Much has changed since the beginnings of the gay liberation movement and the feminist movement in the 1970s in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Yet, to a degree, the invisibility of gay male, lesbian and transsexual lifestyles as well as individual struggles for rights and recognition remains. The diverse contributions in this book discuss how the reframing of ‘queer’ as a proud, border-crossing identity challenges conventional views of gay, lesbian, transsexual and heterosexual identities. At the heart of queer politics and theory lies the (...) double irony that ‘queers’ still experience different social positions and are confronted differently by public challenges, and they also seldom agree about how, and for what political reasons, sexuality should be defined and categorised. In this book, 'queer' brings together wide-ranging commentaries on the history, politics and culture of thirty years of sexual history in Aotearoa/New Zealand. (shrink)

This paper is one of four interrelated papers resulting from the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control convened in June 2008 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Society of Law, Medicine, Ethics. Each of the papers deals with one of the four core elements of legal preparedness: laws and legal authorities for public health practitioners; legal competencies public health practitioners and legal and policy decision makers need (...) for use of these laws and authorities; crossdisciplinary and cross-jurisdiction coordination of law-based public health actions; and information on public health law best practices. Collectively, they are referenced as the “white papers.”Our purpose is to offer action options that will help to improve the legal competencies of public health practitioners and policy decision makers with respect to drafting, interpreting. (shrink)

This paper is one of four interrelated papers resulting from the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control convened in June 2008 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Society of Law, Medicine, Ethics. Each of the papers deals with one of the four core elements of legal preparedness: laws and legal authorities for public health practitioners; legal competencies public health practitioners and legal and policy decision makers need (...) for use of these laws and authorities; crossdisciplinary and cross-jurisdiction coordination of law-based public health actions; and information on public health law best practices. Collectively, they are referenced as the “white papers.”Our purpose is to offer action options that will help to improve the legal competencies of public health practitioners and policy decision makers with respect to drafting, interpreting. (shrink)

Rather than focusing on political and legal debates surrounding attempts to determine if and when genocidal rape has taken place in a particular setting, this essay turns instead to a crucial, yet neglected area of inquiry: the moral significance of genocidal rape, and more specifically, the nature of the harms that constitute the culpable wrongdoing that genocidal rape represents. In contrast to standard philosophical accounts, which tend to employ an individualistic framework, this essay offers a situated understanding of harm that (...) features the importance of interdependence and relationality and that conceptualizes harms as embodied and contextual. The paper ultimately reveals what is distinctive about this particular crime of sexual violence by exploring the logic of genocidal rape: genocidal rape involves the harm of forced self-betrayal unleashed relationally, causing victims as representatives of their group to participate inadvertently in the destruction of that group. (shrink)

This chapter examines the role played by derogatory terms (e.g., ‘inyenzi’ or cockroach, ‘inzoka’ or snake) in laying the social groundwork for the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. The genocide was preceded by an increase in the use of anti-Tutsi derogatory terms among the Hutu. As these linguistic practices evolved, the terms became more openly and directly aimed at Tutsi. Then, during the 100 days of the genocide, derogatory terms and coded euphemisms were used to direct killers (...) to their victims. Understanding these speech acts helps to illuminate the important ways that power is enacted through discourse, how speech acts can prepare the way for physical and material acts, and how speech generates permissions for actions hitherto uncountenanced. Studying the role of speech acts and linguistic practices in laying the groundwork of the genocide illuminates how patterns of speech acts become linguistic practices that constitute permissibility conditions for non-linguistic behaviors. Further, the analysis presented here helps to make sense of the view that a steady, deep, and widespread derogation of a group can be part and parcel of genocide, not only an antecedent to it. (shrink)

Michel Foucault was the first to embed the roots of human sexuality in discipline and biopolitics, therefore revolutionizing our conception of sex and its relationship to society, economics, and culture. Yet over the past two decades, scholars have limited themselves to the study of Foucault's _History of Sexuality_, volume 1 paying lesser attention to his equally explosive _History of Madness_. In this earlier volume, Foucault recasts Western rationalism as a project that both produces and represses sexual deviants, calling out the (...) complicity of modern science and the exclusionary nature of family morality. By reclaiming these deft moves, Lynne Huffer teases out exciting new strands of Foucauldian thought. She then revisits the theorist's ethical work in light of these discoveries, divining an ethics of eros that sees sexuality as a lived experience we are repeatedly called on to remember. Throughout her study, Huffer weaves her own experiences together with Foucault's, sampling from unpublished interviews and other archived materials in order to intimately rework the problem of sexuality as a product of reason. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Reopening a Discussion The empiricist-derived epistemology that has directed most social and natural scientific inquiry for the last three ...

This essay investigates the way in which Wolff takes an interest in the hypothesis of an emendatio of the prima philosophia from Leibniz’s incitement in De primae philosophiae emendatione, et de notione substantiae (1694) to re-found metaphysics. This makes it possible, secondly, to examine the way in which Wolff takes Johannes Clauberg’s ontology as a model, even though it represents in his view only a failed attempt at that same emendatio. Through the analysis of the texts, this article considers the (...) possibility of a new reading of the ‘failure’ attributed by Wolff to Clauberg, which would consist in his having ‘emended’ first philosophy by expelling it from the domain of ontology and finally identifying it with Cartesian prima philosophia. (shrink)

Lynne Huffer's ambitious inquiry redresses the rift between feminist and queer theory, traversing the space of a new, post-moral sexual ethics that includes pleasure, desire, connection, and betrayal. She begins by balancing queer theorists' politics of sexual freedoms with a moralizing feminist politics that views sexuality as harm. Drawing on the best insights from both traditions, she builds an ethics centered on eros, following Michel Foucault's ethics as a practice of freedom and Luce Irigaray's lyrical articulation of an ethics (...) of sexual difference. Through this theoretical lens, Huffer examines everyday experiences of ethical connection and failure connected to sex, including queer sexual practices, sodomy laws, interracial love, pornography, and work-life balance. Her approach complicates sexual identities while challenging the epistemological foundations of subjectivity. She rethinks ethics "beyond good and evil" without underestimating, as some queer theorists have done, the persistence of what Foucault calls the "catastrophe" of morality. Elaborating a thinking-feeling ethics of the other, Huffer encourages contemporary intellectuals to reshape sexual morality from within, defining an ethical space that is both poetically suggestive and politically relevant, both conceptually daring and grounded in common sexual experience. (shrink)

Hunt asks a series of related questions about time in history. Why is time now again on the agenda, for historians and more generally in Western culture?

Bestselling author of The Intention Experiment reveals the latest science that proves the extensive connectedness of mind, matter, and consciousness.

A curious feature of Aztec philosophy is that the basic metaphysical question of the “Western” tradition cannot be formulated in their language, in Nahuatl. This did not, however, prevent the Aztecs from developing an account of 'reality', or whatever it is that might exist. The article is the first of its kind to compare the work of Aristotle on ousia (being) and the Aztecs on teotl and ometeotl. Through this analysis, it suggests that both of the Nahuatl terms are fundamental (...) for expressing the basic character of reality as process for the Aztecs. It also defends their notion as prima facia reasonable, despite its wide divergence from Aristotle's view. (shrink)

The paper discusses motivation as the inner lawfulness of consciousness and a central methodological principle of genetic phenomenology, highlighting the problem of its ambiguous status oscillating between a historical-empirical and a transcendental account of consciousness. The focus on motivation allows for the practical character of intentionality to emerge, thus presenting genetic phenomenology as a more comprehensive approach to subjective life which takes into account its constitutive indeterminacy.

In Self-Identity and Powerlessness , Alice Kouobová proposes a conception of human existence that does not essentially depend on the definition of self-identity. She does this by reinterpreting Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and that of other authors.

Nasir-i Khusraw is a major literary figure in medieval Persian culture. He was a Muslim philosopher, poet, travel writer, and Ismaili da'i who lived a thousand years ago in the lands known today as Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan. Although known in the West mainly for his Safarnama, or travelogue, which describes his seven-year journey from Khurasan, in the eastern Islamic lands, to Cairo, the city of the Fatimid imam-caliphs, his poetry and ideas are less familiar. Yet, over the centuries, Persian-speaking (...) lands have consistently ranked him as one of the finest poets of all time. But today, even among those who know Nasir-i Khusraw's poetry, few understand the philosophical and Ismaili concepts the poet expounds. And while mystical and epic genres of Persian poetry are memorized and studied, the genre of philosophical poetry in Persian remains basically unexplored. This collection of studies seeks to redress the balance. Originally presented at a conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2005 to commemorate the millenary of Nasir-i Khusraw's birth, the papers published here examine his poetry both for philosophical meaning and poetic method. They address a variety of topics, ranging from metaphysics, cosmology, and ontology to prophecy, as well as rhythm and structure, and analysis of individual poems and authorship. (shrink)

"Eros" bezeichnet zuerst ein von fast allen Menschen mehr oder weniger glücklich erfahrenes Phänomen namens Verliebtheit oder sexuelles Begehren. Es gibt aber auch einen höchst einflussreichen Begriff des Eros.

Although Nietzsche's writings clearly deliver an unhealthy dose of misogyny, it must be noticed that they also contain the seeds of a deconstruction of that misogyny. This paper exposes one set of deconstructing elements of Nietzsche's works with respect to his views on women. The wider philosophical context of Nietzsche's thought provides grounds for taking seriously several passages of The Gay Science that reveal a more sympathetic understanding of women, since these passages take seriously Nietzsche's anti-dualism, his perspectivism, and his (...) early existentialist notion of the self. The destabilizing force of these passages, combined with Nietzsche's remarks about women within this philosophical context, reveals that Nietzsche's works promise more insight than many feminists have previously noted. A feminist analysis of Nietzsche's anti-dualism, perspectivism and discussion of the power of naming promises to inform contemporary feminist concerns about the importance of women's articulating our lives. (shrink)

This article argues that the real promise of feminist philosophy of language is in its account of articulated normativity. Feminist philosophy of language began within a descriptivist framework, seeking to identify and root out sexist discursive practices, like naming practices that subsume women’s identity under men’s, descriptive practices that erase or undermine women’s accomplishments and presence as subjects, and so on. This approach had its limits, and led to increased attention to the discursive practices through which we articulate our experiences (...) and construct our lives. Examining the core frameworks through which feminists have analyzed the power of language to shape social reality and construct social selves, this article shows how language is normative in its production and reproduction of social norms by way of its content, forms, and constitutive discursive practices. The article urges feminists to use knowledge of the processes of articulation and legitimation to effect and explain feminist reconstitution of women as whole. (shrink)

The question of forgiveness in politics has attained a certain cachet. Indeed, in the fifty years since Arendt commented on the notable absence of forgiveness in the political tradition, a vast and multidisciplinary literature on the politics of apology, reparation, and reconciliation has emerged. To a novice scouring the relevant literatures, it might appear that the only discordant note in this new veritable symphony of writings on political forgiveness has been sounded by philosophers. There is a more-than-healthy cynicism directed at (...) what many philosophers see as an uncritical promotion of forgiveness, which – they fear – risks distorting and cheapening forgiveness as a moral ideal, on the one hand, and ignoring the moral and political values of justice, accountability and the cessation of harmful relationships, on the other. Are philosophical fears about the dangers of thinking about forgiveness in political terms warranted – or do they perhaps depend in part on conceptual conservatism regarding what exactly political forgiveness might be? I argue that most, if not all, standard objections to political forgiveness emerge from theoretical reliance on a picture of forgiveness I will call the Emotional Model. Once we make conceptual space for descriptions of forgiveness in performative and social terms, the concept is more easily adapted to a political account without at least some of the risks feared by philosophers. (shrink)

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had an enormous influence on twentieth-century philosophy even though only one of his works, the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in his lifetime. Beyond this publication the impact of his thought was mainly conveyed to a small circle of students through his lectures at Cambridge University. Fortunately, many of his ideas have survived in both the dictations that were subsequently published, and the notes taken by his students, among them Alice Ambrose and the late Margaret Macdonald, (...) from 1932 to 1935. These notes, now edited by Professor Ambrose, are here published, and they shed much light on Wittgenstein's philosophical development. Among the topics considered are the meaning of a word and its relation to common usage, rules of grammar and their relation to fact, the grammar of first person statements, language games, and the nature of philosophy. This volume is indispensable to any serious discussion of Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

This volume reaches beyond the controversy surrounding the teaching and learning of evolution in the United States, specifically in regard to the culture, politics, and beliefs found in the Southeast. The editors argue that despite a deep history of conflict in the region surrounding evolution, there is a wealth of evolution research taking place—from biodiversity in species to cultural evolution and human development. In fact, scientists, educators, and researchers from around the United States have found their niche in the South, (...) where biodiversity is high, culture runs deep, and the pace is just a little bit slower. (shrink)

Images of nature abound in the practice of international environmental law but their significance in law is unclear. Drawing on visual jurisprudence, and interpretative methods for visual art, this book analyses photographs for their representations of nature's aesthetic value in treaty processes that concern world heritage, whales and biodiversity. It argues that visual images should be embraced in the prosaic practice of international law, particularly for treaties that demand judgements of nature's aesthetic value. This environmental value is in practice conflated (...) with natural beauty, ethical and cultural values, and displaced by economic and scientific values. Interpretations of visual images can serve instead to critique and conceive sensory, imaginative and emotional appreciations of nature from different cultural perspectives as proposed by philosophers of environmental aesthetics. Addressing questions of value and the visual, this landmark book shows how images can be engaged by nations to better protect the environment under international law. (shrink)

As obstetric medicine has become more sophisticated, so Caesarean section (CS) has become safer. It is now seen as equally safe or, in some circumstances, safer than vaginal birth. Under the new National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines on CS that were published in November 2011, requests for CS are to be given more weight. Women requesting CS can no longer be seen as compromising their control over birth. Rather, they are merely exercising their power, with the new guidelines (...) offering them an increasing role in the decision-making process regarding how they give birth. However, these new guidelines also present new problems, bringing the rights of patients and obstetricians into conflict. In order to mediate these tensions, a virtue-based approach to obstetric ethics is needed as a supplement to the rule- and right-based guidance provided by NICE. (shrink)

The upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has the potential to eliminate or severely restrict access to legal abortion care in the United States. We a...

The long-awaited follow-up to Koller's bestselling chronicle of self-discovery An Unknown Woman outlines how Koller has used her personal philosophy to meet the challenges of everyday life and invites readers to make their own commitment to honest living. Topics include earning money, finding a home, mourning, and feeling good about living alone as well as with others.

Die vorliegende Untersuchung wird von der Frage geleitet, ob und wie sich philosophische Aussagen zur Kunst mit kunsthistorischen Sichtweisen verbinden und für die Rezeption nichtgegenständlicher Kunst fruchtbar machen lassen. Sie basiert auf der Analyse von Positionen des kunsthistorischen Kanons sowie auf der Untersuchung fünf philosophisch-ästhetischer Theorien essentialistischer und antiessentialistischer Art. Aufgrund dieses hermeneutischen Prozesses wird eine Systematik der Bildbefragung entwickelt, die sich als Interpretationsansatz insbesondere für nicht gegenstandsbezogenere Werke eignet. Die interdisziplinäre Arbeit gliedert sich in vier Kapitel. Sie beginnt mit (...) der Untersuchung Elemente Zeigen und Sagen. Im zweiten Kapitel werden Elemente der ikonischen Logik untersucht, die das Sein des Bildes als sein Scheinen definieren. Dabei werden vier Typen ikonisch absenter Charakteristiken systematisiert. Das dritte Kapitel analysiert signifikante Texte zur Ästhetik von G.W.F. Hegel, M. Weitz, N. Goodman, M. Heidegger und H.-G. Gadamer. Aus ihnen werden Leitgedanken deduziert, die im vierten Kapitel die Grundlage von drei systematischen Bildbefragungen bilden. Die kunstwissenschaftliche Relevanz dieses philosophischen Ansatzes wird durch die damit generierten Werkinterpretationen belegt. (shrink)

The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical meaning, such as (...) polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word. (shrink)

J. S. Mill's role in the Indian education controversy is well known, but scarcely well understood. That he drafted, in 1836, a despatch sharply critical of Macaulay's infamous Minute on Indian Education, is general knowledge now. That in drafting the despatch Mill drew upon the ideas of H. H. Wilson, a noted Orientalist and sharp critic of Macaulay and the Anglicists, has been adequately demonstrated. That the despatch was never sent to India, because of the objections of the President of (...) the Board of Trade, John Hobhouse, a Whig with some utilitarian connections, has been common knowledge for several decades. (shrink)

There is a growing call for greater public involvement in establishing science and technology policy, in line with democratic ideals. A variety of public participation procedures exist that aim to consult and involve the public, ranging from the public hearing to the consensus conference. Unfortunately, a general lack of empirical consideration of the quality of these methods arises from confusion as to the appropriate benchmarks for evaluation. Given that the quality of the output of any participation exercise is difficult to (...) determine, the authors suggest the need to consider which aspects of the process are desirable and then to measure the presence or quality of these process aspects. To this end, a number of theoretical evaluation criteria that are essential for effective public participation are specified. These comprise two types: acceptance criteria, which concern features of a method that make it acceptable to the wider public, and process criteria, which concern features of the process that are liable to ensure that it takes place in an effective manner. Future research needs to develop instruments to measure these criteria more precisely and identify the contextual and environmental factors that will mediate the effectiveness of the different participation methods. (shrink)

Imprecise definition of key terms in the “public participation” domain have hindered the conduct of good research and militated against the development and implementation of effective participation practices. In this article, we define key concepts in the domain: public communication, public consultation, and public participation. These concepts are differentiated according to the nature and flow of information between exercise sponsors and participants. According to such an information flow perspective, an exercise’s effectiveness may be ascertained by the efficiency with which full, (...) relevant information is elicited from all appropriate sources, transferred to all appropriate recipients, and combined to give an aggregate/consensual response. Key variables that may theoretically affect effectiveness—and on which engagement mechanisms differ—are identified and used to develop a typology of mechanisms. The resultant typology reveals four communication, six consultation, and four participation mechanism classes. Limitations to the typology are discussed, and future research needs identified. (shrink)

An examination of verbal hallucinations and thought insertion as examples of "alienated self-consciousness.".

Typically, the imagination in thought experiments has been taken to consist in mental images; we visualize the state of affairs described. A recent alternative from Fiora Salis and Roman Frigg main...