ABSTRACT In this article the Irish harp tradition is re-configured as a space consisting of visual and sonic dimensions. The visual dimension of the Irish harp space incorporates the employment of the instrument in contemporary iconography; the sonic dimension includes the employment of the instrument as a metaphor in contemporary literature and songs. By employing Bloch’s concept of surplus and tracing the path of the Irish harp from its earliest employment in Christian iconography, its prominence as an icon of colonial (...) and Ascendancy rule, and finally its utilisation as an utopian tool to inspire members of the Volunteer and United Irish movements in the late eighteenth century, I identify how the accumulation of centuries of utopian surplus resulted in the creation of an utopian icon that had the capacity to inspire a generation of Irish men and women to critique the prevailing social and political order in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

The Republic of Ireland has some of the most restrictive abortion legislation in the world which grants to the ‘unborn’ an equal right to life to that of the pregnant woman. This article outlines recent developments in the public discourse on abortion in Ireland and explains the particular cultural and religious context that informs the ethical case for access to abortion services. Our perspective rests on respect for two very familiar moral principles – autonomy and justice – which are at (...) the centre of social and democratic societies around the world. This article explains the context for the deployment of these concepts in order to support the claim that the current legislation and its operationalisation in clinical practice poses serious risks to the health, lives and well-being of pregnant women, tramples on their autonomy rights and requires of them a self-sacrifice that is unreasonable and unjust. (shrink)

The Logic of Human Personality shows how the ancient definition of person remains useful today, and explains how it happened to fall into disuse. The method of using the categories of Aristotle is illustrated by showing how action, relation, and time as well as the fundamental category of substance, can help us understand what it is to be a person. The Logic of Human Personality agrues, against Mill and others who have found Aristotle's categories unsatisfactory, that in fact they are (...) useful for much psychological and anthropological research today, particularly in the intercultural field. (shrink)

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

Farrell, Marie Review(s) of: A scriptural way of the cross, by Terence O'Donnell and Eugene Stockton, Lawson NSW: Blue Mountain Education and Research Trust, 2010, pp.39, $12.00.

This book explores a fundamental tension in Aristotle's metaphysics: how can an entity such as a living organisma composite generated through the imposition of form on preexisting matterhave the conceptual unity that Aristotle demands of primary substances? Mary Louise Gill bases her treatment of the problem of unity, and of Aristotle's solution, on a fresh interpretation of the relation between matter and form. Challenging the traditional understanding of Aristotelian matter, she argues that material substances are subverted by matter (...) and maintained by form that controls the matter to serve a positive end. The unity of material substances thus involves a dynamic relation between resistant materials and directive ends. Aristotle on Substance offers both a general account of matter, form, and substantial unity and a specific assessment of particular Aristotelian arguments. At every point, Gill engages Aristotle on his own philosophical ground through the detailed analysis of central, and often controversial, texts from the Metaphysics, Physics, On Generation and Corruption, De Anima, De Caelo, and the biological works. The result is a coherent, firmly grounded rethinking of Aristotle's central metaphysical concepts and of his struggle toward a fully consistent theory of material substances. (shrink)

Plato famously promised to complement the Sophist and the Statesman with another work on a third sort of expert, the philosopher--but we do not have this final dialogue. Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher, but did not write it, in order to stimulate his audience and encourage his readers to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato's (...) investigation of knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, the second part of which presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. Gill contends that the dialogues leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher's method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato's philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato's exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose. (shrink)

This book explores a fundamental tension in Aristotle's metaphysics: how can an entity such as a living organisma composite generated through the imposition of form on preexisting matterhave the conceptual unity that Aristotle demands of ...

The concept of self-motion is not only fundamental in Aristotle's argument for the Prime Mover and in ancient and medieval theories of nature, but it is also central to many theories of human agency and moral responsibility. In this collection of mostly new essays, scholars of classical, Hellenistic, medieval, and early modern philosophy and science explore the question of whether or not there are such things as self-movers, and if so, what their self-motion consists in. They trace the development of (...) the concept of self-motion from its formulation in Aristotle's metaphysics, cosmology, and philosophy of nature through two millennia of philosophical, religious, and scientific thought. This volume contains "Self-Movers" (David Furley), "Aristotle on Self-Motion" (Mary Louise Gill), "Aristotle on Perception, Appetition, and Self-Motion" (Cynthia Freeland), "Self-Movement and External Causation" (Susan Sauvé Meyer), "Aristotle on the Mind's Self-Motion" (Michael Wedin), "Mind and Motion in Aristotle" (Christopher Shields), "Aristotle's Prime Mover" (Aryeh Kosman), "The Transcendence of the Prime Mover" (Lindsay Judson), "Self-Motion in Stoic Philosophy" (David Hahm), "Duns Scotus on the Reality of Self-Change" (Peter King), "Ockham, Self-Motion, and the Will" (Calvin Normore), and "Natural Motion and Its Causes: Newton on the 'Vis Insita' of Bodies" (J. E. McGuire). Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The project of this paper is to deliver a semantics for a broad subset of bare plural generics about racial kinds, a class which I will dub 'Type C generics.' Examples include 'Blacks are criminal' and 'Muslims are terrorists.' Type C generics have two interesting features. First, they link racial kinds with ​ socially perspectival predicates ​ (SPPs). SPPs lead interpreters to treat the relationship between kinds and predicates in generic constructions as nomic or non-accidental. Moreover, in computing their content, (...) interpreters must make implicit reference to socially privileged​ ​ perspectives which are treated as authoritative about whether a given object fits into the extension of the predicate. Such deference grants these authorities influence over both the conventional meaning of these terms and over the nature of the ​ objects ​ in the social ontology that these terms purport to describe, much the way a baseball umpire is authoritative over the meaning and metaphysics of 'strike'/​ strike ​. Second, terms like 'criminal' and 'terrorist' receive default ​ racialized ​ interpretations in which these terms conventionally token racial or ethnic identities. I show that neither of these features can be explained by Sarah-Jane Leslie's influential 'weak semantics' for generics, and show how my own 'socially perspectival semantics' fares better on both counts. Finally, I give an analysis of 'Blacks are criminal' which explores the semantic mechanisms that underlie default racialized interpretations. (shrink)

This is a long critical discussion of Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism, focusing primarily on Wilderson's claim that Blackness is equivalent to Slaveness. The article draws out some strengths of the book, but argues that the book's central arguments often rest on shaky methodological, metaphysical, epistemic, and political grounds. Along the way, we consider some complications endemic to the project of evaluating a text so clearly geared towards Black audiences from the perspective of a non-Black reader.

Contributing to both ageing research and queer-feminist scholarship, this article introduces feminist philosopher Margrit Shildrick’s queer notion of the monstrous to the subject of ageing and the issue of dealing with frailty within ageing research. The monstrous, as a norm-critical notion, takes as its point of departure that we are always already monstrous, meaning that the western ideal of well-ordered, independent, unleaky, rational embodied subjects is impossible to achieve. From this starting point the normalizing and optimizing strategies of ageing research (...) – here exemplified through the concept of successful ageing and the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease – can be problematized. The notion of the monstrous instead suggests a view on ageing and ‘monstrous’ embodiment which provides room for other, different ways of being recognized as an embodied subject, and for dealing with difference, vulnerability and frailty. (shrink)

Popper's paradox of ideal evidence has long been viewed as a telling criticism of Keynes's logical theory of probability and its associated concept of the weight of argument. This paper shows that a simple addition to Keynes's definitions of irrelevance enables his theory to elude the paradox with ease. The modified definition draws on ideas already present in Keynes's Treatise on Probability (1973). As a consequence, relevant evidence and the weight of argument may increase, even when new evidence leaves the (...) probability unaltered. (shrink)

In this article, Aislinn O'Donnell offers a set of reflections on the relation between therapy and education. In the first section, she examines criticisms of therapeutic education, mobilizing the example of prison education to highlight the difficulties that arise from imposing prescriptive modes of subjectification and socialization in pedagogy. In the second section, she addresses the relation between therapy and education by focusing on just one element of the experience of education: those moments at which a subject has the potential (...) of becoming significant in the life of a student. An important dimension of the educator's authority involves noticing such moments, fostering the conditions that make them more likely, and engaging in the creative process and practice of deciding how best pedagogically to respond to these moments. In the third section, O'Donnell develops this idea by detailing a philosophical approach and practice that understands “effectiveness” in education as bound to practice, creative responsiveness, and the judgment of the educator in concrete, singular pedagogical situations, rather than construed in terms of generic models of “best practice.”. (shrink)

If the discourse of manners and customs aspires to a stable fixing of subjects and systems of differences, however, its project is not and never can be complete. This is true if only for the seemingly trivial reason that manners-and-customs descriptions seldom occur on their own as discrete texts. They usually appear embedded in or appended to a superordinate genre, whether a narrative, as in travel books and much ethnography, or an assemblage, as in anthologies and magazines.6 In the case (...) of travel writing, which is the main focus of this essay, manners-and-customs description is always in play with other sorts of representation that also bespeak difference and position subjects in their own ways. Sometimes these other positioning complement the ideological project of normalizing description, and sometime they do not.In what follows, I propose to examine this interplay of discourses in some nineteenth-century travel writing chiefly about Africa. While Barrow’s work is not prominent on anybody’s mental bookshelves these days, readers will recognize such names as David Livingstone, John Speke, James Grant, Richard Burton, Mungo Park, or Paul Du Chaillu. During the co-called opening up of central and southern Africa to European capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century, such explorer-writers were the principal producers of Africa for European imaginations—producers, that is, of ideology in connection with the European expansionist project there. What I hope to underscore in these writings is not their tendency towards single, fixed subject positions or single, fixed systems of difference. Rather, I wish to emphasize the multiplicity of ways of codifying the Other, the variety of fixed positions and the variety of given sets of differences that they posit. European penetration and appropriation is semanticized in numerous ways that can be quite distinct, even mutually contradictory. In the course of examining discursive polyphony in these travel writings, I hope to stress the need to consider ideology not only in terms of reductive simplification but also in terms of the proliferation of meanings. 6. Ethnographies would seem to be a counterexample to this claim, but in fact one can fairly easily show that ethnographic writing is inextricably tied to personal narrative. Indeed this tie is a symptom of a serious contradiction between ethnographic methods and ethnographic discourse. See my “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus . Mary Louise Pratt is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is author of Toward a Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse and is a member of the editorial boards of Poetics, Signs Tabloid, and Cultural Anthropology. (shrink)

This article examines how immigrant careworkers relate dynamically with the Norwegian gender regime. While the importation of careworkers contributes both to the practical maintenance and to the undermining on a more ideological level of the Norwegian gender regime, it also brings in new constellations and possibilities. In this article examples from two studies are discussed in the light of institutional and intersectional perspectives. It describes features of the Norwegian gender regime that are especially relevant to carework, and the highly gendered (...) distribution and sharing of carework across the public and private domains. One central Norwegian form of care institution, the nursing home, then comes into focus. Making use of empirical examples from fieldwork and interviews, the article discusses how, as immigrant careworkers increasingly staff these institutions, new light is thrown on existing power structures, while at the same time these structures may be challenged through the fluidity of situational and relational gendering processes. (shrink)

Metaphysics Θ treats potentiality (δύναμις) and actuality (ἐνέργεια), and many scholars think that Aristotle broaches these topics once he has answered his main questions in Ζ and Η. In Ζ he asked, what is primary being? After arguing in Ζ.1 that substance (οὐσία) is primary being—a being existentially, logically, and epistemologically prior to quantities and qualities and other categorial beings—he devotes the rest of the book to οὐσία itself, investigating what it is, to decide what entities count as primary substances. (...) I differ from the leading interpretative consensus that ΖΗ adequately answer the questions about primary substance, and contend instead that Metaphysics Θ continues the same investigation as ΖΗ and, using δύναμις and ἐνέργεια as tools, arrives at a striking new conception of hylomorphism, different from that in ΖΗ, which enables Aristotle to defend the substantial primacy of living organisms consisting of matter and form. (shrink)

This chapter begins with conversations in a prison on Samuel Beckett and pedagogy, conversations that emerged from the authors classes in philosophy. There are two interwoven strands in the chapter. One questions the emphasis on competition and achievement in contemporary education and its implications for the author's relationship to failure. The second, strongly influenced by Beckett, explores ways of reimagining the relationship to failure in such a way that allows them to reflect on what matters in life. Rather than seeking (...) to eliminate failure, it is more interesting to think about how the concept of failure could be reimagined if, as Beckett suggests, failure is not accompanied by disappointment but became simply what we do, rather than being something we are. (shrink)

Aristotle's conception of being is dynamic. He believes that a thing is most itself when engaged in its proper activities, governed by its nature. This paper explores this idea by focusing on Metaphysics , a text that continues the investigation of substantial being initiated inMetaphysics Z. Q.1 claims that there are two potentiality-actuality distinctions, one concerned with potentiality in the strict sense, which is involved in change, the other concerned with potentiality in another sense, which he says is more useful (...) for the present project. His present project is the investigation of substantial being, and the relevant potentiality is the potentiality for activity, the full manifestation of what a thing is. I explore Aristotle's two potentiality-actuality distinctions AND argue that the second distinction is modeled on the first, with one crucial modification. Whereas a change is brought about by something other than the object or by the object itself considered as other (as when a doctor cures himself), an activity is brought about byte object itself considered as itself. This single modification yields an important difference: whereas a change leads to a state other than the one an object was previously in, an activity maintains or develops what an object already is. (shrink)

In 1886, Nietzsche wrote: ‘I am still waiting for a philosophical doctor in the extraordinary sense of the term’: a doctor who pursues not truth, but an exceptional kind of health. Nietzsche's will to health, his theory of drive organisation, and his insistence that the philosopher put himself at risk, all work together in his overall project, which consists of taking up the very role of the highly revalued physician for whom he is waiting. Deleuze and Guattari engage this same (...) task of a revalued doctoring in the Capitalisme et Schizophrénie books, attacking the disease of oedipality and providing instructions for the deorganisation of the organism as self-cure. Offering tips on this radical treatment, they employ the figure of the hypochondriac to show how it can fail. Both Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari perform a revaluation of health as a condition of chronic critique, a condition that wraps itself around illness to keep itself critical. (shrink)

The position and power of women in the early church has been much explored by scholars such as Karen Jo Torjesen and Virginia Burrus. Research has often indicated that women had little power, especially sacramental power, at this time. This article challenges such a perspective by examining and comparing three accounts of women’s experience of the Eucharist in the private sphere during the third century. Drawing on Gregory of Nyssa’s account of Macrina, his sister, and her making of the eucharistic (...) bread, Pseudo-Athanasius’ instructions to virgins celebrating their own eucharistic meals, and Gregory Nazianzus’ description of his sister, Gorgonia, anointing herself for healing with the Eucharist, this article demonstrates that, in the private setting, sacramental power was not the preserve of the male. The Eucharist, in far more varied forms than might be anticipated, is potent in the domestic setting of these women of the early Church. (shrink)

(2000). Of loaded dice and heated arguments: Putting the Hansen?Michaels global warming debate in context. Social Epistemology: Vol. 14, No. 2-3, pp. 109-127.

Though I doubt it has put a Rolls Royce in anybody’s garage, the criticism industry is a reality not to be overlooked. Academics have a responsibility to stay self-aware and self-critical about their own and their profession’s interests. All academic activity has a careerist dimension, but it obviously cannot be explained by that dimension alone, and in this sense Fromm’s point is simply reductive. But of course it is not all academic activity that Fromm is objecting to, only some and (...) notably mine.The image of academic colonization suggests one has stepped beyond some legitimate borders and laid claim to territory rightfully inhabited by others. Whose world was invaded by my essay, or by the “Race,” Writing, and Difference issue in general? Mr. Fromm’s, evidently. Fromm wants a world where words stand still and refer, and don’t get changed. In particular, to use his own examples, he wants a world where blacks are blacks, whites are whites, Americans are Americans, knives are knives, brothers are brothers, and Indians are Indians . Mary Louise Pratt is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Toward a Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse. (shrink)

Allan Bell calls on hermeneutics to enliven the relation between discourse analysts and the materials they study, exploring the image of the analyst ‘standing before’ a corpus, prepared to be transformed by it. The ingredient of desire must be added to the account, as well as the embodied scenario of interpretation. These elements are mobilized to situate Bell’s rereading of Babel and of empire.