Understanding how transcription factor (TF) binding is related to gene regulation is a moving target. We recently uncovered genome‐wide evidence for a “Hit‐and‐Run” model of transcription. In this model, a master TF “hits” a target promoter to initiate a rapid response to a signal. As the “hit” is transient, the model invokes recruitment of partner TFs to sustain transcription over time. Following the “run”, the master TF “hits” other targets to propagate the response genome‐wide. As such, a TF may act (...) as a “catalyst” to mount a broad and acute response in cells that first sense the signal, while the recruited TF partners promote long‐term adaptive behavior in the whole organism. This “Hit‐and‐Run” model likely has broad relevance, as TF perturbation studies across eukaryotes show small overlaps between TF‐regulated and TF‐bound genes, implicating transient TF‐target binding. Here, we explore this “Hit‐and‐Run” model to suggest molecular mechanisms and its biological relevance. (shrink)

This paper is about an avian influenza outbreak in South Africa’s commercial ostrich industry. The outbreak was managed according to international best practice and led to the destruction of 30,000 ostriches in two of South Africa’s provinces. However, the industry has a long history of managing low pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks in a different way. We use the 2004 outbreak and earlier approaches to managing disease to shed light on recent debates on how we might live differently with livestock diseases. (...) The paper is based on in-depth interviews with farmers, veterinarians, scientists and agriculture officials. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

This article is the lead piece in a special report that presents the results of a bioethical investigation into chimeric research, which involves the insertion of human cells into nonhuman animals and nonhuman animal embryos, including into their brains. Rapid scientific developments in this field may advance knowledge and could lead to new therapies for humans. They also reveal the conceptual, ethical, and procedural limitations of existing ethics guidance for human‐nonhuman chimeric research. Led by bioethics researchers working closely with an (...) interdisciplinary work group, the investigation focused on generating conceptual clarity and identifying improvements to governance approaches, with the goal of helping scholars, funders, scientists, institutional leaders, and oversight bodies (embryonic stem cell research oversight [ESCRO] committees and institutional animal care and use committees [IACUCs]) deliver principled and trustworthy oversight of this area of science. The article, which focuses on human‐nonhuman animal chimeric research that is stem cell based, identifies key ethical issues in and offers ten recommendations regarding the ethics and oversight of this research. Turning from bioethics’ previous focus on human‐centered questions about the ethics of “humanization” and this research's potential impact on concepts like human dignity, this article emphasizes the importance of nonhuman animal welfare concerns in chimeric research and argues for less‐siloed governance and oversight and more‐comprehensive public communication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Current State of Vico ScholarshipDavid L. MarshallGiambattista Vico is one of those chameleon figures in the history of ideas who is so intellectually rich that he can be constantly reinvented. It is indicative of the rich ambiguity of his thought that two of the most prominent intellectual historians working today should have come to opposite conclusions about his relationship to the master-category of eighteenth-century intellectual history: for Mark (...) Lilla, Vico was a Counter-Enlightenment thinker; for Jonathan Israel, he was a figure in the Radical Enlightenment.1 Vico’s fungibility gives reason for pause. Someone who can be folded into all manner of intellectual projects may be suspect. But Vico is more colonizing than colonized and, thus, the diversity of his receptions is evidence of creativity, and not merely malleability. The only way to deal with Vico is to dive into the multiplicity of plausible interpretations and find in them the makings of a new line of inquiry. Vico’s moment of flourishing in the Anglophone world came initially in the 1960s and 1970s, but if the diversity and quality of receptions in the last five years is anything to go by then we can say that Vico remains—especially in Italian, French, and German— an intellectual historical provocateur.This review essay surveys such literature and makes a single recurring observation: the various specifications of Vico’s place in intellectual history come into alignment as dimensions of what one might term Vico’s reinvention of rhetoric. As a professor of rhetoric in a culture that possessed—for [End Page 141] the most part—very weak oratorical institutions, Vico found himself in a particularly paradoxical situation. Recent research on Vico suggests that this paradox worked itself out in Vico’s thought in a number of highly interesting ways. First, Vico constitutes an opportunity for intellectual historians of the scientific revolution by offering a simultaneously rhetorical and pragmatic gloss of the early modern logic of experiment. Second, for intellectual historians of religion, Vico constitutes a study in how early moderns could examine the rhetorical functioning of theological vocabularies without necessarily committing themselves to the independent existence of the referents of those vocabularies. Third, for intellectual historians of Enlightenment, Vico confirms that encyclopedism was not a merely French practice in the eighteenth century and that the kind of omnicompetence implicit in encyclopedic multidisciplinarity had roots in rhetorical criticism. Fourth, intellectual historians of Counter-Enlightenment cannot easily fold Vico into their narratives, in part because his legal works (which have been read as a call for cultural retrenchment in response to early modern skepticism) are in fact an account of how Greek rhetoric found its analogue in Roman jurisprudence. Fifth, for historians of the idea of language, Vico demonstrates that there were powerful alternatives in early modernity to the dominant contractualist account of the origin of language (offered by Hobbes, Locke, and others) that were rhetorical and yet did not emphasize the priority of speech over writing.When it appeared in 1961, Nicola Badaloni’s Introduzione a G.B. Vico was the most sophisticated attempt to locate Vico in the Neapolitan philosophical tradition. In many ways, it remains the best attempt at contextualizing a thinker who is notoriously difficult to situate among his contemporaries. John Robertson’s recent Case for the Enlightenment has many virtues (not least its revealing supposition that Vico ought to be read alongside Hume), but as an attempt at contextualization Robertson’s work is not as rich as Badaloni’s.2 In particular, Badaloni did a great deal to reconstruct the history of natural philosophical inquiry at Naples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Badaloni’s description, Naples was a place in which a strong culture of natural philosophical investigation set the foundation for concepts such as experimentalism and pantheism. Furthermore, Badaloni argued that, although such concepts originated in natural philosophy, they cross-pollinated with ideas prominent in the Neapolitan schools of jurisprudence—particularly probabilism. In the [End Page 142] broadest terms, Badaloni argued that Vico’s intellectual project was an examination of the pantheistic principle that Jovis omnia plena (“all things are made of Jove”) in the domains of law, poetry, and history... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman ComedyAmy RichlinC. W. Marshall. The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiv + 320 pp. 2 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $90.C. W. Marshall's new book forms part of the productive trend towards treating ancient theater as performance. In 1991 David Wiles began The Masks of Menander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xi) by commenting on the institutional (...) divide between classics and drama studies. Marshall, as a writer, occupies the unusual position of being able to speak both as a classicist and a professional actor, with substantial credits in both improv and Shakespeare. His work is influenced by writers in theater studies, particularly Susan Bennett on audiences, Keith Johnstone on improv, and Jacques Lecoq on masking and physical movement. Among writers on ancient comedy, he shares with David Wiles a commitment to the serious study of masking, and with Timothy Moore a focus on the interaction between actors and audience. As a performer and director, he has often worked with Mark Damen and Mary-Kay Gamel towards an understanding of ancient drama through hands-on production. Above all, this book is based in Marshall's experience as an actor; having had the privilege of working with him on a production of Persa, I can attest that the physicality of his acting pops his sense of what happened on the stage of Plautus into vivid 3-D.Marshall throughout prefers complex to simple models: the audience was not monolithic (no "Romans" here), venues differed in nature, the actors did not share a single status, literary influences on the plays were multiple (no tyranny of the "Greek original"). The introduction begins with a satisfyingly spiderwebby chart (2) laying out a stemma of influences on Plautus and, separately, Terence. As Marshall observes, audience members bring along their own performance codes, and "For Rome such codes are unlikely even to include knowledge of the play which the playwright claims as his source for the present entertainment" (109). (That is, to get a laugh out of Strange Brew, it is not necessary to know much [End Page 131] about Hamlet.) Venues for production would have been "found spaces" (47), often (following Sander Goldberg) a flat space in front of a temple, with the audience sitting on the steps, but generally any public space capable of holding a simple stage, backdrop, and seats. Marshall envisions the troupe as a mix of free and slave actors, some of whom owned others, opening up "convoluted situations" in the assignment of roles (87–88). Masks, as he demonstrates, could not have followed any rigid typology, especially (151) when they had to put a face on slaves who turned out to be free men (Captivi), whores who turned out to be virgins, and, I would add, Calydonians who turned out to be Carthaginians (Poenulus). The content of plays was determined by a simple bottom line: "the troupe sells an audience to the magistrates for a price" (83). Audiences were "heterogeneous" (186), and, while performance works to create a "consolidated audience," the "economic and social diversity of the audience itself exists in tension with this" (185); if the magistrates wanted to emphasize "Roman social stratigraphy," the plays worked to question divisions (77).The theme throughout is "flexibility," in keeping with what for me is the book's most important hypothesis: the plays of Plautus were collaborative creations (186–87): they "contain lines that did not originate with the playwright" but from "the collective of the theatrical troupe" (268–69). Here, Marshall persuasively draws on his own experience with improv groups, invoking the lazzi of commedia dell'arte and the shtick of vaudeville (165, n. 10) to suggest how Plautus's plays were put together by what he felicitously dubs "shtickomythia" (193). Speaking here as a translator of Plautus, I would vigorously agree: the register often slips into jokes that are corny (e.g., Poenulus 279), and what is corn but a shtick-on plaster? Even the inventiveness of slave-torture insults feels a lot like "yo mama" jokes, the kind of call-and-response humor that young men in agonistic cultures perfect in verbal dueling. Most... (shrink)

In June 1993, conjoined twins Amy and Angela Lakeberg became the focus of national attention. They shared a complex six‐chambered heart and one liver; only one could survive separation surgery, and even her chances were slim. The medical challenge was great and the ethical challenges were even greater.

This is a study involving three HIV clinics in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Manitoba. We sought to identify ethical issues involving health care providers and clinic clients in these settings, and to gain an understanding of how different ethical issues are managed by these groups. We used an institutional ethnographic method to investigate ethical issues in HIV clinics. Our researcher conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews, compiled participant observation notes, and studied health records in order to document ethical (...) issues in the clinics, and to understand how health care providers and clinic clients manage and resolve these issues. We found that health care providers and clinic clients have developed work processes for managing ethical issues of various types: conflicts between client-autonomy and public health priorities, difficulties associated with the criminalization of nondisclosure of HIV positive status, challenges with non-adherence to HIV treatment, the protection of confidentiality, barriers to treatment access, and negative social determinants of health and well-being. Some ethical issues resulted from structural disadvantages experienced by clinic clients. The most striking findings in our study were the negative social determinants of health and well-being experienced by some clinic clients – such as experiences of violence and trauma, poverty, racism, colonization, homelessness, and other factors affecting well-being such as problematic substance use. These negative determinants were at the root of other ethical issues, and are themselves of ethical concern. (shrink)

Val Plumwood argued for a reworking of our concept of wilderness in ways that would both recognize indigenous influence and expand the official "fake" history to include perspective from the Others'side. Borrowing from Plumwood's logic of colonization, I explore how the official history of wilderness in the United States of America is similar to Tasmania's "fake" history. I offer a philosophical analysis of Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in the case of Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823) where the "wilderness" finds (...) its first legal articulation. I argue that although multiple erasures of the Other as found in Marshall's concept of wilderness are serious problems, they do not support wilderness scepticism. Rather, in order to reshape the concept of wilderness in a new non-colonizing way, its antecedents must be clearly understood. Only then can we escape the precedents of control and find an ethical basis to repair the nature/culture split ending the war on the Other. (shrink)

Scholars see Israel as a settler state, comparable with North American, South African and Oceanian cases. But how was Jewish settlement-colonization in pre-Israel Palestine even possible? In the North American, Oceanian and South African cases, European settlers did not encounter diseases like malaria that scholars argue impede settlement. Palestine, however, had high malaria morbidity rates. The disease incapacitated and killed settlers and was one of the most serious threats to Jewish settlement and political economic development. I argue that the exigencies (...) caused by malaria are exactly what fostered Jewish settlement-colonization in Palestine because they prompted the formation of socio-technical arrangements in order to combat the disease. These arrangements included, among other things, people, organizations, scientific knowledge, procedures and larvicides as well as considering the agency of mosquitos and other elements in the environment in disrupting settlement. These arrangements were marshalled by medical-national and political institutions that developed to combat malaria. Only then were Jewish settlers able to effectively colonize Palestine, make their colonies economically viable and make Palestine habitable for future Jewish immigrants. I demonstrate this argument by drawing on archival and library materials that describe the work of an important Zionist Malaria Research Unit (MRU) as well as malaria control efforts in Hefer Valley in the 1930s–1940s, after the unit’s disbandment. Then, I discuss the theoretical implications of this paper to settler-colonial and state-building literatures that, for the most part, neglected the socio-technical nature of state-building and settlement. (shrink)

Unfortunately, as the Chinese might say, we live in very interesting times. Recent technological developments have had the effect of shrinking the world, and, although they have not created the “global village” foreseen by Marshall McLuhan, they have caused major changes in the more familiar “villages” of the past—the family, the community, and the nation—while calling into question the moralities and moral ideals which have found their natural homes within those older “villages.” One of those older moral ideals is (...) that of patriotism. In the lead essay in this volume, Martha Nussbaum argues against this ideal and for another equally old ideal, the stoic ideal of the cosmopolitan, the person whose allegiance is to the worldwide community of human beings. Nussbaum’s essay originally appeared in Boston Review, along with twenty-nine replies. Eleven of those replies, some substantially reworked, appear in this volume, together with five new essays and a final response by Nussbaum. Nussbaum’s respondents span the political spectrum and include such luminaries as Sissela Bok, Richard Falk, Amy Gutmann, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Elaine Scarry, Amartya Sen, and Charles Taylor. Together these essays raise more questions than they answer, reveal hidden complexities in seemingly simple issues, and force the reader to see the world from a variety of sometimes uncomfortable perspectives. In short, they make up a very interesting and very good philosophical text. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Problem with BreathÉglantine Colon (bio)On day 1, when my comrades and I talked about it, we couldn't quite figure out how it happened. It just seemed as though we had suddenly been incited not to communicate or enact our love for each other. This time, no policy had been formulated, no law had been issued. It was harder than usual to locate where, to which parts of the (...) apparatus, we should direct our attention.On day 2, we were at a loss. We had gotten so good at reading the apparatus. We had developed wonderfully efficient techniques of resistance. Each and every one of us had become most brilliant at crafting discrete gestures of love. On day 3 onwards, we were misfiring on a regular basis, falling in and out of love with the same wrong comrades, over and over again, and always out of sync. The loving gestures we composed were barely legible and when we would intuitively find a genre in which to communicate our love, something would inevitably break down. Voices, generally. Sometimes the entire figurative system. Bodies, always. We would lose sleep and appetite over love and get useless for weeks.And then, the problem with love became a problem with breath. On day 6, the air got hot and busy with ashes and all sunsets turned red. At every breath, for all we knew, we could be inhaling particles of carbonized pine sap, debris of melted trailer parts, or burnt baby birds in bits. I quit smoking. I bought boxes of white masks at the construction store. The dominant smell during these days was a cagey mix of ghost paint, polymer fibers, and dry chemistry.On day 17, the air got cold and saturated with drops of viral poison. The city shut down. An incredibly sad number of lungs, too. The perspective to live in pods and die alone, disconnected from each other's breath, hyper-connected to life-support machines, plunged many of us, myself included, into brand new strands of historical despair. For those of us whose lungs had been weakened by bad inner-city fumes, evil chemicals, or entire centuries of racialized exposure to horrendous air quality, the problem with breath became plain lethal.Our neighborhoods were saturated with wildfire smoke and unnecessary death. Elsewhere, the streets were not empty. And when I say not empty, I mean they were just not. Or not yet. Usual metallic densities on the bridge. Geometrical glows of digital light in the underground. [End Page 237]Abnormally, no bodies of any ancestries were being captured, or hanged, or tortured, or kneeled upon. Nothing tangible, nothing blatantly repressive this time. No gas, no gag, no name, no whip, no rope. No strangulating remnant of sovereignty within no softness of biopower. A racist and classist brand of distributive pneumocracy is what it was, or at least this is how it initially appeared.On day 25, "Critical Pandemic Studies" became a thing, and "Pod Theory" a subgenre in post-social anthropology. Denounced as a "white fantasy of networked individualism," (in one of its purest forms) as "domestic fascism dressed as elective affinity," the pod appeared to us, from the get-go, as a thoroughly ratchet social formation. On day 29, the "podtag" emerged as a timely intervention in existing forms of street art. Equational in its form, efficient in its power of evocation, and satirical in its poetic economy, the podtag proliferated on the privatized walls of neighborhoods where the biggest challenges presented to breathing were unreasonably difficult Pilates classes on Zoom. Click for larger view View full resolutionOn day 35, the air got complex and full of knots, so striated that we could no longer count on our capacity to share the same air. A meal was being cooked, an instrument was being played, a child was given birth to, and suddenly the rhythm of all breaths would break. Sometimes a pair of lungs would refuse, stubbornly, to take in any oxygen until someone else's pair of lungs had released its own dose of carbon dioxide. At other times, the quantity of air available to each one of us would decrease with... (shrink)

El estudio de la conciencia es de considerable relevancia en la filosofía de la mente contemporánea. Sin embargo, el enfoque “cientificista” imperante en esta disciplina, aunque de indiscutible utilidad, ha contribuido al rechazo de perspectivas cuyo valor explicativo resulta revelador en la investigación sobre la mente, la consciencia y el cuerpo. Una de estas perspectivas la podemos encontrar en la obra filosófica de Friedrich Nietzsche. El determinismo causal de la relación mente-cuerpo que propuso el filósofo alemán ha sido defendido por (...) medio de propuestas similares de neurocientíficos y filósofos de probada pericia. No obstante, la relevancia de la aportación nietzscheana no ha sido reconocida en su importancia histórica y teórica. El propósito de este artículo es señalar las particularidades sobre la determinación causal de la relación mente/cuerpo y sus implicaciones en los debates actuales sobre la naturaleza de la consciencia. (shrink)

El estudio de la conciencia es de considerable relevancia en la filosofía de la mente contemporánea. Sin embargo, el enfoque “cientificista” imperante en esta disciplina, aunque de indiscutible utilidad, ha contribuido al rechazo de perspectivas cuyo valor explicativo resulta revelador en la investigación sobre la mente, la consciencia y el cuerpo. Una de estas perspectivas la podemos encontrar en la obra filosófica de Friedrich Nietzsche. El determinismo causal de la relación mente-cuerpo que propuso el filósofo alemán ha sido defendido por (...) medio de propuestas similares de neurocientíficos y filósofos de probada pericia. No obstante, la relevancia de la aportación nietzscheana no ha sido reconocida en su importancia histórica y teórica. El propósito de este artículo es señalar las particularidades sobre la determinación causal de la relación mente/cuerpo y sus implicaciones en los debates actuales sobre la naturaleza de la consciencia. (shrink)

Nearly twenty years after SubStance devoted a special issue to the contemporary French writer we know as Antoine Volodine, we are thoroughly pleased to be publishing in this issue the opening of Dondog, a novel that Ben Streeter has translated with inspired exactitude and brilliant tonal precision. In English or in French, entering Dondog is not unlike entering any other "post-exotic" text. One has to learn how to orient oneself to the ruination of Modernity, within the dysfunctional memories of post-traumatic (...) subjects, between dark humor and luminous despair, in the liminal space between life and death, between humanity and animality, and, in the odd beauty... (shrink)

El conjunto de ensayos que el lector tiene entre sus manos expresa un cuerpo sistemático de ideas provocadoras sobre la tensión entre el constitucionalismo y la democracia. Su autor, el profesor Joel Colón-Ríos, boricua, formado en las dos facultades de derecho canadienses de mayor renombre, e investigador de una de las mejores universidades de Oceanía, las ha fraguado a lo largo de más de un lustro y debatido con gran éxito ante la elite intelectual de Norteamérica. La propuesta central (...) del libro es una original reivindicación de la democracia frente al constitucionalismo. Su institucionalización consiste en un constitucionalismo débil. La piedra angular de este modelo es una constitución inacabada, permanentemente abierta al cambio, que permite y promueve la participación y la deliberación popular continua, en particular, mediante el potencial ejercicio del poder constituyente en cualquier momento. De esta manera, el pueblo tiene la posibilidad de hablar por sí mismo cuando lo juzgue pertinente. Puede cuestionar y reformular los principios básicos de la organización social. No está supeditado a las decisiones adoptadas por los ancestros que expidieron la Constitución, ni por sus representantes que, en el Congreso, ostentan el poder de reformarla. Precio: 49.000 pesos. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Denying the Body? Memory and the Dilemmas of History in DescartesTimothy J. ReissIn an essay first published in The New York Review of Books in January 1983, touching her apprenticeship as writer, the Barbadian /American novelist Paule Marshall described the long afternoon conversations with which her mother and friends used to relax in the family kitchen. She recalled how they saw things as composed of opposites; not torn, (...) but completed and made whole by them.Theirs was not a Manichean brand of dualism that sees matter, flesh, the body, as inherently evil, because they constantly addressed each other as “soully-gal”—soul: spirit; gal: the body, flesh, the visible self. And it was clear from their tone that they gave one as much weight and importance as the other. They had never heard of the mind/body split. 1This closing claim is surely less than self-evident. Whether or not the companions had heard of the mind/body split depends on the meaning given to the verb “hear.” Certainly it was embedded in their language, however much the phrase “soully-gal” might recombine its parts.Did the split come from Descartes and early European debates, linguistically colonizing all those who came within its sphere—Africans, Barbadians, Brooklynites? Did it come from a Christian heritage, with its haggling over bodily mortality and immortality of soul? Who knows? A first point is that it is still an everyday experience, deeply buried in language and so in the ideas, feelings, and meanings expressed in language. A second point is that the post-Cartesian debates—to simplify for a moment with an overly heavy [End Page 587] hand—were and are themselves but a variant within a much longer received wisdom. Nonetheless, such wisdom is now bound to that variant, which, willy-nilly, does give one set of parameters to a common experience—at least, to that of those of us who dwell under Western hegemonies. It gives them also, no doubt, to many who live within them at once less clearly and more contentiously.I would like to offer a further powerful instance here, simply to emphasize what and how much is at stake in the questions to be addressed. It occurs in a writing by the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, his Palace of the Peacock. First in a tetralogy, this novel recounts something like a journey away from a life of colonial and postcolonial violence and oppression towards a hoped-for rebirth in “fulfilment and understanding.” 2 Early on, the harsh protagonist, Donne, mocks the narrator, his mysterious “double” and “brother,” Dreamer, who has remarked their distance from “the folk.” “Is it a mystery of language and address?” asks Donne. Slightly bewildered, Dreamer struggles to suggest that the obstacle is less of language than of a deeper disjunction:“it’s an inapprehension of substance,” I blurted out, “an actual fear of the substance of life, fear of the substance of the folk, a cannibal blind fear in oneself. Put it how you like,” I cried, “it’s a fear of acknowledging the true substance of life. Yes, fear I tell you, the fear that breeds bitterness in our mouth, the haunting sense of fear that poisons us and hangs us and murders us. And somebody,” I declared, “must demonstrate the unity of being, and show...” I had grown violent and emphatic... “that fear is nothing but a dream and an appearance....” 3Recovery of unity might become a way to defeat political and historical violences. In the next novel in the sequence, one of two self-indulgently whining characters, accused of pining for a woman who has run away to seek education, explodes: “I don’t believe you can begin to see how some body like they born seeking for mind.” 4 For peoples of the colonized Americas, imbued with “the great civilization of the American Indian,” this urge, Harris then wrote in a critical essay, was simply the personal form of a social and political necessity to recover still-living elements of a culture for which “matter truly bore the imprint of genius,” refusing “the taboo of spirituality removed from sensuous direction.” 5 Recently, Harris has worried this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This special issue provokes a conversation between decolonial and postcolonial feminisms by asking what they are, how they speak about each other, and how they can speak to each other. Read together, the articles engage and sometimes trouble the temporal and spatial distinctions drawn between decolonial and postcolonial approaches. Kiran Asher explores overlaps between decolonial and postcolonial thought by comparing the ideas of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Silvia (...) Rivera Cusicanqui on representation. Aimee Carrillo Rowe also stages a dialogue between these approaches when interrogating her family ’s Chican@ settler history. Tiara R. Na’puti and Judy Rohrer offer an account of how recent scholarship from Hawai‘i and Guåhan (Guam) has elaborated Indigenous epistemologies in settler contexts. Two articles excavate colonialism’s relationship to science: Jennifer Hamilton, Banu Subramaniam, and Angela Willey explore how two instances of population genetic research illustrate the racialized knowledge systems that undergirded colonialism, while Sandra Harding points out how the colonization of Latin America contributed to the edifice of Western science. In a related vein, Breny Mendoza centers the material role of Abya Yala (the preferred term for Latin America) in not just Spanish colonialism but British colonial expansionism and eventually the eclipsing of China. Patricia A. Schechter reflects on her trajectory as a scholar and teacher of US women’s history and the insights she has gained through 504Preface engaging decolonial scholarship. Amy Piedalue and Susmita Rishi argue for a more expansive understanding of postcolonial feminism’s reach as they review recently published titles in the field. Although Anna Tsing and Paulla Ebron’s review of feminist scholarship about the Anthropocene does not directly mention postcolonial or decolonial approaches, it nonetheless engages relevant scholarship on the environmental impact of settler modernization and capitalism. An art essay by Hyunji Kwon introduces the largely unrecognized paintings of former comfort woman Duk-kyung Kang (1929–1997) and focuses on the potential of Kang’s work to challenge Japanese colonial hierarchies. Our featured poets in this issue are Emily Zhang, Megan Kaminski, and Raina J. León. Both postcolonial and decolonial scholars have been committed to critiquing the material and epistemic legacies of colonialism. The distinctions that are frequently drawn between the two approaches, however, have been a source of disquiet to the editors of Feminist Studies, and they prompted our journal’s call for papers in 2016. A common temporal marking that concerned us was the eclipsing of postcolonialism, which was increasingly becoming viewed as passé, and a setting up of decolonial feminism as always already better in time. Decolonial approaches sometimes depicted postcolonial feminism as being only about the past, despite postcolonial feminism’s stated commitment to studying the continuing impact of colonial processes and its complex use of the prefix “post.” Our concern was, as well, with misrepresentations of postcolonial feminist priorities. The depiction of postcolonial feminism as deconstructive, abstract, elite theory confined to the ambit of modern colonial knowledge systems overlooked the important quandaries that postcolonial feminism raised about how to represent marginalized people ethically and, indeed, how to understand the very desire to represent the marginalized—whether or not we claim belonging to them. Postcolonial feminists warned against an easy embrace of alterity, noting that the desire for positioning oneself outside colonialism could naively ignore the power of colonial discourses to frame colonialism’s Other. Another set of hopes for this special issue was to dwell on the spatial markings of decolonial and postcolonial feminisms: decolonial feminism is often associated with Indigenous scholars and those from the Americas, and postcolonial feminism with scholars from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These regional emphases, although not always as tidy as sometimes depicted, have produced distinct intellectual Preface 505 priorities. We must heed decolonial feminism’s insistence on engaging with the genocidal history of settler colonialism, the current manifestations of the violent dispossession of land, and its constitution of gendered racial capitalism the world over. (FeministStudies will soon publish a special issue on Indigenous Feminisms). Yet, if postcolonial feminism is circumscribed geographically to only South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, we risk ignoring its powerful transcontinental mapping of imperial gender formations and its scrupulous attention to the ethics of representing... (shrink)

The authors offer ways to encourage and educate Americans to participate in the public deliberations that make democracy work and lay out the principles of..

Introduction : the politics of our selves -- Foucault, subjectivity, and the enlightenment : a critical reappraisal -- The impurity of practical reason : power and autonomy in Foucault -- Dependency, subordination, and recognition : Butler on subjection -- Empowering the lifeworld? autonomy and power in Habermas -- Contextualizing critical theory -- Engendering critical theory.

In recent analytic metaphysics, the view that ‘ordinary inanimate objects such as sticks and stones, tables and chairs, simply do not exist’ has been defended by some noteworthy writers. Thomasson opposes such revisionary ontology in favour of an ontology that is conservative with respect to common sense. The book is written in a straightforward, methodical and down-to-earth style. It is also relatively non-specialized, enabling the author and her readers to approach problems that are often dealt with in isolation in a (...) more unified way.Thomasson's arguments are mainly counter-attacks on six ‘eliminativist’ arguments against ordinary objects. A causal redundancy argument espoused by Trenton Merricks holds that to suppose that there are ordinary objects is to suppose that these objects have distinctive causal powers. However, the casual efficacy of a baseball, for example, is exhausted by that of some suitably arranged …. (shrink)

Intuitions about the transparency of experience have recently begun to play a key role in the debate about qualia. Specifically, such intuitions have been used by representationalists to support their view that the phenomenal character of our experience can be wholly explained in terms of its intentional content.[i] But what exactly does it mean to say that experience is transparent? In my view, recent discussions of transparency leave matters considerably murkier than one would like. As I will suggest, there is (...) reason to believe that experience is not transparent in the way that representationalism requires. Although there is a sense in which experience can be said to be transparent, transparency in this sense does not give us any particular motivation for representationalism—or at least, not the pure or strong representationalism that it is usually invoked to support. (shrink)

The puzzle of imaginative desire arises from the difficulty of accounting for the surprising behaviour of desire in imaginative activities such as our engagement with fiction and our games of pretend. Several philosophers have recently attempted to solve this puzzle by introducing a class of novel mental states—what they call desire-like imaginings or i-desires. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the i-desire solution to the puzzle of imaginative desire. The introduction of i-desires is both ontologically profligate and (...) unnecessary, and, most importantly, fails to make sense of what we are doing in the imaginative contexts in question. (shrink)

Despite their intuitive appeal and a long philosophical history, imagery-based accounts of the imagination have fallen into disfavor in contemporary discussions. The philosophical pressure to reject such accounts seems to derive from two distinct sources. First, the fact that mental images have proved difficult to accommodate within a scientific conception of mind has led to numerous attempts to explain away their existence, and this in turn has led to attempts to explain the phenomenon of imagining without reference to such ontologically (...) dubious entities as mental images. Second, even those philosophers who accept mental images in their ontology have worried about what seem to be fairly obvious examples of imaginings that occur without imagery. In this paper, I aim to relieve both these points of philosophical pressure and, in the process, develop a new imagery-based account of the imagination: the imagery model. (shrink)

Introduction -- Karl Marx's concept of alienation -- Objectification, alienation, and estrangement -- Other origins of alienation and objectification -- Marx's account of alienation : from early to late -- The alienated object of production : commodity fetishism -- The alienated means of production : machine fetishism -- Machines and the transformation of work -- Marx's energeticist turn -- The first law of thermodynamics -- From arbeit to arbeitskraft -- The second law of thermodynamics -- Machines in the communist future (...) -- Technology and the boundaries of nature -- Material wealth and value : the Grundrisse's fragment on machines -- The strife between technology and capital : the fall in the rate of profit -- Enjoyment not value : challenging the logic of exhaustion -- Man himself as fixed capital -- Class kinship and the redistribution of the means of production -- Machines in the capitalist reality -- Between thermodynamics and humanism : approaching capital -- Machinery as an historical category of production -- Machines, trains, and other capitalist monsters -- Rough, foul-mouthed boys : women's monstrous laboring bodies -- Wage labor and race -- Wage labor and sexuality -- Machinery and revolution -- Alienation beyond Marx -- Science and technology in Marx's excerpt notebooks -- Karl Marx and Charles Babbage -- Machines and temporality : the treadmill effect and free time -- Technophobia and technophilia -- Technophobia and twentieth-century theory. (shrink)

According to representationalism, the qualitative character of our phenomenal mental states supervenes on the intentional content of such states. Strong representationalism makes a further claim: the qualitative character of our phenomenal mental states _consists in_ the intentional content of such states. Although strong representationalism has greatly increased in popularity over the last decade, I find the view deeply implausible. In what follows, I will attempt to argue against strong representationalism by a two-step argument. First, I suggest that strong representationalism must (...) be _unrestricted_ in order to serve as an adequate theory of qualia, i.e., it must apply to all qualitative mental states. Second, I present considerations to show that an unrestricted form of strong representationalism is problematic. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi offers two apparently incompatible models of bereavement. Zhuangzi sometimes suggests that the sage will greet loss with unfractured equanimity and even aplomb. However, upon the death of his own wife, Zhuangzi evinces a sorrow that, albeit brief, fits ill with this suggestion. In this essay, I contend that the grief that Zhuangzi displays at his wife’s death better honors wider values averred elsewhere in the text and, more generally, that a sage who retains a capacity for sorrow will (...) be better positioned for the robust joy so often identified as central to the Zhuangzi’s vision of flourishing. The sagely figures who entirely forego sorrow, I argue, achieve equanimity only through a sacrifice of the emotional range and responsiveness necessary not only for grief but also for the delight Zhuangzi recommends. (shrink)

I show how the 'innersense' (quasiperceptual) view of introspection can be defended against Shoemaker's influential 'argument from selfblindness'. If introspection and perception are analogous, the relationship between beliefs and introspective knowledge of them is merely contingent. Shoemaker argues that this implies the possibility that agents could be selfblind, i.e., could lack any introspective awareness of their own mental states. By invoking Moore's paradox, he rejects this possibility. But because Shoemaker's discussion conflates introspective awareness and selfknowledge, he cannot establish his conclusion. (...) There is thirdperson evidence available to the selfblind which Shoemaker ignores, and it can account for the considerations from Moore's paradox that he raises. (shrink)

in The Case for Qualia,ed. by Edmond Wright , MIT Press (2008), pp. 285-298.

Purpose: This study explores social networkers' interest in and attitudes toward personal genome testing (PGT), focusing on expectations related to the clinical integration of PGT results. Methods: An online survey of 1,087 social networking users was conducted to assess 1) use and interest in PGT; 2) attitudes toward PGT companies and test results; and 3) expectations for the clinical integration of PGT. Descriptive statistics were calculated to summarize respondents' characteristics and responses. Results: Six percent of respondents have used PGT, 64% (...) would consider using PGT, and 30% would not use PGT. Of those who would consider using PGT, 74% report they would use it to gain knowledge about disease in their family. 34% of all respondents consider the information obtained from PGT to be a medical diagnosis. 78% of those who would consider PGT would ask their physician for help interpreting test results, and 61% of all respondents believe physicians have a professional obligation to help individuals interpret PGT results. Conclusion: Respondents express interest in using PGT services, primarily for purposes related to their medical care and expect physicians to help interpret PGT results. Physicians should therefore be prepared for patient demands for information and counsel on the basis of PGT results. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for bringing the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt into dialogue with respect to the links between power, subjectivity, and agency. Although one might assume that Foucault and Arendt come from such radically different philosophical starting points that such a dialogue would be impossible, I argue that there is actually a good deal of common ground to be found between these two thinkers. Moreover, I suggest that Foucault's and Arendt's divergent views about the role (...) that power plays in the constitution of subjectivity and agency should be seen as complementary rather than opposed. (shrink)

In modern pluralist societies, political disagreement often reflects moral disagreement, as citizens with conflicting perspectives on fundamental values debate the laws that govern their public life. Any satisfactory theory of democracy must provide a way of dealing with this moral disagreement. A fundamental problem confronting all democratic theorists is to find a morally justifiable way of making binding collective decisions in the face of continuing moral conflict.