Philosophers as Unreliable Narrators
The notorious distance between many academic writers’ on-the-page personae and their in-person personalities is widely thought to be a good thing. If, in person, many of us are quarrelsome, neurotic, egotistical, oblivious, thin-skinned, competitive, self-aggrandizing, and self-indulgent, yet on the page we appear gentle, thoughtful, courageous, well-informed, and touchingly vulnerable, then at least the research has not been contaminated by the personality. In daily life, we may or may not want to know the person behind the prose as a friend, colleague, boss, neighbor, lover, or presiding judge, but in our studies we expect to hear from a distinctive writing persona, someone calmer, more reliable, more open-minded than most of us ordinarily are. As philosophers, we are supposed to aspire to a higher writing self.
The Politics of Recognition
I A NUMBER of strands in contemporary politics turn on the need, sometimes the demand, for recognition. The need, it can be argued, is one of the driving forces behind nationalist movements in politics. And the demand comes to the fore in a number of ways in today’s politics, on behalf of minority or “subaltern” groups, in some forms of feminism and in what is today called the politics of “multiculturalism.” The demand for recognition in these latter cases is given urgency by the supposed links between recognition and identity, where this latter term designates something like a person’s understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being. The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being. Thus some feminists have argued that women in patriarchal societies have been induced to adopt a depreciatory image of themselves. They have internalized a picture of their own inferiority, so that even when some of the objective obstacles to their advancement fall away, they may be incapable of taking advantage of the new opportunities. And
Proliferative kidney disease: first reported outbreak in North America
Abstract. Proliferative kidney disease (PKD) was diagnosed in rainbow trout, Salmo gairdneri Richardson, at the Hagerman, Idaho, State Fish Hatchery. Wild fish from Riley Creek, one of the hatchery water supplies, were infected with PKD organisms. Clinical signs, gross pathology and histopathology of affected fish were typical of those reported for PKD in salmonids from European hatcheries. In addition to lesions normally seen, we observed a severe vasculitis and occlusion of renal and hepatic vessels. Ultrastructure of the PKD organism and possible inclusion body production sites are described. The disease outbreak was complicated by the presence of other infectious diseases. This is the first recorded outbreak of PKD in North America.