For many philosophical thinkers down through the centuries, the notion of a creation out of sheer nothing has been found to be quite unintelligible. Nevertheless the idea of creation preserves an important insight and needs to be freed from the difficulties of this traditional formulation. Alfred North Whitehead has offered an alternative theory of creation worth exploring: each individual actuality creates itself out of prior creative acts. God then serves to direct this creative process.

In an educational landscape dominated by discourses and practices of learning, standardized testing, and the pressure to succeed, what space and time remain for studying? In this book, Tyson E. Lewis argues that studying is a distinctive educational experience with its own temporal, spatial, methodological, aesthetic, and phenomenological dimensions. Unlike learning, which presents the actualization of a student’s "potential" in recognizable and measurable forms, study emphasizes the experience of potentiality, freed from predetermined outcomes. Studying suspends and interrupts the (...) conventional logic of learning, opening up a new space and time for educational freedom to emerge. Drawing upon the work of Italian philosopher and critical theorist Giorgio Agamben, Lewis provides a conceptually and poetically rich account of the interconnections between potentiality, freedom, and study. Through a mixture of educational critique, phenomenological description, and ontological analysis, Lewis redeems study as an invaluable and urgent educational experience that provides alternatives to the economization of education and the cooptation of potentiality in the name of efficiency. The resulting discussion uncovers multiple forms of study in a variety of unexpected places: from the political poetry of Adrienne Rich, to tinkering classrooms, to abandoned manifestos, and, finally, to Occupy Wall Street. By reconnecting education with potentiality this book provides an educational philosophy that undermines the logic of learning and assessment, and turns our attention to the interminable paradoxes of studying. The book will be key reading for scholars in the fields of educational philosophy, critical pedagogy, foundations of education, composition and rhetoric, and critical thinking and literacy studies. (shrink)

This paper studies proof systems for the logics of super-strict implication ST2–ST5, which correspond to C.I. Lewis’ systems S2–S5 freed of paradoxes of strict implication. First, Hilbert-style axiomatic systems are introduced and shown to be sound and complete by simulating STn in Sn and backsimulating Sn in STn, respectively(for n=2,...,5). Next, G3-style labelled sequent calculi are investigated. It is shown that these calculi have the good structural properties that are distinctive of G3-style calculi, that they are sound and (...) complete, and it is shown that the proof search for G3. ST2 is terminating and therefore the logic is decidable. (shrink)

This paper studies proof systems for the logics of super-strict implication \(\textsf{ST2}\) – \(\textsf{ST5}\), which correspond to C.I. Lewis’ systems \(\textsf{S2}\) – \(\textsf{S5}\) freed of paradoxes of strict implication. First, Hilbert-style axiomatic systems are introduced and shown to be sound and complete by simulating \(\textsf{STn}\) in \(\textsf{Sn}\) and backsimulating \(\textsf{Sn}\) in \(\textsf{STn}\), respectively (for \({\textsf{n}} =2, \ldots, 5\) ). Next, \(\textsf{G3}\) -style labelled sequent calculi are investigated. It is shown that these calculi have the good structural properties that (...) are distinctive of \(\textsf{G3}\) -style calculi, that they are sound and complete, and it is shown that the proof search for \(\mathsf {G3.ST2}\) is terminating and therefore the logic is decidable. (shrink)

According to the Truthmaker Principle: every truth has a truthmaker. Attempts to come to grips with the Truthmaker Principle played a prominent role in Lewis’s metaphysical writings over the last fifteen years of his career. Although Lewis agreed that the truth of propositions must somehow be ontologically grounded, the Truthmaker Principle was too strong: it conflicted with two of Lewis’s most fundamental metaphysical assumptions, the uniqueness of composition and the Humean denial of necessary connections. Lewis endorsed (...) instead a weaker principle: Truth Supervenes on Being. But towards the end of his career, he changed course, noting that his critique of the Truthmaker Principle rested on essentialist assumptions that he, as a counterpart theorist, does not accept. Once freed from those assumptions, a counterpart theorist can accept the Truthmaker Principle after all without buying into unmereological composition and mysterious necessary connections. (shrink)

I argue that traditional views on which beliefs are subject only to purely epistemic assessment can reject demographic profiling, even when based on seemingly robust evidence. This is because the moral failures involved in demographic profiling can be located in the decision not to suspend judgment, rather than supposing that beliefs themselves are a locus of moral evaluation. A key moral reason to suspend judgment when faced with adverse demographic evidence is to promote social equality—this explains why positive profiling is (...) dubious, along with more familiar cases of negative profiling, and why profiling is suspect even when no particular action is at stake. My suspension-based view, while compatible with revisionary normative positions, does not presuppose them. Philosophers of all stripes can reject demographic profiling both in thought and deed. (shrink)

In the debates regarding the ethics of human enhancement, proponents have found it difficult to refute the concern, voiced by certain bioconservatives, that cognitive enhancement violates the autonomy of the enhanced. However, G. Owen Schaefer, Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu have attempted not only to avoid autonomy-based bioconservative objections, but to argue that cognition-enhancing biomedical interventions can actually enhance autonomy. In response, this paper has two aims: firstly, to explore the limits of their argument; secondly, and more importantly, to develop (...) a more complete understanding of autonomy and its relation to cognitive enhancement. By drawing a distinction between the capacity for autonomy and the exercise and achievement of autonomy and by exploring the possible effects of cognitive enhancement on both competence and authenticity conditions for autonomy, the paper identifies and explains which dimensions of autonomy can and cannot, in principle, be enhanced via direct cognitive interventions. This allows us to draw conclusions regarding the limits of cognitive enhancement as a means for enhancing autonomy. (shrink)

In recent decades, huge technological changes have opened up possibilities and potentials for new socio-technological forms of violence, violation and abuse, themselves intersectionally gendered, that form part of and extend offline intimate partner violence (IPV). Digital IPV (DIPV)—the use of digital technologies in and for IPV—takes many forms, including: cyberstalking, internet-based abuse, non-consensual intimate imagery, and reputation abuse. IPV is thus now in part digital, and digital and non-digital violence may merge and reinforce each other. At the same time, technological (...) and other developments have wrought significant changes in the nature of work, such as the blurring of work/life boundaries and routine use of digital technologies. Building on feminist theory and research on violence, and previous research on the ethics of digitalisation, this paper examines the ethical challenges raised for business, workplaces, employers and management by digital IPV. This includes the ethical challenges arising from the complexity and variability of DIPV across work contexts, its harmful impacts on employees, productivity, and security, and the prospects for proactive ethical responses in workplace policy and practice for victim/survivors, perpetrators, colleagues, managers, and stakeholders. The paper concludes with contributions made and key issues for the future research agenda. (shrink)

Demonstrating the connections between contemporary psychoanalysis, Jewish thought and Jewish history, this volume is a significant contribution to the traditions of dialogue, debate and change-within-continuity that epitomize these disciplines. The authors of this volume explore the cross-disciplinary connections between psychoanalysis and Jewish thought, while seeking out the resonance of new meanings, to exemplify the uncanny similarities that exist between ancient Rabbinic methods of interpretation and contemporary psychoanalytic theory and methodology, particularly the centrality of the question and the deconstruction of narrative. (...) In doing so, this collaboration addresses the bi-directional influence between, and the relevance of, the Jewish interpretive tradition and psychoanalysis to provide readers with renewed insight into key topics such as Biblical text and midrash, religious traditions, trauma, gender, history, clinical work and the legacies of the Holocaust on psychoanalytic theory. Creating an intimate environment for interdisciplinary dialogue, this is an essential book for students, scholars and clinicians alike, who seek to understand the continued significance of the multiple connections between psychoanalysis and Jewish thought. (shrink)

Biographical sketch.--Miscellaneous papers and extracts from letters.--Lectures on logic.--Plato's conception of goodness and the good.--Index.

Discusses the life and work of the nineteenth century landscape photographer, presenting a selection of photographs of the American West taken between 1858 and 1891.

According to the High Court in England and Wales, the primary purpose of legal interventions into the lives of vulnerable adults with mental capacity should be to allow the individuals concerned to regain their autonomy of decision making. However, recent cases of clinical decision making involving capacitous vulnerable adults have shown that, when it comes to medical law, medical ethics and clinical practice, vulnerability is typically conceived as opposed to autonomy. The first aim of this paper is to detail the (...) problems that arise when the courts and health care practitioners respond to the vulnerability of capacitous adults on the basis of such an opposition. It will be shown that not only does the common law approach to vulnerability fail to adequately capture the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults, the conception of vulnerability and autonomy in oppositional terms leads to objectionably paternalistic health care responses that undermine the autonomy of vulnerable patients as well as clinical and legal interventions that violate their autonomy. In response, the second aim of this paper is to show that the concepts of autonomy and vulnerability are necessarily entwined and, on that basis, the focus should be on promoting the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults where possible. In order to make this case, the paper explains the limitations of standard approaches to the autonomy of vulnerable adults and, in their place, offers a conception of legitimate, self-authorised autonomy that is fundamentally dependent on intersubjective practices of recognition. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an increased interest in black feminism. Whether thinking of the explosion of activism, the reprinting of classics such as Heart of the Race (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe, 2018 [1985]) and Finding a Voice (Wilson, 1978) or the numerous journalistic or scholarly inquiries into black feminist formations in Britain in the 1970s–1990s, black feminism is a topic of interest once again. Sometimes it goes under other names: POC feminism, Womanism, Fugitive Feminism—each of which offers a specific inflection (...) of this thing I am calling black feminism. Given this context, my aim in this article is to consider how black feminism might be conceived—what kind of an object it is, but more importantly how it might be ‘used’ and utilised as a vibrant and well-honed tool in the armory with which we attempt to craft a politics of ethical freedom. I attempt to draw together work from the theoretical archive of black women’s writing with that of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and his theorisation of ‘object use’ and ‘play’, as foundation stones in the development of a capacity for ethical relating based on the detoxification of racism’s effects on ‘self’, ‘other’ and the intersubjective field that the space between these constitutes. In my mind, the piece is a ‘call’ hoping for a ‘response’, the chorus is ‘black feminism’. (shrink)

In the modern discussions about possibility of synthetic a priori propositions, the theory of definition has a fundamental importance, because the most definition’s theories hold that analytic judgments are involved by explicit definition. However, for Kant –first author who pointed out the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions–many analytic judgments are made by analysis of concepts which need not first be established by definition. Moreover, for him not all a priori knowledge is analytic. The statement that not all analytic judgment (...) is derived from definition and possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, indicates Kant didn’t believe, contrary to modern theories about analytic judgment, the definition is an essential ground of knowledge. (shrink)

“Digital footprints” is an attractive, useful, and increasingly popular metaphor for thinking about Big Data. In this essay, I elaborate on this metaphor to highlight three relatively basic fallacies in the way we tend to think about Big Data: first, that they contain information on complete populations, or “N = all”; second, that they contain recordings of naturalistic behavior; and third, that they can be understood devoid of context.

Much attention has been devoted in recent years to the personal idealism of Martin Luther King, Jr. Among the major contributors to the scholarship in this area is Rufus Burrow, Jr., who places King firmly in the tradition of personal idealism, or personalism, while also uncovering the intellectual unease that made King both a deep and creative thinker and a committed and effective social activist.1 Clearly, Burrow's own sense of his role as a personalist informs his approach to the life (...) and thought of King. Although philosophical personalism figures prominently in Burrow's treatment of King in his writings, ethical and social personalism provides the primary theoretical framework for both Burrow's exploration of .. (shrink)

Psychiatry, as a subspecialty of medicine, is a quintessentially modernist project. Yet across the main campus, throughout the humanities and social sciences, there is increasing postmodern consensus that modernism is a deeply flawed project. Psychiatry, the closest of the medical specialties to the humanities and social sciences, will be the first to encounter postmodern theory. From my reading, psychiatry, though likely defensive at first, will eventually emerge from a postmodern critique, not only intact, but rejuvenated. Postmodern theory, at its best, (...) provides a liberating effect on modernist practices, freeing them from an enslavement to Method and Objectivity in order to allow the more human (all charges of antihumanism not withstanding) to emerge as valued and respected. The net result could be the evolution of a new postmodern psychiatry and a new model of medicine which would be much more enjoyable to practice and much more connected to the concerns of patients. (shrink)

This article introduces cultural studies of medicine to medical humanities readers. Rather than offer extended definitions of cultural studies of medicine or provide a detailed history of the domain, I have organized this introduction around a close reading and review of three recently published texts in the field. These three texts, dealing respectively with cyborg technology, AIDS, and the medical management of sexual identity problems, represent excellent examples of the opportunities and possibilities of applying cultural studies approaches to medical topics. (...) After working through these texts (and the semiotic theories which animate them), I devote my conclusion to a broader consideration of the role of cultural studies of medicine for both medical practice and medical humanities scholarship. (shrink)

Efforts to promote gender equality often encourage changes to interpersonal interactions as a way of undermining gender hierarchy. Such programs are premised on the idea that the gender system can be “undone” when individuals behave in ways that challenge prevailing gender norms. However, scholars know little about whether and under what conditions real changes to the gender system can result from changed behaviors. We use the context of a gender sensitization program in the Democratic Republic of Congo to examine prospects (...) for transformative change at the interactional level of the gender system. Over nine months, we observed significant changes in men’s quotidian practices. Further, we identified a new commitment among many men to a more equal division of household labor. However, participants consistently undermined the transformative potential of these behavioral changes through their dedication to maintaining control over the objective, process, and meaning of change, resisting conceptions of equality that challenged the gender system. Because quotidian changes left gender hierarchy intact, they appear unlikely to destabilize the logics that legitimate women’s subordination. (shrink)

Working through the lens of Donna Haraway's cyborg theory and directed at the example of Prozac, I address the dramatic rise of new technoscience in medicine and psychiatry. Haraway's cyborg theory insists on a conceptualization and a politics of technoscience that does not rely on universal “Truths” or universal “Goods” and does not attempt to return to the “pure” or the “natural.” Instead, Haraway helps us mix politics, ethics, and aesthetics with science and scientific recommendations, and she helps us understand (...) that (without recourse to universal truth or universal good) questions of legitimacy in science come down to local questions of effect and inclusion. What, in the case of my example, are the effects of Prozac? And for whom? Who is included and empowered to create legitimate psychiatric knowledge? Who is excluded and why? And, what political strategies will increase the democratic health of psychiatric science and practice? (shrink)

I. Accompanying the rise of professed socialists to political prominence in the United States and Britain, a growing academic literature, spearheaded by French economist Thomas Piketty’s bestsellin...

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), author of the Essays (published in successive, revised and expanded editions from 1580 until after his death), deserves to be recognized as the first) philosophic architect of modern liberalism, that is, a doctrine that advocates the advancement of individual liberty (under law), and consequently a reduction in the scope and purpose of government to securing what are represented by Montaigne’s successors (Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and the American Founders) as people’s inherent rights to their life, liberty, property, (...) and the “pursuit of happiness” as they conceive it. His outward, periodic professions of extreme conservatism and of homage to the Catholic Church are merely a rhetorical cover designed to protect the author from being persecuted (and his book from being banned). As a practitioner of what he describes as esoteric rhetoric (attributing it to the ancient political philosophers), Montaigne invites careful readers to see through his rhetorical concealment by noting how his conservative professions are undermined by the overall train of his reasoning and argument. Although Montaigne’s argument for liberal individualism may have gone too far in its influence over the long run (that is, the 21st century), we citizens of modern liberal regimes owe him a debt of gratitude for helping to liberate us from the reign of arbitrary monarchs, oppressive aristocrats, and clerical oppressors. (shrink)

In a dynamic term of the United States Supreme Court in 2021-2022 a series of critical cases raise manifold changes and impacts on individual and communal health through 10 key areas ranging from abortions to vaccinations.