In this paper I attempt a new reading of the passage found in 1 Timothy 2.8-15, to try to show how it might be read by women today. The difficulties of reading such patriarchal texts from the canon of biblical literature are not trivialized or overlooked, and are addressed by a selective survey of how this passage has been read in different contexts through the history of interpretation. The resulting reading neither removes this problematic material from the canon, nor denies (...) the oppressive uses it has been put to in keeping women out of positions of power in various church communities. (shrink)

Philosophical inquiry into pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering is a growing area of interest to academic philosophers. This volume brings together a diverse group of philosophers to speak about topics in this reemerging area of philosophical inquiry, taking up new themes, such as maternal aesthetics, and pursuing old ones in new ways, such as investigating stepmothering as it might inform and ground an ethics of care. The theoretical foci of the book include feminist, existential, ethical, aesthetic, phenomenological, social and political theories. (...) These perspectives are then employed to consider many dimensions of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, which are of central importance to human existence, but are only rarely discussed in philosophical cannons. Topics include pregnancy and embodiment, breast-feeding, representations – or the lack thereof – of pregnant and birthing women, adoption, and post-partum motherhood. (shrink)

This chapter examines the distinction among observers, participants, and agents from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism. It first examines an exemplary discourse on the nonscientific theme of “beauty” using the evil stepmother in “Snow White” as an example. It discusses this theme from the perspective of interactive constructivism and interprets it as a problem between universalist and anti-universalist approaches. The chapter then demonstrates numerous connections between constructivism and Dewey's Pragmatic theory of inquiry. Dewey, for example, had (...) already distinguished spectators, agents, and participants, even though he did not articulate those distinctions in a systematic way. This chapter follows upon Dewey's insights, suggesting ways in which a constructivist theory of observation can enrich contemporary Pragmatist arguments. (shrink)

Introduction : the return of original sin -- pt. I. The seductive attraction of disaster. Give me back my enemy -- Have the courage to be afraid -- Blackmailing future generations -- pt. II. Progressives against progress. The last avatar of Prometheus? -- Nature, a cruel stepmother or a victim? -- Science in the age of suspicion -- pt. III. The great ascetic regression. Humanity on a strict diet -- The poverty of maceration -- The noble savage in the Lucerne (...) -- Epilogue : the remedy is found in the disease. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethan’s GiftMichelle BurgessEthan was your average boy next door. He loved everything most 8–year–old boys do including playing baseball, swimming, and watching his favorite baseball team, the Philadelphia Phillies.On December 3rd 2008, life for our family changed forever when Ethan was diagnosed with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, a rare inoperable brainstem tumor. DIPG is in essence a death sentence. There are no survivors and life expectancy after diagnosis is (...) only 9–12 months. Our family was devastated.For the next 14 months, we lived life to the fullest, never taking a single moment or day for granted. As Ethan’s condition worsened, and it became clear that he was close to passing, I spoke with Ethan’s doctor about my desire to be able to donate Ethan’s corneas and his brain tumor for research. He informed me that because of Ethan’s type of tumor that he may be a candidate for donation of other organs as well if that is something we wanted to do.Knowing that there was nothing we could do to save Ethan, it was something that we felt we could do to help others so we decided to explore the option of donating Ethan’s other organs. We were put in contact with the Gift of Life.Two representatives from Gift of Life came to our home and discussed at length with us what would have to happen to make organ donation possible at the time of Ethan’s passing. Specifically that Ethan would have to pass away at the hospital and in the operating room. This was very different than the hospice environment that we had planned. They also had told us that Ethan was only the second young person that they had ever dealt with that the families had planned ahead of time to donate organs. The other person was a teenager who planned his own organ donation.On January 26th 2010, Ethan’s pain had become unmanageable at home and his breathing had become very labored. I spoke with his oncologist and he advised me to bring Ethan to the hospital to try and get his pain under control.We loaded Ethan up in the car for the one–hour car ride to the hospital. On the way to the hospital Ethan fell asleep while being cuddled by me in the backseat. When we arrived at the hospital we noticed that his fingers and toes had turned purple. The nurses immediately checked his oxygen and it had fallen to only 10 %.The doctors advised that he had slipped into a coma in the car, one that he would never awake from. He was immediately placed on life support. A scan was done and it was evident that the progressing tumor was placing pressure on the areas of the brain that controlled basic life functions such as breathing. Ethan could not recover.The decision was made to begin to look for recipients for Ethan’s organs. Because Ethan had not reached the point of brain death, his donation would have to be a post cardiac death transplant, meaning, life support would be removed, when his heart stopped beating and he passed away, the organ procurement would begin. However, he [End Page E1] would not be able to donate his heart. This was very sad for us, knowing how strong his little heart was, but we did understand the process.On January 28th 2010, our family spent the day saying goodbye to Ethan. Even though he could not respond, we know that he could hear us. The nurse was wonderful, doing everything possible to accommodate our large family and despite all the tubes and machines, make it so that I could cuddle with my little boy one last time.Ethan was moved to the operating room and with his stepfather and I on one side and his father and stepmother on the other, life support was removed. Watching my son take his last breath, while I held his hand, kissed his cheeks, told him I loved him and that it was okay to let go and go to Heaven was the hardest moment of... (shrink)

According to tradition, when the Buddha’s aunt and stepmother Mah?praj?pat? was allowed to join the Buddhist monastic community, she accepted eight ‘fundamental rules’ that made the nuns’ order dependent upon the monks’ order. This story has given rise to much debate, in the past as well as in the present, and this is no less the case in Mainland China, where nunneries have started to re-emerge in recent decades. This article first presents new insight into Mainland Chinese monastic practitioners’ common (...) perspectives and voices regarding the gurudharmas, which are rarely touched upon in scholarly work. Next, each of the rules is discussed in detail, allowing us to analyse various issues, until now understudied, regarding the applicability of the gurudharmas in Mainland Chinese contexts. This research thus provides a detailed overview of nuns’ perceptions of how traditional vinaya rules and procedures can be applied in contemporary Mainland Chinese monastic communities based on a cross-regional empirical study. (shrink)

The way we refer to third parties in talk is one means through which relationships between speaker, recipients and referents are made relevant. A range of referring expressions is available and any number of expressions might correctly refer to a referent. One guide to selection is the preference for achieving recognition and the default practice is, where possible, to use a name. This conversation analytic article describes a practice that does not fit the default pattern. In this practice, speakers select (...) a broad social category when a recognitional form could have been used. Despite the designed selection of a categorical form, the referent remains recognitional. For example, in one extract, a mother in conversation with her teenage daughter refers to a collective made up of her former husband and his girlfriend as ‘these people’. The daughter has no difficulty working out who ‘these people’ are and recognizes it as a reference to her father and stepmother. I show that this designedly categorical formulation often contributes to hostile action by distancing the referent from parties to the interaction – making the referent unnameable and not connected to the speaker and recipient. The role of demonstrative pronouns – this, that, these – are discussed in relation to constructing social distance between speakers, recipients and referents. (shrink)

Imagining super rich women in the real and fictional world has long been a struggle. Those few depictions that do exist are scattered across time periods and literary genres, reflecting the legal restrictions that, at different points in time, would not allow women to accumulate assets independent of the patriarchal forces in their lives. The scarcity of extremely wealthy women in literature and film is confirmed by Forbes magazine’s list of the fifteen richest fictional characters that features forty different fictional (...) men and only nine women, with never more than two female characters nominated in a single year. This article explores the depiction of three exceptionally wealthy women: Cruella de Vil in The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) by Dodie Smith, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens, and the figure of the stepmother in various adaptations of “Cinderella.” I demonstrate how the protagonists’ wealth allows them to manipulate others and disconnect themselves from patriarchal and societal expectations. Further, I argue that these affluent antagonists are “rogued” by their respective narratives, highlighting their perceived anti-feminine and emasculating behaviour resulting in a mode of narration that greedily gazes at and shames their appearances and supposed unattractiveness. While this genealogy of rich rogues reiterates the narrow scope of imagining wealthy women on the page and on the screen, there are moments in the narratives that disrupt stereotypical depictions of these wealthy characters who defy the labels imposed on them. (shrink)

Moral philosophers have often felt the need of a concept which would cover all those cases where we are prevented from achieving our ends through no fault of our own: a criterion for saying when failure is not blameworthy. The deontologists thought we were not to blame for actions done in genuine ignorance of the facts. Kant declared in a famous passage that we were not morally responsible for failures due to the “niggardliness of stepmother nature.” In this article I (...) want to introduce into moral philosophy a new concept for clarifying the failures for which we are not to blame: the notion of scarcity, taken from economic theory. (shrink)

The article proposes a re-examination of the role and position of the so-called “Disney villains” within the narrative framework of animated films and popular culture as a whole. In the first part, the historical evolution in the representation of these villains will be explored according to the practice of “queer coding,” which involves attributing stereotypically queer traits to them without explicitly stating their gender and sexual identity. It will be observed how their non-conforming gender and sexuality, used to mark their (...) moral deviance, challenge and defy dominant gender and narrative norms. It is precisely through their queer performance and camp aesthetic that “evil stepmothers,” “sissy-villains,” and “drag-queen-like” sea witches can emancipate themselves from their traditional roles as antagonists (narrative level) and as social outcasts (discursive level) to seize the spotlight through the screen (manifest surface). This study combines tools of Greimasian text analysis, including the canonical narrative schema and the generative trajectory of meaning, with Lotman’s theory and notion of “semiosphere,” to investigate the centrality and criticality of these “quillains” within the heteronormative narrative framework and the broader cultural context. To capture (or being captured by) the queer aspect of these characters and their stories, the invitation is to look at their visage not as a coded symbol of an underlying identity and truth, but as an image that exceeds any defined meaning thanks to its iconic power. (shrink)

This modest contribution has been occasioned by the publication of the Proceedings of an international colloquium held at the De Wulf-Mansion Centre of the Institute of Philosophy in commemoration of the seven-hundredth anniversary of the death of Henry of Ghent. This colloquium had a twofold purpose: «first to establish a status quaestionis of the different fields of research concerning Henry’s doctrines and the critical edition of his work and, second, to provide a forum for specialists to exchange ideas and insights (...) on specific problems. The publication of the Proceedings offers an assessment of our present knowledge and opens up possibilities for further research». It is only natural, then, that the present contribution takes over this twofold end. On the one hand it will attempt to give a survey of what has been achieved thus far in studying Henry’s thought. On the other hand it hopes to derive from this survey a picture of what has been left undone until now, in order to set out a few lines for future research. More in particular it will push forward one issue that has been stepmotherly dealt with: relation. (shrink)

The immense oeuvre of William Whewell (1794-1886), a Victorian monument by itself, has to some extent been treated in a stepmotherly fashion by philosophers and historiansof philosophy. This paper attempts to conceptually clarify Whewell's notion of necessity, which was a core notion in his philosophical project. The author also sketches in broad lines the historical development of this notion in Whewell's thinking and points tothe intertwinement between Whewell's philosophy and theology. Whewell's philosophical work was deeply based on the history of (...) science and his doctrine of Fundamental Ideas can be interpreted as an attempt to historicize Kant's transcendental categories. (shrink)

Even though Kant, because of his modus operandi, has been saluted as the renewer of dialectic method (after mature Plato), nonetheless his ars exponiendi, as apparent, for example, in the subjective deduction of categories, has always been characteristically dual (noumenon/phenomenon, understanding/sensibility, theory/praxis, etc.) or fourfold (as in the antinomies, eventually liable to be reduced to two pairs in conflict). However, in the second Critique a notable contradiction arises in a judgment that is pretendedly analytic and also the consequence of the (...) categorical imperative commanding that every man be treated as an end in himself (as representing humanity in his person). There, it is said that such consideration occurs at the same time and in the same regard as the use of man as a means. Far from treating this contradiction as a mere mistake, this article tries to unfold the fruitfulness of that contradictory judgment in order to reconcile the world of politics, based on the spheres of work and private property (characteristic of the realm of means), with the world of morality (beyond mere ethics).With the purpose of elucidating this point, we will resort to the ‘useful fiction’ of a ‘stepmother Nature’ (in the mundane) and to the heterogony of ends, which transform the external freedom (first and most important of passions) into a reflexive and Law-bounded freedom, open to condolence and sacrifice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joanne Wood LORDJIM AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF KANTIAN AUTONOMY Autonomy IS the fundamental principle of Kantian ethics. This is so because his moral system is based on the crucial idea that nothing in the world can be called "good without qualification except a good will."1 Thus a good will is good in and of itself, without regard to any possible end. For such a will, morality is categorical, for (...) only with such an imperative can moral laws be said to be laws ofcomplete freedom, and willed without regard to any other interest. Thus autonomy is a necessary condition for a good will, because any heteronomous worth a will could achieve would by definition be conditional, and would therefore violate Kant's notion of the unconditional worth of a good will. However, it is precisely this notion of the absolute worth a good will merits on its own that would seem to bear looking into: there is something intuitively wrong with Kant's assertion that even if"it should happen that, by a particularly unfortunate fate or by the niggardly provision of a stepmotherly nature, this will should be wholly lacking in power to accomplish its purpose," it would still "sparkle like a jewel in its own right, as something that had its full worth in itselP (p. 10). The idea implied in this passage, that a good will could exist somehow apart from the world and any effects achieved therein, is problematic to say the least. How could such a will be known? The metaphor ofa "sparklingjewel" is striking, but flawed: ajewel exists in the world, for all eyes to see if they know where to look, whereas a good will exists in the hearts of men. It is for this reason thatJoseph Conrad's LordJim is a fitting supplement to understanding the implications of a Kantian view of morality, for the central concern of the novel is the moral ambiguity that results from our common obscurity ofvision into ourselves and those around us. Given this 57 58Philosophy and Literature ambiguity, which Kant recognizes when he says, "even the strictest examination can never lead us entirely behind the secret incentives, for, when moral worth is in question, it is not a matter of actions which one sees but ofdieir inner principles which one does not see" (p. 23). It seems then irresponsible still to maintain that the worth ofa good will is independent of the way of the world. Since it is evident that if results or other empirical factors are invalid tojudge intentions, then the only judge capable of assessing in advance what maxim is being acted upon is the moral agent; morality becomes a matter of strictly individual conscience or reason. The moral agent thus becomes romanticized, a lone figure needing no other guidance than that which his or her own reason can provide in order to lead a truly good life. LordJim challenges just such a conception of individualist or self-sufficient morality. Due to the essential ambiguity ofwhatjim himselfis, the novel is an extremely difficult one to read. This is further complicated by the fact that, after the first four chapters, the reader is never given an impersonal view ofJim, but instead Marlow's painstaking efforts to fit together the puzzle ofJim's character: "I don't pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog— bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a country... they were no good for purposes of orientation."2 Given this cloud of uncertainty, Jim remains an enigma from beginning to end. The reader is treated to various judgments ofhim during this time from a wide range of viewpoints which Marlow perhaps pursues in an effort to shed some light on the subject, but which nonetheless leave us in darkness because they all omit one factor or another. There is no Authority in this book. The facts ofJim's case are relatively straightforward: it is the interpretation of what lies behind them, ofJim's "inner principles," which is extraordinarily complex. Jim is working as first mate on... (shrink)

Oyeyemi's critique of racism in the United States focuses on the visual binary between whiteness and blackness, which she shows working in multiple ways to warp and distort relationships. In the Whitman family, children are valued (or not valued) according to how their skin color registers on a scale determined by white superiority. Oyeyemi's approach to racism takes the circuitous route of retelling the fairy tale of “Little Snow White,” thus calling into her own narrative a foundational text of Western (...) cultural aesthetics which links beauty to whiteness. (Snow White, whose skin is “white as snow,” is “fairest in the land.”) Rather than narrate a new version of the fairy tale, Oyeyemi separates out its elements – magic mirror, evil stepmother, and beautiful white stepdaughter – and develops each into a new thematic configuration. My analysis focuses on the subtle ways that Oyeyemi's reshaping of mirror, evil stepmother, and innocent beautiful young girl exposes the harms to children inflicted by allegiance to a (false) structure of visible difference between white skin and black skin. (shrink)

According to tradition, Mah?praj?pat?, the Buddha’s aunt and stepmother, when allowed to join the Buddhist monastic community, accepted eight ‘fundamental rules’ that made the nuns’ order dependent upon the monks’ order. This story has given rise to much debate, in the past as well as in the present. This article first shows how the eight rules became an integrated part of the vinaya, and more particularly of the Dharmaguptakavinaya, that forms the basis of monastic ordinations in East Asia. Against the (...) background of a much debated attack on these gurudharmas by the Taiwanese nun Shih Chao-hwei, we have then analysed the viewpoints of contemporary Taiwanese nuns, focusing on some less studied, yet very influential, Taiwanese monastic institutes. This research has brought to light a diversity of opinions on the applicability of the rules, relying in each case on a clear vision on Buddhism and vinaya. (shrink)

Hippolytus' declamation on the progress of human depravity brings him from the invention of weapons to the climactic horror of stepmothers , after which he turns to the vices of women in general and Medea in particular.

In this paper I explore the representations of alter ego figures in a Black Modernist work, Passing, by Nella Larsen and in a contemporary black British novel by Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bi...