This article explores critical theory's relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adorno's thought relates to Hegel's. Adorno's apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative . Adorno's allegiance to Hegel's dialectic emerges when he traces the dialectical process whereby enlightenment reverts (...) to myth and human domination over nature reverts into our domination by nature. However, Adorno criticizes Hegel's dialectic as the ultimate form of ‘identity thinking’, subsuming unique, material objects under universal concepts by using dialectical reason to expand those concepts to cover objects utterly. These two responses cohere because Adorno shares Hegel's view that dialectical contradict.. (shrink)

In the diverse but related essays collected in Values and Evaluations, Julius Kovesi's central concerns are the nature of ideological thinking and the rational core of morality. «It is characteristic of ideological beliefs that their truth is upheld independent of the arguments for them,» he contends. He examines ideological tendencies in the Marxist tradition, in attempts to demythologize Christianity, and in modern British ethical theory. In ethics, he continues the attack on the fact/value dichotomy he began in Moral Notions, (...) a dichotomy he thinks has ideological sources. In theology, he argues that demythologizing is really a form of «remythologizing.» A long study of Moses Hess's essay On the Essence of Money is used to illuminate the early thought of Marx. (shrink)

Contextualists offer "high-low standards" practical cases to show that a variety of knowledge standards are in play in different ordinary contexts. These cases show nothing of the sort, I maintain. However Keith DeRose gives an ingenious argument that standards for knowledge do go up in high-stakes cases. According to the knowledge account of assertion (Kn), only knowledge warrants assertion. Kn combined with the context sensitivity of assertability yields contextualism about knowledge. But is Kn correct? I offer a rival account of (...) warranted assertion and argue that it beats Kn as a response to the "knowledge" version of Moore's Paradox. (shrink)

This article revisits the ethical and political questions raised by feminist debates over essentialism, the belief that there are properties essential to women and which all women share. Feminists’ widespread rejection of essentialism has threatened to undermine feminist politics. Re-evaluating two responses to this problem—‘strategic’ essentialism and Iris Marion Young’s idea that women are an internally diverse ‘series’—I argue that both unsatisfactorily retain essentialism as a descriptive claim about the social reality of women’s lives. I argue instead that women have (...) a ‘ genealogy’: women always acquire femininity by appropriating and reworking existing cultural interpretations of femininity, so that all women become situated within a history of overlapping chains of interpretation. Because all women are located within this complex history, they are identifiable as belonging to a determinate social group, despite sharing no common understanding or experience of femininity. The idea that women have a genealogy thus reconciles anti-essentialism with feminist politics. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge in philosophical work on the rationality of grief. Much of this research is premised on the idea that people tend to grieve much less than would be appropriate or, as it is often called, fitting. My goal in this paper is diagnostic, that is, to articulate two never properly distinguished, and indeed often conflated, arguments in favour of the purported discrepancy between experienced and fitting grief: a metaphysical and a psychological argument. According to the (...) former, grief is rationalized entirely by facts about the past. And because the past is unchangeable, grief can be said to remain forever fitting. According to the latter argument, humans’ emotional resilience causes grief to diminish at a faster rate than would be fitting. Which of these problems we end up facing depends on relatively subtle variations in the characterization of the losses that render grief appropriate. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have advocated for an ‘interactive turn’ in the methodology of social-cognition research: to become more ecologically valid, we must design experiments that are interactive, rather than merely observational. While the practical aim of improving ecological validity in the study of social cognition is laudable, we think that the notion of ‘interaction’ is not suitable for this task: as it is currently deployed in the social cognition literature, this notion leads to (...) serious conceptual and methodological confusion. In this paper, we tackle this confusion on three fronts: 1) we revise the ‘interactionist’ definition of interaction; 2) we demonstrate a number of potential methodological confounds that arise in interactive experimental designs; and 3) we show that ersatz interactivity works just as well as the real thing. We conclude that the notion of ‘interaction’, as it is currently being deployed in this literature, obscures an accurate understanding of human social cognition. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are no people. If identity isn't what matters in survival, psychological connectedness isn't what matters either. Further, fissioning cases do not support the claim that connectedness is what matters. I consider Peter Unger's view that what matters is a continuous physical realization of a core psychology. I conclude that if identity isn't what matters in survival, nothing matters. This conclusion is deployed to argue that there are no people. Objections to Eliminativism are considered, especially that (...) morality cannot survive the loss of persons. (shrink)

Skepticism about the external world may very well be correct, so the question is in order: what theory of knowledge flows from skepticism itself? The skeptic can give a relatively simple and intuitive account of knowledge by identifying it with indubitable certainty. Our everyday ‘I know that p’ claims, which typically are part of practical projects, deploy the ideal of knowledge to make assertions closely related to, but weaker than, knowledge claims. The truth of such claims is consistent with skepticism; (...) various other vexing problems don’t arise. In addition, even if no claim about the world outside my mind can be more probable than its negation, the project of pure scientific research remains well motivated. (shrink)

I argue that God could give us the robust power to do other than we do in a deterministic universe.

In this paper I reconstruct Schlegel's idea that romantic poetry can re-enchant nature in a way that is uniquely compatible with modernity's epistemic and political values of criticism, self-criticism, and freedom. I trace several stages in Schlegel's early thinking concerning nature. First, he criticises modern culture for its analytic, reflective form of rationality which encourages a disenchanting view of nature. Second, he re-evaluates this modern form of rationality as making possible an ironic, romantic, poetry, which portrays natural phenomena as mysterious (...) indications of an underlying reality that transcends knowledge. Yet Schlegel relies here on a contrast between human freedom and natural necessity that reinstates a disenchanting view of nature as fully intelligible and predictable. Third, therefore, he reconceives nature as inherently creative and poetic, rethinking human creativity as consisting in participation in natural creative processes. He replaces his earlier "idealist" view that reality is in itself unknowable with the "idealist realist" view that reality is knowable as creative nature, yet, in its spontaneous creativity, still eludes full comprehension. I argue that Schlegel's third approach to the re-enchantment of nature is his most consistent and satisfactory, and is important for contemporary environmental philosophy in showing how re-enchantment is compatible with modernity. (shrink)

Enactivists often defend the following two claims: Successful interactions are not driven and explained by the interactors’ ability to mindread. And the mechanisms enabling 2nd personal social cognition and those enabling 3rd personal social cognition are distinct. In this paper, I argue that both of these claims are false. With regard to I argue that enactivists fail to provide a plausible alternative to traditional accounts of social cognition in interaction. I examine and reject Hanne De Jaegher’s view according to which (...) interaction is “constitutive” for social interaction. Furthermore, I critically discuss Shaun Gallagher’s and Daniel Hutto’s views according to which social interactions are exclusively driven by low level cognitive mechanisms such as “gaze following” and “emotion detection”. Concerning, I rely on data from so called “spontaneous response” false belief tasks to show that interactive and observational paradigms require the same “social-cognitive” interpretation. (shrink)

According to the standard view, a belief is based on a reason and doxastically justified—i.e., permissibly held—only if a causal relation obtains between a reason and the belief. In this paper, I argue that a belief can be doxastically justified by a reason’s mere disposition to sustain it. Such a disposition, however, wouldn’t establish a causal connection unless it were manifested. My argument is that, in the cases I have in mind, the manifestation of this disposition would add no positive (...) epistemic feature to the belief: a belief that is justified after the manifestation of a reason’s causal powers must have already been justified before their manifestation. As a result, those who adhere to the standard causal view of the basing relation face a hard choice: they should either abandon the enormously popular view that doxastic justification has a basing requirement or modify their view of the basing relation. (shrink)

This essay investigates triadic patterns of argument in the thought of Moses Hess. Three kinds of triadic thinking are distinguished: the triadic pattern of three succeeding ages of mankind; the triadic pattern of original unity, fallen or alienated existence, and return to unity on a higher level; and the triad of head, heart and stomach, a symbolism which recurs in the writings of the Young Hegelians. Distinguishing these patterns throws an interesting light on the similarities and differences between the views (...) of Hess and Marx on the role of the proletariat in history. A translation by the author of Hess's "On the Essence of Money" is appended to the essay. (shrink)

One of the questions that any future history of British moral philosophy in the twentieth century should investigate and document is how it came about that Moore's Principia Ethica was appropriated by what we can call the Humean tradition of moral philosophy. I shall not trace that development now but only argue that there was no excuse or justification for it.

However much the preoccupations and problems of moral philosophy have changed in the last decade or so, we retain, with a ritual observance, a basic conceptual framework. Apart from a few bold spirits who disregard the ritual, most moral philosophers, before they can say anything, have to re-enact the moves of trying to justify how they dare to move from description to evaluation, while others, opposing them, claim that they have disregarded sacred texts and violated the most sacred of ritual (...) moves. Some, and I would like to count myself among these, would like to argue that the whole ritual is unnecessary, misleading, confused and confusing and even detrimental to moral philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that joint action permits a certain degree of luck. The cases I have in mind exhibit the following structure: each participant believes that the intended ends of each robustly support the joint action. This belief turns out to be false. Due to lucky circumstances, the discordance in intention never becomes common knowledge. However, common knowledge of the relevant intentions would have undermined the joint action altogether. The analysis of such cases shows the extent to which (...) common knowledge of the participants’ intentions can be harmful to joint action. This extends a recent line of research that has questioned the necessity of common knowledge in joint action. (shrink)

It is obvious that the fact that I consider my views to be true does not mean that they are true. However, not only is it my obligation to say what I think to be the case, but I do not know what else I should or even could say. It may be suggested – pointlessly – that I should say what is objectively true and not what I subjectively think to be true. The suggestion is pointless because if I (...) thought my views to be true merely subjectively, I would not entertain them; it is precisely because I think that they are objectively true that I do in fact hold them. It may also be suggested, equally unhelpfully, that if there existed a system of philosophy which contained the truth and nothing but the truth, then we should teach that system and not the views that we personally consider to be true. Since some people think that such a system does indeed exist, let us consider why this suggestion does not enable us to say something other than what each of us considers to be true. (shrink)

Philosophers often identify forgiveness with either overcoming or forswearing blaming attitudes such as, paradigmatically, resentment for the right reasons; yet there is little debate as to which of the two (if either) is correct. In this article, I present three arguments that aim to strengthen the forswearing view. First, on the overcoming view, many paradigm cases of forgiveness would turn out to be mere ‘letting go’ instead. Second, only the forswearing view plausibly allows for forgiveness in cases where the victim (...) lost resentment before she had a reason to forgive. Third, only the forswearing view can show why victims of an offense are usually able to know whether they are in a position to forgive. (shrink)

This paper examines the particular relevance of feminist critiques of epistemic authority in contexts of institutionalized violence. Reading feminist criticism of “experts” together with theorists of institutionalized violence, Stone-Mediatore argues that typical expert modes of thinking are incapable of rigorous knowledge of institutionalized violence because such knowledge requires a distinctive kind of thinking-within-discomfort for which conventionally trained experts are ill-suited. The author demonstrates the limitations of “expert” modes of thinking with reference to writings on the Iraq war by Michael (...) Ignatieff and Fouad Ajami. Finally, the author turns to a newly active group of epistemic agents—anti-war relatives of soldiers--to examine the role that undervalued epistemic traits can play in knowledge of war and other forms of structural violence. (shrink)

In this article I ask how fruitful the concept of alienation can be for thinking critically about the nature and causes of the contemporary environmental crisis. The concept of alienation enables us to claim that modern human beings have become alienated or estranged from nature and need to become reconciled with it. Yet reconciliation has often been understood—notably by Hegel and Marx—as the state of being ‘at-home-with-oneself-in-the-world’, in the name of which we are entitled, perhaps even obliged, to overcome anything (...) in nature that is alien to the human mind. This approach to alienation derives ultimately from the German Idealist philosopher J. G. Fichte. I explore an alternative conception of alienation and reconciliation to be found in the work of the Early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. The Romantics think of reconciliation as including a dimension of alienation, in the form of an awareness that nature is greater than and exceeds the understanding of human beings, insofar as we are merely limited parts of the all-encompassing whole that is nature. I argue that this is a more fruitful approach to alienation and reconciliation than that pursued by Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. (shrink)

This paper traces the ethnocentric structure of U.S.-published anthologies in global ethics and related fields and it examines the ethical and philosophical implications of such ethnocentrism. The author argues that the ethnocentric structure of prominent work in global ethics not only impairs the field's ability to prepare students for global citizenship but contributes to the ideological processes that maintain global inequities. In conclusion, the author makes a case that fuller engagement with global-South and indigenous writers on global issues can encourage (...) U.S. students and scholars to examine more closely the ideologies that order our lives and to risk the kind of self examination that is necessary in order to build effective relationships with diverse global communities. (shrink)

In this paper I shall first illustrate the variety of uses the concept of "nature" can and does have. Then I shall indicate that the confusing variety is not without rhyme or reason. I shall end by saying a few words about the notion of "progress". This may sound surprising but the notion of "progress" does tie up with what I shall try to say about the contrast between nature and convention.

In this article I critically re-examine Julia Kristeva's view that becoming a speaking subject requires psychical matricide: violent separation from the maternal body. I propose an alternative, non-matricidal conception of subjectivity, in part by drawing out anti-matricidal strands in Kristeva's own thought, including her view that early mother–child relations are triangular. Whereas she understands this triangle in terms of a first imaginary father, I re-interpret this triangle using Donald Winnicott's idea of potential space and Jessica Benjamin's idea of an intersubjective (...) space of thirdness. I argue that this space provides a maternal third term: a relation of connection and difference between two, a relation that inherits the affective, mobile, generative qualities of the maternal body as the infant (according to Kristeva) imagines it. This connecting space allows both mothers and children to emerge as subjects in their own right. I then suggest that potential-maternal space expands into language, so that language intrinsically allows the possibility of a speaking position of connection with the mother. Entrance into language need not entail separation or matricide: the problem is not language as such but the particular way that speech and logos have been defined historically. (shrink)

What I have to say has no exclusive reference to biblical scholars or theologians. Even most of the mistakes and fallacies I want to point to and investigate are shared by others who also operate in a theological frame of mind. Otherwise the problems I want to raise are familiar problems of philosophy. They are problems we encounter in the philosophy of history when we distinguish between the actual occurrence and documentation of a happening, and the significance, meaning and interpretation (...) of that happening. (shrink)

Police officers' work-life conflict is linked to more subjective health complaints, suicidal thoughts, burnout, and stress in addition to higher degrees of job discontent. Further research findings highlight the significant relationship between stress and work-life balance or work-family conflict affecting police officers regardless of their gender, despite the fact that significant gender differences regarding psychosocial stress were found in general, but especially among police officers who were married and/or had children. Similarly, despite conflicting findings, several research show that gender neither (...) predicts nor significantly differs between male and female police officers in terms of job satisfaction. This study was focused on determining the factors influencing the perception of job satisfaction among police officers which will be used as a basis for improved personnel management in terms of environment and atmosphere, compensation, standards and policies, people, leadership, and organization. This study was participated by one hundred sixty police officers (160). This study was focused on determining the factors influencing the perception of job satisfaction among police officers which will be used as a basis for improved personnel management in terms of environment and atmosphere, compensation, standards and policies, people, leadership, and organization. This study used a purposive sampling technique in choosing the respondents of this study. The descriptive design is an appropriate method to facilitate the gathering of reliable and accurate data through research and conduct of the survey measurement of two or more variables to determine or estimate the extent to which the values for the variables are related or change in an identifiable pattern. (shrink)

I argue that a version of Pascal's Wager applies to the persistent vegetative state with sufficient force that it ought to part of advance directives.

A (revised) account of what all and only religions have in common in virtue of which they are religions.

Advance directives typically have two defects. First, most advance directives fail to enable people to effectively avoid unwanted medical intervention. Second, most of them have the potential of ending your life in ways you never intended, years before you had to die.

People often talk to others about their personal past. These discussions are inherently selective. Selective retrieval of memories in the course of a conversation may induce forgetting of unmentioned but related memories for both speakers and listeners (Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007). Cuc et al. (2007) defined the forgetting on the part of the speaker as within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting (WI-RIF) and the forgetting on the part of the listener as socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SS-RIF). However, if the forgetting associated with (...) WI-RIF and SS-RIF is to be taken seriously as a mechanism that shapes both individual and shared memories, this mechanism must be demonstrated with meaningful material and in ecologically valid groups. In our first 2 experiments we extended SS-RIF from unemotional, experimenter-contrived material to the emotional and unemotional autobiographical memories of strangers (Experiment 1) and intimate couples (Experiment 2) when merely overhearing the speaker selectively practice memories. We then extended these results to the context of a free-flowing conversation (Experiments 3 and 4). In all 4 experiments we found WI-RIF and SS-RIF regardless of the emotionalvalence or individual ownership of the memories. We discuss our findings in terms of the role of conversational silence in shaping both our personal and shared pasts. (shrink)

I argue that being wide awake is an epistemic virtue which enables me to recognize immediately that I'm wide awake. Also I argue that dreams are imaginings and that the wide awake mind can immediately discern the difference between imaginings and vivid sense experience. Descartes need only pinch himself.

In this article I argue that the Early German Romantics understand the absolute, or being, to be an infinite whole encompassing all the things of the world and all their causal relations. The Romantics argue that we strive endlessly to know this whole but only acquire an expanding, increasingly systematic body of knowledge about finite things, a system of knowledge which can never be completed. We strive to know the whole, the Romantics claim, because we have an original feeling of (...) it that motivates our striving. I then examine two different Romantic accounts of this feeling. The first, given by Novalis, is that feeling gives us a kind of access to the absolute which logically precedes any conceptualisation. I argue that this account is problematic and that a second account, offered by Friedrich Schlegel, is preferable. On this account, we feel the absolute in that we intuit it aesthetically in certain natural phenomena. This form of intuition is partly cognitive and partly non-cognitive, and therefore it motivates us to strive to convert our intuition into full knowledge. (shrink)

The study investigated assessment of sex and age impersonation as academic dishonest behaviour among post graduate students’ of Federal Universities of South-South, Nigeria. The study which is a survey research, involved a multi-stage stratified random sampling technique of 440 males and 490 females from 3 universities and 3 faculties of the same universities in South-South, Nigeria. Sample was selected through stratified random sampling approach. The study adopted frequencies, percentages, factor analysis and multiple classification analysis statistical tools. A questionnaire developed and (...) validated by the researcher titled: “Academic Dishonest Behaviour Questionnaire’’ (ADBQ) with Cronbach coefficient alpha reliability of 0.83 was used for data collection. Two research questions and one hypothesis were formulated for the study. The findings indicated that the students used for this study were involved in Sex and Age impersonation aspect of academic dishonest behaviours. Female students were seen to be more involved than male in impersonation, Students ages 25-29years are more culpable in impersonation as academic dishonest behaviour. It is therefore recommended among others that there should be synergy among stakeholders in the educational process to fight this art of impersonation. (shrink)

In discussing the ways in which we hold each other accountable for immoral conduct, philosophers have often focused on blame, aiming to specify adequate responses to wrongdoing. In contrast, theorizing about the ways we can appropriately respond to minor moral mistakes – i.e., criticizable conduct that is bad but not wrong – has largely been neglected. My first goal in this paper is, thus, to draw attention to this blind spot and argue that a separate account of blameless moral criticism (...) is desirable. My second goal is to propose one way to explicate the contrast between blaming and blameless moral criticism in terms of the contrast between moral anger and moral disappointment: while moral anger, as many argue, is an appropriate response to moral wrongdoing, moral disappointment, but not moral anger, is an appropriate response to these minor moral mistakes. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the relationship between trust and inquiry to argue for the view that A trusts B to act in some way only if A believes, in a way that she cannot distinguish from knowledge, for reasons of trust, that B will (or has) act(ed) in this way. Call such beliefs ‘outright trusting beliefs’. To support this view, I shall argue, by way of various examples, that the conditions under which inquiry erodes trust are the same as the conditions (...) under which inquiry erodes outright trusting belief. This congruence is easily explained abductively if we take trust to involve such a belief constitutively. While philosophers have sometimes thought that the relationship between trust and inquiry threatens or complicates the doxastic account of trust, the argument presented here suggests, surprisingly, that this relationship supports and even strengthens this account. (shrink)

Even while progressive educators and feminist standpoint theorists defend the value of marginalized perspectives, many marginal-voice texts continue to be deprecated in academic contexts due to their seemingly "unprofessional," engaged, and creative styles. Thus, scholars who seek to defend a feminist and multicultural curriculum need a theory of knowledge that goes beyond current standpoint theory and accounts for the unorthodox format in which many maringal standpoints appear. In response to this challenge, this essay draws on feminist and postcolonial critics of (...) objectivity, including Dorothy Smith, Chandra Mohanty, Barrios de Chungara, and Arhundati Roy to theorize the epistemic value of texts that respond with passion and creativity to marginalized people's struggles. In conclusion, the author distinguishes ethically oriented engagement with such texts from mere "politicized teaching," and she suggests ways to teach such texts that cultivate their critical potential. (shrink)

Combining inquiry and metacognition helps strengthen mathematical learning. This study examines how metacognitive mathematical inquiry can be modeled using reflective tasking approach. Quasi-experimental design was employed in two comparable groups of Grade 9 students of Ibarra National High School, Maasin City, Philippines during the academic year 2021-2022. Lesson guides on reflective task assessments anchored on metacognitive and inquiry-based learning theories, inquiry rubric scales and modified state metacognitive inventory served as data collection instruments. Results of t-test analysis revealed significant difference in (...) performance between groups implying high efficacy of the methodology in stimulating students’ metacognitive inquiry skill. Correlation values projected significant relationship between reflective learning performances with metacognition. Quantitative evidences, thus, lead to conclusion that reflective tasking methodology exemplifies potential in metacognitive mathematical inquiry as it optimizes their thinking processes, task involvement, and regulation through self-reflection principles worthy of practice throughout lifelong learning. (shrink)

Salience reasoning, many have argued, can help solve coordination problems, but only if such reasoning is supplemented by higher-order predictions, e.g. beliefs about what others believe yet others will choose. In this paper, I will argue that this line of reasoning is self-undermining. Higher-order behavioral predictions defeat salience-based behavioral predictions. To anchor my argument in the philosophical literature, I will develop it in response and opposition to the popular Lewisian model of salience reasoning in coordination games. This model imports the (...) problematic higher-order beliefs by way of a ‘symmetric reasoning’ constraint. In the second part of this paper, I will argue that a player may employ salience reasoning only if she suspends judgment about what others believe yet others will do. (shrink)

There is no large number of very small bads that is worse than a small number of very large bads – or so, some maintain, it seems plausible to say. In this article, I criticize and reject two recently proposed vindications of the above intuition put forth by Dale Dorsey and Alex Voorhoeve. Dorsey advocates for a threshold marked by the interference with a person's global life projects: any bad that interferes with the satisfaction of a life project is worse (...) than any number of bads that don't interfere with such a life project. Such thresholds, I argue, are broadly implausible. Voorhoeve gives a contractualist account for the irrelevance of minor bads. His account, I argue, does not, among other things, provide the right kind of reason in defence of the above intuition. (shrink)

In this article I rethink death and mortality on the basis of birth and natality, drawing on the work of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero. She understands birth to be the corporeal event whereby a unique person emerges from the mother’s body into the common world. On this basis Cavarero reconceives death as consisting in bodily dissolution and re-integration into cosmic life. This impersonal conception of death coheres badly with her view that birth is never exclusively material but always (...) has ontological significance as the appearance of someone new and singular in the world of relations with others. This view of birth calls for a relational conception of death, which I develop in this article. On this conception, death is always collective, affecting all those with whom the one who dies has maintained relations: As such, our different deaths shade into one another. Moreover, because each person is unique in virtue of consisting of a unique web of relations with others, death always happens to persons as webs of relations. Death is relational in this way as a corporeal, and specifically biological, phenomenon, to which we are subject as bodily beings and as interdependent living organisms. I explore this with reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of her mother’s death from cancer. Finally I argue that, on this relational conception, death is something to be feared. (shrink)

In this book, Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, so that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to become a self or, in modernity, an autonomous subject. These assumptions make it difficult to be a mother and a subject, an autonomous creator of meaning. Insofar as mothers nonetheless (...) strive to regain their subjectivity when their motherhood seems to have compromised it, theirs cannot be the usual kind of subjectivity premised on separation from the maternal body. Mothers are subjects of a new kind, who generate meanings and acquire agency from their position of re-immersion in the realm of maternal body relations, of bodily intimacy and dependency. Thus Stone interprets maternal subjectivity as a specific form of subjectivity that is continuous with the maternal body. Stone analyzes this form of subjectivity in terms of how the mother typically reproduces with her child her history of bodily relations with her own mother, leading to a distinctive maternal and cyclical form of lived time. (shrink)

According to statistics, there is an increasing gun-related deaths, violence and trafficking of small arms are emergent consequents of failure towards gun regulation and irresponsible gun ownership worldwide. Thus, this study was conducted to examine the implementation of the Gun Control Policy in Caraga Region focusing on the aspect of enforcement and monitoring. Also, the study aimed to investigate the problems encountered in the implementation of the gun control policy in enforcement and monitoring with the gun owners/operators and PNP personnel (...) as respondents. This study was conducted using the descriptive correlational research design. The study revealed the following findings: Majority of the Gun Operator/Owner respondents are college level, employed to private institutions who owned 1 to 2 guns, license for 1-5 years, mostly under type-1 category. For the PNP Personnel respondents, most of them are purely Baccalaureate holders who served the organization for 6-10 years and have 5 to 10 years’ experience as licensing officers. In terms of the enforcement and monitoring of the gun control policies, the respondents basically rated it as Highly Implemented. On the test of significance, there was a significant difference on the assessment of the respondents in gun control policy monitoring but showed to have no significant difference on the respondent’s assessment in enforcement. Both Gun owners and PNP respondents considered the problems encountered in enforcement and monitoring as highly prevalent problems. On the test of significance, there was no significant difference in the assessment of the respondents for both enforcement and monitoring of Gun Control policies. On the test of significant relationship, there was a significant relationship on the Gun control policies enforcement and monitoring with its problems encountered. It can be concluded that the Gun Control policies were fairly implemented by the government despite the challenges like the problems encountered in its enforcement and monitoring. The problems encountered in enforcement and monitoring were highly prevalent thus it needs serious actions by the PNP organization. It can further be concluded that there is a correlation between the Gun control policies and its problems encountered. Thus, the PNP must conduct series of orientation and forum among the gun owners / operators to strengthen the implementation of the gun control policies, must adopt technology in a form of online app design to hasten the documentation and tracing of expired gun licenses, create more information campaign to prevent gun violence in the future maximizing various platforms, must create “hotline” call center as support mechanism in monitoring unregistered and lost firearms and create online gun licensing system. (shrink)

Judith Butler's contribution to feminist political thought is usually approached in terms of her concept of performativity, according to which gender exists only insofar as it is ritualistically and repetitively performed, creating permanent possibilities for performing gender in new and transgressive ways. In this paper, I argue that Butler's politics of performativity is more fundamentally grounded in the concept of genealogy, which she adapts from Foucault and, ultimately, Nietzsche. Butler understands women to have a genealogy: to be located within a (...) history of overlapping practices and reinterpretations of femininity. This genealogical understanding of femininity allows Butler to propose a coalitional feminist politics, which requires no unity among women but only loosely overlapping connections. For Butler, feminist coalitions should aim to subvert, not consolidate, entrenched norms concerning femininity. Butler has been criticized, however, for failing to explain either how subversive agency is possible or why the subversion of gender norms is desirable. Reviewing these criticisms, I argue that Butler offers a convincing explanation of the possibility of subversive agency, but that the normative dimension of her political thought remains relatively underdeveloped. I explore how the normative aspect of Butler's thought could be strengthened by recasting her notion of genealogy along more thoroughly Nietzschean and materialist lines, in terms of an idea of active and multiple bodily forces. (shrink)

An account of what all and only religions share in virtue of which they are religions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and ChodorowAlison StoneGod the Father and Jesus the Son; Abraham and Isaac; Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus; Zeus and Dionysus; Hamlet and his father; Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons—representations of and fantasies about father-son relationships are central to Western culture and philosophy. Within philosophy, one thinks of Hegel’s conception of the dialectic in terms of the divine trinity, Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Christ (...) and Dionysus, or Kierkegaard’s meditations on Abraham’s near-murder of Isaac. In contrast, mother-daughter relationships have been shrouded in near-universal silence—much more so than representations of either mothers and sons (Oedipus and Jocasta; Mary and Jesus) or fathers and daughters (Agamemnon and Iphigenia; Lear and Cordelia). Female and feminist theorists, writers, and artists have done much to bring mother-daughter relationships into representation and to reimagine the maternal beyond its traditional subservience to father-son dynasties.Amongst continental feminists, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have, of course, made major contributions to this task. Within Anglophone feminism, too, feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have sought to rectify Freud’s overemphasis on the paternal and on father-son relations. Nancy Chodorow’s important work in this area paints a portrait of contemporary mother-daughter relations which seems, at first sight, strikingly similar to Irigaray’s. Both thinkers suggest that mothers and their infant daughters experience a unique level of mutual identification. But under patriarchy—specifically, given exclusively female childrearing for Chodorow and given the absence of any symbolization of female subjectivity for Irigaray—daughters are forced to turn to the father [End Page 45] to achieve any psychical independence from their mothers. The independence that daughters thus attain coexists with ongoing psychical identification with their mothers, so that women oscillate endlessly between separation from and mergence with their mothers. If the dominant template for father-son relations involves violent rivalry followed by guilt-ridden father-worship as the cement of fraternal society, as Freud described in Totem and Taboo (Freud 2001), the template for mother-daughter relations involves hostile separation constantly undone by ongoing fusion. This difference in templates maps the social-symbolic difference between the paternal position of power/authority/law and the maternal position of powerlessness/silence/body.However, the manifest similarities between Irigaray’s and Chodorow’s pictures are embedded in deep theoretical differences. The details of their descriptions of mother-daughter relations differ, and they give different explanations for why these relations follow a logic of separation and fusion: female mothering for Chodorow, the paternal symbolic order for Irigaray. They make different proposals for how to change these relations: shared parenting for Chodorow versus symbolic transformation for Irigaray. They hold conflicting conceptions of the self and of language, reflecting their heterogeneous psychoanalytic backgrounds in Anglo-American object relations versus French Lacanianism and poststructuralism. These deep differences raise questions about whether Chodorow and Irigaray are discussing mother-daughter relations in the same sense at all.Bringing Irigaray and Chodorow together across their different intellectual contexts, this article compares and partially synthesizes their visions of the maternal and of mother-daughter relations. By integrating their perspectives, we can move beyond the “impasse” between Lacanian and object-relations feminisms that dominated psychoanalytic feminist debates in the 1980s and 1990s (Brennan 1991)—debates that have crucially shaped continental feminists’ orientation towards questions of sexual difference, language and representation, and the embodied psyche.The impasse in question has at least two strands. First, for object-relations feminists such as Chodorow, our pre-Oedipal relations with our mothers shape us so that we acquire “core” selves with a fairly stable gender. This approach elevates the mother in importance (compared to classical psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the father), but it loses sight of psychic and gender instability. This can make Chodorow’s views seem rather dated given the impact of Judith Butler’s work and her emphasis on the unstable, shifting nature of gender. Lacanian feminists such as Jacquelyn Rose (Rose 1986) reemphasize psychic instability, but they do so by stressing that the subject is split between paternal language and the pre-Oedipal maternal realm, which means that these theorists also... (shrink)