Un hilo tenue engarza los ensayos reunidos en este volumen y un leit motiv como el de un bajo continuo surge y se oculta, jugando entre las páginas. El testimonio de Paul Valéry nos ofrece el tema del que este libro constituiría unas variaciones: ®El.

Jean-François Lyotard is recognized as one of the most significant French philosophers of the twentieth century. Although nearly all of his major writing has been translated into English, one important work has until now been unavailable. _Discourse, Figure_ is Lyotard’s thesis. Provoked in part by Lacan’s influential seminars in Paris, _Discourse, Figure_ distinguishes between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. Lyotard argues that because rational thought is discursive and works of (...) art are inherently opaque signs, certain aspects of artistic meaning such as symbols and the pictorial richness of painting will always be beyond reason’s grasp. A wide-ranging and highly unusual work, _Discourse, Figure_ proceeds from an attentive consideration of the phenomenology of experience to an ambitious meditation on the psychoanalytic account of the subject of experience, structured by the confrontation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis as contending frames within which to think the materialism of consciousness. In addition to prefiguring many of Lyotard’s later concerns, _Discourse, Figure_ captures Lyotard’s passionate engagement with topics beyond phenomenology and psychoanalysis to structuralism, semiotics, poetry, art, and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum endorses a kind of humanist feminism, which (for her) involves articulating the notion of human being as a normative ethical concept: once this normative concept is articulated, it can be employed to pick out those modes of treating women that are inappropriate with the view to developing corrective public policies. Contra Nussbaum, Louise Antony argues that human being cannot be defined in a normative sense. For Antony, the only plausible human universals are biological or genetic traits, (...) which lack the required ethical component. This, in Antony’s view, undermines humanist feminism because the prospects of cashing out an ethically normative concept of human being are not good. However, I argue this doesn’t undercut humanist feminism. Instead, feminists can single out inappropriate modes of treating women by developing a politically useful notion of dehumanization. My strategy takes rape to be a paradigm case of dehumanizing treatment and examines what key features make it dehumanizing. These key features, then, can be used to develop a general account of dehumanization. (shrink)

Louise Antony draws a now well-known distinction between two explanatory models for researching and addressing the issue of women’s underrepresentation in philosophy – the ‘Different Voices’ (DV) and ‘Perfect Storm’ (PS) models – and argues that, in view of PS’s considerably higher social value, DV should be abandoned. We argue that Antony misunderstands the feminist framework that she takes to underpin DV, and we reconceptualise DV in a way that aligns with a proper understanding of the metaphilosophical framework (...) that underpins it. On the basis of that reconceptualisation – together with the rejection of her claim that DV posits ‘cognitive’ differences between women and men – we argue that Antony’s negative assessment of DV’s social value is mistaken. And, we argue, this conclusion does not depend on endorsing the relevant feminist metaphilosophical framework. Whatever our metaphilosophical commitments, then, we should all agree that DV research should be actively pursued rather than abandoned. (shrink)

Helen Beebee, Anne-Marie McCallion ABSTRACT: Louise Antony draws a now well-known distinction between two explanatory models for researching and addressing the issue of women’s underrepresentation in philosophy – the ‘Different Voices’ and ‘Perfect Storm’ models – and argues that, in view of PS’s considerably higher social value, DV should be abandoned. We argue ….

The decision of the House of Lords in Gillick v West Norfolk Area Health Authority carved out a safe space for competent minors to confidentially access sexual and reproductive health care and advice in the UK. Ireland is one of the few common law jurisdictions that has not endorsed Gillick or a similar mature minor doctrine, nor has it securely legislated for the right to consent of those aged 16 and 17 years. The legal lacuna created by this deficiency has (...) left young persons in Ireland seeking sexual and reproductive healthcare, and the clinicians who provide this, in a challenging place. While this void has been partially filled with policy statements by bodies such as the Irish College of General Practitioners and the Health Service Executive, nonetheless the legal shortcomings leave both a sense of insecurity, and real world difficulties for adolescents seeking to access to sexual and reproductive healthcare. (shrink)

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of scholarly interest in conscientious objection in healthcare. While the literature to date has focused primarily on individual healthcare practitioners who object to participation in morally controversial procedures, in this article we consider a different albeit related issue, namely, whether publicly funded healthcare institutions should be required to provide morally controversial services such as abortions, emergency contraception, voluntary sterilizations, and voluntary euthanasia. Substantive debates about institutional responsibility have remained largely at the level of (...) first-order ethical debate over medical practices which institutions have refused to offer; in this article, we argue that more fundamental questions about the metaphysics of institutions provide a neglected avenue for understanding the basis of institutional conscientious objection. To do so, we articulate a metaphysical model of institutional conscience, and consider three well-known arguments for undermining institutional conscientious objection in light of this model. We show how our metaphysical analysis of institutions creates difficulties for justifying sanctions on institutions that conscientiously object. Thus, we argue, questions about the metaphysics of institutions are deserving of serious attention from both critics and defenders of institutional conscientious objection. (shrink)

In the 1960s and 1970s, scuba technology, underwater cameras, and documentarians revealed a long-hidden underwater world to the public. At this time oceanographic science was growing exponentially. Historians of the marine sciences have focused their studies of the period on institutional and military partnerships, and on the scientist-administrators who shaped oceanographic research institutions (such as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the British National Institute of Oceanography). Underwater habitat development during the 1960s and 1970s, however, (...) deserves greater attention than it has yet received, as it highlights a peculiar confluence of military, scientific, and popular interest, characteristic of the period, in the colonization of the seafloor. Existing accounts have focused on American habitats, notably Sealab and Tektite, since these were the largest and best funded. But this approach overemphasizes a Cold War narrative in which the sole protagonists of the habitat programs were the United States and the Soviet Union. At least 65 habitats were built between 1962 and 1991. Some were state-sponsored, with significant programs run by French, German, Japanese, and Canadian teams. This essay takes as a case study the Canadian Sublimnos habitat as well as the underwater exploration programs it helped launch in Newfoundland (Lora-I) and in the Arctic (Sub-Igloo). The Canadian case demonstrates that technological expertise and public enthusiasm for underwater exploration should not be solely understood with reference to Cold War interests of the two superpowers. Rather, the international range of habitat programs of the 1960s and 1970s reveals an expanding interest in the vertical underwater dimension that was fueled by numerous national scientific aims and territorial claims. (shrink)

This book offers a defence of mathematical fictionalism, according to which we have no reason to believe that there are any mathematical objects. Perhaps the most pressing challenge to mathematical fictionalism is the indispensability argument for the truth of our mathematical theories (and therefore for the existence of the mathematical objects posited by those theories). According to this argument, if we have reason to believe anything, we have reason to believe that the claims of our best empirical theories are (at (...) least approximately) true. But since claims whose truth would require the existence of mathematical objects are indispensable in formulating our best empirical theories, it follows that we have good reason to believe in the mathematical objects posited by those mathematical theories used in empirical science, and therefore to believe that the mathematical theories utilized in empirical science are true. Previous responses to the indispensability argument have focused on arguing that mathematical assumptions can be dispensed with in formulating our empirical theories. This book, by contrast, offers an account of the role of mathematics in empirical science according to which the successful use of mathematics in formulating our empirical theories need not rely on the truth of the mathematics utilized. (shrink)

We all know that speech can be harmful. But how? Mary Kate McGowan argues that speech constitutes harm when it enacts a norm that prescribes that harm. She investigates such harms as oppression, subordination, and discrimination in such forms of speech as sexist remarks, racist hate speech, pornography, verbal triggers, and micro-aggressions.

We applaud Ray and Cooper (2024) for emphasizing environmental health as a bioethics issue. As a team of interdisciplinary pediatric researchers and providers who are part of an institutional clima...

Mary Anne Warren investigates a theoretical question that is at the centre of practical and professional ethics: what are the criteria for having moral status? That is: what does it take to be an entity towards which people have moral considerations? Warren argues that no single property will do as a sole criterion, and puts forward seven basic principles which establish moral status. She then applies these principles to three controversial moral issues: voluntary euthanasia, abortion, and the status of (...) non-human animals. (shrink)

In the late nineteenth century, French naturalists were global leaders in microbial research. Louis Pasteur advanced sterilization techniques and demonstrated that dust particles in the air could contaminate a putrefiable liquid. Pasteur’s discoveries prompted a new research program for the naturalists of the Talisman and Travailleur expeditions: to recover uncontaminated water and mud samples from the deep sea. French naturalists Adrien Certes and Paul Regnard both independently conducted experiments to address the question of whether microorganisms inhabited the oceans and whether (...) organic material in the deep sea was subject to decomposition. The experiments of Certes and Regnard have largely been omitted from histories of microbiology and marine science. However, an examination of their work is crucial for understanding the context in which marine microbiology first developed. At the end of the nineteenth century, marine microbiology emerged from the disciplinary melding of terrestrial microbial ecology, experimental physiology, and the then-nascent field of deep-sea biology. (shrink)

A series of structural constitutional arguments lodged in multiple cases against Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) authorities to negotiate prescription drug prices via the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act threaten the legitimacy of CMS program and federal agency powers.

I begin by discussing the ways in which a would‐be blamer's own prior conduct towards the person he seeks to blame can undermine his standing to blame her (to call her to account for her wrongdoing). This provides the basis for an examination of a particular kind of ‘bar to trial’ in the criminal law – of ways in which a state or a polity's right to put a defendant on trial can be undermined by the prior misconduct of the (...) state or its officials. The examination of this often neglected legal phenomenon illuminates some central features of the criminal law and the criminal process, and some of the preconditions for the legitimacy of the criminal law in a liberal republic. (shrink)

Gene‐editing research is a complex science and foreign in most communities including Botswana. Adopting a qualitative deliberative framework with 109 participants from 7 selected ethnic communities in Botswana, we explored the perceptions of local communities on cultural values, norms, and beliefs that may motivate or deter likely participation in the use of gene‐editing related research. What emerged as the ethnic community's motivators for research participation include the potential for gene‐editing technologies to promote access to individualized medications, and the possibility of (...) protecting family members from genetic related diseases. Deterrents for research participation include cultural values such as implications of lineage for chieftainship, trust, fear or anxiety, uncertainty, and sensitivity on the use of gene‐editing. Findings of our study have implications for continuous engagement with local communities to explore potential ways of addressing cultural sensitivities that can further deter their participation in future gene‐editing related research. (shrink)

This article discusses contemporary social psychological approaches to the social relations and appraisals associated with specific emotions; other people’s impact on appraisal processes; effects of emotion on other people; and interpersonal emotion regulation. We argue that single-minded cognitive perspectives restrict our understanding of interpersonal and group-related emotional processes, and that new methodologies addressing real-time interpersonal and group processes present promising opportunities for future progress.

Philosophers have traditionally concentrated on the qualities that make human beings different from other species. In _Beast and Man_ Mary Midgley, one of our foremost intellectuals, stresses continuities. What makes people tick? Largely, she asserts, the same things as animals. She tells us humans are rather more like other animals than we previously allowed ourselves to believe, and reminds us just how primitive we are in comparison to the sophistication of many animals. A veritable classic for our age, _Beast (...) and Man_ has helped change the way we think about ourselves and the world in which we live. (shrink)

In _Michael Polanyi and His Generation_, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political (...) events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare. At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science. (shrink)

I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, “What is it to be a woman?” Prior attempts by feminist theorists to provide a metaphysical account of what all and only women have in common have all failed for the same reason: there is nothing women have in common beyond being women. Although the social kinds man and woman are primitive, their existence can be explained. I say that human sex difference is the material ground of systems of gender; gender (...) systems serve to enable male control of female reproductive capacities. This explains the fact that most women are female, but it does not entail that all women are female or that all females are women. To clarify my position, I draw an analogy between the kind woman and the kind parent. While it is difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for being a parent, it is clear that the social institution or practice of parenting has its material ground in the biological facts about human reproduction together with facts about infantile dependency. Saying this does not entail that all and only biological progenitors are parents. (shrink)

This 1997 book was the first English translation of all of Kant's writings on moral and political philosophy collected in a single volume. No other collection competes with the comprehensiveness of this one. As well as Kant's most famous moral and political writings, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, and Toward Perpetual Peace, the volume includes shorter essays and reviews, some of which have never been translated before. The volume has (...) been furnished with a substantial editorial apparatus including translator's introductions and explanatory notes to each text by Mary Gregor, and a general introduction to Kant's moral and political philosophy by Allen Wood. There is also an English-German and German-English glossary of key terms. (shrink)

Published in 1982, Carol Gilligan's _In a Different Voice_ proposed a new model of moral reasoning based on care, arguing that it better described the moral life of women. ____An Ethic of Care__ is the first volume to bring together key contributions to the extensive debate engaging Gilligan's work. It provides the highlights of the often impassioned discussion of the ethic of care, drawing on the literature of the wide range of disciplines that have entered into the debate. _Contributors:_ Annette (...) Baier, Diana Baumrind, Lawrence A. Blum, Mary Brabeck, John Broughton, Owen Flanagan, Marilyn Friedman, Carol Gilligan, Catherine G. Greeno, Catherine Jackson, Linda K. Kerber, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Zella Luria, Eleanor E. Maccoby, Linda Nicholson, Bill Puka, Carol B. Stack, Joan C. Tronto, Lawrence Walker, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler. (shrink)

Illusions are thought to make trouble for the intuition that perceptual experience is "open" to the world. Some have suggested, in response to the this trouble, that illusions differ from veridical experience in the degree to which their character is determined by their engagement with the world. An understanding of the psychology of perception reveals that this is not the case: veridical and falsidical perceptions engage the world in the same way and to the same extent. While some contemporary vision (...) scientists propose to draw the distinction between veridical experience and illusion in terms of the satisfaction or non-satisfaction of “hidden assumptions” deployed in the course of normal perceptual inference, I argue for a different approach. I contend that there are, in a sense, no illusions – illusions are as “open” as veridical experiences. Percepts lack the kinds of intentional content that would be needed for perceptual misrepresntation. My view gives a satisfying solution to a philosophical problem for disjunctivism about the good case/bad case distinction: with respect to illusions, every "bad case" of seeing an X can be equally well construed as a "good case" of seeing some Y (different from X). -/- . (shrink)