This paper analyses populism as a layered system with three levels: the political/institutional, the social/interactional, and the psychological/intrapsychic. Each level is theorized using a specif...

This paper addresses a question posed by the increase of democratic backsliding: whether democracy itself is compatible with human nature. It analyses democracy as a layered system consisting of three levels: the political/institutional, the social/interactional and the psychological/intrapsychic. At each level it uses evolutionary theory to describes features of a ‘light side’ of human nature that makes democracy possible, and of a ‘dark side’ of human nature that leads to democratic backsliding. At the political/institutional level these features are the reduction (...) of reactive aggression and the capacity for the intragroup stranger. At the social/interactional level they are the cultural evolution of cooperative norms and an inclusive group identity. At the psychological/intrapsychic level they are the coherent, continuous positive self-experiences produced by shared positive emotions. However, these mechanisms can misfire at each level, producing the dark side that leads to democratic backsliding. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 3, Page 306-321, September 2021.

The topic of the self has long been salient in feminist philosophy, for it is pivotal to questions about personhood, identity, the body, and agency that feminism must address. In some respects, Simone de Beauvoir's trenchant observation, "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other," sums up why the self is such an important issue for feminism. To be the Other is to be the non-subject, the non-person, the non-agent — in short, the mere body. (...) In law, in customary practice, and in cultural stereotypes, women's selfhood has been systematically subordinated, diminished, and belittled, when it has not been outright denied. Since women have been cast as lesser forms of the masculine individual, the paradigm of the self that has gained ascendancy in U.S. popular culture and in Western philosophy is derived from the experience of the predominantly white and heterosexual, mostly economically advantaged men who have wielded social, economic, and political power and who have dominated the arts, literature, the media, and scholarship. Responding to this state of affairs, feminist philosophical work on the self has taken three main tacks: (1) critique of established views of the self, (2) reclamation of women's selfhood, and (3) reconceptualization of the self to incorporate women's experience. This entry will survey feminist perspectives on the self from all three of these angles. (shrink)