The question 'Why should I obey the law?' introduces a contemporary puzzle that is as old as philosophy itself. The puzzle is especially troublesome if we think of cases in which breaking the law is not otherwise wrongful, and in which the chances of getting caught are negligible. Philosophers from Socrates to H.L.A. Hart have struggled to give reasoned support to the idea that we do have a general moral duty to obey the law but, more recently, the greater number (...) of learned voices has expressed doubt that there is any such duty, at least as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

Mr. F. is a fifty‐year‐old father of two school‐aged daughters. Six years ago, he received a double lung transplant because he was suffering from interstitial lung disease, a fatal illness that causes suffocation by progressive scarring of the lungs. He is now experiencing chronic rejection of the transplant and is being considered to receive another. Without it, he is expected to survive only a year and a half. With it, his prognosis will improve, but the numbers are still not good. (...) Three years after his lung transplant, Mr. F. stopped attending his office visits. For a period of sixteen months he went without the studies and attention essential to posttransplant care. He stopped performing the required daily self‐monitoring of his lung function about eight months after his transplant, but he has maintained a regular exercise regimen. While lost to follow‐up, he continued to take his immunosuppressant medications, but he stopped taking medicine to control his high blood pressure because of its expense. (shrink)

Although clinical ethics consultation is a high-stakes endeavor with an increasing prominence in health care systems, progress in developing standards for quality is challenging. In this article, we describe the results of a pilot project utilizing portfolios as an evaluation tool. We found that this approach is feasible and resulted in a reasonably wide distribution of scores among the 23 submitted portfolios that we evaluated. We discuss limitations and implications of these results, and suggest that this is a significant step (...) on the pathway to an eventual certification process for clinical ethics consultants. (shrink)

Clinical ethics consultation is largely outside the scope of regulation and oversight, despite its importance. For decades, the bioethics community has been unable to reach a consensus on whether there should be accountability in this work, as there is for other clinical activities that influence the care of patients. The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, the primary society of bioethicists and scholars in the medical humanities and the organizational home for individuals who perform CEC in the United States, has (...) initiated a two‐step quality attestation process as a means to assess clinical ethics consultants and help identify individuals who are qualified to perform this role. This article describes the process. (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

Skeletal muscle formation is studied in vitro with myogenic cell lines and primary muscle cell cultures, and in vivo with embryos of several species. We review several of the notable advances obtained from studies of cultured cells, including the recognition of myoblast diversity, isolation of the MyoD family of muscle regulatory factors, and identification of promoter elements required for muscle‐specific gene expression. These studies have led to the ideas that myoblast diversity underlies the formation of the multiple types of fast (...) and slow muscle fibers, and that myogenesis is controlled by a combination of ubiquitous and muscle‐specific transcriptional regulators that may be different for each gene. We further review some unexpected results that have been obtained when ideas from work in culture have been tested in developing animals. The studies in vivo point to additional molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate muscle formation in the animal. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

As an alternative to universalism and particularism, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics proposes "intermedialities" as a new model of social relations and intercultural dialogue. The concept of "intermedialities" stresses the necessity of situating debates concerning social relations in the divergent contexts of new media and avant-garde artistic practices as well as feminist, political, and philosophical analyses.

In their article entitled “Ethical Particularism and Patterns”, Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith (JPS henceforth) argue that moral particularism is a cognitively implausible theory since it appears to entail the view that one might have a skill that is not grounded in an ability to recognise and represent natural patterns in the world. This charge echoes the complaints of computational theorists of cognition against their embodied cognition counterparts, namely that, theories of cognition that eschew talk of mental (...) representation are implausible qua theories of cognition. In both debates, the cognitive role of generalisation is central to the discussion; however, contrary to the received wisdom, I want to suggest that the dispute is not between generalisation or mental representation on the one hand and no generalisation or mental representation on the other, but rather between what I will call global and local generalisation. Using the dialogue between JPS and Dancy (our paradigm particularist) to frame this discussion, I show that by replacing Dancy's connectionist model for particularist reasoning with a case-based one, we not only vindicate his response to JPS, but we also gain insight into how it is the global/local distinction rather than the generalisation/no generalisation distinction that divides the two views. (shrink)

Only when students feel engaged both socially and academically can schools and teachers lay the groundwork to motivate achievement. This volume, the fifth in the _Harvard Education Letter _Spotlight series, brings together fifteen seminal articles that examine research and practice on these complex and interrelated issues. Foreword by Sam M. Intrator, associate professor of education and of the Program in Urban Studies at Smith College and codirector of Smith’s Urban Education Initiative. Contributors include: Michael Bitz, James Paul Gee, (...) Pedro A. Noguera, Laura Pappano, George Sugai, and Richard Weissbourd. (shrink)

Opponents of ceteris paribus laws are apt to complain that the laws are vague and untestable. Indeed, claims to this effect are made by Earman, Roberts and Smith in this volume. I argue that these kinds of claims rely on too narrow a view about what kinds of concepts we can and do regularly use in successful sciences and on too optimistic a view about the extent of application of even our most successful non-ceteris paribus laws. When it comes (...) to testing, we test ceteris paribus laws in exactly the same way that we test laws without the ceteris paribus antecedent. But at least when the ceteris paribus antecedent is there we have an explicit acknowledgment of important procedures we must take in the design of the experiments — i.e., procedures to control for “all interferences” even those we cannot identify under the concepts of any known theory. (shrink)

A missed phone call. A misheard word. An inaudible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death. Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates for the first time the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in recent European philosophy, as well as the political stakes of this entanglement. Nowhere is aurality more pivotal than in the dialogue between biopolitical (...) theory and deconstruction about the power over and of life. Closer inspection of these debates reveals that the main points of contention coalesce around figures of sound and listening: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone rings. Shattering Biopolitics stages a series of "over-hearings" between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben who often mishear or completely miss hearing in trying to hear too much. Notions of power and life are further diffracted as Hélène Cixous, Catherine Malabou, and Jean-Luc Nancy join in this high-stakes game of telephone. This self-destructive character of aurality is akin to the chanciness and risk of death that makes life all the more alive for its incalculability. Punctuating the book are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality's subordination and resistance to biopower from racialized chokeholds and anti-migrant forensic voice analysis to politicized speech acts and activist practices of listening. Shattering Biopolitics advances the burgeoning field of sound studies with a new, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the political imbrications of its object of inquiry. Above all, it is sound's capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Eminently Practical Mr. Hume or Still Relevant After AU These Years Nancy Davlantes The practice, therefore, of contracting debt will almost infallibly be abused, in every government. It would scarcely be more imprudent togive aprodigal son a credit in every banker's shop in London, than to impower a statesman to draw bills, in this manner, upon posterity. (David Hume, Political Discourses, 1752) If we do not act (...) promptly, the imbalances in the economy are such that the effects ofthe deficit will be increasingly felt and with some immediacy. (Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, 1988) When David Hume penned his essays some 250 years ago, he was concerned that Britain's rising national debt — a debt fueled by war andpoor debt management that saw fit to mortgage thepublic revenues, and to trust that posterity will pay offthe incumbrances contracted by their ancestors — would eventually bankrupt the country. What the poor man might think ofa country facing a budget deficit of $155 billion, a trade deficit of some $130 billion, and a national debt — can you count the zeroes? — of a staggering $2.6 trillion, one can only imagine. Now imagination, as it happens, plays a central role in Hume's science ofman — it is the imagination, after all, that is free to separate, combine, and transpose its ideas — but asking it to conceive ofthe U.S. economy as it nears the end ofthe 20th century might indeed by asking too much. Was Hume particularly prescient? Probably not. What he was was a keen observer of the human experience who believed the principles of human nature formed the foundation of the four sciences of logic, morals, criticism, and politics. And in those four sciences, he wrote, is comprehended almost every thing, which it can any way import us to be acquainted with, or which can tend either to the improvement or ornament ofthe human mind. It is within the science of politics that considers men as united in society, and dependent on each other (T xv) that Hume wrote his nine Volume XVI Number 1 45 NANCY DAVLANTES economie essays, all but one ofwhich were published in 1752 under the title?? Political Discourses. Before taking a look at the essays themselves, some consideration should be given to Hume's place in the history of economic thought, to his contributions to that "dismal science," and especially to some of the underlying principles in his science of Man. The World as Hume Knew It David Hume wrote in an England in which much of the groundwork had been laid for the Industrial Revolution that was officially to begin in the latter 18th century. It was a time oftransition, between the dying years of a guild system controlled by artisans and a rising merchant class that both owned the materials and marketed the finished goods, between a primarily agrarian society of landowners and tenants and one increasingly urban as the centers ofindustry andproduction moved into the cities. Hume, while it is unlikely that he foresaw the enormous social and economic upheavals that were to come with the mechanization of industry and the development of an extensive factory system, was certainly aware that an evolution was taking place in society, and one he was emphatic in his approval of. As he himself says in his essay, "On Interest," But when men's industry encreases, and their views enlarge, it is found, that the most remote parts ofthe state can assist each other as well as the more contiguous, and that this intercourse ofgood offices may be carried on to the greatest extent and intricacy. Hence the origin of merchants, one of the most useful races ofmen... Merchants... beget industry, by serving as canals to convey it through every corner ofthe state. In praise of the merchant class he differed from his close friend Adam Smith, for whom "merchants were more often anti-social monopolists than beneficent promoters of well-being." That is not to say that Hume thought all was rosy — indeed, as quoted above, he was alarmed at the Britain's mounting public debt, and no doubt realized that a growing landless class would bring with it a host of social issues and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religion within the Limits of History Alone: Pragmatic Historicism and the Future of Theology by Demian WheelerNancy FrankenberryReligion within the Limits of History Alone: Pragmatic Historicism and the Future of Theology. Demian Wheeler. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020. ix+511pp. $95.00 hardcover.The history of Christian theology since the Enlightenment has been a series of unsuccessful attempts to evade a stark dilemma: either fundamentalism or atheism. Contemporary liberal theologians have argued (...) that this dilemma is [End Page 97] entirely too stark, too eliminative of the creative possibilities of revisionism. Liberal theology has wanted to revise and reinterpret Christian faith in conformity with history, reason, a scientific worldview, and a sophisticated grasp of the significance of symbol, analogy, and metaphor in the lives of religious practitioners. Eliminating both supernaturalism and anthropomorphism, liberal theology would make Christianity more intellectually tenable, rescuing it from the literalist hands of fundamentalists, without collapsing it into the equally literalist arms of atheism.The extreme difficulty of evading the either-or dilemma of choosing either fundamentalism or atheism landed liberal theology in a catch-22: either it rejected the intellectually untenable elements of belief, in which case it eliminated just those beliefs that constituted its appeal to popular piety, or it retained certain supernaturalistic and anthropomorphic beliefs, understood as “symbolic,” in which case it forfeited intellectual intelligibility and any appeal to sophisticated moderns. The first version is far too weakened for ordinary American Christians, and the second is still too religious for the masters of suspicion and their followers.It is for this reason that the history of American religious thought reveals a grave irony that complicates the hopes of pragmatic historicists, the protagonists of this superbly clear and rich, deep dive into authors that most readers of this journal will have read, but perhaps not have synthesized as thoroughly as has Demian Wheeler. That irony, as Wheeler knows, is that the more intellectual changes pragmatic historicists make to traditional Christian belief, the more they help to make unbelief viable. The question then arises as to whether pragmatic historicism is simply a half-way house on the road to an atheistic destination. Or, if the word “atheism” sounds too old-fashioned, like something that went out with steamships and girdles, then “agnosticism.” Or, if “agnosticism” still smacks too much of stale debates, why not “pantheism,” as recently revived by Mary-Jane Rubenstein?The detailed development, the verbal bravura, and the measured knowledge in this book are astonishingly impressive. Wheeler’s initial thesis is that liberal theology, particularly of the early Chicago School, and American pragmatism, particularly C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, provide important resources for meeting the challenges posed by the rise of historical consciousness. Sheila Davaney has designated this tradition “pragmatic historicism,” and Wheeler aims to show its compelling import for the future of theology itself. A good deal of the book is devoted to exposition and defense of the views of: Ernst Troeltsch, James, Dewey, George Burman Foster, Shirley Jackson Case, Shailer Matthews, and Gerald Birney Smith, down to Delwin Brown, Sheila Davaney, and William Dean (Wheeler’s teachers at Iliff), along with Gordon [End Page 98] Kaufman and Sallie McFague. In the last chapter, Wheeler draws expertly on the theological views of Bernard Loomer, Michael Hogue, Donald Crosby, and Wesley Wildman. Such an all-star cast deserves to receive all the attention they can get. Wheeler’s occasional emendations come as glittering nuggets of constructive engagement. He does not simply call for a pragmatic historicist approach to theology, but he executes one as well, showing in more detail than his predecessors what it means for such topics as religious diversity (chapters 3 and 4), the nature of authority (chapter 5), the meaning of critical realism, fallibilism, and an altered correspondence theory of truth (chapters 6 and 7), and the doctrine of God (chapter 8). With the same exhaustive treatment that his doktorvater Gary Dorrien has devoted to liberal theology’s history and contemporary expressions, Wheeler carefully saves pragmatic historicism from relativism, expertly critiques all the leading theologians of the “inclusivist,” “exclusivist,” and “pluralist” theologies of religions, while arguing the superiority of his own “particularist” corrective to pluralistic... (shrink)

One of the most significant developments in the art world of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s has been the rise to prominence of art made by minority cultures. Race, Sex, and Gender examines the controversial challenges these groups present to today's artists and critics. Works by African-Americans, feminists, homosexuals, and Latino-Hispanics - once considered marginal - have come to transform contemporary art. As this so-called minority art has moved into a more dominant position, museums - once official symbols of culture (...) - have formed a more secure alliance with the avant-garde. The result is that "minority" art has become, in effect, our most major concern. In this provocative volume, art historian Edward Lucie-Smith seeks to determine how these different groups came to acclaim, and how they have revolutionized the kind of art shown in museums and galleries. Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nancy Spero, Hannah Wilke, Larry Fuente, Cheri Samba, and Martin Puryear are among those artists whose work is pictured and discussed as Lucie-Smith probes issues of racial identity, sexual orientation, and gender politics. Statements from the artists as well as from theoreticians and critics are given, offering additional commentaries on these crucial new topics. Organized by profusely illustrated chapters devoted to specific minority groups, Race, Sex, and Gender is a timely introduction to the issues that are shaping contemporary art. (shrink)

Rigorous attention has been paid to moral distress among healthcare professionals, largely in high-income settings. More obscure is the presence and impact of moral distress in contexts of chronic poverty and structural violence. Intercultural ethics research and dialogue can help reveal how the long-term presence of morally distressing conditions might influence the moral experience and agency of healthcare providers. This article discusses mixed-methods research at one nongovernmental social support agency and clinic in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Chronic levels of moral (...) distress and perceptions of moral harm among clinicians in this setting were both violent, following Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ use of that term, and a source of exceptional and innovative care. Rather than glossing over the moral variables of work in such desperate extremes, ethnography in these settings reveals novel skills and strategies for managing moral distress. (shrink)

University based academic Research Ethics Boards (REB) face the particularly difficult challenge of trying to achieve representation from a variety of disciplines, methodologies and research interests. Additionally, many are currently facing another decision – whether to have students as REB members or not. At Ryerson University, we are uniquely situated. Without a medical school in which an awareness of the research ethics review process might be grounded, our mainly social science and humanities REB must also educate and foster awareness of (...) the ethics review process throughout the academic community. Our Board has had and continues to have students as active members. While there are challenges to having students as Board members, these are clearly outweighed by the advantages, for both the academic community and the future of ethically sound research in the social sciences and humanities. Moreover, the challenges are often based on misconceptions and can be easily overcome through increased education and understanding of the research ethics review process by the academic community at large. The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss the experiences, advantages and challenges of having students as REB members. The advantages of having students as REB members include the following: (1) Students are the proposed participants in many of our reviewed protocols and student members may illuminate unique issues of participation. (2) Students are active and highly engaged members of the REB. (3) Having students on the REB enhances awareness of research ethics within the University. (4) Student REB members have an opportunity to mentor other students and provide leadership for both undergraduate and graduate students. (5) Students are more vigorously recruited than faculty members and often apply for student positions with enthusiasm and preparation. (6) In creating an atmosphere of excellence in research, engaging students at the beginning of their research career will help in creating tomorrow’s leaders in research and research ethics. The challenges of having students as REB members include the following: (1) Faculty members may be uneasy regarding the prospect of students reviewing protocols. (2) Faculty members may be concerned about confidentiality and respect with students reviewing faculty research protocols. (3) There may be an increased burden for students who serve as members on an REB. (4) There is concern that students will offer less continuous service to the REB. (5) There is a common misconception that students do not have the experience to carry out ethical reviews. While there are challenges from faculty members and others regarding having students as REB members, these challenges are often based on misconceptions about the nature of the REB work and the ethics review process in general. These challenges are also often based on the misconception of the ethics review process as one of peer review and evaluation, instead of a community-based and inclusive process. Having student members is a long-term strategy for both overcoming the misconceptions of the REB as a “necessary evil” and for fostering an awareness of the imperative for ethically sound research in the social sciences and humanities. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the claim that any physical theory will have an extremely limited domain of application because 1) we have to use distinct theories to model different situations in the world and 2) no theory has enough textbook models to handle anything beyond a highly simplified situation. Against the first claim, I show that many examples used to bolster it are actually instances of application of the very same classical theory rather than disjoint theories. Thus, there is (...) a hidden unity to the world of classical physics that is usually overlooked (by, for example, Nancy Cartwright who argues for the claims above). Against the second claim, I show that the practice of classical physics involves an enormous (infinite) number of models the use of which cannot be written off as merely ad hoc. Thus, although classical physics cannot, of course, model every situation in nature, it has a much larger domain than some would have us believe. (shrink)

This article examines a neglected but crucial feature of Honneth's critical theory: its use of a concept of recognition to articulate the norms that are apposite for the contemporary world of work. The article shows that from his first writings on the structure of critical social theory in the early 1980s to the recent exchange with Nancy Fraser on recognition and redistribution, the problem of grounding a substantive critique of work under capitalism has been central to Honneth's enterprise. This (...) answers the routine objection that the recognition paradigm fails to take into account economic or material realities. At the same time, Honneth's approach to the critique of work has undergone significant shifts, and it is yet to be fully developed. The article traces these changes in direction, and it proposes an expressivist conception of work that builds upon the `normative content' of the concept of work described by Honneth in his 1980 essay `Work and Instrumental Action'. (shrink)

The question of whether fluid intelligence can be differentiated from general intelligence in older adults is addressed. Data indicate that the developmental pattern of performance on fluid tasks differs from the pattern of general intelligence. These results suggest that it is important to identify changes in fluid cognitive functions associated with frontal lobe decline, as they may be early indicators of cognitive decline. (Published Online April 5 2006).

“The contemporary” is a phrase in frequent use in artworld discourse as a placeholder term for broader, world-picturing concepts such as “the contemporary condition” or “contemporaneity”. Brief references to key texts by philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, and Peter Osborne often tend to suffice as indicating the outer limits of theoretical discussion. In an attempt to add some depth to the discourse, this paper outlines my approach to these questions, then explores in some detail what these three theorists (...) have had to say in recent years about contemporaneity in general and contemporary art in particular, and about the links between both. It also examines key essays by Jean-Luc Nancy, Néstor García Canclini, as well as the artist-theorist Jean-Phillipe Antoine, each of whom have contributed significantly to these debates. The analysis moves from Agamben’s poetic evocation of “contemporariness” as a Nietzschean experience of “untimeliness” in relation to one’s times, through Nancy’s emphasis on art’s constant recursion to its origins, Rancière’s attribution of dissensus to the current regime of art, Osborne’s insistence on contemporary art’s “post-conceptual” character, to Canclini’s preference for a “post-autonomous” art, which captures the world at the point of its coming into being. I conclude by echoing Antoine’s call for artists and others to think historically, to “knit together a specific variety of times”, a task that is especially pressing when presentist immanence strives to encompasses everything. (shrink)

Continental philosophy is in crisis. With the last few decades spent mainly on a “great figures” approach, this tradition is having to come to terms with the fact that most of its luminaries have now passed away. Derrida’s death in 2004 sent shockwaves through the community and seems to have functioned as marker for the generation before my own (I was not yet an undergraduate when it happened). For the rest of us, 2021 will have been a huge year as (...) it marked the loss of Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the few remaining giants of this tradition who was engaged in the task of thinking to the very end. A friend of mine recently ran a seminar with the title “contemporary continental philosophy” in which every single author on the reading list was dead. A strange understanding of “contemporary”! The course was well-received and I have no doubt the students learned a lot, but it illustrates the scale of the problem we face. At some point, the great sequence that began in France in the 1960s will have to be thought of as another period in the history of philosophy, but our tradition does not seem ready to make that transition just yet. For this to happen, philosophy may first have to take another step, or make another beginning. (shrink)

Historical dynamics around feminism, race, and rape discouraged extensive early Black involvement in anti-rape work in the United States. In Los Angeles, concern among women of color in the movement and a state initiative to fund poorly served areas converged to produce two new Black rape crisis centers in the mid-1980s. Ironically, state funding, an otherwise conservative influence on the anti-rape movement, has facilitated the progressive goal of expanding racial and ethnic diversity in the Los Angeles anti-rape movement. Racially homogeneous (...) organizations contributed more to diversifying the movement than integration within organizations. Despite differences in political perspective, women from older feminist groups and the new community-oriented centers now successfully work in coalition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Warn Me If I Approach the Melody” HELAINE L. SMITH In the 1950s on Saturday night TV, Sid Caesar performed comic sketches for a full hour. In one sketch Carl Reiner played Edward R. Murrow interviewing Caesar as the jazz musician Progress Hornsby. At a certain point Murrow asks Hornsby, “To what do you attribute your band’s great success?” and Hornsby answers, “Well, we have special equipment that (...) warns us if we get anywhere near the melody.” And so it must be with Nancy Worman and all those classicists who approach classics and literature as she does—special equipment to warn them whenever they get anywhere near a responsible reading of the text.* Her argument, cast in sentences whose words, like the amphisbaena, turn back on themselves or are unrecognizable as spoken or written English, boils down to (1) Greek men were colonialists and imperialists; (2) Greek tragedy celebrated men of this sort; (3) there arose, quite to the surprise and possibly to the consternation of its authors, women in their plays who were strong and violent rebels against the oppressive social order; (4) Virginia Woolf, whose feminism is not quite as pure as we’d like it, is not so bad after all because, if you look closely, pulling out the odd word here and there, decontextualizing it, inserting its decontextualized meaning elsewhere and mistranslating any Greek phrase that stands in your way, you discover—voila!—that she held views of Greece and Greek tragedy identical to those of radical feminism and shaped her novels, stories, and essays to reflect that view. Worman’s feminist audience, as familiar as it must be with feminist reception theory, would appear, from the unusual number of play summaries, elementary descriptions of the arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 *Nancy Worman, Virginia Woolf’s Greek Tragedy. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. xii + 152 pages. $102.00. 150 “warn me if i approach the melody” origin and structure of Greek drama, and serious mistranslations in her book, to be unfamiliar with ancient drama, with basic Greek, and perhaps with Virginia Woolf as well. Her book has from such scholars received copious praise. But for those who begin less thematically burdened and who, as a colleague of mine liked to say, “worship at the altar of the text,” Worman’s methods turn scholarly inquiry on its head, not because of what they conclude, but because her conclusions are reached the same way the Queen of Hearts insisted trials be conducted: verdict first, evidence afterwards. Nor does Worman’s text have any discernible structure. Material within chapters bears fleeting connection to chapter titles and subheads. Points appear, vanish, and reappear, like the Cheshire cat, suggesting prior academic papers, here combined. This overall disorganization weakens the book, as does the non-linear quality of individual points. The organization of this review, therefore, is not thematic but chronological : it addresses those works of Woolf’s to which Worman gives attention, and presents them by date of publication. A Room of One’s Own appears nowhere in Worman’s text, and To the Lighthouse receives only minimal attention. Medea is nowhere mentioned in the favored categories of proto-feminist and fierce woman. While The Trojan Women and The Birds would both have served Worman well in arguing that Greek theatre reflected Athenian imperialism, they too make no appearance in her text. Instead, she casts Sophocles’ Electra and Antigone as fierce women and their plays, together with the Agamemnon, as emblematic of Athenian aggression and patriarchy. And so, in the forced nature of Worman’s translations and in the reductiveness of her assessment of Woolf, we see the consequences of a determination to bend texts to serve popular theories. “a dialogue upon mount pentelicus” (1906) woolf’s views of Greece reveal the complexity of great writing. Woolf frequently satirizes classicists who take their Helaine L. Smith 151 learning to be a sign of natural excellence, those for whom knowledge of Greek is simply a marker of position and rank. But for those who love such things for their own sake, or come to love them, as the tourists eventually do in “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus,” she... (shrink)

This article examines the cross-generational continuity of community work performed by women living and working in low-income communities and demonstrates the complex ways in which gender, race-ethnicity, and class contribute to the social construction of mothering. The analysis of low-income women's community work challenges definitions of mothering that are limited to biological and legal expressions, thus neglecting the significance of community-based nurturing work for geographic communities and racial-ethnic and class-based groups. The analysis utilizes a broadened understanding of labor and contests (...) the divisions between paid and unpaid work traditionally used to discuss women's work. The article compares and contrasts the experiences of African-American and Latina community workers from low-income communities in New York City and Philadelphia. The findings of the research further demonstrate the ways that knowledge generated from the standpoint of women from different classes and racial-ethnic backgrounds transforms our understanding of politics, labor, and mothering. (shrink)

Concerns for the more-than-human world are consistently marginalized by dominant forms of philosophical and political humanism, characterized here by their unquestioning acceptance of human sovereignty over the world. A genuinely ecological political philosophy needs post-humanist concepts to begin articulating alternative notions of “ecological communities” as ethical and political, and not just biological realities. Drawing upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of community, epharmosis, a largely defunct term of art in early plant ecology, can be reappropriated to signify the creative ethical/political/ecological interrelations (...) that together constitute ecological communities. (shrink)

Concerns for the more-than-human world are consistently marginalized by dominant forms of philosophical and political humanism, characterized here by their unquestioning acceptance of human sovereignty over the world. A genuinely ecological political philosophy needs post-humanist concepts to begin articulating alternative notions of “ecological communities” as ethical and political, and not just biological realities. Drawing upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of community, epharmosis, a largely defunct term of art in early plant ecology, can be reappropriated to signify the creative ethical/political/ecological interrelations (...) that together constitute ecological communities. (shrink)

After forty years of legalized abortion in the United States, the results are starting to come in on the impact this “freedom” has had on women. Bearing an immense burden of blood guilt (shared by the men who support abortion), they have grown hardened and even hostile toward motherhood, domesticity, and children. This has in turn put enormous cultural pressure on those women who “choose” to stay at home to bring up their children, creating a war on women from both (...) directions. (shrink)

This article offers a reconceptualization of “the political” from the standpoint of women working in and for low-income neighborhoods, with special emphasis on the contradictions between their actions as community workers and their understandings of the political aspects of their work. The author also examines how their gender and race identity influenced their political consciousness and practice. The date are drawn from in-depth interviews with forty-two perdominantly African American and Puerto Rican women from New York City and Philadelphia who were (...) hired in community action programs established by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. (shrink)

The article reflects upon Michael Krausz’s account of contemporary debates between singularity and pluralism in the determination ofrightness, and uses that occasion to ask after the larger course of which these debates are a part. Looking to the companion effort to determine truth and rightness at law, it finds telling echoes of those debates in the modem history of legal thought, and sketches that history to the end of drawing out its implications for the project at determining rightness more generally. (...) These sobering implications, itsuggests, call us to rethink the question of the relation of rightness to ontology. (shrink)

This response to Richard Lennan’s presentation of Rahner’s call for a new understanding of faith raises questions about 1) the rationale behind Rahner’s “short formulas,” 2) how feminist challenges are understood, and 3) the place of “the ecclesial” in a secular milieu.

_American Philosophy: The Basics_ introduces the history of American thought from early Calvinists to the New England Transcendentalists and from contract theory to contemporary African American philosophy. The key question it asks is: what it is that makes American Philosophy unique? This lively and compelling book moves through key periods in the development of American thought from the founding fathers to the transcendentalists and pragmatists to contemporary social commentators. Readers are introduced to: Some of the most important thinkers in American (...) history including Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Paine, Charles Sanders Pierce, Thomas Kuhn, Cornel West and many more Developments in five key areas of thought: epistemology, metaphysics, religion and ethics, social philosophy, and political philosophy The contributions of American women, African-Americans and Native Americans. Featuring suggestions for further reading and assuming no prior knowledge of philosophy, this is an ideal first introduction for anyone studying or interested in the history of American thought. (shrink)