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98Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant's Critical Philosophy (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2006.This volume explores the relationship between Kant's aesthetic theory and his critical epistemology as articulated in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The essays, written specially for this volume, explore core elements of Kant's epistemology, such as his notions of discursive understanding, experience, and objective judgment. They also demonstrate a rich grasp of Kant's critical epistemology that enables a deeper understanding of his aesthetics. Collectivel…Read more
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88Uptake and refusalInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.Discussions of uptake in the philosophy of language focus our attention on what role other people have in fixing the import, success, influence and social life of a speech act. The general idea in most discussions of uptake, despite their differences and disagreements, is whether and how an audience is cooperative or uncooperative when a speaker plays a critical role in how speech acts function. This essay is primarily concerned with “refusals”, or uncooperative uptakes. The essay analyzes the v…Read more
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86Intersubjectivity and Receptive ExperienceSouthern Journal of Philosophy 52 (1): 22-42. 2014.Wilfrid Sellars's iconic exposé of the ‘myth of the given’ taught us that experience must present the world to us as normatively laden, in the sense that the contents of experience must license inferences, rule out and justify various beliefs, and rationalize actions. Somehow our beliefs must be governed by the objects as they present themselves to us. Often this requirement is cashed out using language that attributes agent-like properties to objects: we are described as ‘accountable to’ object…Read more
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86Contingent Natures and Virtuous KnowersCanadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (3): 389-418. 2002.When Sandra Harding called for an epistemology of science whose systematic attention to the gendered Status of epistemic agents renders it ‘less partial and distorted’ than ‘traditional’ epistemologies, some commentators recoiled in horror. Propelled by ‘a mad form of the genetic fallacy’ they said, she descends ‘the slide to an arational account of science.’ On a less melodramatic reading, feminist epistemologies such as Harding's advocate not irrationalism, but senses of rationality more expan…Read more
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79“Author TBD”: Radical Collaboration in Contemporary Biomedical ResearchPhilosophy of Science 79 (5): 845-858. 2012.Ghostwriting scandals are pervasive in industry-funded biomedical research, and most responses to them have presumed that they represent a sharp transgression of the norms of scientific authorship. I argue that in fact, ghostwriting represents a continuous extension of current socially accepted authorship practices. I claim that the radically collaborative, decentralized, interdisciplinary research that forms the gold standard in medicine is in an important sense unauthored, and that this poses …Read more
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78What Counts as a Disease, and Why Does It Matter?Journal of Philosophy of Disability 2 130-156. 2022.I argue that the concept of disease serves such radically different strategic purposes for different kinds of stakeholders that coming up with a unified philosophical definition of disease is hopeless. Instead, I defend a radically pluralist, pragmatist account of when it is appropriate to mobilize the concept of disease. I argue that it is appropriate to categorize a condition as a disease when it serves legitimate strategic goals to at least partially medicalize that condition, and when the co…Read more
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75Knowing things and going placesEuropean Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 266-282. 2022.When I say “I know Sarah,” or “I know Berlin,” what sort of knowledge am I claiming? Such knowledge of a particular is, I claim, not reducible to either propositional knowledge-that or to traditional physical know-how. Mere, bare knowledge by acquaintance also does not capture the kind of knowledge being claimed here. Using knowledge of a place as my central example, I argue that this kind of knowledge-of, or “objectual knowledge” as it is sometimes called, is of a distinctive epistemological so…Read more
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72Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers' BodiesRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2005.Mass Hysteria examines the medical and cultural practices surrounding pregnancy, new motherhood, and infant feeding. Late eighteenth century transformations in these practices reshaped mothers' bodies, and contemporary norms and routines of prenatal care and early motherhood have inherited the legacy of that era. As a result, mothers are socially positioned in ways that can make it difficult for them to establish and maintain healthy and safe boundaries and appropriate divisions between public a…Read more
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70Finding autonomy in birthBioethics 23 (1): 1-8. 2008.Over the last several years, as cesarean deliveries have grown increasingly common, there has been a great deal of public and professional interest in the phenomenon of women 'choosing' to deliver by cesarean section in the absence of any specific medical indication. The issue has sparked intense conversation, as it raises questions about the nature of autonomy in birth. Whereas mainstream bioethical discourse is used to associating autonomy with having a large array of choices, this conception …Read more
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58Moral Ecologies and the Harms of Sexual ViolationPhilosophical Topics 46 (2): 247-268. 2018.Traditional moral explorations of sexual violation are dyadic: they focus on the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, considered in relative isolation. We argue that the moral texture of sexual violation and its fallout only shows up once we see acts of sexual violation as acts that occur within an ecosystem. An ecosystem is made up of dwellers and an environment embedded in a broad, thick, interdependent, and relatively stable web of norms, practices, environments, material and …Read more
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50Gender Identity, Gendered Spaces, and Figuring Out What You LoveInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 9 (2): 183-189. 2016.Three years ago, as my fortieth birthday disappeared into the far distance in my rearview mirror, driven by a combination of vanity and fear of my own mortality and decrepitude, I committed to getting in shape.I’ve always been fairly active: I have always walked a lot, commuted by bike when that was plausible, avoided driving whenever possible, and just generally been high energy. But a childhood full of failure at team sports and a lack of innate gifts in the coordination department scared me o…Read more
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42Ethics and Ideology in Breastfeeding Advocacy CampaignsHypatia 21 (1): 157-180. 2006.Mothers serve as an important layer of the health-care system, with special responsi-bilities to care for the health of families and nations. In our social discourse, we tend to treat maternal “choices” as though they were morally and causally Self-contained units of influence with primary control over children's health. In this essay, I use infant feeding as a lens for examining the ethical contours of mothers’ caretaking practices and responsibilities, as they are situated within cultural mean…Read more
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40Public artifacts and the epistemology of collective material testimonyPhilosophical Issues 32 (1): 233-252. 2022.Philosophical Issues, EarlyView.
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39Objectivity and Perspective in Empirical KnowledgeEpisteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 3 (1): 80-95. 2006.Epistemologists generally think that genuine warrant that is available to anyone must be available to everyone who is exposed to the relevant causal inputs and is able and willing to properly exercise her rationality. The motivating idea behind this requirement is roughly that an objective view is one that is not bound to a particular perspective. In this paper I ask whether the aperspectivality of our warrants is a precondition for securing the objectivity of our claims. I draw upon a Sellarsia…Read more
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36Book review: Elizabeth rose Wingrove. Rousseau's republican romance. Princeton, N.j.: Princeton university press, 2000 (review)Hypatia 17 (2): 174-183. 2002.
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36Decentering womenMetaphilosophy 27 (1-2): 28-52. 1996.Many recent theorists have argued that the self is socially constituted, or “decentered” by its social world. With surprising consistency, and in various ways, this decentered self has been gendered feminine, by feminists and non‐feminists alike. In this paper I explore whether there is any special link between femininity and decenteredness. I distinguish between two different ways that the self might be decentered – by its position within a cultural order, or by its interactions and relations w…Read more
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32‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of ReasonsHarvard University Press. 2009.
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30Review of Slavoj iek, Rex Butler (ed.), Scott Stephens (ed.), Interrogating the Real (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (4). 2006.
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29How to get an interpretivist committedProtoSociology 14 180-221. 2000.I argue that interpretivists ought to broaden and enrich the constitutive standards of interpretability and epistemic agency that they have inherited from classic Davidsonian theory. Drawing heavily upon John Haugeland’s recent account of objective truth- telling, I claim that in order to be an interpretable epistemic agent at all, a being must have various kinds of practical commitments that cannot be reduced to combinations of beliefs and desires.On the basis of this claim, I argue that radica…Read more
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27Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 28 (2). 2018.This issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal contains a couple of papers that may be difficult to read for some: one concerning the sexual violation of young Black boys and one on the Guatemalans who were intentionally infected with sexually transmitted diseases and sexually abused in the hands of the United States government and other US-based institutions. I’m honored and proud to be publishing these papers in the journal; both dive headfirst into formidably painful topics of enormous…Read more