‘We were driving through Death Valley, an American-Australian and two Aussies, taking the scenic route from Las Vegas to Santa Cruz.’ This multi-voiced account of multispecies encounters along a highway takes up the challenge of playful and humorous writing that is as well deeply serious and theoretically provocative. Our travels brought us into what Donna Haraway calls the contact zone: a region of recognition and response. The contact zone is a place of significant questions: ‘Who are you, and so who (...) are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?’ Events were everything in this ecology of play, in which the movements of all the actors involved the material field in its entirety. We were brought into dances of approach and withdrawal, dances emerging directly, to paraphrase Brian Massumi, from the dynamic relation between a myriad of charged particles. (shrink)

Decades before the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, Adorno condemned our destructive and self-destructive relationship to the natural world, warning of the catastrophe that may result if we continue to treat nature as an object that exists exclusively for our own benefit. "Adorno on Nature" presents the first detailed examination of the pivotal role of the idea of natural history in Adorno's work. A comparison of Adorno's concerns with those of key ecological theorists - social ecologist Murray Bookchin, ecofeminist (...) Carolyn Merchant, and deep ecologist Arne Naess - reveals how Adorno speaks directly to many of today's most pressing environmental issues. Ending with a discussion of the philosophical conundrum of unity in diversity, "Adorno on Nature" also explores how social solidarity can be promoted as a necessary means of confronting environmental problems. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas both champion the goal of a rational society. However, they differ significantly about what this society should look like and how best to achieve it. Exploring the premises shared by both critical theorists, along with their profound disagreements about social conditions today, this book defends Adorno against Habermas' influential criticisms of his account of Western society and prospects for achieving reasonable conditions of human life. The book begins with an overview of these critical theories (...) of Western society. Both Adorno and Habermas follow Georg Lukács when they argue that domination consists in the reifying extension of a calculating, rationalizing form of thought to all areas of human life. Their views about reification are discussed in the second chapter. In chapter three the author explores their conflicting accounts of the historical emergence and development of the type of rationality now prevalent in the West. Since Adorno and Habermas claim to have a critical purchase on reified social life, the critical leverage of their theories is assessed in chapter four. The final chapter deals with their opposing views about what a rational society would look like, as well as their claims about the prospects for establishing such a society. Adorno, Habermas and the Search for a Rational Society will be essential reading for students and researchers of critical theory, political theory and the work of Adorno and Habermas. (shrink)

In one of his many metaphorical turns of phrase – a leitmotif in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity — Jürgen Habermas speaks of the path not taken by modern philosophers, a path that might have led them towards his own intersubjective notion of communicative reason. Habermas is especially critical of his predecessors, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, because, he believes, they repudiated the rational potential in the culture of modernity. Whenever Adorno and Horkheimer heard the word ‘culture’, they apparently (...) reached for their revolvers. By the 1940s, their confidence in modern culture had allegedly succumbed to bitter disillusionment. Indeed, on Habermas's view, the confidence of these early critical theorists had been shaken so badly by the emergence of Nazism and Stalinism that their scepticism finally embraced reason itself, ‘whose standards ideology critique had found already given in bourgeois ideals’. Consequently, Adorno and Horkheimer were forced to call into question their own immanent critique of modernity: ideology critique itself came ‘under suspicion of not producing truths’. These philosophers supposedly had little choice but to render their now suspect critique ‘independent even in relation to its own foundations’. (shrink)

Adorno and Foucault are among the 20th century’s most renowned social critics but little work has been done to compare their ideas about the activity of critique. ‘Adorno, Foucault and Critique’ attempts to fill this lacuna. It takes as its starting point the Kantian legacy that informs Adorno’s and Foucault’s notions of critique, or their ‘ontologies of the present’, as Foucault calls them. Exploring the ontological foundations of critique, the article then addresses the principal objects of critique: domination and fascism. (...) It ends with a comparative account of the central aims of Adorno’s and Foucault’s critiques of western societies. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno often made reference to Immanuel Kant’s famous essay on enlightenment. Although he denied that immaturity is self-incurred, the first section of this article will show that he adopted many of Kant’s ideas about maturity in his philosophically informed critique of monopoly conditions under late capitalism. The second section will explore Adorno’s claim that the educational system could foster maturity by encouraging critical reflection on the social conditions that have made us what we are. Finally, this article will (...) demonstrate that Adorno links enlightenment to Kant’s idea of a realm of ends. (shrink)

Throughout his work, Adorno contrasted liberal ideology to the newer and more pernicious form of ideology found in positivism. The paper explores the philosophical basis for Adorno's contrast between liberal and positivist ideology. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno describes all ideology as identity-thinking. However, on his view, liberal ideology represents a more rational form of identity-thinking. Fearing that positivism might obliterate our capacity to distinguish between what is and what ought to be, Adorno sought a more secure foundation for his critique (...) of existing conditions. He found this basis in liberal discourse. In the concept of freedom, for example, Adorno located ideas or ideals that negate and transcend the given. One of the conditions for the possibility of critical thought lies in such ideas; critical thinking consists in wielding the more emphatic content of concepts against the pathic rationality of existing conditions. Far from prescribing mimesis as the antidote to a damaged social, political and economic reality, then, Adorno advocates a more dialectically inflected use of concepts as the basis for social criticism. Key Words: Adorno • Critique • Identity • Ideology • Liberalism • Positivism. (shrink)

The article explores the character of Adorno’s materialism while fleshing out his Marxist-inspired idea of natural history. Adorno offers a non-reductionist and non-dualistic account of the relationship between matter and mind, human history and natural history. Emerging from nature and remaining tied to it, the human mind is nonetheless qualitatively distinct from nature owing to its limited independence from it. Yet, just as human history is always also natural history, because human beings can never completely dissociate themselves from the natural (...) world, nature is inextricably entwined with human history. Owing to the entwinement of mind and matter, humanity and nature, a version of dialectical materialism can be found in Adorno’s work. Key Words: body • dialectics • Hegel • history • idealism • Marx • materialism • mind • nature • Timpanaro. (shrink)

Adorno thought that substantive change was not just desirable but also possible. He also offered ideas about what positive change might look like on the basis of his determinate negation of damaged life. This paper begins by exploring Adorno’s ideas about possibility and determinate negation. It also discusses his views about the sort of changes that might be made. Given Adorno’s ideas about the possibility of change, the paper ends by challenging Fabian Freyenhagen’s reading of Adorno as a methodological, epistemic, (...) and substantive negativist. (shrink)

Adorno continues to have an impact on disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, musicology and literary theory. An uncompromising critic, even as Adorno contests many of the premises of the philosophical tradition, he also reinvigorates that tradition in his concerted attempt to stem or to reverse potentially catastrophic tendencies in the West. This book serves as a guide through the intricate labyrinth of Adorno's work. Expert contributors make Adorno accessible to a new generation of readers without simplifying (...) his thought. They provide readers with the key concepts needed to decipher Adorno's often daunting books and essays. (shrink)

One aspect of Foucault's thought brings him much closer to Freud than many commentators believe. This Freudian “moment” in Foucault is formulated in the following dictum: the soul is the prison of the body. For Foucault, the modern soul is formed when the norms that govern disciplinary training and exercise are internalized. Once internalized, these norms affect our self-understanding and conduct. This paper focuses on Foucault's account of internalization. It shows that this Freudian moment in Foucault mitigates his criticisms of (...) the repressive hypothesis, but it also suggests a conception of interiority that can be interpreted as the modern instantiation of the rapport à soi. (shrink)

This study articulates the relational constituents of good care beyond techno‐rational competence. Neoliberal healthcare means that notions of care are readily commodified and reduced to quantifiable assessments and checklists. This novel research investigated accounts of good care provided by nursing, medical, allied and auxiliary staff. The Heideggerian phenomenological study was undertaken in acute medical‐surgical wards, investigating the contextual, communicative nature of care. The study involved interviews with 17 participants: 3 previous patients, 3 family members and 11 staff. Data were analysed (...) iteratively, dwelling with stories and writing and rewriting to surface the phenomenality of good care. The data set highlighted the following essential constituents: authentic care: caring encompassing solicitude (fürsorge); impromptu care: caring beyond role category; sustained care: caring beyond specialist parameters; attuned care: caring encompassing family and culture; and insightful care: caring beyond assessment and diagnosis. The findings are clinically significant because they indicate the importance of nurse leaders and educators harnessing the potential capacity of all healthcare workers to participate in good care. Healthcare workers reported that participating in or witnessing good care was uplifting and added meaning to their work, contributing to a sense of shared humanity. (shrink)

The proportion of the world’s population living in urban areas is increasing rapidly, with the vast majority of this growth in developing countries. As growing populations in urban areas demand greater food supplies, coupled with a rise in rural to urban migration and the need to create livelihood options, there has been an increase in urban agriculture worldwide. Urban agriculture is commonly discussed as a sustainable solution for dealing with gaps in the local food system, and proponents often highlight the (...) many social, environmental, and economic benefits. We argue that the sustainability of urban agriculture should not be assumed. There is a need for research to take a bottom-up approach, exploring the influence that city-level conditions have on livelihood decisions by farmers and how this shapes the practice of urban agriculture. This paper uses a case study for an in-depth look at urban agriculture in Delhi, India to understand from the farmers’ perspective how urban agriculture is practiced and what factors influence farmers’ livelihood decisions. Using a team-based, multi-method Rapid Assessment Process, data were collected through preliminary key informant interviews, field observations, semi-structured interviews with urban farmers, and geographic information systems mapping. This research provides an in-depth description of market-oriented urban agriculture in a developing country, explores how farmers’ livelihood decisions are embedded in the urban context, and discusses the potential of urban agriculture as a sustainable city-system. (shrink)

Background Moral distress is a serious problem for health care personnel. Surveys, individual interviews, and focus groups may not capture all of the effects of, and responses to, moral distress. Therefore, we used a new participatory action research approach—moral conflict assessment (MCA)—to characterize moral distress and to facilitate the development of interventions for this problem. Aim To characterize moral distress by analyzing responses of intensive care unit (ICU) personnel who participated in the MCA process. Research Design In this qualitative study, (...) we invited all ICU personnel at 3 urban hospitals to participate in individual or group sessions using the 8-step MCA tool. These sessions were facilitated by either a clinical ethicist or a counseling psychologist who was trained in this process. During each session, one of the researchers took notes and prepared a report for each MCA which were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Participants and Research Context A total of 24 participants took part in 15 sessions, individually or in groups; 14 were nurses and nurse leaders, 2 were physicians, and 8 were other health professionals. Ethical Considerations This study was approved by the Providence Health Care/University of British Columbia Behavioural Research Ethics Board. Each participant provided written informed consent. Results The main causes of moral distress related to goals of care, communication, teamwork, respect for patient’s preferences, and the managerial system. Suggested solutions included communication strategies and educational activities for health care providers, patients, family members, and others about teamwork, advance directives, and end-of-life care. Participants acknowledged that using the MCA process helped them to reflect on their own thoughts and use their moral agency to turn a distressing situation into a learning and improvement opportunity. Conclusions Using the MCA tool helped participants to characterize their moral distress in a systematic way, and to arrive at new potential solutions. (shrink)

This study articulates the relationship between conceptualisations of time and the accounts of good care in an acute setting. Neoliberal healthcare services, with their focus on efficiencies, predominantly calculate quality care based on time‐on‐the‐clock workforce management planning systems. However, the ways staff conceptualise and then relate to diverse meanings of time have implications for good care and for staff morale. This phenomenological study was undertaken in acute medical–surgical wards, investigating the contextual, temporal nature of care embedded in human relations. The (...) study interviews involved 17 participants: 11 staff, 3 previous patients and 3 family members. Data were analysed iteratively to surface the phenomenality of temporality and good care. The following constituents of the data set are explored that together illustrate the relationship between the conceptualisations of time and the accounts of good care in an acute setting: patient time as a relational journey; patient time, sovereign time and time ethics and time, teamwork and flow. The findings are clinically significant because they offer a contrasting narrative about the relationship between time and care quality. The experiences of giving and receiving good care are indivisible from how temporality is experienced and the social relations within which care is embedded. Healthcare staff experience temporality differently from patients and families, a point that healthcare participants in this study appeared to comprehend and accommodate. For all parties involved in providing care or being the recipient of care, however, the capacity to be present was valued as a humanising ethic of care. Our study reinforces the importance of not creating presumptive binaries about which temporal structures are more or less humanising—there is a place for a fast‐paced tempo, which can be experienced as being in the flow of human relations with one's team and on behalf of patients. (shrink)

The paper begins by comparing Adorno’s and Foucault’s accounts of the normalizing practices that socialize individuals, integrating them into Western societies. In this context, I argue that the animus against socialism can be read as an expression of profound anxiety about the existing socialization of reproduction in the West. In fact, Adorno and Foucault contend that really existing socialization has contained our political imagination to the point where even our ideas about alternatives only conjure up more of the same. Yet (...) Adorno and Foucault do outline what radical social change might look like. Since Foucault linked radical change to the development of a specifically socialist art of government, but offered few clues about what this might mean, the paper also explores Adorno’s work to put more flesh on the idea of a socialist art of government. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:REFLECTIONS ON GADAMER'S NOTION OF SPRACHLICHKEIT by Deborah Cook The works of Hans-Georg Gadamer recall the works of Martin Heidegger as those of Plato memorialize Socrates. The history of philosophy is constituted in such iterations. Indeed, die relationship between Gadamer and Heidegger offers us a paradigm for the understanding of die history of philosophy, manifesting as it does how this history is less marked by change than (...) by a ceaseless repetition of the same. Nevertheless, whUe Gadamer reappropriates the Heidegger of Being and Time, he does so with a different aim in mind; an aim very similar to that of Wilhelm Dilthey: to give to die human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) a solid epistemological foundation for their judgments of cultural artifacts. This foundation would also unsetde the truth value of scientificjudgments about natural objects by reinterpreting them. Heidegger's goal, on die odier hand, was to understand why diere is somediing radier dian nodiing. This led him to propose a fundamental ontology in Being and Time which he later based on die word (verbum). From the beginning, Gadamer could see in the word die power and importance Heidegger had neglected in Being and Time. Thus, on die basis of a philosophy or phenomenology of language, Gadamer pursues his end with the aid of Heidegger's original and ontologically significant formulation of die hermeneutic circle. For Gadamer, the hermeneutic circle of understanding (Verstehen), interpretation (Auslegung), and application (Anwendung) is a movement inscribed primarily in language. Using the literary text as the prototype for any object understood in the circle, he accounts for our appropriation of 84 Deborah Cook85 objects by attributing it to the power diat dwells in language. Gadamer terms this characteristic ofunderstanding its Sprachlichkeit or linguisticality. In our dealings with die world, we understand everytiring in it linguistically. As Heidegger suggested in his Letter on Humanism, language is the house of Being. It is language and language alone which accounts for die fact that we understand die world. Gadamer takes up this view diat language is die house of Being and claims diat understanding, interpretation, and application must be interpreted as linguistic phenomena because diey embody a unified whole — die understanding must not be divorced from interpretation — and because our traffic with objects takes a form analogous to mat of dialogue. It is my aim in mis discussion to consider this Sprachlichkeit as described in Truth and Method first in relation to the Heidegger ofBeing and Time and the later Heidegger and then with respect to our understanding of texts in reading. The Heidegger of Being and Time portrays the much celebrated hermeneutic circle in an original and ontologically significant way. The circle is, for Heidegger, an existentiale characterizing Dasein's very mode of being in the world and its meaning structures. It is no longer primarily a mediod. What is originally meaningful is not language but die structures of significance (the Zeichen ofequipment and the Bedeutsamkeit ofdie world) which are prior to language and from which language is derived. The circle is first and foremost a prelinguistic understanding of tiiose structures of significance toward which Dasein always transcends itself in its projects. The world and equipment are meaningful because Dasein invests diem with meaning. It is thus Dasein diat is responsible for die meaning of the world and equipment. Nonedieless, this meaning is not, for all that, arbitrary ; what underlies it, or makes it possible, is Being. Being (Sein) is die ontological foundation of pre-linguistic significance. It is that upon which meaning is grounded. While objects, dien, do not have meaning, meaning is bestowed on them by the Dasein diat seeks to render diem intelligible to itselfon die basis ofits immediate and pre-ontological understanding of Being. The hermeneutic circle characterizes die way in which diis prelinguistic and pre-ontological relationship to the world and to objects is deployed. In Heidegger's words, "To every understanding of die world, existence is understood with it and vice versa. All interpretation, moreover, operates in the forestructure which we have already characterized. Any interpretation which is to contribute to understanding must already have understood what is to be interpreted." Heidegger then goes on to claim that even the "... derivative ways... (shrink)

The paper begins with a broad description of Adorno’s and Foucault's relations to Marx. Its focus then narrows to describe the relation between the economy and the state in their work, and in particular, whether Adorno adopted Friedrich Pollock’s state capitalist thesis which asserts that state power now outflanks the market economy. The next section deals with exchange relations and power relations, and Foucault’s discussion of neo-liberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics comes to the fore. After questioning Foucault’s claim that (...) neo-liberalism effectively abandons exchange, I conclude that, while Adorno may well be right about the primacy of exchange relations, his analysis must be supplemented with an analysis of power because he recognizes that power superseded exchange in Nazi Germany and believes that the West still faces a resurgence of that horror. In fact, it was this very threat that impelled Foucault to devote much of his work to an analysis of power. (shrink)

This paper represents a preliminary attempt to explore Max Weber’s and Michel Foucault’s distinct accounts of how Christianity facilitated the development of capitalism in the West. Very generally, Weber and Foucault agree that it was the conducts that Christianity inculcated in individuals that aided capitalism’s develop­ment. Yet this paper shows that they disagree about what these conducts were, how they were inculcated, and in whom.

Identifying self-empowerment as the normative core of the liberal democratic project, Habermas proceeds to dilute the revolutionary character of that project. After describing Habermas' views about legitimation problems in the West, the author examines critically Habermas' claim that democratic practices of self-empowerment must be self-limiting, arguing that under some circumstances (which cannot be specified in advance), more radical forms of self-empowerment may be justified. The author also argues that Habermas' own acknowledgement of the revolutionary character of liberal democracy, along with (...) his criticisms of the manifestly unconstitutional circulation of power which characterizes existing liberal democratic states, may themselves provide the basis for a more radical conception of self-empowerment than Habermas will currently allow. (shrink)

»In vino metaphora« pomeni delno slavljenje Nietzschejevega preseganja nihi-lizma. Za afirmacijo življenja v voljo do moči kot izvoru vse dejavnosti, ki ustvarja vrednote se izkaže, da presega nihilizem, ki ga Nietzscheju pogosto očitajo njegovi kritiki. Ena od pomembnejših oblik volje do moči v tem smislu je intoksikacija ali dionizicno. V Nietzschejevem zgodnjem opusu je bilo dionizicno metafizično in umetniško načelo. Njegov kasnejši opus kontrastira dionizicno intoksikacijo z drugimi oblikami in dionizicno postane tako psihološki kot fiziološki pojav. Članek tudi primerja Nietzschejeve (...) poglede o intoksikaciji s pogledi Walter j a Benjamina ter ju obravnava v zvezi s pojavi kakršna sta rock glasba in severnoameriško izkustvo šestdesetih let. (shrink)

The social construction of the individual is a central theme in critical social theory. Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault address this theme throughout their work, offering important insights into individual identity and autonomy in the West. For Adorno, of course, individuation can be fully understood only with the aid of Freudian theory. However, since Foucault often criticized psychoanalysis, the paper will begin by comparing Adorno’s and Foucault’s positions on Freud’s theories of instinct and repression. Following this discussion, I shall (...) examine Adorno’s and Foucault’s distinct views on domination, comparing individuation as an effect of exchange relations in Adorno and of power relations in Foucault. This comparison will issue in a consideration of precisely what is being shaped into an individual. The final section of the paper will draw conclusions about the central features of individuation, while broaching the problem of whether power relations and exchange relations are now so powerful that resistance to them is effectively futile. (shrink)

“Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw” explores Adorno’s ideas about our mediated relationship with nature. The first section of the paper examines the epistemological significance of his thesis about the preponderance of the object while describing the Kantian features in his notion of mediation. Adorno’s conception of nature will also be examined in the context of a review of J. M. Bernstein’s and Fredric Jameson’s attempts to characterize it. The second section of the paper deals with Adorno’s Freudian account of (...) internal nature. While arguing against Joel Whitebook’s view that Adorno needs a concept of sublimation, I contend that Adorno’s genetic account of the relationship between nature and mind enables him to respond to the Freudian injunction to displace the id with the ego with a view to fostering autonomy. In the final section of the paper, problems with Adorno’s ideas about external and internal nature are briefly discussed. (shrink)

Philosophical aesthetics emerges out of eighteenth-century discussions of taste that paid scant attention to the experience of tasting and ingesting food. Sarah Worth diagnoses this historical oversight and offers an unexpected remedy. She argues that we should start our analysis of aesthetic taste over again, this time beginning with the pleasures of the tongue and mouth, and work out from there to consider the kinds of experience, knowledge, and appreciation that belong to eating and savoring. As she argues, our ability (...) to make gustatory discriminations and to determine what tastes good and why is not as different from our aesthetic judgments as philosophers and other aesthetic theorists might have led us to believe. In this engaging and readable book, Worth persuasively argues that food and its many tastes deserve serious philosophical consideration.Worth explores a number of puzzles that arise when we try to make sense of the concept of taste. She disentangles the metaphorical sense of taste understood as a reasoned judgment expressing aesthetic preferences from the literal sense of taste which involves our sensory experiences when food is in our mouths. She discusses good and bad taste, food and pleasure, authentic and inauthentic food, “food porn”—those impossibly glamourized images of food that we find in advertising and magazines and cookbooks and social media—and the role of recipes in the practice of cooking. She places our everyday experiences of food in the context of wider relationships and activities including cultivation, harvesting, processing, shipping, and purchasing, as well as the preparation and cooking meals for family and friends. The book is punctuated by many of the usual philosophical suspects (Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, Bullough and Sibley) as well as critical and feminist theorists, food sociologists, and a number of famous chefs including Fannie Farmer, Julie Child, and Nigella Lawson. If Worth endorses a particular metaphilosophy of food, it would be that of the Slow Food movement, which is the subject of Chapter Three. (shrink)

Chefs have been recognized as potentially important partners in efforts to promote local food systems. Drawing on the diffusion of innovation framework we (a) examine the characteristics of chefs and restaurants that have adopted local foods; (b) identified local food attributes valued by restaurants; (c) examine how restaurants function as opinion leaders promoting local foods; (d) explored network linkages between culinary and production organizations; and (e) finally, we consider some of the barriers to more widespread adoption of local foods in (...) the culinary community. Analyzing quantitative and qualitative data collected from interviews with individuals from 71 restaurants, we compare and contrast restaurants that utilize relatively large amounts of locally-produced ingredients with restaurants using few, if any, local products. Results reveal that chefs are most interested in intrinsic food qualities, such as taste and freshness, and less interested in production standards. As opinion leaders, chefs utilize signage, wait staff, and cooking classes to promote local foods; however, the diffusion process across restaurants, and between restaurants and producers, is limited by network associations. Structural barriers such as distribution problems and lack of convenience were identified as limiting more widespread use of locally-grown foods. We offer several implications of this research for further work that seeks to engage chefs as opinion leaders who are important to building greater support for local food systems. (shrink)

Economists and other social scientists in this century have often supported economic arguments by referring to positions taken by philosophers of science. This important new book looks at the reliability of this practice and, in the process, provides economists, social scientists, and historians with the necessary background to discuss methodological matters with authority. Redman first presents an accurate, critical, yet neutral survey of the modern philosophy of science from the Vienna Circle to the present, focusing particularly on logical positivism, sociological (...) explanations of science (Polanyi, Fleck, Kuhn), the Popper family, and the history of science. She then deals with economic methodology in the twentieth century, looking at a wide range of methodological positions, especially those supported by positions from the philosophy of science. She considers the myth of the feasibility of falsification in economics and, within the context of its significance for economics, discusses the interpretation of Kuhn's philosophy of science as consensus and the danger such a view represents to science. Appendices review the history of the is-ought dispute and list economists whose first works deal with methodological topics. Comprehensive, readable, and accessible to those with little background knowledge, Redman's book will appeal to a wide range of social scientists and philosophers of science. (shrink)

Germund Hesslow has argued recently [2] that a probabilistic theory of causality as advocated by Patrick Suppes [4] has two problems that a deterministic theory avoids. In this paper, I argue that Suppes' probabilistic causal calculus is free of each of these problems and, moreover, that several broader issues raised by Hesslow's discussion tend to support a probabilistic conception of causes.

The Well-Ordered Universe argues that Cavendish's natural philosophy, social and political philosophy, and medical theory share an underlying concern with order. This reveals interesting connections among Cavendish's natural philosophy and her views on gender, animals and the environment, and human health, and explains her commitment to monarchy and social hierarchy.

This guide leads readers systematically through the arguments of Mary Shepherd's two books. Chapters 1-4 cover the arguments in the Essay Upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (1824), where Shepherd argues that causal principles can be known by reason to be necessary truths and that causal inferences can be rationally justified. Shepherd's primary target in this work is Hume, but she also addresses the views of Thomas Brown and William Lawrence. Shepherd considered her second book, Essays on the Perception (...) of an External Universe, and Other Subjects Connected with the Doctrine of Causation (1827), to be an extension of the earlier project on causation; here she appeals to the causal principles established in the first book to argue that we can know through reason that an external world of continually-existing objects must exist independently of us, as the causes of our sensations. Chapter 5 of this Guide addresses Shepherd's accounts of sensation and reasoning; Chapters 6-9 lead the reader through the arguments of the Essays, as well laying out Shepherd's views on skepticism and Berkeleyan idealism, her accounts of mind and body, her philosophy of religion, and the solutions she offers to two puzzles about vision. (shrink)

During the past decade there has been a very effective campaign against any explanation of remembering whose basic concept is that of a causally mediating trace. This paper attempts to provide such an explanation by presenting an explicit deductive argument for the existence of the memory trace. The conclusion is shown to follow from reasonable, empirical assumptions of which the most interesting is a spatiotemporal contiguity thesis. Set-theoretic techniques are used to provide a framework of analysis and probabilistic definitions of (...) some causal notions, as that of a causal chain, are presented. (shrink)

A comprehensive bibliography of economic methodological works since 1860, this volume includes 2,244 entries divided into two primary sections. The first section covers works on economic methodology while Part Two deals with works on the philosophy of science. Many of the entries are annotated, including the classics in economic methodology, almost all of the books, and general works in the philosophy of science section. All other sections include an introduction to the topic and the articles collected under that heading.

The Zhuangzi is one of the richest early Chinese sources for exploring conceptualizations of the visceral human form. Zhuangzi presents the human frame as a corpus of flesh, organs, limbs, and bone; he dissects it before the reader's eyes, turning it inside out and joyfully displaying its fragmented joints, sundered limbs, and beautifully monstrous mutations. This body is a site of immolation and fragmentation that ultimately evokes a larger wholeness and completeness. Drawing and quartering the body, Zhuangzi paradoxically frees it (...) from ordinary mortality. -/- Sommer explores the fields of meaning of different terms for the human body found in the Zhuangzi: the body might appear there as a gong body 躬, a sanctimonious ritualized body; as a shen body 身, a site of familial and social personhood; or as a ti body 體, a complex, multilayered corpus of multiple parts, each of which is consubstantial with the whole. Most commonly, however, the body in the Zhuangzi is the xing 形, an elemental or structural form. Zhuangzi enlivens and develops the xing form in ways that are not seen in other early Chinese texts. He mutilates and mutates it such that boundaries between form and formlessness disappear, and the physical frame becomes incorporated into a larger common body that includes all of life and death. (shrink)

A view of inequality as a relationship between the advantaged and the disadvantaged has gained considerable currency in psychological research. However, the implications of this view for theories and interventions designed to reduce inequality remain largely unexplored. Drawing on the literature on close relationships, we identify several key features that a relational theory of social change should include.

This essay explores the relationships between labour and community formation in order to think through how, where, and when diasporic solidarities are imagined or refused. I draw on ethnographic research among Jamaican women contracted for seasonal work in US hotels to situate diasporic calls and responses in relation to specific contexts and a changing global political economy. I show how global geopolitical shifts not only shape the processes of identity formation and social reproduction, but also condition the perpetuation of notions (...) of nationalized racial hierarchies and ideologies of progress. I also show that hotel workers’ notions of ‘America’ and their commitment to the ‘American Dream’ shapes their subjectivities as migrant workers/consumers and, in their assessment, differentiates them from African-Americans, particularly those most immediately affected by Hurricane Katrina. In doing so, I demonstrate that one of the ideological hegemonies of diaspora is the idea that an individual's capacity to affect their own social mobility and that of their social network always outstrips the ‘locals’ in diasporic elsewheres. (shrink)

Two mechanisms are available for the repair of DNA double‐strand breaks (DSBs) in eukaryotic cells: homology directed repair (HDR) and non‐homologous end‐joining (NHEJ). While NHEJ is not restricted to a particular phase of the cell cycle, it is incapable of accurately repairing DBSs that have suffered a loss or gain of nucleotide sequence information. In contrast, HDR achieves accurate repair of such DSBs by use of a sister chromatid as a DNA template, but is restricted to cell cycle phases (S/G2) (...) when such templates are available. In this scheme, G1 cells appear to lack a mechanism for the accurate repair of certain DSBs, and an ability to use alternative templates would be highly advantageous. Considered here, therefore, is the possibility that RNA transcripts are used as templates for HDR. Potential mechanisms for transcript‐templated HDR, and ways in which it might be detected, are presented. BioEssays 28:78–83, 2006. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)