The question “What is the nature of experience?” is of perennial philosophical concern. It deals not only with the nature of experience qua experience, but additionally with related questions about the experiencing subject and that which is experienced. In other words, to speak of the philosophical problem of experience, one must also address questions about mind, world, and the various relations that link them together. Both William James and Kitarō Nishida were deeply concerned with these issues. Their shared notion of (...) “pure experience” is the conceptual cornerstone of their attempt to deal with the philosophical problem of experience. This dissertation is an analysis of “pure experience” and its relevance to several issues in contemporary hilosophy of mind. Drawing upon James’s and Nishida’s “pure experience”, I argue both for a sensorimotor-based, “extended” conception of consciousness and a bodily skills-based account of moral psychology. (shrink)

Although political values guide people who take advice from standpoint epistemolo-gies in deciding whether to reveal secrets used to resist oppression, these decisions can also be understood and evaluated in purely cognitive or epistemological terms. When political considerations direct us to preserve a secret, the cognitive value progressively diminishes because the view of the world projected by the secret is increasingly vulnerable.

Judith Butler’s influential work in feminist theory is significant for its insight that sexist discourse in popular culture affects the agency and consciousness of individuals, but offers an inadequate account of how such discourse might be said to touch, shape, or affect selves. Supplementing Butler’s account of signification with a Deweyan pragmatic account of meaning-making and selective emphasis enables a consistent account of the relationship between discourse and subjectivity with a robust conception of the bodily organism. An analysis of the (...) popular discourse surrounding Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Presidential campaign demonstrates why this hybrid pragmatic/poststructuralist account is necessary. (shrink)

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)

Michel Foucault's early works criticize the development of modern democratic institutions as creating a surveillance society, which functions to control bodies by making them feel watched and monitored full time. His later works attempt to recover private space by exploring subversive techniques of the body and language. Following Foucault, pragmatists like Richard Shusterman and Richard Rorty have also developed very rich approaches to this project, extending it deeper into the literary and somatic dimensions of self-stylizing. Yet, for a debate centered (...) on the re-creation of the vision of the self, these discussions have yet to fully engage—even while they set the conditions for this engagement with—issues of posthuman technologies, such as AI, robotics, and genetic engineering. These certainly will constitute the primary engine of public institutional surveillance in the years to come. With this surveillance, the two spheres of private self-fashioning and public institutions will continue to evolve in relation to one another. As they do so, democratic society will change considerably. Perhaps Rorty's own normative and linguistic ideal of conversational maintenance may provide something of a democratic limit case on any future posthuman self-fashioning. (shrink)

: This paper explains the discipline of somaesthetics, which emerges from pragmatism's concern with enhancing embodied experience and reconstructing the aesthetic in ways that make it more central to key philosophical concerns of knowledge, ethics, and politics. I then examine Beauvoir's complex treatment of the body in The Second Sex, assessing both her arguments that could support the pragmatic approach of somaesthetics but also those that challenge its bodily focus as a danger for feminism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.4 (2003) 330-352 [Access article in PDF] Liberal Irony, Rhetoric, and Feminist Thought: A Unifying Third Wave Feminist Theory Valerie R. Renegar School of Communication San Diego State University Stacey K. Sowards Department of Communication Studies California State University, San Bernardino The meanings of a feminist movement and feminism have changed significantly over the past hundred years. From the women's suffrage movement, to the Supreme Court (...) decision in Roe v. Wade, to the 1980s label "feminazi," feminist theories and movements have emphasized many different issues for a variety of reasons. In part, it is these differences that make identification with feminist principles and practices so difficult. As part of the new generation of feminists, we are often left wondering if we are good enough as feminists, if we do enough as activists, and what it is that we really stand for. Many of us have grown up with the benefits and the victories of the feminists in the second wave and feel a responsibility to continue to seek the end of oppression. However, our experiences as feminists and young women often leave us feeling angry, hopeless, and confused as to where we are supposed to go, how we are supposed to get there, and what battles we are supposed to wage as part of a feminist movement. Resolving these tensions and questions will allow us to better understand and articulate what it is that we want and need in a feminist theory. Recent and ongoing division within and among feminist movements and theories, lack of consensus, in-group fighting, and a focus on singular women's theories and issues have created problems and a lack of solidarity that is counterproductive to feminism as a whole."Third wave feminism" is a term used to describe feminists who were born in the 1960s and 1970s. Although not universally recognized as a discrete wave of feminism, the third wave is increasingly distinguishing itself in both popular culture and academic writing. 1 We believe that third wave feminism is an emerging movement that currently lacks an overarching or coherent philosophy of praxis. While this type of unifying philosophy is not necessarily required by a movement, we believe that the presence of such a theory, in the instance of third wave feminism, would be highly [End Page 330] beneficial since it could provide direction and explain the motives of young feminists who are still in the process of developing and defining their feminist beliefs and actions. Often the philosophy of a movement is not apparent until the movement is well established or has accomplished its goals. Third wave feminists, however, are in a unique position to simultaneously create and embrace a coherent philosophy while developing their feminist ideas and practices. In this essay, we argue that Richard Rorty's notion of liberal irony, as interpreted by third wave feminist experience, is a coherent philosophy of thought and action that will center the emerging feminist movement and allow it to prosper.For us, a rhetorical theory constructed from Rorty's liberal irony and pragmatism, together with various third wave feminist theories, provides the sort of solution that addresses many of our concerns about the direction of feminist theory. Rorty's philosophy of liberal ironism is compelling but has received scant attention from feminist or rhetorical theorists. A few feminist philosophers have examined a pragmatist feminism, but have largely focused on the early pragmatists, ignoring Rorty's liberal ironism entirely or discussing it only in the larger context of pragmatism (Aboulafia 1993; Hart 1993; Leffers 1993; Pappas 1993; Rooney 1993; Shuler and Tate 2001; Seigfried 1996; Sullivan 2001; Upin 1993). Donna Haraway (1990), although not dealing directly with irony from a pragmatist perspective, notes that language politics are strongly associated with feminist struggles. She argues that feminists can utilize ironic methods to negotiate identities that "seem contradictory, partial, and strategic" (197). An ironic perspective recognizes the exclusion inherent in naming and allows contradictory fusions of identity to emerge. In this way, irony blurs the boundaries of language... (shrink)

In Nietzsche and Embodiment Kristen Brown reveals the smartness of bodies, challenging the traditional view in the West that bodies are separate from and morally inferior to minds. Drawing inspiration from Nietzsche, Brown vividly describes why the interdependence of mind and body matters, both in Nietzsche's writings and for contemporary debates (non-dualism theory, Merleau-Ponty criticism, and metaphor studies), activities (spinal cord research and fasting), and specific human experiences (menses, trauma, and guilt). Brown's theories about the dynamic relationship between body and (...) mind provide new possibilities for self-understanding and experience. (shrink)

How does emancipation from social oppression work and unfold? The paper is an attempt to deal with this question from an aesthetic point of view. By drawing on pragmatist resources, and more precisely on John Dewey’s aesthetic theory and on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, I discuss the critical and transformative potential of a special kind of aesthetic experience, namely ‘aecsthetic experience’. The paper unfolds in three steps: First, I introduce Iris Marion Young’s account of social oppression, (...) which fits particularly well with the framework of the ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1). I show then, in contrast to an established interpretation, how the protagonist of Gilman’s story makes an experience of liberation from oppression (2). Finally, I reconstruct Dewey’s role in my interpretation of this feminist classic, and I suggest what a Deweyan account might learn from it (3). (shrink)

This dissertation addresses a debate about the proper relationship between democratic theory and institutions. The debate has been waged between two rival approaches: on the one side is an aggregative and economic theory of democracy, known as constitutional economics, and on the other side is deliberative democracy. The two sides endorse starkly different positions on the issue of what makes a democracy legitimate and stable within an institutional setting. Constitutional economists model political agents in the same way that neoclassical economists (...) model economic agents, that is, as self-regarding, rational maximizers; so that evaluations of democratic legitimacy and stability depend on the extent to which the design of institutional rules and practices maximize individual utility by promoting efficient schemes of collective choice. Deliberative democrats, on the other hand, understand political agents as communicative reason-giving subjects who justify their preferences and positions on issues that jointly affect them in a process of consensus-directed discourse, or deliberation; so that evaluations of democratic legitimacy and order depend on the degree to which institutional norms and practices promote deliberation and draw upon deliberated public judgment. I argue that despite the numerous incompatibilities between constitutional economics and deliberative democracy—which amount to a 'deep divide'—an opportunity to produce a genuine synthesis of the two approaches arises inasmuch as it is possible to overcome several points of opposition in their separate research programmes. The central thesis of the dissertation is that it is possible to construct a bridge spanning the divide between constitutional economists and deliberative democrats, and that Dewey and Bentley's transactional view can facilitate this bridge-building project. Pursuant to this end, the points of opposition between the v research programmes are mediated by way of five concepts which, on balance, favor deliberative democracy and its feasible institutionalization. (shrink)

Situated approaches to affectivity overcome an outdated individualistic perspective on emotions by emphasizing the role embodiment and environment play in affective dynamics. Yet, accounts which provide the conceptual toolbox for analyses in the philosophy of emotions do not go far enough. Their focus falls (a) on the present situation, abstracting from the broader historico-cultural context, and (b) on adopting a largely functionalist approach by conceiving of emotions and the environment as resources to be regulated or scaffolds to be used. In (...) this paper, I argue that we need totake situatedness seriously: We need (a) to acknowledge that emotions are not situated in undetermined “contexts” but in concrete socio-culturally specific practices referring to forms of living; and (b) to agree that not only are context and emotionsusedfor the sake of something else but also that the meaning-disclosive dimension of affective intentionality is structured by situatedness as well. To do so, I offer a multidimensional approach to situatedness that integrates the biographical and cultural dimensions of contextualization within the analysis of situated affective dynamics. This approach suggests that humans affectively disclose meaning (together) which is at once product and producer of specific forms of living – and these are always already subjects of (politically relevant) critique. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The article critically discusses Rahel Jaeggi’s recent philosophical contribution to a critical theory of capitalism. The first part reconstructs Jaeggi’s account of Lebensform, life-form, that builds up the main ontological framework for addressing and problematizing capitalism intended not as an economic system but as a social whole. The second part focuses on the three different theoretical strategies that Jaeggi puts forward to detect and deal with capitalism’s immanent flaws. The third and last part problematizes the metaphysical assumptions and implications (...) of Jaeggi’s understanding of life-form and outlines a more dialectical, or “transactional” notion of form of life, which is inspired by Dewey’s non-reductionist naturalist method of inquiry. The overall aim is to strengthen the philosophical critique of the capitalist form of life. (shrink)

This article examines how people of color can biologically inherit the deleterious effects of white racism. Drawing primarily on the field of epigenetics, I demonstrate how transgenerational racial disparities are in fact racist disparities that can be manifest physiologically, helping constitute the chemicals, hormones, cells, and fibers of the human body. Epigenetics can be used to demonstrate how white racism can have durable effects on the biological constitution of human beings that are not limited to the specific person who is (...) the target of white racism, but instead extend to that person's offspring. In this way, the field of epigenetics can help philosophers and others understand the transgenerational biological impact of social forces such as white racism. It reveals that the damage done by white racism is more extensive than critical philosophers of race might have realized, and also that interventions against white racism must address not just the economic, geographical, social, and psychological, but also the biological aspects of human existence. In particular, the article examines racist disparities in preterm birth rates and argues that the scope and significance of prenatal care for African American women must be expanded intergenerationally and include wide-scale forms of racial justice. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper brings together a phenomenological and vulnerability-theoretic approach to dementia. The paper challenges the view that subjects with dementia can simply be understood in terms of diminished cognitive capacities or that they have lost all vestiges of personhood or the capacity for meaningful interaction. Instead, drawing on vulnerability theory and the phenomenological work of Kristin Zeiler and Lisa Käll, an alternative view of persons with dementia is offered that is based on intersubjective and intercorporeal relations and accomplishments. A vulnerability (...) approach to dementia is developed that not only provides the basis for empathetic responses to illnesses such as dementia but also points to the intersubjective constitution of subjects more generally. The argument developed is that the notion of vulnerability designates a form of openness to others and that such openness is a precondition for empathy. (shrink)

This review offers a critical analysis of Shannon Sullivan's “feminist pragmatist standpoint theory” as a framework for thinking about issues of identity and truth. Sullivan claims that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on an anonymous or pre-personal quality to bodily experience commits him to a false universality and that his understanding of bodily intentionality traps him in a subjectivist philosophy that is incapable of doing justice to difference. She suggests that phenomenology in general is theoretically limited because of its alleged subjectivism and (...) universalism, and she turns to Dewey's pragmatism to develop a “transactional model” of identity and truth. In response, I argue that Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of anonymity and intentionality do not entail either subjectivism or a false universality. I also challenge Sullivan's conception of truth as transactional flourishing by appealing to the “terrible truths” of violence and oppression. (shrink)

I argue that the experimental method, like the corporeality of the body and the permeability of skins, links John Dewey and Friedrich Nietzsche. I raise questions about referring to bodies rather than body-minds, emphasizing hypothetical construction and the body rather than mutual responsiveness and situatedness, and whether Nietzsche's elitism is comparable to Dewey's democratic ideal of inclusiveness. With Naomi Zack, I argue for substituting ethnicity for race, and also develop Jane Addams as a model for recognizing and dismantling privilege.

This article uses Peirce's Critical Common-sensism to conduct social critical inquiry into racism and “colorblindness” in the U.S. I argue that “colorblindness” discourse - in its sincere, but naïve form - is an enactment of paper-doubt, where racist common-sense beliefs are supposedly eradicated, but still function unintentionally. I offer a Peircean challenge to the common dismissal of people of color's testimony regarding the prevalence of racism. Since people of color experience racism-based secondness often not experienced by whites, their testimony must (...) be embraced as indispensable to the elimination of racist belief-habits. (shrink)

Most psychology begins with a distinction between organism and environment, where the two are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) conceptualized as flipsides of a skin-severed space. This paper examines that conceptualization. Dewey and Bentley's (1949) account of firm naming is used to show that psychologists have, in general, (1) employed the skin as a morphological criterion for distinguishing organisms from backgrounds, and (2) equated background with environment. This two-step procedure, which in this article is named the morphological conception of organism, is (...) shown to inform the writings of the well-known psychologist B. F. Skinner. A review of difficulties with the morphological conception is followed with a review and preliminary integration of four attempts at an alternative conception of organism, and thus environment. Together, these four attempts converge on an analysis of living systems as transdermal (through and across skin) processes only within which organism and environment are distinguishable as complementary phases. The notion of a biological total process, or bioprocess, is employed to clarify this alternative analysis, in which an organism is an ongoing organization rather than a skin-bound body. (shrink)

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor (...) made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self ” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the formation of habits with the help of self-tracking technologies. Although devices like Fitbit smart bands come with promises of empowerment through the means of increased control over users’ habits, existing literature does not provide conclusive findings about the validity of such claims. I contribute to the ongoing debate by relying on John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and its notion of intelligent habit. I demonstrate that from a pragmatist standpoint, habits that are the most likely to (...) accomplish users’ goals contribute to their flourishing need to be reflective (accompanied by adequate deliberation) and flexible (adaptable to the changing circumstances). On this basis I highlight some ethical-epistemic issues surrounding self-tracking technologies that inhibit the formation of habits desirable from a Deweyan standpoint. These include a lack of reflection on the part of the developers, difficulties for users to deliberate and consciously shape the habits developed by their devices, and dependence upon self-tracking tools that makes it difficult to adapt habits to individual needs and circumstances. I conclude the paper by discussing self-tracking’s general impact on flourishing, as well as placing my arguments in the context of the diversity of self-tracking practices and identifying how users attempt to alleviate the shortcomings of the technology and make it more suitable to their goals and needs. (shrink)

The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss three standpoints on human becoming (...) as open, indeterminate, and therefore historical using the voices of Pico della Mirandola, Gordon W. Allport, and Paulo Freire. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation we move from an existential to an ontological register in looking at modes of embodied becoming. His scheme of interpretation of the relation between modes of individuation allows us to understand human becoming in terms of a tendency to neotenization. I compare this ontology with an enactive theoretical account of the dimensions of embodiment, finding several compatibilities and complementarities. Various forms of bodily unfinishedness in enaction fit the Simondonian ontology and the existential analysis, where transindividuality corresponds to participatory sense-making and Freire’s joint becoming of individuals and communities correlates with the open tensions in linguistic bodies between incorporation and incarnation of linguistic acts. I test some of this ideas by considering the plausibility of artificial bodies and personal becoming from an enactive perspective, using the case of replicants in the film Blade Runner. The conclusion is that any kind of personhood, replicants included, requires living through an actual history of concrete becoming. (shrink)

An overview of a philosophical movement originating in the United States of America in the 19th century.

ABSTRACT In this article, I address a highly controversial question of feminist philosophy, namely, the so-called sex/gender distinction, from a Deweyan perspective. I argue that Dewey's naturalism provides useful insights for dealing with and solving the problems concerning this particular type of dualism. My argumentation unfolds in three steps. First, after having briefly introduced the meanings of the two terms, I outline two different, both unsuccessful strategies for overcoming the sex/gender distinction, namely, what I call the radical social constructionist and (...) the nondialectical naturalist strategies. Second, I draw on Dewey's version of naturalism with the aim of conceiving of human beings as simultaneously naturally and socially constructed. Third, I sketch out the hypothesis that Dewey's way of overcoming the pernicious dichotomy between nature and society may be useful for outlining a critical metaphysics of gender. (shrink)

This paper explains the discipline of somaesthetics, which emerges from pragmatism's concern with enhancing embodied experience and reconstructing the aesthetic in ways that make it more central to key philosophical concerns of knowledge, ethics, and politics. I then examine Beauvoir's complex treatment of the body in The Second Sex, assessing both her arguments that could support the pragmatic approach of somaes-thetics but also those that challenge its bodily focus as a danger for feminism.

This paper both elaborates and interrogates the transactional model of human experience at the center of Shannon W. Sullivan's Living Across and Through Skins. In particular, it highlights the need to supplement her account with a psychoanalytic reading of our gendered subjectivities. Moreover, it stresses the necessity to focus on such humanly important—and irreducibly somatic—phenomena as grief and eros.

Merleau-Ponty’s idea of lived body has played a significant role in understanding selfconstruction and has raised issues about the relationships between the private sense and the public world. Merleau-Ponty argues that the lived body and the world are constructed reciprocally. This notion is acknowledged to be a rich source for feminist thought. Yet there is as much criticism as support of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy from feminists such as Grosz (1994, 1995), Sullivan (1997, 2000, 2001, 2002) and Young (1989). Shannon Sullivan vigorously (...) criticises Merleau-Ponty’s lived body as an anonymous body which erases particularities and results in domination. This paper defends Merleau-Ponty’s notion by clarifying the meaning of anonymity in terms of the understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s lived body as an “author”, and as such as incorporating the capacity to resist anonymity, and sustain particularity and difference, through an ongoing process of authoring his/her own lived experience. Ken Plummer’s notion of sexual story-telling is used to elaborate the elucidation. In conclusion, the educational implications of resisting anonymity are considered and envisaged in terms of promoting tolerance of difference and assertion of particularity by encouraging and developing the capacity to construct the self through an ongoing process of both responsive and responsible self-authoring. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , May 2010, Volume 10, Edition 1. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the motivation gap that prevents many people from acquiring and activating environmental values. In the face of this gap, I analyze Aldo Leopold’s conservation philosophy as a potential solution. This is done by reading Leopold through John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience, in which motivated action develops out of unified aesthetic experience made up of three phases: action, emotion, and intelligence. Showing that Leopold’s approach to conservation exhibits this aesthetic structure not only gives it a (...) clearer organization but promotes its use for rectifying the severe lack of environmental conscience and practice in society. (shrink)

In Democracy and Moral Conflict, Robert Talisse defends a folk epistemological justification of democracy. This is a universalist and non-moral justification that he deems necessary to accommodate moral pluralism. In contrast, I argue that this attempt fails to justify democracy, on three grounds. First, democracy cannot accommodate moral pluralism, as Talisse understands it. Second, Talisse's own conception of democracy is inconsistent with moral pluralism. And third, democracy requires moral justification and motivation, both of which can be made consistent from within (...) an experimental moral pluralism. (shrink)

Denying special traits like the use of language to nonhuman animals has often been a basis for the creation of a stand-alone human sphere, apart from and above the animal world and the environmental milieu. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology shows that human communication arises from the semiosis in the extra-human world and is not self-contained. Given many recent insights in scientific studies of nonhuman animals, only a few of which are cited here, it becomes impossible to say that animals are mute, reactive (...) entities. They too share many of the same features of communication with human beings. That said, articulating an interspecies ethic of sympathy or concern must take into account species and individual differences. (shrink)

This paper discusses the interpersonal dimension of self-tracking technologies from the standpoint of Dewey’s pragmatist ethics. Users of self-tracking routinely exchange data with others, interact through social features embedded in their tools, and form communities focused on the sharing and discussion of data. I employ Dewey’s notion of transaction to discuss how self-quantification impacts users’ perception of others and how it mediates interpersonal relations. In Dewey’s ethics engagement with others is a fundamental part of moral life and individual flourishing can (...) only be achieved in social contexts and through the extension of care towards other people. The ethical ideals and epistemic concepts present in pragmatism allow me to argue that despite claims that self-tracking technologies lead to the formation of communities, pro-social instincts exist prior to the adoption of the devices and self-tracking actually inhibits the formation of mutually uplifting social bonds. In my discussion, I focus on the degree of epistemic distance that makes genuine engagement with others difficult, limits to transactional agency that prohibits users from deciding how they are perceived by others, and the reductive and instrumental nature of interactions embedded in the social features of self-tracking technologies. Moreover, I also analyse some political aspects of community-formation in the context of self-quantification and criticise the ownership structures of data and infrastructure that limit communities’ political agency. (shrink)

The article deals with the social pragmatist approach to the political conception of community, especially in light of the challenges posed by the tendency to view democracy without community and blur the problem and boundaries between conflict and reconciliation. KEY WORDS – Community. Conflict. Democracy. Pragmatism. Reconciliation.

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that an essential part of our obligation as teachers and scholars of philosophy is to insist that the ultimate point of criticism is to foster the development of increasingly better explanations of natural and social phenomena. Doing so, moreover, requires that we cultivate in ourselves and our students a sense of gratitude for the very possibility of human flourishing and scientific advance. I illustrate these claims by showing how Dewey's analysis in Human Nature and (...) Conduct is the sine qua non of a good explanation. (shrink)

classical pragmatism, particularly the work of John Dewey, has been foundational to the development of design as a discipline, although rarely directly acknowledged within the literature on design. Recognizing the ways in which the dominant design paradigm reproduces coloniality and modernity, I argue that going back to design’s roots in pragmatism can aid in building a more embodied, situated, and pluralistic design practice. In an attempt to counter the epistemic and ontological injustices perpetuated by design, I support the effort of (...) redesigning design by drawing on pragmatist thinking to present alternative design practices aimed at building reflexivity. In doing so, I bring... (shrink)

In my response to the comments of Vincent Colapietro, Charlene Seigfried, and Gail Weiss on Living Across and Through Skins , I explain pragmatist feminism as an ecological ontology that understands bodies and environments as dynamically co-constitutive. I then discuss the relationship of pragmatist feminism to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Nietzschean genealogy, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Some of the specific concepts I examine include the anonymous body, the bodying organism, truth as transactional flourishing, and the preservation of racial and ethnic categories.

Although political values guide people who take advice from standpoint epistemolo-gies in deciding whether to reveal secrets used to resist oppression, these decisions can also be understood and evaluated in purely cognitive or epistemological terms. When political considerations direct us to preserve a secret, the cognitive value progressively diminishes because the view of the world projected by the secret is increasingly vulnerable.

Literary education exposes students to unpredictable critical moments in their encounters with a text. Drawing on Dewey’s transactional realism and actor-network theory, this theoretical and conceptual study explores the performativity of things and materials as they shape reading and teaching bodies. This transactional performativity extends beyond the physical positioning of the body to the power relations enacted in text situations. The conceptual rationale is illustrated by a story about a reading chair in a detention home for detained young men—an environment (...) where power issues come to a head. The story illustrates a theoretical discussion of what might be characterized as performing ‘the critical’ in reading and how potentialities for students’ experiences are created in text situations by the different components involved. The purpose of the article is to explore the potentialities of performing critical aspects of reading to challenge, to transform, and to encourage resistance. (shrink)

: In my response to the comments of Vincent Colapietro, Charlene Seigfried, and Gail Weiss on Living Across and Through Skins (Sullivan 2001), I explain pragmatist feminism as an ecological ontology that understands bodies and environments as dynamically co-constitutive. I then discuss the relationship of pragmatist feminism to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Nietzschean genealogy, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Some of the specific concepts I examine include the anonymous body, the bodying organism, truth as transactional flourishing, and the preservation of racial and ethnic (...) categories. (shrink)

Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a “living (...) ethics”, described in this inaugural collective and programmatic paper as an effort to consolidate creative collaboration between a wide array of stakeholders. We engaged in a participatory discussion and collective writing process known as instrumentalist concept analysis. This process included initial local consultations, an exploratory literature review, the constitution of a working group of 21 co-authors, and 8 workshops supporting a collaborative thinking and writing process. First, a living ethics designates a stance attentive to human experience and the role played by morality in human existence. Second, a living ethics represents an ongoing effort to interrogate and scrutinize our moral experiences to facilitate adaptation of people and contexts. It promotes the active and inclusive engagement of both individuals and communities in envisioning and enacting scenarios which correspond to their flourishing as authentic ethical agents. Living ethics encourages meaningful participation of stakeholders because moral questions touch deeply upon who we are and who we want to be. We explain various aspects of a living ethics stance, including its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as some barriers to its enactment based on the reflections resulting from the collaborative thinking and writing process. (shrink)

Recent theoretical and philosophical movements within the study of material culture are more carefully attending to the variety of ways in which human artefacts, institutions, and cultural developments extend, shape and alter human cognition over time. Material Engagement Theory in particular has set out to map, explore and understand the relational nature of mind and material world as can be read through cultural artefacts. Within the context of MET, the neurological concept of metaplasticity has been expanded to include the affective (...) domains of technology, materials, and things in the neurological development and architecture of the plastic human mind; a ‘transactional’ relationship between a plastic mind and a plastic material world that are correlated at the ontological level. The challenges of mapping this metaplasticity of mind lie in understanding how the mind and material culture should be understood in relation to the constantly changing lifeworlds of humans over time; the ecological, social, technological and environmental contexts that form the historical specificity of cognitive development. This paper explores how the historical specificity of metaplasticity can be made tangible through the study of material culture, focusing upon the particular activity of oil painting. It will be argued that paintings can provide clues to the historical specificity of the mind that crosses the lifeworld of human action; the technological, phenomenological, philosophical, material, and social conditions underpinning the creation of a painted mark. Drawing from a range of sources that have a root within a Deleuzian process philosophy, the paper builds an account of painting that can be read as expressing the encultured and historical manipulation of paint as an expressive material in itself; an action rendered visible that express the historical emergence of mind. (shrink)