Gender studies has generated numerous questions around “neutral” forms, such as the concept of “Self”. The aim of this analysis is to highlight how “neutral” forms are central to the reiteration of the binary model and the dominance of “man2”. Historically, man is the archetype, placing his supremacy as part of the natural order of things. Inserted into this model, many thinkers have considered the male as the transcendental gender, so, elevating the masculine as universal, a-sexed and decorporealised. In this (...) way, man has convinced himself that he’s not conditioned by his masculinity and can speak for all humanity, becoming the logosthrough which he declines the rest. Man, therefore, has made himself “neutral” – both in the conceptual sense and in the grammatical structure (particularly of binary languages such as Italian) – by taking control of language. Through it, he orders and constitutes the world, developing dichotomies and signifying anatomical bodies. In this research, it is intended to work on language and the relationship between “neutral” and power, emphasizing how that relationship is central to the reproduction of the patriarchal model. Through a critical philosophical reflection, which sees a logical-linguistic and historical-processual methodological structure, the discourse of the I-neutral will be crossed, pointing out how that “neutral” is in truth male. The concluding goal will be to, through “fluid” visions, build the basis for a language that is truly neutral and ready to embrace multiplicity, without relations of domination; a language really inclusive and not a reiterator of the patriarchal model. (shrink)

Blanchot's thought has often been understood as a critique and a reversal of Heidegger's. Indeed, many formulas of the former are construed as mere inversions of the latter. Yet, the philosophical problem raised by the encounter between Blanchot and Heidegger cannot be suffciently accounted for in terms of 'inversion' or 'reversal'. Focusing on the question of the secret in its relation to Geheimnis , this essay starts with a discussion of the notion of secrecy in relation to mysticism and argues (...) that this difference should not be construed in terms of a disjunction. Blanchot's relation to Heidegger is not on a par with Levinas' critical account of the latter; that to acknowledge the centrality of the secret does not commit one to mysticism; and that Blanchot's ultimate claims about the neuter commit him to a position that is much closer to Heidegger's than his apparent disavowal of the latter would seem to entail. (shrink)

The third sex, which for a long period of history meant the androgyne and the homosexual, took on a new sense around 1900, when it was applied to emancipated women, who were featured by novelists and analysed by psychiatrists. Assimilated with lesbians, 'desexualized' by their modern way of life, they were labelled 'neuter', worker bees in a hive-state where 'female–male' markers were tending to disappear. Neither men in sex, nor women in gender (at least according to traditional assumptions), they (...) constituted a new 'battalion' which highlighted all the anxieties of the time: the involution of dimorphism, the threat of lack of differentiation and the 'extinction of the race'. But for those who accepted the label, neuterdom evolved from a pejorative concept into an instrument of a kind of liberation and the strategic means to set up creative space cleared of sexual stigma, until political cooption, aware of the resurgence of a 'superior species', changed its meaning and tipped over into the worst sort of excess. (shrink)

Influential parts of the veterinary profession, and notably the American Veterinary Medicine Association, are promoting the routine neutering of cats and dogs that will not be used for breeding purposes. However, this view is not universally held, even among representatives of the veterinary profession. In particular, some veterinary associations in Europe defend the view that when reproduction is not an issue, then neutering, particularly of dogs, should be decided on a case-by-case basis. However, even in Europe the American view is (...) gaining ground. In light of this situation, this paper considers whether or not routine neutering of cats and dogs, in cases where uncontrolled reproduction is not an issue, can be ethically defended. The starting point of this consideration is a review of the veterinary literature on the effects of neutering on companion animals. The focus is both on the welfare of neutered animals themselves, and on behavioral and other effects that may not directly affect the animals’ welfare, but that maybe motivating factors for owners to neuter their companion animals. Here it becomes clear that justification for routine neutering, particularly of confined male dogs, does not follow from claims about the dogs’ own welfare. The costs of neutering male dogs, in terms of the increased risk of very serious diseases, may well outweigh the benefits. Then, building on this veterinary material, but including some other, additional considerations, the paper goes through some possible ethical approaches to routine animal neutering. These ethical approaches offer different degrees of concern about, or opposition to, routine neutering. Finally, based on this ethical exploration, it is argued that routine neutering, at least in the case of non- free-ranging companion animals, raises significant ethical questions, and from some ethical perspectives, looks highly problematic. (shrink)

Because spaying/neutering animals involves the harming of some animals in order to prevent harm to others, some ethicists, like David Boonin, argue that the philosophy of animal rights is committed to the view that spaying/neutering animals violates the respect principle and that Trap Neuter Release programs are thus impermissible. In response, I demonstrate that the philosophy of animal rights holds that, under certain conditions, it is justified, and sometimes even obligatory, to cause harm to some animals in order to (...) prevent greater harm to others. As I will argue, causing lesser harm to some animals in order to prevent greater harm to others, as TNR programs do, is compatible with the recognition of the inherent value of the ones who are harmed. Indeed, we can, and do, spay/neuter cats while acknowledging that they have value in their own right. (shrink)

This chapter explores the key values at stake in feral cat management, focusing on the debate over whether to use trap-neuter-return or trap-euthanize as management tools for cat populations. The chapter provides empirical background on unowned cats, sketches widely used arguments in favour of reducing cat populations and considers how these arguments relate to important and widely held values including the value of lives, subjective experiences and species. The chapter promotes critical understanding of the diverse value positions that may (...) be at play in debates about the treatment of ownerless cats. (shrink)

Hegel is a complicated figure for considering the philosophical significance of sexual difference. On the one hand, he grants an essential place for sexual difference in his analyses of nature and spirit. On the other hand, he treats the telos of sexual difference as a kind of sexual indifferentiation. For Hegel, both life and spirit depend on sexual difference but as something to be sublated, that is, preserved but only in so far as it is negated for a higher truth (...) or purpose devoid of it. This essay examines this sublation of sexual difference in what Hegel characterizes as the ‘universality’ of the living genus and the ‘universality’ of the rational activity of civil society. I argue that Hegel’s conception of this sublation of difference into universality relies in both instances on a teleological reduction of the ontological significance of sexual difference to reproduction and a contestable interpretation of the roles of male and female sexes in it. However, I claim that Hegel’s account of the relational identity of the sexes, each as not-all of the genus given the other, is a fundamental insight for an ontological analysis of sexual difference. As such, I open a critical reappropriation of Hegel's account of sexual difference for a more difference-affirming, non-hierarchal sexual ontology. I argue that overcoming the hierarchal implications of this Hegelian account of sexual difference requires rethinking the natural and rational universal, which amounts to rethinking what Hegelianism might mean today. (shrink)

A combination of uncritical interpretations of Greek art maintained since antiquity, together with Heidegger’s failed attempt to connect Being with Dasein through the Greeks, has misled the feminist agenda into dismissing both Heidegger and the Greeks. The bad blood left by Irigaray has revitalized scholarship which wants to know why the world-disclosive nullity of Being cannot be primordially transgenderous in essence prior to its worldly dispersal into the two sexes. It takes a radical, phenomenological reduction which applies suprasegmental theory to (...) re-chisel and strip the Greek statue from multiple layers of calcified presumptions deposited by millennia of realism, historicism, naturalism, and psychologism, until the inherently absent primordiality which Heidegger searched in vain in order to ground Dasein, the same which feminism would dismiss as phallocracy if it was not transgender, becomes literally visible. Two fifth century monumental works, the female Euthydikos Kore and the male Blonde Youth, are re-discovered in the reduction, and the prosody that is their faces lets the two genders reunite into something like a dark song. (shrink)

Tarski's equivalence, as he allows, applies only roughly to assertions in ordinary language. Some of the relevant exceptions are of merely grammatical importance but others leave scope for interesting metaphysical pronouncements on science, mathematics and other fields of assertion. To understand these latter exceptions is to gain insight into Baylis' and Lukasiewicz' views on the question "Are some Propositions neither True nor False?" (this journal, 1936). From different standpoints each is right and each is wrong. This comment also applies to (...) some later contributions to their controversy. (shrink)

Readers of Blanchot have long been aware of the importance of politics in the writer's intellectual itinerary. But though the history of Blanchot's political involvements is now quite well documented, much remains to be understood about Blanchot's conception of the political. Prompted in part by his support for the ‘Not In Our Name’ appeal, which was to be one of Blanchot's last political gestures, this essay fragment, which is part of a longer inquiry, reconstructs the writer's thinking on the question (...) of the subject of politics and the closely related issue of the relationship between law and violence. It examines Blanchot's response to Hölderlin's translation of a famous fragment from Pindar entitled ‘Das Höchste’ and places Blanchot's writing within the wider context of the political thought of Benjamin, Schmitt, Agamben, and Derrida. (shrink)

The English pronoun _it_ can anaphorically take on the meaning of a salient generalized quantifier when it occurs in subject position followed by an elided Verb Phrase and (optionally) a VP-level operator. The extent to which theories of pronoun interpretation will have to be altered to take account of this finding will depend on whether the phenomenon is unique to English or part of a crosslinguistic pattern.

Trap-neuter-return (TNR) is promoted as a “humane” alternative to lethal methods for population control of feral domestic cats (Felis catus). This paper explores feedbacks between feral domestic cats, coyotes (Canis latrans), raccoons (Procyon lotor), and skunks (Mephitis mephitis) at a TNR feral cat colony in Rhode Island, USA. A total of 12,272 photographs from a motion-activated camera were analyzed. Cat population size and visitation frequency of wildlife were estimated during three different feeding regimes. Abundant food on the ground was (...) associated with increased wildlife visits, while elevated or limited food was associated with decreased wildlife visits. During the two-year study period, the population of cats dropped from 17 to 12 individuals and the cats appeared to have short life spans, which could have been due to predation by coyotes. Our results suggest that wildlife confluence and predation risks can be influenced by feeding regime. (shrink)

Investigating Spanish Dialectal Grammar with the COSER (Audio Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish)The Audio Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish (or COSER after its Spanish abbreviation) is a corpus of oral interviews which aims at studying dialectal grammar in the Iberian Peninsula. In this paper COSER’s characteristics and methodology are described and compared with atlases with regard to research on dialectal grammar. Thanks to COSER, a number of syntactic aspects of various Spanish dialects, which were only partially known or fully ignored (...) to date, have now been investigated: several pronominal paradigms, subjunctive displacement, and mass neuter agreement. Moreover, the geographical distribution of these aspects had sometimes been considerably broadened so these traditional explanations have now been replaced with new ones based on a better knowledge of the data. The study of dialectal grammar has hence revealed itself as an important source for a better understanding of many cross-linguistic principles, like the Agreement Hierarchy, and opens up new ways of testing their validity. (shrink)

French literary criticism in the twentieth century is marked by two names: those of Roland Barthes andMaurice Blanchot. Each of them cut an individual path through the dense and variegated cultural terrain of their era, and few authors escaped their attention. Their paths generally ran in parallel, and they rarely opposed each other, yet their dialogue was never easy, and the impression remains that between them, there was never really a meeting of minds. Taking 1953 as a crucial year, this (...) article will attempt to situate both the convergences and the divergences which mark their respective careers, by considering them in relation to a single question: that of the neuter. (shrink)

In this paper I tackle the relationship between language, knowledge and power. To this end, I try to give some reasons for the non-arbitrariness of some words, as well as for the non-arbitrariness of grammatical genders in Romance languages, especially Romanian and French. I focus on several specific linguistic structures and uses of particular words in these two languages. I particularly deal with the construction of a third grammatical gender, the neuter, in Romanian, in comparison to the two grammatical (...) genders existing in French, trying to see how the application of Irigarayís theory on the gender of nouns functions for Romanian language. There is no third grammatical gender in French, and therefore Irigarayís argument is proved to be invalid for Romanian. The questions that lead my analysis are: What corporeality does the third grammatical gender, the neuter in Romanian, point to? How are we to consider neuter words? Is the neuter a necessary and sufficient proof for considering Romanian a less sexist lan- guage? Is the neuter the guarantor of impartiality and equilibrium in a grammatically gendered language? (shrink)

This essay explains what Blanchot understands as writing and the space of literature. For Blanchot, writing is the place where the impossible interruption of the destiny of things is put into play, an interruption that world-formation needs but negates and conceals. Writing belongs to an excess outside of language, an otherness of language. The need to write is linked to the point at which nothing can be done with words. Writing is contrasted with dialectical language and the totalizing aim of (...) the Hegelian system. The essay explains the connection between the disaster of writing (after the holocaust), the neuter and fragmentary style of writing and the passivity of writing. (shrink)

Full-Blooded religion is not acceptable in mainstream bioethics. This article excavates the cultural history that led to the suppression of religion in bioethics. Bioethicists typically fall into one of the following camps. 1) The irreligious, who advocate for suppressing religion, as do Timothy F. Murphy, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. This irreligious camp assumes American Fundamentalist Protestantism is the real substance of all religions. 2) Religious bioethicists, who defend religion by emphasizing its functions and diminishing its metaphysical commitments. Religious defenders (...) empty religion of its theology to present its feel-good functions in a way that is acceptable to the irreligious. However, religion reduced to its functions dissolves into a counter-culture that may counteract materialism but lacks the power to motivate much more. This article criticizes both camps, as both presume Enlightenment myths and consequently neuter religion. Both irreligious and religious bioethicists commonly presume Enlightenment myths about secularity and religion. Secularity is presumed neutral and rational. Religion is presumed divisive and irrational. This myth provides built-in value-judgements; we have already judged secularity as good and religion as bad. Much of the debate over religion in bioethics is arguing over false stereotypes of religion. Consequently, mainstream bioethics neuters religion, while the irreligious are gifted political power to define the field. (shrink)

Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are “logical” in nature and thus analogous to the truth operators of formal logic. We here focus on two linguistic connectives and their negations: conjunction _and_ and (inclusive) disjunction _or_. Linguistic connectives exhibit a truth-conditional component as part of their meaning (their semantics), but their use in context can give rise to various implicatures and presuppositions (the domain of pragmatics) as well as to inferences that go beyond semantic/pragmatic properties (...) (the result of reasoning processes). We provide a comprehensive review of the role of the logical connectives in language and argue that three sets of factors—semantic, pragmatic, and those related to reasoning—are separate and separable, though some details may differ cross-linguistically. As a way to showcase the argument, we present two experiments in language comprehension in Spanish wherein pragmatic content was minimised and reasoning processes neutered, thus potentially highlighting what might be the default meanings of the connectives under study. In Experiment 1 we show that the conjunctive reading of inclusive disjunction is available in positive contexts other than in syntactically intricate cases such as downward entailing and free choice contexts, contrary to what has been claimed in the literature. In Experiment 2 we show that negated conjunctions and disjunctions in Spanish can easily receive the same interpretation when contrasted against the same context and, moreover, that these interpretations match those available in English, despite claims from the literature that linguistic connectives and local negation interact differently in English and Romance languages. (shrink)

Why broach and challenge the question of neutrality? For some urgent reasons. The neuter is generally considered to be the condition of objectivity. However, historically, this is asserted by a subject which is masculine and not neuter. Claiming that truth and the way of reaching it are and must be in the neuter amounts to a misuse of power and a falsification of the real. Living beings are not naturally neuter; they are sexuate somehow or other. (...) Subjecting them to the neuter as a condition of their objective status transforms living beings into cultural products deprived of their own origin and dynamism, and builds a world in which the development and the sharing of life are impossible.In this book, four contributors explore this basic mistake of our culture starting from the work of Heidegger and his insistence on maintaining that our being in the world - our Dasein - must be in the neuter. They question the nature of the truth which is then at stake and the political mistakes that it can cause. It is not here a question of sexuality strictly speaking nor of sexual choice. The concern of the two men and the two women who participate in this volume is with the sexuate determination of all living beings. Is not Heidegger’s Dasein, as neutered and supposedly neutral, a kind of technical device which prevents living beings from entering into presence? If so, where might that ultimately lead? (shrink)

My theme here will be vagueness. But first recall Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference. (I will presume these arguments to be familiar.) If Quine is right, then there are radically different acceptable assignments of semantic values to the expressions of any language: different assignments of semantic values that for all that is determined by whatever it is that determines semantic value are all acceptable, and all equally good. Quine even argued that the indeterminacy (...) is so radical that some sentences are true under some acceptable assignments but false under others.1 Still, Quine does not allow intermediate truth-values or truthvalue gaps. (As I will put it, avoiding the disjunctive formulation: does not allow that there are sentences which are neuter.) Quine holds on to classical logic and bivalence and requires each acceptable assignment to be classical and bivalent.2. (shrink)

This book is a translation of Maurice Blanchot's work that is of major importance to late 20th-century literature and philosophy studies. Using the fragmentary form, Blanchot challenges the boundaries between the literary and the philosophical. With the obsessive rigor that has always marked his writing, Blanchot returns to the themes that have haunted his work since the beginning: writing, death, transgression, the neuter, but here the figures around whom his discussion turns are Hegel and Nietzsche rather than Mallarme and (...) Kafka. The metaphor Blanchot uses for writing in The Step Not Beyond is the game of chance. Fragmentary writing is a play of limits, a play of ever-multiplied terms in which no one term ever takes precedence. Through the randomness of the fragmentary, Blanchot explores ideas as varied as the relation of writing to luck and to the law, the displacement of the self in writing, the temporality of the Eternal Return, the responsibility of the self towards the others. (shrink)

Traditional Perspective : Traditionally it is claimed that, the phenomenon of gender-linked (or gender-based) languages stems from historical, cultural, and linguistic evolution. Here’s why some languages assign grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) to nouns: 1. Historical Roots in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) 2. Cultural and Mythological Influences 3. Linguistic Efficiency & Sound Patterns 4. Natural vs. Arbitrary Gender 5. Language Evolution & Simplification.

In late September 1838, Darwin read Malthus's Essay on Population, which left him with “a theory by which to work.”115 Yet he waited some twenty years to publish his discovery in the Origin of Species. Those interested in the fine grain of Darwin's development have been curious about this delay. One recent explanation has his hand stayed by fear of reaction to the materialist implications of linking man with animals. “Darwin sensed,” according to Howard Gruber, “that some would object to (...) seeing rudiments of human mentality in animals, while others would recoil at the idea of remnants of animality in man.”116 With this link closed, Darwin hung the materialist chain around his own neck, where it rested most uncomfortably. Stephen Gould, supporting Gruber's argument, finds evidence for this reconstruction in Darwin's M and N notebooks, whichinclude many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism-the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. No notion could be more upsetting to the deepest traditions of Western thought than the statement that mind-however complex and powerful-is simply a product of brain.117The proferred hypothesis suggests, then, that Darwin was acutely sensible of the social consequences of equating men with animals and therefore mind with brian, and that he thus shied from publically revealing his views until the intellectual climate became more tolerant.The history I have examined makes this hypothesis implausible. Even if Darwin warily explored the implications of his emerging theory in his notebooks, his subsequent study of Fleming, Wells, Brougham, and Kirby should have quieted any trepidation. If these natural theologians did not flinch at seeing human reason prefigured in the mind of a worm, should Darwin have? Moreover, he recognized in his M notebook that the thesis of evolutionary continuity between men and animals did not require an explicit avowal of his conviction that brain was the agent of thought.118 And in any case, his materialism was of a rather benign sort; at least he so expressed it in an annotation in Abercrombie's Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers (1838): “By materialism I mean, merely the intimate connection of thought with form of brain — like kind of attraction with nature of element.”119 This belief would have held little terror for British intellectuals, who were quite familiar — some even comfortable-with Locke's anti-Cartesian argument that there was nothing contradictory in supposing God could make matter to think.120 Finally, even if the intellectual atmosphere of early nineteenth-century Britain were inhospitable to Darwin's brand of materialism, there is little reason to believe he breathed a different air at mid-century while preparing his manuscript.That Darwin should not have feared suspicions of materialism, of course, does not mean that he did not. But I think there were other, more persistent sources of anxiety that kept him from rushing to publish: namely, the several conceptual obstacles he had to overcome if his theory of evolution by natural selection were to be made scientifically acceptable. Prominent among these were the problems surrounding his changing notions of instinct.The inertia of his older ideas about instinct at first made it hard for Darwin to gauge how far the theory of natural selection might be applied to behavior. By the early 1840s he finally felt ready to meet the challenge of the natural theologians by providing a naturalistic explanation for the wonderful instincts of animals. In his “Essays” of 1842 and 1844 one sort of instinct is, however, not considered-that of neuter insects. Yet Darwin seems to have appreciated the difficulties such instincts entailed at least by 1843, when he read Kirby and Spence. He simply required time to work out a solution to a problem he initially perceived as “fatal to my whole theory.” Even while writing the “Species Book” in the summer of 1857, he was still juggling several possible solutions compatible with natural selection. It was only a short time before he actually turned to work on the Origin of Species that he appears to have settled on a single explanation for the difficulties posed by the instincts of worker bees and ants. The force of his theory of community selection snapped the last critical support of the creationist hypothesis and, conveniently enough, also fractured the generalized Lamarckian account of the evolution of behavior. These results were worth waiting for. (shrink)

Greek poetical, judicial, philosophical, and medical texts of the classical period use the term αἴτιος, as well as several derivative terms, to indicate which persons, things, or facts are responsible for, or have caused, a state of affairs. The feminine substantive αἰτία, ‘responsibility’, seems to have appeared only in the early fifth century, as does the neuter substantive τὸ αἴτιον. The full history of this word group is still to be written, though important overviews have already cleared the path (...) for such a study. My contribution to this volume has a far more modest aim and can only constitute a first minor step to that end: to put forth a hypothesis on the archaic meaning of the word, which slightly modifies the usual understanding of it as referring to whom or what ‘plays a part’ or ‘takes a part’ in a situation. I will do so by focusing on the Homeric texts and most especially on the Iliad. (shrink)

In this paper, we will provide na overview of different mechanisms involved in pejoration. Specifically, we will focus on the analysis of three different phenomena in Rioplatense Spanish. First, we will analyze the suffix -ito (‘little’ [suffix]) and how it combines with bases to form pejorative expressions, such as abogadito (‘little lawyer’) and sordito (‘little deaf’). Second, we will analyze (with the support of experimental evidence) the semantics of pejorative expressions, such as puto (‘faggot’), tortillera (‘dyke’), and estúpido (‘stupid’). Finally, (...) we will analyze the pragmatics involved in expressive speech acts that might be used to express contempt toward someone, such as Los del manya son todos putos (‘The ones of the manya are all faggot’). We will assume that pejoration is a negative attitude that is reflected at different linguistic levels. We will defend that pejoration goes beyond the linguistic levels, it may be expressed linguistically, but it may not need to. Pejoration allows us to use neuter terms negatively, change the target of a group insult, and so on. Pejoration is a phenomenon we should consider more carefully when we are dealing with expressions that can potentially be used as a part of hate speech. Pejoration is not a semantic dimension, it is na attitude that can be reflected in our linguistic system. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women on the Global Market: Irigaray and the Democratic StateNicole Fermon (bio)Best known for her subtle interrogation of philosophy and psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray clearly also conducts a dialogue with the political, proposing that women’s erasure from culture and society invalidates all economies, sexual or political. Because woman has disappeared both figuratively and literally from society [see Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing”], Irigaray conceives the contemporary ethical (...) project as a recall to difference rather than equality, to difference between women and men—that is, sexual difference. She characterizes relations between men and women as market relations in which women are commodities, objects, but never subjects of exchange, objects to men but not to themselves: women do not belong to themselves but exist “to keep relationships among men running smoothly” [TS 192]. Women under these conditions require imaginative ways to reconfigure the self, to subvert the melancholy and regression of masculinist economies and envisage a future in which women would not be ashamed of the feminine, would experience it as a positivity worth emulating.Irigaray contends that after the gains of egalitarian politics are carefully examined, the inclusion of women in the political arena has failed to take into account women’s distinct and different position from men, and from each other, as well as perpetuating the fiction of the “neutral” citizen, the ahistorical individual citizen of the nation-state. It is that fiction Irigaray dispels in her critique of liberal democratic politics and its creation, “citizens who are neuter in regard to familial singularity, its laws, and necessary sexual difference” [SG 112] in order to benefit the State and its laws. The subject is male; the citizen is neuter. Who is the female citizen in contemporary society? What is the ethical elaboration of the contractual relations between women and men, and between sexed individuals and the community? How do women imagine a distinct set of rights and responsibilities based on self-definition and autonomy, given the particular strictures of contemporary politics—that is, the market-driven, antidemocratic nature of the current economic national and global forces? Irigaray suggests that “the return of women to collective work, to public places, to social relations, demands linguistic mutations” and profound transformations, an embodied imagination with force and agency in civil life [TD 65].Irigaray warns that if civil and political participation is construed in overly narrow terms, if focus is on economic or judicial “circuits” alone, we overlook the symbolic organization of power—women risk losing “everything without even being acknowledged” [TD 56]. Instead an interval of recognition can expand the political to include the concerns and activities of real women, lest silence imply consent to sexual neutrality, or more likely, to women’s obliteration under men’s interests and concerns. Women’s insistence on self-definition and wage labor, on love and justly remunerated work, [End Page 120] testifies to the obduracy of women’s difference, one that is not likely to disappear. The patriarchal family is still the legal norm, even when certain exceptions are made, while enduring questions regarding women’s health and children’s physical welfare as priorities beyond market considerations are consigned to legislative obfuscation, still a political afterthought. Instead, in the US the liberal state removes the slender welfare net specific to women and children, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and fails to provide medical coverage to those who are among the most vulnerable of its citizens. Women without access to the legal protection of sex-neutral citizenship, poor working women without language (the money for an effective “mouthpiece” to represent their distress in a court of law), are further disempowered by liberal politics’ insistence on sexual neutrality—that is, on repression or amnesia regarding the lived experiences of women.Sexual difference is key to any project of self-definition by women. Irigaray insists on the sexual nature of this self-definition, not solely for its obvious procreative necessity, but because the natural world is a source of renewal and fecundity which requires attentive interrogation and respect [SG 15]. This rebirth seems alien to the structure of male politics, which instead seem to provoke disasters (Bhopal, Chernobyl, or the current runaway... (shrink)

Lack of supportive workplaces may be depriving babies and mothers of the health advantages of breastfeeding. This citizen science pilot project set out to engage women in photographing and sharing information on the available facilities for breastfeeding and expressing and storing breastmilk in Australian workplaces. While some useful insights were gained, the project failed in the sense that 234 people ‘liked’ the project Facebook page set up to recruit participants, but only nine photographs were submitted. The heaviest loss of participation (...) occurred after the ethics committee requirements were explained, in particular, the requirement for employer consent to take a photograph, or alternatively, for a participant to agree to bear the risk of taking a photo without permission. The ethics committee also made stipulations about the formality of language to be used. Thus, the project’s potential role as an enabler for health action was neutered. We argue that the ethics requirements worked contrary to our purpose and possibly acted to reinforce the powerlessness some women experience at work. (shrink)

The question of what responsibility humans have toward feral cats, if any, is a hotly contested one. Cats can be categorized in a number of ways: domesticated, stray, feral, and wild. However, of all these categories, feral cats are the most marginalized. Thus, they can pose a predicament for humans in terms of how or how not to care for them. Possible responses to this predicament range from leaving them alone; feeding them, but not neutering/spaying them; adopting a practice referred (...) to as “trap, neuter, and release” (TNR), in which humans take responsibility for feeding cats, curbing their populations, and possibly monitoring their medical conditions; and even euthanizing them. This paper will provide an introduction to the issue of animal ethics in general and feral cats in particular; identify an ethical framework with which to address the issue of feral cats; explore the history of cat domestication; utilize a framework with which to examine the relationship of all cats to their environments; consider options for how to deal with feral cats in particular (TNR); explore and analyze data on TNR from the city of Philadelphia; and offer concrete solutions to the issue of the liminal feral cat. (shrink)

Do traits evolve because they are good for the group, or do they evolve because they are good for the individual organisms that have them? The question is whether groups, rather than individual organisms, are ever “units of selection.” My exposition begins with the 1960’s, when the idea that traits evolve because they are good for the group was criticized, not just for being factually mistaken, but for embodying a kind of confused thinking that is fundamentally at odds with the (...) logic that Darwin’s theory requires. A counter-movement has arisen since the 1960’s, called multi-level selection theory, according to which selection acts at multiple levels, including the level of the group. After discussing the 1960’s attack on group selection and the concept’s subsequent revival, I examine Darwin’s views on the subject. I discuss what Darwin says about four examples: human morality, the barbed stinger of the honeybee, neuter workers in species of social insect, and the sterility of many interspecies hybrids. I argue that Darwin defended hypotheses of group selection in the first three problems, but rejected it in the fourth. I also discuss Darwin’s general views about the role of group selection in evolution. (shrink)

Fragment B 1 of Parmenides describes a youth’s journey to the house of a goddess who enlightens him as to the nature of all things. The task of translating Parmenides’ Greek text is beset with many difficulties, most notably the phrase kata pant’ atê at B 1.3. There, the neuter accusative plural panta (‘all things’) combines with the feminine nominative singular atê (‘heaven sent blindness’) to render translation impossible. Some have proposed emending the text to read astê (‘down to (...) all cities’), understood in connection with the pathway of divine inspiration. Others reject the emendation in so far as the youth is said at B 1.27 to travel ‘far from the beaten path of men.’ I argue in defense of the reading kata pant’ a<s>tê in so far as references to pathways of inspiration and poetic journeys to the cities of men occur frequently in the poetry of Parmenides’ era. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to find out how people process the dialectal variation encountered in the daily linguistic input. We conducted an eye tracking study (Visual Word Paradigm) that targeted the predictive processing of grammatical gender markers. Three different groups of Norwegian speakers took part in the experiment: one group of students from the capital Oslo, and two groups of dialect speakers from the Western Norwegian town Sogndal. One Sogndal group was defined as ``stable dialect speakers'', and one (...) as ``unstable dialect speakers'', based on a background questionnaire. The students participated in two eye tracking experiments each, one conducted in the their own dialect, and one in the other dialect (i.e., Sogn dialect for the Oslo students, and Oslo dialect for the Sogndal students). The gender systems in the two dialects differ: the Sogn dialect makes an obligatory three-gender split (Masculine, Feminine and Neuter) whereas the Oslo dialect only obligatorily makes a two gender distinction. The research question was whether speakers could use gender markers to predict the upcoming target noun in both local and non-local dialect mode, and furthermore, if they correctly could adjust their expectations based on dialect mode. The results showed that the Sogn speakers could predict upcoming linguistic material both in the local and Oslo dialect, but only the stable group were able to adjust their predictions based on the dialect mode. The unstable group applied a more general Oslo-compatible parsing to both the local and the non-local dialect. The Oslo speakers on the other hand were able to use gender markers as predictors only in their own dialect. We argue that the stable Sogn group should be treated as a bilingual group, as they show native-like skills in both varieties, while the unstable Sogn group can be seen as accommodated monolinguals, in that they treat the two varieties as sharing an underspecified grammar. The Oslo group on the other hand lacks sufficient competence in the other dialect to make use of grammatical markers to make predictions. (shrink)

In recent work Irigaray has continued to meditate on the myopic (we might say ‘monadic’) focus of the Western tradition when it comes to its failure to acknowledge sexuate difference. Irigaray has successfully diagnosed the patriarchally over-determined nature of that tradition masquerading behind a façade of objectivity and neutrality in ways that continue to open up interpretive and critical possibilities in terms of reading the canon today. In some of her work, Irigaray levels a powerful challenge against Heidegger’s conception of (...) Dasein and his point of entry into ‘phenomenological ontology’. Thus, Heidegger, the thinker that Irigaray, arguably, engages with most positively in some of her recent work is charged not just with the ‘exsanguination’ of his conception of Dasein, as it were, but with having neutered Dasein in a way that is all too characteristic of the monadic tendencies of the Western tradition and its enduring suppression of sexuate difference. Part of what we will examine in some depth in this section of the book is a blindspot in Heidegger’s account of Dasein which, for all of his insights concerning the social constitution of Dasein, leaves him open to some of the criticisms which Irigaray has successfully levelled against an entire tradition. As part of our efforts to tease these issues out in some detail, we will consider Derrida’s first Geschlecht essay where he looks to exonerate Heidegger from the charge of phallogocentrism (a charge he had levelled against him in a 1982 interview), along with more recent efforts to artificially cross-pollinate between Heidegger, Derrida and Irigaray. We will further examine the problematic ways that Heidegger looks to ‘neutralise’ Dasein in 1928 as well as his attempts in a series of 1930s texts to introduce a distinction between Dasein and the being of the human being. These attempts dovetail with a series of bizarre and illegitimate moves to exclude “whole peoples and races” from the domain of meaningful historical existence in the 1930s in particular. (shrink)

This paper considers the use of gender, more specifically the choice of an “animate” pronoun (he / she) or the neuter, in references to animals in contemporary English. The gender of English, which is semantic and less highly grammaticalised than that of French or German for instance, reflects the speaker’s point of view, with a system based both on ontology and on an “upgrading” principle. As such, it provides precious insights into the relationship between grammar and conceptualisation of the (...) world. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to understand how gender variation works. It proposes a brief contrastive perspective with French to achieve that. Secondly, it seeks to understand the linguistic effects of the recent “pronoun activism” that advocates rejecting it in references to animals, as a move against their objectification. (shrink)

The paper investigates the development of the system of non-referential elements in Low German from a cross-Germanic perspective. The data is taken from the currently available reference corpora, which cover the period from the beginning of the attestation in the late 9th century to 1700. The analysis of the corpus data suggests that the equivalents of the neuter pronouns it and that act as cataphoric elements already in the earliest Low German records, and that they gradually acquire additional non-referential (...) functions, including that of an existential expletive. This contrasts with the assumed situation in the contemporary Low German varieties which, according to traditional descriptions, lack pronominal expletives comparable to German es but rather display adverbial expletives, comparable to existential there in English and er in Dutch. Examining the distributional properties of the pronominal expletive it in the history of Low German, the paper observes that this type of expletive is prototypically present in formal written registers and likely remains outside the domain of spoken, colloquial style, which is the focus of the traditional dialectal descriptions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Strategic Emergence of Cartesianism:Descartes, Public Controversy, and the Quarrel of UtrechtTyler J. ThomasBetween the years 1645 and 2005, the writings of René Descartes and the teaching of Cartesian philosophy were officially banned at Utrecht University. Although the ban had not been enforced in recent centuries, and was only questionably enforced in its immediate aftermath, this episode at a prominent university in the French philosopher's adopted country rightly qualifies (...) as one of the seventeenth century's most scandalous affairs. Despite the centrality of Cartesianism to "the quarrel," existing scholarship has not captured its full significance to the emergence of Cartesian philosophy. Even Jonathan Israel and Theo Verbeek, the two scholars who have contributed the most to our historical knowledge of the quarrel, tend to characterize its drama as an external annoyance brought upon Descartes because of peculiar features of the Dutch academic-religious landscape rather than an incident deliberately shaped by his own actions.1 [End Page 749]While it is undeniable that Descartes felt persecuted by his Dutch antagonists, this article argues that Descartes's involvement in, and ultimate responsibility for, the quarrel requires reassessment. Specifically, I argue that the quarrel incited certain political dangers associated with publication that Descartes had well anticipated at the outset of his public career. Descartes traced the root of these dangers to the institutional predominance of Scholasticism, which he viewed not only as an erroneous philosophical system but also as a set of principles and methods with pernicious sociopolitical effects. More explicitly than in his philosophical works, Descartes would reveal in the polemical documents of the quarrel his understanding of how the Aristotelian principles at the heart of Scholasticism sustained a class of intellectuals whose social status required the perpetual irresolution of philosophical controversy, which Descartes especially identified with the formal method of disputation practiced in the universities of Europe.Recognizing that he was in a public battle for the legitimacy of his philosophy and, after a certain point, for his own safety, Descartes would admit to employing an evolving publication strategy intended to prepare the intellectual grounds for the acceptance of his principles among the learned public. Ranging from Jesuit priests to Protestant ministers to university officials, Descartes's critics were almost uniformly alarmed by the apparent threat Cartesianism represented to the union of Aristotelianism and orthodox theology. Descartes himself believed that the social status of these officials determined their opposition to his philosophy, and the quarrel prompted him to reveal that the order of his publications and their forms were governed primarily by the need to subvert such hostilities. Moreover, in a letter exchange deserving more attention than it has yet received, Descartes would advocate the wider usage of certain writing techniques to neuter the objections of institutional gatekeepers.2 Even at this well-developed stage of Descartes studies, the extent to which the very appearance of the Cartesian writings was determined by such strategic considerations remains underappreciated. [End Page 750]Careful comparison of the developments of the quarrel with Descartes's own statements helps reveal the intimate relation he perceived between sociopolitical authority in seventeenth-century Europe and the philosophical practices of Scholasticism. His formative role in the quarrel thus merits reexamination not only as a pivotal moment in the emergence of Cartesian philosophy but also as an occasion for further questions regarding the status of the Cartesian writings as strategic documents, including their influence upon later public controversies.3 For these reasons, Descartes's account of his actions during the quarrel deserves a large audience among philosophers, political theorists, and intellectual historians interested in the conflicts that would eventually characterize the Enlightenment.4THE QUARREL UNFOLDS: JUDGMENT OF MARCH 1642In late 1641, almost immediately following publication of the Meditations, a dispute over Cartesian philosophy emerged among the theologians at Utrecht University. In March 1642, Gisbertus Voetius, a prominent Dutch Calvinist theologian and rector of the university, convinced the academic senate to issue a formal condemnation of Cartesian philosophy on three counts. The senate decreed:I. It is opposed to the traditional philosophy which universities throughout the world have hitherto taught on the best advice, and it undermines its foundations.II. Second, it turns away... (shrink)

Maurice Blanchot’s “The Strange and the Stranger” (1958) is an essential text for understanding Blanchot’s thought, its development, and its enduring importance. He presents an early account of the impersonal “neuter” in subject-less experiences like “alienation,” “alteration,” “dispersion,” “disappearance,” and “absence.” These experiences of strangeness threaten thought, which is only “itself and for-itself its own experience.” Relatedly, they also reveal “the neutrality of being or neutrality as being.” With reference to both Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger, Blanchot clarifies the (...) meaning and exigency of a neuter that can take “upon itself the reality of alienation.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay shows how certain limit-points of Lacan's psychoanalytic discourse in his 1955–56 seminar on The Psychoses tangentially brush up against Maurice Blanchot's writing on the neuter, as presented in The Space of Literature from 1955. The effort is to strike up a conversation between Lacan's “clinical discourse” and Blanchot's “critical writing” on the topics of language, writing, authority, and madness. In this regard, the essay approaches an infinite point of approximation between the procedure of psychosis and the (...) procedure of literary writing by questioning whether, at some point in these different ways of proceeding, they may share a certain experience of language. Namely, this is an experience of a language that, as stated by both Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, “speaks all by itself” and does so incessantly and with a certain furious neutrality. (shrink)

German words ending in ›-nis‹ can have either the female or the neutral gender. As is well known, in his Cri-tique of Pure Reason as well as in other writings, Kant often shifts from the neuter to the feminine for words having the mentioned ending, without thereby leading to a difference in meaning. However, in German the word »know-ledge« does not only have an epistemological meaning, but a legal sense as well. It has the meaning of »arbitration award, a (...) judge ́s deci-sion, verdict«. In the present article I try to prove that Kant occassionally uses the word »knowledge« in the legal sense rather than in the epistemological sense. (shrink)

The western philosophical tradition, with its focus on universal concepts and a presumed neuter, but ultimately male subject, has only relatively recently become open to the question of alterity, in particular the alterity of woman as the other of man. The essays of this volume reflect in particular on the ethical implications of taking the feminine other into account. This necessitates a rethinking of the implicit structures of Western philosophy which continue to exclude women as subjects who contribute to (...) the conceptualization of world and society. This volume, which gives voice to women philosophers, is a contribution to that task. (shrink)

Democracy needs a radical rethinking. This paper makes some proposals for a new way of conceiving a democratic world. At first, it is necessary to send back citizens to their own living, thus sexuate, being. This will allow them to be responsible for their own life, that of other living beings, and to care about the climatic and sociocultural environment needed for their development. Because of their reduction to neuter, in fact nonexisting individuals, citizens do not behave as real (...) persons but as cogs in a global mechanism of which they maintain the running towards a gradual robotization of the world. To escape such a destiny, citizens, as long as they remain alive, can resort to their desire without contenting themselves with the satisfaction of needs. Desire longs for the beyond; thus, it compels to transcend oneself and is a driving force of development. Desire also brings people to each other and is the most important agent in the formation of a democratic community. It must take over from the natural sap at the individual and collective levels. In order that desire could act in this way, the current political language, in general too abstract and technical, must be modified, as well as the singularity of the individual and the relationship in difference, beginning with natural difference, must be preserved from the more abstract commitments of a national end even larger community. (shrink)

Funding for animal shelters is often a scarce resource, representing a major challenge affecting many shelter programs in the United States and beyond today. Funding issues and budgetary constraints are often exacerbated by the high rate of animal intake levels relative to adoption rates, the availability of resources to treat medical conditions, and funding for other related programs that may lower euthanasia rates, such as spay and neuter programs. This article proposes an alternative funding option for animal shelter programs (...) using a unique social finance funding model incorporating public-private partnerships and social impact bonds. This social finance model is directly aimed at providing greater funding for animal shelter programs, while also increasing transparency and social impact outcomes. If utilized, the social impact bond model can complement and build upon (but not completely replace) existing funding sources that are critical to saving nonhuman animal lives while benefiting society at large. (shrink)

Women's alienation seems to cling to their bodies like destiny. But what is a woman? An absurd question if ever there was one, since a man's virility seems so self‐evident that it would never occur to him to wonder what makes him a man. As a man, he is both the positive and the neuter term representing all humanity, while doubt is permitted in the case of woman, the negative pole whose elusive “femininity” we continue to pursue. In fact, (...) the problem comes from elsewhere because “Only the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an Other.” But what is the Other? This is a question we have not gotten beyond. The absolute Other might be the Black woman encountered in Africa, whom Simone de Beauvoir mentions in Letters to Nelson Algren. (shrink)