Abstract:Although Angelina Weld Grimké's 1916 play, Rachel, has historically been read as a sentimental, anti-lynching drama, such classifications might limit the play's anarchic potential. Instead of viewing the characters as responding to anti-Black violence, this paper proposes reframing the play's discussion within a context of Black maternity and its necessary engagement with the Afro-pessimist concept of social death. Such reorientation suggests that Rachel works within the theater's very materiality in order to explore the effects of anti-Blackness on Black life. Specifically, (...) this paper argues that the play's performances of abiological Black maternity—and, particularly, the titular character's performances—fugitively evade the natal alienation of social death. Furthermore, such performances link past, present, and future stage productions as well as character representations, recreating kinship formations within Black social life to stage spatio-temporal disruptions on the equation of Blackness as social death. In this way, Rachel offers modern scholars an understanding of how older works might yet be read in light of the more recent theoretical work of radical Black feminist and Afro-pessimist scholars. (shrink)

“To consent to love or be loved,” said Merleau-Ponty, “is to consent also to influence someone else, to decide to a certain extent on behalf of the other.” This essay explicates that idea through a meditation on intimacy. I propose, first, that, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, we are always transgressing into each other’s experience, whether we are strangers or familiars; I call this “ontological intimacy.” Concrete experiences of intimacy are based upon this ontological intimacy, and can take place at two levels: (...) (1) at-this-moment (such that we can experience intimacy even with strangers, by sharing a momentary but extra-ordinary mutual recognition) and (2) in shared interpersonal institutions, or habitual, enduring, and co-enacted visions of who we are, how to live, and what matters. Through particular examples of dynamics within these layers of intimacy (drawing upon work by Berne and by Russon), I claim that we are always, inevitably, imposing an “unfreedom” upon our intimate others. Freedom, then, can only develop from within and by virtue of this “unfreedom.” Thus, what distinguishes empowering or emancipating relationships from oppressive ones is not the removal of transgressive normative social forces; it is rather the particular character of those transgressive forces. Some transgressions upon others’ experience—some forms of “unfreedom”—will tend to promote freedom; others will tend to hinder it. This amounts to a call for promoting agency and freedom not only through critical analysis of public institutions, practices and discourses, but also through critical insight into and transformation of our most private and intimate relationships. (shrink)

In this essay, I propose that human development is the emergence of something significantly new out of a past situation that does not hold that novel achievement as a determinate potential except retrospectively. Development, in other words, might best be understood as a “realization” in the sense of a making-real of some new form of being that had no prior place in reality, that was not programmed in advance, but that once realized can have its roots traced back to determinate (...) conditions and potentials in its own past. This amounts to a rethinking of the nature of developmental potential as retrospectively determined. But it also involves a reconception of the locus of such potential: I argue that developmental potential must be understood as located in the human-organism-in-its-situation, rather than simply in the human organism. I take my bearings from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I make my case by elucidating three different forms of human development described by Merleau-Ponty: intellectual realizations of insight; the realization of a new perceptual-motor skill; and a child’s realization of a new lived way of making sense of the interpersonal world. (shrink)

Emotion is usually conceived as playing a relatively external role in education: either it is raw material reshaped by rational practices, or it merely motivates intellectual reasoning. Drawing upon the philosophy of Hegel and Plato’s Socrates, I argue, however, that education is a process of existential transformation and that emotion plays an essential, internal role therein. Through an analysis of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic, I argue that emotions have their own logic and that an individual can be propelled to (...) increasingly rational emotional stances by the demands of the emotional situationitself, even in the absence of any intellectual reasoning or rational training. Appealing also to the structure and content of Socrates’ conversations, I argue that intellectual reasoning can lead to self-overcoming only insofar as it involves a particular emotional orientation towards the emotional challenges of genuine learning, that is, insofar as it is “conscientious reasoning.”. (shrink)

This is a French abstract for an English-language article, published as "Life is Inherently Expressive: A Merleau-Pontian response to Darwin's _The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals_".

This is a French abstract, published in _Chiasmi_, describing an English-language article entitled "Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of “Letting Others Be” .".

This is an Italian abstract, published in _Chiasmi, describing an English-language article published under the title "Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of “Letting Others Be”.".

This paper argues for an understanding of emotion based upon Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of embodiment and passivity. Through a critical assessment of cognitive theories of emotion, and in particular Solomon's theory, it argues (1) that there is a sense in which emotions may be judgments, so long as we understand such judgments as bodily enactments of meaning, but (2) that even understood in this way, the notion of judgment (or construal) can only account for a subset of emotions which I call (...) "emotional clichés," and not for authentic passions. In contrast with Solomon's account which conceives the subject as constituting, this account of emotion requires us to understand subjectivity as moved by meanings in the world, and as sometimes, in an authentic passion, dispossessed by those meanings. (shrink)

Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose that the infant's initial sense of self is still indeterminate and ambiguous, and is only progressively consolidated, beginning with embodied perceptions of others. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and Hegel's notion of mutual recognition, and with reference to empirical studies in developmental psychology, I argue that perceiving other persons is significantly different from perceiving inanimate things. Until sufficient motor capacities have developed for exploring (...) and perceptually disambiguating inanimate things, it is only in perceiving others who recognize her that the infant is able to realize herself as a self. As the physiological and behavioural evidence suggests, whereas inanimate things initially captivate and dispossess the young infant, other people return her to herself. This paper lends support to the ideas that humans are ontologically social beings, and that selfhood is socially conditioned rather than given with consciousness. (shrink)

It’s one thing to do the right thing. It’s another to be creditable for doing the right thing. Being creditable for doing the right thing requires that one does the right thing out of a morally laudable motive and that there is a non-accidental fit between those two elements. This paper argues that the two main views of morally creditable action – the Right Making Features View and the Rightness Itself View – fail to capture that non-accidentality constraint: the first (...) because it morally credits agents who make heavy-duty moral mistakes; the second because it fails to generalise and is too conservative – a point which this paper gives renewed defence. The paper then goes on to defend and develop an alternative according to which moral worth is mediated by the agent’s knowing how to respond to the reasons of the type which make acting in that way right. It’s argued that this view avoids the problems for the alternatives, and it’s shown that in order for the view to avoid collapsing into a problematic form of Reliabilism we’ll have to think of states of knowing how as essentially successful in character. (shrink)

This book proposes a new, rationally-justified, evidence-based theory concerning values. It discusses practical applications of these universally-applicable values, especially to morality, society, education and upbringing. In doing so, it discusses sexism, sexuality, racism, freedom, politics, law, animal rights, environmental ethics, health-care, war, economics, psychology, science, literature, religion, and much more.

The core insight of Dr. Angelica Tratter’s essay, as I see it, is that we can approach the question of a person’s ways of being in the world in an ‘ontological’ rather than ‘ontical’ manner. Tratter communicates this insight primarily through a rehabilitation of Ludwig Binswanger’s notion of ‘world-design.’ In what follows, I wish both to affirm Tratter’s insight, and also, through my own elaboration of it, to propose some possible divergences of thought. As Tratter notes, Heidegger was unhappy with (...) Binswanger’s appropriation of his thought. Binswanger, Heidegger claims, mistakenly begins with the subject–object divide, and understands “being in the world” as bridging this divide ;.. (shrink)

Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body subverts the authority of the anatomy teaching text, and challenges its claim to objectivity, by writing to the texts of Andreas Vesalius. Vesalius, working in the late 15th century, is recognized as having set the precedent for how the anatomy of the human body is taught even today. By writing a ‘lesbian body’ in disarray, Wittig metaphorically topples the authority and order of the standard Vesalian anatomy. By writing that body as a desiring subject, she (...) also invites us to question the desire for knowledge and ownership of that knowledge, and the illusion of scientific objectivity. Indeed, she offers us a celebration of the subjectivity of the production of texts and identities. But in her rewriting, she must also adopt a particular subject position and guard that position from the ‘wrong’ interpretations. The Lesbian Body is then, despite its literary and political force, a text which fears the interpretive role of its reader. (shrink)

This study identified a range of pedagogies developed to promote global citizenship within a university Latin American dance unit. It implemented changes to teaching and learning approaches in the...

A variety of recent philosophical discussions, particularly on topics relating to complexity, have begun to reemploy the concept of 'emergence'. Although multiple concepts of 'emergence' are available, little effort has been made to systematically distinguish them. In this paper, I provide a taxonomy of higher-order properties that (inter alia) distinguishes three classes of emergent properties: (1) ontologically basic properties of complex entities, such as the mythical vital properties, (2) fully configurational properties, such as mental properties as they are conceived of (...) by functionalists and computationalists, and (3) highly configurational/holistic properties, such as the higher-level patterns characteristic of complex dynamical systems. Or more simply: emergence as ontological liberality, emergence as multiple realizability, and emergence as interactive complexity. (shrink)

It is now standard in the literature on reasons and rationality to distinguish normative reasons from motivating reasons. Two issues have dominated philosophical theorising concerning the latter: (i) whether we should think of them as certain (non-factive) psychological states of the agent – the dispute over Psychologism; and (ii) whether we should say that the agent can Φ for the reason that p only if p – the dispute over Factivism. This paper first introduces a puzzle: these disputes look very (...) much like merely verbal disputes about the meaning of phrases like `S’s reason’ in motivating reasons ascriptions, and yet charity requires us to think that something substantive is afoot. But what? The second aim of the paper is to extract substantive theses from certain natural arguments for Psychologism and Anti-Factivism – theses which are versions of a controversial view of the nature and normative structure of rationality. The paper ends by arguing against these substantive theses on phenomenological and ethical grounds. The upshot is that proponents of Psychologism and Anti-Factivism are either engaged in the project of defending merely verbal theses or they’re engaged in the project of defending false substantive ones. (shrink)

We can contrast rationalising explanations of the form S φs because p with those of the form S φs because S believes that p. According the Common Kind View, the two sorts of explanation are the same. The Disjunctive View denies this. This paper sets out to elucidate the sense in which the Common Kind Theorist asserts, but the Disjunctivist denies, that the two explanations are the same. I suggest that, in the light of the distinction between kinds of explanation (...) and particular explanations, the relevant sameness thesis is ambiguous, thus giving us two distinct versions of the Common Kind View. I then argue that the only direct arguments for Disjunctivism available in the literature fail because they only succeed in undermining one version of the Common Kind View. I finish, however, by providing a fresh argument for the Disjunctive View which aims to undermine both versions of its competitor. (shrink)

Frank Cunningham discusses the idea that there is no universal form of democracy, in his contribution on MacPherson, “Globalization and developmental democracy”. Working at a time in which colonial attitudes had not yet been radically questioned, MacPherson analyzed the democratic potential of peoples that were, in Western eyes, still deemed too immature for self-government. MacPherson’s theoretical framework was particularly suited to such an endeavour, because his definition of democracy did not focus on narrow institutional characteristics. Democracy, according to MacPherson’s (...) broader definition, designates a form of society that gives all individuals the opportunity to develop their “truly human potentials”. (shrink)

An accessible and contemporary introduction to the methods for determining cause and effect in the social sciences Causal inference encompasses the tools that allow social scientists to determine what causes what. Economists--who generally can't run controlled experiments to test and validate their hypotheses--apply these tools to observational data to make connections. In a messy world, causal inference is what helps establish the causes and effects of the actions being studied, whether the impact (or lack thereof) of increases in the minimum (...) wage on employment, the effects of early childhood education on incarceration later in life, or the introduction of malaria nets in developing regions on economic growth. Scott Cunningham introduces students and practitioners to the methods necessary to arrive at meaningful answers to the questions of causation, using a range of modeling techniques and coding instructions for both the R and Stata programming languages. - -. (shrink)

Working in ZF+AD alone, we prove that every set of ordinals with cardinality at least Θ can be covered by a set of ordinals in HOD of K (ℝ) of the same cardinality, when there is no inner model with an ℝ-complete measurable cardinal. Here ℝ is the set of reals and Θ is the supremum of the ordinals which are the surjective image of ℝ.

Considerations of social justice pertain to universities with respect to reserved spaces for applicants from disadvantaged groups, targeted hiring, differential student fees or faculty workloads and salaries, and similarly contested matters. This paper displaces debates over what constitutes just allocation of university resources from those over theories of justice in general to those about alternative visions of the proper goal of universities. To this end, educational and democratic theories of John Dewey are drawn on as an alternative to elitist conceptions (...) and the implications of these competing viewpoints for specific justice-related issues are explicated. (shrink)

What does it mean to wear the white coat? I began to grapple with this as an internal medicine intern. I trained at Duke, where the dress code was more formal than at my medical school. Other than...

Ejes de la territorialidad patriarcal -- Fronteras y antifaces del signo mujer -- En el flujo heterogéneo de la liberación.

Though singularity of the self can be understood in different ways, this essay argues that it ought ultimately to be understood temporally, in terms of becoming and the establishment of what Merleau-Ponty calls «personal institutions». Anorexia is used as a case study: anorexics can oscillate between feeling themselves expressed in their anorexic desires, and feeling themselves expressed in their opposition to anorexic desires. I argue, drawing upon Laing’s understanding of psychopathology, that neither is their «true singular self» but that singularity (...) ultimately realizes itself in the process of this oscillation. Guided by Merleau-Ponty’s concept of «institution», I propose that oscillations result from lived efforts to resolve indeterminately felt existential problems; that the repetitions and «binary rhythm» involved in such oscillations are endemic to personal becoming; and that what enables success rather than failure in such becoming singular are relations with others who act in recognition of this process. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.3 (2001) 207-224 [Access article in PDF] Virtual Witnessing and the Role of the Reader in a New Natural Philosophy Richard Cunningham [Figures]How did the self-described new natural philosophies of the early modern period displace other philosophic (moral, ethical, legal), and specifically religious, discourses as the locus of truth in our culture? Natural philosophy's rejection of disputation and of revelation as means of producing truth (...) in favor of the "discovery" of truth was more accurately an introduction of the invention of truth than of its discovery, and this invention demanded the creation of and participation of a certain kind of reader. Rhetorical examination of the early modern magnetic philosopher William Gilbert's most influential work, De Magnete, 1 will help us understand the "paradigm change," to use Thomas Kuhn's oft-misquoted term, 2 from a culture that accepted probabilistic truth in the natural realm to one that expected moral certainty, from a culture that accepted revelation as a legitimate means of access to truth to one that increasingly recognized only the "discovery" of truth through sensual experience disciplined through experiment.One way this paradigm change was effected was through the inclusion of the reader as an active participant in the new natural philosophies. The reader was included in the new natural philosophies by engendering in him desires for particular forms of knowledge and particular ways of attaining that knowledge. Peter Dear notes that "in the seventeenth century old practices changed and new ones appeared. Those changing practices represent shifts in the meaning of experience itself" (12-13), and he then asks the question that might well have been on the tongues of many as the old practices gave way to the new: "how can a universal knowledge-claim about the natural world be justified on the basis of singular items of individual experience?" (13). A crucially important way to justify the universal knowledge-claim on singular items of individual experience [End Page 207] was through the employment of a technique Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have labeled "virtual witnessing" (60-65). Briefly, "virtual witnessing" describes the use of linguistic resources to produce a vicarious experience enabling a reader to confer agreement as though she had actually been present when an experiment was conducted. Virtual witnessing alone, however, cannot explain how the scientific became the dominant truth-producing paradigm in our culture. Virtual witnessing intermingled with a variety of other elements in early modern natural philosophy to encourage readers to participate in the invention of "true" accounts of the world in which we live. In this article I will apply the tools of rhetorical analysis as I use the example of De Magnete to elaborate on how a Foucauldian form of disciplinary impulse combined in the early modern period with the technology of virtual witnessing to create an audience inculcated with desire, interest, and belief in the new natural philosophy, which had to precede and accompany expansion of the scientific into the dominant truth-producing paradigm it has long since become.For the sake of clarity I should expound upon the two key elements of my argument, "discipline," in the Foucauldian sense in which I use the term, and "virtual witnessing." According to Michel Foucault, "discipline" is "a political anatomy of detail... situated on the axis that links the singular and the multiple" (139-49), and I argue that this point, on the "axis that links the singular and the multiple," is exactly the point that enables modern science. William Gilbert's De Magnete can help us understand how knowledge and power--or epistemê and technê, to use another, perhaps more rhetorically inflected, vocabulary--combined in the early modern period to produce the effects that would become those of modern science. Gilbert provides an excellent example of the movement from the production of truth through revelation to the production of truth through discovery and the experimental method. De Magnete persuades its reader by rendering visible a formerly invisible "universal nature," 3 so that truth is no longer warranted by the invisible workings... (shrink)

Leading Frankfurt School theorist, Herbert Marcuse, possessed an intricate relationship with higher education. As a professor, Marcuse participated in the 1960s student movements, believing that college students had potential as revolutionary subjects. Additionally, Marcuse advocated for a college education empowered by a form of praxis that extended education outside the university into realms of critical thought and action. However, the more pessimistic facet of his theory, best represented in the canonical One Dimensional Man, now seems to be the dominant ideology (...) in the contemporary college experience. With the rise of the corporate university, knowledge is commodified and praxis is supplanted by rampant consumerism. Once a haven for critical theory, the college experience has been overtaken by capitalism, substantially limiting the revolutionary potential for college students in favour of an institutionalised, one dimensional university. (shrink)

The Heart of What Matters shows that literature has a powerful and unique role to play in understanding life's deepest ethical problems. Anthony Cunningham provides a rigorous critique of Kantian ethics, which has enjoyed a preeminent place in moral philosophy in the United States, arguing that it does not do justice to the reality of our lives. He demonstrates how fine literature can play an important role in honing our capacity to see clearly and choose wisely as he develops (...) a moral philosophy that engages with our intimate emotional concerns. Written in an accessible style and drawing from a provocative body of contemporary literature, this book shows how moral philosophy can reach a far wider audience than it has. -/- In part one of this book, Cunningham sketches out the theoretical basis for a redefined conception of moral philosophy. In part two, he engages in extended analyses of novels that address significant life and character issues, specifically Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Seraph on the Suwanee. Cunningham shows exactly how works like these can inform moral philosophy. Drawing from film, history, psychology, and other social sciences in addition to literature, this book adds to the growing number of works that use literature for ethical analysis and to the growing controversy over Kantian ethics. (shrink)

William Cunningham was a prominent British economist and economic historian. In this book, which was first published in 1917, Cunningham provides a concise guide to various aspects of political philosophy, with a particular focus on British political institutions. Appendices are included and textual notes are incorporated throughout. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in political philosophy and the nature of governance.

Here is a surprisingly neglected question in contemporary epistemology: what is it for an agent to believe that p in response to a normative reason for them to believe that p? On one style of answer, believing for the normative reason that q factors into believing that p in the light of the apparent reason that q, where one can be in that kind of state even if q is false, in conjunction with further independent conditions such as q’s being (...) a normative reason to believe that p. The primary objective of this paper is to demonstrate that that style of answer cannot be right, because we must conceive of believing for a normative reason as constitutively involving a kind of rationality-involving relation that can be instantiated at all only if there is a known fact on the scene, which the agent treats as a normative reason. A secondary objective, achieved along the way, is to demonstrate that in their Prime Time Errol Lord and Kurt Sylvan do not succeed in undermining the factoring picture in general, only a simple-minded version of it. (shrink)

This paper begins with a Davidsonian puzzle in the epistemology of perception and introduces two solutions to that puzzle: the Truth-Maker View (TMV) and the Content Model. The paper goes on to elaborate (TMV), elements of which can be found in the work of Kalderon (2011) and Brewer (2011). The central tenant of (TMV) is the claim that one's reason for one's perceptual belief should, in all cases, be identified with some item one perceives which makes the proposition believed true. (...) I defend an argument against (TMV) which appeals to (a) the claim that the reason for which one believes should always to be identified with the explanans of the rationalising explanation to which one's belief is subject and (b) the claim that the explanantia of rationalising explanations must be identified with truths. I finish by replying to two objections to the argument. (shrink)

Following the exploration of the disciplinary identity of physiology before 1800 in the previous paper of this pair, the present paper seeks to recover the complementary identity of the discipline of anatomy before 1800. The manual, artisanal character of anatomy is explored via some of its practitioners, with special attention being given to William Harvey and Albrecht von Haller. Attention is particularly drawn to the important role of experiment in anatomical research and practice-which has been misread by historians as physiological (...) experiment. Although scientific status was claimed by some practitioners for the discipline, the knife remained the tool of the discipline. Finally the differences between the teleological assumptions underlying anatomy, and the 'argument from design' or natural theology are explored. (shrink)

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Rene" Descartes started modern Western philosophy on its search for an absolutely certain foundation for knowledge. ...