Results for 'Gail Anne Soffer'

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  1. Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy & Gayle Salamon (ed.) (2020), 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 320 p. [REVIEW]Marie-Anne Perreault - 2022 - Ithaque 30:245-249.
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    Fits and Misfits: Rethinking Disability, Debility, and World with Merleau-Ponty.Joel Reynolds & Gail Weiss - 2024 - Puncta 7 (1):1-4.
    This piece lays out the framework for a special issue on the topic of "Fits and Misfits," published as volume 7, issue 1 of Puncta: A Journal of Critical Phenomenology. We discuss the relationship between the concept of misfitting, coined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and debility, coined by Jasbir Puar, in relationship to scholarship on Merleau-Ponty. We then introduce each of the eight articles in the special issue: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's "What Misfitting Makes," Susan Bredlau's "Conversational Accessibility: Healthcare, Community, and the Ethics (...)
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  3. What is a Number? Re-Thinking Derrida's Concept of Infinity.Joshua Soffer - 2007 - Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 38 (2):202-220.
    Iterability, the repetition which alters the idealization it reproduces, is the engine of deconstructive movement. The fact that all experience is transformative-dissimulative in its essence does not, however, mean that the momentum of change is the same for all situations. Derrida adapts Husserl's distinction between a bound and a free ideality to draw up a contrast between mechanical mathematical calculation, whose in-principle infinite enumerability is supposedly meaningless, empty of content, and therefore not in itself subject to alteration through contextual change, (...)
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  4. An Enactivist Critique of Protevi’s Political Affect.Joshua Soffer Soffer - manuscript
    John Protevi’s project aims to combine the embodied school of affective cognition with Deleuze’s poststructuralist philosophy. I examine the validity of Protevi’s claim that his reading of Deleuze manages to “sharpen, extend and / or radicalize some of their [4EA] explicit presuppositions, that Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the abstract subject of embodied cognitive psychology, “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. I argue that rather than radicalizing phenomenologically-informed 4EA, Protevi’s reductive reading of Deleuze falls short of both (...)
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  5. Heidegger’s World Projection vs Braver’s Concept of Worldview.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Heidegger’s analysis of the use of tools under the rubric of the ready to hand , or handiness, introduced in the first division of Being and Time, has been an important influence on Lee Braver’s thinking. Braver reads Heidegger’s ready to hand alongside the later Wittgenstein’s language games as articulations of a mode of creativity he describes as absorbed, engaged coping. This mode is both more immediate and more fundamental than representational, conceptual thinking. In this paper, I compare Heidegger’s account (...)
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  6. Words by convention.Gail Leckie & Robert Williams - 2019 - In Ernie Lepore & David Sosa (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language, Volume 1. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Existing metasemantic projects presuppose that word- (or sentence-) types are part of the non-semantic base. We propose a new strategy: an endogenous account of word types, that is, one where word types are fixed as part of the metasemantics. On this view, it is the conventions of truthfulness and trust that ground not only the meaning of the words (meaning by convention) but also what the word type is of each particular token utterance (words by convention). The same treatment extends (...)
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  7. African Sage Philosophy and Socrates.Gail M. Presbey - 2002 - International Philosophical Quarterly 42 (2):177-192.
    The paper explores the methodology and goals of H. Odera Oruka’s sage philosophy project. Oruka interviewed wise persons who were mostly illiterate and from the rural areas of Kenya to show that a long tradition of critical thinking and philosophizing exists in Africa, even if there is no written record. His descriptions of the role of the academic philosopher turned interviewer varied, emphasizing their refraining from imposition of their own views (the social science model), their adding their own ideas (like (...)
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  8. Critique of Embodied Affective Cognition:Against Gallagher, Ratcliffe , Varela.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper (...)
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  9. Who's to Blame for Injustice? Joseph Rouse's Poststructuralist Critique of Enactivist Ethics.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    This paper compares Joseph Rouse‘s perspective on the relation between naturalism, social normativity and ethics with the enactivist approaches of Shaun Gallagher and Hanne De Jaegher. Rouse and these enactivists draw from many of the same conceptual resources, including the philosophical insights of phenomenology , hermeneutics, the later Wittgenstein and feminist scholarship, in order to rethink naturalism in the direction of strong interdependence between the individual and their material and social environment. Rouse(2023) has expressed support for embodied, embedded, extended, and (...)
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  10. A Phenomenological Critique of Ratcliffe's Existential Feeling: Affect as Temporality.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Matthew Ratcliffe’s model of existential feelings can be seen as a critical engagement with perspectives common to analytic, theory of mind and psychological orientations that view psychological functions such as cognition and affectivity within normative objective propositional frameworks. Ratcliffe takes a step back from and re-situates objective reifications within an interactive subject-object matrix inclusive of the body and the interpersonal world. In doing so, he turns a mono-normative thinking into a poly-normative one, in which determinations of meaning and significance are (...)
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  11. Heidegger Against Embodied Cognition.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper (...)
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  12. Crisis, Dispossession, and Activism to Reclaim Detroit.Gail Presbey - 2017 - In Vasiliki Solomou-Papanikolaou Golfo Maggini (ed.), Philosophy and Crisis: Responding to the Challenges to Ways of Life in the Contemporary World, Volume One. pp. 121-129.
    The paper discusses the concept of "crisis" in the context of the city of Detroit's bankruptcy under the rule of the Governor-appointed Emergency Manager. In their recent book, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou discuss the concept of dispossession in all its complexity, in the context of enforced austerity measures in Europe and a global Occupy movement. The concept of “dispossession” clarifies how we actually depend on others in a sustained social world, that in fact the self is social. I will (...)
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  13. Dorothy Day’s Pursuit of Public Peace through Word and Action.Gail Presbey - 2014 - In Gail Presbey Greg Moses (ed.), Peace Philosophy and Public Life: Commitments, Crises, and Concepts for Engaged Thinking. New York, NY: Rodopi. pp. 17-40.
    A co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, its newspaper, and hospitality houses, the writer Dorothy Day promoted public peace nationally and internationally as a journalist, an organizer of public protests, and a builder of associational communities. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s conceptions of the role of speech and action in creating the public realm, this paper focuses on several of Day’s most controversial public positions: her leadership of non-cooperation against Civil Defense drills intended to prepare New York City residents to survive (...)
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  14. Hannah Arendt on Power, Consent, and Coercion.Gail M. Presbey - 1992 - The Acorn 7 (2):24-32.
    Although Hannah Arendt is not known as an advocate of nonviolence per se, her analysis of power dynamics within and between groups closely parallels Gandhi’s. The paper shows the extent to which her insights are compatible with Gandhi’s and also defends her against charges that her description of the world is overly normative and unrealistic. Both Arendt and Gandhi insist that nonviolence is the paradigm of power in situations where people freely consent to and engage in concerted action, and both (...)
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  15. Gandhi: The Grandfather of Confllict Transformation.Gail Presbey - 2013 - In Rhea A. DuMont, Tom H. Hastings & Emiko Noma (eds.), Conflict Transformation: Essays on Methods of Nonviolence. McFarland & Company. pp. 213-24.
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  16. Maasai Rejection of the Western Paradigm of Development.Gail M. Presbey - 2000 - Social Philosophy Today 15:339-359.
    Compared to other ethnic groups in Kenya, the Maasai resisted working wage labor jobs, preferring to continue pastoral practices, even though “development” experts and Kenyans from other ethnic groups derided them as being “backward” and holding back the progress of the country. The phenomenon of Maasai reluctance to adapt to wage labor has been called a "conservative" trend by some, and a radical resistance by others. The British during colonialism seemed irritated and impatient with Maasai for their refusal to work (...)
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  17. Gandhi, Dube and Abdurahman: Collaborations to End Injustice in South Africa.Gail Presbey - 2016 - World History Bulletin 32 (1):5-11.
    The paper traces the parallel paths and mutual influences of these three activists in South Africa. The paper points out that Gandhi often took steps in building his movement that echoed some of the same steps that Dube had done just before him. Also, Abdurahman, who had become Gandhi's friend in 1909, advocated for involving women in nonviolent action, and advocated the use of general strike, shortly before Gandhi incorporated both methods in his movement.
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  18. Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul.Gail Fine (ed.) - 1999 - Oxford University Press.
    This volume in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy looks at central areas in Plato's philosophy: ethics, politics, religion, and the soul. It includes essays on virtue, knowledge, and happiness; justice and happiness; pleasure; Platonic love; feminism; the ideally just state, democracy and totalitarianism; and the nature of the soul and moral motivation.
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  19. Heidegger on Anxiety, Nothingness and Time:How Not to Think Authenticity Inauthentically.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    In his work through the early 1930’s, Heidegger determines what it means to be an authentic self through fundamental attunements such as anxiety, boredom, uncanniness and guilt, and equi-primordially via understanding and thrown projection. The way that attunement and understanding structure authentic disclosure of being involves paradoxical gestures juxtaposing meaning and meaninglessness, presence and absence, affirmation and negation, possibility and reality, holism and individuation, normativity and own-ness. The key to navigating and unifying this tangle of contradictory moments, as Heidegger reminds (...)
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  20. Plato, Volume 2: Ethics, Politics, Religious and the Soul.Gail Fine (ed.) - 1999 - Oxford University Press.
    This series aims to bring together important recent writing in major areas of philosophical inquiry, selected from a variety of sources. The editor of each volume contributes an introductory essay on the items chosen and on the questions with which they deal. A selective bibliography is appended as a guide to further reading.
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  21. Sophie Olúwọlé's Major Contributions to African Philosophy.Gail Presbey - 2020 - Hypatia 35 (2):231-242.
    This article provides an overview of the contributions to philosophy of Nigerian philosopher Sophie Bọ´sẹ`dé Olúwọlé. The first woman to earn a philosophy PhD in Nigeria, Olúwọlé headed the Department of Philosophy at the University of Lagos before retiring to found and run the Centre for African Culture and Development. She devoted her career to studying Yoruba philosophy, translating the ancient Yoruba Ifá canon, which embodies the teachings of Orunmila, a philosopher revered as an Óríṣá in the Ifá pantheon. Seeing (...)
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  22. Unfair distribution of resources in Africa: What should be done about the ethnicity factor?Gail M. Presbey - 2003 - Human Studies 26 (1):21-40.
    The article examines the role of ethnic favoritism in maldistribution of national resources in Kenya and discusses two broad proposals for attacking such corruption. Evidence drawn from research in Kenya disproves the view of Chabal and Daloz, who argue that Africans prefer to distribute goods according to ethnic ties, and shows that frustration with the lack of alternatives to such a system, rather than enthusiasm for it, drives cooperation with corrupt maldistribution. One solution to the problem is to decentralize government (...)
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  23. A Phenomenological Critique of Mindfulness.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela ground the affectively, valuatively felt contingency of intentional acts of other-relatedness in what they presume to be a primordial neutral point of pre-reflective conscious auto-affective awareness. Through meditative practice, we can access this pre-reflective state , and avail ourselves of ‘unconditionally intrinsic goodness', 'spontaneous compassion', 'luminosity', 'blissfulness', and ' a calm and peaceful life guided by the fundamental value of nonviolence'. But how do such feelings emerge as ultimate outcomes of a philosophy of groundlessness? Aren't (...)
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  24. Women's empowerment: the insights of Wangari Maathai.Gail M. Presbey - 2013 - Journal of Global Ethics 9 (3):277-292.
    This paper will highlight Maathai’s insights regarding empowerment, tracing several important themes in her approach, namely, empowerment’s relationship to self esteem, teamwork, and political action, its ambivalent relationship to formal education, and the role of cultural traditions in providing alternatives to colonial-era cultural impositions and current exploitative effects of neo-liberal capitalism. After reviewing Maathai’s thoughts on each of these topics, I will briefly draw upon other East African thinkers and Africanists’ studies of East African communities to present corroborating evidence for (...)
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  25. Refusing the COVID-19 vaccine: What’s wrong with that?Anne Https://Orcidorg Meylan & Sebastian Https://Orcidorg Schmidt - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (6):1102-1124.
    COVID-19 vaccine refusal seems like a paradigm case of irrationality. Vaccines are supposed to be the best way to get us out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet many people believe that they should not be vaccinated even though they are dissatisfied with the current situation. In this paper, we analyze COVID-19 vaccine refusal with the tools of contemporary philosophical theories of responsibility and rationality. The main outcome of this analysis is that many vaccine-refusers are responsible for the belief that (...)
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  26. Is there an obligation to reduce one’s individual carbon footprint?Anne Schwenkenbecher - 2014 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 17 (2):168-188.
    Moral duties concerning climate change mitigation are – for good reasons – conventionally construed as duties of institutional agents, usually states. Yet, in both scholarly debate and political discourse, it has occasionally been argued that the moral duties lie not only with states and institutional agents, but also with individual citizens. This argument has been made with regard to mitigation efforts, especially those reducing greenhouse gases. This paper focuses on the question of whether individuals in industrialized countries have duties to (...)
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  27. Joint Duties and Global Moral Obligations.Anne Schwenkenbecher - 2013 - Ratio 26 (3):310-328.
    In recent decades, concepts of group agency and the morality of groups have increasingly been discussed by philosophers. Notions of collective or joint duties have been invoked especially in the debates on global justice, world poverty and climate change. This paper enquires into the possibility and potential nature of moral duties individuals in unstructured groups may hold together. It distinguishes between group agents and groups of people which – while not constituting a collective agent – are nonetheless capable of performing (...)
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  28. Investigations in Radical Temporality.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    My central research focus over the past 30 years has been the articulation of what I call a radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below, written between 2001 and 2022, I treat the varying ways in which radically temporal thinking manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida's deconstructive project and George Kelly's personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and (...)
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  29. Sense and Affect.Joshua Soffer - 2002 - University Press of America.
    Sense and Affect exposes the limits of important recent strands in continental philosophy. It questions the necessity of a certain language of violence, otherness, disruption and pathos saturating Jacques Derrida's texts and the texts of those having a proximity to Derrida's deconstructionist project. This book establishes a connection between such affective terminology and a common, if heterogeneously expressed, theoretical inadequacy binding Derrida and writers such as Lyotard, Foucault, Caputo and Nancy. Their failure to penetrate a presumed irreducibility of suffering in (...)
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  30. Heidegger, Gendlin and Deleuze on the Logic of Quantitative Repetition.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Gendlin pronounce that difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity. They teach that identity is a surface effect of difference, that to understand the basis of logico-mathematical idealities we must uncover their genesis in the fecundity of differentiation. In this paper, I contrast Heidegger’s analyses of the present to hand logico-mathematical object, which he discuses over the course of his career in terms of the ‘as’ structure, temporalization and enframing , (...)
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  31. Reducing the Actual: A Phenomenological Bracketing of Deleuze’s Qualities and Extensities.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Deleuze is prominent among those philosophers who pronounce that difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity. He teaches that identity is a surface effect of difference, so to understand the basis of logico-mathematical idealities we must uncover their genesis in the fecundity of differentiation. Deleuze wants to offer a foundation of number and mathematics as a subversive, creative force, an affirmation of Nietzsche’s eternal return as the ‘roll of the dice’. But he begins too late. For Deleuze, virtual (...)
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  32. Ways in Which Oral Philosophy is Superior to Written Philosophy: A Look at Odera Oruka’s Rural Sages.Gail Presbey - 1996 - APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 1996 (Fall):6-10.
    The paper is about H. Odera Oruka's Sage Philosophy project. Oruka interviewed rural sages of Kenya, saying that like Socrates, these wise elders had been philosophizing without writing anything down. Paulin Hountondji (at the time) criticized efforts of oral philosophizing, saying that Africa needed a written tradition of philosophizing. Some philosophers were representatives of an "individualist" position which says that philosophical ideas must be attributed to specific named individuals. Kwame Gyekye instead argued that anonymous community wisdom of Africans had indeed (...)
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  33. The Psychology of Anger: George Kelly 's Phenomenology of Hostility.Joshua Soffer Mr - manuscript
    The way that George Kelly treats moving from an act of love to an act of hate, via his formulation of the construct of hostility, may indicate how far apart Kelly’s model and embodied intersubjective approaches stand concerning the issue of the fundamental integrity of experiencing. All feeling and emotion for Kelly expresses an awareness of the relative ongoing success or failure in relating new events to one’s outlook. But his definition of hostility stands out from his account of guilt, (...)
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  34. Beyond the Morality of Justice: Gergen’s Radical Constructionist Critique of Relational Autonomy.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    This paper draws attention to a divergence in approach to the social between Ken Gergen’s radical form of social constructionism and the more moderate constructionist approaches exemplified by the thinking of Shaun Gallagher, Jan Slaby and Karen Barad. Specifically, I argue that the latter stop just short of radical constructionism’s ontological and ethical implications. The ethical question for Gergen is not whether and how we achieve just relations but whether and how we deal with the struggle between competing goods, how (...)
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  35. Globalization and the Crisis in Detroit.Gail Presbey - 2015 - Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 15 (1-2):261-77.
    This article reviews the recent crisis in Detroit focusing on the placement of an Emergency Manager in charge of financial decisions, and a bankruptcy process. This political disenfranchisement harmed the pensions of city employees and offered valuable real estate to investors at low prices. While the crisis was long in the making, with deindustrialization and residential segregation beginning in the 1950s, the crisis was exacerbated in 2008 with the mortgage crisis and with water shut-offs to residences. The greatest harms were (...)
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  36. Against reductivist character realism.Anne Jeffrey & Alina Beary - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (1):186-213.
    It seems like people have character traits that explain a good deal of their behavior. Call a theory character realism just in case it vindicates this folk assumption. Recently, Christian Miller has argued that the way to reconcile character realism with decades of psychological research is to adopt metaphysical reductivism about character traits. Some contemporary psychological theories of character and virtue seem to implicitly endorse such reductivism; others resist reduction of traits to finer-grained mental components or processes; and still others (...)
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  37. Criticisms of Multiparty Democracy: Parallels between Wamba-dia-Wamba and Arendt.Gail Presbey - 1998 - New Political Science 20 (1):35-52.
    The IMF, World Bank, and former colonial powers have put pressure on African countries to adopt multiparty democracy. Because of this pressure, many formerly one‐party states as well as some military dictatorships have embraced Western and Parliamentarian democratic forms. But does this mean that democracy has succeeded in Africa? Ernest Wamba‐dia‐Wamba of the University of Dar‐es‐Saalam and CODESRIA argues that embracing Western paradigms in an unthinking fashion will not bring real democracy, i.e. people's liberation. He advances criticisms of party politics (...)
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  38. H. Odera Oruka on moral reasoning.Gail M. Presbey - 2000 - Journal of Value Inquiry 34 (4):517-528.
    It is worth exploring the longstanding preoccupation with the future that can be found throughout H. Odera Oruka's writings, especially the writings to be found in a retrospective collection of his essays on which he was working at the time of his death, Practical Philosophy: In Search of An Ethical Minimum. This practice of tracing the future results of actions of which people are presently engaged, in order to determine whether a change of course is needed, is not something that (...)
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  39. Gandhi’s Many Influences and Collaborators.Gail Presbey - 2015 - Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (2):360-69.
    In Gandhi's Printing Press, Isabel Hofmeyr introduces readers to the nuances of the newspaper in a far-flung colony in the age when mail and news traveled by ship and when readers were encouraged by Gandhi to read slowly and deeply. This article explores the ways in which Thoreau's concept of slow reading influenced Gandhi and Hofmeyr herself. She discusses the community that surrounded Gandhi and the role it played in supporting the newspaper. Yet, I argue, the role of women of (...)
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  40. The struggle for recognition in the philosophy of Axel Honneth, applied to the current south african situation and its call for an `african renaissance'.Gail M. Presbey - 2003 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 29 (5):537-561.
    The paper applies insights from Axel Honneth's recent book, The Struggle for Recognition, to the South African situation. Honneth argues that most movements for justice are motivated by individuals' and groups' felt need for recognition. In the larger debate over the relative importance of recognition compared with distribution, a debate framed by Taylor and Fraser, Honneth is presented as the best of both worlds. His tripartite schema of recognition on the levels of love, rights and solidarity, explains how concerns for (...)
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  41. Odera Oruka on Culture Philosophy and its role in the S.M. Otieno Burial Trial.Gail Presbey - 2017 - In Reginald M. J. Oduor, Oriare Nyarwath & Francis E. A. Owakah (eds.), Odera Oruka in the Twenty-first Century. Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. pp. 99-118.
    This paper focuses on evaluating Odera Oruka’s role as an expert witness in customary law for the Luo community during the Nairobi, Kenya-based trial in 1987 to decide on the place of the burial of S.M. Otieno. During that trial, an understanding of Luo burial and widow guardianship (ter) practices was essential. Odera Oruka described the practices carefully and defended them against misunderstanding and stereotype. He revisited related topics in several delivered papers, published articles, and even interviews and columns in (...)
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  42. Strategic Nonviolence in Africa: Reasons for Its Embrace and Later Abandonment by Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Kaunda.Gail Presbey - 2006 - In Katy Gray Brown & David Boersema (eds.), Spiritual and Political Dimensions of Nonviolence and Peace. Rodopi. pp. 75-101.
    Soon after taking power, three leaders of nonviolent African independence movements, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia immediately turned to violent means to suppress internal opposition. The paper examines the reasons for the success of their Gandhian nonviolent tactics in ousting British colonial governments and argues that these new heads of state lost confidence in nonviolence due to a mixture of self-serving expediency, a lack of understanding of nonviolence's many different forms, and the (...)
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  43. African Sage-Philosophers in Action: H. Odera Oruka’s Challenges to the Narrowly Academic Role of the Philosopher.Gail Presbey - 1996 - Essence: An International Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):29-41.
    I argue that Oruka’s sages, half of whom were described as arbiters and judges called upon to solve disputes, fulfill Plato’s ideal of a philosopher as a respected, wise thinker who works for the betterment of society. Although the sage has been sidelined in modern academia, even in Africa, Oruka suggests that twentieth-century rural Kenyan sages, with their devotion to community benefit and conversation about practical concerns, are role models for modern Western philosophy, because philosophers everywhere have a duty to (...)
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  44. Akan Chiefs and Queen Mothers in Contemporary Ghana: Examples of Democracy, or Accountable Authority?Gail Presbey - 2001 - International Journal of African Studies 3 (1):63-83.
    The paper evaluates the claims of Kwame Gyekye and Kwasi Wiredu that the Akan traditional governance structures are just as democratic or even more democratic that Western style representative democracies.
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  45. Is Elijah Masinde a Sage-Philosopher? The Dispute between H. Odera Oruka and Chaungo Barasa.Gail Presbey - 1997 - In Kai Kresse & Anke Graness (eds.), Sagacious Reasoning: Henry Odera Oruka in Memoriam. Peter Lang Verlag. pp. 195-209.
    A constant question that arises when study in H. Odera Oruka's sage philosophy project is, who is a sage? What attributes are necessary? While Oruka tried to provide criteria for categorization of folk and philosophical sages, some critics note that the criteria is not clear, or not clearly applied. This paper focuses on Elijah Masinde, a Kenyan prophet who agitated against British colonialism in Kenya. The question of whether or not Masinde was a sage was debated by H. Odera Oruka (...)
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  46. Husserl's Challenge to Merleau-Ponty's Embodied Intersubjectivity.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    In this paper, I show how Husserl, via the method of the epoche, dissolves Merleau-Ponty’s starting point in the gestalt structuralism of primary corporeal intersubjectivity, revealing a more radically temporal foundation that has nothing of gestalt form in it. Whereas for Merleau-Ponty, the dependency of the parts belonging to a whole is a presupposed unity, for Husserl, a whole instantiates a temporal story unfolding each of its parts out of the others associatively-synthetically as the furthering of a continuous progression or (...)
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  47. Sensory Measurements: Coordination and Standardization.Ann-Sophie Barwich & Hasok Chang - 2015 - Biological Theory 10 (3):200-211.
    Do sensory measurements deserve the label of “measurement”? We argue that they do. They fit with an epistemological view of measurement held in current philosophy of science, and they face the same kinds of epistemological challenges as physical measurements do: the problem of coordination and the problem of standardization. These problems are addressed through the process of “epistemic iteration,” for all measurements. We also argue for distinguishing the problem of standardization from the problem of coordination. To exemplify our claims, we (...)
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  48. Heidegger and Derrida on Structure, Form and State.Joshua Soffer - manuscript
    Writers endorsing a general account of meaning as non-recuperable or non-coincidental from one instantiation to the next may nonetheless treat the heterogeneous contacts between instants of experience as transformations of fleeting forms, states, logics, structures, outlines, surfaces, presences, organizations, patterns, procedures, frames, standpoints. When thought as pattern, the structural- ranscendental moment of eventness upholds a certain logic of internal relation; the elements of the configuration mutually signify each other and the structure presents itself as a fleeting identity, a gathered field. (...)
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  49. Should Environmental Ethicists Fear Moral Anti-Realism?Anne Schwenkenbecher & Michael Rubin - 2019 - Environmental Values 28 (4):405-427.
    Environmental ethicists have been arguing for decades that swift action to protect our natural environment is morally paramount, and that our concern for the environment should go beyond its importance for human welfare. It might be thought that the widespread acceptance of moral anti-realism would undermine the aims of environmental ethicists. One reason is that recent empirical studies purport to show that moral realists are more likely to act on the basis of their ethical convictions than anti-realists. In addition, it (...)
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  50. The Epistemology of Group Duties: What We Know and What We Ought to do.Anne Schwenkenbecher - 2020 - Journal of Social Ontology (1):91-100.
    In Group Duties, Stephanie Collins proposes a ‘tripartite’ social ontology of groups as obligation-bearers. Producing a unified theory of group obligations that reflects our messy social reality is challenging and this ‘three-sizes-fit-all’ approach promises clarity but does not always keep that promise. I suggest considering the epistemic level as primary in determining collective obligations, allowing for more fluidity than the proposed tripartite ontology of collectives, coalitions and combinations.
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