A philosophical analysis of the pessimistic and nihilistic conditions of the existential possibilities for blackness and antiblack racism in 21st Century America.

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors (...) We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection. (shrink)

In recent years, a distinction between two concepts of equality has been much discussed: 'distributive’ equality involves people having equal amounts of a good such as welfare or resources, and ‘social’ or ‘relational’ equality involves the absence of social hierarchy and the presence of equal social relations. This contrast is commonly thought to have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between equality and justice. But the nature and significance of the distinction is far from clear. I examine several (...) accounts of this issue and argue none are entirely satisfactory. In turn, I offer an alternative proposal. Relational equality, on my account, involves a concern with each person having an equal 'civic status'. I characterize this concern and show it has distinctive and normatively significant positional and temporal aspects. (shrink)

Paul Ekman is an American psychologist who pioneered the study of facial behaviour. Bringing together disciplinary history, life study, and history of science, this paper focuses on Ekman’s early research during the twenty-year period between 1957 and 1978. I explicate the historical development of Ekman’s semiotic model of facial behaviour, tracing the thread of iconicity through his life and works: from the iconic coding of rapid signs; through the eventual turn from classifying modes of iconic signification using gestalt categories to (...) classifying modes of producing iconic sign-functions using minimal units; to the role and importance of iconicity for the study of the facial expression of emotion, both in terms of the similarities between iconic and analogue signs as well as the differences between facial coding and linguistic signification. In this intellectual genealogy, I argue not only that Ekman relied extensively upon conceptualizations and terminologies from semiotic thought for the creation of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), but also that the question of iconicity is the pivotal problem across the many discoveries and innovations in what I term ‘Ekmanian faciasemiotics’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTConcerned with how individuals assess scientific experts on the Internet, our research investigates the virtual r/science subreddit and their popular Ask-Me-Anything series, where sci...

There is limited evidence that socially responsible investment (SRI) strategies can resolve persistent concerns brought up in scholarship on the industry, particularly as it relates to considerations of justice. It is critical that SRI initiatives be interrogated about their broader impacts on environmental inequality and justice in the context of global power relations. Drawing upon environmental justice (EJ) theory, we propose a framework for transformative investment to halt the exploitation of humans and environment in pursuit of profit. We posit that (...) transformative investment initiatives, including those related to strategies of screening and shareholder resolutions, would reflect three general conditions of environmental justice. They would require (1) cumulative responsibility that focuses on holistic gains so that investment initiatives do not replace one harm with another; (2) embedded accountability that is rooted in the decision-making and concerns of directly impacted communities; and (3) counter-hegemonic practices that are integrated with broader strategies and movements that challenge structures of oppression and exploitation. Through these principles, we address problems with SRI that have already been identified in scholarship on the subject. Moreover, we draw upon Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘strategic power’ to conceptualize the conditions and actions necessary for transformative investment to take root. (shrink)

Two problems are considered here. One relates to who has moral status, and the other relates to who has moral responsibility. The criteria for mattering morally have long been disputed, and many humans and nonhuman animals have been considered “marginal cases,” on the contested edges of moral considerability and concern. The marginalization of humans and other species is frequently the pretext for denying their rights, including the rights to health care, to reproductive freedom, and to bodily autonomy. There is broad (...) agreement across cultural and philosophical traditions about the capacities and responsibilities of moral agents. I propose an inclusive and expansive way of thinking about moral status, situating it not in the characteristics or capacities of individuals, but in the responsibilities and obligations of moral agents. Moral agents, under this view, are not privileged or entitled to special treatment but rather have responsibilities. I approach this by considering some African communitarian conceptions of moral status and moral agency. I propose that moral agency can also be more expansive and include not just individual moral agents but collective entities that have some of the traits of moral agents: power, freedom, and the capacity to recognize and act on the demands of morality and acknowledge and respect the rights of others. Expanding who and what is a moral agent correspondingly extends moral responsibility for respecting rights and fostering the conditions for the health and well-being of humans and animals onto the collective entities who uniquely have the capacity to attend to global-scale health threats such as pandemics and human-caused climate change. (shrink)

Several philosophers argue for the ‘convergence thesis’ for positional goods: prioritarians, sufficientarians, and egalitarians may converge on favouring an equal (or not too unequal) distribution of goods that have positional aspects. I discuss some problems for this thesis when applied to two key goods for which it has been proposed: education and wealth. I show, however, that there is a variant of the thesis that avoids these problems. This version of the thesis is significant, I demonstrate, because it applies to (...) a person’s status as a citizen, which I suggest is the central concern of social or ‘relational’ egalitarianism. (shrink)

This paper examines the following distinctive republican claims: (1) goodwill and virtuous self-restraint are insufficient to realize freedom; and (2) suitable law is constitutive of freedom. In the contemporary literature, these claims are commonly defended in connection with the conception of freedom as nondomination. This account, however, is often rejected on the grounds that freedom as nondomination is moralized and impossible to realize. In response, I propose that the point of protecting people from domination is better understood not as realizing (...) freedom, but instead as giving persons a civic status as equals. Giving persons a civic status as equals, I claim, realizes an important form of social or 'relational' equality, and I distinguish this aim from giving persons a 'status as nondominated’, as some republicans require. I argue that this account vindicates alternative claims about the insufficiency of goodwill and constitutive importance of suitable law—understood in terms of equality rather than freedom—while avoiding the moralization and impossibility objections. I conclude by suggesting some further advantages of the proposed account versus the standard republican view. (shrink)

Describes God in simple, easy terms for children.

How can pain complaints be elicited and analyzed so as to increase the empathic bond between patient and clinician? I will argue that though Wierzbicka’s approach to this question is useful—an exploration of certain abstract dimensions of pain’s meaning—it fails to examine key aspects that are the most useful and crucial for cultural analysis and for building empathic bonds between the clinician and patient. Not just a grammar of pain is needed; rather a biological philology of pain.

The distinction between ‘relational' and ‘distributive’ equality has come to play an important role in discussions of equality and justice. But the nature of the distinction is not as clear as we might hope. In this regard, Juliana Bidadanure makes an interesting and important proposal: the two views involve differing kinds of temporal concern. The distributive approach, she suggests, is concerned with equality over people’s complete lives (diachronic equality), whereas the relational approach is concerned with egalitarian social relations at each (...) moment in time (synchronic equality). I argue that this suggestion, while insightful, is not entirely satisfactory. Both relational and distributive equality, I demonstrate, have diachronic and synchronic aspects. Nonetheless, they do so in distinctive ways. So, while the diachronic/synchronic distinction does not provide a clean cut between relational and distributive equality, examining the temporal aspects of each approach helps to illuminate their distinctiveness. (shrink)

Throughout Supernatural, we watch the Winchesters resist, embrace, and redefine their roles in the family business, “saving people, hunting things.” These tensions echo a topic that philosophers have explored for thousands of years—free will. According to the existentialist philosopher Jean‐Paul Sartre, each person is in a constant state of shaping himself and his place in the world through free will. Dean is admirable in his ability to resist bad faith and act as captain for Team Free Will. In Supernatural, the (...) choices people make are impacted by their soul. Knowing that Sam could simply walk away from hunting to pursue a normal life shows Dean that they no longer share the same sense of moral responsibility. For good or for ill, Sam and Dean are responsible for their actions, which is better than you'd expect from an ex‐blood junkie and a high school dropout with six dollars in his pocket. (shrink)

Why me? -- Sticks and stones -- Hammer of God -- God is great -- The problem of atheists -- Guardian angels -- Nations under God -- God knows.

Provided we agree about the thing, it is needless to dispute about the terms. —David Hume, A treatise of human nature, Book 1, section VIIMap-like representations are frequently invoked as an alternative type of representational vehicle to a language of thought. This view presupposes that map-systems and languages form legitimate natural kinds of cognitive representational systems. I argue that they do not, because the collections of features that might be taken as characteristic of maps or languages do not themselves provide (...) scientifically useful information above and beyond what the individual features provide. To bring this out, I sketch several allegedly distinctive features of maps, and show how they can easily be grafted onto a simple logical language, resulting in a hybrid “manguage.” The ease with which these linguistic and map-like properties can be integrated into a single representational system raises the question of what work broader categories like language and map are doing. I maintain that, as an empirical matter of fact, they serve no particular purpose in cognitive science, and thus do not characterize distinct kinds of cognitive architectures. (shrink)

This paper examines the historiography of literacy between 1780 and 1830 in Britain. The paper first explores the challenges faced by historians in measuring literacy and examines the lenses through which historians have interpreted the available data. Factors thought to contribute to rising literacy rates in this time period include access to education, the Industrial Revolution, religious movements and gender norms.

John Rawls’s thesis that a certain package of basic liberties should be given lexical priority is of great interest for legal and political philosophy, but it has received relatively little defense from Rawls or his supporters. In this paper, I examine three arguments for the thesis: the first is based on the two ‘moral powers’; the second, on the social bases of self-respect; and the third, on a Kantian notion of autonomy. I argue none of these accounts successfully establishes 1) (...) the distinct claim of lexical priority, 2) for the complete package of basic liberties, on the basis of reasons that are appropriately public. In turn, I propose an alternative argument, in support of those two claims, based on the social or ‘relational’ conception of equality. (shrink)

The call for a biosemiotic perspective within medical semiotics has been steadily increasing over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In _Food and Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective_, Yogi Hale Hendlin, Johnathan Hope, and the nine contributions in their edited volume boldly seek to bridge the segregation between nature and culture in the medical sciences as well as in the medical humanities. To a large extent, they achieve this aim by explicating the sign relations _in_ food and medicine, the sign (...) relations _of_ medical theory and practice, and the sign relations _between_ the biology in medicine and medicine of society. Taking up a semio-historical approach, I contextualize two select contributions from Hendlin and Hope’s _Food and Medicine_ with the medical semiotics of the Hippocratic tradition. By comparing the biological semiotics from the contributions to the medical semiotics from the Corpus, I critically explicate the ways in which biosemiotics moves this subdiscipline forward and why the perspective is significant not only for the health of humans, but also for the health of other animals, and indeed for the health of the planet that we all inhabit together. On these grounds, I propose a turn from medical semiotics to _health semiotics_. This program for semiotics would encompass not only food and medicine, but also lifestyle and wellbeing, as well as the subjective, qualitative perspectivism that makes biosemiotics frontier research, thereby constituting a biosemioethics and promoting a semiotic fitness. (shrink)

This paper summarizes and discusses three studies of patterns in the recall of persons in socially bounded communities. Individual sin three different communities (a graduate academic program, a religious fellowship, and a department in a formal organization) free-listed the names of persons in their respective communities. Results indicate that the individuals in each community share a common cognitive structure of community members that is based on the community’s social structure. These studies, combined with the results of other research, strongly suggest (...) that persons are organized in memory according to social structural principles and that affiliation and dominance are the principal dimensions of social cognition. Suggestions are offered for future research to test the generality of these findings. (shrink)

(This book, in Portuguese translation, is an accessible introduction to the philosophy of equality and social justice, with a focus on contemporary theories, especially relational egalitarianism.) -/- O que significa para uma sociedade ser igualitária? A igualdade é amplamente reconhecida como valiosa, seja por cidadãos, políticos, juristas ou filósofos. Ademais, a ideia de igualdade desempenha um papel de grande relevância em muitos movimentos sociais do passado e do presente. Há bastante discordância, porém, acerca de como, exatamente, devemos compreender a natureza (...) e a importância da igualdade. O presente ensaio examina estas questões e apresenta um panorama sumário das mais centrais e influentes abordagens filosóficas à igualdade no quadro de diferentes teorias da justiça, concentrando-se, em particular, na ideia de justiça baseada na igualdade de relações sociais. (shrink)

A new translation and edition of Aristotle's Protrepticus (with critical comments on the fragments) -/- Welcome -/- The Protrepticus was an early work of Aristotle, written while he was still a member of Plato's Academy, but it soon became one of the most famous works in the whole history of philosophy. Unfortunately it was not directly copied in the middle ages and so did not survive in its own manuscript tradition. But substantial fragments of it have been preserved in several (...) works by Iamblichus of Chalcis, a third century A.D. neo-Pythagorean philosopher and educator. On the basis of a close study of Iamblichus' extensive use and excerption of Aristotle's Protrepticus, it is possible to reconstruct the backbone of the lost work, and then to flesh it out with the other surviving reports about the work from antiquity (for example in Alexander of Aphrodisias and other ancient commentators on Aristotle). It is also possible to identify several papyrus fragments of the work, and many references and literary allusions in later authors, especially Cicero, whose own lost dialogue Hortensius was a defense of philosophy modeleld on Aristotle's. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

It is standard to attribute to Kant the view that actions from motives other than duty deserve no positive moral evaluation. I argue that the standard view is mistaken. Kant's account of merit in the Metaphysics of Morals shows that he believes actions not performed from duty can be meritorious. Moreover, the grounds for attributing merit to an action are different from those for attributing moral worth to it. This is significant because it shows both that his views are reasonably (...) consistent with our ordinary views, and that he recognized a variety of purposes in evaluating actions, many of which are not furthered by determining whether they were motivated by duty. (shrink)

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In (...) this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language. (shrink)

This paper argues that if motivation by rightness de re is praiseworthy, then so is motivation by rightness de dicto. I argue that these two types of moral motivation have been unfairly compared, in light of a widespread failure to appreciate the structural similarities between them. These structural similarities become clear when we think more carefully about the nature of motivation and about moral metaphysics. I then argue that the two types of moral motivation are on a par by discussing (...) a series of minimal pairs. I argue that in good cases, in which the agent succeeds in doing what she is motivated to do, both motivations seem praiseworthy, and that bad cases, in which the agent fails, arise for motivation by rightness de re in precisely the same way as they do for motivation by rightness de dicto. I then offer a way to evaluate the unsuccessful agents, according to which someone's motivations can still be praiseworthy even if her actions and moral beliefs are both blameworthy, and someone can have certain praiseworthy motivations while lacking others. On my view, most of us are deeply flawed agents who nonetheless have some redeeming features—including our moral motivations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Practice of SurgeryKaren DevonThere’s no one on the snowy road driving beside me. It’s Christmas Eve, the night the newest attending surgeon on staff gets to be on call. Tonight feels like an anniversary of sorts. The first time I performed an appendectomy “alone” was on Christmas Eve. I can’t recall if it was snowing back then since I hadn’t left the hospital in days. I had assumed (...) that while I was operating on that 26–year–old woman with new abdominal pain that moved towards the left lower quadrant, my attending staff on call was sleeping soundly. I didn’t even know where he lived, or how long it would take if something catastrophic were to happen. I phoned the white–haired man to get his blessing just before midnight. “Have you done this operation before?” he asked. “Yes, several, but not completely alone” I confessed. “Go for it and call me when you are done. Oh, and be safe!” Click. Gulp.As I drive in tonight, again past midnight, I reflect upon that night. Was it practice? A right of passage? The most appropriate treatment for the patient? Perhaps it was even safer this way since my attending really had never done this operation the way it is now done—laparoscopically—by residents. I clearly recall telling the patient and her mother, “We do this all the time! The staff surgeon on call will come in if I need him, but the chief residents always do this operation and I feel comfortable taking care of you.” Sign on the dotted line and make sure you read the part where you are told this is a teaching hospital. Not only was independence an expectation, but I was also supposed to teach the more junior house staff how to emulate what I was so expertly performing.That night I took out the rotting appendix without incident and called the grey haired surgeon in the wee hours. “Merry Christmas Doctor. Sorry to bother you. I just wanted to let you know that the patient is awake and doing well.” “Yes I know. Good work” he replied. “I was in my office. Just in case.”As a resident, I was often torn between the need to gain independence in order to learn and grow as a surgeon, and the idea that I was practicing. As most budding surgeons do, I wanted to be the person doing the surgery. Working on my technical skills was clearly an important part of expertise. Surgery is inherently different than other types of medicine. It seemed slightly more difficult for someone to stop my cutting, than to catch the error in a prescription, before some damage is done. Perhaps a little more like driving a car, than learning to use a calculator. Recently a more modern surgical education is evolving, whereby students practice by simulations on machines. Yet educators know that ultimately many “firsts” need to occur with real patients. That proficiency and expertise are more than a diagnosis, a steady hand, or even the two combined. If the experience of operating as the primary surgeon without immediate supervision, on a patient with acute appendicitis never occurred until we passed licensing exams wouldn’t that be more harmful? I may have been the least legally responsible for outcomes, that night of my own first, when the grey–haired surgeon took the [End Page E1] responsibility of trusting me. But in fact, the obligation I felt was enormous. We cannot simulate the weight of responsibility that comes when responsible for another human being, who you have met and who provides their trust in you. Furthermore, as the teachers of this art and science, we need to balance our obligations to each individual patient with our obligation to society to train competent and caring future surgeons. Surgery would have no history if the “practice” of surgery had nothing to do with practice, defined in its simplest form, yet how do we cover all of this during the late night conversation that is called informed consent. Interestingly since that December evening and for the next 200 laparoscopic appendectomies before my graduation in to... (shrink)

Common sense is not enough -- The "new archaeology" -- Archaeology as a science -- Middle-range theory, ethnoarchaeology, and material culture studies -- Culture and process -- Thoughts and ideologies -- Postprocessual and interpretative archaeologies -- Archaeology, gender, and identity -- Archaeology and cultural evolution -- Archaeology and Darwinian evolution -- Archaeology and history -- Archaeology, politics and culture -- Conclusion : the future of theory.

"Sure to be controversial and of interest to a wide audience in feminist history" (Judith Grant, University of Southern California), this book draws on a wide range of political and intellectual traditions to demonstrate that, only by ...

Three visual habituation studies using abstract animations tested the claim that infants’ attachment behavior in the Strange Situation procedure corresponds to their expectations about caregiver–infant interactions. Three unique patterns of expectations were revealed. Securely attached infants expected infants to seek comfort from caregivers and expected caregivers to provide comfort. Insecure-resistant infants not only expected infants to seek comfort from caregivers but also expected caregivers to withhold comfort. Insecure-avoidant infants expected infants to avoid seeking comfort from caregivers and expected caregivers to (...) withhold comfort. These data support Bowlby’s (1958) original claims—that infants form internal working models of attachment that are expressed in infants’ own behavior. (shrink)

Offers a robust, full-orbed theology of beauty, showing how it has functioned as a theological concept from biblical times to the present day.

Nurses facing impediments to what they perceive as moral practice may experience moral distress. The purpose of this descriptive, cross-sectional study was to determine similarities and differences in moral distress and avoidance behavior between critical care nurses and non-critical care nurses. Sixty-eight critical care and 28 non-critical care nurses completed the Moral Distress Scale and Impact of Event Scale. There were no differences in moral distress scores or impact of event scores between groups after adjusting for age. There was a (...) small positive correlation between moral distress and avoidance behaviors for both the groups. Moral distress is present in both critical care and noncritical care nurses. It is important that nurses are provided with opportunities to cope with this distress and that retention strategies include ways to reduce suffering and mitigate the effects on professional practice. (shrink)