This essay delves into the essentialities of object-giving sources within the formulation of epistemic objectivity. It explores the relationship between objectivity and intentional states, particularly in the context of immediate and transcendent experiences. A key focus of this paradigm is the examination of inferences and how they are held in X’s intentional processes. These claims about inferences contribute to the perception of objectivity by highlighting the epistemological transitions of things that occur in the constitutive ideation. Additionally, the activity within X’s (...) episteme leads to significant articulations that reflect a structural realism of experiences. The essay also introduces a convention of the experiential-intentional process so that the causality manipulations could be avoided by the precents of sources of ideation. In this instance, the central niche is occupied by transcendental reflections of intentionality, which are fundamentally founded on experiences and objectivity, and they possess a distinct rhetorical quality. They manifest as acts, propositional forms, and constituents, all of which contribute to the understanding and justification of objectivity. To establish such a framework that upholds objectivity, certain prerequisites must be met. Firstly, the framework must possess justificational resources that prevent causality manipulations. Secondly, pre-reflective sources should not inter-define causality in epistemic circumstances, although this does not exclude the emergence of causal relations, and thus this approach offers a correlational explanation. Lastly, transcendental reflections should remain compatible with the experiential-intentional process, allowing for the accommodation of subjectivity in the justification of objectivity. (shrink)

This book defends Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument against physicalism. According to physicalism, consciousness is a physical phenomenon. The knowledge argument stars Mary, who learns all objective, physical information through black-and-white media and yet acquires new information when she first sees colors for herself: information about what it is like to see in color. Based partly on that case, Jackson concludes that not all information is physical. The book argues that the knowledge argument succeeds in refuting all standard versions of physicalism: (...) versions on which consciousness is grounded by what objective science reveals. It also argues that given further, plausible assumptions, the knowledge argument leads to Russellian monism, on which there are intrinsic properties that both constitute consciousness and underlie properties physics describes, such as mass and charge. It explains how the knowledge argument establishes those two conclusions and defends the argument against numerous objections. (shrink)

This paper comments on ‘Critique and Negativity: Towards the Pluralisation of Critique in Educational Practice, Theory and Research’ by Dietrich Benner and Andrea English. Negativity is a disquieting ghost for teachers, educational researchers, administrators and other professionals of this field, including those involved in the design of policy. First, I make some remarks in response to the essay by Benner and English in order to draw attention to the importance of dealing with negativity. Second, I introduce a further problematisation of (...) negativity: I deal with the practical issues that emerge from the conceptual reactivation of negativity and the possible consequences that result from this in the context of teaching graduate seminars. I am especially concerned with the ways in which negativity is inscribed in the process of knowledge production (that is, research), and in the possible consequences of subscribing to one or the other concept of negativity (teleological negativity, parasitic negativity, and relational negativity as the sine qua non condition for any ontology). Lastly, I raise some points for discussion with regard to certain possible consequences of the use of one or another notion of negativity in teaching and research. (shrink)

Medieval interpretations of hylomorphism, in which substances are conceived as metaphysical composites of prime matter and substantial form, are receiving attention in contemporary philosophy. It has even been suggested that a recovery of Aquinas's conception of prime matter as a ‘pure potentiality’, lacking any actuality apart from substantial form, may be expedient in hylomorphic interpretations of quantum mechanics. In this paper, we consider a recent hylomorphic interpretation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the theory of Cosmic Hylomorphism, which does not (...) explicitly invoke any notion of prime matter in its original formulation. We argue that prime matter does in fact play a role in constituting and individuating particles in this theory. However, we demonstrate that the notion of prime matter which features in the extended version of Cosmic Hylomorphism that we propose here is distinct from Aquinas's conception of prime matter, inasmuch as it has discrete metaphysical parts. (shrink)

Pincione argues that procedural constitutional guarantees of market freedoms best protect individuals from domination. If he is right, Philip Pettit's claim that various forms of state interference with private markets are needed to forestall domination will prove to be unwarranted. Pincione further contends that market freedoms are best protected by procedural rules for political decision-making, as opposed to constitutional guarantees of private property and other substantive rules.Central to his position are claims that the dispersion of economic power precludes domination, and (...) that free entry into markets furthers such dispersion. As against the idea that the state is in a better position to disperse economic power, Pincione argues that the constitutional provisions needed to implement that idea are contestable, and to that extent require interpretive powers that themselves involve domination. Only a constitution that, as a side effect of its procedures for political decision making, generates full private property rights holds out hope of shielding citizens from domination. This is so, because a plurality of suppliers of goods and services is a structural feature of the free market, in a sense of “structural” that matters for measurements of domination based on fairly uncontroversial claims about persons and resources. (shrink)

Theorists of public reason such as John Rawls often idealize constitutional courts as exemplars of public reason. This paper raises questions about the seduction and limits of analogies between theorists’ account of public reason and actual constitutional jurisprudence. Examining the work product of the United States Supreme Court, the paper argues that while it does engage in reason-giving to support its decisions—as the public reason strategy suggests— those reasons are (largely) legalistic and specifically juristic reasons—not the theorists’ idealized moral-political reasons (...) on matters of fundamental principle. But if constitutional courts do not engage on matters of fundamental principle, then a public reason strategy for assuaging democratic worries about judicial review would no longer be open: prominent liberal and deliberative democratic theorists could no longer point to the alleged superiority of constitutional courts to speak in the name of, and for, the people’s shared political principles. The paper extends beyond the U.S. case study by pointing to three institutional factors explaining the disanalogy between what some constitutional courts do and what public reason theories require them to do. It concludes with considerations about whether the public reason strategy might be more successfully applied to international courts. (shrink)

Constitution is the relation that holds between an object and what it is made of: statues are constituted by the lumps of matter they coincide with; flags, one may think, are constituted by colored pieces of cloth; and perhaps human persons are constituted by biological organisms. Constitution is often thought to be a.

The late 19th century debate among German-speaking physicists about theoretical entities is often regarded as foreshadowing the scientific realism debate. This paper brings out differences between them by concentrating on the part of the earlier debate that was concerned with the conceptual consistency of the competing conceptions of matter—mainly, but not exclusively, of atomism. Philosophical antinomies of atomism were taken up by Emil Du Bois-Reymond in an influential lecture in 1872. Such challenges to the consistency of atomism had repercussions (...) within the physics community, as can be shown for the examples of Heinrich Hertz and Ludwig Boltzmann. The latter developed a series of counter-arguments, culminating in an ingenious attempt to turn the tables on the critics of atomism and prove the inconsistency of non-atomistic conceptions of nature. Underlying this controversy is a disagreement over specific goals of physical research which was considered crucially relevant to the further course of physical inquiry. It thereby exemplifies an attitude towards the realism issue that can be contrasted with a different, more neutral attitude of construing the realism issue as merely philosophical and indifferent with respect to concrete research programs in physics, which one also occasionally finds expressed in the 19th century controversy and which may be seen as the prevailing attitude of the 20th century debate. (shrink)

The traditional concept of prime matter – a purely potential substratum that persists through substantial change and serves to constitute the generated substance – has played a dwindling part in Aristotelian scholarship over the centuries. In medieval interpretations of Aristotle, prime matter was thought to play these two roles in all substantial changes, not only in changes at the level of the four elements. In more recent centuries, traditional prime matter was relegated only to the context of (...) substantial changes between the four elements. And in the last few decades of Aristotelian scholarship, it has become common either to downplay or even to eliminate prime matter’s role in elemental changes too. I will support the traditional concept of prime matter by showing that it aligns Aristotle’s view of elemental change with one of the central constraints on matter imposed in his Physics to a degree that cannot be achieved on the non-traditional interpretations: the need for matter to be in potentiality in a way that avoids the two problematic extremes of mere persistence, on the one hand, and destruction, on the other. This point will be supported by Aristotle’s rejection of both monism and pluralism in On Generation and Corruption. Second, I will argue that Aristotle calls for precisely the same kind of potentiality in a very different context: his critique of Anaxagoras’s view of matter in the Generation of Animals. Here the very same problematic extremes of mere persistence and destruction that plague the alternate views to traditional prime matter also plague the dominant views on the matter for animal generation. Especially since Aristotle takes living things to be paradigmatic substances, these comparisons suggest that the apparent idiosyncrasies of elemental transformation which have motivated interpreters to depart from traditional prime matter may not be so idiosyncratic after all. And if that is so, it may be that the problem lies not so much with traditional prime matter as with our assumptions about how persistence and constitution work in substantial change according to Aristotle. In the end, this line of argument opens the door to three new potential interpretations of the matter for substantial generation in Aristotle, interpretations which align with his concept of potentiality and – to varying degrees – with traditional prime matter as well. (shrink)

The late 19th century debate among German-speaking physicists about theoretical entities is often regarded as foreshadowing the scientific realism debate. This paper brings out differences between them by concentrating on the part of the earlier debate that was concerned with the conceptual consistency of the competing conceptions of matter---{}mainly, but not exclusively, of atomism. Philosophical antinomies of atomism were taken up by Emil Du Bois-Reymond in an influential lecture in 1872. Such challenges to the consistency of atomism had repercussions (...) within the physics community, as can be shown for the examples of Heinrich Hertz and Ludwig Boltzmann. The latter developed a series of counter-arguments, culminating in an ingenious attempt to turn the tables on the critics of atomism and prove the inconsistency of non-atomistic conceptions of nature. Underlying this controversy is a disagreement over specific goals of physical research which was considered crucially relevant to the further course of physical inquiry. It thereby exemplifies an attitude towards the realism issue that can be contrasted with a different, more neutral attitude of construing the realism issue as merely philosophical and indifferent with respect to concrete research programs in physics, which one also occasionally finds expressed in the 19th century controversy and which may be seen as the prevailing attitude of the 20th century debate. (shrink)

The only anthology available on material constitution, this book collects important recent work on well known puzzles in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. The extensive, clearly written introduction helps to make the essays accessible to a wide audience.

The concept of matter is not, I urge, reducible to the concept of an object. This is to be distingusihed from the counterintuitive Aristotelian claim that matter depends for its existence on objects which it constitutes.

ABSTRACT: A traditional objection to inferentialism states that not all inferences can be meaning-constitutive and therefore inferentialism has to comprise an analytic-synthetic distinction. As a response, Peregrin argues that meaning is a matter of inferential rules and only the subset of all the valid inferences for which there is a widely shared corrective behaviour corresponds to rules and so determines meaning. Unfortunately, Peregrin does not discuss what counts as “widely shared”. In the paper, I argue for an empirical plausibility (...) of Peregrin’s proposal. The aim of the paper is to show that we can find examples of meaning-constitutive linguistic action, which sustain Peregrin’s response. The idea is supported by examples of meaning modulation. If Peregrin is right, then we should be able to find specific meaning modulations in which a new meaning is publicly available and modulated in such a way that it has a potential to be widely shared. I believe that binding modulations – a specific type of meaning modulations – satisfy this condition. (shrink)

In what sense are the activities and properties of components in a mechanism explanatorily relevant to the behavior of a mechanism as a whole? I articulate this problem, the problem of constitutive relevance, and I show that it must be solved if we are to understand mechanisms and mechanistic explanation. I argue against some putative solutions to the problem of constitutive relevance, and I sketch a positive account according to which relevance is analyzed in terms ofrelationships of mutual manipulability between (...) the behavior of a mechanism as a whole and the properties and activities of its components. My account is a causal-mechanical account in the sense that it is a particular expression of the idea that constitutive explanation is a matter of showing how an explanandum phenomenon is situated within the causal structure of the world. It is thus offered as a rival to epistemic (argument-centered) and psychological accounts of interlevel explanation. (shrink)

Dark matter is an essential ingredient of the present Standard Cosmological Model, according to which only 5% of the mass/energy content of our universe is made of ordinary matter. In recent times, it has been argued that certain cases of gravitational lensing represent a new type of evidence for the existence of DM. In a recent paper, Peter Kosso attempts to substantiate that claim. His argument is that, although in such cases DM is only detected by its gravitational (...) effects, gravitational lensing is a direct consequence of Einstein's Equivalence Principle and therefore the complete gravitational theory is not needed in order to derive such lensing effects. In this paper I critically examine Kosso's argument: I confront the notion of empirical evidence involved in the discussion and argue that EEP does not have enough power by itself to sustain the claim that gravitational lensing in the Bullet Cluster constitutes evidence for the DM Hypothesis. As a consequence of this, it is necessary to examine the details of alternative theories of gravity to decide whether certain empirical situations are indeed evidence for the existence of DM. It may well be correct that gravitational lensing does constitute evidence for the DM Hypothesis—at present it is controversial whether the proposed modifications of gravitation all need DM to account for the phenomenon of gravitational lensing and if so, of which kind—but this will not be a direct consequence of EEP. (shrink)

In what sense are the activities and properties of components in a mechanism explanatorily relevant to the behavior of a mechanism as a whole? I articulate this problem, the problem of constitutive relevance, and I show that it must be solved if we are to understand mechanisms and mechanistic explanation. I argue against some putative solutions to the problem of constitutive relevance, and I sketch a positive account according to which relevance is analyzed in terms ofrelationships of mutual manipulability between (...) the behavior of a mechanism as a whole and the properties and activities of its components. My account is a causal-mechanical account in the sense that it is a particular expression of the idea that constitutive explanation is a matter of showing how an explanandum phenomenon is situated within the causal structure of the world. It is thus offered as a rival to epistemic (argument-centered) and psychological accounts of interlevel explanation. (shrink)

The idea that two objects can coincide—by sharing all their proper parts, or matter—yet be non-identical, results in the “Problem of Coincident Objects”: in what relation do objects stand if they are not identical but share all their proper parts? One solution is to introduce material constitution. In this paper, I argue that this is ad hoc since, first, this solution cannot be generalized to solve similar problems, and, second, there are pseudo cases of coincidence that should not (...) trigger the introduction of material constitution and these cannot be distinguished in any principled way from the allegedly real cases of coincidence. (shrink)

Adams and Aizawa, in a series of recent and forthcoming papers ((2001), (In Press), (This Volume)) seek to refute, or perhaps merely to terminally embarrass, the friends of the extended mind. One such paper begins with the following illustration: "Question: Why did the pencil think that 2+2=4? Clark's Answer: Because it was coupled to the mathematician" Adams and Aizawa (this volume) ms p.1 "That" the authors continue "about sums up what is wrong with Clark's extended mind hypothesis". The example of (...) the pencil, they suggest, is just an especially egregious version of a fallacy said to pervade the literature on the extended mind. This fallacy, which they usefully dub the "coupling-constitution fallacy", is attributed , in varying degrees and manners, to Van Gelder and Port (1995), Clark and Chalmers (1998), Haugeland (1998), Dennett (2000), Clark (2001), Gibbs (2001), and Wilson (2004). The fallacy, of course, is to move from the causal coupling of some object or process to some cognitive agent, to the conclusion that the object or process is part of the cognitive agent , or part of the agent's cognitive processing (see e.g. Adams and Aizawa (This volume) ms p.2). Proponents of the extended mind and related theses, Adams and Aizawa repeatedly assert, are prone to this fallacy in part because they either ignore or fail to properly appreciate the importance of " the mark of the cognitive" viz the importance of an account of "what makes something a cognitive agent" (op cit ms p.3). The positive part of Adams and Aizawa's critique then emerges as a combination of the assertion that this "mark of the cognitive" involves the idea that "cognition is constituted by certain sorts of causal process that involve non-derived contents" (e.g. op cit ms p.3) and that these processes look to be characterized by psychological laws that turn out to apply to many internal goings-on but not currently (as a matter of contingent empirical fact) to any processes that take place in non-biological tools and artifacts. In what follows, I shall try to show why these arguments display nothing so much as mutual failures of communication: crossed wires concealing a couple of real, important, but much more subterranean, disagreements. In particular, I try to show why the negative considerations advanced by Adams and Aizawa fail to successfully undermine the argument for the extended mind, and why their more radical positive story, unless supplemented by implausible additional claims, fails to cast doubt on the claim that minds like ours can (without the need for any radically new techniques, technologies or interventions) extend into the world. (shrink)

The paper contends that transcendental phenomenology is a form of radical immanent critique able to explicate the necessary structures of meaning-constitution as well as evaluate our present situation through the historically traditionalized layers of concrete, lived experience. In order to make this case, the paper examines the critical dimension of phenomenology through the lens of one of its core conditions for possibility: the imagination. Building on—yet also departing from—Husserl’s own analyses, the paper contends that the imagination is both self- (...) and lifeworld-constituting. The imagination is anchored in our everyday senses of self and world as well as able to distance itself from being naively moored in normalized and deeply sedimented commitments. It is precisely this ‘anchored distance,’ rather than a sweeping doxic and ontic neutrality and negative freedom, that reveals the critical dimension of the imagination. (shrink)

In this two-part article, I propose a new materialist understanding of behavior. The term “mattering” in the title refers to sense-making behavior that matters, that is, to significant habits and materialized behaviors. By significant habits I mean protocols, practices and routines that generate ways of reading material signs and fixed accounts of movement. I advance a notion of behaving that stresses its materiality and sensory shaping, and I provide select examples from music. I note that current definitions of behavior do (...) not capture its material dimension. This is because behavioral science has mostly viewed matter as passive, and not as an active agency. Such an approach has metaphysically framed behavior as a phenomenon of presence that is external from its environment. The approach of behavioral science to matter where there are fixed borders between the internal and external is lacking, since it does not account for agential cuts as conceptualized by Karen Barad. Instead, I consider behavior performatively; as an ongoing iterative practice and as integral to the growth of immanently self-caused matter that spawns metastable relational formations that produce different possibilities for successive formations. In this regard, behavior matters, and matter behaves. One key aspect of my article advances Bernard Stiegler as a critical new materialist thinker. This advancement concerns the technical doings of artworks, which include the material activity that is generative of sensitivity: feelings and beliefs associated with a sense or meaning. I outline an example of the materiality of habits as constitutive of music. After that, I coin the transformative doings of matter on the artist as a “caripulation,” which is a desired movement or motion that transforms the mover and the moved. Finally, I raise “pharmacological” considerations in terms of the Stieglerian aspects of organic and inorganic organized matter. (shrink)

In the face of the puzzles of material constitution, some philosophers have been moved to posit a distinction between an object's matter and its form. A familiar difficulty for contemporary hylomorphism is to say which properties are eligible as forms: for example, it seems that it would be intolerably arbitrary to say that being statue shaped is embodied by some material object, but that other complex shape properties aren't. Anti-arbitrariness concerns lead quickly to a plenitudinous ontology. The usual (...) complaint is that the super-abundance of material objects is too extraordinary to accept, but I want to raise a different worry: I argue that the most natural way of developing this picture is already inconsistent. I show that a simple version of plenitudinous hylomorphism is subject to a Russellian argument, but argue that we cannot treat the problem straightforwardly as an instance of Russell's Paradox of Sets. (shrink)

In the 225 years since the United States Constitution was first drafted, no single book has addressed the key questions of what constitutions are designed to do, how they are structured, and why they matter. In From Words to Worlds, constitutional scholar Beau Breslin corrects this glaring oversight, singling out the essential functions that a modern, written constitution must incorporate in order to serve as a nation's fundamental law. Breslin lays out and explains the basic functions of (...) a modern constitution -- including creating a new citizenry, structuring the institutions of government, regulating conflict between layers and branches of government, and limiting the power of the sovereign. He also moves into the esoteric, discussing the theoretical concepts behind the fundamentals of written constitutions and examining in-depth some of the most important constitutional charters from around the world. In assaying how states put the structural ideas into practice, Breslin asks probing questions about why -- and if -- constitutions matter. His answer is a resounding yes. Solidly argued and engagingly written, this comparative study in constitutional thought demonstrates clearly the key components that a state's foundational document must address. In doing so, Breslin draws a critically important distinction between constitutional texts and constitutional practice. (shrink)

How is constitution‐making possible, when people disagree on so many questions about what is good and what is right? The answer lies in the existence of incompletely theorized agreements–agreements on abstract formulations and on particular practices, amidst disagreement about the largest issues in social life. Such agreements help make constitutions and constitutional law possible, even within nations whose citizens cannot concur on the most fundamental matters. Incompletely theorized agreements thus help illuminate an enduring constitutional puzzle: how members of diverse (...) societies can work together on terms of mutual respect amidst intense disagreements about both the right and the good. (shrink)

This paper is a response to a recent paper by Bobier and Omelianchuk in which they argue that the critics of Giubilini and Minerva’s defence of infanticide fail to adequately justify a moral difference at birth. They argue that such arguments would lead to an intuitively less plausible position: that late-term abortions are permissible, thus creating a dilemma for those who seek to argue that birth matters. I argue that the only way to resolve this dilemma, is to bite the (...) naturalist bullet and accept that the intuitively plausible idea that birth constitutes a morally relevant event is simply mistaken and biologically misinformed. (shrink)

Aristotle's notion of matter has been seen either as unintelligible, it being some mysterious potential entity that is nothing in its own right, or as simply the notion of an everyday object. The latter is the common assumption in contemporary approaches to hylomorphism, but as has been pointed out, especially by scholars with a background in ancient philosophy, if we conceive of matter as an object itself we cannot account for the unity of hylomorphic substances. Thus, they assume (...) that a hylomorphic substance is an essential unity and matter not a constituent at all. This solution to the problem of unity, however, brings us back to the mysterious notion of matter. For these reasons, I will revisit Aristotle's conception of matter in this paper. I will argue that an understanding of form as a cause of being requires that matter be an independent constituent of the individual substance. However, I agree that the conception of matter as an individual object with an essence makes it impossible to solve the problem of unity. We therefore need to take seriously Aristotle's assertion that matter is nothing in its own right and not an individual. By denying that matter is an individual, Aristotle does not introduce a mysterious entity, nor does he deny that it can be identified independently of the whole; instead, matter for Aristotle is an irreducible plurality, and this explains why it is not an individual and has no essence. I will conclude with some observations on how this gives rise to two competing versions of hylomorphic constitution. (shrink)

Legal scholars generally consider the theorisation and constitutionalisation of constitutional interpretation as a matter for the courts. This article first challenges this tendency on conceptual grounds, showing that no institutional commitment follows from the nature of interpretation in law, constitutional law included. It then provides guidance for thinking about institutional perspectives according to two criteria: the nature and normative strength of the sources interpreted and the capacity of the interpreter to include and consider every possibility affected when her interpretation (...) carries collective effects and is authoritatively final. The application of these criteria places the discussion on the grounds of democratic theory. The article thus reviews competing democratic theories and champions deliberative democracy as the alternative whose constitutive features best allow for the development of institutions capable of exercising constitutional interpretation when the imposition of meaning on the constitution is final and carrieserga omneseffects. (shrink)

This paper puts Jane Bennett’s vital materialism into dialogue with Luce Irigaray’s ontology of sexuate difference. Together these thinkers challenge the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that is bound up with both the instrumentalization of the earth and the disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal. In its place they seek to affirm a vital, generative materiality: an ‘active matter’ whose differential becomings no longer oppose activity to passivity, subject to object, or one body, self or (...) entity to its ‘other’. For both thinkers, displacing the hylomorphic conceptual structures that have tended to dominate western metaphysical thought is inseparable from critiquing the model of the individual subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. Such individualism is countered by the relational ontologies figured in Bennett’s ‘distributed agencies’ and Irigaray’s ‘placental economy’, and by a shared attentiveness to the capacities of the human body to bear others within. Nonetheless, this paper argues that each thinker renders this ‘other within’ in very different ways. On the one hand, Bennett’s approach complements and expands Irigaray’s notion of the elemental by affording a greater attentiveness to inorganic and non-sexuate matters. On the other, Irigaray’s conception of generative relationality and the ontological priority of the in-between allows us to think such material entanglements in ways that more fully displace the twinned logics of individualism and instrumentalization. Her project thereby affirms the relational and irreducible differences on which the ‘vitality’ of a vital materiality depends. If there is no more “earth” to press down/repress, to work, to represent, but also and always to desire, no opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what pedestal remains for the ex-sistence of the “subject”? If the earth turned and more especially turned upon herself, the erection of the subject might thereby be disconcerted and risk losing its elevation and penetration. For what would there be to rise up from and exercise his power over? And in? Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman Jane Bennett has recently argued that “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption”, continuing that: “The figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption”.11J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, ix. Henceforth VM. View all notes This insight is prefigured and re-affirmed by the work of Irigaray. Her sustained analysis of western thought and culture shows how its constitutive disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal is inextricably bound up with an equally deep-rooted disavowal of matter and corporeality. As the above passage from Speculum suggests,22L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 133. Henceforth S. View all notes Irigaray seeks to expose woman's reduction to an object for a subject and a maternal-material resource for man's speculations; but in disentangling woman from her symbolic identification with the earth, she also seeks to release the earth from its identification with a passive and manipulable matter. Her work thus bears directly on the revaluation required to transform human beings' relations to materiality: both their own, and that of the earth they inhabit. At the centre of this revaluation is Irigaray's work to displace the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that Bennett also critiques, and to affirm instead a sexuate materiality that is both living and generative. Her consistent troubling of hylomorphism is as unsettling for the subject as her question: “But what if the ‘object’ started to speak?” This question is echoed in Bennett's concern with “the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back, when the mute idol speaks”.33 VM, 2, citing W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005, 157. View all notes As this passage indicates, Bennett's own project is more concerned with the agency of non-human materialities – including their role in the constitution of the human – than with specifically sexed bodies or a materiality inflected by sexual difference. It is these crucial differences in emphasis, I will suggest, that allow the work of these two thinkers to be brought together in productive dialogue. On the one hand, Bennett's approach affords a greater attentiveness to inorganic and non-sexuate matter; on the other, Irigaray's twinned ontology of sexual difference and maternal relation is better able to affirm the relational differences on which the “vitality” of a vital materiality depends. The paper begins by outlining several key elements of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference to show how it leads necessarily to a rethinking of matter. This rethinking is especially helpful for shifting away from the hylomorphism that has been a dominant strand in western thought, informing an understanding of the earth as a fundamentally inert and ever-ready resource. As I will show, the figures through which Irigaray re-articulates female specificity also allow her to refigure the earth as active matter that “turns upon herself ” in generative flux. In the second section, I will situate Irigaray's re-thinking of matter in relation to Bennett's “vital materiality”.44Bennett can be aligned with a number of thinkers who have come to be grouped under the heading “new materialisms”. See S. Alaimo and S. Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008; D. Coole and S. Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. View all notes An advantage of this concept is that it refuses the separation between humans and matter still implicit in concepts such as “the environment”. By attending to “our own constitution as vital materiality”, as well as the ways our “own” bodies are never “fully or exclusively human”, Bennett adjusts the status of human actants while re-evaluating non-human bodies “as actants rather than as objects”. As I will show, her approach provides a constructive critical perspective on Irigaray's work by drawing attention to the specifically non-sexuate nature of the elemental. Equally, however, Irigaray's insistence on sexuate difference problematises any appeal to a generic notion of “the human”. This is especially helpful, I will suggest, in relation to contemporary descriptions of climate change as “anthropogenic”. By homogenising human beings, such descriptions make it more difficult to address the ways in which current ecological problems are inseparable from global patterns of social, political and economic inequity. For both thinkers, challenging hylomorphism needs to be matched with a critique of the dominant modern model of the subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. And for both, this model is displaced and undone by the capacity of the human body to bear others within, in ways that engender and sustain human life. Yet as I will discuss in the final two sections, each thinker renders this “other within” in very different ways, with significant implications for the ethics and politics of a “vital materiality”. In the end it is Irigaray's rendering of a distinctively female capacity to bear an other within, explored via the generative relationality of a placental economy, that more fully escapes the individualism of the One and the Same. Together, Irigaray and Bennett show that to take seriously the ecological crises that currently confront us means overcoming the disavowal of both human beings' own fundamental materiality and our dependency on the sustaining materialities of the earth. In contrast, a dominant strand in contemporary responses to these crises is an environmental politics of “enlightened self-interest”55I borrow this phrase from H. Kopnina's critical discussion in “Forsaking Nature? Contesting ‘Biodiversity’ Through Competing Discourses of Sustainability”, Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 7, no. 1 : 51–63. that precludes any serious re-evaluation of human beings' relations to matter and the earth. If human beings can be persuaded that current levels of environmental degradation are damaging to them, threatening perhaps their very survival, they are more likely to take decisive steps to alter their behaviour. Insofar as such approaches demand action only for the sake of human interests and ends, they are both anthropocentric and spring from the same instrumentalising rationality that has engendered the ecological crises we currently face. They may well be successful in prompting action. But by foregrounding the survival of “the human species” per se, such approaches foreclose discussion of whose interests are served if survival is all that is allowed to be at stake, and whose lives are thereby consigned to ongoing exploitation. Moreover, as I will argue below, the instrumental rationality that serves survival is at odds with an affirmation of life, as a becoming that depends on difference. With this in mind, I will problematise Bennett's proposed politics of “expanded self-interest”, while seeking to retain many of the insights her approach brings. To more fully displace the “rational” self-interest that has encouraged human exploitation of the earth, we might take up Bennett's “vital materiality” in ways informed by Irigaray's conception of generative difference and the relational space-time of the in-between. (shrink)

The general account of material constitution presented in my article, Spatially Coinciding Objects (Ratio vol. 24.1, June 1982), is further developed. There we saw how distinct objects in the same place at the same time can be strictly ordered by an asymmetrical, transitive relation of material constitution. I show herein how this relation can conceivably form ‘upright trees’ in which one object constitutes two other objects, neither of which constitutes the other. It is, however, impossible to have ‘inverted (...) trees’ in which one thing is constituted by two things neither of which constitutes the other. (This impossibility is implied when supposing that there is just one thing which counts as the proximate matter of a thing.). (shrink)

In this article, I begin by describing what I call this Black Lives Matter moment in the US. I then offer three reasons for considering racism as a bioethical issue, the least discussed of which is the way in which racism acts as a barrier to the creation of better healthcare systems. Next, I argue that the concept of race itself constitutes a bioethical issue in a way that is not fully reducible to racism. Finally, I discuss how we, (...) both bioethicists and health care professionals, might meet this moment by identifying individual points of responsibility (beyond liability) for structural injustice. (shrink)

The problem of names of illnesses is both a problem of words and values that should address not only the classification of disorders, but also a fundamental question both for medical sciences and humanities: can psychiatric nosology and classifications fit with the ontological constitution of human beings? This paper aims to discuss the so-called “psychiatric object” and its language and it intends to provide a hermeneutical-phenomenological account to mental health. In doing so, the paper will firstly examine the “psychiatric (...) object” and its language; secondly, it will show the difference between taxonomy and ontology, both of interest for the psychiatric object; third, it will insist on the critique of the epistemological status of psychiatry conceived from a natural point of view following three main paths: a metaphysical one (Heidegger, Jaspers), a social one (Szasz, Foucault, Basaglia), and an ethical one (Laing). Finally, it will clarify why phenomenology and in particular hermeneutical-phenomenology can illuminate the understanding of the psychiatric object and its implications in a cultural context, in order to achieve a more humanistic psychiatry. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers on the history of chemistry, this article develops the idea that drug molecules can be understood as ‘informed materials’. This study argues that molecules should not be viewed as discrete objects, but as constituted in their relations to complex informational and material environments. Through a case study of commercial pharmaceutical R&D, the article examines the role of combinatorial and computational chemistry in enriching the informational and material environment of potential drug (...) molecules. Within the contemporary pharmaceutical laboratory, experiments on molecules can be conducted not just in vitro and in vivo but also, according to researchers, in silico. Molecules come to exist not just as physical reagents but also as elements of arrays, libraries and databases of other molecules, and in a virtual form in computer simulations and virtual libraries. Molecules are also understood by researchers to exist in a ‘chemical space’ of other different molecules, where the notion of chemical space is used both to refer to differences in molecular structure and to territories owned or occupied by particular firms. The article argues that pharmaceutical companies do not merely discover molecular structures that potentially could exist, but also invent novel forms of chemical entity. (shrink)