The authors in this edited volume reflect on their experiences with culturally relevant pedagogy-as students, as teachers, as researchers-and how these experiences were often at odds with their backgrounds and/or expectations.

Pentecostals can be understood as contemporary Christian mystics, and doing so can aid one in both understanding and caring for them. The task of understanding them is facilitated by this category in that it allows one to inhabit a different mindset from what is typical in contemporary settings. Pentecostalism and charismatic movements work out of distinct, fundamental claims that together work as a kind of worldview, one that operates from a hyperawareness of God’s presence and a sensed empowerment of the (...) mystic’s self. The task of caring for them should honor these claims all the while being open to the Spirit’s presence and work. (shrink)

Governing Animals explores the role of the liberal state in protecting animal welfare. Examining liberal concepts such as the social contract, property rights, and representation, Kimberly K. Smith argues that liberalism properly understood can recognize the moral status and social meaning of animals and provides guidance in fashioning animal policy.

In this piece, I argue that we Homo sapiens have an ethical duty to restore natural darkness to biodiverse, forested ecosystems. Historically, human beings have relied on forests for material sustenance and psychophysiological wellbeing. Utilizing the philosophical concepts of wildness and relational value, I argue that we are thereby bound by reciprocity to (in return) mitigate forestadjacent light pollution. After all, a variety of forest-dwelling species are negatively impacted by dwindling natural darkness, including (but not limited to): insectivorous and frugivorous (...) bats, various plant (including tree) species, fungi, and a variety of nocturnal pollinators. In addition, the loss of natural darkness precludes human subjects from undergoing a variety of transformative experiences that are uniquely associated with immersion in dark, biodiverse forests. Finally, as oldgrowth groves disproportionately sequester carbon and are negatively impacted by light pollution, increasing artificial light at night indirectly (and worryingly) serves as a driver of global climate change. (shrink)

Grey’s Anatomy focuses on the personal and professional life of protagonist Meredith Grey. Throughout the long series, a consistent theme is that the audience is confronted with moral dilemmas in Meredith’s professional work with patients as well as in her personal life. Grey’s decision-making often breaks professional protocol in order to do what she believes is best for her patients and those close to her. We argue that Grey’s approach to morality is representative of Simone de Beauvoir’s approach in The (...) Ethics of Ambiguity. In this text, Beauvoir argues that an existentialist ethic must reject a childlike approach to morality in which moral rules are absolute and moral dilemmas have obvious answers. Instead, she argues for a rejection of universalist ethics in favor of acknowledging the ambiguity of the moral realm. By tracing Meredith’s decision-making throughout the course of different seasons of the show, we argue that Meredith exemplifies an existential authenticity compatible with Beauvoir’s existentialist approach to ethics. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between modern technological progress and classical liberalism. The compatibility of classical liberalism and technology is questioned, using fiction and film as a window into Western society’s views on politics, economics, religion, technology, and the family.

Boiger and Mesquita (2012) present a social constructionist perspective on emotion that argues for its multilevel contextualization through social interactions, relationships, and culture. The present comments offer a response to the authors’ call for input from other disciplines. We provide a sociological perspective on emotion construction at each of the contextual levels discussed by Boiger and Mesquita, and discuss a model that can address interdependencies between these levels. Our remarks are intended to identify additional literature that can be brought to (...) bear on multilevel emotion construction and to put forward some ideas for future research on the subject. (shrink)

The field of global ethics draws on traditions of moral theory, mostly derived from western philosophy, in order to address moral problems specific to an increasingly globalised world. This book provides an accessible introduction to the field of global ethics for students of politics, international relations and globalisation. It offers an overview and assessment of key perspectives in global ethics and their implications for substantive moral issues in global politics. These issues include the morality of state and non-state violence, the (...) obligations of rich to poor in a globalising world and the scope and nature of international human rights. The aim of the book is to help non-specialist students understand the assumptions underpinning different moral traditions and to enable them to make up their own minds about the best way of approaching moral judgment and prescription in a shared world, which is nevertheless marked by massive cultural differences and inequalities of power. (shrink)

In this piece, I develop a philosophical account of environmental reverence, as induced by more-than-human entities and environments. Utilizing a relational ethical framework, I conceive of environmental reverence as a moral emotion, which through habituation and cultivation–carries the potential to grow into a fully fledged environmental virtue. By reference to the empirical, psychological literature, I show that environmental reverence is positively affective (i.e., induces subjective wellbeing), inherently motivating, and promotes efficacious conservation behaviors. So conceived, reverence is constrained by a set (...) of both internal and external success conditions; its proper implementation thus requires on-the-ground relationship building between communities and the local, biodiverse spaces near which they dwell. I focus on the important role that reverence plays in motivating the efficacious conservation of sylvan ecosystems, drawing on eco-anthropological research into the high concentrations of biodiversity found in residentially managed ‘sacred groves’. Altogether, I recommend a few first-order, ethical prescriptions: first, mass environmental discourse ought to highlight the motivational efficacy of cultivating cultural narratives that center environmental reverence and the key, carbon-sequestering role that forests play in climate-change mitigation. Finally, it is imperative for environmental ethicists to elevate the epistemic status afforded to traditional ecological and residential land managers. (shrink)

The U.S. Supreme Court declared procreation to be a fundamental right in the early twentieth century in a case involving Oklahoma's Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act, an act that permitted unconsented sterilization of individuals convicted of certain crimes. The right that the Court articulated in that case is a negative right: it requires that the government not place unjustified roadblocks in the way of people seeking to procreate, but it does not require the government to take positive steps to help people (...) procreate if they wish to. I argue that a positive legal right is morally necessary in the United States, given the profound significance of procreation, the current barriers to access to care, and the related issues of individual and societal justice. I assume at the outset that the right to procreate should be expansive enough to include a right to noncoital reproduction. The absence of a positive right to procreate reflects not just constitutional tradition but also a governmental and societal commitment to a longstanding set of reproductive hierarchies by which those who fall outside of the traditional framing of family too frequently find their procreative dreams hindered. Reconceiving procreative rights to include a positive right would create greater opportunities to argue and lobby for increased access to technologies that are out of reach for many. (shrink)

Existing research in color naming and categorization primarily reflects two opposing views: A Cultural Relativist view that posits color perception is greatly shaped by culturally specific language associations and perceptual learning, and a Universalist view that emphasizes panhuman shared color processing as the basis for color naming similarities within and across cultures. Recent empirical evidence finds color processing differs both within and across cultures. This divergent color processing raises new questions about the sources of previously observed cultural coherence and cross-cultural (...) universality. The present article evaluates the relevance of individual variation on the mainstream model of color naming. It also presents an alternate view that specifies how color naming and categorization is shaped by both panhuman cognitive universals and socio-cultural evolutionary processes. This alternative view, expressed, in part, using an Interpoint Distance Model of color categorization, is compatible with new empirical results showing divergent color processing within and across cultures. It suggests that universalities in color naming and categorization may naturally arise across cultures because color language and color categories primarily reflect culturally modal linguistic mappings, and categories are shaped by universal cognitive constructs and culturally salient features of color. Thus, a shared cultural representation of color based on widely shared cognitive dimensions may be the proper foundation for universalities of color naming and categorization. Across cultures this form of representation may result from convergent responses to similar pressures on color lexicon evolution. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Reading the Philosophy of Right The Terms of Ethical Life The Hard Work of Freedom Conclusion Notes References.

A commentary on “The Ethics of Anonymous Gamete Donation: Is There a Right to Know One's Genetic Origins?,” by Inmaculada de Melo‐Martin, and “Autonomous Choice and the Right to Know One's Genetic Origins,” by Vardit Ravitsky, bothin the January‐February 2014 issue.

While recognizing the theoretical importance of context, current research has treated naming as though semantic meaning were invariant and the same mapping of category exemplars and names should exist across experimental contexts. An assumed symmetry or bidirectionality in naming behavior has been implicit in the interchangeable use of tasks that ask subjects to match names to stimuli and tasks that ask subjects to match stimuli to names. Examples from the literature are discussed together with several studies of color naming and (...) basic emotion naming in which no such symmetry was found. A more complete model of naming is proposed to account for flexible mapping of names to items. Principles of naming are suggested to describe effects of stimulus sampling, differing access to terms, task demands, and other impacts on naming behavior. (shrink)

Kant's theory of the intuitive intellect has a broad and substantial role in the development and exposition of his critical philosophy. An emphasis on this theory's reception and appropriation on the part of the German idealists has tended to divert attention from Kant's own treatment of the topic. In this essay, I seek an adequate overview of the theory Kant advances in support of his critical enterprise. I examine the nature of the intuitive intellect's object; its epistemic relation to its (...) object; its mode of comprehension; the relationship between these cognitive elements; and I ask which minds Kant regards as intuitive intellects. (shrink)

Nothing was more important for W. E. B. Du Bois than to promote the upward mobility of African Americans. This essay revisits his “The Conversation of Races” to demonstrate its general philosophical importance. Ultimately, Du Bois’s three motivations for giving the address reveal his view of the nature of philosophical inquiry: to critique earlier phenotypic conceptions of race, to show the essentiality of history, and to promote a reflexive practice. Commentators have been unduly invested in the hermeneutic readings and as (...) a result have misunderstood it as a philosophical text. Du Bois did more than introduce the concept of race into the purview of philosophy, he provided a method for philosophical inquiry into a concept that is notoriously difficult to approach with precision. My goal here is to show why no introduction to philosophy and no discussion about the nature of philosophical inquiry is complete without consideration of “Conservation.” Certainly, it is a text about race, but it is also an important philosophical text in general. (shrink)

Although formal barriers to women’s social and political participation have crumbled, society remains, to a significant degree, gendered in the roles that women and men play. Women’s and men’s choices regarding work and family are largely responsible for maintaining and reinforcing the differences. While feminists recognize the need to criticize women’s choices, too often they focus on restrictive conditions rather than the choices themselves. Kimberly A. Yuracko argues instead that encouraging women to make choices in accordance with a grounded (...) and well-defined conception of perfectionism—a philosopy concerned with human flourishing—is the most effective way to redress persistent gender inequality. To this end, Yuracko seeks not only to expose the perfectionism underlying current choice critiques, but to articulate a concrete set of feminist perfectionist principles that would improve the quality of individual women’s lives and improve the social standing of women as a whole. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have come to understand emotions as dynamic and socially constructed—the product of interdependent cultural, relational, situational, and biological influences. While researchers have called for a multilevel theory of emotion construction, any progress toward such a theory must overcome the fragmentation of relevant research across various disciplines and theoretical frameworks. We present affect control theory as a launching point for cross-disciplinary collaboration because of its empirically grounded conceptualization of social mechanisms operating at the interaction, relationship, and cultural (...) levels, and its specification of processes linking social and individual aspects of emotion. After introducing the theory, we illustrate its correspondence with major theories of emotion construction framed at each of four analytical levels: cultural, interactional, individual, and neural. (shrink)

It has been argued that infants possess a rich, sophisticated theory of mind that is only revealed with tasks based on spontaneous responses. A mature theory of mind implies the understanding that mental states are person-specific. Previous studies on infants’ understanding of motivational mental states such as goals and preferences have revealed that, by 9 months of age, infants do not generalize these motivational mental states across agents. However, it remains to be determined if infants also perceive epistemic states as (...) person-specific. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to use a switch agent paradigm with the classic false belief violation-of-expectation task. Results revealed that 16-month-old infants attributed true and false beliefs to a naïve agent—they did not perceive beliefs as person-specific. These findings indicate that infants’ understanding of beliefs is not as sophisticated as the rich mentalistic view suggests. (shrink)

This book provides an invaluable overview of the competing schools of thought in traditional and contemporary normative international theory and seeks to provide a new basis for doing international political theory and thinking about ethics in world politics today. · Part one explains the role and place of normative theory in the study of international politics before critically examining mainstream approaches in international relations and applied ethics. Here the student is introduced to the central debates between realists and idealists, and (...) cosmopolitans and communitarians. · Part two introduces the conceptual challenges of contemporary perspectives from critical theory, postmodernism and feminism and provides a platform for the author to develop her own Hegelian-Foucauldian approach for doing normative international theory. · In Part three the insights drawn from the first two parts are applied to the study of two key topics in contemporary theoretical debate: the principle of self-determination, and the democratic ideals of political cosmopolitanism. Finally conclusions are made for the future practice of theorizing international politics. Accessibly written and wide-ranging, this text will quickly become essential reading for all students and academics of politics and international relations seeking a deeper understanding of the underlying tensions and future potential of international or global political theory today. (shrink)

Though many have recently attempted either to locate Arendt within feminism or feminism within the great body of Arendt's work, these efforts have proven only modestly successful. Even a cursory examination of Arendt's work should suggest that these efforts would prove frustrating. None of her voluminous writings deal specifically with gender, though some of her work certainly deals with notable women. Her interest is not in gender as such, but in woman as assimilated Jew or woman as social and political (...) revolutionary. In this paper, I argue that Arendt recognized that what frequently passes for a gender question is not essentially a matter of gender at all, but rather an idiosyncratic form of loneliness that typically affects, though is by no means limited to, women. In her work one finds the conceptual tools necessary to understand the “woman problem” rather than an explicit argument or a solution to it. (shrink)

: In a short and much-neglected passage in the second Critique, Kant discusses the threat posed to human freedom by theological determinism. In this paper we present an interpretation of Kant’s conception of and response to this threat. Regarding his conception, we argue that he addresses two versions of the threat: either God causes appearances directly or he does so indirectly by causing things in themselves which in turn cause appearances. Kant’s response to the first version is that God cannot (...) cause appearances directly because they depend essentially on the passive sensibility of finite beings. Kant’s response to the second version is that human beings are endowed with transcendental freedom, which blocks the causal transitivity that is presupposed by this version. We also contrast his position on this topic with Leibniz’s and Spinoza’s. (shrink)