This interdisciplinary essay investigates J.M.G. Le Clézio’s short story “Martin” from the collection entitled La Fièvre (Fever) from the lens of recent empirical studies related to bullying. The 2008 Nobel Laureate in Literature creates a rending portrait of the physical and cerebral anguish suffered by casualties of peer-victimization. The profound inner turmoil experienced by the protagonist Martin mirrors the searing pain felt by millions of innocent victims around the world on a daily basis. Although the nefarious, long-term effects of bullying are often dismissed by misinformed individuals as a reflection of “boys being boys,” research unequivocally demonstrates that bullying is a global pandemic that should be taken seriously. In this disquieting narrative from the early part of his illustrious career, Le Clézio extends an ethical summons to the reader which compels us to think harder about the dire social consequences of bullying. Specifically, the tragic dénouement leaves little room for ambivalence concerning the author’s position related to the anguish experienced by casualties of peer-victimization. In “Martin,” it is the destabilizing realism that attacks the sensibilities of the reader the most. Although this text is a work of fiction, it deeply resonates with the reader given that deplorable incidents, which leave deep inner scars, like the one described in “Martin” occur far too often all across the globe. When analyzed in conjunction with the disconcerting research compiled by international scholars from around the world, “Martin” is an invaluable tool that allows us to catch a small glimpse of the unbearable torment felt by the victims of these heinous crimes.

This essay aims to show that the nations of Central America must create access to safe and legal abortion as well as promote a political dialogue on the subject that is based on reason and science, rather than religion. Not only does prohibiting abortion constitute a violation of women's human rights, but, based on international human rights law as well as the minimum duties of civil ethics, failing in to provide such access or dialogue would mean failing to meet the standards of a legitimate democratic state.

In 2010, Taffy Brodesser-Akner published an article entitled, “How Childbirth Caused my PTSD,” on Salon.com. Much to my surprise, her claims that she was seriously traumatized by childbirth encountered strong resistance and disbelief. In trying to understand the source of this resistance, I discovered a type of violence, which I refer to as “metaphysical violence,” that is often overlooked, yet prevalent, in what many people in the United States understand as normal childbirth practices and protocols. In this essay, I will use María Lugones’s Pilgramages/Peregrinajes to offer a detailed account of what constitutes metaphysical violence, how it functions, and why it is so damaging to at least 9% of post-partum women who meet the criteria for PTSD and the 18% of post-partum women who show some sign of the disorder. Then, I will offer suggestions for how we can help women who may be victims of metaphysical violence during birth avoid some of the trauma it so often induces.

The birth plan has become an increasingly institutionalized tool of Western birth practices, used both in medicalized and midwifery settings. Limited empirical research has been done on the efficacy of birth plans in achieving a commonly-ascribed goal: empowering women in their birth experiences. Still, less work has been done on the ethical dimensions of birth plans. As such, this tool has become nearly ubiquitous in birthing practices, yet they warrant further reflection. In this paper, I articulate the ethical goals of writing birth plans. I frame the birth plan as a narrative project: one that women are encouraged to write out, after careful consideration, as a kind of story that articulates the values, experiences, and relationships that are most important to shaping their experience of a “good birth.” Given the importance of the birth experience for many women, birth plans are ethical projects that the attempt to reframe and improve the deeper political dimensions of birth and patient choice. Birth plans are meant to structure the experience, guide women’s understanding of the process, and foster important clinical relationships. In this way, they are similar to advance directives, which are written to shape successful end-of-life care. Yet, the success of birth plans as tool for this ethical work is questionable. This tool aiming at women’s empowerment and ethical self-reflection often sets women up for a kind of ethical injury, in the attempt to avoid unwanted physical harms of labor and delivery. Birth plans are not legally binding, despite how they are framed as pseudo-contracts. Instead of resisting the challenges of a medicalized birth and to be empowered agreements, birth plans often set women up to fail, often aiming at unreasonable expectations. In my argument, I ask to identify for whom the birth plan works, and in which ways the birth plan experience can be improved. Finally, I address how the failure to give birth plans uptake during emergencies often undermines the patient-physician relationship, working against the primary goal of empowerment.

As the field of assisted-reproductive technology progresses, bioethicists continue to debate whether and how the availability of this technology creates new moral duties for parents-to-be. It is rare for these debates to seriously engage with questions related to race and class. Camisha Russell asks us to move race from the margins to the center of our discussions of reproductive ethics. She argues that this shift can work as a kind of corrective that will lead to better theory. In this paper, I build on Russell’s work by considering two proposals related to prenatal genetic diagnosis [PGD] that received a lot of attention and debate—Julian Savulescu and Guy Kahane’s argument in favor of a “principle of procreative beneficence” and Janet Malak and Judith Daar’s argument in favor of a legal duty, in certain cases, to use PGD. My analysis of each of these arguments shows how a lack of diverse viewpoints leads to bad theory. I end the paper by showing how including a diversity of perspectives shifts our focus from rights to justice.

In this essay, I argue that rather than rejecting narcissism, the most appropriate response to contemporary egoism and individualism is a revised understanding of narcissism, one that acknowledges the deeply social nature of our selves by seeking to understand the ways in which we exist as individuals through others. I will call this form of narcissism “vulnerable narcissism.” Once we recognize the extent to which we are, as individuals, constitutively social, narcissistic investments in oneself can be recognized as investments in particular social conditions that influence, sustain, or disadvantage us.

While recent work on trauma provides insight into the first-person experience of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Aristotelian propositional logic, which underlies Western paradigms of thought, contains implicit ontological assumptions about identity and time which obscure the lived experience of PTSD. Conversely, Indian Buddhist catuskoti logic calls into question dualistic and discursive forms of thought. This paper argues that catuskoti logic, informed by Buddhist ontology, is a more fitting logical framework when seeking to describe and understand the first-person experience of PTSD, as it allows for ambiguity, non-duality, and polysemy.

As a verbal art, the “specifica poetica ” of poetry is incontestably its peculiar rhythmic and sound patterning. Regarded as a ‘twin-sister’ of music, as it originally was meant to be sung, poetry offers a different experience of language and the world. Reciting a poem, reading it ‘aloud mentally’, or simply listening to someone else’s recitation is not a trifle experience. It may prove unsettlingly significant in the light of recent philosophical treatments, inscribed into Heidegger’s existential thought based on his multi-dimensional notion of temporality intrinsic in Being/Dasein, notably, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe and Jacques Derrida. In the present essay, I shall primarily focus on Nancy’s compelling conception of the act of listening which he expounds in his book Listening. Drawing upon a plethora of philosophers, such as, Heidegger, his friend Lacoue-Labarthe and others, Nancy elaborates a forceful understanding of the act of listening beyond the meaning-bound, message-focused one. With a challenging, rich philosophical verve, Nancy probes the experience of listening to music, (poetic) rhythm and even to mere human voices’ timbre and links it to our own awareness of our own subjectivity, as well as perceiving subjects engaging with the world surrounding us. Listening mirrors our own selves. It makes reverberate our silent, inner depths whose essence lies beyond the meaning-loaded constructs which define our existence. Being fundamentally temporal, the subject’s economy is perceived, from this temporally existential view, as governed by an unremitting mimetic deferral, continuity and inception, or in rhythm’s logic, repetition and spacing . Poetry, like music, sets (rhythmic, sound) expectations and is perceived as an experience of immanence. The act of listening to a poem being recited or simply ‘reading it aloud mentally’, echoes the subject’s very economy and the perpetual, inceptive deferral underlying its formation, while at the same time reinforces it. What Nancy calls “to listen with all its being” (35), is what Whitman seems to exhort his reader to perform in his exhilarating work Song of Myself to which I refer in the second part of the present essay.

Political philosophy (past and present) concerns itself with thematic, systematic interrogation of political ideas, structures, institutions, and practices. As such it privileges the authority of reason. But, the vision of the literary imagination likewise can and does contribute to human understanding and to imagining our common future. Ursula K. LeGuin is a master teacher of ethical politics in her award-winning novel The Dispossessed. Therein, the protagonist Shevek is presented as an edifying exemplar of “permanent revolution” in a uniquely “thinking mind.” His quest for solidarity of peoples is grounded on a possibility of authentic selfhood within his anarchist society. Considering the concept of authentic selfhood as discussed in philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Shevek’s character may be represented as an imaginary, yet “real,” example or profile of how authentic selfhood may be constituted. This is consistent with LeGuin’s intent in The Dispossessed.

This paper subjects Dan Brown’s most recent novel Origin to a philosophical reading. Origin is regarded as a literary window into contemporary technoscience, inviting us to explore its transformative momentum and disruptive impact, focusing on the cultural significance of artificial intelligence and computer science: on the way in which established world-views are challenged by the incessant wave of scientific discoveries made possible by super-computation. While initially focusing on the tension between science and religion, the novel’s attention gradually shifts to the increased dependence of human beings on smart technologies and artificial (or even “synthetic”) intelligence. Origin’s message, I will argue, reverberates with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which aims to outline a morphology of world civilizations. Although the novel starts with a series of oppositions, most notably between religion and science, the eventual tendency is towards convergence, synthesis and sublation, exemplified by Sagrada Família as a monumental symptom of this transition. Three instances of convergence will be highlighted, namely the convergence between science and religion, between humanity and technology and between the natural sciences and the humanities.