Apparent orthodoxy holds that artistic understanding is finally valuable. Artistic understanding—grasping, as such, the features of an artwork that make it aesthetically or artistically good or bad—is a species of understanding, which is widely taken to be finally valuable. The objection from mystery, by contrast, holds that a lack of artistic understanding is valuable. I distinguish and critically assess two versions of this objection. The first holds that a lack of artistic understanding is finally valuable, because it preserves the pleasure (...) of an artwork’s incomprehensibility; the second holds that a lack of artistic understanding is conditionally valuable, as the enabling condition of a finally valuable relationship with an artwork. I defend orthodoxy by arguing that both versions of the objection fail and that we have no general reason against gaining artistic understanding. (shrink)

‘Sexualisation’ has been dismissed by some as no more than yet another moral panic about youth and sex. However, it is striking that the term appears to have helped galvanise feminist activism, speaking in some way to the experiences of young people. Building from a history and analysis of the term, I propose that ‘sexualisation’ has served as an interpretive theory of contradictory gender norms, using the figure of the ‘girl’ to gesture towards an intensifying contradiction between the demands that (...) young women display both desirability and innocence. In addressing sexist dimensions of gender norms through the figure of the ‘girl’, a minor, discourses on sexualisation can help circumvent liberal objections about free choice. However, I also express concern that the term has facilitated a focus in media and policy texts which attends less to gender inequity than to sexuality as a contaminant of young femininity. (shrink)

What should we do, aesthetically speaking, and why? Any adequate theory of aesthetic normativity must distinguish reasons internal and external to aesthetic practices. This structural distinction is necessary in order to reconcile our interest in aesthetic correctness with our interest in aesthetic value. I consider three case studies—score compliance in musical performance, the look of a mowed lawn, and literary interpretation—to show that facts about the correct actions to perform and the correct attitudes to have are explained by norms internal (...) to a practice. Practice-internal norms, however, cannot settle the distinct question of which practices we have reason to opt into. When it comes to the source of aesthetic normativity—in virtue of what aesthetic value is genuinely reason-giving—I argue that existing accounts, which appeal to pleasure or achievement, are inadequate. The only practice-external aesthetic requirement is a generic one to opt into at least some aesthetic practices. (shrink)

A fundamental question for IR is whether the value system of liberalism can be universalized, or if, in fact, the illiberal reality of international politics systematically rules out such a universalization. The book addresses this issue by focusing on the rise and fall of a specific liberal project supported by influential German intellectuals.

Many writers describe a sense of requirement in aesthetic experience: some aesthetic objects seem to demand our attention. In this paper, I consider whether this experienced demand could ever constitute a genuine normative requirement, which I call an aesthetic obligation. I explicate the content, form, and satisfaction conditions of these aesthetic obligations, then argue that they would have to be grounded neither in the special weight of some aesthetic considerations, nor in a normative relation we bear to aesthetic objects as (...) such, but in the connections that certain aesthetic considerations have to our practical identities. On the practical identity approach, aesthetic obligation is best understood as a species of promissory obligation, namely self-promising. But this means that the experienced demand can have, at best, the status of a veridical hallucination: although both have the same content, it is the self-promise, and not the experienced demand, that gives rise to the obligation. While aesthetic obligations concern aesthetic objects, they are not obligations to the aesthetic per se. (shrink)

Research on attachment is widely regarded in sociology and feminist scholarship as politically conservative – oriented by a concern to police families, pathologize mothers and emphasize psychological at the expense of socio-economic factors. These critiques have presented attachment theory as constructing biological imperatives to naturalize contingent, social demands. We propose that a more effective critique of the politically conservative uses of attachment theory is offered by engaging with the ‘attachment system’ at the level of ontology. In developing this argument we (...) draw on Deleuze and Guattari, making use of the common language of ethology which links their ideas to that of attachment theory. The attachment system can and has been reified into an image of the infant returning to their caregiver as an image of familial sufficiency. This has offered ammunition for discourses and institutions which isolate women from health, social and political resources. Yet Deleuze and Guattari can help attachment theory and research to be recognized as a powerful ally for progressive politics, for reflection on the movement of human individuation, and for arguing for the meaningful resourcing of those who care for someone else. (shrink)

One influential tradition holds that blame is a moral attitude: blame is appropriate only when the target of blame has violated a moral norm without excuse or justification. Against this, some have recently argued that agents can be blameworthy for their violation of epistemic norms even when no moral norms are thereby violated. This paper defends the appropriateness of aesthetic blame: agents can be blameworthy for their violation of aesthetic norms as such, where aesthetic norms are the norms of social (...) practices that aim at aesthetic values. I adapt a generic account of blame as protest, which can take variable forms, and then argue that aesthetic distortion cases—cases in which an existing artwork is distorted in its presentation—most clearly warrant blame even in the absence of violations of moral norms. (shrink)

Cities are inextricably bound to their human denizens, although this human dimension is complicated by the emphasis on scale, speed, and progress that often dominates the semiotics and discourses of urban competition. In a profoundly ambivalent movement, various aspects of human “livability” are highlighted in the “quality of life” components of cities rankings and planning, while at the same time the “megacity” trend in planning and semiosis constantly threatens to overwhelm precisely that human livability. We can thus detect two broad (...) and fundamentally-opposed semiotic trends, namely, the confidently cosmopolitan trend that emphasizes urban growth and the positive effects these are assumed to have on quality of life; and the dehumanizing trend that emphasizes the human cost of urban growth and its technological components. The profound ambivalence that this indicates, needs to be figured into urban discourses towards a more holistic and balanced account. (shrink)

Contemporary transnational migration has given rise to a new ideology and semiotics of the foreign body – one that draws on the cognitive field of the primitive, marked, and abjected body. This foreign body is carefully differentiated from both the sphere of the local/national, and the “expatriate” professional who by virtue of economic and cultural capital is desired and assimilated into the local sphere. An aspiring cosmopolitan and global city-state like Singapore shows this semiotic differentiation to quite a marked degree, (...) in the policies and discourses of barely-tolerated and abjected foreign workers whose racially-marked bodies are highlighted by typologies of violence, disease, sexuality, and mob assemblies. The semiotics of the foreign body in Singapore is also evident in other racial-cultural fissures elsewhere, including in countries with multicultural reputations such as Australia, and countries like the U.S., U.K. and France that are struggling to cope with large migrant communities of Middle-Eastern and South Asian peoples. (shrink)

The social history of childhood usually identifies Rousseau as the origin of our contemporary understanding of the topic. The literature describes how Rousseau's notion of childhood as a time of natural innocence became embedded in key social forms such as the family and universal education. Scholars working in the history of political thought, however, have uncovered a fundamental relationship between Rousseau and Augustine. Analysis shows that Rousseau's philosophy of childhood recapitulates many Augustinian elements, and was not therefore an ex nihilo (...) creation. (shrink)

Civilizational analysis is increasingly being used to capture the plurality of routes to and through the modern world order. However, the concept of civilization betrays a colonial legacy, namely, a denial that colonized peoples possessed the creative ability to cultivate their own subjecthoods. This denial was especially acute when it came to enslaved Africans in the New World whose bodies were imagined to be deracinated and deculturated. This article proposes that civilizational analysis has yet to fully address this legacy and, (...) to clarify the stakes at play, compares and contrasts the historical sociology of CLR James with the mytho-poetics of Derek Walcott. Both authors, in different ways, have attempted to endow that quintessentially un-civilizable body – the New World slave – with subjecthood. From this discussion, the article makes the case for developing a ‘poetics of slavery’ that could help to address the colonial strictures still residual in the concept of civilization. (shrink)

As a performative activity, music has the potential to help explain the interpretive and rhetorical work of lawyering. As an aesthetic creation that reflects and shapes individual identities and social bonds, music is a cultural force that may contest or enhance political and legal power. The papers in this special issue contribute to the expanding field that pairs law and music by examining how music has affected legal practices and legal thinking in particular historical and cultural instances.

In Purity and Danger, Douglas theorizes purity and impurity in terms of the instantiation and disruption of a shared symbolic order. Purity/impurity discourses act, according to Purity and Danger, as a homeostatic system which ensures the preservation of this social whole, generally encoding that which threatens social equilibrium as impurity. There have been calls for new social theory on this ‘under-theorized’ topic. Presenting such further reflections, I argue that Douglas’ account is less a full explanation than a regularity. Representations of (...) purity are only secondarily symbols of the social order. Rather, purity/impurity discourses are only associated with ‘matter out of place’ when phenomena are assessed for their relative deviation from an imputed state of ‘self-identity’: qualitative homogeneity and correspondence with their essence. Purity and impurity do more than judge self-identity, however. They can play a fundamental role in its performative construction; they are well adapted for smuggling assumptions into our discourses regarding the essence of particular phenomena and forms of subjectivity, simplifying a complex world into a stark contrast between the dangerous and the innocent, the valuable and the valueless, the necessary and the contingent, the originary and the prosthetic, the real and the apparent, and the unitary and the fragmented. (shrink)

Christopher Nolan is the writer and director of Hollywood blockbusters like The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and also of arthouse films like Memento and Inception. Underlying his staggering commercial success however, is a darker sensibility that questions the veracity of human knowledge, the allure of appearance over reality and the latent disorder in contemporary society. This appreciation of the sinister owes a huge debt to philosophy and especially modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. (...) Taking a thematic approach to Nolan's oeuvre, Robbie Goh examines how the director's postmodern inclinations manifest themselves in non-linearity, causal agnosticism, the threat of social anarchy and the frequent use of the mise en abyme, while running counter to these are narratives of heroism, moral responsibility and the dignity of human choice. For Goh, Nolan is a 'reluctant postmodernist'. His films reflect the cynicism of the modern world, but with their representation of heroic moral triumphs, they also resist it. (shrink)

This article draws on different bodies of knowledge in order to review the potential role of outdoor education in providing nature-based experiences that might contribute to sustainable living. A pragmatic perspective is adopted to critique what outdoor education is, and then what it might be. Phenomenology is used to challenge the belief that there is a causal relationship between activities and learning outcomes but foremost to consider what it is to be in nature in the first place. Aspects of both (...) realism and social constructionism are presented as essential to environmental philosophy and the concomitant, but contested, relationship between people and planet. Through these multiple realities the moral significance of nature emerges not only as a theoretical consideration but as a practical one too. In this way I challenge dualisms that provide stumbling blocks to practice and celebrate instead pluralistic thinking where starting points are based on real-life work settings where theory and practice can emerge together through place-specific solutions. (shrink)

This article analyses reaction to the ideologically inspired murder of a soldier, Lee Rigby, in central London by two converts to Islam, Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo. The focus of the analysis is upon the contrast between how the event was reacted to by the UK National Press and on social media. To explore this contrast, we undertook a corpus-assisted discourse analysis to look at three periods during the event: the initial attack, the verdict of the subsequent trial and the (...) sentencing of the murderers. To do this, we constructed and analysed corpora of press and Twitter coverage of the attack, the conviction of the suspects and the sentencing of them. The analysis shows that social media and the press are intertwined, with the press exerting a notable influence through social media, but social media not always being led by the press. When looking at social media reaction to such an event as this, analysts should always consider the role that the press are playing in forming that discourse. (shrink)

Are there aesthetic obligations, and what would account for their binding force if so? I first develop a general, domain‐neutral notion of obligation, then critically discuss six arguments offered for and against the existence of aesthetic obligations. The most serious challenge is that all aesthetic obligations are ultimately grounded in moral norms, and I survey the prospects for this challenge alongside three non‐moral views about the source of aesthetic obligations: individual practical identity, social practices, and aesthetic value primitivism. I conclude (...) by raising questions for further work in this area. (shrink)

C’est à la confrontation entre M. Henry et Husserl sur la question de l’intersubjectivité que s’attache cette contribution. D’après Robby Mandiangu, M. Henry critiquerait la réduction husserlienne d’autrui à un alter ego, c’est-à-dire à un objet posé sous le regard de l’ego transcendantal : un « autre » défini toujours à partir de l’ego. Aux antipodes de toute extase intentionnelle, la notion d’intersubjectivité renvoie chez M. Henry à l’immanence du rapport de la vie à elle-même. Ainsi, l’auteur rappelle que c’est (...) en fonction de ce rapport de tous les vivants au pathos de la Vie que le passage de l’« égoïté » à la « nostrité » peut s’opérer. En revisitant la critique henryenne de l’intersubjectivité intentionnelle dans Phénoménologie matérielle et en la complétant par les analyses sur la philosophie du christianisme dans C’est moi la vérité, Robby Mandiangu retrace le passage d’une « égoïté » à une « nostrité », notamment à partir de l’analyse de la notion de pathos. (shrink)

Many philosophers recognize that, as a matter of psychological fact, one can believe something valuable without valuing it. I argue that it is also possible to value something without believing it valuable. Agents can genuinely value things that they neither believe disvaluable nor believe valuable along a scale of impersonal value.

In a recent paper, Bence Nanay has argued against what he calls the Discontinuity Thesis: the claim that literature (along with all other nonabstract art forms) can never count as genuine philosophizing. I first claim that Nanay’s argument either proves too much or rests on heavy-duty premises that he does not adequately defend. I then present my own strategy for resisting Discontinuity, which argues that the proper response to both literature and philosophy can include emotional engagement coupled with reflection.

Certain relationships generate associative duties that exhibit robustness across change. It seems insufficient for friendship, for example, if I am only disposed to fulfil duties of friendship towards you as things stand here and now. However, robustness is not required across all variations. Were you to become monstrously cruel towards me, we might expect that my duties of friendship towards you would not be robust across that kind of change. The question then is this: is there any principled way of (...) distinguishing those variations across which robustness of the disposition to fulfil duties of friendship is required from those across which it is not? In this paper I propose a way of answering this question that invokes distinctions concerning how we value friends and friendships, and how persons and friendships possess value – distinctions that are central to the project of specifying not only the limits of robustness, but also the source of duties of friendship and associative duties more generally. (shrink)

In ‘Public Reason and Prenatal Moral Status’ (2015), Jeremy Williams argues that the ideal of Rawlsian public reason commits its devotees to the radically permissive view that abortion ought to be available with little or no qualification throughout pregnancy. This is because the only (allegedly) political value that favours protection of the foetus for its own sake—the value of ‘respect for human life’—turns out not to be a political value at all, and so its invocation in support of considerations bearing (...) upon the permissibility of abortion is beyond public reason’s remit. Thus, it will scarcely if ever be legitimate to restrict women’s equality and bodily autonomy for the sake of the foetus, even at full term. In this paper, I argue that Williams fails to establish that Rawlsian reasonable citizens must endorse the radically permissive stance vis-à-vis abortion. Citizens can, I claim, reasonably accord the value of respect for human life weight, and indeed converge on the claim that it outweighs other salient political values, during later stages of gestation. Nevertheless, Williams’s argument gets something right in that it reveals why the value of respect for human life is inadmissible at the bar of public reason in early stages of pregnancy. But then, far from throwing Rawlsian public reason into disrepute, Williams’s argument actually (albeit inadvertently) provides arguably more compelling grounds than any hitherto rallied for endorsing Rawls’s much maligned claim that opposition to the duly qualified right to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy is ‘unreasonable’. (shrink)

Recent criticisms of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) Oxford campaign have problematized the presence of Black bodies within British higher education by reference to an ideal image of the impartial and discerning academy. In this article, I historically and intellectually contextualize the apprehension, expressed in the debates over RMF Oxford, that an intimate Black presence destabilizes the ethos of higher education. Specifically, I argue that much more than Rhodes’ statue implicates the British academy in the Empire’s southern African interests. I (...) excavate a genealogy of academic debates regarding the effects of an increased proximity of Black presence to empire’s white spaces. These debates were initiated by social anthropologists in the interwar years primarily (albeit not solely) with regards to studies of southern Africa’s urbanizing spaces. What is more, such debates were highly influential to the study of ‘race relations’ in Britain’s postwar era of Commonwealth immigration. Critically, all these debates problematized the cognitive competency of African/Black peoples to inhabit white cultural spaces – including the academy – in ways that were not destabilizing of imperial order. Current campus campaigns such as RMF should not be evaluated against an ideal image of the academy. Rather, they form part of a continued confrontation with the afterlives of academic dispositions that were implicated in the imperial project that Rhodes was integral to. (shrink)

Addressing Mbembe’s interview with Goldberg and reflecting upon the book – Critique of Black Reason (2017) – that the interview probes, the author points to a tension in Mbembe’s thought. Mbembe apprehends black reason as all-at-once ‘reason’s unreason’ and the remaking-reasonable of reason. In this respect, there is a clear sense of a simultaneity of imposition–struggle and destruction–repair. Yet this ethos of simultaneity is in tension with Mbembe’s sequential exposition of the black archive, especially the indebtedness of the ‘response’ by (...) blacks to the reasoning about blacks. In his response, the author works through the productive tension between ethos and sequence as a way to demonstrate the richness of Mbembe’s curation of a black archive. (shrink)

This article seeks to contextualize Marx's path to the Capital volumes through what might be called its 'international dimension'. It explores how Marx experienced an array of differentially developed yet related societies through a consciousness of backwardness, and how this consciousness moulded his praxis. In this respect, the article takes issue with the Marxist assumption that the silence in Capital regarding the multi-linear character of modern world development is ultimately non- harmful to the volumes' uni-linear notion of modern world development. (...) The aim of the article is essentially to clear the way for a more rigorous Historical Materialist appreciation of multi-linearity in modern world development. It does so by arguing that the condition of multi-linearity in modern world development formed the very terrain upon which Marx intellectually journeyed towards Capital. Specifically, the framing of the Capital volumes around a singular dialectic of social transformation should be considered as the failed outcome of Marx's pre-existing engagement with the problem of multi- linearity. This argument has ramifications for contemporary Marxist understandings of world development, as well as demonstrating the general importance of contextualizing political thought through an international rather than national or universal historical narrative. (shrink)

In this text, written in relation to my book The Black Pacific, I introduce the connections of the Black Pacific, especially those by which Māori and Pasifika struggles against land dispossession, settler colonialism and racism connect with the struggles of African peoples against slavery, (settler) colonialism and racism. Sociologically, historically and geographically speaking, these connections between colonized and postcolonized peoples appear to be extremely thin, almost ephemeral. But those who critically cultivate these connections know otherwise. In addressing how they might (...) know otherwise, the text addresses the need for critical theory to account in good faith for its reproduction of colonial knowledge structures. (shrink)

In the philosophical debate about literary interpretation, the actual intentionalist claims, and the anti-intentionalist denies, that an acceptable interpretation of fictional literature must be constrained by the author’s intentions. I argue that a close examination of the two most influential recent strands in this debate reveals a surprising convergence. Insofar as both sides (a) focus on literary works as they are, where work identity is determined in part by certain (successfully realized) categorial intentions concerning, e.g., title, genre, and large-scale instances (...) of allusion, allegory, and irony and (b) allow that works can acceptably be interpreted for unintended meanings—since an intentional act can, under a different description, exhibit unintended features—then they turn out to share the same interpretive policy concerning authorial intention. This suggests that philosophers should shift the interpretation debate away from issues of authorial intention and toward issues about the aims of interpretation. (shrink)

Theorists of aesthetic value since Hume have traditionally aimed to justify at least some comparative judgments of aesthetic value and to explain why we thereby have more reason to appreciate some aesthetic objects than others. I argue that three recent theories of aesthetic value—Thi Nguyen’s and Matthew Strohl’s engagement theories, Nick Riggle’s communitarian theory, and Dominic McIver Lopes’ network theory—face a challenge to carry out this explanatory task in a satisfactory way. I defend a monotonicity principle according to which the (...) strength of our aesthetic reasons to appreciate varies monotonically with aesthetic value and claim that these theories, because they do not respect the principle, are non-monotonic. If they cannot find a plausible way to preserve the link between the aesthetic goodness of an object and our aesthetic reasons to appreciate it, these non-monotonic theories should be rejected. (shrink)

A review of Dominic McIver Lopes’s Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value.

In this paper, I outline a pragmatist epistemology of logic inspired by later work of Charles S. Peirce that shares many features with an anti-exceptionalism about logic but, I argue, can better respond to a key problem that plagues the anti-exceptionalist. I first lay out what I take to be the tenets of anti-exceptionalism, discussing some difficulties in formulating the position that make it difficult to definitively label the position discussed here. I then analyze a key problem for the anti-exceptionalist, (...) the background logic problem, and suggest that when framed as a problem for certain types of inquiry, it shares a presupposition about the priority of logic with other problems in the epistemology of logic. Turning to a discussion of Peirce from the 1903 Lowell Lectures, I then outline a pragmatism about logic that rejects the priority claims underlying the problems for inquiry in logic and, I argue, can resolve the background logic problem. (shrink)