Rape is a weapon of war. Establishing this now common claim has been an achievement of feminist scholarship and activism and reveals wartime sexual violence as a social act marked by gendered power. But the consensus that rape is a weapon of war obscures important, and frequently unacknowledged, differences in ways of understanding and explaining it. This article opens these differences to anal...

Cynthia Lee has written a hard-hitting and insightful book on bias and the law of homicide. Her purpose is to document how murder law’s “reasonable person” may absorb the unreason of prejudice in its various forms (from biases of race to gender to sexual orientation). Doctrinally, Lee’s book is wide-ranging and ambitious, covering a variety of standard defenses, such as provocation (chs. 1–3) a...

This paper is an attempt to discuss the concept of madness and its differentcauses and functions in Bessie Head’s semiautobiographical novel A Question ofPower. It aims to explore the multifaceted insanity of Elizabeth the exiled coloredprotagonist in terms of different theories. We will see how once a devastatingtrauma turns out to be a habilitating schizophrenia. Head challenges the readers’n...

of Medicine and other periodicals over the past decade. Dr. Feinstein's aim is nothing less than to induce doctors to think in new ways. He hopes that one result of his proposed revolution in clinical thinking will restore to clinical medicine the status it has lost owing to the explosive growth of molecular biology. He traces at length the growth and change of clinical investigation in this co...

difficult task, or was it more an accident of co-terminosity? The anti-psychiatrists who adopted his themes, the "Great Confinement" and so forth, happened to be in the ascendant at the time (the early 1960s) and embraced his anti-institutional analysis with perfervid zeal despite the confusions engendered in both directions. There seems to have been little acknowledgement either that asylumdom...

It is uncommon for a theoretical discussion of democracy to resonate throughout everyday political discussion. The removal of dictatorial regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq created a rare opportunity for political scientists to remind us of the historical thread connecting democratic theory with practice. Despite the devastation and dashed expectations of the Iraq war, in particular, one should no...

Musing on the rows of discarded crutches on display at Lourdes, the journalist H.L. Mencken observed that no wooden legs were in evidence. Why, one might ask, has this paradox not presented itself to the faithful? Mencken also remarked that faith could be defined as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. The efficacy of prayer is not, as it happens, one of the “weird beliefs” ...

This essay gives an introduction to the study of avatars and player-avatar relations in video games and virtual communities. It propose a short history of avatars, distinguishing between different aspects of the concept and its uses, and then highlighting key debates and research efforts in the field. Drawing on the emerging interdisciplinary field of the philosophy of computer games, the essay...

In memory of Roland-François Lack Like Lina’s, the viewer’s suspicions are centred on glass milk. And it is this milk, putatively poisoned, that focal point my attempt in article, pursuing hints to be found writings both Gaston Bachelard and Jean-Paul Sartre, outline a psychoanalysis peculiarly blank substance. Milk liquid that, symbolic sense, superficially secure its identification with innoc...

ion of logical arguments come into play on some occasions and not others. The authors appraise this argument by way of a systematic comparison of personal storytelling and reason-giving in public deliberation, the first such empirical study. Drawing upon an analysis of 1,415 claims made by 263 people in 12 discussion groups, the authors show that ordinary conventions of storytelling helped deli...