Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory.

Although intersectionality has been widely disseminated across the disciplines as a tool to center women of color's developed perspectives on social reality, it has been notably absent in the scholarship of feminist philosophy and philosophy of race. I first examine the causes and processes of the exclusions of women of color feminist thought more generally, and of intersectionality in particular. Then, focusing attention on Black feminisms, I read Sandra Jackson-Opoku's 1997 novel, The River Where Blood Is Born, with and against (...) Paget Henry's Africana ethnophilosophy. I model an interdisciplinary, intersectional approach to Henry's ethnophilosophy, broadening its philosophical scope by historicizing the liminality that characterizes the realities of many diasporic Black women. I also develop an interpretation of the female protagonists to suggest how many Black women within different historical contexts develop practices to recover African symbolic and discursive registers as a means to claim their subjectivities. Additionally, I challenge Henry's teleological explanation for an increasingly secular Africana philosophical identity. (shrink)

Calls for diversity in higher education have been ongoing for, at least, a century. Today, the diversity movement in higher education is in danger of being co-opted in the US by a move to make ‘intellectual diversity,’ i.e. the diversity of political opinion, on par with the cultural and historical diversity that one finds within differently racialized populations. Intellectual diversity is thought to track different modes of thinking between conservatives and progressives that need policy interventions to promote and protect. Here (...) I offer an account of a mode of thinking to probe what conservative, libertarian, progressive, and critical theory orientations, as modes of thinking, should show in order to present themselves as tokens of ‘intellectual diversity.’ Ultimately, I gesture to the conclusion that intellectual diversity as a mode of thinking degrades into either infinite particularity or impossible singularity that do little establish a call for policy intervention. (shrink)

This paper answers a call made by Anita Allen to genuinely assess whether the field of philosophy has the capacity to sustain the work of diverse peoples. By identifying a pervasive culture of justification within professional philosophy, I gesture to the ways professional philosophy is not an attractive working environment for many diverse practitioners. As a result of the downsides of the culture of justification that pervades professional philosophy, I advocate that the discipline of professional philosophy be cast according to (...) a culture of praxis. Finally, I provide a comparative exercise using Graham Priest’s definition of philosophy and Audre Lorde’s observations of the limitations of philosophical theorizing to show how these two disparate accounts can be understood as philosophical engagement with a shift to a culture of praxis perspective. (shrink)