This collection of papers by prominent feminist thinkers advances the positive feminist project of remapping the moral by developing theory that acknowledges the diversity of women.

When the benefits of surgery do not outweigh the harms or where they do not clearly do so, surgical interventions become morally contested. Cutting to the Core examines a number of such surgeries, including infant male circumcision and cutting the genitals of female children, the separation of conjoined twins, surgical sex assignment of intersex children and the surgical re-assignment of transsexuals, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery.

Hilde Lindemann argues that personhood is the shared practice of recognizing and responding to one another. She calls this practice holding. Holding, however, can fail. Holding failure, by stereotyping for example, can inhibit others’ epistemic confidence and ability to recall true beliefs as well as create an environment of racism or sexism. How might we avoid holding failure? Holding failure, I argue, has many epistemic dimensions, so I argue that moral encroachment has the theoretical tools available to avoid (...) holding failures. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to articulate and understand the epistemology of holding in an attempt to remedy holding failure. I show that the virtue of wokeness emerges from an epistemic environment tainted with moral encroachment. I argue that as long as an individual is woke, she will have a tendency to avoid holding failures. Wokeness and moral encroachment, consequently, are fundamental to the epistemology of holding and consistent proper holding. (shrink)

In this introductory essay, I describe feminist ethics as a kind of approach to morality that says we ought to pay attention to the facts on the ground and empirical information in order to know whether and how a moral problem is a gendered problem. One of the best accounts of feminist ethics is by Hilde Lindemann, who wrote that feminist ethics aims “to understand, criticize, and correct how gender operates within our moral and social beliefs and practices.” (...) She doesn’t define feminism as a theory about women, and neither do I. The term 'feminist' has more to do with the sources of this approach to ethics than the ultimate goals of such theorists; women were influential and early advocates of the view that sometimes a moral problem is a problem because it is gendered. (shrink)

Everyone thinks they know who Prince Zuko is and can be. His father, Fire Lord Ozai, and sister, Azula, think him weak, disobedient, and undeserving of the crown. His Uncle Iroh thinks him good, if troubled, but ultimately worthy of his faith. The kids initially think him a villain, but eventually come to see him as a person – neither monster nor saint – someone who can choose to go in a new way. Zuko himself shows great ambivalence between these (...) conflicting stories about who he is, though each one helps to craft his own self-understanding. In this paper, we apply Hilde Lindemann’s narrative account of the self to explore the ways that others “hold” Zuko in one identity or “let him go” from others. According to Lindemann, our personal identities consist of the first- and third-person stories that cluster around significant acts, relationships, and commitments in our lives. Our identities are fundamentally relational, formed by the interaction between our own self-conception and the ways in which others see us. As such, others’ stories can enable or prevent us from imaginatively projecting ourselves into a particular future. This can lead us to becoming trapped in our identities; without the possibility of being perceived differently by others, we might find ourselves unable to try different ways of being or acting. The converse is also true, in that others can open up new possible identities by seeing things in us that we have trouble seeing in ourselves. If others in our moral community see us as wicked, beyond redemption and unable to repair our wrongs, we are held in the role of the villain and might come to live into that role without question. Zuko’s story is a perfect illustration of Jean Harvey’s reminder that, “it is just not true that once a thief, always a thief” and that agents can choose to go in a new way, can choose to change. How does Zuko change? We argue that Zuko’s redemption is enabled by those in his moral community holding him in identities in which he is a good person, capable and deserving of care, friendship, and love. While the identity he has in relation to his father and sister closes down many possible futures, his uncle Iroh in particular persists in holding him in an identity in which he is loved and worthy of love. And in doing so - in holding this space for him - Iroh opens up a way for Zuko to exercise agency and choose to become a different kind of person than the one he thought he was destined to be. (shrink)

In the Eudemian Ethics II 1, 1219a34–b8, Aristotle defines happiness as ‘the activity of a complete life in accordance with complete virtue’. Most scholars interpret a complete life as a whole lifetime, which means that happiness involves virtuous activity over an entire life. This article argues against this common reading by using Aristotle’s notion of ‘activity’ (energeia) as a touchstone. It argues that happiness, according to the Eudemian Ethics, must be a complete activity that reaches its end at any and (...) every moment. The upshot of this reading is that life reaches completeness within a lifetime and that death cannot be the requirement for making life complete. (shrink)

This paper is a revised version of the essay that won the Zapffe Prize in 2017. -/- In «The Last Messiah» and On the tragic, Peter Wessel Zapffe suggests that humankind should cease to reproduce, as the meaning of life cannot be found and human life at its best is tragic. The theory has been criticized for assuming that the meaning of life must be explained by an external cause and implicitly asks for an infinite causal chain. In this paper, (...) I argue that it is possible to escape this critique by adding a new element to the definition of the tragic: namely, the insight that the tragic cannot come into existence if the subject does not demonstrate its greatness. Precisely because a human, on Zapffe’s understanding, must prove its brilliance if tragedy is to arise, I argue that the tragic cannot be devoid of meaning. In contrast, the individual seems to be provided with a tragic meaning of life, rather than being deprived of it. Furthermore, the new definition of the tragic affects Zapffe’s antinatalism, because a tragic meaning of life does not necessitate that humankind should cease to reproduce. Yet, the definition does not suggest that humans should reproduce either. Instead, it confronts us with the following question: Should one bring new life into the world, when the meaning of life only can be found in the tragic? (shrink)

In Poetics 13, Aristotle claims that the protagonist in the most beautiful tragedies comes to ruin through some kind of ‘failure’—in Greek, hamartia. There has been notorious disagreement among scholars about the moral responsibility involved in hamartia. This article defends the old reading of hamartia as a character flaw, but with an important modification: rather than explaining the hero's weakness as general weakness of will (akrasia), it argues that the tragic hero is blinded by temper (thumos) or by a pursuit (...) for fine, good and desirable things—that is, by what may be labelled ‘qualified’ weakness of will. The upshot is that hamartia ends up as being less blameworthy than ‘proper’ akrasia, but still explains why morally outstanding people are unsuitable for the most beautiful tragedies. (shrink)

As hubs of global exchange, port cities are host to inconvenient and contested pasts. Many of these pasts have yet to be fully recognized. In the wake of demonstrations against racial injustices this summer, the PortCityFutures team discussed how our own research practices relate to systemic inequalities within port cities. It was concluded that we need to better understand how these contested and complex pasts, legacies of diversity and segregation, and colonial pasts impact port cities today.

The pejorative have been the object of a growing literature in philosophy. Hom and May (2013) defend the Semantic Innocence thesis to explain a depreciative force of the pejoratives, receiving attacks from Sennet and Copp (2014). The purpose of this article is to present contributions to this discussion, defending the Semantic Innocence thesis of the attacks received from Sennet and Copp (2014), but presenting a new argument against its pretensions, showing that the Semantic Innocence thesis fails to recognize the derogatory (...) character of insults whose neutral counterpart is false. (shrink)

The present dissertation presents an examination of the Carrollian logic through the reconstruction of its syllogistic theory. Lewis Carroll was one of the main responsible for the dissemination of logic during the nineteenth century, but most of his logical writings remained unknown until a posthumous publication of 1977. The reconstruction of the Carrollian syllogistic theory was based on the comparison of the two books on author's logic, "The Game of Logic" and "Symbolic Logic". The analysis of the Carrollian syllogistics starts (...) from a study of the historical context of development of the logic and the developments of syllogistics previous to the contribution of the author. Situated in the historical period of algebraical logic, Carrollian syllogistics is characterized as a conservative extension of the Aristotelian syllogistics, the main innovation is the use of negative terms and the introduction of a diagrammatic method suitable for the representation of negative terms. The diagrammatic method of the Carrollian syllogistics presents advances in relation to the methods of Euler and Venn. The use of negative terms also requires a redefinition of the notion of syllogism, simplifying and expanding the amount of arguments amenable to logical treatment. Carroll does not use four, but only three categorical propositions in his syllogistic, with interpretation of existential presuppositions congruent with a syntactic-existential reading. Carrollian syllogistics uses some techniques found in the work of algebraists of logic and also made the same confusions between notions of "class" and "member" that were common in the period. Convinced of the social utility of logic and dedicated to popularize it, Carroll priorized a creation of new didactics for the teaching of logic in his works, where he can include his diagrammatic method of solving syllogisms. Carroll made only scant considerations of his conception of logic. Based on the small considerations found throughout the study and on the constant claim of the social utility of logic, it is suggested that Carroll is close to the so-called pragmatic position, which considers a logic as an instrument of regulation of discourse. (shrink)

This book teaches why and how to philosophize in the manner of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. It offers philosophy to readers as one of the great devotions of life, wonderful for the ideals it sets in the sky and the security it gives. It helps readers uncover their deepest beliefs about life and reality.

Written in the fourth century BCE, Philebus is likely one of Plato’s last Socratic dialogues. It is also famously difficult to read and understand. A multilayered inquiry into the nature of life, Philebus has drawn renewed interest from scholars in recent years. Yet, until now, the only English-language commentary available has been a work published in 1897. This much-needed new commentary, designed especially for philosophers and advanced students of ancient Greek, draws on up-to-date scholarship to expand our understanding of Plato’s (...) complex work. In his in-depth introduction, George Rudebusch places the Philebus in historical, philosophical, and linguistic context. As he explains, the dialogue deals with the question of whether a good life consists of pleasure or knowing. Yet its exploration of this question is riddled with ambiguity. With the goal of facilitating comprehension, particularly for students of philosophy, Rudebusch divides his commentary into twenty discrete subarguments. Within this framework, he elucidates the significance—and possible interpretations—of each passage and dissects their philological details. In particular, he analyzes how Plato uses inference indicators (that is, the Greek words for “therefore” and “because”) to establish the structure of the arguments, markers difficult to present in translation. A detailed and thorough commentary, this volume is both easy to navigate and conducive to new interpretations of one of Plato’s most intriguing dialogues. (shrink)

Plato's Theaetetus rejects four explanations of how someone could falsely believe something. The Sophist accepts an explanation of how someone could falsely believe something. The problem is to fit together what Plato rejects in the Theaetetus with what he accepts in the Sophist, given the intended unity of these two dialogues. ;The traditional solution is to take the Sophist's explanation of false speech and belief to be Plato's last word on the matter, to take that explanation as somehow overreaching the (...) problems raised in the Theaetetus. I argue that this solution is unsatisfactory: Using the Cratylus, I point out a 'match-up postulate' needed for false speech, namely, that a person can 'match-up' x with y in some way or other whether or not x and y really belong together in that way. But The Theaetetus rejects this postulate. And This rejection is canonical, that is, Plato is there arguing in his own person. Now Nowhere in the Sophist is any reason given to accept this postulate, nor is it compatible with certain parts of the Sophist. Thus The Sophist's explanation does not overreach the problems raised in the Theaetetus. ;Having rejected the traditional way of fitting together the Theaetetus and Sophist, I suggest the following new way. Instead of taking the explanation of the Sophist to be Plato's last word on false speech, I take his last word to be the rejection of the various explanations in the Theaetetus. ;I motivate this suggestion by comparing Plato's peculiar style of dialogue--as found, for instance, in the Laches and Meno--with the modern, expository style of presenting philosophy. The aim of my comparison is to show that, whereas in an exposition the arguing is done in the middle followed by the conclusion at the end, in Plato's dialogue style the arguing is done in the middle followed by a denial of the conclusion at the end. (shrink)

These two books challenge museums--the predominant and continually evolving institutions of art delivery--in order to uncover and expose the rampant political biases and hidden strategies that their founders, administrators, and boards of trustees have utilized in order to maintain the preferred status quo of predominantly white male power.

Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics takes a fresh look at the history of aesthetics and at current debates within the philosophy of art by exploring the ways in which gender informs notions of art and creativity, evaluation and interpretation, and concepts of aesthetic value. Multiple intellectual traditions have formed this field, and the discussions herein range from consideration of eighteenth century legacies of ideas about taste, beauty, and sublimity to debates about the relevance of postmodern analyses for feminist aesthetics. Forward (...) by Arthur C. Danto, 20 authors include Paul Mattick, Jr., Caroline Korsmeyer, Timothy Gould, Christine Battersby, Mary Devereaux, bell hooks, REnee Lorraine, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elizabeth Ann Dobie, Adrian Piper, Anita Silvers, Susan Feagin, Mary D. Garrard, Ellen Handler Spitz, Noel Carroll, Joanne Waugh, Joseph Margolis, Rita Felski, and Hilde Hein, as well as Peg Brand's essay, "Revising the Aesthetic-Nonaesthetic Distinction: The Aesthetic Value of Activist Art.". (shrink)

This is the co-authored--with Carolyn Korsmeyer--Introduction to the first published feminist scholarship in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Volume 48, Number 4, Fall 1990). Contributors included Hilde Hein, Paul Mattick, Jr., Timothy Gould, Joanne B. Waugh, Joseph Margolis, Mary Devereaux, Noel Carroll, Flo Leibowitz, Anita Silvers, Elizabeth Ann Dobie, Renee Cox, and Ellen Handler Spitz. All essays were subsequently published in an expanded book version entitled, Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics by Penn State Press (1995).

In 1980 F. Wattenberg constructed the Dedekind completion

d of the Robinson non-archimedean field

and established basic algebraic properties of

d [6]. In 1985 H. Gonshor established further fundamental properties of

d [7].In [4] important construction of summation of countable sequence of Wattenberg numbers was proposed and corresponding basic properties of such summation were considered. In this paper the important applications of the Dedekind completion

d in transcendental number theory were considered. We dealing using set theory ZFC
(
-model of ZFC).Given (...) an class of analytic functions of one complex variable f  

z, we investigate the arithmetic nature of the values of fz at transcendental points en, n  .Main results are: (i) the both numbers e
 and e   are irrational, (ii) number ee is transcendental. Nontrivial generalization of the Lindemann- Weierstrass theorem is obtained. (shrink)

Main results are: (i) number e^{e} is transcendental; (ii) the both numbers e+π and e-π are irrational.