This paper argues that the ubiquitous digital networks in which we are increasingly becoming immersed present a threat to our ability to exercise free will. Using process philosophy, and expanding upon understandings of causal autonomy, the paper outlines a thematic analysis of diary studies and interviews gathered in a project exploring the nature of digital experience. It concludes that without mindfulness in both the use and design of digital devices and services we run the risk of allowing such services to (...) direct our daily lives in ways over which we are increasingly losing control. (shrink)

Stecker's revised definition of art in Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value is stated thus: "w is a work of art at t if and only if (a) w has form c which is a member of C and the maker of w intended it to fulfill a sub-set of functions f1 ... fn of F such that f1 ... fn are functions of c or (b) w is an object which achieves excellence in fulfilling a function in F" 1 where: w (...) is an artwork; t is a time; C is the set of central art forms at t; c is a member of the set C; F is the set of functions standardly or correctly regarded as belonging to C at t; f1 ... fn are members of the set F. (shrink)

This book is unique because it is the first single-author monograph which applies Bourdieu’s theory to management studies. It takes a theory-driven approach to develop models to describe service innovation. This will give the reader a full understanding of the variety of different theoretical concepts that Bourdieu created and used and how they can be applied to the study of management and innovation. Moreover, it is also the only book that links Bourdieu’s theory to his methodological approach, providing the reader (...) with a toolkit of methods to perform business ethnographies according to Bourdieu’s approach. The book acts as a primer for anyone wanting to learn how to model an organisational system from a Bourdieusian perspective. It contains all the information someone might need to begin to go out in the field and collect data. Consequently, the people that might want to read this publication include post-graduate students looking to learn business anthropology, as well as post-doctoral and other early career researchers. (shrink)

If death is a harm then it is a harm that cannot be experienced. The proponent of death's harm must therefore provide an answer to Epicurus, when he says that ‘death, is nothing to us, since when we are, death is not present, and when death is present, then we are not’. In this paper I respond to the two main ways philosophers have attempted to answer Epicurus, regarding the subject of death's harm: either directly or via analogy. The direct (...) way argues that there is a truth-maker (or difference-maker) for death's harm, namely in virtue of the intrinsic value the subject's life would have had if they had not died. The analogy argues that there are cases analogous to death, where the subject is harmed although they experience no pain as a result. I argue that both accounts beg the question against the Epicurean: the first by presupposing that one can be harmed while experiencing no displeasure as a result and the second by conflating a de re with a de dicto reading of death's harm. Thus, I argue, until better arguments are provided, one is best to agree with Epicurus and those who follow him that death is not a harm. (shrink)

This paper explains how to use a new software tool for argument diagramming available free on the Internet, showing especially how it can be used in the classroom to enhance critical thinking in philosophy. The user loads a text file containing an argument into a box on the computer interface, and then creates an argument diagram by dragging lines from one node to another. A key feature is the support for argumentation schemes, common patterns of defeasible reasoning historically know as (...) topics . Several examples are presented, as well as the results of an experiment in using the system with students in a university classroom. (shrink)

Legal philosophy dates to the Ancient Greek Philosophers, and it continues to be a vigorously debated subject due to the fact that there does not exist a legal philosophy that is beyond reapproach that encapsulates law’s origins or purpose. This paper will introduce a new legal philosophy, which I have termed instinctualism. -/- Instinctualism is the idea that law originates from human instinct. Human beings are born with certain natural capacities that they learn to utilize as they mature. Examples include (...) speaking, walking, associating, and interacting with others, and practicing faith in a divine being, the state, or some other source of inspiration and hope. Human beings don’t think about the potential illegalities of speaking their minds, moving from one place to another, or engaging in conversation with their friends or associates unless they are indoctrinated to do so. Rather, human beings do these things because they have instinctual desires and the knowledge to do so. Other rights and laws such as freedom of the press are the product of peoples’ instinctual rights. For example, as people learn to speak, they instinctually share information and news about their inner circles or communities. If taken a step further, one begins to discuss an organized press. Knowledge and understanding of laws, such as those limiting certain types of speech, i.e., hate speech, must be taught and learned; it is not instinctual. -/- This paper will introduce a subset of the most influential legal philosophies of different eras in human intellectual development, beginning with those of Ancient Greece. It will proceed to describe the shortcomings of those philosophies before introducing instinctualism as an alternative. After defining instinctualism, I will proceed to discuss how it addresses the shortcomings of other legal philosophies. Next, I will introduce rights guaranteed to the citizens of four prominent countries via relevant sources of primary law for each of those countries. Finally, I will close by reviewing the main arguments in the paper and discussing future research that I will undertake to buttress this paper’s arguments. (shrink)

KEY POINTS In Canada, commercial data brokers collect deidentified patient data from pharmacies, private drug insurers, the federal government and medical clinics without patient consent. Although pharmaceutical companies are the data brokers’ primary customers, academics and nonprofit and public entities also use commercial data sets, given the absence of a coordinated public approach to collecting these data across Canada. Risks of commercialized patient data include loss of anonymity, surveillance and marketing, discrimination and violation of Indigenous data sovereignty. Coordinated infrastructure for (...) the collection and coordination of health data across Canada and updated privacy legislation would protect individuals and communities and enable appropriate data uses. (shrink)

How should we make distributive decisions when there is not enough of the good to go around, or at least not enough of it right now? What does fairness require in such cases? In what follows, we distinguish between cases of scarcity and bottleneck cases, and we argue that both arguments for lotteries and arguments for queues have merit, albeit for different distributive scenarios. When dealing with scarcity not everyone can get the good. A secondary good that can be distributed (...) fairly is the chances of obtaining the good. In cases of scarcity, lotteries are the best way of allocating chances of obtaining the good fairly. When dealing with bottlenecks, the secondary good that can and ought to be distributed fairly is waiting time. Queues are best suited to distribute the good of waiting time fairly. (shrink)

Rivka Weinberg advances an error theory of ultimate meaning with three parts: (1) a conceptual analysis, (2) the claim that the extension of the concept is empty, and (3) a proposed fitting response, namely being very, very sad. Weinberg’s conceptual analysis of ultimate meaning involves two features that jointly make it metaphysically impossible, namely (i) the separateness of activities and valued ends, and (ii) the bounded nature of human lives. Both are open to serious challenges. We offer an internalist alternative (...) to (i) and a relational alternative to (ii). We then draw out implications for (2) and conclude with reasons to be cheerful about the prospects of a meaningful life. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the two most prominent recent evidential arguments from evil, due, respectively, to William Rowe and Paul Draper. I argue that neither of these evidential arguments from evil is successful, i.e. such that it ought to persuade anyone who believes in God to give up that belief. In my view, theists can rationally maintain that each of these evidential arguments from evil contains at least one false premise.

William Rowe has argued that if there is an infinite sequence of improving worlds then an essentially perfectly good being must actualize some world in the sequence and must not actualize any world in the sequence. Since that is impossible, there exist no perfectly good beings. I show that Rowe's argument assumes that the concept of a maximally great being is incoherent. Since we are given no reason to believe that the concept of a maximally great being is (...) incoherent we have no reason to believe Rowe's Argument from Improvability is sound. (shrink)

This article seeks to articulate an interpretation of Fanon’s engagement with G.W.F. Hegel that does not either assume that Fanon rejects Hegel’s normative conclusions or that Fanon’s engagement is incidental to his larger philosophical projects. I argue that Fanon’s take on the master-slave dialectic allows us to better understand the normative claims that undergird Fanon’s calls for violence and revolution in Black Skin, The Wretched of the Earth, and A Dying Colonialism.

Preprinted in God and the Problem of Evil (Blackwell 2001), ed. William Rowe. In this article, we reply to Bill Rowe's "Evil is Evidence Against Theistic Belief" in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell 2003).

This chapter argues that Fanon works to interrupt specular and spectacular renderings of suffering and colonial violence. The touch that Fanon advocates is neither optimal grip, violent grasp, nor uniform pressure, nor can it be predicted in advance. His writing touches colonial wounds; by palpating these wounds and dwelling in them, it resuscitates colonial wounds as feelings that are flesh, and does not leave them behind as if their scar tissue was merely a numb object of the past. Fanon seems (...) to reiterate Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological discovery in Ideas II that the hand that touches the surface of a table, as it moves across it, also feels itself touched. Fanon’s aim is not simply to calculate the destructive effects of colonization, against arguments for its partial “civilizing” benefits. (shrink)

The review argues that Plato makes a valid distinction between inferior hypothetical and superior unhypothetical methods. Given the distinction, the book confuses the hypothetical for unhypothetical dialectic.

In Paulo Freire’s emancipatory model, violence as a mode of struggle is rejected. The revolutionary movement should never appropriate violence in pursuing prospects of emancipation. For Freire, an authentic struggle for emancipation and autonomy does not utilize the praxis of the oppressor which is mainly characterized by dehumanization and violence. This emancipatory model also contends that the oppressor should also be subjected to emancipation as they have also been dehumanized in their subjection of the oppressed. Thus, liberation does not only (...) pursue the humanization of the oppressed but also their oppressors. It follows, therefore, that physical violence is out of the picture as the revolutionary movement recognizes the humanity of the oppressed and her oppressor. Therefore, the movement headed by the oppressed does not operate within the praxis of their oppressors which, for Freire, is a negation of humanity. An alternative position, however, contends that violence is an indispensable aspect of the emancipatory movement. In fact, violence is not only a consequence of the conflict but, for Frantz Fanon, the overarching dynamic over the colonized order. An oppressive paradigm which, for Fanon, could only be overturned by counter-violence. The dismantlement of the colonial order implies the destruction of the “colonist’s sector” which in so doing, necessitates the utilization of violence in the struggle. This work, therefore, challenges the pacificist inclination of Freirean emancipatory model through the lenses of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. This paper argues that though ideal emancipatory politics should be discursive and dialogical which Freire advocates, violence remain to be an indispensable aspect of liberation and resistance. In order to ground these arguments, this paper will appropriate the case of the revolutionary movement of the Katipunan vis-à-vis the Reformists. (shrink)

This paper is a critical assessment of M. W. Rowe's functional definition of art.

Rowe has recently argued that pure risk of harm cannot itself be a harm. I respond to Rowe and argue that given an appropriate understanding of objective probabilities, pure objective risk of harm can itself be a harm.

A sloppy, smug, conceptually muddled, and tendentious Christian apologist's comparison of narrowly selected texts from Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Paul, Luke, and Justin Martyr. Following Alasdair MacIntyre, Rowe defends the traditionist view according to which Spirit-enhanced ‘supernatural’ discourse is intelligible only to those on the inside of Christian faith. Rowe argues that morality and religion are abstractions. Rowe presents his translations of Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus, Paul, Luke, and Justin into modern English while also being committed to the (...) traditionist view that such translations are doomed to inaccuracy and distortion. His views invite relativism and skepticism about all kinds of inquiry, including MacIntyre’s traditioned approach. (shrink)

The scholarship on Frantz Fanon’s theorization of violence is crowded with interpretations that follow the Arendtian paradigm of violence. These interpretations often discuss whether violence is instrumental or non-instrumental in Fanon’s work. This reading, I believe, is the result of approaching Fanon through Hannah Arendt’s framing of violence, i.e. through a binary paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. Even some Fanon scholars who question Arendt’s reading of Fanon, do so by employing a similar binary logic, hence repeating the same (...) either/or paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. I aim to challenge such interpretations of Fanon by demonstrating that in the context of anticolonial armed struggle in which Fanon writes, the either/or framework of the instrumental/non-instrumental binary of violence cannot fully capture his perspective. Violence can indeed be conceived as having both constructive and instrumental aspects. My argument is supported by Fanon’s corpus, including his 1960 Accra speech, “Why We Use Violence” in Alienation and Freedom. This piece, I suggest, together with Fanon’s other writings, poses a direct challenge to the Arendtian binary of violence. My analysis resists positioning the difference between Arendt and Fanon through the instrumental/non-instrumental binary. By using Judith Butler’s notion of “frame” I complicate their difference and argue Arendt’s framing of violence prevents her from apprehending Fanon and – more importantly – interpretations of Fanon based on this Arendtian frame of violence inevitably lead to misinterpretations. (shrink)

A number of authors have developed evidential arguments from evil in the past thirty years. Perhaps the best known evidential arguments from evil are those presented in Rowe (1979) and Draper (1989). We shall spend most of this chapter examining these two arguments.

This paper asks how perception becomes racializing and seeks the means for its critical interruption. My aim is not only to understand the recalcitrant and limitative temporal structure of racializing habits of seeing, but also to uncover the possibilities within perception for a critical awareness and destabilization of this structure. Reading Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with Frantz Fanon, Iris Marion Young and race-critical feminism, I locate in hesitation the phenomenological moment where habits of seeing can be (...) internally fractured. Hesitation, I claim, makes visible the exclusionary logic of racializing and objectifying perception, countering its affective closure and opening it to critical transformation. (shrink)

Dans cet article, j’essaie de dévoiler le contenu de vérité de la préface que Sartre rédigea pour Les damnés de la terre de Frantz Fanon. Je tenterai précisément de montrer que ce texte sert — et a effectivement servi — à paralyser l’analyse de Fanon et à la neutraliser. J’argumenterai donc en faveur de la résistance vis-à-vis d’une telle situation.

The problem of evil is broadly considered to be one of the greatest intellectual threats to traditional brands of theism. And William Rowe’s 1979 formulation of the problem in “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” is the most cited formulation in the contemporary philosophical literature. In this paper, we explore how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be brought to bear on Rowe’s seminal formulation, arguing that our empirical findings raise significant questions regarding (...) the ultimate success of Rowe’s argument. Such a result would be quite notable within philosophy of religion, since this is considered one of the most formidable arguments against theism. However, further testing is needed before any firm conclusions can be drawn. -/- In section 1, we elucidate Rowe’s formulation of the problem of evil and the intuitions that seem to underwrite it. In section 2, we explore how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be brought to bear on Rowe’s formulation, outlining our hypotheses and our methods for testing them before showcasing our results. In section 3, we discuss the philosophical import of our results–arguing that our results, when taken together, pose an initial challenge to Rowe’s seminal argument. (shrink)

A critique of Plantinga's free will defense. For an updated version of this critique, with a reply to objections from William Rowe and Alvin Plantinga, see my "The logical problem of evil: Plantinga and Mackie," in Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard‐Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 19-33.

This chapter contains sections titled: Rowe's Evidential Argument from Evil Draper's Evidential Argument from Evil Concluding Remarks Works cited.

The author Kitija Mirončuka in her article "Human Savages: Frantz Fanon and Racism" analyses how race, a seemingly constant human trait (natural phenomenon), becomes a condition for exclusion, differentiation, and violence (i.e., abnormality). In the article, the body is portrayed as a formalizable object; the author deliberates whether the natural origin is something changeable and exceptional. Introducing the Franco-Algerian philosopher Frantz Fanon, the author focuses on biopolitical practices and forms of violence that imperceptibly incorporate new concepts of human (...) - Algerian appearance, lifestyle, movement, and habits - savagery, animalism, abnormality, extremeness, and unacceptability. The article reviews three perspectives - body and race, body and skin colour, body and rhythm - to indicate that all these features, although common to many bodies, nevertheless, are selectively used to either normalize or discriminate a person based on appearance or cultural and ethnic affiliations. (shrink)

Preprinted in God and the Problem of Evil(Blackwell 2001), ed. William Rowe. Many people deny that evil makes belief in atheism more reasonable for us than belief in theism. After all, they say, the grounds for belief in God are much better than the evidence for atheism, including the evidence provided by evil. We will not join their ranks on this occasion. Rather, we wish to consider the proposition that, setting aside grounds for belief in God and relying only (...) on the background knowledge shared in common by nontheists and theists, evil makes belief in atheism more reasonable for us than belief in theism. Our aim is to argue against this proposition. We recognize that in doing so, we face a formidable challenge. It’s one thing to say that evil presents a reason for atheism that is, ultimately, overridden by arguments for theism. It’s another to say that it doesn’t so much as provide us with a reason for atheism in the first place. In order to make this latter claim seem initially more plausible, consider the apparent design of the mammalian eye or the apparent fine-tuning of the universe to support life. These are often proposed as reasons to believe in theism. Critics commonly argue not merely that these supposed reasons for theism are overridden by arguments for atheism but rather that they aren’t good reasons for theism in the first place. Our parallel proposal with respect to evil and atheism is, initially at least, no less plausible than this proposal with respect to apparent design and theism. (shrink)

Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the ‘white gaze’ nearly crushed him. In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty’s overly inclusive corporeal schema. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-scripted ‘blackness’. Through a re-telling of his own experiences of (...) racism, Fanon is able to show how a black person in a racialized context eventually internalizes the ‘white gaze’. In this essay I bring Fanon’s insights into conversation with Foucault’s discussion of panoptic surveillance. Although the internalization of the white narrative creates a situation in which external constraints are no longer needed, Fanon highlights both the historical contingency of ‘blackness’ and the ways in which the oppressed can re-narrate their subjectivities. Lastly, I discuss Fanon’s historically attuned ‘new humanism’, once again engaging Fanon and Foucault as dialogue partners. (shrink)

BSTRACT Frantz Fanon’s works have been invaluable in the analysis of colonies and the colonized subject’s mentality therein, but an analysis of the colonial power itself has been largely left to the wayside. The aim of this paper is to explicate a key element of Fanon’s theoretical framework, the metropolis/periphery dichotomy, then, using the writings of Huey P. Newton and Stokely Carmichael, among others, show its reversal within the colonial power. I will analyze this reversal in three ways: first, (...) the reversal of the relationship between, and the roles of, the metropolis and periphery; second, the role of police and the differences between the colonial police and the police within the colonial power; and third, the modified role of prisons within the colonial power. (shrink)

Dorothy Rowe's book amounts to a spectacularly missed chance to make a significant contribution to the very important questions the author set out to address. The book promises to provide an answer to "why our beliefs about the nature of death and the purpose of life dominate our lives," but ends up being a bizarre hodgepodge of self-help psychology, uninformative case studies, and a large number of disconnected personal observations -- the whole thing peppered here and there with philosophical (...) and even political considerations. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon both argue that oppression fundamentally constrains the subject’s relationship to and embodied experience of time, yet their accounts of temporality are rarely brought together. This paper will explore what we might learn about the operation of different types of reductive temporality if we read Beauvoir and Fanon alongside each other, focusing primarily on the early works that arguably lay out the central concerns of their respective temporal frameworks. At first glance, it seems that (...) these two models of temporality have radically different emphases. While Beauvoir suggests that reductive temporalities work to sever the future from the past and present, Fanon locates this destructive operation in the heightening of their entanglement. However, I will contend that there are deep affinities between these accounts: For both Beauvoir and Fanon, freedom is bound up with futurity, with its lack therefore cashed out in terms of stagnation, repetition, and the entrapment within a hollow moment that prevents authentic projection. Both resist teleological perspectives; problematize the endeavor to describe the structures of lived temporality in neutral terms; and show that temporality is crucial to the pursuit of a political phenomenology. These resonances, however, should only serve to recast rather than dissolve the tension between their approaches; ultimately, we need to acknowledge the distinctiveness of their differing concerns and aims. (shrink)

It is crucial to actively detect the risks of transactions in a financial company to improve customer experience and minimize financial loss. In this study, we compare different machine learning algorithms to effectively and efficiently predict the legitimacy of financial transactions. The algorithms used in this study were: MLP Repressor, Random Forest Classifier, Complement NB, MLP Classifier, Gaussian NB, Bernoulli NB, LGBM Classifier, Ada Boost Classifier, K Neighbors Classifier, Logistic Regression, Bagging Classifier, Decision Tree Classifier and Deep Learning. The dataset (...) was collected from Kaggle depository. It consists of 6362620 rows and 10 columns. The best classifier with unbalanced dataset was the Random Forest Classifier. The Accuracy 99.97%, precession 99.96%, Recall 99.97% and the F1-score 99.96%. However, the best classifier with balanced dataset was the Bagging Classifier. The Accuracy 99.96%, precession 99.95%, Recall 99.98% and the F1-score 99.96%. (shrink)

I argue that representations of the Muslim woman in the Western imaginary function as counter-images to the patriarchal ideal of Western woman. Drawing upon the work of Frantz Fanon (and supplementing it with a consideration of the role of gender), I show how the image of the veiled, Muslim woman is both othered and racialized. This “double othering,” I argue, serves: (i) To normalize Western norms of femininity. The social control of women and their bodies by liberal society is (...) hidden. Gender oppression is rather projected onto Muslim women, and identified with their societies, while remaining invisible within Western society. Western womanhood is taken to be “free” of such oppression. (ii) To deflect attention away from Western patriarchy, and promote complicity on the part of Western women with this society rather than other women. (iii) To represent Western femininity as an ideal that solicits women’s complicity universally. The attempt is to establish the superiority of Western society and its gender norms and morally justify the domination of other societies (in the name of civilization and the liberation of women). (shrink)

William L. Rowe’s argument against divine freedom has drawn considerable attention from theist philosophers. One reply to Rowe’s argument that has emerged in the recent literature appeals to modified accounts of libertarian freedom which have the result that God may be free even if he necessarily actualizes the best possible world. Though in many ways attractive, this approach appears to lead to the damning consequence of modal collapse i.e., that the actual world is the only possible world. But (...) appearances can be deceiving, and in this paper I argue that the threat of modal collapse dissolves when we consider Alvin Plantinga’s critique of the purportedly Leibnizian notion that God can actualize any possible world, and incorporate the implications of this critique into the divine freedom debate. Developing a suggestion by Edward R. Wierenga, I argue first that the modal collapse objection fails within a Molinist context, and then I extend the discussion beyond that context to show that the objection also fails on the assumption that Molinism is false. (shrink)

This article explores Fanon's thought on dance, beginning with his explicit treatment of it in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. It then broadens to consider his theorization of Black embodiment in racist and colonized societies, considering how these analyses can be reformulated as a phenomenology of dance. This will suggest possibilities for fruitful encounters between the two domains in which (a) dance can be valorized while (b) opening up sites of resignification and resistance for Black (...) persons and communities-including a revalorization of Black embodiment as a kind of empowering danced experience. (shrink)

ESP: El concepto de alma en las filosofías de Platón y Aristóteles, por la posición que ocupa en sus argumentos relativos a la esclavitud, fue central para la estructura ideológica sobre la que se sostuvo la institución esclavista durante la Colonia. Será importante remitirnos, en un primer momento, al estudio de Erwin Rohde sobre este concepto, para examinar la materialidad del hálito y plantear una relación entre la mirada y la configuración de imaginarios. Posteriormente, examinaremos el lugar que tiene el (...) alma en los argumentos de Platón y Aristóteles en favor de esclavitud, con énfasis en el papel de la mirada, el dominio sobre el cuerpo y la naturaleza de los cuerpos esclavizables. Finalmente, revisaremos en la obra de Frantz Fanon una crítica a la mirada europea y occidental que diseca el cuerpo negro al otorgarle un alma. -/- ENG: The concept of the soul in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, due to the posi-tion it occupies in their arguments concerning slavery, will be central to the ideo-logical structure on which the institution of slavery was sustained during colonial times. It will be important to refer, at first, to Erwin Rohde’s study of this concept, to examine the materiality of the breath and to propose a relationship between the gaze and the configuration of imaginaries. We will then examine the position of the soul in Plato’s and Aristotle’s arguments in favor of slavery, emphasizing the role of the gaze, the dominion over the body, and the nature of enslaved bodies. Finally, we will review in the work of Frantz Fanon a critique of the European and Western gaze that dissects the black body by granting it a soul. (shrink)

I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self-images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some (...) of its tropes. My examples are the Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon’s Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them. This essay received Honorable Mention from the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee in the Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

When two agents engage in a joint action, such as rowing together, they exercise joint know-how. But what is the relationship between the joint know-how of the two agents and the know-how each agent possesses individually? I construct an “active mutual enablement” account of this relationship, according to which joint know-how arises when each agent knows how to predict, monitor, and make failure-averting adjustments in response to the behaviour of the other agent, while actively enabling the other to make such (...) adjustments. I defend the AME account from three objections, and I then use this account as the platform for an examination of the reducibility of joint know-how to joint propositional knowledge. A summative account of joint propositional knowledge is incompatible with the reduction of joint know-how to joint propositional knowledge, whereas a distributive account is not. I close by highlighting some open questions the AME account brings into view concerning the evolutionary origin and scaling up of joint know-how. (shrink)

William L. Rowe cites Stephen Wykstra's skeptical theism as the most powerful objection to the evidential argument. Initially, I object to skeptical theism on the basis that skeptical theism leads to moral paralysis. I then will conclude that the skeptical theist has other resources that enable the formation of a moral code.

Skeptical theism is a family of responses to arguments from evil. One important member of that family is Stephen Wykstra’s CORNEA-based criticism of William Rowe’s arguments from evil. A cornerstone of Wykstra’s approach is his CORNEA principle. However, a number of authors have criticized CORNEA on various grounds, including that it has odd results, it cannot do the work it was meant to, and it problematically conflicts with the so-called common sense epistemology. In this paper, I explicate and defend (...) a CORNEA principle. After sketching a brief argument for it, I show how it can be acquitted of these recent charges. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore some of the temporal structures of racialized experience – what I call racialized time. I draw on the Martiniquan philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, in particular his book ‘Black Skin, White Masks,’ in order to ask how racism can be understood as a social pathology which, when internalized or ‘epidermalized,’ may result in aberrations of affect, embodiment and agency that are temporally lived. In this regard, I analyze the racialized experience of coming ‘too late’ (...) to a world predetermined in advance and the distorted relation to possibility – the limitation of playfulness and imaginative variability – that defines this sense of lateness. I argue that the racialization of the past plays a structuring role in such experience. Racialization is not limited to the present, but also colonizes and reconfigures the past, splitting it into a duality of times: one open and civilizational, the other closed, anachronistic and racialized. To understand this colonial construction of the past, I draw on the work of Latin American thinker Aníbal Quijano. (shrink)

Skeptical theism is a family of responses to the evidential problem of evil. What unifies this family is two general claims. First, that even if God were to exist, we shouldn’t expect to see God’s reasons for permitting the suffering we observe. Second, the previous claim entails the failure of a variety of arguments from evil against the existence of God. In this essay, we identify three particular articulations of skeptical theism—three different ways of “filling in” those two claims—and describes (...) their role in responding to evidential arguments of evil due to William Rowe and Paul Draper. But skeptical theism has been subject to a variety of criticisms, several of which raise interesting issues and puzzles not just in philosophy of religion but other areas of philosophy as well. Consequently, we discuss some of these criticisms, partly with an eye to bringing out the connections between skeptical theism and current topics in mainstream philosophy. Finally, we conclude by situating skeptical theism within our own distinctive methodology for evaluating world views, what we call “worldview theory versioning.”. (shrink)

In his lecture “Philosophy and the Unheard,” Cavell invites us to observe a pervasive analogy between Schoenberg’s idea of the twelve-tone row and Wittgenstein’s idea of grammar, which is supposed to encapsulate an expansive, sweeping philosophical program—Cavell’s own. For Cavell, the analogy evinces not only the kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation, which is attuned to Wittgenstein’s seemingly paradoxical amalgamation of embrace and resistance in regarding to the conditions of modernity, but also a kind of philosophy of music, which (...) is illuminated by musical procedure. In this essay I probe into Cavell’s analogy, which, I contend, rests on Cavell’s interpretation (contra Von Wright) of Spengler’s influence on Wittgenstein. I argue that Cavell delineated the analogy in a way which does not consider a deeply felt gradation in Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitude toward modern music. This ultimately renders Schoenberg’s composition with twelve-tone incommensurate with Wittgenstein’s Spenglerian scheme of musical decline. I also argue that “Schoenbergian unheard” is not analogous to its purported Wittgensteinian counterpart. While the former inheres in comprehensibility—namely, correct, conscious application of the kind of contrived rules that would ensure coherence—the latter inheres in transparency, namely, a familiar physiognomy, which is internally related to the preconditions as well as the lived, embodied realities of musical intelligibility. From Wittgenstein’s perspective, the Schoenbergian idea of the row with its unforeseen yet pervasive consequences turns out to be tantamount to an idea of grammar for music for the meaning-blind. I conclude that in this “tale of two unheards,” Cavell invariably remains on the side of Wittgenstein. Philosophy, as it mattered most to him, has no business with music for the meaning-blind. (shrink)

This article interprets Teresa Brennan’s work on the forgetting of affect transmission in conjunction with Sylvia Wynter’s argument concerning the rise of Western Man through the dehumanization of native and African peoples. While not directly in dialogue, Wynter’s decolonial reading of Foucault’s epistemic ruptures enriches Brennan’s inquiry into this “forgetting,” given that callous, repeated acts of cruelty characteristic of Western imperialism and slavery required a denial of the capacity to sense suffering in others perceived as differently human. Supplementing Brennan with (...) Wynter, we can better describe the limits of sympathy discourses as resting on identification and perceived sameness. In turn, Brennan comes to Wynter’s defense in her call for a new science of plural cultures to redefine the human, which some have interpreted as a positivist misreading of Frantz Fanon. Brennan and Wynter alike have been criticized for their appeals to science; yet, I defend their respective proposals for social-scientific inquiry with support from Brennan’s response to the 1996 Sokal Hoax: the influence of the social on the biological body is, indeed, difficult to study, but this does not invalidate the inquiry as such. (shrink)