We applaud the spirit of MacNeilage's attempts to better explain the evolution and cortical control of speech by drawing on the vast literature in nonhuman primate neurobiology. However, he oversimplifies motor cortical fields and their known individual functions to such an extent that he undermines the value of his effort. In particular, MacNeilage has lumped together the functional characteristics across multiple mesial and lateral motor cortex fields, inadvertantly creating two hypothetical centers that simply may not exist.

Ancients and moderns alike have constructed arguments and assessed theories on the basis of common sense and intuitive judgments. Yet, despite the important role intuitions play in philosophy, there has been little reflection on fundamental questions concerning the sort of data intuitions provide, how they are supposed to lead us to the truth, and why we should treat them as important. In addition, recent psychological research seems to pose serious challenges to traditional intuition-driven philosophical inquiry. Rethinking Intuition brings together a (...) distinguished group of philosophers and psychologists to discuss these important issues. Students and scholars in both fields will find this book to be of great value. (shrink)

The weight of trace, that drips from structure. A memory encased in material – the constant desire to contain, to orchestrate the transient. Is memory. Flesh against the hardest material. What becomes of the energies that move against form?

Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heather Hillsburg (2013) and Kate Eichhorn (2015) have argued that it might be recuperated for feminist ends. This article mobilises the call to rethink nostalgia through an analysis of the feminist stories and storytelling in Joan Braderman’s 2009 film, The Heretics. A documentary about a feminist collective founded in New York City in the 1970s, The Heretics sets up a way of thinking about feminism’s past that is steeped (...) in nostalgia. Throughout the film, Braderman maintains that the 1970s were ‘a time when everything seemed possible’. By contrast, she assesses the moment in which she makes the film as a time in which ‘fear corrodes even the young’. As feminist viewers of the film who did not (indeed by virtue of age could not) experience feminism in the 1970s, we initially read the nostalgic narrative of loss framing the film with suspicion. By drawing on feminist scholarship on nostalgia and feminist storytelling, however, we argue that nostalgia can function in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call a reparative mode that enriches the relationships that feminist scholars, activists and cultural workers bear to feminisms’ pasts. (shrink)

We all have moral beliefs. But what if one beleif conflicts with another? DePaul argues that we have to make our beliefs cohere, but that the current coherence methods are seriously flawed. It is not just the arguments that need to be considered in moral enquiry. DePaul asserts that the ability to make sensitive moral judgements is vital to any philosophical inquiry into morality. The inquirer must consider how her life experiences and experiences with literature, film and theatre (...) have influenced her capacity for making moral judgments and attempt to ensure that this capacity is neither naive nor corrupted. (shrink)

The idea of a virtue has traditionally been important in ethics, but only recently has gained attention as an idea that can explain how we ought to form beliefs as well as how we ought to act. Moral philosophers and epistemologists have different approaches to the idea of intellectual virtue; here, Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski bring work from both fields together for the first time to address all of the important issues. It will be required reading for anyone (...) working on either side of the debate. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between feminist theologies and women’s poetry and fiction. Using Sheila Hassell Hughes’ work on this same relationship as a point of departure, I contend that feminist theologians rely on literature by women for a variety of reasons, and I focus on how literature by women offers feminist theologies a multitude of examples of women’s experience, embodied experience in particular. If women’s experience is the starting point for a truly feminist theology, women’s writing seems an obvious (...) source of the theologian’s materialist and semiotic quest. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis play is based on the author’s ethnographic and archival research on the French philosopher Henry Corbin’s years in Tehran, Iran. Corbin taught in Tehran between 1947 and 1978 at the Institute of Philosophy, which he founded. The play is a dialogue between a fictional university student, Ali, and his mentor, the French philosopher Henry Corbin, with interjections from the angel of history. Ali is trying to come to grips with his love of Islamic mystical philosophy and its dangerous appropriation (...) by political actors of the time, as well as with a deeply personal mourning. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. (shrink)

The Iran–Iraq war, which took place from 1980 to 1988, was one of the longest and bloodiest conventional wars in the history of the last century. The war was also the largest mobilization of the Iranian population and was achieved primarily by producing and promoting a culture of martyrdom based on religious themes found in Shi'i Islam. It was the war that created and consolidated what we know today as the Islamic republic of Iran. For years there have been two (...) popular public discourses in post-war Iran: the secular discourse, which is to evade, to ignore, to escape to the Caspian; and then the state's discourse, of the strong, mourning women and the heroic martyrs. It is the group of women who exist betwixt the dominant discourses of the secular versus the religious and the idea of womanhood versus motherhood that I am interested in exploring here by looking at the most recent work of a secular female filmmaker, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad. (shrink)

How does an object persist through change? How can a book, for example, open in the morning and shut in the afternoon, persist through a change that involves the incompatible properties of being open and being shut? The goal of this reader is to inform and reframe the philosophical debate around persistence; it presents influential accounts of the problem that range from classic papers by W. V. O. Quine, David Lewis, and Judith Jarvis Thomson to recent work by contemporary philosophers. (...) The authors take on the question of persistence by examining three broad approaches: perdurantism, which holds that change over time is analogous to change over space; exdurantism, according to which identity over time is analogous to identity across possible worlds; and endurantism, which holds that ordinary objects persist by enduring. Each of these approaches appears to be coherent, but each also has its own metaphysical problems. Persistence includes papers that argue for perdurantism, exdurantism, or endurantism, as well as papers that explore some metaphysical difficulties challenging each account. In this way the collection allows readers to balance the trade-offs of each approach in terms of intuitiveness, theoretical attractiveness, and elegance.Contributors:Yuri Balashov, William Carter, Graeme Forbes, Sally Haslanger, Katherine Hawley, H. S. Hestevold, Mark Hinchliffe, Mark Johnston, Roxanne Marie Kurtz, David K. Lewis, Ned Markosian, D. H. Mellor, W. V. O. Quine, Theodore Sider, Richard Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman. (shrink)

In Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation (Oxford University Press, 2021), Daniel Groll argues why people who use donated sperm or eggs to have children ought to use a known donor. His main argument for this position is that a child conceived in this way will have a foreseeable, significant interest in acquiring genetic knowledge. However, Groll addresses issues that are of interest to anyone who thinks about the nature of families and parent‐child relationships. (...) For example, what obligations or responsibilities does a parent have to their child? What makes someone a parent? And what is the significance to one's identity of knowing about one's genetic origins? While a claim about access to genetic knowledge lies at the heart of Groll's book, he is all too aware of the social forces that influence people to care about their genetic origins. His prescriptions, ultimately, reflect this reality. (shrink)

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals have been identified as posing risks to reproductive health and may have intergenerational effects. However, responses to the potential harms they pose frequently rely on medicalised understandings of the body and normative gender identities. This article develops an intersectional feminist framework of intergenerational justice in response to the potential risks posed by endocrine-disrupting chemicals. We examine critiques of endocrine disruptors from feminist, critical disability and queer standpoints, and explore issues of race and class in exposures. We argue that (...) responding to the risks posed by endocrine disruptors such as brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and phthalates requires developing a theory of intergenerational justice that recognises relationality and transcorporeality, and that also recognises harm in terms of suffering, not in terms of difference. (shrink)

Over the course of the past few decades, comparative political theory has acquired a measure of institutional legitimacy and intellectual recognition as part of the ongoing, interdisciplinary challenge to prevailing academic categories, coordinates, and borders. This arrival has been accompanied by a conspicuous focus on methodology both by those who claim the mantle of comparative political theory and those who reject it. The following reflections read this focus symptomatically, as revealing intellectual, institutional, and professional exigencies rather than as distinct to (...) any particular scholar, argument, or publication. Neither a “state of the field” nor a proprietary defense of what comparative political theory is or should be, these observations toggle back and forth between reflections on my own engagement and disengagement with the topic of comparative political theory on the one hand and, on the other, concerns about how this preoccupation with method simultaneously expresses and exacerbates the displacement of politics in the very field that aims to understand it. Among the questions I raise are: What might be driving this disproportionate focus on methodological arguments in and about comparative political theory? What are the stakes of such a focus, particularly for younger scholars in political science departments decreasingly hospitable to political theory? Finally, what does this augur for the future of the study of politics broadly understood within disciplines dedicated to the scientific study of human behavior? (shrink)

The text consists of essays that revolve around the question of the nature and meaning of philosophy, even as it demonstrates philosophy's significance and relevance to some fundamental human problems and issues. The essays present diverse views of what philosophy might be and might aspire to be, with contributors being influenced by a wide range of philosophical approaches and traditions. The conversations also cut across disciplinary boundaries to interrogate and utilize ideas taken from ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, literary studies, cultural studies, (...) and the sociology of science. Traversing regional boundaries, the essays show philosophical analysis at work in exploring some issues pertinent to African, Caribbean, European, and American experiences, even while not ignoring Asian traditions. The collection presents interesting and intriguing views on how philosophical inquiry can illuminate various pressing problems: development, conflict, the discriminating preservation of worthwhile traditions, and the prevalence of apathy. It also reflects the vitality and multifaceted nature of philosophical discourse in grappling with live issues. The edited text is a comprehensive, balanced, and unique anthology of readings capturing the diversity of philosophical investigation. (shrink)

William P. Alston was the founding editor of the Philosophy Research Archives and a president of the American Philosophical Association. This special volume was prepared in honor and recognition of Alston's many contributions to philosophy as author, editor, teacher, and mentor. Publication of this volume was made possible by his colleagues and the philosophy department at Syracuse University.

One aim philosophers have in constructing moral theories is to identify the natural or non-Moral characteristics that make actions right or obligatory, Things good, Or persons virtuous. Yet we have no clear understanding of what it is for certain of a thing's non-Moral properties to be responsible for its moral properties. Given the recent interest in the concept of supervenience one might think that the dependence of moral on natural properties could be explained in terms of it. Unfortunately, None of (...) the definitions of supervenience offered so far is adequate to this task, And indeed, There is some reason to think that this dependence relation is ultimately mysterious. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to investigate experimentally the extent to which children’s novel word learning and story comprehension from eBooks depends on the relevance of interactive eBook features. A story was created in the lab to incorporate novel word-object pairs. The story was read to preschoolers (3-5 years old, N = 103) using one of the three books: noninteractive control, interactive-relevant, interactive-irrelevant. Novel word learning and story comprehension were assessed with posttests in which children picked target objects from (...) an array and sorted story events into sequences, respectively. Findings indicate that word learning and story comprehension were similar across all three books, suggesting that simple interactive features – whether relevant or irrelevant to the story – had little impact on learning in this controlled experiment. (shrink)

The contributions in this volume make an important effort to resurrect a rather old fashioned form of foundationalism. They defend the position that there are some beliefs that are justified, and are not themselves justified by any further beliefs. This epistemic foundationalism has been the subject of rigorous attack by a wide range of theorists in recent years, leading to the impression that foundationalism is a thing of the past. DePaul argues that it is precisely the volume and virulence (...) of the assaults which points directly to the strength and coherence of the position. (shrink)

La vida de Siháb al-Din al-Suhrawardi es oscura. Datos aislados referentes a sus estudios, viajes y contactos se encuentran en breves noticias de los diccionarios biográ-ficos de los siglos xn y xm. Estas noticias permiten esbozar una biografía de al-Suhrawardi desde sus comienzos hasta la oposición de que fue objeto por parte de los Memas de Alepo y su trágica muerte, interpretada en el marco y el contexto de la ciu-dad. Todo este material de los diccionarios biográficos es sólo relativamente (...) fidedigno e incluso los textos contemporáneos incluyen datos erróneos. = Shiháb al-Din al-Suhrawardi's life is obscure. Some clues regarding his studies, travels and encounters are found in short biographical notices of the 12th and 13th centuries. These notices can provide the means to sketch al-Suhrawardi's biography: his early life, his coming to Aleppo, the mounting opposition of the Memas of Aleppo, and the final moments that led to his tragic death. The sociopolitical context of Aleppo provides a good framework for the interpretation of the data provided by the biographers. All these biographical works are, however, of relative reliability. Even the most contemporary texts are in fact not devoid of erroneous elements. (shrink)

To explore 3- to 7-year-old children's developing understanding of human and non-human minds, a battery of "background knowledge" tasks was administered to 51 American children. The children were asked to speculate about how three other intentional agents would understand various visual displays. First, children answered when they themselves did not understand the displays, then they answered after they had been given information necessary to understand the displays. Results revealed that children begin to understand the role of background knowledge around the (...) same age that they pass false-belief tasks; and that before thoroughly understanding the role of background knowledge they already begin to discriminate between different types of minds. By age four, children began to show some understanding that because of having different minds than people, God is more able and dogs are less able to understand some visual displays even with full visual access. (shrink)

This chapter begins with a weak understanding of intuitions as beliefs that do not result from more familiar sources, but that the person currently holds simply because the proposition believed seems true to the person upon due consideration. Nearly all moral inquiry makes significant use of moral intuitions. Reflective equilibrium is perhaps the most sophisticated intuitionistic approach to moral inquiry. It modifies the usual understanding of reflective equilibrium by arguing that inquirers must not merely mold their moral intuitions into a (...) coherent system via a process of mutual adjustment, but must also strive to enhance their competence at making moral judgments. It then considers and rejects an argument for the reliability of moral intuitions that takes them to provide evidence regarding our own moral concepts. Finally, it defends reflective equilibrium by arguing that there is no sensible alternative to accepting the intuitions we have after full reflection, which is, in essence, what reflective equilibrium does. (shrink)

Recently, Gilbert Harman has used empirical results obtained by social psychologists to argue that there are no character traits of the type presupposed by virtue ethics—no honesty or dishonesty, no courage or cowardice, in short, no virtue or vice. In this paper, I critically assess his argument as well as that of the social psychologists he appeals to. I suggest that the experimental results recounted by Harman would not much concern such classical virtue theorists as Plato—particularly the Plato of the (...) Republic—because they are pretty much exactly what these theorists would have predicted. The more difficult thesis that virtuous or vicious character traits exist, I do not here argue. Instead, the results of this paper focus on clarifying some of the ways in which character traits are understood by virtue ethicists, especially those who look to the classical philosophers. (shrink)

I’m not sure one even needs to think a state of affairs is true for us to take attitudinal pleasure in it. We surely take pleasure in imagining states of affairs. In such a case, we are well aware that the state of affairs that is the object of our enjoyment does not obtain. What is the proper account of the pleasure we take from imagining? I am fairly sure this is not a type of sensory pleasure. Would it make (...) sense to say that what S is attitudinally pleased by is the state of affairs consisting of S’s imagining p rather than p? I don’t think this will do. It seems possible for S to take pleasure in the imagined state of affairs, p, but not in the state of affairs of S’s imagining p. Consider the case of Chastity, who has had a puritanical upbringing. One day Chastity imagines a torrid romantic encounter with one of her co-workers. Quite in spite of herself, Chastity is pleased by the state of affairs which she merely imagines. But her upbringing has left its mark on her, so she feels very guilty about allowing her thoughts to run in such an unwholesome direction. Chastity is pained by the state of affairs consisting in her imagining the encounter. (shrink)