Tiantai Buddhism emerged from an idiosyncratic and innovative interpretation of the Lotus Sutra to become one of the most complete, systematic, and influential schools of philosophical thought developed in East Asia. Brook A. Ziporyn puts Tiantai into dialogue with modern philosophical concerns to draw out its implications for ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Ziporyn explains Tiantai’s unlikely roots, its positions of extreme affirmation and rejection, its religious skepticism and embrace of religious myth, and its view of human consciousness. (...) Ziporyn reveals the profound insights of Tiantai Buddhism while stimulating philosophical reflection on its unexpected effects. (shrink)

Ideal for students and scholars alike, this edition of _Zhuangzi _ includes the complete Inner Chapters, extensive selections from the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters, and judicious selections from two thousand years of traditional Chinese commentaries, which provide the reader access to the text as well as to its reception and interpretation. A glossary, brief biographies of the commentators, a bibliography, and an index are also included.

Explores the work of Guo Xiang, a Neo-Taoist thinker who developed a radical philosophy of freedom and spontaneity.

This article provides an overview of controversies in the history of Chinese philosophy concerning the diversity of meanings of the term Li , as well as the comparative issues raised in various attempts by modern Chinese and Western interpreters to come to terms with this diversity of meanings. Revisiting the earliest pre-philosophical uses of the term, an attempt is then made to synthesize the insights of previous interpreters and open up a new path for investigating its distinctive implications in classical (...) Chinese thought, Chinese Buddhism, and Neo-Confucianism. (shrink)

All Mahayana schools adopt some version of the Two Truths theory, with one exception: the Tiantai school, which alone among all Buddhist schools moves from the Two Truths epistemology to a Three Truths model of truth. The Three Truths are actually three different ways of looking at any object or state. Each implies the other two, and each is one way to describe the whole of that object, including its other two aspects. This cup is a cup: that is provisional (...) truth, conventional truth, local coherence. This cup is not a cup: that is ultimate truth, its emptiness, its global incoherence. To be a cup is not to be a cup: that is its Centrality, its Non‐duality, its Absoluteness. This cup is all things, all possible ways of being, all universes, as this cup. (shrink)

Ideas adapted from the tradition of Chinese Tiantai Buddhism, in particular the notions of the "Three Truths" and "opening the provisional to reveal the real," are applied to the traditional mind-body problem as framed in Western philosophical discourse. An attempt is made to offer an account of the mind-body relation that explicates both the identity and the opposition between these two terms, thereby avoiding the traditional positions of dualism, monism, and parallelism while also accounting for the features of the relation (...) that have made these positions attractive in the past. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Tiantai Doctrine of Evil as the Good:A Response to David R. LoyBrook ZiporynIn a recent issue of this journal (vol. 54 [1]:99-103), David Loy has done me the honor of publishing his sympathetic and thoughtful review of my book Evil and/or/ as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Loy has done an excellent (...) job of bringing to the forefront some of the most troubling and distinctive aspects of the Tiantai Buddhist position on evil, as expressed in particular in the works of Siming Zhili, the focus of my book. Inevitably, with the nit-picky vanity that perhaps assails every reviewee, I feel some points have been imperfectly understood or represented, but in general I want before anything else to express my gratitude to Loy for the insight and acuity with which he has handled this material, the care he has taken in reading and responding to the book, and the candor, lucidity, and forcefulness with which he has expressed a very reasonable, non-Tiantai Mahāyāna response to some of the more radical and counterintuitive Tiantai ideas.But one particularly great service Loy has done is to present a very important and necessary challenge: what would these Tiantai writers, with their bizarre ideas about the interpenetration, nay, identity, of good and evil have to say about Hitler and the Holocaust? Putting this particular topic up as a casual example to be employed in an academic discussion, in effect "making use of" the mountains of corpses in the context of an ivory-tower discussion of subtle logical and ontological hairsplitting, perhaps will strike some as being in more than questionable taste. But there are points to be made here, and it is a valid question, one that needs to be addressed—indeed, that we cannot help addressing—even when it is played as a card all the meanings of which have already been determined. Loy is quite right: these mountains of corpses are always already in play in the background of our discussions of moral doctrines, perhaps even in the interstices of our casual entertainments, and we let ourselves off too easily if we leave them in the background, as unexamined, prepackaged moral tokens, or stock bugaboos whose "use-value" in the culture has already been nonnegotiably and comfortably mapped out. This is the extreme test case that anyone who wants to talk seriously about values and ethics must face head-on. For these reasons I want to take this opportunity to extend the thought experiment and respond to this challenge, speaking for the sake of argument in the name of the Tiantai doctrine, in the hopes that this will perhaps initiate a dialogue with specialists in other systems of moral theory, who might attempt a similar experiment.To do this, however, it will be necessary to take up a few of the more general theoretical questions raised in Loy's review. The first of these concerns the relation between ultimate truth and provisional truth. Loy acknowledges that, as argued in [End Page 329] the book, the Tiantai position gives a higher status to provisional or conventional truth than most Mahāyāna Two Truths doctrines, accurately paraphrasing the conclusion that "for Tiantai, however, the provisional ends up being equal to the ultimate truth." But, on the other hand, he wishes to point out as a potential shortcoming of the Tiantai position that it seems to overstress the "highest point of view." This assertion comes in the context of a grudging attempt to make sense of the Tiantai affirmation of evil from the point of view of the general Mahāyāna Two Truths theory, thereby, in my opinion, fatally distorting the point. Loy is willing to admit "the fact that from the highest point of view every possible apprehension—including evil ones—is neither a distortion of reality nor subject to invalidation by some other more privileged perspective." This strikes Loy as problematic, and he offers his own solution: it lies in "realizing that this 'ultimate' point of view is insufficient by itself—that it always needs... (shrink)

The idea of a nous as arche, of a single purposive rational mind that creates the world or otherwise accounts for the world being as it is, has dominated most Western thought in one form or another since it was proposed by Plato, quoting Socrates, quoting Anaxagoras, in the Phaedo, particularly in the form given it in monotheist religions and theologies and, less explicitly but still powerfully, in their secular aftermaths. Each of the dominant traditions in pre-modern China is however (...) “God-less” in the sense of lacking just this conception. This article takes a look at the forms of God-less religiousness developed in these traditions, as a way of recovering some of the ethical and epistemological alternatives obscured by the idea of God idea in monotheistic cultures. (shrink)

Explores the development of Chinese thought, highlighting its concern with questions of coherence. Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience. The way in which early Chinese thinkers approached concepts such as one and many, sameness and difference, self and other, and internal and external stand in stark contrast to the way parallel concepts entrenched in much of modern thinking developed in Greek and European thought. (...) class='Hi'>Brook Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journeys found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of assumptions that tends to see questions of identity, value, and knowledge—the subject matter of ontology, ethics, and epistemology in other traditions—as all ultimately relating to questions about coherence in one form or another. Mere awareness of how many different ways human beings can think and have thought about these categories is itself a game changer for our own attitudes toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion. Brook Ziporyn is Professor of Chinese Philosophy, Religion, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. His books include The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

The article, a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur,” analyzes the metaphysical assumptions behind the valorization of “clear and distinct ideas,” apodictic knowledge, and definitiveness, and it suggests alternatives derived from Daoist sources, where a different model of knowing prevails. That model undermines the idea of purposive willing in the service of goals known in advance, and undermines as well the bases for any human or divine activity designed to achieve definite ends. If (...) purpose is not privileged either metaphysically or ethically, the concomitant notion of unambiguous fact is also shaken. In the absence, even in principle, of any form of knowing, human or divine, that is unambiguous and apodictic, there is no reason to grant ontological privilege to the paradigm of “unambiguous potential objects of knowledge.” This article concludes by asking and in part answering what the world looks like, what sort of human cognition and activity is most appropriate, in the absence of clear purposes, definite knowledge, and unambiguous facts. (shrink)

Spinoza, as a monist and a rationalist, seems unlikely to have occasion to confront any form of the solipsism problem. However, a close examination of his epistemology reveals that he does in fact confront a very radical form of this problem, and offers an equally radical solution to it, derived from the very epistemological premises that make it a potential problem for him. In particular, we find that the conception of the mind as the “idea of the body,” premised on (...) the strict identity of mental modes (“ideas”) and extended modes (“bodies”) forecloses any possibility of awareness extending “beyond” the confines of the finite body, or of any idea being able to be about anything other than its own bodily mode: ideas can only be ideas “of” the body of which they are the idea, and hence the mind, as the idea of the body, cannot have any ideas “of” anything outside of the body. The solution comes from the “Common Notions” which establish the existence of the world outside the body not by “reaching” that world, but merely by establishing immanently the nature of the finite body qua finite body. This manner of instantiating an infinite externality of the body within the body itself, though highly exceptional in European intellectual history, bears interesting similarities to the solutions to distinct but parallel problems concerning the relation of the finite to the infinite found in Chinese thought, in particular in the Zhuangzi and in the Huayan and Tiantai schools of Buddhism. (shrink)

The idea of a nous as arche, of a single purposive rational mind that creates the world or otherwise accounts for the world being as it is, has dominated most Western thought in one form or another since it was proposed by Plato, quoting Socrates, quoting Anaxagoras, in the Phaedo, particularly in the form given it in monotheist religions and theologies and, less explicitly but still powerfully, in their secular aftermaths. Each of the dominant traditions in pre-modern China is however (...) “God-less” in the sense of lacking just this conception. This article takes a look at the forms of God-less religiousness developed in these traditions, as a way of recovering some of the ethical and epistemological alternatives obscured by the idea of God idea in monotheistic cultures. (shrink)

The term Dao originally means a Way or Course or Guide, something very close to purposive action as such – a prescribed course to attain a prescribed goal. It is precisely something that is selected out, valued, desired, kept to rather than discarded. The Daoist usage of the term “Dao” is thus an ironic usage: it is used deliberately in the opposite of its literal sense to make a point – the real way to attain value is through what we (...) do not value, the real way is an anti-way, the real fulfilment of purpose lies in letting go of purpose. Purpose by definition excludes the purposeless. But this relationship is not symmetrical; purposelessness does not exclude purpose. On the contrary, it includes, allows, and even generates purpose. Not one purpose, however, but infinite purposes, all of which remain embedded in a larger purposelessness, but not contradicted or undermined by it. The structure of purpose is such as to either exclude or to subordinate the purposeless. But even if merely subordinated rather than excluded, purposelessness ceases tobe genuinely purposeless. It becomes instead instrumental to purpose, pervaded completely by purpose. So a monotheist cosmos is one that ultimately forecloses entirely purposelessness, and thereby also undermines all forms of inclusiveness, non-duality, and the non-personal. The relation of purpose to purposelessness is more tricky than it appears. This essay attempts a direct reconfiguring of this relation through the concept of wu-wei as effortless and purposeless action. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a work that bears comparison to Mahāyāna Buddhist literature in more ways than one. Nietzsche was turning against the Schopenhauerian doctrine of the denial of the will, which he read as symptomatic of a larger nihilistic trend swallowing up almost all existing spiritual culture, while the Mahāyāna was turning against the world-denying implications of the doctrine of Nirvana as the ending of desire and samsara that was so central to early Buddhism. In this article, (...) I explore one move made in both of these cases: the move from total negation to total affirmation seen as a convergence of these two apparently opposed extremes. Of central interest here is the “identity of indiscernibles” that applies structurally to these two opposite extremes, “willing nothing” and “willing everything,” with the latter effected only through “willing one thing intensely,” at once excluding and including all other things, and its liberative potential. (shrink)

This essay explores one of the first distinctively Sinitic reappropriations of Madhyamaka epistemology: Seng Zhao’s essay “Prajñā is Without Knowledge.” Seng Zhao’s work is here read as a deliberate collapse of the traditional Madhyamaka Two Truths into two simultaneous aspects of sagely wisdom, rather than a diachronic means-end relation, arriving at a crypto-Zhuangzian “trivialist” conclusion aimed at undermining epistemological bivalence at its roots. For Seng Zhao, because nothing can be established as true, nothing can be excluded as false. Here the (...) understanding of Emptiness has become not the exclusion of all views, but the inclusion of all views. This is rooted in Seng Zhao’s view that, to use Jan Westerhoff’s terms, the denial of substance-svabhāva is always also implicitly the denial of essence-svabhāva. Seng Zhao move from Emptiness as exclusion to Emptiness as inclusion, and from denial of ontological substance to denial of mutually exclusive determinateness, sets the agenda for the distinctive developments of classical Chinese Buddhist philosophy to come. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism explores a new mode of philosophizing through a comparative study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and philosophies of major Buddhist thinkers including Nagarjuna, Chinul, Dogen, Shinran, and Nishida Kitaro. The book offers an intercultural philosophy in which opposites intermingle in a chiasmic relationship, and which brings new understanding regarding the self and the self's relation with others in a globalized and multicultural world.

This paper addresses two interpretive puzzles in Plato’s Philebus. The first concerns the claim, endorsed by both interlocutors, that the most godlike of lives is a pleasureless life of pure thinking. This appears to run afoul of the verdict of the earlier so-called ‘Choice of Lives’ argument that a mixed life is superior to either of its ‘pure’ rivals. A second concerns Socrates’ discussion of false pleasure, in which he appears to be guilty of rank equivocation. I argue that we (...) can solve both puzzles by attributing to Plato an account of pleasure as a species of intentional attitude. (shrink)

Can we respond to injustices in the world in ways that do more than just address their consequences? In this book, Brooke A. Ackerly argues that what to do about injustice is not just an ethical or moral question, but a political question about assuming responsibility for injustice. Ultimately, Just Responsibility offers a theory of global injustice and political responsibility that can guide action.

From the diverse work and often competing insights of women's human rights activists, Brooke Ackerly has written a feminist and a universal theory of human rights that bridges the relativists' concerns about universalizing from particulars and the activists' commitment to justice. Unlike universal theories that rely on shared commitments to divine authority or to an 'enlightened' way of reasoning, Ackerly's theory relies on rigorous methodological attention to difference and disagreement. She sets out human rights as at once a research ethic, (...) a tool for criticism of injustice and a call to recognize our obligations to promote justice through our actions. This book will be of great interest to political theorists, feminist and gender studies scholars and researchers of social movements. (shrink)

In Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, Brooke Ackerly demonstrates the shortcomings of contemporary deliberative democratic theory, relativism and essentialism for guiding the practice of social criticism in the real, imperfect world. Drawing theoretical implications from the activism of Third World feminists who help bring to public audiences the voices of women silenced by coercion, Brooke Ackerly provides a practicable model of social criticism. She argues that feminist critics have managed to achieve in practice what other theorists do only incompletely (...) in theory. Complemented by Third World feminist social criticism, deliberative democratic theory becomes critical theory - actionable, coherent, and self-reflective. While a complement to democratic theory, Third World feminist social criticism also addresses the problem in feminist theory associated with attempts to deal with identity politics. Third World feminist social criticism thus takes feminist theory beyond the critical impasse of the tension between anti-relativist and anti-essentialist feminist theory. (shrink)

This article identifies a foundation for Confucian democratic political thought in Confucian thought. Each of the three aspects emphasized is controversial, but supported by views held within the historical debates and development of Confucian political thought and practice. This democratic interpretation of Confucian political thought leads to (1) an expectation that all people are capable of ren and therefore potentially virtuous contributors to political life; (2) an expectation that the institutions of political, social, and economic life function so as to (...) develop the virtue of being a perfected human being; and (3) an expectation that there be public spacefor political criticism and for ongoing contestation over the duties and behaviors of individual leaders and citizens and over the functioning of the institutions that am to cultivate their behavior. (shrink)

This article identifies a foundation for Confucian democratic political thought in Confucian thought. Each of the three aspects emphasized is controversial, but supported by views held within the historical debates and development of Confucian political thought and practice. This democratic interpretation of Confucian political thought leads to an expectation that all people are capable of ren and therefore potentially virtuous contributors to political life; an expectation that the institutions of political, social, and economic life function so as to develop the (...) virtue of being a perfected human being; and an expectation that there be public space for political criticism and for ongoing contestation over the duties and behaviors of individual leaders and citizens and over the functioning of the institutions that are to cultivate their behavior. (shrink)

Across a wide variety of cultural settings, kin have been shown to play an important role in promoting women’s reproductive success. Patrilocal postmarital residence is a potential hindrance to maintaining these support networks, raising the question: how do women preserve and foster relationships with their natal kin when propinquity is disrupted? Using census and interview data from the Himba, a group of semi-nomadic African pastoralists, I first show that although women have reduced kin propinquity after marriage, more than half of (...) married women are visiting with their kin at a given time. Mobility recall data further show that married women travel more than unmarried women, and that women consistently return to stay with kin around the time of giving birth. Divorce and death of a spouse also trigger a return to living with kin, leading to a cumulative pattern of kin coresidence across the lifespan. These data suggest that patrilocality may be less of a constraint on female kin support than has been previously assumed. (shrink)

It is a profound compliment that Robyn Eckersley, Michael Goodhart, Luis Cabrera, and Kristi Kenyon have engaged so thoughtfully with the arguments of Just Responsibility. In their treatments, the...

Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning their grandchildren as well as helping their daughters with household chores and productive labor. Previous studies have investigated these contributions across a broad time period, from infancy through toddlerhood. Here, we extend and refine the grandmothering literature to investigate the perinatal period as a critical window for grandmaternal contributions. We propose that mother-daughter co-residence during this period affords targeted grandmaternal effort during a period of heightened vulnerability (...) and appreciable impact. We conducted two focus groups and 37 semi-structured interviews with Himba women. Interviews focused on experiences from their first and, if applicable, their most recent birth and included information on social support, domains of teaching and learning, and infant feeding practices. Our qualitative findings reveal three domains in which grandmothers contribute: learning to mother, breastfeeding support, and postnatal health and well-being. We show that informational, emotional, and instrumental support provided to new mothers and their neonates during the perinatal period can aid in the establishment of the mother-infant bond, buffer maternal energy balance, and improve nutritional outcomes for infants. These findings demonstrate that the role of grandmother can be crucial, even when alloparenting is common and breastfeeding is frequent and highly visible. Situated within the broader anthropological and clinical literature, these findings substantiate the claim that humans have evolved in an adaptive sociocultural perinatal complex in which grandmothers provide significant contributions to the health and well-being of their reproductive-age daughters and grandchildren. (shrink)

The mother–adult daughter relationship has been highlighted in both the social sciences and the public health literature as an important facet of social support networks, particularly as they pertain to maternal and child health. Evolutionary anthropologists also have shown positive associations between support from maternal grandmothers and various outcomes related to reproductive success; however, many of these studies rely on proximity as a surrogate measure of support. Here I present data from the Puerto Rican Maternal and Infant Health Survey (PRMIHS) (...) comparing geographic proximity of mother and daughter with a self-reported measure of mother-to-daughter support. These two measures were used to predict infant health outcomes as well as various measures of instrumental and emotional aid provided during pregnancy and after birth. Primary support was shown to have a positive effect across the analyses, whereas geographic proximity was associated with an increased risk of infant mortality and low birth weight as well as reduced odds of receiving support. This paradox was then examined using a combination variable that teased out the interactions of maternal support and proximity. Women who were geographically close to their mothers but who did not consider them a primary source of support had increased odds of infant death and low birth weight, and were less likely to receive either tangible or intangible forms of aid, while women whose mothers were both close and primary showed uniformly positive outcomes. These results place the role of propinquity within the larger context of social support and highlight the need for more detailed studies of social support within evolutionary anthropology. (shrink)

The questions of this article are: what can we learn from deliberative democratic theory, its critics, the practices of local deliberative communities, the needs of potential participants, and the experiences of virtual communities that would be useful in designing a technology-facilitated institution for global civil society that is deliberative and democratic in its values? And what is the appropriate design of such an online institution so that it will be attentive to the undemocratic forces enabled by power inequalities that can (...) emerge in discursive communities? I answer these questions with an institutional innovation that meets a need of global civil society and that is responsive to critics of deliberative democratic theory and attentive to the particular agents engaged in women's human rights activism. (shrink)

Humans are obligate cooperative breeders, relying heavily on support from kin to raise children. To date, most studies of cooperative breeding have focused on help that supplements rather than replaces parental care. Here we propose that fosterage can act as a form of dispersed cooperative breeding, one that enhances women’s fitness by allowing them to disinvest in some children and reallocate effort to others. We test this hypothesis through a series of predictions about the costs and benefits of fosterage for (...) mothers, foster parents, and foster children using data from the Himba, a group of Namibian agro-pastoralists. We show that fostering out children enhances mothers’ fitness, and we provide evidence for a causal link from fosterage to enhanced fitness by showing that fosterage of early-born children is associated with greater maternal reproductive success. Foster parents minimize the costs of fosterage by skewing their care toward their postreproductive years, and by mainly fostering close kin. However, the system is associated with some detrimental effects on foster children, who are more likely to be stunted and underweight than their non-fostered counterparts. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis symposium brings together normative and empirical scholars in dialogue on Brooke Ackerly’s innovative and compelling recent monograph, Just Responsibility. Contributors discuss the book’s distinctive grounded normative theory methodology, its arguments for how individuals can take appropriate responsibility for global structural injustices, and its potential for practical impact.

In activist circles feminist political thought is often viewed as abstract because it does not help activists make the kinds of arguments that are generally effective with donors and policy makers. The feminist political philosopher's focus on how we know and what counts as knowledge is a large step away from the terrain in which activists make their arguments to donors. Yet, philosophical reflection on the relations between power and knowledge can make a significant contribution to women's human rights work (...) in the area of evaluation. Feminist political philosophy can offer guidelines for how to evaluate the work of women's human rights organizations and their funders in light of the social, political, and economic conditions that render their work necessary and difficult. This article offers 1) an account of the difficulty in showing the impact of social change activism using conventional modes of measurement, particularly those that focus on first order effects, 2) feminist theoretical insights into the interrelatedness of global gender injustices that may help us develop better benchmarks of evaluation for women's human rights programming, and 3) a sketch of how to approach the evaluation of organizations and donors who seek to support global gender justice. (shrink)

In the real world, many people suffer as a function of their subordinate position in social hierarchy. Deliberative, relativist, and essentialist political theorists have sketched philosophies of social criticism that alone are inadequate for criticizing some harmful social values, practices, and norms. Certainly, theirs are critical theories in the sense that they are actionable, coherent, and self-reflective. But they are not adequate theories of social criticism. They do not specify satisfactorily the roles, qualifications, and methodology of social critics worried about (...) the struggles and wishes of real people. I specify all three. Drawing from the practical experience of a wide variety of women activists, I generalize about the roles and qualifications of the social critic. In addition, I formally articulate a method of social criticism that feminists have been developing. Collectively, feminists--particularly Third World women activists-have pioneered a method of social criticism that allows them to criticize existing social values, practices, and norms that perpetuate inequalities. The method of social criticism I propose provides a discipline for ongoing questioning and evaluation of social practices by a society with the help of social critics. In the process of explicating my own philosophy of social criticism, I offer criticisms of the implications for social criticism of three political philosophies--deliberative democratic theory, Michael Walzer's relativism, and Martha Nussbaum's essentialism--and argue that feminist critics have managed to achieve in practice what adherents of those three schools do incompletely in theory. (shrink)

In In re Christopher I., the California Court of Appeal upheld a juvenile court's decision to withdraw life-sustaining medical treatment for a then-1-year-old dependent of the court. Christopher I. had come under juvenile court custody after his biological father, Moises I., physically abused him and rendered him comatose. Christopher's biological mother, Tamara S., was either unwilling or unable to protect him. After the disposition hearing, Tamara petitioned for a “Do Not Resuscitate” order for Christopher and/or removal of his life-sustaining medical (...) treatment. Moises opposed, asserting that the juvenile court did not have authority to make medical decisions for a dependent child, for whom counsel had been assigned, without appointing a guardian. The juvenile court rejected Moises's argument and proceeded with an evidentiary hearing. All six physicians who testified supported the withdrawal of treatment or at least a DNR order. (shrink)

In In re Christopher I., the California Court of Appeal upheld a juvenile court's decision to withdraw life-sustaining medical treatment for a then-1-year-old dependent of the court. Christopher I. had come under juvenile court custody after his biological father, Moises I., physically abused him and rendered him comatose. Christopher's biological mother, Tamara S., was either unwilling or unable to protect him. After the disposition hearing, Tamara petitioned for a “Do Not Resuscitate” order for Christopher and/or removal of his life-sustaining medical (...) treatment. Moises opposed, asserting that the juvenile court did not have authority to make medical decisions for a dependent child, for whom counsel had been assigned, without appointing a guardian. The juvenile court rejected Moises's argument and proceeded with an evidentiary hearing. All six physicians who testified supported the withdrawal of treatment or at least a DNR order. (shrink)

As part of a celebration of Susan Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family, this article notes how some impacts of the book were so accepted that their original source has been forgotten. It goes on to make three critical arguments about 1) Okin's pared-down account of gender injustice, 2) her choice to embrace the Rawlsian distributive view of justice, and 3) her treatment of the family as the linchpin of gender injustice.

: Theoretically, feminists ought to be the best deliberative democrats. However, political commitments (which this author shares) to inclusiveness on issues of reproductive health and gay and lesbian rights, for example, create a boundary within feminism between those committed to the "feminist consensus" on these issues and women activists who share some feminist commitments, but not all. This article offers theoretically and empirically informed suggestions for how feminists can foster inclusive deliberation within feminist spaces.

Theoretically, feminists ought to be the best deliberative democrats. However, political commitments to inclusiveness on issues of reproductive health and gay and lesbian rights, for example, create a boundary within feminism between those committed to the “feminist consensus” on these issues and women activists who share some feminist commitments, but not all. This article offers theoretically and empirically informed suggestions for how feminists can foster inclusive deliberation within feminist spaces.

Theoretically, feminists ought to be the best deliberative democrats. However, political commitments to inclusiveness on issues of reproductive health and gay and lesbian rights, for example, create a boundary within feminism between those committed to the “feminist consensus” on these issues and women activists who share some feminist commitments, but not all. This article offers theoretically and empirically informed suggestions for how feminists can foster inclusive deliberation within feminist spaces.