Suchergebnisse

Wittgenstein and political philosophy: understanding practices of critical reflection / James Tully -- The limits of conservatism: Wittgenstein on "our life" and "our concepts" / David R. Cerbone -- Wittgenstein, fetishism, and nonsense in practice / Denis McManus -- Genealogy as perspicuous representation / David Owen -- Notes on the natural history of politics / Allan Janik -- Wittgenstein and the conversation of justice / Richard Eldridge -- Doing without knowing: feminism's politics of the ordinary / Linda M.G. Zerilli -- On seeing liberty as / Jonathan Havercroft -- "But one day man opens his seeing eye": the politics of anthropomorphizing language / Wendy Lynne Lee -- Does your patient have a beetle in his box? Language-games and the spread of psychopathology / Carl Elliott -- Wittgenstein on bodily feelings: explanation and melioration in philosophy of mind, art, and politics

This article summarizes Ami Harbin's 2016 monograph, Disorientation and Moral Life, which argues that disorientations are an invaluable ethical resource. Harbin offers what she calls a "non-resolvist account of moral agency," in which non-deliberative and non-decisive action has the potential to be just as morally significant as fully thought-through and conclusive decision-making. It then suggests that Harbin's moral method provides a useful way of thinking through political inequities in the discipline of Philosophy, and illustrates this with some examples. It highlights three lacunae or possible extensions to the argument: the value but also the complexity of understanding "doubling back" strategies; the ambivalence between psychological and philosophical claims about the value of irresoluteness and the paradoxical nature of being certain of the value of moral uncertainty; and the spatial, temporal, and embodied nature of disorientation.

A recent clinical literature on the psychology of cosmetic surgery patients is concerned with distinguishing good from bad candidates. Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) — a mental disorder marked by a pathological aversion to some aspect(s) of one's appearance — is typically understood in this context as a contra-indication for cosmetic surgery, as it marks those with inappropriate motivation who are unlikely to be satisfied by the surgery's outcomes. This article uses Foucault's genealogical work to argue that both the attempt to provide diagnostic conditions for BDD itself, and the broader attempt to demarcate normal and psychopathological concern with appearance are, in part, effects of disciplinary power. Although often presented as a way of making cosmetic surgery more ethical and restrained, this epistemic project inadvertently defends cosmetic surgical interests. Specifically, it contributes to legitimizing the image of an ethically suspect sub-specialty of medicine, and supports its commercial expansion and effective profit-making by displacing its negative sequelae onto patient psyches.

This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members' capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom and flexibility. The hupomnemata of these organizations thus use asketic language to conceal their implication in normalization.