As is the case in other situations of deep uncertainty, the unknowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic have aroused a great deal of attention in the media. Drawing insights both from mediatization theory and ignorance studies, we discuss the coverage of the AstraZeneca vaccine controversies to develop a new concept that we call the mediatization of ignorance. In doing so, we conceptualize the procedure through which unknowns become mediatized as a three-step process that results from a combination of (...) logics from the areas of politics, health, and science/industry. Moreover, we argue that the mediatization of ignorance may have promoted vaccine hesitancy at a moment when vaccination was crucial for addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. We conclude by suggesting the need to explore in further detail the role that ignorance plays not only in the management of the COVID-19 crisis but also in different areas of society. (shrink)

A recent stream of epistemology gives special relevance to ignorance within the framework of an epistemological theory. Indeed, some want to give a significant role to ignorance in epistemological theorizing. In this paper, we argue that a particular sort of ignorance, which involves recognition of the fact that one is ignorant, is central to the acquisition of knowledge given the epistemic structure of society. It is clear, we hold, that Socrates realized the relevance of what we (...) call ‘Socratic ignorance’ in the acquisition of knowledge and was aware of the division of epistemic and cognitive labor that we find in our society. We shall explain the way we understand this Socratic ignorance, as opposed to what we will call ‘stubborn ignorance’ and the role this ignorance of Socratic overtones and related character traits can play in the acquisition of knowledge from others and with others. (shrink)

Although many researchers theorize that primitive numerosity processing abilities may lay the foundation for whole number concepts, other classes of numbers, like fractions, are sometimes assumed to be inaccessible to primitive architectures. This research presents evidence that the automatic processing of nonsymbolic magnitudes affects processing of symbolic fractions. Participants completed modified Stroop tasks in which they selected the larger of two symbolic fractions while the ratios of the fonts in which the fractions were printed and the overall sizes of the (...) compared fractions were manipulated as irrelevant dimensions. Participants were slower and less accurate when nonsymbolic dimensions of printed fractions were incongruent with the symbolic comparison decision. Results indicated a robust basic sensitivity to nonsymbolic ratios that exceeds prior conceptions about the accessibility of fraction values. Results also indicated a congruity effect for overall fraction size, contrary to findings of prior research. These findings have implications for extending theory about the nature of human number sense and mathematical cognition more generally. (shrink)

How do we theorize the experiences of caregivers abused by their children with autism without intensifying stigma toward disability? Eva Kittay emphasizes examples of extreme vulnerability to overturn myths of independence, but she ignores the possibility that dependents with disabilities may be vulnerable and aggressive. Instead, her work over-emphasizes caregivers' capabilities and the constancy of disabled dependents' vulnerability. I turn to Judith Butler's ethics and her conception of the self as opaque to rethink care amid conflict. Person-centered planning approaches, pioneered (...) by disability rights activists, merge Butler's analysis of opacity with Kittay's work on embodied care, while also inviting a broader network of people to both interpret needs and change communities. By expanding our conceptions of dependency, feminist disability studies can continue the aim of both Kittay and Butler: to humanize unintelligible lives. (shrink)

In today's philosophy of science, scientific theories are construed as abstract mathematical objects: formal axiomatic systems or classes of set-theoretic models. By focusing exclusively on the logico-mathematical structure of theories, however, this approach ignores their essentially cognitive nature: that theories are conceptualizations of the world produced by some cognitive agents. As a result, traditional philosophical analyses of scientific theories are incapable of coherently accounting for the relevant relations between highly abstract and idealized models in science and concrete empirical phenomena in (...) the world. ;As a more accurate and comprehensive alternative to traditional analyses of scientific theorizing, the dissertation proposes and develops a conception of scientific theories which makes explicit the essential role of cognitive agents--theorizers--in generating abstract scientific models and systematically relating such models to experimentally controlled parts of the world. ;Specifically, by utilizing the conceptually powerful formal framework of the Theory of Categories, the new approach clarifies and makes formally precise the cognitive status of several important aspects of scientific theorizing, including the notion of a scientific model as theorizers' mathematical conceptualization of the world jointly determined by theorizers' physical interactions with the world and their cognitive access to mathematical objects, the distinction between models in science and models in pure mathematics, the distinction between provisional and successful scientific models, the notion of a systematic correspondence between successful scientific models and the world which does not impose upon the world the mathematical structure of scientific models, and the way in which theorizers' modeling strategy determines the general structure of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Will there be any joint future for science and Islam? Although such questions have recently received considerable attention, more basic questions are often ignored. This article aims at addressing some of those more basic questions through exploring the assumptions that underlie different possible understandings of the question about the future of Islam and science. By investigating the relation between conceptualizations of religion and the question about the future of Islam and science, it will be argued that different understandings of the (...) concept of religion (i.e., whether it denotes real objects, whether it is universal, and whether it is belief centered) lead to extremely different readings of the question. Besides, it will be argued that different answers to the question about the future of Islam and science can be understood in terms of the inference to best theological explanation; thus, the criteria that one assumes for the best theological explanation result in different criteria for evaluation of the answers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feeling IgnorantA Phenomenology of Ignorance1Emily McRaeWhat does it feel like to be confused? What does it feel like to ignore something? These questions, although not prioritized in Western epistemologies, nevertheless matter in our lives. We often use our feelings as feedback on our epistemic states. Feeling ignorant is a reason to think we are ignorant and can motivate us to do something about it. Such feelings are fallible, of (...) course—we can feel like we know something we do not in fact know—but they provide rough, practical guidance to tracking our own epistemic states and motivations. In fact, feelings of ignorance may be central to the activity of learning. It is doubtful that we could learn effectively without them.But the affective profile and phenomenology of ignorance are rarely theorized in Western accounts, in large part, I suspect, because of the pervasive dichotomy of "thinking and feeling" that historically has dominated Western philosophical approaches to the mind. This dichotomy encourages us to sort phenomena according to their boundaries, and, if we must choose, ignorance seems to be more of an epistemic event than an affective one. Luckily, though, we do not have to choose. Buddhist psychological taxonomies, as I will show, are drawn along different lines. This positions Buddhist moral psychology to be a productive framework to investigate ignorance, since it allows us to attend to its epistemic, affective, and somatic contours.This paper focuses on the affective component of ignorance: what ignorance feels like, when and why these feelings arise (and when and why [End Page 26] they do not), and what feeling ignorant, particularly in moral contexts, can do for us. Drawing on the fourth-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu, I examine the phenomenology of ignorance and argue that how ignorance feels depends on our epistemic access to our ignorance (whether and to what extent we know that we are ignorant) and the object of ignorance (what our ignorance is about). I argue that ignorance has a complex affective profile: it can feel a lot of different ways, ranging from unpleasant fogginess to clueless confidence. This complex affective profile makes ignorance difficult to spot, especially in ourselves, and marks a difference between ignorance and other problematic mental states, such as hatred or resentment, that have a more straightforward phenomenology. Understanding the connection between the object of ignorance, the epistemology of ignorance, and its affective phenomenology allows us to take on the project, essential in the Buddhist philosophical traditions, of locating and addressing our ignorance. Without careful attention to these three components, it is possible, and likely, to simply ignore our ignorance. I conclude with the suggestion that the ability to attend to our ignorance requires the cultivation of equanimity.This investigation into the affective side of ignorance requires the introduction of a core Buddhist philosophical and psychological category: the dysfunctional states (kleśa; nyon mongs). This is not only because the category of kleśa is a productive framework for understanding the phenomenology and epistemology of ignorance, as I will argue in the next section, but also because traditional Western categories of reason and emotion, or thinking and feeling, are not up to the task of investigating the affective aspects of ignorance. This dichotomy makes a division exactly at the place where my inquiry in this paper begins, for ignorance—as an affective, epistemic, and somatic experience—straddles the divide between thinking and feeling. The category of kleśa includes ignorance, along with other states that Western taxonomies would classify as emotions, such as hatred or envy. This allows for an investigation into features that ignorance may share with emotions without the commitment to the cumbersome claim that ignorance is (or is not) an emotion in the Western sense.The KleśasThe kleśas are dysfunctional states that cause wrong actions and suffering. They are typically divided into primary and secondary kleśas, where the primary kleśas are the root dysfunctional states and the secondary kleśas arise from the primary ones. Different texts and traditions include different kleśas as primary and secondary, but all agree that ignorance, desire, and hatred are among the primary kleśas... (shrink)

This article presents a novel theoretical approach to explore nurse executives’ paradoxical identity and agency of executive and nurse in homecare organizations. This complex phenomenon has yet to be well theorized or analyzed. Through a synthesis of literature, we demonstrate that Critical Management Studies, as informed by Foucault, and the Sociology of Ignorance, can create a different understanding of the complex interplay between knowledge and nonknowledge (ignorance) that positions nurse executives in both influential and precarious ways in homecare (...) organizations. This theoretical framework has the potential to allow for the explicit exploration of nurse executives’ strategic epistemic and discursive positioning and highlights hierarchal power structures within homecare organizations. We posit that this framework, that spans nursing, management and sociology disciplines, sets a different understanding of homecare organizations as epistemic landscapes, exposing institutional knowledge and ignorance dynamics that remain largely concealed and unchallenged, yet are integral to understanding nurse executives’ epistemic agency. (shrink)

Karl Popper's methodology highlights our scientific ignorance: hence the need to institutionalize open‐mindedness through controlled experiments that may falsify our fallible theories about the world. In his endorsement of “piecemeal social engineering,” Popper assumes that the social‐democratic state and its citizens are capable of detecting social problems, and of assessing the results of policies aimed at solving them, through a process of experimentation analogous to that of natural science. But we are not only scientifically but politically ignorant: ignorant of (...) the facts that underpin political debate, which are brought to our attention by theories that, as Max Weber emphasized, can be tested only through counterfactual thought experiments. Public‐opinion and political‐psychology research suggest that human beings are far too unaware, illogical, and doctrinaire to conduct the rigorous theorizing that would be necessary to make piecemeal social engineering work. F.A. Hayek realized that the public could not engage, specifically, in piecemeal economic regulation but failed to draw the conclusion that this was due to a specific type of political ignorance: ignorance of economic theory. (shrink)

This article considers ongoing attempts to regulate or even ban researchon LambdaMOO. Industry, private individuals, and research institutionshave supported MOOs, or multi-user object-oriented worlds. The earlyresearch on MOOs by Pavel Curtis, who was one of the key designers,suggests that these systems are part of a research project and have beenresearched since they were originally designed. However, a group ofMOOers have grown increasingly uncomfortable about the quotation ofcertain texts on web sites and academic journals and the potentiallypanoptic effect of research. Some (...) of these practices have breachedcommunity conventions. Yet, such things as testing, invisibly watching,freely quoting characters, and ignoring certain rules have always beenaspects of the system. The dispute over research ethics and theparticipation of varied researchers within this setting indicate thatdiverse values are represented among MOOers and different expectationsexist about how the MOO might be a community. The term ``community'' andthe presumption that online characters are people may have alsoincorrectly informed the research debate by making it seem that onlinesettings provide immediate access onto spaces, bodies, and individuals.Many MOOers may believe that research threatens individuals andcommunity. However, critical histories and analysis are needed in orderto explain the system to new users and encourage alternative forms ofdevelopment. Such work can only be produced if online systems are opento research and critique. (shrink)

During the Philippine-American War, the Anti-Imperialist League was the organizational vanguard of an anti-imperialist movement. Research on this period of U.S. imperialism has focused on empire building, ignoring the gendered activity of anti-imperialists in the metropole. The author outlines the constitutive relationship between gendered structures and experience that informed anti-imperialists' “contentious politics,” using archival sources of the Anti-Imperialist League and anti-imperialist debates in newspapers. The author shows how anti-imperialist leaders informally included women's monetary donations, labor, networks, and reputations while formally (...) excluding their full membership. Finally, the author shows how masculinist ambivalence, or the pattern of the gendered inclusions/exclusions of anti-imperialists, explains the incremental transformations and reproductions of gendered structures in anti-imperialists' contentious politics. The author suggests masculinist ambivalence has theoretical utility for explaining gendered inclusions and exclusions in movements that are not explicitly about gender conflict or change. (shrink)

Psychological science is maturing and therefore transitioning from explorative to theory-driven research. While explorative research seeks to find something “new,” theory-driven research seeks to elaborate on already known and hence predictable effects. A consequence of these differences is that the quality of explorative and theory-driven research needs to be judged by distinct criterions that optimally support their respective development. Especially, theory-driven research needs to be judged by its methodological rigor. A focus on innovativeness, which is typical for explorative research, will (...) instead incentivize bad research practices (e.g., imprecise theorizing, ignoring previous research, parallel theories). To support the advancement of psychology, we must drop the innovation requirement for theory-driven research and instead require the strongest methods, which are marked by high internal and external validity. Precise theorizing needs to substitute novelty. Theories are advanced by requiring explicit, testable assumptions, and an explicit preference for one theory over another. These explicit and potentially wrong assumptions should not be silenced within the peer-review process, but instead be scrutinized in new publications. Importantly, these changes in scientific conduct need to be supported by senior researchers, especially, in their roles as editors, reviewers, and in the hiring process. An important obstacle to further theory-driven research is to measure scientific merit using researchers’ number of publications, which favors theoretically shallow and imprecise writing. Additionally, it makes publications the central target of scientific misconduct even though they are the main source of information for the scientific community and the public. To advance the field, researchers should be judged by their contribution to the scientific community (e.g., exchange with and support of colleagues, and mentoring). Another step to advance psychology is to clearly differentiate between measurement model and theory, and not to overgeneralize based on few stimuli, incidences, or studies. We will use ideas from the theory of science to underline the changes necessary within the field of psychology to overcome this existential replication crisis. (shrink)

Emmalon Davis has offered an insightful analysis of an under-theorized form of epistemic oppression calledepistemic appropriation.This occurs when an epistemic resource developed within marginalized situatedness gains inter-communal uptake, but the author of the epistemic resource is unacknowledged. In this paper, I argue that Davis's definition of epistemic appropriation is not exhaustive. In particular, she misses out on explaining cases of epistemic appropriation in which an intra-communal epistemic resource isobscuredthrough inter-communal uptake. Being attentive to this form of epistemic appropriation allows us (...) to identify unique forms of epistemic oppression that emerge as a result of socially maintained active ignorance. (shrink)

Alasia Nuti’s important recent book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, makes many persuasive interventions. Nuti shows how structural injustice theory is enriched by being explicitly historical; in theorizing historical-structural injustice, she lays bare the mechanisms of how the injustices of history reproduce themselves. For Nuti, historical-structural patterns are not only shaped by habitual behaviors that are or appear to be morally permissible, but also by individual wrongdoing and wrongdoing by powerful group agents like (...) states. In this article, I extend Nuti’s rich analysis, focusing on two questions that arise from her theory of historical-structural injustice: Beyond being blameworthy for wrongful acts themselves, are culpable wrongdoers blameworthy for contributing to structural injustice? Does historical moral ignorance mitigate moral responsibility for past injustice? Regarding, I distinguish between the local and societal structural effects of wrongdoing. Though I think this distinction is well-founded, it ultimately leads to tensions with structural injustice theory’s idea of ordinary individuals being blameless for reproducing unjust structures. Regarding, I argue that even though it is natural for the question of historical moral ignorance to arise in considering past wrongdoing, at least in the case of powerful group agents, we should not overlook forms of cruelty which present-day moral concepts are not needed to condemn. (shrink)

Until very recently, normative theorizing in ethics was frequently conducted without even mentioning uncertainty. Just a few years ago, Sven Ove Hansson described this state of affairs with the slogan: “Ethics still lives in a Newtonian world.” In the new Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Probability, David McCarthy writes that “mainstream moral philosophy has not been much concerned with probability,” understanding probability as “the best-known tool for thinking about uncertainty.” This special predilection for certainty in ethics was surprising since (...) most decisions or evaluations are made both by individuals and policy-makers through the fog of a widely understood uncertainty that includes risk, ignorance, indeterminacy. Therefore, the main task of this special issue is to encourage philosophers to rethink the standard paradigm in ethics by redirecting discussions about ethical questions to problems involving different kinds of uncertainty when an individual or a policy maker does not have access to or knowledge about. (shrink)

Epistemic states of uncertainty play important roles in ethical and political theorizing. Theories that appeal to a “veil of ignorance,” for example, analyze fairness or impartiality in terms of certain states of ignorance. It is important, then, to scrutinize proposed conceptions of ignorance and explore promising alternatives in such contexts. Here, I study Lerner’s probabilistic egalitarian theorem in the setting of imprecise probabilities. Lerner’s theorem assumes that a social planner tasked with distributing income to individuals in (...) a population is “completely ignorant” about which utility functions belong to which individuals. Lerner models this ignorance with a certain uniform probability distribution, and shows that, under certain further assumptions, income should be equally distributed. Much of the criticism of the relevance of Lerner’s result centers on the representation of ignorance involved. Imprecise probabilities provide a general framework for reasoning about various forms of uncertainty including, in particular, ignorance. To what extent can Lerner’s conclusion be maintained in this setting? (shrink)

The issues addressed in philosophical papers on quotation generally concern only a particular type of quotation, which I call 'closed quotation'. The other main type, 'open quotation', is ignored, and this neglect leads to bad theorizing. Not only is a general theory of quotation out of reach: the specific phenomenon of closed quotation itself cannot be properly understood if it is not appropriately situated within the kind to which it belongs. Once the distinction between open and closed quotation has (...) been drawn and properly appreciated, it is tempting to consider that only closed quotation is relevant to semantics. Open quotation is more a matter of pragmatics: it is a matter of what people do with words, rather than a matter of content and truth-conditions. In this way one can provide the beginning of a justification for the neglect of open quotation in current semantic theorizing. There is some truth in this view, yet the phenomenon of 'mixed quotation', investigated at length in this paper, is interesting precisely because it shows that things are not so simple. Important issues concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics will thus be raised. (shrink)

The question of how to theorize the relationship between consciousness and the social transformation of racism remains vexed. Most critical theories agree that some form of critical consciousness is necessary for the transformation of social life, but disagree about whether this change is sufficient. Furthermore, they disagree about whether the content of this change is at the level of cognitive beliefs, active ignorance, or ideology. In this article, I describe most accounts of social transformation of racism as relying upon (...) what I call awareness consciousness. I argue that the model of awareness consciousness in critical theory risks giving too much explanatory power to the role of self-knowledge in developing accounts of successful social transformation. In contrast, I defend an account of critical consciousness that emphasizes the primacy of social structures in constraining and enabling our practices. When social structures can no longer support our horizons of expectation there is the possibility for the development of what I call crisis consciousness and utopian consciousness. The materialist account I deploy locates the social transformation of racism in the experience of dysfunctional institutions and the consequent insight of how to collectively develop functional institutions that can enable new forms of social practice. (shrink)

The research theorizes how hubris impacts ethical decision making and develops empirical evidence that earnings manipulation is more likely at firms led by CEOs influenced by hubris. The theory posits that hubris impairs moral awareness by causing decision makers to ignore external factors that otherwise drive such awareness. Additionally, these individuals apply a flawed subjective assessment of the decision they face which further impairs moral awareness. The predicted result is that hubris leads managers to invoke an amoral decision process which (...) causes a higher incidence of unethical behavior among these individuals. An empirical study investigates the relationship between CEO hubris and the unethical practice of earnings manipulation. This study finds a significant correlation between CEO hubris and earnings manipulation at the firms they lead, an outcome broadly consistent with the theory developed. (shrink)

This article aims at theorizing a creative and processual theory of non-heterosexual identity. It will be argued that, so far, scholars have tended to theorize non-heterosexual identity from a monologic perspective, which establishes one-sidedly a casual and/or unproblematic relation between the emergence of forms of psychological suffering and the development of a non-heterosexual identity. Although it must be recognized that such a claim is important at a political level, at a subjective level, it leaves non-heterosexual people destined to be (...) flooded by distressing and painful emotional states. To counter monologism within theorisations of non-heterosexual identity development, without ignoring the negative impacts of heteronormativity, it will be argued that non-heterosexual identity needs to be theorized 1) as part of a creative process situated in a specific sociohistorical context marked by heteronormativity, 2) as part of a situated process that produces and never ceases to produce multiple effects (self-states), which are unified to create an identity, and 3) as part of a situated process of creation that can be artificially transformed through art. These are the three claims that will move forward the argument of this article. (shrink)

In recent years Michael Sandel’s communitarian criticism of John Rawls’s theory of justice has gained much attention in philosophical circles. Specifically, he takes issue with the conception of the self—implicit in Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”: an extraction of the individual from their social environment, which creates an “unencumbered self” that is then used to theorize about justice. Sandel believes that some social ties are so deeply embedded in the human experience that even hypothetical isolation of the individual is likely (...) to lead ethical thinking astray. Additionally, he thinks that human emotions and other circumstantial considerations need to be taken into account. His emphasis on the situated self has... (shrink)

The history of moral dilemma theory often ignores the medieval period, overlooking the sophisticated theorizing by several thinkers who debated the existence of moral dilemmas from 1150 to 1450. In this book Michael V. Dougherty offers a rich and fascinating overview of the debates which were pursued by medieval philosophers, theologians and canon lawyers, illustrating his discussion with a diverse range of examples of the moral dilemmas which they considered. He shows that much of what seems particular to twentieth-century (...) moral theory was well-known long ago - especially the view of some medieval thinkers that some forms of wrongdoing are inescapable, and their emphasis on the principle 'choose the lesser of two evils'. His book will be valuable not only to advanced students and specialists of medieval thought, but also to those interested in the history of ethics. (shrink)

In the past three decades scholars in virtually every humanistic and social scientific research discipline, and in some natural sciences, have drawn attention to quite striking instances of gender bias in the modes of practice and theorizing typical of traditional fields of research. They generally begin by identifying explicit androcentric biases in definitions of the subject domains appropriate to specific scientific fields. Their primary targets, in this connection, have been research that leaves women out altogether, research that ignores women’s (...) contributions or victimization, and research that conceptualizes its subject, male or female, human or non-human, in explicitly gender biased terms. (shrink)

This article examines the limitations of the sociological research on feminist identities and ideologies that ignores the intersection of race and gender. Drawing from multiracial feminist theorizing, the author asks, Is self-identification as feminist a biased indicator of the salience of feminism in African American women's lives? Do women's racial statuses mediate the relationship between particular life events and experiences and the extent to which they embrace feminism? and To what extent are racial differences important when considering what women (...) understand feminism to be? To answer these questions, the author conducted multiple group analyses of structural equation models to analyze data from the 1996 General Social Survey. Her findings are consistent with multiracial feminist theories and suggest a need to rethink traditional approaches to feminist research so that women's differences are no longer marginalized. (shrink)

This dissertation is a systematic study of Spinoza's ethical system as a virtue ethic. Spinoza's ethical theory has been under-appreciated in this regard and has therefore been virtually ignored by contemporary virtue ethicists who have looked almost exclusively to the ancients as a source of insight regarding the virtues. With my dissertation I aim both to contribute to Spinoza scholarship and to provide an historical resource to contemporary ethicists working in the area of virtue. ;The dissertation can be divided into (...) two parts. The first part, Chapters One thru Four, deals mostly with Spinoza's metaethic and the rudiments of Spinoza's normative ethic. These chapters include a discussion of spinozistic value, the dictates of reason and Spinoza's ethical intellectualism. These chapters lay the foundation for the more explicit discussion of Spinoza's virtue ethic that takes place in Chapters Five thru Seven. In these later chapters I focus on the following questions: To what extent is Spinoza's ethical theory properly a virtue ethic? What is the structure of his virtue ethic? Does it resemble any of the virtue ethics of the ancients? In what sense is, as Spinoza insists, virtue its own reward? Is Spinoza's intellectualist virtue ethic internally cogent? I argue, inter alia, that Spinoza's ethical theory is properly a virtue ethic, that it does differ in interesting ways---particularly methodologically---from most ancient virtue ethics and that Spinoza recognizes three distinct benefits for those who live virtuously. ;In the final chapter I treat what I take to be the central issue regarding the cogency of Spinoza's intellectualist virtue ethic. Does the intellectual state that Spinoza identifies with virtue and advocates cultivating deliver on what it promises in terms of the rewards of virtue? The answer, I argue, is that it does not. However, I further argue that Spinoza's ethical theory is not thereby devastated. There is room for a sympathetic spinozean to remedy this defect. The defect merely reveals that there is significant ethical theorizing, beyond what Spinoza himself provides, that needs to be done. (shrink)

As cognitive science, including especially cognitive neuroscience, closes in on the first realistic models of the human mind, philosophical puzzles and problems that have been conveniently postponed or ignored for generations are beginning to haunt the efforts of the scientists, confounding their vision and leading them down hopeless paths of theory. I will illustrate this claim with a brief look at several temporal phenomena which appear anomalous only because of a cognitive illusion: an illusion about the point of view of (...) the observerix. Since there is no point in the brain where "it all comes together," several compelling oversimplifications of traditional theorizing must be abandoned. (shrink)

The literature on the interplay between geographic communities and organizations has largely ignored the role of individual residents. In adopting a meso-perspective, we examine a potentially vital relationship between corporate conduct and pro-social behavior demanding sacrifice from individuals. Drawing on Weber ), we theorize that organizations in a community legitimize personal social conduct in three ways—by serving as role models, imparting norms and values, and routinizing forms of interaction. We study the relationship between corporate social responsibility behavior by local firms (...) and the social distancing of citizens in US counties during the Covid-19 pandemic, a core ethical outcome. We argue and find that the residents of communities in which firms exhibit higher levels of CSR engaged in more SD during the Covid-19 pandemic. This was true when firms were long-established, isomorphic in their CSR, and major employers and vendors. Moreover, CSR relating to the treatment of employees as well as positive and negative extremes in CSR bore especially strong relationships with SD. Implications are drawn for the study of business ethics, as modeled by CSR, as a force for ethical personal behavior and public health in communities. (shrink)

This book is the culmination of Heinrich Meier's acclaimed analyses of the controversial thought of Carl Schmitt. Meier identifies the core of Schmitt's thought as political theology--that is, political theorizing that claims to have its ultimate ground in the revelation of a mysterious or supra-rational God. This radical, but half-hidden, theological foundation unifies the whole of Schmitt's often difficult and complex oeuvre, cutting through the intentional deceptions and unintentional obfuscations that have eluded previous commentators. Relating this religious dimension to (...) Schmitt's support for National Socialism and his continuing anti-Semitism, Meier compels the reader to come to terms with the irreconcilable differences between political theology and political philosophy. His book will give pause to those who have tended to gloss over the troubling aspects of some of Schmitt's ideas. With editions in German, French, Italian, and now English, Meier's two books on Schmitt have dramatically reoriented the international debate about Carl Schmitt and his significance for twentieth-century political thought. "Standing far above the rest . . . is Heinrich Meier's new study, Die Lehre Carl Schmitts , which covers all of Schmitt's writings. . . . Meier's work has forced everyone to take a second look at the assumptions underlying Schmitt's better-known writings and reconsider some that have been ignored."--Mark Lilla, reviewing the German edition in The New York Review of Books. (shrink)

AMONG THEOLOGICAL WRITERS, MANY HAVE SUSPECTED THAT JOHN Rawls's writings on justice add up to a de facto manifesto of secularism. His writings especially provoke anxiety about the potential exclusion of theological affirmations from public political discourse. Much of this anxiety focuses on his concept of the "original position" from which principles of justice are negotiated. Consideration of the anxiety provoked by this concept, however, suggests that it is theologically richer than Rawls's critics allow. A turn to Søren Kierkegaard's The (...) Concept of Anxiety enables interpretation of the original position as a device of representation that identifies every individual with the fact of original sin. Crucial to this interpretation is Kierkegaard's description of original sin in terms of anxiety that arises from the innocence that is ignorance in the comparable original position of Adam. Where anxiety arises, sin follows. Where sin arises, the need for justice follows. Reading Rawls and Kierkegaard together consequently offers insight into the relevance of the history of the doctrine of original sin to contemporary theorization of justice. (shrink)

The scholarship on meaningful work has approached the topic mostly from the perspective of the subjective experience of the individual worker. This has led the literature to under-theorize, if not outright ignore, the cultural and normative dimension of meaningful work. In particular, it has obscured that a person’s ability to find meaning in her life in general, and her work in particular, is typically anchored and dependent on shared institutions and cultural aspirations. Reflecting on the future of work, particularly on (...) the dangers posed by the threat of technological unemployment, helps us recognize this cultural and normative dimension of meaningful work. I argue that a world with few work opportunities is a world devoid of a core structuring ideal around which our society has organized itself and, as such, will strain our ability to make sense of what it means to find life meaningful. To make this case I show that work operates as a central organizing _telos_ around which our contemporary lives gravitate. Work touches everyone and everything, defining the rhythms of our days and weeks and providing a center of gravity around which our lives are structured. Work constitutes a central dimension of human flourishing. Through work we provide for our material needs, develop our skills and virtues, build community, and contribute to the common good. As such, work constitutes a central organizing ideal in contemporary Western societies, a fact has significant normative force and plays an important role in our finding work meaningful. (shrink)

This paper proposes to assess the naturalist project in epistemology with an eye towards exposing the project as deficient for serving as a robust epistemological project. Epistemologists treasure a certain family of questions and burden themselves with a number of specific concerns the most important of which, I think, cannot be answered by the epistemological naturalist. Ignoring these questions, I will argue, essentially amounts to a dismissal of the principle tension that primarily motivates and properly guides epistemological theorizing. This (...) tension is the familiar appearance vs. reality distinction and characterizes what I am calling the classical landmark or boundary-stone for epistemological theorizing. I will defend the claim that a full replacement of the traditional/classical epistemological project by a naturalized epistemology closes epistemology off from making important claims needed in a theory of human knowledge and, for that reason, a full replacement should be resisted. These claims that an epistemology should be expected to make issue from what I call the classical landmark for epistemological inquiry. Naturalist's effectively ignore this landmark and I caution them in the spirit of the proverb to not "remove the ancient landmark which your fathers have set. (shrink)

The Aristotelian-Thomist claim is that external actions can be morally evaluated when they are voluntary (which includes being based on reasonably accurate knowledge of what an agent is doing), absent which, in effect, we evaluate outcomes, not acts. Also, in the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition the internal act of the will is paramount. These claims contrast with some current theorizing, e.g., by Judith Jarvis Thomson, that morally evaluates actions separately from agents, downplaying the internal act. Taking cases from current authors that (...) revolve around ignorance of key facts, I critique their theorizing on the basis of the nature of agency, the nature of abstraction, the moral language we use in describing acts, the need for reasonably complete descriptions of acts, and the tendency of act evaluations to “leak” into agent evaluations in objective theories. I then describe how Thomas Aquinas’s account of moral evaluation avoids these problems and provides a superior, multi-dimensional framework for moral evaluation. (shrink)

The concept of a relational self has been prominent in feminism, communitarianism, narrative self theories, and social network theories, and has been important to theorizing about practical dimensions of selfhood. However, it has been largely ignored in traditional philosophical theories of personal identity, which have been dominated by psychological and animal theories of the self. This book offers a systematic treatment of the notion of the self as constituted by social, cultural, political, and biological relations. The author's account incorporates (...) practical concerns and addresses how a relational self has agency, autonomy, responsibility, and continuity through time in the face of change and impairments. This cumulative network model of the self incorporates concepts from work in the American pragmatist and naturalist tradition. The ultimate aim of the book is to bridge traditions that are often disconnected from one another--feminism, personal identity theory, and pragmatism--to develop a unified theory of the self. (shrink)

In this essay Sarah Galloway considers emancipation as a purpose for education through examining the theories of Paulo Freire and Jacques Rancière. Both theorists are concerned with the prospect of distinguishing between education that might socialize people into what is taken to be an inherently oppressive society and education with emancipation as its purpose. Galloway reconstructs the theories in parallel, examining the assumptions made, the processes of oppression described, and the movements to emancipation depicted. In so doing, she argues that (...) that the two theorists hold a common model for theorizing oppression and emancipation as educational processes, distinguished by the differing assumptions they each make about humanity, but that their theories ultimately have opposing implications for educational practices. Galloway further maintains that Freire and Rancière raise similar educational problems and concerns, both theorizing that the character of the relations among teachers, students, and educational materials is crucial to an emancipatory education. Galloway's approach allows discussion of some of the criticisms that have been raised historically about Freire's theory and how these might be addressed to some degree by Rancière's work. Taking the two theories together, she argues that the possibility for an emancipatory education cannot be ignored if education is to be considered as more than merely a process of passing down the skills and knowledge necessary in order to socialize people into current society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ManifestsRachel Blau Duplessis (bio)O great classic cadences of English poetry We blush to hear thee lie Above thy deep and dreamless.—Denise Riley, Mop Mop GeorgetteThat tall white pasture clump that we call cow parsnip, Queen Anne’s lace magnified, are, in Latin, umbellifers, a flat-topped or rounded flower cluster. But sometimes people call them “umbrella flowers.” This work is closer to umbrella flowers than to umbellifers, down there on the (...) ground with bricolaged theorizing practices, folk etymologies, my poetry, and intransigent details. That was a tribute to the essay as woodsy ramble [Good xii and x].And to the essay as personal—a way of marking and mocking the professional codes and impersonal solemnities of the representation of thought. If saying “I” like a heroine will adequately undermine unsituated false universals, I’ll say “I” yes I will. “I” will report that in 1966 or so I diminished all the way down to a scant handful of one-line poems, and to gnomic statements, barely effective. The kind of development they needed was not rhetorical but historical.I, Lady, you are my true love’s lady. You stand in the middle of the room, Sunlight streaming around you. Sunlight takes hold of the seeds in you And wets them. I want to hold myself to you, But you are myself. Can I?This 1966 fragment issues directly from, and is a preternatural reminder of a passionate problematic—questions of gender, in relation to an engagement with poetry, poetry figured as a set of psychosocial and intellectual institutions imbuing a practice of writing in lines. This fragment knew and represented issues, points of political and cultural contradiction about the construction of authorship and the poetic career before their maker could see them as such. The fragment was a cognitive act, not just in autobiography. It functioned as a probe of a situation then almost invisible and always underacknowledged; to have understood it then, one would have needed the cultural apparatus precipitated (though not elaborated) by a social movement—second wave feminism, something that had not yet occurred.Despite mirroring each other in a dramatic hinged appositive, with Lady as hinge (“I, Lady, you”), the female “I” is separated by the very concept “Lady” from her addressee, one traditional addressee of poems, the female “you.” “Lady” is both hinge and barrier; she belongs to “my true love”—a charming and smug ballad turn, filled with idealizations of class and sexuality. Yet the “I” wants to hold this “you” figure to herself, actualizing in female-to-female attraction the long half-life of a Petrarchan structure of feeling in order to create female authorship. Now that gesture could be interpreted as desire (in a [End Page 31] lesbian, matrifocal, or preoedipal plot), or as self-aggrandizing forms of egoistic desire. Is the desired embrace regressive? immature? narcissistic? self-serving? greedy? masturbatory? (all these having been thought of as bad attitudes with a bad press—one might now wonder). Fueled by an ambisexual or polysexual suggestiveness, the poem makes a wobbly declaration of vocation in its desire to embrace singular, hieratic woman herself, yourself, myself. Yet as pronouns multiply, a serious problem is accosted. “But you are myself. Can I?”The fragment stops, startled, where the cultural problem began. Authorship was compromised and almost aborted; in any event, these issues, which seemed to me, in my (then commonplace) ignorance of female cultural production, to have no analogues, pointed me toward total blockage. The “can I” is not simply a personal questioning of my own powers, but concerns general contingencies of gender and female place in culture, a then invisible social horizon. Am “I” forbidden to poetry by one—but one key—law of poetry—the cult of the idealized female? Should “Lady” be ditched totally? or examined? both? and how to poke at a Petrarchanism that seems utterly belated, never uniformly hegemonic, and not, after all, the whole content of poetry? (As I bear down upon it, it recedes, is evasive.) Yet any number of writers do take “Lady” for granted as one of the institutional assumptions of poetry. Many male writers get to say Lady early and often... (shrink)

To some students with disabilities who take philosophy classes, and even to some professors with disabilities who teach philosophy, the discipline is not welcoming. Philosophical theory traditionally recognizes so-called normal people and common modes of functioning but seems to ignore or disparage biologically anomalous individuals. The adequacy of our epistemological and ethical philosophies is a pressing reason for us to acknowledge disability in philosophical theorizing. And there are equally pressing reasons to acknowledge that students with various kinds of disabilities (...) are members of our classes. In this special issue of Teaching Philosophy the authors reflect on how disability is engaged with in their philosophy classrooms for and by their students, and in the philosophy they teach. (shrink)

This paper will argue for the need to attend to the impact of cognitive and other psychological limitations on the ways in which we theorize about fairness and unfairness. In particular it will consider the implications of the fact that people seem better able to describe situations as unfair than to articulate coherent conceptions of fairness, and that theories that make demands on people that they perceive as inordinate will be ignored regardless of the strength of the arguments in their (...) favor. (shrink)

This book is the culmination of Heinrich Meier's acclaimed analyses of the controversial thought of Carl Schmitt. Meier identifies the core of Schmitt's thought as political theology—that is, political theorizing that claims to have its ultimate ground in the revelation of a mysterious or supra-rational God. This radical, but half-hidden, theological foundation unifies the whole of Schmitt's often difficult and complex oeuvre, cutting through the intentional deceptions and unintentional obfuscations that have eluded previous commentators. Relating this religious dimension to (...) Schmitt's support for National Socialism and his continuing anti-Semitism, Meier compels the reader to come to terms with the irreconcilable differences between political theology and political philosophy. His book will give pause to those who have tended to gloss over the troubling aspects of some of Schmitt's ideas. With editions in German, French, Italian, and now English, Meier's two books on Schmitt have dramatically reoriented the international debate about Carl Schmitt and his significance for twentieth-century political thought. "Standing far above the rest... is Heinrich Meier's new study, _Die Lehre Carl Schmitts_, which covers all of Schmitt's writings.... Meier's work has forced everyone to take a second look at the assumptions underlying Schmitt's better-known writings and reconsider some that have been ignored."—Mark Lilla, reviewing the German edition in _The New York Review of Books_. (shrink)

This paper draws upon research on a complementary currency to explore the ethical dimensions of that community economic development work. In doing so, the paper argues that the figure of the stranger is increasingly important to understand in theorizing community, especially given increased attention to the discourse of the stranger in theories of ethics and identity in a globalizing world. As such, the paper lays out three modes of the strange—economic, geographic and ethical—which emerge out of this complementary currency (...) project. In identifying these three modes of being strange, the paper validates ways of articulating strangers and strangeness without essentializing the strange, ignoring the power relations that produce strangers, or pushing aside the strange in favor of blas communion. (shrink)

Of course, I do not mean by the title of this paper to deny the existence of something called ‘the mind’. But I do mean to call into question appeals to it in analyzing cognitive notions such as understanding and knowing, where its domain is taken to be independent of what one might find out in cognitive science. In this respect, I am expressing the skepticism of Sellars in “Empiricism and the philosophy of mind” [1956], where he explodes, not only (...) the ‘Myth of the Given’, but also, as part of that myth, theorizing about thoughts, intentions and the like, where such theorizing is regarded as something more than a nascent cognitive science, in which such entities enter as theoretical entities, in aid of accounting for our cognitive abilities. The myth is that these entities present themselves in consciousness, available to us by introspection—and, perhaps, a priori reasoning. But, even among authors who claim to embrace Sellars ’ critique of the Myth of the Given, his message about the mind is ignored.1 As an example, I want to consider and disarm an influential line of thought, by John McDowell, which implicates the mind in the analysis of knowing and understanding, not in the legitimate sense of suggesting causal accounts of our cognitive abilities in terms of mental or physiological structures, but in the sense of claiming that these abilities are mental or essentially involve the mental in a way that escapes the net of cognitive science. The ground on which I stand in this discussion is one which I attribute to Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. Basically, the position. (shrink)

Normative apriorist philosophers of science build purely normative a priori reconstructions of science, whereas descriptive naturalists eliminate the normative elements of the philosophy of science in favor of purely descriptive endeavors. I hope to exhibit the virtues of an alternative approach that appreciates both the normative and the natural in the philosophy of science. ;Theory ladenness. Some philosophers claim that a plausible view about how our visual systems work either undermines or facilitates our ability to rationally adjudicate between competing theories (...) on the basis of a theory-neutral observation language. I argue that these psychological premises do not support the epistemological conclusions drawn. ;Scientific theories. I argue for a psychological plausibility constraint: An account of scientific theories should tell us how a theory is mentally represented. I tentatively advance an account that satisfies the constraint. Finally, I criticize the traditional view of theories and the semantic view of theories . ;Conceptual clarity. Philosophers often offer classical accounts of terms ; then others adduce alleged counterexamples. The success conditions on these accounts must include either preserving or revising the original term's extension. Given recent psychological theorizing, the probability that we can find an extension-preserving classical account of a term is very low. Furthermore, it provides no benefits over the empirical effort to find the non-classical conditions we actually use in applying our terms. If the aim of counterexample philosophy is to non-arbitrarily revise the extension of the original term, I argue that we should choose a particular account of a term on the basis of how it performs in our best available theory on the subject. ;Conclusion. I argue that normative apriorists unwittingly make defeasible empirical assumptions that, if false, would undermine their normative claims. Against descriptive naturalism I argue that the cost of ignoring normative issues is exorbitant. Finally, I defend a version of normative naturalism, a style of philosophy of science that is informed--but not engulfed--by empirical assumptions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One of the most important developments in twentieth-century rhetorical theory is Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's insight that concepts, when under strain, can be split or dissociated into two separate terms. Not a simple binary, these terms remain interconnected in a value hierarchy with one term serving as the normative frame for the other. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca theorize that either term can be dissociated further, producing a fan-type dissociation. Unlike ordinary dissociations, fan-types place three or more terms in hierarchical relationship, resulting (...) in unique rhetorical features. Fanning a dissociation can serve three basic rhetorical functions: purging undesirable elements, preserving less undesirable elements from total devaluation, and purifying desirable elements. Building on these basic functions, rhetors can perform complex rhetorical actions, from intensifying a dissociation's values to completely undoing a dissociation. Long ignored by theorists and critics, fan-types complicate our understanding of dissociation, argumentation, and value-based reasoning, and therefore deserve more scholarly attention. (shrink)

Introduction The discussion of “self-knowledge” as a philosophical issue begins with an intuition. This intuition is based on the fact that our knowledge of our mental states or our knowledge in relation to statements like: “I know that I am happy,” is a particular knowledge that is distinct from the rest of our knowledge. It seems that in order to gain knowledge of ourselves, we do not need to go through those processes that we go through in order to gain (...) knowledge about the external world or knowledge of other minds. We feel that we directly know our own mental states. The role of self-knowledge philosophers is to explain this type of particular knowledge. Theories such as the Inner Sense Theory, the Acquaintance Theory, inferentialism, or theories with a rationalist approach are presented in response to this issue. Considering theories such as the Inner Sense Theory and the Acquaintance Theory, we will find that a common aspect of these theories is that self- knowledge has been defined as a product of an internal observation of our mental states. Such an approach is a kind of Empiricism in self-knowledge. The Rationalist approach has been raised against this approach. This approach, by linking self-knowledge with rationality, has opened a new chapter in the discussion of self-knowledge. The foundation of this approach is based on the principle that our situation as a rational agent plays a fundamental role in self-knowledge. Rationalists believed that this ignorance of the fundamental role of rationality in self-knowledge has caused Empiricists to ignore the most important kind of self-knowledge that is associated with rationality. Tyler Burge, Richard Moran, and Matthew Boyle are some of the important philosophers who theorize about this kind of self-knowledge. Goal In this paper, we will first introduce the main components of Rationalist approaches because we want to review the theoretical literature of this approach. Then, we will bring up a summary of the Tyler Burge view, a famous and important philosopher of the rationalist approach. This is an introduction to introduce Moran’s Theory of Transparency which is the focal point of our discussion. We will then refer to one of the most important challenges facing the Transparency Theory and bring up a significant solution that is presented by Matthew Boyle. We will also show that despite the advantages of this solution, there are ambiguities and other challenges. Finally, we will try to set up two proposals as a way to advance Boyle’s solution. Conclusion The perspective of rationalist philosophers about the existence of a kind of self-knowledge in rational creatures seems to be a powerful idea that is difficult to oppose. Tyler Burge presented interesting arguments about this issue. But it is not easy replying to the question of how this kind of self-knowledge occurs. The theory of Transparency and Reflectivism were proposed to respond to this question. Although they have been considered as efficient theories; however, the mentioned problem still remains ambiguous and complex. Transparency denied the introspective self-knowledge, but couldn’t explain how transparent self-knowledge occurs and therefore, it does not provide a complete explanation for self-knowledge. Some vagueness and some important challenges still continue to exist in this theory. Finally, we propose two proposals as a complement to Boyle’s theory. Maybe they could advance this theory. We suggest that we can use the concept of non-conceptual belief and dispositional belief. These debates have the potential for solving some of the challenges of Transparency and Reflectivism. These are profound topics and need great reflection. We know that our proposals are very elementary and crude ideas. But perhaps they can be a way toward developing the Transparency and Reflectivism theories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin by Johnny LyonsMario ClemensThe Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, by Johnny Lyons; 276 pp. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.A well-established Isaiah Berlin scholar recently pointed out, "Berlin gets us interested in value pluralism, but he leaves us with many questions."1 Therefore, is it really the case—as value pluralism holds—that human life in general and politics in particular are characterized by potentially conflicting values that cannot (...) be brought into a hierarchy, thus leaving us with tough and sometimes tragic choices? Does pluralism, thus understood, not lead to moral relativism? And what are the political implications of value pluralism?In the Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, an encompassing study of Berlin's extensive oeuvre, Johnny Lyons makes an original suggestion for how to address these sustained riddles of Berlin scholarship. For Lyons, the key to understanding Berlin's political theory is his particular notion of philosophy. The author seeks to show "that it is only by unearthing Berlin's conception of philosophy that we can make sense of his political theory" (p. xv).Lyons—who taught philosophy for six years, then abandoned academia in the late 1990s to work in corporate communications, and now has reentered the philosophical debate with this study on Berlin's philosophy—is highly skeptical of the mainstream way of doing philosophy. Lyons sees much of anglophone moral and political philosophy engaged in a "self-styled scientific enterprise" (p. 213), where philosophy is "identifying itself too closely with science or at the very least with a severely naturalistic mindset" (p. 219). This has led to "weirdly formal and systematic moral theorizing" (p. 214), resulting in "predominantly formal, abstruse and largely unreadable work" (p. 213), which moreover ignores the insights of the "the historical turn" (p. 154, emphasis in the original). According to Lyons, this "current state of largely sterile detachment and ossifying specialization is neither inevitable nor useful" (p. 218).What Berlin had, and what, according to Lyons, contemporary anglophone philosophy lacks, is the awareness of more than one legitimate way of describing and understanding the world. Notwithstanding the crucial achievements of the natural sciences, this philosophy's positivist methods are not the only possible approaches to genuine insights.For Lyons, the primary task of philosophy is "to make sense of the world we live in" and to help "us to determine how best to live our lives within that world" (p. 215). And in the light of such a definition of philosophy, Berlin's approach appears preferable to the mainstream analytic tradition.The claim that scientific explanations do not exhaust the possibilities of rational insight is, of course, not new. Lyons himself points to the parallels between Berlin's "humanistic philosophy" (p. 214) and "the twentieth-century phenomenological turn to capture the Lifeworld or Lebenswelt, the intelligible field of our common subjective experience" (p. 221). Moreover, there is an [End Page 472] obvious parallel to the hermeneutic tradition (from Friedrich Schleiermacher, via Wilhelm Dilthey, to Hans-Georg Gadamer), which emphasizes understanding (Verstehen) as opposed to explaining (Erklären).Innovative, then, is not Lyons's claim that he has found a philosopher with a more human-centered way of doing philosophy. Instead, what is noteworthy is his suggestion that the themes Berlin scholars grapple with will appear in a new light once we pay sufficient attention to Berlin's particular understanding of philosophy.The book consists of five parts. In his "general introduction," Lyons introduces readers, especially those unfamiliar with Berlin, to his political philosophy. Lyons also addresses some of the likely objections against treating Berlin as a political philosopher (as opposed to a historian of ideas or "mere" essayist).In part two, Lyons explores Berlin's particular understanding of philosophy. For Lyons, two insights set Berlin apart from the dominant analytic tradition. First, Berlin adopts Immanuel Kant's claims that we see the world through concepts and categories of our own making. Second, Berlin takes on board two of Giambattista Vico's observations: we cannot look at the world from outside history, only through historical perspectives; and we nevertheless do have access to the outlooks of past epochs and their thinkers because our shared humanity enables... (shrink)

This work argues that Simone Weil and Michel Henry appropriate two key insights from Marx—the critique of abstraction and the possibility of living labor—in order to philosophize subjectivity more actively. I place the two philosophers together because there is an uncanny similarity in their interpretations of Marx and specifically, in their use of his notion of praxis. The work begins with Weil’s and Henry’s criticism of philosophy for ignoring what is most human—praxis, or subjectivity. Following Marx’s _First Thesis on Feuerbach_, (...) both argue that philosophy problematically abstracts subjectivity by objectifying it. In other words, philosophy too often identifies the subject as a _thing_ that can be described, analyzed, and examined. Both assert that just as Capital deadens workers and their living laboring capacity, western philosophy is limited by various objectifications that function to deaden the individual, most notably _a knowledge of consciousness. _The two reject these objectifications and argue that Marx’s praxis offers another, more active, modality for considering subjectivity. The second half of this work focuses on what is unique to Weil and Henry: the suggestion that Marx’s living has not been adequately understood. Both suggest that Marx attends to praxis philosophically by creating a new method: one that emphasizes what Weil calls _experiencing_ and Henry designates _knowledge of life._ Attending to this method provides the operative distinction in my work: the difference between a philosophy that objectifies by relying on a _knowledge of consciousness_ and a philosophy that attends to _experiencing_ and depends upon a _knowledge of life_. The key for Weil and Henry is that Marx attends to the active dimension of subjectivity: _real_, lived, existence. For both, praxis and living labor point to a singular dimension of subjectivity that is irreducible to objectification, generalization or even to theorizing. In the concluding section I discuss how both thinkers’ interpretations of Marx provide a different modality for philosophy: the possibility of considering subjectivity subjectively by focusing on cultures that foster _knowledge of life_ and promote the singular dimension that is living labor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Appreciating Susan SontagFred RushMuch education from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s was self-education. Although one might happen to take a university course that incorporated contemporary art and criticism, it was a rarity. More often one supplemented university fare with one's own reading, listening, and viewing of cutting-edge art, anthropology, music, philosophy, linguistics, etc. Susan Sontag was for many Americans of that time a preeminent guide in this process, opening (...) doors to some of the most interesting and influential European work in art and criticism. Sontag's essayistic output—and she was one of the supreme writers in that genre—was seminal. Any sociologist or intellectual historian of the period would have to take her work greatly into account. Her incisive takes on her subject matter were not for everyone. Although trained as a philosopher at the then epicenter of the Anglophone philosophical world, Harvard, she did not tiptoe through academic complexities and was, therefore, decidedly out of step with the philosophical temperament of that time. She strode in, proselytized for her favorites, excoriated her enemies, and left no one in the room ignorant of the fact that she had been there, dominated the conversation and, on the way out, rearranged the furniture.Sontag's views generally have not received much philosophical attention. Even those who prize her critical work have tended to sell short the early, programmatic essays like "Against Interpretation" and "On Style." Perhaps this neglect is self-wrought. Sontag is often at her best when engaged in what one might call first-order criticism, that is, criticism of particular works of art on their own terms. Her work in critical theory tends to be both abstracting and declamatory and, so, operates against her strong suit. Moreover, Sontag's theory of criticism commits her to [End Page 36] the precedence of critical practice over theorizing. Accordingly, she is led to reduce the importance of those early essays. Yet this is where the interest of philosopher will fall, if indeed it falls at all.Sontag's main concern relevant to the philosophy of literature and to aesthetic theory more broadly is what she takes to be the colonization of aesthetic and critical response by what she terms "theory." Critical response is always, to some degree theoretical of course, so her point cannot be one that is ascribed sometimes to her, i.e., that critical response is supposed to be non-theoretical tout court. An "erotics of art," the famous formula contained in the last sentence of "Against Interpretation," is after all an erotics, which was in the ancient world a genre of theoretical investigation, not erotic experience or even erotica. Criticism can be theoretical in many senses as well. By itself the term "theory" does not rule out much unless one appends to it constraints having to do with the internal structure of bodies of knowledge that either qualify or disqualify them as theories correctly so-called. Sontag seems most concerned about two aspects of theoretical accounts of art: (A) their systematicity and (B) their use of modes of interpretation that undercut the aesthetic nature of works. With regard to (B), she is wary particularly of accounts of literary value that appeal to unconscious or subterranean social forces as determinative of meanings of works. The problem with (A) is that systematicity, she claims, tends toward exclusion and reduction, destroying the particularity of individual works.These two contentions comprise the diagnostic and negative side of Sontag's programmatic work in literary theory, i.e., what is to be avoided in one's experience and judgment of art. What is to be avoided is "interpretation," but what is interpretation exactly? What is the scope of Sontag's claim against it? Do her early essays provide a stable, convincing account of the relation between theory, on the one hand, and experience and criticism, on the other? Is she caught between formalism and a more politically engaged kind of criticism? On the positive side, what kind of critical response to literature is appropriate to its aesthetic nature? Is Sontag's replacement for interpretation viable? Sontag presents her answers to the first set of questions in an unstructured... (shrink)

In this extraordinary contribution to Nietzsche studies, Robert Alejandro offers an original interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy viewed as a complete whole. Alejandro painstakingly traces the different ways in which Nietzsche reconfigured and shifted his analyses of morality and of the human condition, until he was content with the final result: nothing was dispensable; everything was necessary. This is a philosophy of reconciliation--hardly nihilism--and it is a perspective that is not adequately addressed elsewhere in the literature on Nietzsche. Alejandro traces (...) the evolution of Nietzsche's thought by identifying the different layers of his philosophy, expressed in a complex array of stories and historical narratives. Alejandro analyzes the different stories of Nietzsche, places those stories within a tradition of genealogical theorizing, and interprets both the stories and the genealogy in terms of one of Nietzsche's unique features, his use of "historiobiography." According to Alejandro, historiobiography blends the idea of an attunement with all history and one's awareness of this attunement. As a mode of philosophizing, historiobiography allows Nietzsche to view all human history as if it runs through his own life and thoughts. Alejandro argues that Nietzsche deployed three strategies to find relief from his sense of the meaninglessness of life: his magnified concept of what he himself represented in human history, his doctrine of the eternal recurrence, and his philosophy of reconciliation. "I am confident that this book will be considered essential reading for any scholar doing serious research into Nietzsche's thought and its implications.... The author carefully traces the shifts and turns and occasionally the contradictions and dead-ends in the development of Nietzsche's major themes. I have never read an account of Nietzsche's thought as fully and convincingly supported by textual reference as this book. Others will disagree with the author's readings of Nietzsche, that is the nature of scholarship, but I cannot see how they could be ignored." --_Edward Portis, Texas A & M University_ "This is a major work on Nietzsche. Robert Alejandro offers us a reading of Nietzsche's Herculean efforts that Nietzsche scholars and scholars who write about modernity and postmodernity will be unable to ignore. This wide ranging and deep book addresses major issues in cultural history, psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, and the vast literature on modernity and secularization. I expect this to be a book that generates debate and discussion for years to come." --_Robert Hollinger, Iowa State University_ "Robert Alejandro delivers a rich, lively account of Nietzsche's quest for meaning. By focusing on the theme of _historiobiography_, Alejandro illuminates Nietzsche's bold attempt to place himself at the center of a comprehensive account of the rise and fall of Western civilization. A thoughtful, well-crafted book, written very much in the spirit of Nietzsche himself." --_Daniel Conway, Texas A & M University_. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Epistemological Warfare and Hope in Critical Dystopia by Emrah AtasoyClaire P. CurtisEmrah Atasoy. Epistemological Warfare and Hope in Critical Dystopia. Ankara: Nobel Bilimsel Eserler, 2021. vii+ 167 pp. ISBN: 978-625-7589-04-8This book is an application of the idea of critical dystopia to three understudied novels and the beginning of an argument about utopian desire itself. Emrah Atasoy, a prolific author who reviewed Turkish speculative fiction in a well-received 2021 (...) Utopian Studies article, is modeling a search for hope in dystopian texts. In this book, derived from his dissertation, he examines three British novels written in three different eras of the twentieth century: Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night (1937), Anthony Burgess's The Wanting Seed (1962), and P. D. James's The Children of Men (1992). In each novel, Atasoy argues, the protagonists move from an ignorance that served the interest of the dystopian forces to a resistant knowledge that should be read as offering hope, both as resistance and as knowledge.The book is organized in a straightforward way, with an introduction, conclusion, and then three analytical chapters, one for each of the novels. The introduction is expansive, offering both brief surveys of the nature of utopia and dystopia and a recounting of a number of themes taken up by dystopian texts: education, politics, gender roles, family life, and more. Layered onto this is a discussion of theorizing around knowledge and power and the transition from ignorance to understanding. The chapters focused on the individual novels are all similarly expansive. Atasoy offers biographical information about the authors along with considerations of the primary social and political events to which the authors might be responding. The analyses of the novels focus primarily on the motivations of the protagonists, but interspersed in the plot summaries are narrative cul-de-sacs explaining particular textual details (for example, the discussion of Theo's choice of the Greek statue of Diadoumenos as allocation to leave a note for the Warden [James, 37]). These [End Page 519] little detours are often interesting but can be distracting from the primary analytic focus.The analyses themselves also cover a lot of territory. The middle section of the chapter on The Children of Men (118–34) includes discussions of power, eugenics, religion, sexuality, punishment, assisted suicide, and immigration. Each of these is used to elucidate modes of social and political control wielded by the Warden, but the sheer number of issues included in the fast-moving analysis left me wanting more. Atasoy's analysis of Quietus nicely captures the ways in which James has created a world where the elderly are both encouraged and manipulated to end their lives for the good of the whole. This discussion fits especially well with the larger focus of his analysis on modes of social engineering. Fewer themes and more close readings like this one would have deepened the reading experience. But for anyone beginning a project on one of these novels, this book is a good place to start.This book begins and ends with the interesting contention that times of catastrophe diminish the literary production of utopia, and potentially the capacity for hope itself. While the point of this book is not to defend this claim empirically, it is one worth considering for any scholar of utopia, or any person interested in the potential of future change for the better. The book may underplay the fact of twentieth-century literary utopias (there is a brief discussion of the feminist utopias written in the 1970s and 1980s), but it is surely correct that there is an imbalance in the production of utopia in favor of dystopia. Utopias are more challenging to construct and potentially (especially in this day and time) less formulaic than dystopia, which is an increasingly popular (and marketable) genre.Kim Stanley Robinson noted in a recent interview that "[utopias] shape people's conception of what's possible that could be good in the future."1 Atasoy's book offers the possibility that a close reading of dystopian texts might well help us uncover other ways of finding out what future good is possible. By extolling the value of finding the... (shrink)

This article gives an overview of 4 important lacunae in political liberalism and identifies, in a preliminary fashion, some trends in the literature that can come in for support in filling these blind spots, which prevent political liberalism from a correct assessment of the diverse nature of religious claims. Political liberalism operates with implicit assumptions about religious actors being either ‘liberal’ or ‘fundamentalist’ and ignores a third, in-between group, namely traditionalist religious actors and their claims. After having explained what makes (...) traditionalist religious actors different from liberal and fundamentalist religious actors, the author develops 4 areas in which political liberalism should be pushed further theoretically in order to correctly theorize the challenge which traditional religious actors pose to liberal democracy. These 4 areas are: the context of translation; the politics of exemptions; the multivocality of theology; and the transnational nature of norm-contestation. (shrink)