Iris Marion Young (1949-2006) was one of the most influential and innovative political theorists of her generation who had a significant impact on a wide range of topics such as democratic theory, feminist theory, and justice. She bridged many longstanding divides among political theorists, engaging in Continental and critical theory, but also insisting on the importance of normative argument: her corpus stands as a testament to the fruitfulness of engaging in both abstract theory and the 'real world' of everyday (...) politics. This volume spans the several decades of her work, illustrating her intellectual development over time through three major areas of innovation: Gender: Maintaining that gender is both conceptually and politically meaningful, Young theorized gender in terms of structures that, in combination, position different people we call "women" in different ways, such that some women have some structures in common, without all women sharing all gendered structures in common. Justice: Young's early writings on a critical theory of justice evolved in her later and posthumously published works where she developed an account of justice that brought together her theorization of structure with her concern to respond to contemporary claims of injustice. The Politics of Difference: Young rejected universal and abstract theories of justice and maintained that justice instead required attending to the experiences of people marked by difference. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch once observed: 'philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious'. What was obvious to Murdoch, and to all those who read her work, is that Good transcends everything - even God. Throughout her distinguished and prolific writing career, she explored questions of Good and Bad, myth and morality. The framework for Murdoch's questions - and her own conclusions - can be found here.

Dooley provides background information for each of the interviews, along with a thorough index.

In this classic work of feminist political thought, Iris Marion Young challenges the prevailing reduction of social justice to distributive justice.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2022.

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, (...) that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity. (shrink)

A collection of the author's most influential essays and short works includes her critique of existentialism, her two dialogues on art and religion, key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, the concept of love, and more.

Feminist social theory and female body experience are the twin themes of Iris Marion Young's twelve outstanding essays written over the past decade and brought together here. Her contributions to social theory raise critical questions about women and citizenship, the relations of capitalism and women's oppression, and the differences between a feminist theory that emphasizes women's difference and one that assumes a gender-neutral humanity. Loosely following a phenomenological method of description, Young's essays on female embodiment discuss female movement, pregnancy, (...) clothing, and the breasted body. In an introduction that situates her work in the context of shifts in feminist theory and politics over the past decade, Young emphasizes the rootedness of her theorizing in a dedicated and seasoned political activism. (shrink)

In her long-awaited Responsibility for Justice, Young discusses our responsibilities to address "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated, often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless.

The essay theorizes the responsibilities moral agents may be said to have in relation to global structural social processes that have unjust consequences. How ought moral agents, whether individual or institutional, conceptualize their responsibilities in relation to global injustice? I propose a model of responsibility from social connection as an interpretation of obligations of justice arising from structural social processes. I use the example of justice in transnational processes of production, distribution and marketing of clothing to illustrate operations of structural (...) social processes that extend widely across regions of the world. The social connection model of responsibility says that all agents who contribute by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice have responsibilities to work to remedy these injustices. I distinguish this model from a more standard model of responsibility, which I call a liability model. I specify five features of the social connection model of responsibility that distinguish it from the liability model: it does not isolate perpetrators; it judges background conditions of action; it is more forward looking than backward looking; its responsibility is essentially shared; and it can be discharged only through collective action. The final section of the essay begins to articulate parameters of reasoning that agents can use for thinking about their own action in relation to structural injustice. a Footnotesa Thanks to David Alexander, Daniel Drezner, David Owen, and Ellen Frankel Paul for comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks to David Newstone for research assistance. (shrink)

THE PAPER DEFINES AND DEFENDS A PRINCIPLE OF COLLECTIVE SELF-DETERMINATION AS ONE OF THE PRINCIPLES OF THE ORDERING OF A JUST SOCIETY. THAT PRINCIPLE SPECIFIES THAT INDIVIDUALS PARTICIPATE EQUALLY IN THE MAKING OF DECISIONS WHICH WILL GOVERN THEIR ACTIONS WITHIN INSTITUTIONS OF SPECIAL COOPERATION. THE PAPER ADOPTS THE STRATEGY OF ARGUING TO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE BY ASKING WHAT PRINCIPLES WOULD BE CHOSEN IN RAWLS' ORIGINAL POSITION. IT ARGUES THAT, CONTRARY TO THE THRUST IMPLICIT IN RAWLS AND OTHER LIBERAL THINKERS, PERSONS (...) IN THE ORIGINAL POSITION WOULD HAVE NO BASIS FOR DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN POLITICAL AND NON-POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS OF SOCIAL COOPERATION, AND THUS WOULD CHOOSE THE PRINCIPLE OF SELF-DETERMINATION DIRECTLY AS APPLYING TO ALL INSTITUTIONS AND ACTIVITIES OF SOCIAL COOPERATION. (shrink)

This latest work from one of the world's leading political philosophers will appeal to audiences from a variety of fields, including philosophy, political science, women's studies, ethnic studies, sociology, and communications studies.

Murdoch's study attempts to analyse and evaluate the different strands of Sartre's rich and complex oeuvre. Combining the objectivity of the scholar with a profound interest in contemporary problems, Iris Murdoch places Sartre's achievement in the perspective of philosophical, political and aesthetic thought, showing the ambiguities and dangers inherent in his position. -- Book jacket.

The acclaimed author of The Good Apprentice draws on the entire history of philosophy--and particularly on Plato and Kant--to formulate her own model of morality and demonstrate how thoroughly it is bound up with our daily lives. "An utterly absorbing book".--The Wall Street Journal.

Critics of a politics of difference have misidentified these social movements as asserting an identity politics of recognition. Most of these movements are better understood as resisting unjust structural inequalities. Inclusive democratic process involves paying specific attention to group differences in order to transform preferences and maximize social knowledge.

Muḥammad Mahdī ibn Abī Z̲arr Narāqī, -1794 or 1795. Jāmiʻ al-saʻādāt - Criticism and interpretation; Islamic ethics.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2003, given by Iris Marion Young, an American philosopher.

«Ethics and Imagination» en The Irish Theological Quarterly, nº 52, marzo 1986, pp. 81-95. Una versión un poco diversa y titulada «Imagination» se encuentra en Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Londres, Chatto and Windus, 1992, pp. 308-348.

Based on a case study of the South African food and canning industry at the Cape from 1940 to 1960, this article examines the conditions that fostered women's high level of involvement both in the trade union and in local and national political organizations concerned with gender and racial issues. Particularly important were women's prevalence in seasonal labor, which gave them few individual options for improving their situation at work; a progressive, nonracial trade union that encouraged close ties between family, (...) work, and community and that kept women involved during the off-season; and an active political movement concerned to mobilize women against the threats to their work and family lives from the apartheid state. In addition, unlike women in many areas of Asia and Latin America, these women had a long tradition of productive labor and were not expected to refrain from visible public activity. (shrink)

In a typical classroom interaction, the teacher asks questions, students answer, and the teacher—knowing the answer—evaluates the responses. This structure might cultivate a view of knowledge as objective, uncontested, and immutable. In response to criticisms of such models, teachers increasingly encourage students’ self-expression, communicating the validity of multiple solutions and perspectives. Stressing that there is "no one right answer,” might be important in countering absolutist and encouraging relativist understandings of knowledge. Cultivating more qualified and critical perspectives that seek to use (...) criteria to judge an answer's quality and identify better answers from among a set of "right answers" may be more difficult to achieve, and might explain the prevalence of multiplist and paucity of evaluativist positions among youth. We suggest that teacher training that emphasizes pedagogy apart from subject-matter learning might contribute to practices that encourage individual expression without providing the domain-specific tools or values of evaluating knowledge claims. (shrink)

Residential racial and class segregation produce or exacerbate distributive injustice and political exclusion. Integration as the dispersal of a concentrated minority among the majority, however, often has its own harmful consequences. An alternative ideal of differentiated solidarity combines positive affinity grouping with non‐discrimination and regional government that encourages attention to shared problems and inequality.

Some philosophical positions maintain that some aspect of reality depends on human practices, cognitive attitudes or sentiments. This paper presents a framework for understanding such positions in a way that renders them immune to a number of natural but allegedly devastating objections.

The decline of religion and ever increasing influence of science pose acute ethical issues for us all. Can we reject the literal truth of the Gospels yet still retain a Christian morality? Can we defend any 'moral values' against the constant encroachments of technology? Indeed, are we in danger of losing most of the qualities which make us truly human? Here, drawing on a novelist's insight into art, literature and abnormal psychology, Iris Murdoch conducts an ongoing debate with major (...) writers, thinkers and theologians—from Augustine to Wittgenstein, Shakespeare to Sartre, Plato to Derrida—to provide fresh and compelling answers to these crucial questions. (shrink)

Some authors defend literary cognitivism – the view that literary fiction is cognitively valuable – by drawing an analogy between cognitive values of thought experiments and literary fiction. In this paper my aim is to analyse the reasons for drawing this analogy and to see how far the analogy can be stretched. In the second part, I turn to the claim put forward by literary anti-cognitivists according to which literature can at best be the source of hypotheses, not of knowledge. (...) I challenge this claim by showing that hypotheses can have valuable cognitive benefits on their own, thus hoping to restore cognitive benefits readers get from literature.Neki autori brane književni kognitivizam – stajalište da književna fikcija ima spoznajnu vrijednost – povlačeći analogiju između spoznajne vrijednosti misaonih eksperimenata i književne fikcije. U ovome ću radu analizirati razloge za ovu analogiju te vidjeti koliko se njen doseg može proširiti. U drugome dijelu razmotrit ću tvrdnju književnih antikognitivista prema kojoj književnost u najboljem slučaju može biti samo izvor hipoteza, a ne znanja. Ovu ću tvrdnju dovesti u pitanje pokazujući da hipoteze same mogu imati vrijedne spoznajne koristi, u nadi da se na taj način mogu obnoviti spoznajne koristi koje čitatelji pronalaze u književnosti.Certains auteurs défendent le cognitivisme littéraire – position selon laquelle la fiction littéraire a une valeur cognitive – en établissant une analogie entre les valeurs cognitives de l’expérience mentale et la fiction littéraire. Dans cet article, j’analyserai les raisons de cette analogie et verrai jusqu’où cette analogie peut s’étendre. Dans la seconde partie, j’examinerai l’affirmation des anti-cognitivistes littéraires selon lesquels la littérature peut tout au plus être une source d’hypothèses et non pas du savoir. Je mets cette affirmation au défi en montrant que les hypothèses à elles seules peuvent avoir de précieux avantages cognitifs, dans l’espoir de restaurer ainsi les avantages cognitifs que les lecteurs tirent de la littérature.Einige Verfasser verteidigen den literarischen Kognitivismus – einen Standpunkt, nach welchem die literarische Fiktion erkenntnismäßig ersprießlich ist – indem sie eine Parallele zwischen den Erkenntniswerten der Gedankenexperimente und der Literaturfiktion ziehen. In dieser Schrift fasse ich den Vorsatz, die Ursachen für diese Parallelisierung auszukundschaften wie auch zu ermitteln, inwieweit sich diese Analogie ausdehnen lässt. In dem zweiten Teil wende ich mich der vonseiten der literarischen Antikognitivisten vorgebrachten Behauptung zu, welcher zufolge die Lieratur günsigstensfalls eine Hypothesen- und keineswegs eine Wissensquelle zu sein vermag. Ich hinterfrage diese These, indem ich die Anschauung erhärte, dass Hypothesen über eigene wertvolle erkenntnisbezogene Vorzüge verfügen können; all dies in der Hoffnung, kognitive Vorteile herzustellen, welche die Leserschaft aus der Literatur herausliest. (shrink)