The dispute about the role of class in understanding the life situations of people of color has tended to be overpolarized, between a class reductionism and an “it's only race” position. Class processes shape racial groups’ life situations. Race and class are also distinct axes of injustice; but class injustice informs racial injustice. Some aspects of racial injustice can be expressed only in concepts associated with class (e.g., material deprivation, inferior education). But other aspects of racial injustice or other (...) harms, such as racial discrimination or stigma, are not reducible to class concepts and cannot be fully addressed through class-focused policies. Overall, any attempt to fully secure racial justice for a racial group will require a combination of race-focused and class-focused policies. Anti-racist outlooks often neglect or downplay either the normative or the explanatory significance of class, or both—for example, by overlooking or downplaying the dignitary harms of class and the material harms of race; missing the historical dimension of class injustice; masking class by a narrowing of the complex normative structure of racial disparities; or not recognizing that a class-focused initiative (like raising the minimum wage) can address substantial racial justice concerns, even though not all of them. “Systemic racism” terminology recognizes class explanatorily but suppresses it normatively. Charles Mills's influential notion of “white supremacy,” while a powerful tool for conceptualizing and illuminating racial injustice, can also contribute to minimizing or masking the justice-related impact of class, as do some of Mills's specific discussions of class in various writings. (shrink)

Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In this book, philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how Kant, (...) from his social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology. As a scholar, Kant developed a ground-breaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature or Naturforscher. As an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued those descriptions with normative relevance. In both roles, he left behind, as one of his legacies, a worldview that excluded non-whites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements. Scholars who research and teach Kant's philosophy therefore have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship. And they must do so with a pragmatic attention to nonideal social realities and a deliberate orientation toward substantial racial justice, equality, and inclusion. Lu-Adler pushes the discourse about Kant and racism well beyond the old debates about whether he was racist or whether his racism contaminates his philosophy. By foregrounding the lasting legacies of Kant's raciology, her work calls for a profound reorientation of Kant scholarship. (shrink)

Alison Bailey’s The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance examines how whiteness misshapes our humanity, measuring the weight of whiteness in terms of its costs and losses to collective humanity. People of color feel the weight of whiteness daily. The resistant habits of whiteness and its attendant privileges, however, make it difficult for white people to feel the damage. White people are more comfortable thinking about white supremacy in terms of what privilege does for them, (...) rather than feeling what it does to them. The first half of the book focuses on the overexposed side of white privilege, the side that works to make the invisible and intangible structures of power more visible and tangible. Bailey discusses the importance of understanding privileges intersectionally, the ignorance-preserving habits of “white talk,” and how privilege and ignorance circulate in educational settings. The second part invites white readers to explore the underexposed side of white dominance, the weightless side that they would rather not feel. The final chapters are powerfully autobiographical. Bailey engages readers with a deeply personal account of what it means to hold space with the painful weight of whiteness in her own life. She also offers a moving account of medicinal genealogies, which helps to engage the weight she inherits from her settler colonial ancestors. The book illustrates how the gravitational pull of white ignorance and comfort are stronger than the clean pain required for collective liberation. The stakes are high: Failure to hold the weight of whiteness ensures that white people will continue to blow the weight of historical trauma through communities of color. -/- All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. -/- -/- . (shrink)

Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship (Stratton, 2016) is much more than a history book about American education. It is a critical work that provides philosophical undertones that challenge our perception about the imperial roles of the U.S. school system. Stratton very clearly and meticulously presents the intricate relationship between history, civics, and geography within school curricula and textbooks. He shows us how these subjects have been manipulated by those in power to (...) promote a hidden agenda. One that instills national pride, American loyalty, and patriotism, and is designed to turn students into supporters of U.S. imperialism and of their racial and class hierarchies. An example of this is Stratton’s own examination of the content of books like, Complete Geography written in 1899. Stratton claims this text was widely used in American public schools and it explicitly states that, “the Caucasian or white race is most intelligent and most powerful of all races.” Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship helps us understand why it has taken so much time for people of color, like me, to occupy academic spaces and to begin the dismantling of oppressive governmental and pedagogical systems that have intentionally kept us from having a dignified education. (shrink)

Amongst the many social factors that impact upon children, race is arguably one of the largest. Race is an ever-present social category that governs many elements of a child’s interaction with others, and especially for racial minority children it exerts a deep influence on their understanding of themselves. In this chapter, we shall begin by examining what the concept of race really amounts to, emphasizing its status as a socially constructed concept, before examining in the following section how children first (...) come to recognize the existence of race, and to understand their own racial identity.We will then look at two important areas that illustrate the profound impact that the social presence of race and the child’s developing understanding of racial identity have upon the social conditions of many children. First, we will examine how race and childhood intersect in matters of educational opportunity and achievement, before moving on to examine the issue of transracial adoption in the final section. (shrink)

Who is recognised as a philosopher and what counts as philosophy influence both the content of a philosophical education and academic philosophy’s continuing demographic skew. The “philosophical who” and the “philosophical what” themselves are a partial function of matters that have been passed over in collective silence, even if that now feels to some like a silence belonging to the distant past. This paper discusses some philosophical silences regarding race, gender, and disability in the context of reflection on philosophical (...) education and on philosophical practice in the public sphere. It focuses on Charles Mills’ writings on race, Susan Babbitt’s on race and gender, and on more collaboratively-generated work on eugenics and disability. (shrink)

The emergence of Critical Race Theory marked an important point in the history of racial politics in the legal academy and the broader conversation about race and racism in the United States. More recently, CRT has proven an important analytic tool in the field of education, offering critical perspectives on race, and the causes, consequences and manifestations of race, racism, inequity, and the dynamics of power and privilege in schooling. This groundbreaking anthology is the first to pull together both (...) the foundational writings in the field and more recent scholarship on the cultural and racial politics of schooling. A comprehensive introduction provides an overview of the history and tenets of CRT in education. Each section then seeks to explicate ideological contestation of race in education and to create new, alternative accounts. In so doing, this landmark publication not only documents the progress to date of the CRT movement, it acts to further spur developments in education. (shrink)

Kant begins his Lectures on Pedagogy by stating, “[t]he human being is the only creature that must be educated” (Kant, 2007, 9:441), and he argues that it is through education that we can transform our initial “animal nature into human nature” (ibid. 2007, 9:441). Kant understands education as involving an ordered process of care, discipline, instruction and formation through enculturating, civilizing and moralizing (Formosa 2011). Further, Kant envisages that we should pursue as a species the “moral perfection” that (...) is the “final destiny of the human race” through education (Collins, 1997, 27:470; see Dean, 2014). However, to engage in this pursuit Kant believes that, through education and social change, we have to regulate our “animal nature” and counter the moral corruption of our species, which he calls the “radical innate evil in human nature (not any the less brought upon us by ourselves)” (Kant, 1998, 6:32). If humanity is to pursue its final destiny of moral perfection, then education will need to respond responsibly to the propensity to evil that is deeply rooted in us as finite and imperfect rational beings living in imperfect and at times even in morally corrupted social conditions. This paper outlines some of the relevant issues. (shrink)

This paper asks whether prisoners should have access to Pell Grants, for which they are currently ineligible. In the first section, the author considers philosophical arguments relating to the present ban by examining traditional concerns of deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. The second section explores two arguments against a more inclusive Pell Grant policy. In the third section the author argues that restoring higher education grants to prisoners is compelling, especially when one considers issues of race and class. The paper (...) concludes by using Erich Fromm’s social theory to call into question the justice, ethics, and rationality of those societies that normalize mass incarceration. (shrink)

School boosters are tax-exempt organizations that engage in fundraising efforts to provide public schools with supplementary resources. This paper argues that prevailing forms of school boosting are defeasibly unjust. Section 1 shows that inequalities in public education funding in the United States violate John Rawls’s two principles of domestic justice. Section 2 argues that prevailing forms of school boosting exacerbate and plausibly perpetuate these injustices. Section 3 then contends that boosting thereby defeasibly violates Rawlsian principles of nonideal theory for (...) rectifying injustice. Thus, boosting should be presumptively either made illegal or substantially reformed. Finally, Section 4 responds to potential objections. (shrink)

Amalia Holst (1758-1829) has had a rather conflicted reception within the history of feminism. Her Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung (On the Vocation of Woman to the Higher Education of the Mind, 1802) is a strident defense of women’s right of access to education; however her case relies on the presuppostion of woman's traditional threefold role as "mother, spouse, and housewife." In this essay, in addition to disclosing new details about Holst's life, I contend that (...) a closer reading of her text reveals a rather more radical project motivating her discussion, and that this helps alleviate concerns about her alleged unoriginality, conservatism, and elitism. (shrink)

While those who take a "structuralist" approach to racial justice issues are right to call attention to the importance of social practices, laws, etc., they sometimes go too far by suggesting that antiracist efforts ought to focus on changing unjust social systems rather than changing individuals’ minds. We argue that while the “either/or” thinking implied by this framing is intuitive and pervasive, it is misleading and self-undermining. We instead advocate for a “both/and” approach to antiracist moral education that explicitly (...) teaches how social structures influence ideas about race and how ideas about race shape, sustain, and transform social structures. Ideally, antiracist moral education will help people see how social change and moral progress depend on the symbiotic relations between individuals and structures. We articulate a conception of “structure-facing virtue” that exemplifies this hybrid approach to illuminate the pivotal role moral education plays in the fight for racial justice. (shrink)

Race is one of the most common variables in the social sciences, used to draw correlations between racial groups and numerous other important variables such as education, healthcare outcomes, aptitude tests, wealth, employment and so forth. But where concern with race once reflected the view that races were biologically real, many, if not most, contemporary social scientists have abandoned the idea that racial categories demarcate substantial, intrinsic biological differences between people. This, in turn, raises an important question about the (...) significance of race in those social sciences: if there is no biological basis of race, why are racial categories useful to social scientists? More specifically, in virtue of what are racial categories a successful basis of informative, important social scientific generalizations? 2 We’ll call this social science’s race puzzle. (shrink)

How should we explore the relationship between race and educational opportunity? One approach to the Black-White achievement gap explores how race and class cause disparities in access and opportunity. In this paper, I consider how education contributes to the creation of race. Considering examples of classroom micropolitics, I argue that breakdowns of trust and trustworthiness between teachers and students can cause substantial disadvantages and, in the contemporary United States, this happens along racial lines. Some of the disadvantages are academic: (...) high achievement is more difficult when one faces mistrust, ego depletion, effort pessimism, and insult. And within a knowledge economy, exclusion from knowledge work makes one vulnerable to injustice. But the problem goes deeper than achievement, for schools are contexts in which we develop self-understandings and identities that situate us as members of society. If students of color are systematically denied full participation in trusting conversations that create shared knowledge—especially, knowledge that holds power within the dominant culture—they are unjustly deprived resources to form flourishing selves that are suited to the positions of power and authority. The argument suggests that knowledge is not best understood simply as a commodity to be distributed, and opportunity is not just a matter of access. Moreover, even if access is granted, those who are motivated and talented can fail: they drain their willpower by coping with insults, or reasonably lose optimism about their efficacy. Over time, motivation may shift away from achievement, and under the circumstances this can be a rational response. The barriers to achievement are many, but true opportunity is impossible without trust and trustworthiness. (shrink)

In the second half of the nineteenth century, many Latin American intellectuals adapted the philosophy of positivism to address the pressing problems of nation-building and respond to the demands of their own social and political contexts, making positivism the second most influential tradition in the history of Latin American philosophy, after scholasticism. Since a comprehensive survey of positivism’s role across Latin American and Latinx philosophy would require multiple books, this chapter presents the history of positivism and its transformations in Mexican (...) and Chicanx philosophies, proceeding chronologically and focusing on these representative thinkers: Auguste Comte (1798-1857), Gabino Barreda (1818-1881), Justo Sierra (1848-1912), José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), Antonio Caso (1883-1946), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004). We pay special attention to how positivism was used to build the Mexican nation and reconstruct Mexican identity through education, creating philosophical debates about the relationships among science, religion, morality, education, race, economic progress, and national development. These debates continue to resonate as we think critically about the respective roles of scientific education—then called “positive” education, now “STEM” education—and moral education in the curricula used to educate a country’s youth while reconstructing their ethnoracial and national identities. (shrink)

The Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954 mandated school integration. The decision also to recognize that inequalities outside the schools, of both a class- and race-based nature, prevent equality in education. Today, the most prominent argument for integration is that disadvantaged students benefit from the financial, social, and cultural “capital” of middle class families when the children attend the same schools. This argument fails to recognize that disadvantaged students contribute to advantaged students’ educational growth, and sends (...) demeaning messages to the disadvantaged students and messages of unwarranted superiority to the advantaged. Parents, teachers, and schools can adopt a justice perspective that avoids these deleterious aspects of the capital argument, and helps create a community of equals inside the integrated school. Struggles for educational justice must remain closely linked with struggles of both a class- and race-based nature for other forms of justice in the wider society. (shrink)

The poem is about my PhD experience. The title and parts of the themes are derived from an incident in the Bible (Acts 19:13-20). In order to provide a deeper meaning to my story, I have deployed a biblical allusion which connects with the story of the sons of Sceva, who made unsuccessful attempts to exorcise a man from Ephesus. They failed primarily because they operated not in the spirit but in the flesh.

Higher Education has been considered as a site of knowledge, and it is a place, where one can pursue it. But, the distribution of knowledge and acquiring knowledge is controlled by various factors. For example, caste, class, language, region, religion, gender, race, etc. The two principal factors, i.e. language and caste, determine one's access and then survival in higher educational institutions. The Hegemony of English language becomes a very problematic for non-English background students in the higher educational classroom in (...) India. The hegemony of one language itself achieves the status of dominant or prestigious. The caste, class and gender also determine who are going to use the English language as a medium of instruction. In the era of modernization and globalization, caste, class and gender dynamic work inherently in the higher education. In this context, this paper gives a broader insight of language and caste-based discrimination, and it's a mechanism in the higher education set-ups. (shrink)

Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic has been of especially great interest to progressive and radical Hegelians—broadly speaking, politically left-leaning interpreters of Hegel who object to certain social hierarchies and demand their abolition. They read Hegel as giving an account of how ‘lordship’ over others is an inherently unstable and unsatisfying social formation, even for its supposed beneficiaries. Marxists, feminists and post-colonial theorists have all found inspiration in Hegel's analysis of the lord and bondsman by applying it to concrete relations of oppression, such (...) as capitalism, patriarchy, or racism. In contrast, recent scholarship on Hegel's views on race and colonialism has cast doubt on whether his systematic political philosophy and philosophy of history can be of similar use to progressives. Hegel was undeniably a Eurocentric thinker, but philosophers like Robert Bernasconi and Alison Stone have convincingly shown that he was also a racist and a defender of colonialism. Crucially, however, few of the scholars who write on Hegel's pro-colonialism have analysed this feature of Hegel's thought in connection with the lord-bondsman dialectic. In this article, I argue for two connected theses. First, I argue that contrary to the hopes of some progressive defenders of Hegel, we cannot easily separate the lord-bondsman dialectic from Hegel's pro-colonialism. This is because Hegel himself appealed to the lord-bondsman dialectic to argue that colonial slavery educated its victims, and could therefore be temporarily justified. Second, I argue that this pro-colonial reading of the dialectic, though largely ignored by contemporary interpreters, was in fact recognized and embraced by a group of Hegelians in North America known as the St Louis Hegelians. They used the lord-bondsman dialectic as a basis for a qualified defence of pre-Civil War American slavery. (shrink)

Background: In the context of globalization, Vietnamese universities, whose primary function is teaching, there is a need to improve research performance. Methods: Based on SSHPA data, an exclusive database of Vietnamese social sciences and humanities researchers’ productivity, between 2008 and 2019 period, this study analyzes the research output of Vietnamese universities in the field of social sciences and humanities. Results: Vietnamese universities have been steadily producing a high volume of publications in the 2008-2019 period, with a peak of 598 articles (...) in 2019. Moreover, many private universities and institutions are also joining the publication race, pushing competitiveness in the country. Conclusions: Solutions to improve both quantity and quality of Vietnamese universities’ research practice in the context of the industrial revolution 4.0 could be applying international criteria in Vietnamese higher education, developing scientific and critical thinking for general and STEM education, and promoting science communication. (shrink)

This study looks into issues facing Indonesian multicultural education and offers solutions based on the worldview of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika. The study tries to clarify how Bhinneka Tunggal Ika’s worldview applies to the nation’s rich history, numerous tribes, nations, races, worldviews, including customs. The worldview is deeply established in the historical background of the Majapahit Kingdom and deeply embedded in Indonesia’s identity as the world’s largest Muslim nation; it can serve as a foundation for promoting religious freedom and building (...) a peaceful, multicultural society for multicultural education. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper the sameness and difference between two distinguished Indian authors, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932) and Mahasweta Devi (b. 1926), representing two generations almost a century apart, will be under analysis in order to trace the generational transformation in women’s writing in India, especially Bengal. Situated in the colonial and postcolonial frames of history, Hossain and Mahasweta Devi may be contextualized differently. At the same time their subjects are also differently categorized; the former is not particularly concerned with subalterns (...) whereas the latter specifically focuses on the effect of race and class on gender. The quest for the ‘self’ and ‘subjectivity’ is more pertinent in the latter and consequently the appeal for agency is based on a crude power struggle. Hossain, a philanthropist who championed the woman question, believed that striving for equality should be a collective process which could be achieved by spreading awareness among fellow-inmates inhabiting the prison of patriarchy. Like Euro-American first-wave feminists, Rokeya advocated the necessity of education among women in order for them to be able to comprehend their plight and ‘awake’ for the cause. She addresses fundamental issues of feminism like education and the systematized claustrophobia within the domestic space. Whereas Mahasweta Devi, has been an activist writer who is regarded as the brand ambassador for the support of the marginalized, deprived and denotified tribes of India. It is her mission to provide succour to the marginalized sections, especially tribes from the Purulia district of West Bengal, like the Kherias and Shabars. As an activist writer she explores tribal life and allied socio-political issues which reflect their agony. (shrink)

Given the growing interest in entrepreneurship education and the quest to provide entrepreneurial skills to all including the youths, the study investigates high school learners’ interest and readiness to start a business in South Africa. A group of high school learners (n=403) from select high schools in Cape Town was purposively sampled using self-administrated questionnaires while personal interviews were held with all Business Studies teachers in the participating schools (n=9). The results of this study indicate that 52% of the (...) learners are interested in starting a business, while 73% of them were from moderate income schools. A chi square test was performed to determine if the race and income level of the school influenced learners’ responses, and we found no statistical significance (P > 0.01). An overwhelming majority of the learners (73%) was of the view that they could start a business with the help of the knowledge and skills gained in the entrepreneurship education received. Suggestions on how to increase high school learners’ entrepreneurial intent and readiness to start a business upon leaving high school include the implementation of frequent learner visits to businesses as well as inviting entrepreneurs to give talks to learners. The goal of any scientific social enquiry such as the one pursued in this study, is to produce knowledge that assists in distilling viewpoints that express accurate necessities for socioeconomic development. Therefore, the practical implications of the study reside in the reinforcement of the need for a curriculum that addresses entrepreneurship education in South African high schools. -/- . (shrink)

So much value is ascribed to human life. This is so because life is generally regarded as a precious gift to humanity, which should be cherished and protected, as failure to cherish and protect life will bring about the inevitable extinction of the entire human race. Abortion is one of the numerous contemporary issues that undermine the sanctity and value of human life; for it involves terminating a pregnancy by removing a fetus or embryo before it can survive independent of (...) the uterus, or killing the fetus inside the uterus. The issue of abortion is highly controversial; for while some individuals permit it, some others condemn it totally, as evident in the 'pro-life' versus 'pro-choice' controversy. 'Pro-life' advocates condemn abortion because it is an outright disrespect for the dignity and value of human life, and hold that there should be sustained discussions on it, to expose its danger and fatal consequences. 'Pro-choice' advocates are simply indifferent to the issue of abortion; for them, getting involved in abortion is a matter of choice for an individual - that is, one is at liberty to accept or reject abortion so that in the final analysis, abortion should not be an issue for discussion. This article explores several arguments and bioethical concerns on abortion, approaches to the issue of abortion, and Nigeria's abortion provisions, which are evident in the Criminal and Penal Codes, respectively. Ultimately, this article recommends that beyond merely stating punishments for those involved in abortion, the following should be done: (a) Correcting the disparity between the Criminal and Penal Codes by ensuring that both Codes have the same penalty stated, or completely reducing them into a single Code that will be applied across the country, (b) Modifying the Criminal and Penal Codes by including information that will serve the purpose of educating Nigerians on the bioethical issues associated with abortion, and (c) Designating a body charged with ensuring compliance with and implementation of the abortion laws. (shrink)

In *Engaging Capital Emotions,* Douglas Berman and Stephanos Bibas argue that emotion is central to understanding and evaluating the death penalty, and that the emotional case for the death penalty for child rape may be even stronger than for adult murder. Both the Berman and Bibas article and the subsequent Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana (striking down the death penalty for child rape) raise difficult questions about how to measure the heinousness of crimes other than murder, and about (...) the role the pain suffered by victims and victims' families should play in this inquiry. In this Reply, I agree with the authors on the importance of confronting emotion's role in capital punishment, for reasons I discuss in Part A. However, I disagree with their claim that the moral outrage evoked by child rape supports making it a capital crime. Part B explores the difficulties of using the existence of moral outrage as a measure of appropriate punishment. Part C argues that the penal system should not merely reflect moral outrage, but channel and educate it. It suggests that the availability of the death penalty may create an anchoring effect, communicating the message that the death penalty is the proper way to express moral outrage and to honor the worth of murder victims. It explores the consequences of this message. Section II focuses on the role of emotion in deciding whether child rape should be a capital crime. Part A considers the problematic role of victim harm in determining whether the death penalty is appropriate. It explores the question, raised in Kennedy v Louisiana, of whether the effect of a capital trial on child rape victims ought to be part of the calculus. Part B argues that there are three particular problems with allowing juries to sentence child rapists to death: the deleterious effect of anger and empathy, the problem of generic prejudice, and the issue of race. (shrink)

his article develops a set of recommendations for the psychiatric and medical community in the treatment of mental disorders in response to the recently published fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that is, DSM-5. We focus primarily on the limitations of the DSM-5 in its individuation of Complicated Grief, which can be diagnosed as Major Depression under its new criteria, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). We argue that the hyponarrativity of the descriptions of these disorders (...) in the DSM-5, defined as the abstraction of the illness categories from the particular life contingencies and personal identity of the patient (e.g., age, race, gender, socio-economic status), constrains the DSM-5's usefulness in the development of psychotherapeutic approaches in the treatment of mental disorders. While the DSM-5 is useful in some scientific and administrative contexts, the DSM's hyponarrativity is problematic, we argue, given that the DSMs are designed to be useful guides for not only scientific research, but also for the education of medical practitioners and for treatment development. our goal therefore is to offer suggestions for mental health practitioners in using the DSM-5, so that they can avoid or eliminate the problems that may stem from the limitations of hyponarrativity. When such problems are eliminated, we believe that effective psychotherapeutic strategies can be developed, which would be successful in repairing the very relationships that are strained in mental disorder: the patient's relationship to herself, her physical environment, and her social environment. (shrink)

Hans Reichenbach was a formidable figure in early-twentieth-century philosophy of science. Educated in Germany, he was influential in establishing the so-called Berlin Circle, a companion group to the Vienna Circle founded by his colleague Rudolph Carnap. The movement they founded—usually known as "logical positivism," although it is more precisely known as "scientific philosophy" or "logical empiricism"—was a form of epistemology that privileged scientific over metaphysical truths. Reichenbach, like other young philosophers of the exact sciences of his generation, was deeply impressed (...) by the far-reaching changes in physics brought about by Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. Reichenbach responded to scientific advances by doing fundamental work in space-time theories, in quantum mechanics, in statistical mechanics, and in the development of probability theory—making him the most important philosopher of physics in the first generation of logical empiricism. Forced from his academic position by the Nazi race laws in 1933, Reichenbach wrote _Experience and Prediction_ at the University of Istanbul, where had had fled, expressly to introduce logical positivism to English speakers. In the two decades following World War II, during the explosion of scientific advances in North America, logical positivism was the reigning theory of the philosophy of science and Reichenbach was at the peak of his career. But, inevitably, support for logical positivism began to wane as it became obvious that the justification of scientific theories could not be entirely resolved by relying on strictly formal, technical processes. The growth of the discipline of the history of philosophy of science, which has created an audience of scholars eager for seminal classics in scientific philosophy, and the evidence supporting a historicist paradigm within logical positivism are two important reasons to make _Experience and Prediction_ available once again. "Hans Reichenbach's_ Experience and Prediction_ is one of the most important books in twentieth-century philosophy of science. Its author was, along with Rudolf Carnap, one of the two principal ambassadors to North America of the exciting new European philosophical movement known here under the names 'Logical Positivism' and 'Scientific Philosophy.' In 1938, when the book was published, Reichenbach was an exile from his native Germany, teaching in Istanbul, Turkey, and about to emigrate to the United States to take up a prestigious position at UCLA. He wrote_ Experience and Prediction_ in English as his calling card to his new American colleagues. More than any other single book,_ Experience and Prediction_ set the agenda for the new discipline of the philosophy of science that was to emerge after World War II as, perhaps, the most exciting new area in North American philosophy. Many of the problems still at the focus of discussion were given their classic formulations in this book. Long out of print,_ Experience and Prediction_ appears here in a new edition accompanied by a splendid historical introduction by the noted young philosopher and historian of the philosophy of science, Alan Richardson. A jewel of a book may once again be appreciated in its proper setting." —Don A. Howard, University of Notre Dame. (shrink)

This dissertation is centrally concerned with exploring obituaries as repositories of values. Obituaries are a publicly-available natural language source that are variably written for members of communities that are wide (nation- level) and narrow (city-level, or at the level of specific groups therein). Because they are explicitly summative, limited in size, and written for consumption by a public audience, obituaries may be expected to express concisely the aspects of their subjects’ lives that the authors (often family members living in the (...) same communities) found most salient or worthy of featuring. 140,599 obituaries nested in 832 newspapers from across the USA were scraped with permission from Legacy.com, an obituaries publisher. Obituaries were coded for the age at death and gender (female/male) of the deceased using automated algorithms. For each publishing newspaper, county-level median income, educational achievement (operationalized as percent of the population with a Bachelor’s degree or higher), and race and ethnicity were averaged across counties, weighting by population size. A Neo4J graph database was constructed using WordNet and the University of South Florida Free Association Norms datasets. Each word in each obituary inthe corpus was lemmatized. The shortest path through the WordNet graph from each lemma to 30 Schwartz value prototype words published by Bardi, Calogero, and Mullen (2008) was then recorded. From these path lengths, a new measure, “word-by-hop,” was calculated for each Schwartz value to reflect the relative lexical distance between each obituary and that Schwartz value. Of the Schwartz values, Power, Conformity, and Security were most indicated in the corpus, while Universalism, Hedonism, and Stimulation were least indicated. A series of seven two-level regression models suggested that, across Schwartz values, newspaper community accounted for the greatest amount of word-by-hop variability in the corpus. The best-fitting model indicated a small, negative effect of female status across Schwartz values. Unexpectedly, Hedonism and Conformity, which had conceptually opposite prototype words, were highly correlated, possibly indicating that obituary authors “compensate” for describing the deceased in a hedonistic way by concurrently emphasizing restraint. Future research could usefully further expand word-by-hop and incorporate individual-level covariates that match the newspaper-level covariates used here. (shrink)

The issue of the relation of the sacred to the secular has become paramount in virtually every country in the world. From church-state relations in the US, with the debates around abortion and same-sex marriage, to the vitriolic discussions in France over the veil (hijab) sacred-secular, faith-reason, transcendence-imminence -- impacts every aspect of personal, social, and political life. Indeed, the questions often asked are whether Huntington s, Clash of Civilizations is today s reality? Is clash and conflict inevitable? This volume (...) collects papers from scholars from all around the globe and digs into that question. Do the sacred and the secular necessarily end in conflict? Building on scholars such as Charles Taylor, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermaus, and John Rawls, as well as the world s great religious traditions, the authors assembled here respond with a nuanced, but resounding, NO. A deeper read demands the possibility, indeed, necessity, of complementarity. It has become ever more urgent to discover the proper and complementary relation between the two so that both can be promoted through mutual collaboration. The deeper implications of the discussion can be perceived in many current global problems: cultural identity, multiculturalism, pluralism, nationalism, economic inequality, race, terrorism, migration, public education, and climate change. The volume unfolds in seven sections: Foundations; Sacred and Secular; Complement or Conflict; Hermeneutics; African traditions; South Asian Traditions; Chinese Traditions; and Islamic Traditions. It is fascinating to observe how the various authors grapple with unfolding the relation of sacred/secular, faith/reason, church-mosque/state, transcendence/imminence. The section on Islam illustrates this. These chapters deal with the thorny, usually misunderstood debate between the scholars and those, westerners refer to as fundamentalists or radicals. In the latter, there is no space left to reason, interpretation, or historical criticism. This ugly divide usually emerges in the hot-button issues like the treatment of women and religion-related terrorism. However, these oversimplifications betray the intellectual roots of Islamic tradition. Here the argument is advanced that there are common and multiple meanings of rationality in the Islamic primary sources and that doctrine, the Qur an, and the Sunnah, open considerable space for the rational and the secular in Islamic teachings. Unknown to most in the West, the grappling within Islam goes on. Moreover, the grappling seems to be heating up in all traditions. We are all called to the discussion. Our globe needs it! (shrink)

abstract: Richard T. Greener was the first Black graduate of Harvard College in 1870, and he served briefly as a professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina from 1873 to 1877. Historians and biographers have uncovered many of the facts of his unusual life, but to date his philosophy has remained unappreciated. This essay reconstructs his philosophy from published and archival sources, evaluating it in relationship to the work of his better-known mentor, Frederick Douglass. I argue that Greener’s (...) account of Reconstruction politics, especially his arguments on land redistribution, race, and Black intellectual history, possess notable advantages over Douglass’s views. Of particular importance is that he defended a more robust republican state than did his hero, while rejecting the originalism and constitutionalism that characterize Douglass’s liberalism. (shrink)

We live with the legacy of injustice, political as well as personal. Even if our governments are now democratically elected and governed, our societies are scarred by forms of power and privilege accrued from a time in which people’s race, sex, class and religion were grounds for denying them a role in government, or in the selection of those who governed them. What does that past imply for the treatment of religion in democratic states? The problem is particularly pressing once (...) one accepts that religious freedom is not just a matter of individuals’ freedom of conscience and worship, but of people’s claims to associate with others through institutions whose powers, status and commitment to equality are very different (Laborde, 2015). If this means that churches pose some of the same philosophical and practical problems as families, from a democratic perspective, the fact that churches have no obvious point or justification, beyond being the repository of the claims to conscience of their members, appears to distinguish them from the former. In principle, this should make it easier to think about the claims of government, as compared to those of churches. In practice, however, it may simply bring into sharper focus philosophical and political challenges to equality that contemporary democracies now face. (shrink)

A crucial socio-political challenge for our age is how to rede!ne or extend group membership in such a way that it adequately responds to phenomena related to globalization like the prevalence of migration, the transformation of family and social networks, and changes in the position of the nation state. Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant assumed that international connectedness between humans would inevitably lead to the realization of world citizen rights. Nonetheless, globalization does not just foster cosmopolitanism but simultaneously yields the (...) development of new group boundaries. Group membership is indeed a fundamental issue in political processes, for: “the primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community” – it is within the political community that power is being shared and, if possible, held back from non-members. In sum, it is appropriate to consider group membership a fundamental ingredient of politics and political theory. How group boundaries are drawn is then of only secondary importance. Indeed, Schmitt famously declared that “[e]very religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is suffciently strong to group human beings e#ectively according to friend and enemy”. Even though Schmitt’s idea of politics as being constituted by such antithetical groupings is debatable, it is plausible to consider politics among other things as a way of handling intergroup di#erences. Obviously, some of the group-constituting factors are more easily discernable from one’s appearance than others, like race, ethnicity, or gender. As a result, factors like skin color or sexual orientation sometimes carry much political weight even though individuals would rather con!ne these to their private lives and individual identity. Given the potential tension between the political reality of particular groupmembership defnitions and the – individual and political – struggles against those definitions and corresponding attitudes, citizenship and civic behavior becomes a complex issue. As Kymlicka points out, it implies for citizens an additional obligation to non-discrimination regarding those groups: “[t]his extension of non-discrimination from government to civil society is not just a shift in the scale of liberal norms, it also involves a radical extension in the obligations of liberal citizenship”. Unfortunately, empirical research suggests that political intolerance towards other groups “may be the more natural and ‘easy’ position to hold”. Indeed, since development of a virtue of civility or decency regarding other groups is not easy, as it often runs against deeply engrained stereotypes and prejudices, political care for matters like education is justified. Separate schools, for example, may erode children’s motivation to act as citizens, erode their capacity for it and!nally diminish their opportunities to experience transcending their particular group membership and behave as decent citizens. This chapter outlines a possible explanation for such consequences. That explanation will be found to be interdisciplinary in nature, combining insights from political theory and cognitive neuroscience. In doing so, it does not focus on collective action, even though that is a usual focus for political studies. For example, results pertaining to collective political action have demonstrated that the relation between attitudes and overt voting behavior or political participation is not as direct and strong as was hoped for. Several conditions, including the individual’s experiences, self-interest, and relevant social norms, turned out to interfere in the link between his or her attitude and behavior. Important as collective action is, this chapter is concerned with direct interaction between agents and the in$uence of group membership on such interaction – in particular joint action. Although politics does include many forms of action that require no such physical interaction, such physical interaction between individuals remains fundamental to politics – this is the reason why separate schooling may eventually undermine the citizenship of its isolated pupils. This chapter will focus on joint action, de!ned as: “any form of social interaction whereby two or more individuals coordinate their actions in space and time to bring about a change in the environment”. Cognitive neuroscienti!c evidence demonstrates that for such joint action to succeed, the agents have to integrate the actions and expected actions of the other person in their own action plans at several levels of speci!city. Although neuroscienti!c research is necessarily limited to simple forms of action, this concurs with a philosophical analysis of joint action, which I will discuss below. (shrink)

Digital humanities research has developed haphazardly, with substantive contributions in some disciplines and only superficial uses in others. It has made almost no inroads in philosophy; for example, of the nearly two million articles, chapters, and books housed at philpapers.org, only sixteen pop up when one searches for ‘digital humanities’. In order to make progress in this field, we demonstrate that a hypothesis-driven method, applied by experts in data-collection, -aggregation, -analysis, and -visualization, yields philosophical fruits. “Call no one happy until (...) they are dead.” “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” These ancient norms still inform how we speak of the dead. From their beginnings in the nineteenth century, modern obituaries have been both practical and honorary. They are written with two aims: to pay respect to the deceased and to inspire the living to follow in their footsteps. The obituary of William Custis of Virginia exemplifies these aims, say that “it is due to his memory publicly to record his virtues,” and that “There is in the life a noble, independent and honest man, something so worthy of imitation, something that so strongly commends itself to the approbation of the virtuous mind, that his name should not be left to oblivion” (Daily National Intelligencer, 18 November 1838). Likewise, philosophers have emphasized that we can determine what counts as a virtue for a given type of person in a given community by analyzing what people say about the dead (Zagzebski, L. Virtues of the Mind. Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 135). By adhering to norms of praise, admiration, and respect, obituaries reveal what counts as a virtue, value, or constituent of wellbeing (VVC) for a particular type of person in a particular community. -/- One way to explore this insight would be to close-read a small number of obituaries of people from intersecting demographics, crossing dimensions such as gender, age, race, class, educational attainment, veteran status, religion, and location. Another, which we demonstrate in this chapter, is to harness digital humanities resources to distance-read a much larger number of obituaries, extracting both demographic meta-data and first-order content expressive of VVC. We then analyze and visualize this information to establish the structures of VVC associated with different types of people in different communities, arguing that data-science measures such as eigenvector centrality can be used to identify cardinal virtues. We also explain the rudiments of our text- and meta-data mining, our method of aggregating and comparing texts, and our visualization techniques. In so doing, we pave the way for researchers in philosophy and related fields to generate similar analyses and visualizations. (shrink)

In the Panathenaic Games, there was a torch race for teams of ephebes that started from the altars of Eros and Prometheus at Plato’s Academy and finished on the Acropolis at the altar of Athena, goddess of wisdom. It was competitive, yes, but it was also sacred, aimed at a noble goal. To win, you needed to cooperate with your teammates and keep the delicate flame alive as you ran up the hill. Likewise, Plato’s philosophy combines competition and cooperation in (...) pursuit of the goal of wisdom. On one level, agonism in Plato is explicit: he taught in a gymnasium and featured gymnastic training in his educational theory. On another level, it is mimetic: Socratic dialogue resembles intellectual wrestling. On a third level, it is metaphorical: the athlete’s struggle illustrates the struggle to be morally good. And at its highest level, it is divine: the human soul is a chariot that races toward heaven. This volume explores agonism in Plato on all of these levels, inviting the reader—as Plato does—to engage in the megas agōn of life. Once in the contest, as Plato’s Socrates says, we’re allowed no excuses. (shrink)

This essay presents racial literacy and racial dexterity as educational desiderata, especially for white students. Racial literacy is defined as the ability to recognize and interpret racial nuances in real social engagements. Racial dexterity is defined as the ability to engage successfully with diverse racial contexts. After defining racial literacy and racial dexterity, Kevin Harrelson analyzes these skills by contrasting them with racial naivety and racial anxiety. He argues that transitioning from naivety to literacy, and from anxiety to dexterity, requires (...) treating cross-racial interactions as key learning events. (shrink)

With the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, John Rawls not only rejuvenated contemporary political philosophy but also defended a Kantian form of Enlightenment liberalism called “justice as fairness.” Enlightenment liberalism stresses the development and exercise of our capacity for autonomy, while Reformation liberalism emphasizes diversity and the toleration that encourages it. These two strands of liberalism are often mutually supporting, but they conflict in a surprising number of cases, whether over the accommodation of group difference, the design (...) of civic education, or the promotion of liberal values internationally. During the 1980’s, however, Rawls began to jettison key Kantian characteristics of his theory, a process culminating in the 1993 release of Political Liberalism and completing the transformation of justice as fairness into a Reformation liberalism. -/- Reconstructing Rawls argues that this transformation was a tragic mistake because it jeopardized the most important features of his theory, viz. the lexical priorities of right, liberty, and fair equality of opportunity as well as the difference principle. Controversially, this book contends that Rawls’s so-called “political turn,” motivated by a newfound interest in diversity and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has pushed liberalism more broadly towards cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. The book then demonstrates that the central elements of justice as fairness can only be defended within the context of a Kantian Enlightenment liberalism and that Rawls’s hope for a more pluralistic grounding for his theory, endorsed by a wide variety of belief systems present in modern democratic societies, is illusory. -/- Reconstructing Rawls is the first book to systematically compare Rawls’s and Kant’s theories and the first to offer an internal critique and reconstruction of justice as fairness, reconceiving it as a comprehensive, universalistic Kantian liberalism. By doing so, it gives us both the vision of a liberal world order—“a republicanism of all states, together and separately,” as Kant put it—and a mode of justification addressed to all men and women, not as members of particular nations, races, and faiths, but as human beings, as citizens of the world. In short, it reclaims Rawls for the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Legal theorists seek to persuade other jurists of certain theories: Textualism or purposivism; formalism or realism; natural law theory or positivism; prison reform or abolition; universal or particular human rights? Despite voluminous literature about these debates, tremendous uncertainty remains about which views experts endorse. This Article presents the first-ever empirical study of American law professors about legal theory questions. A novel dataset of over six hundred law professors reveals expert consensus and dissensus about dozens of longstanding legal theory debates. -/- (...) Law professors also debate questions about the nature of the legal academy. Descriptively, which subjects (e.g. constitutional law) and methods (e.g. law & economics) are most central within the legal academy today? And prescriptively, should today’s legal academy prioritize additional areas (e.g. legislation) or methods (e.g. critical race theory)? There is great interest in these questions but no empirical dataset of experts’ views; this results in uncertainty about which views experts endorse. This Article’s empirical study also clarifies these questions, documenting law professors’ evaluation of over one-hundred areas of law. -/- The legal theory and legal academy findings support implications for legal scholarship, education, and practice. Clearly, debates about law and the legal academy’s evolution should not be settled by a survey. Nevertheless, insofar as law professors are experts about these issues, it is instructive to discover and carefully examine what views those experts hold, so as to help determine which views are most likely to be true and how the legal academy ought to develop. (shrink)

As civil liberties are shredded and powerful corporate and political force engage in a range of legal illegalities, the state itself becomes a model for corruption and violence. Violence has become not only the foundation of corporate sovereignty, it has also become the ideological scaffolding of common sense. Under casino capitalism, the state has become the enemy of justice and offers a prototype for types of misguided rebellion that mimic the lawlessness enshrined by corporate sovereignty and the repressive state apparatuses. (...) Under such circumstances, the force of action does not reside in deliberation, compassion, justice, equality and freedom. The state of exception has become the rule serving to legitimate illegality and normalizing violence and force as the only mediating dynamic worth utilizing to solve problems. In addition, subjectivity itself has become both hyper-masculinized, transformed, and subordinated to the celebration of an aggressive, violent and hyper-competitive war machine. Evidence of the hardening of the culture and the ongoing visibility of a pathological form of hyper-masculinity abounds in polices that amount to a permanent war on the poor, women, immigrants, workers, public servants, Muslims, poor minorities and those adults marginalized by class and race. Casino capitalism's paranoiac and increasingly repressive institutional and ideological apparatuses live in fear of dissent, critical rationality and the possibility of collective struggles moved by the desire for justice and a radical democracy. This is precisely where questions about education and resistance connect to broader debates about producing critical agents capable of acting as engaged and responsible citizens in a substantive democracy. Neoliberalism, as a dominant ideology, changed not only ways of thinking, but, consequently, practices. Evidently, a process of transformation like the one imposed by the hegemony of neoliberal ideology does not take place without resistance-conscious or not-and here it is the role of the State (and its ideological apparatus) in the subjection of individuals. For Fisher, there is no element that shows that the public actually embraced neoliberal doctrines with enthusiasm. For Mark Fisher, capitalist realism is \\\"an expression of class decomposition, and a consequence of class disintegration\\\". The phenomenon resulting from this discontent that finds few ways to express itself that are not individual is named by Mark Fisher as the \\\"privatization of stress\\\", which easily converts into depression and other psychological suffering. Although both its neoliberal and neoconservative components are opposed to bureaucracy in favour of privatised decentralisation, in practice capitalist realism involves the normalisation of bureaucracy and the creation of additional and unnecessary labour. Although pyramidal hierarchies are flattened, the increase and establishment of constant communication through technology has led to people at the same level surveilling each other. (shrink)

John Dewey was the foremost figure and public intellectual in early to mid-twentieth century American philosophy. He is the most academically cited Anglophone philosopher of the past century, and he is among the most cited Americans of any century. In this comprehensive volume spanning thirty-five chapters, leading scholars help researchers access particular aspects of Dewey’s thought, navigate the enormous and rapidly developing literature, and participate in current scholarship in light of prospects in key topical areas. Beginning with a framing essay (...) by Philip Kitcher calling for a transformation of philosophical research, contributors interpret, appraise, and critique Dewey’s philosophy under the following headings: Metaphysics; Epistemology, Science, Language, and Mind; Ethics, Law, and the Starting Point; Social and Political Philosophy, Race, and Feminist Philosophy; Philosophy of Education; Aesthetics; Instrumental Logic, Philosophy of Technology, and the Unfinished Project of Modernity; Dewey in Cross-Cultural Dialogue; The American Philosophical Tradition, the Social Sciences, and Religion; and Public Philosophy and Practical Ethics. (shrink)

It is no accident that white privilege designed to be both be invisible and weightless to white people. Alison Bailey’s “On White Privilege and Anesthesia: Why Does Peggy McIntosh’s Knapsack Feel Weightless?” extends a weighty invitation white readers to complete the unpacking task McIntosh (1988) began when she compared white privilege to an “invisible and weightless knapsack.” McIntosh focuses primarily making white privilege visible to white people. Bailey’s project continues the conversation by extending a ‘weighty invitation’ to white readers to (...) explore why the metaphorical knapsack, despite the weight of its contents, feels weightless. Here’s the short answer. The knapsack only feels weightless because white people have become anesthetized us to our own brokenness. We are more comfortable considering what white privilege does for us than what it does to us. People of color feel the weight of whiteness every day. The weighty invitation invites white readers to become sensitive to our own insensitivity. To do this Bailey (1) explores white resistance to unpacking the weight; (2) people of color’s testimonies to the daily impact of the weight on their bodies; and (3) how the anesthesia of white privilege distorts our humanity. The article concludes with a McIntosh style list of that the anesthesia of privilege distorts white people’s humanity. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Dewey, ed. Steven Fesmire Volume Abstract: John Dewey was the foremost figure and public intellectual in early to mid-twentieth century American philosophy. He is the most academically cited Anglophone philosopher of the past century, and he is among the most cited Americans of any century. In this comprehensive volume spanning thirty-five chapters, leading scholars help researchers access particular aspects of Dewey’s thought, navigate the enormous and rapidly developing literature, and participate in current scholarship in light of (...) prospects in key topical areas. Beginning with a framing essay by Philip Kitcher calling for a transformation of philosophical research, contributors interpret, appraise, and critique Dewey’s philosophy under the following headings: Metaphysics; Epistemology, Science, Language, and Mind; Ethics, Law, and the Starting Point; Social and Political Philosophy, Race, and Feminist Philosophy; Philosophy of Education; Aesthetics; Instrumental Logic, Philosophy of Technology, and the Unfinished Project of Modernity; Dewey in Cross-Cultural Dialogue; The American Philosophical Tradition, the Social Sciences, and Religion; and Public Philosophy and Practical Ethics. [The downloadable sample is Fesmire's Introduction to the volume.]. (shrink)

As it became clear that Donald Trump had a real base of political support, even as analysts consistently underestimated his electoral prospects, they grew increasingly fascinated with the question of who was supporting him (and why). However, researchers also tend to hold strong negative opinions about Trump. Consequently, they have approached this research with uncharitable priors about the kind of person who would support him and what they would be motivated by. Research design and data analysis often seem to be (...) oriented towards reinforcing those assumptions. This essay highlights the epistemological consequences of these tendencies through a series of case studies featuring prominent and influential works that purport to explain the role of race and racism in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It demonstrates that quality control systems, which should catch major errors, seem to be failing in systematic ways as a result of shared priors and commitments between authors, reviewers and editors – which are also held in common with the journalists and scholars citing and amplifying this work – leading to misinformation cascades. Of course, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, prejudicial study design, and failure to address confounds are not limited to questions about Trump – however they seem to be particularly pronounced in this case due to the relative homogeneity and intensity of scholars’ views about this topic as compared to other social phenomena. “Trump studies,” therefore, provides fertile ground for exploring how social research can go awry – and the consequences of these failures -- particularly with respect to work on contentious and politically-charged topics. (shrink)

This chapter has two main goals: to update philosophers on the state of the art in the scientific psychology of intelligence, and to explain and evaluate challenges to the measurement invariance of intelligence tests. First, we provide a brief history of the scientific psychology of intelligence. Next, we discuss the metaphysics of intelligence in light of scientific studies in psychology and neuroimaging. Finally, we turn to recent skeptical developments related to measurement invariance. These have largely focused on attributability: Where do (...) the mechanisms and dispositions that explain people’s performance on tests of intelligence inhere – in the agent, in the local testing environment, in the culture, or in the interactions among these? After explaining what measurement invariance is in the context of intelligence testing, we explore the phenomenon of stereotype threat as a challenge to measurement invariance, as well as more recent work on overcoming or buffering against stereotype threat. (shrink)

The biological race debate is at an impasse. Issues surrounding hereditarianism aside, there is little empirical disagreement left between race naturalists and anti-realists about biological race. The disagreement is now primarily semantic. This would seem to uniquely qualify philosophers to contribute to the biological race debate. However, philosophers of race are reluctant to focus on semantics, largely because of their worries about the ‘flight to reference’. In this paper, I show how philosophers can contribute to the debate without taking the (...) flight to reference. Drawing on the theory of reference literature and the history of meaning change in science, I develop some criteria for dealing with cases where there is uncertainty about reference. I then apply these criteria to the biological race debate. All of the criteria I develop for eliminating putative kinds are met in the case of ‘race’ as understood by twentieth century geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and his contemporary proponents, suggesting that we should eliminate it from our biological ontology. (shrink)

Racial disparities in health outcomes have recently become a flashpoint in the debate about the value of race as a biological concept. What role, if any, race has in the etiology of disease is a philosophically and scientifically contested topic. In this article, I expand on the insights of the new mechanistic philosophy of science to defend a mechanism discovery approach to investigating epidemiological racial disparities. The mechanism discovery approach has explanatory virtues lacking in the populational approach typically employed in (...) the study of race and biomedicine. The explanatory constraints that form an integral part of the new mechanistic approach enable mechanism discovery to avoid the epistemic and normative shortcomings of the populational approach. The methodology of mechanism discovery can fruitfully be extended to the treatment and reversal of epidemiological racial disparities. (shrink)

Elimination controversies are ubiquitous in philosophy and the human sciences. For example, it has been suggested that human races, hysteria, intelligence, mental disorder, propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires, the self, and the super-ego should be eliminated from the list of respectable entities in the human sciences. I argue that eliminativist proposals are often presented in the framework of an oversimplified “phlogiston model” and suggest an alternative account that describes ontological elimination on a gradual scale between criticism of empirical (...) assumptions and conceptual choices. (shrink)

The project of this paper is to deliver a semantics for a broad subset of bare plural generics about racial kinds, a class which I will dub 'Type C generics.' Examples include 'Blacks are criminal' and 'Muslims are terrorists.' Type C generics have two interesting features. First, they link racial kinds with ​ socially perspectival predicates ​ (SPPs). SPPs lead interpreters to treat the relationship between kinds and predicates in generic constructions as nomic or non-accidental. Moreover, in computing their content, (...) interpreters must make implicit reference to socially privileged​ ​ perspectives which are treated as authoritative about whether a given object fits into the extension of the predicate. Such deference grants these authorities influence over both the conventional meaning of these terms and over the nature of the ​ objects ​ in the social ontology that these terms purport to describe, much the way a baseball umpire is authoritative over the meaning and metaphysics of 'strike'/​ strike ​. Second, terms like 'criminal' and 'terrorist' receive default ​ racialized ​ interpretations in which these terms conventionally token racial or ethnic identities. I show that neither of these features can be explained by Sarah-Jane Leslie's influential 'weak semantics' for generics, and show how my own 'socially perspectival semantics' fares better on both counts. Finally, I give an analysis of 'Blacks are criminal' which explores the semantic mechanisms that underlie default racialized interpretations. (shrink)

Philosophical reflection on racial profiling tends to take one of two forms. The first sees it as an example of ‘statistical discrimination,’ (SD), raising the question of when, if ever, probabilistic generalisations about group behaviour or characteristics can be used to judge particular individuals.(Applbaum 2014; Harcourt 2004; Hellman, 2014; Risse and Zeckhauser 2004; Risse 2007; Lippert-Rasmussen 2006; Lippert-Rasmussen 2007; Lippert-Rasmussen 2014) . This approach treats racial profiling as one example amongst many others of a general problem in egalitarian political philosophy, (...) occasioned by the fact that treating people as equals does not always require, or permit, us to treat them the same. The second form is concerned with how racial profiling illuminates the nature, justification, and reproduction of hierarchies of power and privilege based on skin colour and morphology. This form of reflection on racial profiling is therefore less about the justification for judging people based on the characteristics of the group to which they (appear to) belong, and more concerned with the specific ways in which the association of racialized minorities – and, in particular, black people – with crime, contributes to, and reflects, racial inequality, and oppression.(Kennedy 1998; Zack, 2015; Lever, 2005; Lever 2007). Both approaches to profiling have much to recommend them and, taken together, they form an essential component of the political philosophy of race. The statistical approach has the merits of linking racial profiling, as practice, to a body of other practices that generate and justify inequalities based on factors other than race, but it typically offers little by way of insight into the role of racial profiling itself in sustaining racial inequality and injustice. The racial construction approach, for obvious reasons, is rather better at the latter task, but its insights tend to come at the price of a broader understanding of the ways in which inequality is reproduced and justified, or of the ethical dilemmas raised by our competing claims to security. As we will see, insights from both approaches can be synthesized to clarify what, if anything, is wrong with racial profiling and what broader conclusions for equality and security follow from the study of profiling. (shrink)

The following paper puts the history of race and colonialism in conversation with the history of the concept of energy. The objective is to understand what a critical decolonial perspective can teach us about the central role that energy plays in western culture, materially and epistemologically. I am interested in how this approach to political, epistemological, and ontological questions demands that we reconceptualize energy to account for the historical particularity of the concept and the phenomena of history and intersubjectivity, which (...) are eschewed in a purely materialistic and quantitative conception of energy. We will see how energy has been complicit in the racialization of black and indigenous bodies, and how the privileged place that the concept of energy has occupied in the canon of western physics has served to obscure the theological, metaphysical, and cultural assumptions that constitute it. (shrink)