Stephanie Mills presented the following as the keynote address at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy in Chicago. Mills addresses the readers of this journal in her role as a bioregional author and social critic. Adopting a narrative style rather than the typical format of the “philosophical essay,” she raises questions that are always and still at the core of our philosophical dialogue: What is nature? How do we humans perceive our relationship (...) with nature? And how may the blind spots of academic philosophy be discerned in traditional approaches to issues such as “nature versus humans,” the wilderness debate, and the possibility and limits of technology? (shrink)

Though grassroots organizations have mobilized against US environmental injustices since; the 1980s, academic definitions of environmental justice (EJ) remain limited in important ways, including: a tendency to privilege cases where activists achieve a successful, ‘tidy’ outcome; inattention to roles natural resource dependence and free market systems play in structuring environmental inequality; and a tendency to under-analyze alternative notions of EJ that result, utilized by activists who prioritize local autonomy and procedural justice in land-use decision making. Here, I argue that these (...) alternative notions of EJ help mobilize divergent forms of EJ activism-‘sites of resistance’ to industrial production systems and their risks, and ‘sites of acceptance’ to those same practices. To illustrate, I explore extensive mixed method data in the context of energy development and sites of acceptance related to uranium production in the southwestern United States. I show how alternative notions of EJ are shaped by identification with uranium production, persistent poverty and economic insecurity, and faith that increased uranium production will fuel US nuclear power production and help combat global climate change. (shrink)

Critical approaches to the canon of Western political and legal thought from the point of view of race or gender have developed in recent years, as have studies highlighting the connections between supposedly universalist philosophies and their role in sustaining or legitimizing imperial and colonial conquests. On social contract theory in particular, seminal works include Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract and Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract. The importance of this type of work cannot be understated, and Mills is (...) right to insist on the “blinding whiteness of the discipline.” In the case of Hobbes, I argue, the privilege established in his texts is better qualified as “civilizational” rather than “racial.” Hobbes’s texts construct a certain image of civilization, a form of exclusion and domination that eschews biological determinism in favor of social, historical bias. This “civilizational” thinking certainly can work – and will work later on in conjunction with modern racism and white privilege – to exclude many. The racial contract – as per Mills – is only a late installment on a more fundamental one, the civilizing contract. (shrink)

An applicant to our graduate program in philosophy, accepted as well by one (but only one) other graduate program, wrestles with his decision. Finally he decides to attend the other program, but he thanks me for our offer, telling me, "I'm glad that at least I had a choice." I want to focus a bit on these two stories, for while the central conclusion in each -- something turning on the importance of choice -- is initially compelling, it is also, (...) on reflection, philosophically puzzling. It is compelling, because many of us in similar positions would share this response; phenomenologically, it feels right to us. We want to believe that the central facts of our lives -- whether or not we have children, where we are educated, what career we follow, with 1 whom we join as partners -- contain in them some fundamental element of our own selection and decision. We will be exploring below exactly what will turn out to be important here, and why, but for now, in our pre-reflective grasp of this phenomenon, we can say that it seems to have something to do with the value we place on autonomy, self-governance, self-authorship. We want, metaphorically speaking, to write the story of our own lives. But let me now begin to draw out why I find this insistence on the importance of choice, which so many of us would share, to be so puzzling. Both individuals, in both stories, want to be offered a certain additional option in order to have -- or at least to feel that they have? -- a choice about what they are going to do next. But, on the one hand, we could argue that, even with this added option, they still don't have a "real" choice -- they don't have the choice of doing what they most want to do; and on the other hand, one could argue that even without the added option, they always had some choice. Let me explain. In the first story, my friend certainly doesn't have open to her the option that would have been her first choice (and, in our society, what we might call the standard choice, the most frequently chosen option): to produce a biological child with her partner in a happy marriage.. (shrink)

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience.

Mills argues for a new critical theory that develops the insights of the black radical political tradition. While challenging conventional interpretations of key Marxist concepts and claims, the author contends that Marxism has been 'white' insofar as it has failed to recognize the centrality of race and white supremacy to the making of the modern world.

Psychoanalysis has traditionally had difficulty in accounting for the existence of evil. Freud saw it as a direct expression of unconscious forces, whereas more recent theorists have examined the links between early traumatic experiences and later ‘evil’ behaviour. _Humanizing Evil: Psychoanalytic, Philosophical and Clinical Perspectives _explores the controversies surrounding definitions of evil, and examines its various forms, from the destructive forces contained within the normal mind to the most horrific expressions observed in contemporary life. Ronald Naso and _Jon Mills_ bring (...) together an international group of experts to explore how more subtle factors can play a part, such as conformity pressures, or the morally destabilizing effects of anonymity, and show how analysts can understand and work with such factors in clinical practice._ _Each chapter is unified by the view that evil is intrinsically linked to human freedom, regardless of the gap experienced by perpetrators between their intentions and consequences. While some forms of evil follow seamlessly from psychopathology, others call this relationship into question. Rape, murder, serial killing, and psychopathy show very clear links to psychopathology and character whereas the horrors of war, religious fundamentalism, and political extremism resist such reductionism. Humanizing _Evil_ is unique in the diversity of perspectives it brings to bear on the problem of evil. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers, and Jungians. Because it is an integrative depth-psychological effort, it will interest general readers as well as scholars from a variety of disciplines including the humanities, philosophy, religion, mental health, criminal justice, political science, sociology, and interdisciplinary studies. Ronald Naso, Ph.D., ABPP is psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in independent practice in Stamford, CT. The author of numerous papers on psychoanalytic topics, he is an associate editor of _Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies_, and contributing editor of _Division/Review _and _Journal of Psychology and Clinical Psychiatry_. His book, _Hypocrisy Unmasked: Dissociation, Shame, and the Ethics of Inauthenticity_, was published by Aronson in 2010. Jon Mills, Psy.D., Ph.D., ABPP is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at Adler Graduate Professional School, Toronto. A 2006, 2011, and 2013 Gradiva Award winner, he is Editor of two book series in psychoanalysis, on the Editorial Board for _Psychoanalytic Psychology_, and is the author and/or editor of thirteen books including his most recent works, _Underworlds: Philosophies of the Unconscious from Psychoanalysis to Metaphysics_, and _Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis_, which won the Goethe Award for best book in 2013. (shrink)

SummaryThis article argues that Archibald Campbell's Necessity of Revelation can be viewed as the first application of the ‘science of human nature’, a characteristic branch of the Scottish Enlightenment, to the study of religious belief. Adopting Baconian and Newtonian methodological principles, Campbell set hypotheses, collected historical data, and inferred conclusions about the capabilities of human nature to come to fundamental religious ideas without the aid of revelation. He did so not only to reject the ‘deist’ position on the powers of (...) unassisted human reason, associated with Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation, but also to refute Campbell's conservative critics within the Church of Scotland who had earlier tried him for heresy. Campbell's example is that of a university professor using the experimental study of religion to defeat both radical freethinking and Calvinist orthodoxy. His work is another instance of the complicated relationship between science and religion within eighteenth-century Scotland. (shrink)

What can we learn from Lyotard’s reading of Wittgenstein regarding contemporary debates around deep disagreement? It has been shown that Lyotard’s notion of differend can offer a new perspective on deep disagreement, and I expand on this idea by looking at what we can take from Lyotard’s reading of Wittgenstein to reconsider the notion of hinge commitments or propositions. Rather than considering the way Lyotard misreads some of Wittgenstein’s ideas, as many scholars have shown, I focus on the positive dimension (...) of Lyotard’s reading, investigating what he does with Wittgenstein’s ideas, and perhaps also what he does _to_ Wittgenstein’s ideas. In _The Differend_, Lyotard brings Wittgenstein on a political terrain with which he is quite unfamiliar. I argue that Lyotard’s reading offers a specific interpretation of the notion of form of life, and that insisting on this notion shifts the focus from the epistemological dimension of hinges to the moral dimension of life—existential, political, and even aesthetic. To do so, it is necessary to understand how Lyotard reshapes Wittgenstein’s thought, and how the notions of _phrase_, _phrase regimen_, and _genre of discourse_ relate to Wittgenstein’s language-games and forms of life. (shrink)

Since its original 1996 publication,Jorge Garcia''s ``The Heart of Racism'''' has beenwidely reprinted, a testimony to its importanceas a distinctive and original analysis ofracism. Garcia shifts the standard framework ofdiscussion from the socio-political to theethical, and analyzes racism as essentially avice. He represents his account asnon-revisionist (capturing everyday usage),non-doxastic (not relying on belief),volitional (requiring ill-will), and moralized(racism is always wrong). In this paper, Icritique Garcia''s analysis, arguing that hedoes in fact revise everyday usage, that hisaccount does tacitly rely on belief, (...) thatill-will is not necessary for racism, and thata moralized account gets both the scope and thedynamic of racism wrong. While I do not offeran alternative positive account myself, Isuggest that traditional left-wing structuralanalyses are indeed superior. (shrink)

Editorial for the Special Issue on Nietzsche by Yvanka B. Raynova.

Substance‐dualist interactionism faces two sorts of challenge. One is empirical, involving the alleged incompatibility between interactionism and the supposed closure of the physical world. Although widely considered successful, this challenge gives no reason for preferring materialism to dualism. The other sort of challenge holds that interactionism is conceptually impossible. The historically influential version of the conceptual challenge is now discredited, but recent discussions by Chomsky and by Crane and Mellor suggest a new version. In brief, the argument is that anything (...) that interacts causally with physical things would have to be sanctioned by physics,and anything sanctioned by physics is ipso facto physical. I focus on the second premise. I show that plausible arguments for it are in fact fallacious and that counterexamples undermine it. Thus the argument fails: substance‐dualist interactionism cannot be ruled out on conceptual grounds alone. (shrink)

‘Damn your principles, stick to your party!’ Benjamin Disraeli supposedly commanded. As Garnett’s short, lively history of the interplay of conservative thought and the ideology of the British Cons...

When someone encounters an explanation perceived as weak, this may lead to a feeling of deprivation or tension that can be resolved by engaging in additional learning. This study examined to what extent children respond to weak explanations by seeking additional learning opportunities. Seven‐ to ten‐year‐olds (N = 81) explored questions and explanations (circular or mechanistic) about 12 animals using a novel Android tablet application. After rating the quality of an initial explanation, children could request and receive additional information or (...) return to the main menu to choose a new animal to explore. Consistent with past research, there were both developmental and IQ‐related differences in how children evaluated explanation quality. But across development, children were more likely to request additional information in response to circular explanations than mechanistic explanations. Importantly, children were also more likely to request additional information in direct response to explanations that they themselves had assigned low ratings, regardless of explanation type. In addition, there was significant variability in both children's explanation evaluation and their exploration, suggesting important directions for future research. The findings support the deprivation theory of curiosity and offer implications for education. (shrink)

Since mitochondrial replacement techniques were developed and clinically introduced in the United Kingdom, there has been much discussion of whether these lead to children borne of three parents. In the UK, the regulation of MRT has dealt with this by stipulating that egg donors for the purposes of MRT are not genetic parents even though they contribute mitochondrial DNA to offspring. In this paper, I examine the way that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act in the UK manages the question (...) of parentage. I argue that the Act breaks the link typically made between genetic causation and genetic parenthood by redefining genetic causation solely in terms of nuclear genetics. Along with this, mtDNA is construed as a kind of supplement to the nuclear family. Drawing on the account of the supplement developed by Jacques Derrida, I argue that mtDNA and the women who donate it are seen as both essential to establishing the nuclear family but also exterior to and insignificant for it. (shrink)

This paper explores two reddit communities that supported Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, respectively, in the run up to the 2016 US Presidential election campaign. Much of the paper is dedicated to explaining how reddit functions, describing the behaviour of the subreddit communities in question and then asking whether these demonstrated collective intelligence. Subreddit communities submit and vote on content, through their votes they make collective decisions about which content will be broadcast to their community. Large subreddit communities that formed (...) rapidly to support a candidate in an election have not previously been observed on reddit—these offered an interesting context for the consideration of whether subreddit communities demonstrate collective intelligence. Voting is a key determinant of what happens on each subreddit and it is conducted anonymously, it is, therefore, not possible to understand the role that every individual plays in the functioning of the subreddit. The behaviour of these subreddit communities can only be understood as a collective of submitting, commenting, voting and moderating participants. Whether these collectives behave intelligently is a matter of how one defines intelligence—but it is clear that they can be effective in pursuing certain ends. These collectives encounter and sometimes oppose each other on reddit. The community of Trump supporters in particular were in conflict with a number of other high-profile communities on the site, and also the platform’s administrators. (shrink)

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with plato and Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, (...) socialism, welfare capitalism, andlibertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironically, the most important political system of recent global history-the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a political system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background against which other systems, which we are to see as political are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along. (shrink)

Healey et al. use experiments with chat dialogues to test the hypothesis that language co‐ordination is driven by ‘running repairs’. They replace signals of understanding such as “okay” with weaker, ‘spoof’ signals like “ummm”, and replace specific requests for clarification like “on the left?” with signals that suggest a higher degree of misunderstanding like “what?”. The latter manipulation causes participants to switch rapidly to more abstract forms of referring expression.

It is impossible to imagine contemporary critical theory without the work of Michel Foucault. His radical reworkings of the concepts of power, knowledge, discourse and identity have influenced the widest possible range of theories and impacted upon disciplinary fields from literary studies to anthropology. Aimed at students approaching Foucault's texts for the first time, this volume offers: * an examination of Foucault's contexts * a guide to his key ideas * an overview of responses to his work * practical hints (...) on 'using Foucault' * an annotated guide to his most influential works * suggestions for further reading. Challenging not just what we think but how we think, Foucault's work remains the subject of heated debate. Sara Mills' Michel Foucault offers an introduction to both the ideas and the debate, fully equipping student readers for an encounter with this most influential of thinkers. (shrink)

We are beings endowed with “personal capacities”—the capacity for reason, for a concept of self, perhaps more. Among ontologically salient views about what else we are, I focus on the “Big Three.” According to animalism, we are animals that have psychological properties only contingently. According to psychologistic materialism, we are material beings; according to substance dualism, we are either immaterial beings or composites of immaterial and material ones; but according to both psychologistic materialism and substance dualism, we essentially have some (...) psychological properties. I argue that—contrary to what has been argued and is natural to think—none of the Big Three yields different assignments of moral status to early fetuses from any of the others, and consequently the moral status of early abortion doesn’t depend on which (if any) of these views of personal ontology is correct. (shrink)

"What do grown children owe their parents?" Over two decades ago philosopher Jane English asked this question and came up with the startling answer: nothing (English 1979). English joins many contemporary philosophers in rejecting the once-traditional view that grown children owe their parents some kind of fitting repayment for past services rendered. The problem with the traditional view, as argued by many, is, first, that parents have duties to provide fairly significant services to their growing children, and persons do not (...) owe repayment for others' mere performance of duty; second, even where parents go above and beyond duty in their loving and generous rearing of their children, the benefits are bestowed, at least on young children, without their voluntary acceptance and consent, and so, again, fail to generate any obligation of subsequent repayment on their part (see Blustein 1982: 182-3). Moreover, the entire idiom of obligation and repayment, in English's 1 words, "tends to obscure, or even to undermine, the love that is the correct ground of filial obligation" (352). English's alternative, however -- that children strictly "owe" their parents nothing except what flows naturally from whatever love and affection exist between them -- also strikes many as problematic. Christina Hoff Sommers offers examples of what seem to be clearly delinquent adult children, who simply don't "feel" like sharing their lives with their aging parents, or providing any emotional or financial support to them, and so don't (Sommers 1986: 440-41). Sommers points out that we need some talk of obligations in order to fill in the cracks in human relationships where love and affection fail: "The ideal relationship cannot be 'duty-free,' if only because sentimental ties may come unraveled, often leaving one of the parties at a material disadvantage'" (450-51). Sommers proposes as her alternative to English that legitimate duties arise out of special relationships defined by social roles: being a father or mother, a son or a daughter, "is socially as well as biologically prescriptive; it not only defines what one is; it also defines who one is and what one owes" (447).. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Scottish judge and ‘eccentric’ philosopher James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s (1714–1799) significance within Enlightenment thought is usually seen as stemming from his Origin and Progress of Language (6 vols., 1773–1792). The OPL was a major contribution to the Enlightenment’s debate over the philosophy of language, and established Monboddo’s reputation as an innovative and influential, yet controversial and credulous proto-anthropologist. In the following I explore Monboddo’s Egyptomania and the role it plays in his account of the origins and development of (...) religion within his larger ‘History of Man’. Monboddo’s idiosyncratic and untimely fusion of conjectural history, Buffon-inspired natural history, Christian theology, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and credulous interest in Egyptology, especially in Antient Metaphysics (6 vols., 1779–1799), make him extremely difficult to place within the Scottish Enlightenment. I want to bring Monboddo back into our conversation about the Scottish Enlightenment, shed light in the process on his highly idiosyncratic combination of enlightened and unenlightened thought and, using Monboddo’s example, emphasize some interesting if unexpected aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment’s application of the ‘science of human nature’ to the study of religion. For Monboddo, human civilization and religious knowledge owes their existence to Egyptian daemon-kings. (shrink)

The idea of different folk psychologies is the idea that among the world's cultures there are those whose folk, or commonsense, psychologies differ in theoretically significant ways from each other and from western folk psychology. This challenges the claim that folk psychology is a 'cultural universal'. The paper looks first of all at what are called 'opulent' accounts of folk psychology, which employ a wide-ranging and more complex set of psychological concepts, and 'core' accounts, which employ a much more restricted (...) set of such concepts. With respect to both kinds of account it is argued that field studies of the folk-psychological concepts of a number of ethnic groups indicate significant differences between the concepts used by those groups and those of western folk psychology; and hence do not support the view that folk psychology is a cultural universal. (shrink)

Between the later views of Wittgenstein and those of connectionism 1 on the subject of the mastery of language there is an impressively large number of similarities. The task of establishing this claim is carried out in the second section of this paper.

In contemporary times, wildlife managers attempt to provide solutions to problems arising from conflicting uses of the environment by humans and nonhuman animals. Within the Kangaroo Management Zones of New South Wales , the commercial culling "solution" is one such attempt to perpetuate kangaroo populations on pastoral land while supporting farmers in continuing inefficient sheep farming. Because wildlife management rests on a distinction between the "nature" of humans and animals, then humanist attention to standards of individual welfare need not interrupt (...) the process whereby individual animals are killed within an economic framework designed to improve habitat management for the conservation of their populations. Building on Thorne's discussion of the meanings scripted onto individual kangaroo bodies, this paper explores the utilitarian underpinnings of the commercialization approach and considers the ethical implications of constructing the population as resource, even if this results in an improvement in the welfare of individual kangaroos. (shrink)

The paradox that has challenged historians of abolitionism is how Britain’s outlawing of trafficking of enslaved Africans in 1807 could take place when the country’s involvement in the trade was as...

Previous experimental findings support the hypothesis that laughter and positive emotions are contagious in face-to-face and mediated communication. To test this hypothesis, we describe four experiments in which participants communicate via a chat tool that artificially adds or removes laughter, without participants being aware of the manipulation. We found no evidence to support the contagion hypothesis. However, artificially exposing participants to more lols decreased participants’ use of hahas but led to more involvement and improved task-performance. Similarly, artificially exposing participants to (...) more hahas decreased use of haha but increased lexical alignment. We conclude that, even though the interventions have effects on coordination, they are incompatible with contagion as a primary explanatory mechanism. Instead, these results point to an interpretation that involves a more sophisticated view of dialogue mechanisms along the lines of Conversational Analysis and similar frameworks and we suggest directions for future research. (shrink)

The “Occupy Wall Street!” movement has stimulated a long listing of other candidates for radical “occupation.” In this paper, I suggest the occupation of liberalism itself. I argue for a constructive engagement of radicals with liberalism in order to retrieve it for a radical egalitarian agenda. My premise is that the foundational values of liberalism have a radical potential that has not historically been realized, given the way the dominant varieties of liberalism have developed. Ten reasons standardly given as to (...) why such a retrieval cannot be carried out are examined and shown to be fallacious. (shrink)