Teri Merrick

The 2005 International Consensus Conference on Intersex resulted in a substantive revision of the lexicon and guidelines for treating intersex conditions. The speed with which the new treatment protocol has been adopted by healthcare practitioners and providers is considered unprecedented. However, a number of intersex people and advocacy groups have complained that the recommended revisions are inadequately informed by the testimony of intersex people. In this paper, I argue that such complaints are valid and that, despite the conference conveners stated intention, the revisions perpetuate the epistemic injustice long endured by intersex people. By analyzing the Consensus Conference and its results as a failed attempt to redress the epistemic marginalization of intersex patients and advocacy groups, I am able to identify lingering institutional hurdles to cultivating the virtue of epistemic justice in biomedical practice.

Gottlob Frege is a significant figure in the philosophy of mathematics and logic insofar as he is the founder of modern symbolic logic and the articulator of the key distinctions and problems that have come to define much of contemporary analytic philosophy. Frege's concept-object distinction plays a major role in underwriting his thesis that numbers must be objects of a particular kind. Fregean numbers are generally interpreted as archetypal abstract objects, demanding some explanation as to how we come to know them. Because Frege's distinction does not seem to deliver such an explanation, commentators have tended to dismiss it as a mistake. I argue that, despite its treatment by most scholars, Frege's distinction should not be read as an ontological claim, but as a methodological principle designed to prevent the errors being committed by his mathematical contemporaries. Analyzed as a norm of mathematical reasoning, Frege's concept-object distinction reveals itself as a neo-Kantian variant of Kant's distinction between a concept and an intuition. A key part of my argument involves delineating the different neo-Kantian camps that arose as a result of the clash between non-Euclidean geometries and Kant's epistemology. Frege is then shown to be aligned with the neo-Kantian camp led by Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Seeing Frege as influenced by Cohen/Natorp's interpretation of Kantian epistemology not only supports my thesis that the C&O distinction is a methodological claim, but also explains why Frege defended the claim that Euclidean geometry was a body of necessary and universal truths grounded on pure intuition and continued to do so well into the 1900's

The 2005 International Consensus Conference on Intersex resulted in a substantive revision of the lexicon and guidelines for treating intersex conditions. The speed with which the new treatment protocol has been adopted by healthcare practitioners and providers is considered unprecedented. However, a number of intersex people and advocacy groups have complained that the recommended revisions are inadequately informed by the testimony of intersex people. In this paper, I argue that such complaints are valid and that, despite the conference conveners stated intention, the revisions perpetuate the epistemic injustice long endured by intersex people. By analyzing the Consensus Conference and its results as a failed attempt to redress the epistemic marginalization of intersex patients and advocacy groups, I am able to identify lingering institutional hurdles to cultivating the virtue of epistemic justice in biomedical practice.

This paper argues that Frege's notoriously long commitment to Kant's thesis that Euclidean geometry is synthetic _a priori_ is best explained by realizing that Frege uses ‘intuition’ in two senses. Frege sometimes adopts the usage presented in Hermann Helmholtz's sign theory of perception. However, when using ‘intuition’ to denote the source of geometric knowledge, he is appealing to Hermann Cohen's use of Kantian terminology. We will see that Cohen reinterpreted Kantian notions, stripping them of any psychological connotation. Cohen's defense of his modified Kantian thesis on the unique status of the Euclidean axioms presents Frege's own views in a much more favorable light.

Generally speaking, naturalism is the view that the methods of empirical science are our best, perhaps only, methods for obtaining knowledge. Merrick reshapes this debate by introducing a new question: Is naturalism compatible with fostering appreciative love for the created order? She argues the naturalism's operating paradigm for evaluating explanations is well-tailored to achieve the goal of scientific inquiry championed by Francis Bacon in the 17th century. But it systematically weeds out explanations more likely to induce appreciative love for the phenomena. Merrick concludes by looking at C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves and Henri Nouwen's Life of the Beloved for attitudes and practices that inquirers should adopt.