Men and women have always bargained for sex. In Hard Bargains, philosopher-lawyer Linda Hirshman and legal historian Jane Larson provide the first complete analysis of power in heterosexual relationships, combining an eye-opening legal history of sexual regualtion with thought-provoking predictions of what the future might bring.

Men and women have always bargained for sex. In Hard Bargains, philosopher-lawyer Linda Hirshman and legal historian Jane Larson provide the first complete analysis of power in heterosexual relationships, combining an eye-opening legal history of sexual regulation with thought-provoking predictions of what the future might bring. Hirshman and Larson tell a riveting tale that spans the centuries--from early accounts of adulterers hanging from the gibbet, to the impact of the Kinsey Reports and Hugh Hefner's playboy philosophy, to (...) the 1960s judge who argued in favor of sex with eleven-year-olds. The book examines the factors that have shaped our notions of sex, from Catholic teaching to the theories of Sigmund Freud, and it explores the Supreme Court decisions of the last few decades that revolutionized the politics of sex. And Hard Bargains not only provides a deep understanding of historical and current disputes, it also offers striking predictions of what sexual bargaining will look like in the future--rape laws replaced by laws of sexual autonomy, adultery subjected to breach of contract action, fornicators responsible for each other's rent, prostitution considered an unfair labor practice. These are a few of the surprising--and surprisingly workable--solutions the authors foresee in the 21st century. Hard Bargains takes a forthright and level-headed look at all aspects of one of the biggest controversies in contemporary American society--heterosexual sex--and delivers a radically new perspective on the sexual lives of women and men. (shrink)

Call the norms of inquiry zetetic norms. How are zetetic norms related to epistemic norms? At first glance, they seem quite closely connected. Aren't epistemic norms norms that bind inquirers qua inquirers? And isn't epistemology the place to look for a normative theory of inquiry? While much of this thought seems right, this paper argues that the relationship between the epistemic and the zetetic is not as harmonious as one might have thought and liked. In particular, this paper argues that (...) some familiar contemporary epistemic norms are in tension with, and even in conflict with, central zetetic norms. (shrink)

In this paper I look at belief and degrees of belief through the lens of inquiry. I argue that belief and degrees of belief play different roles in inquiry. In particular I argue that belief is a “settling” attitude in a way that degrees of belief are not. Along the way I say more about what inquiring amounts to, argue for a central norm of inquiry connecting inquiry and belief and say more about just what it means to have an (...) inquiry or question settled. (shrink)

Highly accessible and intelligently composed textbook introduction to the field of semantics with suggested readings.

Postcolonialism offers challenging and provocative ways of thinking about colonial and neocolonial power, about self and other, and about the discourses that perpetuate postcolonial inequality and violence. Much of the seminal work in postcolonialism has been shaped by currents in philosophy, notably Marxism and ethics. "Understanding Postcolonialism" examines the philosophy of postcolonialism in order to reveal the often conflicting systems of thought which underpin it. In so doing, the book presents a reappraisal of the major postcolonial thinkers of the twentieth (...) century.Ranging beyond the narrow selection of theorists to which the field is often restricted, the book explores the work of Fanon and Sartre, Gandhi, Nandy, and the Subaltern Studies Group, Foucault and Said, Derrida and Bhabha, Khatibi and Glissant, and Spivak, Mbembe and Mudimbe. A clear and accessible introduction to the subject, "Understanding Postcolonialism" reveals how, almost half a century after decolonisation, the complex relation between politics and ethics continues to shape postcolonial thought. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Philosophy Pitfalls, and What Is Needed to Avoid Them Institutional History at Cambridge Cambridge Philosophy Reference.

"It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless. Certain forms of personal righteousness have become to a majority of the community almost automatic. But we all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements. (...) To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation. This book is a study of various types and groups who are being impelled by the newer conception of Democracy to an acceptance of social obligations involving in each instance a new line of conduct."--. (shrink)

This volume tracks the evolution of Mansbridge's key contributions to democratic theory in participatory, institutional and feminist contexts through articles that span her entire career to date.

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we (...) to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

The proposed new geological era, The Anthropocene (aka Age of Humans, Age of Man), marking human domination of the planet long called Mother Earth, is truly The Age of the Motherfucker. The ecocide of the Anthropocene comes from Man, the Western- and masculine- identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that masks itself as the exemplar of the civilized and the human. The word motherfucker was invented by the enslaved children of White slavemasters to name their mothers' rapist/owners. Man's strategic (...) motherfucking, from the personal to the planetary, is invasion, exploitation, spirit-breaking, extraction and toxic wasting of individuals, communities, and lands, for reasons of pleasure, plunder, and profit. Ecocide is attempted deicide of Mother Nature-Earth, reflecting Man's goal to come the god he first made in his own image. The motivational word Motherfucker further reveals the Anthropocene with a flip side signifying an outstanding, formidable, and inexorable force. Mother Nature-Earth is that "Mutha'" -- one defying translation into heteropatriarchal classifications of gender, one capable of overwhelming Man and not the other way around. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American scholarship, ecofeminism, ecowomanism, green activism, femme, queer, and gender non-binary philosophies, literature and arts, Afrofuturism, and popular culture, Call Your "Mutha'" contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence of Man's supremacy over nature, but that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is going away. It is imperative now to call the "Mutha'" by decolonizing land, bodies, and minds, ending rapism, feeding the green, renewing sustaining patterns and affirming devotion to Mother Nature-Earth. (shrink)

Countable homogeneous relational structures have been studied by many people. One area of focus is the Ramsey theory of such structures. After a review of background material, a partition theorem of Laflamme, Sauer, and Vuksanovic for countable homogeneous binary relational structures is discussed with a focus on the size of the set of unavoidable colors.

Healthism and ableism intertwine through an imperative of normalcy and the ensuing devaluing of those who fail to meet societally dominant norms and expectations around “normal” health. This paper tracks the effect of that imperative of normalcy through current research into gut microbiome therapies, using therapies targeting fatness and autism as examples. The complexity of the gut microbiome ought to encourage us to rethink our conception of ourselves and our embeddedness in the world; instead, the microbiome is transformed into one (...) more tool for controlling unruly bodies and minds. (shrink)

Challenges the idea held by many prominent twentieth-century Sinologists that early China experienced a “language crisis.” Jane Geaney argues that early Chinese conceptions of speech and naming cannot be properly understood if viewed through the dominant Western philosophical tradition in which language is framed through dualisms that are based on hierarchies of speech and writing, such as reality/appearance and one/many. Instead, early Chinese texts repeatedly create pairings of sounds and various visible things. This aural/visual polarity suggests that texts from (...) early China treat speech as a bodily practice that is not detachable from its use in everyday experience. Firmly grounded in ideas about bodies from the early texts themselves, Geaney’s interpretation offers new insights into three key themes in these texts: the notion of speakers’ intentions (yi), the physical process of emulating exemplary people, and Confucius’s proposal to rectify names (zhengming). Jane Geaney is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond and the author of On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought. (shrink)

In this paper, we study some new examples of ideals on $$\omega $$ with maximal Tukey type (that is, maximal among partial orders of size continuum). This discussion segues into an examination of a refinement of the Tukey order—known as the weak Rudin–Keisler order—and its structure when restricted to these ideals of maximal Tukey type. Mirroring a result of Fremlin (Note Mat 11:177–214, 1991) on the Tukey order, we also show that there is an analytic P-ideal above all other analytic (...) P-ideals in the weak Rudin–Keisler order. (shrink)

This book explores the persistence of Pythagorean ideas in theoretical physics. It shows that the Pythagorean position is both philosophically deep and scientifically interesting. However, it does not endorse pure Pythagoreanism; rather, it defends the thesis that mind and mathematical structure are the grounds of reality. The book begins by examining Wigner's paper on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. It argues that, whilst many issues surrounding the applicability of mathematics disappear upon examination, there are some core (...) issues to do with the effectiveness of mathematics in fundamental physics which remain. The core issues are the existence of the laws of nature and our minds ability to fathom them, the use of formal mathematics in discovering things about the quantum world, the fact that deep mathematics is needed to describe fundamental physics, and the asymptotic nature of the quest for knowledge. These issues are the focus of the book. The author seeks to explain them within a metaphysical framework that takes mind and mathematical structure as its fundamental principles. The framework - called quantum monadology - combines ideas from Leibnizian monadology, set theory, and consistent histories quantum theory. (shrink)

The Filter Dichotomy says that every uniform nonmeager filter on the integers is mapped by a finite-to-one function to an ultrafilter. The consistency of this principle was proved by Blass and Laflamme. A medial limit is a universally measurable function from [Formula: see text] to the unit interval [0, 1] which is finitely additive for disjoint sets, and maps singletons to 0 and ω to 1. Christensen and Mokobodzki independently showed that the Continuum Hypothesis implies the existence of medial limits. (...) We show that the Filter Dichotomy implies that there are no medial limits. (shrink)

The forcing construction Pmax, invented by W. Hugh Woodin, produces a model whose collection of subsets of ω₁ is in some sense maximal. In this paper we study the Boolean algebra induced by the nonstationary ideal on ω₁ in this model. Among other things we show that the induced quotient does not have a simply definable form. We also prove several results about saturation properties of the ideal in this extension.

To the best of my knowledge, no one in recent decades has written a book of this magnitude about the semantics of natural language. Certainly, nothing available today matches this volume in depth, precision, and coherence. The authors present classical and recent results of linguistic semantics within the framework of interpretative T-theories and defend the philosophical foundations of their approach by showing how it fits into the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics. The book also includes an array of excellent exercises (...) and a good list of references. (shrink)

Our language and metaphors about environmental issues reflect and affect how we perceive and manage them. Discourse on invasive species is dominated by aggressive language of aliens and invasion, which contributes to the use of war-like metaphors to promote combative control. This language has been criticised for undermining scientific objectivity, misleading discourse, and restricting how invasive species are perceived and managed. Calls have been made for alternative metaphors that open up new management possibilities and reconnect with a deeper conservation ethic. (...) Here, we turn to Indigenous perspectives because they are increasingly recognised as offering important and novel voices in invasive species discourse. We examine how Australian Aboriginal elders and land managers (rangers) speak about 'environmental weeds' (the term used to describe invasive plants in Australia) and weed management. Based on qualitative research with five Aboriginal groups in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, our findings indicate that Aboriginal elders speak about weeds through passive, neutral language and prefer metaphors for weed management that focus on health, care and creation. We outline the influence that this language has for how rangers practice weed work and discuss its implications for the mainstream paradigm. (shrink)

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery (in painting, photography, prints, film, and design) of race construction primarily in Scandinavia and the empires of Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia at a time when the disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and publications on race were debating competing theories of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. These regions, while on the periphery of continental Europe, largely marginalized in the scholarship of nineteenth-century art history, and ignored by Edward (...) Said (Orientalism 1978), have been central locations for theorizing white identity and for containing diverse ethnic populations that have generated substantive ethnographic study and regional conflicts since the eighteenth century. This anthology explores art that engaged with ethnography and anthropology to shape visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures, both indigenous (Roma, Sámi, Inuit, and Celts) and migrant or colonial (Muslims and Blacks), chiefly between 1850 and 1930, but extending into the early twenty-first century. The essays in this book contribute to postcolonial research by documenting colonial-style treatment of minority groups and by seeking to qualify binary systems through explorations of anomalies, complexities, and contradictions that emerge when seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts. This book presents a range of different artistic voices that responded to ethnographic and anthropological information by producing images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued that information. The authors seek to uncover instances of connections and variability, to establish the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and to challenge the certainties of racial categorization. (shrink)

"It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless. Certain forms of personal righteousness have become to a majority of the community almost automatic. But we all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements. (...) To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation. This book is a study of various types and groups who are being impelled by the newer conception of Democracy to an acceptance of social obligations involving in each instance a new line of conduct."--. (shrink)