In this paper I develop a genealogical approach for investigating and evaluating conspiracy theories. I argue that conspiracy theories with an epistemically problematic genealogy are (in virtue of that fact) epistemically undermined. I propose that a plausible type of candidate for such conspiracy theories involves what I call ‘second-order conspiracies’ (i.e. conspiracies that aim to create conspiracy theories). Then, I identify two examples involving such conspiracies: the antivaccination industry and the industry behind climate change denialism. After fleshing out the mechanisms (...) by which these industries systematically create and disseminate specific types of conspiracy theories, I examine the implications of my proposal concerning the particularism/generalism debate and I consider the possibility of what I call local generalism. Finally, I tackle three objections. It could be objected that a problematic genealogy for T merely creates what Dentith (2022) calls ‘type-1’ (or ‘weak’) suspicion for T. I also consider a challenge according to which the genealogical method is meta-undermined, as well as an objection from epistemic laundering. (shrink)

A second-order conspiracy (SOC) is a conspiracy that aims to create (and typically also disseminate) a conspiracy theory. Second-order conspiracy theories (SOCT) are theories that explain the occurrence of a given conspiracy theory by appeal to a conspiracy. In this paper I argue that SOC and SOCT are useful and coherent concepts, while also having numerous philosophically interesting upshots (in terms of epistemology, explanation, and prediction). Secondly, I appeal to the nature of two specific kinds of second-order conspiracies to make (...) the case for what has been called ‘local generalism’ (Stamatiadis-Bréhier 2023a). Specifically, I focus on so-called ‘denial industries’ to argue that the structure of these second-order conspiracies allows us to infer non-accidental generalisations about the domain of conspiracy theories. Even though it is true that there is nothing epistemically problematic with the general class of conspiracy theories, there are specific subsets of conspiracy theories that warrant immediate strong suspicion (cf. Dentith 2022). By looking at the intricate mechanisms by which these denial industries operate, we can infer that the conspiracy theories that are produced by them are epistemically unwarranted. I conclude by making some exploratory remarks about what the metaphysics of second-order conspiracies would look like. (shrink)

In this paper I revisit an important response to the Moral Twin Earth (MTE) challenge: The Common Functional Role strategy (CFR). I argue that CFR is open to a revenge problem. MTE-cases allegedly show that two linguistic communities can be in genuine disagreement even when they are regulated by distinct families of properties. CFR provides a way to reconcile the intuition that the two communities are in genuine disagreement with the claim that the use of moral terms by both communities (...) is causally regulated by different families of properties. This is done by identifying a functional role that those families of properties both fulfill. Still, even if CFR is successful, its proponents need to face a serious revenge problem. Roughly, it could be that the families of properties that regulate each community are equally perfect realizers of the relevant higher-order functional state. I suggest that the proponent of CFR faces a dilemma: either CFR has controversial implications about first-order moral theory, or CFR needs to be coupled with substantive and parochial empirical/metaphysical assumptions to avoid those implications. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Genevieve Lloyd THE SELF AS FICTION: PHILOSOPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry (...) or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious at all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people — what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. Virginia Woolf, "The Mark on the WaIl" ' The anxiety Virginia Woolf describes is, at one level, a familiar, everyday one of self-esteem. But the passage can also be read as expressing a more metaphysical unease about our conception ofwhat it is to be a self at all. Our difficulties in preventing the "romantic figure with the green of forest depuis all about it" from collapsing back into mat "shell of a person which is seen by other people" have philosophical roots. We have inherited ideals of objective knowledge which put severe restraints on the capacity to construct our selves as fictions. Our selves are part ofthe world and our representations of mem must conform to standards of truth. Yet we also want to separate our selves out from the world we know. As a knowing self, I am not merely an object of knowledge, but its luminous, though elusive, source and structuring center. My subjectivity seems to give me a special status in the world. But it is difficult to see how mat special status is to be reconciled with ideals of objective knowledge. As Thomas Nagel sums up the philosophical dilemma, in Mortal Questions, we are impelled, on the one hand, to resist an entirely "external" view ofwhat we most essentially are and do. But this sense ofour irreduci168 Genevieve Lloyd169 ble subjectivity comes up against an equally strong drive to include human beings and everything about diem as contents of a world mat can be understood "objectively." Our awareness of ourselves involves a sense of how the world is experienced from a particular point of view. But this idea of what the world is like from different points of view is at odds with our inherited ideals ofknowledge. To qualify as real, diings must be there independendy of particular points of view. Objectivity demands setting aside the "internal" viewpoint in an attempt to see die world, as it were, from no point of view at all. Yet we do feel mat our awareness of being ourselves cannot be reduced to the awareness of being the particular persons with the determinate properties we have, there to be perceived from perspectives not our own.2 As Arthur Prior puts the point, in his paper "Identifiable Individuals," an exchange of properties between Julius Caesar and Mark Antony might leave the world looking exacdy the same to us, but certainly not to Caesar or Antony. The experience of being called Julius Caesar or being murdered on me ides of March are very different experiences from being called Mark Antony or dallying on the Nile with Cleopatra.3 This seems to suggest mat my awareness ofbeing myself cannot be equated wim awareness of being some person with a determinate set of properties. It was, of course, precisely that kind of consideration which prompted Descartes, in the Meditations, to postulate the self as a pure ego, which remains the same regardless ofany imagined change in outer circumstances. It is the thought experiment of shedding all his actual properties which prompts him to treat the self as a special kind of object, immune to the fluctuations and uncertainties that afflict others. But, as Bernard Williams has pointed out, in his article "Imagination and... (shrink)

In this essay, I propose a functionalist theory of grounding (functionalist-grounding). Specifically, I argue that grounding is a second-order phenomenon that is realized by relations that play the noncausal explanatoriness role. I also show that functionalist-grounding can deal with a powerful challenge. Appeals to explanatory unificationism have been made to argue that the success of noncausal explanations does not depend on the existence of grounding relations. Against this, I argue that a systematization involving functionalist-grounding is superior to its anti-relational counterpart.

This new collection of essays by leading feminist critics highlights the fresh perspectives that feminism can offer to the discussion of past philosophers. Rather than defining itself through opposition to a "male" philosophical tradition, feminist philosophy emerges not only as an exciting new contribution to the history of philosophy, but also as a source of cultural self-understanding in the present.

This new edition of Genevieve Lloyd's classic study of the maleness of reason in philosophy contains a new introduction and bibliographical essay assessing the book's place in the explosion of writing and gender since 1984.

Moral realists often disagree about the nature of moral properties. These properties can be natural (as per naturalistic moral realism) or non-natural. But it is unclear how we should understand the notion of naturalness employed in these discussions. In this paper I propose a novel account of moral naturalness. I suggest that a property F is natural iff F falls within the scope of a natural law. In turn, a law is natural when it figures in a nomic nexus involving (...) the laws of physics. (shrink)

I argue that moral principles, construed as moral generalizations, can be genuinely explanatory. Specifically, I present and respond to a challenge according to which moral generalizations are explanatorily redundant. In response, I present and defend an explanatory dimension of moral generalizations that is based on the idea of unification. I do so in the context of motivating a realist-friendly moral explanatory pluralism (i.e., the view that there can be many, equally legitimate, explanations of moral facts). Finally, I appeal to the (...) same theoretical resources to tackle an objection from explanatory circularity. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how realist moral naturalists can provide an intra-theoretic explanation of the epistemic possibility of wholesale moral error. This is a requirement on metaethical theories that has been recently defended by Akhlaghi (2021). After clarifying Akhlaghi’s argument and responding to Evers’s (2021) recent rebuttal, I argue that even under the assumption that moral facts are grounded in an appropriate subset of natural facts (N-facts), there is still a non-zero probability of wholesale moral error. This is demonstrated (...) by considering three types of epistemically possible scenarios: specifically, it could either be that N-facts do not actually exist, or that N-facts exist in a way that entails wholesale moral error, or that N-facts exist in a non-error theoretic way, but their existence is temporally restricted. (shrink)

Separatists about grounding take explanations to be separate from their corresponding grounding-facts. Grounding-facts are supposed to underlie, or back, such explanations. However, the backing relation hasn’t received much attention in the literature. The aim of this paper is to provide an informative definition of backing. First, I examine two prominent proposals: backing as explaining (Kovacs 2017; 2019a) and backing as grounding (see Sjölin Wirling 2020). Finally, I put forward my own proposal. I argue that under plausible assumptions about the role (...) of backing and the nature of explanation, backing should be understood as a form of truthmaking, minimally construed. (shrink)

Genevieve Lloyd illuminates and challenges some perplexing aspects of contemporary attitudes to wonder. She draws especially on Flaubert, who influenced the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. She also reaches into contemporary debates on refugees, secularisation and climate change.

“Modern slavery,” a term used to describe severe forms of labor exploitation, is beginning to spark growing interest within business and society research. As a novel phenomenon, it offers potential for innovative theoretical and empirical pathways to a range of business and management research questions. And yet, development into what we might call a “field” of modern slavery research in business and management remains significantly, and disappointingly, underdeveloped. To explore this, we elaborate on the developments to date, the potential drawbacks, (...) and the possible future deviations that might evolve within six subdisciplinary areas of business and management. We also examine the value that nonmanagement disciplines can bring to research on modern slavery and business, examining the connections, critiques, and catalysts evident in research from political science, law, and history. These, we suggest, offer significant potential for building toward a more substantial subfield of research. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Nader Shoaibi (2024) makes a valuable contribution to the discussion on genealogies and conspiracy theories (CTs) by focusing on a particular kind of genealogy: what he calls 'political genealogies'. Roughly, political genealogies are not so much interested in the epistemic warrant (or rationality) of a given belief or theory. Rather, their function is to illuminate the social and political conditions that give rise to the spread of (unwarranted) CTs. Shoaibi also notes that such genealogies have an (...) important normative dimension: by drawing on the social/political conditions surrounding CTs we are also invited to engage in a ‘constructive strategy’ concerning CT-believers. This strategy, according to Shoaibi, can be cashed out in terms of ‘world-travelling’ which, as per feminist philosopher Maria Lugones, involves radical humility and playfulness. I agree with a lot of what Shoaibi has to say in his paper. I find his notion of CT political genealogies philosophically fruitful since it carves out what I take to be novel conceptual space in the literature. And I welcome the appeal to ‘world-travelling’ when dealing with proponents of unwarranted CTs. In this piece I respond to some of Shoaibi’s worries against epistemic genealogies, and I raise a concern about the possibility of political genealogies being hijacked by malicious actors. I also make some preliminary remarks about what could be called 'genealogical pluralism' about CTs, while also arguing for the primacy of epistemic genealogies. (shrink)

As a constructive alternative to the exclusionary binaries of Cartesian philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens turn to Spinoza. Spinoza's understanding of the body as "in relation" takes the focus of philosophical thought from the homogeneous subject to the heterogeneity of the social, and the focus of politics from individual rights to collective responsibility. The implications for feminism are radical; Spinoza enables a reconceptualization of the imaginary and the possibility of a sociability of inclusion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 575 Geneviève Pagé Gender at the Crossing: Ideological Travelings of US and French Thought in Montreal Feminism This article recounts a story about Montreal feminism using the narrative thread of its conceptual language. It is a story of language as a political choice that guides our actions, but also language as a political issue, a barrier, a (...) tool that structures our thinking and that reflects and reproduces relations of power in knowledge production and dissemination. Gender is the central character in this story—its role representing the way US, French, and Quebec theoretical traditions are deeply in dialogue with each other; yet this dialogue is arbitrary and filled with long silences. In reviewing the dialogue, this article identifies a few elements that play a significant role in favoring or impeding the traveling of ideas and concepts, focusing, in the case of Quebec, on how part of the feminist movement, comprised of radical or “revolutionary” feminists, engages with and constructs theory. The article begins by briefly tracing the evolving meanings of gender in the United States from the 1920s to the twenty-first century. Then, turning to France, a second section identifies elements limiting the traveling of US understandings of gender in French feminist theory, especially the predominance of specific traditions of thought, namely existentialism and Marxism, leading to different ways of thinking about oppression, patriarchy, sexism, and the idea of womanhood. In a third section, I shift the focus to Quebec, particularly Francophone Montreal, to survey its feminist thought, political traditions, and 576 Geneviève Pagé translation. Its history, its people, and its geographic location put it at the convergence of US and French influences, but with a distinct added local imperative: the struggle for national liberation. The specific ways in which Quebec nationalism has foregrounded power and politics around language has had a major impact on how Quebec feminists have negotiated relations with their southern feminist neighbors. In this sense, Quebec feminism presents an excellent case study of language operating as an axis of power. Furthermore, in the context of globalization and resistances to globalizing processes, Montreal provides a perfect example by which to highlight both transnational influences and local specificities. Montreal, as a classic example of Mary Louise Pratt’s cultural and linguistic “contact zone”—the space where communities of practices interact—is a city in which one can clearly identify “the intellectual and linguistic points of contact between cultures, and make visible the political pressure that activates them.”1 I treat translations that occur in this context as the process of connecting and communicating between communities. As queer theorist Juana María Rodríguez has noted in another context, “the process of translation involves more than merely translating languages; it involves translating cultures, values, and institutions of power.”2 Similarly, translation here involves an exchange between symbolic and semiotic structures of both the original and the new communities. Zooming out of Montreal, I then address the politics of translation on a more global scale, pointing out the particular ways the production and dissemination of knowledge is especially beholden to market relations. All these reflections help us understand the traveling of ideas, concepts, and ideologies across linguistic barriers. I conclude that it is in the interest of feminists to pay particular attention to what knowledge is produced from different standpoints and in different languages and what it can teach us. 1. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34; Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996), 36. 2. Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 19. Geneviève Pagé  577 Gender in the United States It is among US feminists that the conceptualization of the gender/sex dichotomy first developed. However, gender—the word—ironically comes to English from the French genre and shares with that word its derivation from the Latin genus, meaning “kind,” “sort,” or “type.” The derivation is most visible in the borrowing in English of the French genre, for example, in literary forms such as fiction or poetry. Similarly, both the English... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Spinoza has often been cited as a classic example of the philosophical category of ‘rationalism’; and there is indeed much about his philosophy that can seem to warrant that classification. This essay will argue that it is nonetheless a simplification, which can cloud some of the most important and interesting insights that can be gained from reading Spinoza now. Although it is true that his treatment of human knowledge emphasized the exercise of reason, his crucial—and frequently misunderstood—concept of ratio (...) was much richer and more nuanced than the common understanding of ‘rationalism’ can capture. The essay seeks to clarify Spinoza’s version of human reason, elaborating its interconnections with imagination and emotion; and its positioning within the totality of Nature. It draws on comparisons with Pascal—and on consideration of Flaubert’s responses to Spinoza’s works—to illuminate what is distinctive in Spinoza’s account of human reason. What emerges, it is argued, is important—not only for contemporary philosophy, but more broadly for the understanding of conceptual aspects of current issues associated with the status of human beings within the natural world. (shrink)

Spinoza's doctrine of the uniqueness of substance has been interpreted as absorbing individual self-consciousness into an all-embracing whole.

Over 50,000 youth, mostly between the ages of 13 and 17 years, migrated to the United States without familial accompaniment in the fiscal year 2018. The tripartite process of pre-flight, flight, and resettlement exposes these unaccompanied immigrant children to multiple, and often ongoing, traumatic events that can significantly and adversely impact their mental health into adulthood. However, the ethical considerations for psychologists working with this growing population, with limited exceptions, remain largely unaddressed. As more and more UIC flee their home (...) countries due to violence, abuse, and economic instability only to experience further stressors during the processes of detainment, custodial placement, and acculturative adjustment in the US, there is an increasing need for psychological services; thus, the importance of preparation of mental health providers is increasingly significant. Psychologists must have the requisite skills and knowledge of the complex experiences of UIC, and of how these intersect with salient cultural, developmental, and systemic factors, as a means of providing competent and ethical mental health treatment. The present article highlights several ethical issues that arise when providing psychological services to UIC, with particular consideration paid to the embeddedness of UIC in various organizational entities with which psychologists will likely need to interface when working with this population. Implications and recommendations for practicing psychologists and training programs are discussed. (shrink)

Spinoza is a key figure in modern philosophy. _Ethics_ is his most studied and well known work. Being both up-to-date and clear, this Guidebook is designed to lead the reader through this complex seminal text. _Spinoza's Ethics_ introduces and assess: * Spinoza'a life, and its connection with his thought * The text of the _Ethics_ * Spinoza's continuing relevence to contemporary philosophy.

Based on archival and ethnographic data, this article analyzes the iconic-making, iconoclastic unmaking, and iconographic remaking of national identifications. The window into these processes is the career of Saint John the Baptist, patron saint of French Canadians and national icon from the mid-nineteenth century until 1969, when his statue was destroyed by protesters during the annual parade in his honor in Montréal. Relying on literatures on visuality and materiality, I analyze how the saint and his attending symbols were deployed in (...) processions, parades, and protests. From this analysis, I develop the sociological concept of aesthetic revolt, a process whereby social actors rework iconic symbols, redefining national identity in the process. The article offers a theoretical articulation and an empirical demonstration of how the context, content, and the form of specific cultural objects and symbols—national icons—are intertwined in public performance to produce eventful change, and shows why and how the internal material logic and the social life of these icons shape the articulation of new national identities. (shrink)

Why would the work of the 17th century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza concern us today? How can Spinoza shed any light on contemporary thought? In this intriguing book, Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd show us that in spite of or rather because of Spinoza's apparent strangeness, his philosophy can be a rich resource for cultural self-understanding in the present. _Collective Imaginings_ draws on recent re-assessments of the philosophy of Spinoza to develop new ways of conceptualising issues of freedom and difference. (...) This ground-breaking study will be invaluable reading to anyone wishing to gain a fresh perspective on Spinoza's thought. (shrink)