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This book deals with bioethical issues relevant to women across the life span. “Gender justice” is the starting point and the end point of the author’s approach to the issues addressed. The first section offers an overview of bioethics, critiques prevalent approaches to bioethics and models of the physician-patient relationship, and sketches distinguishing aspects of women’s health care. Classical pragmatists and feminist standpoint theorists are enlisted in support of “an egalitarian perspective”, and positions on the moral status of fetuses and those already born are examined. The second section identifies topics that are directly or indirectly related to women’s health; these include prenatal testing, childbirth and newborn decisions, treatment of minors and the elderly, assisted reproduction, abortion, eating disorders, domestic violence, breast and gynecological cancer, end of life care, and research on women. Brief cases illustrate variables related to each topic. Empirical and theoretical considerations follow each set of cases; these are intended to precipitate more expansive and critical examination of the questions raised. The book concludes with discussion of an egalitarian ideal to be pursued through an ethic of virtue or supererogation rather than obligation. By embracing this ideal, according to the author, moral agents support a more demanding level of morality than guidelines or laws require.

Toward a Generous Orthodoxy provides a refined exposition of Hans Frei's christologically motivated engagement with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clifford Geertz, Erich Auerbach, his use of ordinary language philosophy and nonfoundational philosophical insights, while illuminating and expanding his orientational indebtedness to Karl Barth's theology. By placing Frei's work into critical conversation with developments in pragmatist thought and cultural theory since his death, the rereading of Frei offered here aims to correct and resolve many of the complaints and misunderstandings that vex his theological legacy. The result is a clarification of the unity and coherence of Frei's work over the course of his career; a reframing of the complex relationship of his work to that of his Yale colleague George Lindbeck and successive "postliberal" theological trends; demonstration that Frei's uses of Barth, Wittgenstein, Auerbach, and Geertz do not relegate his theological approach to critical quietism, methodological separatism, epistemic fideism, or a so-called "theological ghetto"; explication and development of Frei's account of the "plain sense" of Scripture that evades charges of narrative foundationalism and essentialism on one hand and, on the other, avoids criticisms that any account so emphasizing culture, language, and practice will reduce scriptural meaning to the ways the text is used in Christian practice and community. What emerges from Toward a Generous Orthodoxy is a sharpened account of the christologically anchored, interdisciplinary, and conversational character of Frei's theology, which he came to describe as a "generous orthodoxy," modeling a way for academic theological voices to take seriously both their vocation to the Christian church and their roles as interlocutors in the academic discourse.

This book is a collection of sixteen chapters written over the last twenty years. They include chapters on quasi-realism and practical reasoning, but range over many other topics, including trust, dilemmas, fiction, semantics, pragmatism, observation, and the nature of reason. This is the first book linking well-known expressivist work on practical reason to the wider concerns of contemporary pragmatism.

This book aims to reconcile pragmatism (in both its classical American and its Wittgensteinian forms) with analytic philosophy. It investigates relations between the meaning of linguistic expressions and their use. Giving due weight both to what one has to do in order to count as saying various things and to what one needs to say in order to specify those doings makes it possible to shed new light on the relations between semantics (the theory of the meanings of utterances and the contents of thoughts) and pragmatics (the theory of the functional relations among meaningful or contentful items). Among the vocabularies whose interrelated use and meaning are considered are: logical, indexical, modal, normative, and intentional vocabulary. As the argument proceeds, new ways of thinking about the classical analytic core programs of empiricism, naturalism, and functionalism are offered, as well as novel insights about the ideas of artificial intelligence, the nature of logic, and intentional relations between subjects and objects.

Charles Peirce's pragmatist philosophy contains important ideas for understanding the nature of epistemic rationality and rational self‐control. After a discussion of his views about the different demands of theory and practice, the book explains his account of truth, before comparing it with the correspondence theory of truth and tracing its relations to his theory of indexical reference. This is followed by an investigation of his defence of a system of ‘scientific metaphysics’ and its role in rational inquiry. We then turn to a consideration of how his pragmatism and his account of rationality rest upon his acceptance of a modified version of the common‐sense philosophy. This theme in his thought leads him to emphasize the role of sentiments and emotions in epistemic evaluation, and this lies behind his distinctive views about doubt and about why we should not take scepticism seriously. The final two chapters of the book explore Peirce's argument for the reality of God and begin to address the question of how he thought his pragmatist philosophy could be proved.

This book presents an empiricist alternative (‘constructive empiricism’) to both logical positivism and scientific realism. Against the former, it insists on a literal understanding of the language of science and on an irreducibly pragmatic dimension of theory acceptance. Against scientific realism, it insists that the central aim of science is empirical adequacy (‘saving the phenomena’) and that even unqualified acceptance of a theory involves no more belief than that this goal is met. Beginning with a critique of the metaphysical arguments that typically accompany scientific realism, a new characterization of empirical adequacy is presented, together with an interpretation of probability in both modern and contemporary physics and a pragmatic theory of explanation.

This book elucidates and defends C.S. Peirce’s pragmatist account of truth. Peirce was interested in exploring truth’s connections to the practices of inquiry, belief, and assertion. This distinctly pragmatic project resulted in the view that truth is what would be agreed upon, were inquiry to be pursued as far as it could fruitfully go. The view that a belief is true if it would be indefeasible connects truth to human practices, but which takes truth to be something to be discovered. That is, Peirce’s view of truth is much more objectivist than some currently popular brands of pragmatism. In this expanded edition, advances in the understanding of Peirce’s theory of truth are noted, and include a new chapter which shows how Peirce’s view of truth is friendly to moral judgements.

Manufacturing Possibilities examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile and machinery industries in Germany, the U.S., and Japan since World War II. Using detailed historical and interview based contemporary analysis, the book shows that as national industrial actors in each sector try to compete in global markets, they recompose firm and industry boundaries, producer strategies, stakeholder interests and governance mechanisms at all levels of their political economies. Theoretically, the book marks a departure from both neoliberal economic and historical institutionalist perspectives on change in advanced political economies. It characterizes industrial change as a creative, bottom up, process driven by reflective social actors. The alternative view consists of two distinctive claims. The first is that action is social, reflective and ultimately creative. When their interactive habits are disrupted, industrial actors seek to repair their relations by reconceiving them. Such imaginative interaction redefines interest and causes unforeseen possibilities for action to emerge, enabling actors to trump existing rules and constraints. Second, industrial change driven by creative action is recompositional. In the social process of reflection, actors rearrange, modify, reconceive and reposition inherited organizational forms and governance mechanisms as they experiment with solutions to the challenges that they face. Continuity in relations is interwoven with continuous reform and change. Most remarkably, creativity in the recomposition process makes the introduction of entirely new practices and relations possible. Ultimately, the message of Manufacturing Possibilities is that social study of change in advanced political economies should devote itself to the discovery of possibility. Preoccupation with constraint and failure to appreciate the capaciousness of reflective social action has led much of contemporary debate to misrecognize the dynamics of change. As a result, discussion of the range of adjustment possibilities has been unnecessarily limited.

The book's discussion is divided into two parts. Chapters 1-5 trace the unnoticed yet occasionally harmful role that uncritical thinking about ‘concepts’ plays within our practical life, whether in guiding scientific progress or simply in the management of our everyday affairs. The motivations central to classical conceptual traditionalists (such as Bertrand Russell) and neo-pragmatic holists (such as W. V. Quine) are sympathetically presented, but it is nonetheless argued that some middle route between these philosophical centres needs to be found. The purpose of the survey of the initial chapters is to indicate the benchmarks that an improved conception of concept should accommodate. In Chapters 6 and 7, a simple non-classical pattern (called a ‘facade') is formulated, which allows a descriptive practice to encode useful physical information in unexpected ways. The pattern’s utilities are defended through a series of important scientific exemplars and shown to be silently incorporated within various forms of everyday usage as well. Many of the standard philosophical puzzles canvassed earlier in the book are shown to have arisen when a ‘facade’ (or allied descriptive structure) has become mistaken for a simpler form of linguistic arrangement. Awareness of these potential ‘semantic mimicries’ provides a guide to the moderated approach to conceptual evaluation that the book eventually defends. Its concluding chapters map out the allied caution with respect to ‘rigor’ and ‘rule following’ that also needs to be observed, lest a descriptive useful language be prevented from assuming its optimal contours. Because the book is rather long, the preface indicates several abbreviated courses of reading that may help a reader find the material of greatest personal salience.