Placebos are much discussed in both the medical and philosophy of medicine literatures. Once narrowly defined as inert “sugar pills,” (Holman 2015), they now are now most often taken to be “treatments that appear similar to experimental treatments, but that lack their characteristic components” (Howick et. al. 2013). In addition to their use in the control […]
An interdisciplinary quarterly journal dedicated to philosophical bioethics.
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Book Reviews
Victoria Pitts-Taylor, The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics, Duke University Press, 2016
The brain matters. Says the opening line from Victoria Pitts-Taylor’s The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics. On the face of it, the human brain matters inasmuch as it is the body’s central information processing organ; the CEO that presides over many of our executive bodily functions. But the brain matters beyond the ways in […]
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Editor's Pick
Editor’s Pick, September 2018: Lauren Freeman and Saray Ayala López
Our Editor’s Pick for our September 2018 issue is Lauren Freeman and Saray Ayala López’s paper, “Sex Categorization in Medical Contexts: A Cautionary Tale.” In this paper, Freeman and Ayala López question the completely standard practice of sorting patients into male and female (and in unusual, ‘abnormal’ cases, ‘other’) as a first step in providing […]
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Book Reviews
Inmaculada de Melo-Martin, Rethinking Reprogenetics, Oxford University Press, 2016
Rethinking Reprogenetics: Enhancing Ethical Analyses of Reprogenetic Technologies is a compact, rigorously argued volume that packs quite a punch. Inmaculada de Melo-Martin aims to provide a crucial corrective to the analyses of bioethicists who have taken to cheerleading the development and use of reprogenetic technologies1 (p.7). She argues that they should instead carefully evaluate the […]
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Book Reviews
Kevin C. Elliott, Daniel Steel, eds. Current Controversies in Values and Science, Routledge, 2017
As a general claim, most philosophers of science accept that science is not value-free. The disagreements lie in the proverbial details. The essays in Current Controversies in Values and Science, edited by Kevin Elliott and Daniel Steel focus on such details. Like other volumes in the Routledge Current Controversies in Philosophy’s series, this one asks […]
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Book Reviews
Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Oxford University Press, 2017
Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is an accessible and timely exploration of a particular aspect of gendered oppression that has received surprisingly little scholarly treatment. There is a lot of feminist work on sexism, oppression, and patriarchy, but misogyny, as Manne defines it, is distinct from all of these. Her purpose in […]
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Editor's Pick
Editor’s Pick, June 2018: Tommy J. Curry and Ebony A. Utley
Our Editor’s Pick for our June 2018 issue is Tommy J. Curry and Ebony A. Utley’s paper, “She Touched Me: Five Snapshots of Adult Sexual Violations of Black Boys.” In this painful and nuanced paper, Curry and Utley argue compellingly that Black boys are especially vulnerable to sexual violation. Ironically, this special vulnerability is grounded […]
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Book Reviews
Sarah S. Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome, University of Chicago Press, 2013
Following the tradition of feminist philosophers and scholars of science from the 1980s onward such as Evelyn Fox-Keller, Helen Longino, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and others who revealed how popular notions of masculinity and femininity infiltrated and shaped the content of scientific knowledge, Sarah S. Richardson’s book Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the […]
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Book Reviews
Jesse Wall, Being and Owning: The Body, Bodily Material, and the Law, Oxford University Press, 2015
Jesse Wall’s Being and Owning: The Body, Bodily Material, and the Law addresses the legal status of ‘bodily material’; items which used to be, but are no longer, part of a living human organism: especially, ‘separated’ materials like gametes or tissue samples, and (to a lesser extent) cadavers and other mortal remains. Wall’s discussion, however, […]
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Book Reviews
Travis Rieder, Toward a Small Family Ethic: How Overpopulation and Climate Change Are Affecting the Morality of Procreation. Springer, 2016.
The global human population is currently about 7.6 billion people, and our numbers are still increasing. Although human population growth has not been a popular topic to discuss in the last quarter-century, its contribution to various environmental problems is becoming harder and harder to ignore. Travis Rieder’s Toward a Small Family Ethic confronts the effects […]