Se realizó un estudio descriptivo con el objetivo de caracterizar la dieta cetogénica como una alternativa en el tratamiento de la epilepsia refractaria en niños para mejorar su calidad de vida, con la consiguiente disminución de su costo económico. La epilepsia catastrófica o refractaria es un problema social de salud que la padecen pacientes pediátricos, generalmente en los primeros días de vida, de difícil control y con múltiples crisis pese al empleo de fármacos antiepilépticos en dosis tóxica, e incluye diferentes (...) síndromes y enfermedades con características propias. Esta dieta ofrece una esperanza para aquellos pacientes que se resisten al tratamiento con medicamentos y su solución representa un valor social porque su beneficio supera el costo. A descriptive study with objective to characterize the ketogenic diet as alternative in the treatment of the refractory epilepsy in children for elevating their quality of life, with the consequent decreasing of its economic cost, was carried out. The catastrophic or refractory epilepsy is one health social problem that the pediatric patient suffers, generally in the first days of life, the hard control and with numerous crisis despite of the use of antiepileptic drugs in toxic doses, and include different syndromes and diseases with own characteristics. This diet offers one hope, and its solution represents a social value because the benefit overcomes the cost for those patients that resist the drug treatment. (shrink)

Recent forest fires in Brazil and Australia have been the subject of irrational discussions on social networks without any legitimate scientific basis. These discussions often overlook or ignore fundamental questions about how limited government reactions, especially from the Brazilian government, to climate change affect these disasters. This article seeks to foster a discussion supported by data about climate change, the consequences of increased frequency of catastrophic weather events, and ways in which aggressiveness and ignorance via the internet and social networks (...) do nothing to address the underlying issues. (shrink)

El artículo expone resultados de investigación etnográfica acerca de algunas de las particularidades que presentan las políticas sobre la vida en contextos de pobreza urbana. Se trata de un trabajo de investigación desarrollado entre 2013 y 2016 en la localidad de José León Suárez, Región Metropolitana de Buenos Aires. Una de las dimensiones particularmente relevantes que plantea la gubernamentabilidad de la pobreza es la de la violencia. Aquí se focaliza en el análisis de situaciones y acontecimientos que expresan una modulación (...) de la vida que proponemos denominar como violencia hacia la vida, denotando así el poder relacional y político de la violencia. Presentamos y reflexionamos en torno a las tensiones que adquieren estas situaciones, entendiendo que constituyen parte de la trama del gobierno tal como se ensambla cotidianamente en estos barrios de la urbe metropolitana. La investigación etnográfica es clave para profundizar en el estudio y la comprensión de los modos microfísicos que asumen las políticas sobre la vida en las metrópolis contemporáneas. (shrink)

An analysis is presented of the relationships between consumers ethical beliefs, ethical ideology, Machiavellianism, political preference and the individual difference variable "need for closure". It is based on a representative survey of 286 Belgian respondents. Standard measurement tools of proven reliability and robustness are used to measure ethical beliefs (consumer ethics scale), ethical ideology (ethical positioning), Machiavellianism (Mach IV scale) and need for closure. The analysis finds the following. First, individuals with a high need for closure tend to have beliefs (...) that are more ethical as regards possible consumer actions, and score higher on idealism and lower on Machiavellianism, than those with a low need for closure. Second, a correlation exists between political preference and ethical beliefs. Third, a significant relationship exists between ethical ideology and political preference for the two largest political parties. Fourth, individuals with a high and low need for closure have different political preferences for right-wing and left-wing parties. (shrink)

Intractability is a growing concern across the cognitive sciences: while many models of cognition can describe and predict human behavior in the lab, it remains unclear how these models can scale to situations of real-world complexity. Cognition and Intractability is the first book to provide an accessible introduction to computational complexity analysis and its application to questions of intractability in cognitive science. Covering both classical and parameterized complexity analysis, it introduces the mathematical concepts and proof techniques that can be used (...) to test one's intuition of tractability. It also describes how these tools can be applied to cognitive modeling to deal with intractability, and its ramifications, in a systematic way. Aimed at students and researchers in philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistics who want to build a firm understanding of intractability and its implications in their modeling work, it is an ideal resource for teaching or self-study. (shrink)

Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities is the first book to outline and define the specific and evolving field of the creative humanities and provides the field's nascent bibliography.

The objective of the present review on the evolution of Green Chemistry, since its emergence until 2016, aimed an integrated vision of its progress along the three phases of its development: emergence, divulgation and consolidation. The methodology involved the analysis of a selection of bibliography on the evolution of GC collected from issues of the ACS symposia series; editorials in specialized GC journals; and commemorative birthday papers/editorials of these journals and of the GC itself. The analysis allowed to identify and (...) discuss the characteristics and conceptions of GC agents about fundamental concepts and procedures, in order to visualize and better understand the state of knowledge and the subject areas that make up the field. The main alterations identified in the evolution of GC were: it acquired a better defined identity, with more participation of academy and increased scope; was progressively framed in sustainability; has been aspiring to a holistic frame and to a change on the nature of the innovation for its implementation, from incremental to transformative. The analysis suggests that for supporting expansion and consolidation of GC the following aspects deserve attention: full validation of chemical greenness by metrics; better characterization of the frontiers of GC research areas/themes; increased integration between academy and industry; and penetration in chemistry curricula. Its basic philosophy being the practice of a chemistry more focused on the environment preservation, GC means a new stage in nature and in the history of Chemistry. (shrink)

Despite their success in describing and predicting cognitive behavior, the plausibility of so-called ‘rational explanations’ is often contested on the grounds of computational intractability. Several cognitive scientists have argued that such intractability is an orthogonal pseudoproblem, however, since rational explanations account for the ‘why’ of cognition but are agnostic about the ‘how’. Their central premise is that humans do not actually perform the rational calculations posited by their models, but only act as if they do. Whether or not the problem (...) of intractability is solved by recourse to ‘as if’ explanations critically depends, inter alia, on the semantics of the ‘as if’ connective. We examine the five most sensible explications in the literature, and conclude that none of them circumvents the problem. As a result, rational ‘as if’ explanations must obey the minimal computational constraint of tractability. (shrink)

The European Corporate Sustainability Framework (ECSF) is, among other concepts, based on a phase-wise development approach as described by Clare Graves' Levels of Existence Theory. As much as corporate sustainability has a sequence of adequate interpretations, aligned with each development level, also the notion of business excellence can be defined at multiple levels, as this paper demonstrates. Furthermore, the authors analyze the current EFQM Excellence Model for particular biases towards various development levels and suggest a new and innovative two-step approach (...) to assessing organizational performance with respect to organizational excellence (OE) and corporate sustainability. According to the organization's ambition, the assessment is either limited to a shareholder approach, mainly focusing at optimal usage of resources, or it also includes an additional assessment format based on the stakeholder approach, with specific reference to the organization's performance on the financial, social and ecological bottom line. This paper demonstrates the need and feasibility of an EFQM-Based assessment tool with a combined focus on corporate sustainability and OE. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious work has shown that a stooped posture may activate negative mood. Extending this work, the present experiments examine how stooped body posture influences recovery from pre-existing negative mood. In Experiment 1, participants were randomly assigned to receive either a negative or neutral mood induction, after which participants were instructed to take either a stooped, straight, or control posture while writing down their thoughts. Stooped posture led to less mood recovery in the negative mood condition, and more negative mood in (...) the neutral mood condition. Furthermore, stooped posture led to more negative thoughts overall compared to straight or control postures. In Experiment 2, all participants underwent a negative mood induction, after which half received cognitive reappraisal instructions and half received no instructions. Mood-congruent cognitions were assessed through autobiographical memory recall. Again, stooped position led to less mood recovery. Notably, this was independent of regulation instruction. These findings demonstrate for the first time that posture plays an important role in recovering from negative mood. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to defend the view that art is a relevant source of knowledge, including moral knowledge, in the absence of empirical evidence corroborating this view. In the first part, I discuss what is known as the causal question, that is, the question regarding art's impact on spectators. I argue that the alleged failure of art to impact us may be a matter of moral motivation and the particular circumstances of moral reasoning more than the cognitive (...) and ethical character of a work. To support my claim, I rely on contemporary research on moral reasoning. I conclude by sketching a wider context within which we should consider art's impact, stressing the relevance of cognitive sciences and moral psychology. (shrink)

This article contributes to contemporary philosophy of technology by carrying out a diffractive reading of Ernst Cassirer’s “Form und Technik” (1930) and Gilbert Simondon’s Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958). Both thinkers, who are here brought together for the first time, stood on the brink of the defining bifurcations of twentieth-century philosophy. However, in their endeavor to come to grips with the “being” of technology, Cassirer and Simondon, each in their own way, were prompted to develop an ontology of (...) emergence that gives ontological priority to “technicity,” that is, to technology considered in its efficacy or operative functioning. By reading Cassirer’s and Simondon’s insights through one another, we aim to further develop this ontology of emergence, and, simultaneously, to demonstrate the relevance of these thinkers for present-day theorizing. As we hope to show, the insistence on the ontological force of technological apparatuses transverses received philosophical and ontological divides and revitalizes the notions of “nature” and “the human,” which are now understood as coevolving with technology. (shrink)

This article lies at the intersection of two problems: the one concerning the potential of fictional works to inform us about our social reality and foster our understanding of its various aspects, and the one concerning their potential to engage with philosophical issues. I bring these two together by analyzing the hit television series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. According to my interpretation, the series is informative about our social world, and it raises philosophical concerns about it. This makes (...) it well-equipped to fulfill the educative function attributed to mass art by Noël Carroll, and to stand out as an example of what he calls popular philosophy. To support this interpretation, I rely on contemporary views regarding the nature of our engagements with fictional narratives. I then explore how philosophical concerns are generated and I elaborate on the role they have in deepening one’s understanding of one’s social circumstances. I further show how the series provides innovative and independent philosophical knowledge by means specific to the medium of generic serialized fiction. The central part of my argument is an analysis of the narrative strategies which enable the informative and philosophical aspects of the series to generate the series’ educative function. (shrink)

Many compelling examples have recently been provided in which people can achieve impressive epistemic success, e.g. draw highly accurate inferences, by using simple heuristics and very little information. This is possible by taking advantage of the features of the environment. The examples suggest an easy and appealing naturalization of rationality: on the one hand, people clearly can apply simple heuristics, and on the other hand, they intuitively ought do so when this brings them high accuracy at little cost.. The ‘ought-can’ (...) principle is satisfied, and rationality is meaningfully normative. We show, however, that this naturalization program is endangered by a computational wrinkle in the adaptation process taken to be responsible for this heuristics-based (‘ecological’) rationality: for the adaptation process to guarantee even minimal rationality, it requires astronomical computational resources, making the problem intractable. We consider various plausible auxiliary assumptions in attempt to remove this obstacle, and show that they do not succeed; intractability is a robust property of adaptation. We discuss the implications of our findings for the project of naturalizing rationality. (shrink)

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, and (...) setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on "diffraction." This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or "new materialist.". (shrink)

Advancement in cognitive science depends, in part, on doing some occasional ‘theoretical housekeeping’. We highlight some conceptual confusions lurking in an important attempt at explaining the human capacity for rational or coherent thought: Thagard & Verbeurgt’s computational-level model of humans’ capacity for making reasonable and truth-conducive abductive inferences (1998; Thagard, 2000). Thagard & Verbeurgt’s model assumes that humans make such inferences by computing a coherence function (f_coh), which takes as input representation networks and their pair-wise constraints and gives as output (...) a partition into accepted (A) and rejected (R) elements that maximizes the weight of satisfied constraints. We argue that their proposal gives rise to at least three difficult problems. (shrink)

In this paper I follow Ted Nannicelli in the project of establishing boundaries of television works. I focus on serialized television works pertaining to a particular genre and I set out to provide an account of their identity. My claim is that external identity of such works is determined by their specific genre-affiliation, given the way in which generic norms determine the content of the series, namely, its characteristic storylines and regular set of characters. From the internal perspective, a series’ (...) identity is determined by the particular way in which it implements abstract generic norms. I describe the process of such implementation as creation of series-specific formulaic patterns, and I analyze different layers of works where such patterns are evident. My central claim is that series-specific formulaic patterns create a coherent set of norms which, through repeated instantiation in the series’ episodes, become associated with that particular series. The function of this set is to establish the series’ boundaries, and to maintain its identity when different modifications to the patterns are made. (shrink)

In this article, I defend the cognitive value of certain generic television series. Unlike media and television scholars, who have been appreciative of the informative capacity of television fiction, philosophers have been less willing to acknowledge the way in which these works contribute to our understanding of our social reality. My aim here is to provide one such account, grounded in aesthetic cognitivism, that is, the view that fiction is a source of knowledge. Focusing on crime and courtroom dramas, I (...) start by offering some examples of the cognitive benefits available in some of these series and I argue that the more beneficial cases establish superior mimetic relations with reality, enhancing their capacity to present ethically challenging issues. I then examine whether the fictional dimension of these works presents an obstacle to their informative potential and I conclude that it does not. A central aspect of my account is the claim that the degree of cognitive benefit depends on the underlying narrative strategy of the series. Specifically, there are clues in any given show, including the treatment of ongoing characters, which signal the extent to which it can be taken as mimetically reliable and thus, cognitively valuable. I complete my account by addressing anti-cognitivists’ arguments which call to doubt the informative aspect of television series and their capacity to address ethical concerns. (shrink)

A pandemia de COVID-19 já levou à morte mais de cem mil brasileiros. A doença impõe um debate sobre o papel do Estado na segurança alimentar e na agricultura sustentável, que foram diretamente atingidas pelo isolamento social. O presente artigo, fruto a pesquisa exploratória doutrinária, objetiva fundamentar atuação do Poder Público durante a pandemia, pelo Princípio da Fraternidade, para a realização do Objetivo de Desenvolvimento Sustentável 02 da Organização das Nações Unidas, que prevê metas para erradicação da fome, melhoria da (...) segurança alimentar, da nutrição e da agricultura sustentável. (shrink)

This article engages with the philosophical reflections of the French historian of science Hélène Metzger (1886–1944) in order to develop a vocabulary for understanding the rise of non-reductive Continental naturalism in the contemporary humanities. The bibliography of current naturalist approaches in the arts and the human sciences is still in the making, but it is altogether clear that the trend is not scientist or historicist or relativist. This epistemological diagnosis refers us to Metzger, who found herself surrounded with the logical (...) positivism of the Wiener Kreis, on the one hand, and the historicism of her French colleagues, on the other, as well as with the infiltration of the history of science by a chronological empiricism. In this article I will take the most recent book of Vicki Kirby – Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large from 2011 – as an exemplary case of non-reductive Continental naturalist scholarship in the humanities today and by reading it through the concepts of Metzger, I will demonstrate how this type of research leads to refreshing insights in what constitutes positive humanities knowledge and what is the role of the a priori in the field. (shrink)

This edited volume examines the topic of trust and its place in the thought of several key figures from the history of philosophy. Drawing on thinkers and philosophical traditions from across the globe, the chapters focus especially on trust's moral and social dimensions.

Altered attachment characteristics may disturb the HPA and can even cause changes in the hippocampus. However, it is unknown if that will influence spatial navigation performance, learning and recalling. In this study we pretend to verify if there are differences in spatial navigation learning and was associated with attachment style dimensions of anxiety and close-depend. Sixty-five female participants were recruited and were evaluated using the Adult Attachment Scale-R and tested on a virtual maze navigation task (VMT) at one moment (exploratory (...) trial + 3 trials) and 24h later (3 trials). There was a significant Moment x Trial x Close-Depend interaction for the outcome time, F (2, 126) = 3.807, p = 0.025, with post-hoc analysis indicating that the High Close-Depend group displayed significant improvements between Trial 1 and Trial 3 in the post-test assessment. Conversely, the Low Close-Depend group displayed significant improvements between Trial 1and Trial 3 but on the pre-test assessment. Furthermore, the Low Close-Depend group presented significant better performance in pre-test Trial 3 in comparison to the High Close-Depend group. Thereby, it seems that low comfort with proximity and trust in others is associated with reduced spatial navigation recall, although spatial learning performance was actually superior in these participants. It is possible that reduced exposure to social interaction and meaning relationship may be reduced in the Low Close-Depend group, leading to modifications in hippocampal function and, ultimately, reduced spatial recall. Conversely, participants with high comfort with proximity and trust in others may not display typical spatial learning in the proposed task as they are more willing to freely explore the presented environment. (shrink)

The sixteen essays in Gender Struggles address a wide range of issues in gender struggles, from the more familiar ones that, for the last thirty years, have been the mainstay of feminist scholarship, such as motherhood, beauty, and sexual violence, to new topics inspired by post-industrialization and multiculturalism, such as the welfare state, cyberspace, hate speech, and queer politics, and finally to topics that traditionally have not been seen as appropriate subjects for philosophizing, such as adoption, care work, and the (...) home. (shrink)

RESUMO O presente artigoapresenta reflexões sobre o conceito de “imprevisibilidade” advindas a partir do exercício de tradução para a língua portuguesa da obra Os mecanismos culturais imprevisíveis1, último livro publicado por Iuri Lótman. Mais do que uma explicação completa e definitiva das acepções sobre os trabalhos imprevisíveis da cultura, esboçamos nestes escritos fundamentos de interesse para a constituição de processos semiósicos de nossas particulares preocupações. Dessa forma, apresentam-se para as análises relações imprevisíveis em processos relacionados à ciência e à tecnologia, (...) à arte e à figura do estrangeiro.ABSTRACT This article reflects upon for the concept of unpredictability based on the translation into Portuguese of The Unpredictable Workings of Culture, Yuri Lotman’s last published book. More than a complete and definitive explanation of the meanings of the unpredictable works of culture, this article outlines the fundamentals that interest the constitution of semiosic processes that concerns us. Thus, unpredictable relationships in processes related to science and technology, art and the foreign figure are presented for the analysis. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the question of engaged philosophy with an emphasis on aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Referring to some specific problems discussed in these areas – in particular climate change, ecological crisis and immoral art – I demonstrate that philosophy can be engaged in two ways: (i) in its aspiration to question social reality, culture, human experience and the strategies for making sense of and finding value in that experience; (ii) in the aspiration to contribute to (...) the well-being of individuals and society through its contribution to understanding that reality and experience. First, I point to the connection between the philosophical questions and the fundamental intellectual aspirations of human beings as social and cultural beings, but also as autonomous knowers and valuers. Second, I respond to two objections that can be directed against engaged philosophy: (i) one that points to a lack of consensus among philosophical responses (the problem of disagreement), and (ii) one that highlights the irrelevance of philosophical debates to our social practice. (shrink)

Assume-se a investigação narrativa (auto)biográfica como modo de documentar as experiências ambientais da formação docente. Desse modo, apresentam-se as narrativas das experiências envolvendo a Educação Ambiental na formação inicial de uma professora-pesquisadora, as quais mostram, que a temática da sua pesquisa de mestrado está relacionada com as experiências ambientais vividas no contexto escolar e acadêmico reforçando a perspectiva da investigação a partir das memórias da infância e o reencontro com narrativas construídas na formação inicial. Apresentam-se compreensões relacionadas a formação docente (...) ambiental e as potencialidades do processo narrativo (auto)biográfico centrado nas narrativas revividas e recontadas ao resgatar o diário de formação da professora-pesquisadora. Argumenta-se que o ato de documentar a experiência de formação mostra às potencialidades da pesquisa narrativa e reafirma a importância da escrita (auto)biográfica no processo de investigação. (shrink)

In this essay we will argue for the following theses: 1- know-how is not a form of practical knowledge devoid of propositional sense; 2- the relationship between each perception and the body itself is metaphysically contingent. 3- it is up to the brain to configure or to shape a physical body (Körper) into a living body (Leib) and not the other way around; 4- phenomenal externalism of enactivist nature, even in its mild form, is empirically implausible: the correlation between the (...) conscious character of sensory experience with spatiotemporal neuronal patterns is much more systematic and regular than with anything outside the brain. But in its radical form is entirely implausible and contra-intuitive: phenomenal duplicates are not necessarily duplicates of agency; in short, 5-we are our own brain that has a body, avatars, and artifacts, properly configured and molded by the brain, and not a body that has a brain among other essential organs. (shrink)

Colonialism and Its Legacy brings together essays by leading scholars in both the fields of political theory and the history of political thought about European colonialism and its legacies, and postcolonial social and political theory. The essays explore the ways in which European colonial projects structured and shaped much of modern political theory, how concepts from political philosophy affected and were realized in colonial and imperial practice, and how we can understand the intellectual and social world left behind by a (...) half-millennium of European empires. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation is a well-established therapy for the motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, but there remains an opportunity to improve symptom relief. The temporal pattern of stimulation is a new parameter to consider in DBS therapy, and we compared the effectiveness of Temporally Optimized Patterned Stimulation to standard DBS at reducing the motor symptoms of PD. Twenty-six subjects with DBS for PD received three different patterns of stimulation while on medication and using stimulation parameters optimized for standard DBS. Side (...) effects and motor symptoms were assessed after 30 min of stimulation with each pattern. Subjects experienced similar types of side effects with TOPS and standard DBS, and TOPS were well-tolerated by a majority of the subjects. On average, the most effective TOPS was as effective as standard DBS at reducing the motor symptoms of PD. In some subjects a TOPS pattern was the most effective pattern. Finally, the TOPS pattern with low average frequency was found to be as effective or more effective in about half the subjects while substantially reducing estimated stimulation energy use. TOPS DBS may provide a new programing option to improve DBS therapy for PD by improving symptom reduction and/or increasing energy efficiency. Optimizing stimulation parameters specifically for TOPS DBS may demonstrate further clinical benefit of TOPS DBS in treating the motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. (shrink)

With his thesis on the genius who does not know from where their ideas come from and how they create, Kant left an indelible mark on thought concerning art and artistic creation. He insisted that it represents a unique act by natural gift, and thus specific for the domain of art, and specifically not belonging to the domain of science. Although today we know that such a disposition is wrong, many of Kant’s claims are supported in contemporary theories in cognitive (...) science, but also by the artistic practice. In this paper, I will analyse Kant’s theory of beautiful art and artistic creation in the context of contemporary research on creativity and talent and show how much is Kant’s theory on beautiful art and artistic creation rich explanatory, especially for understanding and thinking the artistic creation, artistic reception and artistic practice. (shrink)

Leech et al. present a connectionist algorithm as a model of (the development) of analogizing, but they do not specify the algorithm's associated computational-level theory, nor its computational complexity. We argue that doing so may be essential for connectionist cognitive models to have full explanatory power and transparency, as well as for assessing their scalability to real-world input domains.

In this classic work of feminist political thought, Iris Marion Young challenges the prevailing reduction of social justice to distributive justice.

We offer philosophical motivations for a method we call Virtual World Cognitive Science (VW CogSci), in which researchers use virtual embodied agents that are embedded in virtual worlds to explore questions in the field of Cognitive Science. We focus on questions about mental and linguistic representation and the ways that such computational modeling can add rigor to philosophical thought experiments, as well as the terminology used in the scientific study of such representations. We find that this method forces researchers to (...) take a god’s-eye view when describing dynamical relationships between entities in minds and entities in an environment in a way that eliminates the need for problematic talk of belief and concept types, such as the belief that cats are silly, and the concept CAT, while preserving belief and concept tokens in individual cognizers’ minds. We conclude with some further key advantages of VW CogSci for the scientific study of mental and linguistic representation and for Cognitive Science more broadly. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young (1949-2006) was one of the most influential and innovative political theorists of her generation who had a significant impact on a wide range of topics such as democratic theory, feminist theory, and justice. She bridged many longstanding divides among political theorists, engaging in Continental and critical theory, but also insisting on the importance of normative argument: her corpus stands as a testament to the fruitfulness of engaging in both abstract theory and the 'real world' of everyday (...) politics. This volume spans the several decades of her work, illustrating her intellectual development over time through three major areas of innovation: Gender: Maintaining that gender is both conceptually and politically meaningful, Young theorized gender in terms of structures that, in combination, position different people we call "women" in different ways, such that some women have some structures in common, without all women sharing all gendered structures in common. Justice: Young's early writings on a critical theory of justice evolved in her later and posthumously published works where she developed an account of justice that brought together her theorization of structure with her concern to respond to contemporary claims of injustice. The Politics of Difference: Young rejected universal and abstract theories of justice and maintained that justice instead required attending to the experiences of people marked by difference. (shrink)

This essay introduces an anthropological practice that remains largely unexplored in the historical literature on racial science: biometrics. In the early twentieth century, biometricians analyzed skull measurements using novel statistical methods to demonstrate racial biological differences. Drawing on new archival material, the essay reveals how these biometric data practices challenged racist anthropology. Between 1934 and 1952, Geoffrey Morant, an expert on biometry and race in Karl Pearson’s Biometric Laboratory in London, mobilized biometry to debunk Nazi racial theories. He informed the (...) public about Nazism’s fallacies in The Races of Central Europe (1939) and his UNESCO pamphlet The Significance of Racial Differences (1952). Unlike anti-racism campaigners such as Ashley Montagu, however, Morant did not dismiss the biological reality of race in his fight against Nazi racism. The essay shows that the coexistence of anti-racist and racializing practices was not paradoxical but, rather, an important feature of the anthropological study of human variation in the twentieth century. (shrink)