First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

While standard histories of Western political thought represent women’s rights as an offshoot of the earlier movement for the equal rights of men, this essay argues that the eighteenth-century push for democracy and equal rights was grounded in arguments first used to defend women’s right to moral and religious self-determination, based on their rational and spiritual equality with men. In tandem with the rise of critiques of absolute monarchy, ideal marriage, which had previously involved lordship and subjection, was transformed into (...) an equal companionate relationship based on inclination and affection. The essay argues that the transformation, by the time of the American and French revolutions, of neo-Roman republicanism—which had been aristocratic and oligarchic—into egalitarian, democratic republicanism had been mediated by the extension of arguments, widely distributed in the literature criticizing the slavery of marriage, into a general critique of slavery and support for the equal rights of men. (shrink)

This discussion of Sally Haslanger’s recent book, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford 2012), investigates how her theory of race and gender handles the problem of intersectionality; that is, the problem of how to understand the ways in which one’s location in multiple socially constructed categories affects one’s lived experiences, social roles, and relative privilege or disadvantage. Haslanger defines race and gender as locations within hierarchical social structures. This high-level structural analysis allows her to find commonality without claiming (...) that, for example, all women share social roles or psychological characteristics. However, race-based oppression seems sometimes to cancel out gender-based privilege; thus raising the question of how, on Haslanger’s model, we are to understand race and gender working together. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 62, Issue 1, pp 1 - 25 This paper aims to articulate Aristotle’s general account of vice, an account that applies to all special vices, regardless of their spheres of action and emotion, and whether they are states of excess or deficiency. Vice is ignorance in the decision : the paper explains what this means.

The concept of phronesis is venerable and is experiencing a resurgence in contemporary discourses on professional life. Aristotle’s notion of phronesis involves reasoning and action based on ethical ideals oriented towards the human good. For Aristotle, humans possess the desire to do what is best for human flourishing, and to do so according to the application of virtues. Within health care, the pervasiveness of economic agendas, technological approaches and managerialism create conditions in which human relationships and moral reasoning are becoming (...) increasingly de‐valued. This creates a tension for nurses, and nursing leaders, as the desire to do what is morally right is often in conflict with contextual demands. In this paper, Aristotle’s writing on phronesis is examined with a focus on his classic conceptions of eudaimonia, the virtues, deliberation, judgement, and praxis. Building on Aristotle’s work, a number of contemporary views are explored with a focus on what various conceptualizations offer for the discipline of nursing. These expanded conceptions of phronesis include attention to: embodiment in practice; open‐mindedness including the capacity to stay curious and open to recognizing what we do not know; perceptiveness as a disposition towards insight and aesthetic understanding; and reflexivity as an ongoing process of interrogation and inquiry into ourselves and our actions. Drawing on these concepts, we discuss the affordances of phronesis as a morally informed guiding force to attend to modern‐day challenges in nursing practice and nursing leadership. (shrink)

The welfare mother is a powerful symbol of the supposed irresponsible, sexually promiscuous, and immoral behavior of the poor. Resting on dominant ideologies of race, class, and gender, the welfare mother suggests not a poor mother but a bad mother. Based on interviews with 34 mothers receiving public assistance, this article explores how women receiving assistance claim for themselves an identity as good mothers by defining the appropriate responsibilities of mothers to prioritize, protect, discipline, provide for, and spend time with (...) their children. The material realities of poverty combined with work requirements now attached to public assistance exacerbate contradictions between these roles and create difficulties for these mothers. This article explores these contradictions and examines the possibilities for and limits of their use as resistance strategies. (shrink)

In this paper I describe and defend an account of virtuous motivation that differs from what we might call ordinary moral motivation. It is possible to be morally motivated without being virtuously motivated. In the first half of the essay, I explore different senses of moral motivation and the philosophical puzzles and problems it poses. In the second half, I give an account of virtuous motivation that, unlike ordinary moral motivation, requires the motivational structure characteristic of a fully virtuous person. (...) I draw on Aristotle's account of virtuous action to argue that a fully virtuous agent's judgment reflects a robust form of moral knowledge about what features of an action render it virtuous and hence, choiceworthy. Virtuously motivated actions are chosen in light of those features and are accompanied by the affective state appropriate to the overall moral landscape in which the judgment is made. (shrink)

This paper develops an approach to humanist social critique that combines insights from Marx and Fanon. I argue that the concept of the human operative in humanist social critique should be understood both as the normative background against which questions of human flourishing and dehumanization can come into view, and as the evolving demand for universal human emancipation. Far from being abstract, essentialist, or ahistorical, Marx and Fanon show that humanist social critique operates through a dialectic between particular, socially and (...) historically situated forms of oppression and struggle, and the universal species-context of the human life-form in which particular forms of suffering and injustice can come into view as instances of dehumanization. In developing this approach to humanist social critique, I defend humanism against three prominent objections: the charge of speciesism, the charge of essentialism, and the recent charge from Kate Manne who argues that humanism underdescribes relations of social antagonism and that recognition of humanity is compatible with inhumane treatment. In addition to considering the necessary relation between the particular and the universal, I also consider the relation between the psychological and social/political, arguing against the recent approach to the problem of dehumanization in the work of David Livingstone Smith. (shrink)

Collecting and using tissue, blood, urine, and other human biospecimens for various types of research is not new. But for personalized medicine to realize its potential, researchers will need thousands more of these samples for genetic studies. And the particular nature of genetic research—the sensitivity of the information it reveals—has raised a host of ethical questions, some which are new to human subjects research. What counts as informed consent when a biospecimen may be stored for years and used for unforeseen (...) research? How freely can the biospecimens and the genetic information they contain be shared with other researchers? If research uncovers a genetic risk factor or some other important medical .. (shrink)

Bauer, Taub, and Parsi's review of an international sample of standards on informed consent, confidentiality, commercialization, and quality of research in tissue banking reveals that no clear national or international consensus exists for these issues. The authors' response to the lack of uniformity in the meaning, scope, and ethical significance of the policies they examined is to call for the creation of uniform ethical guidelines. This raises questions about whether harmonization should consist of voluntary international standards or international regulations that (...) include an official oversight mechanism and sanctions for noncompliance, and about who should participate in the harmonization process. Moreover, the normative assumptions and political dynamics that shape global policymaking need to be addressed. This commentary explores the policy implications and normative questions raised by the idea of international ethical guidelines for the use of biotechnologies and biotechnological resources such as stored samples of human tissue. (shrink)

Drawing on (auto)ethnographic research—on the process of becoming a marathon swimmer, this paper argues that conventional characterisations of marathon swimming as being ‘80 per cent mental and 20 per cent physical’ reprise a mind–body split that at worst excludes women and at best holds them to a masculine standard. This in turn draws the focus towards sensory deprivation, bodily suffering and overcoming, to the exclusion of the pleasures of swimming, beyond the expected ones such as the challenge of swim completion. (...) By exploring instead the ‘shifted sensorium’ of marathon swimming, and examples of the autotelic pleasures of swimming, this paper argues that training changes the way swimming body feels, and that it is these changes that enable a swimmer to feel ‘at home’ in an environment to which it does not naturally belong. This focus on the sensory aspects of swimming, and its unexpected pleasures, both highlights the ways in which those pleasures do not flow unproblematically to women, and brings to light alternative and politically provocative ways of experiencing the gendered sporting body. This highlights the contingency, however constrained, of even the most entrenched ways of thinking about bodies, both within and outside sport. (shrink)

An approach to Derrida's différance from the perspective of analytic philosophy of language which attempts to show both how many of Derrida's insights are influenced by analytic philosophy of language and can be related to ideas found in Quine, Wittgenstein, and Dennett, but which ultimately concludes that the linguistic idealism that he promotes is incoherent.

Within both philosophy and psychology, a new pro-emotion consensus is replacing the old dogmas that emotions disrupt practical rationality, that they are at best arational, if not outright irrational, and that we can understand what is really central to human cognition without studying them. Emotions are now commonly viewed as evolved capacities that are integral to our practical rationality. An infinite mind, unencumbered by a body, might get along just fine without emotions; but we finite embodied creatures need them if (...) we are to be capable of responding appropriately to our reasons and navigating in a risky world with poor information, limited attention, and restricted computational power. Emotions are clever design solutions to the problem of making fast decisions in response to significant practical problems posed by the natural and social worlds: we perceive a danger and fear immediately primes us to take protective action. On this view, the theory of emotions is an essential part of a theory of ecologically situated and constrained rationality - that is to say, of human rationality. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

On the eve of the presidential inauguration, the U.S. health system faces rising costs of care, growing numbers of uninsured, wide variations in quality of care, and mounting public dissatisfaction. Despite spending more on health care than any other country, a recent Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health Care System National Scorecard reports that the United States is lagging far behind other major industrialized countries — all of which provide universal health insurance — in five key domains: healthy (...) lives, access, quality, equity, and efficiency. U.S. national performance is well below benchmarks of top performance set by other countries or high performing states, hospitals, or health plans within the United States, with broad disparities in experience depending on geographic location, income, race/ethnicity, and insurance coverage. National leadership is required to manage the growing health care crisis in the United States and improve care for all Americans. (shrink)

Dummett's output has been prolific and highly influential, but not always as accessible as it deserves to be. This book sets out to rectify this situation.

The disappearance of Catharine Macaulay’s eighteenth-century defense of the doctrines that justified the seventeeth-century republican parliament, has served to obscure an important strand of enlightenment faith, that was active in the lead up to the American and French Revolutions, and that also played a significant role in the history of feminism. This faith was made up of two intertwined strands, ‘Christian eudaimonism’ and ‘rational altruism’. Dominant contemporary accounts of the origins of republicanism and democratic theory during the eighteenth-century have excluded (...) serious consideration of Macaulay’s writing. Bringing her works into the mix, both poses difficulties for certain genealogies of the political thought of the period, and tends to favour a once popular view, which emphasized the centrality of Locke. Nevertheless, the Locke whose influence is found in Macaulay’s writing is not the possessive individualist, or rational egoist, that he and other liberals have been represented as being, but rather a rational altruist, whose political philosophy is grounded in natural law and harks back to Milton. This same philosophy provides the philosophical foundations for Wollstonecraft’s two most significant political texts, the Vindication of the Rights of Men and Vindcation of the Rights of Woman. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of evolving ideas, urgencies, and actions that we have experimented with in our teaching of an environmental sustainability subject with pre-service teachers at an Australian university. It is a work in progress. Through this shared educator-student teaching and learning process we feel the tensions of contradictory forces that disrupt the flow of prior teaching as we all become unsettled by hope and reality, grief, and loss, all mixed in with a sense of urgency and tempered (...) by a set of often unimaginative contemporary pedagogical practices. These tensions often resort educators like us, to perpetuate well-worn and critiqued tropes such as how to ‘care for the planet’ through ‘greening’ practices in schools such as recycling and energy conservation. Always inadequate and limited we are experimenting in our pedagogical repertoire with new ways to teach as we could no longer keep up the charade of agitating for change in the same way. In this paper we explore some of the opening and closures that effect environmental sustainability teaching. We consider how through a reimagining of sustainability education with new pedagogical openings of ‘making kin’ we first attend to these emotional tensions as a means of waking up to who we are in the Anthropocene and then find ways to identify relational ethico-onto-epistemologies in our teaching. By disrupting humanist paradigms and embracing critical posthumanist sensitivities the educators and students nuzzle into new ways of knowing and being in the world. (shrink)

This article is a commentary response to the study results outlined in “The State of Teacher Training in Philosophy.” In recognition of the study’s determination that 70 percent of the jobs new philosophers will apply for are non-tenure track, our graduate programs must provide training in teaching excellence and the fostering of student learning, or what I call pedagogical areté. I will argue that achieving this teaching excellence requires 1) Familiarity with cognitive neuroscience advancements on how people learn, 2) Knowledge (...) of today’s college students, and 3) Practiced methods for scaffolding and assessment of student learning. My claim is that pedagogic excellence is both a role-related moral obligation and a duty we owe to society—what Lee Shulman characterizes as the pedagogical imperative. This increased focus on pedagogical proficiency creates an opportunity for philosophy to establish and solidify its disciplinary value. (shrink)

Volume 75, Issue 5-6, 2019, Page 376-380.

Emergency care in large urban hospitals across the country is in the midst of major redesign intended to deliver quality care through improved access, decreased wait times, and maximum efficiency. The central argument in this paper is that the conceptualization of quality including the documentary facts and figures produced to substantiate quality emergency care is socially organized within a powerful ruling discourse that inserts the interests of politics and economics into nurses' work. The Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale figures prominently (...) in the analysis as a high‐level organizer of triage work and knowledge production that underpins the way those who administer the system define, measure and evaluate emergency care processes, and then use this information for restructuring. Managerial targets and thinking not only dominate the way emergency work is understood, determined, and controlled but also subsume the actual work of health‐care providers in spaces called ‘wait times’, where it is systematically rendered ‘unknowable’. The analysis is supported with evidence from an extensive institutional ethnography that shows what nurses actually do to manage the safe passage of patients through their emergency care process starting with the work of triage nurses. (shrink)

Experimental radiobiology represented a long-standing priority for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, but organizational issues initially impeded the laboratory progress of this government-funded work: who would direct such interdisciplinary investigations and how? And should the AEC support basic research or only mission-oriented projects? Alexander Hollaender's vision for biology in the post-war world guided AEC initiatives at Oak Ridge, where he created and presided over the Division of Biology for nearly two decades. Hollaender's scheme, at once entrepreneurial and system-oriented, made good (...) use of the unique resources provided by the AEC and by Oak Ridge's national laboratory setting, while at the same time it restructured wartime research practices to better reflect biologists' own priorities. Because Hollaender offered many academic experimental biologists a way of envisioning military-related patronage as integral - rather than antithetical - to their professional identities, his work provides an important lens through which to examine the early post-war intellectual and institutional development of radiobiology. (shrink)

Traces women's defence of their moral and spiritual equality with men, from the works of Christine de Pizan, through Marguerite of Navarre, Madeleine de Scudéry, Arcangela Tarabotti, to Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, arguing that although she appears not to have been aware of these precursors, the arguments they developed paved the way for her feminism.

At first glance, Germaine de Staël and Immanuel Kant evince strikingly different attitudes to aesthetic judgment. Yet she promoted Kant's aesthetics and philosophy. This paper examines both Staël's early literary works and her later De l'Allemagne in order to tease out the relationship between their aesthetic theories.