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252The Antinomies of Impure Reason: Rousseau and Kant on the Metaphysics of Truth‐TellingInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 48 (3). 2005.Truth-telling is a project that is both gripping and problematic for Rousseau, as he is both captured by an ideal of telling as complete, undistorted discernment, documentation and communication, and also haunted by the fear that telling can never be this innocent. For Rousseau, as for Kant, telling does not leave the told untouched; rather, telling gives us a type of contact with objects that is marked and mediated by the process of telling itself, and hence the possibility of immediately grasp…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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151Objectivity and perspective in empirical knowledgeEpisteme 3 (1-2): 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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25Joseph Rouse: How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism (review)Philosophy of Science 71 (2): 216-219. 2004.
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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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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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27Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 25 (4). 2015.This issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal continues two conversations that have been developing in this journal over the last few years, and introduces a new and timely one. Kevin Elliot and Paul Mushak’s paper, “Structured Development and Promotion of a Research Field: Hormesis in Biology, Toxicology, and Environmental Regulatory Science,” continues an ongoing debate in this journal over the role of values in shaping scientific methodology and communication, and how this role should…Read more
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211The ontology and temporality of conscienceContinental Philosophy Review 35 (1): 1-34. 2002.Philosophers have often posited a foundational calling voice, such that hearing its call constitutes subjects as responsive and responsible negotiators of normative claims. I give the name ldquo;transcendental conscience to that which speaks in this founding, constitutive voice. The role of transcendental conscience is not – or not merely – to normatively bind the subject, but to constitute the possibility of the subject's being bound by any particular, contentful normative claims in the first p…Read more
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297Resituating the principle of equipoise: Justice and access to care in non-ideal conditionsKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 17 (3): 171-202. 2007.: The principle of equipoise traditionally is grounded in the special obligations of physician-investigators to provide research participants with optimal care. This grounding makes the principle hard to apply in contexts with limited health resources, to research that is not directed by physicians, or to non-therapeutic research. I propose a different version of the principle of equipoise that does not depend upon an appeal to the Hippocratic duties of physicians and that is designed to be appl…Read more
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102
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131Measuring motheringInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 1 (1): 67-90. 2008.As a culture, we have a tendency to measure motherhood in terms of a set of signal moments that have become the focus of special social attention and anxiety; we interpret these as emblematic summations of women's mothering abilities. Women's performances during these moments can seem to exhaust the story of mothering, and mothers often internalize these measures and evaluate their own mothering in terms of them. "Good" mothers are those who pass a series of tests—they bond properly during their…Read more
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37Book 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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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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11Editor's NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 26 (4). 2016.Bioethicists have, of course, always been concerned with death: we have asked when should we allow it to happen without trying to stave it off any longer; whether is it ever acceptable for doctors to hasten or cause it; how can we make death a dignified and relatively humane experience for the dying and for their loved ones; and how we can and cannot treat human remains. We discussed all of these classic ethical issues even when death itself seemed to be a fairly straightforward, all-or-nothing …Read more
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405Pragmatism has enjoyed a major resurgence in Anglo-American philosophy over the course of the last decade or two, and Robert Brandom’s work – particularly his 1994 tome Making it Explicit (MIE) – has been at the vanguard of this resurgence (Brandom 1994).2 But pragmatism comes in several surprisingly distinct flavours. Authors such as Hubert Dreyfus find their roots in certain parts of Heidegger and in phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and they privilege embodied, preconceptual skills as o…Read more
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226Fertile grounds for theoretical inquiry can be found in the oddest corners. Contemporary television programming provides viewers with several talk shows of the grotesque, as I will call them, in which the aim of each episode is to put some monstrous human phenomenon on display with the help of a host and a participating studio audience. In this paper I will try to support the unlikely claim that these talk shows, which include The Jerry Springer Show and Sally Jesse Raphael (among others), provi…Read more
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21Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 23 (4). 2013.It gives me great pleasure to introduce the December 2013 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal—our ninety-second!—and to introduce myself as the new Editor-in-Chief of the journal. For almost a quarter of a century, from its special vantage point in Washington, D.C., and at Georgetown University’s Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute of Ethics, the KIEJ has served as a leading source for practically engaged, policy-relevant philosophical work in bioethics, broadly construed. Under the e…Read more
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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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1Conformity, Creativity and the Social Constitution of the SubjectDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1995.This work seeks to take seriously the common philosophical claim that individual subjects are constituted by their social world. A detailed understanding this claim requires an analysis of what is involved in being a subject, of the nature of 'the social', and of the possible constitutive relationships between these. I begin with a critical history of the idea that subjects are norm-followers, and that social groups constitute individuals by demanding their conformity to norms. I trace this 'con…Read more
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129Analytic philosophy and the return of Hegelian thought (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (1). 2009.In this book, Paul Redding argues both that Hegel’s thought is making a resurgence in some quarters of analytic philosophy, and that such a resurgence is well-deserved and will bear future fruit. He begins with Bertrand Russell’s story of analytic philosophy as born out of a rejection of Hegelian thought, and traces the development of an alternative path through analytic philosophy that moves through Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Evans, and finds its fullest contemporary form in Brandom and …Read more
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142How do patients know?Hastings Center Report 37 (5): 27-35. 2007.: The way patients make health care decisions is much more complicated than is often recognized. Patient autonomy allows both that patients will sometimes defer to clinicians and that they should sometimes be active inquirers, ready to question their clinicians and do some independent research. At the same time, patients' active inquiry requires clinicians' support
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2The Routledge Companion to Bioethics (edited book)Routledge. 2014.The Routledge Companion to Bioethics is a comprehensive reference guide to a wide range of contemporary concerns in bioethics. The volume orients the reader in a changing landscape shaped by globalization, health disparities, and rapidly advancing technologies. Bioethics has begun a turn toward a systematic concern with social justice, population health, and public policy. While also covering more traditional topics, this volume fully captures this recent shift and foreshadows the resulting deve…Read more
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5Editorial NoteKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 24 (1). 2014.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editorial NoteRebecca Kukla, PhD, Editor in ChiefThis spring is an exciting time at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. We are rolling out our new series of online reviews of books in bioethics, practical ethics, and the ethical, social, and legal dimensions of science and medicine. These in-depth reviews will be written by leading figures in the discipline, and will be published in online issue supplements, with pre-publication…Read more
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21The phrenological impulse and the morphology of characterIn Sue Campbell, Letitia Meynell & Susan Sherwin (eds.), Embodiment and Agency, Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 76--99. 2009.
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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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241Myth, memory and misrecognition in Sellars' ``empiricism and the philosophy of mind''Philosophical Studies 101 (2-3): 161-211. 2000.