Review of Nicola Möβner’s 'Visual Representations in Science. Concept and Epistemology'. Forthcoming in Grazer Philosophische Studien.

In this review I provide a brief analysis of the main features of the collective volume Shifting Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2020), edited by Teresa Marques and Åsa Wikforss. The volume addresses several related topics, and it contains contributions from psychologists and philosophers. It deals with the topic of concept variation understood in a broad sense, for it tackles diachronic, contextual, interpersonal and even intrapersonal variation; besides, the second part of the book is devoted to the topic of (...) concept revision and amelioration. I provide a brief description of the book and then I critically assess each of the contributions. (shrink)

Thomas Davidson's review on Edouard Crahay's book on the politics of St. Thomas.

Review of: War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003–2007. Falls Church, VA: Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army; Washington, DC: Borden Institute: Walter Reed Army Medical Center; 2008.

A review of [Existence and Consolation: Reinventing Ontology, Gnosis and Values in African Philosophy]. Author: Ada Agada Editor: Jonathan O. Chimakonam Publisher: Paragon House and 3rd Logic Option Number of Pages: 368 Reviewer: Joseph N. AGBO Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki.

This review uses the excellent recent anthology, What Is Enough: Sufficiency, Justice, and Health, edited by Carina Fourie and Annette Rid, as a springboard for a discussion of a little-noticed problem for sufficientarian principles governing the distribution of health or health care. All sufficientarian principles must be assigned a scope: the set of individuals who are to be brought up to the level of sufficiency. When it comes to health and health care, sufficientarians will, rightly, want to reject broad (...) scopes, because they will entail that we are accountable for securing health care for, for example, wild animals. Unfortunately, any narrow scope will seem morally arbitrary, because it will imply that among all the individuals who could benefit from health care we are obligated to provide it only to some of them. But, I suggest here that such arbitrariness is no problem for narrow-scope sufficientarianism in health or health care as long as the principle is cast as a non-fundamental principle of public policy as opposed to a fundamental moral principle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women PhilosophersDavid NovitzWomen Philosophers, edited by Mary Warnock; xlvii & 301 pp. London: Everyman, 1996, $8.50 paper.A collection entitled Men Philosophers would strike many as bizarre. This not just because of the difficulty of deciding who and what to include in it, but because philosophy, as Mary Warnock explains it in her introduction, should have nothing to do with being a man—and certainly should not be prized on (...) the basis of the gender (religion, nationality, race, class, sexual orientation) of its author.What makes Warnock’s collection any less bizarre? A book entitled Male Philosophers (or, better still, Male Philosophy) would make some sort of sense if it contained examples of the ways in which men unconsciously (or consciously) privilege their sex in their philosophical writing. This would be a meta-philosophical critique designed, one supposes, to preserve the integrity of a discipline that seeks, among other things, to follow the argument. But this is not the aim or rationale of Women Philosophers. By contrast, the title Feminist Philosophers, whenever it occurs, is much less puzzling, for feminist philosophy is a first-order enterprise in the service of a particular political cause. When we read such a title, we know what to expect.But Mary Warnock has declined to edit a collection of feminist philosophy. More significantly, she does not believe that such works are properly a part of philosophy. Writing in her introductory essay of “what used to be called ‘the Women Question,’” she maintains that “there tends to be too much unexamined dogma in these writings, too much ill-conceived proselytizing, too little objective analysis, to allow them to qualify for inclusion among philosophical writing proper” (p. xxxiii). A philosopher, she contends, “must be concerned with matters of a high degree of generality, and must be at home among abstract ideas. It is not enough,” she tells us, “to seek the truth, for truth can be established with regard to particular facts; it can be the aim of historians and novelists....” A genuine philosopher wants truths and theories of sufficient generality to “explain the particular and the detailed and the everyday” (pp. xxix–xxx). Philosophical theories need to be defended with arguments rather than dogma or reformist zeal, and it is in the quality of these arguments that the merits of any philosopher become apparent. It is, Warnock says, “these generalizing, explanatory, and argumentative aspects” of women’s philosophical work that she has tried to include in the volume.Sandra Harding, Lorraine Code, Alison Jagger, and Susan Hekman number among those who seem but, according to Warnock, fail in the end to make the grade. “For the great subjects of philosophy, the nature of human knowledge, the limits of science, the foundations of morality or of aesthetics... must be concerned with ‘us’ in the sense in which ‘we’ are all humans. The truths which philosophers seek must aim to be not merely generally, but objectively, even universally, true. Essentially they must be gender-indifferent” (p. xxxiv). To [End Page 541] deny the possibility of this, to insist that there are many perspectives, no one to be preferred over any other, is to engage “not in philosophy, but in a species of anthropology.”There are no arguments for this view; only the claim that many feminists and postmodernists would agree with her assessment. Nor is the assessment always fair, for whatever the philosophical shortcomings, say, of Lorraine Code’s Epistemic Responsibility, a predilection for unexamined dogma is not one of them. And although a work of feminist epistemology, it is not clear to me that the theoretical perspective that Code’s book develops does not apply universally.The aim of Women Philosophers plainly is to show that there are women who do not just proselytize, but who have performed, and who still perform, the Enlightenment task of defending general claims and theories with arguments, who do so without succumbing to the partial, sometimes self-serving, claims of religion and feminism, and who advance their thoughts with the sort of argumentative rigor that reaches beyond the call of gender, race, and class.The book offers a lively array of examples. The first is an... (shrink)