, as new treatments without adverse effects become available, the risk with false positives no longer justifies the accompanying loss of autonomy. Partial disclosure balances ethical considerations by focusing on symptoms instead of labels, but evidence that laypersons may interpret this information as a pseudo-diagnosis and that symptoms alone also contribute to stigma limits the efficacy of this approach. In addition, there are notable societal considerations relating to disclosure involving conservatorship, the reach of insurance companies, and discrimination. We advocate a hybrid approach to disclosure and recommend future research aimed at understanding the effects of stigma on clinical course and a renewed focus on those help-seeking cases that do not transition but remain clinically relevant. (shrink)

Building on recent developments in radical democratic theory, in this article we articulate and explore a fresh perspective for theorists and activists of radical democracy: a ‘living critique of domination’. Characterized by a two-fold analytical effort, a ‘living critique of domination’ calls for a radical critique of contemporary forms of power and control coupled with a reappraisal of emancipatory political experiences created by the political action of the Many. We demonstrate that this project responds to the theoretical and practical challenges (...) faced by a politics of emancipation today. Our article offers a first articulation of this living critique through a discussion of three recent political experiences, namely, the 2016 French uprising, Nuit Debout, as well as the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. (shrink)

Case studies and first-person stories about decision-making, written by professionals in the field, bring a uniquely personal touch to this valuable text.

Cornelia Dean draws on her 30 years as a science journalist with the New York Times to expose the flawed reasoning and knowledge gaps that handicap readers when they try to make sense of science. She calls attention to conflicts of interest in research and the price society pays when science journalism declines and funding dries up.--.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as Symptom:Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic CriticismTim Dean (bio)This paper tackles a problem that is exemplified by, but not restricted to, Slavoj Žižek's work: the tendency to treat aesthetic artifacts as symptoms of the culture in which they were produced. Whether or not one employs the vocabulary and methods of psychoanalysis to do so, this approach to aesthetics has become so widespread in the humanities that (...) it qualifies as a contemporary critical norm. As a norm, it may be subject to debate and even contestation. Today it is normative to read literature, film, and other cultural texts primarily as evidence about the societies that made them—evidence that necessarily requires our hermeneutic labor in order to yield its significance. This methodological protocol remains in place whether one inhabits critical perspectives as ostensibly disparate as historicist, materialist, or psychoanalytic modes of thinking; it is also a grounding assumption of cultural studies, irrespective of how one defines that critical practice. Indeed, the issue I want to address is quite as much a Marxist problem as it is a psychoanalytic one, and therefore the way in which Žižek articulates Lacan with Marx makes his work especially fertile terrain on which to engage this matter. As Žižek reminds us in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Lacan claimed that Marx invented the symptom [SO 11]—an observation that Žižek has been keen to exploit from the very beginning of his work.Žižek's combining psychoanalysis with Marxism in novel ways has helped make Lacan more palatable to contemporary critical sensibilities by politicizing psychoanalysis, demonstrating how it offers less an account of the individual than of society and culture. In Žižek's hands psychoanalytic theory appears less vulnerable to the standard criticisms that it is ahistorical and apolitical. While a number of critiques of Žižek have reiterated these common objections, nevertheless his politicizing of psychoanalysis has been particularly important during a period that witnessed the rise of new historicism, the institutionalization of cultural studies, and the escalating importance of "the political" as a sign—perhaps the sign—of humanities professors' seriousness.1 Žižek's work has gone a long way toward making Lacan seem indispensable to cultural studies, just as Juliet Mitchell's and Jacqueline Rose's work a decade earlier made Lacan seem indispensable to theoretically rigorous feminism. At a moment when the poststructuralist variant of Lacanian theory was being displaced by historicist modes of thought, Žižek emerged on the scene to revivify psychoanalysis and make it exciting again. Thus his work's appeal has an historical basis quite apart from Žižek's own personal charisma and his remarkable productivity. It is his politicizing of psychoanalysis, as much as his [End Page 21] rendering Lacan newly accessible, that has made Žižek popular. I want to argue, however, that his style of politicizing psychoanalysis carries a significant ethical cost, one that follows partly as a consequence of Žižek's failure to work through his theoretical relation to Althusser, from whom he derives the practice of symptomatic reading while claiming to displace the latter's version of psychoanalytic Marxism. Thus I shall be arguing for a significant distinction between a political and an ethical psychoanalysis, suggesting that we have been cultivating the former at the expense of the latter.Spaghetti PsychoanalysisThe notion of the symptom is central to Žižek's thinking about politics and culture. Although in his work and in psychoanalytic theory more generally the term symptom carries a range of conceptual meanings, symptomatology remains the governing trope of Žižek's oeuvre. Following Lacan, who continued to modify the concept of the symptom throughout his career, Žižek argues that just about anything can be understood as symptomatic:[I]n the final years of Lacan's teaching we find a kind of universalization of the symptom: almost everything that is becomes in a way symptom, so that finally even woman is determined as the symptom of man. We can even say that "symptom" is Lacan's final answer to the eternal philosophical question "Why is there something instead of nothing?"—this "something" which "is... (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is the forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character: this series is a much-needed focus for it.

Human culture is uniquely complex compared to other species. This complexity stems from the accumulation of culture over time through high- and low-fidelity transmission and innovation. One possible reason for why humans retain and create culture, is our ability to modulate teaching strategies in order to foster learning and innovation. We argue that teaching is more diverse, flexible, and complex in humans than in other species. This particular characteristic of human teaching rather than teaching itself is one of the reasons (...) for human’s incredible capacity for cumulative culture. That is, humans unlike other species can signal to learners whether the information they are teaching can or cannot be modified. As a result teaching in humans can be used to support high or low fidelity transmission, innovation, and ultimately, cumulative culture. (shrink)

Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character. Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. OSM offers a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philsophy of mind and philosophy of science. Besides independent essays, volumes will often contain a critical (...) essay on a recent book, or a symposium that allows participants to respond to one another's criticisms and questions. Anyone who wants to know what's happening in metaphysics can start here. (shrink)

The dominated convergence theorem implies that if is a sequence of functions on a probability space taking values in the interval [0, 1], and converges pointwise a.e., then converges to the integral of the pointwise limit. Tao [26] has proved a quantitative version of this theorem: given a uniform bound on the rates of metastable convergence in the hypothesis, there is a bound on the rate of metastable convergence in the conclusion that is independent of the sequence and the underlying (...) space. We prove a slight strengthening of Tao’s theorem which, moreover, provides an explicit description of the second bound in terms of the first. Specifically, we show that when the first bound is given by a continuous functional, the bound in the conclusion can be computed by a recursion along the tree of unsecured sequences. We also establish a quantitative version of Egorov’s theorem, and introduce a new mode of convergence related to these notions. (shrink)

The covert administration of medication occurs with incapacitated patients without their knowledge, involving some form of deliberate deception in disguising or hiding the medication. Covert medication in food is a relatively common practice globally, including in institutional and homecare contexts. Until recently, it has received little attention in the bioethics literature, and there are few laws or rules governing the practice. In this paper, we discuss significant, but often overlooked, ethical issues related to covert medication in food. We emphasise the (...) variety of ways in which eating has ethical importance, highlighting what is at risk if covert administration of medication in food is discovered. For example, losing trust in feeders and food due to covert medication may risk important opportunities for identity maintenance in contexts where identity is already unstable. Since therapeutic relationships may be jeopardised by a patient’s discovery that caregivers had secretly put medications in their food, this practice can result in an ongoing deception loop. While there may be circumstances in which covert medication is ethically justified, given a lack of suitable alternatives, we argue that in any particular case this practice should be continually re-evaluated in light of the building moral costs to the relational agent over time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionCarolyn J. Dean (bio)... even since he [Nietzsche] became famous has he ever been anything but an occasion for misunderstanding?—Georges Bataille, The Accursed ShareAt the current juncture in the history of studies “on Bataille,” admiration and indebtedness have given way to admiration constrained by ambivalence and indebtedness complicated by a desire for accountability. This special issue provides an opportunity to work through these inevitable critical shifts, symptoms of (...) an immeasurable debt to a writer from whom we have necessarily taken distance. It is also an occasion to ask about our own investments in the renewed production of Bataille.During his lifetime (1897–1962), Georges Bataille was called many names, including a “pornographer” and a fascist, and when he died he became a cult figure among some intellectuals, for whom he represented an eclectic and unappreciated thinker. Since his untimely death, Bataille has become very famous. Now, according to Jürgen Habermas, this former librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, editor of Critique, author of covertly circulated erotic books and other works that did not sell well, stands first in a line of French intellectuals leading from “Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida” [Habermas 14]. 1 Bataille’s remains are located in the posthumanist pantheon: his work is joined to the giants of the French philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary heritage, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Blanchot; he has been the subject of countless literary exegeses and even of a prizewinning biography [see Surya]. Bataille no longer has the merit of being unknown.But who is the Bataille we pretend to know? He is the one with whom many critics identify, yet his work is necessarily misunderstood, sometimes (but not always) in the interests of preserving its insights. Critical work on Bataille naturally emphasizes his theory of dépense (expenditure), his mysticism, his attraction to the sacrificial, sadomasochistic erotics of fascist politics, and tends, viscerally if implicitly, to identify with Bataille’s refusal to be hard in the conventional sense—his repudiation of impermeable, phallic masculinity and its association with moral resolve. In 1945, Bataille wrote that he was the “contrary of him who tranquilly watches the dismasted vessels from the shore, because in fact... I cannot imagine anyone so cruel that he could notice the one who is dismasted with such carefree laughter. Sinking is something altogether different, one can have it to one’s heart’s content...” [OC 6:358]. In 1966, a sensitive critic wrote: “Bataille’s cogito, thus, reads: ‘I sink therefore I am’” [Hollier 138]. In other words, Bataille was no proponent of a sink-or-swim philosophy, but of “the hard desire to endure”—words he wrote to describe Vincent Van Gogh, whose self-mutilation was, from Bataille’s perspective, the necessary precondition of his art. This hard desire is paradoxically the hard labor of unbinding the self, a project that entails yet moves beyond empathizing with those caught in the storm: Bataille insisted that creation required symbolic castration rather than the phallic virtue of the moral man or the swollen pride of those who volunteer heroically for the rescue mission (“Heroism,” he said, “is an [End Page 3] attitude of flight” [OC 5: 347]). As countless critics have demonstrated, even Bataille’s most relentlessly hard-core texts use sexuality as an allegory for the self-shattering of the phallic body.The sacrificial constitution of the man who would sink—for this Bataille was giddily embraced after his death. By 1990, when Yale French Studies devoted a special issue to him, the embrace was equally enthusiastic, but giddiness had given way to some defensiveness. Those theorists who did not admire Bataille equated his repudiation of phallic virtue with the ego-dissolving sublimity of fascism. After all, some of his friends and intellectual heirs had been subjected to public scrutiny for their anti-Semitic, often fascist sympathies. Implicitly defending Bataille, the editor of that special issue insisted on Bataille’s “ethics” of sacrifice. He claimed that Bataille held “onto the possibility of an ethics” through a paradoxically “incessant repositing of the ethical” [Stoekl 2, 5]. This account of Bataille’s ethics avoids the problem that the ethics of sacrifice in... (shrink)

This paper offers a defense of the practice of mindless eating. Popular accounts of the practice suggest that it is non-autonomous and to blame for many of society’s food related problems, including the so-called obesity epidemic and the prevalence of diet related illnesses like diabetes. I use Maureen Sie’s “traffic participation” account of agency to argue that some mindless eating is autonomous, or more specifically, agential. Insofar as we value autonomous eating, then, it should be valued. I also argue that (...) mindless eating can be substantively good: it can help us achieve valuable ends, like creating and maintaining community. Acknowledging the agency and value in mindless eating has both practical and ethical benefits. I contend that it can help us preserve the value in mindless eating while suggesting more effective ways to change it, and, by offering a new narrative about mindless eaters, may be less damaging to agency than popular narratives. (shrink)