UNDERSTANDING PRIVACY by Daniel J. Solove (Harvard University Press, 2008)

From the book jacket:
Privacy is one of the most important concepts of our time, yet it is also one of the most elusive. As rapidly changing technology makes information increasingly available, scholars, activists, and policymakers have struggled to define privacy, with many conceding that the task is virtually impossible.

In this concise and lucid book, Daniel J. Solove offers a comprehensive overview of the difficulties involved in discussions of privacy and ultimately provides a provocative resolution. He argues that no single definition can be workable, but rather that there are multiple forms of privacy, related to one another by family resemblances. His theory bridges cultural differences and addresses historical changes in views on privacy. Drawing on a broad array of interdisciplina ry sources, Solove sets forth a framework for understanding privacy that provides clear, practical guidance for engaging with relevant issues.

Understanding Privacy will be an essential introduction to long-standing debates and an invaluable resource for crafting laws and policies about surveillance, data mining, identity theft, state involvement in reproductive and marital decisions, and other pressing contemporary matters concerning privacy.
Daniel Solove offers a unique, challenging account of how to think better about-- and of-- privacy. No scholar in America is more committed to demystifying "the right to privacy".
--Anita L. Allen, University of Pennsylvania Law School



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In this blog post, Stanley Fish argues that Deconstruction in particular and "French Theory" in general do not threaten the loss of anything significant in American intellectual life.

excerpts from the original article in the New York Times:

Certainly mainstream or centrist intellectuals thought there was a lot to worry about. They agreed with Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, who complained that the ideas coming out of France amounted to a “rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment” even to the point of regarding “science as nothing more than a ‘narration’ or a ‘myth’ or a social construction among many others.”

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Book: Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2007, 269pp.,

Daniel Jacobson: "Berys Gaut's new book offers an extended argument for moralism about art: roughly, the thesis that the intrinsic moral flaws of an artwork count as aesthetic flaws, and its moral merits as aesthetic merits. The recent debate over moralism in the philosophy of art has generated some unfortunate terminological and taxonomic confusion. Gaut navigates this morass deftly, homing in on what is at issue between moralism and its two competitors: autonomism and an anti- theoretical view sometimes misleadingly termed immoralism. Autonomism holds that the moral qualities and defects of artworks are never aesthetically relevant. The anti- theoretical view holds that although the moral qualities of art are sometimes aesthetically relevant (contra autonomism), its morally dubious features can be among its aesthetic merits and its morally salutary features among its aesthetic flaws (contra moralism)." more

Tim Maudlin, The Metaphysics Within Physics, Oxford University Press, 2007, 197pp., $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780199218219.

Reviewed by Richard Healey, University of Arizona: "This brief but fertile volume develops and defends the basic idea that "metaphysics, in so far as it is concerned with the natural world, can do no better than to reflect on physics." It consists of six essays sandwiched between an introduction and an epilogue. Though written independently over more than fifteen years, in combination they offer a unified blueprint for the construction of a metaphysics based on physics. Maudlin proposes to build on a foundation in which laws of nature and a directed time are assumed as primitives which generate the cosmic pattern of events -- observable or not. Physical modality follows readily, but (he argues) physics does not itself employ a notion of causation. So causal and counterfactual locutions are fit candidates for an analysis that will supplement physical law with pragmatic factors, while metaphysical possibility is suspect beyond the bounds of physical possibility." more

If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it?
Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study. Please note all programs will be available to listen to again in real audio after the episode has aired. Go to http:// www.cbc.ca/ podcasting/ index.html? newsandcurrent# thinkaboutscien ce  for the podcast versions of the series.

http:// www.cbc.ca/ ideas/features/ science/ index.html
[Submitted by Telos]