Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is a multifaceted disability, characterized not only by brain- and body-based challenges, but also high rates of environmental adversity, lifelong difficulties with daily living, and distinct sociocultural considerations. FASD is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disabilities in the Western world and associated with significant social and economic costs. It is important to understand the complexities of FASD and the ways in which FASD requires unique consideration in research, practice, and policy. In this article, we discuss (...) our perspectives on factors that distinguish FASD from other disabilities in terms of complexity, co-occurrence, and magnitude. We provide an overview of select literature related to FASD as a socially rooted disability with intergenerational impacts and multiple layers of stigma. These social issues are intertwined with notable experiences of adversity across the lifespan and high rates of co-occurring health concerns for individuals with FASD, all of which present unique challenges for individuals, caregivers, families, service providers, and policy makers. Understanding these factors is the first step in developing and implementing specialized initiatives in support of positive outcomes for individuals with FASD and their families. Future directions are proposed for advancing research, practice, and policy, and responding to the unique complexities of FASD. (shrink)

A difficulty for alethic pluralism has been the idea that semantic evaluation of conjunctions whose conjuncts come from discourses with distinct truth properties requires a third notion of truth which applies to both of the original discourses. But this line of reasoning does not entail that there exists a single generic truth property that applies to all statements and all discourses, unless it is supplemented with additional, controversial, premises. So the problem of mixed conjunctions, while highlighting other aspects of alethic (...) pluralism worth investigating further, does not constitute an effective objection to it. (shrink)

Debates about new technologies, such as crop and food genetic modification (GM), raise pressing questions about the ways ‘experts’ and ‘ nonexperts’ communicate. These debates are dynamic, characterized by many voices contesting numerous storylines. The discoursal features, including language choices and communication strategies, of the GM debate are in some ways taken for granted and in others actively manipulated by participants. Although there are many voices, some have more influence than others. This study makes use of 50 hours of in-depth (...) interviews with GM scientists, nonexperts, and other stakeholders in the GM debate to examine this phenomenon. We uncover rhetorical devices used by scientists to characterize and ultimately undermine participation by non-experts in areas including rationality, knowledge, understanding and objectivity. Scientists engage with ‘the public’ from their own linguistic and social domain, without reflexive confirmation of their own status as part of the public and the citizenry. This raises a number of interesting ironies and contradictions, which are explored in the article. As such, it provides valuable insights into an increasingly important type of discourse. (shrink)

According to Colerus, Spinoza replied affirmatively when his landlady asked if she "...could be saved in her faith." This paper asks what Spinoza could have meant -- and what his landlady would have thought he meant. She was asking about salvation of a certain kind -- a kind that Spinoza did not in fact believe to be possible. When he talks about salvation in his writings, he has in mind a different kind of salvation -- one that his landlady will (...) certainly not achieve "in her faith." So, when he assured her that she could be saved in her faith was he simply lying to her? This question is explored against the background of the controversies regarding Spinoza's sincerity in the Tractatus Theologico-politicus. (shrink)

"No, your honor. I didn't know who or what he was when I first came across the book -- they don't exactly love him in the synagogue, if you've read the story of his life. I found it in a junkyard in a nearby town, paid a kopek, and left cursing myself for wasting money hard to come by. Later I read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a whirlwind at my back. As I (...) say, I didn't understand every word but when you're dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a witch's ride. After that I wasn't the same man. That's in a manner of speaking, of course, because I've changed little since my youth.". The speaker is Yakov Bok, the unlikely hero of Bernard Malamud's The Fixer. At this point, early in the novel, Yakov speaks truthfully when he says that he has changed little since his youth. But over the next two and a half years (the time-period covered in the novel), he will undergo profound change and impressive moral growth. He suffers; he learns; he grows. Spinoza's name and ideas appear again and again at crucial moments in the course of the hero's moral development. Yakov Bok's verbal account of Spinoza's ideas is often comically primitive, but his understanding far outstrips his ability to articulate. By the end of the novel, his sufferings have led him to a deep grasp of certain of Spinoza's ethical and political doctrines. (shrink)

This article reports the findings of a one-year project examining British press coverage of the genetically modified (GM) food debate during the first half of 2003, and both expert and non-expert reactions to that coverage. Two pro-GM newspapers and two anti-GM newspapers were selected for analysis, and all articles mentioning GM during the period in question were stored in a machine readable database. This was then analyzed using corpus linguistic and discourse analytic techniques to reveal recurrent wording, themes and content. (...) This text analysis was complemented by 12 interviews with experts involved in the communication of GM issues, and 12 focus-group sessions in which members of the public reacted to selected newspaper texts and other GM material. Both in the press and in public reaction, the issue of GM was found to be intimately associated with other political events of the time, notably the invasion of Iraq. Except among experts, there was little awareness of the official national debate and issues were approached in more general terms. Pro-GM characterization of the issues as primarily scientific, both by newspapers and experts, was rejected by the anti-GM press and campaigners, and by the focus-group participants. They assessed the issues in a more global frame, rejecting scientists and companies as unreliable. In addition, they linked both US and British GM policy to the invasion of Iraq, and, by analogy, rejected pro-GM arguments as untrustworthy. (shrink)

It has been alleged that Carolus Linnaeus practised Eurocentrism, sexism and racism in naming plant genera after famous botanists, and excluding ‘barbarous names’. He has therefore been said to practise ‘linguistic imperialism’. This paper examines whether Linnaeus applied ‘linguistic imperialism’ to the naming of Chinese plants. On the basis of examples such as Thea (¼Camellia), Urena, Basella, Annona, Sapindus (¼Koelreuteria), and Panax, I conclude that Linnaeus used generic names of diverse origins. However, he misidentified Chinese plants’ habitats, and acted on (...) these misapprehensions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 560-561 [Access article in PDF] Olli Koistinen and John Biro, editors. Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 255. Cloth, $49.95. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, Spinoza tried to provide conceptual foundations for the newly developing "natural philosophy" of his day. His monism, naturalism, and theory of mind are still intriguing today, but they are notoriously (...) difficult to understand. There is little interpretive consensus with regard to even the most basic concepts and claims. In Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes the diversity of interpretive perspective is vividly on display.All of the eleven essays in this collection are published here for the first time. They cover a broad range of topics and, taken together, they move us forward in our understanding of Spinoza's basic doctrines. Most of the essays are carefully argued discussions of clearly defined issues of interpretation. They address matters that are central to the system and central to our understanding of the system—monism, causation, individuation, conatus.The editors' Introduction claims that Jonathan Bennett's 1986 work set a new standard of Spinoza scholarship—a standard that the essays in this volume seek to measure up to. Most (not all) of these essays do indeed come close to Bennett's commendable level of argumentative clarity and rigor. And here, as in Bennett's work, the emphasis is mostly systematic and argumentative, not historical.The collection opens with a very good essay by Michael Della Rocca entitled "Spinoza's Substance Monism." This essay applies to the thorny issue of substance monism the same argumentative strategy that Della Rocca has elsewhere applied to monism regarding individual modes—i.e., to the claim that an extended mode and the idea of that mode are identical. The argument turns on the complete conceptual independence of the attributes, and Della Rocca makes a strong case for the centrality of that somewhat puzzling doctrine. John Carriero's contribution ("Monism in Spinoza") continues the focus on monism, but from a different perspective. Carriero asks, "Why does Spinoza hold that finite... bodies [End Page 560] are not substances?" (47). Rejecting two traditional responses he provides a plausible answer to this good question by focusing on an early exchange of letters between Spinoza and Oldenburg and upon Spinoza's rethinking of Descartes's conception of extension.One of the most interesting essays is Don Garrett's interpretive discussion of Spinoza's derivation of the conatus doctrine at Ethics3p4-3p6 ("Spinoza's Conatus Argument"). Commentators have identified various putative fallacies in the argument that Spinoza offers for this doctrine—chiefly fallacies of equivocation. Garrett develops an interesting and plausible notion of "inherence" that casts light on a number of central metaphysical relations and permits a defensible reading of the conatus argument. For the serious Spinoza scholar, this one essay is worth the price of the volume.Olli Koistinen's "Causation in Spinoza" considers Spinoza's solution to the difficulty of causal interaction between substances—a glaring problem in Descartes that provoked glaringly problematic solutions from Malebranche and Leibniz. Richard Manning's essay addresses a controversial point in Jonathan Bennett's interpretation. The issue is whether, in Spinoza's system, mental content can have causal significance—a point closely related to the important issue of teleological explanation of human behavior. Manning supports a kind of "thoughtful teleology," making a convincing case for the causal efficacy of mental content.On the whole the authors in this volume restrict their discussion of secondary literature to the works of fellow Anglophones. One finds occasional mention of Gueroult, but the Continental literature on Spinoza is mostly ignored. There are two notable exceptions to this rule. Steven Barbone ("What Counts as an Individual for Spinoza?") discusses the thorny issue of modal individuation in Spinoza's system, arguing against Matheron's 1969 claim that for Spinoza the state is an individual. Emphasizing the centrality of power, Barbone draws important (liberal) political conclusions from his analysis of individuation. Mark Kulstad ("Leibniz, Spinoza and Tschirnhaus: Metaphysics à Trois, 1675-1676") fruitfully uses recent Continental work on... (shrink)

In recent years there has been a tendency in some quarters to see an affinity between the views of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on the subject of religious belief. It seems to me that this is a mistake, that Kierkegaard's views were fundamentally at odds with Wittgenstein's. That this fact is not generally recognized is, I suspect, owing to the obscurity of Kierkegaard's most fundamental assumptions. My aim here is to make those assumptions explicit and to show how they differ from (...) Wittgenstein's. (shrink)

Since the middle of the 20th century there has been a significant debate about the attribution of capacities of living systems, particularly humans, to technological artefacts, especially computers—from Turing’s opening gambit, to subsequent considerations of artificial intelligence, to recent claims about artificial life. Some now argue that the capacities of future technologies will ultimately make it impossible to draw any meaningful distinctions between humans and machines. Such issues center on what sense, if any, it makes to claim that gadgets can (...) actually think, feel, act, live, etc. I outline this debate and offer a critique of its persistent polarization. I characterize two of the debate’s major camps (associated roughly with Turing and Searle); argue that the debate’s structure (including key assumptions inherent to each camp) precludes resolution; and, contend that some central clashes within the debate actually stem from an inadequately drawn distinction between claims about the capacities of artifacts and claims about the proper criteria for assessing such attributions. I offer a different perspective in which I: challenge some central elements of the debate that contribute to its perennially irresolvable state; hold that the debate needs to be placed more squarely in sync with how we in fact treat the attribution of such capacities to humans themselves; and, offer (unlike the other two camps) a foothold for making moral assessments of such proposed technologies. (shrink)

IN an article on Rousseau’s annotations of a popular botany text, Henry Cheyron describes the Genevan philosopher as ‘ce botaniste me´juge´’. 3 The misapprehension of Rousseau’s botanical practice identified by Cheyron has its roots, I believe, in Rousseau’s own depiction of his botanising in the Reˆveries; in the ‘Septie`me promenade’ Rousseau selfconsciously portrays this study as socially isolated, lazy and lacking in direction: ‘La botanique est l’e´tude d’un oisif et paresseux solitaire... Il se prome`ne, il erre librement d’un objet a` (...) l’autre, il fait la revue de chaque fleur avec inte´reˆt et curiosite´.’4 Neither does Rousseau disguise botany’s role for him as a ‘the´rapeutique improvise´e’; the therapeutic purpose has tended to obscure the rigour, application, time and knowledge that Rousseau put into his botanical studies so that no less a scholar than Jean Starobinski asserts: ‘Jean-Jacques herborise en collectionneur, et non pas en naturaliste. C’est pour lui une occupation, un amusement, plutoˆt qu’une ve´ritable action.’5 Finally, Rousseau fuels this misunderstanding.. (shrink)

The Australian moratorium on human clinical trials of xenotransplantation was lifted in December 2009. This decision follows public consultations on whether xenotransplantation should or should not proceed in Australia, which occurred in 2002 and 2004. However, the public consultation, in its design and process, did not facilitate meaningful public engagement and involvement, thus marginalising the public and devaluing their social experiences and diverse knowledges. This brief article questions what constitutes adequate public consultation, and suggests that consensus conferences or citizen juries (...) should be explored as a mechanism for meaningful public engagement for future public consultation exercises in Australia. (shrink)

Women, Power and Autonomy—Rights, Respect and Representation in Law and Society brings together the works of academics and activists engaged in the struggle to reinstitute power and autonomy for women. The contributors and the countries they represent and about which they write include India, Australia, the United States, Nigeria, Portugal, Pakistan, Sweden and the United Kingdom, with some crossing boundaries and citizenship. Their areas of expertise include English literature and literary criticism, law, politics and political science, philosophy, history, rights campaigning, (...) linguistics, theology, film and film criticism. This Introduction explores the issues of power, rights and autonomy as they arise in each of the chapters and draws the links between subjects addressed in each contribution—the way in which rights, respect and representation intersect in family law, marriage (including forced marriage and under-age or child marriage) and divorce, property rights (in law and in literature), widowhood and child custody, faith, financial rights and government funding, abortion, surrogacy, prostitution and pornography, prison and politics. Linkages between women’s representation in politics and religious institutions, in finance and financial institutions, film, literature and social media are considered together with writing aimed at the teenage-girl and its potential for politicisation and engendering feminism and feminist independence and identity, and a critique of the categorisation of writing fixed firmly in the literary cannon. Campaigning for women’s entry to non-traditional jobs and corporate management is attested to, alongside campaigns for women’s rights in prison, programs granting bail to keep women out of prison, and action to rectify failures in resourcing women’s services, particularly those dedicated to Black and minoritised women. (shrink)

In 2024 two films with a woman as the central character vied for Oscar honours. Barbie lost out entirely for top honours, albeit nominated (along with Poor Things) for “Best Picture” (Oppenheimer won). Actor nominations for Barbie were America Ferrera for Best Supporting Actress (no luck—awarded to Da’Vine Joy Randolph for The Holdovers) and Barbie’s male hanger-on, Ken, played by Ryan Gosling (topped by Robert Downey Jr in Oppenheimer, so Poor Things’ Mark Ruffalo missed out too), with other nominations limited (...) to costume design, production design, best adapted screenplay and music—where it was Ken’s Song, otherwise known as “I’m Just Ken”, gaining the nomination-nod along with “What Was I Made For?” which did win—but the dual nomination was almost a message that (contrary to the theme of the film) Barbie could not possibly be accepted as an independent woman, and could be considered only in conjunction with “her” “man”. Poor Things, however, triumphed. Not only were there eleven nominations, including for Best Director (winner), Best Actress (winner), Best Supporting Actor, along with original score, adapted screenplay, cinematography, film editing, costume design (winner), production design (winner), makeup and hairstyling (winner), but the film was reviewed as “brilliant” with Emma Stone (in the leading role) giving “surely the boldest performance of her career so far” (Geoffrey McNab, Independent); “performance of a lifetime” and “best movie of the year” (Christy Lemire, RogerEbert.com); “non-stop bonkers brilliance” (David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter). Yet is The Academy the final word on good, better, best (or indeed poor, poorest, worst)? When it comes to female directors and films with a feminist base, ethos, and attitude, it fails miserably. Through Barbie and Poor Things, with an excursus into Silence of the Lambs, this chapter contests what counts, when it comes to assessing the value of film, film performance and film direction, considering conflicting views of what is feminist, what is sexist, and the exploitation of women dressed up in a distorted vision of female freedom. Referencing “the male gaze”, is there a feminist counterweight, and does it make a difference whether the director is female or male? The 2025 Academy awards give no cause for considering there is any improvement, with the “best actress” award going to the character depiction of a prostituted woman acting under a male director in Anora. Reviewing the Barbie/Barbie phenomenon, ultimately the question is, is Barbie retrievable or does Barbie need to be retrieved, for indeed arguably hope lies with Barbie whilst the women in Poor Things exist in the realm of a distorted imagination that encapsulates misogyny. (shrink)

Drawing together the threads of the contributions to Women, Power and Autonomy—Rights, Respect and Representation in Law and Society, this Conclusion briefly critiques the notion of “soft” and “hard” areas of responsibility and policy. The chapter determines that fields labelled “women’s issues” should not be rated as “soft” and hence secondary. Rather, they should be considered areas of policy and practice, action and accountability, that are the concern of “everyone”—albeit “everyone” too often includes the male of the species only, demoting (...) the female to the realm of “the other”. Referencing the manner in which each of the book’s chapters raises and reflects questions of rights, respect and representation, with cross-overs between chapter topics, consideration is given to rights and lack of respect for widows, property and its importance to them, as to teenager readers, women’s (and girls’) rights (and wrongs) as mothers and surrogates, as under-age and forced brides, prostituted, paedophiled, and pornographied women, women in politics, in finance and the corporation, in non-traditional jobs and campaigning to get there, in prison and on bail, encountering conflicts between religion and culture, and working in under-resourced service fields to support women and women’s needs, embracing Black and minoritised women, and including abortion and health rights. It references women’s efforts, as related by contributors, to advocate and gain advances for women through law and practice, in times of revolution and change, and in times of regression and fighting back. It recounts the way legislative reforms can be undermined by traditional lawyers and judges schooled in conventional—and patriarchal—law, and the importance of language and women’s aptitude in finding “the words to say it”. It concludes that the language of rights, respect and representation is central to women’s demands for them, and that it is the language of rights, respect and representation that will determine in law and society whether women’s demands can or will be met. Finally, that women’s temperament and tenacity, voice and vision, will ensure women win. (shrink)

The US Supreme Court overturning of Roe v Wade [1973] by Dobbs v Jackson [2022] has seen the passage of anti-abortion rights laws in a number of US states, with accompanying and sadly predictable deaths of women seeking the health care to which they are—or should be—entitled. Other US states have acted to ensure that women from out-of-state requiring pregnancy termination or accompanying treatment can have it, although states adopting repressive legislative approaches have included criminalisation of travel to prohibit access (...) to health services outside their jurisdiction. And it is not only the US where problematic and regressive action threatening women’s health rights has occurred. During the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK, women who sought advice and medication for abortion subsequently found themselves before a criminal court, facing charges under the Offences Against the Person Act (OAPA) 1861 (UK) or section 5 of the Abortion Act 1967 (England, Scotland and Wales). One young woman was charged and convicted of murder of her “just born” child, in circumstances where, had she been able to seek medical attention far earlier, the pregnancy could have been terminated lawfully and without police and prosecutorial repercussions. In Australia, where all states and territories have decriminalised abortion, the US Supreme Court decision appears to have spurred the introduction or threatened introduction of Bills to re-criminalise women’s essential health care. Why is it, then, that in the twenty-first century, women in countries that purport to adhere to human rights standards are faced with a denial of their human right to medical treatment, the threat or application of sex discriminatory laws, practices and procedures, and a diktat based in religious fundamentalism or simple misogyny and failure to respect women, women’s autonomy, and women’s right to life? Exploration of the failure to grant women equal status as human—which lies at the heart of the abortion rights debate, is essential to expose the continuation of the nineteenth and early twentieth century judicial proposition that women, not being persons, should be denied autonomous rights extended to men. (shrink)

This book explores women’s rights from an international perspective. The authors discuss abortion, surrogacy, prostitution, marriage and family law, touching on themes including children, property, forced and arranged marriage and under-age marriage, separation, divorce and widowhood. They also analyse commerce and financial rights, as well as employment rights and women in the corporate sector. Throughout the book these topics raise questions of respect, from the perspective of violence against women, provision of resources and services, and women in the criminal justice (...) system under bail and imprisonment. This book also addresses the representation of women in media and politics, including in film and literature. Overall, the authors explore the intersection of rights, respect and representation, and their roles in women’s status in society as well as in law. (shrink)