In “Global Knowledge Frameworks and the Tasks of Cross-Cultural Philosophy,” Leigh Jenco searches for the conception of knowledge that best justifies the judgment that one can learn from non-local traditions of philosophy. Jenco considers four conceptions of knowledge, namely, in catchwords, the esoteric, Enlightenment, hermeneutic, and self- transformative conceptions of knowledge, and she defends the latter as more plausible than the former three. In this critical discussion of Jenco’s article, I provide reason to doubt the self-transformative conception, and also advance (...) a fifth, pluralist conception of knowledge that I contend best explains the prospect of learning from traditions other than one’s own. (shrink)

In this article, I map current conceptions of cosmopolitanism and sketch distinctions between the concept and humanism and multiculturalism. The differences mirror what I take to be a central motif of cosmopolitanism: the capacity to fuse reflective openness to the new with reflective loyalty to the known. This motif invites a reconsideration of the meaning of culture as well as of the relations between home and the world.

According to ‘global institutionalism,’ individuals who do not share a state have duties of justice to one another, and this is explained, in part, by the institutional connections that obtain between them. In this chapter, I defend this view against two challenges. First, I consider challenges raised by ‘non-institutionalists,’ who deny that facts about global institutional interaction bear on the nature of duties of justice that arise between particular individuals. Second, I address challenges posed by ‘domestic institutionalists,’ who accept the (...) claim that facts about institutional interaction bear upon the scope of justice but deny that the right sort of interaction necessary to ground duties of justice is found in the global domain. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron has plausibly argued that historical injustices can be superseded by serious efforts to achieve justice in the present and future. This essay considers what it might mean to arrange things justly in the relevant way, focusing on the work of John Rawls as our best existing template for conceptualizing justice of this kind. The essay outlines ways in which a Rawlsian system of social justice seems unable to meet its own normative aspirations and unable to provide a model (...) for overcoming historically constituted disadvantage. As the essay argues, the society described by Rawls is likely to remain divided by inherited class structures, given the motivational requirements of markets and the psychological effects of the division of labor, so that inheritors of historical injustice would remain disadvantaged even if Rawlsian principles were put into practice. The essay considers some speculative methods for overcoming these inequalities, and argues that the most promising approach in circumstances as we know them will draw on already-existing programs of compensation for historical expropriation. The essay also argues that Rawlsians should take seriously the application of the difference principle to the distribution of political authority alongside material resources, suggesting that we should give careful thought to how political structures can protect the interests of the least advantaged. The paper argues that, once again, existing mechanisms for Aboriginal self-governance are more appropriate as a system of forward-looking justice than they may otherwise appear. The essay argues in closing that political philosophy should give increased attention to the ethics of political action and to conflict among the disadvantaged in imperfect circumstances. (shrink)

The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and (...) dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden intellectual historians’ sense of the complexity, variation, and transnational currents within postwar American discourse about modernity and tradition. (shrink)

Defenders of Aboriginal rights such as James Tully have argued that members of majority populations should allow Aboriginal peoples to argue within their own preferred intellectual frameworks in seeking common moral ground. But how should non-Aboriginal academics react to claims that seem insufficiently critical or even incoherent? This essay argues that there are two reasons to be especially wary of attacking such errors given the historical injustices perpetrated by settler states against Aboriginal peoples. First, attempts to root out error will (...) often be misplaced, because they will fail to consider the full range of possible reasons for particular kinds of social practices. Second, such attempts will often have counterproductive social effects in disrupting conversations and prolonging Aboriginal alienation. This essay thus argues that non-Aboriginal academics should be willing to exercise considerable self-restraint toward apparent intellectual errors, because such a strategy will be most conducive to realizing justice over the long term. (shrink)

Now more than ever the role of the other has been put into question and marginalized in a redefinition of an “American national self-protective identity” in the current post election climate. In philosophical terms, an identity of a radical other- implies that any change, any difference, any impurity can be conceived as posing a threat to identity. If a specific group of people is identified as preventing the self from being what it ought to be, the other is identified as (...) a security threat. One option is to willingly conform to the assigned role as a threat. The opposite option I argue in my paper is one that can be achieved through the lens of a cosmopolitan framework of hospitality. By exploring the writings of French philosopher, feminist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigary’s cosmopolitan pedagogy of difference rooted in the concept of hospitality from the point of view of education, I hope put forth an alternative phenomenological pedagogy, one that connects issues of positionality with those of an embodied anti-racist philosophy of difference. By using case studies from my own classroom, I hope to elucidate how educators can implement an anti-racist pedagogy in the current post election climate, by creating spaces for dialogue where students are engaging in an authentic discourse on the nature of their positionality. (shrink)