Disgust is not a pleasant subject. It is perhaps partly for this reason that it has not been much discussed in philosophical literature, or, indeed anywhere else. Disgust has considerable moral significance however, and appreciating its significance will illuminate the present state of our morality. One may be led to this view by reflecting on several recent works on pollution. The pollution in question, of course, is not of the air, soil, or water, but that of people who have violated (...) moral taboos of their society'. (shrink)

This paper investigates an unexplored indexical dimension inherent in the mapping structure of metaphor. The empirical focus is on the metaphor of stain but the scope of indexicality in relation to...

Over the past decade, Canadian media coverage of street sex work has steadily increased. The majority of this interest pertains to graphic violence against street sex workers, most notably from Vancouver, British Columbia. In this article, the authors analyze newspaper coverage that appeared in western Canadian publications between 2006 and 2009. In theorizing the violence both depicted and perpetrated by newspapers, the authors propose an analytic framework capable of attending to the process of othering in all of its complexity. To (...) this end, the authors supplement a Foucauldian analysis of abjection by considering the work of Judith Butler along with Julia Kristeva's conceptualization of abjection. Using excerpts from western Canadian newspapers, the authors illustrate how the media's discursive practices function as triggers for the process of cultural abjection by inscribing street sex workers with images of defilement. The authors argue that newspaper coverage of street sex workers reinforces the inviolability of normalized life by constantly reiterating the horror reserved for abjected bodies. (shrink)

When one visits Thailand, one is struck by the enormous number of temples in the urban Bangkok area, many of which are conspicuously absent from the more cherished art historical works on the art and architecture of south-east Asia. The Wat Po complex and Wat Reitmit, one discovers, whatever their virtues for the Western tourist, are not among the temples and archaeological sites mentioned in the text of such an authority as Benjamin Rowland. Nor are these temples—when cited at all—discussed (...) in the same vein as, for example, the Konarak temples of Orissa , where at least some veneration is paid to the plasticity of the carving in its depiction of sexual variety, even if the depictions themselves were at one time held to possess little or no intrinsic merit as pieces of sculpture. (shrink)

Scripture, the creeds, and tradition have provided the raw material that theology has attempted to refine. The contribution of much recent theology comes from new insight into these materials by women, blacks, and the Third World, often as examined by analytic tools derived from post‐Christian ideologies. The theology of Rosemary Ruether stands out because of her choice of sources, among which she includes documents excoriated as heretical by what she calls the patriarchal orthodoxy of the early Christian church. Because of (...) this it is useful to examine this type of theology in relation to other theological inquiries of recent years. The thesis of this paper is that, in her ability to incorporate source material hitherto regarded as heretical, Ruether has demonstrated the scientific character of this kind of theology. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper describes the way in which a simple device, the pregnancy wheel, has been used by the medical profession to impose a new way of measuring and experiencing pregnancy.The change involves counting in weeks instead of counting in months and it is gradually replacing a commonsensical method that had deep physiological and cultural roots. In contrast, the medical methodology of counting forty weeks is more complicated and lacks direct connections to the events of pregnancyIn the encounter between the (...) doctor and the pregnant woman the pregnancy wheel has a variety of uses, among them determinations of the age and estimated size of the fetus.It plays an additional role, however, in the medicalization of pregnancy by providing the doctor with privileged information. It also influences modes of thinking through the way in which it deals with the question of the beginning of pregnancy, a question that has clear moral implications. (shrink)

Building critically on anthropology’s “ontological turn,” this article isolates conceptualization as a core concern for anthropological thinking: anthropology as the activity of transfiguring the contingency of ethnographic materials in the formal language of conceptual relations and distinctions. Focusing on works by Mauss and Evans-Pritchard, as well as my own research, the article articulates the morphological character of such a project. While akin also to philosophy, such attention to the “shapes” of conceptual relations is analogous to the practice of art in (...) its concern for the expressive potentials of these acts of conceptual transfiguration. (shrink)

“Eve Sedgwick’s ‘Other Materials’” refers to a graduate seminar that Sedgwick offered at the CUNY Graduate Center entitled “How to Do Things with Words and Other Materials.” As its title suggests, her seminar advanced Sedgwick’s enduring “FASCINATION” with “MAKING UNSPEAKING OBJECTS” of all sorts, which elsewhere included the body’s organic and inorganic waste. Taking a cue from her teaching, I suggest that, while critics have extensively detailed Sedgwick’s contributions to literary interpretation, sexuality, gender, affect, and performativity, we should also appreciate (...) her writings as theorizing queer material relations. This observation is pertinent given her rethinking of psychodynamic object relations theory alongside her creative writings on “THE WASTE PRODUCTS,” or the matter we ceaselessly produce. My argument thus anchors its claims in a close non-Kleinian reading of her poem “Bathroom Song,” which also offers an unforeseen take on paranoid and reparative idioms of psycho-material being. How waste matter facilitates this unanticipated insight is one of my essay’s – and Sedgwick’s – subsidiary concerns. (shrink)

This special issue of History of the Humane Sciences intends to shed light on a series of psychopathological entities that do not target well defined conditions and experiences, but rather aim at delimiting zones of uncertainty that defy psychopathology’s order of things: mild diagnoses or subthreshold disorders, borderline conditions, culture bound syndromes, or ideas of dimensions and dimensionality. While these categories have come to play an increasingly central role in psychiatric and psychological thinking during the last 50 years, historians and (...) social scientists have had remarkably little to say about how they have been created, what they have been used for, and what kind of realities they have helped to shape. In this introductory article we propose the concept of ‘psychopathological fringes’ to refer to these categories that are located somewhere at the border of psychopathological classifications and refer to zones of conceptual underdetermination. The notion of fringes serves to highlight both the conceptually and the socially marginal nature of the conditions, personal identities, and worlds delimited by these categories. The fringes of psychopathology are zones of vagueness, of epistemic uncertainty, and moral ambiguity. This introduction proposes a first incursion in these zones. It suggests some of the reason why they might have had attracted little interest in the past and why they may be more salient recently. It follows some analytical clues that might help chart a way through it and proposes a map through the collection of articles included in this issue. (shrink)

This article investigates the emotional undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November. I argue that one of the main characters of Jansson’s book is the autumn forest that surrounds the abandoned Moomin house. The decomposing forest is not just an emblem of the inner lives of the guests that gather in the house but is an active character itself: an ambiguous life form that creeps in the house and must be expelled from its living core. I further demonstrate that the (...) emotion of disgust has a crucial role in Jansson’s narrative, and that an adequate analysis of the intentional content of disgust allows us to see what is at issue in the relations between the characters. In my reading, the main insight of Tove Jansson’s last Moomin book is not about loss or sorrow but is about the human capacity to begin anew by composing novel wholes from scraps. (shrink)

Risk is always present in people’s lives: diseases, new technologies, socio-scientific issues such as climate change, and advances in medicine—to name just a few examples—all carry risks. To be able to navigate risks in everyday life, as well as to participate in social debate on risk-related issues, students need to develop risk competence. Science education can be a powerful tool in supporting students’ risk competence, which is an important component of scientific literacy. As there are different definitions of risk within (...) the scientific community, the aims of this article are to review the literature on two major theoretical frameworks for conceptualising risk, the realist, and the constructivist paradigms of risk and to connect both in order to suggest a working definition of what can be understood as risk competence in science instruction. (shrink)

Although disgust is recognized as a common and prominent emotion in healthcare, little is known about how healthcare professionals understand, experience and conceptualize disgust. The aim of the study was to gain an in‐depth understanding of how nursing and midwifery students experience, understand and cope with disgust in their clinical work. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Six participants (all women: two nursing students, four midwifery students) from a university in the South of England were (...) interviewed. Four superordinate themes with eight subthemes were identified. Overall, findings suggest that participants experience both moral and physical disgust; however, they find it difficult to talk about and use other terms to describe their experience. Findings are discussed through the lens of social identity theory, to understand the relevance of professional identity and how this might further maintain the disgust taboo. The strategies participants have developed in order to cope with disgust are explored and understood within the current healthcare climate. Future research should focus on ways of addressing the experience of disgust by healthcare professionals in order to improve the quality of care provided, especially in the climate of the COVID‐19 crisis. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a theoretical framework for the analysis of expertise and experts in contemporary societies. It argues that while prevailing approaches have come to see expertise in various forms and functions, they tend to neglect the broader historical and societal context, and importantly the relational aspect of expertise. This will be discussed with regard to influential theoretical frameworks, such as laboratory studies, regulatory science, lay expertise, post-normal science, and honest brokers. An alternative framework of expertise is introduced, showing (...) the limitations of existing frameworks and emphasizing one crucial element of all expertise, which is their role in guiding action. (shrink)

The regulation of innovation reflects a specific imaginary of the role of governance that makes it external to the field it governs. It is argued that this decision and rule-based view of regulation is insufficient to deal with the inescapable uncertainties that are produced by innovation. In particular, relying on risk-based knowledge as the basis of regulation fails to deal sufficiently both with the problem that innovation ensures the future will not resemble the past, and with the problem that the (...) social priorities that underlie innovation often remain unquestioned. Recently, rights-based frameworks have been defended as principle-based approaches to innovation governance that address the gaps which trouble an understanding of regulation as guided by risk-based decision procedures. An alternative view of governance is defended, based on a concept of care drawn from feminist ethics and other traditions. Care aims, not at justifying punctual decisions, but at transforming institutions and practices, with the goal of creating specific institutional ‘virtues’, and requires the broad and deep participation of publics in shaping innovation. In this way, governance is made internal to innovation. (shrink)

In this article, the importance of ritual as a collective response to death is discussed. A case example, taken from a larger ethnographic study, is used to explore the responses and reactions of a group of Italian nurses to death as it occurs within an intensive care unit in Rome, Italy. The material presented is used to analyse the significance that cultural, religious and social beliefs and quasi‐beliefs can have in nursing practice. The issues highlighted in this examination of the (...) place of ritual in death are located and discussed within their highly specific cultural context and suggest that, where emphasis remains on nurses as a collective rather than on the individual nurse, ritual acts to ensure that social and moral order prevails. (shrink)

Taking account of local culture: limits to the development of a professional ethos The need to extend the discussion of culture in the study of nursing, combined with an enthusiasm for the possibility of viewing nursing from a new perspective, provides the impetus for this study. Based on fieldwork undertaken in the intensive care unit (RICU) of a major public hospital in Rome (Italy), this paper explores some of the key aspects of the social relations and local staff culture of (...) one particular group of Italian nurses. In a climate of globalization, where the deployment of dominant Anglo‐American ideas is difficult to counter, the RICU presents as a setting which challenges the widespread assumptions of universal standards of nursing practice. By building a picture of the working world of these particular nurses, we are assisted in our understanding of nursing practice as a local cultural activity. In exploring the significance of local culture this paper brings into question the universality of the current paradigm of professionalism and professional identity, and emphasizes the value of acknowledging local culture. (shrink)

Emile Durkheim's "Antis?mitisme et crise sociale," written in 1899 during the Dreyfus Affair in France, is introduced. The introduction summarizes the principal contributions that "Antis?mitisme et crise sociale" makes to the sociology of anti-Semitism, relates those contributions to Durkheim's broader theoretical assumptions and concerns, situates his analysis of anti-Semitism in its social and historical context, contrasts it to other analyses of anti-Semitism (Marxist and Zionist) that were prominent in Durkheim's time, indicates some of the revisions and additions that a fuller (...) and more complete Durkheimian theory of anti-Semitism would entail, and highlights the significance of Durkheim's ideas for the contemporary study of ethnic and racial antagonism. While noting the limitations of Durkheim's analysis, the introduction concludes that "Antis?mitisme et crise sociale" has sadly regained its relevance in the light of a revival of anti-Semitism at the turn of the millennium. (shrink)

La actual crisis financiera nos ha impactado de tal forma que es imposible escapar a una reflexión sobre el sistema financiero global y sus efectos sociales. La conciencia política puede ser radicalmente alterada a través de experiencias catastróficas, dándonos la posibilidad de pensar en una transformación del orden establecido. En este trabajo, nos proponemos reflexionar sobre las relaciones financieras regionales y globales a la luz del reciente escándalo de la LIBOR. Es fundamental que las organizaciones intergubernamentales, las organizaciones no gubernamentales, (...) los Estados democráticos, las empresas y la sociedad civil se involucren en procesos de innovaciones financieras responsables en un contexto de gobernanza sostenible global. (shrink)

The article examines a fundamental problem in classical Jaina philosophy, namely, the ontological status of dead matter in the hylozoistic and at the same time dualistic Jaina worldview. This question is of particular interest in view of the widespread contemporary Jaina practice of venerating bone relics and stūpas of prominent saints. The main argument proposed in this article is, that, from a classical doctrinal point of view, bone relics of renowned ascetics are valuable for Jainas, if at all, because of (...) their unique physical attributes, rather than the presumed presence of the deceased in the remains as posited in much of the extant literature on relic worship across cultures. The specific focus of the article are Jaina and non-Jaina explanations of the qualities of special matter in terms of karmic and natural processes of transformation. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to investigate radio frequency identification tagging as a form of sociotechnical experimentation and the kinds of sociotechnical futures at stake in this experimentation. For this purpose, a detailed analysis of a publicly available promotional video by a tag producer for the fashion industry, a sector widely using RFID tags, was analysed in detail. The results of the study indicated that the sociotechnical imaginary of RFID tagging gravitates around the core value of perfect sociotechnical efficiency. (...) This demands a high degree of readiness to engage in standardization efforts, which performs a specific materialized understanding of ethics by other means. Furthermore, the analysis points to the importance of considering the spatiotemporal dimensions in which RFID tags work when reflecting on how this technology matters to society. Finally, the analysis shows a tacit effort to keep RFID technology and thus any questions of responsible innovation confined to the shop floor. However, given the spreading of the use of RFIDs, much wider-ranging considerations are called for. (shrink)

Despite the upsurge of research on disgust, the implications of this research for the investigation of cultural pollution beliefs has yet to be adequately explored. In particular, the sensitivity of both disgust and pollution to a common set of elicitors suggests a common psychological basis, though several obstacles have prevented an integrative account, including methodological differences between the relevant disciplines. Employing a conciliatory framework that embraces both naturalistic and humanistic levels of explanation, this article examines the dynamic reciprocal process by (...) which contamination/contagion appraisals in individuals serve to shape—and are in turn shaped by—culture-specific pollution beliefs. This complex interrelationship is illustrated by examining ancient Near Eastern and modern ethnographic documentation of pollution beliefs, highlighting the underappreciated function of these pollution beliefs as folk theories for the spread of infectious disease. By evaluating how pollution beliefs shape contamination appraisals in individuals, it will be argued that cultural inheritance has played a much larger role in guiding disease avoidance behavior than has been previously recognized. (shrink)

In remarks scattered across his corpus of writings, Nietzsche offers a fascinating analysis of the theme of purity. In this article I systematize these fragments into a genealogy and draw out conclusions relevant to philosophy and cultural criticism. Nietzsche argues that the Christian use of purity, as both an ideal and a means of achieving self-martyrdom of the will, has been retained in modern Western culture. He is generally quite skeptical of purity, considering it to be tightly associated with dominating (...) and mediocratic social institutions. However, he also sees potential for purity to help bring about an escape from these systems of social control. (shrink)

In most rewilding projects, humans are still the agents in control: it is us who decide to no longer want to fully control nature. Spontaneous rewilding changes the nature of this game. Once we are confronted with species that have their own agency, that cannot fully be controlled, and that behave in ways that we do not always like, then it proves hard to co-exist and tolerate nature’s autonomy. Nowhere is this more clearly visible than with the resurging wolf, whose (...) return to parts of western Europe challenges our existing ideas about ourselves and our place in the landscape. (shrink)

Men's passage to fatherhood: an analysis of the contemporary relevance of transition theory This paper presents a theoretical analysis of men's experiences of pregnancy, birth and early fatherhood. It does so using a framework of ritual transition theory and argues that despite its earlier structural‐functionalist roots, transition theory remains a valuable framework, illuminating contemporary transitions across the life course. The paper discusses the historical development of transition or ritual theory and, drawing upon data generated during longitudinal ethnographic interviews with men (...) undergoing the transition to fatherhood, analyses its relevance in understanding contemporary experiences of fatherhood. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology and human sociobiology often reject the mere possibility of symbolic causality. Conversely, theories in which symbolic causality plays a central role tend to be both anti-nativist and anti-evolutionary. This article sketches how these apparent scientific rivals can be reconciled in the study of disgust. First, we argue that there are no good philosophical or evolutionary reasons to assume that symbolic causality is impossible. Then, we examine to what extent symbolic causality can be part of the theoretical toolbox of (...) the evolutionary social sciences. This examination leads to the conclusion that it is possible to make evolutionary sense of Mary Douglas’s theory of disgust, and that her view of symbolic causality can and should inform evolutionary theories of (sociocultural) disgust. (shrink)

Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred have had a continuous impact on cultural anthropology and the study of ancient Chinese thought, respectively, but neither has typically been read as a contribution to comparative religious ethics. This paper argues that both books developed from profound dissatisfaction with the empiricist presuppositions that dominated their fields into the 1970s and that both should be associated with the revival of American pragmatism that is currently driving a reinterpretation (...) of ethics as a social practice embedded in historically contingent discourse about agency, virtue, and social organization. This pragmatic turn results in a shift of comparative ethics away from issues of methods and metaethics in the direction of history and fieldwork as the preconditions for useful comparison. (shrink)

This paper explores the laborious and intimate work of turning bodies of research animals into models of human patients. Based on ethnographic research in the interdisciplinary Danish research centre NEOMUNE, we investigate collaboration across species and disciplines, in research aiming at improving survival for preterm infants. NEOMUNE experimental studies on piglets evolved as a platform on which both basic and clinical scientists exercised professional authority. Guided by the field of multi-species research, we explore the social and material agency of research (...) animals in the production of human health. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s concept of “collaborative survival”, we show that sharing the responsibility of the life and death of up to twenty-five preterm piglets fostered not only a collegial solidarity between basic and clinical scientists, but also a transformative cross-fertilization across species and disciplines—a productive “contamination”—facilitating the day-to-day survival of piglets, the academic survival of scientists and the promise of survival of preterm infants. Contamination spurred intertwined identity shifts that increased the porosity between the pig laboratory and the neonatal intensive care unit. Of particular significance was the ability of the research piglets to flexibly become animal-infant-patient hybrids in need of a united effort from basic and clinical researchers. However, ‘hybrid pigs’ also entailed a threat to the demarcation between humans and animals that consolidates the use of animals in biomedical research, and efforts were continuously done to keep contamination within spatial limits. We conclude that contamination facilitates transformative encounters, yet needs spatial containment to materialize bench-to-bedside translation. (shrink)

Rule is commonly conceptualized with reference to the compliance it invokes. In this article, we propose a conception of rule via the practice of resistance instead. In contrast to liberal approaches, we stress the possibility of illegitimate rule, and, as opposed to critical approaches, the possibility of legitimate authority. In the international realm, forms of rule and the changes they undergo can thus be reconstructed in terms of the resistance they provoke. To this end, we distinguish between two types of (...) resistance—opposition and dissidence—in order to demonstrate how resistance and rule imply each other. We draw on two case studies of resistance in and to international institutions to illustrate the relationship between rule and resistance and close with a discussion of the normative implications of such a conceptualization. (shrink)

A noteworthy development that has transpired in American sociology in the past quarter century has been the increasingly sophisticated interest in the analysis of human cultural systems. Sadly, however, these analyses reveal that social scientists rarely appreciate the profoundly evolutionary aspects of human culture. The chief purpose of this essay is to address this shortcoming and to offer some tentative suggestions toward its rectification. The essay begins by briefly reviewing recent developments in the analysis of cultural systems, primarily by reference (...) to the influential work of Wuthnow. Second, a common flaw in these approaches is addressed—namely, the absence of any recognition of the value of grounding sociocultural theory in an informed evolutionary framework—and the case is made that this shortcoming is avoidable, even within the context of the intellectual traditions of the social sciences. Third, the evolutionary foundations of human cultural behavior are explored in terms of an analysis of relevant theoretical and empirical developments in the evolutionary neurosciences. Fourth, the value of these insights is illustrated by reference to an evolutionary critique of a recent and thought-provoking contribution to the study of modern political culture—Douglas and Wildavsky’s analysis ofRisk and Culture. Finally, the article concludes by emphasizing the value of and the necessity for incorporating evolutionary reasoning into the domain of sociocultural theory. (shrink)

This article examines the cultural practices through which a group of professionals infuse their work and community with charisma. Although previous research has theorized the “charisma of office” (Weber 1978), we know little about how the occupants of such offices sustain it. I focus on a group of psychoanalytically-inclined psychotherapists, whose field, despite its early charismatic beginnings, has been especially embattled in recent decades. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I reveal how they share stories emphasizing their “idealization” by others, (...) draw boundaries between their professional and private lives to manage their work identities, and perform interpersonal affective work that shores up their claims to extraordinary abilities. Together, these cultural practices constitute charisma within the professional group. This article thus makes a case that, as expertise becomes increasingly contested, we must look beyond social organization and the evidentiary bases of knowledge to understand professional authority. (shrink)

This article proposes a rethinking of Bourdieu’s habitus as context-specific, multiple, and decentralized based on nine months of participant-observation fieldwork with dumpster divers in New York City. Dumpster divers are mostly white, college-educated people in their twenties and thirties who eat food from retail trash as a lifestyle choice. Sociologists have recently theorized culture as a fragmented, incoherent “toolkit” of cultured capacities acquired throughout the lifetime. Bourdieu on the contrary, theorized socialized culture as habitus, a relatively durable, classed structure acquired (...) during childhood. While he recognized the possibility of acquiring “specific” habitus (Bourdieu 2000) later in life, he never developed the theoretical implications of socialization across multiple contexts. Building on ethnographic evidence of dumpster divers’ contradictory pursuit of food taste through the distasteful behavior of eating from the trash, I develop an alternative model of habitus as interlinked bundles of dispositions acquired in specific contexts. To theorize the bundled quality of habitus, I introduce what I call the practical congruity of dispositions. I show how rather than being disparate elements of a cultural repertoire, ways of seeing, common sense, dexterity, and orientations “make sense” in conjunction as actors mobilize them in specific contexts: dumpster diving acquires a commonsensical character based on the practical sense practitioners acquire. My understanding of habitus goes beyond the fragmentation assumed in notions of culture as a repertoire of cultured capacities, on the one hand, and the continuity and coherence premised in notions of primary and secondary habitus, on the other hand. (shrink)

Magda Arnold is recognised as one of the pioneers of modern cognitive approaches to the study of emotion. Indeed, her definition of appraisal is still employed more or less unchanged by many researchers. Somewhat less well known is Arnold's broader theory of emotion, personality, and human development that formed the context for her ideas about appraisal. In this paper, I examine the influence of the psychology of Thomas Aquinas on Arnold's thinking about appraisal, emotion, the self and self-actualisation. I then (...) critique current conceptions of appraisal in the light of her ideas about emotion and the person. I end with a plea to broaden our conception of what constitutes a moral emotion. (shrink)

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are socially constructed as more ‘dirty’ than other gynaecological conditions. This article analyses women’s accounts of interactions with clinicians, subsequent to a diagnosis of genital herpes simplex virus or human papilloma virus. Women conceptualised consultations as a ‘moral event,’ different from other consultations. This moral component is highlighted drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘the confessional.’ Additionally, Douglas’ anthropological construction of ‘dirt’ is used to consider why these consultations are ‘confessional’ experiences. Email interviews were conducted with 26 (...) women diagnosed with a viral STI and 12 sexual health clinicians. Data were analysed thematically using a feminist, poststructuralist approach. Findings indicated that discourses of morality shape sexual health consultations. Five themes were identified in relation to the moral ‘work’ in clinical consultations about a viral STI diagnosis: the particular ‘dirtiness’ of viral STIs, clinicians as moral agents, the ‘non‐judgmental’ clinician, women juggling truth‐telling and risk and clinicians prescribing moral work. Clinicians support and educate women more effectively if they recognise subjective, moral aspects of sexual health consultations rather than assuming that effective clinical teaching is rational, scientific and non‐judgmental. (shrink)

Gilligan’s (1982) refinement of Kohlberg’s theory on moral development operates on two theses: (1) females, more so than males, reach moral decisions based on the personalities of the relevant individuals; and (2) female behaviors stemming from moral decisions are based upon “care” and “responsibility for others.” This article accepts the first thesis but argues that the second is incorrect. That is, self-interest—i.e., aiding “blood” kin and/or carefully monitoring reciprocity—rather than “altruism” is argued to be the operant dynamic in forging distaff (...) morality and resultant behavior. Six empirical examples are presented as contraindicative of Gilligan’s second thesis. Finally, it is suggested that selection for the psychological traits of independence and the mastery of subtle social chess yielded ancestral females who had more descendants—us—than did females with alternative profiles. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore how food can be analyzed in terms of signs and codes of everyday life, and especially how food can be used to express ethical concerns. The paper investigates the potential of a semiotic conceptual analysis: How can the semiotic approach be used to analyze expressions of ethics and food ethics in everyday life? The intention is to explore from a theoretical point of view and with constructed cases, how semiotics can be used (...) to analyze the role of food as an expression of ethics in everyday life among families, friends, and colleagues: How do foodstuffs function as signs of ethics in everyday life? How is food used to send signals about care and concern? How are the signs of food ethics perceived? It is concluded that analyzing ethical considerations with respect to food with the help of the semiotic model can show us perspectives that otherwise would be difficult to see and thus we can address everyday food ethical issues that otherwise might not be noted. The semiotic approach to food ethics in everyday life is a conceptual framework that can be used to draw attention to certain domains and fields of food ethical behavior that otherwise would tend to remain implicit and unspoken. (shrink)

I consider reasons for questioning ‘the laws of logic’, and suggest that these laws do not accord with everyday reality. Either they are rhetorical tools rather than absolute truths, or else Plato and his successors were right to think that they identify a reality distinct from the ordinary world of experience, and also from the ultimate source of reality.