In this unconventional article, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg conduct a three-way ‘conversation’ in which they all take turns outlining how they understand the relationship among postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism. It begins with a short introduction, and then Ros, Sarah and Catherine each define the term they have become associated with. This is followed by another round in which they discuss the overlaps, similarities and disjunctures among the terms, and the article ends (...) with how each one understands the current mediated feminist landscape. (shrink)

This essay examines the connections between the Miss America pageant and reality makeover television shows. We argue that televised performances of gender have shifted focus from the intensely scripted, out-of-touch Miss America to reality makeover shows that normalize cosmetic surgery as a means to become the ‘ideal’ woman. While both spectacles offer their viewers performances of femininity, these performances need to be understood as emerging from the cultural and political conditions in which they are produced. This difference in presentation of (...) the subjects of beauty pageants and makeover programmes speaks respectively to the changing role of media in the normalization of performances of femininity, as well as to the affiliation of many young women with post-feminist politics in the United States. (shrink)

Book synopis: A collection of more than 30 specially commissioned essays, this volume surveys the work of the 17th-century philosopher-scientist commonly regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, while integrating unique essays detailing the context and impact of his work. Covers the full range of historical and philosophical perspectives on the work of Descartes Discusses his seminal contributions to our understanding of skepticism, mind-body dualism, self-knowledge, innate ideas, substance, causality, God, and the nature of animals Explores the philosophical significance of (...) his contributions to mathematics and science Concludes with a section on the impact of Descartes's work on subsequent philosophers. (shrink)

Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics takes a fresh look at the history of aesthetics and at current debates within the philosophy of art by exploring the ways in which gender informs notions of art and creativity, evaluation and interpretation, and concepts of aesthetic value. Multiple intellectual traditions have formed this field, and the discussions herein range from consideration of eighteenth century legacies of ideas about taste, beauty, and sublimity to debates about the relevance of postmodern analyses for feminist aesthetics. Forward (...) by Arthur C. Danto, 20 authors include Paul Mattick, Jr., Caroline Korsmeyer, Timothy Gould, Christine Battersby, Mary Devereaux, bell hooks, REnee Lorraine, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elizabeth Ann Dobie, Adrian Piper, Anita Silvers, Susan Feagin, Mary D. Garrard, Ellen Handler Spitz, Noel Carroll, Joanne Waugh, Joseph Margolis, Rita Felski, and Hilde Hein, as well as Peg Brand's essay, "Revising the Aesthetic-Nonaesthetic Distinction: The Aesthetic Value of Activist Art.". (shrink)

Ten years after the Human Genome Project’s completion the life sciences stand in a moment of uncertainty, transition, and contestation. The postgenomic era has seen rapid shifts in research methodology, funding, scientific labor, and disciplinary structures. Postgenomics is transforming our understanding of disease and health, our environment, and the categories of race, class, and gender. At the same time, the gene retains its centrality and power in biological and popular discourse. The contributors to Postgenomics analyze these ruptures and continuities and (...) place them in historical, social, and political context. Postgenomics, they argue, forces a rethinking of the genome itself, and opens new territory for conversations between the social sciences, humanities, and life sciences. Contributors. Russ Altman, Rachel A. Ankeny, Catherine Bliss, John Dupré, Michael Fortun, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sabina Leonelli, Adrian Mackenzie, Margot Moinester, Aaron Panofsky, Sarah S. Richardson, Sara Shostak, Hallam Stevens. (shrink)

The Introduction provides a historical and literary context for the examination of Albert Camus’s 1947 fictional novel, The Plague, to suggest its relevance to our own lived experiences of the 2021 Covid-19 pandemic that brought the routines and expectations of our normal, daily lives to an unprecedented halt. Details of Camus’s life and work inform our reading of the narrative that give rise to multiple interpretations as well as intriguing questions of scholarly inquiry: How realistic are the characters? Does solidarity (...) eventually triumph over isolation? Does the popular novel inspire social change or fail in its aspirations? Facing the absurdity of a similarly unwelcome and unpredictable disease, have we managed our fear of death more successfully than the citizens of Oran? An overview of authors’ contributions sets the stage for new and unique perspectives: an invitation for readers to reflect upon our communal experience of immense grief. (shrink)

When we define something as a crime, we generally thereby criminalize the attempt to commit that crime. However, it is a vexing puzzle to specify what must be the case in order for a criminal attempt to have occurred, given that the results element of the crime fails to come about. I argue that the philosophy of action can assist the criminal law in clarifying what kinds of events are properly categorized as criminal attempts. A natural thought is that this (...) project should take the form of specifying what it is in general to attempt or try to perform an action, and then to define criminal attempts as attempts to commit crimes. Focusing on Gideon Yaffe's resourceful work in Attempts (Oxford University Press, 2010) as an example of this strategy, I argue that it results in a view that is overly inclusive: one will count as trying to commit a crime even in the far remote preparatory stages that we in fact have good reason not to criminalize. I offer an alternative proposal to distinguish between mere preparations and genuine attempts that has its basis not in trying, but doing: a criminal attempt is underway once what the agent is doing is a crime. Working out the details of this schema turns out to have important implications for action theory. A recently burgeoning view known as Naive Action Theory holds that all action can be explained by appeal to some further thing that the agent is doing, and that that the same explanatory nexus is at work even when we appeal to what the agent is intending, trying, or preparing to do -- these notions do explanatory work because they too refer to actions that are in progress, albeit in their infancy. If this is right, than the notion of 'doing' will also be too inclusive for the purposes of the criminal law. I argue that we should draw the reverse conclusion: the distinctions between pure intending, trying, preparing, and doing serve an important purpose in the criminal law, and this fact lends support to the view that they are genuine metaphysical and explanatory distinctions. (shrink)

After offering an opening consideration of the hazards of neoliberalism, I address the general shape of the crisis of care that has evolved under its auspices. Two aspects of this crisis require greater attention: the moral precarity of caregivers and the relational harms of neoliberal capitalism. Thus, I first consider the moral precarity that caregivers experience by drawing on a concept that originates in scholarly work on the experiences of healthcare workers and combat veterans, namely, moral injury. Through this concept, (...) we can see how caregivers in late-stage capitalism face a seemingly unavoidable violation of their own significant moral beliefs. Second, I examine how the crisis of care results not only in individual harms of moral injury but also in harms to relationships themselves, as I continue to track the impact of moral injury on our intrapersonal and interpersonal lives. Ultimately, I argue that an important facet of the crisis of care is how it operates as a crisis of relationality in which our intrapersonal and interpersonal connections are placed under practical and moral strain. In taking a broader view, we can see how the fraying of particular intrapersonal and interpersonal connections can accumulate, resulting in the unraveling of wider webs of interdependency, just when we need them most. Throughout the paper, I zero in on the moral implications of the crisis of care driven by neoliberalism, featuring the damages that caregivers and their relationships sustain when situated in morally precarious ways. In doing so, I drive home the point that the crisis of care under neoliberalism is as much a moral and relational crisis as it is a political and economic one. (shrink)

Overview essay of the field of feminist aesthetics updated Winter, 2021.

This book provides a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between what propositional content is at-issue and what content is not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials (...) and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, she argues that all sentences make three contributions: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground; not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the illocutionary relation uses the at-issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type, can trigger further updates. 0The analysis is supported by extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the author's own fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other languages. (shrink)

Over a span of thirty years, twentieth-century French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida held a conversation across texts. Sharing a Jewish heritage and a background in phenomenology, both came to situate their work at the margins of philosophy, articulating this placement through religion and literature. Chronicling the interactions between these thinkers, Sarah Hammerschlag argues that the stakes in their respective positions were more than philosophical. They were also political. Levinas's investments were born out in his writings on Judaism (...) and ultimately in an evolving conviction that the young state of Israel held the best possibility for achieving such an ideal. For Derrida, the Jewish question was literary. The stakes of Jewish survival could only be approached through reflections on modern literature's religious legacy, a line of thinking that provided him the means to reconceive democracy. Hammerschlag's reexamination of Derrida and Levinas's textual exchange not only produces a new account of this friendship but also has significant ramifications for debates within Continental philosophy, the study of religion, and political theology. (shrink)

A new collection of essays highlighting the wide range of Buber's thought, career, and activism. Best known for I and Thou, which laid out his distinction between dialogic and monologic relations, Martin Buber (1878-1965) was also an anthologist, translator, and author of some seven hundred books and papers. Martin Buber: Creaturely Life and Social Form, edited by Sarah Scott, is a collection of nine essays that explore his thought and career. Martin Buber: Creaturely Life and Social Form shakes up (...) the legend of Buber by decentering the importance of the I-Thou dialogue in order to highlight Buber as a thinker preoccupied by the image of relationship as a geode to spiritual, social, and political change. The result is a different Buber than has hitherto been portrayed, one that is characterized primarily by aesthetics and politics rather than by epistemology or theology. Martin Buber: Creaturely Life and Social Form will serve as a guide to the entirety of Buber's thinking, career, and activism, placing his work in context and showing both the evolution of his thought and the extent to which he remained driven by a persistent set of concerns. (shrink)

This volume is an interdisciplinary attempt to insert a broader, historically informed perspective into current political and academic debates on the issue of evidence and the reliability of scientific knowledge. Evidence in Action is the perfect resource for all those interested in the relationship between science, technology, and the role of knowledge in society.

This paper proposes a theory of text on-screen as “unvoiceover.” It addresses both the case for captioning as social good and the affordances (aesthetic, affective) of writing in or over the moving image. Advancing an argument informed by perspectives from d/deaf Studies, Critical Disability Studies and Digital Interface Studies, and applying modes of analysis from literary criticism alongside those proper to the study of moving image and sound, it examines the idiosyncrasies of text-in-motion as non-sonorous, fugitive counterpart to the traditional, (...) troublesome “voiceover.” To develop a poetics of the unsounding voice on-screen, the paper focalizes its argument through multimedia artist Liza Sylvestre’s Captioned series: a body of moving image work that is itself, paradoxically, uncaptioned. Framing Sylvestre’s lyrical “unvoiceover” as a reimagining of the lost roles of film explainers and literary intertitles, I argue that the artist’s takeover of the caption track intervenes critically in contemporary debates about the ethics of audio-visual translation, situated description and access as public ethos rather than private concern. Posing the artist’s personal-and-political writing as suggestive of a lower-case analogue to Deaf Gain, I show how Sylvestre’s “unvoiceover” educates its “receivers” in the purpose and functioning of captions. By reading Sylvestre’s writing on-screen more closely than its fugitive form seems to invite, I show how the unvoiceover encultures its own demands on its readers and elicits its own habits of reading. By scrutinizing how Sylvestre’s series makes the case for captioning, this paper makes the case for a new appraisal of the aesthetic, affective and political affordances of the unvoiceover as writing on the run. (shrink)

The prospect of using genome technologies to modify the human germline has raised profound moral disagreement but also emphasizes the need for wide-ranging discussion and a well-informed policy response. The Hinxton Group brought together scientists, ethicists, policymakers, and journal editors for an international, interdisciplinary meeting on this subject. This consensus statement formulated by the group calls for support of genome editing research and the development of a scientific roadmap for safety and efficacy; recognizes the ethical challenges involved in clinical reproductive (...) applications of genome editing but, importantly, rejects the idea that human reproductive germline modification is necessarily morally unacceptable; and highlights the importance of meaningful engagement in discussions of genome editing and the development of regulation and oversight mechanisms to govern future uses of such technologies. (shrink)

In this reflection, I respond to Anthony Reddie's reflections and assertions about the sacramentality of black flesh in a world shaped by white supremacy. I locate myself as Korean American and refer to my experience of ministering to university students during the rise of Black Lives Matter in the US. Instead of offering cognate claims for the sacramentality of Asian flesh, I ask what theological repentance should look like in light of the historical profaning of the black body. Using the (...) work of two black American artists, jazz musician Robert Glasper and painter Titus Kaphar, I offer beginning reflections on how our liturgies and practices need to change as part of theological repentance—including lament. (shrink)

Traditional philosophical discussions of knowledge have focused on the epistemic status of full beliefs. In this book, Moss argues that in addition to full beliefs, credences can constitute knowledge. For instance, your .4 credence that it is raining outside can constitute knowledge, in just the same way that your full beliefs can. In addition, you can know that it might be raining, and that if it is raining then it is probably cloudy, where this knowledge is not knowledge of propositions, (...) but of probabilistic contents. -/- The notion of probabilistic content introduced in this book plays a central role not only in epistemology, but in the philosophy of mind and language as well. Just as tradition holds that you believe and assert propositions, you can believe and assert probabilistic contents. Accepting that we can believe, assert, and know probabilistic contents has significant consequences for many philosophical debates, including debates about the relationship between full belief and credence, the semantics of epistemic modals and conditionals, the contents of perceptual experience, peer disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, perceptual dogmatism, and transformative experience. In addition, accepting probabilistic knowledge can help us discredit negative evaluations of female speech, explain why merely statistical evidence is insufficient for legal proof, and identify epistemic norms violated by acts of racial profiling. Hence the central theses of this book not only help us better understand the nature of our own mental states, but also help us better understand the nature of our responsibilities to each other. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I criticise a recent account of fictional discourse proposed by Nathan Salmon. Salmon invokes abstract artifacts as the referents of fictional names in both object- and meta-fictional discourse alike. He then invokes a theory of pretence to forge the requisite connection between object-fictional sentences and meta-fictional sentences, in virtue of which the latter can be assigned appropriate truth-values. I argue that Salmon's account of pretence renders his appeal to abstract artifacts as the referents of fictional names (...) in object-fictional discourse explanatorily redundant. I further argue that his account is therefore no improvement over those he criticises, thus leaving his own account unmotivated. (shrink)

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Second Edition_ is an invaluable guide and major reference source to the major topics, problems, concepts and debates in philosophy of psychology and is the first companion of its kind. A team of renowned international contributors provide forty-nine chapters organised into six clear parts: Historical background to Philosophy of Psychology Psychological Explanation Cognition and Representation The biological basis of psychology Perceptual Experience Personhood. _The Companion_ covers key topics such as the origins of experimental (...) psychology; folk psychology; behaviorism and functionalism; philosophy, psychology and neuroscience; the language of thought, modularity, nativism and representational theories of mind; consciousness and the senses; dreams emotion and temporality; personal identity and the philosophy of psychopathology. For the_ second edition_ many of the current chapters have been updated, and seven new chapters added on important new topics such predictive processing, comparative cognition, learning, and group cognition, as well as a new introductory chapter by the editors on the demarcation between philosophy and psychology. Essential reading for all students of philosophy of mind, science and psychology, _The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology _will also be of interest to anyone studying psychology and its related disciplines. (shrink)

I investigate the role of feminist theorizing in relation to traditionally-based aesthetics. Feminist artworks have arisen within the context of a patriarchal Artworld dominated for thousands of years by male artists, critics, theorists, and philosophers. I look at the history of that context as it impacts philosophical theorizing by pinpointing the narrow range of the paradigms used in defining “art.” I test the plausibility of Danto’s After the End of Art vision of a post-historical, pluralistic future in which “anything goes,” (...) a future that unfortunately rests upon the same outdated foundation as the concept “art.” This essay was originally published in The Proceedings of the Twentieth Century World Congress of Philosophy (1999) and reprinted in Noel Carroll, ed., Theories of Art Today (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). (shrink)

In this article I explore the concept of originality from several viewpoints. Within the world of printmaking, I show that while print dealers may draw attention to originality in order to enhance economic value, artists emphasize the aesthetic value of a work based on the freedom to express artistic intent and to experiment with techniques of the medium. Within the worlds of philosophy and to some extent, psychology, “originality” has been misleadingly tied to the notions of “creativity” and “genius,” thereby (...) replicating a cultural bias that links an artist to particular mental processes that are unnecessarily exclusive. An experiential account of creativity like the one recently advanced by Bence Nanay not only disadvantages those artists whose lived experiences reflect fewer social opportunities than their counterparts, but also invokes a concept of luck that undermines the role of originality within an artwork's overall aesthetic value. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish three kinds of kinds: traditional philosophical kinds such as truth, knowledge, and causation; natural science kinds such as spin, charge and mass; and social kinds such as class, poverty, and marriage. The three-fold taxonomy I work with represents an idealised abstraction from the wide variety of kinds that there are and the messy phenomena that underlie them. However, the kinds I identify are discrete, and the three-fold taxonomy is useful when it comes to understanding claims (...) about the normativity, scope, and implementation of conceptual engineering. In particular it reveals: first, that conceptual engineering in a broad sense is not distinctively normative; but second, that there is a distinctive normativity present in conceptual engineering in the narrow sense of amelioration; third, that conceptual engineering in the narrow sense of amelioration is only possible for terms that refer to kinds whose grounds we can change; and fourth, that the amelioration of such kind terms can be brought about as a result of changing the grounds of those kinds. The overall aim is to draw attention to the differences between kinds of kinds to make sense of the diverse and often conflicting claims in the conceptual engineering literature, both from its proponents and from its detractors. The hope is that paying attention to the differences between kinds of kinds will provide a better understanding of the landscape. (shrink)

_La Peste_, originally published in 1947 by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus, chronicles the progression of deadly bubonic plague as it spreads through the quarantined Algerian city of Oran. While most discussions of fictional examples within aesthetics are either historical or hypothetical, Camus offers an example of "pestilence fiction." Camus chose fiction to convey facts--about plagues in the past, his own bout with tuberculosis at age seventeen, living under quarantine away from home for several years, and forced separation from (...) his wife who remained in Algiers while he was abroad in Nazi-occupied France. His own lived experiences undergird an imaginative account of shared human realities with which we can identify: vulnerability to the disease, isolation, fear, and finally humanitarianism. _The Plague_ teaches us to neither covet nor expect what we so casually took for granted. This collection of original essays on philosophical themes in _The Plague_ is of special relevance during and in the aftermath of Covid-19 but also provides reflections that will be of lasting value to those interested in this classic work of literature. The novel explores questions of enduring importance. Do we collectively meet the threshold of ethical behavior posed by Camus who wrote, "What's true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves"? Or does the absurd undermine the compassionate? Do "heroes" dutifully fight a plague with "common decency," or does human nature resign itself to the normalization of uncontrollable suffering and death? There are myriad ways to approach the novel and this volume encourages readers to ponder human dilemmas in fictional Oran informed by our current pandemic. Series editor forward by Richard Eldridge. List of Contributors includes Steven G. Kellman, Jane E. Schultz, Andrew Edgar, Kathleen Higgins, Edward B. Weiser, Cynthia A. Freeland, and Margaret E. Gray; see "Introduction" by Peg Brand Weiser below. (shrink)

This special issue of HYPATIA: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy entitled "Women, Art, and Aesthetics" highlights the expanded range of topics at center stage in feminist philosophical inquiry to date (2003): recontextualizing women artists (essays by Patricia Locke, Eleanor Heartney, and Michelle Meagher), bodies and beauty (Ann J. Cahill, Sheila Lintott, Janell Hobson, Richard Shusterman, Joanna Frueh), art, ethics, politics, law (A. W. Eaton, Amy Mullin, L. Ryan Musgrave, Teresa Winterhalter), and review essays by Estella Lauter and Flo Leibowitz. Annotated (...) bibliography by Joshua Shaw. (shrink)

Not everyone faces “modern” death equally, whether in Oran or today’s world. In this chapter, I argue that the “difficulty” in Oran of “modern death” as described by Camus is still with us today in that Americans neither faced death together in any form of solidarity under the Trump administration nor faced death individually in any traditional “decent” manner (as proposed by the character Tarrou), that is, comforted by family or friends. One reason is overwhelming fear of death—what neuroscientists call (...) “existential anxiety”—that can motivate human behavior toward either selfishness or an ethics of care. As a result of lived experiences of the pandemic, a sense of “heroic solidarity” has perhaps been finally achieved that moves us from despair to hope, confirming Camus’s faith in humanity. (shrink)

Can an ordinary viewer ever experience art---particularly politically charged, socially relevant art--in a neutral, detached, and objective way? The familiar philosophical notion of disinterestedness has its roots in eighteenth-century theories of taste and was refined throughout the twentieth century. In contrast, many contemporary theorists have argued for what I call an "interested approach" in order to expand beyond the traditional emphasis on neutrality and universality. Each group, in effect, has argued for the value of a work of art by excluding (...) the other's approach. This essay will consider the legacy of the concept of disinterestedness for contemporary aesthetic theory in light of challenges posed by postmodern skepticism regarding the possibility of disinterestedness, and by the difficulties involved in appreciating political art with a disinterested attitude. My principle example of political art will be drawn from feminist art--the extraordinary and controversial performance art of the French artist, ORLAN. Unlike traditional philosophers, I will advocate that an interested stance toward art is, at times, inevitable and appropriate. I will also argue not only that feminist art--and by extension political art of all kinds--can be experienced disinterestedly, but that it should be. As a position inconsistent with both traditionalists and feminist critics of tradition, my recommendation of both disinterestedness and interestedness affords what I take to be the fullest and fairest experience of a work of art. (shrink)

This volume proposes an in-depth exploration of the materiality of art and writing in modernism and the avant-garde. The essays explore how the avant-gardes and modernism attempted to establish the material specificity and hybridityof media and art forms. The collection sheds light on the full range and import of the aesthetics of matter in avant-garde and modernist practice across all art forms from the 19th century to the present day.

This paper develops a precise understanding of the thesis of moral encroachment, which states that the epistemic status of an opinion can depend on its moral features. In addition, I raise objections to existing accounts of moral encroachment. For instance, many accounts fail to give sufficient attention to moral encroachment on credences. Also, many accounts focus on moral features that fail to support standard analogies between pragmatic and moral encroachment. Throughout the paper, I discuss racial profiling as a case study, (...) arguing that moral encroachment can help us identify one respect in which racial profiling is epistemically problematic. (shrink)

This is the co-authored--with Carolyn Korsmeyer--Introduction to the first published feminist scholarship in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Volume 48, Number 4, Fall 1990). Contributors included Hilde Hein, Paul Mattick, Jr., Timothy Gould, Joanne B. Waugh, Joseph Margolis, Mary Devereaux, Noel Carroll, Flo Leibowitz, Anita Silvers, Elizabeth Ann Dobie, Renee Cox, and Ellen Handler Spitz. All essays were subsequently published in an expanded book version entitled, Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics by Penn State Press (1995).

One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically different responses. These preference reversals violate the principle of procedure invariance that is fundamental to all theories of rational choice. If different elicitation procedures produce different orderings of options, (...) how can preferences be defined and in what sense do they exist? This book shows not only the historical roots of preference construction but also the blossoming of the concept within psychology, law, marketing, philosophy, environmental policy, and economics. Decision making is now understood to be a highly contingent form of information processing, sensitive to task complexity, time pressure, response mode, framing, reference points, and other contextual factors. (shrink)

Generic generalizations such as ‘mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus’ or ‘sharks attack bathers’ are often accepted by speakers despite the fact that very few members of the kinds in question have the predicated property. Previous work suggests that such low-prevalence generalizations may be accepted when the properties in question are dangerous, harmful, or appalling. This paper argues that the study of such generic generalizations sheds light on a particular class of prejudiced social beliefs, and points to new ways in (...) which those beliefs might be undermined and combatted. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a neglected puzzle for the moral realist. I then canvass some potential responses. Although I endorse one response as the most promising of those I survey, my primary goal is to make vivid how formidable the puzzle is, as opposed to offering a definitive solution.

This contribution to the volume explains predicativism, including reasons that favour it and different versions of it. What all predicativist theories have in common is the claim that a proper name is a general, predicative term, with a hidden determiner in its single use.

This book traces the historic transformation of institutional review boards (IRBs) from academic committees to compliance bureaucracies. Sarah Babb opens the black box of contemporary IRB decision-making, which is increasingly outsourced to specialized private firms.

This book examines the paradox of digital enhancement: we simultaneously desire to be governed by the logic of perfection and to be self-governed. Through genealogical and aesthetic critique, Sarah Bianchi questions the costs of our digital present and conceptualizes how to critically construct an enlightened agency.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning dance critic teaches us to appreciate—and enact—grace in every dimension, from the physical to the emotional. Grace has long been taught as essential to civilized living. The Three Graces—goddesses of charm, beauty, and creativity—exemplify ease and harmony with one another and the world around them. But what has happened to this simple, marvelous concept of being at ease in the world? With warmth, humor, and an ever-perceptive eye, Sarah L. Kaufman sifts the graceful from the graceless, (...) celebrating heart-catching moments of physical elegance in sports, movies, dance, fashion, and music; rare sightings of celebrity grace; the secrets of gracious hosts; and grace found unexpectedly, in the kitchen of a high-end restaurant and among strippers in a basement bar. Kaufman’s thought-provoking reflections on these physical and social acts of grace offer hope for even the clumsiest, most awkward among us. Guided by the muse of Cary Grant (with further inspiration from Smokey Robinson, Roger Federer, Nelson Mandela, Margot Fonteyn, Amy Purdy, Beyoncé, and others), Kaufman illuminates the importance of grace in the small moments of everyday life. In The Art of Grace, she inspires us to walk taller, spend time on unnecessary kindnesses, and celebrate the grace notes in our lives and those of others. (shrink)

Sustainable Medicine is based on the premise that twenty-first century Western medicine--driven by vested interests--is failing to address the root causes of disease. Symptom-suppressing medication and "polypharmacy" have resulted in an escalation of disease and a system of so-called "health care," which more closely resembles "disease care." In this essential book, Dr. Sarah Myhill aims to empower people to heal themselves by addressing the underlying causes of their illness. She presents a logical progression from identifying symptoms, to understanding the (...) underlying mechanisms, to relevant interventions and tests and tools with which to tackle the root causes. As Myhill writes, "It's all about asking the question 'why?'" Sustainable Medicine covers a wide range of symptoms including inflammation (infection, allergy, autoimmunity), fatigue, pain, toxic symptoms, deficiency symptoms, and hormonal symptoms. And Dr. Myhill includes a toolbox of treatments for specific illnesses and ailments, as well as a general approach to avoiding and treating all disease. Finally, she offers a series of case histories to show how people have successfully taken control of their health and healed even in the face of the most discouraging symptoms--all without the harmful interventions of 21st century Western medicine. (shrink)

Some omissions seem to be causes. For example, suppose Barry promises to water Alice’s plant, doesn’t water it, and that the plant then dries up and dies. Barry’s not watering the plant – his omitting to water the plant – caused its death. But there is reason to believe that if omissions are ever causes, then there is far more causation by omission than we ordinarily think. In other words, there is reason to think the following thesis true.