My Turn: Halting Refugee Admissions is Misguided

Article excerpt: In the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Paris, state governors from more than 25 states, including the governor of my state, New Hampshire, have stated that they are shutting down their borders and not allowing Syrian refugees to live in their states. While their pronouncements carry no legal weight, because state governors don’t have the authority to decide whether to admit refugees into the United States (that is the president’s prerogative), they are misguided and morally reprehensible

My Turn: \u27We the People\u27 and the Garland Nomination

[Excerpt] Because I teach constitutional law, a friend recently asked me whether Judge Merrick Garland or President Obama might successfully sue to compel the Senate to take action on the nomination of Judge Garland to fill the vacancy on the United States Supreme Court. Almost certainly not, I told him. Under settled precedent, a judge would dismiss such a case as raising a non-legal \u27\u27political question. It would be very difficult to develop acceptable decisional standards for such a claim. Moreover, courts are reluctant to entertain lawsuits challenging mechanisms that the Senate uses to oversee the judiciary

Fully Realizing Partial Realization

There has been a movement in philosophy, growing over the last twenty years, to treat dispositionality as irreducible and, in turn, offer dispositional accounts of important metaphysical matters such as the laws of nature, free will, causation, and modality. However, unlike the earlier turn towards possible worlds in metaphysics, the turn towards dispositions hasn’t had much impact in semantics. But this is, in my view, largely because semanticists have yet to consider what dispositional analyses of (say) tense, aspect, generics, or modals would look like. My aim in this paper is to push the dispositionality movement forward on the semantics front by considering a dispositional analysis of the progressive aspect

I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts

I had no plans of writing a blog post this week. I said my piece on ghost tours last year. This Halloween, it was the next generation’s turn to share their opinions on the matter. Jules and Jen both did a spectacular job on the subject, and I commend them even though our perspectives differ. But when I learned that my stance had come under fire from another blog, I eagerly leapt from the comfort of my editing armchair and returned to the front lines to compose this piece [excerpt]

A Tractable Model of Reciprocity and Fairness

We introduce a parametric model of other-regarding preferences in which my emotional state determines the marginal rate of substitution between my own and others' payoffs, and thus my subsequent choices. In turn, my emotional state responds to relative status and to the kindness or unkindness of others' choices. Structural estimations of this model with six existing data sets demonstrate that other-regarding preferences depend on status, reciprocity, and perceived property rights.

Reply to Rosanna Keefe’s ‘Modelling higher-order vagueness: columns, borderlines and boundaries’

This paper is an expanded written version of my reply to Rosanna Keefe’s paper ‘Modelling higher-order vagueness: columns, borderlines and boundaries’ (Keefe 2015), which in turn is a reply to my paper ‘Columnar higher-order vagueness, or Vagueness is higher-order vagueness’ (Bobzien 2015). Both papers were presented at the Joint Session of the the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association in July, 2015. At the Joint Session meeting, there was insufficient time to present all of my points in response to Keefe’s paper. In addition, the audio of the session, which is available online, becomes inaudible at the beginning of my reply to Keefe’s comments due to a technical defect. The following is a full version of my remarks

Autobiography

My grandparents immigrated to the U.S. around the turn of the last century. My mother’s parents and six older siblings came from Poland. My father’s parents met in New York, she having come from Russia and he from Romania. My parents, both born in 1908, grew up in New York and never lived outside the metropolitan area. Both finished high school and went to work, my father studying at Brooklyn Law School at night while selling shoes during the day. When they married in 1929, my mother was earning $15 a week as a bookkeeper and my father,$5 a week as a novice lawyer.Search frictions;

Corporate blue : a novel presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English, Massey University

My first day on the job with those nutcases, I was greeted by the loser's end of a very large handgun. Were I a more intuitive man, I could have taken that as a sign to just turn around and walk away. Leave that place and never think of it again. It would've been the wise thing to do. In my own defence however, I could point out that I didn't have a lot of options as to where I could turn. The President of the United States, among others, was pissed-off with me. And I had promised myself that I would make the best of this new situation in a new country. In time-I figured a year max-I was sure they would all forgive me back in America and let me come home

Reflections on Doing Research Grounded in My Experience of Perinatal Loss: From Auto/biography to Autoethnography

This article, derived from my doctoral dissertation (Davidson 2007) examining the emergence of hospital protocols for perinatal bereavement during the last half of the twentieth century in Canada, focuses on the methodological complexities – the draw, the drain, and the delight of doing qualitative research grounded in my own experience of perinatal loss. With my dissertation now a fait a complete, reflecting back on my research, my use of autoethnography at this point allows a return to a story that has already happened and involves \'\'the construction and reconstruction\' of my personal 2 experiences as narratives\' (Autrey 2003: 10). Taking this narrative turn, my enquiry here shifts auto/biography to autoethnography as a mode of enquiry.Qualitative Research; Feminist Research; Perinatal Loss and Grief; Bereavement; Experience; Auto/biography; Autoethnography

In the house of a stranger

This Master’s Report follows the thread through the development of my research, ideas and sculptural objects over the course of my three years at the University of Texas. My work, in its broadest terms, has an invested interest in the quiet complexity of the familiar object, the seemingly benign material things that inhabit daily life. These objects are anchors, containers filled with fragments of time and place, they help orient oneself spatially and emotionally. The objects I make cull from a visual and material vocabulary that is familiar, but this familiarity becomes more complicated and uncomfortable as the objects begin to turn on their functional and material expectations, leaving a rift between the thing known and the thing experienced. In my work friction forms as objects get cut up and recast, as touch and matter and intimacy accumulate on their surfaces.Studio Ar